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A gladiator (Latin for “swordsman”) was an armed combatant who entertained audiences in the Roman Republic and later in the Roman Empire, in violent confrontations with other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals. The fights were to the people’s delight. At the end of a fight the winner looked to the yelling, hurling and screaming audience or to the “moderator” – what to do next? – Thumbs up meant give him mercy, let him live; thumbs down: kill ‘em. A cheering crowd would watch these horrendous games of mostly men fighter. There were some female exceptions. As in today’s world – there are also some female gladiators.
Today, there are female competitions in almost all sports. But they are generally in lesser demand than men-events. After all, we live in a macho-world. Wars and other conflict confrontations are mostly led by men – and those who suffer most, are women, children and the elderly.
The Gladiator fights date back to the 3rd Century BC. Nowadays’ gladiator games are adapted to the 21st Century.
The origin of gladiatorial combats is not clear. There is some evidence that they were used in funeral rites during the Punic Wars of the 3rd Century BC. The Punic Wars were a series of confrontations fought between the Roman Republic and the Ancient Empire of Carthage (based in what today is Tunisia and stretching over western North Africa). Those were for pure entertainment of the masses, to deviate from war losses, and to show winner’s ego, pride – propaganda for more fighting and more violence.
The tradition of gladiator games lasted for almost a thousand years, until the 6th Century AD. Their origins appear like ceremonial, but later, when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire – they served as brutal entertainments for the masses to deviate their attention from what the empire was doing at home, or “cooking” abroad, in foreign lands, with resources – “taxes” – taken from the people. Resources of the people being diverted to causes that served only a small elite.
Not unlike today, where resources from the people, “taxes” from peoples’ earnings are used for purposes that are decided by the elite in power to a large extent, for reasons and projects that do not serve the people at all. Just take the military budgets – they serve a small group the war and destruction industry, but not the people. People do not want wars.
In the early years of the first millennium (70 AD), the Roman Colosseum was built, where most gladiator games were fought. They were entertaining “compensation-deviation” for the people, so they would not think about what was going on with their monetary resources in foreign lands or even at home – against their vital interests of wellbeing. Their attention was focused on small-scale violence – leaving the big behind-the-scenes stuff to the elite.
The gladiator battles that pitted armed combatants against one another in brutal but often highly choreographed duels to the death, were by far the most popular kind of entertainment that unfolded in the Colosseum.
Today, modern-day Colosseums are football and soccer stadiums. Thus, modern-day gladiator fights are back. They are not as violent and as deadly as those fought in the ancient Roman Colosseum, but today’s emotion-loaded sports events are also destined to deviating peoples’ attention from the “deadly games”, games played by a minute world elite, well hidden from the entertained masses. So well hidden and prepared for decades that they hit the people like a ton of bricks, when they are finally let loose on the innocent masses – masses for years misled by their governments’ propaganda machine.
Right now, the plandemic, called covid-19, has within 18 months already devastated the lives of several billion of people throughout the UN’s 193 UN member countries – not by disease (SARS-CoV-2) caused death, but rather by a devastated economy, induced poverty, famine, despair and eventually death from desolation, famine and misery.
Within a year and a half, basic human rights have been stolen, abridged, taken away, in warp speed, and what were thought to be at least remnants of democracies, especially in the Global North, have become tyrannies, almost overnight; legalized tyrannies many of them under swiftly and semi-clandestinely passed martial law.
Driven by fake news and lavishly paid false propaganda, people have been lulled into fear – constant fear of death from an invisible enemy “V” for virus – from a monstruous fear-machine – false and fabricated disease figures, that they – and the entire society, what’s left of it, is breaking apart, incapable of living normal lives. Indeed, because normal life has been extinguished with the well-in-advance planned pandemic, i.e., plandemic.
An obscure ultra-rich world elite that pretends to call the shots on everything, ordered governments to submit to The Virus, a corona virus, SARS-Cov-2, the version two of the SARS virus launched principally on China in 2002 / 2003. The “order” came on 11 March 2020, from the pharma-compromised World Health Organization (WHO) declaring SARS-Cov-2, alias Covid-19, a worldwide pandemic. It is virology 101, no virus strikes naturally the entre world all 193 UN member countries at once. This was the beginning of the UN Agenda 2030, also called Agenda 21.
It’s also the beginning of the modern-days’ gladiator games.
In this ten-year-program, UN Agenda 2030, a complete structural change of society, if not our civilization, is planned to be implemented, leaving behind what the World Economic Forum (WEF) calls “The Great Reset”, a world that belongs to a few diabolical dark, rich beings, served by a drastically reduced world population.
The death knell to bring the population down, is a gigantic drive of “vaccination” with precisely what the CDC calls an “experimental gene-therapy”, so-called mRNA jabs. Governments around the globe lie, calling it a vaccine. They spend the peoples’ billions, if not trillions, in tax money to lavishly reward the pharmaceuticals – in return for “vaccines”.
Already the immediate reaction to the coerced jabs is a severe death toll, reaching within the first 6 months of the “vaxx-drive” reported serious injuries and deaths that are exponentially higher than those of regular vaccinations over the past 50 years together.
The European Union reports 1.5 million serious vaccine injuries and 15,500 Deaths from the mRNA-jabs, as of 25 June 2021. See this. And by far, not all injuries are reported.
That already indicates that this tyrannical drive to vaccinate more than 7 billion people on Mother Earth, against a virus which has a proven death rate of no more than 0.3% to 0.8 %, about equivalent to the common flu, has nothing to do with health; absolutely nothing. To the contrary. Its wanton injury, and even better: death. And 193 UN member governments are coopted, either by (deadly) threats or by lush rewards, or simply by being given a placebo instead of a deadly mRNA-experimental toxin.
While all is done to convert the lie – a universal crime of biblical proportions – into the truth, by billions of dollars or euros spent on false propaganda, the real truth does slowly seep through. Real science is exiting the matrix of the bought and corrupted science – and is revealing against all odds and threats the truth. It is still largely suppressed, but gradually emerging – and ever more of the lulled masses are waking up to life-threatening lies and crimes of their governments.
“It’s time to insert a break” – so, the elite, those who shall not be named, but are invisibly commanding the visible elite of our governments. And mind you, those who resist may disappear.
It’s time for the modern-days gladiator games, sports events like soccer championships, the European Cup, the American Cup, a variety of tennis championships, Wimbledon (UK), French Open, US Open, Australian Open, the summer Olympics starting these days in Japan…
Fights between today’s gladiators are normally not about death and life – but they nevertheless let bottled-up emotions explode — like you’d never think humans are capable of letting off so much steam. Just watch the slow-motion replays of a goal in one of these soccer championships matches. It is almost unbelievable the energy let loose, by the players, as well as by the public. Reality is forgotten. That’s the plan.
Just imagine the shall-remain-unnamed billionaires, and others belonging to the dark and wicked masterminds behind the scenes and above the governments – leaning back in their armchairs, watching a soccer game – elated of joy, smiling – we have them where we want them to be — giv’em another month or two of diversion, then we’ll lock them down again. This time even harsher, so they get used to it – become familiar with the method – with the infamous carrot and stick approach.
And the stick is getting bigger and bigger and the carrot proportionately smaller – just a little piece of sugar, of hope to have you accept the master’s scepter coming down on you, ever more forcefully, bringing ever more hardship, misery, disease and death. You shall learn to be obedient.
Tyrants Don’t Create Tyranny. Our Obedience Does. See also this.
This may well be the plan. The covid-tyrants will tell the media: After all, it’s their fault. We told them to be careful, to wear masks, keep social distancing; get vaccinated….
And the media go in over-drive: The new strong variants, like the ever-stronger Delta variant is spreading rapidly. It’s affecting sports players as well as spectators. The media is already warning – that “infection cases” are rising, related to the sports events, that people were careless in their behavior – and may have to bear the consequences at the end of summer, or before, when the virus – or new “variants” of the virus hit and over-buren hospitals.
The Fourth Wave is in the coming – its already being announced openly by the media. They never fail to announce their plan in advance – it’s part of the “diabolical ritual”?
In Australia the “Delta Variant” has already locked down, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and maybe other cities. This is scary. Others be prepared, You may be next.
In the meantime, to keep spirits up and going, to incite even more “transgressions” against obedience, marketing outlets (are being sold to) say that flying in the Global North may be back to “normal” by 2022. Giving hope to normalcy. Nothing is more deceiving than one’s hopes being crashed – and that for “mea-culpa” because we, the people, transgressed against all precautions, against risks.
The winter may hit us hard. Lower our moral. Make us more obedient. Make us see the stick, the ever-present stick.
They say, the “D” for Delta Variant is so much stronger – they are already developing a new vaccine for it. So, those who have had already their two shots and are still alive, may need to get a third one, to ward off the Delta Variant. Such a nonsense. Variants are usually weaker than the original virus and they usually differ no more than 5% from the original in the case of corona viruses.
But in the meantime, and while we live the northern summer, lets enjoy, football, soccer, tennis, Olympics – what have you – all sorts of sports that brings out the animal in us, in terms of emotions, and yelling and screaming and mass waving for a team, a player , mass celebrations — thumbs up, and thumbs down – lets do and be gladiators and enjoy their game.
It’s nothing but a prep for the real killing game, where We, The People, are in the arena, exposed to the “swordsmen” – and those high above us, social media giants, computer moguls, eugenists, bankers of the “chosen ones” – again, they shall remain unnamed – those above the UN and all the member governments, those who are watching us, have been watching us for at least the last century – these un-people, will eventually lift or lower their thumbs, when they see us crumbling and already beaten by fear.
Shall we live or die?
It really depends on us.
Do we want to wake up, step out of the Matrix and take the Red Pill, taking responsibility for a new world which WE, the People are to create in solidarity? – Or do we – as a majority – submit to comfort and to the agenda of the WEF’s Global Resetters, and those that command the Global Resetters, hoping and trusting to be happy at the end when we own nothing.
Mind you, this gladiator game – call it also “the process”, is currently planned to end by 2030 – or earlier, if we continue the way we have been. The way it looks right now, from the Global Gladiators vintage point – we will continue to just submitting to massive vaxxing, followed by horrifying “side effects” and death, hoping to survive, being happy as digitized humanoids, owning nothing and being managed by AI robots, becoming the new norm.
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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.
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).
Everywhere you look, things are getting weird, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Throughout all of our ups and downs over the decades, one thing that our society could always count on for a certain degree of consistency was nature. But now nature is going haywire at the same time that the very fabric of our society seems to be unraveling all around us. In this article, I am going to share with you a number of items that have been brought to my attention over the past month. On their own, each one of these items is “unusual”, but the fact that so many really strange things are all happening simultaneously is definitely cause for alarm.
In this article, I am not even going to bring in stories from the rest of the globe. For example, right now a horrific plague of mice is causing massive problems in Australia. Perhaps I will talk about this in a future article, but in this one I am just going to focus on this country.
The following are 5 bizarre new plagues that have made headlines in the United States within the last 30 days…
#1 A Plague Of Rattlesnakes
The endless megadrought in our western states is having a lot of unexpected consequences, and this includes a plague of rattlesnakes. According to the Daily Mail, rattlesnakes have been moving into urban areas in California in large numbers because of the exceedingly dry conditions…
Much of the US west is currently undergoing a record heatwave and its worst drought in at least 20 years, with temperatures soaring into the triple digits this weekend, and wildlife experts are saying the extreme weather is creating the perfect conditions for increased interactions between humans and animals.
Rattlesnakes, in particular, have been seen moving into urban areas in larger numbers, and are being found on porches, yards, nearby pools and under children’s play equipment.
Len Ramirez catches rattlesnakes for a living, and he says that they are being found “everywhere” at this point…
Len Ramirez stalked through the dried landscape, scanning the ground ahead searching for movement. Called out to an estate in Napa Valley, the owner of Ramirez Rattlesnake Removal company was finishing up his last job of another busy day wrangling, removing and relocating snakes from homes across northern California. He’d found three in just this yard, including one nestled roughly 1,000 yards from the pool.
Rattlesnakes are everywhere these days, he says – on front porches, in potted plants, and under children’s play equipment. “I am busier than I have ever been. Complaints are coming in from all over the state.”
A punishing drought in the U.S. West is drying up waterways, sparking wildfires and leaving farmers scrambling for water. Next up: a plague of voracious grasshoppers.
Federal agriculture officials are launching what could become their largest grasshopper-killing campaign since the 1980s amid an outbreak of the drought-loving insects that cattle ranchers fear will strip bare public and private rangelands.
#3 Birds Dropping Dead In Very Large Numbers
As I discussed last week, birds are suddenly dropping dead in very large numbers in multiple U.S. states. In Indiana, unusual bird deaths have now been reported in fifteen different counties, and authorities have absolutely no idea why this is happening…
The Department of Natural Resources warns that songbirds have now died in fifteen counties across Indiana and more across the region.
“I’ve never seen them exhibit the gooey eyes and crustiness in addition to the neurological symptoms,” Allisyn Gillet, DNR ornithologist said.
Gillet says she’s getting reports of nearly a dozen songbirds a week. in the last month, she says they’ve had at least 100 reports and no one knows exactly what’s causing it.
In addition to Indiana, large numbers of birds are also dropping dead in Washington D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky and Ohio.
#4 Unprecedented Flooding In Detroit
A massive storm last Friday turned I-94 into a lake and caused horrific flooding in both Detroit and Dearborn.
Many areas remain underwater as I write this article, and police are warning people not to play in the water because there is “a good chance” that it contains raw sewage…
Historic rainfall on Friday caused power outages in metro Detroit, at least 1,000 cars abandoned as highways filled up with water, and countless flooded residential basements in the area. The flooding produced more viral videos, including one showing a man jet-skiing down the street in Dearborn, as well as a surreal image of people playing in a flooded part of a highway as if it were a beach on one of the Great Lakes, prompting an even more surreal tweet from Michigan State Police. (“Finally in the things I would never thought I would have to say: Do not go into the water,” an MSP officer tweeted. “This water has debris, sharp metal, submerged cars, gasoline and oil floating in it. There is also a good chance that there is sewage also in the water. In other words it’s gross!”)
#5 The Worst Heatwave To Ever Hit The Northwest
We have just seen the highest temperature that has ever been recorded in the city of Portland.
The same thing is true for Seattle.
And the same thing is true for dozens of other cities in the Northwest. In fact, the little community of Lytton in British Columbia actually just recorded the hottest temperature in the history of Canada.
This unprecedented heatwave is being caused by an absolutely massive “heat dome”, and CBS News Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli says that there is only a “1/10,000+ chance” that something like this could happen.
Unfortunately, this heat dome looks like it is going to be around for a while…
There is no timetable for how long a heat dome can last, but things won’t immediately cool down in much of the Pacific Northwest. Forecasts have inland areas such as Spokane, Washington and Boise, Idaho reaching triple-digit temperatures for the rest of the week. The National Weather Service’s excessive heat warning is in effect until 11 p.m. PT on Thursday.
So why are so many crazy things happening to the United States all at the same time?
I don’t know.
But I do believe that our nation has entered a time of tremendous instability, and I believe that it is going to get a whole lot worse.
The stable conditions of the last several decades are disappearing, and I believe that we have now entered an era when global events are going to get really wild.
Unfortunately, most Americans are still anticipating that things will get back to the way they were in the “old days”, but at this point the “old days” are gone for good.
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Vaccine “passports” being put in place by the European Union and Australia as well as some U.S. states and businesses are one of the more alarming instruments advancing the “heart and soul of Technocracy and Scientific Dictatorship.”
As must be increasingly apparent to anyone capable of digging beneath the media’s daily outpouring of Orwellian propaganda, the planet-wide changes ushered in by the conveniently timed COVID crisis have surprisingly little to do with health. Facilitated by big tech, big military, big pharma’s injectable operating systems and other tools of “biofascism,” the takeover being engineered by private central bankers and their technocratic partners represents no less than a complete end-run around human freedom.
Vaccine “passports” or “certificates,” being put in place by the European Union and Australia as well as some U.S. states and businesses, are one of the more alarming instruments advancing this tyrannical centralization and control agenda. Not one to mince words, author Naomi Wolf makes the case that the “passports,” if allowed to become the norm, could trigger “the end of civil society” and “literally the end of human liberty in the West.”
Why is there such a strong push to make travel and commerce contingent on vaccine passports? One important answer, well understood by Wolf as CEO of a tech company, is “location intelligence” — what technocracy expert Patrick Wood calls the “heart and soul of Technocracy and Scientific Dictatorship.” Without irony, the champions of location data rhapsodize that such data are “a powerful way to connect people to place, transactions to actions, responses to trends, and customers to where they do business and the kind of business they do” — ultimately facilitating the “digital transformation of society on the whole.”
Less cheerfully, technocrats understand, even if the general public does not, that location data permit control at the most granular levels and provide “a platform for understanding what’s going on at all scales.” This point was disturbingly illustrated in a June 21 study in JAMA Internal Medicine, which essentially denounced “small and informal social gatherings,” positing that children’s birthday parties are potential hotbeds of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
This willingness on the part of technocracy’s foot soldiers to be party poopers — literally — would be silly were it not for the study’s baleful messaging, which confirms Wolf’s concerns that we are not only in a battle for liberty but in “a war against human beings and the qualities that make us human.”
No fun allowed
On its webpage devoted to “small gatherings,” updated May 6, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) addresses the topic of social gatherings with family and friends, “such as small holiday parties, family dinners and small special celebrations.” To make such events “safer,” CDC counsels hosts and attendees to limit the number of guests, wear a mask “with two or more layers…indoors and outdoors except when eating or drinking,” socially distance, avoid handshakes and hugs, supply one’s own food and dishes — and (precluding any “Happy Birthday” songs) avoid any loud cheering or singing. Better yet, CDC says, simply have a virtual gathering!
The JAMA birthday party study helpfully reinforces the CDC’s dour advice. Conducted by private-sector researchers from RAND Corporation, Harvard and “healthcare navigation” company Castlight Health, the study looked at privately insured households whose members did or did not have a birthday in the preceding two weeks and county-level COVID-19 prevalence data — but included no data from actual social gatherings.
Taken at face value, one can see how the study’s take-home message — that households in certain counties were possibly a little bit more likely to receive a COVID diagnosis subsequent to an adult or child having a birthday — could direct worriers toward the CDC’s “virtual gathering” solution. However, one needs to parse the study’s definition of risk. As has become par for the course in risk pronouncements designed to steer COVID-related behavior in a particular direction, the researchers said nothing about absolute risk, even though many consider absolute risk statistics to be “the most useful way of presenting research results to help … decision-making.”
Thus, while the study reported a 31% “relative increase” in COVID diagnoses “associated with birthdays” — a finding, moreover, that pertained solely to households in the 10% of counties with the highest background prevalence of COVID — the increased absolute risk (again, only in the 10% of high-background-prevalence counties) amounted to a flimsy 0.086 increase over the COVID “background rate” of .278/100. Nevertheless, the researchers augmented their antisocial message with the conclusion that “policy interventions designed to limit disease transmission should also focus on informal gatherings.”
Defending freedom
The heavy-handed marketing of COVID injections and COVID vaccine passports as tickets to “freedom” has brought George Orwell’s inverted “freedom is slavery” logic fully to the fore. The “appendix” to 1984 explains that while the fictional totalitarian regime Oceania could readily condone use of the word “free” in statements such as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds,” usages such as “politically free” or “intellectually free” had gone entirely and intentionally extinct because the concepts themselves had been erased.
The alarming rapidity with which the U.S. and once “robust” Western democracies were able to implement “elements of a locked-in, 360-degree totalitarianism” was facilitated not just by a heretofore unimaginable level of global policy coordination but also by the public’s complacency. The pressing question of the day, therefore, is whether citizens will continue to tolerate blatant efforts to memory-hole freedom.
Lobbying for COVID vaccine mandates and passports in the U.S., one of the latest darlings of vaccine coercion recently argued that the Biden administration “shouldn’t be so squeamish about vaccine verification,” openly calling mandates and “verification” desirable tools to “push [the unvaccinated] in the right direction.”
And if we are to believe Gallup poll propaganda, more than half of Americans are already on board, supporting policies such as having to show proof of vaccination to fly or attend sporting events or concerts. On the other hand, in an “unscientific” poll on independent journalist Sharyl Attkisson’s website, 97% of respondents answered “absolutely not!” to the question “Do you support requiring ‘vaccine passports’?”
The dispiriting cold water now being thrown on children’s birthday parties is part and parcel of a set of COVID-inaugurated policies that, in Naomi Wolf’s words, “seem designed to ensure that humans will have no ‘analog’ space or ‘analog’ culture left — no way to feel comfortable simply gathering in a room, touching one another as friends or allies, or joining together.”
Fortunately, as writer Allan Stevo has noted, Americans “are becoming increasingly firm and resolute” about freedom, “saying ‘Yes!’ to good things” and “saying ‘No!’ to bad things” — and that, says Stevo, “is exactly how bad times turn into good times.”
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On June 28, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet released a stunning 23-page report accompanied by a 95-page conference room paper for the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) documenting systemic racism and human rights violations by police forces against Africans and people of African descent throughout the world. The report considered more than 340 interviews and more than 100 written submissions from civil society organizations.
Bachelet grounded her analysis in “the long-overdue need to confront the legacies of enslavement, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism and to seek reparatory justice.” She took aim at “misconceptions that the abolition of slavery, the end of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism” and subsequent reforms have eliminated “the racially discriminatory structures built by those practices and created equal societies.”
The report finds:
The dehumanization of people of African descent — a practice rooted in false social constructions of race created to justify enslavement, pervasive racial stereotypes and widely accepted harmful practices and traditions — has sustained and cultivated a tolerance for racial discrimination, inequality and violence, which continues to have a disproportionate impact on the enjoyment of their human rights.
“Systemic racism needs a systemic response,” Bachelet wrote. “States should adopt a systemic approach to combating racial discrimination through the adoption and monitoring of whole-of-government and whole-of-society responses.” They should be designed “to dismantle systemic racism.”
Hailing the report as “a victory,” the U.S. Human Rights Network (USHRN) issued a statement saying it “reflects the efforts of civil society to educate UN officials about human rights violations and the peoples’ solutions … even convening a peoples’ commission of inquiry to take on what the UN declined to do last year.”
After the killing of George Floyd and subsequent mass protests, the USHRN and the ACLU organized an international coalition that urged the HRC to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate systemic racism and police violence against people of African descent in the United States. Instead, on June 19, 2020, after intensive lobbying by the Trump administration, the HRC adopted resolution 43/1, directing the High Commissioner to prepare a report on police violence and other human rights violations against Africans and people of African descent around the world (not limited to the United States).
“The worldwide mobilization of people calling for racial justice has forced a long-delayed reckoning with racism and shifted debates towards a focus on the systemic nature of racism and the institutions that perpetrate it,” Bachelet wrote.
Bachelet’s report indicts the cultures of systemic racism, denial and impunity of law enforcement officials for violating the human rights of people of African descent. She lays blame for “the racialization of poverty” at the feet of insufficient meaningful participation of people of African descent in decision making and impediments to their right to vote. Bachelet charges that “the dehumanization of people of African descent” is “rooted in false social constructions of race historically created to justify enslavement, pervasive racial stereotypes” and false narratives that associate people of African descent with criminal activities.
Discriminatory identity checks and stops-and-searches are attributable to racial profiling, according to Bachelet, and she condemns disproportionate stops, arrests and imprisonment for drug-related offenses.
Bachelet’s analysis of 190 cases globally (most from the United States) revealed that at least 85 percent of police-related deaths could be attributed to: (1) policing of minor offenses, traffic stops and stops-and-searches (such as the case of George Floyd); (2) intervention of police as first responders to mental health crises; and (3) special police operations (like the case of Breonna Taylor). Many of the victims did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to justify lethal force under international legal standards.
Citing our commission report, Bachelet decries the militarization of law enforcement, including the deployment of military personnel and equipment, which often leads to “a rapid escalation in the use of force” particularly “in the context of the war on drugs.”
She also cites our commission report’s analysis that the lack of clarity in use-of-force laws about obligations under international human rights law increases the risk of violations and poses an impediment to accountability.
Harmful stereotypes shape encounters between people of African descent and law enforcement, and gang-related police operations in communities of African descent are frequently influenced by racial bias and stereotypes that associate those communities with criminality, Bachelet found, citing our commission report.
Challenges to holding police officers accountable for violating the human rights of people of African descent detailed by Bachelet include: (1) the absence of independent accountability mechanisms and deficient investigations; (2) prosecutorial discretion and reluctance to file charges against police; (3) “qualified immunity;” and police unions (citing our commission report’s discussion of these issues).
As did our commission report, Bachelet cited a 2021 University of Chicago study, which found that use of force legislation and directives in the largest cities of the 29 wealthiest countries often did not comply with international human rights law.
A Transformative Agenda With Calls for Reparatory Justice
“[N]o State has comprehensively accounted for the past or for the current impact of systemic racism,” Bachelet notes. “Structures and systems that were designed and shaped by enslavement, colonialism and successive racially discriminatory policies and systems must be transformed.”
“A comprehensive approach to repair the legacies of the past must be grounded in an intersectional and intergenerational analysis of the impacts of enslavement, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, colonialism and successive racially discriminatory policies and systems,” Bachelet writes. “These impacts should be recognized, acknowledged and redressed.”
The transformative agenda in the report’s annex includes: “Dismantle structures and systems designed and shaped by enslavement, colonialism and successive racially discriminatory policies and systems.”
Additionally, the annex states: “Reimagine policing and the criminal justice system by supporting and implementing community-driven models for dignity and collective safety that protect and serve all members of communities without discrimination.”
Collette Flanagan, founder and CEO of Mothers Against Police Brutality, who testified in the commission’s hearings, said,
“The release of the U.N. High Commissioner’s report is not only historic, but hopefully it will be a beacon of light for other countries to unite and stand against the egregious extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S. law enforcement; holding the United States accountable for their shameful police brutality history.”
Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, also responded to Bachelet’s report, stating,
“This historic report provides a blueprint for the United States and other countries to begin reckoning with the long history of systemic racism that permeates through policing and other state violence and structural discrimination against Black people. We welcome this report and urge the Biden administration and Congress to heed the recommendations and take bold action to eliminate systemic racism in the United States, starting with our policing institutions.”
“Reparatory justice requires a multipronged approach that is grounded in international human rights law,” Bachelet writes. “Reparations are one element of accountability and redress. For every violation, there should be repair of the harms caused through adequate, effective and prompt reparation.” She notes that reparations are not limited to monetary compensation but also include formal apologies, memorialization, institutional and educational reforms, and acknowledgement of the legal responsibility of the State for violations “linked to truth, justice and guarantees of non-recurrence.”
Bachelet’s report is a powerful call to arms to states around the world to dismantle systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent. Activists as well as legislators must use this report to effect real change and dismantle systemic racism.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.
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Angry crowd of demonstrators toppled the statue of Queen Victoria to the ground off its base on the front lawn of the Manitoba Legislative Building in Winnipeg, Canada, according to the visuals that emerged late Thursday. In the declaration of their rage brought by the impact of the recent discovery of 182 unmarked graves in British Columbia and Saskatchewan with remains of Indigenous children aged between seven and 15, a large mob pulled the monument from the pedestal base.
The crowd rallied at an Every Child Matters walk on the Canada Day (observed on July 1) against the country’s residential schools system. It daubed the statue, unveiled in 1904, in red hand prints and smears. The historical monument was built during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The monarch had reigned the country when the treaties for the residential school system were negotiated by the First Nations and the federal government. The monument was designed by British sculptor George Frampton and it depicts the queen seated on throne and displaying an orb and a scepter, seen as two of the most authoritative monarchical symbols.
A statue of Queen Elizabeth II was also torn down that had stood east side of the grounds near Governor Janice Filmon’s House. People then climbed atop the downed statues, while several others shot images.
Winnipeg police force was summoned at the scene, and at least one person was taken into detention on Legislative Grounds regarding a disturbance. Although it appears that the person taken into custody was indulged in a brawl attempting to stop the revolting, largely indigenous mob from destroying the statue that they had tied a long rope to at the time, wrapped around the front. A probe was ordered by the police, according to the local press reports. A spokesperson for the police department told reporters that enforcement action will be taken at some point, in the near future.
Addressing Canadians, PM Justin Trudeau said, “If this difficult time has taught us all one thing, it’s that in times of challenge or crisis Canadians are there for one another,” he said. “We’ve all helped our communities stay safe and healthy.”
Canda Day’s toned down celebratory fervour
Canada Day on July 1 toned down the celebratory fervour, as the country in its entirety reflected on the way it has and continues to treat the indigenous population, immigrant Canadians, and Indian communities after the residential school incident, a system that began operating in the 1880s with last of them closing down as early as 1996. The system forcibly snatched Indigenous children from their families and put into these schools where they were forbidden from acknowledge their heritage and culture, and prohibited to speak in their own languages.
Indigenous children were subjected to physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse if they broke the rules that concentrated in “civilising” Indigenous peoples. As many as 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children were confined in these conditions, which the historians have dubbed as “cultural genocide”. As many as 4,100 children succumbed in these systems that reflect on the past’s harrowing realities.
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Featured image is from @GraffitiRadical/Twitter/AP
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“On the morning of September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld ran to the fire at the Pentagon to assist the wounded and ensure the safety of survivors,” expressed a mournful George W. Bush in a statement. “For the next five years, he was in steady service as a wartime secretary of defense – a duty he carried out with strength, skill, and honor.”
Long before Donald Trump took aim at irritating facts and dissenting eggheads, Donald Rumsfeld, two times defense secretary and key planner behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was doing his far from negligible bit. When asked at his confirmation hearing about what worried him most when he went to bed at night, he responded accordingly: intelligence. “The danger that we can be surprised because of a failure of imagining what might happen in the world.”
Hailing from Chicago, he remained an almost continuous feature of the Republic’s politics for decades, burying himself in the business-government matrix. He was a Congressman three times. He marked the Nixon and Ford administrations, respectively serving as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity and Defense Secretary. At 43, he was the youngest defense secretary appointee in the imperium’s history.
He returned to the role of Pentagon chief in 2001, though not before running the pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle and making it as a Fortune 500 CEO. It was under his stewardship that the US Food and Drugs Administration finally approved the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame. A report by a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry had claimed that the drug “might induce brain tumors.” This did not phase Rumsfeld, undeterred by such fanciful notions as evidence.
With Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, and Rumsfeld’s membership of the transition team, the revolving door could go to work. The new FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., was selected while Rumsfeld remained Searle’s CEO. When Searle reapplied for approval of aspartame, Hayes, as the new FDA commissioner, appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the 1980 findings. When it became evident that a 3-2 outcome approving the ban was in the offing, Hayes appointed a sixth person. The deadlocked vote was broken by Hayes, who favoured aspartame.
In responding to the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, Rumsfeld laid the ground for an assault on inconvenient evidence. As with aspartame, he was already certain about what he wanted. Even as smoke filled the corridors of the Pentagon, punctured by the smouldering remains of American Airlines Flight 77, Rumsfeld was already telling the vice-chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff General Richard Myers to find the “best info fast … judge whether good enough [to] hit SH@same time – not only UBL.” (Little effort is needed to work out that SH was Saddam Hussein and UBL Usama/Osama Bin Laden.)
Experts were given a firm trouncing – what would they know? With Rumsfeld running the Pentagon, the scare mongers and ideologues took the reins, all working on the Weltanschauung summed up at that infamous press conference of February 12, 2002. When asked if there was any evidence as to whether Iraq had attempted to or was willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, given “reports that there is no evidence of a direct link”, Rumsfeld was ready with a tongue twister. “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” This was being frightfully disingenuous, given that the great known for Rumsfeld was the need to attack Iraq.
To that end, he authorised the creation of a unit run by the under-secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, known as the Office of Special Plans, to examine intelligence on Iraq’s capabilities independently of the CIA. Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit a year prior to the invasion, described the OSP’s operations in withering terms. “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.”
One of Rumsfeld’s favourite assertions – that Iraq had a viable nuclear weapons program – did not match the findings behind closed doors. “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program,” claimed a report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “is based largely – perhaps 90% – on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”
None of this derailed the juggernaut: the US was going to war. Not that Rumsfeld was keen to emphasise his role in it. “While the president and I had many discussions about the war preparations,” he notes in his memoirs, “I do not recall him ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision.”
With forces committed to both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States found itself in the situation Rumsfeld boastfully claimed would never happen. Of this ruinously bloody fiasco, Rumsfeld was dismissive: “stuff happens.” Despite such failings, a list of words he forbade staff from using was compiled, among them “quagmire”, “resistance” and “insurgents”. Rumsfeld, it transpired, had tried regime change on the cheap, hoping that a modest military imprint was all that was necessary. The result: the US found itself in Iraq from March 2003 to December 2011, and then again in 2013 with the rise of Islamic State. Afghanistan continues to be garrisoned, with the US scheduled to leave a savaged country by September.
Rumsfeld was not merely a foe of facts that might interfere with his policy objective. Conventions and laws prohibiting torture were also sneered at. On December 2, 2002, he signed a memorandum from General Counsel William J. Haynes II authorising the use of 20-hour interrogations, stress positions and the use of phobias for Guantanamo Bay detainees. In hand writing scrawled at the bottom of the document, the secretary reveals why personnel should not be too soft on their quarry, as he would “stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” The results were predictably awful, and revelations of torture by US troops at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 led him to offer his resignation, which President Bush initially rejected.
By November 2006, military voices had turned against him. With the insurgency in full swing and Iraq sliding into chaos, the Army Timescalled for the secretary’s resignation. “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear the brunt.” Bush eventually relented.
It is interesting that so little of this was remarked upon during the Trump era, seen as a disturbing diversion from the American project. When Trump came to office, Democrats and others forgave all that came before, ignoring the manure that enriched the tree of mendacity. The administration of George W. Bush was rehabilitated.
In reflecting on his documentary on Rumsfeld Errol Morris found himself musing like his protagonist. “He’s a mystery to me, and in many ways, he remains a mystery to me – except for the possibility that there might not be a mystery.” The interlocutor had turned into his subject.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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Reports of deaths and serious injuries from the COVID-19 jabs mount by the day. As of June 11, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) had posted 358,379 adverse events, including 5,993 deaths and 29,871 serious injuries
In the European Union’s database of adverse drug reactions from COVID shorts, called EudraVigilance, there were 1,509,266 reported injuries, including 15,472 deaths as of June 19, 2021. EudraVigilance only accepts reports from EU members, so it covers only 27 countries. Remarkably, about HALF of all reported injuries — 753,657 — are listed as “serious”
The British Yellow Card system had, as of June 9, 2021, received 276,867 adverse event reports following COVID “vaccination,” including 1,332 deaths
Before you make the decision to participate in this unprecedented health experiment, it may be wise to assess your personal insurance and financial ability to handle a serious injury, as pandemic vaccine manufacturers are indemnified against lawsuits
If you are injured by a COVID shot and live in the U.S., your only recourse is to apply for compensation from the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Act (CICP). Payouts are rare, cover only lost wages and unpaid medical bills, cannot be appealed, are capped around $370,000 for death, and require you to exhaust your private insurance before kicking in
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Reports of deaths and serious injuries from the COVID-19 jabs have been mounting with breakneck rapidity. Those who look at the numbers and have some awareness of historical vaccine injury rates agree we’ve never seen anything like it, anywhere in the world. While data can be hard to come by for some countries, the ones we can check reveal deeply troubling patterns.
United States — As of June 11, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) had posted 358,379 adverse events,1 including 5,993 deaths and 29,871 serious injuries. In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there were 271 serious injuries2 and seven deaths. Among pregnant women, there were 2,136 adverse events, including 707 miscarriages or premature births.3
All of these are bound to be undercounts as, historically, less than 10% of vaccine side effects are reported to VAERS.4 An investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services put it as low as 1%.5,6
Be that as it may, the reported rate of death from COVID-19 shots now exceeds the reported death rate of more than 70 vaccines combined over the past 30 years, and it’s about 500 times deadlier than the seasonal flu vaccine,7 which historically has been the most hazardous.
The COVID shots are also five times more dangerous than the pandemic H1N1 vaccine, which had a 25-per-million severe side effect rate.8,9 Assuming the COVID shots had the same side effect rate, and assuming some 200 million got the vaccine, the estimated number of people suffering a serious side effect would be about 5,000. We’re well past that already, as 35,86410people have been seriously injured or killed.
Even though there are nearly 6,000 reported deaths in VAERS, this number is likely seriously compromised. I recently interviewed Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who has treated COVID patients quite successfully, and we discussed the very distinct possibility that everyone who receives the COVID jab may die from complications in the next two to three years.
He personally knows of 28 COVID jab deaths that were not accepted by VAERS. Zelenko suspects the number of deaths may exceed 100,000 already.
Getting the COVID jab 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.
Please be sure and make a notation in your calendar to review my groundbreaking interview with Zelenko this Sunday, July 4, 2021, which is only three days away. We will review protocols you can use to protect you and your family or those you love, who now regret getting the COVID jab.
European Union — In the European Union’s database of adverse drug reactions from COVID shots, called EudraVigilance, there were 1,509,266 reported injuries, including 15,472 deaths as of June 19, 2021.11 EudraVigilance only accepts reports from EU members, so it covers only 27 of the 50 European countries.
Remarkably, about HALF of all reported injuries — 753,657 — are listed as “serious,” meaning the injury is life-threatening, requires hospitalization, results in a medically important condition, significant disability or persistent incapacity.
U.K. — The British Yellow Card system had received, as of June 9, 2021, 276,867 adverse event reports following COVID “vaccination,” including 1,332 deaths.12
Israel — According to a report by the Israeli People Committee, a civilian body of health experts, “there has never been a vaccine that has harmed as many people.”13 For example, Israeli data show boys and men between the ages of 16 and 24 who have been vaccinated have 25 times the rate of myocarditis (heart inflammation) than normal.14
(Myocarditis is also affecting teens and young adults in the U.S. Although CDC officials say no confirmed deaths have been reported, at least two deaths have been linked temporally to the vaccine.15,16,17,18,19)
Australia — In Australia, two people have died from blood clots after taking AstraZeneca’s COVID shot. Meanwhile, only one person — an elderly woman — has died from COVID-19 this year.20,21
If Something Goes Wrong, You’re on Your Own
The pain and suffering these shots have already created is hard to imagine. Clearly, millions around the world have had their lives turned upside down by them. Many may not recover, physically or financially. It’s really important to realize that if something goes wrong, you’re largely on your own.
Before you make the decision to participate in this unprecedented health experiment, it may be wise to assess your personal insurance and financial ability to handle a serious injury, as pandemic vaccine manufacturers are indemnified against lawsuits. You cannot sue them for damages. Nor can you sue the government or anyone else.
If you are injured by a COVID shot and live in the U.S., your only recourse is to apply for compensation from the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Act (CICP), under which COVID-19 vaccines are a covered countermeasure.22 The CICP is run by a sparsely staffed agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Details and hyperlinks to benefit request forms can be found in the Congressional Research Service’s legal sidebar, “Compensation Programs for Potential COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries.”23 You cannot apply for and will not receive compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which covers other vaccines, including the flu vaccine.
Compensation from CICP is very limited and hard to get. In its 15-year history, it has paid out just 29 claims, fewer than 1 in 10.24,25,26 You only qualify if your injury requires hospitalization and results in significant disability and/or death, and even if you meet the eligibility criteria, it requires you to use up your private health insurance before it kicks in to pay the difference.
There’s no reimbursement for pain and suffering, only lost wages and unpaid medical bills. This means a retired person cannot qualify even if they die or end up in a wheelchair. Salary compensation is of limited duration, and capped at $50,000 a year. On top of all that, you cannot appeal the CICP’s decision. Appeals simply get reviewed by another staff member in the same office.
Can You Afford a COVID Shot Injury?
Even if they can get it, CICP awards are likely to be a drop in the bucket for most people. The average award is $200,000, and death cases are capped at $370,376.27 Meanwhile, you can easily rack up a $1 million hospital bill if you suffer a serious thrombotic event.28 You must also pay for your own legal help and any professional witnesses you may need to support your claim.
In early June 2021, KRDO news reported29 on the case of Kendra Lippy, a 38-year-old woman who had no health complaints prior to getting her Johnson & Johnson shot. Within a week, she developed headaches, abdominal pain and nausea. Her diagnosis: Severe blood clots that progressed into multiple organ failure and coma.
She had to have most of her small intestine removed and will need total parenteral nutrition for the rest of her life — a feeding method that bypasses her gastrointestinal tract. She was hospitalized for 33 days, including 22 days in the intensive care unit. She now needs occupational and physical therapy to regain basic functions like walking, writing and holding a fork.
Lippy’s hospital bill already exceeds $1 million, a sum she’ll likely never be able to pay off, and there’s no telling what kind of medical treatment she’ll need in years to come. Clearly Lippy is headed for bankruptcy, and medical bills are the most common cause in the U.S.
Additional Stipulations That Make Payouts Rare
There are also time stipulations. You must file a request for benefits within one year of the date the vaccine was administered in order to qualify. This is a serious barrier, as serious side effects can take time to develop. For example, after the 2009 swine flu pandemic, people started reporting Guillain-Barre syndrome years after getting the pandemic H1N1 vaccine. At that point, they no longer qualified.30
Worst of all, however, is the fact that it is now your responsibility to prove your injury was the “direct result of the countermeasure’s administration based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence beyond mere temporal association.”
In other words, you basically have to prove what the vaccine developer itself has yet to ascertain, seeing how you are part of their still-ongoing study! The CICP is also notoriously secretive about why claims are approved or rejected. As reported by the Insurance Journal, “it doesn’t release even the most basic details such as the kinds of sicknesses people claim they got from vaccines.”31
As of June 1, 2021, 1,360 Americans had sought compensation from the CICP for injuries and deaths arising from pandemic countermeasures, but only 869 were deemed eligible to file a claim.32None has been adjudicated. Professor Peter Meyers, a former director of the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, who has referred to the CICP as a “black hole process,”33 warns that it’s a “lousy program.” He told Life Site News:34
“It’s a secretive, opaque program whereby some unknown officials within the Department of Health and Human Services will make decisions; we don’t know how many people are adjudicating, who they are, or what the process is.”
The secrecy means there are no official statistics on the types of injuries people are filing for, or what countermeasure is said to have caused their injury. By the way, vaccines are not the only countermeasures shielded from liability. Hospital treatment errors are shielded too, and we know some hospitals routinely killed patients, whether they had confirmed COVID-19 or not, by placing them on ventilators even when they didn’t need it.35
Can You Trust These White-Collar Criminals?
As mentioned, pandemic vaccine makers are shielded from financial liability. The only way you can sue is if you can prove “willful misconduct,” such as deliberate deception, fraudulent behavior or hiding relevant information. To get around this, vaccine makers may simply not look for certain problems.
The potential for infertility is a perfect example. The spike protein is suspected of having reproductive toxicity, and Pfizer’s biodistribution data show it accumulates in women’s ovaries.36Despite that, Pfizer did not perform any reproductive toxicology tests. Since they didn’t look, they can with a straight face say they “didn’t know” the shot might cause reproductive failure. The thing is, they should have suspected it, and done the tests to make sure.
Already, we’re seeing signs of reproductive toxicity. Data suggest the miscarriage rate among women who get the COVID “vaccine” within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy is a whopping 82%. The normal rate is 10%, so this is no minor increase. Infertility will be far more difficult to ascertain, and could take decades.37
In a May 28, 2021, letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Ira Bernstein and Sanja Jovanovic and Deann McLeod, HBSc, of Toronto, pointed this out by highlighting that preliminary safety studies published in the NEJM in April 2021 were in error by including “clinically unrecognized pregnancies” in them.38
They included adjusted graphs reflecting this, and asked the study’s authors to remove the erroneous data but, interestingly, their letter disappeared from the internet the last week of June, although it was still in Wayback archives as of June 27, 2021. Coincidentally, June 17, 2021, the NEJM republished the April study with no explanation as to why it was being republished and with no adjustments to the data.
Considering the criminal history of Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, it’s hard to understand how millions of people trust these companies not to lie in order to make a buck. As reported by Life Site News:39
“Just three main vaccine makers, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, have been ordered by state and federal courts to pay a combined more than $8.6 billion in fines to resolve dozens of allegations of criminal and civil misconduct.
Pfizer alone was fined $2.3 billion — the largest such settlement in history, according to the Department of Justice — for willfully defrauding and misbranding its drugs that had already been yanked from shelves for their documented dangers.
But for six whistleblowers who brought evidence forward against the company, it may have continued misbranding and selling its dangerous wares.
‘We’ve made a trade-off in America,’ said Meyers, in giving vaccine manufacturers liability protection to ensure that they will keep making vaccines that, before legal immunity, were bogged down in lawsuit litigation for side effects.
Manufacturers who make cars or ladders or other products can be sued if they are faulty. Vaccine makers have blanket liability to ensure their products are produced, government funding to produce them, ensured government orders for products, government-paid mass-marketing and mandates …
‘The tradeoff seems unfair today because the CICP program is such as flawed program,’ said Meyers, particularly when vaccine companies are raking in colossal profits (Pfizer is set to haul in $26 billion from its COVID vaccines this year and COVID vaccine manufacturing is churning out billionaires whose annual salaries are multiples of a decade of CICP payouts to dozens of people).
The CICP benefits are ‘stingy compensations,’ he added, for people who are suffering and waiting in the face of corporate greed and government opacity. Notwithstanding the drug companies’ criminal records, Meyers thinks they would be ‘crazy to risk misconduct.’ If it turned out that vaccine makers were actually hiding information on risks of COVID vaccines, he said, ‘it would be a catastrophe.'”
Are Government and Big Pharma Guilty of Willful Misconduct?
I don’t know about you, but the feeling I get when I look at the cascade of injuries and deaths occurring within days or in many cases mere hours after injection is that something is terribly amiss, and vaccine makers are sweeping it all under the rug. Isn’t that willful misconduct? Failing to perform reproductive toxicology tests after they discover that spike protein accumulates in the ovaries — isn’t that reprehensible willful misconduct?
Continuing to claim that the mRNA stays in the shoulder muscle when they have data showing it gets distributed into virtually all organs in the human body — isn’t that hiding important information? Isn’t that reprehensible willful misconduct?
I would argue that government officials are also guilty of medical maleficence. As noted by Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology,40 the most current version of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that governs these COVID shots reveals the FDA opted not to require stringent post-vaccination data collection and evaluation, even though they had the power to do so.
Again, if you don’t look for injuries, you’re unlikely to find them. If there’s no robust data collection and review process, they can say the shots are safe and shuttle them through the licensing process far more easily. The problem they’re now facing is that VAERS is getting such an overwhelming number of reports that even if they account for only 10% of actual injuries, or less, it’s absolutely unmistakable that there are serious problems.
Failing to require vaccine makers to put together a comprehensive system to capture adverse event data is a sign of incompetence at best. But that’s not all. The FDA really starts appearing deceitful when refusing to acknowledge that the VAERS reports indicate there are problems.
To call “coincidence” more than 35,000 times is simply not believable, and to dismiss the risks of permanent disability and death as being “worth it” is beyond heartless, seeing how we have safe and effective treatments and no one actually needs to gamble their health on an experimental gene therapy.
COVID Shots Are Clearly Riskier Than Advertised
As noted in a June 22, 2021, Wall Street Journal article,41 while VAERS cannot tell us whether the shots were causative in any given side effect report, when you see clusters of reports that form a trend, it’s time to investigate.
Four serious adverse effects that are currently trending are thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), noninfectious myocarditis (heart inflammation), especially in those under 30, deep-vein thrombosis and death.42
In order for such effects to be tolerable, even if rare, the vaccine (or drug) would need to be absolutely crucial for survival. Think of a highly infectious pandemic of Ebola, for example — something where death is swift and virtually assured, and treatment, once infected, is ineffective.
None of those criteria apply to COVID-19, which has a lethality rate on par with the seasonal flu for all but the elderly and those most frail. The vaccine would also need to be an actual vaccine — something that provides immunity. COVID-19 gene therapy injections don’t do that either.
Overall, it’s clear that deaths and injuries from these shots are being swept under the rug, and we cannot allow that to continue. We must keep pushing for transparency, honesty and accountability.
Remember, mark your calendar to view my groundbreaking interview with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko this Sunday, which is only three days away. We will review protocols you can use to protect you and your family or those that you love who now regret getting the COVID jab.
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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On the day of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen square, amid all the pomp and circumstance, delivered a stark geopolitical message:
The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to intimidate, oppress or subjugate them. Anyone who tries to do this will find themselves on a collision course with a large steel wall forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese.
I have offered a concise version of the modern Chinese miracle – which has nothing to do with divine intervention, but “searching truth from facts” (copyright Deng Xiaoping), inspired by a solid cultural and historical tradition.
The “large steel wall” evoked by Xi now permeates a dynamic “moderately prosperous society” – a goal achieved by the CCP on the eve of the centennial. Lifting over 800 million people out of poverty is a historical first – in every aspect.
As in all things China, the past informs the future. This is all about xiaokang – which may be loosely translated as “moderately prosperous society”.
The concept first appeared no less than 2,500 years ago, in the classic Shijing (“The Book of Poetry”). The Little Helmsman Deng, with his historical eagle eye, revived it in 1979, right at the start of the “opening up” economic reforms.
Now compare the breakthrough celebrated in Tiananmen – which will be interpreted all across the Global South as evidence of the success of a Chinese model for economic development – with footage being circulated of the Taliban riding captured T-55 tanks across impoverished villages in northern Afghanistan.
History Repeating: this is something I saw with my own eyes over twenty years ago.
The Taliban now control nearly the same amount of Afghan territory they did immediately before 9/11. They control the border with Tajikistan and are closing in on the border with Uzbekistan.
Exactly twenty years ago I was deep into yet another epic journey across Karachi, Peshawar, the Pakistan tribal areas, Tajikistan and finally the Panjshir valley, where I interviewed Commander Masoud – who told me the Taliban at the time were controlling 85% of Afghanistan.
Three weeks later Masoud was assassinated by an al-Qaeda-linked commando disguised as “journalists” – two days before 9/11. The empire – at the height of the unipolar moment – went into Forever Wars on overdrive, while China – and Russia – went deep into consolidating their emergence, geopolitically and geoeconomically.
We are now living the consequences of these opposed strategies.
That strategic partnership
President Putin has just spent three hours and fifty minutes answering non pre-screened questions, live, from Russian citizens during his annual ‘Direct Line’ session. The notion that Western “leaders” of the Biden, BoJo, Merkel and Macron kind would be able to handle something even remotely similar, non-scripted, is laughable.
The key takeaway: Putin stressed US elites understand that the world is changing but still want to preserve their dominant position. He illustrated it with the recent British caper in Crimea straight out of a Monty Python fail, a “complex provocation” that was in fact Anglo-American: a NATO aircraft had previously conducted a reconnaissance flight. Putin: “It was obvious that the destroyer entered [Crimean waters] pursuing military goals.”
Earlier this week Putin and Xi held a videoconference. One of the key items was quite significant: the extension of the China-Russia Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, originally signed 20 years ago.
A key provision: “When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that…it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.”
This treaty is at the heart of what is now officially described – by Moscow and Beijing – as a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era”. Such a broad definition is warranted because this is a complex multi-level partnership, not an “alliance”, designed as a counterbalance and viable alternative to hegemony and unilateralism.
A graphic example is provided by the progressive interpolation of two trade/development strategies, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which Putin and Xi again discussed, in connection with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which was founded only three months before 9/11.
It’s no wonder that one of the highlights in Beijing this week were trade talks between the Chinese and four Central Asia “stans” – all of them SCO members.
“Law” and “rule”
The defining multipolarity road map has been sketched in an essay by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that deserves careful examination.
Lavrov surveys the results of the recent G7, NATO and US-EU summits prior to Putin-Biden in Geneva:
These meetings were carefully prepared in a way that leaves no doubt that the West wanted to send a clear message: it stands united like never before and will do what it believes to be right in international affairs, while forcing others, primarily Russia and China, to follow its lead. The documents adopted at the Cornwall and Brussels summits cemented the rules-based world order concept as a counterweight to the universal principles of international law with the UN Charter as its primary source. In doing so, the West deliberately shies away from spelling out the rules it purports to follow, just as it refrains from explaining why they are needed.
As he dismisses how Russia and China have been labeled as “authoritarian powers” (or “illiberal”, according to the favorite New York-Paris-London mantra), Lavrov smashes Western hypocrisy:
While proclaiming the ‘right’ to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries for the sake of promoting democracy as it understands it, the West instantly loses all interest when we raise the prospect of making international relations more democratic, including renouncing arrogant behavior and committing to abide by the universally recognized tenets of international law instead of ‘rules’.
That provides Lavrov with an opening for a linguistic analysis of “law” and “rule”:
In Russian, the words “law” and “rule” share a single root. To us, a rule that is genuine and just is inseparable from the law. This is not the case for Western languages. For instance, in English, the words “law” and “rule” do not share any resemblance. See the difference? “Rule” is not so much about the law, in the sense of generally accepted laws, as it is about the decisions taken by the one who rules or governs. It is also worth noting that “rule” shares a single root with “ruler,” with the latter’s meanings including the commonplace device for measuring and drawing straight lines. It can be inferred that through its concept of “rules” the West seeks to align everyone around its vision or apply the same yardstick to everybody, so that everyone falls into a single file.
In a nutshell: the road to multipolarity will not follow “ultimatums”. The G20, where the BRICS are represented, is a “natural platform” for “mutually accepted agreements”. Russia for its part is driving a Greater Eurasia Partnership. And a “polycentric world order” implies the necessary reform of the UN Security Council, “strengthening it with Asian, African and Latin American countries”.
Will the Unilateral Masters ply this road? Over their dead bodies: after all, Russia and China are “existential threats”. Hence our collective angst, spectators under the volcano.
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This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Pepe Escobar,born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
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).
The Biden administration made headlines last week as it moved to shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, including ones based in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine. Officials justified the decision by claiming the organizations were agents of “disinformation.”
The most notable of these is probably English-language Iranian state broadcaster Press TV. Visitors to PressTV.com are now met with the seal of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and a message notifying them that the domain “has been seized by the United States government.” (The site has since migrated to an Iranian-based domain, PressTV.ir.)
This is far from the first time Press TV has been targeted. Eighteen months ago, Google deleted the Iranian channel’s YouTube account; earlier this year, Facebook did the same, banning its page, which had over 4 million followers. In 2019, the US also arrested American Press TV presenter Marzieh Hashemi, holding her without charge for over a week. Hashemi, a Muslim, said her headscarf was forcibly removed, and she was offered only pork to eat.
Western outlets covering the new seizures did not frame them as an attack on the First Amendment (Washington Post, 6/23/21; CNN, 6/23/21; Fox News, 6/23/21), many preferring instead to discuss the shortcomings of the Iranian media landscape. Slate (6/24/21), for example, reminded readers that Iran “blocks foreign social media sites, censors critical foreign outlets and jails reporters.” While this may be perfectly true, Slate suggested it was possible for the Biden administration to make a “clear distinction” between when Iran does it and when the US carries out similar actions; “disinformation and election interference are serious problems,” it helpfully noted.
Nosediving press freedom
Decrying the state of press freedoms in official enemy states is a favorite pastime of corporate media (FAIR.org, 11/1/06, 5/20/19, 10/20/19). It is a point of pride in the US that freedom of speech is written into the Constitution. Increasingly, however, if we want to find direct government censorship of speech, we don’t have to travel far.
Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, freedom of the press nosedived. Reporters working for foreign outlets like RT America were forced to register as “foreign agents,” under a 1938 law passed to counter Nazi propaganda. The channel was subsequently taken off the air in Washington, DC.
Donald Trump’s claim that his anti-BDS order “targets antisemitism” was presented as fact in the New York Times headline (12/10/19); the perspective of “critics” that it was “an attack on free speech” was treated as an allegation in the subhead.
Meanwhile, critics or opponents of US foreign policy have been constantly penalized and often pulled off major social media platforms (FAIR.org, 4/16/19). The Trump administration also attempted to force the sale of Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to an American company, and to halt Huawei’s spread as 5G network provider of choice to the globe.
Internally, Trump demanded the NFL fire star quarterback Colin Kaepernick for peacefully protesting during the national anthem. He also directly interfered in the university curriculum; his Department of Education ordered the universities of Duke and North Carolina at Chapel Hill to rewrite their Middle Eastern Studies programs, as they were overly “positive” towards Islam and did not promote US national security goals.
Trump also issued an order all but outlawing the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Since the Civil Rights era, boycotts have been understood to be protected speech under the First Amendment. Nevertheless, since 2015, 35 US states have approved laws penalizing BDS. Effectively, anyone wanting to take public money in any form must sign a pledge to never boycott the state of Israel.
Last year, journalist Abby Martin (herself a target of social media censorship) was blocked from giving a lecture at Georgia Southern University because she refused to sign those First Amendment rights away. Public school staff have been fired for the same thing.
Perhaps most worryingly, Trump’s base is on board with tearing up the First Amendment. A 2018 poll found that 43% of Republicans agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.”
State censorship by states
Even after Trump’s defeat, the GOP is still pushing through regulations limiting speech across America. A new Ohio law making filming police illegal is currently rapidly advancing (News 5 Cleveland, 6/24/21). Critics note that the bill would outlaw recording crimes like the murder of George Floyd.
A proposed Ohio law could outlaw videos like the one that led to Derek Chauvin’s conviction for murdering George Floyd (News 5 Cleveland, 6/24/21).
Meanwhile, laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory—a paradigm that examines structural racism in US institutions—have been passed or are being considered in at least 21 states (US News, 6/23/21). This has been egged on by the conservative press, who have turned the school of thought into an ideological fixation, mentioning it nearly 1,300 times in the past three and a half months (Media Matters, 6/15/21).
These bans on Critical Race Theory are mirrored by new “Don’t Say Gay” laws, which forbid the teaching of LGBT history in K-12 schools, or give parents the opportunity to pull children from classes mentioning key historical events like the Stonewall Riots. A swath of red states have either passed or are currently considering such legislation (New Republic, 6/28/21).
In another worrying move for free speech advocates, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has just signed a bill requiring both university students and their professors to register their ideological views with the state (Salon, 6/23/21), supposedly in a bid to promote “intellectual diversity” on campus. Staff fear the results will be used to purge or deny employment to those deemed insufficiently conservative.
DeSantis is also currently overseeing a huge rewrite of the state’s school curriculum, in an effort to ensure that children are definitively instructed that “communism is evil,” in his own words (WBNS, 6/22/21). Children will be provided with “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.” DeSantis presents the move as providing children with facts rather than “trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.”
Long before Trump
Image below: The offices of Radio TV Serbia after being deliberately targeted by US bombers.
The attempts to muzzle the press did not start with Trump, however. President Obama oversaw a war on whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, and ensured that Julian Assange has spent the best part of a decade in hiding or in prison. Assange’s most notable journalistic action was to release the Iraq War Logs and the Collateral Murder video, which showed US pilots massacring civilians—including two Reuters journalists—in cold blood.
Outright attacking media outlets is a common tactic for the US military. During the Kosovo War, the US deliberately targeted the buildings of Serbian state broadcaster RTS, killing 16 people (FAIR.org, 8/2/00). Four years later, it conducted airstrikes on the offices of Abu Dhabi TV and Al Jazeera in Baghdad at the same time as American tanks shelled the Hotel Palestine. On the incident, Reporters Without Borders, stated: “We can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists” (FAIR.org, 4/10/03). This was far from the only military attack on Al Jazeera during the invasion. The Bush administration even had the network’s journalist Sami al-Hajj kidnapped, holding him inside the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison camp for six years without charge.
Although many still like to hold up the United States as a bastion of free speech uninhibited by government censorship, in this new era, the idea is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. While corporate media like to highlight the many press freedom shortcomings of hostile foreign nations, the censorship worries start much closer to home.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent nearly US$6 billion over the past 17 years trying to improve agriculture, mainly in Africa. This is a lot of money for an underfunded sector, and, as such, carries great weight. To better understand how the Gates Foundation is shaping the global agriculture agenda, GRAIN analysed all the food and agriculture grants the foundation has made up until 2020.
Eighteen years ago, the American public and countries that belonged in the “coalition of the willing” were duped into a war with Iraq that led to a genocide. At least 600,000 Iraqis perished over the span of a decade as innocent men, women and children were burnt at the altar of the military-financial complex based on a discredited theory that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction and was intent on unleashing them against the West.
Even the weather seemed to be obeying the script. At 9am on Thursday morning a brief thunder storm hit northern Beijing. Nothing unusual in that, it is after all the height of summer and the rainy season. But about 20 km away in central Tiananmen Square where President Xi Jinping was leading celebrations to mark the communist party’s 100th anniversary the massed ranks remained largely dry. The storm passed. Nothing, it seemed, would get in the way of the party’s party.
The legendary Chinese success story goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and China’s Communist Revolution that began in 1945. The foundation of the CPC on 1 July 1921 signaled the end of some 200 years of China’s oppression by foreign powers, to western invasions and exploitation, grabbing China’s territories and especially her rich natural resources – and to gain trading advantages, including from the riches of China’s resources and crafts.
As a Canadian journalist, I could be subject to a censorship bill which, if passed in Senate, means the government in Canada can effectively shadow-ban and censor my voice into oblivion, along with other dissenting voices.
Despite a lack of evidence that plastic shields would reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission and documentation that children are at a much lower risk for COVID than adults, officials recommended masks and plastic boxes to separate and socially distance children.
After only five months in office, President Joe Biden has already become notorious for his verbal gaffes and mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly Republican-partisan physician has suggested that he be tested to determine his cognitive abilities.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) centennial takes place this week at the heart of an incandescent geopolitical equation. China, the emerging superpower, is back to the global prominence it enjoyed throughout centuries of recorded history, while the declining Hegemon is paralyzed by the “existential challenge” posed to its fleeting, unilateral dominance.
Among the millions of Canadians celebrating the 154th anniversary of the signing of the British North American Act (July 1st 1867) how many are actually aware that our Southern neighbour, the United States of America had formulated in 1924 a carefully designed plan to invade Canada and bomb Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax and Vancouver.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: “Bad for African Farmers, Bad for the Planet”: How the Gates Foundation Is Driving the Food System in the Wrong Direction
This important article by Colin Todhunter published more than five years ago (on January 21, 2016) analyses how the Gates Foundation had contributed to exacerbating social inequalities and “uprooting indigenous agriculture for the benefit of global agribusiness”.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development, according to a new report by the campaign group Global Justice Now. With assets of $43.5 billion, the BMGF is the largest charitable foundation in the world. It actually distributes more aid for global health than any government. As a result, it has a major influence on issues of global health and agriculture.
‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?’ argues that what BMGF is doing could end up exacerbating global inequality and entrenching corporate power globally. Global Justice Now’s analysis of the BMGF’s programmes shows that the foundation’s senior staff are overwhelmingly drawn from corporate America. As a result, the question is: whose interests are being promoted – those of corporate America or those of ordinary people who seek social and economic justice rather than charity?
According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is intended to deepen the role of multinational companies in global health and agriculture especially, even though these corporations are responsible for much of the poverty and injustice that already plagues the global south. The report concludes that the foundation’s programmes have a specific ideological strategy that promotes neo-liberal economic policies, corporate globalisation, the technology this brings (such as GMOs) and an outdated view of the centrality of aid in ‘helping’ the poor.
The report raises a series criticisms including:
1) The relationship between the foundation and Microsoft’s tax practices. A 2012 report from the US Senate found that Microsoft’s use of offshore subsidiaries enabled it to avoid taxes of $4.5 billion, a sum greater than the BMGF’s annual grant making ($3.6 billion in 2014).
2) The close relationship that BMGF has with many corporations whose role and policies contribute to ongoing poverty. Not only is BMGF profiting from numerous investments in a series of controversial companies which contribute to economic and social injustice, it is also actively supporting a series of those companies, including Monsanto, Dupont and Bayer through a variety of pro-corporate initiatives around the world.
3) The foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, pushing for the adoption of GM, patented seed systems and chemical fertilisers, all of which undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food security across the continent.
4) The foundation’s promotion of projects around the world pushing private healthcare and education. Numerous agencies have raised concerns that such projects exacerbate inequality and undermine the universal provision of such basic human necessities.
5) BMGF’s funding of a series of vaccine programmes that have reportedly lead to illnesses or even deaths with little official or media scrutiny.
Polly Jones the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now says:
“The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed. This concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of corporate America. The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.”
The report states that that Bill Gates has regular access to world leaders and is in effect personally bankrolling hundreds of universities, international organisations, NGOs and media outlets. As the single most influential voice in international development, the foundation’s strategy is a major challenge to progressive development actors and activists around the world who want to see the influence of multinational corporations in global markets reduced or eliminated.
The foundation not only funds projects in which agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations are among the leading beneficiaries, but it often invests in the same companies as it is funding, meaning the foundation has an interest in the ongoing profitability of these corporations. According to the report, this is “a corporate merry-go-round where the BMGF consistently acts in the interests of corporations.”
Uprooting indigenous agriculture for the benefit of global agribusiness
The report notes that the BMGF’s close relationship with seed and chemical giant Monsanto is well known. It previously owned shares in the company and continues to promote several projects in which Monsanto is a beneficiary, not least the wholly inappropriate and fraudulent GMO project which promotes a technical quick-fix ahead of tackling the structural issues that create hunger, poverty and food insecurity But, as the report notes, the BMGF partners with many other multinational agribusiness corporations.
Many examples where this is the case are highlighted by the report. For instance, the foundation is working with US trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya mono-crops have displaced rural populations and caused great environmental damage. According to Global Justice Now, the BMGF-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent. The end markets for this soya are companies with relationships with the fast food outlet, KFC, whose expansion in Africa is being aided by the project.
Specific examples are given which highlight how BMGF is also supporting projects involving other chemicals and seed corporations, including DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta and Bayer.
According to the report, the BMGF is promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of chemical fertilisers and expensive, patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified seeds. The foundation bankrolls the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in pushing industrial agriculture.
A key area for AGRA is seed policy. The report notes that currently over 80 per cent of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.
In order for commercial seed companies to invest in research and development, they first want to protect their ‘intellectual property’. According to the report, this requires a fundamental restructuring of seed laws to allow for certification systems that not only protect certified varieties and royalties derived from them, but which actually criminalise all non-certified seed.
The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with the BMGF and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.
At the same time, AGRA is working to promote costly inputs, notably fertiliser, despite evidence to suggest chemical fertilisers have significant health risks for farm workers, increase soil erosion and can trap small-scale farmers in unsustainable debt. The BMGF, through AGRA, is one of the world’s largest promoters of chemical fertiliser.
Some grants given by the BMGF to AGRA have been specifically intended to “help AGRA build the fertiliser supply chain” in Africa. The report describes how one of the largest of AGRA’s grants, worth $25 million, was used to help establish the African Fertiliser Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) in 2012, whose very goal is to “at least double total fertiliser use” in Africa. The AFAP project is being pursued in partnership with the International Fertiliser Development Centre, a body which represents the fertiliser industry.
Another of AGRA’s key programmes since its inception has been support to agro-dealer networks – small, private stockists of transnational companies’ chemicals and seeds who sell these to farmers in several African countries. This is increasing the reliance of farmers on chemical inputs and marginalising sustainable agriculture alternatives, thereby undermining any notion that farmers are exercising their ‘free choice’ (as the neo-liberal evangelists are keen to tell everyone) when it comes to adopting certain agricultural practices.
The report concludes that AGRA’s agenda is the biggest direct threat to the growing movement in support of food sovereignty and agroecological farming methods in Africa. This movement opposes reliance on chemicals, expensive seeds and GM and instead promotes an approach which allows communities control over the way food is produced, traded and consumed. It is seeking to create a food system that is designed to help people and the environment rather than make profits for multinational corporations. Priority is given to promoting healthy farming and healthy food by protecting soil, water and climate, and promoting biodiversity.
Recent evidence from Greenpeace and the Oakland Institute shows that in Africa agroecological farming can increase yields significantly (often greater than industrial agriculture), and that it is more profitable for small farmers. In 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (Olivier de Schutter) called on countries to reorient their agriculture policies to promote sustainable systems – not least agroecology – that realise the right to food. Moreover, the International Assessmentof Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was the work of over 400 scientists and took four years to complete. It was twice peer reviewed and states we must look to smallholder, traditional farming to deliver food security in third world countries through agri-ecological systems which are sustainable.
In a January 2015 piece in The Guardian, Director of Global Justice Now said that ‘development’ was once regarded as a process of breaking with colonial exploitation and transferring power over resources from the ‘first’ to the ‘third world’, involving a revolutionary struggle over the world’s resources. However, the current paradigm is based on the assumption that developing countries need to adopt neo-liberal policies and that public money in the guise of aid should facilitate this.
If this new report shows anything, it is that the notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked by rich corporations and a super-rich ‘philanthrocapitalist’ (whose own corporate practices have been questionable to say the least, as highlighted by the report). In effect, the model of ‘development’ being facilitated is married to the ideology and structurally embedded power relations of an exploitative global capitalism.
The BMGF is spearheading the ambitions of corporate America and the scramble for Africa by global agribusiness.
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Eighteen years ago, the American public and countries that belonged in the “coalition of the willing” were duped into a war with Iraq that led to a genocide. At least 600,000 Iraqis perished over the span of a decade as innocent men, women and children were burnt at the altar of the military-financial complex based on a discredited theory that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destructionand was intent on unleashing them against the West.
The crimes against humanity that were committed against a nation that never attacked us would not have been possible had it not been for the ever obsequious mainstream media. Instead of pushing back against talking points and doing independent validation of the lies they were being sold by George Tenet and his ilk, the supposed “free-press” parroted Bush and Blair administrations’ propaganda and crippled society with fears of mushroom clouds blanketing America, the UK and beyond.
The non-stop stories of chemical weapons being unleashed against the United States and the malicious alliterations of biological bombs unleashing hell from Tikrit to Topeka conditioned Americans to accept a war that was planned by Project for a New American Century four years before the Twin Towers fell. On the eve of the “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, what was in reality Operation Iraqi Liquidation, an astounding 72% of Americans supported a war against Iraq. At one point, George Bush’s approval rating was 90%, the highest approval ratings in the history of polls.
Not even ice cream and birthday cakes enjoy such astronomical popularity; which goes to show the mind-bending powers of media narratives.
While Americans and the rest of the world were being hoodwinked and gaslighted to endorse an invasion that would eventually lead to crimes against humanity in Iraq, dissenting voices were sounding the alarm and stating that Saddam no longer had WMDs. The UN weapons inspector Hans Blix headed a team that was tasked with verifying if Iraq actually possessed chemical, biological and/or nuclear armaments. In his report to the UN Security Council on February 14th, 2003—a month before the invasion of Iraq was launched—he stated, “so far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons [of mass destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions”.
Blix was immediately lambasted by warmongers in America, the UK and beyond and his reputation sullied because he had the decency to state the truth in the face of unyielding war propaganda. Blix was not the only one who was savaged for daring to push back against the establishment; Chris Hedges gave a speech at a college where he came out in opposition against the Iraq War. Not only did he get booed off the stage, within short order, he was drummed out of his job at the New York Times and banished to the gulag and banished from mainstream media. The Grey Lady had no need for a Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent, they were too busy echoing Bush administration and selling the Iraq War. After all, if it bleeds, it leads—there are fortunes to be made in carnage.
I cite the criminal conducts of Bush, Blair and their enablers in the press for a reason. The same actors who once fear-mongered about WMDs in Iraq are back at it again as they emotionally manipulate us in an effort to manufacture “vaccine” consent. This time around, they are denying the existence of WMDs which are the mRNA and adenovirus biological agents they are pumping into the arms of billions of people around the world. Just like the Iraq War, people who are sounding the alarm about these experimental “vaccines” are being vilified and marginalized in order to further an insane mass-“vaccination” campaign that could lead to a global genocide that will make the mass-killings that took place in Iraq look like child’s play if what we have been warning about becomes reality.
Three days ago, after I wrote about how a group of doctors with Yetena Weg were dangerously advising people to get jabbed without giving them the full picture of the risks involved with the “vaccines”. I was promptly suspended by Twitter for making factual statements about these unsafe and ineffective boosters that were based on research. One of the founders of Yetene Weg by the name of Dr. Fitsum Tilahun took to Twitter to advocate for my silencing because I had the audacity to question his “vaccine” propaganda. That type of dangerous rhetoric was perfectly acceptable during the heyday of the TPLF junta in Ethiopia, a terrorist group he supports, but it has no place in America.
Instead of responding in kind, I asked him nine questions about the safety and efficacy of the boosters he is promoting. Dr. Tilahun promptly blocked me and went back to advising men, women and children to get injected with snake oils that are causing harm and deaths to thousands of people. This imperious disposition and cavalier disregard of concerns that people have about these “vaccines” is commonplace among doctors who are promoting them. Another group of doctors called “Evidence Base” hosted a room on Clubhouse where they said that people who question the “vaccines” are exhibiting cult-like tendencies who need an intervention.
Four years after the Iraq War was initiated, dissenters in Wall Street were warning about Credit Default Swaps and how banks were repackaging toxic mortgages. Some regulators who were not in cahoots with Wall Street were telling their higher-ups about CDS and how toxic debt could cripple the global economy. To our demise, their admonitions fell on deaf ears. In 2008, what they feared became reality as the markets imploded and wiped away the life savings of tens of millions of Americans and billions of people around the world. Demonizing dissenters is a tried and true playbook of fascists which eventually leads to blowbacks that unleash massive human suffering.
Of course, this is nothing new; Galileo and Copernicus were persecuted for going against the “settled science” that earth was the center of the universe. Every generation, people who refuse to blindly follow authority and instead question the status quo are demonized, ostracized and in some cases killed. I’m pretty sure that the first person who invented the wheel was labeled a “conspiracy theorist” because he came up with a more effective way of transporting rocks. Think of where humanity would be at this moment if it was not for dissenters who had the courage to ask “why” while everyone else was complying with “conventional wisdom”.
I write this article for all dissenters who are being berated, excommunicated by their friends and family and censored for seeking truth instead of acting like Jim Jones’s adherents. You are right to be inquisitive instead of “trusting the science”; science is not supposed to be trusted, it demands continuous inspection. We were once bashed for stating that Covid-19 was man-made, that children should not get jabbed and that the “vaccines” were far from safe. Just like Hans Blix and Chris Hedges were eventually vindicated, we too are being exonerated as more information surfaces about the origins of this the Coronavirus and as horrific news keeps dripping out about people who have been “vaccinated” dying by the droves.
There are many people who fall prey to the malicious propaganda of the establishment as they unquestioningly follow authority and repeat the malicious ad hominem that are weaponized against people who question the intentions of Big Pharma. Instead of putting the burden of proof on biotech corporations like Pfizer, that was levied one of the largest fine in human history in 2009 for medical fraud, they libel us for doubting their dubious talking points. To which I ask this one question: what if we are right? The worst that will happen if we are wrong is dealing with the status quo of a virus that has a mortality rate of 0.66%, but if we are correct in our assessments about these “vaccines”, I shudder at the thought of the implications.
I hope, for the sake of humanity, that I am eventually proven wrong about the worst-case scenario that I fear about these “vaccines”. Being proven right about the emergence of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement—a condition that wiped out the lab animals that were injected with mRNA “vaccines” in past studies—would not be vindication but a source of my greatest depression. I have family members who got jabbed; I pray for them daily and for the rest of humanity. We listened to warmongers once and that led to a genocide in Iraq, I hope for all our sakes that heeding Covid-19 fearmongers will not lead to a global holocaust.
“It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.” ~ Harold Pinter
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Even the weather seemed to be obeying the script. At 9am on Thursday morning a brief thunder storm hit northern Beijing. Nothing unusual in that, it is after all the height of summer and the rainy season. But about 20 km away in central Tiananmen Square where President Xi Jinping was leading celebrations to mark the communist party’s 100th anniversary the massed ranks remained largely dry. The storm passed. Nothing, it seemed, would get in the way of the party’s party.
Napoleon may not have actually said it but the quote attributed to him has taken on a prophetic air. China has awakened, it has shaken the world but perhaps not in the way envisaged by the Corsican. Wherever Covid originated, the first major impact of the virus was in the Chinese city of Wuhan and since then quarantine and lockdown, either real or potential, have dominated the lives of billions.
With more than 90 million members China’s communist party is now the world’s largest and most powerful political movement, controlling a fifth of the globe’s population and the world’s second-largest economy. For the first time the world is seeing a China setting the agenda that matters to it. It claims much of the South China Sea and has expanded internationally through the Belt and Road initiative, which has built ports, power stations, train lines and other infrastructure overseas.
The ruling party was established in secrecy in 1921, in the vacuum following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. It held its first session at a girl’s school in Shanghai, on Xintiandi, in the French Concession. The concessions to foreign powers in Shanghai highlighted China’s humiliation. It quickly moved from the school to a boat on a nearby lake to escape the attention of the police.
The birthplace of Chinese communism is now deep in the heart of one of Shanghai’s brightly lit shopping and entertainment areas, selling French designer clothing and perfumes.
When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, many pundits thought that the other great communist power would be next. Understandable, but wide of the mark. President Joe Biden, at the G7 summit on June 13, stated not only that America had profound differences with China, but also that much of the world questioned “whether or not democracies can compete’’.
Under Xi the party has yet again undergone a transformation, one of many.
As Xi was preparing to take power 10 years ago, local party bosses appeared in public more like a business group, with men and women, donning sharply cut suits, shiny shoes, crisp white shirts. Expensive brandy (always French) was consumed at almost every party banquet, regardless of how modest the occasion or the surroundings. That is no longer the case. Study sessions are again mandatory where party theory and Xi Jinping Thought are discussed. Apps monitor the reading habits of cadres. Party bosses’ business suits have been replaced by blue zip-up jackets, white open shirts, no tie.
Xi places the onus on political loyalty and discipline. He can handle a slowing, even shrinking economy. What he fears most is a champagne-swilling Charleston-swinging economy where people forget or disregard party discipline. He has also made the selection for party membership more rigorous. Applicants must now undergo an investigation (neighbors and colleagues are asked about them) and take a battery of tests and interviews, before years of waiting for full membership. Previously, formalities could be concluded in a matter of weeks.
Over the decades, the party has adapted like a chameleon. It has survived and thrived after suppression and brutal conflict, vicious purges, famine and political turmoil. Its secret? Simple; jettison ideology that was once at its core in favor of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – today’s blending of rampant capitalism and the heavy hand of the state.Even communism hasbeen ditched in favor of a Han (the largest ethnic group not just in China but the world and they make up about 90 percent of the country’s population) nationalism.
But, and this is often overlooked, Chinese citizens feel secure. Their borders are not threatened. The streets are safe. Yes, corruption is rife, the state is intrusive, connections count, favors can be bought, courts dispense party discipline and there is huge income inequality. These problems are not unique to communism. They have plagued China for millennia. But in the sweep of Chinese history, this is the blessed generation and they know it.
But this alone will not be enough to ensure stability. The World Bank considers China an upper-middle-income country and the income required to combat poverty in this category is set at $5.50 a day. China proudly proclaims that it has abolished “absolute poverty” and it has.
But according to the World Bank, about a quarter of China’s population, by this measure, still remain in poverty.
And income inequality is widespread as Premier Li Keqiang, who was heavily criticized at the time, pointed out in May last year.
The Chinese dream much heralded in the early part of the last decade is now rarely mentioned. Social immobility and income inequality have markedly increased social friction. Economic stagnation is a real possibility. The world has seen China rise. It may not go into a sharp decline but its economic engines are stalling. Storm clouds do not always follow script.
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Tom Clifford is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Award winning journalist Julian Assange will spend his 50th birthday in a UK supermax prison for exposing the war crimes of American imperialism.
In early January of 2021 a UK judge, Vanessa Baraitser, blocked the US attempt to extradite Assange on humanitarian grounds. In her judgement she agreed with all of the American claims against Assange. She agreed the central claim that Assange was a hacker who conspired with Chelsea Manning to steal American intelligence documents.
In 2017 the US Department of Justice (DOJ) decided to apply for the extradition of Julian Assange who at that time was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. They decided not to pursue Assange on the grounds of leaking documents to media outlets such as the New York Times and Guardian.
This is based on the deliberations of the DOJ during the Obama presidency. During the Obama presidency the Department of Justice reached the conclusion that media outlets which published documents given to them by WikiLeaks were protected under the 1stamendment. Therefore they decided not to pursue an extradition application for Assange.
William Barr, Attorney General under Trump, decided that the extradition case against Assange had to be based on other grounds. The central charge against Assange was to be the claim that he conspired with Chelsea Manning to hack US military computers to illegally obtain classified documents.
This claim that Julian Assange conspired with Manning to hack US military systems was supported by the claims made by Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson. Thordarson’s claims formed a key part of the second superseding indictment against Assange that the US Department of Justice presented last summer to Judge Baraitser.
Stundin journalists Bjartmar Oddur Þeyr Alexanderssonand Gunnar Hrafn Jónsson have written an article that deals a huge blow to the American case against the WikiLeaks publisher. They note that the second superseding indictment from the DOJ purported to:
“… show that Assange instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland.
The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well.’’
“Nonetheless, the tactics employed by US officials appear to have been successful as can be gleaned from the ruling of Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser on January 4th of this year. Although she ruled against extradition, she did so purely on humanitarian grounds relating to Assange’s health concerns, suicide risk and the conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons. With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.’’
Thordarson, a serial criminal with convictions for child abuse and fraud, has admitted in a recent interview with Stundin that he made up the claims about Assange. Thordarson now admits that he lied about the claim that Assange instructed him to hack into the computers of Icelandic members of parliament and steal files from a bank in that country.
Thordarson who stole over $50,000 from WikiLeaks while working as a volunteer, spent several hours with the journalists from Stundin where he admitted to numerous crimes. Thordarson tells the story of how the FBI offered him an immunity deal in May 2019 in return for his testimony against Assange.
“The deal, seen in writing by Stundin, also guarantees that the Do J would not share any such information to other prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies. That would include Icelandic ones, meaning that the Americans will not share information on crimes he might have committed threatening Icelandic security interests – and the Americans apparently had plenty of those but had over the years failed to share them with their Icelandic counterparts.’’
These journalists from Stundin have revealed how Thordarson has continued committing financial crimes of fraud during the period of his work with the DOJ. Icelandic authorities seem oblivious to his criminal activity. It would appear that this key witness against Julian Assange was emboldened by his immunity deal. Alexandersson and Jónsson note:
“It is as if the offer of immunity, later secured and sealed in a meeting in DC, had encouraged Thordarson to take bolder steps in crime. He started to fleece individuals and companies on a grander scale than ever; usually by either acquiring or forming legal entities he then used to borrow merchandise, rent luxury cars, even order large quantities of goods from wholesalers without any intention to pay for these goods and services.’’
So there you have it. A key witness for the US case against Julian Assange has admitted that his testimony against the WikiLeaks editor was a pack of lies. It would appear that Thordarson was incentivised to lie by the promise of immunity from his many crimes.
The US case against Julian Assange has been dealt a huge blow by this revelation. However, it remains to be seen if the High Court in London will take this into consideration when it finally hears the US appeal against the decision not to extradite Assange.
All people of good conscience should step up their efforts in support of a journalist imprisoned for exposing American war crimes.
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As a Canadian journalist, I could be subject to a censorship bill which, if passed in Senate, means the government in Canada can effectively shadow-ban and censor my voice into oblivion, along with other dissenting voices.
After seeing his tweet on the issue of Bill C-10, recently passed in the House of Commons, I spoke with Canadian journalist Dan Dicks about this. He explained that the bill is being presented as being about Canada bringing Big Tech companies under the regulation of the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), to have them display more Canadian content.
“But what people are missing,” he cautioned, “is that there were clauses put into this bill, protections for certain publishers and content creators that would protect people like myself and yourself.”
Those clauses, he said, were recently removed from the bill, leading many content-creating Canadians aware of the bill to worry they will be treated the same as a broadcaster or a programmer, subject to the regulations of the CRTC.
The bottom line is that, beyond the mumbo jumbo of the government, this is the latest attack on freedom of expression, and on dissent.
“It really appears that it’s a backdoor to be able to control the free flow of information online, and to begin to silence voices that go against the status quo,” Dicks said, warning that fines for violators could follow.
“It’s not looking good for individual content creators. Anybody who has any kind of a voice or a significant audience, where they have the ability to affect the minds of the masses, to reach millions of people, they are going to be the ones who are on the chopping block moving forward.”
Names like James Corbett come to mind. Although based in Japan, as a Canadian he would be subject to the bill. And with his very harsh criticisms of many issues pertaining to the Canadian government, he is a thorn they would surely be happy to remove under the pretext of this bill.
Or Dicks, who likewise creates videos often critiquing Canadian government actions.
An article on the Law & Liberty website, which describes itself as focussing on “the classical liberal tradition of law and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons,” notes the bill enables “ample discretion to filter out content made by Canadians that doesn’t carry a desirable ideological posture and [to] prioritize content that does.”
The article emphasizes that the bill violates Canadians’ right to free expression, as well as “the right to express oneself through artistic and political creations, and the right to not be unfairly suppressed by a nebulous government algorithm.”
It noted that Canadians with large followings, like Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Steven Crowder, “each enjoy audiences which far exceed any cable television program.”
As with my examples above, these prominent Canadian voices likewise risk shadow-banning under this bill.
But, worse, there is another bill, C-36, that also portends heavy censorship: the “Reducing Online Harms” bill. This one not only involves censorship, but hefty fines and house arrests for violators
The same Law & Liberty article notes, “Canada is also expected to follow the template of Germany’s NetzDG law, which mandates that platforms take down posts that are determined to constitute hate speech—which requires no actual demonstrated discrimination or potential harm, and is thus mostly subjective—within 24 hours or to face hefty fines. This obviously will incentivize platforms to remove content liberally and avoid paying up.”
The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), rightly, contests this bill, noting, “the proposed definition of hate speech as speech that is ‘likely’ to foment detestation or vilification is vague and subjective.”
Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, is likewise extremely critical of the bills.
Trudeau has made every issue about race, gender and religion since his election.
Now he wants to criminalize everyone who disagrees with his tribalist vision.
The CCF points out the potential complete loss of Canadians’ fundamental rights with these bills.
It should be common sense that these bills are extremely dangerous to Canadians, however cloaked in talk of levelling playing fields and of combating hate speech they may be.
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Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent nearly US$6 billion over the past 17 years trying to improve agriculture, mainly in Africa. This is a lot of money for an underfunded sector, and, as such, carries great weight. To better understand how the Gates Foundation is shaping the global agriculture agenda, GRAIN analysed all the food and agriculture grants the foundation has made up until 2020.
We found that, while the Foundation’s grants focus on African farmers, the vast majority of its funding goes to groups in North America and Europe. The grants are also heavily skewed to technologies developed by research centres and corporations in the North for poor farmers in the South, completely ignoring the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity that these farmers already possess.
Also, despite the Foundation’s focus on techno-fixes, much of its grants are given to groups that lobby on behalf of industrial farming and undermine alternatives. This is bad for African farmers and bad for the planet. It is time to pull the plug on the Gates’ outsized influence over global agriculture.
In 2014 GRAIN published a detailed breakdown of the grants made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote agricultural development in Africa and other parts of the world.1 Our main conclusion then was that the vast majority of those grants were channelled to groups in the US and Europe, not Africa nor other parts of the global South. The funding overwhelmingly went to research institutes rather than farmers. They were also mainly directed at shaping policies to support industrial farming, not smallholders.
Much has happened since then. For starters, Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce in May this year, leaving the future of the Foundation and its grant-making in doubt. The news came as Bill Gates himself came under fire for supporting Big Pharma’s patent monopoly on COVID-19 vaccines, for effectively preventing people’s access across much of the world, and for how he treats – or mistreats – women.2 The Foundation’s agenda with agriculture has also been coming under increased scrutiny. A 2020 report from Tufts University concluded that its work in Africa completely failed to meet the objectives that it had set itself.3 The African Centre for Biodiversity published a string of reports denouncing the Gates Foundation for pushing GMOs and other harmful technologies onto Africa.4 Amongst all this, the US Right to Know collective started a “Bill Gates Food Tracker” to monitor the multiple initiatives that Gates is involved in to reshape the global food system.5
GRAIN wondered whether the Gates Foundation had been receptive to the criticism of its food and agriculture funding. So we set out to update our 2014 report, downloaded the Foundation’s publicly available grant records and created a database of all of the Foundation’s grants in the area of food and agriculture from 2003 to 2020 – almost two decades worth of grant-making.6
The results are sobering. From 2003 to 2020 the Foundation dished out a total of 1130 grants for food and agriculture, worth nearly $US6 billion of which almost US$5 billion is supposed to service Africa.
There was no shift to try and reach groups in Africa directly, no refocusing away from the narrow technological approach, and no moves to embrace a more holistic and inclusive policy agenda. Of course, the Gates Foundation is about much more than just making grants.
The Foundation’s Trust Fund, which manages the Foundation’s endowment, has big investments in food and agribusiness companies, buys up farmland, and has equity investments in many financial companies around the world.7 These, and other activities of Gates in the area of food and agriculture, are illustrated in the infographic that accompanies this report.8
The Gates Foundation fights hunger in the South by giving money to the North
Graph 1 and Table 1 provide an overall picture of GRAIN’s research results. Almost half of the Foundation’s grants for agriculture went to four big groupings: the global agriculture research network of the Consortium Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA – set up in 2006 by the Gates Foundation itself together with the Rockefeller Foundation), the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF – another technology centre pushing Green Revolution technology and GMOs into Africa) and a number of international organisations (World Bank, UN agencies, etc.). The other half ended up with hundreds of research, development and policy organisations across the world. The Gates Foundation claims that 80% of their grants are meant to serve African farmers. But of the funding to these hundreds of organisations a staggering 82% was channelled to groups based in North America and Europe while less than 10% went to Africa-based groups.
The breakdown of the NGOs that the Gates Foundation funds is even worse. Almost 90% of this funding goes to groups in North American and Europe whilst just 5% is directly channelled to African NGOs. The Gates Foundation seems to have very little trust in African organisations serving African farmers. Not that we would want the Gates Foundation to just send more of its grants directly to Africa if it comes with the same corporate industrial farming agenda. But it illustrates the point of where the priorities of the Foundation lie.
For contrast, Oxfam spends over half of all its funding directly in Africa, and over a third in Asia and Latin America, a lot of it through local NGOs in these regions.9
The Gates Foundation gives to scientists, not farmers
As can be seen in Graph 2, the single biggest recipient of grants from the Gates Foundation is the CGIAR- a consortium of 15 international research centres launched in the 1960s and 70s to promote the Green Revolution with new seeds, fertilisers and chemical inputs. The Gates Foundation has given CGIAR centres US$1.4 billion since 2003. Another priority for the Gates Foundation in its funding is to support research at universities and national research centres. Again, the vast majority of the Gates’ grants go to universities and research centres in North America and Europe. Together, all this research gets almost half (47%) of the Gates Foundation’s funding.
The Gates Foundation’s support for Green Revolution-style research extends beyond the scientists. One of the most significant recipients of Gates Foundation funding is a high-profile advocacy organisation called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). The Gates and Rockefeller Foundations launched AGRA in 2006 as a “farmer-centered” and “African-led” institution. The reality is anything but. AGRA implements a top-down Green Revolution agenda with the main focus being to get new seeds and chemicals developed by Gates funded research centres and corporations into the hands of African farmers. AGRA establishes, funds, coordinates and promotes networks of pesticide and seed companies and public agencies to sell and supply agriculture inputs to farmers across Africa. It also actively lobbies African governments to implement policies that favour seed and pesticide companies, such as patents on seeds or regulations that allow for GMOs.
The Gates Foundation has given AGRA a whopping US$638 million since 2006, covering almost two thirds of its overall budget. But AGRA’s results are underwhelming to say the least. In the countries where AGRA is active, yields of staple crops increased only 18% over the past 12 years- far short of AGRA’s goal of doubling yields. Meanwhile, undernourishment (as measured by the FAO) increased by 30% in those countries.10
Instead of acknowledging that their data shows a complete failure to achieve their objectives and changing their approach accordingly, Bill and Melinda are doubling down. In early 2020 they launched their own new research institute called “Gates Ag One”. This enterprise claims to speed up the development of new seeds and chemicals and get them to farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia more quickly.11 Where will the institute be based? Not in Ethiopia or Sri Lanka but in St. Louis, USA, home of Monsanto and other GMO and pesticide giants.
The Gates Foundation buys political influence
In many subtle and not so subtle ways the Gates Foundation grants are used to push policy makers to implement its top-down industrial farming agenda.
Gates at the 2006 World Economic Forum advising policy makers. Photo: World Economic Forum; Peter Klaunzer- Flickr
One recent example is the 2021 “High-Level Dialogue on Feeding Africa” that was held on 29-30 April this year.12 This forum, funded by the Gates Foundation, and organised by a number of Gates Foundation grantees such as the African Development Bank, CGIAR and AGRA, was meant to launch a policy and funding agenda to further push the Green Revolution into Africa. The event attracted no less than 18 African heads of state and several other high-profile personalities. But, most remarkable of all, is that of all the international organisations with activities in Africa on the long speakers list of the dialogue, virtually all are Gates grantees. The forum concluded with a commitment to double agricultural productivity, something AGRA and the Gates Foundation have been promising and failing to deliver for the last decade and a half.
Of course, AGRA itself is also actively pushing the African policy agenda. AGRA is among the key conveners of the annual Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) which calls itself the world’s premier forum for African agriculture and has been convening annual meetings for the past decade. Partners include some of the main global agrochemical corporations, such as Bayer, Corteva and Yara, and of course the Gates Foundation itself. Unsurprisingly, its agenda is clearly oriented to push government policies towards more chemical inputs, fertilisers and hybrid seeds. On its website, AGRF has a special section it calls the Agribusiness deal room, which “has directly facilitated over 400 companies with targeted investor matchmaking and hosted more than 800 companies to explore networking opportunities”.13 This is clearly market matchmaking serving corporate interests, not farmers.
While most of the Gates grants are aimed at pushing technological solutions, many are also oriented towards policy change. A total of 45 grants address policy or policy makers. For example, Iowa State University got a grant to support implementation of policy changes aimed at increasing the supply of new seeds to farmers in Africa. The World Economic Forum received a grant to support a “policy platform for ag innovation and value chain development”, whilst the African Centre for Economic Transformation got a grant to promote agricultural transformation in Africa aimed at policy reforms. In addition, the Foundation is actively involved in bankrolling the “Enabling the Business of Agriculture” project, implemented by the World Bank, amongst many other initiatives.14
Gates’ enthusiasm for GMOs is made clear through its grant database. Michigan State University received US$13 million to create a centre in Africa that provides training for African policy makers on how to use and promote biotechnology. The African Seed Trade Association got a grant to increase farmers’ awareness “of the benefits of replacing their older varieties of crops with newer seed”. AATF got US$32 million to increase awareness on the benefits of agricultural biotechnology and another US$27 million to fund the approval and commercialization GMO maize in at least four African countries. So the Gates Foundation is not only funding public acceptance of GMOs, it is also directly funding the approval and commercialisation of GMOs in Africa.
Gates grantees are clearly carrying the Gates agenda and influencing global agricultural policy. In just over a decade, the Gates brainchild in Africa, AGRA, has managed to manoeuvre itself from nowhere right into the centre of agricultural policy discussions across the continent. Similarly, while resistance to GMOs in Africa remains high, the AATF is managing to get legislation adopted to accept GMOs, as seen most recently in Ghana. It’s just as important to look at who the Gates Foundation is supporting as who they are not supporting; African farmers. The Foundation provides zero funding to support farmer seed systems, which supply 80 to 90% of all the seeds used in Africa. Instead, it provides a lot of funds to initiatives that destroy them. Furthermore, the Gates Foundation props up biofortification as a solution to malnutrition, taking funds and attention away from much more practical and culturally appropriate efforts to improve nutrition by enhancing on-farm biodiversity and people’s access to it.15 Over the last decade or so, the Gates Foundation has given US$73 million to biofortification initiatives that essentially seek to artificially pack nutrients into single crop commodities.
Then, of course, there is Bill Gates himself. Sitting down with heads of state, policy makers and business leaders, Gates tries to convince them that his view of the world is the one to go after. The world has gotten used to pictures of him shaking hands or sitting shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of the world. Indeed, many of those leaders seem very eager to be in these pictures and heed his advice. The most recent display of this was at Joe Biden’s virtual “Leaders Summit on Climate” where Gates shared his vision on how to fight the climate crisis.16 His recipe to tackle the climate crisis is very similar and equally dangerous to how he wants to feed the world: develop new technologies, trust the market, and put in place policies so that corporations can make it all happen faster.17
Gates clearly isn’t listening to or learning from the people on the ground. So why should anyone listen to him? Rather than being listened to, Gates and his top down corporate technology agenda must be resisted and stopped in its tracks.
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Notes
1 GRAIN, “How does the Gates Foundation spend its money to feed the world?”, Nov 2014. https://grain.org/e/5064
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The legendary Chinese success story goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and China’s Communist Revolution that began in 1945. The foundation of the CPC on 1 July 1921 signaled the end of some 200 years of China’s oppression by foreign powers, to western invasions and exploitation, grabbing China’s territories and especially her rich natural resources – and to gain trading advantages, including from the riches of China’s resources and crafts.
Background and History
About two centuries ago, foreign interferences were dominated by illegal Opium Trade that eventually culminated in two Opium Wars. In the 18th and 19th centuries Western countries, mostly Great Britain, exported opium grown in India to China. In turn, the Brits used the profits from opium sales largely to buy Chinese luxury goods, like porcelain, silk, and tea. These goods were in high demand in the west.
Much of this opium export was illegitimate and created widespread addiction throughout China, causing serious social and economic calamities. The wars were triggered by China’s attempting to suppress the trade, that grew tremendously from about 1820 onwards. In early 1839 the Chinese government confiscated and destroyed more than 20,000 chests of opium (chest = about 63.5 kg) — some 1,400 tons of the drug—that were warehoused at Canton (Guangzhou), Guangdong Province by British merchants. By 1838 imports had grown to some 40,000 chests annually.
In July 1839, British sailors killed a Chinese villager. The British government refused to turn the accused over to be judged in Chinese courts. The Brits did not wish its subjects to be tried in the Chinese legal system, and refused to turn the accused men over to the Chinese courts.
The East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis, commanded by Lieutenant W. H. Hall, with boats from the Sulphur, Calliope, Larne and Starling, destroying the Chinese war junks in Anson’s Bay, on 7 January 1841. (Public Domain)
This conflict prompted the first Opium War (1839 – 1842), fought between the UK and the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912), with the British objective to legalize the opium trade. This did not happen, which led to the Second Opium war (1856 – 1860), also called the Anglo-French war. But China did not win the wars and the nefarious addiction-causing trade continued for several more decades.
China’s British forced war-concession to the winner, was to hand over the island of Hong Kong to British administration. In addition, China had to legalize the opium trade and concede a number of trading ports to the Brits, as well as opening travel for foreigners into China and granting residencies for Wester envoys to China. And an important concession for a predominantly Buddhist country was that China had to grant freedom of movement to Christian missionaries throughout China.
The wars and the resulting multiple concession of China, prompted an era of unequal treaties between China and foreign imperialist powers, aka, the UK, France, Germany, the United States, Russia and Japan. China was forced to concede many of her territorial and sovereignty rights. These encroachments on Chinese sovereignty weakened and eventually brought down the Qing dynasty, leading to a revolution on October 10, 1911, bringing the Kuomintang (KMT) to power. They are also referred to as the Chinese National Party and founded the Republic of China on 1 January 1912.
The founder of the KMT and initial ruler of China after the 1911 revolution, Sun Yat-sen attempted to modernize China along western lines and values – which was not accepted by the Chinese people. The next couple of decades of KMT rule were rather chaotic times, during which Sun Yat-sen was unable to control China which fractured into many regions controlled by warlords. To strengthen its position and to gain back control of the country, the KMT was seeking alliance with the new fledgling Communist Party, forging the first United Front, but was still unable to control all of China. After Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) took over and became the KMT strong man.
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The creation of the Communist Party of China on 1 July 1921, was deeply marked by the preceding history. One of the CPC’s key objective was that China would never again be dominated by wester colonial powers. The CPC became a force to be reckoned with, as it grew stronger by increased solidarity forged throughout communities and regions of China which all pursued the same goal – independence from foreign colonization and exploitation and the creation of a sovereign communist China, with a sovereign socialist economy.
Site of the first CCP Congress, in the former Shanghai French Concession (CC BY-SA 3.0)
With the support of the west, notably the UK and the United States, the KMT-led government of the Republic of China (ROC) entered in 1927 into a civil war with the forces of the CPC. The war was intermittent, but basically played out in two major phases, until 1949. The first phase can be described as a war of attrition. It lasted until 1937, when due to the Japanese invasion of China, KMT-CPC hostilities were put on hold. Instead, a KMT-CPC alliance fought and defeated the Japanese. This was also called the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression(1937–1945).
The KMT – CPC civil war resumed with the victory over the Japanese forces, and entered its second, but most violent and decisive final phase from 1945 to 1949. This phase is also called the beginning of the Chinese Communist Revolution, during which the CPC gained the upper hand and finally defeated the Kuomintang on the Chinese mainland.
The leader of KMT (1928 – 1975), Chiang Kai-shek, fled the mainland and established himself and the KMT in what was originally called by her Portuguese discoverers in 1542, Ilha Formosa (“beautiful island”), located north of the Philippines and the South China Sea, some 180 km off the Southeastern coast of China.
In 1895 Formosa became “Taiwan” meaning “foreigners” referring to the early Chinese settlers on the island. Today Taiwan is again integral part of China, since the Treaty of San Francisco (WWII Allied Forces Peace Agreement with Japan, signed on 8 September 1951), when Japan ceased its occupation of Taiwan, returning the island back to China.
Though an integral part of China, Taiwan is still occupied by the KMT Regime, calling it the Republic of China or ROC, the name taken over from KMT’s reign over mainland China until their defeat by the CPC in 1949, which also marked the beginning of the new communist People’s Republic of China (PRC).
This internationally illegal control of Taiwan by the KMT has been going on since 1949, but especially for the last 50 years, when on 25 October 1971, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the PRC, led by the CPC, as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and removed the representatives of the Chiang Kai-shek ROC regime of Taiwan from the United Nations. Nevertheless, today still 15 nations, including the Vatican, of the 193 UN member nations recognize Taiwan as the official China. Many of them would like to switch to the officially recognized CPC-led mainland China, but are coerced, predominantly by the US and the UK, not to do so.
Over the past several decades, the United States, the UK and other western allies have continually sought to destabilize China by interfering in Taiwan, meaning in China’s internal affairs. The latest such events include the US weapons sale for US$ 5 billion to Taiwan in December 2020, and earlier this year, the U.S. Ambassador to the Pacific Island of Palau (Palau being one of the states recognizing Taiwan), became the first US envoy to travel to Taiwan in an official capacity, since Washington cut formal ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing in 1979.
In addition, the US is promoting closer relations with Taiwan through the so-called Taipei Act, signed in April 2020, calling for strengthening trade relations and diplomatic ties between the US and Taiwan to bring Taiwan closer into “international space”, meaning politically distancing the island territory from the mainland.
This and other interferences of the US in China’s internal affairs, are attempts at disrupting peaceful co-existence with China. They include the US-provoked trade war with Beijing, during the last almost 4 years; the stationing of about 60% of the American Navy in the South China Sea; the Washington orchestrated interference in Honk Kong, seeking independence from Beijing; and wildly falsified accusation of Human Rights abuses of the Uyghurs in the officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in Northwestern China; as well as similar claims in Tibet.
Thanks to the steadfast leadership of President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China and of the Communist Party of China, these interferences are being dealt with carefully by Beijing, always trying to find diplomatic and non-belligerent solutions.
China is a master in following the paths of non-aggression, while constantly creating and moving peacefully forward – always with the goal of achieving a multipolar world, where people of different nations, regions, races, roots, cultures and believes can prosper peacefully together.
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Present – and Vision for the Future
Since the foundation of the Communist Party on 1 July 1921, China strove for total independence, and never surrendered to foreign invasions or attempts to influence China’s internal, as well as foreign relations policies. What the CPC has attained over the past 100 years is truly remarkable. It comprises not only maintaining internal solidarity, but also and foremost, people’s trust in the government, moving peacefully forward, becoming food, health and education-wise autonomous and self-sufficient and, not least, lifting 800 million people out of poverty. No other nation in the world has achieved such extraordinary objectives for their people’s well-being.
The CPC has today 91 million members. It is by far the largest single party in the world. In addition, thanks to her leadership, starting with Mao Tse Tung in 1949 and today by President Xi Jinping, China, with a population of 1.4 billion people, has become the second largest economy in the world in absolute terms, and since 2017 already the largest, assessed by the only real measure – the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). This is an indicator of how much people can buy for their money. Within a few years, China is expected to surpass the currently largest economy, the United States, also in absolute terms.
A political slogan on the wall in Longhua District, it reads: “Holding high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics for the Xi Jinping Era. We should fully implement the of spirit of the 19th CPC National Congress.” (CC0)
This is, of course, representing a threat for the country that has declared itself as THE Empire of the world, controlling all vital essentials, like energy, food supply and the international monetary system – though faltering, but still dominated by the US-dollar. The self-styled empire is already crumbling. And Washington knows it. Its strongest asset, the US-dollar, is gradually being dismantled. The US-currency has been widely used throughout the world, almost exclusively, to buy vital goods and services, like energy, food and communication services, as well as for other international trade, but it is losing its weight in the international arena.
The reasons for this are both political and economic. On the economic front, the US have created by their 1913 Federal Reserve Act, a fiat currency without any backing, a currency of which the flow and money mass can be expanded at will. This allowed and still allows Washington to “print” money as per necessities, i.e. to finance extensive wars and conflicts around the globe and to accumulate debts that the US Treasury and Federal Reserve (the totally privately owned US Central Bank), will never be able to pay back.
The US-dollar has absolutely no backing whatsoever. When Washington abandoned in 1971 their self-designed so-called gold-standard (Bretton Woods Conference, 1944), the US-dollar became de facto the “new gold standard”, since the gold standard was based on the value of the US-dollar (US$35 / troy ounce, about 31 grams), instead of on a basket of currencies. Since everybody needed US dollars for their reserves, this gave the US Treasury free range to increase its money supply almost infinitely.
When the US, also at the beginning of the 1970s, negotiated with Saudi Arabia, head of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), that all hydrocarbons, petrol gas and coal, should be traded in US-dollars, it gave the US another dollar boost – printing freely dollars in abundance, because the entire world needed US-dollars to buy hydrocarbon energy. Even today about 84% of all energy consumed worldwide consists of hydrocarbons (2019 Forbes).
As a counter-measure, the US promised the House of Saud to always protect Saudi Arabia, and proceeded almost immediately building numerous military bases in Saudi Arabia, from which they are now waging different wars in the Middle East.
Due to this phenomenon of freely generating new US-dollars, creating new debt, the US is by far the most indebted country in the world, with currently US$ 49.8 trillion debt, compared with a 2020 GDP of about US$ 21 trillion (Debt – GDP ratio 2.3 = 237% debt over GDP).
There is another important component of US debt, called by the General Accounting Office (GAO), “Unfunded Liabilities”, US$ 213 trillion (all figures 16 April 2021: US Debt Clock). These exceptionally high ratios have undoubtedly also to do with incurred covid-debt.
Unfunded liabilities are debt obligations that do not have sufficient funds or assets set aside to pay them. These liabilities generally refer to the U.S. government’s debt-service (unpaid interest on debt), or pension plans and their impact on savings and investment securities, as well as health-insurance and social support coverage for soldiers returning from wars.
These astronomical debt figures and an unbacked fiat currency are even further reducing worldwide confidence in the US-dollar. It is clear, the US debt will never be paid-off. The Federal Reserve Chair, Allan Greenspan (1987 – 2006), once answered to a journalist’s question, when will the US pay back her debt: Never. We just print new money. So, spoken, so it was and so it is.
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Today and for the last about 10 years the US-dollar has no longer a hydrocarbon trade monopoly, nor are other international contracts primarily established in US-dollars as used to be the case a couple of decades ago. China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and others have stopped using the US-dollar and are trading in local currencies and increasingly in Chinese yuan.
Why? – Countries’ treasurers around the world started realizing that the dollar is a highly volatile fiat currency, based on nothing, as shown by the above figures. Equally important for the loss of trust in the US-currency is that dollar-denominated international assets and the US banking system are frequently used by Washington to impose draconian, illegal economic sanction on countries that do not follow Washington’s dictate, including blocking countries’ foreign placed reserve assets. These economic and political realities are signaling the end of the US-dollar hegemony.
The trend of diminishing trust in the US-dollar may increase when China rolls out her digital Renminbi (RMB = people’s money) or international Yuan (the terms RMB and Yuan are used interchangeably) which may be used for international trade without touching the international US-dominated SWIFT transfer and US banking system. The Chinese currency being backed by a strong and solid Chinese economy, confidence in the Chinese currency is growing rapidly. Already today, the Chinese currency’s use as an international reserve asset is increasing quickly.
While the US Federal Reserve (FED) is also contemplating a new digital currency, it is not clear to what extent it can be detached from the current dollar and its debt burden. In any case, with US international trade waning, and Chinese trade rapidly increasing, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for a declining empire to catch up with China.
For example, in the first quarter of 2021, Chinas foreign trade (exports and imports) soared by 29.2%, with Exports jumping 38.7% from the year before, while imports climbed 19.3 percent in yuan terms, according to the General Administration of Customs (GAC).
If anything, these developments – plus the fact that China has been highly successful in overcoming the covid-crisis – within less than 6 months – and putting her industrial apparatus back on line, are testimony for a solid CPC leadership, a sound Chinese economy and fiscal policy. China is the world’s only major economy reporting economic growth in 2020, amounting to 2.3% according to the Wall Street Journal. It is what China calls “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” – a feature demonstrating a spirit of constant creation and evolution of the CPC.
These facts will further enhance international trust in the Chinese economy, as well as in the Chinese way of seeking a more equal, more egalitarian and more just multipolar world, where nations may keep their national sovereignty over their internal and external political inclinations, their culture, national resources, monetary policies and foreign relations – and live peacefully together.
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CPC and the Chinese Vision
The New Silk Road, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is President Xi Jinping’s brilliant brainchild. It’s based on the same ancient principles as was the original Silk Road, adjusted to the 21st Century, building bridges between peoples, exchanging goods and services, research, education, knowledge, cultural wisdom, peacefully, harmoniously and ‘win-win’ style. On 7 September 2013, President Xi presented BRI at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University. He spoke about “People-to-People Friendship and Creating a better Future”. He referred to the Ancient Silk Road of more than 2,100 years ago, that flourished during China’s Western Han Dynasty (206 BC to 24 AD).
Referring to this epoch of more than two millenniums back, President Xi pointed to the history of exchanges under the Ancient Silk Road, saying, “they had proven that countries with differences in race, belief and cultural background can absolutely share peace and development as long as they persist in unity and mutual trust, equality and mutual benefit, mutual tolerance and learning from each other, as well as cooperation and win-win outcomes.”
President Xi’s vision may be shaping the world of the 21st Century. The Belt and Road Initiative is designed and modeled loosely according to the Ancient Silk Road. President Xi launched this ground-breaking project soon after assuming the Presidency in 2013. The endeavor’s idea is to connect the world with transport routes, infrastructure, industrial joint ventures, teaching and research institutions, cultural exchange and much more. Since 2017, enshrined in China’s Constitution, BRI has become the flagship for China’s foreign policy.
BRI is literally building bridges and connecting people of different continents and nations. The purpose of the New Silk Road is “to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets, through cultural exchange and integration, to enhance mutual understanding and trust of member nations, ending up in an innovative pattern with capital inflows, talent pool, and technology database”.
BRI is a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese Government. Already today BRI has investments involving more than 150 countries and international organizations – and growing – in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Since the onset of BRI in 2013, BRI investments have exceeded US$ 5 trillion equivalent.
BRI is a long-term multi-trillion investment scheme for transport routes on land and sea, as well as construction of industrial and energy infrastructure and energy exploration – as well as trade among connected countries. Unlike WTO (World Trade Organization), BRI is encouraging nations to benefit from their comparative advantages, creating win-win situations. In essence, BRI is to develop mutual understanding and trust among member nations, allowing for free capital flows, a pool of experts and access to a BRI-based technology data base.
At present, BRI’s closing date is foreseen for 2049 which coincides with the People’s Republic of China’s 100th Anniversary. The size and likely success of the program indicates, however, already today that it will most probably be extended way beyond that date. It is worth noting, though, that only in 2019, six years after its inception, BRI has become a news item in the West. Remarkably, for six years, the west was in denial of BRI, in the hope it may go away. But away it didn’t go. To the contrary, many European Union members have already subscribed to BRI, including Greece, Italy, France, Portugal – and more will follow, as the temptation to participate in this projected socioeconomic boom is overwhelming.
The BRI, also called Belt and Road, or One Belt One Road, is not the only initiative that will enhance China’s economy and standing in the world.
After decades of western aggressions, denigrations and belligerence towards China, in a precautionary detachment from western dependence, China is focusing trade development and cooperation on her ASEAN partners. In November 2020, after 8 years of negotiations, China signed a free trade agreement with the ten ASEAN nations, plus Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, altogether 15 countries, including China.
The so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, covers some 2.2 billion people, commanding some 30% of the world’s GDP. This is a never before reached agreement in size, value and tenor.
The RCEP’s trade deals will be carried out in local currencies and in yuan – no US dollars. The RCEP is, therefore, also an instrument for dedollarizing, primarily in the Asia-Pacific Region, and gradually moving across the globe. Moving away from the dollar-based economies may be an effective way to stem against the western “sanctions culture”. China is soon rolling-out her new digital Renminbi (RMB) or yuan, internationally, as legal tender for inter-country payments and transfers. The digital RMB is primed to become also an international reserve currency, thereby further reducing demand for the US-dollar.
Orientation towards China’s internal economic development – so-called horizontal instead of vertical growth – is a strategy to develop local Chinese internal production and infrastructure to build up and enhance Chinese internal capacities and markets and bringing about wellbeing and a better equilibrium between China’s vast hinterland and China’s prosperous eastern coastal areas.
The future belongs to China
After two thousand years of western “white supremacy”, relentless exploitation, colonization, discrimination and outright enslavement of other colored people, other cultures, throughout the world, the time has come to turn the wheel – and to veer the future of mankind into a more peaceful, more just and more egalitarian world.
During the next hundred years and under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party – China will guide the East into the era of the Rising Sun – prosperity and good health for all.
This new epoch will strive for a multi-polar world, with win-win trade relations, and bringing about new environmental, social and technological challenges, but also a new awakening for a social consciousness and solidarity. A key instrument for achieving major goals for human wellbeing is the Belt and Road Initiative, providing a steady flow of new ideas, creations, cultural exchange and mutual learning. The future focus may be on:
Renewable sources of energy, based mainly on hydro- and solar power, developed with cutting edge technologies, i.e. capturing solar power with a process of photosynthesis, producing high efficiency energy yields;
Increasing green areas in urban centers to bring about a balance of natural CO2 absorption and Oxygen production, aiming at zero pollution;
Protecting the world’s rain forests and water resources;
Keeping natural resources and public services – health, education, food supply, water and sanitation services, electricity, and public transport – in the public domain;
Promoting biological and multi-crop agriculture;
Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help increase production and transport efficiency and to serve humanity; and
Adopting public banking as the primary means of socioeconomic development funding, Leading humanity to building a community with a shared future for mankind.
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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. He is also 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 and a Non-resident senior fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Without research evidence to suggest that plastic desk shields effectively reduce the transmission of COVID-19, many schools purchased them for their students and teachers, for all practical purposes putting the students in a plastic box
One school principal called it keeping the children “in their bubble.” However, evidence shows that air flow restriction by the shields and masks may increase the risk of acquiring COVID-19
Plastic pollution is mounting quickly as 129 billion face masks are discarded monthly and the plexiglass desk shields are moved out of schools
The CDC relied on anecdotal evidence to support the recommendation for mandatory masks and their own data showed 85% of those with confirmed COVID-19 reported they either “often” or “always” wore a face mask
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Despite a lack of evidence that plastic shields would reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission and documentation that children are at a much lower risk for COVID than adults, officials recommended masks and plastic boxes to separate and socially distance children.1
Not long after China announced the novel coronavirus, researchers began collecting data. Within months many scientists realized that COVID-19 does not affect children at the same rate that it affects adults. There have been many theories as to why this is the case.2 For one thing, children do not have the same types of comorbidities that increase the risk for adults and older adults. Their immune systems are also different.
Experts postulated that another difference was the expression of the angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) 2 receptor that is necessary for the virus to infect cells. Some suggested that other viruses common to the mucosa and airways in young children may limit the growth of the virus, which reduced the rate of severe illness.
Available data3 in the early months from the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed a cohort of 44,672 confirmed cases of COVID-19 indicated 2.1% of patients were aged zero to 19 years. As more data were collected throughout 2020, researchers continued to report that children have a much lower risk of severe disease and mortality from COVID-19 than do adults.4
According to the CDC,5 since children are hospitalized significantly less often than adults, it suggests that children may have less severe illness. They also attribute the lack of transmission in children to school closures in the spring and early summer of 2020, keeping children at home. And yet, children were still exposed to adults in their home who were symptomatic for the viral illness.
The lack of severe symptoms in children infected with SARS-CoV-2 is in stark contrast to the history of significant symptoms with other respiratory viruses in children.6
No Evidence Portable School Desk Shields Are Effective
Dystopian: President Joe Biden visits school kids wearing masks sitting behind plastic protective shields pic.twitter.com/tmfsWzVkNd
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 3, 2021
In this 44-second clip, a masked President Biden is visiting a school where the children are all wearing masks behind plastic shields. It’s a disturbing sight that the mainstream media appears to take in stride as they try to convince you that this is the way we should live.
Mid-March 2021, the CDC released new guidelines, which reduced the social distance in schools to 3 feet and removed the recommendations for barriers between school desks. Greta Massetti leads the CDC’s community interventions task force and said about the plastic shields, “We don’t have a lot of evidence of their effectiveness” in preventing transmission.7
The new recommendations triggered a variety of responses in teachers and parents, some of whom are not comfortable sending their children to school where they may be allowed within 3 feet of another child or teacher.8
If you haven’t seen the plastic boxes being purchased in bulk by school systems for students at each of their desks, try imagining a three-sided transparent plexiglass shield that measures about 22 inches high9 and surrounds the front and two sides of the student’s desk.
Some school systems are excited by the prospect of adding another layer of distance between people. One school in Hawaii recently purchased 460 shields for students and teachers. Principal James Denight said, “Our focus is the health and safety of students and staff. We’re going to keep them in their bubble.”10
Mainstream media outlets covering the story are calling face masks and plastic shields “the new normal.”11 In one school in Ohio, students and staff spend the day wearing a mask and carry a foldable plastic shield they set up on their desks.
Unfortunately, the vast fortune the school systems and retail businesses are spending on plastic is not supported by scientific evidence. In the early months, health authorities told the public that the virus was spread by large droplets. Yet, scientists and researchers like Joseph Allen from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, protested, saying the virus could travel farther, making plastic shields ineffective.12
Nearly one year after the novel coronavirus began infecting people, the World Health Organization and the U.S. CDC finally accepted what researchers had been arguing — the virus can spread through the air.13 A recently released study14 by the CDC of COVID-19 transmission in elementary schools in Georgia demonstrated that plastic barriers on desks or tables were not effective.
Building scientist Marwa Zaatari spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg about plastic desk shields, saying they create15 “a false sense of security. Especially when we use it in offices or in schools specifically, plexiglass does not help. If you have plexiglass, you’re still breathing the same shared air of another person.”
Air Flow Restriction May Raise Risk of Transmission
One study published in the journal Science16 has suggested desk shields used in multiple school systems across the U.S. “are associated with lower risk reductions (or even risk increases).”
A preprint paper17 released from Japan investigated the effect plastic shields would have in areas with poor ventilation. They found the plexiglass blocked the air flow and may increase the risk for infection. The CDC study concluded that the results:18
“… highlighted the importance of masking and ventilation for preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in elementary schools and revealed important opportunities for increasing their use among schools.”
Yet, the published data do not support their statement supporting masking. It’s important to note that the incidence of COVID-19 in the schools evaluated was extremely low. Among students and staff members, there were only 3.08 COVID-19 cases per 500 enrolled students during the study period.
The analysis of the numbers showed the incidence of COVID was 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff used masks and 39% lower where ventilation was improved, as compared to schools that did not use these strategies. However, in absolute numbers, a 37% reduction is only about one case in the school — hardly a supportive statistic for requiring schoolchildren to wear masks all day long.
Especially interesting is that the statistic was for teachers and staff and not for students. When the researchers looked at masking students they found, “The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.”19
The data suggest that masks are not as effective as government health experts would like you to believe, even though viral experts have been outspoken about the dangers of wearing face masks. Virus expert Judy Mikovits is one of those who have posted on social media. According to Weblyf.com, Mikovits wrote:20
“Do you not know how unhealthy it is to keep inhaling your carbon dioxide and restricting proper oxygen flow? … The body requires AMPLE amounts of oxygen for optimal immune health. Proper oxygenation of your cells and blood is ESSENTIAL for the body to function as it needs to in order to fight off any illness. Masks will hamper oxygen intake.”
Mikovits is joined by Dr. Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer. According to News-Medical.Net, she warned the public against wearing face masks “as the virus can get trapped in the material and cause infection when the wearer breathes in.”21 Nationally recognized board-certified neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock also believes face masks may cause serious harm:22
“Now that we have established that there is no scientific evidence necessitating the wearing of a face mask for prevention, are there dangers to wearing a face mask, especially for long periods? Several studies have indeed found significant problems with wearing such a mask.
This can vary from headaches, to increased airway resistance, carbon dioxide accumulation, to hypoxia, all the way to serious life-threatening complications … By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.”
Where Will All the Plastic Go?
Interestingly, the sale of plexiglass has roughly tripled since the beginning of 2020, rising to roughly $750 million in the U.S.23 Sales were fueled by offices, restaurants and retail stores that scrambled to put up plastic shields after being told it would reduce the spread of the virus.
Tufts Medical Center epidemiologist Shira Doron supports the use of plastic shields but acknowledges “there’s no research” to support plexiglass barriers against coronavirus spread. She spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg, saying: “We don’t know a lot.” However, she believes that it comes down to, “If it might help, and it makes sense, and it doesn’t hurt, then do it.”24
Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense and, ultimately, it may trigger mental health issues for children and adds to the growing plastic problem. Zaatari and Allen believe that plastic shields may make sense in certain settings, such as in front of cashiers if it doesn’t impede airflow. However, money would have been better spent on improving ventilation and air filtration in the school systems.
Craig Saunders, president of the International Association of Plastics Distribution, spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg about the future of those plexiglass shields when they are no longer used. He said, “It’s 100% recyclable thermoplastic. [It] just comes down to the logistics.”25
Yet, the logistics of recycling plastic are not a societal strong suit as has been demonstrated in the past 30 years. This begs the question of whether the additional plastic garbage from discarded plexiglass shields will join the trillions of pieces of plastic that litter the oceans and beaches.26
The planet is also facing a new plastic crisis brought on by discarded face masks. Each month there’s an estimated 129 billion face masks being used,27 most of which are disposable, made from plastic microfibers. Before wearing a mask became a daily habit, more than 300 million tons of plastic were already produced globally each year.
Most of it has ended up as waste, which led researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Princeton University to warn that masks could quickly become “the next plastic problem.”28Bottled water containers have been a leading source of environmental plastic pollution, but will likely be outpaced by disposable masks.
While about 25% of plastic bottles are recycled, “there is no official guidance on mask recycle, making it more likely to be disposed of as solid waste,”29 the researchers stated. “With increasing reports on inappropriate disposal of masks, it is urgent to recognize this potential environmental threat.”30
No matter what the ultimate goal was in pushing the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that ensuring the safety of the Earth on which we live was not a priority. It is essential we protect the ecosystem, and therefore our food supply.
Mindless Mask Mandates Likely Ineffective and Harmful
The evidence that masks do not work to prevent the spread of viruses has been demonstrated using influenza and COVID-19. The first COVID-19 specific randomized controlled surgical mask trial was published in November 2020,31 and it confirmed previous, conflicting32 findings showing that:
Masks may reduce your risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection by as much as 46%, or it may increase your risk by 23%
The vast majority — 97.9% of those who didn’t wear masks, and 98.2% of those who did — remained infection-free
Despite scientific evidence, the CDC has relied on anecdotal stories about hair stylists and retrospective reports to prop up their recommendation for universal mask-wearing to prevent the spread of infection.33 In addition to this, their own data34,35,36 also show 70.6% of patients with confirmed COVID-19 reported always wearing a cloth mask or face covering in the 14 days preceding their illness and 14.4% wore it often.
This means a total of 85% of people who had confirmed cases of COVID-19 either “often” or “always” wore a face mask. For a discussion of more science-based evidence about face masks, see “Mindless Mask Mandates Likely Do More Harm Than Good.”
Denight’s focus on keeping children “in their bubble” is not far from what’s happening across the world. Data from a study37 using Germany’s first registry recorded the experiences of children wearing masks. It shows there are physical, behavioral and psychological harms38 being perpetrated on children in the name of science.
Data from 25,930 children found the average child was wearing a mask 270 minutes each day and parents, doctors and others reported 24 health issues associated with that mask wearing. These problems:39
“… included irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).”
Added to these concerning symptoms, they also found 29.7% reported feeling short of breath, 26.4% being dizzy and 17.9% were unwilling to move or play.40 Hundreds more experienced “accelerated respiration, tightness in chest, weakness and short-term impairment of consciousness.”41
Push Back Against Tyranny
Measurements of anxiety or depressive disorder have also jumped dramatically for adults. Data from the CDC42 show the percentage of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder and/or depressive disorder was 11% in the first quarter of 2019 but jumped dramatically to 41.1%43 across the U.S. by January 2021.
This jump in anxiety and depression in adults is significant for children since there is a positive relationship between a child’s behavioral problems and mental health with maternal mental health44and parental mental health.45
This means that independent of their own stress and psychological harm from mask-wearing, lockdowns and plastic shields, children also respond negatively to the rising rate of anxiety and depression exhibited by adults. Thus, the impact on a child’s mental health is the result of both their own stress and that of their parents.
March 20, 2021, marked the 1-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 lockdown. On that day, people in more than 40 countries took to the streets to peacefully demonstrate against the lies and tyrannical measures being taken by governmental agencies and experts in the name of a viral pandemic.
Chances are you didn’t hear about this global rallying cry for freedom since the mainstream media have near-universally censored any news of it. However, this information is vital to understanding how your freedoms are being stripped and what you can do to protect your rights.
Our children and our children’s children are depending on us to ensure they have the freedom and the right to make decisions for themselves about their health, wellness and finances. Read more at “Global Pushback Against Tyranny Has Begun.”
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We are a group of doctors, dentists and scientists who are concerned about the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine to the general population, along with the implication from the Medical Council of New Zealand and the Dental Council of New Zealand of incompetence if we do not fully support the COVID-19 vaccination program, or indeed get vaccinated ourselves.
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In a recent paper entitled ‘Tomorrow’s Arctic: Theatre of War or Cooperation?’ I introduced readers to the US-Russian grand design which shaped not only the sale of Alaska in October 1867 to the USA for $7.5 million, but also Russia’s involvement in the American Civil War as Czar Alexander II arranged the deployment of Russian military fleets to San Francisco and New York.
Even though President Lincoln and Czar Alexander II were both known as great reformers and emancipators for their common commitment to free slaves and serfs, both leaders were assassinated before their grand visions could come to fruition.
In this article, I would like to present another chapter of this forgotten history: The creation of modern Canada as a confederation designed explicitly to prevent the inevitable construction of a Russian-American rail connection through the Bering Strait in the wake of the Civil War.
The Strategic Value of the Bering Strait Tunnel in History
For those who are not aware, the Bering Strait Rail tunnel project is a 150 year idea which was formulated by allies of Lincoln and Alexander II after America’s Civil War.
The original grand design was driven by a plan to connect telegraph lines between continents, followed soon thereafter by a connection of the Trans Siberian Railway and America’s Trans Continental Railways through British Columbia, Alaska and into Eurasia, as laid out spectacularly by former Colorado Governor William Gilpin in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.
Echoing today’s Belt and Road Initiativewhich is quickly growing to become a world land bridge, Gilpin described what this new paradigm of human civilization was destined to look like:
“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events” [Cosmopolitan Railway p. 213]
The idea of the Bering Strait tunnel was supported by Czar Nicholas II who, in 1906 hired a team of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies on the initiative which then had an estimated cost of $350 million.
Sadly a couple of World Wars and disastrous revolution kept this project from blossoming as it was intended.
This idea was revived again by FDR’s great Vice President Henry Wallace who discussed the project at length with Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942. In this meeting Wallace declared that “It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”
Again, the Cold War derailed this project and it was only in 2007 that the Russian Government revived it once again with Putin even offering to pay 2/3of the $65 billion estimated cost to construct the 100 km tunnel across the Bering Strait. This project was offered to the west more loudly in 2011 and in May 2014, China unofficially gave their backing to the initiative. Sadly, unipolar technocrats and neocons controlling NATO foreign policy had not the eyes to see what benefits such projects offered those who joined in its construction, and instead continued onto their zero-sum game plan for full spectrum dominance.
With the 2018 unveiling of the Polar Silk Road extending the east-west development corridors into the Arctic, which have merged increasingly with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and Putin’s Northern Vision, the Bering Strait connection has again been given new life. If nations of the west find the courage to let go of the Titanic before the hellish chaos of the oncoming financial meltdown erupts, then the projects animating the new multi polar paradigm will undoubtedly look a lot like the World Land bridge concept illustrated by the Schiller Institute below.
Arctic development remains one of the best strategic points of alliance and cooperation needed to re-organize the collapsing world economic order around firm principles of multipolar cooperation and value and as such is not too different from the dynamic shaping the world when Lincoln took office in 1860.
The 19th century Clash of Two Systems
Lincoln’s economic advisor and leader of the international export of the American System of Political economy, Henry C. Carey, described this clash between two systems in his 1851 Harmony of Interests:
“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”
Carey, just like the British Empire’s Lord Palmerston, clearly recognized that America had not completed “the mission of 1776” since not one but TWO Americas existed within Washington: One positive America representing the anti-slavery/anti-colonial principles of the 1789 constitution vs. another hypocritical slave power that never believed that “all men were created equal”. Just as two antithetical impulses existed within America, so too did two opposing views of “Manifest Destiny” co-evolve since 1776: One hellish version driven by the ‘principle’ of spreading slavery and suppressing the weak while the other more noble impulse was represented by the spirits of Lincoln, Carey and Gilpin illustrated above.
This fatal contradiction within the republic was exploited fervently by Anglo-American intelligence for 80 years before the inevitable civil war finally broke out in 1861.
President Lincoln defined the terms of this contradiction and immanent war in an 1858 debate with the Slave Power’s champion Stephen Douglas saying:
“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.“
This quote is important as it addresses the fact that Lincoln recognized correctly the inextricable connection between the institution of slavery (even when it masqueraded under a republican veneer) and monarchical principles of colonialism which saw mankind’s right to rule defined not by morality, or merit but rather by “principles” of hereditary right.
The Stage is Set for a Forgotten Battle
By now most informed people are aware of Russia’s 1863 intervention into the Civil War as a turning point that blocked British and French imperialist forces from entering the war militarily on the side of the Southern rebels. What is not so well established is how Russian and American grand strategy to connect the continents by rail did not occur as it was intended after the sale of Alaska.
There are several convergent factors at play during the 1865-1867 period which presented a major challenge to the weakening British Empire strategists:
The need to confederate British territories in North America as possession of the Empire instead of allowing them to either become independent nations or annexing to Lincoln’s republic.
If this first task could be done by ousting pro-Lincoln forces in Canadian political power and killing Lincoln, then the next task involved transferring the vast private territories owned by the Hudson Bay Company separating eastern colonies from the lone western outpost of British Columbia on the Pacific. The majority of Canada during this pre-1867 period was private Hudson Bay land as it had been since it was chartered in 1670 by Prince Rupert.
If this transfer of Hudson Bay possessions into federal hands could be affected, then it would still be necessary to somehow persuade the fiercely independent British Columbian subjects to join Confederation. This was not a simple task as the vast majority were in favor of annexing to the USA due to the economic despair of their colony caused by the collapse of the Gold rush bubbles in 1858 and total isolation from the other British American colonies.
The Anti Union Confederacy That Succeeded
On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act was enacted consolidating Britain’s “other” anti-American confederacy operation under a new constitution dedicating the new federation’s existence to be conducive“to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire”.
It should be kept in mind that the project to confederate actually began during the Civil War in the form of a week-long booze-soaked orgy of the Charlottetown convention of 1864 which hammered out the resolutions later put into law in 1867.
Some have wondered why just days before the July 1, 1867 enactment, would-be confederate President Jefferson Davis gave a speech to cheering crowds in Lennoxville Quebec stating:
“I hope that you will hold fast to [your] British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country”.
This pro-British gushing from a confederate traitor in Quebec shouldn’t be surprising at all if we take into account the fact that Montreal and Toronto served as Southern confederacy bases of operations used with the full support of the British Empire to run terrorist operations, raids, espionage and financing of the war against Lincoln’s forces from the North (while Canada “officially” maintained an air of neutrality). Even Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Boothe was discovered to have been deployed from Montreal to kill Lincoln, with union officers discovering a $500 cheque amidst his possessions signed directly by none other than Ontario Bank President Henry Starnes (who would later become Mayor of Montreal).
As Barry Sheehy pointed out in Montreal: City of Secrets, during the Civil War, “the largest Confederate Secret Service base outside Richmond was located in Montreal” under the direct control of confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin- himself an asset of British Intelligence.
Much like the exiled Russian and Hong Kong oligarchs and traitors of the modern day, Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and many other confederate rebels lived out their days in comfort in both Canada and Britain (Benjamin becoming an English Barrister in London from 1865 until his death in 1884).
The Sale of Alaska and the Rush for British Columbia
On October 1867, the British Empire was caught off guard with the news that Russia’s Alaskan possessions had been sold to America for $7.2 million in a secretive diplomatic maneuver which Secretary of State William Seward described as the most important deal of his life.
The sale had suddenly made the isolated colony of British Columbia very hot real estate. During this 1867 purchase, Lincoln’s Trans Continental Railway, begun in 1863 at the height of the Civil War was a mere two years from completion, linking the Pacific to Atlantic for the first time in history and thus destroying the British monopoly over maritime shipping routes.
With students of Lincoln’s program to be found among the intelligentsia of Russia, led by Count Sergei Witte and Dimitri Mendeleyev, the American modeled (and largely American-built) Trans-Siberian Railway’s construction was not far away, and the linking of rail across the two continents was discussed as a real possibility by republican visionaries the world over.
The chances that British Columbia would join confederation were minute at this time as the broken colony had no ties of commerce to Britain or the east coast confederacy 3500 km away. In fact, on July 2, 1867 the first of several petitions was sent to Queen Victoria requesting that either the colony’s debt burdens and economic woes be alleviated by the Mother country or that the queen grant them permission to annex to the USA!
At this time, American consul to Victoria Allen Francis, wrote a letter to the president stating:
“Even the colonists claiming most loyalty to the queen, are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States as their only salvation- as the only means of retrieving the colonies from their present embarrassment and decline.”
BC’s Colonialist Newspaper described the situation in the following terms:
“Since no change would be for the worse, they (British Columbians) would welcome annexation to the United States to continuing in a state of poverty and wretchedness. In writing this we know we speak the mind of 9 out of every 10 men in the colony… the sentiment is heard at every gathering street corner- at social gatherings, in business circles- in all places”
On July 18, 1868 the Hudson Bay territories (aka: Rupert’s Land) were sold to Ottawa under an operation led by Sir Georges Etienne Cartier who stated “in this country we must have a distinct form of government in which the monarchical spirit will be found.”
Cartier’s monarchical spirit was reflected in Canada’s leading fathers of confederation such as Sir John A. Macdonald who famously stated “a Britisher I was born and a Britisher I will die”and who looked to the vast wilderness west of Toronto saying in 1867: “I would be quite willing, personally to leave the whole country a wilderness for the next half century, but I fear if Englishmen do not go there the Yankees will.”
On May 22, 1867, Father of Confederation Sir Alexander Galt stated British policy for western expansion (to block the connection between Russia and the USA) saying: “If the United States desire to outflank us on the west, we must accept the situation and lay our hand on British Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. This country cannot be surrounded by the Unites States- We are gone if we allow it… ‘From the Atlantic to the Pacific’ must be the cry in British America as much as it has ever been in the United States”
The last serious effort by British Columbians to join America was made with the Annexation petition of 1869listing BC’s desperate grievances with the empire and appealing to President Grant:
“The only remedy for the evils which beset us, we believe to be in a close union with the adjoining States and Territories, we are already bound to them by a unity of object and interest; nearly all our commercial relations are with them; They furnish the Chief Markets we have for the products of our mines, lands and waters; They supply the Colony with most of the necessities of life; They furnish us the only means of communication with the outer world… For these reasons we earnestly desire the ACQUISITION of this Colony by the United States.”
The Alabama Claims
The last great hope for extending Lincoln’s rail through BC into Alaska at this time arose amidst the 1869-1871 Alabama Claims affair which saw the world’s first international trial in Geneva address the matter of Britain’s military support for the confederacy during the Civil War (reflecting the irony of America’s recent covert support for Syrian rebels). Britain’s air of neutrality was betrayed by her construction of Confederate war ships that unleashed havoc on Lincoln’s Navy. The court ruled in favor of America and soon Britain came close to loosing it’s Canadian possessions as payment for their sin (Senator Charles Sumner and Secretary Seward both advocated this course), although weaker figures in America ended up agreeing to a measly $15 million settlement in 1872 while all wrongs were forgotten.
With these failures to capture the pregnant moment, the effort to assimilate BC into London’s northern confederacy was accelerated.
Ottawa negotiations began on June 7, 1870 and within weeks nearly all resolutions and clauses were agreed upon. The two biggest impediments to B.C.’s entry into the Confederacy were dealt with by the payment of all of the colony’s debts by Ottawa and the promise made by Sir Macdonald to construct a rail line linking the new province with Montreal and Quebec “within ten years”. This promised rail line was necessary in order to sabotage the intention of the American Manifest Destiny policy.
With these arrangements agreed upon (paralleling similar arrangements in the former Red River Settlement in today’s Manitoba), British Columbia was admitted into Confederation as the 6th Canadian Province. Within the coming decades, as Canada was opened up to form a British-controlled Northern Confederacy blockade against the civilizing progress of the sovereign nation state intention of the United States, Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed as provinces where there had formerly been only Hudson’s Bay land. The lack of progress on Canada’s rail by 1878 had resulted in renewed disenchantment on the part of British Columbians who demanded once more for annexation into the USA resulting in Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Policy of 1878-1885” which forced the construction of Canada’s own trans continental rail (with the inaugural train cars arriving in BC’s Port Moody from Montreal on the 4thof July, 1885).
By the time of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the American System of Political Economy had resulted in the greatest explosion of wealth in the United States and became a model for the whole civilized world seeking to break free of British colonial hegemony.
Converts to the American System were made by all lovers of progress from around the world who came to the Convention. Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck vigorously applied American System practices of high protective tariffs and vast internal improvements under his Zollverein. Czars Alexander II and III and their close circle of Russian advisors applied the American model for the vast modernization of Russia vectored around the Trans-Siberian Rail. Even Japan under the Meiji Restoration applied the American model to escape feudalism and enter the modern age.
Sadly, an age of London-financed revolutions, assassinations and wars mis-shaped the 1880s, 1890s, and 20thcentury, preventing this system of win-win cooperation from evolving as it was destined.
Today the world is again pulled by two opposing systems represented by Lincoln’s international allies on the one hand and British Intelligence on the other… although today’s champions of the multi polar world of cooperation have names like Xi Jinping and Putin. These Eurasian statesmen have ushered in a new system of credit, diplomacy, security, economic and science policy governed by the best principles displayed by the American System of the 19thcentury and occasionally revived albeit only briefly under such 20thcentury leaders like Franklin Rooseveltand John F. Kennedy.
Whether the western nations have the moral fitness to recover their lost traditions and join in this new paradigm or not yet remains to be seen…
The author delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:
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First published on February 5, 2021
Bill Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.
“Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself, an appetite that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.” — Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge in the Gates/Microsoft antitrust-fraud case
Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of America’s exemplary struggle to supplant the yoke of European feudalism with a noble experiment in self-governance depended on the perpetual control of the nation’s land base by tens of thousands of independent farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.
So at best, Gates’ campaign to scarf up America’s agricultural real estate is a signal that feudalism may again be in vogue. At worst, his buying spree is a harbinger of something far more alarming — the control of global food supplies by a power-hungry megalomaniac with a Napoleon complex.
Let’s explore the context of Gates’ stealth purchases as part of his long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally.
As usual, Gates coordinates these personal investments with taxpayer-subsidized grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest and most powerful organization in all of international aid, his financial partnerships with Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Food, and his control of international agencies — including some of his own creation — with awesome power to create captive markets for his products.
Characteristically, Gates’ approach to global problems put technology and his chemical, pharmaceutical and oil industry partners at the center of every solution. As it turned out, Gates’ “innovative strategy” for food production was to force America’s failed system of GMO, chemical and fossil fuel-based agriculture on poor African farmers.
African agricultural practices have evolved from the land over 10,000 years in forms that promote crop diversity, decentralization, sustainability, private property, self-organization and local control of seeds. The personal freedom inherent in these localized systems leaves farm families making their own decisions: the masters on their lands, the sovereigns of their destinies. Continuous innovation by millions of small farmers maximized sustainable yields and biodiversity.
In his ruthless reinvention of colonialism, Gates spent $4.9 billion dollars to dismantle this ancient system and replace it with high-tech corporatized and industrialized agriculture, chemically dependent monocultures, extreme centralization and top-down control. He forced small African farms to transition to imported commercial seeds, petroleum fertilizers and pesticides.
Gates built the supply chain infrastructure for chemicals and seeds and pressured African governments to spend huge sums on subsidies and to use draconian penalties and authoritarian control to force farmers to buy his expensive inputs and comply with his diktats. Gates made farmers replace traditional nutritious subsistence crops like sorghum, millet, sweet potato and cassava with high-yield industrial cash crops, like soy and corn, which benefit elite commodity traders but leave poor Africans with little to eat. Both nutrition and productivity plummeted. Soils grew more acidic with every application of petrochemical fertilizers.
As with Gates’ African vaccine enterprise, there was neither internal evaluation nor public accountability. The 2020 study “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)” is the report card on the Gates’ cartel’s 14-year effort. The investigation concludes that the number of Africans suffering extreme hunger has increased by 30 percent in the 18 countries that Gates targeted. Rural poverty has metastasized dramatically, and the number of hungry people in these nations has risen to 131 million.
Under Gates’ plantation system, Africa’s rural populations have become slaves on their own land to a tyrannical serfdom of high-tech inputs, mechanization, rigid schedules, burdensome conditionalities, credits and subsidies that are the defining features of Bill Gates’ “Green Revolution.”
The only entities benefiting from Gates’ program are his international corporate partners — and particularly Monsanto, in which the Gates Foundation Trust purchased 500,000 shares worth $23 million in 2010 (but later divested those shares after pressure from civil society groups). Gates himself even filmed commercials for Monsanto’s GMOs, touting them as the “solution” to world hunger.
The AGRA Watch initiative of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice follows Gates’ agricultural and food policies. According to Heather Day, an AGRA Watch spokesperson, AGRA is a trojan horse for corporate kleptocracy.
“The Gates Foundation and AGRA claim to be ‘pro-farmer,’ ‘pro-poor’ and ‘pro-environment,’” Day told me. “But their approach is closely aligned with transnational corporations, like Monsanto, and foreign policy actors like USAID [United States Agency for International Development]. They take advantage of food and global climate crises to promote high-tech, centralized, industrial agriculture that generate profits for Gates’ corporate partners while degrading the environment and disempowering farmers. Their programs are a dark form of philanthrocapitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”
Gates’ climate activism (A memo to my environmental colleagues)
To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.” These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control.
It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery. In my 40 years as a climate activist, I saw zero evidence of Gates’ funding of genuine climate advocacy; the Gates Foundation is AWOL in the climate wars.
The leading climate groups, National Resource Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Waterkeepers, etc., receive virtually nothing from the world’s largest philanthropy. His investment history suggests that the climate crisis, for Gates and his cronies, is no more than an alibi for intrusive social control, “Great Reset”-scale surveillance, and massive science fiction geoengineering boondoggles, including his demented and terrifying vanity projects to spray the stratosphere with calcium chloride or seawater to slow warming, to deploy giant balloons to saturate our atmosphere with reflective particles to blot out the sun, or his perilous gambit of releasing millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in South Florida.
When we place these nightmare schemes in context alongside the battery of experimental vaccines he forces on 161 million African children annually, it’s pretty clear that Gates regards us all as his lab rats.
Gates has learned to fatten himself on global crises, whether it’s pandemics, climate, famine or mass extinction. Climate change has given Gates an excuse to create monopolies over seed, food and agriculture.
In other words, climate change was the guise for more mischievous geoengineering. Meanwhile, Gates’ ag policies are destroying our planet’s climate systems, pushing millions of species to extinction, desertifying the soil, destroying water systems and enriching the Poison Cartel.
So, a note to my fellow environmental leaders: Bill Gates is not our amigo! Furthermore, Gates has put climate reform in malodour with millions of Americans, who see his climate pretenses in context of his ambitions to control humanity and put an end to economic activity and personal freedom.
It’s largely Gates’ doing that half of America sees climate change as either a “Great Reset” flimflam to shift wealth upward, or a geoengineering boondoggle. It’s on them that they don’t recognize the serious peril of climate change. It’s on us that we seem deliberately blinded to the peril of Bill Gates.
Gates profits from all this confusion; the polarization of the climate debate paralyzes reform efforts thereby preserving the value of his carbon stakes. We all need to recognize who is really behind that Green mask!
Biopiracy
“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter to all state governors, February 1937
Long experience and research have shown that agroecology based on biodiversity, Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is essential not just to civil liberties and democracy, but to the future of food and farming.
For thousands of years, farmers’ innovation and biodiversity evolved together to create the most efficient practices for sustainable food production and biodiversity. The United Nations’ seminal 2009 study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) documents the incontrovertible evidence demonstrating the abject failure of the Gates/Rockefeller “Green Revolution” to improve on traditional agriculture.
IAASTD deployed a team of 900 leading scientists, agronomists, and researchers to study the issue of world hunger. Their comprehensive and definitive report showed that GMO crops are not the answer to food shortfalls or rural poverty. That report definitively concludes that neither Gates’ Green Revolution nor his GMOs can feed the world and at the same time protect the planet.
Green Revolution policies subvert food and nutritional security, and dispossess small farmers through debt for external inputs. IAASTD and numerous other studies show that Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Knowledge Sovereignty are the only viable future for food and farming. The United Nations and the world’s top agricultural scientists have admitted that GMOs cannot fight hunger as effectively as traditional farming.
Bill Gates has opted to ignore this reality, dismissing science-based evidence in favor of his messianic faith that he is ordained by God to save the world with technology. According to Dr. Gates, M.D., good health only comes in a syringe (he is the world’s biggest vaccine producer).
Likewise, Farmer Bill preaches that good food only comes from monocultures, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, GMO crops and patented seeds that he happens to own. In constructing his agriculture empire, Gates has repeatedly shown himself willing to ignore the voices of scientists and farmers, and to trample laws, treaties, traditions, civil rights, science, and sensibilities.
Stealing seeds
Since the onset of the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago, farmers and communities have worked to improve yield, taste, nutrition, robust seed qualities that enhance peculiar growth, medicinal and nutritional attributes, and the genetic resilience that allows certain seeds to flourish in particular soil and water conditions or resist predators.
These vigorous, ingenious genetics are the products of a miraculous collaboration between humans, nature and their Creator during humanity’s 1,000 generations of intense agricultural innovation. The free exchange of knowledge and seeds among farmers has been the basis for maintaining biodiversity and food security.
Since 1979, under World Bank auspices, a consortium of agricultural research centers known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has been collecting these premier seeds from small farmers across the globe and preserving them in 15 independent Public Seed Banks stationed in different countries. That venture sought to archive a complete inventory of heritage seed stocks for the benefit of all humanity so as to preserve crop diversity for the millennia.
In the last 17 years, Gates has successfully maneuvered to gain control of those collections — comprising 768,578 seeds — and to assert monopoly ownership of the world’s premier seed inventories.
Beginning in 2003, working in coordination with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped $720 million into CGIAR’s Seed Bank project. As the largest funder of the CGIAR, Gates used his financial leverage to force the merger of the CGIAR’s 15 legally independent centers into one legal entity, a sinister initiative that he calls “Gates Ag One.” He then moved to orchestrate the transfer of research and seeds from scientific research institutions to commodity-based corporations like Bayer and Cargill with which he partners. In this way he is raiding, plundering and privatizing the seed stockpile for the most promising seeds from indigenous farmers around the world.
Gates Ag One’s director, Joe Cornelius, is a former executive at Bayer Crop Science. Prior to that, he was Monsanto’s Director of International Development. Working with Cornelius, Gates has perfected the techniques Monsanto pioneered in the 1980s when it led the push to propagate GMOs, and to patent seeds. Gates has made himself the Commanding General in Big Data’s pirate war to plunder and monopolize the common genomic data of millions of plants bred by peasants over the millennia.
Gates funds Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global project he launched in 2015 to map the genomes and genome sequences of the peasant seed stocks held in seed banks. DivSeek and Gates Ag One are the tips of his spears, “mining” seed data to “censor” out the commons. In other words — to terminate the public’s ownership claims.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies, Gates’ minions at DivSeek and Gates AG One scan these seeds and categorize their genetic data to map, patent and pilfer humanity’s global seedstock heritage. Gates bolsters his patent rationale by using CRISPR technology to selectively edit the heritage seed genomes, making changes sufficient to withstand patent challenges.
Gates’ principal objective is to breed Green Revolution varieties engineered to respond to chemical inputs produced by Gates’ “Poison Cartel” partners: Monsanto, Bayer, Dow/DuPont, CropLife, BASF, Syngenta, Corteva, etc. In short, Gates deliberately robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, erasing evolutionary history and its links to the soil, reducing it all to a simple “code.” In this way, Gates captures our planet’s genetic diversity, rewrites it, patents its code, steals the seeds from humanity and marries them off to the chemical conglomerates.
By centralizing the Seed Banks and manipulating intellectual property laws, Gates has launched a campaign of “genetic colonialism” to rob the world’s peasants and indigenous farmers of their hard-earned seeds and knowledge.
“Gates Ag One’s aim is to take control over the genetic diversity of this planet,” agricultural freedom activist Dr. Vandana Shiva told me. According to Shiva, Gates “continues to subvert and sabotage both farmers’ seed sovereignty and the seed sovereignty of countries. ‘Gates Ag One’ is a clear declaration of his intent to create an empire over life and biodiversity, over food and farming, and over our sustenance.” In the process, says Shiva, “Gates is financing infernal Frankenstein experiments that defile God’s creation.”
Citizens, governments and farm organizations have written many laws and governments have adopted international treaties on biodiversity protection, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol to the CBD. By conning government officials, manipulating intellectual property law and rewriting seed regulations, Gates has been able to bypass or trample these statutes and treaties, and to evade the multilateral governance structures that governments put in place to prevent global corporations from hijacking the planet’s biodiversity and the seed commonwealth of peasants and farmers.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
Gates’ missionary faith in technology as the solution for every human ill, from food insecurity and disease to climate health, explains his obsessive promotion of GMOs. Gates’ zealous GMOs idolatry and gene-editing technologies leave him deaf to the mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence and warnings by agronomists, nutritionists, toxicologists and other scientists who question their safety.
GMO vaccines and medicines are mainstays of his public health enterprise, and Gates finances research, development and proliferation of GMOs as the fix for every agricultural problem. He funded, for example, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the two CRISPR chemists who won 2020 Nobel prizes for gene editing.
Gates was also one of the largest shareholders of Monsanto — the world’s most aggressive promoter of GMOs and pesticides. The central mission of Gates Ag One is to fly into the face of virtually every independent science and safety assessment in a blind rush to impose Gates’ untested GMOs, patented seeds, synthetic foods and experimental medicines on humanity.
One might expect his Monsanto stake and his partnerships with processed food, chemical and oil companies to discredit Gates’ pretensions as a public health advocate. But Gates’ massive investments in media journalism (a March 2020 Nation magazine exposé reveals the Gates Foundation has bought Gates guarantees of favorable coverage with $250 million in grants to mediaoutlets including NBC/Universal, BBC, NPR, The Guardian, Le Mond, Al Jazeera, and others “to influence the news”) have insulated him from the scrutiny and skepticism the media historically applied to fiendish profiteering schemes and rank hypocrisy by power-mad billionaires.
Money talks, and the billions that Gates and his pharma allies annually pour into public and commercial journalism have instead made Gates the media’s chief darling. He uses his biweekly “satellite tours” of leading cable and network news shows to showcase his mesmerizing power to command softball questioning and fawning deference from obsequious hosts (with the exception of Norah O’Donnell) including Anderson Cooper (CNN), David Muir (ABC), Ari Melber (MSNBC), and Chuck Todd (NBC), who gratefully entertain his lofty prognostication on topics ranging from public health to the economy and agriculture policy.
Gates is currently deploying his billions to orchestrate attacks against GMO and gene editing laws in many of the countries that have imposed safety standards. When scientists and regulators plead that time is essential to accurately assess the safety of gene editing and GMOs, Gates declares that “Time is the enemy!”
In 2017, a German human rights group, Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBS), published evidence of a Gates’ secretive campaign to evade democratically imposed restraints on his high-risk gene manipulation experiments. HBS released more than 1,200 emails the group obtained under U.S. Freedom of Information laws. Those documents show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hired a shady Big Ag/Biotech spy and propaganda outfit to mount an undercover espionage attack aimed at corrupting United Nations officials and sabotaging international efforts to ban a diabolical new technology called “gene drive.”
Gene drives are at the cutting edge of genetic engineering, synthetic biology and gene editing. They are the tools of choice for eugenicists and for those seeking to build the technocratic “transhuman future” championed by Gates and his Silicon Valley cronies.
Scientists use CRISPR technology to edit genes into an organism’s chromosomes to reprogram DNA to switch off the normal rules of genetic inheritance and “drive” the artificially introduced trait through an entire population and spread it to all future generations. Their capacity to permanently alter the genome of an entire species makes gene drives the biological instrument of ultimate power.
Gene-editing technology could facilitate Gates’ schemes to create and patent new-and-improved species of plants and animals, or to exterminate species of which he disapproves. One of his aims is to use gene drives to insert “suicide genes” to eradicate entire mosquito species that spread Zika or malaria — a goal of the Target Malaria Project, in which the Gates Foundation has invested$40 million. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a long-time protégé and partner of Gates and an enthusiastic cheerleader for gene drive, told StatNews, “Getting rid of them would be a blessing.”
Critics argue that gene drives pose an existential biosecurity risk to humanity due to their capacity to change or eliminate entire species and to catastrophically alter ecosystems. They are, also, the ultimate biological weapon; the most satanic minds in various military and intelligence agencies covet gene drives to breed supersoldiers or to mint “apocalypse genes.” Critics fear that nations might one day use “genocide genes” to eradicate certain races or undesirable traits.
HBS’s Gene Drive Files expose the leading role of the U.S. military in the development of gene drive technology. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent approximately $100 million researching gene drives. The other primary Gene Drive investors are Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested $75 million in researching suicide and anti-fertility genes.
At the 2016 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 13) in Cancun, 179 international organizations, including the Heinrich Böll Foundation, voted for the UN to impose a global moratorium on gene drives. The opponents of this technology also circulated a letter, “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation.” Environmentalists worry about unintended consequences if suicide or extinction genes leap species.
The Gene Drive emails reveal that in reaction to the COP 13 resolution, the Gates Foundation hired “Emerging Ag,” a sketchy espionage concern with its own sinister entanglements with Big Pharma and Big Ag, to sabotage and shut down the diverse and unified international coalition opposing gene drive.
The Gates Foundation gave Emerging Ag $1.6 million to “recruit a covert coalition of academics to manipulate the UN decision-making process over gene drives.” The emails reveal that the Gates’ campaign was part of the billionaire’s plan to “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents.” Emerging Ag secretly mobilized some 65 allegedly “independent scientists” for hire — “Biostitutes,” in the industry vernacular — and public officials to an online expert group, the UN CBD Online Forum on Synthetic Biology. A senior executive of the Gates Foundation provided these crooked operatives with daily instructions on how to sabotage regulations, undermine the science, discredit advocates, corrupt the process, and subvert democracy.
In furtherance of its campaign, Gates simultaneously funded a 2016 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences endorsing gene driving. The DARPA co-funded the whitewash report with the Gates Foundation. As The Guardian noted after the release of the NAS report:
“The same US defense research agency (DARPA) who paid for the NAS study have made it known that they are going all-in on gene drive research and development of ‘robust’ synthetic organisms. There is good reason to be worried.”
As Jim Thomas of the ETC Group observed: “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.”
In furtherance of its coordinated campaign with Emerging Ag, the Gates Foundation manipulated three members, who were under Gates’ control, of the relevant UN expert committee known as AHTEG (Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group) on Synthetic Biology. Gates and Emerging Ag were successful and the UN shot down the moratorium.
Mounting evidence points to the kind of industrially grown and processed foods that Gates favors as leading culprits in the chronic disease epidemics that are devastating human health and debilitating children across the globe.
The world’s most popular GMOs function to facilitate aerial spraying of pesticides. Monsanto’s technique of inserting genes to make agricultural crops resistant to weed-killing poisons allows Big Ag to fire ground-based farm workers, replacing them with airplanes (or drones) that saturate landscapes (and food) with aerosolized toxins like glyphosate and neonicotinoids.
Since the proliferation of chemical pesticides in the 1940s, more than half of American songbirds have disappeared, most of the world’s bee and insect populations have collapsed and chronic disease rates in America have risen to 54% in lockstep with increased pesticide use.
As Vandana Shiva pointed out, “Gates has declared chemical warfare not just on nature but on our body’s metabolic systems and the symbiosis in the gut microbiome with his pesticides and herbicides obsession, and his campaign to switch humanity to GMOs.”
Synthetic foods: soylent ‘Gates’
“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” — CIA propagandist Bertrand Russell, an advocate of one world government, dictatorship, and top-down control of the masses by a privileged oligarchal class (1952).
Gates’ power, profit and control agenda appears to drive his commitment to synthesize so-called “transhuman” laboratory foods and his massive investments in processed food manufacturing.
That collaboration has large stakes in Beyond Meat, which they co-own with Tyson Foods and Cargill. Beyond Meat makes plant-based GMO and pesticide-laden chicken tacos. Gates and his Billionaire Boys Club also have big positions in Impossible Foods, which uses heat and pressure to produce synthetic burgers and bratwurst from GMO soy. Lab results show the company’s imitation meat contained glyphosate levels 11 times higher than its closest competitor. Seth Itzkan from Soil4Climatewrote:
“Impossible Foods should really be called ‘Impossible Patents.’ It’s not food; it’s software, intellectual property — 14 patents, in fact, in each bite of Impossible Burger. It’s IFood, the next killer app. Just download your flavor. This is its likely appeal to Bill Gates, their über investor.”
Another of Breakthrough’s ventures is Memphis Meats, which formulates an engineered meat-like tissue on a substrate of calf’s blood. A bullish Bloomberg predicts that synthetic meat revenues will reach $3.5 billion by 2026.
In June 2020, the “Breakthrough Bros” invested $3.5 million in Biomilq, a company that produces synthetic breast milk from “cultured human mammary glands and epithelial cells.” Gates has not explained whether the milk will contain the maternal antibodies — present in authentic mother’s milk — that function to protect infants from infectious diseases, or whether the coming generations of Biomilq kids will need to rely, instead, on additional batteries of Gates’ GMO vaccines.
Unimpressed, Vandana Shiva observes that Bill Gates “wants to deprive us of good, healthy proteins and fats and get us hooked on his synthetic lab-grown trash.”
Following Gates’ lead, GAVI is optimistic that bugs will soon be an important food supplement for impoverished and undernourished children.
Perhaps in anticipation of that happy day, the Gates Foundation has invested in a South African company that makes edible protein from cultivated maggots. The company’s factory houses a billion flies and produces 22 tons of maggots daily that graze on slaughterhouse, municipal and household waste. Since markets are still immature for maggots as human food, Gates sells his maggot-meal to factory meat operations like those owned by Gates’ partner, Tyson Foods, to feed battery-caged chickens, and to large-scale fish farms, like those owned by Unilever, a $58 billion multinational, which is both a business partner to Gates and a grant beneficiary of his peculiar public charity.
As usual, Gates has also mobilized the international agencies that he controls and the large corporations with which he partners to drive his fake food agenda including, most notably, The Gates-funded World Economic Forum (WEF), which assembles the world’s billionaires in Davos each year to plan and plot out humanity’s political and economic future.
Schwab makes the case that powerful people should use the COVID crisis to impose authoritarian controls, pervasive surveillance, oppressive new economic models and one-world government on a beleaguered, terrified and compliant humanity. The Great Reset is WEF’s plan to rebuild a new controlled economy systematically after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Schwab and Prince Charles unveiled “The Great Reset” at a WEF summit in May 2020. It is a vision for transferring the world into a totalitarian and authoritarian surveillance state manipulated by technocrats to manage traumatized populations, to shift wealth upward, and serve the interests of elite billionaire oligarchs. To “reset” global food policies, the WEF has promoted and partnered with an organization called EAT Forum, which describes itself as the “Davos for food.”
EAT’s co-founder is Wellcome Trust, an organization founded, funded by and strategically linked to vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline, in which Gates is heavily invested. EAT’s biggest initiative is called FReSH, which the organization describes as an effort to drive the transformation of the food system. The project’s partners include Bayer, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever, and tech giant Google.
The EAT Forum works with these companies to “add value to business and industry” and “set the political agenda.” To further this profit-making enterprise, EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Australia. The organization also assists the Gates-funded United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the “creation of new dietary guidelines” and sustainable development initiatives.
According to Frederic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels, EAT network is working closely with some of the biggest imitation meat companies, including Impossible Foods and other biotech companies, to replace wholesome nutritious foods with Gates’ genetically modified lab concoctions.
“They frame it as healthy and sustainable, which of course it is neither,” Leroy told The Defender.
Dr. Shiva also scoffs at Gates’ perennial propaganda claims that his GMO meats are about feeding kids and derailing climate change:
“Lab-processed fake food is really about patenting our food, not about feeding people or saving the climate, as Gates and his fellow biotech friends pretend. EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”
“Companies like Unilever and Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies are already chemical processors, so many of these companies are very well positioned to profit off of this new food business which revolves around processing chemicals and extracts needed to produce these lab-made foods on a global scale.”
Fortified foods
Synthetic and GMO foods tend to be low in the vital micronutrients that support human health. Glyphosate, for example, functions as a chelator. It kills weeds by leaching out the mineral building blocks of life. Farm crops exposed to glyphosate have far less nutritional value than natural foods.
People eating Gates’ processed, synthetic and GMO foods may have full stomachs, while being clinically malnourished. Gates is rushing to solve this problem by buying technologies and partnering with companies like Roche and Kraft that fortify foods artificially with minerals and vitamins. He is simultaneously promoting laws in developing nations to mandate food fortification. Those laws benefit pesticide and processed food companies to the disadvantage of traditional and organic farmers. Since U.S. companies, like Roche, Kraft, General Foods and Philip Morris already fortify their processed cheese and cereals, they are Gates’ enthusiastic partners in this grift.
I saw this hustle perpetrated by another Big Food swindler earlier in my career. In 2003, I was representing thousands of small-plot Polish farmers in the battle to keep Smithfield Foods’ industrial pork factories out of Poland. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Andrzej Lepper, told me that Smithfield officials offered him a $1 million bribe to support a law requiring slaughterhouses to install high tech hygiene technology including laser-operated restroom faucets. Smithfield knew the law would have the effect of shuttering the 2,600 family operated abattoirs that made Poland’s signature kielbasa sausage. As the only entity that could afford the lasers, Smithfield would thereby gain monopoly control of Poland’s slaughter capacity and 100% of its lucrative kielbasa exports.
Gates took his food fortification laws from Smithfield’s playbook. By mandating that all foods be fortified, Kraft products like Cheez Whiz and American Singles, and its vitamin-fortified Kool-Aid and Tang, are positioned to displace locally produced goat cheese and goat milk in village markets and put small African farmers out of business.
To promote his mandatory fortified foods agenda, Gates created another of his useful quasi-governmental organizations, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to assist multinational food companies (Gates’ business partners) in lobbying for favorable tariffs and tax rates for processed and fortified foods, and speedier regulatory review of new products in targeted countries. Gates’ GAIN consortium also gives local governments money to stimulate demand for fortified foods through large-scale public relations campaigns or by offering governmental “seals of approval” for corporate food products.
Gates, GAVI and GAIN
Gates modeled his GAIN project after his billion-dollar global vaccine program (GAVI). By masquerading as a public health agency, GAVI has successfully mobilized public agencies and private industry to profitably dump untested, experimental or discredited, and often deadly vaccines to inoculatepoor children in developing nations.
According to Vandana Shiva, GAIN’s objective is to “coordinate campaigns that pressure African and Asian countries to give obscene subsidies, tax breaks and tariff exemptions and other preferences for processed foods.”
Some experts are troubled by the idea of Bill Gates and multinational food companies teaming up to colonize food systems in underdeveloped countries, and hawking processed foods under a public health banner.
Dr. Mark Hyman, the New York Times bestselling author and Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, told me:
“ … despite occasionally being fortified with vitamins and minerals processed foods are loaded with sugar, starch, processed oils, artificial colors, preservatives, pesticides and sodium which contribute to the double burden of obesity and malnutrition, and the chronic disease epidemic. Globally 11 million die every year from an excess of ultra-processed foods and lack of protective whole foods, making processed food the number one killer in the world.”
Dr. Hyman calls those foods “the opposite” of nutrition. Shiva agrees. “The GAIN program,” says Shiva, “is less about solving malnutrition than a heavy-handed way to force poor nations to open access to their markets, to obliterate local producers.”
“With one exception, iodized salt, fortified foods cost too much, fail to reach their intended targets, or are too limited in scope to do what they are intended to do. I see these laws as solving a problem for the companies that make these products, not addressing nutrient and calorie deficiencies. I’m not a fan of fortified foods. I want a wide variety of real foods made more available and less expensive, and locally produced. So I would agree with the critics. I wish the Gates Foundation would invest in projects to promote small, local food production.”
Artificial intelligence: ridding the world of farmers
“We used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity.”
Above all, he wants it to work fast. Gates’ “computational acceleration” will hasten the adoption of these beneficial innovations to achieve his ambitious schemes to deliver scientific breakthroughs to small farmers before climate change destroys their yields.
But Shiva warns American farmers, already drowning in debt, to be wary of Gates’ promises to throw them a line:
“When Bill Gates forced his devilish ‘rescue’ technologies on Indian farmers, the only one to benefit was Gates and his multinational partners. He gave money to the government and a company called Digital Green and made extravagant promises to digitally transform Indian agriculture. Then with the cooperation of his purchased government officials.
“Bill Gates put cameras and electronic sensors in the homes and fields of Indian farmers. He used their cell phones, which he gave them for free, and his fiber optic and 5G installations — which he persuaded the Indian Telecom Company to finance — to catalog, study, and steal farmers’ crop data, indigenous practices, and agricultural knowledge for free. Then he sold it back to them as new data. Instead of digitally transforming farms as he promised, he transformed Indian farmers into digital information. He privatized their seeds and harvested the work of the public system. He ripped out their knowledge assets and heirloom genetics, and installed GMO seeds and other ridiculous practices.” Shiva adds, “His clear agenda was to drive small farmers from the land and eventually mechanize and privatize food production.”
Christian Westbrook, an agricultural researcher and the founder of the online podcast, “Ice Age Farmer,” takes comfort that American farmers know Gates’ history in India and Africa: “We know who Bill Gates is, and we know the mischief he made for small farmers in Mexico, Africa and India. We know that his recent land purchases here are just the start of the Green Revolution 3.0. He wants to suck out the democratic essence of America’s pastoral landscapes and our farm families — to steal our livelihoods, our knowledge, our seeds, and our land.”
Westbrook takes note of the fact that like all chiselers, Gates is always in a rush:
“His strategy is to keep everyone moving so fast they can’t see the scam. He’s always telling us that climate change can’t wait, that we need to accelerate access to these products and adoption of his technologies, that research isn’t happening fast enough.”
Westbrook told me that Gates’ endless talk about “accelerating the process” and his extravagant promises of miraculous new technologies, of “investment,” and of “public-private” partnerships, are all part of his con. “He keeps telling everyone we need to ‘accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.’”
Many farmers say they don’t care to be rescued by Gates. Westbrook says he thinks Gates intends his baronial U.S. spreads to serve as flagships — showcases for his retinue of digital technologies for American farmers. “He’s doing it for the same reasons he brought his technology to Indian farms — to steal their knowledge, and move them off the land.”
Trent Loos, a sixth-generation Midwestern rancher and farm activist, told me that farmers have a knee-jerk reaction against billionaires “playing Monopoly” with American farmland:
“It makes it difficult for young farmers or even those who have farmed for generations, to compete with such deep pockets. It certainly creates a barrier for them. When people with this type of wealth start to buy farms, it makes us wonder what they are really up to. Nobody wants to rent land from Bill Gates, or work as his sharecropper.”
Westbrook says he believes Gates is pursuing a darker agenda. Like Shiva, Westbrook believes that Gates and the other robber barons are using the pretexts of climate, biodiversity, and the zoonotic pandemic threat to get human beings out of the ag business and off the farm. And there is evidence to support him. The Gates Foundation is significantly invested in Alphabet, Google’sparent company. Alphabet has invented “crop sniffing” robots, designed to replace farmers and ranchers, as part of its “Mineral” project. Its “Moonshot” project is “developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics, and more.”
Says Westbrook, “He wants to get the people off of the farms, get the animals off, and get us all eating his plant-based meats and bug protein.”
“Gates talks about farming as an archaic, quaint, dirty, dangerous, inefficient, barbarous relic from the past that threatens us by increasing the menace of climate change and the risks of global pandemics by putting humans in dangerous contact with microbes,” says Howard Vlieger, an Iowa farmer who has worked as a crop and livestock consultant in the U.S. and Canada since 1992.
Vlieger is an expert on the impacts of pesticides and GMOs on food products and soils. “Gates’ objective is to move the world “away from sustainable and humane animal agriculture that celebrates our contact with the soil and finds good health in our respectful interactions with nature — and toward artificial cows and a grim chemical paradigm that are all features of top-down dystopia. His vision is one of contaminated and unsavory foods and separation of man from nature.”
“Gates seems to have no concept of the joy that ordinary people — people like our family — take in farming,” Nicolette Niman told me. Niman is a California rancher and farmer, and the author of the books “Righteous Porkchop” and “Defending Beef.” Her husband Bill is the founder of Niman Ranch, a co-op of hundreds of small sustainable U.S. cattle and hog growers who market high-quality organic beef and pork from sustainable grass-fed operations.
“Regenerative farming and ranching immeasurably enriches human lives. It’s challenging work, based upon our intimate contact with the earth. At its best, good farming is a quest to understand and follow nature’s models,” Niman said. Niman says that Gates seems to have little interest in nature’s wisdom:
“He doesn’t seem to understand that our engagement with the soil, and joy we get from our contact with the earth, our complex relationship with our animals, even with all the hardships and difficulties, are sources of our freedom and our pride, and happiness at being masters of our destinies.”
“We need to build a world that respects individual self-determination, the humane treatment of animals, and good stewardship of our soils. We need to understand that a wholesome relationship with nature is not only vital to our health and climate, it’s the source of dignity, liberty, and enrichment in our post-industrial era.”
Using wide-ranging technologies, all of these activists from various continents expressed their discomfort with Gates’ tendency to look at population, rather than people, and to see the management of population as a problem in urgent need of his technological solutions.
“Gates sees the forest, not the trees,” Vlieger observes. “And even when he looks at the forest, he only seems to see board feet of lumber — how he can leverage the landscapes for cash and commoditize people.” Vlieger continues:
“Gates’ habit of seeing every human difficulty through the lens of some technological solution from which he can profit is beyond myopic. It’s pathology — sociopathology, really. Gates is a dangerously powerful sociopath with $137 billion and a vision for a top-down technocracy. Does that worry anybody?”
Westbrook says Gates, Cargill and Tyson are a powerful cartel on a mission to end animal agriculture and drive human beings from farms. “It is ‘replacement agriculture,’” says Westbrook. “They even use that word, ‘alternative agriculture.’”
Westbrook’s view of the dystopian future of technocratic totalitarianism envisioned by Bill Gates sounds like a baseless conspiracy theory if one ignores all the evidence supporting him. He predicts that we will very soon — in months, not years — see engineered food shortages and pressures to empty and “improve” the rural landscapes by idling farmland and replacing farm jobs with robots and artificial intelligence.
Westbrook predicts government efforts to push populations toward mega cities and smart cities where businesses are closed, jobs are scarce, and most of us will rely on universal basic income paid in digital currencies — revocable, of course, in cases of noncompliance and disobedience. Westbrook predicts a scenario “where the human cattle are completely dependent on the government for money and food, and all the folks are in one place in the smart cities and they’re easily monitored by the technocrats of Gates’ Great Reset.” Westbrook continued:
“They’re shutting down food production and actually more, more broadly, they’re shutting down all economic activity, all human activity, corralling us into their smart cities. It’s pretty appalling. And now that we’ve got these pandemics, we had to implement medical martial law, and since it’s all a health crisis, we’re also going to have to take over all of your food productions and your nutritional needs. They’ve married these two things.”
Time will tell us if Westbrook’s nightmare is merely a paranoid conspiracy theory — I hope so.
Food Systems Summit
In 2009, Bill Gates, an unelected billionaire with no governmental office or diplomatic portfolio, kicked off his global vaccine enterprise with a speech to the United Nations. He announced the $10 billion donation and declared the launch of his “Decade of Vaccines.” His scheme unfolded like clockwork. Gates’ contributions secured him ironclad control over WHO. As Foreign Affairs has reported, “Few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.”
Gates created and funded powerful faux-governmental agencies like PATH, GAVI, CEPI, and the Brighton Collaboration, to push vaccines in developing countries, to consolidate his control over public health, and to prepare the groundwork for the global vaccine putsch he had pre-scheduled for 2020.
In January 2019, the WHO dutifully declared — citing no specific evidence — that “vaccine hesitancy” was one of the principal threats to global health. The Gates’ Medical Cartel followed that statement with orchestrated campaigns in every U.S. state and in countries around the globe by pharma-financed politicians introducing laws to mandate vaccines and end exemptions.
Two months later, the powerful House Intelligence Committee chair, Adam Schiff — yet another of Gates’ financial beneficiaries — demanded social media and media companies begin censoring “vaccine misinformation” — a euphemism for any assertion that departs from official pharma and government pronouncements. Gates has giant stakes in Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Those companies all began enthusiastically censoring criticism of vaccines.
A year later, the COVID-19 outbreak provided an opportunity of convenience for Gates and his vaccine cartel to consolidate their control of humanity. A May 2020 article by Derrick Broze in The Last American Vagabond observed that, “By tracing the Foundation’s investments and Gates’ relationships we can see that nearly every person involved in the fight against COVID-19 is tied to Gates or his Foundation by two degrees or less.” Their relationship gave Bill Gates and his Foundation an unchallenged influence over the response to the pandemic.
Gates repeatedly declared, in appearances on virtually every network and cable show and on every media platform, that all economic activity must cease until all 7 billion humans were vaccinated and possessedimmunization passports. His ten-year Decade of Vaccines that began with his UN appearance had gone off without a hitch. Under the leadership of Gates’ old protégé and loyalist, Fauci, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services arranged immunity from liability for COVID vaccines and committed $48 billion in taxpayer money to buy and distribute a retinue of new experimental vaccines, many of them owned by Gates.
Gates’ control of the process has been complete. His execution of his vaccine prediction was elegant and flawless. And now Gates’ surrogates are rolling out the same playbook to push through his totalitarian food agenda.
During the October 14 -18 plenary of the 46th Session of the UN Committee on World Food Security, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, announced the convening of a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. Guterres acknowledged that the Summit had been jointly requested by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Bill Gates and his foundation generously fund and control all four organizations.
The UN Food Systems Summit effectively announced a parallel agenda to the one launched by the WEF when it hosted its Great Reset conference in June, 2020. In their research into the UN Food Systems Summit, AGRA Watch (the grassroots advocacy group that follows Gates and his foundation’s failed Green Revolution in Africa) found that of the 12 individuals involved in the Summit, 11 have strong connections to the Gates Foundation.
According to Heather Day of AGRA Watch, in some instances, these organizations were directly funded by the Gates Foundation and others Gates-funded specific programs that had major roles: “So his fingers aren’t just in it; almost every single one of the participants is working for Bill Gates. These are the authors of the UN food systems summit.” The Food Systems Summit is a 100% Gates project.
Kalibata reminded Food Systems Summit participants of the urgency. They had, she said, only 10 years left to accelerate the transformation of our food systems to meet Sustainable Development Goals for climate, nutrition and pandemic response.
The UN Food Systems Summit will lay out Gates’ “Decade of Food” blueprint for the global food agenda to be completed by 2030. We can only pray that Gates’ next new health plan for humanity won’t involve the same level of traumatic violence to our civil rights, to our global economy, to the traditions of our civilization, to the idealism of democracies, and to our self-determination, that accompanied his 2020 “Decade of Vaccines.”
Day is pessimistic: “Gates’ plan will be a roadmap of how to replace everything that is good about farming with the technocrats’ own systems for jobless farming, chemical food and bug protein,” predicts Day.
Conclusion
The Gates Foundation is not conventional philanthropy. It gives miniscule, if any, support to popular causes like the Wounded Warrior Foundation, ASPCA, environmental, or voting rights or civil rights groups.
It is a weaponized philanthropy that Gates launched in 1994 to resuscitate his reputation after the Microsoft antitrust case exposed him as a lying, cheating, thieving, manipulator intent on felonious monopoly control of global information conduits.
Gates has since invested $36 billion into the Gates Foundation, which has a value of $46.9 billionover which he and his wife exercise total control. The foundation has given away only $23.6 billionin charitable grants, and these “gifts” include billions in tax-deductible donations to companies in which Gates is invested, like Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi.
Gates’ brilliant mind devised this scheme to form a foundation that shelters his income, and allows him to leverage taxpayer dollars by investing the foundation’s earnings in projects that multiply his wealth and expand his power and public prestige, while avoiding taxes.
Using this structure, he can give tax-deductible donations to companies he partly owns and reap personal and foundation profits while avoiding taxes — and allowing him to hide his money in myriad ways. It’s a win-win! Gates has deployed his foundation as the embodiment of his base instincts for monopoly and control — a vehicle for ruthless philanthrocapitalism that hijacks public access and blurs the lines between corporate and public interests, cloaks private profit agendas with lofty public-spirited rhetoric and gives himself monopoly control over public health, our planet’s life support systems, our economics and people.
Gates has made his foundation a tool for consolidating the efforts of his fellow billionaires, captured regulators, and his business partners from Big Pharma, Dirty Energy, GMO food, Telecom and Big Data, and the bought and brain-dead journalists who collectively profit from the multiplying miseries of the dystopian world they have arranged for the rest of us. Gates and his cronies, toadies and minions pump up fear of pandemics, climate change, mass extinction — and offer his vision of new technologies as the salvation, which only he possesses the genius to deploy.
Gates is planning a satellite fleet that will be able to survey every square inch of the planet 24 hours per day. Such systems will no doubt be useful should populations become restless with political and economic structures that strip citizens of power, shift wealth ever upward, and doom most of humanity to meaningless, hopeless survival.
Democracy and farm freedom advocate Dr. Vandana Shiva says that Gates’ philanthrocapitalism is a “destructive force with the potential to push the future of our planet towards extinction and ecological collapse.” Shiva accuses Gates of using philanthropic capitalism to accelerate the corporate takeover of our seed, agriculture, food, knowledge and global health systems. “He funds the manipulation of information and promotes the erosion of democracy — all in pursuit of personal power and profits.”
Shiva says the Gates Foundation has powered an “unholy alliance” between big capital, science and technology institutions and governments to establish a global empire over life, through monocultures, patents and monopolies designed to destroy the natural world of diversity, self-organization and freedom.
“You have seen the wickedness they can do with vaccines in the name of public health,” Shiva told me. “Well, now he controls the land. He controls the seed. He controls the food. He has the ultimate power to starve us all to death.”
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Hundreds of unmarked graves have been discovered on the premises of another former ‘Indian residential school’ in Canada, throwing further light on the extent of the genocide of indigenous children. On Thursday, June 24, the Cowessess First Nation said in the press conference at least 600 unmarked graves have been discovered on the grounds of what used to be the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.
Cowessess chief Cadmus Delorme also stated that the radar search had indicated 751 graves in the ground, adding that the ground-penetrating radar system used to discover these graves has an error rate of 10% to 15%. This would translate to at least 600 graves on the grounds. The news comes barely a month after 215 unmarked graves of children were discovered on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
In the press conference, Delorme also stated that the graves are being treated as “unmarked graves” rather than “mass graves” as of now. Much like the Kamloops schools, the Marieval school was also operated by the Roman Catholic Church between 1886 and 1970. The Church controlled more than two-thirds of all the so-called Indian residential schools in Canada.
“In 1960, there may have been marks on these graves. The Catholic Church representatives removed these headstones and today they are unmarked graves,” stated Delorme. Removing grave marks or gravestones is a criminal act as per Canadian law, and chief Delorme added that the ground will be treated as a crime scene.
He also noted that it is yet to be ascertained whether the graves discovered are all that of children. “We cannot confirm they are all children. But there are oral stories that there are adults in this gravesite, as well,” Delorme added. The discovery has attracted further outrage across Canada, which is reeling from the discovery of the Kamloops graves.
A joint statement released by the Cowessess First Nation and the Federation of Sovereign Indian Nations (FSIN) stated that “our community is in mourning and our families are in pain. Every one of our Cowessess members has a family member buried there. The pain we are feeling is real.”
FSIN chief Bobby Cameron, who had earlier called the discovery a proof of genocide in the country, emphasized that sadly “this is just the beginning.” He pointed out that thousands of children have died in these residential schools for the better part of the 19th and 20th century.
“There are thousands of families across our Treaty territories that have been waiting for their children to come home. Saskatchewan had the highest number of residential schools and highest number of survivors. There will be hundreds more,” he added.
The province of Saskatchewan in central Canada has a large indigenous population, constituting over 16% of the total population – much higher than the national average of less than 5%. The province also had the last of the operational Indian residential schools in the country, Gordon’s Indian Residential School in Punnichy, which was closed only in 1996.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), in its final report released in 2015, had documented 566 deaths in the school in its nearly nine decades of operation. The TRC stated that these confirmed deaths are still only a partial record and that the actual numbers could be much higher.
Indigenous leaders and TRC officials have often called for a nationwide search and discovery of all unmarked graves, to identify the victims of the residential schools and allow proper burials as a step towards justice for a historical crime. Over 6,000 students are estimated to have died in these schools that operated for nearly a century or even longer across Canada.
“This horrific truth can no longer be ignored,” said Stephanie Scott, executive director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). “The least governments and churches must do now is to provide access to the necessary records to identify the locations of all the children and allow communities to honor them with the traditional ceremonies and protocols they were denied.”
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Featured image: The grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, where Cowessess leaders discovered hundreds of graves. (Photo: Cowessess First Nation/Facebook)
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The code name for the war games may seem puzzling; there’s a noticeable incongruity with the name of an animal primarily associated with South Asia and Africa used for maneuvers on the top of the world. It’s less baffling when one recalls the mongoose is used to kill snakes. Russian submarines are the snakes.
This year’s iteration includes warships, warplanes and submarines from NATO member states Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway and the U.S. Five of those states – Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and the U.S. – are Arctic coastal nations. The others are Finland and Sweden, both NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners, and Russia. Isolated Russia. Targeted Russia.
Two submarines, six military vessels and eight aircraft are involved.
The Russian submarine fleet is that part of its nuclear triad of delivery systems least vulnerable to a first-strike attack. Missile silos and aircraft on the ground could be destroyed within hours of such an attack. Submarines, then, are Russia’s last line of defense, the only retaliatory force left and as such its main deterrent force.
Neutralizing Russia’s submarines, first or soon in a first strike, would render the nation defenseless in a strategic context. NATO knows that. That’s why it conducts Dynamic Mongoose annually.
“By exercising and validating our anti-submarine warfare capabilities, tactics, techniques and procedures during Dynamic Mongoose 21, NATO will be better prepared to counter, and if necessary, defeat a subsurface threat during an emerging crisis or conflict….I am confident that collectively we will be able to operate effectively in a sub-surface threat environment, where joint warfighting proficiency with submarines, maritime helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft is essential to mission success.”
Shorn of the excess verbiage, the commander was talking about anti-submarine warfare. Nothing else.
The deputy commander of NATO’s Allied Maritime Command added to the above the assertion that “the airbases provided by three Allied Nations [Britain, Iceland and Norway] this year will let us showcase how capable NATO is, in terms of conducting large scale anti-submarine warfare operations in the North Atlantic….”
The NATO press release on the drills also speaks of strengthening NATO interoperability and of submarines taking turns “hunting and being hunted, closely coordinating their efforts with the air and surface participants.”
The Arctic Ocean, especially under the polar ice cap, used to be the final redoubt of Russian strategic capabilities. NATO is determined to eliminate that remaining refuge.
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell
Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell
The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell
Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.
And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell
Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.
What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We’re running out of options.
Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
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After only five months in office, President Joe Biden has already become notorious for his verbal gaffes and mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly Republican-partisan physician has suggested that he be tested to determine his cognitive abilities. That said, however, there is one June 16th tweet that he is responsible for that is quite straightforward that outdoes everything else for sheer mendacity. It appeared shortly after the summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was apparently intended to be rhetorical, at least insofar as Biden understands the term. It went: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.”
There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100, but that does not take into account the frequent interventions of various kinds that took place largely in Latin America between the Spanish-American War and 1946. One recalls how the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler declared that “War is a racket” in 1935. He confessed to having “…helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
And there have been since 1900 other regime change and interventionist actions, both using military force and also brought about by corrupting local politicians with money and other inducements. And don’t forget the American trained death squads active in Latin America. Some would also include in the list the possibly as many as 50 Central Intelligence Agency and Special Ops political assassinations that have been documented, though admittedly sometimes based on thin evidence.
That Joe Biden, who has been at a reasonably high level in the federal government for over forty years, including as Vice President for eight years and now President should appear to be ignorant of what his own government has done and quite plausibly continues to do is astonishing. After all, Biden was VP when Victoria Nuland worked for the Obama Administration as the driving force behind efforts in 2013-2014 to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square accompanied by Senator John McCain to encourage the protesters.
A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé who is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. As Biden’s tweet even recognized in a backhanded way, it is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior. Biden clearly is part of that and also clearly does not understand what he is doing or saying.
Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The Obama and Biden Administration’s replacement of the government in Kiev was the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. That point of conflict has continued to this day, with a U.S. warships in the Black Sea engaging in exercises with the Ukrainian navy.
Biden was also with the Obamas when they chose to destabilize and destroy Libya. Nor should Russia itself be forgotten. Boris Yeltsinwas re-elected president of Russia in 1996 after the Clinton Administration pumped billions of dollars into his campaign, enabling him to win a close oligarch-backed victory that had been paid for and managed by Washington. Joe Biden was a Senator at the time.
And then there is Iran, where democratically elected Mohammed Mossadeqwas deposed by the CIA in 1953 and replaced by the Shah. The Shah was replaced by the Islamic Republic in turn in 1979 and the poisoned relationship between Washington and Tehran has constituted a tit-for-tat quasi-cold war ever since, marked by assassinations and sabotage.
And who can forget Chile where Salvador Allende was removed by the CIA in 1973 and replaced by Augusto Pinochet? Or Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 where the CIA failed to bring about regime change in Havana? Can it be that Joe Biden cannot recall any of those “interventions,” which were heavily covered in the international media at the time?
And to make up the numbers, Joe can possibly consider the multiple “interferences in elections,” which is more precisely what he was referring to. As a CIA officer stationed in Europe and the Middle East in and 1970s through the early 1990s, I can assure him that I personally know about nearly continuous interference in elections in places like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, all of which had prominent communist parties, some of which were on the verge of government entry. Bags of money went to conservative parties, politicians were bribed and journalists bought. In fact, during that time period I would dare to say there was hardly an election that the United States did not somehow get involved in.
Does it still go on? The U.S. has been seeking regime change in Syria since 2004 and is currently occupying part of the country. And of course, Russia is on the receiving end of a delegitimization process through a controlled western media that is seeking to get rid of Putin by exploiting a CIA and western intelligence funded opposition. China has no real opposition or open elections, nor can its regime plausibly be changed, but it is constantly being challenged by depicting it and its behavior in the most negative fashion possible.
Joe Biden really should read up on the history of American political and military interventions, regime changes and electoral interference worldwide. He just might learn something. The most important point might, however, elude him. All of the intervention and all of the deaths have turned out badly both for the U.S. and for the people and countries being targeted. Biden has taken a bold step to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, though it now appears that that decision might be in part reversed. Much better to complete the process and also do the same thing in places like Iraq, Somalia and Syria. The whole world will be a better place for it.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
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Even though Biden’s airstrikes targeted an Iraqi militia and killed civilians, the US said the bombing was a “message” to Iran. Kadhimi told Stoltenberg that the US-led coalition in Iraq should not use the country as a theater to attack other countries.
Kadhimi’s office shared a readout of the meeting between the Iraqi leader and Stoltenberg with Newsweek. The readout said that Kadhimi “indicated the importance of developing relations between Iraq and NATO for the interests of the Iraqi people and the stability of the region and the world, as he stressed the importance of Iraq not being an arena for settling conflicts, or a springboard for aggression against any of its neighbors.”
Iraq has found itself in the middle of Washington’s campaign against Iran before. In January 2020, the US assassinated Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani was killed alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was the leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a group of mostly Shia state-sponsored militias that was formed in 2014 to fight ISIS.
The killing of Muhandis and Soleimani enraged many in Iraq, and the country’s parliament voted unanimously to expel US troops. But the US refuses to leave and continues to bomb PMF fighters, enraging the Iraqi government.
On Monday, a spokesman for Iraq’s armed forces released a statementcondemning Biden’s airstrikes. “We condemn the US air attack that targeted a site last night on the Iraqi-Syrian border, which represents a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security in accordance with all international conventions,” the statement said.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
The recent statement issued by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC (CPSBC) [1] is a clear violation of the mission of the CPSBC to “act first and foremost in the interest of the public.” [2] The CPSBC fails in this duty by stifling genuine inquiry into what is best for patients and threatening to sanction any doctor who dares to question the merits of the prevailing measures.
Even a robot programmed to “follow the science” would throw up his hands in despair while reading the latest FDA COVID pronouncement. After untold numbers of people have been given antibody tests to determine their COVID status, the FDA now states, “Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a safety communication informing the public that results from SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a COVID-19 vaccination.”
New York’s Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting an exhibition devoted to an in-depth review of Paul Cézanne’s drawings. If there is any criticism to be made of this extraordinary show, it is that it is frankly overwhelming: with roughly 280 pencil, ink and gouache drawings and watercolors (and even a handful of oil paintings), there is so much to take in that two or three visits to the exhibition may be required to do it justice.
The large aeronaval maneuver Sea Breeze, officially “co-hosted by the United States and Ukraine” in the Black Sea, began yesterday. The United States planned and command it, it is, therefore, the host in this sea close to Russian territory. Sea Breeze takes place from June 28 to July 10. It is led by US Naval Forces Europe-Africa / Sixth Fleet with headquarters in Naples. It includes naval, submarine, amphibious, land, and air warfare exercises.
While benefits were rare and short-lived, side effects were common and long-term effects are completely unknown. In the 12-to-15 age group, 75.5% experienced headache, along with a long list of other transient side effects. However, more serious systemic adverse events also occurred in 2.4% of the trial subjects receiving the actual mRNA shot.
A recently published study in this month’s American Journal of Therapeutics, took an in-depth look at 18 randomized controlled studies on the use of Ivermectin to control COVID-19. The study concludes that the use of Ivermectin “significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19” and “found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”
One month after the end of the last hostilities between Israel and Hamas, events on the ground demonstrate that little has changed. And once again the US media is ignoring Israel’s creeping annexation of Palestinian lands and their brutally aggressive behaviors toward the Palestinian people.
Thirty years ago, the man who taught me quantum mechanics at Harvard wrote that the suppression of debate will be the “death of science”. Perhaps he saw the shape of things to come. Today, science is being perverted for political ends to an unprecedented extent. To look for an appropriate analogy, we would have to go back to the authority of the Church in medieval Europe.
On the final day of the Assange extradition hearing, magistrate Vanessa Baraitser refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce, on the grounds it was out of time. The affidavit explained that the defence had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.
As of June 21, nearly half (49%) of cases occurred in females and 76% were aged 65 years and older. There were a total of 3,907 hospitalizations and 750 deaths among those who had breakthrough infections, although not all of the hospitalizations may have been due primarily to COVID, Forbes reported.
What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk everywhere, waiting to attack?
Excerpts from the Preface of Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book.
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“The fear campaign has served as an instrument of disinformation.
Media lies sustained the image of a killer viruswhich initially contributed to destabilizing US-China trade and disrupting air travel. And then in February “V- the Virus” (which incidentally is similar to seasonal influenza) was held responsible for triggering the most serious financial crisis in World history.
And then on March 11, 2021 a lockdown was imposed on 193 member states on the United Nations, leading to the “closure” of national economies Worldwide.
Unprecedented in history, applied almost simultaneously in a large of number countries, entire sectors of the World economy have been destabilized. Small and medium sized enterprises have been driven into bankruptcy. Unemployment and poverty are rampant.
The mental health of millions of people Worldwide has been affected as a result of the lockdown, social distancing, job losses, bankruptcies, mass poverty and despair. The frequency of suicides and drug addiction has increased Worldwide.
“V the Virus” is said to be responsible for the wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. That’s a lie. There is no causal relationship between the (microscopic) SARS-2 virus and economic variables.
It’s the powerful financiers and billionaires who are behind this project which has contributed to the destabilization (Worldwide) of the real economy.
And there is ample evidence that the decision to close down a national economy (resulting in poverty and unemployment) will inevitably have an impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality.
Since early February 2020, the Super Rich have cashed in on billions of dollars.
Amply documented it’s the largest redistribution of global wealth in World history, accompanied by a process of Worldwide impoverishment.
The fear campaign prevails. And people are now led to believe that the corona vaccine sponsored by their governments is the “solution”. And that “normality” will be restored once the entire population of the planet has been vaccinated.
The SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
How is it that a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which under normal conditions would take years to develop, was promptly launched in early November 2020? The mRNA vaccine announced by Pfizer is based on an experimental gene editing mRNA technology which has a bearing on the human genome.
Were the standard animal lab tests using mice or ferrets conducted?
This caricature by Large + JIPÉM explains our predicament:
Mouse No 1: “Are You Going to get Vaccinated”,
Mouse No. 2: Are You Crazy, They Haven’t finished the Tests on Humans”
And why do we need a vaccine for Covid-19 when both the WHO and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have confirmed unequivocally that Covid-19 is “similar to seasonal influenza”.
The plan to develop a vaccine is profit driven. It is supported by corrupt governments serving the interests of Big Pharma. It’s Big Money for Big Pharma, generous payoffs to corrupt politicians, at the expense of tax payers.
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Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.
He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)
He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).
He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]
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The recent statement issued by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC (CPSBC) [1] is a clear violation of the mission of the CPSBC to “act first and foremost in the interest of the public.” [2] The CPSBC fails in this duty by stifling genuine inquiry into what is best for patients and threatening to sanction any doctor who dares to question the merits of the prevailing measures.
Health Canada, and also the federal and provincial governments, have imposed measures that have never been utilized before and are not in alignment with standard pandemic procedures. This includes indiscriminate lockdowns, physical distancing, extensive use of face coverings, closure of schools, businesses, and places of worship, and emergency use authorization of unapproved genetic treatments that have not completed standard clinical trials.
Instead of recognizing that these measures do not appear to be working, and that other governments globally have ended these same measures, governments across Canada insist on doing more of the same regardless of the negative consequences. To date, our BC government and public health authorities have failed to provide appropriate scientific and medical evidence to support these measures in spite of numerous requests and legal proceedings filed against them. Public Health officials have also refused to participate in open and transparent debate on their measures with both the public and their own medical professionals.
In July 2020, Vaccine Choice Canada filed legal action against the Government of Canada, Government of Ontario, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Teresa Tam and others.[3] The defendants have failed to submit a Statement of Defence. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the various governments have not filed a statement of defence because they are unable to defend the use of the imposed measures.
There is a growing body of expert opinion globally which recognizes that these measures are doing more harm than good. The Great Barrington Declaration, which strongly advocates for an end to indiscriminate lockdowns, has been signed by more than 45,000 health care professionals globally. For the CPSBC to imply that the science is settled and that anyone who disagrees with the measures, or reports the harm caused by the measures is spreading ‘misinformation’, is unethical and immoral and cannot be tolerated.
The unfortunate reality is that the CPSBC is not alone in acting against physicians in this way. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) has similarly attempted to bully and censor its physicians.[4] The public is rapidly losing trust in a medical system that rigidly follows policy dictates, disregards the patient’s experience, acts without reliable scientific data, denies the ethical and legal right to informed consent, and attempts to silence our frontline health care professionals.
Vaccine Choice Canada honours doctors as Dr. Stephen Malthouse and Dr. Charles Hoffe for their courage, integrity, and commitment to the health of their patients. This is what ethical doctors do. The muzzling of debate and silencing of frontline experts not only harms patients, it undermines the credibility of the CPSBC in the eyes of the public. The consequences of this loss of trust will be far reaching.
We strongly advise the CPSBC to withdraw their statement and instead issue a statement in support of BC physicians that “act first and foremost in the interest of their patients.”
I look forward to your considered response.
Sincerely,
Ted Kuntz, President
Vaccine Choice Canada
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Addis Ababa‘s unexpected decision to implement a unilateral ceasefire in its rebellious Tigray Region following eight months of war there was influenced by its opponents’ unconventional military advantage fighting on their mountainous home turf, neighboring Eritrea’s military withdrawal from the conflict following international criticism of its activities, and the immense Western pressure put upon the aspiring Horn of Africa hegemon to prevent what the US predicted might become the world’s worst famine there.
Observers were shocked by Monday’s announcement that the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) withdrew from the capital of the country’s rebellious Tigray Region and implemented a unilateral ceasefire until the end of the planting season there that’s usually sometime in September. Addis Ababa had presented its actions there as a law enforcement operation against separatists led by the previously leading force of the former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which was later designated as terrorists. Government accounts claimed that the ENDF was winning though these assertions couldn’t be independently verified the entire time due to the difficulty that independent journalists had in accessing the war-torn region. The protracted conflict there also led to accusations of human rights abuses by all sides, and the US recently warned that Tigray risked suffering from the world’s worst famine if the conflict didn’t end soon.
There are several possible explanations for this dramatic turn of events. The first is that the TPLF commanded an unconventional military advantage by fighting on their mountainous home turf. The allegations of human rights abuses by the ENDF might have also inspired a massive recruitment drive among the locals if they began to view the conflict through a national liberation lense, thereby making it impossible for the military to indefinitely control the region. Neighboring Eritrea, which also militarily intervened in the region, earlier accused the US of supporting the TPLF so it’s possible that some degree of foreign backing was responsible for the militants regrouping in recent months and thus being able to more effectively launch their latest counteroffensive that coincided with the country’s long-delayed elections last week. Regardless of however they came to be so strong, the outcome is still the same, and it’s that the ENDF were just defeated by the TPLF.
The second explanation concerns Eritrea’s withdrawal from the conflict zone under international pressure. This former Ethiopian region recently emerged as the Horn of Africa’s most influential country after its decisive intervention in Tigray at least temporarily prevented its neighbor’s “Balkanization” which could have been disastrous for the region since it’s Africa’s second most populous country. Eritrea was also accused of human rights abuses and still largely remains a “pariah” state. It could have been the case that its leadership concluded that it might not be able to withstand any more international pressure so it decided to pull out of the conflict for now. Whatever its strategic calculations may have been, its departure from Tigray seems to have directly affected the ENDF’s ability to retain control of the region. This could explain the military’s unexpected defeat at the hands of the TPLF, which if truly the case, would then show how much stronger Eritrea is than Ethiopia.
The third explanation concerns the US’ dire warning that up to 900,000 of the region’s approximately 6 million people faced the threat of what it predicted might become the world’s worst famine if the conflict continues to drag on. This placed tremendous pressure upon the aspiring Horn of Africa hegemon and especially its leader Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who received the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago for peacefully ending Ethiopia’s nearly two-decade-long conflict with Eritrea. Just like its neighbor, Ethiopia was quickly on the path to becoming a “pariah” state in Western eyes and would have arguably been the world’s largest one had that scenario come to pass, which it still might. PM Abiy earlier claimed that foreign aid might be exploited as a front to arm the TPLF so his volte face speaks volumes about how desperate the military and also possibly the international political situation had become that he’d order the ENDF’s withdrawal in spite of that.
With these three interconnected reasons in mind for explaining Ethiopia’s stunning military reversal in Tigray, it’s now time to consider the strategic consequences of this development. The TPLF will likely consolidate and become stronger than ever, including as a result of foreign support that’ll enter the region disguised as aid. Addis Ababa won’t have much if any influence over this de facto independent region of the country, but a continuation war might break out after the planting season ends sometime in September if the ENDF also successfully regroup by then. It also might not, though, especially if a large part of the reason for the ENDF’s withdrawal was to reduce international pressure resulting from the US’ dire warning of the world’s worst impending famine. PM Abiy might not have the political will to risk the Western political and economic (sanctions) response to restarting the conflict under those conditions.
Unlike during the (first?) Ethiopian Civil War, the TPLF is unlikely to make a run on the capital but it might pursue hostile forces a bit beyond Tigray. That’s because the people of the neighboring Amhara Region and Eritrea will fight to the death to stop the TPLF’s invasion. Ethno-regional animosity is at an all-time high and Amhara militias have also reportedly been active in Tigray during the recent conflict in order to reclaim territory that they believe is theirs. It’s extremely unlikely that they’d roll over and let the TPLF sweep through their region en route to Addis Ababa in order to overthrow the same Prime Minister who’s emboldened them and their claims on parts of Tigray. This state of affairs suggests that the conflict might remain frozen for the indefinite future, thus creating a prime opportunity for foreign meddling. In addition, the TPLF might activate its nationwide network of agents to stage attacks behind enemy lines and incite rebellion in other regions.
The conflict between PM Abiy and the TPLF is of an existential nature. Each regards the other as illegitimate and a threat to Ethiopia. PM Abiy sees the TPLF as a terrorist group that’ll do anything to return to power even if this includes provoking another civil war while they believe that he’s the one that’s ruining the country through his ambitious socio-economic reforms that risk opening up the same Pandora’s Box that they tried so hard to keep closed during their rule. In other words, they blame one another for “Balkanizing” Ethiopia, and this worst-case scenario might actually happen whether in full or in part if the conflict isn’t politically resolved as soon as possible. Regrettably, no such peaceful resolution appears possible since neither side is willing to compromise on their maximalist aims: PM Abiy wants to wipe out the TPLF while they want to overthrow him. This creates the ideal space for foreign meddling, which will certainly exacerbate the conflict.
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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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Even a robot programmed to “follow the science” would throw up his hands in despair while reading the latest FDA COVID pronouncement.
After untold numbers of people have been given antibody tests to determine their COVID status, the FDA now states:
“Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a safety communication informing the public that results from SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a COVID-19 vaccination.”
Boom.
I’m imagining just a small sample of people—perhaps 5000—marching in unison into a hospital, saying, “We tested positive for COVID on an antibody test…and then we had to isolate, and some of us were treated with toxic drugs…and NOW we learn that the antibody test is useless…”
Digging a little deeper in the document, we have a statement referring to the COVID vaccine:
“The authorized vaccines for prevention of COVID-19 induce antibodies to specific viral protein targets; post-vaccination antibody test results will be negative in individuals without a history of previous natural infection if the test used does not detect the type of antibodies induced by the vaccine.”
In other words, the FDA is saying, “Look, the vaccine creates specific antibodies against the spike protein, not the virus. If you take the standard antibody test after vaccination, it’ll be useless, because the test isn’t meant to detect antibodies against the spike protein. It only detects antibodies against the virus [2].”
This raises several serious questions. One of them is: Since developing antibody tests is as easy as pie, why hasn’t the FDA developed one that detects antibodies against the spike protein?
And the answer to that question is obvious. If the FDA did develop such a test, then—in terms of conventional vaccine theory—it would be easy to see how well the vaccine is working, or not working.
And THAT is not a goal public health officials want to achieve. That is not a risk worth taking. Suppose, after testing 20,000 vaccinated people, it turns out that only 800 have produced antibodies against the spike protein?
Another (unanswered) question: Are specific antibodies against the spike protein, conferred by the vaccine, sufficient to neutralize, disable, destroy the actual virus if it drops down out of a cloud and tries to infect a vaccinated person?
Of course, as my readers know, I’ve spent a year demonstrating that no one has proved the SARS-CoV-2 virus exists. However, I make many forays into the insane world where people believe the virus is real; and I show that even within that world, the experts contradict themselves and compound their egregious fallacies like rabbits spawning babies.
This latest foray shows the FDA is both criminal and insane.
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New York’s Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting an exhibition devoted to an in-depth review of Paul Cézanne’s drawings. If there is any criticism to be made of this extraordinary show, it is that it is frankly overwhelming: with roughly 280 pencil, ink and gouache drawings and watercolors (and even a handful of oil paintings), there is so much to take in that two or three visits to the exhibition may be required to do it justice.
Given the exhibition’s scale, all we can endeavor to do here is mention a handful of its highlights and curiosities. Consider, for example, Studies of a Rower (1867-69), sketched in Cézanne’s late twenties. Three images of a solitary oarsman move steadily across the page with the central figure being the most complete. Which is to say that we may take the series to be three distinct studies of a rower, or – what is perhaps more interesting to consider – we may take the series as a whole, almost as if we are watching the still frames of a film. The young artist in that case may be striving to convey something significant about our experience of motion and time and how they are interrelated. Already with this ostensibly simple page we seem to be observing the gestation of a modern sensibility – which is to say, the seeing of the artist is not the interrogation of an in-itself world, but a vision which occurs in him, and is configured by him: “Drawing is only a configuration of what you see,” as Cézanne would state.
The fundamental insight of modern epistemic thought is that we can never ignore the constitutive role of the knower, or in this case the artist. We may appreciate this also in the context of Cézanne’s preoccupation with time and death. Cézanne would return many times to the image of the human skull – the classic memento mori. “There is no line” Cézanne is to have said. In the Study of a Skull (1902-04), for example, we find several outlines being offered, such that the boundary between the skull and its background is hardly definitive. What Cézanne recognized was that the contour of an object is never given to us as a simple line delineating the shape of the thing but is rather the “ideal limit towards which the sides of the [object] recede in depth,” as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty observes. This is why we find Cézanne consistently presenting multiple curves when tracing the shape of an object, be it a skull, an apple or the human figure.
If we are going to be true to the visible world then we cannot be satisfied with a “bloodless contour” encircling the object before us. As his friend Joachim Gasquet recalled, Cézanne observed that “objects never cease to be alive.” Nature is alive everywhere – “she is nowhere dead nor silent,” as Goethe would state in the preface to his Theory of Colours (1840). Objects “oscillate within [their] prescribed limits” – just as we find in Cézanne’s Still Life with Green Melon (1902-06): the melon’s circumference appears almost to be vibrating with multiple, broken, anxious and restless lines. The world and everything in it is alive; and nothing that is living is completely still or utterly without motion – everywhere we look the world is charged with movement, vitality and dynamism.
Cézanne was obsessed with the fidelity to truth – being true to the object, which is also to say being true to the sensations which the artist experiences in his encounter with the object: “Sensation is the basis of everything, for a painter,” Cézanne would say. Being true was decidedly not about being faithful to some self-sufficient world existing independently and in-itself. “The landscape thinks itself in me.” Cézanne is suggesting that the painter is in a sense performing a vital ontological function with respect to the object. The painter allows the object to realize its inner essence in and through the coming-to-itself of the visible which the painter carefully, painstakingly traces.
There was also a darker side to Cézanne’s work, which the exhibition thankfully does not overlook. Especially in his early years we find a certain preoccupation with violence, murder and brutality. What was Cézanne’s attraction to scenes of grizzly violence? Why does he return again and again to depictions of murder and rape? To be sure, terrible physical violence is a theme running through much of Western art, although we certainly cannot suppose that artists were drawn to these subjects for all the same reasons. For Francisco Goya – who was immensely popular with Cézanne and his contemporaries (the exhibition in fact includes a small but immediately recognizable sketch of Goya’s self-portrait) – depictions of violence often functioned as an indictment, a judgment on the harsh reality of war, the reality of evil and the inhumanity of man.
Cézanne’s examination of violence is found in this exhibition among a number of small but extraordinarily intense pieces. The Murder (1874-75) is a watercolor depicting the moment just before an assailant is about to plunge his knife into a hapless victim. The brightness and serenity of the very real landscape (located in southern France) presents a sharp contrast to the grizzly scene in the lower forefront.
Another notable watercolor is The Abduction (1867), combining themes of violence and eroticism, and most likely representing the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto (as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), a scene that Cézanne would execute in a much-discussed oil painting that same year. There is a notable messiness to the brushwork of the watercolor, absent in the comparatively polished technique of the oil painting, which is arguably more appropriate to the impulsiveness of the action we witness. Whatever else was driving Cézanne to create these intense depictions of brutality and violence, one way we may begin to understand them is as a critical assessment of the modernist notion of progress based in a frank investigation of our primal nature and the instinctual urges by which it is characterized.
The Bathers, large plate (Les baigneurs, grand planche) 1896-97, Source: MoMA
Cézanne used watercolor throughout most of his career – and the medium was for him anything but a minor genre. As with virtually all his materials, Cézanne would prove to be radically innovative when it came to watercolor as well. In his earlier work, Cézanne would apply watercolor more thickly and generally cover the paper completely. But over time his method evolved: his watercolors were thinned to the point of transparency and applied almost like delicate veils or screens of color. No less significant was Cézanne’s readiness to leave parts of the paper blank; and to apply graphite markings between, under and over the various layers of paint. These were features which would eventually come to characterize his mature paintings as well – including the use of bare canvas, as well as a more translucent palette.
One of the exhibition’s many notable watercolors is Cézanne’s Three Pears (1888-90), which was also displayed at his first solo exhibition in 1895. It is a fascinating composition and given the arrangement of the pears – especially the two in the foreground – also perhaps a somewhat erotic one. The fruits rest on a white dish surrounded by a freely painted arabesque of black and grey. This rather wild background motif seems to turn, twist and writhe almost as though it were animate. We may be hardly surprised to learn that both Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir each wanted this work for themselves, and ultimately had to draw lots to determine which of them could have it (Degas won).
The exhibition also includes a significant sampling of Cézanne’s landscapes executed en plein air – his exploration and study of “the diversity of the scene offered by nature” as he put it. These are works that would be accomplished through a slow, deliberative process based in the rigorous and attentive observation of the natural world. “Nature is on the inside,” Cézanne would state – so that the real question becomes, how does the natural world make itself seen by the painter? Forest Path (1904-06), a watercolor and graphite on cream wove paper, is characteristic of Cézanne’s late work, using methods which his friend and fellow artist Émile Bernard would describe as “singular… and excessively complicated.” In the upper half we find a kind of arched canopy, achieved in part by a long, penciled branch stretching from right to center; while on the left are diamond-shaped, prismatic patches of color which together serve to form a scene at once delicate, and sure, luminously aglow, yet maintaining the density of the foliage and mossy forest floor.
There is much more to this exhibition than I have touched on here: the self-portraiture, the numerous sketches of his wife and son, the oil paintings, and the list goes on. Cézanne was clearly interested in capturing the world in all its plenitude and diversity. The singular achievement of this exhibition is that it allows us to enter into Cézanne’s process of giving shape and substance to not simply what he sees, but how he sees. Cézanne is in many ways the quintessential modern artist, “the father of us all,” as Picasso would remark. And we can see from this remarkable exhibition why this is so – if to be modern is ultimately to recognize that the mind is always active, always organizing our sensations, and our experience; forming a world that without our constitutive activity would remain a mass of confusion and chaos. In a sense the artist is doing what we all are doing all the time – how could it be otherwise? But unlike the rest of humanity, the artist is giving substance and solidity to that process whereby we (re)configure the world, by tracing – with loving patience and laser-like focus – the world’s very coming-to-appearance in and through every movement of the pencil or brush.
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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The large aeronaval maneuver Sea Breeze, officially “co-hosted by the United States and Ukraine” in the Black Sea, began yesterday. The United States planned and command it, it is, therefore, the host in this sea close to Russian territory. Sea Breeze takes place from June 28 to July 10. It is led by US Naval Forces Europe-Africa / Sixth Fleet with headquarters in Naples. It includes naval, submarine, amphibious, land, and air warfare exercises.
Since this series of annual maneuvers in the Black Sea began in 1997, the 2021 edition sees the largest number of participants: 32 countries from six continents with 5,000 soldiers, 18 special forces teams, 32 ships, and 40 war airplanes. Not only NATO member countries – Italy, Great Britain, France, Spain, Greece, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, the three Baltic republics, Turkey and Canada – participate in it, but partner countries like Georgia, Moldova, Sweden, Israel, and above all Ukraine. Other nations sent their military forces to the Black Sea: Australia, Japan, South Korea and Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Senegal, and Brazil. The fact that military forces are deployed in the Black Sea, even from Australia and Brazil for this great maneuver under US command directed against Russia, is in line with what Joe Biden promised: “As president I will immediately take steps to renew the alliances of the United States, and make America, once again, lead the world”. The war maneuver in the Black Sea, the largest to date, demonstrates that President Biden’s steps go in the direction of a growing escalation against Russia and at the same time against China.
Sea Breeze 2021 actually began on June 23, when the British warship HMS Defender sailing from Ukraine to Georgia entered Crimea’s territorial waters. A deliberate provocative act claimed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who declared that Great Britain can again send its warships to those waters since it does not recognize the “annexation of Ukrainian Crimea by Russia“. This hostile action, certainly concerted with the United States, was implemented just a week after the Biden-Putin Summit, defined by the US president “good, positive“; a week after Russian President Putin warned in the press conference in Geneva: “We conduct military exercises within our territory, we do not bring our equipment and personnel close to the borders of the United States of America, as the US and its partners are doing now near our borders”. This hostile action was implemented by Great Britain just two weeks after the signing of the New Atlantic Charter with the United States, in which their Allies are assured that they will always be able to rely on “our nuclear deterrents” and that “NATO will remain a nuclear alliance”.
The deliberate violation of Crimean territorial waters made the war maneuver in the Black Sea even more dangerous. This act, if repeated, may have the aim of provoking a Russian military response possibly with some dead or wounded, to accuse Moscow of aggression. It is not a coincidence that some architects of the Maidan Square putsch in 2014 hold important posts in the Biden administration, such as the current Undersecretary of State for political affairs Victoria Nuland. The putsch set in motion a sequence of events, the bloody offensive against the Russians of Ukraine pushed the inhabitants of Crimea – Russian territory passed to Ukraine in Soviet times in 1954 – to decide the secession from Kyiv and the reannexation to Russia with 97% of votes in a popular referendum. NATO and the EU accused Russia of having illegally annexed Crimea and subjected it to sanctions. Now, they want to move from political to military confrontation. They play with fire, even with the nuclear one.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image: The Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer, HMS Defender. (OGL v1.0)
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A new meta-integrative qualitative research paper published in the journal Buildings presents the multi-level problems that could arise from the implementation of smart building structures, especially with 5G and IoT devices. Researchers found cybersecurity threats and radiation effects, “especially from 5G cells that can directly affect the individual, biologically and mentally.” The paper also focuses on e-waste and energy consumption.
The authors challenge the rhetoric that 5G is energy saving. The paper documents that because so many additional cell towers and antennas are required for 5G “the generic notion that wireless data transfer is energy-conserving or can act as a CO2 eliminator can be challenged.” The authors recommend a thorough analysis of the carbon emissions and environmental impacts of massive data centers and undersea optic cabling.
“This new paper should be a call to action for our city planners and elected leaders worldwide. A cradle to grave analysis of so called “smart” cities should be a pre-requisite before we leap into 5G. As this paper outlines, the true cost of 5G and the internet of things includes cyber-security threats, electromagnetic pollution, E-waste, and environmental impacts from data centers and the proliferation of undersea cables. The word “smart” is being used to describe a tsunami of infrastructure and technology that is harming our environment and threatens human health,” stated Theodora Scarato, Executive Director of Environmental Health Trust co-author to the paper “Building Science and Radiofrequency Radiation: What Makes Smart and Healthy Buildings” which documents why and how to reduce/eliminate radio frequency (wireless) electromagnetic radiation in buildings. “We must ensure safe and sustainable technology to protect our children’s healthy future.”
Abstract
Smart buildings deploying 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) are viewed as the next sustainable solution that can be seamlessly integrated in all sectors of the built environment. The benefits are well advertised and range from inducing wellness and monitoring health, amplifying productivity, to energy savings. Comparatively, potential negative risks are less known and mostly relate to cyber-security threats and radiation effects. This meta-integrative qualitative synthesis research sought to determine the possible underlying demerits from developing smart buildings, and whether they outweigh the possible benefits. The study identified five master themes as threats of smart buildings: a surfeit of data centers, the proliferation of undersea cables, the consternation of cyber-security threats, electromagnetic pollution, and E-waste accumulation. Further, the paper discusses the rebound impacts on humans and the environment as smart buildings’ actualization becomes a reality. The study reveals that, although some aspects of smart buildings do have their tangible benefits, the potential repercussions from these not-so-discussed threats could undermine the former when all perspectives and interactions are analyzed collectively rather than in isolation.
Conclusions
Smart buildings are seen as the futuristic change in the built environment. Along with smart vehicles, they are deemed to reduce carbon and GHGs emissions by incorporating smart appliances that can communicate with each other and generate live information for data analytics to prescribe the solution to problems ranging from energy efficiency to health are. While technological companies advertise the benefits of smart buildings and smart cities, there is an equal need to understand the demerits behind developing these smart cities/smart buildings.
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This meta-integrative qualitative research paper tried to understand and correlate the multilevel problems that could arise from the implementation of these structures, especially with 5G and IoT devices. Apart from cybersecurity threats to radiation effects, especially from 5G cells that can directly affect the individual, biologically and mentally, a thorough analysis of the indirect effects such as the carbon emissions from massive data centers and undersea optic cabling is highly recommended to counteract the carbon emission reduction that these buildings claim to make through efficient appliances. The study also considered the potential electromagnetic radiation pollution that could arise from electronics waste disposal and its potential negative contribution to the environment.
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Finally, this study cautions that more research is needed to quantify both benefits and threats on a comparative scale to verify whether there is any chance that threats could be more detrimental than the benefits. The underlying objective is that impacts on human health, environment, and climate change must be regarded as a top priority prior to the deployment of such a technology on a global scale.
Generally, there is a belief that wireless connections decrease CO2 emissions. However, the wireless transfer of data can take place only for a short distance (distance being dependent on the frequency of operation of the smart devices), for example, for 4G, the wireless data transmission is around 1000 miles, while, for 5G, it is only 10 miles. As a result, additional relay cell towers and antennas are required for the operation of 5G devices [95]. As a result, the generic notion that wireless data transfer is energy-conserving or can act as a CO2 eliminator can be challenged. Therefore, the data from any sensor device would have to take a wired path for almost 99% of its travel time to reach back to the user’s mobile phone [96]. Thus, smart buildings that function with multiple smart devices that are connected to a network culminate with the installation of more undersea cables.
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In the early 70s the Rolling Stones sized it up for we working stiffs in their song ‘Working for the Company’:
I want a real fine car, fly Miami too All the rum, I want to drink it, all the whiskey too My woman need a new dress, my daughter got to go to school I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company I’m working so hard to keep you in the luxury
You can’t call me lazy on a seven day a week Make a million for the Texans, twenty dollar me Yes, I want a gold ring, riding in a limousine I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company I’m working so hard to keep you in the luxury
Now listen, I’m a proud man, not a beggar walking on the street I’m working so hard, to keep you from the poverty I’m working so hard to keep you in the luxury, oh yeah (I’m working so hard, I’m working so hard) Harder, harder, working, working, working
I think it’s such a strange thing, giving me concern Half the world it got nothing the other half got money to burn My woman need a new dress, my daughter got to go to school I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company, oh, yeah I’m working so hard, oh, yeah
Working on a Sunday in refinery Make a million for the Texans, twenty dollar me All the rum, I want to drink it, I got responsibility I’m working so hard to keep you from the poverty, oh, yeah I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company, oh, yeah I’m working so hard, oh, yeah
Sadly, nothing has changed for those of us who work for ‘The Man’ or ‘The Corporation’. Wherever one may look one will see that there are really NO leaders, from either of the ‘One Party/Two Party’ scheme, to look out for us.
Why? As this writer alludes to by the title of our website, It’s the empire… stupid! George Orwell referred to it as ‘Big Brother’ in his tremendous novel 1984. The ‘Man’ or ‘The Corporation’ or ‘The Company’ (from Jagger and Richards) translates into the same mush.
It’s the Super Rich, meaning those within a fraction of the 1% of us, who pull the strings of this horrendous puppet system.
How cunning they have always been to offer us Serfs the appearance of democracy.
You hear it from all the talking heads from both sides of the aisle in government, along with their counterparts in the mainstream or corporate run media. They all trumpet this facade of true representative government… a LIE!
As with Jim Morrison’s famous rant from one of his hit songs, The Soft Parade:
When I was back there in seminary school There was a person there Who put forth the proposition That you can petition the Lord with prayer Petition the lord with prayer Petition the lord with prayer You cannot petition the lord with prayer!
If we wish to have the change needed inside of this empire, beginning with election of our representatives, we need to take ALL PRIVATE MONEY OUT OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS!
The 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Buckley vs. Valeo, saying that ‘Money is Free Speech’, opened the door, or rather kept the door closed, on electoral fairness.
So long as the Super Rich can pull the purse strings on elections, we will never see the best people (from us working stiffs AKA 99+ % of the populace) being able to both run for office and win those offices… PERIOD! As Morrison used the analogy of prayer, so it is with us working stiffs petitioning our government to heed us.
It is, as many say, a game. Violence will never be the answer, because it begets more violence and usually places the wrong people as replacements to lead. Once more of us who work and strain under this empire see it for what it is….
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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on the It’s the Empire… stupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change, and Countercurrents.org. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].
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).
While Pfizer claims its vaccine is 95% effective, this is the relative risk reduction. The absolute risk reduction — which is far more relevant for public health measures — is actually less than 1%
While benefits from COVID “vaccination” in children between the ages of 12 and 15 are rare and short-lived, side effects are common and long-term effects are completely unknown
In the 12-to-15 age group, 75.5% experienced headache, along with a long list of other transient side effects. Serious systemic adverse events occurred in 2.4% of the trial subjects receiving Pfizer’s mRNA shot
While Pfizer boasted a 100% efficacy rate in 12- to 15-year-olds, this conclusion is a statistical trick. Fewer than 2% of fully vaccinated children avoided COVID-19; 98% of them would not have gotten COVID anyway. So, the benefit is small
Even if vaccinating children were found to reduce infection among adults, it would be unethical and against regulations to do so, because the FDA can only authorize the use of a medical product in a given population if the benefit outweighs the risk in that same population, and in children the benefits do not outweigh the risks
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Many scientists and medical experts have warned that vaccinating children against COVID-19 is both unnecessary and risky in the extreme. The video above features comments by Peter Doshi, Ph.D., made during a June 10, 2021, public hearing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
Doshi is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and the senior editor of The BMJ. He has previously pointed out that while Pfizer claims its vaccine is 95% effective, this is the relative risk reduction. The absolute risk reduction — which is far more relevant for public health measures — is actually less than 1%.1 As such, the COVID-19 vaccine is of dubious benefit, to say the least.
If you choose to watch the video above I must warn you to stop after Doshi finishes and not view the presentation by Dr. Jacqueline Miller. She’s a paediatrician and the head of development for infectious diseases at Moderna. The reason I advise this caution is because if you understand reality, you will be shocked at how easily a physician can sell out and sacrifice even her own children in the delusional belief that Moderna’s shot provides any benefit to children.
Meanwhile, largely because of irresponsible beliefs and comments like Miller’s, harms are rapidly mounting, which skews the risk-benefit ratio even further. Considering the potential for harm, children should not get the COVID-19 vaccine, Doshi says, citing trial evidence from Pfizer — the very same evidence used to support its emergency use authorization application for 12- to 15-year-olds. In this trial, harms clearly outweighed the benefits.
Risk-Benefit Analysis
While benefits were rare and short-lived, side effects were common and long-term effects are completely unknown. In the 12-to-15 age group, 75.5% experienced headache, along with a long list of other transient side effects. However, more serious systemic adverse events also occurred in 2.4% of the trial subjects receiving the actual mRNA shot.
Now, Pfizer boasted a 100% efficacy rate in this age group. This, Doshi explains, was based on 16 cases occurring in the placebo group, while no cases were recorded in the vaccine group. However, since there were about 1,000 placebo recipients, fewer than 2% of the placebo group actually tested positive for COVID-19.
“Put another way, 2% of the fully vaccinated avoided COVID,” Doshi says, adding “98% of the vaccinated wouldn’t have gotten COVID anyway … So, the benefit is small.”
One of the reasons for why children reap so little benefit from this jab is because a significant portion of American children are already immune and aren’t at risk of infection to begin with. Doshi cites Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showing an estimated 23% of children under the age of 4 and 42% of those age 5 through 17 have already had a SARS-CoV-2 infection and now have robust and long-lasting immunity.
While most side effects in children have been short-lived, at least seven deaths among 12- to 17-year-olds had been reported as of June 11, 2021, as well as 271 events rated “serious.”2 In the long term, there’s really no telling what might happen, and that’s a really important point.
As noted by Doshi, during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, narcolepsy didn’t become apparent until nine months after vaccination with the Pandemrix vaccine, and it wasn’t until four months into Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign that heart damage was recognized as a side effect in young men and boys.
Cocooning Does Not Work
Doshi goes on to explain why vaccinating children will not likely benefit adults, as claimed. This practice, sometimes referred to as “cocooning,” has never actually been proven. Doshi cites a 2021 BMJ editorial3 in which the authors stressed that vaccinating children against COVID-19 is “hard to justify right now,” seeing how children experience only mild disease and transmission by children is limited, while the possibility of unintended consequences is high.
“Should childhood infection (and re-exposures in adults) continue to be typically mild, childhood vaccination will not be necessary to halt the pandemic,” the authors state.4
“The marginal benefits should therefore be considered in the context of local healthcare resources, equitable distribution of vaccines globally, and a more nuanced understanding of the differences between vaccine and infection induced immunity.
Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood as transmission blocking immunity wanes but disease blocking immunity remains high. This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date.”
Doshi points out that even if you believe that a small benefit is better than nothing, you must remember that this is an unproven hypothetical benefit. We would need a proper randomized controlled trial to ascertain whether vaccinating children might actually benefit adults. “We need confirmatory evidence, not just assumptions,” Doshi says.
Vaccinating Children to Benefit Adults Is Unethical
However, even if vaccinating children were found to reduce infection among adults, we may still not be able to do so. Why? Because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can only authorize the use of a medical product in a given population if the benefit outweighs the risk in that same population.
This means that even if adults were to benefit, if children don’t benefit from it themselves, then we cannot authorize the vaccine for children. So, if children reap no benefit, then whether or not vaccinating them might benefit adults is a moot argument. You cannot authorize a drug for use in a population that reaps no benefit.
In conclusion, Doshi points out that the FDA has no basis on which to grant COVID-19 vaccines emergency use authorization for children in the first place, as COVID-19 is not an emergency in children. The threat this infection poses to children is negligible and no more serious than that of the common cold or flu.
Since demonstrated risks far outweigh demonstrated benefits in children, the vaccines also fail to meet the biologics license application required for ultimate market approval.
Already, healthy children have died shortly after the jabs, dozens of cases of heart inflammation have been reported, and Pfizer’s own biodistribution study raises serious questions about the shot’s potential to cause infertility. Last but not least, since there’s no “unmet need,” there’s also no need to rush to approve these injections for children.
To be clear, the only way they can even try to justify vaccinating children is by sacrificing them as shields to protect the elderly, which is completely unethical. Children are not harmed by COVID-19 itself, yet they keep using the slogan that “Nobody is safe until everyone is vaccinated,” which simply isn’t true.
Carefully Consider the Many Risks
While long-term effects are unknown, there’s reason to suspect they may be severe. A Pfizer biodistribution study5,6 demonstrates the synthetic mRNA does not stay near the injection site as initially assumed. It is, in fact, widely disseminated in your body within hours of injection.
It enters your bloodstream and accumulates in a variety of organs, primarily your spleen, bone marrow, liver, adrenal glands and, in women, the ovaries. The spike protein — which we now know is pathogenic and causes disease in and of itself — also travel to your heart, brain and lungs. Once in your blood circulation, the spike protein binds to platelet receptors and the cells that line your blood vessels. When that happens, one of several things can occur:
It can cause platelets to clump together — Platelets, aka thrombocytes, are specialized cells in your blood that stop bleeding. When there’s blood vessel damage, they clump together to form a blood clot. This is why we’ve been seeing clotting disorders associated with both COVID-19 and the vaccines
It can cause abnormal bleeding
In your heart, it can cause heart problems
In your brain, it can cause neurological damage
In your blood vessels, it can cause vasculitis, including Kawasaki disease, antiphospholipid syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma and Sjogren’s disease.7 These conditions significantly increase your risk of death, in some cases raising mortality by 50 times compared to people who do not have these conditions
Regardless of the tissue, the spike protein can also impair your mitochondrial function, which is imperative for good health, innate immunity and disease prevention of all kinds.
When the spike protein interacts with the ACE2 receptor, it can disrupt mitochondrial signaling, thereby inducing the production of reactive oxygen species and oxidative stress. If the damage is serious enough, uncontrolled cell death can occur, which in turn leaks mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into your bloodstream.8
Aside from being detected in cases involving acute tissue injury, heart attack and sepsis, freely circulating mtDNA has also been shown to contribute to a number of chronic diseases, including systemic inflammatory response syndrome or SIRS, heart disease, liver failure, HIV infection, rheumatoid arthritis and certain cancers.9
The spike protein is also expelled in breast milk, which could be lethal for babies. You are not transferring antibodies. You are transferring the vaccine itself, as well as the spike protein, which could result in bleeding and/or blood clots in your child. All of this suggests that for individuals who are at low risk for COVID-19, children and teens in particular, the risks of these vaccines outweigh the benefits by a significant margin.
I recently came across yet another paper that describes a very important mechanism that, to my knowledge, is not widely known, despite being published in July 2020. The paper, “Genetic Polymorphisms Complicate COVID-19 Therapy: Pivotal Role of HO-1 in Cytokine Storm,”10 explains that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has a far higher affinity for porphyrin molecules in the cell membrane than ACE-2.
Porphyrins are molecules with optical properties. Their ability to absorb light accounts for many of the beneficial health effects of sunlight.11 Porphyrins are also the building blocks of heme, the precursor to hemoglobin, which is necessary to bind oxygen in your blood.
According to this paper, porphyrins not only facilitate SARS-CoV-2 invasion into the cell, but they also allow the virus to bind functional hemoprotein within the cell, thereby increasing oxidative stress.
When the spike protein bind to porphyrins, it upregulates free heme and iron, which causes oxidation and fuels inflammation. It also increases reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation, while decreasing levels of heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) enzymes. HO enzymes degrade heme into free iron, bilirubin (which has antioxidant effects) and carbon monoxide (which is antiapoptotic). As such, the HO system plays a crucial role in cellular defense.
The spike protein essentially overwhelms the anti-inflammatory cytoprotection normally offered by HO-1. As dysfunctional porphyrin are no longer capable of making heme, more hemoprotein becomes available for SARS-CoV-2 to bind to, which results in the release of more free iron. As the cycle continues, inflammation builds. Iron released by dying cells also has toxic effects. All of this has devastating consequences for your mitochondria, and, as noted in this paper:12
“If insufficient mitochondria in cells are evident, such as in white adipose cells, these cells are unable to accommodate the severe ROS formed leading to overwhelming inflammation. Brown adipose cells are better at handling ROS due to higher concentrations of mitochondria.”
This explains why obese individuals are at much higher risk. Because their fat cells have fewer mitochondria, they’re less able to counteract the ROS and therefore end up with higher levels of inflammation. The unprecedented outpouring of toxic iron into the body may also help explain why some end up with “long-hauler syndrome” after recovering from COVID-19.
Worst of all, since all of this is related to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the COVID shots may also end up promoting cancer, as excess iron is tightly associated with tumorigenesis in multiple human cancer types through a variety of mechanisms, including catalyzing the formation of mutagenic hydroxyl radicals, regulating DNA replication, repair and cell cycle progression, affecting signal transduction in cancer cells, and acting as an essential nutrient for proliferating tumor cells.
Do You Have Vaccine Regret?
If you’ve already had one or two COVID shots and are now having second thoughts, first, be sure to never have another vaccination again, with any vaccine of any kind. Even if you’re not having discernible symptoms as of yet, you’d be wise to start building your innate immune system. To do that, you need to become metabolically flexible and optimize your diet.
I interviewed Dr. Vladimir Zelenko June 23, 2021, and that interview should go live July 4, 2021. We discussed what Dr. Mike Yeadon — a former chief scientist at Pfizer, which is one of the primary manufacturers of COVID shots — believes, which is that those who are vaccinated are already condemned to certain and agonizing deaths.
He believes those who have received the injection will die prematurely and three years is a generous estimate for how long they can expect to remain alive.
If Yeadon’s projections are true, it changes EVERYTHING. There is no way to know if it is accurate or not, but Yeadon is someone who has serious insights as Pfizer’s former chief scientist. I was a Boy Scout and their motto is to “Be prepared.” Clearly, this is one contingency that needs to be planned for. Zelenko happens to share this belief. We discuss in great detail the strategies that can be used to lower the risk of Yeadon’s predictions coming true.
Use time-restricted eating and eat all your meals for the day within a six- to eight-hour window. Avoid all vegetable oils and processed foods. Focus on certified-organic foods to minimize your glyphosate exposure, and include plenty of sulfur-rich foods to keep your mitochondria and lysosomes healthy. Both are important for the clearing of cellular debris, including these spike proteins. You can also boost your sulfate by taking Epsom salt baths.
You’ll also want to make sure your vitamin D level is optimized to between 60 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL (100 nmol/L to 150 nmol/L), ideally through sensible sun exposure. Sunlight also has other benefits besides making vitamin D.
To combat the toxicity of the spike protein, you’ll want to optimize autophagy, which may help digest and remove the spike proteins. Time-restricted eating will upregulate autophagy, while sauna therapy, which upregulates heat shock proteins, will help refold misfolded proteins and also tag damaged proteins and target them for removal. It is important that your sauna is hot enough (around 170 degrees Fahrenheit) and does not have high magnetic or electric fields.
Other remedies that might be helpful if you’re experiencing side effects from your COVID shot(s) include:
Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin treatments. Ivermectin appears particularly promising as it actually binds to the spike protein. To learn more, please listen to the interview that Brett Weinstein did with Dr. Pierre Kory,13 one of Dr. Paul Marik’s collaborators
Low-dose antiretroviral therapy to reeducate your immune system
Low-dose interferons such as Paximune, developed by interferon researcher Dr. Joe Cummins, to stimulate your immune system
Peptide T (an HIV entry inhibitor derived from the HIV envelope protein gp120; it blocks binding and infection of viruses that use the CCR5 receptor to infect cells)
Cannabis, to strengthen Type I interferon pathways
Dimethylglycine or betaine (trimethylglycine) to enhance methylation, thereby suppressing latent viruses
Silymarin or milk thistle to help cleanse your liver
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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In a recent article, “Critical Race Theory [CRT] is Worse than Marxism, the social thinker and author, Prof. Paul Gottfried, breaks ranks from his Alt-Right compatriots to argue that CRT “has nothing to do with traditional Marxism.” “The swear words “Marxist” and “revolutionary,” Gottfried writes, “are thrown around by conservatives, such as those at Heritage, the New York Post and Fox News, with the same abandon with which the left speaks about “human rights”…” Rather than being truly revolutionary, based upon the history of past revolutionary movements, CRT “is an instrument of repression brandished by those in power against those whom it is feared might resist them.” Yet most important, to label CRT as Marxist desecrates good ol’ Marx’s tomb.
In fact, at the time Critical Theory emerged from the German Frankfurt School in the 1930s, its most adamant opponents were the traditional card-carrying Marxists and Communists. The School’s intention was to actually re-write classical Marxism and to prolong the internal fallacies launched during the Enlightenment era. Perhaps its most redeeming value is its efforts to define and explain the phenomenology of social power and aggression. Its primary early proponents, such as Max Horkheimer, were also harsh critics of the rise of metaphysical realism and scientific dogmatism that today has turned modern science, especially the biological sciences and medicine, into a fundamentalist ideology or religion. But this is where Critical Theory’s contributions end. Critical theory has more in common with Freudian sexual repression and psychoanalysis than Marx. One of the 20th century’s great philosophers Karl Popper criticized the Frankfurt School for offering no viable and realistic pathway to improve society. Unlike Marx, who reasonably condemned capitalist society’s unfairness, he did offer a vision for a better future. On the other hand, Critical Theory for Popper, was “vacuous and irresponsible” for omitting a promised future altogether. Remarkably, modern Critical Theory’s leading spokespersons, such as Robin DiAngelo, are exemplars of the very manifestation of dysfunctional biases that Critical Theory rebukes. This may be a reason why those who embrace tribal wokeness are simply angry, maladjusted adolescents in adult bodies.
The 21st century woke generations appear to have entered a coma. Its characteristic qualia of ADHD would likely prevent them from getting through 20 pages of Das Capital let alone making any sense from it. The most recent incarnation of wokeness is not an awakening of either conscientiousness or a higher conscious awareness that directly experiences the sacredness of all life, other humans, and the animal and plant kingdoms. It veered from its origins within the Black community in the 20th century when it was used to refer to a social and political awareness for racial and social injustices. In fact its first modern expression might be traced back to a 1962 New York Times article by the Black author William Melvin Kelly in referring to being “well informed, up to date.” To be authentically woke requires critical thought and discernment, and also an intuitive knowing to distinguish the cobra from the rope when groping in the dark. Now the term has been adopted by two entire generations, regardless of race, and politically weaponized with almost an ontological unease to conquer and divide. Hence to be woke is anti-woke.
Througout human history there have been those who have held hierarchical power to control those who are subject and dependent upon that power, such as the rule of kings, emperors and authoritarian tyrants. And for having our daily needs met and securing financial ease there are the landowners, merchants and bankers. In all of these power relationships, equity is always on the side of those who hold power. At this moment our nation has reached an impasse where only a tiny group of individuals control and govern the dictates of the lives of the many.
The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote, “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.” What McLuhan was suggesting is that the masses have the tendency to focus on what is most obvious and consequently miss or ignore the deeper and more subtle changes happening over a period of time. In other words, what may seem to be correct and just on the surface eventually brings forth deleterious or “unintended” consequences. McLuhan was writing long before the internet. Now, presidential campaigns and federal laws, public health policies, the mainstream media and the films and music are the conduits for how we define ourselves and establish the options of dogmatic beliefs that we ultimately identify with. But all of these narratives are controlled by a handful of power players, including the social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. Succumbing to the siren’s call of this illusion is being woke with closed eyes.
There is a saying that if you do not know the product being advertised you are the product; and this is certainly true for how millions of Americans are persuaded to purchase junk they have no need for, including the honor of wearing a “woke” badge. Our personal realities thereby are reduced to millions of bits of algorithmic data that know more about us than we know about ourselves. We are sold on the promises of 5G technology despite the media never mentioning its serious dangers to human health and the environment. The risks of genetically modified foods and the lack vaccine science to prove their safety and efficacy are censored from public discourse. Federal agencies that started small and were believed to be temporary, such as Homeland Security, became permanent and unstoppable leviathans that encroach into every corner of our lives.
At this moment, we are being lectured like children to get vaccinated against the SARS-2 virus so life can return to normal. In principle, this sounds reasonable. However, to accomplish this there lurks under this message’s surface the hidden intention to bypass or trash essential regulatory protective measures to assure the safety of these products. If you get vaccinated, you are now “woke.” If you remain cautious or hesitant because nobody has even a vague idea about the Covid-19 vaccine’s long-term adverse effects, you should be hermetically sealed away from the society, branded, canceled and censored.
Conventional medical voices who refuse to be misled by Biden’s, Anthony Fauci’s and Bill Gate’ Ministry of Truth are also being canceled and censored from society by Silicon Valley and social media. So too are professors who have spoken out against student demands for personal entitlement and the anti-woke White Fragility diatribe that condemns genetic whiteness as racist. Students would prefer college to be sanitized of critical thought, a pleasant, non-intrusive and safe environment filled with teddy bears and psychologists next door to drug their episodes of existential angst and purposelessness in life.
As the pandemic hijacks our attention, global warming increases. But federal experts tell us we have time. Biden tells us the economy is recovering and flourishing and a herd of lemmings believe this message despite 20 percent of Americans who will go to sleep hungry tonight. Those with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and dementia are told to just hang on a bit longer; a big pharmaceutical cure is just around the corner. But for decades, this carrot has been dangled before us and has yet to come to fruition.
Everything today is its opposite. The blue and red pills have been pulverized together. Only a purple pill laced with the strychnine of lies and half-truths is offered by an unduly legislative system run by technocrats and their private financial handlers. Woke and anti-woke are indistinguishable since both are born from similarly delusional worldviews isolated from reality. Neither is capable of observing the preciousness and fragility of human life. What should be a condemnation of the class and economic struggle against the elites’ persecution of everyone else has degenerated into hate-filled identity war, both on the Left and the Right. It is only the rare authentic progressive who has transcended this divide and can observe wisely the battlefields orchestrated by politically motivated ideologues, aristocrats and the media.
As the US spins further into a controlled dystopia, it is difficult to imagine that the trajectory towards social decay can be easily reversed. Arthur Miller said, “an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” Therefore, we still have a long way to go and it may require a full system-failure at all economic and social levels before a viable and realistic effort can restore what has been lost from the ethical wasteland left in its wake. It took Rome several centuries to collapse but we are on course to accomplish this feat within a decade. To remain optimistic, therefore, requires a rejection of the dominant Social Darwinism and the specter of what Thomas Huxley called the Church Scientific that now informs both parties and that has shackled us into a fatalist purgatory or worse Dante’s hedonic hells of lust, gluttony and greed. The evangelical Christian Right, as science’s counterrevolutionary reactive response, is equally a major contributor to the dumbing down of the nation’s sanity with fairy tales and superstition.
Our indoctrination into scientific materialism, our surrendering our autonomy and divine freedoms to political and corporate regimes, and the clashes over political correctness, that disempower us from believing we can change our conditions, has resulted in a sense of hopelessness in life and growing existential despair. It is contributing to the unbridled frenzy of anger in the streets, again from both the Left and Right. Ideological beliefs become dogmas founded upon our mental afflictions, which in turn hold rule over our emotions, fears and hatreds and reactions. No wonder that pessimism is on the rise and optimism is in decline.
Only a personal encounter with a deeper purpose and meaning in life, which cuts through the tyranny of our false sense of the self or ego, can ultimately guide us to rise above the turmoil and crises facing us. This does not imply a detached disinterest, an ascetic renunciation, from the plights of our neighbors and humanity. In fact, only by discovering authentic kindness and compassion through a personal introspective inquiry into ourselves and our connection with the others can an authentic sense of well-being and genuine happiness emerge. It is a commitment to finding our interconnection, in fact our interdependence, with others in the spirit of selflessness and service.
Yet to be left alone with only your own mind to keep you company terrifies the vast majority of people, including those who might be characterized as “normal.” This was observed in literally “shocking” experiments. In a University of Virginia study, hundreds of student participants would sit alone in an empty lab room for 15 minutes. No mobile phones, books, paper or anything was permitted. Just themselves and the cacophony of static in their own minds. However, there was a button they could push if they felt so inclined that would give a moderately painful electric shock. The results? Sixty-seven percent of men and 25 percent of women chose to find amusement to occupy their minds by shocking themselves rather than sit quietly and have peaceful time for self-reflection. This was despite all of the participants stating prior to the experiment that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity.
So if modern American society relies solely upon mental and emotional distraction to survive, clearly there is no hope for constructive solutions to emerge to confront climate change, racism, identity politics, inequality, etc. Nor will society evolve beyond that of primates if we can only function from our reptilian and limbic brains. Obviously not everyone will discover the same purpose to his or her life’s meaning. It is an individual quest that is largely entwined with each of our unique gifts, skills, passions and talents that we have brought into this incarnation. Those who disagree that one can discover meaning in life are the dogmatists of materialism and should be shunned as deranged scientific fanatics. Logic and reason alone will not satisfy this discovery, although developing skills in critical thought and discernment is more often than not necessary. It is only the rare person who has immediate intuitive knowledge about herself and the world around her.
For the remainder of us, we need to reeducate ourselves to create a roadmap, develop a discerning eye, and engage in deep introspection into ourselves to find a genuine well-being that transcends power player’s board game to manufacture social strife, division and hatred. It is an individual journey that begins deep within ourselves and ends by embracing others in community despite all differences. However this is not an exercise in reason, but a direct experience within the depths of ourselves. When we touch on that space that can only be reached by subjective introspection new horizons of opportunities and possibilities open up. Then we can understand the words of the great jazz artist John Coltrane, “I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.” In that honoring of our inherent goodness, genuine well-being and happiness is found and only then can our illusions and dogmatic beliefs be broken down.
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Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD direct Progressive Radio Network. They are frequent contributors to Global Research.
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What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk everywhere, waiting to attack?
What happens is that emotionally damaged people start driving bad politics and bad policy.
“Fifteen days to flatten the curve.” That phrase is surely now banned by corporate media, for it reminds us how the supposedly acute health threat of March 2020 was repeatedly re-packaged to keep populations off-balance and out of business not for 15 days, but for 15 months.
Never in modern times has a health issue been so flagrantly politicized, nor wielded as a club, as the Wuhan virus has been. Outside a few rational locales, almost every nation drank the COVID Kool-Aid, competing to see who could enforce the stupidest rules.
Naturally, academia would lead the way:
Among Americans aged 15–24, a total of 587 died of COVID in 2020, according to the CDC, representing about 0.16%, or about 1 in 642, of COVID deaths. If you are young, you have essentially no chance of dying of COVID. The low youth mortality impact from COVID was known by April 2020.
Yet many universities now require these low-risk young people to inject the experimental vaccine or be banished from campus. Did you already catch the WuFlu and have antibodies? Too bad. The great pulsating brains of academia cannot differentiate.
Young people who want to serve their country are also targets: the passive-aggressive command at West Point compels the unvaccinated to sacrifice a week’s vacation to quarantine and then to wear masks in the most ridiculous circumstances imaginable — to harass them and make them look like fools. Military leaders do not care whether the experimental vaccines might do more harm than good, especially on a previously COVID-exposed youth. Take the jab and shut up, cadet; Colonel Suckup needs to PowerPoint his 100% compliance success.
Famed baseball pitcher Anthony Fauci claims that he is Science personified, yet anyone can make simple deductions that have eluded the doctor: there is effectively no difference in COVID rates between regions that went full Stalin on COVID rules and those areas that took a more holistic or decentralized approach to the virus.
Great Britain, with its multiple draconian lockdowns, has a COVID case rate of 6.76% of the population, while Sweden, which mostly left schools and businesses open and went soft-touch on mask mandates, has a case rate of 10.7%. But Sweden’s death rate is 20% lower than the U.K.’s, so what was the point of Britain’s lockdown hysteria?
Similarly, some U.S. schools were closed for up to a year, and kids as young as two were required to wear masks in a sickening display of fear-psychosis. Yet in Switzerland, schools reopened permanently about 4–5 weeks after the initial virus panic in the spring of 2020, and children under 12 were never required to wear masks at any time. Switzerland’s COVID case and death rates are both lower than the U.S.’s. On the other hand, in Washington, D.C., where self-righteous residents wear masks even while jogging in the woods, restaurants were already open in March 2021, while in Switzerland, restaurants were closed from December until late May, in the apparent hope of destroying every last small eatery. There’s no science in any of this posturing.
And none of this jumping through hoops made any difference in the progression of the virus: lockdown-crazy Michigan has a higher COVID death rate than libertarian Florida (despite its large elderly population).
Lost in all of this seems to be the simple fact that the COVID virus is not that deadly. True, about 12% of the 4.7-million total U.S. deaths recorded between January 2020 and June 2021 were credited to COVID. About 1.7% of positive cases end in death. But 80% of COVID deaths occurred in the over-65 population, which always has a much higher death rate from infectious diseases, such as pneumonia. If you are under 65 and test positive for COVID, you have a 0.25% chance of death (1/400), which is probably about the same as if you caught a bad flu and suffered complications from it. It’s also logical that we will see periods of below-average death rates in the next year or two, in the same way that there are bad flu years and not-bad flu years.
Self-serving politicians locked down free citizens (and, ironically, released prisoners), destroyed businesses, marred kids’ psyches, and harassed people with mask and testing mandates, all for a coronavirus that in the end was not that novel. And they did it with the connivance of corporate media, which censored and slandered anyone who asked the most basic questions about the virus’ origins and treatments.
In a future sane world, people will view the orchestrated panic of the COVID era with the same bemused condescension we might view the supposed War of the Worlds radio invasion scare of 1938, or the bygone use of leeches for seemingly every ailment.
Yes, grandson, back in 2020, the whole world went batty.
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Former Marine Daniel Rabil grew up in Washington, D.C. and lives in Switzerland.
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).
More than 4,100 people have been hospitalized or died with COVID in the U.S. despite having been fully vaccinated, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
As of June 21, nearly half (49%) of cases occurred in females and 76% were aged 65 years and older. There were a total of 3,907 hospitalizations and 750 deaths among those who had breakthrough infections, although not all of the hospitalizations may have been due primarily to COVID, Forbes reported.
According to the CDC’s website, the number of COVID vaccine breakthrough infections are likely an undercount of all SARS-CoV-2 infections among fully vaccinated persons due to passive and voluntary reporting.
“These surveillance data are a snapshot and help identify patterns and look for signals among vaccine breakthrough cases,” the agency stated. “No unexpected patterns have been identified in the reported breakthrough infections.”
On May 1, the CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to only reporting cases resulting in hospitalization or death, a move the agency was criticized for by health experts.
Although the CDC stated the shift in reporting will “help maximize quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance,” the change in reporting results in a lower overall number of reports of breakthrough cases in the U.S.
According to CDC data, a total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, including 995 hospitalizations and 160 deaths.
Almost half of adults in Israel and UK infected with Delta COVID variant were fully vaccinated
According to The Wall Street Journal, almost half of adults infected in an outbreak of the Delta variant of COVID in Israel were fully vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccine.
Fully vaccinated people who’ve come into contact with the Delta variant will have to quarantine, Chezy Levy, the director-general of Israel’s health ministry said in a statement June 23.
“Even though the numbers are low, the fact that this is reaching vaccinated people means … that we are still checking how many vaccinated people have also been infected,” Levy said.
On Monday, Levy said a third of the new daily cases were in people who had been vaccinated. Though they are preliminary, the figures show the Delta variant may spread even in places like Israel where large portions of the population have been vaccinated.
Earlier this month, The Daily Mail reported that a new study in the UK showed 12 (or 29%) of 42 fully vaccinated people died after catching the Delta variant. In Public Health England’s technical briefing on June 25, that figure had risen to 43% (50 of 117), with the majority (60%) having received at least one dose.
High profile breakthrough cases
As The Defender reported in May, Bill Maher was fully vaccinated when he tested positive for COVID, prompting HBO to reschedule the taping of two of his shows.
That same month, eight people from the Yankees franchise tested positive for COVID, including coaches, staff members and two-time All-Star shortstop Gleyber Torres. At least 85% of the team had been vaccinated.
On June 10, two fully-vaccinated passengers aboard a Celebrity cruise ship tested positive for COVID and had to be isolated, according to the Royal Caribbean Group. The ship was billed as the first fully-vaccinated cruise in North America, The New York Times reported.
The ship’s 650 crew members and 600 passengers were required to be vaccinated before boarding and had to show proof of a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of sailing.
Two passengers on a Mediterranean cruise operated by MSC Cruises also tested positive.
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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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So, Matt Hancock has resigned as Britain’s health secretary. A line has now been drawn under a scandal that gave the British press the ‘public interest’ licence to splash photos of a cabinet minister locking lips with his aide. Nothing more to see here.
This, at least, is what the government wants us to think. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday morning, justice secretary minister Robert Buckland insisted any queries about Hancock were either prurient or irrelevant since “Matt has resigned”. Move along, folks.
But the Hancock affair is about much more than a senior minister breaking his own COVID rules with his adviser, Gina Coladangelo. The whole episode highlights – once again – the gaping hole in the middle of Boris Johnson’s government where transparency, probity and honesty should be.
Forgot about how the footage of Hancock and Coladangelo leaked into the media, the real question to ask is how did the minister’s paramour end up with a paid government job in the first place?
We know that the pair met as students – in Oxford, of course – and that last March, just as the pandemic was breaking, Hancock brought Coladangelo in as an unpaid communications adviser. Six months later, Hancock made her a non-executive director in his health department, for which she netted £1,000 a day before expenses.
Why was Coladangelo, a lobbyist, chosen to oversee the health department in the midst of a global pandemic? It’s impossible to say. The government refuses to answer questions about how non-executive directorships are divvied out.
In fairness to Hancock, he’s not the only person who has his mates as sinecured board members. As we revealed last week, at least 16 Tory allies have been given roles that are ostensibly to “challenge” ministers. How much challenge do you think a Conservative donor is going to give his man in charge?
This government has shown itself willing to fight even the most basic transparency
There’s more, inevitably. Hancock was using his private Gmail account to conduct government business, including discussing lucrative COVID contracts. The use of personal email accounts to conduct government business is forbidden. In a detail remarkable even for this administration, Hancock did not have a department email address. Very handy for evading those pesky Freedom of Information requests – as Hancock would know, given he was once the minister in charge of FOI.
It isn’t supposed to be like this. Since the mid-1990s, British politics has had a confusing architecture of committees and watchdogs that are supposed to prevent the kind of sleaze scandals that dogged John Major’s moribund administration. But what good is a system based on norms and values when politicians can break them without any sanction?
Hancock is not the only politician who seems oblivious to Nolan principles of public life. So many sitting cabinet ministers have breached the ministerial code that you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a kind of insider prank, like when England World Cup footballers shoehorned song titles into interviews for a ‘joke’.
Robert Jenrick remains housing secretary despite breaking the law in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Tory donor Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development (the decision saved Desmond an estimated £45m). After the story broke, the then business minister Nadhim Zahawi said that if voters wanted to raise planning issues with their MPs, they could, as Desmond had done, pay to attend a Conservative fundraiser.
Earlier this month, the High Court in London ruled that the Cabinet Office acted unlawfully when, at the start of the pandemic, it awarded a contract to a public relations firm run by former colleagues of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. Public First, run by James Frayne and Rachel Wolf, was paid £560,000 to conduct focus groups and market research to gauge public opinion of government policies – including the prospect of Scottish independence.
The Cabinet Office responded to the Public First judgment the way it responds to so much – with a barrage of furious and dissembling spin. Michael Gove remains in post at the department despite clearly breaking the ministerial code.
There’s more. Hancock’s health colleague Lord Bethell has also been using private email to conduct government business.
A Cabinet Office inquiry found evidence that Priti Patel bullied her staff – in breach of the ministerial code – but the home secretary remains in office as Boris Johnson, the sole arbiter of the rules, decided not to sanction an investigation. The prime minister’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, Alex Allan, resigned in protest. He was replaced, more than six months later, only after it emerged that a Conservative donor had quietly paid for the lavish refurbishment of Johnson’s Downing Street flat.
One of the recurring questions of recent days is why Boris Johnson did not fire Hancock, rather than allowing him to resign. It is comforting to speculate that it might reflect his own marital infelicities. A prime minister who won’t admit how many children he has sired is hardly one to talk, surely?
Alas, it is doubtful that Johnson’s reluctance to sack his health secretary owes anything to concerns about his own behaviour. The prime minister has previously described himself as “literally bursting with spunk” (That’s a mental image none of us need to see.) But Johnson’s reticence is very much in keeping with his own attitude to upholding standards in public life.
In 2019, Parliament’s Committee on Standards found that he had demonstrated “an over-casual attitude towards obeying the rules of the House” after failing to declare a property interest. A few months earlier he had breached the rules on declaring book royalties. Before that, he had not sought permission before signing a £275,000 contract as a Daily Telegraph columnist three days after resigning as foreign secretary.
Last year, the prime minister took the unprecedented step of overruling the House of Lords appointment committee to ennoble the long-standing Conservative donor Peter Cruddas. It subsequently emerged that Cruddas, a former party treasurer, gave £500,000 to the Tories three days after taking his seat.
No wonder this government seems so determined to neuter the Electoral Commission. It has also shown itself willing to fight even the most basic transparency. openDemocracy was forced to mount a legal challenge after the Cabinet Office had appealed against a ruling that it should publish documents relating to a secretive unit accused of ‘blacklisting’ Freedom of Information requests from journalists and campaigners. The tribunal judge found there was “a profound lack of transparency about the operation” and ordered that the documents be released.
That judgement has sparked a parliamentary inquiry into FOI, launched by a committee dominated by Conservative MPs. But while Johnson’s colleagues clearly have concerns about his government’s secretive modus operandi, the prime minister has surrounded himself with pliable ministers who will happily defend anything from COVID contracts for Tory donors to the use of private email accounts to conduct government business.
As Robert Buckland attempted to bat away questions about Hancock on Monday morning radio, he dismissed concerns about the epidemic of ministerial rule-breaking on the ground that the Conservatives had won a “resounding victory” in last month’s local elections. I don’t remember “because we can get away with it” being one of the seven Nolan principles for ethics standards in public life. But it sums up Boris Johson’s government to a T.
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Thirty years ago, the man who taught me quantum mechanics at Harvard wrote that the suppression of debate will be the “death of science”. Perhaps he saw the shape of things to come.
Today, science is being perverted for political ends to an unprecedented extent. To look for an appropriate analogy, we would have to go back to the authority of the Church in medieval Europe.
“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” — Anthony Fauci
So G-d speaks through the mouth of the Pope, and maybe the Prophet Elijah and Charles Manson. But the Good Doctor of NIAID is the one with a direct line to Science.
My point is not that Fauci has grown too big for his britches, but that science is not religion. The whole reason that we trust science is that it’s a society of open debate. Dr Fauci aspires to be the high priest of epidemiology. But if science carries more weight than the Church, it’s not because its priests are smarter or better qualified, it’s because science has no priests.
Science means arguing the case on its merits, and arguing on the merits is exactly what they are trying to avoid by calling anyone who disagrees with them, “anti-science”.
A real scientist said,
Science is not a set of beliefs. Scientists don’t believe anything… You always have to be ready to have your favorite theory proven wrong, and if you’re not, you shouldn’t be doing science. [Video]
Eight months ago, I wrote about the hijacking of the imprimatur of “science” for political ends. Of course, politicization of science is much older than eight months. Perhaps it’s as old as The Enlightenment, but certainly as old as Social Darwinism and the Fabian Society. But the current wave of censorship began five years ago, with a gradual but persistent movement in the mainstream press to legitimize censorship.
Protecting the public from “fake news”
“Fake news” wasn’t a thing until five years ago. The lies of Donald Trump were deemed more dangerous than other lies, and the Beltway think tanks decided that the Public needed protection. For the 227 years before this, we Americans generally agreed that freedom of the press held the highest value for the viability of democracy. Deciding what is true and forbidding the publication of falsehoods sounds like a good idea only for the first millisecond, until you ask, “who decides what is true?”. Stalin knew well the power of Pravda. Hitler had his Völkischer Beobachter. Do you remember the origin of the phrase “memory hole”? George Orwell described in detail the way in which totalitarian governments must continually rewrite history to support a constantly-changing agenda.
Donald Trump was dangerous to the Establishment not because his lies were more pernicious or more convincing than other lies, but because occasionally, the rambling, self-serving monologue that continually streamed from his lips included some inconvenient truths. He charged that software in voting machines was rigged. He talked about the CIA’s blackmail racket, based on entrapment with child sex slaves. He proposed a new, independent inquiry into 9/11. He promised to declassify millions of pages of military documents on UFOs. The Establishment needed to silence Trump, not to protect the Public, but to protect the Establishment.
Lately, it is fashionable to smugly dismiss the deranged beliefs of “right-wing kooks” rather than endure the inconvenience of documenting just why these beliefs are “right-wing” and why they are wrong. This recent propaganda piece from University of Southern California exploits fear of The Deadly Virus to promote an idea that is far more deadly: legitimizing government surveillance of people with opinions at odds with the prevailing narrative. Need I remind you that the Fourth Amendment forbids the government from spying on citizens unless a judge has issued a search warrant, based on evidence that law enforcement agencies need this information to investigate a crime that has already been committed.
“Crime prevention” is an idea I can endorse with full conscience when it involves anti-poverty measures, drug rehab services, and housing for the homeless. But arresting people before they commit crimes is a practice absolutely forbidden by a millennium of British and American common law, and for the best of reasons: It has historically been used to jail the political opposition and hide the machinations of the powerful. It’s probably true that AI can make statistical predictions about who will commit a crime based on videos, and certainly true that the potential for abuse of this technology is a red flag.
Research behind the USC piece associates conservative political views with doubts about vaccination. The unstated implication is that vaccines are so obviously and universally safe that the only reason even to study their safety would be an anti-science bias which, incidentally, is common among fanatics of the Far Right.
This month, the cover story of Harvard Magazine was written by a young staff writer with no scientific background. The title poses the question, “Can Disinformation be Stopped?”, while ignoring important preliminary questions, “Should disinformation be stopped?” and “How can we tell disinformation from information?” and “Whom can we trust with the awesome responsibility of discerning truth from falsehood?” The three examples of “disinformation” cited on the cover are nothing of the sort, and in fact are topics where questioning points to deep sources of corruption, which the Powers that Be are most desperate to suppress. 1. “Election in question: were votes stolen?” 2. “Hydroxychloroquine is the cure for COVID-19” 3. “5G Networks Spread Coronavirus”
“Election in question: were votes stolen?” America has a sordid but largely hidden history of election theft. But the Help America Vote Act of 2001 has opened the floodgates for election theft on an unprecedented scale. Elections are so much easier to steal because vote tabulation is accomplished with black-box software that has been ruled a “trade secret” by our highest court. I have been a statistical consultant to election integrity activists since the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio on behalf of George W. Bush. We have used exit polls as the best available check on election results, and we have seen a growing rightward shift in the reported Federal results compared to exit polls. But in 2020, there were no exit polls for the first time in modern American history. So many people mailed their ballots that the people who showed up at the polls could not be considered a fair sample. In short, 2020 was the most opaque election in American history. There is no reason to trust the reported election results. At a time when America desperately needs a system of tabulation that the average voter can trust, all questioning of vote tabulations is ridiculed as the paranoid fantasies of right-wing partisans. [No, I’m not saying that “Trump really won”; I’m saying that I have no idea who really won, and that questioning our election machinery is not only legitimate but essential for the future of democracy.]
“Hydroxychloroquine is the cure for COVID-19” The American CDC and NIH have been criminally culpable in suppressing effective preventives and cures for COVID since the beginning of the pandemic. Exhibit A is a super-sized observational study of 100,000 COVID patients on 3 continents that was rushed through peer review last year and published prominently in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal. But there was no data to back up this study. It was retracted. It was an obvious and scandalous scientific fraud, used to discredit the most effective available treatment, keeping alive the fear of COVID until a vaccine could be released. In combination with zinc, chloroquine is a safe and effective preventative or early treatment. But doctors have been fired for prescribing it, and pharmacists have been ordered not to fill prescriptions. Later, Ivermectin, an even more effective treatment for COVID, useful at all stages, has been demonstrated. Dr Pierre Kory and Dr Peter McCullough each testified before Congress about the extraordinary effectiveness of their treatment protocols, but to no avail. Is Ivermectin a right-wing drug? America’s most popular expert on natural medicine received death threats when he posted evidence on his blog that vitamin D lessens the severity of COVID. Treatments are still being suppressed by government, by social media, and by medical authorities. This has cost millions of lives worldwide. It is being done to keep fear of COVID alive, and to make sure that vaccines are the only game in town. If I may offer my expert opinion as a biostatistician: Many more people have died of COVID in the last year than if the world’s governments had done nothing at all, imposed no restrictions on commerce or culture, and allowed the medical system to operate without interference as it has in the past.
“5G Networks Spread Coronavirus” There are thousands of credible studies associating radio frequency radiation with anxiety, depression, insomnia, inability to concentrate, and even cancer. There are known mechanisms by which such non-ionizing radiation affects electrochemical cell signaling. Still, there are physicists and engineers who deny the possibility of biological effects from cell phone radiation on theoretical grounds. For 30 years, the telecom industry has stonewalled, denying that further regulation is necessary, publishing bogus studies that report “no significant evidence” of risk. (Let me wear my statistician’s hat again, to tell you that it is very easy to design a study that fails to produce evidence of associations that are real, but much harder to design a study that demonstrates associations when none realy exist.) Last week, I was on a panel of engineers discussing safety standards for a new generation of cell phone technology. Most members were inclined to impose the burden of proof on those of us claiming a danger. In other words, unless we could clearly prove that 5G technology caused disease and we could explain a physical mechanism of harm, they thought that implementation of 5G should continue without safety standards. This is opposite to the attitude that American safety regulators have taken in every other field of technology. Why are health standards being determined by electrical engineers with no background in health sciences? And yes, there is legitimate and disturbing science associating higher COVID death rates in cities where 5G has been adopted early.
Make no mistake about it: The “fake news” campaign is not about protecting the public from lies; rather it is about establishing a state-sanctioned news network, which has been a central pillar for the stability of every totalitarian regime in history. Despotic leaders can only remain in power by hiding the truth of what they are doing from the people they govern. Conversely, there can be no meaningful democracy if there is only one source of centrally-managed information.
Other examples, past and present
For decades, UFO sightings were fake news. Now we’re supposed to believe that UFOs are real, but that the tens of millions of Americans who believed in them before that belief was sanctioned are ignorant, gullible thrill-seekers. None of the investigative reporters who have covered UFOs in the past are welcome when the self-important talking heads discuss UFOs as a new phenomenon.
Last year, the idea that COVID arose in a laboratory was fake news. Now it’s mainstream science, so long as you blame COVID on lax safety standards at Chinese laboratories. Questioning the bioweapons research at Fort Detrick and nine other American Biosafety Level 4 labs is still verboten in the public discourse. Moreover, the idea that COVID might have been deliberately released is nowhere mentioned, despite all the simulations and preparedness exercises that seemed to foretell the future with their focus on Coronaviruses of Chinese origin.
Twenty years ago, on September 11, the Twin Towers and a third tower not struck by aircraft all fell straight down in free fall, indicating there was zero resistance from the steel structure underneath. In one moment, the steel is holding up a 110-storey building; in the next moment there is nothing inhibiting its collapse. It doesn’t happen in nature that all the supporting members just happen to melt at exactly the same moment. This requires precision engineering and precisely-timed explosive charges. And yet, if you search for “9/11 building collapse”, Google will lead you to the retracted Federal NIST report claiming, absurdly, that collapses of all three buildings were the natural and expected results of localized fires. You can find the realistic science that proves all three buildings were wired for demolition if you search through DuckDuckGo. Science professors have lost their careers for telling the truth about 9/11.
58 years ago, John Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. The Warren Commission report concluded that a single bullet passed up and down and in and out of Kennedy’s body, subsequently breaking the arm of John Connally, then Governor of Texas, and falling out of his body onto the gurney, unscarred, where it could be conveniently discovered by hospital personnel. Despite the fact that the Warren Report is physically implausible, and despite the fact that a Congressional committee in 1979 concluded that Kennedy was “probably” killed by a conspiracy rather than a lone gunman, scientific challenges to the official narrative are banned from Wikipedia and social media. There are many good books, and you can preview some of the truth on Wikipedia’s page for conspiracy theories.
But the story of vaccines is in a class by itself, by far the most successful corporate propaganda campaign in history. In every other field, we define pathological fanaticism by its extreme dogma, taking an absolute position, with no recognition of subtlety and no regard to evidence. This is the attitude of the religious zealot. But in the case of vaccines, the propaganda narrative has turned this common sense on its head. All vaccines are safe. All vaccines are effective. This is the “scientific position”. Anyone who questions a particular vaccine, or identifies a side-effect, or claims that getting the disease provides better protection than taking the vaccine, is an “anti-vaxxer”, a science-denier, a menace to the universal social good of herd immunity. BTW, the term, “herd immunity” used to be defined in the world of public health as a condition of a population which had been through the disease, and so was resistant to future epidemics. In the age of COVID, “herd immunity” has been re-defined by WHO as a benefit that can only be conferred by vaccines.
Epilogue
My mentor at Harvard (first paragraph) was Julian Schwinger, one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th Century, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman for (independently) formulating relativistic quantum field theory. His physics papers had been prized by the scientific community and were published in top-tier physics journals ever since, as an 18-year-old wunderkind working under J Robert Oppenheimer, he conducted pioneering research in nuclear physics. But after the cold fusion controversy of 1989, Schwinger became interested in the phenomenon, and suggested some deep theoretical insights. He was told by the world’s foremost physics journal that they would not consider a paper on cold fusion because the editors didn’t believe it was real. This is what prompted Schwinger’s warning about the future of physics. He resigned from the American Physical Society in protest.
I first discovered the cold fusion story in 2012. Over the ensuing two years, I attended two conferences and visited five cold fusion laboratories. I can attest from talking to the experimental scientists and reviewing their data that cold fusion is real. Of course, the potential for solving the world’s energy problems and for learning fundamentally new principles of physics are both monumentally exciting. Despite many replications of cold fusion worldwide and several companies pursuing it as a new energy source, this remains a topic that mainstream physics journals refuse to touch.
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Josh Mitteldorf is best known for contributions to the biology of aging. He has written two books based on his evolutionary theory of aging [Popular, Academic], and blogs for ScienceBlog.com about aging and related matters. DataBETA is his present scientific project, a survey of thousands of individuals who are early adopters in anti-aging medicine, together with technology that will determine which (if any) of their pills and diets are effective. Most of his academic papers are available from ReserachGate. He maintains a page of health and diet recommendations for a longer life at AgingAdvice.org.
He is a writer in genres besides science: poetry, political commentary, and a bit of fiction. His “anti-blog” called Daily Inspiration has been posted continually since 2005. He was formerly an editor at OpEdNews. As “Doctor Math”, he contributed more than 5,000 responses to questions submitted at the MathForum in the 1990s.
Politically, he has been an advocate for peace, for democracy, for environmental sanity, and for public health. He was treasurer of the Delaware Valley Clean Air Council and president of the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Pennsylvania in the 1990s. Since 2005, he has been a statistical consultant and writer for the election integrity movement, which seeks transparency in the way our votes are counted.
Mitteldorf grew up in New York City and suburbs, graduated from the Harvard College Physics Department (1970), and continued to a PhD in astrophysics from University of Pennsylvania (1987).
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In what sounds like a plot turn in one of those Britbox crime-thriller series, a tranche of soggy Ministry of Defence documents ranging from “Official Sensitive” to “Secret UK Eyes Only” were found behind a bus stop in Kent Tuesday morning, according to a breaking story by the BBC today.
The 50-page bundle of doc provides an unbelievably candid insight into a “wide range of important areas.”
“This is a major embarrassment for the Ministry of Defence, which is currently carrying out a detailed investigation into how the papers came to be lying on a street corner, in the rain, in the early hours of Tuesday morning,” writes BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, who does not say how they were found or what tipped the news service off, since the finding was several days ago.
But the find is an explosive one. Not only to the docs reveal that the Brits knew very well that the Russians would respond aggressively (and they did, the extent to which is in dispute) when they sailed the HMS Defender 12 miles off the coast of Crimea in the Black Sea this week, they did it deliberately — a case that British officials have been acknowledging in the last few days.
According to the “Official Sensitive” documents, the case was made to avoid confrontation by taking an alternative route through non-contested waters but that would run the risk of looking “scared/running away.” The Russians said they fired warning shots and dropped bombs in reaction to their “freedom of navigation” operation, a detail the Brits deny.
But to U.S. readers the most important information taken from this tranche is the most sensitive “Secret UK Eyes Only” one. It details that Washington has asked the UK to leave their own special operations forces behind after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This signals what analysts have been anticipating — that the Biden Administration has not made a definitive decision on how to deal with counterterrorism issues beyond Sept. 11, and that one of the options still open is leaving a presence behind. Apparently that might include other foreign forces.
The papers do not say whether the Brits will comply (though the BBC article notes that the idea of leaving troops behind after withdrawal has been discussed in media reports); in fact they look dubious at the prospect.
Adams quotes the papers, saying that any UK footprint “that persists…is assessed to be vulnerable to targeting by a complex network of actors,” and that “the option to withdraw completely remains.”
What the heck were these papers doing behind a bus stop and were they meant for the BBC and if so, why? For our purposes, it is clear that the UK seems right in line with Washington, not only in “poking the Russian bear,” but it may be open to staying in Afghanistan for a longer haul than the people (American and British) want. It may also be worth asking whether these “special operators” the U.S. is asking for would be covertly placed in Afghanistan or not.
This is good, but depressing information.
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On the final day of the Assange extradition hearing, magistrate Vanessa Baraitser refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce, on the grounds it was out of time. The affidavit explained that the defence had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.
The defence had not only to gather evidence from Iceland, but had virtually no access to Assange to take his evidence and instructions, as he was effectively in solitary confinement in Belmarsh. The defence had requested an adjournment to give them time to address the new accusations, but this adjournment had been refused by Baraitser.
She now refused to accept Gareth Peirce’s affidavit setting out these facts.
What had happened was this. The hearings on the Assange extradition in January 2020 did not seem to be going well for the US government. The arguments that political extradition is specifically banned by the UK/US extradition treaty, and that the publisher was not responsible for Chelsea Manning’s whistleblowing on war crimes, appeared to be strong. The US Justice Department had decided that it therefore needed a new tack and to discover some “crimes” by Assange that seemed less noble than the Manning revelations.
To achieve this, the FBI turned to an informant in Iceland, Sigi Thordarson, who was willing to testify that Assange had been involved with him in, inter alia, hacking private banking information and tracking Icelandic police vehicles. This was of course much easier to portray as crime, as opposed to journalism, so the second superseding indictment was produced based on Thordarson’s story, which was elaborated with Thordarson by an FBI team.
The difficulty was that Thordarson was hardly a reliable witness. He had already been convicted in Iceland for stealing approximately $50,000 from Wikileaks and with impersonating Julian Assange online, not to mention the inconvenient fact he is a registered sex offender for online activities with under-age boys. The FBI team was in fact expelled from Iceland by the Icelandic government, who viewed what the FBI was doing with Thordarson as wholly illegitimate.
Notwithstanding all of that, in June 2020 we had the extraordinary position of the US government, 18 months since the start of extradition proceedings and six months after opening arguments had been heard by the court, being permitted completely to change the charges and alleged crimes which were the grounds for extradition, in the second superseding indictment.
On 8 September 2020 I was in court to reportMark Summers QC addressing the question of these new superseding charges:
The court resumed with a new defence application, led by Mark Summers QC, about the new charges from the US governments new superseding indictment. Summers took the court back over the history of this extradition hearing. The first indictment had been drawn up in March of 2018. In January 2019 a provisional request for extradition had been made, which had been implemented in April of 2019 on Assange’s removal from the Embassy. In June 2019 this was replaced by the full request with a new, second indictment which had been the basis of these proceedings before today. A whole series of hearings had taken place on the basis of that second indictment.
The new superseding indictment dated from 20 June 2020. In February and May 2020 the US government had allowed hearings to go ahead on the basis of the second indictment, giving no warning, even though they must by that stage have known the new superseding indictment was coming. They had given neither explanation nor apology for this.
The defence had not been properly informed of the superseding indictment, and indeed had learnt of its existence only through a US government press release on 20 June. It had not finally been officially served in these proceedings until 29 July, just six weeks ago. At first, it had not been clear how the superseding indictment would affect the charges, as the US government was briefing it made no difference but just gave additional detail. But on 21 August 2020, not before, it finally became clear in new US government submissions that the charges themselves had been changed.
There were now new charges that were standalone and did not depend on the earlier allegations. Even if the 18 Manning related charges were rejected, these new allegations could still form grounds for extradition. These new allegations included encouraging the stealing of data from a bank and from the government of Iceland, passing information on tracking police vehicles, and hacking the computers both of individuals and of a security company.
“How much of this newly alleged material is criminal is anybody’s guess”, stated Summers, going on to explain that it was not at all clear that an Australian giving advice from outwith Iceland to someone in Iceland on how to crack a code, was actually criminal if it occurred in the UK. This was even without considering the test of dual criminality in the US also, which had to be passed before the conduct was subject to extradition.
It was unthinkable that allegations of this magnitude would be the subject of a Part 2 extradition hearing within six weeks if they were submitted as a new case. Plainly that did not give the defence time to prepare, or to line up witnesses to these new charges. Among the issues relating to these new charges the defence would wish to address, were that some were not criminal, some were out of time limitation, some had already been charged in other fora (including Southwark Crown Court and courts in the USA).
There were also important questions to be asked about the origins of some of these charges and the dubious nature of the witnesses. In particular the witness identified as “teenager” was the same person identified as “Iceland 1” in the previous indictment. That indictment had contained a “health warning” over this witness given by the US Department of Justice. This new indictment removed that warning. But the fact was, this witness is Sigurdur Thordarson, who had been convicted in Iceland in relation to these events of fraud, theft, stealing Wikileaks money and material and impersonating Julian Assange.
The indictment did not state that the FBI had been “kicked out of Iceland for trying to use Thordarson to frame Assange”, stated Summers baldly.
Summers said all these matters should be ventilated in these hearings if the new charges were to be heard, but the defence simply did not have time to prepare its answers or its witnesses in the brief six weeks it had since receiving them, even setting aside the extreme problems of contact with Assange in the conditions in which he was being held in Belmarsh prison.
The defence would plainly need time to prepare answers to these new charges, but it would plainly be unfair to keep Assange in jail for the months that would take. The defence therefore suggested that these new charges should be excised from the conduct to be considered by the court, and they should go ahead with the evidence on criminal behaviour confined to what conduct had previously been alleged.
Summers argued it was “entirely unfair” to add what were in law new and separate criminal allegations, at short notice and “entirely without warning and not giving the defence time to respond to it. What is happening here is abnormal, unfair and liable to create real injustice if allowed to continue.”
The arguments submitted by the prosecution now rested on these brand new allegations. For example, the prosecution now countered the arguments on the rights of whistleblowers and the necessity of revealing war crimes by stating that there can have been no such necessity to hack into a bank in Iceland.
Summers concluded that the “case should be confined to that conduct which the American government had seen fit to allege in the eighteen months of the case” before their second new indictment.
Baraitser refused to rule out the new charges, and then did rule out the immediate defence request for an adjournment to give them time to respond to the new charges. At the end of the hearings she refused to accept the Peirce affidavit explaining why the defence was unable to respond. The court had by then spent nearly a month listening to witnesses refuting the first superseding indictment, as prepared by the defence, but nothing addressing the second superseding indictment.
Summers was absolutely furious when Baraitser refused to accept Peirce’s affidavit on the subject, to the extent he was still explosive in the street outside after the hearings had concluded.
While Baraitser’s eventual decision barred extradition on the grounds of Assange’s health and US inhumane prison conditions, the second superseding indictment and Thordarson’s accusations were accepted as a valid basis for extradition.
Thordarson has now told Icelandic magazine Stundin that his allegations against Assange contained in the indictment are untrue, and that Assange had not solicited the hacking of bank or police details. This is hardly a shock, though Thordarson’s motives for coming clean now are obscure; he is plainly a deeply troubled and often malicious individual.
Thordarson was always the most unreliable of witnesses, and I find it impossible to believe that the FBI cooperation with him was ever any more than deliberate fabrication of evidence by the FBI.
Edward Snowden has tweeted that Thordarson recanting will end the case against Julian Assange. Most certainly it should end it, but I fear it will not.
Many things should have ended the case against Assange. The First Amendment, the ban on political extradition in the US/UK Extradition Treaty, the CIA spying on the preparations of Assange’s defence counsel, all of these should have stopped the case dead in its tracks.
It is now five months since extradition was refused, no US government appeal against that decision has yet been accepted by the High Court, and yet Julian remains confined to the UK’s highest security prison. The revelation that Thordarson’s allegations are fabricated – which everyone knew already, Baraitser just pretended she didn’t – is just one more illegality that the Establishment will shimmy over in its continued persecution of Assange.
Assange democratised information and gave real power to the people for a while, worldwide. He revealed US war crimes. For that his life is destroyed. Neither law nor truth have anything to do with it.
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It was a humid June on the east coast 50 years ago when the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. The anniversary is worth marking, for reasons sweeping and grand, and for reasons deeply personal.
In 1971 Daniel Ellsbergleaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret U.S. government history of the Vietnam War, to the Times. No one had ever published such classified documents before, and reporters feared prosecution under the Espionage Act. A federal court ordered the Times to cease publication after an initial flurry of excerpts were printed, the first time in U.S. history a federal judge had invoked prior restraint and shattered the 1A.
In a legal battle too important to have been written first as a novel, the NYT fought back. The Supreme Court on June 30, 1971 handed down a victory for the First Amendment in New York Times Company v. United States, and the Times won the Pulitzer Prize. The Papers helped convince Americans the Vietnam War was wrong, their government could not be trusted, and The People informed by a free press could still have a say in things. This 20 year anniversary rightfully marks all that.
Today, journalists expect a Pulitzer for a snarky tweet that mocks Trump. In our current shameful state where the MSM serves as an organ of the Deep State, the anniversary of the Papers also serves as a reminder to millennials OnlyFansing as journalists that there were once people in their jobs who valued truth and righteousness. Perhaps this may inspire some MSM propagandist to realize he might still run with lions instead of slinking home to feed his cats.
The 50th anniversary of the Papers is also a chance to remember how fragile the victory in 1971 was. The Supreme Court left the door open for prosecution of journalists who publish classified documents by focusing narrowly on prohibiting the government from prior restraint. Politics and public opinion, not law, have kept the feds exercising discretion in not prosecuting the press, a delicate dance around an 800-pound gorilla loose in the halls of democracy. The government, particularly under Obama, hasmeanwhile aggressively used the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to those same journalists.
There is also a very personal side to this anniversary. When my book, We Meant Well, turned me into a State Department whistleblower and set off a wall of the bad brown falling on me, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg sent me two of his books, unannounced, in the mail.
He wrote a personal message inside each one, explaining to me what I was doing was hard, scary, and above all, a duty. It changed me and my understanding of what was happening to me. I wasn’t arguing procedure with the State Department and grubbing for my pension, I was defending the First Amendment itself. I wrote Dan a thank you note. Here’s some of it.
Thank you for sending me copies of your books, and thank you even more for writing “with admiration for your truth telling” inside the cover flap of one. I am humbled, because I waited my whole life to realize today I had already met you.
In 1971 I was 10 years old, living in Ohio. The Vietnam War was a part of our town’s life, same as the Fruehauf tractor-trailer plant with its 100 percent union workforce, the A&P and the Pledge of Allegiance. Nobody in my house went to war, but neighbors had gold stars in their windows and I remember one teacher at school, the one with the longer hair and the mustache, talking about Vietnam.
It meant little to me, involved with oncoming puberty, but I remember my mom bringing home from the supermarket a newsprint quickie paperback edition of the Pentagon Papers. There of course was no Internet and you could not buy the Times where I lived. Mom knew of politics and Vietnam maybe even less than I did, but the Papers were all over the news and it seemed the thing to do to spend the $1.95. When I tried to make sense of the names and foreign places it made no impact on me.
I didn’t understand then what you had done. While I was trying to learn multiplication, you were making photocopies of classified documents. As you read them, you understood the government had knowledge early on the war could not be won, and that continuing would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly.
A lot of people inside the government had read those same Papers and understood their content, but only you decided that instead of simply going along with the lies, or privately using your new knowledge to fuel self-eating cynicism, you would try to persuade U.S. Senators Fulbright and McGovern to release the papers on the Senate floor.
When they did not have the courage, even as they knew the lies continued to kill Americans they represented, you brought the Papers to the New York Times. The Times then echoed the courage of great journalists and published the Papers, fought off the Nixon administration by calling to the First Amendment, and brought the truth about lies to America. That’s when my mom bought a copy of the Papers at the A&P.
You were considered an enemy of the United States because when you encountered something inside of government so egregious, so fundamentally wrong, you risked your own fortune, freedom, and honor to make it public. You almost went to jail, fighting off charges under the same draconian Espionage Act the government still uses today to silence others who stand in your shadow.
In 2009 I volunteered to serve in Iraq for my employer of some 23 years, the Department of State. While I was there I saw such waste in our reconstruction program, such lies put out by two administrations about what we were (not) doing in Iraq, that it seemed to me that the only thing I could do — had to do — was tell people about what I saw. In my years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled only with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid hid their flaws.
What I saw in Iraq was different. There, the space between what we were doing (the waste), and what we were saying (the chant of success) was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not nerveless bureaucrats. It wasn’t Vietnam in scale or impact, but it was again young Americans risking their lives, believing for something greater than themselves, when instead it was just another lie. Another war started and run on lies, while again our government worked to keep the truth from the people.
I am unsure what I accomplished with my own book, absent getting retired-by-force from the State Department for telling a truth that embarrassed them. So be it; most people at State will never understand the choice of conscience over career, the root of most of State’s problems.
But Dan, what you accomplished was this. When I faced a crisis of conscience, to tell what I knew because it needed to be told, coming to realize I was risking at the least my job if not jail, I remembered that newsprint copy of the Papers from 1971 which you risked the same and more to release. I took my decision in the face of the Obama administration having already charged more people under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined, but more importantly, I took my decision in the face of your example.
Later, whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden would do the same. I know you have encouraged them, too, through your example and with personal messages.
So thank you for the books you sent Dan. Thank you for your courage so that when I needed it, I had an example to assess myself against other than the limp men and women working now for a Department of State too scared of the truth to rise to claim even a whisper of the word courage for themselves.
Fast-forward to 2021. In these last few years the term “whistleblower” has been co-opted such that a Deep State operative was able to abuse the term to backdoorimpeachment against a sitting president. The use of anonymous sources has devolved from brave individuals speaking out against a government gone wrong into a way for journalists to manufacture “proof” of anything they want, from claims the president was a Russian spy to the use of the military to create a photo op in Lafayette Park.
On this anniversary we look at individuals like Ellsberg and reporters like those at the Times and know it is possible for individuals with courage to make a difference. That is something worth remembering, and celebrating.
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Important article first published on July 27, 2012 provides a historical perspective on the Black Sea Military Buildup
With permanent access to eight air and other military bases and training facilities in Bulgaria and Romania acquired over the past seven years, and advanced interceptor missiles to be stationed in the second country in three years, the Pentagon is establishing a firm foothold in the Black Sea region from which to continue current and initiate new military operations in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and the Caucasus.
The U.S. Marines Corps’ Black Sea Rotational Force and the U.S. Army’s Task Force-East are assigned to the region on a regular basis and American warships are frequent visitors to the Black Sea, notwithstanding the 1936 Montreux Convention which limits the passage of non-littoral nations’ military vessels through the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits to the Black Sea.
Last year the flagship of the U.S.-NATO interceptor missile system, the guided missile cruiser USS Monterey, participated in the U.S.-led Sea Breeze naval exercise in the Black Sea – a NATO Partnership for Peace initiative – coordinated from Odessa, Ukraine, only 187 miles from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol.
This year’s Sea Breeze [2012], held from July 9-21, was the largest naval exercise held in the Black Sea this year and featured personnel from 17 nations, NATO members and partners (not always publicly acknowledged): The U.S., Ukraine, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Israel, Moldova, Qatar, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates. Algeria, Bangladesh, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates participated for the first time. The last two states, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council and of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative military partnership, provided NATO with warplanes for the six-month air war against Libya last year. The United Arab Emirates also has troops serving under NATO in Afghanistan.
Overlapping with the above maneuvers, another NATO Partnership for Peace exercise run by U.S. European Command, Rapid Trident 2012, was launched in Western Ukraine on July 16 and will run to July 28.
An estimated 1,400 service members from 16 countries – the U.S., Ukraine, Austria, Azerbaijan, Denmark, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Georgia, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Sweden – are participating.
The Dacian Thunder 2012 exercise is being conducted by the U.S., Britain and Romania from July 10-31 in the third nation. Led by the U.S. 81st Fighter Squadron and Marines, the three NATO allies are training for, in the words of the U.S. Air Force website, “air-to-air, air-to-ground, combat search and rescue, air defense, air security, air intelligence, tactical command, and cross service logistical support and operations” in preparation for “future contingency operations.”
Earlier this month U.S. Army Europe commander Lieutenant General Mark Phillip Hertling visited Georgia, on the other end of the Black Sea, to meet with the country’s new defense minister, Dimitri Shashkin, and top military commanders.
This week Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, Deputy Director of Plans, Policy and Strategy for U.S. European Command, met with Defense Minister Shashkin to begin the implementation of this year’s agreement between U.S. President Barack Obama and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to upgrade Georgia’s military capabilities.
This week Saakashvili’s spouse, Netherlands-born Sandra Roelofs, visited the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. to meet with six Georgian soldiers being treated there for injuries sustained in NATO’s Afghan war.
Last week Saakashvili met with Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and stated:
“You know that 2014 has been declared as the year of NATO expansion, and Georgia already has a real chance for full membership in NATO, which represents an important long-term security guarantee for us.”
The Georgian head of state added:
“Turkey is one of the major supporters in our drive to join NATO and for that we are very grateful, because it represents a historic chance for Georgia, for the region and for our good neighborly relations to [have] Georgia protected within this international organization.
“Recently it (Georgia’s NATO membership) became more realistic than it has ever been in history.”
In 2005, the year after Romania became a member of NATO, the Pentagon acquired several military installations in the nation including the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, previously employed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The following year it gained bases in neighboring Bulgaria, including the Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer air bases. The above are the first American military bases on the territory of former members of the Warsaw Pact.
The Marine Corps’ Black Sea Rotational Force, which as of this year is spending six months in the greater Black Sea region, frequently operates from the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, as has the Task Force-East.
The Black Sea Rotational Force’s area of operations is formally the Black Sea region, the Balkans and the Caucasus, though in fact it extends into Moldova and Greece as well. That is, it has defined a geostrategically vital area of the world, the junction of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as its purview, one which includes all the so-called frozen conflicts in former Soviet space: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transdniester.
The Black Sea region was completely inaccessible, was terra prohibita, to the Pentagon during the Cold War era. NATO expansion, with the incorporation of new members and partners, has opened the sea to U.S. military penetration, presence and use for what are termed downrange operations – armed interventions – to the east and the south.
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For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a U.S. bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden’s first air attack in February: the U.S., in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.”
Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done. To begin with, how can U.S. airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be “defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense”? Nobody suggests that the targets of the bombing campaign have the intent or the capability to strike the U.S. “homeland” itself. Neither Syria nor Iraq is a U.S. colony or American property, nor does the U.S. have any legal right to be fighting wars in either country, rendering the claim that its airstrikes were “defensive” and an “act of self-defense” to be inherently deceitful.
The Pentagon’s description of the people bombed by the U.S. — “Iran-backed militias groups” — is intended to obscure the reality. Biden did not bomb Iran or order Iranians to be bombed or killed. The targets of U.S. aggression were Iraqis in their own country, and Syrians in their own country. Only the U.S. war machine and its subservient media could possibly take seriously the Biden administration’s claim that the bombs they dropped on people in their own countries were “defensive” in nature. Invocation of Iran has no purpose other than to stimulate the emotional opposition to the government of that country among many Americans in the hope that visceral dislike of Iranian leaders will override the rational faculties that would immediately recognize the deceit and illegality embedded in the Pentagon’s arguments.
Beyond the propagandistic justification is the question of legality, though even to call it a question dignifies it beyond what it merits. There is no conceivable Congressional authorization — none, zero — to Biden’s dropping of bombs in Syria. Obama’s deployment of CIA operatives to Syria and years of the use of force to overthrow Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad never had any Congressional approval of any kind, nor did Trump’s bombing of Assad’s forces (urged by Hillary Clinton, who wanted more), nor does Biden’s bombing campaign in Syria now. It was and is purely lawless, illegal. And the same is true of bombing Iraq. The 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, which the House just last week voted to repeal, has long since ceased to provide any legal justification for ongoing U.S. troop presence and bombing campaigns in that country.
In its statement justifying the bombing raids, Biden’s Pentagon barely even bothered to pretend any of this is legal. It did not cite either the 2002 AUMF for Iraq or the 2001 AUMF authorizing the use of force against those responsible for 9/11 (a category which, manifestly, did not include Iran, Iraq or Syria). Instead, harkening back to the days of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, the Biden Defense Department claimed that “as a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” and casually asserted that “as a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq.”
Those claims are nothing short of a joke. Nobody seriously believes that Joe Biden has congressional authority to bomb Syria and Iraq, nor to bomb “Iranian-backed” forces of any kind. As The Daily Beast‘s long-time War on Terror reporter Spencer Ackerman put it on Sunday night, discussions of legality at this point are “parody” because when it comes to the U.S.’s Endless Wars in the name of the War on Terror, “we passed Lawful behind many many years ago. Authorization citations are just pretexts written by lawyers who need to pantomime at lawfulness. The U.S. presence in Syria is blatantly illegal. Such things never stop the U.S.”
That is exactly right. The U.S. government is a lawless entity. It violates the law, including its own Constitution, whenever it wants. The requirement that no wars be fought absent congressional authority is not some ancillary bureaucratic annoyance but was completely central to the design of the country. Article I, Section 8 could not be clearer: “The Congress shall have Power . . . to declare war.” Two months after I began writing about politics — back in December, 2005 — I wrote a long article compiling the arguments in the Federalist Papers which insisted that permitting the president unchecked powers to wage war without the approval of the public — through their representatives in Congress — was uniquely dangerous for ushering in the kind of tyranny from which they had just liberated themselves, and another article in 2007 which did the same:
The Constitution — while making the President the top General in directing how citizen-approved wars are fought — ties the use of military force to the approval of the American citizenry in multiple ways, not only by prohibiting wars in the absence of a Congressional declaration (though it does impose that much-ignored requirement), but also by requiring Congressional approval every two years merely to have an army. In Federalist 26, this is what Alexander Hamilton said in explaining the rationale behind the latter requirement (emphasis in original):
The legislature of the United States will be obliged by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not at liberty to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.
Public opposition is the key check on the ill-advised use of military force. In Federalist 24, Hamilton explained that the requirement of constant democratic deliberation over the American military is “a great and real security against military establishments without evident necessity”. . . .
Finding a way to impose checks on the President’s war-making abilities was a key objective of the Founders. In Federalist 4, John Jay identified as a principal threat to the Republic the fact that insufficiently restrained leaders “will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”
But as Ackerman says, even discussing legality at this point is meaningless, an empty gesture, a joke. It gives far too much credit to the U.S. ruling class, as it implies that they care at all about whether their posture of endless war is legal. They know that it is illegal and do not care at all. Many have forgotten that President Obama not only involved the U.S. in a devastating regime-change war in Libya without congressional approval, but so much worse, continued to do so even after the House of Representatives voted against providing him authorization to use force in Libya. Obama ignored the House vote and kept troops in Libya anyways as part of a NATO mission, claiming that NATO and U.N. authorization somehow entitled him to do this despite his own country’s Congress voting against it, reflecting overwhelming opposition among the citizenry. (The U.N. authorization — even if it could somehow supplant the U.S. Constitution — only allowed the use of force to protect civilians, not to overthrow the Libyan government, which quickly and predictably became the NATO mission, making itclearly illegal).
This is one reason I found the Trump-era discourse so suffocatingly dishonest and fraudulent. I began writing about politics in 2005 in order to document the systemic lawlessness that had become the fully bipartisan Bush/Cheney War on Terror. The executive power theories that were adopted — that the president has the right to do whatever he wants under Article II regardless of congressional laws or any other acts by courts or the citizenry, even including spying on American citizens without warrants — was the pure expression of authoritarianism and lawlessness. That lawlessness not only continued but escalated severely under the Obama administration, with the war in Libya, the claimed right to assassinate anyone in the world without due process, including U.S. citizens, and the CIA’s covert regime-change war in Syria.
Having to watch the Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden operatives who ushered in this permanent state of illegality and lawless wars prance around during the Trump years as noble defenders of the sacred rule of law — all while being celebrated and profiting greatly — was nauseating in the best of times. American elites do not care about the rule of law or the Constitution. Ignoring it is how they empower themselves at the expense of the citizenry. That is why very few will care about the fact that Biden (indulging the fiction for a moment that it was he) ordered the bombings on two countries without the slightest whiff of legal authority to do so.
While it feels frivolous even to raise questions of legality — since so few in Washington care about such matters — the real overarching question is the simplest one. Why does the U.S. continue to have a military presence in Iraq and Syria? What conceivable benefits redound to American citizens from the massive expenditures required to keep U.S. troops stationed in these two countries, the risk of those troops’ lives, the endless acquisition of bombs and other weapons to fight there, and the obvious but severe dangers from triggering escalation with powerful militaries that — unlike the U.S. — actually have a vital interest in what takes place in their bordering countries?
While the ordinary American only suffers from all of this, there are definitely some sectors of U.S. society which benefit. The corporation that Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin left in order to run the Pentagon — Raytheon — needs ongoing troop deployment and permanent warfare for its profitability. According to The New York Times, it was “Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [who] briefed Mr. Biden on attack options early last week,” after which “Mr. Biden approved striking the three targets.” So Gen. Austin’s colleagues on the Raytheon Board of Directors, as well as his comrades on the Boards of General Dynamics and Boeing, are surely thrilled with this attack.
Indeed, anyone invested in endless war in the Middle East — including the entire U.S. intelligence community and the weapons industry which feeds off of it — must be thrilled by all of this. Each time the U.S. “retaliates” against Iran or Iraqi militias or Syrian fighters, it causes them to “retaliate” back, which in turn is cited as the reason the U.S. can never leave but must instead keep retaliating, ensuring this cycle never ends. It also creates a never-ending supply of angry people in that region who hate the U.S. for bringing death and destruction to their countries with bombs that never stop falling and therefore want to strike back: what we are all supposed to call “terrorism.” That is what endless war means: a war that is designed never to terminate, one that is as far removed as possible from actual matters of self-defense and manufactures its own internal rationale to continue it.
But what is beyond doubt is that this illegal, endless war in the Middle East does nothing but harm American citizens. As they are told that they cannot enjoy a sustainable let alone quality standard of living without working two or three dreary hourly-wage, benefits-free jobs for corporate giants, and while more Americans than ever continue to live at home and remain financially unable to start families, the U.S. continues to spend more on its military than the next thirteen countries combined. This has continued for close to two full decades now because the establishment wings of both parties support it. Neither of them believes in the Constitution or the rule of law, nor do they care in the slightest about the interests of anyone other than the large corporate sectors that fund the establishment wings of both parties. The bombs that fell on Syria and Iraq last night were for them and them alone.
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The highest official of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, arrived in Colombia to participate in a “delicate” mission in terms of security, as part of the “cooperation” between the two countries.
The Colombian ambassador in Washington, Francisco Santos, reported on the arrival of the CIA director, however Santos did not want to provide additional details about Burns’ visit to Bogotá.
“I prefer not to tell you it is a delicate mission, an important mission in terms of intelligence, that we managed to coordinate,” Santos replied obliquely when asked about the mission.
This visit comes after US President Joe Biden’s first telephone conversation with his Colombian counterpart Iván Duque. The Colombian government, following the directions of the US regime, has been trying unsuccessfully for years to overthrow the legitimate government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, accusing it of human rights violations, when in reality it is in Colombia where human rights violations are sadly part of the everyday life of the civilian population.
The day before the visit marked two months since the beginning of Colombia’s bloody repression of the national strike and demonstrations rejecting the policies of Duque and demanding that measures be taken in the area of human rights particularly, due to the violence and repression perpetrated by his government.
Santos explained that the visit of the highest CIA official to Colombia was made by through a contact, after having already held three meetings with the organization.
— Michel Caballero Palma (@MichelCaballero) June 29, 2021
Santos explained that in those meetings they had been told where they are going and what is happening, so they consider this visit as “very important.”
“That contact was made, you understand,” said Santos. “We have been working with that agency. We have had three meetings.”
William Burns became director of the CIA on March 18 of this year, as part of the changes that Biden made after his inauguration.
What’s behind the CIA visit to Colombia?
Colombia is experiencing a delicate internal situation due to the demonstrations. The strike committee and demonstrators do not intend to cease until their requests are heard by the government.
These demonstrations revealed to the world the malicious structure of Colombia’s security organizations and the repressive manner that the government responds to peaceful protests.
CIA Director William Burns just flew to Colombia for what the far-right government says are a series of "delicate and important" meetings 🤨
This CIA visit comes while the narco-regime has been massacring and disappearing anti-austerity protesters in a brutally violent crackdown https://t.co/eXZCHjKgDE
In addition, the visit follows the alleged attack against the Colombian president last Friday, in which his helicopter was purportedly hit by six bullets. Hours later they attempted to hold the government of Venezuela responsible.
The accusations arose after the alleged discovery of weapons bearing identifying marks of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB).
Added to this is the complaint made by the Venezuelan government recently that the government of Colombia and the United States sponsor criminal gangs to commit crimes on the border with Venezuela and even in some barrios of Caracas.
“It is imperative to remind the international community that these irregular groups have the sponsorship of the Colombian government and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is why their incursions into Venezuelan territory should be considered as an aggression sponsored by Iván Duque, since he provides them with logistical-financial support,” warned the Venezuelan Minister for Defense, Vladimir Padrino López. Violence promoted in Apure state by Colombian paramilitary narco-trafficking gangs has taken the lives of more than ten Venezuelan army officers this year and sowed panic among the Venezuelan population.
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Featured image: CIA Director William J. Burns official portrait (Public Domain)
Is a new Worldwide lockdown envisaged as a means to combating the “dangerous” Covid variant entitled “Delta”. First identified last year in India, The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant was “thought to have driven the deadly second wave of infections this summer in India”. According to so-called “scientific opinion” it is now said to be spreading worldwide, to some 80 countries.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration added a warning to fact sheets — as advised by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — for Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines indicating an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 25 added a warning to patient and provider fact sheets for Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines indicating an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination.
Less than two weeks after NATO members reaffirmed allegiance to Article 5 – that an attack on one member was an attack on all members – the UK nearly put that pledge to the test. In a shockingly provocative move, the UK’s HMS Defender purposely sailed into Crimean territorial waters on its way to Georgia.
Echoing criticism from across the globe on Monday, the Iraqi government slammed the Biden administration for overnight U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria at facilities the Pentagon says were used by Iran-backed militias.
Nicaragua is in the news again. But not for being one of the countries with the greatest reduction in poverty and social inequality worldwide since 2007 (poverty by half, extreme poverty by a third, and going from being the fourth most unequal country to being the fourth least unequal in Latin America).
Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili paid a two-day visit to Ukraine earlier this week (her first) and met with her opposite number President Volodymyr Zelensky. Zurabishvili first came to world notice when she emerged as part of the triumvirate that took over in Georgia following the so-called Rose Revolution in late 2003 that saw incumbent head of state Eduard Shevardnadze manhandled and divested of his powers.
Welcome to the latest NATO show: Sea Breeze starts today and goes all the way to July 23. The co-hosts are the US Sixth Fleet and the Ukrainian Navy. The main protagonist is Standing NATO Maritime Group 2. The show, in NATOspeak, is just an innocent display of “strenghtening deterrence and defense”. NATO spin tells us the exercise is “growing in popularity” and now features more than 30 nations “from six continents” deploying 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and “18 special operations and dive teams”.
India has dispatched at least 50,000 additional troops to the Chinese border where there are currently 200,000 combat-ready troops, an increase of more than 40% since the two rival powers clashed in the Himalayas in June last year, resulting in the death of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese.
As official government data is emerging in Europe and the USA on the alarming numbers of deaths and permanent paralysis as well as other severe side effects from the experimental mRNA vaccines, it is becoming clear that we are being asked to be human guinea pigs in an experiment that could alter the human gene structure and far worse.
A group of 57 leading scientists, doctors and policy experts has released a report calling in to question the safety and efficacy of the current COVID-19 vaccines and are now calling for an immediate end to all vaccine programs. We urge you to read and share this damning report.
You are a Universal Being. Your body is just a vehicle for the manifestation of this Universal Being here on Earth. As a Universal Being your ‘essence’ lives forever. Start identifying your Self as a Universal Being, merged with the source of all existence. The more you live in this Self – the Real You – during this lifetime – the more seamless is the passage onwards at the time of passing.
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From his secure fortress of contented spite, Dominic Cummings, exiled from the power he once wielded at Number 10 as one of the chosen, must have felt a sense of satisfaction. Biliously, the former top aide to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnsonhad scorned the now former UK Health Secretary in a performance before MPs lasting hours. Matt Hancock, Cummings explained last month, could have been sacked for any number of things he did in responding to the pandemic.
With history moving from its tragic gear into a farcical one, Hancock has resigned. It had all the makings of a tabloid fix: the minister’s name (Hancock), an aide, kissing, a leaking mole and CCTV. But the departure was not for mendacity or want of competence so much as an ill-considered moment in breach of COVID-19 regulations. With the country still continuing a lockdown that was meant to dramatically ease on June 21, a camera recording the Health Secretary snogging his aide, Gina Coladangelo, was leaked. The camera footage of the office incident was recorded on May 6.
Johnson was never going to sack his minister on grounds of incompetence. The leader has set the precedent others must follow. According to the vengeful Cummings, it took a hail of 89 texts from Johnson’s wife Carrie to lessen the support. It was left to Hancock to fall upon his sword, which he took some time to do.
In his resignation letter, priorities are reversed. “The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.” The actual reason comes afterwards. “I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this.” People who had “sacrificed so much in this pandemic” were owed a sense of honesty “when we have let them down as I have done by breaching this guidance.” The Times tersely opined that such conduct suggested that “the government tolerates breaches of lockdown rules for themselves, while insisting the public adhere to higher standards.”
With the bigger picture of Hancock’s conduct miniaturised (the breach of social distancing rules, various questionable staff appointments – the list is long), Brandon Lewis, Northern Ireland Secretary, could now focus on the important matters: finding out how CCTV footage found its way into the pages of that undyingly malicious paper of poor record, The Sun. The culprit is said to be lurking in the corridors of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
British press outlets suggested that the leaker had made contact via Instagram to an unnamed anti-lockdown activist. “I have some very damning CCTV footage of someone that has been classed as completely f***ing hopeless. If you would like some more information please contact me.” The same paper supplied readers with all the details, leaving little to the imagination. Included was a crude outlay of Hancock’s office, including the positioning of the Union Jack, painting of the Queen, bookshelf, coat rack and, it transpires, the “kiss door”.
On Sky News, Lewis made the government’s priorities clear. “I have seen some of the reports this morning outlining how different journalists think the tape might have got out there. That is certainly a matter I know the Department of Health will be looking into to understand exactly how that was recorded, how it got out of the system. It’s something we need to get to the bottom of.”
In comments that can only induce smirks of derision, Lewis preferred to focus on the principle that what took place in “government departments can be sensitive, important and people need to have confidence that what is happening in a government department is something that allows the government to be focused on these core issues, and the sensitivity sometimes in the security sense of those issues.”
Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was also busy directing attention to the things that counted – at least from a government perspective. By leaking footage of Hancock’s intimate moment, the leaker may well have sailed close to breaching the Official Secrets Act. Paying lip service to the “open society” and protections “for whistleblowers who find things out and release them in the public interest”, Hunt told the Andrew Marr Show what really bothered him. “[W]e need to understand how this happened, and to make sure that ministers are secure in their offices, to be able to have conversations that they know aren’t going to be leaked to hostile powers.”
A fevered panic swept through Johnson’s cabinet, with ministers fearing they might be the next one to be Hancocked. Justice Minister Robert Bucklandrevealed that sweeps were being organised to identify any filming or listening devices that had escaped detection. “I think there is an important principle here about need for ministers and civil servants who often are handling very sensitive material and information to have a safe space within which to work.”
The calls for investigation did not stop at the issue of a breach of ministerial confidence. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wished to guide the debate back to the breach of those very regulations government ministers had insisted Britons follow. “What’s important now is for there to be proper investigations into which rules were broken in relation to use of private email, in relation to the appointment of senior staff and also in relation to the social distancing rules.”
Hancock had certainly built himself a fortress of impropriety during the course of the pandemic. The Sunday Times, having seen minutes of various meetings, noted that the minister had been using a private email address from March 2020 to conduct departmental correspondence, making accountability for decisions regarding the novel coronavirus slippery at best.
The deflectors were also tapping away. Those sympathising with Hancock within the government were aghast at the very existence of a camera in the office. Had he been the victim of an orchestrated sting by enemies in Number 10? Or did some meddlesome power such as China wish to cause ripples by installing a clinch catching “love bug”?
The smug Mail on Sundaypoured water on suggestions of foul play. “In fact, pictures taken in September 2017, just before Hancock moved in, show that the camera which caught the clinch is clearly visible on the ceiling of his office.” But the Tories were also searching for another alibi that would, if not exonerate Hancock then at least provide a distraction from his conduct.
To that end, suspicion started growing legs with commentary on the camera’s make. While rented from a Singaporean firm, it stems from Chinese manufacturer Hikvision, a company under contract to supply surveillance equipment to the authorities in China’s Xinjiang region. Despite being blacklisted by Washington in October 2019 for its role in conducting surveillance of Uighurs in the region’s network of “re-education camps”, US cities, counties and schools have made good use of them during the pandemic. In Britain, city councils employ them in public spaces.
The China Research Group, run by Tory MPs keen to drum up fears about China, fastened on Hikvision’s role in the Hancock affair in a statement. “There are questions over whether [Hikvision cameras] are currently used in Portcullis House (where MPs have their offices) and the Palace of Westminster (where the House of Lords and the House of Commons is located).” The group feared “the potential for Chinese intelligence agencies to tap into camera feeds in sensitive locations”.
The nature and scope of the forthcoming inquiry is uncertain. A full-blooded investigation, no holds barred, might well reveal a bit more than the Department of Health might want to reveal. Investigators run the risk of lionising a potential whistleblower while uncovering a good deal of rot at the centre of the Johnson government. And few civil servants, and certainly no government politician, would like to see that.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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A recently published study in this month’s American Journal of Therapeutics, took an in-depth look at 18 randomized controlled studies on the use of Ivermectin to control COVID-19. The study concludes that the use of Ivermectin “significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19” and “found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”
Ivermectin was first developed as a veterinary drug in the 1970s, however since 1988 it has been prescribed for humans to combat various parasitic infections. Was later added to the WHO’s list of essential medications and in 2015 the inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, many doctors and scientists were looking for new ways to deal with the virus. At the same time, an interesting series of events occurred one nursing home in Toronto, in February 2020 (just before COVID-19 emerged in Canada the Valley View Nursing Home in Toronto, Canada had a parasitic outbreak. 170 patients at the home were given Ivermectin. The residents of the 4th floor, where the outbreak occurred, were given the highest dose; the rest of the residents were given a prophylactic dose. The staff were not given Ivermectin. Then they had a Covid-19 outbreak. The staff were infected with COVID-19 much more than the patients. Only 6 patients contracted COVID, and they all had mild cases. The patients on the 4th floor, who received the highest dose of ivermectin, had no cases of COVID. These patients were very elderly with comorbidities, and they had much contact with the staff yet only 6% were infected.
Since then, over 60 clinical trials (31 randomized controlled) conducted by 549 scientists in 18,931 patients were conducted to see what if any link Ivermectin has with preventing and treating COVID-19. The conclusions of these studies reveal dramatic positive outcomes for the use of Ivermectin. When used prophylactically patients saw an 85% reduction in hospitalization and death, early treatment was effective 76%, and even when used as a later stage treatment was effective 46% of the time.
While these studies suggested that Ivermectin was indeed a safe, cheap, and effective treatment for COVID-19, many public health policy makers refused to permit its use to treat and prevent COVID-19. The FDA in it’s statement said that the “FDA has not approved ivermectin for use in treating or preventing COVID-19” later explaining that “The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19”. Many are insisting it’s time for the FDA to review the data and formally approve its use.
One such advocate for the use of Ivermectin is Dr. Pierre Kory, a founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Kory, along with the other professionals at the FLCCC developed the specific protocol to prevent and treat COVID-19 using Ivermectin. While the treatment was shunned by the medical establishment and the social media banned promoting or debating the treatment, physicians, like Kory, persisted and advocated for its use. In December 2020 Dr. Kory and others gave an impassioned plea, backed by scientific research at a committee hearing in the U.S. Senate. Stating that Ivermectin “basically obliterates transmission of this virus,” the doctor continued saying “When I say miracle I do not use that term lightly[.] … [T]hat is a scientific recommendation based on mountains of data that has emerged in the last three months.”
Unfortunately, many are still uninformed of this treatment, and the medical establishment is still blocking its use. Several hospitals around the country are even refusing to administer the treatment to seriously ill patients. A number of patients had to go as far as to get a court order to force the hospital to permit them to use this life saving medication. Thankfully all of those patients received their Ivermectin and made dramatic turnarounds and subsequently recovered for COVID-19.
The hope of a safe and effective medication to prevent and treat COVID-19 appears to have been found in Ivermectin; unfortunately it continues to be deemed unacceptable by the medical establishment and undiscussable by social media.
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One month after the end of the last hostilities between Israel and Hamas, events on the ground demonstrate that little has changed. And once again the US media is ignoring Israel’s creeping annexation of Palestinian lands and their brutally aggressive behaviors toward the Palestinian people.
There appeared to be an awakening of the press last month, especially the extensive coverage given to Israel’s effort to evict Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and the Israeli military’s brutal assault on Palestinians at Al Aqsa, signalling greater sensitivity to the Palestinian plight. Although these Israeli actions and the mass uprisings of Palestinian youth they precipitated were drowned out by the more familiar storyline of Israeli bombardments of Gaza in response to Hamas rocket fire, after the ceasefire, positive coverage of Palestinian suffering continued, but only for a time.
Attention was soon diverted by the drama of Netanyahu’s defeat and the formation of the new Israeli government. At this point, the Israeli hasbara industry kicked into full gear. Newly inaugurated Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a notorious hardliner, we are told, has become a pragmatist who wants to restore frayed relations with Democrats. In an appeal to the Biden administration, a senior member of the Bennett-Lapid government said that their future “rests in Biden’s hands…we hope that they will understand the constraints under which we are operating…” In other words, “Don’t look at what we do or place demands on us; what should count is that we’re not Netanyahu.”
But, as a leading Israeli peace activist noted, US attitudes toward Israel “ought to be framed by Israeli policies, not Israeli politicians, and as long as the policies continue, there is no reason to cut Israel slack for the simple fact that Israel’s not being led by Netanyahu”.
As for the policies, nothing has changed. In the aftermath of the unrest that rocked Israeli cities last month, Israeli police arrested 2,100 citizens, 91 per cent of whom were Palestinian citizens of Israel. Shortly after being inaugurated, the new government issued a permit for flag-waving extremists to march through Arab neighbourhoods chanting “Death to Arabs”, “Your villages will burn,” and other incendiary taunts. Once again, Israeli police arrested Arab counter-protesters.
In an ominous development, Israeli police set up barricades around the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood and established a checkpoint for residents. They have also established guard posts near the Damascus Gate that the Israeli press notes are frequently being used to harass and beat young Palestinians who gather at the Gate’s plaza. As I had feared, with each passing day, it appears that the Israelis are intent on repeating in Jerusalem what they did in Hebron. The Israeli press also reports that police have used brutal “crowd dispersal even when not necessary” and deployed skunk water hoses, spraying the plaza, the Old City walls, and homes in Silwan with a liquid that has a long-lasting “unbearable stench”.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the occupied lands, settlement expansion and creeping annexation continue. Just this week, the new government gave the green light to 31 new projects in settlements across the West Bank. And in Hebron, the Israelis have seized land adjacent to al Ibrahim Mosque to complete their takeover of this UNESCO-protected site.
South of Hebron, the fertile lands of Khirbet al Aida, owned by Palestinians have been subjected to settler raids, demolition activity, and expropriation. The Israeli government’s intent is to connect settlements around Hebron, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank.
Equally ominous are the activities of settlers, protected by the Israeli military, who have established an “outpost”, Evyatar, on a hilltop to the south of Nablus, Jabal Sabih. While the military has declared this outpost “flagrantly illegal”, 60 homes have already been constructed, and soldiers have been seen assisting the settlers moving construction materials up the hill. The government has provided the outpost with water, electricity, and roads.
Palestinians, on whose land this “outpost” is being erected, have been protesting this blatant land grab. In the last six weeks, Israelis have shot and killed five young Palestinian protesters.
Like the development in Hebron, Palestinians understand that what is illegal today becomes legal tomorrow. Once completed, Evyatar will connect with other once-illegal outposts and will cut Nablus off from the rest of the West Bank.
One month after the end of the last “Gaza war”, Israeli settlers participated in 14 marches throughout the West Bank, protected by the Israeli military, demanding that the government expropriate Palestinian lands for settlement construction.
Meanwhile in Gaza, despite Hamas’ hollow boasts of victory, tens of thousands of Palestinians in that impoverished strip remain homeless, many more without water and electricity, and the entire population without hope for the future.
In the Israeli Knesset, the new government is seeking renewal of a law to ban Palestinian “family unification” (forbidding Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of Jerusalem from bringing spouses from the West Bank, Gaza, or outside to live with them) with Defense Minister Benny Gantz arguing that passage of this law “is necessary to maintain the security of the state and its Jewish democratic character”.
The bottom line: Netanyahu may be out, but creeping annexation and oppression continue. For Palestinians, nothing has changed.
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The writer is president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute.
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Too many American politicians at all levels of government have come to believe that your money is their money. Federal, state and local tax rates are set annually and often arbitrarily based on the issues that elected officials and tax managers consider to be important. Input from the public is basically unwelcome except at election time but, even then, the breakdown of dollars and cents that will be coming out of one’s pocket is rarely under discussion.
It is past time to consider what the pie in the sky being proposed by the Democrats, since they are currently in power, will actually cost the American taxpayer. Bear in mind, that Democratic Party proposals that are now being floated are directed at certain constituencies that the party is seeking to weld into an unbeatable coalition that will defy all Republican attempts to recover either Congress or the Presidency. Similar activity is taking place at the state and local level. There is no consideration of the fact that government, at least theoretically, is intended to benefit all of the citizenry, not a select portion thereof that will henceforth be required to deliver the vote loyally. Politicians who manipulate the system with that in mind should be sent to jail, but alas, in the US system no one is ever punished, even if they start a war under false premises as did former President George W Bush and his apparatchiks.
Under the Democrats, the entire process whereby the spoils derived from being power are distributed is being driven by social engineering, i.e. race and gender. One of President Joe Biden’s first moves upon taking office was to propose special payments and other incentives for black farmers, who, his administration argued, had been disadvantaged because they had been systematically denied loans for many years. It should seem outrageous that federal tax dollars were to be used to support only one racial group, but not a single Democrat appeared to be disturbed. Fortunately, a federal court ruled favorably in a case brought by a white farmer claiming that racially directed government assistance is unconstitutional as it violates the “equal protection under the law” principle. The Democrats are, however, continuing to push for their program of tying blacks firmly into their coalition, even if it means creating a system that is manifestly and even transparently unfair.
One of the most bizarre news stories of the past several weeks has to be the revelation that the Defense Department will be paying for transgender surgery for those biological males in the ranks that want to become women and vice versa. One can honestly accept that there are transgender individuals in the so-called armed services and they deserve respect for what they perhaps quite genuinely are, but this goes well beyond that. In the usual squeaky-voiced pander much favored by the Biden Administration, Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough announced during “Pride Week” that the new guidelines would create a “safe and caring” environment for all veterans, while also citing the “dark history” of discrimination against gay and transgender military personnel. “Safe and caring?” Our military? Hope they never have to fight a real war.
The White House also got into the promotion, releasing a statement that “President Biden believes that gender identity should not be a bar to military service and that America’s strength is found in its diversity. This question of how to enable all qualified Americans to serve in the military is easily answered by recognizing our core values. America is stronger, at home and around the world, when it is inclusive. The military is no exception. Allowing all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform is better for the military and better for the country because an inclusive force is a more effective force. Simply put, it’s the right thing to do and is in our national interest.”
The statement is like many, Executive Order signing statements coming out of the Biden White House, complete nonsense. The historically most effective fighting forces have had high levels of cohesion, not diversity and it is difficult to imagine what they national interest would be in having an army that can’t fight. Transgenders were, in fact, first allowed to serve, predictably, under President Barack Obama before being blocked by President Donald Trump. They are now again a cherished part of the military community under Honest Joe Biden and both active duty transgenders and veterans will soon be able to receive gender-transition surgeries, mostly through the Veterans Affairs (VA) health care coverage. It is estimated that there are now 15,000 transgender individuals on active duty while possibly as many as 135,000 more are veterans. The numbers seem impossibly large, but gender transition surgeries will now be covered by the string of military hospitals and the veteran healthcare network.
Bear in mind that transgender transformation surgery is not urgent care or even health maintenance: it is an optional procedure intended to turn G.I. Joe into G.I. Jane or the reverse. Also bear in mind that the US taxpayer submits to the burden of the enormous and growing so-called Defense budget in the belief that it exists to protect the United States, not to change genders of American citizens who might be enlisting in the military precisely to obtain that benefit. According to a recent estimate the cost of the procedure can range from $15,000 up to more than $50,000 depending on how extensive the surgery is. Multiply that by 150,000 to get some idea of what the pander to gender obsessed fanatics in the Democratic Party and among its limousine liberals base will cost the average taxpayer, who will get nothing in return from it.
The Pentagon, of course, is fully engaged in the war on extremism and is also actively promoting the racist Critical Race Theory while rooting out extremists, which means white people, who are evil supremacists both genetically and by definition. CRT is, by the way, a remarkable Marxist-based invention that blames most bad things in America on white people. And it is being forced on the public by the usual zealots with the claim that it will make everyone the beneficiary of “equity.” On the contrary it makes Americans less well educated and dependent on government for handouts.
Even counties and school districts that have had no racial issues are being forced to hire Diversity & Equity Managers and high-priced consultants to explain the new reality. As a manifestation of CRT thinking, Fred Reed observes how increasingly in American schools “Math curricula are being dumbed down because blacks do poorly at math, English grammar instruction eliminated because blacks can’t or won’t learn it, entrance exams for the elite and demanding high schools eliminated because blacks don’t pass them, SATs dropped because blacks score poorly on them, promotion exams in police departments eliminated because blacks don’t pass them. Entrance requirements at medical school are lowered because not enough blacks pass them, AP courses in high school eliminated because too few blacks get into them… White parents are forced to see their children subjected to what they regard as obscene, semiliterate, violent, stupid, a culture dominated by what seems to them, (and would to any First World country) the opposite of cultivation.”
And, to be sure, the military is leading the way to join the new world order. Seeking to promote both racial and gender diversity in its ranks, the Navy has created a task force designed to “combat discrimination,” which inter alia requires sailors to take a pledge to “acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities,” whatever that is supposed to mean. The Army is also doing its bit. In a recent appearancebefore Congress Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley “defended the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and, referencing the January 6 Capitol riot, said, ‘it is important that we train and we understand … and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white.’”
Milley, who seems unaware of the “black rage” that has been burning, looting and shooting over the past year, particularly stressed the impact of the January 6thCapitol Building “insurrection,” saying “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that?”
It is important to seek to understand what Milley has bought into: putting the military squarely on the side of the administration in the cultural wars currently being endured while making clear who the enemy is: white America. Some cynics observed that Milley and the military-industrial-complex behind him, who collectively speaking cannot any longer fight and win a war, are chiefly concerned with the hundreds of billions of dollars that they enjoy annually. To secure that it is necessary to play nice with whatever the White House, and the woke media, are peddling. Again, it all comes down to money that is stolen from taxpayers in this country. Time for the taxpayers themselves to put an end to the nonsense.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
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The fear campaign has once again gone into high gear.
Is a new Worldwide lockdown envisaged as a means to combating the “dangerous” Covid variant entitled “Delta”.
First identified last year in India, The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant was “thought to have driven the deadly second wave of infections this summer in India”.
According to so-called “scientific opinion” it is now said to be spreading worldwide, to some 80 countries.
“Delta plus has also been found in nine other countries – USA, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, Japan, Poland, Nepal, Russia and China – compared to the original highly contagious Delta strain, which has now spread to 80 countries.”
According to the White House:
“Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever.
Joe Biden’s proposed “solution” is:
“Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late.” (emphasis added)
Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever. Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late. pic.twitter.com/9gBeRpvCe8
Uk Health authorities are now claiming that the new cases of the Delta B1.617. variant, increase the risk of hospitalization by 2.7 times, (according to Public Health England).
What is the “science” behind this disinformation campaign.
Technical Briefing 16 includes variant diagnoses made both by whole-genome sequencing and by a genotyping PCR test, including the categorisation of confirmed and probable variant results and a rules-based decision algorithm (RBDA) to identify variant and mutation (VAM) profiles from genotype assay mutation profiles. Genotyping is used to identify variants Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma; targets were updated in mid-May 2021 to prioritise accurate identification of Delta over Alpha.
Prof. Neil Ferguson is Boris Johnson’s government trusted “advisor”. He was the architect of the infamous Imperial College “mathematical model” which was used to justify the March 11, 2020 lockdown and closure of the global economy, leading to mass unemployment, extreme poverty and despair.
Image on the right: Neil Ferguson (Source: Financial Times)
Generously funded by the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation, his March 2020 computer model estimates and predictions border on ridicule.
The March 11, 2020 lockdown as a means to containing the alleged pandemic is a crime against humanity.
And now, the same discredited “expert” (in consultation with his colleagues of the SAGE Committee of experts) has designed a new “mathematical model” which is being used to justify a “Fourth Wave Lockdown”.
According to the British media:
“New modelling for the government’s SAGE committee of experts [to which Ferguson belongs] has highlighted the risk of a “substantial third wave” of infections and hospitalisations, ….
A Whitehall source said it was “broadly correct” that the outlook was now more pessimistic. “Cases are obviously higher and they are growing quickly,” the source said. (Guardian)
“the Delta variant of coronavirus is 30% to 100% more transmissible than the previously dominant variant”. (quoted by the Guardian).
Where does he get his data and estimates?
What Ferguson fails to mention is virus variants are always “less vigilant” and “less dangerous” in comparison to the original virus.
UK officials are nonetheless intimating to the possibility of a Fourth Wave lockdown. According to Britain’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty (who is also a member of the SAGE Committee)
The NHS needs to brace itself for another difficult winter ahead, with the possibility of a further “very significant Covid surge”,
SAGE refers to The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies which advises the UK government on Covid related policies. Many of the members of this illustrious panel are potentially in conflict of interest.
The statement by Prof Whitty, is based on “a new study commissioned by the government”. Professor Graham Medley – who chairs the SPI-M modelling sub-group of the government’s SAGE panel pointed to the possibility that “restrictions would have to be reintroduced.”
Prof Ferguson, who also sits on the SPI-M modelling sub-group, said the Delta variant posed a “higher risk of hospitalisations” – but said it was still unclear how deadly a third wave of infections might be. (Independent)
These announcements are frivolous. Their intent is to justify drastic policy measures (lockdown, mask, social distancing, closure of economic activity, disruption of health services) as well as the speeding up the vaccination programme.
Moreover, these statements by British health officials (not to mention the results of the “modelling exercise”) regarding the so-called spread of “the more infectious Delta variant” are now being used to the justify the implementation of “Fourth Wave” lockdown policies in a large number of countries.
The development of restrictive measures has unfolded in India, sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, Malaysia, among others. In Australia, major urban areas including Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin have literally been closed down.
“Fake Science” regarding D the Dangerous Delta Variant is the driving force behind these measures which are relentlessly creating social chaos and the destabilization of national economies.
In turn, the Delta variant is being used Worldwide as a pretext to speed up of the mRNA vaccine campaign.
“Have no Fear, Pfizer is here”. Despite the wave of mRNA “vaccine” related deaths and injuries the “solution” of Public Health England (PHE) and its SAGE and Imperial College panels of distinguished experts to these alleged “deadly variants” is “get the jab”. The Pfizer experimental mRNA vaccine –is now heralded as “88% effective against the Delta variant”.
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Foi iniciada ontem a Sea Breeze, Briza Marítima, a grande manobra aeronaval oficialmente “organizada em conjunto, no Mar Negro, pelos Estados Unidos e pela Ucrânia“. Os Estados Unidos, que a planeiam e comandam, são, portanto, os anfitriões neste mar próximo do território russo. A Sea Breeze, que ocorre de 28 de Junho a 10 de Julho, é dirigida pelas Forças Navais USA/Africa, da qual faz parte a Sexta Frota, com quartel general em Nápoles. Essa mesma manobra subentende exercícios de guerra naval, submarina, anfíbia, terrestre e aérea.
Desde quando, em 1997, teve início esta série de manobras anuais no Mar Negro, a edição de 2021 conta com o maior número de participantes: 32 países de seis continentes, com 5.000 militares, 18 equipas de forças especiais, 32 navios e 40 aviões de guerra. Participam não são só países membros da NATO – Itália, Grã-Bretanha, França, Espanha, Grécia, Noruega, Dinamarca, Polónia, Bulgária, Roménia, Albânia, as três repúblicas bálticas, Turquia e Canadá – mas também países parceiros, principalmente a Ucrânia, Geórgia, Moldávia, Suécia e Israel. Entre os outros que enviaram forças militares para o Mar Negro, estão a Austrália, o Japão, a Coreia do Sul, o Paquistão, os Emirados Árabes Unidos, o Egipto, a Tunísia, Marrocos, Senegal e o Brasil. O facto de serem destacadas forças militares no Mar Negro, provenientes da Austrália e do Brasil, para a manobra em larga escala sob o comando dos EUA dirigida contra a Rússia, está de acordo com o que Joe Biden prometeu: “Como presidente, vou tomar medidas imediatas para renovar as alianças dos Estados Unidos e fazer com que a América, mais uma vez, lidere o mundo“. A manobra de guerra do Mar Negro, a maior realizada até à data, mostra que os passos do Presidente Biden vão no sentido de uma escalada crescente contra a Rússia e, ao mesmo tempo, contra a China.
A Sea Breeze 2021, na realidade, foi iniciada a 23 de Junho, quando o navio de guerra britânico HMS Defender, navegando da Ucrânia para a Geórgia, entrou em águas territoriais da Crimeia. Um acto deliberadamente agressivo, reivindicado pelo Primeiro Ministro Boris Johnson, que declarou que a Grã-Bretanha pode novamente enviar os seus navios de guerra para essas águas, visto que não reconhece a “anexação da Crimeia Ucraniana” pela Rússia. Esta acção hostil, seguramente de acordo com os Estados Unidos, foi efectuada apenas uma semana após a Cimeira Biden-Putin, descrita pelo Presidente dos EUA como “boa e positiva“, uma semana após o Presidente da Federação russa, Vladimir Putin ter advertido na conferência de imprensa em Genebra: “Conduzimos exercícios militares dentro do nosso território, não levamos o nosso equipamento e as nossas tropas para perto das fronteiras dos Estados Unidos da América, como os EUA e os seus parceiros estão agora a fazer perto das nossas fronteiras”. Esta acção hostil foi implementada pela Grã-Bretanha somente duas semanas após a assinatura da Nova Carta do Atlântico com os Estados Unidos, na qual os Aliados têm a garantia de que podem sempre contar com “os nossos dissuasores nucleares” e que “a NATO continuará a ser uma aliança nuclear“.
A Ucrânia e os E.U.A. estão a organizar conjuntamente o exercício no Mar Negro com a participação e apoio de 32 países no total: Albânia, Austrália, Brasil, Bulgária, Canadá, Dinamarca, Egipto, Estónia, França, Geórgia, Grécia, Israel, Itália, Japão, Letónia, Lituânia, Moldávia, Marrocos, Noruega, Paquistão, Polónia, Roménia, Senegal, Espanha, Coreia do Sul, Suécia, Tunísia, Turquia, Ucrânia, Emirados Árabes Unidos, Reino Unido, e Estados Unidos.
A violação deliberada das águas territoriais da Crimeia torna ainda mais perigosa, a manobra de guerra no Mar Negro. Tal acto, se repetido, pode ter como objectivo provocar uma resposta militar russa, possivelmente com alguns mortos ou feridos, para acusar Moscovo de agressão. Não é pura coincidência que na Administração Biden ocupem cargos importantes, alguns dos arquitectos do putsch da Praça Maidan, em 2014, tais como Victoria Nuland, a actual Subsecretária de Estado para os assuntos políticos. O putsch desencadeou a sequência dos acontecimentos que, com a ofensiva sangrenta contra os russos da Ucrânia, levou os habitantes da Crimeia – território russo passado para a Ucrânia, na era soviética, em 1954 – a decidir, com 97% dos votos num referendo popular, a separar-se de Kiev e reanexar-se à Rússia. Foi acusada pela NATO e pela UE de ter anexado ilegalmente a Crimea e foi submetida a sanções. Agora querem passar do confronto político para o confronto militar. Estão a brincar com o fogo e, também, com o fogo nuclear.
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You are a Universal Being. Your body is just a vehicle for the manifestation of this Universal Being here on Earth. As a Universal Being your ‘essence’ lives forever. Start identifying your Self as a Universal Being, merged with the source of all existence. The more you live in this Self – the Real You – during this lifetime – the more seamless is the passage onwards at the time of passing.
Say: “I am a spiritual entity and nothing can harm me, because ‘I’ am not this physical body which carries me through this third density existence experienced here on Earth. ‘I’ am soul, ether, spirit, plasma – and I chose to come back to planet Earth and to be reborn into a human body in order to perform valuable tasks and help realign Earthly existence with Cosmic existence – and thereby create harmony and balance.”
Repeat this – and feel the fear fall away. Feel it dissolve like the sun-burned morning mist.
Fear is a state of mind. A cramped mind. Every part of it is alien to us save that useful bit that warns us not to do some crazy act – like jump over the edge of a cliff under the illusion that one will sprout wings and fly away into the blue horizon!
Yes, the ‘real you’ can fly. The ether/spirit you. But the physical you is a gravity respecting entity here on dear mother Earth. Respect this type of fear, for it is a God given preservation instinct.
So, you are not convinced? You hold onto your fear because it seems ‘real’, doesn’t it? You quite like it, a sort of drug. After all every TV, newspaper, radio and neighbour is telling you ‘to be afraid.’ It’s easier to give in than not to. There are so many things you need to fear, they say, so many that there is almost no room left for anything else to get you going in a positive direction.
We live in a culture of fear, imposed by those we elect and allow to manage our lives. Think about it – so determined are most of us to avoid taking true responsibility for our lives and the lives of other living beings that we allow our minds to say to us “OK, that’s fine, leave it to the politicians, bankers and corporate board members to run our affairs for us.” Then we turn around and curse them for introducing a despotic top-down police-state agenda that makes a misery out of our lives!
How foolish can one get?
All the while ‘the elected ones’ (by us) learn better and better how to manipulate those who elected them, so that they can hold onto the power. They are addicted to power – and use it to make us addicted to fear. So we shrink, while they expand.
How very foolish so much of mankind is. Both parties, the purveyors of fear and the fearful, bogged-down in a rail siding leading to nowhere. Both sides bogged-down in a rail siding completely terminating our natural evolutionary instinct and putting in its place a state of perpetual self-imprisonment.
“Fear not!” say I, for anyone reading this is not heading for the end of the line or the gallows; is not busy constructing a hangman’s noose to stick his/her neck in. Nobody reading this can suffer the delusion that to profit from worldly riches is superior to profiting from the flow of Divine uplift. An ecstatic state which comes from rejecting fear and ceasing to hide in the shadows of a frightened ‘little me’.
This ‘little me’ is a hypnotised being who has convinced himself/herself that one can never step forward and take responsibility for one’s destiny, or make a valuable contribution on the stage of life.
Out you go ’little me’ – and stay out. No place for you in the unfolding age of Truth. For as has been said, You are not a cipher, You are a Divine eminence – and is that a quality to hide away under a cloak of self impoverishment? Well, is it?
After what seems like an interminable pause, an answer emerges: ‘NO’
And immediately, as if shot from a cannon, the Real You bursts upon the scene – soul-burden immeasurably lightened! Yes, I can see this Real You, right now, and I can tell you – you are an outstanding being with enough potential to single-handedly transform both yourself and your community into manifestations of an age of instant enlightenment!
Yes, my friend, I’m not talking about someone else, it’s you who is transformed. ‘Little me’, who was that? Never mind, gone forever.
Now you stand single, strong, proud, all traces of fear banished forever. Maybe for the first time, you are free, out of jail, ready to be intoxicated by the sweet scent of the wild rose, the symphonic triumph of the dawn chorus, the illustrious beauty of awakened nature calls you forth – rejoice in her and act in her defence!
Proudly step forward to defend her precious wealth of vital diversity, so cruelly sterilised by vampires wearing carefully pressed city suits and a fixed smile on their faces. They and their clan scared you once, didn’t they? But no more, you now see the fake smile for exactly what it is.
You are metamorphosed and stand shining, a ray of the living sun. Use your new gifts well, my friend, millions need the support of your awakened powers to themselves be awakened and freed from the hypnosis of fear. These are the builders of the New Society which is our imperative to create – and no one else’s.
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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info.
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Originally published on July 1, 2015, slightly revised on June 27, 2021
Since the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy (and the Vietnam War that had much to do with all three) it has been hard for historically-literate and open-minded Americans to generate much patriotic fervor on the Fourth of July. But they should have been skeptical long before those idealism-shattering events. My own seriously deficient high school education in world and American history has necessitated decades of catch-up reading and research in order to find the truth about the dark, covered-up underbelly of America.
My high school textbooks totally ignored the real histories of the conquistadores, the genocide of Native Americans and their cultures, and the truth about the actual brutality of the enslavement of Black Africans. My history books glorified America’s wars, and never mentioned the concentrated use of propaganda that have shaped police state movements world-wide. The cold realities of white racism, sexism, militarism, enforced poverty, corporate abuse, the banking system, and who are the members of the predatory global investor classes that have been gradually owning/controlling the politicians, the media and industry so successfully. Sadly, my relative ignorance about the painful and unwelcome truths about what really happened in past history is probably the norm.
I have tried to do some of the catching-up by reading the relatively hidden alternative literature, starting with books like Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States and also the writings of historically-literate truth-tellers like Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges.
Anyone who honestly reads those author’s books can’t help but become disillusioned with America’s history and the massive propaganda by which the vast majority of us Americans have been duped into sometimes very sincerely believing that the US is the new shining light of the world, working courageously and endlessly for justice and peace.
The Pseudo-patriotic Propaganda is Getting Thicker
And the flag-waving propaganda is getting thicker and smellier with every move that our nation’s sociopathic mega-corporations, their unelected, over-privileged ruling elites, their well-paid lobbyists, their hordes of cunning, shyster lawyers, their five right-wing bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court justices, their thousands of bribed state and federal legislators, the entrenched bureaucracy, and their corporate-controlled media – all of whom are complicit in the demise of American democracy. Anyone who is paying attention is watching their democracy wither and die while the conscienceless uber-wealthy and their corporations bloat up, heading for the next take-over.
The connections between wealth, power, violence and injustice should be obvious. Judge Louis D. Brandeis nailed that concept when he said:
“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
With regards to American history as Zinn expressed it in his writings and speeches, all one has to do is list a few events that have contributed to the disillusionment and the reason so many find it hard to fake patriotism on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Veterans Day or Columbus Day (or to pretend that the Christian religious holidays of Christmas or Easter have much to do with the original, pacifist, unconditionally-loving, enemy-loving, compassionate teachings and actions of the original form of Christianity).
Many of the progressive thinkers of my generation were irretrievably disillusioned by the government-backed conspiracies (and the resultant cover-ups) that orchestrated the political murders of the leftist heroes (and perhaps the only hope for the American Dream) JFK, MLK, RFK and Paul Wellstone. And the pain is re-experienced every time one realizes that the hidden, still-unindicted family of conspirators behind those assassinations are still at large, and therefore remain unpunished and free to kill again.
(One could say the same thing about the hidden power elites who were behind the planting of the controlled demolitions that so dramatically brought down the three WTC towers on 9/11/01 an event that “legitimized” the start of the homicidal and suicidal wars for oil in the Mideast. And, similarly unpunished and free to exploit again, are the known financial and political elites that caused the Crash and started of the Great Recession of 2008. They not only got bailed out, but were rewarded for their crimes rather than going to jail where they belonged.
Those folks who have done the necessary catch-up research and reading that revealed what the censors had taken out of our history books have understandably become disillusioned about America’s role in the history of the world.
A Few Historical Facts to Temper One’s Patriotism
Consider these events that were hailed with mesmerizing flag-waving fervor, just from the last two generations:
1) the crimes against humanity and atrocities that were done in our name in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos;
2) the quasi-fascism of the traitorous, criminal, autocratic Richard Nixon (and his unapologetic resurrection that allowed him to actually receive positive funeral eulogies from prominent US politicians, all of whom ignored his treachery);
3) Ronald Reagan’s bogus “trickle-down” economic scheme that cunningly camouflaged the disastrous effects of the next six items;
4) the predatory lending schemes from Reagan acolytes that destroyed so many small family farms and businesses in the 1980s, thus enriching the already rich;
5) the predatory corporate privatization schemes that did the same;
6) the granting of huge tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy and their corporations, again starting in the Reagan era;
7) the massive Reagan-era nuclear weapons buildup during the orchestrated Cold War;
8) Reagan’s union-busting agenda, which fostered the impoverishment of America’s middle classes;
9) the un-repayable 4 trillion dollars of new debt during the Reagan years (largely thanks to the bloating of the US military (which is still on-going) that some future generation won’t be able to reverse either; 10) the use of extra-judicial, foreign-based torture sites and killer drones that assassinates people who are only suspected of being enemies of the state;
11) Etc, etc. Add your own nightmarish examples of America’s many anti-democratic and military misadventures.
Any number of progressive Americans are still working, often with broken hearts, for peace and justice in our nation and also in the world, but these heroes are understandably cynical about – indeed, often disgusted with – America’s wasteful, boastful, morally bankrupt, war-mongering –predation, which is now now increasingly global in scope.
Is America Only Quasi-Fascist – or is it Worse Than That?
It is true that many historically aware, intelligent people around the globe look at our national security apparatus (the NSA, the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the increasingly militarized police/Swat teams that suppress honest, nonviolent dissent) – and what do they see? They see the Gestapo.
Many of these citizens of the world look at the Stars and Stripes – and they see a Swastika.
Many of these same people see fascism when they look at the US’s long history of supporting fascist dictators in nations like Iran, South Korea, South Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, etc. Friendly American fascism was institutionalized during the Cheney/Bush-era at Abu Ghraib in the prisoner abuse scandal, in the legalized torture policies at secret CIA sites and in the prolonged torturous imprisonment of “suspects” at Guantanamo who haven’t been charged with a crime and who haven’t been given a chance to prove their innocence in a trial before their peers.
Fascism in America can be understood when one acknowledges that America is ruled by corporations and the elite families that own 90 % of the wealth and resources. They are the predators smf the rest of us are the prey. Recall that Mussolini, the inventor of fascism, said: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power”.
Private corporate interests are fostered and protected, not only by the most lethal and costly weapons systems ever, but by the most brutal and efficient killing force in the history of the world – both paid for by the US taxpayer. Hitler’s monster weapons and his Wehrmacht soldiers were pikers in comparison.
True Patriotism is the Willingness to Have a Lover’s Quarrel with Your Country
Not that us disillusioned ones don’t love our country. Many of tus dissenting peace-lovers, justice-seekers and, by logical extension, whistle-blowers, think of themselves as loving America so much that they are willing to have a lover’s quarrel with it. That sounds pretty American to me.
I was once a member-supporter of the Democratic Party, even to the point of becoming a delegate to the Minnesota State DFL Convention back during the frightening, anti-regulatory Reagan era. I was – and still am – a believer in the ideals of the progressive, anti-fascist, pro-union, anti-crony capitalism, pro-environment, anti-racist, anti-militarist wing of the party that was best exemplified by the politics of Paul Wellstone. That nearly disappeared remnant of the Democratic party appears to have become totally captured by the pro-militarist and pro-corporate-ruling elite.
Many true patriots have sadly come to realize that American politics is increasingly meeting the definition of classical European fascism (although the Democratic Party is not as strongly fascist as the more intensely corporate-controlled, NeoConservative, Theocracy-aspiring, Tea Party-tolerating, racist-infiltrated, Young Earth believing, climate change denying, anti-intellectual Republican Party. Being an anti-fascist, I find it hard to support, ethically or monetarily, the agendas of either of these entities.
Most seasoned American peacemakers have seen through the propagandistic pro-war rhetoric that is dutifully repeated as valid by the corporate-controlled media (and, sadly, increasingly so even on the once honorable NPR, MPR, and PBS.
War profiteers in the investor classes know that there is no ethical money to be made in a world without wars or rumors of wars. Therefore publically-traded corporations that are connected to the weapons and other war-related industries do their mercenary duty for the Pentagon’s pro-war and Cold War agendas, both of which are good for business and share-holder value.
The “Greed is Good” Captains of Industry and their Ponzi Scheme dealings on Wall Street have been selling their addictive products to the “hoping-to-get-rich-quick” crowd for as long as the stock market has existed – and the gambling addicts in the investor classes can’t get off the stuff long enough to sober up and see that they are being had.
The Ideals of Lady Liberty
The United States of America stopped being a beacon of light, truth, peace and liberty long ago. It didn’t just happen after JFK’s assassination or 9/11 (which was a cleverly – and provably – orchestrated event designed to start the highly-profitable Middle East Wars for Oil [see www.ae911truth.org for proof] when the Cheney/Bush administration, squandering the sympathy of the world with a series of blatant lies, led the US public into an illegal and unjust war, showing their willingness to risk igniting World War III, with the full consent of most of the servile congress-persons from each of the two major political parties.
Cynicism about Independence Day (independence from Great Britain) and the ideals behind the Statue of Lady Liberty, was prevalent in America long before France gave America the Statue. That generous gift from an appreciative nation was intended to celebrate the first 100 years of American independence but also represented the fondness that France had for the US and its role in inspiring the French Revolution.
America’s promise to be the beacon to the world has been shattered many times since the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886. America once deserved its reputation as a refuge to the oppressed people of the world – which is the America that disillusioned activists still naively hope can be revived. There was indeed a time in world history when the inscription on the Statue of Liberty represented the real aspirations of true patriots – something that is worth fighting and even dying for.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Many generations of the increasingly despised “tempest tossed” – if they ever made it across the border – found out too late that they were going to be discriminated against, chewed-up, spit out, rendered homeless or exploited by corporate America for their cheap labor. It has taken many of us a long time to understand that our multinational corporations, with the essential help of the brutal tactics of the CIA and hired local mercenary soldiers, were the ones who forced these Central Americans from their land and livelihoods in the first place, in the interest of making room for corporate plantations to raise and export sugar cane, coffee, and bananas. And then, if the unjustly dispossessed ones actually made it to “El Norte” alive, these victims were harassed, abused in America’s for-profit prison system, offered no access to health care, safe living situations, living wages, or real security for the future.
The First Victims of American Fascism Were – and Still Are – Non-White
The very first victims of American Fascism were the aboriginal people who could have annihilated the usurper Columbus and his sex-starved crew (who abducted and raped young native women ASAP back on board the Santa Maria). Native Americans suffered the indignity and cruelty of the European invaders and ultimately were nearly annihilated themselves via legalized, racist, genocidal policies (“the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) at the hands of the US Army that then “opened up the frontier” to the undocumented and illegal immigrants from war-weary, impoverished, and exploited Europe, all white folks who had over-populated their own homelands.
Next in line for exploitation were the black African victims of the very profitable slave trade that produced a lot of the “wretched refuse”. The eventually freed slaves of the late-1800s were destined to become the easily-lynchable victims of Jim Crow segregation that persists to this very day in most of the quasi-fascist southern states – despite federal legislation that supposedly granted them civil liberties and voting rights. Note that those hard-won voting rights are now being taken away by the afore-mentioned Supreme Court – at the request of those southern racists who haven’t yet gotten over the loss of the Civil War.
These oppressed ones “yearning to be free” had often been fooled about the deceptive “American Dream”. For many it rapidly became the “American Nightmare”. Many of them were destined to be treated as virtual slaves, indentured servants, share-croppers, or otherwise victims of predatory entities that found any number of ways to exploit these “untermenschen”. They became the frequently-unemployed masses who were so desperate for work that they were willing to accept the poverty wages offered by greedy corporations and the wealthy elites, all of whom did everything possible to prevent the unionization of their industries. (It is important to understand the business principle that high unemployment, frightened, desperate-for-work workers, low wages, and union exclusion all help the profit margins and share prices of publicly-traded companies.)
The spirit of Liberty seems to have been strangled, what with the late-lamented Cheney /Bush /Rumsfeld /Rove doctrine of pre-emptive, aggressive and endless wars (which meets the definition of international war crimes and crimes against humanity). (Click on the link below and watch one of these crimes that occurred in Baghdad that was courageously and patriotically leaked by Chelsea Manning here). Now, as an extension of the Cheney/Bush doctrine, America is not only victimizing Middle Eastern women and children, but it is also brutalizing Central Americans whose land was stolen from them by American industry and who only want to find dignified work somewhere in order to better themselves and to support their families.
After thinking about America’s immigration issue, some concerned citizens might actually work for the acceptance of these hard working freedom-loving immigrants and instead deport (or convert) the worst of our American fascists and racists. America might turn out to be more purely American with some variation of that plan.
One person who criticized the annual 4th of July celebrations was the emancipated black intellectual Frederick Douglass. Douglass was the pre-eminent – and obviously very courageous – mid-19th century spokesperson for the abolition of slavery. His speeches and writings remain important today because of the powerful way he articulated the case against racial discrimination.
I close this essay with excerpts from Douglass’s 4th of July speech that he delivered to a mostly white audience back in 1852, a decade before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration. His words could have been spoken by First Nations people, Black Africans, Chinese immigrants, Japanese immigrants, Hispanics and many other racial, ethnic and sexual minorities from the dark pages of American history.
Prepare for many unwelcome truths which still remain true today.
Douglass could simplistically be dismissed as being unpatriotic, but his statements are irrefutable and his truth-telling makes him a hero to justice-seekers. Douglass warns in his speech that “I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.”
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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired rural family physician from Duluth, Minnesota. For the past decade since his retirement, Dr Kohls has written a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His column, titled Duty to Warn, has been re-published and archived at websites around the world.
Dr Kohls practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career, primarily helping psychiatric patients who had become addicted to their cocktails of dangerous, addictive psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His Duty to Warn columns often deal with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-prescribing, over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing and sickness-promoting food industry.
Dr Kohl is a a frequent contributor to Global Research.
