Global Research

First published on December 29, 2019

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“Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to destroying the Soviet Union, as well as weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, etc. and again those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers.” – Professor Michel Chossudovsky (from this week’s interview).

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America was born out of a revolt against British imperial rule.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British Empire was “the hated enemy”. In 1812, the young republic declared war on Great Britain and tried unsuccessfully, to conquer the Canadian colonies.

Within less than a half century of its birth, the United States of America under President James Monroe, established a policy that came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted that the USA would oppose any further colonization in the Americas (Western Hemisphere) by European powers. By establishing a sphere of influence outside its borders, the new republic was arguably taking its first steps in the direction of becoming an imperial power. [1]

Subsequent decades saw the U.S. continue to grow in geographic size, economic power and geopolitical influence. By the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. had become a significant military and economic player, and after World War II, the U.S. was to overtake all the European powers as the dominant force on the world stage.

A popular conception is that the United States is a democratic country devoted to the principles of the Founding Fathers and tasked with the responsibility of bringing freedom and democracy to the world. A less naive viewpoint might hold that governments corrupted by greed and the influence of big money have redirected the country’s foreign policy away from these high ideals toward whatever might benefit entrenched wealthy interests.

The notion that America’s military expansion might be guided by imperial rivalries with European powers is not immediately evident. Certainly, while menacing gestures and indignant statements toward nations like China or Russia or the so-called rogue or failed states like North Korea and Iraq may be common-place, U.S. leadership over the last century has typically exhibited a congenial attitude toward its counterparts in Europe.

In a recent paper by Professor Michel Chossudovsky (presented at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)) focussing on documentary record of  both world wars, the interwar period, the Cold War and the post Cold War period, America has continued to adopt an adversarial attitude toward Great Britain.

In fact, the paper, published in Spanish as La globalizacion de la guerra: Cronología de la “Guerra Larga” de EE.UU. contra la Humanidad, exposes, among other aspects, U.S. support for Nazi Germany, a 1920-39 approved plan to invade Canada, and plans to wage a nuclear war against 66 Soviet cities in the immediate wake of World War II at a time when the two countries were allies.

In a feature length interview, Professor Chossudovsky elaborates on his thesis, placing world events spanning the last century, including the recent Brexit drama in the United Kingdom, in that context.

Professor 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, and Editor of Global Research. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. His books include The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), and The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015). 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.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 281)

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Transcript- Interview with Professor Michel Chossudovsky, Dec. 19, 2019

The transcript has been edited by Prof Chossudovsky. Text boxes, maps added.

Part One

Global Research: You presented your paper in Nicaragua at the beginning of December 2019.  Could you briefly introduce that paper to us?

Michel Chossudovsky: Well, the focus essentially was on the globalization of war and the chronology of U.S. hegemony.

The (“accepted scholarly”) history of the last hundred years is misleading because it presents Britain and the United States as allies, but in fact, they were never allies. They were competing Empires.

This confrontation between the United States and Britain has existed right from the onset of the founding of the United States in 1776. It became increasingly pervasive in the wake of the Civil War, 1865.

There were US military scenarios and war plans directed against the British Empire. These were not limited to the Western Hemisphere.

In essence, the objective of the United States was to weaken the British Empire and acquire a dominant position Worldwide.

There’s a lot of history, and I want to  point to some important landmarks.

The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885, which was essentially a French and British initiative, the United States was excluded. They were there as observers, but they were never offered any role to play in “the carving up of Africa”, so that in effect, the European powers had already decided on the carving up of Africa without the United States.

1914 Map of Africa

Then you have the Spanish-American war of 1898, and then the First World War (1914-1918), and what we can say is that the United States consolidated its hegemony in relation to the British Empire specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean but also in Asia.

And although the Monroe Doctrine was not “officially” directed against the British Empire, it was nonetheless intent upon consolidating US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

GR: Professor Chossudovsky, could you remind us briefly what exactly is the Monroe Doctrine and when it came about?

MC: Well, the Monroe Doctrine was initiated in the early 19th century, and it went through several phases. But ultimately, the concept was that European powers should not intervene in the Western hemisphere. It was directed largely against Spain and France but also Britain. And as we know France was also involved in Mexico at one point in its history (1862)

In other words, the Monroe doctrine laid the groundwork for hemispheric consolidation by the United States.

Now, what’s very important, particularly for Canadians, – because we have a particular way of understanding our history from 1867 onwards – is the fact that the United States had a plan to annex Canada, that was formulated in 1866.

M.C: (Cont) Of course then we had Confederation (1867). But that war plan against Canada wasn’t dropped: After World War I, the United States formulated a plan to invade the British Empire (including Canada). It was called ‘War Plan Red.’

Now, the details of this plan to invade the British Empire might seem absurd. They were supposed to be allies.

What happened was that there were plans to invade Canada, there were war games right at the US-Canadian border – and there were plans to even use chemical weapons against Canadians.

Map: Invasion plan directed against Canada and British possessions in Caribbean

The bombing campaign underlying these War plans was formulated in the 1920s and 1930s. It consisted in a plan to bomb four major Canadian cities, namely Vancouver Montreal, Halifax, and Quebec City. This infamous project had been entrusted to none other than General Douglas MacArthur. Well he wasn’t General at the time. He became General during World War II.

But nonetheless, War Plan Red pointed to the fact that there was a certain continuity, and there were plans to invade Canada.

The United States never really dropped its intent to wage war on the British Empire.  And in 1939, when World War II broke out, the United States remained neutral. It did not side with the Allies until much later. In early September 1939, the United States declared its neutrality. It did not take any action to prevent the invasion of France by Nazi Germany, nor the bombing raids directed against the U.K.

World War II commenced with the invasion of Poland and the Baltic States, which was followed by war on the Western Front, including the invasion and occupation of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the bombings of the U.K.

The war on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union started in June 1941.

Text Box. The Invasion of Canada 

A detailed plan to invade Canada, entitled “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan — Red”  was approved by the US War Department under the presidency of Herbert Hoover  in 1930. It was updated in 1934 and 1935 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was “put on hold” in 1939 following the outbreak of the Second World War.

Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley  was largely instrumental in the formulation and approval of Plan Red by the US administration.

In its day, War Plan RED was not meant to be funny. The 1928 draft stated that “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously”. The 1930 draft stated that “large parts of CRIMSON territory will become theaters of military operations with consequent suffering to the population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country…”

US Support of Nazi Germany

M.C: Now, the United States, in the course of the 1930s, but even extending further into World War II,  was collaborating quite actively with Nazi Germany in the areas of finance, technology but also in the areas of military production, and this included the participation of Ford, Rockefeller, and also the Bush family.

The granddad of President Bush Junior was Prescott Bush. In other words the granddad of George W Bush was the director of the Union Banking Corporation, Brown Brothers Harriman, which in turn were partners with Thyssen Stahl, a  major German conglomerate involved in the weapons industry of the Third Reich. And this has been reasonably well documented.

The United States continued to collaborate with Nazi Germany after September 1939. And after December 1941, namely Pearl Harbor, the US joined the allies, declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy. And there was a formal shift with regard to Nazi Germany. The Roosevelt administration adopted  “Trading With The Enemy” legislation, In other words Washington took an official stance in support of its allies against Nazi Germany. But unofficially they continued collaborating with Nazi Germany.

Text box. The Bush Family and Nazi Germany, “Sleeping with the Enemy”

Prescott Bush was a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co and director of Union Banking Corporation which had close relations with German corporate interests including Thyssen Steel, a major company involved in the Third Reich’s weapons industry. 

“…[N]ew documents, declassified [in 2003], show that even after America had entered the war [December 8, 1941] and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he [Prescott Bush] worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty” (The Guardian, September 25, 2004)

According to Yuri Rubtsov:

In August 1934, American “Standard oil” in Germany acquired 730,000 acres of land and built large oil refineries that supplied the Nazis with oil. At the same time, Germany  secretly took delivery of the most modern equipment for aircraft factories from the United States, which would begin the production of German planes.

Germany received a large number of military patents from American firms Pratt and Whitney”, “Douglas”, “Curtis Wright”, and American technology was building the “Junkers-87”. In 1941, when the Second world war was raging, American investments in the economy of Germany amounted to $475 million. “Standard oil” invested – 120 million, “General motors” – $35 million, ITT — $30 million, and “Ford” — $17.5 million. (emphasis added)

Standard Oil Was Selling Oil to the Third Reich

M.C: Invariably neglected by historian and journalists, there’s a something which is absolutely crucial to an understanding of WWII:  Germany did not have any petrol, fuel – it had very limited supplies of petrol.

This is documented in the book by Jacques Pauwels, a prominent Canadian historian. Pauwels analyses the relationship between Standard Oil, which was owned by the Rockefeller family and the Nazi regime.

Standard Oil was the largest oil producer Worldwide. It controlled the oil industry, and Nazi Germany was dependent on oil.

And that oil was sold to Nazi Germany directly up until Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and subsequently it was sold via third countries indirectly, to bypass the “Trading With The Enemy Act” which was passed in the US Senate.

Well, in fact it was a previous legislation [1917] but nonetheless, it’s worth noting that the Bush family’s assets were confiscated under the “Trading with Enemy”  legislation.

M.C.: (Cont) But as far as Standard Oil was concerned, they continued selling oil to Nazi Germany up until 1944-1945.

And the Roosevelt administration turned a blind eye.

And the main reason for this was that without the oil supplies from Standard Oil, Nazi Germany could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union, and in fact, even the Western Front would have been compromised.

So that the sale of US oil by Standard Oil to the Third Reich was crucial. The US was sleeping with the enemy. Unofficially the US was a de facto “ally” of Nazi Germany. There were no sanctions imposed on the Third Reich: After Pearl Harbor (December 1941) US oil was sold to the enemy through third countries, and then there was a large component of Standard Oil’s shipments which was sold out of Venezuela.

Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941 by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. It resulted in 26 million deaths.

It was understood that the Third Reich would be getting oil from the United States.

The Nazis were staunch military planners, and prior to launching Operation Barbarossa they ensured that they would have regular supplies of oil provided by Standard Oil.

Without US oil, they could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union.

Text Box. The Unspoken Question. Where did Germany get its oil from?

Prior the December 1941, Texas oil was shipped on a regular basis to Nazi Germany.

While Germany was able  to transform coal into fuel, this synthetic production was insufficient. Moreover, Romania’s Ploesti oil resources (under Nazi control until 1944) were minimal. Nazi Germany largely depended on oil shipments from US Standard Oil.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) occurred barely six months after the launching of Operation Barbarossa (July 1941). The United States enters World War II, declaring  war on Japan and the axis countries.

Trading with the Enemy legislation (1917) officially implemented following America’s entry into World War II did not  prevent Standard Oil of New Jersey from selling oil to Nazi Germany. This despite the Senate 1942 investigation of US Standard Oil.

While direct US oil shipments were curtailed, Standard Oil would sell US oil through third countries. US oil was shipped to occupied France through Switzerland, and from France it was shipped to Germany:

“… for the duration of the Second World War, Standard Oil, under deals Teagle had overseen, continued to supply Nazi Germany with oil. The shipments went through Spain, Vichy France’s colonies in the West Indies, and Switzerland.”

It should be noted that a large share of Nazi Germany’s oil requirements was met by shipments out of Venezuela which at the time was a de facto US colony.

Venezuela’s US sponsored (War-time) president General Isaías Medina Angarita (May 1941 – October 1945) was there to protect US oil interests as well as “trade with the enemy” from the onset of America’s entry into World War II in December 1941:

John D. Rockefeller Jr. owned a controlling interest in the Standard Oil corporation, but the next largest stockholder was the German chemical company I. G. Farben, through which the firm sold $20 million worth of gasoline and lubricants to the Nazis. And the Venezuelan branch of that company sent 13,000 tons of crude oil to Germany each month, which the Third Reich’s robust chemical industry immediately converted into gasoline.

While Medina Angarita’s government pressured by Washington in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) remained officially neutral (de facto aligned with the US, while breaking its relations with Nazi Germany), oil shipments out of Venezuela to Germany were not discontinued. In a rather unusual twist (bordering on ridicule) Venezuela declared war on Germany in February 1945, when the war was almost over.

Without those oil shipments instrumented by Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, Nazi Germany would not have been able to implement its military agenda. Without fuel, the Third Reich’s eastern front under Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have taken place, saving millions of lives. The Western front including the military occupation of France, Belgium and The Netherlands would no doubt also have been affected.

M.C:  The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration could have adopted severe sanctions against Standard Oil with a view to enforcing a blockade against Nazi Germany.

The US was not committed to peace: Washington’s unspoken objective was not only to destroy the Soviet Union, it also consisted in undermining Britain’s role  as an imperial power.

Let us be under no illusions. Without the oil shipments instrumented by US Standard Oil and its subsidiaries, Nazi Germany’s imperial design could not have been undertaken.

It should be noted that the role of the US in supplying Nazi Germany with oil is casually ignored. Today’s Western “consensus” which was upheld by the European Parliament is to blame Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for WWII.

GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you said quite a bit there.  Could you maybe just share with our listeners some of the key source documents that you used for your research that informed your analysis?

MC: Well, you know, from a historical standpoint, this US-Third Reich “alliance” was not clear in my mind, it was blurred. Moreover, with some exceptions it was not the object of (mainstream) scholarly research.

What I did was to indulge in what might be called common sense analysis. In this regard, I think that Jacques Pauwels book on World War II, is absolutely fundamental.

Common sense analysis tells us the following: you cannot wage a large scale military campaign without fuel.

Without the steady supply of fuel to Nazi Germany from Standard oil, the history of WWII would have been totally different. Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have occurred.

But then, there’s another element which I mentioned earlier with regard to the British Empire. War Plan Red against the British Empire was put on hold in 1939. But it was never abandoned.

From 1939 onwards, from a geopolitical standpoint, America’s unspoken hegemonic objective was to weaken all competing imperial powers including the British empire.

In other words, weaken Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Holland as well as Japan. All these countries had colonial possessions. And in the wake of World War II, Europe had been destroyed and the US economy was booming.

In the course of the post-war era, these colonial possessions (e.g. Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia) were taken over, integrated into America’s sphere of influence.

The two historic objectives of the United States in World War II were

1) to undermine the British Empire and competing imperial powers,

2) destroy the Soviet Union,

Secret Plan to Wage Nuclear War on the Soviet Union Formulated during WWII

There was a secret plan first formulated in 1942 confirmed by declassified September 15, 1945 documents, that the United States was intent upon waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Two atomic bombs were dropped respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki under President Truman (6 and 9 August 1945), and we know that in the first few minutes of that bombing of Hiroshima, a hundred thousand people were killed, and the same thing occurred with regard to Nagasaki.

These cities were totally destroyed, leading also to extensive nuclear radiation.

But what most people don’t know, is that on the 15th of September 1945, declassified documents from the U.S. war department pointed unequivocally to a detailed US plan to bomb  66 cities of the Soviet Union – with over 200 atomic bombs.

Some historians might have concluded: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dress rehearsals for this devastating project directed against 66 Soviet cities. Now, I think this is significant because this project was formulated when the Soviet Union and the United States were allies theoretically against Nazi Germany.

But in fact 20th Century history, I think, has to be looked at very carefully.

US oil for Nazi Germany’s motorized convoys of tanks and armored cars, its Luftwaffe planes was part of America’s plan to destroy the Soviet Union. It  resulted in the loss of 26 million lives.

Another related plan consisted in Wiping the Soviet Union off the Map, by dropping of more than 200 atomic bombs on 66  Soviet cities. This project was tantamount to the planning of genocide.

Now, that project did not take place because the Soviet Union had information on this plan first formulated in 1942 and they were in the process of developing their own weapons system.

But what I’m saying  is that the arms race did not start with the Cold War. The arms race started with the Manhattan Project (launched in 1939) which consisted in building nuclear weapons capabilities in the United States. And Canada, incidentally, was a partner in that project.  And so was Britain.

Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to

a) destroying the Soviet Union,

b) weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, etc and so on, (Those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers).

Intermission

Part Two

GR: Another aspect of U.S. hegemony, as you put it, is also the economic dimension. We spoke with Michael Hudson a few months back and, you know, he mentioned the use of the U.S. dollar in maintaining their control and financing their war agenda.

So, could you speak to the point of the use of the U.S. dollar, and the way that’s been used to maintain America’s hegemonic role – the way they’ve been able to use the creation of these institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and just the U.S. dollar as the currency – the world’s petro-currency?

US Dollar Hegemony

MC:  Well, you know, this goes back to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, where there was a decision which was virtually imposed in the post-war era, to establish the U.S. dollar as the international currency. And linked up to gold and then subsequently the gold standard was dropped.

This dollarization of the post World War II economy went through several stages. It eventually led to the World Bank and the IMF playing a pro-active role in countries which were former colonies of the Western European powers: Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and of course Latin America – in other words, these were so-called ‘developing countries.’

But again it’s the Washington Consensus, it’s the World Bank, the IMF which became instruments leading to the consolidation of U.S. hegemony, namely  U.S. dollar hegemony.

And definitely that is really, in a sense, an outcome of World War II where all the competing imperial powers are ultimately destroyed. Well, they’re no longer competing powers and I’m talking about Italy, France, Britain, Belgium, Holland, and of course Germany.

That whole structure has been ultimately flattened, and many of the so-called developing countries – territories of these former colonial powers– are now within the U.S. sphere of influence.

And the dollar is their proxy currency.

So, it’s a structure of domination and hegemony using currency markets, economic policy conditionalities, control of wages, control of prices, and so on.

And then it’s also the whole process of relocation of industrial activity to cheap labour economies. And many of those cheap labour economies are the former colonies of the Western Powers.

GR: Now, there’s the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so the Soviet Union is no more.

And then we have entered into a new phase, but the United States and its NATO allies continue to advance towards the border of Russia.

we’re at the point where US-NATO is threatening Russia,

Moreover, since 2001 the US is  waging a  ‘Global War on Terrorism’. It’s the post 9/11 period.

So, does this signify an important course change, and how does that relate to this ongoing effort to supplant the British Empire?

MC: Well, I mean, in the wake of World War II NATO is established in 1949.

It’s the seventieth anniversary of NATO so to speak. And it’s the shift into the Cold War. Now NATO was actually established (April 1949) barely a few months before the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) on October 1st 1949. And consistently of course, NATO has been targeting the Soviet Union on behalf of the Pentagon.

The United States has been the main power in sustaining the Cold War up until its “official end” in 1989.

But in effect, the Cold War is not over. While the Soviet Union no longer exists, US-NATO is now directing its threats against the Russian Federation (which is bona fide capitalist country).

Again, it’s part of a hegemonic project, not by the NATO member states but of the United States which controls NATO via the Pentagon.

And I think that the whole process of militarization after World War II with the establishment of the geographic command structures – the U.S. Central Command, U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Pacific Command, etc – hundreds of military bases around the world.

US Geographic Commands

And largely, well, they’re not only there threatening Russia, they’re threatening China.

And these bases are also there as a means to enforcing america’s sphere of influence, i.e. colonize regions which were formerly colonies of European countries.

In Southeast Asia, of course, what is very important are the strategic waterways.

Indonesia is a de-facto within the U.S. zone of influence and various other countries as well.

And so, it’s a process of global militarization in each of the major regions of the world.

This new hegemony in the wake of the Cold War is also characterized by various modes of interference in the affairs of sovereign states through military dictatorships in Latin America, regime change, engineered protest movements, sanctions, meddling in national elections, and so on.

It’s the whole gamut of military might which of course supports U.S. economic and financial interests in different parts of the world.

And it’s not strictly in the context of Eastern Europe. It’s also in Central Asia, it’s in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait,

And in the present structure we now have a situation where the Russian Federation and China are allies under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which ultimately constitutes a powerful countervailing bloc in relation to U.S. hegemony, particularly in the Asian context.

GR: Most people understand there was a great deal of enmity between the United States and the British Empire in the late 18th century and early 19th century. But over the course of the last couple of centuries, one would think that, well, maybe they’ve changed their ways. I mean the United States is more of a partnership with the United Kingdom, as opposed to looking to supplant them as the dominant empire.

Could you maybe take on that idea, i.e. that there’s no interest in a partnership? Because there’s certainly been a lot of partnership in all of these military adventures we’ve seen since the second world war, but what indications are there that the objective of supplanting of the British Empire is still in effect?

MC: Well, you know, the world is characterized by what I would call cross-cutting coalitions. You can be friends in the area of diplomacy and politics, and then  enemies in financial affairs. We can see the situation with regard to the relationship between, let’s say, the United States and Turkey, or Turkey and NATO. Turkey is an ally now of Russia, but it’s still part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

With regard to Britain and the United States – there are many cross-cutting relations. Britain is still Europe’s main financial market, and the City of London is considered one of the major financial centres in the world. And there are links between British and American firms. And there are links also with other European countries.

But, I think there’s something quite specific. Today, while the United Kingdon aligns itself with the United States, they are subordinate to the US.

And I don’t think British governments have any intention of restoring the British Empire, because, apart from the Commonwealth, it is more or less defunct – it doesn’t exist anymore.

But, on the other hand, it’s important to point out that in all recent wars, Britain has faithfully participated in an Anglo-American alliance, both with regard to Afghanistan, as well as, of course, with regard to Iraq during the Gulf War (1991) as well as in 2003. It was marked by The Bush-Tony Blair relationship.

In that regard, there is, of course, a very cohesive and corrupt alliance.

But when you look at the hegemonic objectives of the United States, you realize that what’s happening today in the United Kingdom is the appointment under PM Boris Johnson of a U.S. proxy regime.

GR: Could you explain that a little bit?

MC: It’s something which is not so straighforward to explain. I should mention there are other cases of proxy governments in Western Europe, particularly in France and Germany.

But what this means is that essentially the United States is intent upon taking over the European landscape.

And in one form or another it has done that since the end of World War II, simply by the fact that there are U.S. military bases in several European countries, and they have NATO and they control NATO.

But in the case of Britain, we must understand that the UK  has never been part of the Eurozone. And there’s a reason for that, and it has to do with U.S.- U.K. relations in terms of financial institutions, markets, and so on.

But more recently, there have been UK-US negotiations pertaining to trade and investment, etc. the details of which haven’t really emerged. Negotiations between Boris Johnson and the Trump administration, let’s say, with regards to macro-economic policy, specifically the privatization of health services.

In other words, what the U.S. is pushing for is the neoliberal restructuring of Britain, extensive privatization, repeal of the welfare state, something which was built in the post World War II era, namely socio-democracy.  And which has nothing to do with British colonialism.

It had to do with the fact that, at one point, the British people pushed towards the development of social programs, education and so on.

And I think that what is happening now is that we have a government which ultimately is not representative of the British people. It has become an instrument of dominant U.S. hegemonic interests, as well as a continuation of a fragile Anglo-American partnership dominated by Washington.

So that, I think that is the endgame. The destabilization of Britain as a nation state.

That destabilization is engineered by the Washington Consensus.

If we look at the evolution of the British Empire from Queen Victoria at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, US hegemony ultimately prevails, The endgame of Britain’s imperial ambitions is economic and political chaos under Brexit.

GR: Yeah…

MC: …It’s not that Brexit per se is the issue. It’s the fact that a proxy government has been installed. It’s a corrupt government. It’s manipulated by financial interests and it is ultimately leading Britain, the former British Empire into a total political impasse.

Intermission

Part Three

GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you brought up Brexit there just now, and I just want to get some clarification. Does Brexit ultimately serve U.S. goals or was it just a means by which a certain kind of proxy, as you say, would get elected?

MC: Well, I think the broader US objective is to create instability across the European landscape. It serves U.S. interests because it cuts Britain off from the European Union. But it also defines a whole series of trade agreements, and so on, which are to benefit the United States. (i.e. US financial interests).

The irony is that U.S. expansionism and hegemony feeds on creating and disrupting both national and local economies. The result is economic and social destabilization.

US sponsored neoliberal reforms destabilize the national economy and create social divisions. (For instance the divisions created in EU member states). the nation state becomes fragmented. (eg. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are broken up). You create divisions within national societies.

At the same time, the War on Terrorism is used, of course, to weaken the fabric of Western European countries: it triggers the refugee crisis. The latter is marked by people fleeing the war theatres in Syria, or Iraq, or elsewhere. The refugee crisis is the direct result of U.S. military aggression, whether it’s direct military action or whether it is the result of US sponsored terrorist insurgencies.

The whole European landscape now is in crisis politically, socially. And  this is also the consequence of  U.S. led wars in the Middle East.

But it is also the result of neoliberal policies which are now much more generalized, and which are now being applied in many Western countries.

And inevitably, when you start adopting neoliberal policy in a country like the United Kingdom, you destroy the whole fabric of the welfare state. That’s ultimately the objective.

GR: Professor Chossudovsky we’re going to have to bring the interview to a close shortly, but I wanted to ask one more question about the fact that when these plans – this hegemonic agenda – originated in the 19th century, the U.S. was ascendant, and now it would seem that today and for a couple of decades now, the U.S. has been on the decline with China apparently – appearing to be on the rise and forming partnerships with Russia and other countries. So, how do you see this – I mean, is this agenda of imperial dominance going to fall apart, given the immense debts that the U.S. has racked up, and the inability to sell U.S. Treasury bonds as they have in the past. How do you see this proceeding? Is the U.S. hegemon going to succeed or is it destined to fail?

MC: Well, you know, it has a lot to do with the sources of money wealth. And it’s the growth of speculative activities, the hedge funds, the deregulation of banking during the Clinton administration and the fact that now you can make money without necessarily producing anything.

And you can speculate.

And the various corrupt forms of wealth creation within the financial system are ultimately to the detriment of the real economy.

Then, there’s the whole issue of delocation. And, in effect, what we’ve seen now in the United States is that certain industries are simply being wiped out – and it’s true also in Canada and Western Europe.

And they’ve been delocated to Southeast Asia or even to China for that matter, to cheap labour havens in Southeast Asia.

But at the same time the implementation of these austerity measures, coupled with very large military budgets is leading to the collapse of America’s economic infrastructure.

So the real economy is in crisis. In the core of the US Empire, there’s a large share of the U.S. population which don’t even meet minimum food requirements.

It’s a situation of impoverishment of the richest country on the planet.

And that has a lot to do with the way the US imperial apparatus functions. You delocate everything with a view to paying $150 a month to workers in Southeast Asia, which then leads to people loosing their jobs on assembly lines in North America and so on, And ultimately then this leads to unemployment and the collapse in purchasing power and the downfall of economic activity, not to mention rising food prices. But also concurrently the whole infrastructure of the U.S. economy is in crisis.

And I suspect that this is going to backlash because the Empire is no longer in a position to assert its hegemony in relation to real economic activity. 

And the levels of consumer demand have collapsed because of the process of off-shoring of jobs, which create unemployment.

We might make a comparison with the Roman Empire. At one point, in the history of the Roman Empire, the use of slave labor contributed to destroying the independent small scale handicraft economy as well as farming. With the extension of the slave labor economy, the levels of consumer demand simply collapsed, and the whole productive and trading structure went into crisis.

Well, we’re living that, in a sense. We delocate industrial activity to an overseas cheap labour economy with exceedingly low wages (from $100 and $300 a month), and then we close down our factories here.

And then we cut all social expenditures with a view to funding the military industrial complex with large scale investments now of the order of $1.3 trillion for an absolutely useless nuclear weapons program: the only use for that program is to blow up the planet.

Meanwhile, the media tell us that that “nuclear weapons make the World safer”.

This hegemonic project seeks to minimize wages at a global level. In the central core of the US Empire: America, has a declining standard of living, it has high levels of illiteracy, it has poverty, racism alongside a thriving luxury good economy for a small sector of the population.

And those social conditions in the heart of the Empire are exacerbated by the thrust of America’s hegemonic objectives in different parts of the world including  the ‘profit driven” global cheap labor economy.

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

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.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

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Notes:

1) Worthington, Chauncey Ford (2001). Writings of John Quincy Adams(vol. VII). Boston, Massachusetts. p. 372.

This article by Jean-Marie Chauvier was first published on June 22, 2016

***

On 22nd June, 2021 it will have been 80 years since the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the Hitlerian invasion of the Soviet Union, the war of extermination, pillage and colonization which was to cost the lives of between 24 and 29 million human beings (according to recent estimates): Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and other Soviet peoples who spearheaded the resistance – finally victorious – to Nazi Germany and its allies. It is sometimes forgotten that this aggression was led not only by Germans but by the armies, SS divisions and various other legions of most European countries, under fascist, right-wing authoritarian, or occupation regimes, which were to a greater or lesser extent collaborators.

The fact – explicit in the principal Nazi documents – is also neglected that Hitler’s “European project”, the destruction of the USSR and the colonization (economic integration) of a vast “Lebensraum” in the East was the major project of this war. Berlin’s Generalplan Ost provided for deportation beyond the Urals of thirty to fifty million Slavs, of whom a good number were to die – estimates were in the vicinity of thirty millions deaths. In the course of the first year of the invasion around twelve million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately exterminated through starvation or shooting – a subject generally withheld from us – and 900,000 Jews, as implementation of the “final solution” got underway.

But the approach of the 75th anniversary is equally inspiring an indictment of the USSR and Russia. Make way for militant revisionism!

In the Baltic countries that are members of the European Union and NATO, and in Ukraine since the political overturn of February 2014, the accent is being placed on “Bolshevik barbarity” to which resistance was mounted by the local nationalisms allied with Germany. The death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war is imputed to Stalin “who had not signed the Geneva conventions” protecting prisoners. The war itself and its mass carnage are attributed to “the twin totalitarianisms” and certain historians and journalists (Russian oppositionists, Ukrainian nationalists) are putting into circulation the German theory according to which Hitler “was obliged” to attack the USSR given the imminence of a Soviet invasion of Europe.

The “revisionism” currently fashionable, including in Germany and Central Europe, focuses its attention on the acts of cruelty perpetrated by the Red Army and the anti-fascist resistance. In this new “inventory”, the work of often remarkable historians (notably in Germany) carries little weight with public opinion by comparison with the novels and fiction films, media “revelations” adapted to the political requirements and the new presumed expectation of the “the public”. Who would be so bold as to claim that “the past is unpredictable”?

Jean-Marie Chauvier is a researcher and specialist on Russia, Belarus and Ukraine

Translated from French by Wayne Hall

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

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***

First published on June 17, 2021

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Selected quotations from Transcript

Indian tribal girls were used as guinea pigs.

With 1.3 billion people, India is a good base for pharmaceutical companies to make a killing and also kill a lot of people in the process.

The manipulation of people by the media.

It is so terrifying what they are doing.

“We are taking things that are genetically modified organisms and injecting them into little kids arms…”, says Bill Gates

Over 490 000 children in India developed paralysis as a result of the Gates supported vaccine.

There was a parliamentary inquiry, and the Gates Foundation was excluded from India.

And Now they are back, doing their own tricks again.

**

Watch the video by clicking the image below. click right hand corner to go into full screen.

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A man claiming to be a friend with a British Airways pilot has stated that 3 pilots have just died within the past week shortly after receiving COVID-19 injections, and his recording has gone viral on social media.

An Exclusive Interview of Three Frontline Canadian Physicians “Freedom of expression is enshrined in our Constitution, and is imperative in a free and democratic society, as it underpins other human rights, such as the freedoms of thought, conscience, association and assembly.

Free expression is vital to robust and open debate in order to formulate sound and reasoned public policy. This video reveals the disturbing, and dangerous, trend of how peaceful voices of frontline physicians who dissent, and disagree, with state policy regarding COVID directives, are being silenced.

Dr. Gill, Dr. Phillips and Dr. Lamba have all come under attack for their expression that public health directives and mandates are grossly flawed and misguided, and for calling attention to the incredible harms of the governments’ forced lockdowns.

Their desire to speak about the research they know, and the harms they witness, is driven by their conscience.

Their only purpose in doing so is to live up to their oath to “first, do no harm”.

Source Links: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t…

Please subscribe to this YouTube channel and https://www.carenotcuts.ca​ to stay informed. Exclusive Interview by the Constitutional Rights Centre of Canada and Whole Hearted Media. Original Premiere was February 21, 2021.

Independent MP Derek Sloan holds a news conference on Parliament Hill to raise concerns about the alleged censorship of doctors and scientists as well as medical information related to vaccines.

The Ontario MP has been critical of lockdowns that have been in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also sponsored a petition questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

He is joined by a trio of doctors and scientists.

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***

The NATO proclamation—promoted at its annual summit this week—that a cyber attack could trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty heightens the risk of military confrontation with Russia or China.

So does a new stipulation—announced at the summit—that space attacks could trigger Article 5. Russia has already been accused of testing space-based anti-satellite weapons, which could be adopted as a justification now for war.

Article 5 says that the NATO alliance regards an attack on one of its members as an attack on all of them. That is supposed to come into play only in case of an armed attack, since that is the only kind of attack under the UN Charter that warrants responsive use of force.

If one expands the concept of armed attack in violation of the UN Charter, one opens a broader path to the use of force. Thus, while the concept of self-defense is obviously necessary, where an actual armed attack occurs, the concept is dangerous if acts not amounting to armed attack can trigger it.

NATO’s history with invocation of Article 5 does not give much comfort. The only time that occurred was after the September 11, 2001, criminal attacks in the United States against the Pentagon and World Trade Towers. That invocation provided justification for military action in Afghanistan that was said to be aimed at Al-Qaeda but that morphed into a twenty-year fiasco that is now reaching its ignoble end. It is dangerous to leave the decision to start war to NATO.

Scene of destruction in Afghanistan following U.S. NATO bombing there. The war resulted from NATO’s invocation of Article 5 following the 9/11 attacks. [Source: revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com]

The UN Charter is set up, in fact, to keep regional defense organizations from undertaking war without authorization from the UN Security Council. NATO decisions to start wars skirt that obligation.

The United States decreed a dangerous expansion of self-defense in 2002 when it said in the Defense Department’s annual strategic policy document that self-defense is warranted in response not only to an actual armed attack, but as well in response to an anticipated attack. That interpretation opened the path to the distortion of facts relating to Iraq that provided a rationale for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

NATO, moreover, was set up to stop what was said to be a risk of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. NATO has transformed itself into an organization with worldwide scope. So when President Biden says, as he just did, that Article 5 is a “sacrosanct” obligation, he is diverting attention from what Article 5 was created to prevent.

Cyber attacks of one kind or another occur frequently these days. While it is true—and this is the rationale for the NATO statement—that cyber attacks can be extremely damaging, their very frequency heightens the risk of calling cyber attacks the equivalent of an armed attack.

The nightmare scenario is that a cyber attack occurs, the origin is not obvious, but NATO says it was the work of Russia or China and proceeds with military action. There would be no oversight for that assessment.

Another nightmare is that Russia or China is accused of a space-based attack of unknown origin, or which derives from weapons testing.

The prohibition of use of force contained in the UN Charter in 1945 was an important achievement for the world community. The Charter allowed for self-defense but kept it within narrow bounds. The expansion of the parameters of Article 5 in the 21^st century that is claimed to allow for defense force—in violation of the UN Charter—is a danger to world peace.

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John Quigley is Professor of International Law at Ohio State University.

Featured image: NATO headquarters in Brussels. [Source: americansecurityproject.org]

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***

MinutesMinutes before liftoff, Elon Musk’s SpaceX ignored at least two warnings from the Federal Aviation Administration that launching its first high-altitude Starship prototype last December would violate the company’s launch license, confidential documents and letters obtained by The Verge show. And while SpaceX was under investigation, it told the FAA that the agency’s software was a “source of frustration” that has been “shown to be inaccurate at times or overly conservative,” according to the documents.

SpaceX’s violation of its launch license was “inconsistent with a strong safety culture,” the FAA’s space division chief Wayne Monteith said in a letter to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell. “Although the report states that all SpaceX parties believed that such risk was sufficiently low to comply with regulatory criteria, SpaceX used analytical methods that appeared to be hastily developed to meet a launch window,” Monteith went on.

Launch violations are rare in the industry, even as private contractors have taken over work that once was the US government’s alone. SpaceX occupies a particularly dominant position, as it is now NASA’s only ride to the International Space Station and the Moon. The documents exclusively obtained by The Verge show how SpaceX prioritized speed over safety when launching on its own private rocket playground. Ultimately, the FAA didn’t sanction SpaceX, and less than two months later, SpaceX resumed flights in Boca Chica, Texas.

For Musk, SpaceX’s CEO who was on site for SN8’s launch day, the violation is one of the latest tussles with regulators overseeing his companies. After settling with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 over an attempt to take Tesla private, Musk was told his tweets about the company needed a lawyer’s sign-off. Shortly after, he went on 60 Minutes to say no one was approving his tweets; the SEC brought him back to court, though Musk’s tweets have continued to raise eyebrows with no apparent consequences. In 2020, Musk’s Fremont Tesla factory violated local safety orders, defying the local government’s stay-at-home order to work through the pandemic. Musk taunted local officials, inviting them to come arrest him.

SpaceX emerged from the December launch violation relatively unscathed. The company has since won a $2.9 billion contract to put NASA astronauts on a Starship flight to the Moon in 2024 — the first and only such contract in a half-century.

Neither SpaceX nor Musk has publicly commented on the SN8 violation. SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment. The FAA confirmed the violation after a report by The Verge in January. But a confidential five-page report by SpaceX and letters between Shotwell and Monteith reveal what SpaceX employees knew before liftoff and detail how the company responded to its violation in the aftermath.

SpaceX first attempted to launch SN8 at SpaceX’s South Texas Starship campus on December 8th with FAA approval, but it scrubbed due to an engine issue. Launch day on December 9th, when weather conditions changed, was full of ad hoc meetings between company employees and FAA officials, who repeatedly rejected SpaceX’s weather and launch modeling data that purported to show SN8 was safe to fly, according to a five-page SpaceX report. It was unclear what role, if any, Musk himself played in the decision to launch SN8.

SpaceX’s SN8 Starship prototype successfully lifts off in violation of its launch license.GIF: SpaceX

The FAA’s models showed that if the rocket exploded, its shockwave could be strengthened by various weather conditions like wind speed and endanger nearby homes. As a new launch countdown clock was ticking, SpaceX asked the FAA to waive this safety threshold at 1:42PM, but the FAA rejected the request an hour later. SpaceX paused the countdown clock.

SpaceX’s director of launch operations, whose name wasn’t provided in the report, restarted the launch countdown clock shortly after. The report said the director had “the impression that” SpaceX’s data was sufficient. But that wasn’t the case. As the launch clock was counting down, SpaceX staff in the meeting made little progress — 15 minutes before liftoff, “the FAA informed SpaceX that the weather data provided was not sufficient.” The same safety risk remained, and SN8 wasn’t cleared for launch.

SpaceX employees left the FAA meeting for the company’s launch control room ahead of SN8’s launch. Minutes before liftoff, an FAA safety inspector speaking on an open phone line warned SpaceX’s staff in the launch control room that a launch would violate the company’s launch license. SpaceX staff ignored the warning because they “assumed that the inspector did not have the latest information,” the SpaceX report said.

SpaceX launched the rocket anyway. The steel-clad SN8 prototype flew more than six miles over the company’s private rocket facilities on the coast of Boca Chica, Texas, and blew to smithereens upon landing. No injuries or damage to any homes were reported.

SN8 perishes in an explosive “hard landing”

In one letter to Shotwell, Monteith cited SpaceX’s report and slammed the company for proceeding with the launch “based on ‘impressions’ and ‘assumptions,’ rather than procedural checks and positive affirmations.”

“These actions show a concerning lack of operational control and process discipline that is inconsistent with a strong safety culture,” he said.

SpaceX agreed to take over a dozen corrective measures but defended its own data and decision-making. The company criticized the FAA’s launch-weather modeling software. The software’s results, SpaceX said, can be intentionally interfered with to provide “better or worse results for an identical scenario.”

SpaceX has complained to the FAA in the past about the software, but “this feedback has not driven any action, contributing to the situation described above,” the report said. A “closer and more direct dialogue” with FAA officials would’ve smoothed the FAA discussions before SN8’s launch, SpaceX added.

SpaceX also proposed corrective measures: pausing the launch countdown clocks if an FAA inspector says there’s a violation and lowering the threshold for manually detonating an errant rocket midflight, before a more dangerous explosion occurs. The company also proposed to build at least four new launch and weather modeling tools with the FAA.

Monteith wasn’t happy with SpaceX’s response. He ordered SpaceX to reevaluate its safety procedures and launch day chain of command, and he urged it to go back and review the launch control room phone lines to spot any times SpaceX strayed from the license’s communication plan. He also required an FAA inspector to be physically present in Texas for every Starship prototype launch in the future. Flying inspectors from offices in Florida to rural Texas for each launch isn’t easy, so the FAA might base one in Houston for a shorter trip.

FAA investigators couldn’t determine whether the SN8 license violation was intentional, according to people involved in and briefed on the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity. That’s partially why the FAA review of the violation wasn’t a more in-depth investigation that could have resulted in fines or stronger consequences. FAA officials also believed grounding Starship and foisting a two-month investigation on a multibillion-dollar company focused heavily on speedy timelines would be a more effective penalty than imposing relatively trivial fines, the people said.

SN8 marked SpaceX’s first high-altitude launch outside of its other launch sites in Florida and California, where Air Force officials who monitor local weather conditions tell the company whether it’s safe to launch. Those government officials, formally called Range safety officials, don’t exist at SpaceX’s private rocket facilities in south Texas. SpaceX was primarily responsible for its own range safety during SN8’s launch, a responsibility in which it had very little experience. The company acknowledged in its report that the Starship site “was not mature enough” to function as a range.

SpaceX is moving ahead anyway. Since the launch violation, it’s launched four more rockets at the Starship site and even landed one successfully — all with FAA approval and a few changes to its operations. Unlike SN8, which launched on an automatic timer, other Starship launches now require a final “go” command from a human operator, Shotwell said in a letter to Monteith. And it is taking a stab at maturity, at least with its range safety tech.

At least one of the new launch-weather models SpaceX proposed, designed to bolster its range capabilities, has already taken shape. The company is building a database of wind patterns over Boca Chica to help inform its launch day weather modeling, using an experimental tool to gather wind speed data, according to a document the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission in April.

But new weather tools won’t change Musk’s Twitter presence, a concern for agency officials and lawmakers who worry the CEO’s candid tweets influence SpaceX employees and put unfair pressure on launch safety processes.

As the FAA’s review of SpaceX’s safety culture investigation was nearing completion in late January, holding up the company’s SN9 launch for a few days, Musk tweeted that the FAA’s “space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure” and that, under its rules, “humanity will never get to Mars.” An FAA spokesman replied, saying the agency “will not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety.”

The House transportation committee that oversees the FAA opened its own probe into SpaceX’s SN8 violation in February as well as “the FAA’s subsequent response, and the pressure exerted on the FAA during high profile launches,” chairs of the committee and its aviation subcommittee wrote to the agency’s administrator Steve Dickson. SpaceX’s recent launch activities raise serious questions about whether the FAA is under “potential undue influence” in making safety decisions, the letter said.

In March, after an onsite FAA inspector left town for the weekend following a week of anticipation for the company’s SN11 prototype launch, SpaceX emailed the inspector on Sunday to return for a Monday liftoff, according to a person familiar with the exchange. The inspector, taking the weekend off, missed the email at first but hopped on an early Monday morning flight back to Texas.

“FAA inspector unable to reach Starbase in time for launch today,” Musk wrote on Twitter, stirring up vitriol against the FAA in SpaceX’s fan base bubbles on Twitter and Reddit. The inspector landed in Texas, and SN11 launched the next day.

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***

Back in the George W. Bush years, I began thinking the US ruling class had entered a serious phase of rot. After a round of tax cuts skewed toward the very rich, Bush and his cronies launched a horribly destructive and expensive war on Iraq that greatly damaged the reputation and finances of the United States on its own imperial terms.

The president and his cronies seemed reckless, vain, and out of control. Bush adviser Karl Rove dismissed the critiques of “the reality-based community,” with its conclusions drawn from “the judicious study of discernible reality.” Instead, Rove asserted, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” One waited in vain for the grown-ups to appear on the scene and right the imperial ship, but, if they existed at all, they were too busy celebrating their tax cuts and pumping up the housing bubble to bother.

After that bubble burst, creating the financial crisis and the Great Recession, the smooth and cerebral Barack Obama seemed like a stabilizing force. That’s not what many of his more fervent supporters expected of his presidency; they were hoping for a more peaceful and egalitarian world, but they got neither. Facing the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, one like that depression driven in large part by Wall Street, Obama was not about to do anything on the scale of the New Deal. There was the early and underpowered stimulus package, but beyond that, there would be no major reregulation of finance and no programs of public investment, income security, or redistribution. Unlike the Franklin Roosevelt administration, or even John F. Kennedy’s, for that matter, there was little political ferment around the White House, even though the Democratic policy elites came out of the same Ivy League circles as their ancestors.Image on the right: President George W. Bush and Karl Rove on August 13, 2007. (Joyce N. Boghosian / Wikimedia Commons)

The disappointments of the Obama years prepared the way for Donald Trump. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, many people (including sometimes me) thought the establishment would somehow keep Trump from winning. Hillary Clinton, the product of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, would stop the vulgarian who cheated his way into Wharton from entering the Oval Office. But her brand of status-quo politics failed to inspire.

Trump was not the bourgeoisie’s favorite candidate. He had support from provincial plutocrats but not from the executive suite at Goldman Sachs. When he took office and immediately began ransacking, one wondered if the deep state would rein him in. Maybe the CIA would even arrange a malfunction in Air Force One’s fuel line. But it was not to be. Tax cuts and deregulation made capital forget all their reservations about Trump, and the stock market made 128 fresh daily highs — on average, one every six days — between inauguration and the onset of the coronavirus crisis. It took his encouragement of an attack on the US Capitol for the big bourgeoisie to complain openly — 99 percent of the way through his time in office.

Fish rots from the head, they say, and it’s tempting to think the same about US society. We’ve always had a brutal ruling class — more brutal at certain times (the years of slavery and Jim Crow) than others (the New Deal). But despite the brutality, there was usually a great economic and cultural dynamism. That now seems long past, and I’m not just talking about the era of Trump and the coronavirus. Something has gone badly wrong at the top of this society, and all of us are suffering for it.

One doesn’t want to idealize the ruling classes of the past. For all of history, their wealth and status have depended on exploiting those below them — and they’ve never shied away from extreme measures if they feel that those things are threatened. But the present configuration of the American ruling class is having a hard time performing the tasks it’s supposed to in order to keep the capitalist machine running. It’s not investing, and it’s allowing the basic institutions of society — notably the state but also instruments of cultural reproduction like universities — to decay.

Capitalists have long been driven by shortsightedness and greed. But it feels like we’ve entered what Christian Parenti calls the necrotic phase of American capitalism.

Lest anyone misunderstand, this isn’t an argument for a better elite or a “true” meritocracy; it’s ultimately an argument for a different society, one not dependent on the rule of plutocrats and their hired hands.

A core concept of Marxism is class struggle, but the tradition exhibits a strange dearth of investigation of the ruling class. When I first started getting interested in elite studies, I asked the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman whose writing he liked on the issue. He thought a moment and said, “Marxists don’t write about the ruling class.” When I asked why not, he said, “They think it’s obvious.”

You could say the ruling class is the capitalist class, of course, but what does that mean? CEOs of Fortune 500 companies? Their shareholders, to whom they allegedly answer? What about the owner of a chain of franchised auto parts stores in the Midwest? The owner may be able to get his congressperson on the phone — a senator might be harder — to get a tax break slipped unobtrusively into a larger bill, but what influence does he have over larger state policy? Are car dealers part of the ruling class? If so, what about new versus used? And what about someone like Henry Kissinger, a man who started as a clever functionary and ended up shaping US foreign policy in much of the 1970s, and who still has an influence over how diplomats and politicians think? How about less grand politicians and high government officials? Are they employees of the ruling class or its partners — or shapers, even? It’s not at all obvious.

Before proceeding, I should say I’m not taking seriously the idea that there is no ruling class — that there are voters in a democracy who may be divided into interest groups but none are dominant. Yes, the constrained democracy we live under is a lot better than a dictatorship would be; elections do act as a limit on elite power. But that’s a long way from the popular self-government socialists dream of. Nor am I taking seriously conceptions of a ruling class that center on PC-obsessed, organic-food-eating urban elites. That set has some influence, especially among the liberal wing of the consciousness industry, but it doesn’t shape the political economy.Image below: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1976. (Library of Congress)

I’d say the ruling class consists of a politically engaged capitalist class, operating through lobbying groups, financial support for politicians, think tanks, and publicity, that meshes with a senior political class that directs the machinery of the state. (You could say something similar about regional, state, and local capitalists and the relevant machinery.) But we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the political branch of the ruling class in shaping the thinking of the capitalists, who are too busy making money to think much on their own or even organize in their collective interest.

One way to approach the question of a ruling class is through Italian elite theory, namely the work of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels. In his four-volume warhorse The Mind and Society, Pareto laid out a clear vision of society:

“Ignoring exceptions, which are few in number and of short duration, one finds everywhere a governing class of relatively few individuals that keeps itself in power partly by force and partly by the consent of the subject class, which is much more populous.

To preserve its power, that governing class must be “adept in the shrewd use of chicanery, fraud, corruption.”

Individual governing elites do not last: “History is a graveyard of aristocracies,” Pareto declared. Contributing to their passing is a loss in vigor, an effect of the decadence of the well-established and the failure to invigorate the stock by recruiting from below. For Pareto, a healthy governing class is able to absorb the leaders of the “governed” and thereby neutralize them. “Left without leadership, without talent, disorganized, the subject class is almost always powerless to set up any lasting régime.” (Karl Marx said something similar: “The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.”) But if the governing class is overcome by “humanitarian sentiments” and is unable to absorb the natural leaders of the oppressed, it could be overthrown, especially if “the subject class contains a number of individuals disposed to use force.”

Image on the right: Gaetano Mosca (Wikimedia Commons)

Mosca wrote at some length about strata below the ruling elite. The one just below it, which plays the officer corps to the enlisted personnel of the masses, is crucial to the health of the system and functions as the backbone of political stability. Should it erode, morally or intellectually, then society will unravel. It can tolerate foolishness at the top if the stratum just one level below is in good order — one thinks of Trump and the grown-up problem.

Mosca saw clearly the profound relation of the family to political and economic power, something modern conservatives understand (and people who wonder about the coexistence of “family values” and neoliberal politics don’t). Upper-class parents do their best to prepare their children for rule, and there’s always a heavy dose of inheritance in social power. In an exuberant moment, Mosca wrote:

In order to abolish privileges of birth entirely, it would be necessary to go one step farther, to abolish the family, recognize a vagrant Venus and drop humanity to the level of the lowest animalism. In the Republic Plato proposed abolishing the family as an almost necessary consequence of the abolition of private property.

Further down, Mosca lamented the state of the European middle classes in the 1930s. He warned, “If the economic decline of [the middle] class should continue for a whole generation, an intellectual decline in all our countries would inevitably follow.” They are “great repositories of independent opinion and disinterested public spirit,” without which:

we would have either a plutocratic dictatorship, or else a bureaucratico-
military dictatorship, or else a demagogic dictatorship by a few experts in mob leadership, who would know the arts of wheedling the masses and of satisfying their envies and their predatory instincts in every possible way, to the certain damage of the general interest.

He didn’t define the “general interest,” a concept often confused with what’s good for the upper orders, but the erosion of the US middle ranks over the last few decades has had a trajectory not unlike what Mosca worried about.

Of the Italian trio, Michels is the most interesting, not least because so much of his attention is paid to the Left formations to which he once belonged. His most famous contribution is known as the “iron law of oligarchy,” a belief that organizations will always evolve into hierarchies, even parties ostensibly trying to overthrow the hierarchies of bourgeois society. Marx was right about class struggle as the motor of history, Michels conceded, but every new class coming to power will itself evolve a new hierarchy. Even syndicalists, argued Michels, who criticize the oligarchic tendencies in socialist parties and favor instead direct strike action by organized workers, need leaders. “Syndicalism is even more than socialism a fighting party. It loves the great battlefield. Can we be surprised that the syndicalists need leaders yet more than do the socialists?”

Within socialist parties and organization, Michels pointed to the prominence of traitors to the bourgeoisie. Most of the prominent nineteenth-century socialist writers, Marx and Engels most famously, were bourgeois intellectuals; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a rare exception. So, too, the revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century: Vladimir Lenin came out of a middle-class family and was educated as a lawyer; Leon Trotsky was born to a rich farming family and educated in cosmopolitan Odessa; Che Guevara was another child of the middle class who was surrounded by books and political conversation as he grew up. No doubt the descendants of the old syndicalists would argue that these relatively elite origins contributed to the ossification of the Russian and Cuban revolutions — but one could cite Michels’s retort about the necessity of leaders to the syndicalists in response to that critique. Growing up bourgeois confers some advantages — time to study, as well as exposure to the nature of power — often denied to people further down the social hierarchy. Instead of lambasting their “privilege,” it might be better to welcome these class traitors.This doesn’t mean one should be complacent about them, or about the concept of leadership in general. Many on the Left have resisted applying Michels’s iron law to our parties and occasionally our governments, but it would be better to acknowledge the power of the tendency and figure out the best way to keep those leaders accountable through what Michels called “a serene and frank examination of the oligarchical dangers of democracy.” It’s better to be open about the reality of hierarchies than to pretend they don’t exist; even professedly leaderless organizations are subject to domination by the charismatic.

The Italians focus primarily on politics and the state as the sites of rule, without much interest in their relations with capitalists. For an American, that seems like a serious deficit. But in some senses, the focus on politics is clarifying. That’s where class conflicts are often crystallized, sharpened to a point — more so than in the workplace, which can appear to be the site of interaction among individuals rather than classes. As the Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas put it, through relations with the state, the complex and diffuse relation between classes “assumes the relatively simple form of relations between the dominant and the dominated, governors and governed.”

We once had a coherent ruling class, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), who more or less owned and ran the United States from its founding through the 1970s. Based largely in the Northeast, with offshoots in the Upper Midwest, WASPs went to the same elite schools and colleges, belonged to the same clubs, married out of the same pool, and vacationed in the same favorite rural retreats. There were Southern WASPs, descendants of the slave-owning gentry, but they never had the social weight of their northern relatives — though they did rule their region and enjoy an outsize role in Congress for decades.

Visiting crew team at the Groton School on the Nashua River. (National Archives at College Park)

At the rank-and-file level, men worked in genteel law firms and brokerages or as executives in old-line manufacturing firms, and women did volunteer work for museums and charities and maintained the social relations that kept the group functioning together as a class. At the high end, WASPs played a role in government far out of proportion to their numbers, most notably in foreign policy. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), target of innumerable conspiracy theories generated from left and right for its prominent role in shaping imperial policy, traces its origins to the end of World War I, when a delegation of British and American diplomats and scholars decided to preserve the transatlantic comity of the war years and form a council whose purpose was, in the words of Peter Gosse’s official history, “to convene dinner meetings, to make contact with distinguished foreign visitors under conditions congenial to future commerce.” The CFR didn’t begin to influence policy until the 1930s, when its fellows and members helped plot the takeover of the British Empire, a concern of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

That special identification with England has been foundational to WASP identity from the first. But it took waves of fresh immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, people with strange customs and sometimes dangerous politics, for the formation to come to energized self-consciousness as a class, beginning in the 1880s. That decade brought the obsession with finding one’s old-stock roots, the first country clubs, the founding of the Social Register, and, quite importantly, the opening of the Groton School by Endicott Peabody, which shaped generations of the wellborn as well as the children of arrivistes who wanted to learn the ways of the wellborn. Peabody’s vision was one of “Muscular Christianity,” popular among elites of the time, who were worried about a loss of manliness in an increasingly urban society — austere, disciplined, athletic. FDR said that the influence of Peabody and his wife meant more to him than “any other people next to my father and mother.”

Coming out of World War II, elite WASPs like Averell Harriman (son of a robber baron) and Dean Acheson (son of the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, who learned how to row crew from Harriman at Groton), supplemented by recruits like George Kennan (son of a Milwaukee lawyer) and John McCloy (a poor kid from Philly who learned the ways of the elite at an early age and got certified with a Harvard Law degree), shaped what would become the US empire. Their skill can’t be denied; that empire has had a long and successful run, though it now looks to be coming unglued. (The competitive pressures of having the USSR as rival, and having socialism as a plausible alternative to capitalism in the twentieth century, did bring out some of the talent in the upper crust.)

McCloy, despite being a recruit, earned the title of “chairman of the American establishment” for having run postwar Germany and becoming a name partner of the law firm that represented the Rockefellers, Chase, and Big Oil (from which he took a break to run the young World Bank, which he kept safe for Wall Street). At one point, he was simultaneously chair of Chase, the Ford Foundation, and the Council on Foreign Relations and partner at the elite law firm Milbank, Tweed, where he basically ran US Middle Eastern policy.

Cast into political exile in the Eisenhower years, the WASPs returned with the status-anxious John F. Kennedy, desperate for the approval of a stratum suspicious of Irish Catholics. Kennedy, who was denounced by WASP columnist Lucius Beebe as “a rich mick from the Boston lace curtain district,” went to Choate and Harvard to learn the manner of the upper orders. As president, he brought back the older patrician crew and added the notorious McGeorge Bundy, another Groton product, who would be one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the Vietnam War, a disaster that pretty much ended that caste’s dominance of foreign policy.

Image below: John F. Kennedy at Harvard University, circa 1939.

Fresh from helping wreck Southeast Asia, Bundy went on to run the Ford Foundation, where, among other things, he applied counterinsurgency techniques developed in Vietnam to the urban crisis of the 1970s. Bundy’s strategy, as Karen Ferguson recounts in Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism, was to split off the “natural” leadership of the black community and incorporate it into the ruling class, then encourage the separate development of black schools and cultural institutions on an apartheid model, because the broad population just wasn’t advanced enough to join white society. The Italian elite theorists would have been proud of him.

As the twentieth century rolled on, WASP predominance eroded in spheres other than foreign policy. The 1970s saw a mini genre of “decline of the WASP” books and articles crop up, as Jews, Eastern and Southern European ethnics, and even blacks and Latinos began to permeate cultural, political, and business elites. At the same time, the old-line manufacturing companies, headquartered not only in New York but also in outposts of the WASP archipelago like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, fell to Japanese competition and squeezed profits. Inflation and multiple generations of inheritance ate away at old WASP fortunes. And the deregulation of Wall Street that began in the mid-1970s turned the genteel world of white-shoe investment banking (and associated law firms) into a ruthlessly competitive one. Gone were the days when a well-bred young man could pop out of Yale and into a quiet job as a bond salesman.

To use the language of finance theory, the transaction replaced the relationship. All those old WASP ties of blood and club were replaced by principles of pure profit maximization. Firms that had dealt with the same investment bank for decades shopped around to find out who could give them the best deal. The stable world of the immediate postwar decades, in which the same companies dominated the Fortune 500 and trading on the New York Stock Exchange, was transformed by a massive wave of takeovers and business failures.This new competitive structure destroyed the WASP dominance at the same time that it created fresh fortunes: oil and natural resources in the South and the West, and takeover artists like Henry Kravis and Carl Icahn. At the center of the turbulence was the investment banking firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which, though it bore a pedigreed name — the firm’s founder, Anthony Drexel, was a partner of J. P. Morgan and a member of Philadelphia’s aristocracy — had turned into a machine for borrowing lots of money and powering a fresh generation of arrivistes. But with the aristocracy in decline, the new arrivals had little to be assimilated into, unlike in Peabody’s days. Instead, the 1980s brought us stylized remnants of the old order like The Official Preppy Handbook, a guide to dressing and acting like the aristocracy, and Anglophilic clothing designed by Ralph Lauren (born in the Bronx as Ralph Lifshitz).

Though always a major part of American life, money was about to take a starring role. It’s hard to believe now, but when Forbes compiled its first list of the 400 richest Americans in 1982, there were just over a dozen billionaires among them, and the minimum price of entry was $100 million, or $270 million in 2020 dollars. Oil and real estate tycoons were prominent among them. Now, tech and finance dominate the list, and the fortunes are far larger — the minimum price of entry in 2020 was $2.1 billion. The five richest 2020 members were worth $520 billion; in 1982, the top five were worth $11 billion, or $26 billion in current dollars. A 2015 study of the Forbes list over the years found a decreasing prominence of inherited wealth and a rise in self-made fortunes — though the new arrivals were more likely to depart the list than the pedigreed.

The economic and financial forces that helped destroy the WASPs and create a new capitalist class deserve close attention. Much of it revolved around the stock market, as the 1970s became the 1980s. The entire model of how to run large corporations was transformed.Stock markets are peculiar institutions. They’re touted in the media as economic thermometers, to a public that has little idea what they do. Few people have deep ownership interest in the markets; only about half of American households have retirement accounts, with an average holding of $65,000. The richest 1 percent own 55 percent of stocks; the next 9 percent own 39 percent, leaving all of 6 percent for the bottom 90 percent. The market’s behavior can seem bizarre to outsiders and connoisseurs alike, swinging from extremes of joy to despair. Its reaction to news can be perplexing, but it’s a realm where people are all trying “to beat the gun,” an American phrase that John Maynard Keynes adopted in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money to describe the logic of speculative markets.

As frivolous as the market can seem, there’s a serious business going on under all the froth. Much of the productive apparatus of the United States is owned by public corporations — that is, ones whose stock is widely held and traded on exchanges. Those shares represent ownership interests in those corporations. As detached as the stock market may appear from reality, it’s actually an institution central to class formation — the way an owning elite stakes its ownership claims on an economy’s means of production as a whole. That’s in contrast to the nineteenth century, when industrial firms were owned by individual capitalists or small partnerships. As those firms grew, they became too big to be run and funded by a small circle; their organizational form gave way to the professionally managed corporation owned by outside shareholders. That became the dominant form of economic activity in the early twentieth century.

But the owners — the shareholders — don’t know the first thing about how to run corporations, so they have to hire specialists to do the work for them. This presents what’s known in the trade as an agency problem: the owners are dependent on hired hands to run their companies for them, but how do they know the executives are running the firms in the shareholders’ interests and not their own? Yes, shareholders elect the board of directors, and boards hire and fire top management, but in practice, it’s not easy for disperse shareholders to supervise a board, and crafty CEOs can turn boards into rubber stamps. If the market were working in accordance with official theology, it would be disciplining actors into the proper profit-maximizing behavior, but clearly that’s not enough.

A classic work on the topic is Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property, published at the depths of the Depression in 1932, when capitalism was in deep disrepute. Berle and Means, both advisers to FDR, saw the large, publicly owned corporation — ever since nicknamed the Berle-Means corporation, marked by what they call the “dissolution of the atom of property” — as a profound innovation. It was about to become, if it wasn’t already, “the dominant institution of the modern world.”

There were many perils in this new arrangement. As Berle and Means noted, “out of professional pride,” managers could choose to “maintain labor standards above those required by competitive conditions and business foresight or . . . improve quality above the point which, over a period, is likely to yield optimum returns to the stockholders.” This would benefit other stakeholders, as we call them today, namely workers and customers, but it would be in “opposition to the interests of ownership.”

But that was not without political promise. As good New Dealers, they thought this new capitalism could be managed responsibly after the reckless high jinks of the 1920s. Gone were the rabid profit maximizers of the robber baron era; why push to maximize profits when they’ll only be passed along to shareholders? With the profit maximizing incentive gone, under a regime of proper state regulation and enlightened management, the system was evolving into a “collective capitalism,” as Berle called it in the preface to the revised 1967 edition. Or, as the authors put it in the original text, the modern corporation is “approach[ing] toward communist modalities.” It would be more accurate to say that this view aimed to make socialism obsolete and irrelevant now that the days of Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan had given way to the man in the gray flannel suit.

As the legal historian Mark Roe argues, the Berle-Means corporation emerged out of a nineteenth-century populist distrust of concentrated financial power. Better dispersed ownership, the thinking went, than bank ownership. These trends were reinforced by the New Deal, which broke up banks, took them largely out of the stock ownership game, and made it harder for financial operators to interfere in corporate management.

There was a clear political intent here. As Roe notes, the New Deal leashing of finance moved issues of ownership and class division off the political agenda, issues that were hot in the 1930s. FDR was explicit about the need to break up “private socialism” — concentrated corporate and financial power — in order to prevent “government socialism.” For New Dealers — many of them renegade WASPs rebelling against their kind’s Republicanism — the point of regulation wasn’t to stifle capital, it was to legitimate it by making financial power seem transparent and disinterested.

For the first few postwar decades, the New Deal model was standard liberal doctrine. In The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that rapacious profit maximization had been replaced by a secure mediocrity, and greedy capitalists by a “technostructure.” Top managers, who were well paid but on nothing like today’s scale, saw little point in risk-taking; they wanted sales growth and prestige, not the paychecks that would later populate the Forbes 400. Today’s paychecks are driven by stock prices; in the 1950s, top executives were paid mostly straight salaries. Shareholders had become vestigial; if they didn’t like the performance of firms they held stock in, they’d just sell the shares. No one ever troubled management.

The New York Stock Exchange and portraits of capitalists and financiers, 1903. (New York Public Library)

That comfortable world began falling apart in the 1970s, as profits stumbled, financial markets performed miserably, and inflation rose inexorably. As we’ll see later, the corporate class organized to address this politically, but there was also a fierce fight within the capitalist class as shareholders began demanding more.

Enabling that demand for more was the major shift in the ownership of stocks. In the early 1950s, households (mostly rich ones, of course) owned over 90 percent of stock; now it’s under 40 percent. Large institutional holders like pension funds and mutual funds owned about 2 percent of all stock in the 1950s; now it’s around 30 percent. While the household owners of the mid-twentieth century had common interests in rising share prices and stable, generous dividends, they had no means of organizing to influence the corporations they owned. Today’s institutional owners have plenty of means. The diffuse, passive shareholders of the past have given way to the professional money managers of recent decades.

Deteriorating economic and financial performance, combined with the change in ownership, provided rich material for the shareholder revolution. Beginning in the 1970s, financial theorists, notably Harvard’s Michael Jensen, began to query the Berle-Means corporation. In a 1976 paper, Jensen and coauthor William Meckling noted the oddity of the public corporate form: “How does it happen that millions of individuals are willing to turn over a significant fraction of their wealth to organizations run by managers who have so little interest in their welfare?” Having raised the question, they let the arrangement off the hook, essentially saying that it’s worked well so far. Jensen turned more aggressive in the 1980s, denouncing corporate managers as inefficient wastrels sorely in need of outside discipline. He particularly liked debt as a form of discipline; if a company had big debts to pay, it would concentrate managerial minds on maximizing profitability by cutting costs and closing or selling weaker divisions.

Theorists revived interest in a 1965 paper by law professor Henry Manne, who argued that efficiency — by which he meant profitability — would best be served by having corporations constantly up for auction to the highest bidder. What came to be known as the “liquid market for corporate control” would discipline managers, forcing them to concentrate on profits and stock prices at the expense of all those old New Deal considerations.

As theorists like Jensen did their work, financiers developed the practice: a debt-driven restructuring of corporate America. A wave of takeovers undertaken by investment boutiques like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and individual takeover artists like Icahn was launched at “underperforming” firms. While details vary, the model involved borrowing lots of money, taking over target firms against management’s wishes, and forcing a sale to the operator or some third party. Corporate indebtedness rose massively and fed the broad attack on labor that was underway in the 1980s; the quickest way to cut costs and raise your stock price was to do mass layoffs. The larger point of all these exercises was to center the stock price in managerial consciousness. That would solve the agency problem: make managers think like shareholders, relentlessly cutting costs and raising profits.

The takeover wave of the 1980s completely disrupted the corporate landscape, bringing down a lot of old names and, with them, an old corporate culture. The renegades were initially seen as disreputable and greedy, conducting an assault on old values — the “barbarians at the gate,” as Bryan Burrough and John Helyar called their book on the battle for RJR Nabisco. Texas oilman turned financial operator T. Boone Pickens framed his 1983 takeover attempt on Gulf as an attack on a pampered corporate elite. Pickens never took over Gulf; it ended up being bought by SOCAL (Standard Oil of California), but he made over $700 million by selling the stock he’d accumulated in the attempt. Another casualty of the deal was to diminish the old WASPy Pittsburgh corporate elite, of which Gulf was a pillar. And, as Fortune noted in an admiring 2019 obituary for Pickens, raids like his changed the way managers did business; the constant fear of a hostile takeover was “revolutionary, forever changing the way companies interacted with their shareholders.”

As often happens, the debt mania came to a bad end when too much money was borrowed to buy bad assets at excessive prices. The model collapsed in a wave of bankruptcies and a long recession in the early 1990s. But later in that decade, shareholders came up with a new ploy to press their interests: pension-fund activism, perversely led by public funds like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). (Curiously, KKR, one of the pioneers of the 1980s takeover movement, which had initially been seen as reckless and maybe scandalous, was legitimated on Wall Street when it won an investment from the Oregon state pension fund; the second K, Henry Kravis, still publicly thanks the fund for helping launch them. Everywhere you look, you can see that states shape markets.) CalPERS would draw up lists of underperforming companies and lobby management to tighten the ship — meaning cut costs and boost the stock price. When I interviewed the chief counsel of CalPERS in the mid-1990s, I asked him about the propriety of using funds held in workers’ names to pursue an anti-worker agenda; he said they just cared about maximizing returns.The result of all this was to turn the stock market into an ever-updating grade on corporate performance. To induce managers to think like shareholders, their compensation was increasingly linked to the stock price. The intra-capitalist family fight looked to have been resolved in favor of shareholders. Predictable mediocrity, the lodestar of the 1950s and 1960s, had given way to the cult of the profit-seeking CEO with a 25 percent return on equity.

The shareholder revolution of the 1980s was supposed to make the passive investor a thing of the past. No longer would management run companies as private fiefdoms with little outside supervision: they’d be disciplined by activist investors and real-time report cards provided by stock prices.That was the case for quite a while, but the intraclass peace treaty after the shareholder revolution has brought back several aspects of that old world. Two are especially important: the growth of index funds and the explosion in stock buybacks, through which corporations have shoveled trillions of dollars into their shareholders’ pockets.

Financial theory from the 1960s onward argued convincingly that it’s nearly impossible to beat the market. Sure, there are star investors like George Soros and Warren Buffett, but most people aren’t them. Instead of trying to beat the market, many investors decided to settle for matching it. Big money managers like Vanguard began offering mutual funds that replicated prominent stock market indexes, notably the S&P 500, by investing in the component stocks in proportion to their weights in the index. Because the management of an index fund is almost automatic, fees are very low compared to actively managed funds, which require the attention of highly paid specialists (who rarely deserve their compensation given how many of them lag the averages they’re supposed to beat).

Image on the right: BlackRock building in New York. (Wikimedia Commons)

Over the last decade, law professors Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst report, 95 percent of all inflows into investment funds have gone to passively managed funds, like mutual funds. The lion’s share has gone into funds managed by the Big Three (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street), and that proportion has been rising. In 1998, those three firms held about 5 percent of the total capitalization of the S&P 500, an index made up of the stocks of the largest blue chip corporations. That share is now 21 percent, and it’s almost certain to keep growing. Managers of index funds rarely challenge management — and why would CEOs listen to them if they couldn’t, by definition, sell their stock? And while managers of passive funds swear that they care deeply about their corporate governance responsibilities — high-mindedly called “stewardship” in the literature — they have little economic incentive to do much. Any improvement caused by an indexer’s stewardship would accrue to other indexers as well, which would violate all norms of capitalist rationality. And with fees as low as they are, there’s not much money around to pay the stewards. Those entrusted with that task have about half a day for every company they cover. Index fund managers sometimes say they engage in behind-the-scenes lobbying of corporate managers, but the Big Three had no engagement at all with more than 90 percent of the firms in their portfolios.

Of course, the kinds of supervision that authors like Bebchuk and Hirst long for, like dismantling defenses against hostile takeovers, aren’t good for the working class. But this does represent a significant departure from the early hopes of the shareholder revolutionaries. There are still activist hedge funds that take positions in companies they see as underperforming to provoke management changes or takeovers, but they’ve become a lot rarer than they were in the 1980s, when CEOs routinely felt like they were under siege.

If you can’t buy and sell stocks based on corporate performance, there’s less discipline coming from the stock price. A financial world in which index funds dominate is one where the stock market plays almost no role in how corporations are run. That prompts the question: Who needs outside stockholders?

In 2016, Inigo Fraser Jenkins, an analyst with the investment house Bernstein, declared indexing “worse than Marxism.” Central planning is bad enough, he argued, but a system in which capital allocation was purely formulaic looks backward rather than shaping the future, which will damage innovation. Soon after writing that, Fraser Jenkins was diagnosed with lymphoma, and when he returned from his brush with death, he wrote a near-four-thousand-word essay musing on whether what he does for a living is worth it. Both those positions are worth taking seriously. With stockholders tending in the direction of autopilot, are they irrelevant?

This new unity of purpose between managers and shareholders has produced some perverse results, notably an eagerness to shower the shareholders with corporate cash. In both academic and popular theory, the stock market is supposed to be a way to fund corporate investment; shareholders are providing capital to firms in need of it. In fact, the stock market does very little of that. According to statistics collected by finance professor Jay Ritter, US corporations raised just over $755 billion in initial public offerings (IPOs) — first sales of stock to the public by previously private corporations — between 1998 and 2020. That pales in comparison to the $8.5 trillion firms spent buying back their own stock over the same period, which is still only half their profits. Such stock buybacks — which were mostly illegal before 1982 — are intended to boost prices and make shareholders happy. But since CEOs and other top executives are now paid mainly in stock, buybacks make them happy, too. (Research by the Washington Post and the Securities and Exchange Commission has found that corporate executives often sell into a buyback program, profiting off the lift all the corporate purchases give to prices.) The Berle-Means corporation has been transformed into a machine for stuffing vast sums into the wallets of shareholders and CEOs.

A study by Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon shows that buybacks have depressed investment, and that firms with high share ownership by index funds and other broad mutual funds that hold stocks rather than trading them aggressively (which, it should be said, makes excellent financial sense) do more buybacks and stint more on investment. Another reason to ask why we need outside shareholders.

The capitalist class is showing faint signs of rethinking the shareholder-first orthodoxy. In August 2019, the Business Roundtable, big capital’s trade association, issued a statement signed by 181 CEOs declaring the business had social goals other than profit-making — responsibilities to “all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.” Commenting on the statement, JPMorgan Chase chair Jamie Dimon vowed “to push for an economy that serves all Americans,” a wish that is hard to square with his role in life. A subset of Wall Street money managers has been pushing for corporations to take environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into account when investing. That sounds nice, but a primer on ESG filters published by CNBC reports that such exemplars as Microsoft, Lyft, and Honeywell (which, among other things, makes parts for military aircraft) pass the worthiness test.Just after Joe Biden’s inauguration, BlackRock boss Larry Fink announced that because “climate risk is investment risk,” he would be voting shares under that firm’s management against boards and CEOs that failed to show “significant progress on the management and reporting of climate-related risk, including their transition plans to a net zero economy.” In that statement, Fink also expressed concern for those capitalism has forgotten to treat well, though he was sparing in detail on how he’d change things. After that high-minded display, however, Fink is finding some of Biden’s early climate moves a bit extreme. There’s the bottom line to consider.

While much of this is risible, considering the sources and their material interests, the rhetorical shift is noteworthy. The corporate class is feeling unloved in ways it hasn’t since the 1970s.

At the same time the stock market was acquiring a larger role in our economic life, so was a countermovement toward privatization. The number of public corporations has fallen dramatically — though their share of the economy has, if anything, grown — through mergers as well as the growth of private equity (PE), a form of business that hearkens back to the nineteenth century, before the emergence of the Berle-Means corporation.Curiously, modern PE traces its roots to some of the prime agents of the shareholder revolution, buyout boutiques like KKR. Of course, the 1980s buyout firms weren’t the first to prowl the financial landscape, armed mostly with other people’s money and looking to do deals — you could see J. P. Morgan himself as such an operator — but they were obscure players in the early postwar decades. The 1982 buyout of Gibson Greetings, led by former Treasury secretary (and avid right-wing propagandist) William E. Simon, made him and his partners millions of dollars when the company went public sixteen months later. It’s often credited as the deal that got the 1980s buyout movement going, but it was KKR, founded in 1976 by three alumni of the late investment bank Bear Stearns (which blew up in the 2008 financial crisis), that really made the headlines. Among KKR’s triumphs of the 1980s were the buyouts of Safeway — which led to mass layoffs, union-busting, and worker suicides — and RJR Nabisco, the deal that inspired the 1989 best-seller Barbarians at the Gate.

With the end of the “roaring ’80s,” the markets and the economy entered a period of doldrums that they didn’t emerge from until the middle of the next decade. Buyout activity slowed markedly, as corporate America tried to digest all the debt contracted during the period of extreme exuberance. There was a surge with the dot-com mania of the late 1990s, a retreat when it collapsed, another surge in the mid-2000s, a bigger retreat when the whole world nearly fell apart in 2008 (a year when a private equity titan, Bain’s Mitt Romney, ran for president), and yet another surge over the last decade.

The core structure of private equity is fairly simple. A small management team raises a pool of money from rich individuals and institutions, then cruises for deals. The outside investors don’t have much say in how things are run; they have to trust that the management team knows what it’s doing. The typical target is an established firm that has seen better days. The PE shop buys the firm and works it over, cutting costs — most notoriously through layoffs but also by selling or closing the weaker operations. The purchase usually involves a major amount of borrowed money — money contributed by the outside investors is just a foundation, on top of which sits copious amounts of debt — which means a good deal of the target’s cash flow has to be devoted to paying off interest and principal. On top of that, the new PE owners often issue debt in the target’s name and pay themselves rich dividends with the proceeds. Returns for the PE firm’s principals can be very generous; outside investors, however, don’t necessarily do so well after the principals take their cut. The goal is usually to sell the firm to someone else several years down the line, either to another PE firm or to the public with a stock offering.

Private equity has become a major employer — not directly, since their staffs are relatively small, but through the companies they own. The Carlyle Group, KKR, and Blackstone together employ close to 2 million people. It’s odd to think about PE this way. As Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett put it a few years ago, because of “their ruthless focus on efficiency and profit,” these companies are “better known for cutting jobs” than creating them.

Private equity’s apologists say the model contributes to growth and employment, but lately, PE has been in the news for carnage in retail — chains like Toys “R” Us were killed in part by the enormous debt imposed by their PE owners — and for jacking up the price of health care, where the buyout artists have recently been working their magic. PE went from being little involved in health care twenty years ago to having a massive presence today. Hospitals, medical and dental practices, and ambulance operators were taken over and often “rolled up,” as they say in the business, into large, heavily indebted regional or national behemoths. With the unexpected costs of the COVID-19 crisis, the PE model “amplified . . . salary cuts, layoffs, and bankruptcies across the health care industry,” in the words of an article in, of all places, the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Faced with unexpected costs and little financial cushion, “the short-term focus of the PE model led to hard cost cutting rather than more in-depth planning for the future.” Salaries and staff were slashed amid a profound health emergency.

But what’s most striking about PE is how it’s reconfigured the capitalist class — away, to some degree, from the dispersed ownership of the public company and back to a narrower ownership group. Curiously, many of the PE firms have themselves gone public, including KKR and Blackstone. Blackstone’s IPO in 2007 was exquisitely timed, arriving as the first symptoms of the great financial crisis were revealing themselves; you’d suspect that the firm’s two leading figures, Stephen Schwarzman and Hamilton “Tony” James (a member of Henry and William’s family), surmised that things were about to go south and it’d be a good time to cash in on the exuberance of the investing public. Blackstone’s principals kept all the voting shares and the right to set their own pay. Other PE firms have engaged in similar maneuvers to maintain tight management control. Even going public hasn’t changed the industry’s predilection for calling the shots with little external supervision.

A less malignant subset of PE is venture capital (VC), which provides money to start-ups, many of them in tech. It’s not picking over “incumbent” old companies for unexploited values; it’s trying to create new value, some of it fanciful.

In a world made flush with free Federal Reserve money — trillions of it after the 2008 financial crisis, and a few more trillions amid the COVID-19 crisis — VCs have had cash to burn. The characteristic creature of the time has been the “unicorn,” if it achieved a billion-dollar valuation, and a “decacorn” if it managed ten times that. The exuberant funding of unprofitable firms was reminiscent of the late-1990s dot-com era, but unlike that time, the public didn’t participate through the stock market — it was funded by VCs using money from institutional investors and billionaires.In the historiography of Wall Street, VCs and other “insiders” were the smart money who began selling off their investments to the masses through IPOs when it looked like time to get out. That was the spirit of the late 1990s, captured by star analyst Henry Blodget’s characterization of a now-forgotten stock called 24/7 Media as a “piece of shit” even while his employer, Merrill Lynch, was urging clients to “accumulate.” Blodget, who was fined $4 million and banned for life from the securities business, went on to be a financial journalist.

This time, though, the VCs held back, waiting years to go public. Word was that they and their beneficiaries didn’t want all the scrutiny that came with an IPO — pesky shareholders wanting their say and their share. And when some of the big names finally made their debut, many initially fell on their faces. That didn’t stop the IPOs, however; from 2018 onward, we’ve seen some of the most vigorous activity in initial offerings, though nothing like the late 1990s. The public company is far from dead, but it’s not as alluring as it once was.

Recent decades have seen another throwback to nineteenth-century models: an increasing prominence for the owners of very profitable private firms. A study of US tax records, “Capitalists in the Twenty-
First Century,” by economist Matthew Smith and colleagues, finds that a large portion of the upper ranks — just over half of the proverbial 1 percent — is populated by the owners of closely held firms, rather than the public company CEOs who get so much of the press. Under American tax law, these are structured as pass-through entities, meaning their profits are untaxed at the firm level and distributed directly to their owners, either a single individual or a small partnership.

The form has grown sharply over the decades. Its share of total business income rose from 10 percent in the mid-1980s to 35 percent in recent years. Contributing to that growth are both a rise in value added per worker and an increasing share of that value taken by the owners.

Who are these owners? Most of them (85 percent) are “self-made,” at least in the sense that their parents were not in the 1 percent — though the remaining 15 percent whose parents were is fifteen times their share of the population. They’re unlikely to operate in capital-intensive industries, like manufacturing, which are more appropriate to conventional corporate forms. As the authors say:

Typical firms owned by the top 1–0.1% are single-establishment firms in professional services (e.g., consultants, lawyers, specialty tradespeople) or health services (e.g., physicians, dentists). A typical firm owned by the top 0.1% is a regional business with $20M in sales and 100 employees, such as an auto dealer, beverage distributor, or a large law firm.

These enterprises yield a nice living for their owners, especially at the highest end. Firms owned by the top 0.1 percent (those with annual incomes of $1.6 million or more) have an average of seventy-four employees who yield a profit of $14,000 each for the boss — more than $10 million in total. Few of these owners have more than one business, which makes for some precarity, and few businesses survive their owners. Even at the high end, this is not “Big Capital,” though it’s fat personal income. But they make up much of the top 0.1 percent — 84 percent of it in all. That’s thirteen times the number who make their big incomes as officers of public corporations; in the aggregate, privateers make eight times as much as their corporate comrades.

An interesting take on regional elites — those who live outside metropolitan centers and own businesses that might be small by globalists’ standards but are big in local terms — comes from the historian Patrick Wyman. Wyman wrote about what he called the “local gentry” in his hometown of Yakima, a city of 94,000 in Washington’s fruit and wine country, a long 140 miles from cosmopolitan Seattle. They own the region’s orchards and vineyards, and the businesses that serve those industries. Many are quite rich — not private equity rich, but enough to fund, in Wyman’s words, “hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands.” You can say the same of hundreds of small cities around the country — Jeep dealers, McDonald’s franchisees, construction companies.

This formation looks a lot like a major base for the Republican Party: fervent enemies of taxes and regulations who may be too dispersed to cohere independently as a class but who can be nurtured by conservative politicians, donor networks, and think tanks. As of late October 2020, Yakima’s contributions to Donald Trump exceeded those to Biden by two or three times — a sharp contrast with Seattle, where, in some zip codes, Biden was ahead by as much as a 72:1 margin (and with five times as many dollars as Yakima). Upper-class Yakima is part of a formation that has been around for a long time; they were the financial base of right-wing politics back when Richard Hofstadter was writing about the paranoid style, but they’ve gotten a lot richer.

It’s not just geographical, it’s also a sectoral angle to the class base for right-wing politics. The MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, was the most charmingly visible of Trump’s marginal business supporters, but there are also characters like Marty Davis, whom the Washington Post described as a “quartz-countertop mogul” based in suburban Minneapolis, at whose lakefront house Trump held an indoor fundraiser just before his COVID diagnosis. Minneapolis is far from a backwater, but Davis operates in an industry that would never qualify for inclusion in the commanding heights of capitalism. Still, the Davis family, which diversified into countertops after a successful run in the dairy business, was rich enough to have made a brief appearance on Forbes’s 2015 list of America’s richest families, with $1.7 billion in net worth.

All these developments do have some things in common: the share-price-motivated and buyback-driven public corporation, the extractive private-equity model, and the more exploitative closely held firm that dies with its founder all aim to take out as much money as possible, without much consideration for the future.

The two-party system has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past several decades. Once the party of New Dealers and Southern segregationists, the Democrats have evolved into a coalition of the softer side of the metropolitan establishment and a progressive wing the party leadership hates. And the GOP, once the party of the northeastern WASP elite, has evolved into a coalition of plutocrats and an enraged provincial petite bourgeoisie (often mistaken for the “white working class”).Both transformations can be read as driven partly by circumstances and partly by conscious effort applied to parties themselves. For example, the decline of manufacturing weakened the Democrats’ labor base as well as the economic base of the old WASPs in the Republican Party. Democrat support for civil rights drove Dixiecrats out, and Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy welcomed them into a Republican Party that had once been fairly progressive on civil rights.

But there were also vigorous internal restructuring programs that transformed the ideological coloration of the parties. In the 1980s, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), led by the likes of Bill Clinton, aimed to reinvent the Democratic Party for the neoliberal era by purging it of progressive forces left over from the 1960s and 1970s. The goal was to make it friendly to Wall Street and the Pentagon while dropping the civil rights and tree-hugger talk, and it was largely successful, as the party found popular support among professionals in the nicer suburbs.

Without downplaying the importance of the transformation of the Democrats — always a party of capital that had to pretend not to be one for electoral purposes — it must be said that the change in the GOP and the growth of the Right are a far more interesting story, because that’s where the organized energy among the bourgeoisie has been for decades.

Back in the 1950s, the Right was basically a movement of intellectuals funded by provincial petit bourgeois industrialists — the owners of machine tool makers in Milwaukee and the like. They saw Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers (UAW) as socialism on the march, and Eisenhower as too accommodating of it. (Contempt for Eisenhower drove a lot of right-wing organizing in the 1950s.) The big bourgeoisie had made an unhappy peace with the New Deal. The corporate and Wall Street establishment, based in the Northeast, featuring marquee names like Rockefeller, du Pont, Pew, Mellon, and Whitney, and supplemented by small-town worthies from the Midwest, found political expression in Eisenhower’s party, a formation that survived into the early 1960s. They were temperamentally conservative in the sense of being cautious, but not ideologically driven.

For most of the twentieth century, there was a great deal of ideological diversity within the two major parties. Though more conservative than the Democrats on economic issues, the Republican Party had a liberal wing, just as the Dems had a conservative one. Though it’s hard to believe today, when the Republican Party routinely race-baits to win the votes of white bigots, the GOP of the 1950s and 1960s often had a stronger civil rights record than the Democrats, because they didn’t have a large Southern component. Into the 1960s, the Republicans were frequently stronger than Democrats on civil liberties, too. There had long been far-right tendencies in the Republican Party — most notoriously Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who ended up disgraced after a wild run in the 1950s but whose obsessions, like hatred of upper-class Harvard-educated liberals, prefigured his modern descendants. But the party was dominated by northeastern WASPs. As Taft, a leader of the party’s conservative Midwestern wing, put it in 1952 after losing the presidential nomination to Eisenhower, “Every Republican candidate for President since 1936 has been nominated by the Chase National Bank.” Chase was a Rockefeller family enterprise, and it was certainly not socialist. But Eisenhower was not a reactionary. As he wrote to his brother:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things . . . [but] their number is negligible and they are stupid.

The business branch of that “splinter group” had a material problem with the Eisenhower-era settlement: General Motors may have preferred life without the UAW, but it could afford to pay union rates, especially in exchange for labor peace. Smaller fries couldn’t. They were caught in the petite bourgeoisie’s classic position, squeezed by big labor and big capital. Their freedom was under siege, and they reacted by funding a right-wing insurgency. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by the retired CEO of a Massachusetts-based candy company, Robert Welch, who’d made a fortune off lollipops and Junior Mints. Welch was rich, but he was no Rockefeller or Mellon.

Three years earlier, William F. Buckley, a few years out of Yale, founded National Review, with the mission of “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop,” as he wrote in the magazine’s first issue in November 1955. As incredible as this may sound now, Buckley had trouble raising money for the magazine and needed help from his father, a small-time oil baron. As Buckley later put it, the capitalists didn’t seem all that interested in the project of saving capitalism.Eisenhower’s tepidity and compromises energized the Right, whose insurgency was almost Bolshevist in its ideological and organizational discipline. The Bolshevik tendencies were no accident. There were not only intellectuals like James Burnham, a Trotskyist turned cofounder of National Review, but important organizers like Clif White and the ex-Communist Marvin Liebman, who consciously emulated Red tactics in organizing their insurgency, from organizational and ideological discipline to how to dominate a meeting. That rigor and energy dismayed and disoriented the moderates, who preferred politeness and compromise above all things.

The Birchite and Buckleyite tendencies would eventually split, sort of — but before they did, they united in their affection for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as their political avatar. Continuing the provincial petit bourgeois theme, Goldwater was the grandson of the founder of a five-outlet department store chain based in Phoenix — a flyspeck next to the likes of Macy’s. Goldwater — or, more accurately, Goldwater’s supporters — launched a bid for the 1960 Republican nomination that failed badly and had victor Richard Nixon betray the Right in several ways, but most visibly with his choice of the Massachusetts aristocrat Henry Cabot Lodge Jr as his vice presidential candidate.

Goldwater tried again in 1964, and though he would eventually be crushed in the general election by Lyndon Johnson, the convention that nominated the Arizonan was an important rite of passage for the conservatives. As journalist Murray Kempton put it, “This convention is historic because it is the emancipation of the serfs . . . The serfs have seized the estate of their masters.” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a leader of the moderate Republican faction whose name embodied the old elite’s domination of the party, was shockingly heckled, a sign of the WASPs’ impending decline. The party’s transition on race was made crudely clear by insults directed against black attendees — one of whom saw his jacket deliberately burned with a cigarette. Jackie Robinson, who was a delegate, said that the performance made him feel like “a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

Movement conservatives were undeterred by Goldwater’s massive loss and continued with their plot to take over the Republican Party. A year later, Buckley ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, with the conscious aim of drawing enough votes away from the liberal Republican John Lindsay to elect the Democratic candidate, Abraham Beame, and thereby weaken the GOP’s left flank. (The contrast with left liberals, who condemn any third-party challenge that might lead their party to a loss, is a vivid symptom of their lack of conviction.) Buckley initially thought he’d harvest votes from the city’s WASP elite, but they were put off by his social conservatism. Instead, he tapped into the growing backlash of white ethnics — the people at the end of the subway lines, as future Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips, lead architect of his anti–civil rights Southern strategy, put it. Buckley ended up with 13 percent of the vote — not huge, but a nontrivial amount for a third-party candidate, and a sign of things to come.

Though much of that backlash was driven by race, there was also a class angle that most center-left analysts overlook. Lindsay was a social liberal and very attentive to the concerns of black New Yorkers, but on economic policy, he worked largely on behalf of the city’s powerful real estate industry, reflecting his patrician base. At the time, city policy was several years into accelerating the eviction of manufacturing and working-class housing from Manhattan and replacing it with offices and upscale residences. This was good for financiers, developers, and lawyers, but not for working-class whites — who expressed their resentment by lashing out at blacks and liberals rather than the less visible moneybags.

Nixon, elected in 1968, would work similar resentments on a national scale, developing a mass base for conservative politics. But he mostly governed to the left of his rhetoric. His time in office brought us food stamps, the Environmental Protection Agency, and a proposal for a guaranteed annual income. Those compromises with liberalism energized the Right the same way Eisenhower’s had two decades earlier. (In the brief period when I was a young conservative, I cast my first presidential vote against Nixon because he was too liberal.) But Nixon provided longer-term assistance to the cause of the Republican right with his Southern strategy — appealing to the resentments of white Southerners (and their fellow thinkers in the urban North) over the social gains of black Americans.

During Nixon’s final years as president, the Right began mobilizing in the extraparliamentary realm as well. Sidney Blumenthal’s 1986 book The Rise of the Counter-Establishmenttraces the ascent of the insurgent right’s policy infrastructure. The book is a reminder that while capitalists have a gut sense of their class interests, they can’t really think in detail about policy. For that, they fund think tanks.Blumenthal highlights a shift within the capitalist class that led to a change in the political complexion of its hired intellectuals. For decades, the corporate establishment funded the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations (which has, among others, a David Rockefeller room); the Brookings Institution, a hotbed of Democratic centrism; and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which is conservative but, as Rockefeller once said, not “far out.” According to Irving Shapiro, CEO of DuPont in the 1970s and one of the era’s business statesmen, AEI shaped capitalist thought in that decade.

A new cadre of rising Sun Belt entrepreneurs rejected this establishmentarian order, lusting for something more muscular. As Blumenthal points out, many of the nouveaux riches ran their own firms, unlike the old elite, who were the heads of public corporations. To the new class, that traditional order was stagnant. In 1973, beer mogul Joseph Coors founded the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which took some time to get going but eventually became a powerhouse as the Reagan revolution set in.

President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan waving from the limousine during the Inaugural Parade on January 20, 1981, in Washington, DC. (White House Photographic Collection)

This new subclass brought a fresh worldview. As Blumenthal puts it, “The Sunbelt entrepreneurs possess neither authority endowed by inheritance nor authority stemming from bureaucratic function. For almost all Sunbelt entrepreneurs, social status is derived entirely from crisp new money.” Heritage, the intellectual avatar of this consciousness, spun forth multiple-volume briefings for the Reagan administration, much of which found its way into policy.

But the big capitalists weren’t screaming for Ronald Reagan. In Blumenthal’s telling, they had to be pulled in his direction, and the think tanks played an important role in that process. Walter Wriston, the influential chair of Citibank from 1967 to 1984, said that his East Coast business set underestimated Reagan’s skills. His crowd initially preferred a more orthodox candidate, like former Texas governor John Connally or George H. W. Bush, for the presidency in 1980. But they came around. David Rockefeller provided the ultimate blessing: “My enthusiasm has grown. I didn’t adequately recognize the strength of his leadership.” Rockefeller’s conversion came about despite the early conservative movement’s ire toward his family and institutions like the CFR that it endowed.

Blumenthal’s arrivistes held a mix of envy and contempt for the old establishment, resenting its prestige while lamenting its decadence. It’s curious how that view still pervades the American right, even though that old establishment is considerably reduced. Equally curious is how its institutions, the Ivy League universities, have become the boutique workshops for producing today’s meritocracy. While it’s tempting to point only at the Democratic side of that formation — the Clintons, Barack Obama — some of our leading right-populists have a similar institutional pedigree, a formation distinguished by its denunciation of elites. Josh Hawley went to Stanford and Yale Law; Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Ron DeSantis all went to Harvard Law. The former New Right, once the joint project of a rising subclass and movement conservatism, has aged into a game played by cynics.

Blumenthal’s account centers on movement conservatism, which the corporate establishment didn’t participate in. But it began mobilizing on its own, developing new institutions and reviving older ones to fight the inflation-prone, worker-friendly(ish) Keynesian order and impose what we would later call the neoliberal agenda.

As Benjamin Waterhouse emphasizes in Lobbying America, many of the businesspeople who pushed that neoliberal agenda in the 1970s were neither movement conservatives nor self-made entrepreneurs but career managers. They were often socially liberal. But they objected to the host of new demands coming from women and racial minorities, as well as to the explosive growth in regulation. This strained the accommodation with the New Deal and the Keynesian state beginning in the late 1960s, a discontent that intensified in the 1970s when inflation and fiscal recklessness seemed not like transient problems but the foundations of a new disorder. Deepening the hurt feelings of capitalists was perceived hostility to business in public opinion, popular culture, and, increasingly, among their employees.The major old-line business lobbies, the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, had lost credibility and power in Washington because of their relentless anti-labor and anti–New Deal stances in the postwar decades, ceding ground to more accommodationist organizations.

It took some time for capital to mount its counterrevolution. Modern business political action committees (PACs) got their start in the early 1960s, but their ranks were thin and their legal status murky until the Federal Election Commission legalized them in 1975. The number of corporate PACs subsequently exploded.

You can’t tell the story of the new political consciousness of the 1970s business class without mentioning the Powell Memorandum, named after Lewis F. Powell, then a corporate lawyer and later a Supreme Court justice. Writing to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971, Powell worried about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system,” but he worried even more about the spread of antibusiness attitudes in previously respectable realms like academia, the media, and churches, and among intellectuals, artists, and even politicians. He lamented the passivity of business in the face of these existential threats and urged a massive ideological mobilization by capital to make a fundamental case for its legitimacy.

While the influence of the Powell memo is sometimes exaggerated, it did embody the business wisdom of the time and help inspire a quadrupling of the Chamber’s membership during the 1970s. Shedding its musty reputation but not its conservative politics, it reinvented itself as a slick, modern organization — but one railing against occupational safety inspectors and environmental regulations. It argued that business had no social responsibility, a position once associated with marginal figures like Milton Friedman, who was himself on the verge of becoming not at all marginal. The renascent Chamber became an important part of the Right’s institutional structure.

But capital was organizing on other fronts as well. The Business Roundtable, made up of the CEOs of 150 large corporations, was founded at a private club in Manhattan in 1973 to fight the antibusiness drift of American politics. But the founding wasn’t on the executives’ initiative — they needed political actors to organize them, as they often do. When visiting Washington in 1971, John Harper, CEO of Alcoa, was urged by Treasury secretary John Connally and Federal Reserve chair Arthur Burns to form a “nonpartisan” lobbying group for big business as a whole — something that had never existed before. There were specific trade associations but nothing to represent the whole crew. Harper and several colleagues founded the Roundtable in 1973, an early sign that capital was becoming a class “for itself,” one capable of consciously organizing to pursue its own power and interests. It was, unlike the Heritage Foundation crowd, bipartisan, pragmatic, and (by its own imagining) nonideological.

The Roundtable came into being just as the Right was founding its flagship think tanks: Heritage was born in the same year, 1973, and the Cato Institute four years later. For that relatively brief moment — the late 1970s into the early 1980s — productive parallel agitation by the mainstream business lobby and the newly mobilized right would result in moments of political triumph like the appointment of Paul Volcker to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve and the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Together, Volcker and Reagan would end the “inflationary spiral” of the 1960s and 1970s and break the economic and political power of organized labor.

That triumph, however, would lead to a dissolution of capital’s broad political unity. As Lee Drutman shows in The Business of America Is Lobbying, his history of the industry, after creating an infrastructure for politicking, the focus of business narrowed dramatically, to sectoral and even firm-specific issues. Its fragmentation was so complete that it was unable or unwilling to mobilize when a posse of hopped-up reactionary GOP backbenchers shut down the government and threatened default on Treasury bonds. In an interview, Drutman explained this silence as a symptom of capital’s narrowing field of vision:

It’s a business-wide issue, and they’re all looking out for their own narrow interests . . . Business rarely lobbies as a whole . . .Success has fractured them. When there was a lot at stake, it was easy to unify. They felt like they were up against Big Government and Big Labor. But once you don’t have a common enemy, the efforts become more diffuse . . . There’s not a sense of business organized as a responsible class.

Most of the organizational energy ever since has been on the Right. The most prominent figure in that agitation for decades has been Charles Koch, a rare case of a serious capitalist organizing independently on his class’s behalf. Along with his late brother David, Charles has led a small but very rich network of plutocrats who have pushed American politics to the right at every level of government over the last few years. The family’s money comes from control of a private company, Koch Enterprises, with $115 billion in annual revenues. Were it a public corporation, it would rank around seventeenth in the Fortune 500.

The Koch network organizes regular conferences for the like-minded, where they raise money and plot strategy, and their tentacles have spread into every state in the country. The circle — now with hundreds of major donors, distributing hundreds of millions of dollars every year — is thick with hedge fund managers and fossil fuel magnates, supplemented by a rank and file drawn from the pass-throughs in the top 0.1 percent. At the summit, financiers like Steven Cohen, Paul Singer, and Stephen Schwarzman — who mostly run their own investment funds rather than working for established banks — were drawn to the enterprise in the early Obama years, fearing he was a reincarnation of FDR about to crack down on their business models. (As it turned out, he never did much more than call them “fat cats” once, a remark many on Wall Street never forgave him for.) They were joined by carbon moguls who were afraid Obama was serious when he said, upon clinching the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” A big portion of the Koch network consists of financiers who own their own firms and not public corporations. They don’t like anyone telling them what to do — neither government nor outside shareholders.

Unlike many on the Left, Charles Koch has never seen a contradiction between electoral work and other organizing. His network showers cash on right-wing candidates up and down the ballot, but it also supports professors, think tanks, publications, and advocacy organizations — all as part of a coherent, long-term, and ideologically rigorous strategy. There’s nothing remotely like them in US politics.

That’s not to say there isn’t some big money on the liberal left — just not as much, and not as ideologically coherent. The closest liberals come is the Democracy Alliance (DA), which was founded in 2005 and gets money from George Soros and other, less famous monied liberals. But it distributed only about $500 million in the first decade of its existence — less than the Koch network spends on one election cycle. And unlike the Koch network, whose spending is tightly controlled by the leadership, DA members decide where to spend their money.

For Koch, following the model laid down by Friedrich Hayek and his comrades, political ideas have a production chain. The Mont Pelerin Society, the organization of neoliberal economists convened in a village by that name in Switzerland in 1947 on Hayek’s invitation, had a clear conception of how to spread its influence. Peak intellectuals, like Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and other luminaries of the movement, would develop ideas, which would spread down to think tanks, then to politicians and journalists, and finally to the public. (Friedman spanned several levels of the hierarchy at once, writing books and papers that were influential in the economics profession at the same time he lobbied politicians and wrote a column for Newsweek.) As Burton Yale Pines of the Heritage Foundation put it back in the 1980s, “Our targets are the policy-makers and the opinion-making elite. Not the public. The public gets it from them.”

One of the principal actors in the Koch family’s intellectual production and distribution network has been Richard Fink. Fink, then an NYU grad student in economics, dropped in on Charles one day in the late 1970s and asked for money to found a libertarian institute. Koch wrote him a check, which he used to set up the Center for the Study of Market Processes at Rutgers. He soon relocated it to George Mason University (GMU), where it became the Mercatus Center. In 1985, the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies moved from California to join Mercatus at GMU. This sequence of events transformed a formerly obscure state university in the DC suburbs into the Vatican of libertarian intellectual life. They’ve reproduced the model at universities around the country, financing institutes and endowing chairs with considerable influence over the direction of research. Unlike many leftists, Koch and co. take academia seriously.

In a 1996 article, Fink outlined his master strategy: an intellectual economy of producer goods and consumer goods, as in the real economy, reminiscent of the Mont Pelerin structure. The intellectuals, often university-based, are the makers of the producer goods (ideas), which are then transformed into intermediate goods by think tanks, and ultimately into products for mass application by activists. Or, as Koch himself put it, “libertarians need an integrated strategy, vertically and horizontally integrated, to bring about social change, from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” He’s done a lot to make it happen.Think tanks are the middlemen in the production and dissemination of ideas. One of the most important has been the Cato Institute, founded in 1977 with Koch money. The name came from Murray Rothbard, the libertarian economist, who emphasized there was nothing “conservative” about the institute’s mission: he dismissed conservatism as “a dying remnant of the ancien régime . . . ineluctably moribund, Fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America.” For Rothbard — like Koch and Cato — libertarianism is a revolutionary doctrine. Koch money also funded the Reason Foundation, best known for its eponymous magazine. Reason was founded by a Boston University student in 1968 and published out of his dorm room in its early days. A decade later, Charles Koch agreed to finance it if it remained “uncompromisingly radical.”

All these Koch-fueled entities — GMU, Cato, Reason — busily schooled Republican politicians and operatives throughout the 1980s and 1990s on the wisdom of privatization and austerity.

There are other right-wing mega-donors, though none with the broad scope and vision of Koch. Hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who was originally part of the Koch network and then went off on his own, was a major funder of the Trump campaign and the Breitbart News operation. Another striking pair of characters is Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein. Richard inherited a bunch of Schlitz beer money and then built a second fortune in the Uline packaging business. They support media, like the Federalist, and candidates that some on the Right find a little hot to handle, like Roy Moore, the Alabama judge with a taste for teenage girls. They’re also major supporters of the Club for Growth and Scott Walker, former governor of their home state, Wisconsin.

Right-wing funders, led by the Koch network, have created scores of policy outlets around the country. The State Policy Network (SPN) has sixty-six affiliates and over eighty associates populating every state but North Dakota. Founded in 1992 by the industrialist Thomas A. Roe, who had set up the first of these think tanks in South Carolina six years earlier on a suggestion from Ronald Reagan (politicians in the lead again!), the SPN flock develops policies, disseminates propaganda, and trains personnel to promote “economic liberty, rule of law, property rights, and limited government,” which, in practice, means gutting regulations, cutting taxes and services, privatizing public schools and pension systems, and destroying unions.

Closely associated with the SPN is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which shares funders and priorities but operates at the political ground level, writing bills and lobbying legislators. Since state and local governments often function in obscurity, with part-time legislators and thin staffs, having prewritten bills and trained politicians is a vital lubricant for the right-wing agenda. Aside from the usual right-wing funding sources, ALEC also draws from a wide variety of business interests, often by offering their assistance on a specific policy issue and then bringing the firms more permanently into the fold.

It’s an impressive network, running from the Oval Office all the way down to places like Schoharie County, New York, where a Mercer-funded think tank has been agitating. It’s been crucial to Republican control of statehouses across the country, influencing the shape of Congress because of their jurisdiction over districting and electoral law.

Despite this power, the Right has never achieved political hegemony, nor have its business patrons achieved economic hegemony. The Koch network is rich, but its wealth pales next to the Fortune 500’s cash flow. One way to make this point is to poke about their think tanks, where money is made into policy. There’s a decided lack of big names.

The board of the Cato Institute, despite its ties to the Koch world, is heavy with second-tier and third-tier capitalists — the chair of something called TAMKO Building Products, a Missouri-
based firm; a managing director with Susquehanna International Group, a money management firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania; and the former owner of the Tennessee-based Young Radiator Company. Koch aside, it’s light on seriously elite connections.

As is the Heritage Foundation. Its president, Kay C. James, was previously a dean at Regent University, the school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. Another link to the educational right is board member Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a deeply conservative institution that takes no federal cash so Washington can’t tell it what to do. Other trustees include a corporate headhunter with two degrees from Baptist colleges; a real estate developer and chair of a food service company, both of which almost no one has heard of; the chair of a small maker of wearable biosensors; the head of a small private equity firm; another PE guy who advertises himself as “a life member of MENSA and the NRA”; and “one of America’s leading authorities on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness.” Its major funders contain few recognizable names outside standard right-wing circles (Bradley, Coors, Scaife, Walton). Its lower order of funders includes some big names — ExxonMobil, GE, Google, Visa — but they’re greatly outnumbered by much smaller ones.

Contrast this with the centrist Brookings Institution, whose board includes ambassadors from Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, TD Bank, Duke Energy, and Young & Rubicam. Its top funders include the Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Comcast, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Time Warner, Toyota, AIG, and the governments of Japan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — and even the libertarian would-be secessionist Peter Thiel, who, like any big investor, knows the importance of diversification. Or take the Clintonite Dems’ favorite think tank, the Center for American Progress, which has a “Business Alliance” — price of admission: $100,000 — that includes Comcast, Walmart, GM, GE, and Boeing.

But their relatively inferior class status still hasn’t stopped the Right from winning lots of fights. As Blumenthal pointed out, the businessmen around Reagan were not heavyweights; they brought us Duracell batteries, the Diners Club credit card, and Lassie — two second-tier brands and a defunct fictional dog. Despite that light footprint, their intense organization and commitment have allowed the Right to punch way above its weight. These intrepid capitalists served as an avant-garde for their larger, more cautious comrades. It’s a messy business, cutting taxes and regulations.

Another dimension of the Right’s influence is what it does to the respectable left. As Thatcher adviser Sir Alan Walters told me at a conference twenty years ago, the Iron Lady’s most lasting achievement was her transformation of the Labour Party, which had ceased to stand for much. Something analogous happened with the post-Reagan Democratic Party, which has played an enormous supporting role in the organizational and ideological collapse of New Deal/Great Society liberalism. The party turned its attention away from the urban working class (which was savaged by deindustrialization) and toward professionals in the suburbs. But you would never characterize this formation as brimming over with political or intellectual passion of any sort.

Trump is thankfully a fading memory, but his relation to the right-wing counter-establishment is worth a closer look. Most weren’t all that interested in him; he certainly served part of their agenda, but the economic nationalism bothered these apostles of the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. An exception was Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire famous for Cambridge Analytica (which turned out not to be some AI Svengali but rather a bit of a fraud), who threw Trump some money and brought Steve Bannon and David Bossie — the head of Citizens United, who mounted the famous legal case that opened politics to vast and secretive funding — into his orbit. Bannon and Bossie gave Trump, never much on political philosophy, some right-wing ideology (notably “America First nationalism”) and connections. The Koch set at first kept their distance from the new administration. But they did have an in through Marc Short, Mike Pence’s chief of staff, who headed a Koch front group called Freedom Partners from 2011 to 2015. Trump — or, given his ignorance of policy, more likely Pence — soon turned to the Koch network for advice on staffing his new administration.Image below: Donald Trump at his inauguruation on January 20, 2017. (Wikimedia Commons)

A well-organized force is ideally suited to fill a vacuum. The Koch touch was most visible in energy and environmental policy, but they had personnel placements elsewhere as well. Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo was once known as “the congressman from Koch” when he represented the Wichita area in Congress from 2011 to 2016. Earlier, he had a business career in that city that was partly funded by Koch Industries.

The network’s influence extended to informal advisers as well. Trump took advice on energy from pals like fracking magnate Harold Hamm, whom Jane Mayer described as a “charter member of the Kochs’ donor circle.”

The Kochs won some victories in the Trump era: a generous loosening of energy and environmental regulation, friendly court appointments, and fat tax cuts. But they never did repeal Obamacare, and the tariffs and immigration restrictions were major losses. Trump’s rhetoric about immigration and Muslims were among the reasons Charles Koch refused to endorse him. Much of corporate America wasn’t happy with that part of Trump’s agenda either, but they were too happy with their tax cuts to do much about it until the Capitol riot.

But a new class fraction did find expression in, or at least had affinities with, the Trump administration. As I argued above, the business coalition that came together in the 1970s to lobby for deregulation and tax cuts largely dissolved as a united force when it got what it wanted. Rather than a broad agenda, the business lobby narrowed to focus on sectoral and individual corporate interests. The Chamber of Commerce, though purporting to speak for business in general, came to rent itself out to specific clients, often unsavory ones. Big capital is socially liberal — or it pretends to be. It has no interest in the Christian right’s moral agenda, nor is it nativist. Almost every Wall Street and Fortune 500 company has a diversity department, handling everything from anti-racist training sessions to the corporate float for the annual LGBT pride parade. Their worldview is little different from Hillary Clinton’s — but they’re not passionately engaged in politics. They write checks, but profits are high, and the tax rate they paid on those profits over the last few years was the lowest it’s been since the early 1930s.

They’re layabouts compared to the class fraction I’m describing, a gang made up of the owners of private companies as opposed to public ones, disproportionately in dirty industries. The financier wing comes largely out of “alternative investments,” hedge funds and private equity, not big Wall Street banks or Silicon Valley VC firms. Most alternative investment operations are run as partnerships with a small staff, often under the direction of a single figure. Collectively, they look like freebooters more than corporate personalities, and asset-strippers more than builders, be it natural assets in the case of the carbon moguls or corporate assets in the case of the PE titans. Trump himself ran a real estate firm with a small staff and no outside shareholders. Like a private equity guy, Trump loaded up his casinos with debt and pocketed much of the proceeds.

The prominence of private ownership is striking, and it’s politically reactionary. Lately, institutional investors have been lobbying for some action on climate — not profit-threatening action, of course, but something. Central bankers are starting to make similar noises; they’re increasingly worried that a financial system reliant on carbon assets (which could easily collapse in value when they’re recognized for the climate-killers they are) might run into serious trouble. Since they have no outside shareholders, the Kochs and Hamms of the world are spared having to listen to this chatter.

This alliance between the private corporate form and political reaction is a reminder of Marx’s observations on the topic. He described the emergence of the corporation, with its separation of ownership and management, as “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-abolishing contradiction.” Workers could hire managers as easily as shareholders, or maybe perform the task themselves. The stockholder-owned public corporation was a stepping-stone to a truly public entity. Short of that ambition, public firms are more transparent and subject to outside pressure than those controlled by a small, secretive circle of owners.

But, as we’ve seen, such owners have proven highly capable of organizing as a political force. Corporate America isn’t averse to working with Koch organizations. Exxon and Microsoft worked with the Koch-heavy Citizens for a Sound Economy to push very specific agendas. But these are usually temporary, targeted crusades; none have the durability and ubiquity that the Koch agenda itself has. And that agenda has a substantial toehold on state power.

Returning to the theories of Nicos Poulantzas, while there are often divisions within the capitalist class, its predominant bloc organizes a “general interest.” The contradictions remain, but the hegemonic fraction creates sufficient consensus to rule by universalizing its worldview as part of its dominance (or, as Marx put it in a classic formulation, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”). That kind of consensus seems to be missing in US politics in recent decades, a point that became very clear during the Trump era. The corporate and financial establishment, initially suspicious of rule by such a volatile incompetent, never tried to rein him in. He was never interested in a universalizing rhetoric, as Poulantzas’s hegemonic fraction is supposed to be. Instead, he stoked division almost every time he tweeted.

Within the GOP, the petit bourgeois mass base — the car dealers and accountants — is in conflict with its big business wing, and neither can gain political or ideological hegemony over the whole society. (That intraclass conflict became sharp and visible during Trump’s second impeachment hearing.) The Democrats, for that matter, look divided between the old centrist DLC faction — tied to parts of Wall Street and big capital, represented by Biden — and a younger, more leftish, and more energetic activist wing. It’s much easier to imagine (to take some names from the fuzzy past) Everett Dirksen and Lyndon Johnson coexisting in the same universe than to picture Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ro Khanna as colleagues in governance. Until the 1990s, the federal government never shut down for any length of time because of the inability to pass a proper budget; since 1995, the US government has shut down to a significant degree five times, for a cumulative total of eighty days, and political leaders openly suggested that a default on Treasury securities might be a salutary measure. There’s something fractured in a state that engages in periodic shutdowns.

Bourgeois pundits often lament “divided government” and the inability to compromise, which they attribute to partisanship or bad temperaments. A more fundamental reason may be that no fraction of capital, neither the older centrist kind nor the upstart right-leaning kind, is able to achieve hegemony. The Right has considerable strength at elite levels, but in the popular realm, it’s only the Electoral College, voter suppression, and aggressive gerrymandering that keeps it electorally competitive. Its position is greatly aided, however, by the deep weakness of more centrist forces, who lack serious intellectual or political energy. As the Right discredits itself with ludicrous attacks on the Capitol and farcical QAnon conspiracies, the center-left is feeble. The geriatric nature of the mainstream Democrat leadership is a sign of exhaustion. We’re a long way from when DLC-style politics, as terrible as they were, had at least the superficial appeal of novelty. Now we’ve got the No Malarkey Express parked in the Oval Office.

Elite division looks to be in stark contrast with the coherence and breadth of the WASPs, a relatively narrow, homogenous owning class bound by inherited wealth that married out of the same mating pool; went to the same schools; belonged to the same clubs; owned a lot of capital; ran the major industrial companies, law firms, and banks; ran major educational institutions like prep schools and universities; ran major cultural institutions like universities and museums, as well as the philanthropies that shaped social thought and cultural life; and defined the limits of liberal politics. WASPs also populated government, like C. Douglas Dillon in the Treasury or Dean Acheson at the State Department or Nelson Rockefeller as the governor of New York. We shouldn’t be nostalgic for them; they were often deeply racist and driven by notions of the “white man’s burden.” But they had a unity and authority that our current rabble of grifters and parvenus lacks.

That stratum’s leading analyst, the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (himself a product of Philadelphia’s Main Line) thought a society like ours needed an authoritative elite of the sort his brethren once were. As he put it:

[U]nfortunately success is not synonymous with leadership, and affluence without authority breeds alienation . . . the inevitable alienation of the elite in a materialistic world where privilege is divorced from duty, authority is destroyed, and comfort becomes the only prize . . .

The essential problem of social order, in turn, depends not on the elimination but the legitimation of social power. For power which is not legitimized tends to be either coercive or manipulative. Freedom, on the other hand, depends not in doing what one wants but on wanting to do what one ought because of one’s faith in long-established authority.

For those of us who believe in democracy, this is an unacceptably hierarchical view of society. But in a society like ours, one deliberately structured to magnify elite authority and limit the power of the horde — if you don’t believe me, check out Federalist No. 10, in which James Madison makes it quite explicit his constitution was designed to do just that — the quality of governance depends profoundly on the nature of that elite. Our contemporary pack of plutocrats and scammers looks incapable of legitimation or coherent rule — and it appears to be nowhere near up to the challenge of climate change. Maybe Biden’s top economic adviser, Brian Deese, who came to the White House after handling ESG issues for BlackRock, will organize his class buddies into a significant force on addressing climate, but Larry Fink’s objections to Biden’s early executive orders suggest he’ll have quite a task on his hands. And that’s before the Koch network and the Freedom Caucus have gone to work.

Alas, it must be conceded that, until the bonds of that constitution are broken and something approaching a real democracy is instituted, Baltzell has a point about how the loss of ruling-class authority — a legitimation crisis — might lead to social tensions and disorder. With the center so weak, it does present an opportunity for the organized right to make gains — but it presents an opening for the Left, too.

Making revolution against the ruling class, however, is a hell of lot harder than making a revolution within it.

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Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host of Behind the News. His latest book is My Turn.

Featured image is from Jacobin

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The first astronauts for China’s new space station have blasted off for the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power.

The trio launched on Thursday on a Long March-2F rocket for the Tiangong station, where they will spend three months.

Liftoff took place at 9:22 am local time (0122 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest China’s Gobi desert.

Their Shenzhou-12 spacecraft will dock with the Tianhe main section of the space station, which was placed in orbit on April 29.

The module has separate living spaces for each of them, a treadmill for exercise, and a communication centre for emails and video calls with ground control.

It is China’s first crewed mission in nearly five years.

Matter of huge prestige in China

The launch represents a matter of huge prestige in China, as Beijing prepares to mark the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party on July 1 with a massive propaganda campaign.

To prepare for the mission, the crew has undergone more than 6,000 hours of training, including hundreds of underwater somersaults in full space gear.

The mission’s commander is Nie Haisheng, a decorated air force pilot in the People’s Liberation Army who has already participated in two space missions.

The two other members are also members of the military.

Over the next year and a half, another 11 missions are planned to complete the construction of Tiangong in orbit.

The first crew will test and maintain the systems onboard, conduct spacewalks and undertake scientific experiments.

Ban on US astronauts on ISS

China’s space ambitions have been fuelled in part by a US ban on its astronauts on the International Space Station, a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan.

It is due for retirement after 2024, even though NASA said it could potentially remain functional beyond 2028.

The Chinese station reportedly is intended to be used for 15 years and may outlast the ISS, which is nearing the end of its functional lifespan.

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Residents of Sheikh Jarrah’s resistance to eviction by Israeli Jews evolved into a military confrontation so lopsided, the Israeli bombardments against Gaza so terrifying, it drew widespread condemnation (the US government excepted).

The Palestinian dead, injured and homeless are still being tabulated, while eviction processes of Sheikh Jarrah’s Arab inhabitants continue, even as we learn of similar forced displacement of Arabs in nearby Silwan.

Another Israeli scheme to dislodge Palestinians is home demolition—they number in the many thousands and continue (in Bustan, Silwan) even as I write. For a glimpse of these all-too-routine violations, I append my newly-digitized April 5, 1996 Christian Science Monitor article based on what I witnessed — I likened it to a lynching – when on assignment in the West Bank 25 years ago.

“It’s quite a spectacle, a Palestinian home being blown apart. Furniture, dishes and clothes, hastily removed, are deposited helter-skelter in the path or road.

Villagers stand by, silent and grim . Heavily armed soldiers are massed to prevent any disruption. Confused, awed children turn sullen.

Americans rarely see Israel’s demolition policy at work; but it’s a regular form of punishment. All Palestinians, from toddlers to the elderly, are familiar with it. Perhaps it’s happened to a neighbor. Perhaps they themselves were hauled out of their house in the early morning and told by a soft-spoken Israeli officer, with his troops surrounding the residence, that he has his orders. The entire town is aroused. Neighbors join in the frantic rush to save some household items; they know it’s useless to protest.

The silent frenzy of losing a home this way has no parallel. It’s not like a flood or a fire; it’s more like a lynching. There’s no one to call for help. Hundreds of soldiers surround the house and village to ensure no one interferes with the bulldozers and dynamite teams.

Legalized destruction

It’s all done legally too. That is to say, a paper, written in Hebrew, is presented to the householder spelling out the order to blow up or bulldoze his or her home, or to seal it. Often the order charges that the house lacks a building permit. Typically, a family has two hours’ notice.

In a village near Hebron in 1991, I saw the remains of a mosque that was flattened weeks before. The land had been cleared because of some building infraction, neighbors told me.

At other times, particularly during the intifadah (uprising), a family is informed that their son was caught (not convicted but simply picked up and charged) throwing a Molotov cocktail, or that he was captured in an attack on an Israeli.

In some cases, only the family orchard (their livelihood) is leveled. Again, the family is notified when the machines are already on the nearby road. Orchards have been destroyed based simply on a report that some Palestinian children were hiding from soldiers among the trees, or Jewish settlers claim that someone they were pursuing was heading in that direction.

During the first three years of the intifadah (1987-1991), when communal punishment was the norm for civil disobedience, the Palestinian Human Rights information Center recorded 1,726 demolitions or sealings of homes. On average, there are nine Palestinians living in a home; so those lost houses represent about 15,000 men, women and children, forcibly made homeless during that time. Often the dwelling is not even the family’s original home but a shelter inside a crowded refugee camp built with the help of United Nations funding.

Israel says it demolishes certain houses because they’re the homes of “suicide bombers”. The news media, which remains silent about these actions, are effectively sanctioning the policy. So conditioned is the public that whatever is done to an “Islamist terrorist” seems justified and is endorsed. Are we right to stand by silently and accept that?

Consider this: The demolitions are retaliatory actions that strike deep into the core of Palestinian identity. They are bound to have some traumatic effect on children. Such devastation may quell opposition temporarily, but the long-term effects may be very different. People may become more embittered and hostile towards Israeli authority. Blowing up the home of a family may in fact move the brothers and sisters of a dead man into closer identification with his actions.

Israel does not respond in this manner to all heinous acts. Look at the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by the Israeli law student. Look at Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer. Their actions repelled most Israelis, yet their homes and families remained unharmed. No, these destructive acts are specifically designed for and executed against Palestinians.

Palestinians’ view

Palestinians see this type of punishment as another method Israel uses to “clear the land”, to deny their existence, to implement its “cleansing” policy. People deprived of a home may have one less link with the land. But such actions have other consequences. Children witness their homes, the places they were born, blown apart. They watch fathers and other male relatives helplessly held at gunpoint. They imbibe the horrified reaction of their mothers and grandmothers.

The house as the center

Because this form of punishment is so rare, few can imagine the impact of a house being blown up in front of its owners. We have to understand how central the house is to Palestinian life. Even today, most Palestinians are born at home. This is the place for daily prayer, for family meals, for weddings, for homecomings from jail, and for funerals. This is where everyone gathers to pass the evening. It is not a shelter; it is a community. It is the place for consolation and joy, the haven and the refuge.

Mother is the manager, so the home is unequivocally associated with her power and protective role. Harming the house is like violating the mother. Many children will feel they must avenge this injustice. Especially with the world community standing by seeming to sanction the destruction, family members may feel more responsibility to seek justice. Anyone who understands this would advise Israel to cease this practice for these reasons, if not for moral ones.”

Photos above and below–a sturdy old Jerusalem wall, replaced by a parking lot– was posted by Lisa S Majaj

Author’s note: Israel’s removal of Palestinians is interminable: sometimes it’s by shrewd legal maneuvers; sometimes it’s by harassment, sometimes it’s violent takeovers, and sometimes it’s brutal demolition. A protracted process, it’s so routine that it hardly garners outside attention. Besides residences, Palestinian orchards and nature preserves are savagely destroyed by Israeli forces. A recent egregious case was reported by my colleague Raouf Halaby in Counterpunch.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Barbara Nimri Aziz.

BN Aziz whose anthropological research has focused on the peoples of the Himalayas is the author of the newly published “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”, available on Amazon. 

Barbara is a frequent contributor to Global Research

All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

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On June 13, 2021, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put out a statement welcoming the new Israeli government and outlining Canada’s support for all things Israeli.

The full statement is available on the government website and contains many simplistic platitudes that conceal too many ugly realities.  Without deconstructing all of it there are some salient points that do stand out.

The first is that “Canada and Israel are close friends bound together by shared democratic values”, in actuality a true statement, as neither country is truly democratic.

Both are colonial settler establishments.

Both are apartheid societies.

Both use militarized force to maintain control of indigenous populations.

Both are members/participants in the U.S. empire, although for Israel it is more of a manipulated convenience, and for Canada it is simple sycophancy and a pretence at global greatness.

Both attempt to overthrow other legally established governments, with Canada doing so more expansively around the empire (Venezuela, Haiti, Ukraine, Libya, Syria et al) while Israel stays with neighbouring states (sort of – to wit Iran).

Both kill Arabs:  Israel quite directly with Naftali Bennett bragging about it, while Canada does it more discreetly through military trade with Saudi  Arabia and support of the U.S. empire in general.

Neither country has a truly democratic electoral system, with the power residing in the corporations and political managers rather than the demos, the people.

Both take indigenous children from their families:  Canada formerly through the churches and school system, now through the foster care system;  Israel does it through militarized abductions, imprisonment, and torture (which is sort of like Canada’s church schools were like, with the verified dimension of murder).

Chances are I could go on, but the significant lack of truly “democratic” actions is obvious and common to both countries.

Trudeau goes on to say Canada has joined efforts in “combatting anti-semitism in all its forms”.  Well and good but that includes support for the vaguely worded and poor exemplar of what antisemitism actually is within the IHRA definition (and it is not criticism of actions against international law and humanitarian law as practiced by Israel).  Canada has a formal policy statement – though not a law – supporting the IHRA definition in the House of Commons.  What Canada’s politicians ignore comes from recent polls showing that a large majority of Canadian citizens do not support Israeli actions and do not support the government’s positions on Israel/Palestine. Canada’s government also opposes the BDS  movement, a peaceful resistance idea that acknowledges the apartheid nature of the state.  Ironically, Canada is all for BDS when it comes to its U.S. partner’s great dislikes.

Next, “Canada remains steadfast in its commitment to a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living in peace, security, and dignity”.  Sounds great, but it is an impossibility and Trudeau and his cohorts wilful ignorance on this topic simply demonstrates how little he cares for Palestine and peace, security, and dignity.  The Oslo Accords, the Roadmap to Peace, the two state solution is dead.

Israel is quite happy to play along as it has given and will give them plenty of time to build and expand settlements that already prevent any contiguous viable Palestinian state.  Trudeau is not alone in this as all political parties officially support the two state solution, although the NDP have shifted to a position of criticism of Israel’s most recent actions and attacks on Sheikh Jarrah, the al-Aqsa mosque, and Gaza.

With a final thank you to Netanyahu Trudeau ends with “Canada and Israel achieved a great deal together.”  Wow, oh so true, this implicates Canada in Israel’s war crimes and humanitarian crimes, while providing the linguistic obfuscation to make it sound all so wonderful.   Not such strange bedfellows.

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Antagonizes Russia further at Geneva summit by calling out its supposedly terrible human rights record—when the U.S. has run secret torture prisons

From the moment he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Joe Biden was groomed for high office by his mentor, Averell Harriman, a fabulously wealthy investment banker, governor of New York, coordinator of the Marshall Plan, and one of the original U.S. representatives to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after its formation in 1949.

Harriman died in 1986 but would have been proud of his protégé on Monday, June 14^th, when Biden gave a public briefing at the annual NATO summit in Brussels in which he affirmed the U.S. commitment to the NATO alliance and Article 5 of its charter as a “sacred obligation.”

Article 5 states that an attack on one member is an attack on all members.

Biden also lauded a NATO blueprint promoting greater military spending to contain the alleged threats from China and Russia—which Biden following Harriman has long played up.

During the 2020 election, Biden received $236,614 from General Dynamics, which conveniently received a $140 million, five-year contract in 2017 and $695 million contract in 2020 to upgrade NATO’s Information Technology (IT) and cyber-security infrastructure and that of the U.S. army in Europe.

Biden further received $447,277 from Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the F-16 Fighting Falcon jet, a NATO favorite, which last year began air patrols for NATO over Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries.

The above totals show who is driving Biden’s support for NATO’s latest military buildup, which includes the expansion of space-based weapons and military exercises, airborne surveillance systems, and a growing forward presence in the Baltic states and Poland.

Warped Spending Priorities

NATO was established as a military alliance between Western European countries and the United States and Canada to contain alleged Soviet aggression.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has added 16 new member-nations and expanded to Russia’s border—despite a promise by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not do so.

Image on the right: James A. Baker with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in Moscow making a false promise. Gorbachev should have known from U.S. history never to trust an American leader. [Source: nsarchive.gwu.edu]

A Brussels Summit Communiqué claimed that NATO was the “most successful Alliance in history,” whose importance today resulted from “multiple threats” to Western democracies from “assertive and authoritarian powers,” notably China and Russia, whose “aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.”

The Communiqué warned further about new “cyber, hybrid and other asymmetric threats, including disinformation campaigns, and by the malicious use of ever-more sophisticated emerging and disruptive technologies.”

This is seen as justification for a renewed commitment to the two percent GDP metric agreed upon in 2014 in which NATO member-states contribute two percent of their budget toward NATO—a total that will be increased after 2024.

Donald Trump had generated great publicity during his presidency demanding that NATO members adhere to the two percent provision, though Biden adopted the same position, bragging on Monday that ten countries had met the two percent goal [the number is actually twelve] and that the others were “on the way.”

Despite the pandemic, 2020 witnessed a 13.6% increase in worldwide military spending. NATO states spent $1.062 trillion on the military, approximately 56% of the global total.

NATO service weapons by nation. [Source: m4a1-shermayne.tumblr.com]

Quique Sánchez, a Barcelonan peace activist noted at “Stop NATO 2021,” a webinar sponsored by the Left in the European Parliament, that if even a fraction of this military spending were cut, the entire world could be given COVID vaccines, and the public health crisis would recede.

Education and health care would also be adequately funded and proper action taken to combat climate change.

At an April 2019 anti-NATO protest in Washington, D.C., folk singers Ben Grosscup and Luci Murphy performed the song “NATO’s Got to Go,” which characterized NATO as a “political scheme to sell the whole world with the flu.”

The song went on: “From Kosovo to Afghanistan to African shores, the bureaucrats of NATO just keep making war.”

Ben Grosscup performing folk song “NATO’s Got to Go” at a Washington, D.C., anti-NATO rally in April 2019. Medea Benjamin, founder of the peace group CodePink, stands with sign “Say No to NATO.” [Source: worldbeyondwar.org]

NATO indeed has spearheaded illegal military interventions, such as in Libya where the removal of secular pan-Africanist Muammar Qaddafi resulted in a decade of civil war, empowered Islamic fundamentalists, and led to the reintroduction of slavery.

Relatives and neighbors search for survivors in the rubble of the Gafez family home in Majer on August 9, 2011, one day after NATO strikes on this and another compound killed 34 people and wounded more than 30. [Source: hrw.org]

Afghanistan under NATO occupation has also evolved into a failed state led by a violent kleptocratic elite which covertly supports the very enemy it purports to be combating.

NATO 2030 Agenda

One priority of the Brussels NATO summit was to promote the new report, NATO 2030: United for a New Era, which aims to repurpose NATO as a bulwark against supposed Chinese and Russian aggression in the new Cold War.

The report was written by a group of ten experts assembled by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. They include Dr. A. Wess Mitchell, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs from 2017 to 2019, who was among the earliest proponents of placing NATO personnel in Poland and the Baltic States in the aftermath of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, and pushed for expanded U.S. military aid to Georgia and Ukraine.^[1]

Predictably, NATO 2030 uses hostile language demonizing China and Russia, with recommendations that will lead to growing confrontation.

Some of those recommendations are illegal—the report, for example, advocates sustaining the nuclear arms race, despite the UN having outlawed nuclear weapons.

The extreme measures advocated in the report are justified under the claim that NATO has “responded with resolve to the threat posed by Russian aggression in the Euro-Atlantic region,” and that this threat has to be deterred.

Russia, however, was never an aggressor in the Euro-Atlantic region.

It responded in 2014 to a Western-backed coup in Ukraine by re-annexing Crimea—which historically belonged to Russia and which its population voted on—and by supporting a rebellion in Ukraine’s two eastern provinces, which the population there broadly supported.

Russia’s evil is epitomized according to NATO 2030 by its “use of chemical weapons, poisoning and state-sanctioned assassination”; however, none of these accusations has been substantiated.

NATO 2030 further condemns Russia for its allegedly “assertive behavior” in the Baltic states and Black Sea—when Russian military maneuvers have been largely developed in response to U.S.-NATO provocations.

A NATO press release in early March illustrates the point very well: It reported that NATO conducted military exercises “simultaneously over the Baltic Sea and Black Sea ensuring that allied forces remain ready to operate together and respond to any threat.”

The press release continued: “Taking off from Norway, two US Air Force B-1 bombers trained with fighter aircraft from Poland, Italy and Germany [flew] over the Baltic Sea and flew over the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In a separate event, two French Rafale fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle and two Spanish F-18 aircraft on NATO duty in Romania took part in drills involving NATO warships in the Black Sea.”

U.S. and Danish fighter jets flying over the Baltic Sea. [Source: usafe.af.mil]

If Russia had performed the same kind of exercises in the Gulf of Mexico, flown aircraft over Ottawa, and brought together allies in a hostile alliance, then Americans too would try to fortify the country’s defenses—or do something far more drastic if history is any guide.

But Russia is apparently not entitled to self-defense in the American-dominated world order, which NATO helps entrench.

Besides Russia, NATO 2030 notes with alarm the “growing power and assertiveness of China,” which has supposedly engaged in “intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region” and “proved its willingness to use force against its neighbors.”

China, however, has won substantial support with its One Belt-One Road and other infrastructural development programs, and has not invaded anyone since the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979—while the U.S. has invaded dozens of countries in that time.

Although NATO 2030 repeatedly accuses Russia and China of promoting disinformation, it is NATO which is advancing disinformation along with biased analyses that are designed to secure yet higher levels of military spending.

The report’s concern for climate change and the environment also rings hollow; military aircraft are major sources of carbon emissions and military weapons a huge cause of pollution.

Not a Kumbaya Moment—The Biden-Putin Summit

On Wednesday, June 16^th, Biden traveled to Geneva and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an 18^th century villa in a much-awaited summit.

The tone of the meeting was cordial and Putin and Biden agreed to a) restore their countries’ two respective ambassadors; b) begin negotiations on nuclear talks to potentially replace the new START treaty limiting nuclear weapons after it expires in 2026; and c) cooperate in the realm of cyber security, Arctic exploration, and preventing terrorism in Afghanistan, and Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

The Biden-Putin meeting lacked the same circus environment as in 2018 when Donald Trump was accused in the media and by Democratic Party politicians of being a traitor for meeting with Putin and hatching certain agreements and plans.

The latest meeting, however, does not herald a new détente: Biden said that “This is not a kumbaya moment,” referring to the feel-good song popular in the 1960s. “This is not about trust. This is about self-interest, and verification of self-interest.”

Failing to share a meal or take a walk with Putin, Biden refused to reconsider key U.S. policies that have resulted in the new Cold War. These include: a) the U.S. sanctions policy on Russia—which has harmed Russia and has been based on fraudulent pretexts; b) The U.S.’s pulling out of the Open Skies, Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) and Intermediate Nuclear Range Forces (INF) treaties; and c) NATO expansion.

Biden continued to antagonize Russia further by a) rebuking its human rights record and treatment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny; and b) affirming the United States’s “unwavering commitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

The latter statement insinuates that Russia violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity when in fact the U.S. was the one to violate it by providing $5 billion over a decade in support of color revolutions and regime-change efforts that culminated in the 2014 coup d’états against Russian-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych.

This coup triggered Ukraine’s civil war that drew in the Russians—in defense of two eastern provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, whose people voted to secede after the post-coup Ukrainian government tried to impose the Ukrainian language on them.

During his press conference, Putin responded to Biden’s moralistic proclamations about human rights by pointing to secret prisons run by the CIA where torture was carried out, and complained about the “bloody coup” in Ukraine in 2014, which the U.S. had instigated.

Putin also said that the U.S. supported opposition groups in Russia to “weaken the country”since it “sees Russia as “an adversary” and that Russia was not behind any cyber-attacks.

Putin further defended his government’s treatment of Alexei Navalny, stating that Navalny wanted to be arrested because he decided to return to Russia when there was a warrant out for him.

Additionally, Putin compared the arrest of protesters in Russia to the arrest of Black Lives Matter protesters and Trump supporters “expressing political demands” who stormed the U.S. Capitol on June 6^th; comparisons which Biden said were “ridiculous.”

In the latter case, rioters were [ie. Ashli Babbit] “shot on the spot, even if unarmed,” Putin said, marking the U.S. response as worse than anything Russia had done.

Ironically, while both Putin and Biden were speaking, a major maritime exercise was being carried out in the Baltic Sea involving 16 NATO countries, 60 aircraft and 4,000 military personnel.

The American aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan and several other warships were also moving into disputed waters in the South China Sea, prompting China to respond by sending fighter jets to conduct a show of force over the waters of South Taiwan.

The New York Times reported the same day that China and Russia had joined forces to challenge the U.S. in space, ushering in a new era of space competition that could match or eclipse the era of the first Cold War.

U.S. imperial drives have generally created a dangerous world environment—which Biden’s foreign policy has so far helped exacerbate. Russia and China’s alliance should prove more durable than the one established in the 1940s and 1950s—and more damaging to Washington’s global designs that appear more and more unsustainable.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Mitchell had criticized Barack Obama’s efforts in his first term to ameliorate U.S.-Russia relations and has been a strong proponent of stepping up efforts to counter Russia and China. 

Featured image: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks with U.S. President Joe Biden during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of a NATO summit at NATO headquarters in Brussels, June 14, 2021. [Source: pri.org]

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This is important right to the end. Show this to anyone who has yet to get one or both mRNA shots.

“Good doctors are doing unthinkable things like injecting biologically active messenger RNA that produces this pathogenic spike protein into pregnant women. I think when these doctors wake up up from their trance, they’re going to be shocked to think what they’ve done to people,” he said, echoing what he, and Dr. Harvey Risch, professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham during an interview last month.

“We are at over 5,000 deaths so far, as you know, and I think about 15,000 hospitalizations. In the EU it’s over 10,000 deaths. We are working with the Center for Medicaid (CMS) data, and we have a pretty good lead that the real number is tenfold.”

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video interview

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“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.

Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

Which country has conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.

What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

For example, this is the agency that used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over the injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.

This is the government’s answer to precrime: first, foster activism by stoking feelings of outrage and injustice by way of secret agents and informants; second, recruit activists to carry out a plot (secretly concocted by the government) to challenge what they see as government corruption; and finally, arrest those activists for conspiring against the government before they can actually commit a crime.

It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

Just recently, it was revealed that the FBI has been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become thieves.

For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the  safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.

This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.

Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.

The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.

In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks. As Reuters reported back in 2013:

Even as the U.S. government confronts rival powers over widespread Internet espionage, it has become the biggest buyer in a burgeoning gray market where hackers and security firms sell tools for breaking into computers. The strategy is spurring concern in the technology industry and intelligence community that Washington is in effect encouraging hacking and failing to disclose to software companies and customers the vulnerabilities exploited by the purchased hacks. That’s because U.S. intelligence and military agencies aren’t buying the tools primarily to fend off attacks. Rather, they are using the tools to infiltrate computer networks overseas, leaving behind spy programs and cyber-weapons that can disrupt data or damage systems.

As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”

In fact, the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries.

Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.

The government chose to ignore the warnings.

That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.

First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.

This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.

They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.

As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.

We’re the ones to suffer the blowback.

Blowback is a term originating from within the American Intelligence community, denoting the unintended consequences, unwanted side-effects, or suffered repercussions of a covert operation that fall back on those responsible for the aforementioned operations.

As historian Chalmers Johnson explains, “blowback is another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.”

Unfortunately, “we the people” are the ones who keep reaping what the government sows.

We’re the ones who suffer every time, directly and indirectly, from the blowback.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

We can persuade ourselves that life is still good, that America is still beautiful, and that “we the people” are still free. However, as science fiction writer Philip K. Dick warned, “Don’t believe what you see; it’s an enthralling—[and] destructive, evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear axis.”

In other words, as I point out Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all is not as it seems.

The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.

“We the people” are not free.

The government is not our friend.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Featured image is by Dave Newman | CC by 2.0

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The idea of children, including preschoolers, walking around with bacteria traps on their breathing orifices all day so shocked the conscience that last summer, a bunch of internet parodies were produced illustrating such absurdity. Then, within weeks, most local governments mandated this cruel form of child abuse for an entire year without any study of the side effects. Now a group of parents from the Gainesville, Florida, area have shown that such masks are traps for harmful bacteria that potentially make children much sicker than from COVID — the virus for which the masks were required, but failed to mitigate.

In a press release obtained by TheBlaze and posted at RationalGround.com, six Alachua County, Florida, parents reported the findings of the lab cultures of their children’s masks worn in school. The parents sent the six masks to the University of Florida’s Mass Spectrometry Research and Education Center after they were worn for five to eight hours, most during in-person schooling by children ages 6 through 11. Although many students across the country likely wore dirty masks indefinitely for numerous days, the face masks studied in this analysis were new or freshly laundered before wearing. One of the masks submitted was from an adult who wore it at work as a cosmetologist.

The resulting report found that five masks were contaminated with bacteria, parasites, and fungi, including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia-causing bacteria.

The lab used a method called proteomics to extract proteins from the masks and sequence them. The analysis detected the following 11 alarmingly dangerous pathogens on the masks:

• Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumonia)
• Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis)
• Neisseria meningitidis (meningitis, sepsis)
• Acanthamoeba polyphaga (keratitis and granulomatous amebic encephalitis)
• Acinetobacter baumanni (pneumonia, bloodstream infections, meningitis, UTIs — resistant to antibiotics)
• Escherichia coli (food poisoning)
• Borrelia burgdorferi (causes Lyme disease)
• Corynebacterium diphtheriae (diphtheria)
• Legionella pneumophila (Legionnaires’ disease)
• Staphylococcus pyogenes serotype M3 (severe infections — high morbidity rates)
• Staphylococcus aureus (meningitis, sepsis)

“Half of the masks were contaminated with one or more strains of pneumonia-causing bacteria,” according to the release. “One-third were contaminated with one or more strains of meningitis-causing bacteria. One-third were contaminated with dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. In addition, less dangerous pathogens were identified, including pathogens that can cause fever, ulcers, acne, yeast infections, strep throat, periodontal disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and more.”

For a control, the parents submitted a T-shirt worn by one of the children at school and unworn masks. No pathogens were found on the controls.

Obviously, the naysayers will immediately jump on this and criticize it as being a rudimentary study and small sample size. But that is the entire point. Of course, this issue needs further study. But why has this not been done over the course of the entire year by our government or any well-funded institution? How can we mandate such draconian policies without studying the side effects, including the spread of pathogens? Why is this left to helpless parents trying to raise awareness of these concerns?

It’s not like these concerns are novel. On March 8, 2020, Dr. Fauci told “60 Minutes” that masks can only block large droplets, they give a false sense of security, and they cause people to get more germs on their hands by fiddling with them. Several weeks later, Surgeon General Jerome Adams punctuated this point about the counterproductivity of wearing masks in public. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on March 31, Adams said that based on a study that shows medical students who wear masks touch their faces 23 times more often, one has to assume that “wearing a mask improperly can actually increase your risk of getting disease.”

A 2014 study of hospital workers wearing surgical masks in a Bangkok hospital found their masks to be saturated with Staphylococcus aureus (found on some of the masks in the Alachua study) and the fungus Aspergillus. Another study of hospital workers in China from 2019 observed that after more than six hours of use, masks worn by medical personnel also contained viruses, including adenovirus, bocavirus, respiratory syncytial virus, and influenza viruses. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to hypothesize that a warm and humid microclimate cultivated by a mask is going to serve as an incubator for all sorts of pathogens. Not surprisingly, studies have shown that pathogen density on masks grows exponentially after two hours of use.

To this day, Fauci and CDC researchers have never answered how those concerns were no longer valid after their political U-turn on masks, given the terrible conditions with which we’ve witnessed the entire country wearing and reusing masks. The same reason why Fauci said last summer they never planned to embark on a randomized controlled trial of the efficacy of masks is likely why they never studied the side effects of masks either. They didn’t want to discover the truth that they themselves originally understood.

These findings are important for two reasons. First, there is a need to ensure that mask mandates are never implemented again. The Boston Globe is already advocating their use for the flu season. Second, as much as the mask mandate has ended for most consumers, workers in many professions are still required to wear them for hours on end without regard for the hazards they pose.

A Florida appeals court has already ruled that the mask mandate in Alachua County is presumptively unconstitutional because it violates bodily autonomy. The risk of masks cultivating and spreading other pathogens is just another reason why something this personal to the body must remain a personal choice.

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In a newly released book, members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior, a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in the U.K., admit government is using fear to control and manipulate the population

SPI-B, which advocated for the use of fear messaging, now says it was unethical, totalitarian and a regrettable mistake

Aside from the barrage of bad-news-only data — which was heavily manipulated in a variety of ways — fear and anxiety are also generated by keeping you confused

Giving out contradictory recommendations is being done on purpose, to keep you psychologically vulnerable. By layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, you are easily manipulated

Government’s reliance on behavioral psychology didn’t just happen as a result of the pandemic. These tactics have been used for years, and are increasing

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Governments are using fear to control and manipulate their citizens. That has now been admitted by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K. And they should know, because they advocated for it, and now say it was a regrettable mistake. As reported by The Telegraph, May 14, 2021:¹

“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behavior during the COVID pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian.’ Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s COVID-19 response.

SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from COVID-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’

Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: ‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.’”

Psychological Warfare Is Real

The Telegraph quotes several of the SPI-B members, all of whom are also quoted in the newly released book, “A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” written by Laura Dodsworth:²

“One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: ‘In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.

The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared’ …

One warned that ‘people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise … We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in’ …

Another member of SPI-B said they were ‘stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology’ during the pandemic, and that ‘psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them.’

Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the COVID Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: ‘If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become. If we’re being really honest, do I fear that government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.’”

The Manufacture of Fear

For nearly a year and a half, governments around the world, with few exceptions, have fed their citizens a steady diet of frightening news. For months on end, you couldn’t turn on the television without facing a tickertape detailing the number of hospitalizations and deaths.

Even when it became clear that people weren’t really dying in excessive numbers, the mainstream media fed us continuous updates on the growing number of “cases,” without ever putting such figures into context or explaining that the vast majority were false positives.

Information that would have balanced out the bad news — such as recovery rates and just how many so-called “cases” actually weren’t, because they never had a single symptom — were censored and suppressed.

They also refused to put any of the data into context, such as reviewing whether the death toll actually differed significantly from previous years. Instead, each new case was treated as an emergency and a sign of catastrophic doom.

Aside from the barrage of bad-news-only data — which, by the way, was heavily manipulated in a variety of ways — fear and anxiety are also generated by keeping you confused. According to Dodsworth, giving out contradictory recommendations and vague instructions is being done intentionally, to keep you psychologically vulnerable.

“When you create a state of confusion, people become ever more reliant on the messaging. Instead of feeling confident about making decisions, they end up waiting for instructions from the Government,” she said in a May 20, 2021, interview on the Planet Normal podcast.³

An example provided by Dodsworth are the pandemic measures implemented over Christmas 2020:

“Family Christmases were on, then off, then back on, then off again. You have got someone tightening the screw, then loosening the screw, then tightening it again. It’s like a torture scenario.”

But that’s not all. As explained by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, by layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, they are easily manipulated. I have no doubt driving people into a state where logic and reason no longer registers is the whole point behind much of the conflicting information we’re given.

The Fear Factory

In her book, Dodsworth details a number of branches of the British government that are using psychological warfare methods in their interaction with the public. In addition to the SPI-B, there’s the:⁴

According to Dodsworth, there are many others. In her book, she claims at least 10 different government departments in the U.K. are working with “behavioral insights teams” to manipulate the public.

We’re Just Seeing It Now

Importantly, government’s reliance on behavioral psychology didn’t just happen as a result of the pandemic. These tactics have been used for years, for myriad PR purposes, and while the pandemic may be winding down, Dodsworth warns that more and more behavioral scientists are being hired:⁸

“It’s growing and growing. Right now, I feel we are in a maelstrom of nudge,” she says. “In the past, there have been calls to consult the public on the use of behavioral psychology, and those calls have come from the behavioral scientists themselves. And yet it hasn’t happened. We haven’t yet been consulted on the use of subconscious techniques which effectively strip away our choices …

I fervently hope this book [‘The State of Fear’] is actually going to inspire a much-needed conversation about the use of fear, not just in the epidemic, but the way we use behavioral psychology overall.

It’s not just a genie that has been let out the bottle. It’s like we’ve unleashed a Hydra and you can keep chopping its head off, but they keep employing more of these behavioral scientists throughout different government departments. It’s very much how the Government now does business. It’s the business of fear …

I think ultimately people don’t want to be manipulated. People don’t enjoy being hoodwinked and they don’t want to live in a state of fear. We maybe need to be a bit bolder about standing up more quickly when something is not right.”

Fear Is Contagious

Fear has long been the tool of tyrants. It’s profoundly effective, in part because it spreads from person to person, just like a virus. The contagion of fear is the topic of the Nova “Gross Science” video above, originally aired in mid-February 2017. Among animals, emotional distress responses are telegraphed through pheromones emitted through various bodily secretions such as sweat and saliva.

As explained in the video, when encountering what is perceived as a serious threat, animals with strong social structures, such as bees and ants, will release alarm pheromone. The scent attracts other members of the hive or colony to collectively address the threat.

Humans appear to have a very similar capability. When scared or stressed, humans produce chemosignals, and while you may not consciously recognize the smell of fear or stress, it can have a subconscious impact, making you feel afraid or stressed too.

Humans also tend to mimic the feelings of those around us, and this is yet another way through which an emotion can spread like wildfire through a community or an entire nation — for better or worse. Behavioral psychologists refer to this as “emotional contagion,” and it works both positive and negative emotions.

For example, if you’re greeted by a smile when meeting someone, you’re likely to smile back, mimicking their facial expression and behavior. If someone looks at you with an angry scowl, you’re likely to suddenly feel angry too, even if you weren’t before and have no subjective reason to — other than that someone looked at you the “wrong” way.

However, while both positive and negative emotions are contagious, certain emotions spread faster and easier than others. Research cited in the Nova report found that “high arousal” emotions such as awe (high-arousal positive emotion) and anger or anxiety (high-arousal negative emotion) are more “viral” than low-arousal emotions such as happiness or sadness.

The Nova report also points out that researchers have been mining Twitter and other social media data to better understand how emotions are spread, and the types of messages that spread the fastest. However, they ignored the primary culprits, Google and Facebook both of which steal your private data and use it to manipulate your behavior.

At the time, in 2017, they said this information was being harvested and used to develop ways to avoid public messaging that might incite mass panic. But the COVID-19 pandemic suggests the complete opposite. Clearly, behavioral experts have been busy developing ways to generate maximum fear, anxiety and panic.

How to Inoculate Yourself Against Negative Contagion

At the end of the report, Nova cites research detailing three effective ways to “immunize” yourself against negative emotional contagions.

1. Distract yourself from the source of the negative contagion — In the case of pandemic fearporn, that might entail not reading or listening to mainstream media news that for the past year have proven themselves incapable of levelheadedness.
2. Project your own positive emotions back at the source of the negative contagion — If talking to someone who is fearful, they might end up “catching” your optimism rather than the other way around.
3. Speak up — If someone is unwittingly spreading “negative vibes,” telling them so might help them realize what they’re doing. (This won’t work if the source is knowingly and purposely spreading fear or anxiety though.)

Pandemic of Panic

In a recent Tweet,⁹ Ivor Cummins, a biochemical engineer who researches the root causes of chronic disease, shared a short video detailing the root cause of the panic pandemic. Why has the whole world seemingly gone mad from fear?

As explained by Cummins, the outsized level of public fear is the result of a catastrophic feedback loop system where political and mainstream media drivers are pushing fear onto the public, and public fears are then feeding the media (fear sells) and pushing politicians to take action, which generates more fear messages. And so, round and round it goes.

However, at a certain point, this engine of fear starts losing steam. To keep the pandemic pandemonium going, academics bearing doomsday predictions were brought in to scare politicians and provide more fearporn fodder for the media.

Aiding the academic drivers are unelected, undemocratic organizations such as the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Big Pharma (just to name a few), all of which support these academic doomsday prophets from behind the scenes or openly promote them.

All of the organizations Cummins mentions are part of a technocratic, unelected elite that are making decisions for the entire world. If we were to somehow shut down this secondary engine that feeds into the first, the global insanity would probably start to abate.

The question is, can that be done? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has likened our current predicament to “an apocalyptical battle,”¹⁰ as we’re facing formidable undemocratic forces with seemingly unlimited financial resources, political influence and the ability to control the global landscape of communications.

We’re facing a globalist agenda that ultimately seeks to gain total control by stripping away human rights and the rights of countries, and they’re using “biosecurity” as justification for it all.

Exposing the Grand Plan

As explained by journalist James Corbett in his October 16, 2020, Corbett Report,¹¹ the Great Reset is a new “social contract” that ties every person to it through an electronic ID linked to your bank account and health records, and a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life.

It’s about getting rid of capitalism and free enterprise, and replacing them with “sustainable development” and “stakeholder capitalism” — terms that belie their nefarious, antihumanity intents. As noted in the book, “Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order”:¹²

“… Sustainable Development is Technocracy … The Sustainable Development movement has taken careful steps to conceal its true identity, strategy and purpose, but once the veil is lifted, you will never see it any other way. Once its strategy is unmasked, everything else will start to make sense.”

In her blog post “The Great Reset for Dummies,” journalist Tessa Lena summarizes the purpose behind the call for a global “reset”:¹³

“The mathematical reason for the Great Reset is that thanks to technology, the planet has gotten small, and the infinite expansion economic model is bust — but obviously, the super wealthy want to continue staying super wealthy, and so they need a miracle, another bubble, plus a surgically precise system for managing what they perceive as ‘their limited resources.’

Thus, they desperately want a bubble providing new growth out of thin air — literally — while simultaneously they seek to tighten the peasants’ belts, an effort that starts with ‘behavioral modification,’ a.k.a. resetting the western peasants’ sense of entitlement to high life standards and liberties … The practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions:

One, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology).

And two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest ‘science.’

The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital … precision — all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability.”

These new global “assets” can also be turned into brand-new financial instruments that can then be traded. For example, Zero-Budget Natural Farming is now being introduced in India. This is a brand-new concept of farming in which farmers must trade the carbon rate in their soil on the global market if they want to make a living. They’ll get no money at all for the crops they actually grow.

The Pandemic Has Been a Psychological Operation

There’s not a single area of life that is left out of this Great Reset plan. The planned reform will affect everything from government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing and even how we interact with our fellow human beings in general.

It goes without saying that to radically transform every last part of society has its challenges. No person in their right mind would agree to it if aware of the details of the whole plan. So, to roll this out, they had to use psychological manipulation, and fear is the most effective tool for inducing compliance there is.

The following graphic illustrates the central role of fearmongering for the successful rollout of the Great Reset.

Social Engineering Is Central to Technocratic Rule

Technocracy is inherently a technological society run through social engineering. Fear is but one manipulation tool. The focus on “science” is another. Anytime someone dissents, they’re simply accused of being “anti-science,” and any science that conflicts with the status quo is declared “debunked science.”

The only science that matters is whatever the technocrats deem to be true, no matter how much evidence there is against it. We’ve seen this first-hand during this pandemic, as Big Tech has censored and banned anything going against the opinions of the WHO, which is just another cog in the technocratic machine.

If we allow this censorship to continue, the end result will be nothing short of devastating. So, we simply must keep pushing for transparency, truth, medical freedom, personal liberty and the right to privacy.

Recognizing that the fear we feel has been carefully manufactured can help free us from its grip, and once we — en masse — no longer believe the lies being put before us, the engine driving the fear and panic will eventually run out of steam.

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Notes

^1, 2 The Telegraph, May 14, 2021 (Archived)

^3, 4, 8 The Telegraph May 20, 2021 (Archived)

⁵ Bi.team

⁶ PR Week October 17, 2018

⁷ Data Compliant, Fighting Fake Science

⁹ Twitter Ivor Cummins May 15, 2021

¹⁰ Children’s Health Defense August 28, 2020

¹¹ Corbett Report October 16, 2020

¹² Geopolitics August 29, 2020

¹³ Tessa.substack.com October 28, 2020

All images in this article are from Mercola

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

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Compiled by Dr. Gary G. Kohls

From Free Press

“There are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” – Mark Twain

It has long been known that benign coronavirus species are capable of causing 15 – 30 % of common colds (usual symptoms: runny nose, cough, sore throat). This reality was recently mentioned by an internationally-famous virologist from Germany, in an interview where he also admitted that laboratory confirmation of COVID-19 is next to impossible given the high incidence of both false-positive “COVID-19” PCR swab tests and false positive “COVID-19” serum antibody tests.

Apparently, neither test seems to be able to distinguish between the benign coronaviruses that can cause common colds and the more serious coronavirus that actually causes COVID-19!

Dr Fauci’s ignorance of (or his ”conflict of interest-generated” failure to reveal) that fact justified his oft-repeated assertions in his endless media rounds and White House press conferences prior to the ill-fated economic shut-down:

“I think we should be overly aggressive (even if we) get criticized for over-reacting. I think Americans should be prepared … to hunker down.”

Anthony Fauci, as everybody should know, is the long-time director of the NIH’s NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). He is, significantly, also a holder of many HIV vaccine patents and the holder of the patent for the Sanofi-Pasteur Corporation’s Dengue virus vaccine that recently killed 600 Philippine children.)

Another expert, Dr Christian Drosten, pictured on the right, is the Director of Berlin University’s Institute of Virology. He is known at “Germany’s real face of the coronavirus crisis”.

The quotes below came during an interview that Dr Drosten made last month, in which he revealed that the benign coronavirus that causes the common cold cannot be differentiated from the actual Covid-19 virus by the PCR test kits, over 200 of which are currently in development by profiteering medical device companies!

The interview can be read here.

Here are a few of the pertinent quotes:

“Some virologists now assume that there are people who have become immune to COVID-19 unnoticed because they have had a relatively harmless corona cold in the past.” 

“It is quite the case that we expect that there may be an unnoticed background immunity – due to cold coronaviruses, because they are related to the SARS CoV-2 virus in a certain way.”

“15 percent of common colds are caused by well-known coronaviruses. These are so similar to the current (COVID-19) virus that they can even cause false positive antibody tests.”

“It could be that certain people who had a cold virus a year or two ago are protected in an unprecedented way.”

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COVID-19’s Phony Death Numbers

Covid-19’s Phony Death Numbers are the justification for unprecedented lockdown measures, euthanasia of the elderly, social distancing, detrimental masking, possible mandatory vaccines of dubious effect, all of which are causing the destruction of life and livelihood. But, why do this? And whose interests are being served?

By F. William Engdahl

Not only are the coronavirus models being used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and most national health agencies based on highly dubious methodologies, and not only are the tests being used of wildly different quality-only indirectly confirming evidence of a possible COVID-19 infection-but now the actual designations of deaths related to COVID-19 are being revealed to be equally problematic for a variety of reasons. It gives alarming food for thought as to the wisdom of deliberately putting most of the world’s people–and with it the world economy–into Gulag-style lockdown on the argument that it is necessary to contain deaths and prevent overloading of hospital emergency services.

When we take a closer look at the definitions used in various countries for “death related to COVID-19” we get a far different picture of what is claimed to be the deadliest plague to threaten mankind since the 1918 “Spanish” Flu.

The USA and CDC Definitions

Right now the USA is said to be the nation with the largest number of COVID-19 deaths, as of this writing, with media reporting some 68,000 deaths. Here is where it gets very dodgy.

The US Government agency responsible for making the cause of death tally for the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is making huge changes in how they count so-called novel coronavirus deaths.

As of May 5, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the CDC in Atlanta, the central agency recording causes of death nationwide, reported 39,910 COVID-19 deaths. A footnote defines this as “Deaths with confirmed or presumed COVID-19”.

How a doctor makes the “presumed” judgment leaves huge latitude to the hospital and health professionals. Although the coronavirus tests are known to be subject to false results, CDC states that even where no tests have been made a doctor can “presume” COVID-19. Useful to note for perspective is the number of USA deaths recorded from all causes during the same period of February 1 through May 2, that was 751,953!

Now it gets even more murky. The CDC posted this notice: “As of April 14, 2020, CDC case counts and death counts will include both confirmed and probable cases and deaths.” From that time the number of so-called COVID-19 deaths in USA has exploded in an alarming manner – or so it would appear. On that day, April 14, New York City’s coronavirus death toll was revised with 3,700 fatalities added, with the provision that the count now included “people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have it.”

The CDC now defines “confirmed” as “confirmatory laboratory evidence for COVID-19,” which as we noted elsewhere included tests of dubious precision. Then they define “probable” as “with no confirmatory laboratory testing performed for COVID-19.” Just a guess of the doctor in charge.

Now leaving aside the major discrepancy between the CDC headline COVID-19 deaths as of May 5 of 68,279 and their detailed total of 39,910 deaths for the same period, we find another problem. Hospitals and doctors are being told to list COVID-19 as cause of death even if, say, a patient age 83 with pre-existing diabetes or cardiac issues or pneumonia dies with or without COVID-19 tests.

The CDC advises, “In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID cannot be made but is “suspected” or “likely” (e.g. the circumstances are compelling with a reasonable degree of certainty) it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.’”

This opens the door ridiculously wide for abuse of coronavirus death numbers in the United States.

A Big Money Incentive

A provision in the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, gives a major incentive for hospitals in the US, most all of them private, for-profit businesses, to deem newly-admitted patients as “presumed COVID-19.” By this simple method the hospital then qualifies for a substantially larger payment from the government Medicare insurance, the national insurance for those over 65. The word “presumed” is not scientific, not at all precise but very tempting for hospitals concerned about their income in this crisis.

Dr Summer McGhee, Dean of the School of Health Sciences at the University of New Haven, notes that,

“The CARES Act authorized a temporary 20 percent increase in reimbursements from Medicare for COVID-19 patients…” He added that, as a result, “hospitals that get a lot of COVID-19 patients also get extra money from the government.”

Then, according to a Minnesota medical doctor, Scott Jensen, also a State Senator, if that COVID-19 designated patient is put on a ventilator, even if only presumed to have COVID-19, the hospital can get reimbursed three times the sum from the Medicare.

Dr Jensen told a national TV interviewer,

“Right now, Medicare is determining that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you get $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator you get $39,000, three times as much.”

Little wonder that state governors, such as Massachusetts’ Governor Charlie Baker, suddenly began back-dating causes of death (totals back to March 30, significantly inflating COVID death numbers, or that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo began demanding 30,000 ventilators and emergency equipment around the same early April time, equipment that was not needed.

In short, the COVID-19 death statistics in the USA are highly dubious for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the huge financial incentives to hospital administrators who had been told to cancel all other operations to make extra room for a “predicted” flood of coronavirus illnesses. That “rising” death toll said to be “COVID-19-or presumed to be-COVID-19” brings on the decisions to lock down the economy and in effect create an economic pandemic of unparalleled dimensions.

The lack of uniformly agreed tests and the inaccuracies of many tests used, as well as the extremely doubtful criteria for declaring a cause of death as being “from” COVID-19 suggests that it is well past time to re-examine the unprecedented lockdown measures, social distancing, masking, possible mandatory vaccines of unproven effect, all of which are producing personal, social and economic devastation.

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De-mystifying the Misleading COVID-19 Statistics

Understanding the Statistics: Provisional Death Counts and COVID-19

“There are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” – Mark Twain

Part Three: The CDC’s National Vital Statistics System  is where the numbers come from

Provisional death counts deliver our most comprehensive picture of lives lost to COVID-19.

These estimates are based on death certificates, which are the most reliable source of data and contain information not available anywhere else, including comorbid conditions, race and ethnicity, and place of death.

How it Works

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) uses incoming data from death certificates to produce provisional COVID-19 death counts. These include deaths occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

COVID-19 deaths are identified using a new ICD–10 code.

When COVID-19 is reported as a cause of death – or when it is listed as a “probable” or “presumed” cause— the death is coded as U07.1. This can include cases with or without laboratory confirmation.

Why These Numbers Are Different

Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. Our counts often track 1–2 weeks behind other data for a number of reasons:

Death certificates take time to be completed. There are many steps involved in completing and submitting a death certificate. Waiting for test results can create additional delays. States report at different rates.

Currently, 63% of all U.S. deaths are reported within 10 days of the date of death, but there is significant variation among jurisdictions.

It takes extra time to code COVID-19 deaths. While 80% of deaths are electronically processed and coded by NCHS within minutes, most deaths from COVID-19 must be coded manually, which takes an average of 7 days. Other reporting systems use different definitions or methods for counting deaths.

Things to Know About the Data

Provisional counts are not final and are subject to change. Counts from previous weeks are continually revised as additional records are received and processed. 

Provisional data are not yet complete. Counts will not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for more recent periods. However, we can estimate how complete our numbers are by looking at the average number of deaths reported in previous years.

Death counts should not be compared across jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions report deaths on a daily basis, while others report deaths weekly or monthly. In addition, vital record reporting may also be affected or delayed by COVID-19 related response activities.

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Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Brussels on Monday reminds us once again of what a hoax the United States had perpetrated on the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 by assuring him that the western alliance would expand “not one inch eastward” once Moscow allowed German Unification and disbanded the Warsaw Pact.

Briefing Book #613 dated December 12, 2017 at the US National Security Archive located at the George Washington University in Washington, DC says as follows: 

“U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. 

“The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.

“The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” read more 

It is this cold-blooded treachery and back-stabbing by the Bill Clinton Administration that rankles most in the Russian mind today, as the NATO enters the Black Sea and slouches toward Russia’s western borders. read more…

Suffice to say, Washington’s post-Cold War diplomacy in Europe has met with astounding success. The heart of the matter is that today the US critically depends on NATO: 

• To exercise its global hegemony; 
• To provide a captive market for export of hundreds of billions of dollars worth American weaponry; 
• To pin down major European powers (especially Germany) to an alliance system that puts brakes on their strategic autonomy and pursuit of independent foreign policies; 
• To gain “strategic depth” to undertake military operations globally as part of an alliance system rather than blatantly as an interventionist power;
• To justify the deployment of thousands of American forces and store nuclear missiles in Europe; and, 
• To cement the US’ dominance of the transatlantic system. 

The NATO brings to mind the classic paradigm of someone all dressed up and nowhere to go. It has to constantly reinvent a reason for its existence. Russia has been providing that reason — although, Moscow has no intentions of capturing territories beyond its borders. Of course, there is no question of a war between the NATO and Russia, either, since the latter is a thermonuclear power that can destroy the US many times over. 

The NATO summit’s final communique issued yesterday once again puts Russia on the alliance’s crosshairs. It develops the theme in six paragraphs that are based on a self-serving narrative (Para. 9 to 15). And the alliance’s entire build up for the foreseeable future devolves upon tackling this perceived “Russian threat.” 

NATO’s new narrative 

Meanwhile, the Brussels communique for the first time in the alliance’s history also brings in China’s rise as posing a potential challenge. The US has been pressing for this in the recent years and has succeeded in including some references to China in the communique. (Paras 56-57.) The communique makes the following points with regard to China: 

• “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security”; 
• NATO is concerned over China’s “coercive policies”;
• China is “rapidly expanding” its nuclear capabilities and is developing “a larger number of sophisticated delivery systems to establish a nuclear triad”; 
• China is “opaque in implementing its military modernisation and its publicly declared military-civil fusion strategy”; 
• China has military cooperation with Russia and has participated in in Russian exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area; and,  
• NATO is concerned with China’s “frequent lack of transparency and use of disinformation”; and, China is not upholding its international commitments and acting “responsibly in the international system, including in the space, cyber, and maritime domains, in keeping with its role as a major power.” 

But, typically, the communique softens the blow by dissimulating a conciliatory attitude, saying NATO maintains “a constructive dialogue” and welcomes “opportunities to engage” with China in information exchange on respective policies and activities, to enhance awareness and discuss potential disagreements.

The communique urges China “to engage meaningfully in dialogue, confidence-building, and transparency measures regarding its nuclear capabilities and doctrine.  Reciprocal transparency and understanding would benefit both NATO and China.”  

Make no mistake, this is Washington’s hand writing the NATO communique. Hence this mixed message. The fact of the matter is that many European allies would feel uneasy. For, China poses no military threat to the western alliance. The Europeans visualise a challenge from China largely in the economic sphere — trade, investment, technology, setting up global standards and so on. 

China appears to have anticipated the US’ shenanigans. China’s mission to the EU promptly reacted with facts and figures, pointing out that in 2021, Beijing’s military spending stood at $209 billion in comparison with the alliance’s $1.17 trillion, which is over half of the entire global military expenditure and 5.6 times that of China. The statement said, “We will unswervingly defend our sovereignty and development interests, and keep a close eye on NATO’s strategic adjustments and policies toward China.” 

An editorial in the Global Times said, “This NATO summit can be seen as a key point in the US and Europe’s attitude toward China in the security arena. Washington has raised the curtain for a political mobilisation campaign to use the NATO bloc to carry out strategic competition with China.

“The US wants to create a narrative that equates its own hegemony to the collective strategic advantage of the West and form a consensus among 30 countries. As long as NATO countries are bound by a common hatred for China, the interest links between Western countries and China will lose its moral basis and the US could force small European countries to serve its China strategy, politically exploiting them for US interests.” 

QUAD is a shaggy-dog story 

Beijing’s diplomatic countermove will be to strengthen China-European Union cooperation. It works to China’s advantage that the US does not have the sort of clout to dictate policies to the EU as it has on the NATO platform. (German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already counselled caution about NATO closing the door on China.)   

What is Washington’s strategy in creating a China vector for NATO, which was in the first instance formed for the security of the Euro-Atlantic space?

Here the parallels are striking with the mid-1990s when the US turned its back on the assurances given to Gorbachev and proceeded with the NATO expansion in anticipation of a Russian resurgence in a conceivable future. 

The US anticipates that within the coming decade, China must be stopped from overtaking it as the number one global power. The US needs an alliance system to cope with China’s emergence. The QUAD is a shaggy-dog story, in reality. 

Second, to assuage the Russian apprehensions regarding the NATO’s eastward expansion, Bill Clinton administration had offered to Boris Yeltsin that Moscow would be consulted on the NATO plans. Thus was born the NATO-Russia Council. But it was an empty gesture as the US anyway went ahead and did whatever it wanted with NATO expansion. 

Similarly, the NATO claim that it has a “constructive dialogue” with China is sheer sophistry. The NATO will go through the charade of a dialogue for a while to calm Chinese nerves before taking the gloves off within 2-3 years at the most.

Third, NATO’s expansion in the 1990s was helpful for Washington to create a window to forge a unified strategic posturing with European allies vis-a-vis Russia. Similarly, the US has begun working hard for the past year or two to get the European allies on board its strategy toward China. The NATO becomes the hub where this work in progress is best handled. 

Fourth, the NATO expansion in the 1990s inevitably complicated Russia’s aspirations to become part of a new common security space between Vancouver and Vladivostok. On the contrary, the US secured a say in Russia’s bilateral relations with the NATO countries. 

Similar US strategy is at work here to complicate China’s relations with its European partners. Already, the US could block its major NATO allies from partnering with China in 5G technology. The US aims to vanquish China’s BRI projects in Europe on security grounds. 

Equally, per NATO guidelines, China can be eventually denied access to western technologies altogether. The point is, while the 30 heads of state and government have expressed concern over China’s “coercive policies”, “opaque ways”, its “use of disinformation” and have upfront called on Beijing to “uphold its international commitments and to act responsibly in the international system.” 

Whither ‘Asian Century’? 

Finally, as in the case with Russia, the US is pushing China toward an infructuous arms race. Of course, this creates the rationale for increased defence spending by NATO countries, which would in turn promote exports of US military technology to Europe. 

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II are expected to sell in the hundreds, if not thousands, to the US’ allies through 2035. Already, the planned initial buyers include Japan (147 aircraft), South Korea (80) and Australia (upto 100). 

The NATO is a lucrative hunting ground for the American arms industry. The bigger the NATO’s threat perceptions, the greater the scope for US exports of weaponry.

In the final analysis, NATO’s naming of China as a systemic challenge would have profound implications for international security. Prima facie, it will draw China and Russia even closer together. 

As the US strategic containment of China intensifies, Beijing will come under pressure to boost its deterrence and rapidly increase the number of commissioned nuclear warheads and the DF-41s, the strategic missiles that are capable of long-range strikes and have high-survivability.

China will be on guard as regards its sovereignty and will prepare for an intense showdown. Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Global Times, wrote recently, “In this scenario, a large number of Dongfeng-41, and JL-2 and JL-3 (both intercontinental-range submarine-launched ballistic missile) will form the pillar of our strategic will. The number of China’s nuclear warheads must reach the quantity that makes US elites shiver should they entertain the idea of engaging in a military confrontation with China.” 

There is an African proverb, ‘When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.’ To be sure, the Asian region is becoming the theatre where the US-China tensions will play out. Inevitably, this would cast shadows on the region’s extraordinary prospects for growth and development. The prospects for the ‘Asian Century’ may diminish. And that can only work splendidly for the US, but Asian countries themselves will be the poorer for it.

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Israel’s “change government”, which brought down 15-year Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, will struggle to be an instrument of change because its eight diverse components disagree on how to handle core issues.  On Palestine, this government will almost certainly continue Netanyahu’s policies of colonisation and repression because any attempt to effect change on this existential issue would blow up the coalition. Its partners extend from parties representing the far right through centre right, the left and Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennet — who heads an ultranationalist religious party with only six seats in the 120 member Knesset — is a hardliner on Israel’s colonial enterprise and rejects any Palestinian entity in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

His unlikely partner for several years of the engineer of the disparate coalition, Yair Lapid.  He is regarded as a centrist on Israel’s political spectrum which has shifted right-wards since the Likud took power in 1977. If the coalition survives until September 2023, alternate prime minister Lapid is slated to take over the top job. He will hardly seek to attempt any ”changes” that will prevent him from taking over.

The third prime mover of the coalition is Avigdor Lieberman, head of the secular right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party, who has been determined to bring down Netanyahu for several years.  He has served in several Israeli governments as foreign and defence minister and is to assume the influential post of finance minister.  He has expropriated the post of chairman of the Knesset finance committee for a member of his faction.

Two ministers were in Netanyahu’s most recent Cabinet. Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz, retains the defence portfolio, and New Hope founder Gedeon Sa’ar, the justice ministry. Both are deputy prime ministers.

All five have served under Netanyahu and broken with him personally due to his authoritarianism, failure to honour commitments, and arrogance, rather than his policies.

Ministries assigned to the centre-right Labour Party and leftist Meretz cover areas where there can be moderate change on the domestic front while the Ra’am, the Israeli’s Palestinian  fundamentalist partyhas not claimed a ministry but chairmanship of key Knesset committees.

Ra’am is the first Palestinian party to participate in an Israeli government although there have been Palestinian ministers belonging to other parties in government. Until now only Zionist Jewish parties have been at the heart of the ruling establishment. Ra’am’s head Mansour Abbas has secured promises of benefits for Israel’s 20 per cent neglected and marginalised Palestinian minority, including funding for municipalities, schools, and public services, increased policing to fight a spike in crime, and an end to Israeli bullying of bedouin.

While Abbas may have bought benefits for Palestinian Israelis, many if not most are uncertain about Ra’am putting in power a coalition, heavily weighted in favour of the right. During the Netanyahu years, they have forged increasingly close connections with Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, rejected being called “Arab {rather than Palestinian] Israelis” and  reclaimed their Palestinian identity.

Furthermore, the “change government” will have to deliver some if not major change.  World public opinion has been alienated by the Netanyahu era, moved away from regarding Israel as a special case entitled to impunity over its never-ending occupation, land grab, harsh treatment of Palestinians, and attempts to drag the US and the West into a war with Iran.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has launched investigations into alleged Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.  The UN Human Rights Council has set up a permanent commission to probe Israel’s May onslaught on Gaza and other actions against the Palestinians.  Amnesty International has dared to apply the word “apartheid” to the system of governance Israel imposes on theWest Bank.

“The perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity have evaded justice for more than half a century. An ICC investigation marks a long-overdue step towards justice for victims,  and is a chance to end the cycle of impunity that is at the heart of the human rights crisis in the [occupied territories],” said Saleh Higazi, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Last month, Ireland’s parliament adopted a motion branding Israeli settlements and  policies in the occupied West Bank  “de facto annexation”. This amounts to the most forthright  characterisation of the situation in the West Bank by any European Union legislature.  Ireland is not alone.

Democratic Party members of the US Congress have castigated Israel and urged the US government to suspend $3.8 billion in military funding for Israel as well as millions proposed to resupply its “Iron Dome” system which has protected Israel from rockets from Gaza while Israeli warplanes bomb the unprotected coastal strip with a population of two million Palestinians.

Having ignored developments on the international scene for most of his latest 12-years in power Netanyahu continues to behave as usual — hectoring opponents and accusing “change” of  betraying Israel and risking its security.  He enjoys the support of his Likud Party, the largest in the Knesset, and the hard right nationalist and religious parties.  However, a slender majority of Israelis are fed up with him.  They have shifted to parties represented in the coalition —  mainly because they are weary and wary of Netanyahu — and resent his drive to exploit Israeli divisions in order to evade prison for breach of trust, fraud and bribery in his ongoing trial in a Jerusalem court.  Now that he is not prime minister he could be the second Israeli premier to do jail time — after fellow Likud leader Ehud Olmert.

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From 1950 through May 23, 2021, the mandate of the UN Security Council has been either violated or ignored, contributing to the gross destabilization of the world, and the Security Council has authorized four virtually genocidal wars through resolutions based upon fabricated justifications.  The Security Council supported war on the DPRK in 1950, which continues in some form up to the present, and which obliterated the DPRK between 1950 through 1953, provoking the People’s Republic of China to intervene. China, at that time was not a member of the United Nations. 

Resolution 678 in 1990,  led to the NATO bombing campaign that destroyed the infrastructure necessary to sustain human life in Iraq, reducing that previously functioning progressive state to rubble, and a current incubator of terrorism. 

Resolution 1973 quickly adopted in 2011, led to the NATO bombing campaign that destroyed the infrastructure necessary to sustain human life in Libya, formerly a progressive, functioning state, now an incubator of terrorism.   Most recently the Security Council failed to produce even a paltry press statement calling for a cease fire in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, and by its inaction helped make possible the destruction of the electricity system and the sewerage system of Gaza, reducing much of the city to rubble in May, 2021.  Of course the human deaths were more than 200 in Gaza, and approximately 40 in Israel.

On June 8, 2021 at the Security Council, Russian Deputy Permanent Representative Gennady Kuzmin stated to the Estonian President of the Council, at a meeting in connection with the consideration of the report of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals:

“It is noticeable with what elated mood you spoke today, with what enthusiasm you reported on your achievements.  How they were in a hurry to share the news about the conviction of another high-ranking Serb.  The announced verdict against Ratko Mladic is a continuation of the politicized line set by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.  An iconic stain on the reputation now of the Residual Mechanism.  …For nearly 30 years, almost a third of a century, the biased and costly flywheel of the Hague justice systematically grinds the fates of the participants in the Balkan war….The war that destroyed the once united state – Yugoslavia….How easy it is, given impunity, NATO countries can step over the UN Charter and start a military operation in a third country.  Has anyone been responsible for the massive aerial bombing of civilian targets, incl. in the city limits of Belgrade and other large cities, for the killing and wounding of thousands of civilians, including journalists at the Belgrade TV Center and the Chinese Embassy?  Why at one time he chose to close his eyes to the obvious crimes of the Kosovar Albanians, and now their cases are being dealt with by the Special Court of Kosovo?”

“The ICTY went down in history as an instrument of vengeance, and not as an organ of justice.  The ICTY and the Residual Mechanism, alas, did not become institutions of reconciliation in the heterogeneous Balkan society.  The reason for this is the lack of justice in the decisions made, attacks on one side of the conflict and the silence of the sins of others.”

On September 29, 2020 “Euronews.com” published a lengthy article entitled:

“Leaked Files, Organ Removal and Irrepressible Anger:  What’s behind the Kosovo war crimes probe?”…

”The leaked files, which apparently named President Hashim Thaci and other leading KLA figures as well as charges against them, to journalists.  The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, which is probing claims that the KLA members committed war crimes during and after the war, said that the veterans association was aiming to ‘undermine the proper administration of justice.’….Less than 24 hours after Gucati was arrested  ‘for intimidation of witnesses, retaliation and violation of secrecy of proceedings….the charges against Gucati and Haradinajis are a sideshow to another arrest in Kosovo last week, that of former KLA commander Salih Mustafa, on war crimes charges.  Mustafa is accused of arbitrary detention, torture and murder at a detention centre in April 1999….Internationally the KLA – which carried out attacks on Serbian police stations and politicians, was regarded as a terrorist organization……..In 1998 the KLA became the main player in the struggle for Kosovan independence, winning the backing of the United States and benefiting from a massive influx of cash…  Although the KLA was disbanded as a military force after the war, their leaders acquired top jobs with Hasim Thaci becoming President.”

However, in 2008 Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia published her memoirs:

“Confrontation with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity.’…She alleged that serious crimes had taken place during the conflict in Kosovo against Serb nationals during and after the war, but these crimes had not been seriously investigated.  Major figures in the post-war Kosovar government were involved.  As well as abuse, murder and disappearance of prisoners at a wide-ranging network of KLA detention facilities in northern and central Albania, Del Ponte highlighted claims that human organs were removed from Serb prisoners in Albania, transported abroad and sold”…Del Ponte’s claims provoked an investigation led by Council of Europe MEP Dick Marty, which in December 2010 backed the accusations of human organ trafficking and implicated KLA leaders.  Among them it named President Thaci.

By 1998 Marty stated that Thaci “not only had support within Kosovo, but had become the preferred partner in Washington, an endorsement which Marty stated made him ‘untouchable.’

Following the NATO bombing campaign in June, 1999, the Drenica group, headed by Thaci had ‘unfettered control’ in which to carry out various forms of smuggling and trafficking.  KLA units were deployed into Kosovo;  Serb inhabitants, along with Roma and other minorities quickly became targets for revenge.

Albright and KLA leader Hashim Thaci

Marty’s report corroborated Del Ponte’s allegations of human organ trafficking, quoting testimonies that ‘spoke credibly and consistently of a methodology by which all of the captives (mostly Serb) were killed, usually by a gunshot to the head, and were operated upon to remove one or more of their organs, ‘harvested’ for sale,” an enormously lucrative business.  The KLA regularly cannibalized Serb human corpses, among other atrocities.  Of course, it is also possible that they “operated on” live Serbs to extract their vital organs in even more barbaric methods.

On June 8, 2021 Russian Deputy Ambassador Kuzmin was undoubtedly referring to the demonization of the Serbs, and “silence on the sins of others,” among which were KLA leaders and President Hasim Thaci, himself.

The NATO bombing of Serbia in 2000, followed by barbaric treatment of Serb prisoners by KLA leaders, recalls Western European and especially Vatican complicity throughout the slaughter of the Serb prisoners at Jasenovac concentration camp in World War II, where the fascist Ustasha tortured to death more than half million Serbs, exterminating the orthodox Christian Serb population, much as Hitler exterminated German Jews.  Archbishop Stepinovac, advisor to the Ustasha fascist state was appointed by Pope Pius XII.  Stepinovac was ultimately responsible for this genocide at Jasinovac concentration camp.

These buried crimes, both at the concentration camp, Jasenovac in WW II and those perpetrated by the KLA following the NATO bombing  of Belgrade and other Serb cities in 1999, still cry out for justice, and these are, no doubt the “sins lacking justice” to which Russian Deputy Ambassador Kuzmin referred at the United Nations Security Council on June 8, 2021.

A rare and perhaps unique record of these crimes and the abhorrent consequence of the demonization of the Serbs was published by the late Vladimir Dedijer, formerly Yugoslavian delegate to the UN, and considered a leading authority on 20^th Century genocide;  Dedijer, together with Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Nobel Laureate Harvard Professor  Dr. George Wald, chaired the Bertrand Russell International Tribunal on War Crimes.  Dedijer’s documentation of the Ustasha’s atrocities appear to have been obscured until in 1990 Dedijer published his monumental work, “The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, the Massacre of the Serbs in World War II.”

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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York. 

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Public health insiders increasingly are calling out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the “insanity” of pushing COVID vaccines on people who have already acquired natural immunity.

Although accurate numbers are difficult to come by, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conservatively estimates more than a third of Americans (at least 114.6 million) have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. There is ample reason to believe that in most of these individuals, SARS-CoV-2 infection “induces long-term immunity.”

For example, a December 2020 study by Singapore researchers found neutralizing antibodies (one prong of the immune response) remained present in high concentrations for 17 years or more in individuals who recovered from the original SARS-CoV.

More recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published evidence of durable immune responses to natural infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Even back in March 2020, the NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci shared his view (in an email [p. 22] to Ezekiel Emanuel) that “their [sic] would be substantial immunity post infection.”

Yet despite these recent findings, health authorities are largely ignoring natural immunity’s stellar track record. In fact, as the American Institute of Economic Research reported, it appears in order to promote the COVID vaccine agenda, key organizations are not only “downplaying” natural immunity but may be seeking to “erase” it altogether.

Until recently, the Mayo Clinic reported that individuals who survived the 1918 influenza pandemic were immune, 92 years later, to H1N1 influenza. However as economist Jon Sanders noted, the Mayo Clinic removed the mention of 1918 influenza immunity from its website this spring. And late last year, the WHO was caught attempting to unscientifically exclude “immunity developed through previous infection” from the very definition of herd immunity.

Why, asks Sanders, are Americans being kept in the dark about the fact that so many “have faced COVID-19 and won” — and, therefore, “don’t need a vaccine?”

Policy reversal

The evidence that natural immunity is strong and long-lived goes back decades. In contrast, the one-dimensional immunity conferred by vaccination and vaccine boosters is often fickle, short-lived or altogether absent.

The well-studied phenomenon of vaccine failure observed following mass vaccination against illnesses such as measles, pertussis and influenza — and the serious or fatal “breakthrough infections” we are now observing after COVID shots — have proven this point repeatedly.

The CDC’s indiscriminate advice to the segment of the population that has recovered from COVID-19 to get a COVID vaccine stands in stark contrast to the agency’s approach to other infections.

For example, CDC does not recommend measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination for individuals who have confirmation of past infection or who were born in the pre-MMR era, when everyone got those childhood diseases.

Recognizing that vaccination is beside the point for people who acquire immunity naturally — by experiencing a given illness naturally — CDC likewise tells individuals who have lab confirmation of “disease-induced immunity” against varicella that they do not need to get a chickenpox vaccine.

Surprising criticism from insiders

Online medical news outlet MedPage Today, owned by “leading Internet information and services company” J2 Global, describes itself as “a trusted source for clinical news coverage across medical specialties.”

For the most part, this translates into bland mainstream coverage that, in the COVID era, has included heavy promotion and endorsement of the public health party line on vaccination.

However, the publication’s “Enterprise & Investigative team” also professes to be willing to “shine a light on wrongdoing in medicine — whether individual, corporate or governmental” as well as “following the money in healthcare.”

Of late, this investigative team appears to have decided to blow the whistle on the suppression of discussion about natural COVID immunity. On May 28, MedPage published an op-ed bluntly titled “Quit Ignoring Natural COVID Immunity.” Days later, Dr. Marty Makary, MedPage Today editor-in-chief, in public interviews reiterated many of the arguments laid out in the op-ed.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, one of the op-ed’s two co-authors, is a former CDC medical officer and “frequent advisor to the CDC, NIH and WHO.” In their op-ed, Klausner and co-author Noah Kojima ask why we are “so focused on vaccine-induced immunity … while ignoring natural immunity” and also criticize policy-makers for ignoring the “complexities of the human immune system” —  including the evidence that both B cells and T cells contribute to post-COVID cellular immunity.

Arguing that protection among COVID-recovered individuals “is similar to or better than vaccine-induced immunity,” they also condemn the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advice against using antibody testing, instead urging the following:

“[P]olicymakers should include natural immunity as determined by an accurate and reliable antibody test or the documentation of prior infection … as evidence of immunity equal to that of vaccination [emphasis added]. That immunity should be given the same societal status as vaccine-inducted [sic] immunity. Such a policy will greatly reduce anxiety and increase access to travel, events, family visits, and more … allowing [those who have recovered] to safely discard their masks, show their faces, and join the legions of those vaccinated.”

In his public statements, Makary has been even more outspoken, describing the sidelining of natural COVID immunity — which he believes is “probably lifelong” — as “[o]ne of the biggest failures of our current medical leadership.”

According to Makary, the CDC’s relentless focus on vaccine-induced immunity and its “demonizing” of individuals who choose not to get a COVID vaccine makes the agency “the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history.”

Makary, whose other professional roles include professor of medicine and public health at Johns Hopkins University and election to the National Academy of Medicine, also remarked, “I never thought I’d say this, but please ignore the CDC guidance.”

Makary has also expressed dissent on the topic of COVID vaccines and children. In a June 10 opinion piece in MedPage Today, Makary told parents to “think twice before giving the COVID vax to healthy kids,” characterizing the risk of a healthy child dying of COVID as “between zero and infinitesimally rare.” (Blunting the force of this statement, however, Makary signaled his support of COVID-19 vaccination in “any child with a medical condition, including being overweight” — which means at least 54% of American children).

In a June 13 television appearance, Makary continued to criticize the CDC, accusing it of “sitting on a lot of data,” including important information about the serious heart complications now being experienced by adolescent recipients of the COVID injections. According to a news account, Makary suggested that “fanaticism” governs the aggressive push for COVID vaccination, again citing “the insanity of insisting on a vaccine to immunize those already immune.”

Pushback welcome

In early June, Children’s Health Defense called for an immediate halt to COVID vaccination of minors, pointing to the significant risk of adverse events, including blood clots and heart inflammation, and the vaccines’ unknown long-term effects.

Scientists recently offered a dramatic explanation for some of these adverse outcomes, disclosing that the spike protein in the Pfizer and Moderna injections is actually a pathogenic toxin that accumulates in organs and tissues and crosses the blood-brain barrier.

In this context, reminders about the role and benefits of natural immunity can counterbalance the dangerous and false herd immunity rhetoric that seeks to justify COVID vaccines for kids.

Readers of The Defender are also likely familiar with the numerous conflicts of interest that make it so difficult to trust advice from officials at captured agencies like the CDC and the FDA. When insiders cloaked with titles and prestige from the public health establishment put forth critiques of these agencies, we would be foolish not to pay attention.

In the context of the growing censorship of any information that runs counter to government and industry claims, pushback from all corners is welcome, particularly when it is grounded in both evidence and common sense.

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For the first time since its mass-vaccination campaign kicked off three months ago, Hong Kong’s vaccination indemnity fund has paid out a total of HK$450,000 ($58,000) as compensation for patients who suffered particularly severe reactions to inoculation against COVID.

Out of more than 3MM doses of vaccines that have been administered in the city-state since February, HK’s Food and Health Bureau said it had received 74 applications for compensation as of June 10, 58 of which were still being processed. As of Sunday, 3,605 people had reported an adverse reaction to their jabs, roughly 0.12% of all vaccination recipients. Only 1.2MM, or 16.3% of the city’s population, has been fully vaccinated.

Awards were given to patients whose reactions were deemed especially severe.

“The principles of severity assessment include fairness to applicants, prudent use of public funding, transparency to the public, and based on medical science,” the bureau said in a statement. “Severity of individual cases is subject to case-by-case assessment according to their circumstances.”

The compensation figures were revealed while authorities also confirmed a new imported case from Sri Lanka, which brought the city’s official tally to 11,881, with 210 related deaths. So far 21 deaths have been recorded involving people who received a jab two weeks before dying, although no connection has been made between he vaccination and the deaths, according to the state authorities.

Between May 17 and Sunday, Hong Kong’s public hospitals reported 2.8 deaths for every 100K vaccinated adults. That’s compared with 58.1 in 100K among the rest who were not.

One of the patients who received a payout from the HK$1 billion ($129MM) fund suffered an allergic reaction that nearly killed them, according to the SCMP.

Of the three claims of vaccine-related deaths, two have already been processed while one was rejected because of a lack of an official vaccination record.

Family members of fatal cases could receive up to HK$2.5MM if a patient is below the age of 40, or a maximum of HK$2MM for patients aged 40 or older.

To be eligible for a payout, a registered doctor must certify all serious adverse events. Another condition is the expert committee monitoring side effects of vaccines cannot rule out that the event is not related to the jab.

Tim Pang Hung-cheong, a patients’ rights campaigner from the Society for Community Organisation, also supported the payout, but said the amount should have been higher to reflect the loss of income and work ability caused by the side effects. He also said the government should publish in detail the reasons for approving or rejecting each claim, to give confidence to those thinking of getting a jab.

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It requires major suspension of disbelief to consider the G7, the self-described democracy’s most exclusive club, as relevant to the Raging Twenties. Real life dictates that even accounting for the inbuilt structural inequality of the current world system the G7’s economic output barely registers as 30% of the global total.

Cornwall was at best an embarrassing spectacle – complete with a mediocrity troupe impersonating “leaders” posing for masked elbow bump photo ops while on a private party with the 95-year-old Queen of England, everyone was maskless and merrily mingling about in an apotheosis of “shared values” and “human rights”.

Quarantine on arrival, masks enforced 24/7 and social distancing of course is only for the plebs.

The G7 final communique is the proverbial ocean littered with platitudes and promises. But it does contain a few nuggets. Starting with ‘Build Back Better’ – or B3 – showing up in the title. B3 is now official code for both The Great Reset and the New Green Deal.

Then there’s the Yellow Peril remixed, with the “our values” shock troops “calling on China to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms” with a special emphasis on Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

The story behind it was confirmed to me by a EU diplomatic source, a realist (yes, there are some in Brussels).

All hell broke loose inside the – exclusive – G7 room when the Anglo-American axis, backed by spineless Canada, tried to ramrod the EU-3 plus Japan into an explicit condemnation of China in the final communiqué over the absolute bogus concentration camp “evidence” in Xinjiang. In contrast to politicized accusations of “crimes against humanity”, the best analysis of what’s really going on in Xinjiang has been published by the Qiao collective.

Germany, France and Italy – Japan was nearly invisible – at least showed some spine. Internet was shut off to the room during the really harsh “dialogue”. Talk about realism – a true depiction of “leaders” vociferating inside a bubble.

The dispute essentially pitted Biden – actually his handlers – against Macron, who insisted that the EU-3 would not be dragged into the logic of a Cold War 2.0. That was something that Merkel and Mario ‘Goldman Sachs’ Draghi could easily agree upon.

In the end the divided G7 table chose to agree on a Build Back Better World – or B3W – “initiative” to counter-act the Chinese-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Reset or else

The White House, predictably, pre-empted the final G7 communiqué. A statement later retracted from their website, replaced by the official communique, made sure that, “the United States and our G7 partners remains deeply concerned by the use of all forms of forced labor in global supply chains, including state-sponsored forced labor of vulnerable groups and minorities and supply chains of the agricultural, solar, and garment sectors – the main supply chains of concern in Xinjiang.”

“Forced labor” is the new mantra handily connecting the overlapping demonization of both Xinjiang and BRI. Xinjiang is the crucial hub connecting BRI to Central Asia and beyond. The new “forced labor” mantra paves the way for B3W to enter the arena as the “savior” human rights package.

Here we have a benign G7 “offering” the developing world a vague infrastructure plan that reflects their “values”, their “high standards” and their way of business, in contrast to the Yellow Peril’s trademark lack of transparency, horrible labor and environmental practices, and coercion methods.

Translation: after nearly 8 years since BRI, then named OBOR (One Belt, One Road) was announced by President Xi, and subsequently ignored and/or demonized 24/7, the Global South is supposed to be marveling at a vague “initiative” funded by private Western interests whose priority is short-term profit.

As if the Global South would fall for this remixed IMF/World Bank-style debt abyss. As if the “West” would have the vision, the appeal, the reach and the funds to make this scheme a real “alternative”.

There are zero details on how B3W will work, its priorities and where capital is coming from. B3W idealizers could do worse than learn from BRI itself, via Professor Wang Yiwei.

B3W has nothing to do with a trade/sustainable development strategy geared for the Global South. It’s an illusionist carrot dangling over those foolish enough to buy the notion of a world divided between “our values” and “autocracies”.

We’re back to the same old theme: armed with the arrogance of ignorance, the “West” has no idea how to understand Chinese values. Confirmation bias applies. Hence China as a “threat to the West”.

We’re the builders of choice

More ominously, B3W is yet another arm of the Great Reset.

To dig deeper into it, one could do worse than examining Building a Better World For All, by Mark Carney.

Carney is a uniquely positioned player: former governor of the Bank of England, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, adviser to PM Boris “Global Britain” Johnson and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, and a trustee of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Translation: a major Great Reset, New Green Deal, B3W ideologue.

His book – which should be read in tandem with Herr Schwab’s opus on Covid-19 – preaches total control on personal freedoms as well as a reset on industry and corporate funding. Carney and Schwab treat Covid-19 as the perfect “opportunity” for the reset, whose benign, altruistic spin emphasizes a mere “regulation” of climate, business and social relations.

This Brave New Woke World brought to you by an alliance of technocrats and bankers – from the WEF and the UN to the handlers of hologram “Biden” – until recently seemed to be on a roll. But signs in the horizon reveal it’s far from a done deal.

Something uttered by B3W stalwart Tony Blair way back in January is quite an eye-opener: “It’s going to be a new world altogether… The sooner we grasp that and start to put in place the decisions [needed for a] deep impact over the coming years the better.”

So here Blair, in a Freudian slip, not only gives away the game (“deep impact over the coming years”, “new world altogether”) but also reveals his exasperation: the sheep are not being corralled as fast as necessary.

Well, Tony knows there’s always good old punishment: if you refuse the vaccine, you should remain under lockdown.

BBW, incidentally, accounts for a heterodox category of porn flics. B3W in the end may reveal itself as no more than toxic social porn.

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***

On the “Dark Horse Podcast,” Dr. Robert Malone, creator of mRNA vaccine technology, said the COVID vaccine lipid nanoparticles — which tell the body to produce the spike protein — leave the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues.

On June 10, Dr. Robert Malone, creator of mRNA vaccine technology, joined evolutionary biologist Bret Brownstein, Ph.D., for a 3-hour conversation on the “Dark Horse Podcast” to discuss multiple safety concerns related to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

In this short outtake from the full podcast, Malone, Brownstein and tech entrepreneur Steve Kirsch touch on the implications of the controversial Japanese Pfizer biodistribution study. The study was made public earlier this month by Dr. Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist.

They also discuss the lack of proper animal studies for the new mRNA vaccines, and the theory, espoused by virologist Geert Vanden Bossche, Ph.D., that mass vaccination with the mRNA vaccines could produce ever more transmissible and potentially deadly variants.

As The Defender reported June 3, Bridle received a copy of a Japanese biodistribution study — which had been kept from the public — as a result of a freedom of information request made to the Japanese government for Pfizer data.

Prior to the study’s disclosure, the public was led to believe by regulators and vaccine developers that the spike protein produced by mRNA COVID vaccines stayed in the shoulder where it was injected and was not biologically active — even though regulators around the world had a copy of the study which showed otherwise.

The biodistribution study obtained by Bridle showed lipid nanoparticles from the vaccine did not stay in the deltoid muscle where they were injected as the vaccine’s developers claimed would happen, but circulated throughout the body and accumulated in large concentrations in organs and tissues, including the spleen, bone marrow, liver, adrenal glands and  — in “quite high concentrations” — in the ovaries.

The mRNA — or messenger RNA — is what tells the body to manufacture the spike protein. The lipid nanoparticles are like the “boxes” the mRNA is shipped in, according to Malone. “If you find lipid nanoparticles in an organ or tissue, that tells you the drug got to that location,” Malone explained.

According to the data in the Japanese study, lipid nanoparticles were found in the whole blood circulating throughout the body within four hours, and then settled in large concentrations in the ovaries, bone marrow and lymph nodes.

Malone said there needed to be monitoring of vaccine recipients for leukemia and lymphomas as there were concentrations of lipid nanoparticles in the bone marrow and lymph nodes. But those signals often don’t show up for six months to three or nine years down the road, he said.

Usually, signals like this are picked up in animal studies and long-term clinical trials, but this didn’t happen with mRNA vaccines, Malone said.

Malone said there are two adverse event signals that are becoming apparent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of them is thrombocytopenia — not having enough platelets, which are manufactured in the bone marrow. The other is reactivation of latent viruses.

Malone found the ovarian signal perplexing because there is no accumulation in the testes.

Malone said the original data packages contained this biodistribution information. “This data has been out there a long time” within the protected, non-disclosed, purview of the regulators across the world, he said.

According to Malone, the FDA knew the COVID spike protein was biologically active and could travel from the injection site and cause adverse events, and that the spike protein, if biologically active, is very dangerous.

In fact, Malone was one of many scientists to warn the FDA about the dangers of the free spike protein.

Malone suggested autoimmune issues may be related to free-circulating spike protein which developers assured would not happen. To pick up autoimmune issues, a 2- to 3- year follow-up period in phase 3 patients would be required to monitor for potential autoimmune consequences from vaccines — but that monitoring didn’t happen with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Pfizer and Moderna also didn’t conduct proper animal studies, Brownstein said. What the animal models give us is a signal that alerts us to what we need to follow up on in humans.

Brownstein said:

“We’ve got very alarming short-term stuff. We’ve got short-term stuff that is alarming on the basis of where we find these lipids, where we find the spike proteins — those things are reasons for concern because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. We’ve also got an alarming signal in terms of the hazards and deaths or the harms and the deaths that are reported in the system and there are reasons to think they are dramatic under-reports.”

Vaden Bossche got it right

One of the potential harms from the vaccines, Brownstein said, was made famous by Vanden Bossche, a vaccinologist who worked with GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team in Seattle, and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization in Geneva.

Earlier this year, Vanden Bossche put out a call to the World Health Organization, supported by a 12-page document, that described the “uncontrollable monster” that a global mass vaccination campaign could potentially unleash.

Vanden Bossche said a combination of lockdowns, and extreme selection pressure on the virus induced by the intense global mass vaccination program, might diminish the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the short-term, but ultimately, will induce the creation of more mutants of concern. This is what Vanden Bossche calls “immune escape” (i.e. incomplete sterilization of the virus by the human immune system, even following vaccine administration).

Immune escape will in turn trigger vaccine companies to further refine vaccines that will add, not reduce, the selection pressure, producing ever more transmissible and potentially deadly variants.

The selection pressure will cause greater convergence in mutations that affect the critical spike protein of the virus that is responsible for breaking through the mucosal surfaces of our airways, the route used by the virus to enter the human body.

The virus will effectively outsmart the highly specific antigen-based vaccines being used and tweaked, depending on the circulating variants. All of this could lead to a hockey stick-like increase in serious and potentially lethal cases — in effect, an out-of-control pandemic.

Malone said:

“Vanden Bossche’s concern is not theoretical. It is real and we have the data. We’re stuck with this virus or its downstream variants pretty much for the rest of our lives and it’s going to become more like the flu. We will have continuing evolution and circulation of variants, and that is an escape.”

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

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

The world’s nine nuclear armed states have downsized their military arsenals, but made up for their loss by increasing the number of weapons on high operational alert, according to a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

As a result, the world is increasingly within striking distance of nuclear weapons—either by accident or by design.

The most vulnerable region is Asia, which is home to four of the world’s nine nuclear powers, namely, India, Pakistan, China and North Korea, the rest being the US, UK, France, Russia and Israel.

The study says the nine countries collectively possessed an estimated 13,080 nuclear weapons at the start of 2021.

This was a decrease from the 13, 400 that SIPRI estimated these states possessed at the beginning of 2020, since some of these weapons have gone into “retirement”.

But despite this overall decrease, the estimated number of nuclear weapons currently deployed with operational forces increased to 3,825, from 3,720 last year.

Around 2,000 of these—nearly all of which belonged to Russia or the US—were kept in a state of high operational alert ready for a strike.

World nuclear forces, January 2021

Source: SIPRI Yearbook 2021

While the US and Russia continued to reduce their overall nuclear weapon inventories by dismantling retired warheads in 2020, both are estimated to have had around 50 more nuclear warheads in operational deployment at the start of 2021 than a year earlier.

Russia also increased its overall military nuclear stockpile by around 180 warheads, mainly due to deployment of more multi-warhead land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

The deployed strategic nuclear forces by both countries remained within the limits set by the 2010 Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), although the treaty does not limit total nuclear warhead inventories, according to SIPRI.

Meanwhile, a new report released last week by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned that nuclear-armed states spent $72.6 billion on their nuclear weapons – even as the pandemic spread in 2020, an increase of $1.4 billion from 2019.

The report, Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending, showcases how during the pandemic, which had devastating health and economic consequences last year, governments were increasingly channeling tax money to defence contractors, which in turn increased the amounts to lobbyists and think tanks to encourage a continued increase of spending.

Out of the $72.6 billion that countries spent on nuclear weapons in 2020 globally, $27.7 billion went to less than a dozen defence contractors to build nuclear weapons, which in turn spent $117 million lobbying and upwards of $10 million funding most major think tanks writing about nuclear weapons.

“The climate and Covid emergencies are showing us what we really need for our security and safety as human beings, and it’s not nuclear weapons,” said Dr Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy (AIDD) and a UK-based member of ICAN’s Steering Group.

“The UN system is struggling because its efforts to build cooperative peace and security are constantly undermined and strangled by aggressive nation states. Most people can see we need cooperation and sharing to solve global challenges, from vaccines to sustainable resources,” she told IPS.

But a minority of governments with nuclear dependencies and militaristic economies create the most dangers for everyone, said Dr Johnson.

“With their aggressive posturing, new types of weapons and corrupt selling practices they arm rivals, feed insecurity and wars, and undermine international security, law and human rights, she warned.

“As the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force this year, it has come as little surprise to see some governments kick back with extra bells and whistles on their pointless and insecure nuclear weapons”.

She said privileged governments with vested interests have engaged in similar angry retaliations when faced with other international treaties that bring much-needed legal constraints.

Professor M. V. Ramana, Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security, and Director, Liu Institute for Global Issues, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, told IPS the ICAN report documents the power of the political control wielded by companies involved in nuclear weapons production and maintenance is.

These companies profit enormously from their involvement in making these weapons of mass destruction and use a share of these profits to lobby for and shape the decision-making process in ways that further their profits, and loosen any semblance of democracy in this sphere, he said.

“To have such actions continue during a global pandemic is shocking, and reveals the completely misguided priorities of these nuclear weapon states and their allies,” said Dr Ramana, a scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

According to a breakdown provided by ICAN on global spending on nuclear weapons, the US leads the list:

• United States: $37.4 billion
• China: $10.1 billion
• Russia: $8 billion
• United Kingdom: $6.2 billion
• France: $5.7 billion
• India: $2.4 billion
• Pakistan: $1 billion
• North Korea: $667 million

The top 5 companies profiting from nuclear weapon contracts were:

• Northrop Grumman ($13.6 billion)
• General Dynamics ($10.8 billion)
• Lockheed Martin ($2 billion)
• Raytheon Technologies ($449.5 million)
• Draper ($342 million)

Dr Johnson said stigmatising and banning nuclear weapons not only affects the profits of military-industrial businesses, but the careers of many bureaucrats, academics and politicians who for decades have promoted spending taxpayer’s money on these weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) instead of investing more in their countries’ health, education, peace-building relations and environment-saving technologies.

“Like all peace and security objectives, nuclear disarmament is not a one-off project, but a transformative process that needs to be built and maintained throughout our lives.’

She said the TPNW puts UN bodies and activists in a stronger position in terms of international norms and law, but as will be seen as States Parties hold their first meeting in 2022, we have a lot of work ahead of us to construct the vital institutional, humanitarian and verification infrastructures for the Treaty to become universally effective.”

“Nuclear weapons still have the potential to cause great harm, so these dying kicks of nuclear colonialism need to be stopped. In Britain, many are now promoting the TPNW while campaigning for ‘Nurses not Nukes’ and accusing Boris Johnson’s government of violating Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations with recent policies that increase the role and numbers of UK nuclear weapons,” said Dr Johnson.

“ICAN’s recent nuclear spending report ‘Complicit’ deals with another dimension where civil society can exert very effective pressure. Not only does ICAN expose the high financial costs to the nuclear armed governments (and therefore people), but also names some of the major military-industrial and bureaucratic-academic profiteers”.

She said naming names is important, as civil society continues to lift the covers and expose the corrupt and dependent relations that have kept nuclear weapons in business since 1945.

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Thalif Deen is a former Director, Foreign Military Markets at Defence Marketing Services; Senior Defence Analyst at Forecast International; and military editor Middle East/Africa at Jane’s Information Group. He is also the co-author of “How to Survive a Nuclear Disaster” (New Century, 1981).

Featured image: Euratom inspectors conduct safeguards inspections at URENCO in the Netherlands. Credit: IAEA/Dean Calma

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
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Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

On 3 June 1941 a meeting of the Soviet Supreme Military Council was chaired in Moscow. Its goal was to ratify instructions for the Red Army’s political workers, which would stress the need for vigilance and caution against the growing Nazi threat.

When Joseph Stalin’s close associate, the Soviet politician Georgy Malenkov, read the paperwork regarding this conference he dismissed it by saying, “The document is formulated in primitive terms, as though we were going to war tomorrow”. (1)

War was in fact just over two weeks away, and there was every need for Russian preparations to proceed at a frantic pace. Nevertheless, Stalin supported Malenkov’s stance, and the directive for gearing towards imminent conflict was not issued. One of the clearest indications, that Stalin was not preparing for war in 1941, can be seen in the following: On 6 June 1941, Stalin sanctioned a comprehensive strategy for an unrushed transfer of Soviet industry to military production.

The American journalist Harrison E. Salisbury, who spent extensive time in Russia, wrote of Stalin’s war policy, “This timetable called for completion of the plan by the end of 1942! It was an excellent, detailed schedule, calling for the conversion of large numbers of civilian plants to military purposes, and the construction of much-needed defense facilities”. The relaxed pace at which Stalin wanted to achieve a transformation to a full war economy, reveals his lack of immediate concern about Adolf Hitler’s intentions. The Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, remembered Stalin saying shortly after Germany had routed France, “we would be able to confront the Germans on an equal basis only by 1943”. (2)

After 1 June 1941 Soviet personnel continued to arrive in Germany for holiday breaks, bringing with them their wives and children. The Soviet embassy in Berlin noticed a worrying development. On the Unter den Linden boulevard in central Berlin was located the studio of Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. In the display window of Hoffmann’s business, he previously placed maps of European theatres, where the Germans were going to wage war.

In the spring of 1940 Hoffmann erected maps of the Netherlands and Scandinavia in his front window; in April 1941 charts of Yugoslavia and Greece featured; in late May 1941, a great map of the western USSR appeared, including Belorussia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states. (3)

On the same day (6 June 1941) that Stalin ratified his war plan, the Soviet leader received a report from the NKGB, Russia’s intelligence service. The NKGB evaluation calculated that four million German soldiers were now amassed along the Soviet frontiers, in preparation for Operation Barbarossa. (4)

Also on 6 June, the Wehrmacht replaced their guards near Soviet borders with field troops. The Germans put military directors in charge of all hospitals. An estimated 200 Axis troop trains every day were passing through Nazi-dominated central Europe, and arriving beside the Ukrainian or Polish boundaries. The noise of German and Axis vehicles was such that local residents had difficulty sleeping at night.

It was at this time that SS First Lieutenant Otto Skorzeny was transferred to the Eastern front by rail, along with the rest of his unit. Skorzeny later recalled, “Our Das Reich division therefore spent several weeks working exclusively to put our rolling stock in working order and, at the beginning of June 1941, we received the order to entrain the division. After we had driven around Bohemia-Moravia, our train reached Upper Silesia and finally Poland. Where were we going? We had no idea and gave our imaginations free reign… None of us came up with the idea that we might attack Russia, and so have to fight on two fronts”. (5)

In mitigation to Stalin, not all of the Nazi divisions themselves were aware of Hitler’s design to invade Russia. Yet the Germans could not shield from Russian eyes masses of their soldiers, whose lines stretched across the horizon for miles. Along the crucial River Bug frontier in eastern Poland, where the Soviet 4th Army was stationed, more than 40 German divisions were sighted by 5 June 1941.

After Winston Churchill’s failed earlier efforts to convince Stalin of a German invasion, on 10 June 1941 – just 12 days before the Germans attacked – the British again warned Moscow. Alexander Cadogan, British Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, invited to his office Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador to Britain. Cadogan told Maisky, “Take a piece of paper and write down what I’m going to dictate”. Cadogan thereupon stated in detail the identity and positioning of German divisions beside the Soviet borders (6). Maisky was alarmed at hearing this and sent the data by urgent cipher to Moscow.

Three days later on 13 June 1941 a report from TASS, the Russian news agency, brushed aside rumours of a German-Soviet war, claiming it to be a British provocation. Stalin was unshakeable in his belief that reports of a Nazi invasion in 1941 were a British trick, to sow trouble between Germany and Russia.

In mid-June 1941 Stalin stressed to General Georgy Zhukov, “Germany is involved up to its ears in the war in the west, and I believe Hitler will not risk creating a second front for himself by attacking the Soviet Union”. (7)

Altogether, 600,000 German oil-guzzling motor vehicles were being prepared to roll eastwards on Hitler’s order. From where did resource-poor Germany obtain the quantities of oil necessary, so as to launch the largest military operation in history? To begin with briefly, in 1938 the Nazis domestically produced around 3 million tons of oil; 2.5 million of which was synthetically created; and the other 0.5 million or so from natural extraction on German terrain (8); such as the oil present at Nienhagen and Rietberg in the northern half of Germany.

From 1936 to 1939, synthetic oil production in Germany almost doubled (9). As the Germans attacked western Poland on 1 September 1939, there were 14 synthetic hydrogenation plants churning out oil at full capacity in the Reich, and another six being built. With the German annexation of Austria, on 12 March 1938, came oil rich areas which the Germans quickly exploited – like the newly discovered Prinzendorf field in the Vienna Basin. After 1938, the Austrian part of the Nazi empire was by itself producing almost 900,000 tons of oil a year. (10)

In early October 1938, Germany had annexed the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, which held restricted oil reserves but was more plentiful in other mineral resources. Richard Overy, the English historian, wrote how “the Sudeten areas contained rich deposits of lignite, or brown coal, which was far more suitable for synthetic production” (11). The German takeover of the Sudetenland boosted their ability to create oil from hydrogenation processes.

The Wehrmacht’s advance into Poland ensured, furthermore, that Germany had access to oil rich parts of that country, such as at the town of Jaslo. The capturing of Polish territory like Jaslo provided the Nazis with “a substantial amount of petroleum, and almost immediately replaced the oil reserves which Germany had expended to take Poland”, the US historian Arnold Krammer wrote, who often focused on German history (12). The following spring and summer, of 1940, saw swift Nazi victories secured against Denmark, Norway, France and the Low Countries, which did not put an intolerable strain on Berlin’s fuel stocks.

In December 1939, Hitler had reached an important agreement with Romania. They consented to export on average 130,000 tons of oil each month to Germany, in return for Nazi arms sales. Just prior to the German conquest of western and northern Europe, from 6 March 1940 Romania’s oil shipments to Germany increased further; 200,000 tons of Ploesti oil was funnelled to the Reich, in both March and April 1940, as noted by the Romanian academic Gavriil Preda. (13)

A grateful Hitler sold heavy weaponry in return to Bucharest. The Romanians were worried about possible Russian encroachment, which that summer would materialise in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia; but the latter territory had belonged to the Russian Empire for a century until World War I.

By the beginning of 1940, oil consumption for the civilian population in Germany was dramatically scaled back, to benefit the Wehrmacht. Non-military German oil use had burnt up around 200,000 tons monthly, but in early 1940 civilian oil usage had dropped to 71,000 tons (14). This policy was saving the Nazis over 100,000 tons of oil a month, not inconsiderable. The German defeat of France, in June 1940, guaranteed them the wells of Pechelbronn, in the province of Alsace in eastern France. From July 1941, the Alsace fields provided the Reich with between 60,000 to 65,000 tons of oil annually, a small amount. (15)

With Romania joining the German-led Axis alliance on 23 November 1940, deliveries of Romanian oil to the Nazis grew substantially again, under their new autocratic leader Ion Antonescu. In 1941 the Ploesti wells produced 5.5 million tons of oil and in 1942 another 5.7 million tons; of these totals, Antonescu supplied the Germans from 1941 with about 3 million tons per annum of refined Romanian oil (16). According to professor Clifford E. Singer, of the University of Illinois, the Wehrmacht consumed “an average of 4.6 million tons of oil per year for 1941-1943”. (17)

Hungary’s decision to join the Axis, on 20 November 1940, allowed the Germans to exploit the oil resources of Nagykanizsa, in the far west of Hungary. During 1940 the Hungarian wells yielded an insignificant 231,000 tons of oil, but under German technical expertise this output sharply increased. In 1944 Hungary produced 809,000 tons of oil (18). Almost all of this went to the German war machine, and Hungary’s oil remained in Nazi hands almost to war’s end. Hitler’s last large-scale offensive, Operation Spring Awakening, was concerned partly with having continued control over the Hungarian oil fields.

Through the 1930s, and into the 1940s, around 150 companies from America engaged in various business deals with the Nazis, an incredibly high number (19). Some of these were among the largest corporations in existence such as Standard Oil, Texaco, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company.

Standard Oil, in co-operation with General Motors, furnished the Nazis in 1935 with the vital tetraethyl lead formula. It was a substance which greatly improved the performance of German oil expending engines, notably Luftwaffe aircraft. In pursuing its Blitzkrieg warfare, Nazi Germany was reliant on acquiring rubber, synthetic and natural. Standard Oil was also heavily implicated in the supplying of synthetic rubber to the Nazis, the butyl rubber process, via Standard’s operations with IG Farben, the infamous German chemical conglomerate. (20)

Through the Nazi-Soviet Pact’s terms, Russia was obliged among other things to dispense with thousands of tons of natural rubber to Germany. In one month alone, April 1941, Stalin sent 4,000 tons of raw rubber to the Reich across Siberia (21). Stalin further allowed the Germans to trade with the Middle East and further afield.

In mid-1940, Stalin agreed that 15,000 tons of rubber from India be transported across Soviet land, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, ending up in Germany (22). The Soviets supplied Berlin too with significant deliveries of iron ore, scrap metal, pig iron, etc. The German historian Heinrich Schwendemann realised, “By the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union had become the most important supplier of raw materials to the Third Reich”.

Russian deliveries of oil to Germany up to June 1941 amounted to at least 900,000 tons. The English military author, Antony Beevor, puts the number at more than 2 million tons of Soviet oil shipped to the Nazis (23). The 2 million-plus figure does seem excessive, however, and the 900,000 total is the more commonly cited.

In the summer of 1940, Hitler outlined that the German need for Soviet oil was “most pressing” and the Reich’s oil levels “will not become critical as long as Romania and Russia continue their supplies, and hydrogenation plants can be adequately protected against air attacks”. (24)

Nothing is said by Hitler here of American oil deliveries to the Reich, yet in the 1930s and early 1940s the Germans did receive some shipments of oil from US transnationals, with America then being the earth’s biggest oil producing country by far. It includes Standard Oil, Texaco and Phillips Petroleum operations with Hitler’s Germany, which invariably goes unmentioned by mainstream scholars. US oil supplies to the Nazis sometimes arrived through neutral states, such as Switzerland and Sweden (25). Quite early in the war, on 11 December 1941 Hitler declared hostilities with America which certainly complicated, but did not entirely end, further US business ventures in Germany.

There is a real scarcity of statistics available for public viewing, as to how much American oil the Nazis actually got. Also there are the logistical problems involved, in shipping oil across a vast and turbulent ocean like the Atlantic; notwithstanding that American businessmen owned or had major stakes in subsidiaries based in fascist Europe.

After the Wehrmacht attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941, eastern territories under Nazi occupation opened up other oil sources for the Reich. There were considerable reserves of raw materials in the region of Galicia, which covers parts of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. Galicia fell entirely into German hands during Barbarossa’s opening days, and the German-held Galicia refineries had a capacity to produce 390,000 tons of oil a year. (26)

More oil wells were present in Estonia, conquered by German Army Group North in July 1941, and which before the invasion produced a limited 120,000 tons a year of shale oil. Russian troops largely destroyed the Estonian refineries, but they were promptly put back in working order by the Germans. Modest quantities of oil were located in western Ukraine, in the city of Drohobych, which was taken by the Wehrmacht in early July 1941.

Across that fateful year of 1941, Nazi-controlled Europe manufactured about 12 million tons of oil (27). This amount was still not sufficient to sustain Hitler’s thousand year Reich, especially with his invasion of Russia stalling and an extended war looming; as seen by the German attempt to capture the Caucasus’ giant oil reserves; in particular Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, which during World War II furnished the Soviet Union with 80% of its oil (28). The Baku wells peaked in 1941, providing the Russians that year with an eye-watering 23.5 million tons of oil, approximately double of what was available to the Axis powers in 1941.

German thinking behind their attack on the USSR was not only to destroy Bolshevism, but to gain mastery over the world’s second biggest oil producing state at the time.

*

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (Da Capo Press, 30 Sep. 1985) p. 69

2 Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Pan; Reprints edition, 16 Apr. 2010) p. 406

3 Salisbury, The 900 Days, p. 70

4 Ibid.

5 Otto Skorzeny, My Commando Operations: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando (Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1 Jan. 1995) p. 76

6 Salisbury, The 900 Days, p. 70

7 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (Hodder Arnold, 23 Feb. 2007) p. 36

8 Gavriil Preda, German Foreign Policy towards the Romanian Oil during 1938-1940, International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, Vol. 3, No. 3, May 2013, p. 1 of 4

9 Arnold Krammer, Fueling the Third Reich, Vol. 19, No. 3, July 1978, p. 10 of 29, Jstor

10 Ibid.

11 Richard Overy, Why The Allies Won (Pimlico, 7 Sep. 2006) p. 282

12 Krammer, Fueling the Third Reich, p. 15 of 29, Jstor

13 Preda, German Foreign Policy towards the Romanian Oil during 1938-1940, p. 3 of 4

14 Edward E. Ericson, Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933-1941 (Praeger Publishers, 30 Nov. 1999) p. 64

15 Krammer, Fueling the Third Reich, p. 15 of 29, Jstor

16 Ibid., p. 16 of 29

17 Clifford E. Singer, Energy And International War (World Scientific Publishing; Illustrated edition, 3 Dec. 2008) p. 145

18 Krammer, Fueling the Third Reich, p. 15 of 29, Jstor

19 Ofer Aderet, “U.S. Chemical Corporation DuPont Helped Nazi Germany Because of Ideology, Israeli Researcher Says”, Haaretz, 2 May 2019

20 Antony Cyril Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (Clairview books; Illustrated edition, 5 Nov. 2010) p. 75

21 United States Congress, Proceedings and Debates of the U.S. Congress, Volume 94, Part 9, p. 366

22 Heinrich Schwendemann, German-Soviet Economic Relations at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 1939-1941, January to June 1995, p. 2 of 18, Jstor

23 Antony Beevor, The Second World War (Phoenix Press, 2013) p. 189

24 Tobias R. Philbin, The Lure of Neptune: German-Soviet Naval Collaboration and Ambitions, 1919-1941 (University of South Carolina Press; First edition, 1 Nov. 1994) p. 48

25 Jacques R. Pauwels, “Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler”, Global Research, 7 June 2019

26 Krammer, Fueling the Third Reich, p. 15 of 29, Jstor

27 Ibid., p. 16 of 29

28 Emil Lyutskanov, Leila Alieva, Mila Serafimova, Energy Security in the Wider Black Sea Area – National and Allied Approaches (IOS Press, 15 Aug. 2013) p. 10

Eighty years Ago: June 22, 1941: Nazi Germany Attacks the Soviet Union

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, June 17, 2021

War against the Soviet Union was what Hitler had wanted from the beginning. He had already made this very clear on the pages of Mein Kampf, written in the mid-1920s. Furthermore, as a German historian has recently convincingly demonstrated, it was a war against the Soviet Union, and not against Poland, France, or Britain, that Hitler had wanted and planned to unleash in 1939.

Video: Our Son Died 12 Hours After Vaccine Jab. “Murdered by J and J”

By Matthew Grace, June 17, 2021

Medical researcher and health consultant Matthew Grace interviews grieving parents Pam and Jeff Goodman to discuss and dissect the coverup and criminal promotion of the Covid 19 “vaccination.” Many shocking revelations and irrefutable facts are presented here to help keep you and your family safe. “Mass Deception in the History of Humankind”.

Video: Covid-19 Criminality

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Ariel Noyola Rodriguez, June 17, 2021

Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 “pandemic”.  SARS-2 is upheld as the “killer virus”.  And now the Covid vaccine is presented to public opinion as the “solution”, which will allow us to resume a “normal life”.

The Campaign against Ivermectin: WHO’s Chief Scientist Served with Legal Notice for Disinformation and Suppression of Evidence

By Colin Todhunter, June 17, 2021

On 25 May 2021, the Indian Bar Association (IBA) served a 51-page legal notice on Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), for “her act of spreading disinformation and misguiding the people of India, in order to fulfil her agenda.”

Video: Pharmacist Quits CVS Job Over Refusal to Kill People with COVID-19 Shots and Becomes a Whistleblower

By Brian Shilhavy, June 17, 2021

A pharmacist who used to work for CVS has gone public with details about how the pharmacy chains are handling the roll outs of the COVID-19 injections. She obviously has done her homework as a pharmacist, and was convinced that these shots were harming people.

Pathology as a Religious Sect. “I am a God”

By S. M. Smyth, June 17, 2021

Human beings have a long history of worship, of seeking to secure some certainty in the face of forces beyond their control: wind and weather, wild beasts, and things that go bump in the night. Through ritual and sacrifice, people tried to control the unknown, to shape the world to their liking: to survive and thrive.

Member of Parliament in Finland Warns Government that They Are Guilty of Genocide for Misleading Public on COVID-19 Injections

By Ano Turtiainen MP, June 17, 2021

Ano Turtiainen, member of Parliament of Finland, gave a straight speech 9.6.2021 about possible COVID vaccine genocide going on in Finland. He warned all members of the Finnish Parliament and media by letting them know if they would still continue misleading our citizens by telling them fairy tales about safe vaccines, they are intentionally involved in several different crimes, the most serious of these may be even genocide.

Relentless Digitalization: Is a Cashless Economy a Real Threat to Privacy and Civil Liberties?

By Sophia Wright, June 17, 2021

The relentless digitalisation of every day life since the advent of the Internet has led to many accepting as inevitable the eventual emergence of a cashless society. For the last few years, a fierce debate has taken place in the public sphere involving politicians, economists and sociologists alike, on the ethical boundaries of such a society and the threat it poses to individual freedom, privacy and civil liberties.

US Marine Corps Rebuilt to Confront China

By Brian Berletic, June 17, 2021

The US Marine Corps has after nearly a century of integrating tanks into its fighting forces, abandoned armored warfare in favor of missiles and drones to “confront China” in the Indo-Pacific region.

The Real B3W-NATO Agenda

By Pepe Escobar, June 17, 2021

For those spared the ordeal of sifting through the NATO summit communique, here’s the concise low down: Russia is an “acute threat” and China is a “systemic challenge”. NATO, of course, are just a bunch of innocent kids building castles in a sandbox. Those were the days when Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, coined the trans-Atlantic purpose: to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

This GRTV video was first published on August 26, 2015

The “Chinese dragon” of the last two decades may be faltering but it is still hailed by many as an economic miracle.

Far from a great advance for Chinese workers, however, it is the direct result of a consolidation of power in the hands of a small clique of powerful families, families that have actively collaborated with Western financial oligarchs.

This is the GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV, with James Corbett and Michel Chossudovsky.  

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War against the Soviet Union was what Hitler had wanted from the beginning. He had already made this very clear on the pages of Mein Kampf, written in the mid-1920s. Furthermore, as a German historian has recently convincingly demonstrated, it was a war against the Soviet Union, and not against Poland, France, or Britain, that Hitler had wanted and planned to unleash in 1939. On August 11 of that year, Hitler explained to Carl J. Burckhardt, an official of the League of Nations, that “everything he undertook was directed against Russia,” and that “if the West [i.e., the French and the British] is too stupid and too blind to comprehend this, he would be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, turn and defeat the West, and then turn back with all his strength to strike a blow against the Soviet Union.”

This is in fact what happened. The West did turn out to be “too stupid and blind,” as Hitler saw it, to give him “a free hand” in the east, so he did make a deal with Moscow — the infamous “Hitler-Stalin Pact” — and then unleashed war against Poland, France, and Britain. But his ultimate objective remained the same: to attack and destroy the Soviet Union as soon as possible. Hitler and the German generals were convinced they had learned an important lesson from World War I. Devoid of the raw materials, such as oil and rubber, needed to win a modern war, Germany could not win their planned new edition of the “Great War.” In order to win such a war, Germany would have to win it fast, very fast. This is how the blitzkrieg concept was born, that is, the idea of warfare (Krieg) fast as lightning (Blitz).

Blitzkrieg meant motorized war, so in preparation for such a war Germany, during the thirties, cranked out massive numbers of tanks and planes as well as trucks to transport troops. In addition, gargantuan amounts of oil and rubber were imported and stockpiled. As we have seen, much of this oil was purchased from US corporations, some of which also kindly made available the “recipe” for producing synthetic fuel from coal. In 1939 and 1940, this equipment permitted the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to overwhelm the Polish, Dutch, Belgian, and French defences with thousands of planes and tanks in a matter of weeks; blitzkriege, “lightning-fast wars,” were invariably followed by blitzsiege, “lightning-fast victories.”

The victories against Poland, France, et cetera were spectacular enough, but they did not provide Germany with much loot in the form of vitally important oil and rubber. Instead, “lightning warfare” actually depleted the stockpiles built up before the war. Fortunately for Hitler, in 1940 and 1941 Germany was able to continue importing oil from the still neutral United States, mostly via other neutral (and friendly) countries such as Franco’s Spain. Moreover, under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact the Soviet Union herself also supplied Germany rather generously with oil. However, it was most troubling for Hitler that, in return, Germany had to supply the Soviet Union with high-quality industrial products and state-of-the-art military technology, which was used by the Soviets to modernize their army and improve their weaponry. Another headache for Hitler was the fact that the terms of his deal with the Soviets had permitted the latter to occupy eastern Poland, thus shifting their border, and their defences, a few hundred kilometres to the west, making the planned march to Moscow much longer for the German military. (As the Wehrmacht did actually make it to the outskirts of Moscow in late 1941, it can be argued that they would probably have taken the city, and perhaps won the war, had they been able to launch their attack from positions further east.)

Elements of the German 3rd Panzer Army on the road near Pruzhany, June 1941 (Public Domain)

In 1939, Hitler had reluctantly shelved his plan for war against the Soviet Union. But he resurrected it very soon after the defeat of France, in the summer of 1940. A formal order to prepare plans for such an attack, to be code-named Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa) was given a few months later, on December 18, 1940.4 By 1940 nothing had changed as far as Hitler was concerned: “The real enemy was the one in the east.”5 Hitler simply did not want to wait much longer before realizing the great ambition of his life, that is, destroying the country he had defined as his arch-enemy in Mein Kampf. Moreover, he knew that the Soviets were frantically preparing their defences for a German attack which, as they knew only too well, would come sooner or later. (The notion that, on account of their 1939 non-aggression pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were friendly “allies” is hopelessly erroneous.) Since the Soviet Union was getting stronger by the day, time was obviously not on Hitler’s side. How much longer could he wait before the window of opportunity would close? Furthermore, waging a blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union promised to provide Germany with the virtually limitless resources of that huge country, including Ukrainian wheat to provide Germany’s population, experiencing wartime shortages, with plenty of food; minerals such as coal, from which synthetic oil and rubber could be produced; and — last, but certainly not least — the rich oil fields of Baku and Grozny, where the gas-guzzling Panzers and Stukas would be able to fill their tanks to the brim at any time. Steeled with these assets, it would then be a simple matter for Hitler to settle accounts with Britain, starting, for example, with the capture of Gibraltar. Germany would finally be a genuine world power, invulnerable within a European “fortress” stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, possessed of limitless resources, and therefore capable of winning even long, drawn-out wars against any antagonist — including the US — in one of the future “wars of the continents” conjured up in Hitler’s feverish imagination.

Image on the right: OKH commander Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and Hitler study maps during the early days of Hitler’s Russian Campaign (Public Domain)

Hitler and his generals were confident that the blitzkrieg they prepared to unleash against the Soviet Union would be as successful as their earlier lightning wars against Poland and France had been. They considered the Soviet Union as a “giant with feet of clay,” whose army, presumably decapitated by Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s, was “not more than a joke,” as Hitler himself put it on one occasion. In order to fight and, of course, win the decisive battles, they allowed for a campaign of four to six weeks, possibly to be followed by some mopping-up operations, during which the remnants of the Soviet host would “be chased across the country like a bunch of beaten Cossacks.” In any event, Hitler felt supremely confident, and on the eve of the attack, he “fancied himself to be on the verge of the greatest triumph of his life.”

In Washington and London, the military experts likewise believed that the Soviet Union would not be able to put up significant resistance to the Nazi juggernaut, whose military exploits of 1939–40 had earned it a reputation of invincibility. The British secret services were convinced that the Soviet Union would be “liquidated within eight to ten weeks,” and the chief of the Imperial General Staff averred that the Wehrmacht would slice through the Red Army “like a warm knife through butter,” and that the Red Army would be rounded up “like cattle.” According to expert opinion in Washington, Hitler would “crush Russia [sic] like an egg.”

The German attack started on June 22, 1941, in the early hours of the morning. Three million German soldiers and almost 700,000 allies of Nazi Germany crossed the border. Their equipment consisted of 600,000 motor vehicles, 3,648 tanks, more than 2,700 planes, and just over 7,000 pieces of artillery. At first, everything went according to plan. Huge holes were punched in the Soviet defences, impressive territorial gains were made rapidly, and hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner in a number of spectacular “encirclement battles.” The road to Moscow seemed to lay open. However, all too soon it became evident that the blitzkrieg in the east would not be the cakewalk that had been expected. Facing the most powerful military machine on earth, the Red Army predictably took a major beating but, as propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels confided to his diary as early as July 2, also put up a tough resistance and hit back very hard on numerous occasions. General Franz Halder, in many ways the “godfather” of Operation Barbarossa’s plan of attack, acknowledged that Soviet resistance was much stronger than anything the Germans had faced in Western Europe. Wehrmacht reports cited “hard,” “tough,” even “wild” resistance, causing heavy losses in men and equipment on the German side. More often than expected, Soviet forces managed to launch counterattacks that slowed down the German advance. Some Soviet units went into hiding in the vast Pripet Marshes and elsewhere, organized deadly partisan warfare, and threatened the long and vulnerable German lines of communication. It also turned out that the Red Army was much better equipped than expected. German generals were “amazed,” writes a German historian, by the quality of Soviet weapons such as the Katyusha rocket launcher (a.k.a. “Stalin Organ”) and the T-34 tank. Hitler was furious that his secret services had not been aware of the existence of some of this weaponry.

The greatest cause of concern, as far as the Germans were concerned, was the fact that the bulk of the Red Army managed to withdraw in relatively good order and eluded destruction in a huge encirclement battle, in the kind of repeat of Cannae or Sedan that Hitler and his generals had dreamed of. The Soviets appeared to have carefully observed and analyzed the German blitzkrieg successes of 1939 and 1940 and to have learned useful lessons. They must have noticed that in May 1940 the French had massed the bulk of their forces right at the border as well as in Belgium, thus making it possible for the German war machine to encircle them. (British troops were also caught in this encirclement but managed to escape via Dunkirk.) The Soviets did leave some troops at the border, of course, and these troops predictably suffered the Soviet Union’s major losses during the opening stages of Barbarossa. But — contrary to what is claimed by historians such as Richard Overy — the bulk of the Red Army was held back in the rear, avoiding entrapment. It was this “defence in depth” — facilitated by the acquisition of a “glacis,” a territorial “breathing space,” in Poland in 1939 — that frustrated the German ambition to destroy the Red Army in its entirety. As Marshal Zhukov was to write in his memoirs, “the Soviet Union would have been smashed if we had organized all our forces at the border.”

As early as the middle of July, as Hitler’s war in the east started to lose its Blitz-qualities, countless Germans, military as well as civilians, of low as well as high rank, including Hitler himself, lost their belief in a quick victory. And by the end of August, at a time when Barbarossa should have been winding down, the Wehrmacht’s high command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) acknowledged that it might no longer be possible to win the war in 1941. A major problem was the fact that, when Barbarossa started on June 22, the available supplies of fuel, tires, spare parts, et cetera, were good enough for only about two months. This had been deemed sufficient because it was expected that within two months the Soviet Union would be on its knees and its unlimited resources — industrial products as well as raw materials — would therefore be available to the Germans. However, by late August the German spearheads were nowhere near those distant regions of the Soviet Union where oil, that most precious of all martial commodities, was to be had. If the tanks managed to keep on rolling, though increasingly slowly, into the seemingly endless Russian and Ukrainian expanses, it was to a large extent by means of fuel and rubber imported, via Spain and occupied France, from the US.

The flames of optimism flared up again in September, when German troops captured Kiev, and, further north, made progress in the direction of Moscow. Hitler believed, or at least pretended to believe, that the end was now near for the Soviets. In a public speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on October 3, he declared that the eastern war was virtually over. And the Wehrmacht was ordered to deliver the coup de grâce by launching Operation Typhoon (Unternehmen Taifun), an offensive aimed at taking Moscow. However, the odds for success looked increasingly slim, as the Soviets were busily bringing in reserve units from the Far East. (They had been informed by their master spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, that the Japanese, whose army was stationed in northern China, were no longer considering attacking the Soviets’ vulnerable borders in the Vladivostok area.) To make things worse, the Germans no longer enjoyed superiority in the air, particularly over Moscow. Also, sufficient supplies of ammunition and food could not be brought up from the rear to the front, since the long supply lines were severely hampered by partisan activity. Finally, it was getting chilly in the Soviet Union, though no colder than usual at that time of the year. But the German high command, confident that their eastern blitzkrieg would be over by the end of the summer, had failed to supply the troops with the equipment necessary to fight in the rain, mud, snow, and freezing temperatures of a Russian fall and winter.

Taking Moscow loomed as an extremely important objective in the minds of Hitler and his generals. It was believed, though probably wrongly, that the fall of its capital would “decapitate” the Soviet Union and thus bring about its collapse. It also seemed important to avoid a repeat of the scenario of the summer of 1914, when the seemingly unstoppable German advance into France had been halted in extremis on the eastern outskirts of Paris, during the Battle of the Marne. This disaster — from the German perspective — had robbed Germany of nearly certain victory in the opening stages of the Great War and had forced it into a lengthy struggle that, lacking sufficient resources and blockaded by the British navy, it was doomed to lose. This time, in a new Great War fought against a new arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, there was to be no “miracle of the Marne,” that is, no defeat just outside the capital, and Germany would therefore not have to once more fight, resourceless and blockaded, a long, drawn-out conflict it would be doomed to lose. Unlike Paris, Moscow would fall, history would not repeat itself, and Germany would end up being victorious. Or so they hoped in Hitler’s headquarters.

The Wehrmacht continued to advance, albeit very slowly, and by mid-November some units found themselves only thirty kilometres from the capital. But the troops were now totally exhausted and running out of supplies. Their commanders knew that it was simply impossible to take Moscow, tantalizingly close as the city may have been, and that even doing so would not bring them victory. On December 3, a number of units abandoned the offensive on their own initiative. Within days, however, the entire German army in front of Moscow was simply forced on the defensive. Indeed, on December 5, at three in the morning, in cold and snowy conditions, the Red Army suddenly launched a major, well-prepared counterattack. The Wehrmacht’s lines were pierced in many places, and the Germans were thrown back between 100 and 280 kilometres with heavy losses of men and equipment. It was only with great difficulty that a catastrophic encirclement could be avoided.

On December 8, Hitler ordered his army to abandon the offensive and to move into defensive positions. He blamed this setback on the supposedly unexpected early arrival of winter, refused to pull back further to the rear, as some of his generals suggested, and proposed to attack again in the spring. Thus ended Hitler’s blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, the war that, had it been victorious, would have realized the great ambition of his life, the destruction of the Soviet Union. More importantly, such a victory would also have provided Nazi Germany with sufficient oil and other resources to make it a virtually invulnerable world power. As such, Nazi Germany would very likely have been capable of finishing off stubborn Great Britain, even if the US would have rushed to help its Anglo-Saxon cousin, which, in early December of 1941, was not yet in the cards. A blitzsieg, that is, a rapid victory against the Soviet Union, then, was supposed to have made a German defeat impossible, and would in all likelihood have done so. (It is probably fair to say that if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union in 1941, Germany would today still be the hegemon of Europe, and possibly of the Middle East and North Africa as well.) However, defeat in the Battle of Moscow in December 1941 meant that Hitler’s blitzkrieg did not produce the hoped-for blitzsieg. In the new “Battle of the Marne” just to the west of Moscow, Nazi Germany suffered the defeat that made victory impossible, not only victory against the Soviet Union itself, but also victory against Great Britain and victory in the war in general. It ought to be noted that the United States was not yet involved in the war against Germany.

Bearing in mind the lessons of World War I, Hitler and his generals had known from the start that, in order to win the new Great War they had unleashed, Germany had to win fast, lightning-fast. But on December 5, 1941, it became evident to everyone present in Hitler’s headquarters that a blitzsieg against the Soviet Union would not be forthcoming, and that Germany was doomed to lose the war, if not sooner, then later. According to General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the OKW, Hitler then realized that he could no longer win the war. And so it can be argued, as a German historian, an expert on the war against the Soviet Union, has done, that the success of the Red Army in front of Moscow was unquestionably the “major break” (Zäsur) of the entire world war.

In other words, the tide of World War II can be said to have turned on December 5, 1941. However, as real tides turn not suddenly but rather gradually and imperceptibly, the tide of the war turned not on a single day, but over a period of days, weeks, and even months, in the period of approximately three months that elapsed between the (late) summer of 1941 and early December of that same year. The tide of the war in the east turned gradually, but it did not do so imperceptibly. Already in August 1941, astute observers had started to doubt that a German victory, not only in the Soviet Union but in the war in general, still belonged to the realm of possibilities. The well-informed Vatican, for example, initially very enthusiastic about Hitler’s “crusade” against the Soviet homeland of “godless” Bolshevism, started to express grave concerns about the situation in the east in late summer 1941; by mid-October, it came to the conclusion that Germany would lose the war. Likewise in mid-October, the Swiss secret services reported that “the Germans can no longer win the war.” By late November, a defeatism of sorts had started to infect the higher ranks of the Wehrmacht and of the Nazi Party. Even as they were urging their troops forward toward Moscow, some generals opined that it would be preferable to make peace overtures and wind down the war without achieving the great victory that had seemed so certain at the start of Operation Barbarossa. When the Red Army launched its devastating counteroffensive on December 5, Hitler himself realized that he would lose the war. But he was not prepared to let the German public know that. The nasty tidings from the front near Moscow were presented to the public as a temporary setback, blamed on the supposedly unexpectedly early arrival of winter and/or on the incompetence or cowardice of certain commanders. (It was only a good year later, after the catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942-43, that the German public, and the entire world, would realize that Germany was doomed; which is why even today many historians believe that the tide turned in Stalingrad.)

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Jacques R. Pauwels is the author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002 and The Great Class War 1914-1918, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2016. Dr. Pauwels is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Important report by Matthew Grace

Medical researcher and health consultant Matthew Grace interviews grieving parents Pam and Jeff Goodman to discuss and dissect the coverup and criminal promotion of the Covid 19 “vaccination,”

Many shocking revelations and irrefutable facts are presented here to help keep you and your family safe.

“Mass Deception in the History of Humankind”.

Below is an interview with the parents of their son who died shortly after the vaccine.

He was murder by J and J.

“Where are the unbiased reports. It’s gone.”

“The media has created a fear culture”

“You have to dig to find the truth”.

The information pertaining to the dangers of the Covid vaccine are being deliberately withheld.

Both the government and the media are responsible for crimes against humanity.

Facebook, Google and Twitter are involved in suppressing both the data and scientific analysis pertaining to the mRNA vaccine.

Google is involved in blocking access to independent online reports on the vaccine

Sustaining Covid lies constitutes a criminal act.

M. Ch. June 17, 2021

***

 https://www.bitchute.com/video/2ksR83HI5kga/

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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The highly anticipated Putin-Biden Summit resulted in very few tangible outcomes, but obsessing over that fact misses the most important point, which is that their leaders confirmed that there’s a mutual will to improve their relations.

Presidents Putin and Biden went into Wednesday’s summit with the intention of rescuing their bilateral relations from their lowest level since the end of the Old Cold War, and while their efforts resulted in few tangible outcomes, they nevertheless succeed in confirming that they both have the will to improve their ties. The only visible successes were the decision to return their ambassadors and set up a variety of working groups, with the most important one focusing on strategic security issues. They also revealed that they discussed the Arctic, cybersecurity, and regional conflicts like Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, as well as Iran’s nuclear program. Both leaders also expressed a desire to improve trade in the future too.

Differences still persist, however, especially over issues that the US describes as “democracy” and “human rights”. Nevertheless, these aren’t serious enough to impede the improvement of their relations. They simply agreed to disagree and that’s that. It’s much more important for both leaders to resolve their strategic security problems first and foremost, especially by negotiating a successor to the recently extended New START upon its expiry. They also needed to discuss the “rules of the road”, as President Biden put it, when it comes to their overall competition with one another. Both leaders confirmed that the talks were held in a positive atmosphere free from threats, which further confirms their desire to resolve whatever issues they realistically can.

Since not a lot of specific details were disclosed, it’s difficult to predict exactly what form their possible cooperation could take on the wide range of issues that they discussed. Even so, what’s most important is that they talked about those topics and sought to find a convergence of interests between them. This further speaks to their positive intentions in responsibly regulating their comprehensive competition with one another, the end effect of which could be a reduction of tensions in Europe. That in turn could free up the US to more aggressively “contain” China on the other side of Eurasia, but nobody should expect an intensification of such efforts anytime soon since it’ll still take some time to make progress on the Russian front, if it happens at all.

The reason for such caution is that there are still some rabidly anti-Russian members of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) who could try to sabotage their incipient rapprochement. They already tried doing so by provoking this April’s tensions in Ukraine as well as setting President Biden up during an interview around that time to agree with his interlocutor that his Russian counterpart is a so-called “killer”. Those efforts failed to derail what the world now knows was their behind-the-scenes talks this entire time which helped pave the way for Wednesday’s summit.

That being said, the anti-Russian faction of the American “deep state” might still not given up on trying to ruin bilateral relations. Even in the event that they stage another provocation, however, it’s unclear whether Russia would react to it or even whether those closest to Biden who were responsible for organizing Wednesday’s summit would fall for it. President Putin sincerely seems to believe that his American counterpart wants to improve relations, and even though neither leader trusts the other, they appear to understand that this vision is in their mutual interests. For that reason, the anti-Russian faction of the “deep state” might not succeed.

Speculation aside, there’s no question that Wednesday’s summit was a positive development for both countries. Their leaders finally had the chance to talk face-to-face and sort out as many of their problems as possible. It’ll now be up to those below them to see to it that tangible progress is achieved on everything that they discussed. The world might have to wait some time before seeing the visible fruits of their efforts, but they should expect that they’ll eventually see something, even if only in the sphere of strategic security. That would make Wednesday’s summit a success even if nothing else improves, whether in general or right away.

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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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First published on June 3, 2021

On 25 May 2021, the Indian Bar Association (IBA) served a 51-page legal notice on Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), for “her act of spreading disinformation and misguiding the people of India, in order to fulfil her agenda.”

The Mumbai-based IBA is an association of lawyers who strive to bring transparency and accountability to the Indian justice system. It is actively involved in the dissemination of legal knowledge and provides guidance and support to advocates and ordinary people in their fight for justice.

The legal notice says Dr Swaminathan has been:

“Running a disinformation campaign against Ivermectin by deliberate suppression of effectiveness of drug Ivermectin as prophylaxis and for treatment of COVID-19, despite the existence of large amounts of clinical data compiled and presented by esteemed, highly qualified, experienced medical doctors and scientists,”

and

“Issuing statements in social media and mainstream media, thereby influencing the public against the use of Ivermectin and attacking the credibility of acclaimed bodies/institutes like ICMR and AIIMS, Delhi, which have included ‘Ivermectin’ in the ‘National Guidelines for COVID-19 management’.”

The notice is based on the research and clinical trials carried out by the ‘Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’ (FLCCC) and the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) Panel. These organisations have presented an enormous amount of data that strengthen the case for recommending Ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

The IBA says that Dr Swaminathan has ignored these studies and reports and has deliberately suppressed the data regarding the effectiveness of Ivermectin, with an intent to dissuade the people of India from using it.

However, two key medical bodies, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi, have refused to accept her stand and have retained the recommendation for Ivermectin, under a ‘May Do’ category, for patients with mild symptoms and those in home isolation, as stated in ‘The National Guidelines for COVID-19 management’.

It is interesting to note that the content of several web links to news articles and reports included in the notice served upon Dr Swaminathan, which was visible before issuing the notice, has either been removed or deleted.

It seems that the vaccine manufacturers and many governments are desperate to protect their pro-vaccine agenda and will attempt to censor information and news regarding the efficacy of Ivermectin.

The legal notice can be read in full on the website of the India Bar Association.

Readers are also urged to look at the article ‘COVID Deaths Plunge after Major World City Introduces Ivermectin’, which recently appeared on the World Net Daily News Center website.

The article  ‘COVID Vaccines: A Faltering Framework’ on the OffGuardian’ website is also recommended. The author argues that for the Pfizer vaccine, 119 people must be injected for it to reduce a ‘COVID case’ in one person; the other 118 receive no benefit whatsoever but placed themselves at genuine (potential) risk from the vaccine itself. The Lancet suggests that 119 number might be even higher.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

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Doing his best to justify President Biden’s $750 billion military budget, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that China’s military has been building its military capabilities at “a very serious and sustained rate.”

Well, of course it has been. How else would the U.S. national-security establishment justify its ever-increasing budgets? I’m just surprised that Milley didn’t mention Russia in the same breath, as well as North Korea, Cuba, the Taliban, Venezuela, Iran, and all the other minor official enemies, maybe even communist Vietnam too.

China and Russia were the two official enemies — or “rivals,” “opponents,” “enemies”  — during the Cold War that kept the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA in high cotton. That was when both countries were supposedly part of an international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow. If increasing amounts of U.S. taxpayer money were not shifted into the coffers of the U.S. national-security establishment, it was argued, America would end up falling to this international communist conspiracy.

In fact, it was this supposed threat of “godless communism” that was emanating from Moscow that was the justification for converting the federal government to a national-security state in the first place. For more than 150 years, the federal government operated as a limited-government republic with limited powers. After World War II, it was converted to a national-security state to wage the Cold War against China, Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union, other communist countries, and communism in general. That’s when the U.S. national-security establishment acquired omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination.

As we pointed out in our recent online conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination,” by the summer of 1963 President Kennedy had achieved a breakthrough and recognized that this Cold War fear-mongering was nothing more than a racket. At his Peace Speech at American University, he threw the gauntlet down by declaring an end to the Cold War and an intention to have the United States exist in peaceful harmony with the communist world. 

That sealed John Kennedy’s fate. No president since Kennedy has dared to do that. 

After Kennedy was removed from office, Americans got the Vietnam War and another 25 years of ever-increasing money, influence, and power for the national-security establishment, 

It was always assumed by most everyone that the Cold War racket would go on forever. To the shock of the U.S. national-security establishment, the Soviet Union unilaterally called it quits in 1989. China was, of course, still around, just as North Korea and Cuba were. But the Pentagon and the CIA knew that without the Soviet Union, their Cold War racket would no longer be sufficiently powerful to justify ever-increasing budgets.

That’s when they went into the Middle East and began killing, destroying, and humiliating people, knowing that this would almost certainly produce terrorist “blowback” or retaliation. And sure enough, it did: the World Trade Center in 1993, the USS Cole, and the U.S. embassies in East Africa. But none of them was large enough to become a gigantic new official enemy that would replace the Soviet Union and godless communism. 

But then the 9/11 attacks came, which provided the new official enemy to replace communism — “terrorism.” The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were back in high cotton again with ever-increasing annual budgets to wage their “global war on terrorism.”

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were then used as the excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, where U.S. forces wreaked massive death and destruction over many years, which guaranteed more anger and rage, which ensured a never-ending supply of new terrorists. 

Thus, the Pentagon and the CIA had found another official enemy, one that was likely to last for decades, perhaps even longer than the Soviet Union and godless communism. 

But after 20 years of interventionism in Afghanistan and the Middle East, U.S. forces are now in retreat, which means that all the fear-mongering about how the terrorists are coming to get us will lack the impact it had on Americans in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

What to do now? The answer is obvious: It’s now time to return to China and Russia as America’s old and new official enemies. Oh, sure, the threat of an international conspiracy involving godless communism supposedly emanating from Moscow will not be available but the hope is that Americans will nonetheless be just as afraid, so that they don’t question the ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer largess going into the military-intelligence coffers.

There is only one solution to this sordid, deadly, destructive, and corrupt racket: the dismantling, not the reform, of the national-security state apparatus and the restoration of America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic. That’s the way to lead America to peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.  

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

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A pharmacist who used to work for CVS has gone public with details about how the pharmacy chains are handling the roll outs of the COVID-19 injections.

She obviously has done her homework as a pharmacist, and was convinced that these shots were harming people.

But apparently she was such a good employee, that originally they allowed her to stay on even though she made it clear that she was NOT going to be injecting anybody with these shots.

In fact, she states that not only was she not going to inject anyone, she was actually going to try to convince CVS customers NOT to take the injections.

She laments the fact that most people did not care, and took the shots anyway.

She reveals how the pharmacy chains are getting a lot of money to administer COVID-19 bioweapon shots.

If you (her administrative colleagues) don’t see a problem with what’s going on – there’s a problem there. Or you’re just doing this for the money that all of the pharmacy chains are getting.

And don’t think that they’re not getting A LOT OF MONEY!

CVS was advertising for the longest time for PRN casual pharmacists. They were advertising paying $6500 a week to pharmacists who would come on board and go to old folks’ homes and kill them. Or I mean give them the “vaccine.”

$6500.00 a week! So that’s $6500.00 a week, per pharmacist per neighborhood area, per community, per city, per region, per county, per state, for the whole United States.

So for “casual labor” do you think that’s coming out of their own pocket? They’re not going to do it unless they are getting a lot of money from the government to make sure that they fulfill their contractual duty with the government in getting this distributed and into people.

This is mainly a result of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed from last year, that gave a blank check to Big Pharma to distribute these injections that many doctors and scientists are now calling “bioweapons.” He gave them $TRILLIONS to spend, and to this day he is very proud of this fact, and mentions it every chance he gets.

This is where states are getting their millions of dollars to entice people to get the shots with lotteries, free beer, free marijuana, and many other incentives, along with a $BILLION dollar advertising campaign designed to use propaganda to fool the public into believing that these shots are safe and necessary to “return to normal.”

She continues with what she said to her former employer:

I let them know that a lot of people, especially with this particular vaccine, or series of vaccines, a lot of people are relying on your educational expertise to help guide them, to tell them whether this is OK or not OK.

They’re relying on you! Your education, your integrity and your honesty.

And you don’t have a problem with vaccinating people with the professional package insert…

You know, I was dying waiting for the first batch of vaccines to come, to get a hold of this (holding package insert in her hands) to see what they were going to put on the package insert.

And of course when we got them, look! They’re blank. Both sides.

And what does it say?

“INTENTIONALLY BLANK”

So you’re putting this into people without knowing what the hell you’re putting in them?

And you don’t see a problem?

Or, if you do realize there’s a problem, because you yourself understand that it’s not statistically possible to have in the middle of a flu season, to go on the State Department of Health website, to MMWR Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report, to look at the number of flu cases per year, and we’re at ZERO, ZERO, ZERO.

That’s not statistically possible.

And then we have all the people who simply could not see through the lies that, “Oh we had a non-existent flu season because everybody was doing a bang-up job at masking up and social distancing.”

But then they would turn around and say that the COVID numbers were just spiking and further out of control and we needed more and more things implemented because people were not wearing masks and social distancing!

You can’t have it both ways.

If you happen to be a health professional, and you can’t see this, you’ve got big problems, and you’ve got serious blood on your hands.

Now, I’ve had a couple of colleagues tell me, “Well you know what, I just kind of view this as my employer is making me do this, you know, so I gotta do it.”

No, you don’t! This is a choice, this is an individual choice that YOU are making. You’re going to be held accountable.

There’s nothing that would allow me to do something that is so wrong. You’re killing people. You’re damning them. You’re wounding them.

We are very indebted to this brave woman coming forward and addressing the public. She talks about many issues, as an insider, such as batch control and targeting certain ethnic groups, which we know fits into their eugenic goals.

She does not identify her name or location in this video, but she is apparently in Florida. I could not initially find the original source of this video, but she put her screen name at the end, and through that I found what appears to be her YouTube Channel here.

She understands that this video will not last long on YouTube and encourages others to share it on other platforms.

Watch her entire presentation. This is from our Rumble channel, and it is also on our Bitchute channel.

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Ano Turtiainen, member of Parliament of Finland, gave a straight speech 9.6.2021 about possible COVID vaccine genocide going on in Finland. He warned all members of the Finnish Parliament and media by letting them know if they would still continue misleading our citizens by telling them fairy tales about safe vaccines, they are intentionally involved in several different crimes, the most serious of these may be even genocide.

Thank God for this man Ano Turtiainen, who is daring to tell the truth!

Here is his complete speech as seen on this video:

”Honorable Chairman, the committee’s report mentions a wide range of real challenges to Finland’s security. This report however lacks a very serious challenge to the safety of Finland and Finns in our present everyday life. I refer to these so-called COVID vaccines which have also divided our people in two; awake and misguided.

Dear members of the Parliament (MP´s), I will now give you the following information so that you can never again plead ignorance after hearing this information about the risk to which Finnish citizens have been exposed. Finland is currently injecting its citizens with toxins disguised as COVID vaccines. Listen carefully. None of these injected poisons disguised as COVID vaccines has a marketing licence in Finland but only a conditional marketing authorisation from the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The terms of a conditional licence state that the authorization is conditional, quote: “The available information must demonstrate that the benefits of the medical product outweigh its risks.”

Secondly, dear colleagues, despite the repetition of the media we have so far officially zero COVID deaths in Finland. According to THL (equivalent to CDC) the official causes of death from the year 2020 will not be published until 2022. However according to Fimea (equivalent to VAERS) 78 people have died from COVID vaccines in Finland and there are 1,306 serious adverse reaction reports and 3,630 unprocessed reports. About 57% of processed reports are estimated to have serious adverse reactions. The source for this is Fimea (www.fimea.fi).

Thirdly, conditional marketing licence for these toxics which are disguised as COVID vaccines also says, quote: ”The applicant must be able to provide comprehensive clinical information in the future.” Dear colleagues, this text is taken directly from the website of European Medicines Agency (EMA). I have said here many times that this is a human experiment. In violation of the Nuremberg Code, Finns have not been told that this is a human experiment.

Now with this speech, I have made all of you, as well as the media, aware that this is a human experiment and that its results are terrible. By comparison, the previously failed vaccine experiment Pandemrix was stopped with 32 times fewerside effects than what we have now. So, now I ask you all: how many more people should die or get injured before we interrupt this killing of people?

Dear colleagues, you are now aware of this extreme severe security threat facing our nation and that the disadvantages from the injections outweigh the benefits. You no longer have a reason not to act to save our nation.

Finally, if you still continue misleading our citizens by telling them for example fairy tales that vaccines are safe and have a marketing licence you are intentionally involved in several crimes, the most serious of these may be even genocide. Once again, I remind everyone of you here: a crime becomes intentional when it is committed knowingly. Now you are all aware. Thank you.”

-Finnish MP, Ano Turtiainen

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“God is dead. . .  And we have killed him. . . . Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? — “Nietzsche

Appeasing the Gods

Human beings have a long history of worship, of seeking to secure some certainty in the face of forces beyond their control: wind and weather, wild beasts, and things that go bump in the night.

Through ritual and sacrifice, people tried to control the unknown, to shape the world to their liking: to survive and thrive.

The means have been varied: shamanic dancing, religious chanting, alchemy, animal sacrifice, and even cannibalism, whereby warriors sought to assimilate the virtues of their respected and formidable enemies.

To many, the whole of the natural world was sacred, each animal, tree, or blade of grass. The very ground on which they stood was imbued with religious significance. They had mythic names for each feature of the local geography.

Each mountain was a magic mountain.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, From whence cometh my help.  — Psalms, King James Bible

Over time, slouching toward what we now call ‘civilization,’ polytheism gave way to monotheism. One god to rule us all. A giant bearded paterfamilias even if, occasionally, God the Father displayed some of the characteristics of The Godfather.

Sooner or later, as the priest kings of old were stalked and killed in the sacred grove by the new god king, the old monolithic and wrathful God of the Old Testament was bound to be dethroned.

So, what’s a worshipper to do? The urge to worship is deep, so something or someone must be found to fill the power vacuum of a people ‘alone in a hostile world’ as Karen Horney describes the basic mind-set of the neurotic.

If one feels powerless—or at least not powerful enough—to cope with life’s dangers, be they physical or social, one must find the most powerful force with whom to ally oneself.

If God the Father made man in his own image, why cannot a mighty man create God in his own image. Indeed, why cannot he be a veritable god himself? The king is dead. Long live the king!

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, 

how infinite in faculties, in form and moving 

how express and admirable, in action 

how like an angel, in apprehension 

how like a god! 

— Shakespeare, Hamlet 

Man As God

In times past, kings and emperors took unto themselves powers that were almost god-like in their scope. Caligula forced the Roman Senate to worship him as a god. 

If you are a Roman emperor you can get away with that, at least until your kingdom comes crashing about your ears.

For most people, however, the declaration ‘I am God’ would land you drooling in the corner of a psychiatric day-room, doped up to the gills with powerful pharmaceuticals.

The key to pulling off this caper is the amount of power you have at your disposal. As might makes right, the more power you have the more ‘right you are, if you think you are.’ You decide what reality is, and the faithful must believe in their god, and his pronouncements from his own personal Olympus.

Bamboozling the World

If you have wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, media companies, advanced technology and legions of scientists at your command, the world is literally your oyster. You are ‘king of the world.’ What you say goes, and the common herd dutifully swallows your version of reality, submissively bleating: ‘Yes sir, no sir. Three bags full, sir!’

Insanity Turned on its Head 

When the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, what was insane becomes sane; sanity becomes insanity—even criminally insane. Some will be considered dangerous terrorists, akin to heretics of old, insofar as they disturb the delicate equilibrium of the madhouse.

Reality is defined by the most powerful and, in a culture that reveres power, the powerful are revered, even worshipped, and their word is law, the revealed gospel truth.

Naturally, when flattered by nearly universal reverential kowtowing, ego-inflated, megalomaniac master magicians believe their own publicity. They believe, in fact, that they are ‘as gods,’ joining the other worshippers in worshipping themselves. 

Now they have formed their own religious sect, and evangelized most of the known world, there is no stopping them—no chance they will come to their senses this side of the grave. They may even believe they have found the elusive ‘Fountain of Youth’ and achieved immortality. 

So, like ‘Mad King George,’ they will require a force and a will greater than their own to destroy their diabolical delusions, along with their illusory virtual world, before they destroy us all, and the very real and beautiful planet we live on.

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Full transcript below.

Keir Simmons: Mr President, it’s been a long time since you sat down with an American television network. Almost three years, I think. Thank you for your time. There’s a lot to discuss. I hope we have time to get to all of the issues.

But I want to begin with some news from the US just today. In the US it’s reported that Russia is preparing, perhaps within months, to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system, enabling Tehran to track military targets. Is that true? (COMPLETE MISTRANSLATION TWICE – ABOUT HACKING AND GIVING IRAN TECHNOLOGY FOR ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM)

Vladimir Putin: Would you mind repeating the question again, that we are preparing to hack what kind of facilities?

Keir Simmons: No. It’s in the report today that Russia is preparing to give or to offer to Iran a satellite technology which will enable Iran to target military, to make military targets. (Laughter.)

Vladimir Putin: No. We don’t have that kind of programmes with Iran. No, it’s just nonsense all over again, yet again. We have cooperation plans with Iran, including military and technical cooperation. And all of this fits the framework of the decisions that were agreed upon in our programme, in regard to Iran’s nuclear programme in the context of UN decisions together with our partners in the preparation of the JCPOA whereby some point sanctions, including in the area of military and technical cooperation, should be lifted from Iran. We have certain programmes which concern conventional weapons, if it gets that far. However, we haven’t even gone to that stage yet. We don’t even have any kind of real cooperation in the conventional weapons area. So if anybody is inventing something regarding modern space-based technology, this is just plain fiction. This is just fake news. At the very least, I don’t know anything about this kind of thing. Those who are speaking about it probably know more about it. It’s just nonsense, garbage.

Keir Simmons: So, presumably you’d agree that giving Iran satellite technology that might enable it to target US servicemen and women in places like Iraq or to share that information with Hezbollah or the Houthis in Yemen so they could target Israel and Saudi Arabia, that giving Iran that kind of satellite technology would be dangerous?

Vladimir Putin: Look, why are we talking about problems that don’t exist? There is no subject for discussion. Somebody has invented something, has made something up. Maybe this is just a bogus story so as to limit any kind of military and technical cooperation with Iran. I will say once again this is just some fake information that I have no knowledge about. For the first time I’m hearing about this information from you. We don’t have this kind of intentions. And I’m not even sure that Iran is even able to accommodate this kind of technology. This is a separate subject, a very high-tech subject.

We don’t rule out cooperation with many world nations in space. But probably everybody knows very well our position in terms that we are categorically against space militarisation all together. We believe that space should be free from any and all kinds of weapons located in near-Earth orbits. We don’t have this kind of plans or any plans, especially concerning the transfer of technology of the level that you have just described.

Keir Simmons: Ok. Let’s move on to your summit with President Biden.

The context for the summit is that he’s meeting with the G7, a group that you used to belong to, with NATO, with European leaders. President Biden has defined his first trip to Europe as quote, ”about rallying the world’s democracies.“ He views you as a leader of autocrats, who is determined to undermine the liberal democratic order. Is that true?

Vladimir Putin: Well, I don’t know. Somebody presents it from a certain perspective. Somebody looks at the development of this situation and at yours truly in a different manner. All of this is being offered to the public in a way that is found to be expedient for the ruling circles of a certain country.

The fact that President Biden has been meeting up with his allies, there is nothing unusual about it. There’s nothing unusual about a G7 meeting. We know what G7 is. I have been there on numerous occasions. I know what the values are in that forum. When people get together and discuss something, it’s always good. It’s better than not to get together and not to discuss. Because even in the context of the G7 there are matters that require ongoing attention and consideration because there are differences, strange as it may seem. There may be differences in assessments of international events on the international arena and among them. And very well then, let’s get together and discuss it.

As far as NATO, I have said on many occasions, ”This is a Cold War relic.“ It’s something that was born in the Cold War era. I’m not sure why it still continues to exist.

There was a time and there was some talk that this organisation would be transformed. Now it has been kind of forgotten. We presume that it is a military organisation. It is an ally of the United States. Every once in a while, it makes sense to meet up with your allies, although I can have an idea of how the discussion goes on there. Clearly everything is decided by consensus. However, there is just one opinion that is correct. Whereas the other opinions are not quite that right, putting it in careful terms. Well, there we go. Allies are getting together. What’s so unusual about it? I don’t see anything unusual about it. As a matter of fact it’s a sign of respect to the US allies before a summit between the US and Russian presidents. Probably it is being presented as desire to find out their opinion on the key issues of the current agenda, including those issues that President Biden and I will discuss. However, I’m inclined to think that despite all of these niceties, the United States, as far as their relationship with Russia, will be promoting what they consider important and necessary for themselves, above all for themselves, in their economic and military interests. However, to hear what their allies have to say about – it probably never hurts. This is working procedure.

Keir Simmons: So let’s talk about your meeting with President Biden, the summit that will happen after those meetings. President Biden asked you to meet with him. He didn’t make any preconditions. Were you surprised?

Vladimir Putin: No. We have a bilateral relationship that has deteriorated to what is the lowest point in recent years. However, there are matters that need a certain amount of comparing notes and identification and determination of mutual positions, so that matters that are of mutual interest can be dealt with in an efficient and effective way in the interests of both the United States and Russia. So, there is nothing unusual about it. In fact, despite this seemingly harsh rhetoric, we expected those suggestions because the US domestic political agenda made it impossible for us to restore the relationship at an acceptable level. This meeting should have taken place at some point. So, President Biden launched this initiative. Prior to that, as you know, he had supported the extension of the START treaty, which of course was bound to meet with support from our side. We believe that this treaty in the area of containment of strategic offensive weapons has been worked through and thoroughly, and meets our interests, and meets the US interests. So this offer could be expected.

Keir Simmons: Will you go into the summit agreeing to begin more arms control talks immediately after the summit? Because as you mentioned, President Biden has extended New START by five years. Washington would like that to be the beginning, not the end of that conversation.

Vladimir Putin: We know what matters and what problems Americans want to discuss with us, we understand these questions, matters and problems. We’re prepared for this joint work. We have certain if not differences than different understandings of what pace – at what pace and in what directions we need to be moving. We know what constitutes priorities for the US side. And this is, generally speaking, a process that needs to be advanced at the professional level along the lines of the Foreign Ministry and Defence Ministry on the Russian side, the Pentagon and State Department of the US side. We are prepared for this work.

We’ve heard signals that the US side would like to see these negotiations resumed at the expert level of professionals. We will see if the conditions for this have been created following the summit. Of course, we are not saying no. We are ready to do this work.

Keir Simmons: President Biden wants predictability and stability. Is that what you want?

Vladimir Putin: Well, this is the most important thing. This is the most important value, if you will, in international affairs.

Keir Simmons: Sorry to interrupt you. But he would say that you have caused a lot of instability and unpredictability.

Vladimir Putin: Well, he says one thing. I say another thing. But maybe at some point in certain ways our rhetoric varies and is different. But if you ask my opinion now, I am telling you what it is. The most important value in international affairs is predictability and stability. And I believe that on the part of our US partners, this is something that we haven’t seen in recent years. What kind of stability and predictability could there be if we remember the 2011 events in Libya where the country was essentially taken apart, broken down? What kind of stability and predictability was there?

There has been talk of a continued presence of troops in Afghanistan. And then all of a sudden, boom!, the troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan. Is this predictability and stability again?

Now the Middle East events. Is this predictability and stability, what all of this will lead to? Or in Syria? What is stable and predictable about this?

I’ve asked my US counterparts, ”You want Assad to leave? Who will replace him? What will happen when he’s replaced with somebody?“ The answer is odd. The answer is, ”I don’t know.“ Well, if you don’t know what will happen next, why change what there is? It could be a second Libya or another Afghanistan. Do we want this? No. Let us sit down together, talk, look for compromise solutions that are acceptable for all the parties. That is how stability is achieved. It cannot be achieved by imposing one particular point of view, the ”correct“ point of view, whereby all the other ones are incorrect. That’s not how stability is achieved.

Keir Simmons: Let’s get to some other issues. I want to just talk a little bit more about your relationship with President Biden. This will not be the Helsinki summit. President Biden is not President Trump. You once described President Trump as a bright person, talented. How would you describe President Biden?

Vladimir Putin: Well, even now, I believe that former US President Mr Trump is an extraordinary individual, a talented individual, otherwise he would not have become US President. He is a colourful individual. You may like him or not. And he didn’t come from the US establishment. He had not been part of big time politics before, and some like it, some don’t like it but that is a fact.

President Biden, of course, is radically different from Mr Trump because President Biden is a career man. He has spent virtually his entire adulthood in politics. He has been doing it for a great deal of years and I have already said that and that is an obvious fact. Just think of the number of years he spent in the Senate, and how many years he was involved in the matters of international politics and disarmament, virtually at the expert level. That’s a different kind of person, and it is my great hope that yes, there are some advantages, some disadvantages, but there will not be any knee-jerk reactions on behalf of the sitting US President, that we will be able to comply with certain rules of engagement, certain rules of communications and will be able to find points of contact and common points.

Keir Simmons: Well, President Biden said one time when you met, you were inches away from each other, close to each other. And he said to you, ”I’m looking into your eyes, and I can’t see a soul.“ And you said, ”We understand each other.“ Do you remember that exchange?

Vladimir Putin: As far as soul, I’m not sure. One has to think about what soul is. But I do not remember this particular part of our conversations, to be honest with you. I do not remember. We all, when we meet, when we get together, when we talk, when we work and strive and achieve some solutions, we all proceed from the interests of our nations and our states. And this is fundamental and is the bedrock of all our actions and intentions. And this is the driving force and the motive for organising meetings of this kind. And as far as soul goes, that’s something for the church.

Keir Simmons: Yeah. You are a religious man. President Biden is saying he told you to your face, ”You don’t have a soul.“ (Laughter.)

Vladimir Putin: I do not remember this. ”Something is wrong with my memory.“

Keir Simmons: He says it was about 10 years ago when he was vice president.

Vladimir Putin: Well, he probably has good memory. I do not rule this out, but I don’t remember this. In personal encounters, people try to act appropriately. I do not remember any inappropriate elements of behavior on the part of my counterparts. I don’t think that anything like that has happened. Perhaps he did say something, but I do not remember.

Keir Simmons: Would you have felt that was an inappropriate thing to say?

Vladimir Putin: Well, that depends on the context. It depends on what form they’re said in. One can say this in different ways. It can be presented in different ways. But generally, people meet up in order to establish a relationship and create an environment and conditions for joint work, with a view to achieving some kind of positive results. If one is going to have a fight with somebody else why bother and have a meeting? One’s better off looking into budget and social policies domestically. We have many issues that we have to resolve. What’s the point then? It’s just a waste of time.

Of course, one can present this for domestic political consumption, which I believe is what has been done in the US in the last two years, where the US-Russia relationship was sacrificed for the sake of a fierce political strife inside the US.

We can see that. We know it very well. We have been accused of all kinds of things: election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth. And not once, not one time did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof. Just unfounded accusations. I’m surprised that we have not yet been accused of provoking the Black Lives Matter movement. That would have been a good line of attack. But we didn’t do that.

With NBC correspondent Keir Simmons.

Keir Simmons: What do you think of the Black Lives Matter movement?

Vladimir Putin: I think that, of course, this movement was used by one of the political forces domestically in the course of election campaigns. But there are some grounds for it. Let’s remember Colin Powell who was Secretary of State, was in charge of the Pentagon. He even wrote in his book that even he as a high-ranking official had felt some kind of injustice towards himself his entire life as someone with a dark complexion.

Even from the Soviet days, we in Russia, we have always treated with understanding the fight of African Americans for their rights. And there are certain roots to it. And there is a certain foundation for this. But no matter how noble the goals that somebody is driven by, if it reaches certain extremes, if it spills over into… if it acquires elements of extremism, we cannot approve this. We cannot welcome it. So our attitude to this is very simple. We support African Americans’ fight for their rights, but we are against any types and kinds of extremism, which unfortunately sometimes, regrettably, we witness these days.

Keir Simmons: You mention cyberattacks and deny any involvement by Russia. But Mr President, there is now a weight of evidence, a long list of alleged state-sponsored cyberattacks. Let me give you five.

There’s a lot, but it makes a point. The US intelligence community says Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Election security officials said Russia tried to interfere with the 2020 election. Cybersecurity researchers said government hackers targeted COVID vaccine researchers, hacking for COVID vaccines.

In April, the Treasury Department said the SolarWinds attack was the world’s worst, including nine federal agencies. And just before your summit, Microsoft says it has discovered another attack with targets including organisations that have criticised you, Mr Putin.

Mr President, are you waging a cyber war against America?

Vladimir Putin: Dear Keir, you have said that there is a weight of evidence of cyberattacks by Russia. And then you went on to list those official US agencies that have stated as much. Is that what you did?

Keir Simmons: Well, I’m giving you information about who said it so you can answer.

Vladimir Putin: Right. You are conveying information to me as to who said that. But where is evidence that this was indeed done? I will tell you that this person has said that, that person has said this. But where is the evidence? Where is proof? When there are charges without evidence, I can tell you that you can take your complaint to the International League of Sexual Reform (SIC).

This is a conversation that has no subject. Put something on the table so that we can look and respond. But there isn’t anything like that.

One of the latest attacks, as far as I know, was against the pipeline system in the US. Right, yes. So what?

Keir Simmons: But this is… but you mention…

Vladimir Putin: Just a moment. As far as I know, the shareholders of this company even made a decision to pay the ransom. They paid off the cyber gangsters. If you have listed an entire set of US special services (powerful, global, respectable), after all they can find whoever the ransom was paid. And once they do that, they will realise that Russia has nothing to do with it.

Then there’s the cyberattack against a meat processing plant. Next time they will say there was an attack against some Easter eggs. It’s becoming farcical, like an ongoing farcical thing, never-ending farcical thing. You said ”plenty of evidence,“ but you haven’t cited any proof. But again, this is an empty conversation, a pointless conversation. What exactly are we talking about? There’s no proof.

Keir Simmons: You’ve moved on to this question of ransomware and criminals. Russian-speaking criminals is the allegation, are targeting the American way of life: food, gas, water, hospitals, transport. Why would you let Russian-speaking criminals disrupt your diplomacy? Wouldn’t you want to know who’s responsible?

Vladimir Putin: You know, the simplest thing to do would be for us to sit down calmly and agree on joint work in cyberspace. We did suggest that to Obama’s administration…

Keir Simmons: In September.

Vladimir Putin: In October. We started in September, and during his last year in office. In October at first they didn’t say anything. Then in November, they came back to us and said that, yes, it was interesting. Then the election was lost.

We restated this proposal to Mr Trump’s administration. The response was that it is interesting, but it didn’t come to the point of actual negotiations.

There are grounds to believe that we can build an effort in this area with the new administration, that the domestic political situation in the US will not prevent this from happening. But we have proposed to do this work together. Let’s agree on the principles of mutual work. Let’s find out what we can do together. Let’s agree on how we will structure counterefforts against the process that is gathering momentum. We here in the Russian Federation have cybercrimes that have increased many times over in the last few years. We are trying to respond to it. We are looking for cyber criminals. If we find them, we punish them.

We are willing to engage with international participants, including the United States. You are the ones who have refused to engage in joint work. What can we do? We cannot build this work, we cannot structure this work unilaterally.

Keir Simmons: Well, I’m not the government, Mr Putin. I’m just a journalist asking you questions.

Vladimir Putin: I understand that.

Keir Simmons: But if you clearly want to negotiate, you must have something to negotiate with. You don’t ask for a truce unless you’re fighting in a war.

Vladimir Putin: You know, as far as the war, NATO, and I’d like to draw your attention to that, has officially stated that it considers cyberspace a battlefield, an area of military action, and it conducts exercises in that battlefield.

Keir Simmons: And you are involved in that field.

Vladimir Putin: No.

Keir Simmons: Russia is fighting on that battlefield. Correct?

Vladimir Putin: No, no, that is not correct.

Keir Simmons: Really?

Vladimir Putin: That is not current. Really. If we wanted to do that… NATO said that it considers cyberspace an area of combat. And it prepares and even conducts exercises. What stops us from doing that? If you do that, we will do the same thing. But we don’t want that, just like we don’t want space militarised, in the same manner we don’t want cyberspace militarised. And we have suggested on many occasions, agreeing on mutual work in the cybersecurity area in this area. But your government refuses to.

Keir Simmons: It isn’t, I mean. I saw your proposal from September, from just in September. Isn’t what you’re proposing? That if you can come to an agreement over hacking and election interference, then you’ll call off the hacking and the election interference if America agrees not to comment on your elections and your political opponents?

Vladimir Putin: What we count on is that nobody should interfere in domestic internal affairs of other countries, neither the US in ours nor we in the USA’s political processes or any other nations. All nations of the world should be given an opportunity to develop calmly. Even if there are crisis situations they have to be resolved by the people domestically, without any influence or interference from the outside.

I don’t think that this call by the US administration, today’s administration is worth anything. It appears to me that the US government will still continue to interfere in the political processes in other countries. I don’t think that this process can be stopped, because it has gained a lot of momentum. However, as far as joint work in cyberspace for the prevention of some unacceptable actions on the part of cyber criminals, that is definitely something that can be agreed upon. And it is our great hope that we will be able to establish this process with our US partners.

Keir Simmons: If you were in America, what would you fear might happen next? The lights being switched off the way they were in western Ukraine in 2015?

Vladimir Putin: You mean if I were in America, what I would be afraid of? Is that the question?

Keir Simmons: What should Americans worry about? What might happen next if there’s no agreement on cyber?

Vladimir Putin: You know, this is just like space militarisation. This is a very dangerous area. At some point, in order to achieve something in the nuclear area in terms of confrontation in the area of nuclear weapons, the USSR and the United States did agree to contain this particular arms race. But cyberspace is a very sensitive area. As of today, a great deal of human endeavours rely upon digital technologies, including the functioning of government. And of course interference in those processes can cause a lot of damage and a lot of losses. And everybody understands that. And I am repeating for the third time: Let’s sit down together and agree on joint work on how to achieve security in this area. That is all. What’s bad about it? I don’t even understand.

I’m not asking you. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. But for me as an ordinary citizen, it would not be clear and understandable, why is it that your government refuses to do it? Accusations keep coming, including up to interference, involvement in a cyberattack against some kind of a meat processing plant. But our proposal to start negotiations in this area are being turned down. This is some kind of nonsense, but that’s exactly what’s been happening.

I repeat one more time. It is my hope that we will be able to start engaging in positive work in this area.

In terms of what’s to be afraid of, why is it that we suggest agreeing on something? Because what people can be afraid of in America, are worried about in America, the very same thing can be a danger to us. The US is a high-tech country. NATO has declared cyberspace an area of combat. That means they are planning something. They are preparing something. So obviously this cannot but worry us.

Keir Simmons: Do you fear that American intelligence is deep inside Russian systems and has the ability to do you a lot of damage in cyber?

Vladimir Putin: I’m not afraid, but I bear in mind that it is a possibility.

Keir Simmons: Let me ask you about human rights, an issue that President Biden will raise. Mr President, he’ll raise the issue of Alexei Navalny, targeted for assassination, now in a Russian jail. Mr President, why are you so threatened by opposition?

Vladimir Putin: Who says that I feel threatened by opposition or we are threatened by opposition? Who told you that I’m scared by opposition? It’s just funny.

Keir Simmons: Well, a Russian court has just… Excuse me, I’m sorry. A Russian court has just outlawed organisations connected to Mr Navalny. Literally every non-systemic opposition figure is facing criminal charges. In journalism Meduza and VTimes have been hit with ”foreign agent“ labels and face collapse. Mr President, it’s as if dissent is simply not tolerated in Russia anymore.

Vladimir Putin: You are presenting it as dissent and intolerance towards dissent in Russia. We view it completely differently. You have mentioned the law on foreign agents, but that’s not something that we invented. That law was passed back in the 1930s in the United States. And that law is much harsher than ours, and it is directed and intended, among other things, at preventing interference in the domestic political affairs of the United States.

Keir Simmons: But Mr President…

Vladimir Putin: And on the whole, I believe that it is justified.

Keir Simmons: Look, I’m just going to…

Vladimir Putin: Do you want me to keep answering?

Keir Simmons: In America, we call what you’re doing now ”whataboutism.“ ”What about this? What about that?“ It’s a way of not answering the question. Let me ask you a direct question.

Vladimir Putin: Let me answer. You’ve asked me a question. You are not liking my answer, so you’re interrupting me. This is inappropriate. So there we go. In the United States, this law was adopted a long time ago. It’s working, and sanctions under that law are much harsher than here, up to imprisonment.

Keir Simmons: There you go, still talking about the United States.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, yes. Again you are not letting me… But I will revert to us. I will go back to us. Don’t worry. I will not just be focused on US problems. I will revert and go back, and comment on what’s happening here.

Keir Simmons: Mr President, I thought your belief was that nations shouldn’t intervene in other countries’ domestic affairs, shouldn’t comment on other countries’ politics. But there you are, doing it again.

With NBC correspondent Keir Simmons.

Vladimir Putin: No. If you muster patience and let me finish saying what I mean to say, everything will be clear to you. But you are not liking my answer. You don’t want my answer to be heard by your audience. That is the problem. You are shutting me down. Is that free expression? Is that free expression American way?

Keir Simmons: Please, answer.

Vladimir Putin: Here we go. The US adopted this law. We passed this law very recently in order to protect our society against outside interference. When in some of the states, a foreign observer comes to a polling station, the prosecutor says, ”Come a few feet closer, and you’ll go to jail.“ Is that normal? Is that democracy in the modern world? But that is an actual practice in some of the states. We don’t have anything like that.

When I talk about these laws, about non-interference or attempts at interference, what do I mean as applied to Russia? Many entities of the so-called ”civil society“ – the reason I say ”so-called civil society“ is because many of those entities are funded from abroad. Specific relevant action programs are prepared. Their core members are trained abroad. And when our official authorities see that, in order to prevent this kind of interference in our domestic affairs, we make relevant decisions and adopt relevant laws. And they are more lenient than yours.

We have a saying: ”Don’t be mad at the mirror if you are ugly.“ It has nothing to do with you personally. But if somebody blames us for something, what I say is, ”Why don’t you look at yourselves?“ You will see yourselves in the mirror, not us. There is nothing unusual about it.

As far as political activities and the political system, it is evolving. We have 44 registered parties. Well, 34, I think. And 32 are about to participate in various electoral processes across the country in September.

Keir Simmons: Those are the registered.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, yes.

Keir Simmons: We only have a limited amount of time, Mr President.

Vladimir Putin: There is also non-systemic opposition. You have said that some people have been detained. Some people are in prison. Yes, that is all true. You mentioned certain names.

Keir Simmons: Those are the ones that are being…

Vladimir Putin: Yes, yes. I will talk about it. Yes. I will not leave any of your questions unattended.

Keir Simmons: Alexei Navalny is his name.

Can I just ask you a direct question? Did you order Alexei Navalny’s assassination?

Vladimir Putin: Of course not. We don’t have this kind of habit, of assassinating anybody. That’s one.

Number two is I want to ask you: Did you order the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman? Do you know that 450 individuals were arrested after entering the Congress? And they didn’t go there to steal a laptop. They came with political demands. 450 people…

Keir Simmons: You’re talking about the Capitol riot.

Vladimir Putin: …have been detained. They’re facing a jail time, between 15 and 25 years. And they came to the Congress with political demands. Isn’t that persecution for political opinions? Some have been accused of plotting to topple, to take over government power. Some are accused of robbery. They didn’t go there to rob.

The people who you have mentioned, yes, they were convicted for violating their status, having been previously convicted, given convent, given suspended sentences which were essentially warning to not violate the Russian laws. And they completely ignored the requirements of the law. The court went on and passed and turned the conviction into real jail time. Thousands and thousands of people ignore requirements of the law – and they have nothing to do with political activities – in Russia every year and they go to jail. If somebody is actually using political activities as a shield to deal with their issues, including achieve their commercial goals, then it’s something that they have to be held responsible for.

Keir Simmons: There you go again, Mr President. ”What about America?“ when I’ve asked you about Russia. Let me ask. You mentioned Congress. Let me ask you another direct question that you can answer. And it’s an allegation that has been made, an accusation that has been made again and again now in the United States. The late John McCain in Congress called you a killer. When President Trump was asked, was told that you are a killer, he didn’t deny it. When President Biden was asked whether he believes you are a killer, he said, ”I do.“ Mr President, are you a killer?

Vladimir Putin: Look, over my tenure, I’ve gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretexts and reasons and of different calibre and fierceness. And none of it surprises me. People with whom I work and with whom we argue, we are not bride and groom. We don’t swear everlasting love and friendship. We are partners. And in some areas, we are rivals or competitors.

As far as harsh rhetoric, I think that this is an expression of overall US culture. Of course, in Hollywood, because we mentioned Hollywood at the beginning of our conversation, there are some deep things in Hollywood macho which can be treated as cinematographic art but more often than not it’s macho behavior that is part of US-political culture where it’s considered normal.

By the way, not here. It is not considered normal here. If this rhetoric is followed by a suggestion to meet and discuss bilateral issues and matters of international policies, I see it as desire to engage in joint work. If this desire is serious, we’re prepared to support it.

Keir Simmons: I don’t think I heard you answer the question, the direct question, Mr President.

Vladimir Putin: I did answer. I will add, if you let me. I have heard dozens of such accusations, especially during the period of some grave events during our counterterrorism efforts in North Caucasus. And when it happens, I’m always guided by the interests of the Russian people and Russian state. And sentiments in terms of who calls somebody what, what kind of labels, this is not something I worry about in the least.

Keir Simmons: Let me give you some names. Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead. Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium. Sergei Magnitsky, allegedly beaten and died in prison. Boris Nemtsov, shot moments from the Kremlin, moments from here. Mikhail Lesin died of blunt trauma in Washington, DC. Are all of these a coincidence, Mr President? (Laughter.)

Vladimir Putin: Look, you know, I don’t want to come across as being rude, but this looks like some kind of indigestion, except that it’s verbal indigestion. You mentioned many individuals who indeed suffered and perished at different points in time for various reasons at the hand of different individuals.

You mentioned Lesin. Lesin used to work in my administration. I liked him very much. He died, he perished or died in the United States. I’m not sure if he perished or died. We should ask you how exactly he perished. I regret to this day that he is not with us. In my opinion, he’s a very decent person.

As far as the others, we found some of the criminals who committed those crimes. Some are in prison, and we are prepared to continue to work in this mode and along this avenue, identifying everybody who violate the law and by their actions cause damage, including to the image of the Russian Federation.

However, just piling everything together is meaningless, inappropriate and baseless. If one sees it as a line of attack, then very well. Let me listen to it one more time. But I’d like to repeat that I have heard it many times. But this doesn’t baffle me. I know which direction to move in to secure the interests of the Russian state.

Keir Simmons: Let’s move on to Belarus and Ukraine, two issues that will certainly come up in your summit with President Biden. Did you have prior knowledge that a commercial airliner would be forced to land in Belarus and that a journalist would be arrested?

Vladimir Putin: No, I did not know about this. I didn’t know about any airliner. I didn’t know about the people who were detained there subsequently. I found out about it from the media. I didn’t know, I didn’t have a clue about any detainees. I don’t know. It is of no interest to us.

Keir Simmons: You appear to have approved of it judging by your meeting with President Lukashenko soon afterwards.

Vladimir Putin: Not that I approve of it. Not that I condemn it. But, well, it happened. I said recently in one of the conversations with a European colleague, the version of Mr Lukashenko who told me about it was that information had been given to them that there was an explosive device on board the plane. They informed…

Keir Simmons: And you believe that?

Vladimir Putin: …the pilot without forcing the pilot to land. And the pilot made a decision to land in Minsk. That is all. Why should I not believe him? Ask the pilot. It’s the simplest thing. Ask the chief pilot. Ask the commander of the aircraft. Did you ask him if was he forced to land? Because I have not heard or seen an interview with the commander of the aircraft that landed in Minsk. Why not ask him? Why not ask him if he was forced to land? Why don’t you ask him? It’s actually even odd. Everybody accuses Lukashenko, but the pilot hasn’t been asked.

You know, I cannot but recall another similar situation where the plane of the President of Bolivia was forced to land in Vienna, the order of the US administration.

Air Force One, a presidential plane, was forced to land. The President was taken out of the aircraft. They searched the plane. And you don’t even recall that. Do you think it was normal, that was good, but what Lukashenko did was bad?

Look, let us speak the same language and let us use the same concepts. If, well, Lukashenko is a gangster, how about the situation with the Bolivian President? Was it good? In Bolivia, they viewed it as humiliation of the whole country. But everybody kept mum not to aggravate the situation. Nobody is recalling that. By the way, this is not the only situation…

Keir Simmons: You’re recalling it.

Vladimir Putin: This is not the only situation of this kind.

Keir Simmons: With respect, you’re…

Vladimir Putin: If it’s him, you gave him an example to follow.

Keir Simmons: …recalling it, but it is a completely different example, Mr President. We are talking about (Laughter.) a commercial flight. Shouldn’t people be able to take a commercial flight across Europe without fear of being shot down like in the case of MH-17 or forced down so that a dictator can arrest a journalist?

Vladimir Putin: Yes. Look, I will tell you one more time. What President Lukashenko told me, I don’t have any reason not to believe him. For the third time, I’m telling you: Ask the pilot. Why don’t you ask the pilot: Was he…

Keir Simmons: But you…

Vladimir Putin: …being scared? Was he being threatened? Was he being forced? The fact that information appeared that there was a bomb on the plane, that individuals, people who had nothing to do, who were passengers, who had nothing to do with politics or any kind of domestic conflicts, that they could perceive it negatively, could be worried about it, of course that’s a bad thing. There is nothing good about this. And obviously, we condemn everything that has to do with this, and international terrorism, and the use of aircraft. Of course, we are against this. And you’ve told me that the landing of the aircraft of the President of Bolivia is a completely different matter.

Yes, it is different except that it is ten times worse than what was done, if anything was done in Belarus. But you just won’t acknowledge it. You are ignoring it, and you want millions of people around the world to either not notice it or forget about it tomorrow. You won’t get away with it. It won’t happen.

Keir Simmons: In the case of neighbouring Ukraine earlier this year, the European Union said you had more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. Was that an attempt to get Washington’s attention?

Vladimir Putin: Look, first, Ukraine itself constantly – and I think is still doing that – kept bringing personnel and military equipment to the conflict area in the southeast of Ukraine, Donbass. That’s one. Two is that we conducted exercises in our territory and not just in the south of the Russian Federation but also in the Far East and in the north, in the Arctic.

Simultaneously, military exercises were being held in different parts of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the US was conducting military exercises in Alaska. Do you know anything about it? Probably not. But I’ll tell you that I do know. And that is in direct proximity to our borders. But that’s in your territory, on your land. We didn’t even pay attention to it.

What is happening now? Now, at our southern borders, there is a war game, Defender Europe, 40,000 personnel, 15,000 units of military equipment. Part of them have been airlifted from the US continent directly to our borders. Did we airlift any of our military technology to the US borders? No, we did not.

Keir Simmons: Many of those…

Vladimir Putin: Why are you worried then?

Keir Simmons: But many of those exercises are a response to your actions, Mr President. Do you worry that your opposition to NATO has actually strengthened it? For six years, NATO has spent more on defence.

Vladimir Putin: Some defence. During the USSR era, Gorbachev, who is still, thank God, with us, got a promise, a verbal promise that there would be no NATO expansion to the east. Where is that…

Keir Simmons: Where is that…

Vladimir Putin: …promise? Two ways of expansion.

Keir Simmons: Where is that written down? Where is that promise written down?

Vladimir Putin: Right, right. Well done. Correct. You’ve got a point. Got you good. Well, congratulations. Of course, everything should be sealed and written on paper. But what was the point of expanding NATO to the east and bringing this infrastructure to our borders, and all of this before saying that we are the ones who have been acting aggressively?

Why? On what basis? Did Russia after the USSR collapsed present any threat to the US or European countries? We voluntarily withdrew our troops from Eastern Europe. Leaving them just on empty land. Our people there, military personnel for decades lived there in what was not normal conditions, including their children.

We went to tremendous expenses. And what did we get in response? We got in response infrastructure next to our borders. And now, you are saying that we are threatening somebody. We’re conducting war games on a regular basis, including sometimes surprise military exercises. Why should it worry the NATO partners? I just don’t understand that.

Keir Simmons: Will you commit now not to send any further Russian troops into Ukrainian sovereign territory?

Vladimir Putin: Look, did we say that we were planning to send our armed formations anywhere? We were conducting war games in our territory. How can this not be clear? I’m saying it again because I want your audience to hear it, your listeners to hear it both on the screens of their televisions and on the internet.

We conducted military exercises in our territory. Imagine if we sent our troops into direct proximity to your borders. What would have been your response? We didn’t do that. We did it in our territory. You conducted war games in Alaska. God bless you. But you had crossed an ocean, brought thousands of personnel, thousands of units of military equipment close to our borders, and yet you believe that we are acting aggressively and somehow you’re not acting aggressively. Just look at that. The pot calling the kettle black.

Keir Simmons: Moving on, the Biden administration has said that at your summit they will bring up the case of two US prisoners in Russia, Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed. They are two former Marines. Trevor Reed is suffering from COVID in prison. Why don’t you release them ahead of the summit? Wouldn’t that show goodwill?

Vladimir Putin: I know that we have certain US citizens who are in prison, have been convicted, found guilty. But if one considers the number of Russian Federation citizens who are in US prisons, then these numbers don’t even compare. They cannot be compared. The United States has made a habit in the last few years of catching Russian Federation citizens in third countries and take them to back to the US in violation of all international legal norms and put them in prison.

Keir Simmons: It’s just that there’s a limited amount of time, Mr President. Unless we can have more time, I’d be very happy to have to keep going for another 30 minutes.

Interview to NBC correspondent Keir Simmons.

Vladimir Putin: I determine the time here, so don’t worry about time. Your guy, the Marine, he’s just a drunk and a troublemaker. As they say here, he got himself shitfaced and started a fight. Among other things, he hit a cop. It’s nothing. It’s just a common crime. There is nothing to it.

As far as possible negotiations on the subject, sure it can be talked about. Obviously we’ll raise the matter of our citizens who are in prison in the US. Yes, it can be a specific conversation. Sure. We’re happy to do it although it doesn’t seem that the US administration has raised that matter. But we’re prepared to do that.

Our pilot Yaroshenko has been in prison in the US for a good, I don’t know how many years, 15, maybe 20 years. And there also the problem seems to be a common crime. We could and should talk about it. We haven’t been talking about this, but we could. If the US side is prepared to discuss it, so are we.

Keir Simmons: So his family will find that incredibly distressing to hear you talk about him that way. It does sound though as if you would consider some kind of a prisoner swap.

Vladimir Putin: There is nothing offensive about it. He got drunk on vodka and started a fight. He fought a cop. There is nothing offensive about it. These things happen in life. There is nothing horrible about it. It happens to our men as well. Somebody gulps down some vodka and starts a fight. So you violate the law, you go to prison. What would have happened if he’d fought a cop, if he’d hit a cop in your country? He would have been shot dead on that spot, and that’s the end of it. Isn’t that the case?

Keir Simmons: And on the prisoner swap question, is that something that you would consider? Are you looking to negotiate? You’re meeting with the President.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, of course. Even better would be a discussion of the possibility of entering into an agreement on extradition of individuals who are in prison. This is standard international practice. We have such agreements with several countries. We’re prepared to enter into such an agreement with the United States.

Keir Simmons: Just to be clear so we hear it from you, which Russian prisoners in the US would you be hoping to bring back to Russia by name?

Vladimir Putin: Well, we have a whole list. I just mentioned a pilot, a pilot named Yaroshenko who was taken to the US from a third country and was given a lengthy sentence. He has major health issues, but the prison administration is not paying attention to this. You have mentioned that your citizen has coronavirus, but nobody’s paying attention to the health issues of our citizen.

We’re prepared to discuss these issues. Moreover, it makes sense, as you correctly said, and I completely agree with you, there are matters of humanitarian nature. And why not discuss them as long as they pertain to the health and life of specific individuals and of their families? Of course. Sure thing.

Keir Simmons: Just quickly before I move on, on the subject of prisons, again with Alexei Navalny, will you commit that you will personally ensure that Alexei Navalny will leave prison alive?

Vladimir Putin: Look, such decisions in this country are not made by the President. They’re made by the court whether or not to set somebody free. As far as the health, all individuals who are in prison, that is something that the administration of the specific prison or penitentiary establishment is responsible for.

And there are medical facilities in penitentiaries that are perhaps not in the best condition. And they are the ones whose responsibility it is. And I hope that they do it properly. But to be honest, I have not visited such places for a long time.

I visited one in St Petersburg some time ago and that was a very grave impression that was made on me by the medical facilities in a prison. But since then, I hope, some things have been done to improve the situation. And I proceed from the premise that the person that you have mentioned, the same kind of measures will apply to that person, not in any way worse than to anybody else who happens to be in prison.

Keir Simmons: His name is Alexei Navalny. People will note that you weren’t prepared to say…

Vladimir Putin: Oh, I don’t care.

Keir Simmons: …that he would leave prison alive.

Vladimir Putin: Please, listen to me carefully. His name can be anything. He’s one of the individuals who are in prison. For me, he is one of the citizens of the Russian Federation who has been found guilty by a court of law and is in prison. There are many citizens like that.

By the way, our so-called prison population, the people who are in prison, has in the last few years been reduced by almost 50%, which I consider a big victory for us and a major sign of our legal system becoming more humane.

He will not be treated any worse than anybody else. Nobody should be given any kind of special treatment. It would be wrong. Everybody should be in an equal situation. This is called the most favoured nation treatment. Not worse than anybody else. And the person that you have mentioned, that applies to him as well.

Keir Simmons: Appreciate the extra time, Mr President. The team has been in quarantine for almost two weeks, so this interview is very important to us.

I want to ask you about China. China is working on its fourth aircraft carrier. It has two. Russia has one, and it’s not in service at the moment. China refused to take part in arms control talks last year. You complain so much about NATO to your west. Why do you never complain about China’s militarisation to your east?

Vladimir Putin: The first thing I want to say is that over the last few years, the last few decades, we have developed a strategic partnership relationship between Russia and China that previously had not been achieved in the history of our nations, a high level of trust and cooperation in all areas: in politics, in the economy, in the area of technology, in the area of military and technical cooperation. We do not believe that China is a threat to us. That’s one. China is a friendly nation. It has not declared us an enemy, as the United States has done.

Keir Simmons: China hasn’t…

Vladimir Putin: Don’t you know anything about this? That’s number one.

Number two is that China is a huge, powerful country, 1.5 billion. In terms of purchasing power parity, the Chinese economy has exceeded that of the United States. And in terms of trade for the previous year, last year, China has tied Europe for the first place, whereas the US has dropped to the second position. Do you know about this?

China has been developing. And I understand that what’s beginning is a certain kind of confrontation with China. Everybody understands it. We can see it. Why hide from and be scared of these issues? However, we’re not alarmed by it, including, among other things, by the fact that our defence sufficiency, which is how we describe it, is at a very high level, including because of this. But the most important thing is the nature and level of our relationship with China.

You said China will have four aircraft carriers. How many does the United States have?

Keir Simmons: A lot more.

Vladimir Putin: There you go. That’s my point. Why would we worry about the Chinese aircraft carriers? On top of everything else, we have a hugely vast border with China, but it’s a land border. It’s a land border. What? Do you think the Chinese aircraft carriers will cross our land border? This is just a meaningless conversation.

Keir Simmons: But you also have a Pacific coast.

Vladimir Putin: You are right, that there will be four of them. It is correct that there will be four of them. Right.

Coast? Well, the coast is huge. But the bulk of the border between us and China is a land border. And, yes you’re right that there will be four of them because one needs to be in maintenance, one needs to be on combat duty, one needs to be in repairs. There is nothing excessive here for China.

That is why what you said, that China won’t engage in negotiations on arms control, it refuses to negotiate reductions in nuclear offensive weapons. You should ask the Chinese about it, whether it’s good or bad. It’s for them to decide. But their arguments are simple and understandable: in terms of the amount of ammunition and warheads and delivery vehicles, the United States and Russia are far, far ahead of China. And the Chinese justly say, ”Why would we make reductions if we are already far behind what you have? Or do you want us to freeze our level of nuclear deterrence? Why should we freeze? Why we, a country with a 1.5 billion population, cannot at least set the goal of achieving your levels?“ These are all debatable issues that require thorough consideration. But making us responsible for China’s position is just comical.

Keir Simmons: What do you think of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang?

Vladimir Putin: You know, I have met certain Uyghurs. It’s always possible to find individuals who criticise the central authorities. I have met Uyghurs on my trips to China, and I assure you at the very least what I heard with my own ears, that on the whole they welcome the policies of the Chinese authorities in this area. They believe that China has done a great deal for people who live in this part of the country from the perspective of the economy, raising the cultural level, and so on and so forth. So why should I offer assessments looking at the situation from outside?

Keir Simmons: You know there are many Uyghurs who do not say that and that America has accused China of genocide. The Secretary of State has accused China of genocide against the Uyghurs. There is the accusation of a million Uyghurs in so-called concentration camps. Is that your message to the Muslim communities in the former Soviet Union? You don’t think anything wrong is happening there?

Vladimir Putin: As far as the Muslim community in Russia, I need to give a message to it through policies of the Russian authorities vis-à-vis Muslims in the Russian Federation. That is how I need to give my message to the Muslim community in the Russian Federation. We’re an observer in the Organisation of Islamic Conference.

About 10% of our population, probably a little more, are Muslims. They are citizens of the Russian Federation who do not have any other fatherland. They’re making a colossal contribution to the development of our country. And that pertains to both clerics and ordinary citizens.

Why should I speak to and build a relationship with this part of our population by reference to the situation in China without understanding thoroughly what is happening there? I think that you’re better off asking about all these problems the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China or the US State Department.

Keir Simmons: It’s just a question of whether you are prepared to criticise China. China, for example, abstained on Crimea at the Security Council. China’s biggest banks have not contravened American sanctions against Russia. Do you think you get 100% support from China?

Vladimir Putin: You know, we are neighbouring countries. One does not choose one’s neighbours. We are pleased with the level, as I said, – unprecedentedly high level of our relationship as it has evolved over the last few decades, and we cherish it, just like our Chinese friends cherish it, which we can see. Why are you trying to drag us into some kind of matters that you evaluate as you see it fit for building your relationship with China? I will tell you completely… Can I speak…?

Keir Simmons: Please, yeah.

Vladimir Putin: Can I be completely honest? We can see attempts at destroying the relationship between Russia and China. We can see that those attempts are being made in practical policies. And your questions, too, have to do with it.

I have set forth my position for you. I believe that this is sufficient, and I’m confident that the Chinese leadership being aware of the totality of these matters, including the part of their population who are Uyghurs, will find the necessary solution to make sure that the situation remains stable and benefits the entire multi-million-strong Chinese people, including its Uyghur part.

Keir Simmons: You understand, of course, I’m just trying to question you about Russia’s position in relation to China and the United States. Let me ask you in a different way. Are you splitting off from the US space programme and moving forward with China?

Vladimir Putin: No, why? We are prepared to work with the US in space. And I think recently the head of NASA said that he could not imagine development of space programmes without its partnership with Russia. We welcome this statement and we value it.

Keir Simmons: I’ll just explain. Because the head of the Russian space agency has threatened leaving the international space programme in 2025 and specifically talked about sanctions in relation to that threat.

Vladimir Putin: Well, honestly, I don’t think that Mr Rogozin, that is the name of the head of Roscosmos, has threatened anyone in this regard. I’ve known him for many years, and I know that he is a supporter of expanding the relationship with the US in this area, in space.

Recently, the head of NASA spoke in the same vein. And I personally fully support this. And we have been working with great pleasure all of these years, and we’re prepared to continue to work.

For technical reasons though, and that’s a different matter, is that the International Space Station is coming to an end of its service life. And maybe in this regard, Roscosmos does not have plans to continue their work. However based on what I heard from our US partners, they, too, are looking at future cooperation in this particular segment in their certain way. But on the whole, the cooperation between our two countries in space is a great example of a situation where, despite any kind of problems in political relationships in recent years, it’s an area where we have been able to maintain and preserve the partnership and both parties cherish it. I think you just misunderstood what the head of the Russian space programme said.

We are interested in continuing to work with the US in this direction, and we will continue to do so if our US partners don’t refuse to do that. It doesn’t mean that we need to work exclusively with the US. We have been working and will continue to work with China, which applies to all kinds of programmes, including exploring deep space. And I think there is nothing but positive information here. Frankly, I don’t see any contradictions here. I don’t think any mutual exclusivity here.

Keir Simmons: Let me ask you one more way just to understand the relationship between China, Russia and America. If the People’s Liberation Army made a move on Taiwan how would Russia respond to that?

Vladimir Putin: What? Are you aware of China’s plans to militarily solve the Taiwan problem? I don’t know anything about it.

As we frequently say, politics do not require the subjunctive mood. The subjunctive mood is inappropriate in politics. There is no ”could be“ and ”would be“ in politics.

I cannot comment on anything that is not a current reality of the modern world. Please, bear with me. Don’t be angry with me. But I think this is a question about nothing. This is not happening. Has China stated that it intends to solve the Taiwan problem militarily? It hasn’t happened. For many years, China has been developing its relationship with Taiwan. There are different assessments. China has its own assessment. The US has a different assessment. Taiwan may have its different assessment of the situation. But fortunately, it hasn’t come to a military clash.

Keir Simmons: I’m being told to wrap up. But if I could just ask you a couple more questions.

Vladimir Putin: Sure, please. Go ahead.

Keir Simmons: Our own Andrea Mitchell saw just this month the last border crossing into Syria where supplies literally keep people alive. You’re threatening to close that crossing in July at the Security Council. Why would you do that, knowing that it will cause the death of refugees?

Vladimir Putin: Look, unfortunately, there are a great deal of tragedies there already. And all our actions in their totality need to be geared at stabilising the situation and bringing it into a normal course. And with support of Russia, Syria has been able, the Syrian authorities have been able to bring back under their control over 90% of the Syrian territory.

What needs to be set up now is just humanitarian assistance to people, irrespective of any kind of political context. But our partners in the West, in the West in general, both the US and Europeans have been saying that they’re not going to give help to Assad. What does Assad have to do with it? Help out people who need that assistance. Just the most basic things. They won’t even lift restrictions on supplies of medications and medical equipment even in the context of the coronavirus infection. But that is just inhumane. And this kind of cruel attitude to people cannot be explained in any way.

As far as the border crossings, there is the Idlib area where combatants are still robbing people, killing people, raping people. There is nothing’s happening. There is the Al-Tanf Zone, which by the way is controlled by US military.

Recently there we caught a group of gangsters, bandits who came, who had come from there. And they directly said that they had specific goals as far as Russian military facilities. As far as border crossings, our position is such that assistance needs to be given just as it should be done in the entire world, as it is provided for in the provisions of international humanitarian law. Assistance should be given through the central government. It shouldn’t be discriminated against. And if there are grounds to believe that the central government of Syria will plunder something, well, set up observers on the part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent oversee everything.

I don’t think that anybody in the Syrian government is interested in stealing some part of this humanitarian assistance. It just needs to be done through the central government. And in this sense, we support President Assad because a different mode of behavior would be undermining the sovereignty of the Syrian Arab Republic. And that’s all.

As far as the Idlib zone, the Turkish troops there effectively control the border between Turkey and Syria, and convoys cross the border without any restrictions on their numbers in both directions.

Keir Simmons: Mr President, you extended the Constitution so that you could be President of Russia until 2036. Do you worry that the longer you are in power and without any sign of someone to replace you, the more instability there may be when you finally do choose to leave office?

Vladimir Putin: What will collapse overnight? If we look at the situation in which Russia was in the year 2000, where it was balancing on the brink of preserving its territorial integrity and sovereignty, the number of individuals below the poverty line was colossal. It was catastrophic.

The GDP level had dropped below anything that’s acceptable. Our FX and gold reserves were $12 billion, whereas our foreign debt was $120 billion, if we count it in dollars.

Now, there are many other problems. The situation is completely different. Of course, somebody will come and replace me at some point. Is all of this going to collapse? We’ve been fighting international terrorism. We have nipped it in the bud. Is it supposed to come back to life? I don’t think so. Another matter is that on the political scene, different people can emerge with different points of view. Great. Very good.

You know, I have linked my entire life, my entire fate to the fate of my country to such an extent that there isn’t a more meaningful goal in my life than the strengthening of Russia. If anybody else, and if I see that person, even if that person is critical of some areas of what I have been doing, if I can see that this is an individual who has constructive views, that he or she is committed to this country and is prepared to sacrifice his entire life to this country, nor just some years, no matter his personal attitude to me, I will make sure, I will do everything to make sure that such people will get support.

It is a natural biological process. At some point, someday, we will all be replaced. You will be replaced at where you are. I will be replaced at where I am. But I am confident that the fundamental pillar of the Russian economy and statehood and its political system will be such that Russia will be firmly standing on its feet and look into the future confidently.

Keir Simmons: And would you look from that person for some kind of protection the same way that you offered to Boris Yeltsin when you took over?

Vladimir Putin: I am not even thinking about that. These are third-tier issues. The most important thing, the single most important thing is the fate of the country and the fate of its people.

Keir Simmons: Very good. Thank you very much for your time, Mr President. We’ve gone over, and I really appreciate it. It was a really interesting conversation, so thank you.

*

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***

Thousands of Israelis waved flags and marched in a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem, asserting Israeli control over the city and testing the feeble ceasefire in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The march had been delayed from last month out of concern it would escalate the violence in the city just as fighting was breaking out between Israel and Palestinian groups on May 10^th.

Hamas vowed a response to the recent escalation, and returned to its usual military practice: launching incendiary balloons into Israeli territory.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that 20 fires were sparked by these attacks over the past 24 hours, and in response scrambled warplanes to carry out airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.

The IDF said that it had targeted Hamas military compounds, used by the group’s operatives.

The Israeli strikes in Gaza appeared to cause no deaths or injuries.

But the Israeli military warned that it was “prepared for any scenario, including a resumption of hostilities, in the face of continuing terror activities from the Gaza Strip.”

Israel also deployed Iron Dome to the country’s south to guarantee security.

Tel Aviv’s government needed to show that it had security under control, especially since it hosted a full delegation of former US generals who met with various IDF officials.

Earlier on June 15^th, in Jerusalem,  mostly young Israelis marched to the main entrance to the Old City’s Muslim quarter.

Many of them chanted “Death to Arabs”.

There,  a few thousand dancing demonstrators had gathered to celebrate Israel’s contested control of East Jerusalem.

Scores of stone-throwing Palestinians took part in running street battles with Israeli security forces, who used rubber bullets, batons and water cannons spraying foul-smelling water to scatter those trying to disrupt the nationalist celebration outside the Old City walls.

At least 33 people were injured, including a 14-year-old boy hit by a rubber bullet, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

Israeli police said that two officers were lightly wounded and 17 people were arrested during the protests.

Hamas leaders had urged Palestinians to take part in a “day of rage” to challenge the protest outside the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, and the militant group then launched incendiary balloons.

The march’s organizers are former allies turned political enemies of new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who has drawn ire from Israel’s right-wing population for forming a coalition that also includes the left-wing and an Arab party.

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that him being removed from his post was just temporary and he would be back in a short time-span, as Israel is essentially lost without him.

Any sort of escalation in the West Bank is in his favor, as he may claim that his competition is not effectively dealing with the situation.

*

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***

The relentless digitalisation of every day life since the advent of the Internet has led to many accepting as inevitable the eventual emergence of a cashless society. For the last few years, a fierce debate has taken place in the public sphere involving politicians, economists and sociologists alike, on the ethical boundaries of such a society and the threat it poses to individual freedom, privacy and civil liberties. There are logical fears that the eradication of cash would accelerate the already alarming disparities between rich and poor and leave citizens at the mercy of the international banking system, with little to zero control over their personal data.

Sky News Australia host Cory Bernardi argues that a cashless society would mark ‘the end of privacy’. Indeed, a move towards a wholly digital society would represent a global victory for big tech, big data and big government. It is argued that “the abolition of paper and metal currency is often presented as an improvement on the current way of doing business. It is indeed, but only for banks and governments, not so much for the citizens and customers which they are supposed to serve.” The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the process of a move towards a cashless global economy.

So what are we risking by removing cash completely from our economies? Would it represent the final nail in the coffin for personal privacy? Is it really worth giving up our civil liberties to pander to the minacious ambition of big tech and authoritarian governments?

Mass Surveillance and the Cashless Economy

A move towards a cashless economy has alarmed many who believe such a step would mean a drastic move towards a mass surveillance state. With every bank transaction able to be monitored by the banks and other financial intermediaries, and therefore by governments, only cryptocurrency transactions would remain private and hidden from third-party view. The idea that every purchase you make is “authorised and recorded by a privately run commercial bank, giving it a transaction-by-transaction history of your entire commercial life”, represents for many a somewhat dystopian future.

From Sweden to China, serious moves are being made to completely remove physical cash transactions from the economy. China in particular has launched a country-wide experiment to introduce a centralised ‘digital yuan’, with individuals’ funds being stored on a ‘digital wallet’, easily accessible to central government. This would in theory create the “world’s largest repository of financial transactions data, allowing the authoritarian CCP unprecedented access to ramp up surveillance of ordinary citizens.”

To opponents of cashless societies, handing over such control to either public or private organizations would represent another draconian shift towards authoritarianism. Laura Poitras highlighted in Der Spiegel how “the NSA monitors banks and credit card transactions — sometimes in apparent violation of national laws and global regulations. The European SWIFT financial transaction network is being tapped on different levels, internal documents from the US spy agency show.” Cashless economies would remove citizens ability to avoid such under-the-table practices.

The existence of these third-parties (banks or payment intermediaries like VISA or Mastercard) and the ever-growing power they wield facilitates this trend towards the expansion of surveillance states. They have unique access to every financial transaction in an economy, described by Brett Scott in the Guardian as “a big data economic macro-surveillance system.” Advocates for solid cash therefore extol the virtues of coins and notes as the most “flexible and anonymous medium for quick small transactions that don’t involve an intermediary.”

An Attack on Our Civil Liberties?

‘Cashless society’ is a euphemism for the “ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay society”, asserted Brett Scott in a 2016 article for the New Statesman. The level of subtle control exercised over one’s daily activities would be significant. Scott underlines how “you’d have no choice but to conform to the intermediaries’ automated bureaucracy, giving them a lot of power, and a lot of data about the microtexture of your economic life.”  This phenomenon has already begun creeping into Western societies; London buses stopped accepting cash in 2014, Norway has become a ‘world leader’ in cashless transactions, with banknotes accounting for only 3-4% of transactions in the country.

Many argue that the anonymity of ‘classic’ payment processes is vital for our civil liberties and individual freedoms. Expanding the cashless economy would surely mean that non-adherents and opponents could easily be cut off from the system for refusing to comply. On a more human level, individuals must be protected from invisible power structures, third-party actors who could use their unfettered access to individuals’ data for nefarious reasons.

A 2019 report claimed that up to 8 million people in Great Britain would not be able to cope with the removal of cash from the economy. Would ostracising such a large section of society be worth it for convenience, cost, personal preference and the avoidance of tax evasion? As things stand, the arguments against continue to outweigh the arguments for.

*

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Sophia Wright holds a degree in political economy, law and politics. She has worked as an analyst in Europe for various banking institutions, as well as for European institutions. She is also a mother, and what she has seen of macroeconomic and macro-political developments motivates her to alert the younger generation to the dangers of a host of measures in the pipeline.

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***

The US Marine Corps has after nearly a century of integrating tanks into its fighting forces, abandoned armored warfare in favor of missiles and drones to “confront China” in the Indo-Pacific region.

The Marine Times in a 2020 article titled, “The Corps is axing all of its tank battalions and cutting grunt units,” would explain:

…the Corps is making hefty cuts as the Marines plan to make a lighter and faster force to fight across the Pacific to confront a rising China.

As part of Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger’s plan to redesign the force to confront China and other peer adversaries by 2030, the Marines are axing all three of its tank battalions, and chucking out all law enforcement battalions and bridging companies…”

Since the announcement, the Marine Corps’ tank battalions have been fully deactivated.

Defense News in another 2020 article, this one titled, “Here’s the US Marine Corps’ plan for sinking Chinese ships with drone missile launchers,” would note:

The US Marine Corps is getting into the ship-killing business, and a new project in development is aimed at making their dreams of harrying the People’s Liberation Army Navy a reality.

The article cited Marine Corps requirements and development chief Lieutenant General Eric Smith, who would explain:

“They are mobile and small, they are not looking to grab a piece of ground and sit on it,” Smith said of his Marine units. “I’m not looking to block a strait permanently. I’m looking to maneuver. The German concept is ‘Schwerpunkt,’ which is applying the appropriate amount of pressure and force at the time and place of your choosing to get maximum effect.”

Smith describes a concept where the US fleet can herd Chinese ships into a contested area where the Marines can do damage from the shore.

The invocation of “Schwerpunkt” – a concept utilized as part of Nazi Germany’s war of aggression against both Western Europe and the Soviet Union during World War 2 – is incredibly instructive in understanding the pathology at play within US foreign policy and defense strategy.

Washington’s Obsession with Primacy

Washington’s overall strategy toward China is one of encirclement and containment along with the preservation of what US policymakers call America’s “primacy” over the Indo-Pacific region – a region the US itself is not located in.

US military strategists have a long, passionate, but otherwise inexplicable and disturbing admiration of Nazi Germany’s fabled military prowess. It is inexplicable because ultimately Nazi Germany not only lost World War 2 but ceased to exist entirely after losing the war. It is distrubing considering what little Nazi Germany did manage to accomplish was confined to death and destruction.

Concepts like “Schwerpunkt” and “Blitzkrieg” served as tools of an aggressor nation fighting and winning battles (at least initially) amid an ultimately lost war.

These concepts were imagined by Nazi strategists as able to overwhelm numerically, economically, and militarily superior adversaries if done fast enough – with Berlin hoping to overwhelm Soviet forces in a single season.

In reality the logistics of a sustained war of aggression, deep within another nation’s territory, across such vast distances made “overwhelming” a superior opponent impossible. Soviet forces were able to adapt and overcome German invaders while simultaneously enjoying advantages in manpower, industrial capacity, and much shorter logistical lines. Soviet forces also possessed the moral imperative of defending their own territory while German soldiers were left wondering why they were fighting and dying hundreds of miles from their own borders.

The US now finds itself emulating the failed strategy of Nazi Germany – both overall as an aggressor nation on an international level but also upon hypothetical battlefields thousands of miles away from its own shores.

US strategists imagine that these same concepts served them well in the 1990’s during the Persian Gulf War – failing to note the numerical and economic (and thus technological) advantages the US had over Iraqi forces which played a much more important role.

Imagining that these same tactics will work against a numerically and economically superior opponent with at least peer-level military technology is deeply flawed.

Much of US foreign policy today is fundamentally flawed, however, predicated on many false assumptions. The most central false assumption is that the US can or should maintain primacy over the Indo-Pacific region and that China should be subordinated within a US-dominated “international order.”

China today has a population many times larger than the US. Annually, China generates millions more graduates in fields relative to enhancing its technological and industrial capacity than the US does. China’s economy will most certainly surpass the US and its influence and relations throughout the Indo-Pacific region are both more sustainable and more desirable for the people living in the region than America’s policy of “either us or them.”

There is no logical reason why China should not surpass America as the most powerful nation on Earth both economically and militarily. To suggest it shouldn’t implies that despite possessing every possible advantage over the United States – the people of China are still somehow “inferior,” thus enabling America’s continued primacy over Asia. It is this fundamentally flawed assumption – along with many others – driving American foreign policy and defense strategy toward ever-increasing and unsustainable extremes.

China’s Military Advantages

Militarily, China already possesses a larger navy than the US does – a gap that will only widen in coming years. While some have claimed that the US possesses more capable ships and can augment its fleet size with the ships of its allies – this ignores the fact that the US uses its navy to dominate others around the entire planet – not just in seas along China’s peripheries.

China currently and will likely well into the future continue to concentrate its naval forces in the defense of its own actual territory and “near abroad.”

The US Navy and Marine Corps’ dreams of “herding” Chinese warships into carefully prepared kill-zones consisting of straits the US imagines itself controlling fails to account for the fact that China could maintain a significant naval force on both sides of any given strait in question without ever needing to enter it.

Advances in missile and drone technology is a two-way street and one China is not idle in regards to. Numbers of missiles and drones operating on a hypothetical battlefield anywhere in the Indo-Pacific region will consist of Chinese and American forces at the very least matched numerically, but with China ultimately enjoying shorter logistical lines and much more substantial reserve forces on hand and able to mobilize across much shorter distances.

What This Really Means for the US Marines and America’s Actual Defense

What a US Marine Corps without its tanks truly represents is a storied branch of America’s armed forces neutered by an increasingly irrational foreign policy driving an equally irrational national defense strategy.

The Marine Corps until now existed as a highly versatile and mobile force with aviation, armor, and infantry capable of responding to virtually any battlefield challenge imaginable with a full range of combined arms options – from close-up urban combat to warfare on open battlefields at great distances. These were capabilities unique to the US Marine Corps that no other US service could offer.

Now the US Marine Corps has been specifically tailored to fight a war of aggression thousands of miles from American shores, in a specific theater, against a very specific opponent. It is a war the US has already lost before ever fighting, and in the process has cost its Marine Corps its ability to respond to other potential threats to America’s actual defense at home.

The only beneficiaries of the US Marine Corps’ disfigurement are arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin building the missile systems US Marines imagine themselves using against China, and defense contractors like Oshkosh building the vehicles carrying them into these hypothetical, far-flung battles. Also benefiting – of course – are the generals and politicians on the take of America’s oversized and out-of-control arms industry while Americans themselves are left to pay the bills.

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Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

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***

The West is the best
The West is the best
Get here and we’ll do the rest
Jim Morrison, The End

For those spared the ordeal of sifting through the NATO summit communique, here’s the concise low down: Russia is an “acute threat” and China is a “systemic challenge”.

NATO, of course, are just a bunch of innocent kids building castles in a sandbox.

Those were the days when Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, coined the trans-Atlantic purpose: to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

The Raging Twenties remix reads like “keep the Americans in, the EU down and Russia-China contained”.

So the North Atlantic (italics mine) organization has now relocated all across Eurasia, fighting what it describes as “threats from the East”. Well, that’s a step beyond Afghanistan – the intersection of Central and South Asia – where NATO was unceremoniously humiliated by a bunch of Pashtuns with Kalashnikovs.

Russia remains the top threat – mentioned 63 times in the communiqué. Current top NATO chihuahua Jens Stoltenberg says NATO won’t simply “mirror” Russia: it will de facto outspend it and surround it with multiple battle formations, as “we now have implemented the biggest reinforcements of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War”.

The communiqué is adamant: the only way for military spending is up. Context: the total “defense” budget of the 30 NATO members will grow by 4.1% in 2021, reaching a staggering $1.049 trillion ($726 billion from the US, $323 billion from assorted allies).

After all, “threats from the East” abound. From Russia, there are all those hypersonic weapons that baffle NATO generals; those large-scale exercises near the borders of NATO members; constant airspace violations; military integration with that “dictator” in Belarus.

As for the threats from China – South China Sea, Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific overall – it was up to the G7 to come up with a plan.

Enter “green”, “inclusive” Build Back Better World (B3W), billed as the Western “alternative” to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). B3W respects “our values” – which clownish British PM Boris Johnson could not help describing as building infrastructure in a more “gender neutral” or “feminine” way – and, further on down the road, will remove goods produced with forced labor (code for Xinjiang) from supply chains.

The White House has its own B3W spin: that’s a “values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership” which will be “mobilizing private-sector capital in four areas of focus – climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equality – with catalytic investments from our respective development institutions”

The initial “catalytic investments” for BW3 were estimated at $100 billion. No one knows how these funds will be coming from the “development institutions”.

Seasoned Global South observers already bet they will be essentially provided by IMF/World Bank “green” loans tied to private sector investment in selected emerging markets, with an eye on profit.

The White House is adamant that “B3W will be global in scope, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Africa and the Indo-Pacific”. Note the blatant attempt to match BRI’s reach.

All these “green” resources and new logistic chains financed by what will be a variant of Central Banks showering helicopter money would ultimately benefit G7 members, certainly not China.

And the “protector” of these new “green” geostrategic corridors will be – who else? – NATO. That’s the natural consequence of the “global reach” emphasized on the NATO 2030 agenda.

NATO as investment protector

“Alternative” infrastructure schemes already proliferate, geared to contain “Russia bullying” and “Chinese meddling” off from the EU. That’s the case of the Three Seas Initiative, where 12 EU member-states from Eastern Europe are supposed to better interconnect the Adriatic, Baltic and Black Seas.

This initiative is a pale copy of China’s 17+1 mechanism of integrating Eastern Europe as part of BRI – in this case forcing them to build very expensive infrastructure to receive very expensive American energy imports.

The offensive against “threats from the East” is bound to fail. Dmitry Orlov has detailed how “Russia excels at building and operating huge energy, transportation and materials production systems” and, in parallel, how “the technosphere…has quietly relocated and is now busy telecommuting between Moscow and Beijing.”

As every geek knows, China is way ahead in 5G and is the world’s top market for chips. And now the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law – significantly approved right before the G7 in Cornwall – will “safeguard” Chinese companies from “unilateral and discriminatory measures imposed by foreign countries” and the US “long arm jurisdiction”, thus forcing Atlanticist capital to make a choice.

It’s China as a rising global power that in fact has proposed an “alternative” to the Global South in the first place, a counterpunch to the endless IMF/World Bank debt trap of the past decades. BRI is a highly complex sustainable development trade/investment strategy with the potential to integrate vast swathes of the Global South.

That’s a direct connection to Chairman Mao’s famous theory on the division of the Three Worlds ; the emphasis then on the post-colonial Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), of which China was a stalwart, now encompasses the whole Global South. In the end, it’s always about sovereignty against neocolonialism.

B3W is the Western, essentially American, reaction to BRI: try to scotch as many projects as possible while harassing China 24/7 in the process.

Unlike China or Germany, the US hardly manufactures products the Global South wants to buy; manufacturing accounts for only 5% of a US economy essentially propped up by the US dollar as reserve currency and the – dwindling – Pentagon’s Empire of Bases.

China churns out ten top engineers for every US “financial expert”. China has perfected what is known among bilingual tech experts as an effective system to make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) development plans – and implement them.

The notion that the Global South will be convinced to privilege B3W – a hollow PR coup at best – over BRI is ludicrous. Yet NATO will be regimented to actively protect those investments that follow “our values”. One thing is certain: there will be blood.

*

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Reposted complete article from Information Clearing House

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

Creating Enemies: China Reacts to NATO Targeting It

By Rick Rozoff, June 16, 2021

After months of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg mercilessly – tediously – denouncing Russia and China ahead of yesterday’s summit, the communiqué issued after it finally raised China’s ire. Two of the document’s 79 points addressed China. The second was conciliatory; the first was confrontational. It was the first time the 30-nation military bloc so overtly directed harsh language of that nature at China in an official publication.

19-Year-Old College Freshman Dies from Heart Problem One Month After Second Dose of Moderna Vaccine

By Megan Redshaw, June 16, 2021

Simone Scott, a 19-year-old freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., died June 11 of complications from a heart transplant she underwent after developing what her doctors believe was myocarditis following her second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine.

Florida Appeals Court Rules Mask Mandate Is Unconstitutional

By Daniel Horowitz, June 16, 2021

Although Florida has been largely free of state-based COVID restrictions and never had a mask mandate, several counties, such as Alachua, zealously instituted unconstitutional regulations until fairly recently. In a landmark ruling on Friday, Florida’s First District Court of Appeals ruled that a lower court had erred in tossing out the lawsuit against Alachua County’s mask mandate because it should be held as presumptively unconstitutional.

Biden Wants NATO to Project the Strength It Doesn’t Have

By Scott Ritter, June 16, 2021

COVID, Ivermectin and the Crime of the Century

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, June 16, 2021

Studies have shown ivermectin inhibits replication of SARS-CoV-2 and seasonal influenza viruses, inhibits inflammation through several pathways, lowers viral load, protects against organ damage, prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 when taken before or after exposure, speeds recovery and lowers risk of hospitalization and death in COVID-19 patients.

Tupac Shakur Would Have Turned 50 Today–If He Hadn’t Threatened Deal Between Drug Traffickers and U.S. Banks Making Billions Laundering CIA Drug Money

By John Potash, June 16, 2021

On June 16, 2021, the late rap icon Tupac Shakur would have turned 50 had he survived a still unsolved drive-by shooting in Las Vegas 25 years ago. Few knew that behind his “gangsta rap” façade, Tupac was an activist leader who worked to counter CIA drug trafficking through street gangs.

Dancing with the Israeli Flag in Jerusalem: What It Means and Why Palestinians Rage

By Rima Najjar, June 16, 2021

Palestinians see the Israeli annual raid of the Old City (including the Haram al-Sharif complex, where al-Aqsa mosque is housed) in celebration of the occupation, annexation and Judaization of Jerusalem under the flag of the Zionist Jewish state as an abomination.

The CIA Attempts Coups in Nicaragua with Tax Dollars Through US Agencies and Corporate Foundations: USAID Does Not Provide Aid – It Carries Out Coups

By Nan McCurdy, June 16, 2021

The country is 90% self-sufficient in food. 99% of the population have electricity in their homes that is now generated with 70+% green energy; International financial Institutions including the World Bank, the International Development Bank and The Central American Bank for Economic Integration praise Nicaragua for its excellent, efficient project execution.

Inflation Hype, Infrastructure ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ and Intro to Keynes’ Economics

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, June 16, 2021

Today’s Alternative Visions radio show analyzes the just released Consumer Price Index inflation for May and reports on the latest developments in the ‘Infrastructure Follies’ phony negotiations going on in Congress and the Biden administration. How ‘smoke & mirror’ offers and counter-offers are steadily reducing the level of infrastructure spending and, in turn, how Biden is cutting out his tax hike proposals in turn (and what tax items are likely next).

Peru at the Brink of Civil War? The Uprising of the Dispossessed

By Peter Koenig, June 16, 2021

Election results have been considered as fair by the pro-US, pro-capitalist Organization of American States (OAS). The same organization that supported the post-election US-instigated coup against Evo Morales in November 2019. Either they have learned a lesson of ethics, or there were too many international observers watching over OAS’s election observations. Or, as a third option, Washington may have yet a different agenda for this part of their “backyard”.

New Book: Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission

By Ray McGinnis, June 16, 2021

The events of September Eleventh 2001 shook America and they shook the world. Nearly 3,000 people died at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. The day has divided our history into pre-9/11 and post-9/11 worlds.

Is the COVID Vaccine Causing the “COVID Variants”?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, June 16, 2021

The so-called Covid variants, officially designated as mutations, are being used to extend the British lockdown. However, Dr. Luc Montagnier, a Nobel laureate and former director of the Retrovirology Lab at the Pasteur Institute reports that in fact it is the vaccinations that are producing the variants.

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

“This is the G7 summit. They are all arriving by private jets, there is no quarantine, no masks being worn.

So why are they able to do whatever they want but we are stuck having to do what they tell us to do?

These are G7 leaders — not socially distancing, not quarantining, not wearing masks. …”

[Unfortunately, some harsh language in the last two sentences]

Video

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***

Hands on hips, she stood behind the counter, glaring. “No face, no service.” 

“What?” I blurted, as the door swung behind me, jingling a bell.

“This is a bakery, not a bank,” she responded with all the sharpness of a knife swiftly slicing bread.

I took a few slow steps forward and shook my head in non-understanding. The overwhelming smell of fresh sourdough penetrated the polyester mask stretched over my nose, mouth and chin. The twenty-something girl with a slight German accent raised a hand mirror from the countertop. She aimed it at me.

“You look like a bank robber.”

So opens the first chapter of my forthcoming novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story – a book I hope will help derail the corona craze before it’s too late. (Note: The working titles were previously COVID-27 and Brave New Normal.)

“…politicians, governments fear books,” says Richard Evans, author of the New York Times bestseller The Christmas Box, in an interview. “Every revolution started with a book. Every single one of them — whether it is religious, cultural or political — there is always a book at the base of it.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin had such an effect on the Civil War. When Lincoln met author Harriet Stowe he’s been quoted as saying: “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

Alabama author Mark Childress credited Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with having a similar impact on the civil rights movement: “I think the book really helped [white people] come to understand what was wrong with the system in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art…”

Likewise, in the battle against totalitarianism, here are five dystopian classics:

• Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
• George Orwell’s 1984
• Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
• Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta
• Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Back in March, when lockdown began, I put down the urban fantasy novel I’ve been (re)writing for the last ten years; and picked up my pencil to write a short story set in a grim COVID future. 85,000 words later I was faced with a novel about the novel coronavirus: Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. It’s a story which seeks not to predict the outcome of the corona hoax but to prevent it.

I’ll release the novel in three parts; and then altogether as a single book. Part one is coming soon. Subscribe for behind-the-scenes updates.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors. Since March 2020, he has been writing articles that question and expose the contradictions in the COVID-19 narrative and control measures. He is also completing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca.

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Introduction

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Southern African Development Community (SADC), an organization made up of 16 member states, was established in 1980. It has as its mission to promote sustainable and equitable economic growth and socio-economic development through efficient, productive systems, deeper cooperation and integration, good governance and durable peace and security, so that the region emerges as a competitive and an effective player in international relations and the world economy.

Lawrence Stargomena Tax began as the fourth Executive Secretary in September 2013. According to the official information, her second term of office ends in August 2021. As Executive Secretary, her key responsibilities include engaging all the members as an economic bloc, overseeing and implementing various programmes and projects in the Southern African region.

She has a diverse employment career, including holding a top position as the Permanent Secretary at the Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and East African Cooperation from 2008 to 2013, thereafter appointed as the Executive Secretary of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) at the 33rd Summit of the Heads of State and Government held in Lilongwe, Malawi.

In this insightful and wide-ranging farewell interview with Kester Kenn Klomegah in May, Executive Secretary Lawrence Stargomena Tax discusses the most significant achievements and challenges in deepening cooperation and promoting socio-economic development as well as peace and security, and further makes suggestions for the future of Southern Africa. Here are the interview excerpts.

*: The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat is the Principal Executive Institution of SADC, and the SADC Executive Secretary leads the SADC Secretariat as mandated by Articles 14 and 15 of the Treaty establishing SADC. Functions of the SADC Executive Secretary include overseeing: strategic planning for the Organisation; management, coordination and monitoring of SADC programmes; coordination and harmonization of policies and strategies; mobilization of resources; representation and promotion of SADC; and promotion of SADC regional integration and cooperation.

Achievements: SADC has recorded numerous achievements since its establishment, some of which were recorded during my term of office, from September 2013 to-date 2021. The functions of the Executive Secretary notwithstanding, the recorded milestones are a result of collective efforts by Member States, the Secretariat, and other Stakeholders, as well as team-work by staff of the Secretariat. Eight (8) years is quite a long time, as such several achievements and milestones were recorded during the eight years of my tenure in office, allow me to highlight some of the key ones as follows:

Consolidation of democracy, and sustenance of peace and security in the region. The SADC region remains stable and peaceful, notwithstanding, isolated challenges. This is attributed to solid systems and measures in place, such as our regional early warning, preventive and mediation mechanisms, which facilitate timely detection and re-dress of threats and challenges, and effective deployments of SADC electoral observation missions. Examples during my tenure of office, include SADC preventive mission to the Kingdom of Lesotho, SADC peace and political support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, SADC mediation in Madagascar, SADC facilitation in Lesotho, and effective deployment of electoral observation Missions to SADC Member States. To mitigate and address threats posed by cybercrime and terrorism, a cybercrime and anti-terrorism strategy was adopted in 2016. The strategy is being implemented at regional and national levels.

In the historical-political space, the Southern African Liberation struggles were documented through the Hashim Mbita Publication, a publication that comprehensively and authentically documents the struggles in the three SADC languages, English, French and Portuguese. The Publication enables all, especially the youth to understand and appreciate the history and the Southern African Liberation.

Forging a long-term direction of SADC through the adoption of the SADC Vision 2050, that is transposed on the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) 2020-2030. Vision 2050 sets out the long-term aspirations of SADC over the next thirty (30) years, while the RISDP 2020-30 outlines a development trajectory for the Region for ten (10) years to 2030. Vision 2050 is based on a firm foundation of Peace, Security and Democratic Governance, and premised on three inter-related pillars, namely Industrial Development and Market Integration; Infrastructure Development in support of Regional Integration; and Social and Human Capital Development. This also goes hand in hand with frontloading of Industrialization that aims at transforming SADC economies technologically and economically. Industrialization remains SADC main economic integration agenda since April 2015, when the SADC Industrialization Strategy and Roadmap 2015-2063 was approved.

By addressing the supply side constraints as part of the implementation of the SADC industrialization strategy, cross border trade continues to grow, and business environment has been improving, where cost of doing business has been declining steadily and gradually. In addition, values chains were profiled, specifically in three priority sectors, namely mineral beneficiation, pharmaceutical and agro-processing, and a number of value chains have been developed and are being implemented. The Industrialization Strategy has also recognized the private sector as a major player to SADC industrialization and regional integration as a whole.

The adoption of the SADC Simplified Trade Regime Framework in 2019, which has contributed to the enhancement of trade facilitation, and adoption of the SADC Financial Inclusion and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Strategy that has enhanced financial inclusion in Member States. Ten Member States have so far developed financial inclusion strategies, and there has been an 8 percent improvement in financial inclusion to a tune of 68 percent.

Introduction and operationalization of the SADC Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS), a multi-currency platform, which went live in October 2018. All Member States except Comoros are participating in the SADC-RTGS and a total of 85 banks are participating in the system. The SADC-RTGS has enabled Member States to settle payments among themselves in real time compared to previously when it used to take several days for banks to process cross border transactions. As of December 2020, 1,995,355 transactions were settled in the System, representing the value of South African Rands (ZAR) 7.81 Trillion.

Approval of the establishment of the SADC Regional Development Fund in 2015 which aims at mobilizing funds for key infrastructure and industrialization projects.

Realization of targets set in the SADC Regional Infrastructure Development Master Plan (RIDMP) that was approved in 2012, including the establishment of One-Stop Border Posts which entails joint control and management of border crossing activities by agents of the adjoining countries, using shared facilities, systems and streamlined procedure. These include:

One-Stop Border Posts at Chirundu Border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and Nakonde -Tunduma Border between Tanzania and Zambia; a third One-Stop Border Post, about to be operationalised is at Kazungula Border between Botswana and Zambia, where the road-rail bridge has been completed.

Cross-border infrastructure projects, both hard and soft, that have facilitated assimilated, cost-effective, unified and efficient trans-national infrastructure networks and services were developed and are being implemented. These projects include cross-border transmission links in several Member States using optical fibre technology, thereby, allowing landlocked Member States such as Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe to connect to the submarine cables on either or both the east and west coast of Africa. Five (5) Member States (Botswana, Eswatini, Namibia, South Africa and Tanzania) have achieved the 2025 SADC Broadband Target to cover 80% of their population, and eight (8) Member States, namely Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, have put in place National Broadband Plans or Strategies.

The installation and commissioning of more than 18300 Megawatts (MW) between 2014 and 2020 to meet the increasing power demand in the Region has been recorded. Connecting the remaining three (3) mainland Member States namely Angola, Malawi and United Republic of Tanzania to the Southern African Power Pool remains a priority, and to this effect the Zambia-Tanzania Interconnector is at construction phase.

The adoption of the Regional Water Climate Change Adaptation Strategy and Flood Early Warning System in 2015. This has contributed to improvements in climate and weather forecasting, whereby a Southern African Regional Climate Outlook Forum has been established. The forum provides a platform for Member States to review and discuss the socio-economic impacts and potential impacts of the climate outlook, including on food security, health, water and hydropower management, and disaster risk management.

The adoption of the SADC Disaster Preparedness and Response Strategy and Fund (2016-2030), which has contributed to the enhancement of regional disaster management and responses capacity.

A number of administrative milestones were also recorded during my tenure of office, including, institutional reforms, policy reviews, change management towards enhanced cooperate governance and effective delivery. Among others, the SADC Organization Structure was reviewed and streamlined in 2016 to deliver on the technological and economic transformation of the region, in line with the SADC Industrialization Strategy 2015-2063; and a number of policies and strategies, and guidelines were developed to enhance cooperate governance and change management.

As the first female Executive Secretary, since I joined the SADC Secretariat, Gender mainstreaming and Women empowerment were among the areas that I paid dedicated attention to. In this regard, all policies that were developed during my tenure mainstreamed gender and engendered women empowerment. A SADC Framework for Achieving Gender Parity in Political and Decision-Making positions was developed, and provides strategies, and guidelines for strengthening the implementation of the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development in order to ensure that at least 50 percent of all decision-making positions at all levels would be held by women by 2030, and progress is encouraging.

The Region also continued to intensify the fight against HIV and AIDS, TB and Malaria. To this effect, harmonized minimum standards for the prevention, treatment and management of the diseases were developed to promote health, through support for the control of communicable diseases; and preparedness, surveillance and responses during emergencies.

Here are the challenges: Challenges are expected in any organization, the most important thing is to address them timely and effectively. Challenges that I encouraged included:

A multi-cultural operating environment. This needed high level of patience, and approaches that will facilitate inclusiveness and ownership. The challenges sometimes affected speed in terms of delivery, as one had to get a clear understanding of issues at hand, and devise appropriate problem solving approaches.

Another problem is balancing diverse interests by Member States. Sixteen (16) Member States is not a small number, each will have her own priorities and interests, which sometimes are not necessarily the same across the region, or regional priorities. This needs one to be analytical and a quick thinker, applying negotiation and convincing skills.

The Region has also experienced a multiplicity of natural disasters with varying frequency and magnitude of impact, which sometimes occurred at unprecedented scale, for example, Tropical Cyclone Idai with its devastating impacts, including loss of lives, displacement of people, and massive destruction to properties. In response, SADC strengthened the regional disaster preparedness and response coordination and resilience building mechanisms, and more efforts are ongoing in this area.

The tail-end of my term of office encountered challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, which still remains a major concern and a challenge globally, and in almost all SADC Member States. On the response side, SADC has exhibited determination, solidarity and has undertaken several coordinated regional responses and put in place various harmonized measures to fight the pandemic and to mitigate its socio -economic impacts. These include regulations for facilitation of cross border movement of essential goods, services and transport, which were speedily developed and adopted, and were also harmonized at Tripartite level bringing on board the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC).

These measures contributed to the containment of the spread of COVID-19, and facilitated continuity of socio-economic activities and livelihood of SADC citizens. The SADC Secretariat also carried out an in-depth assessment of the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19 on SADC economies. The assessment revealed a number of sectoral impacts. Based on the assessment, measures to address the challenges have been put in place at national and regional levels, and at the SADC Secretariat.

Whereas, the region has progressed in terms of its objectives, it is yet to achieve its ultimate goal of ensuring economic well-being, improvement of the standards of living and quality of life for the people of Southern Africa. Achieving this aspiration, remains a challenge to be progressively tackled to the end.

KKK: Southern African region is unique in terms of stability and investment climate, but there are also differences in political culture, policies and approach toward development issues. How did you find “a common language” for all the 16 SADC leaders?

LST: The common language of SADC revolves around basic tenets which include history, values and common agenda. Historically, the region has common principles and values. Dating back to migration era, you will note that some of the parts of the SADC region are inhabited by the Bantu people who share some cultural similarities. Politically, the region united and stood in solidarity against colonialism a resolve that led to the liberation struggle that brought Member States together (resulting in the formation of the Front Line States, then the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference) to fight and break from colonialism.

In terms of values, SADC believes in mutual respect and equality. Although Member States differ in size, wealth or development, they treat each other as equal sovereign states. Secondly, Member States make decisions through consensus, without anyone imposing on the other.

Lastly, SADC, like any other organization has a common agenda as spelt out in its Treaty, Article 5, which, among others, aims at “promoting sustainable and equitable economic growth and social economic development that will ensure poverty alleviation with the ultimate objective of its eradication, enhance the standard and quality of life of the people of Southern Africa and support the socially disadvantaged through regional integration.” Based on the common agenda, a vision, and policies and strategies have been developed to guide implementation and realization of the common agenda.

Therefore, notwithstanding some differences in political culture, national policies and approaches towards development issues, the history of the region, the shared principles and values embraced by the organization, and its common agenda have always enabled the Region and Member States to find a common ground, language and interest as a region, that is for all the 16 SADC Member States and SADC Leaders.

KKK: You have always advocated for an increased economic partnership and for sustainable development in the region. Do you agree that there is still insufficiently developed infrastructure in the industrial sector and other sectors in the region? How can the situation, most probably, be improved in the long term?

LST: SADC recognises that a seamless and robust infrastructural network will create the requisite capacity for sustained economic growth, industrialisation and development. Measures to enhance infrastructure in the industrial sector and other sectors are in place and being implemented as part of the SADC industrialization Strategy 2015-2063, and the SADC Regional Infrastructure Development Master Plan of 2012. It should however be noted that while steady progress is being recorded, investments in these areas require substantial resources and partnership between Public and Private Sectors. Estimates by the African Development Bank (AfDB), published in its African Economic Outlook of 2018, reveal that Africa’s annual infrastructure requirements amount to $130bn – $170bn, with a financing gap in the range of $68bn–$108bn. SADC therefore, invites investors from within and outside the region to partner in this strategic areas for mutual benefits.

SADC has also established the Project Preparation and Development Facility (PPDF). The purpose of the PPDF funding is to enhance   delivery on infrastructure development in the SADC Region, by bringing projects to bankability and as such facilitate investments by private sector and/or cooperating partners.

SADC is also in a process of operationalizing the SADC Regional Development Fund that will, among others, mobilize funds for key infrastructure and industrialization projects.

KKK: How do you assess the economic potential in the region? What foreign players have shown keen interest and/or already playing significant roles in SADC? Within the context of AfCFTA, what may further attract them?

LST: The SADC region is endowed with diverse natural resources, including almost all of the key minerals for feed-stocks into regional manufacturing, agriculture, construction, power and other sectors.

The Region has been cooperating with both the private sector and international cooperation partners to implement its various policies and strategies to ensure that the region benefits from its own economic potential.  Entering into force of the AfCFTA, provides an opportunity to SADC in collaboration with the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC) to expedite the operationalization of the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite Free Trade Area as a necessary pillar for the AfCFTA, and thus expanded cross-border and international investments and trade.

KKK: In spite the degree of development complexities, you have SADC in your heart. Do you feel you have left something undone for the region? What are your last words, expert views and suggestions for ensuring sustainable social and economic growth in the region and for the future of SADC?

LST: SADC is about cooperation and regional integration, and this is a continuous process not an event. With the progress made, the gains need to be sustained, while at the same time accelerating and deepening integration progressively in areas that are either ongoing, or yet to be embarked upon, including taking a bold decision and establishing the long overdue SADC Customs Union, and to expeditiously operationalize the SADC Development Fund.

Here are my last words. I call upon SADC to remain focused and bring about the envisaged sustainable social and economic growth for the benefit of SADC citizens, in line with the trajectory set by SADC Vision 2050 and Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan 2020-30, as supported by the SADC Industrialization Strategy and Roadmap 2015 – 2063, and the SADC Regional Infrastructure Development Master Plan 2012. Member States should continue implementing these initiatives.

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The so-called Covid variants, officially designated as mutations, are being used to extend the British lockdown. However, Dr. Luc Montagnier, a Nobel laureate and former director of the Retrovirology Lab at the Pasteur Institute reports that in fact it is the vaccinations that are producing the variants.

Dr. Montagnier says that an enormous mistake, an unacceptable mistake, a scientific and medical error has been made. The Covid vaccines are causing new variants that perpetuate the problem.

Dr. Montagnier said that epidemiologists know but are silent about the phenomenon, known as “Antibody-Dependent Enhancement” (ADE). Prof. Montagnier explained that the trend is happening in each country where “the curve of vaccination is followed by the curve of deaths.”

Montagnier’s point is supported by information in an open letter from a long list of medical doctors to the European Medicines Agency. The letter stated that “there have been numerous media reports from around the world of care homes being struck by COVID-19 within days of vaccination of residents.”

In a recent statement French Virologist Christine Rouzioux said: “the rise in new cases is occurring in vaccinated patients in nursing homes in ‘Montpellier, in the Sarte, in Rheims, in the Moselle.”

I am concerned that the mistakes made by public health bureaucrats, or the deceptions in which they have engaged, have become too serious to be acknowledged and that the dangerous vaccines will continue to be administered.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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After months of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg mercilessly – tediously – denouncing Russia and China ahead of yesterday’s summit, the communiqué issued after it finally raised China’s ire. Two of the document’s 79 points addressed China. The second was conciliatory; the first was confrontational. It was the first time the 30-nation military bloc so overtly directed harsh language of that nature at China in an official publication.

The opening sentence of section 55 contends that “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security.” A threat to an individual member of NATO can result in the activation of its Article 5 war clause. China was accused of endangering the security of the entire alliance.

Specifically, China was charged with:

• “coercive policies” that are the antithesis of “the fundamental values enshrined in the Washington Treaty” (NATO’s founding document)
• expanding its stock of nuclear weapons and more sophisticated delivery systems “to establish a nuclear triad” [such as the U.S. and Russia have]
• being “opaque” in modernizing its military
• being equally opaque in relation to what is called its military-civil fusion strategy
• lack of transparency
• use of disinformation
• engaging in military cooperation with Russia

The last point is worth examining. Although the communiqué specifies concern about that cooperation including “exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area,” in general no distinction is made between a military exercise in, say, the Pacific Ocean and the so-called Euro-Atlantic area. To lecture a nation in regard to who it can engage in military cooperation with is overt diktat; is an insult to its sovereignty. The U.S. and its NATO allies regularly conduct military exercises in nations bordering China, the Khaan Quest exercise in Mongolia and the Steppe Eagle exercise in Kazakhstan, and in nearby Cambodia (Angkor Sentinel), as well as naval exercises with several neighboring nations off China’s coast. China has not threatened local nations for participating in those. The NATO summit communiqué mentioned, for example, strengthening military ties with its Partners Across the Globe members Japan, South Korea and Australia: while attacking China for engaging in military exercises with its neighbor Russia.

Neither has it threatened other Asia-Pacific nations for joining NATO military partnership programs, several of which nations border China: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan and Tajikistan.

China responded accordingly, and quickly, to the above writ of indictment. The spokesman of the nation’s mission to the European Union (China doesn’t have a mission to NATO as many of its Asia-Pacific neighbors do) denied that China presents “systemic challenges” to other nations, much less to all of Europe and North America.

NATO was accused of slander and of misjudging the current international political climate; in fact of mixing Cold War thinking and bloc mentality with normal state-to-state relations. The statement also ascribed the motivation for the attack to the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden.

China already has a blood debt to settle with NATO, one it has never forgotten, for the military bloc’s killing of three journalists and the wounding of 27 other Chinese in Belgrade in 1999.

And it has come in for an unrelenting barrage of insult and vilification from NATO in the months leading up to the summit: see here and here and here and here and here.

In response to the above charges against China, The Global Times said this:

“This NATO summit can be seen as a key point in the US and Europe’s attitude toward China in the security arena. Washington has raised the curtain for a political mobilization campaign to use the NATO bloc to carry out strategic competition with China.”

The EU mission spokesperson’s comment also included a reminder that China’s defense budget for this year is $209 billion (1.35 trillion yuan), which is 1.3% of the Chinese gross domestic product, less even than the 2% demanded of NATO member states. “In contrast, the 30-member NATO alliance has a total military spending as high as $1.17 trillion, making up over half of the global sum and 5.6 times that of China.”

The statement also mentioned that the world who knows which country’s “military bases stretch all over the world, and….aircraft carriers are wandering around to flex their military muscle.”

It also recalled that the U.S. alone has almost 20 times the amount of nuclear as weapons as China does, and invited NATO to match China’s commitment to the no-first-use of nuclear weapons and “unconditionally not using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states or zones.” One knows what the answer to that offer will be.

The Chinese official said: “I would like to ask whether NATO and its member states, which are striving for ‘peace, security and stability,’ can make the same commitment as China?” One knows what the answer to that question would be.

The response to NATO also contained words particularly worth heeding:

“China has been committed to peaceful development, but will never forget the tragedy of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, nor the sacrifices of our compatriots’ homes and lives,. We will unswervingly defend our sovereignty and development interests, and keep a close eye on NATO’s strategic adjustments and policies toward China.”

Not content to have dragooned almost the entire European continent into its ranks, to have waged wars of aggression against countries in three continents (none of them remotely near the “Euro-Atlantic” area) and recruited forty partners to add to its thirty members, NATO is now challenging and confronting China.

An opinion piece in China Daily (No enemy? NATO will create one) had this to say about NATO’s throwing down the gauntlet to China, of moving from one adversary to another, from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia to Libya to China: “By imposing their role of imaginary enemy upon China, NATO is hurting the interests of the whole world, its own members included. And the only side that benefits is NATO itself, because it finds an excuse to continue existing and spending the $2.5 billion collected from Western taxpayers’ pockets.”

The loss in treasure is great; the loss of blood may be far greater.

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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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Simone Scott, a 19-year-old freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., died June 11 of complications from a heart transplant she underwent after developing what her doctors believe was myocarditis following her second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine.

Scott received her second dose of Moderna on May 1, WLWT 5 reported. When the 2020 Mason High School graduate and senior class vice president paid a surprise visit to her parents for Mother’s Day, May 9, her mother said she noticed Scott wasn’t feeling well.

“I did notice she was kind of stuffy so her voice wasn’t exactly the same,” Valerie Kraimer said.

Scott returned to campus on May 11, where even after a visit to the doctor, her condition worsened. Kraimer said multiple tests came back negative including a COVID-19 test.

“On Sunday morning [May 16], she texted her father and said, ‘Dad, I feel so dizzy. I cannot get out of bed’ and that’s when everything really started from there,” Kraimer said.

Scott’s parents were hundreds of miles away so her father called campus police to have someone check in on her.

“We learned that a doctor had to jump on her chest and give her CPR because she was that bad, and then the whole cascade of events happened, Kraimer said. “They had to intubate her and realized she was in heart failure.”

After multiple interventions, including hooking Scott to an ECMO machine that mirrors the function of the heart so her own heart could rest, doctors determined she needed a heart replacement. Her doctors have not fully confirmed the cause of her death, but they said it appears Scott suffered from myocarditis.

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

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French novelist George Sand once said: “Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”

According to poet/playwright Oscar Wilde, “(l)ife imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

In the Hollywood film Dave, after fictional US president Bill Mitchell is incapacitated by a severe stroke, look-alike temp employment agency manager Dave Kovic (played by Kevin Kline) is enlisted to impersonate him.

In real life USA, a double represents cognitively impaired Biden in public — especially for addresses and currently in Europe at meetings with G7 leaders, NATO allies, and at an upcoming so-called summit with Vladimir Putin.

His role involves little more reciting or paraphrasing pre-scripted remarks.

Aware of the charade, congressional members, key foreign leaders, and establishment media suppress what’s going on — while the real Biden is hidden at the White House or who knows where.

At a Sunday press conference in Britain after meeting with G7 leaders, Biden’s impersonator recited or paraphrased the following pre-scripted remarks:

A dubious — unlikely to be approved by Congress — “commitment (was) made (for a so-called) “Build Back Better World Partnership” that involves spending “more than $40 trillion (to compete with China’s) Belt and Road Initiative.”

Agreement on addressing environmental issues and corruption was more rhetorical posturing than reality.

Working on “cyber (and related) threats” begins at where they emanate from in the West.

So-called G7 “democratic values” are more illusion than reality under police state enforced totalitarian rule on a fast-track toward full-blown tyranny in the West.

Saying “America is back in the business of leading the world alongside (likeminded) nations” left their permanent war on humanity unexplained.

Quoting NATO’s collective defense principle under the alliance’s founding treaty Article 5, Biden’s double said “(an) attack on one is an attack on all” — at a time when no foreign threats exist to its members 

Discussing his June 16 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, he belligerently said he’ll “make (himself) very clear what the conditions are to get a better relationship…with Russia (sic).”

Left unexplained is that they require Moscow to subordinate the country’s sovereign rights to US/Western interests.

What clearly won’t happen assures worsening bilateral relations ahead with no prospect of improving them.

When Biden’s double meets with Putin, he’ll “be very straightforward with him about our concerns (sic).” 

“And I will make clear my view of how that meeting turned out.”

“There’s no guarantee you can change a person’s behavior or the behavior of his country.”

“Autocrats (sic) have enormous power and they don’t have to answer to a public.” 

“And the fact is that it may very well be, if I respond in kind — which I will — that it doesn’t dissuade him and he wants to keep going.” 

“(W)e’re going to be moving in a direction where Russia has its own dilemmas.”

Its activities “are contrary to international norms (sic).” 

“(T)hey have also bitten off some real problems they’re going to have trouble chewing on (sic).”

Calling relations “at a low point” ignored full US-led Western responsibility for what’s gone on since usurping power by Biden regime hardliners.

Falsely accusing Russia of “interfer(ing) in our elections (sic),” cyber-attacking the US (sic), he vowed further toughness ahead than already.

Saying “(w)e’re not looking for conflict (sic) ignored Washington’s forever war on humanity at home and abroad.

Claiming the US seeks “to resolve those actions which we think are inconsistent with international norms” begins at home and in complicit Western capitals.

Shifting attention to China, Biden’s double repeated Big Lies about human rights abuses in Jinjiang and Hong Kong.

He ignored real ones committed worldwide by the world’s leading human rights abuser USA — at home and abroad.

He falsely implied that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is undemocratic.

Washington’s geopolitical agenda aims for dominating nations free from its control, looting their resources, and subjugating their people.

Russia, China, and other nations — free from US control — operate by higher standards, according to international law the US-dominated West long ago abandoned.

There’s no chance whatever for improved bilateral relations from talks between Putin and Biden’s double.

At best, they’ll be another exercise in futility, accomplishing nothing positive.

At worst, bilateral relations may sink to a new low in their aftermath.

The latter is most likely.

*

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

Featured image: The President of the United States, Joe Biden stands next to the The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson giving a thumbs up in front of the G7 sign while at the G7 Leaders’ Summit. Carbis Bay, Cornwall. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street (Flickr)

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In April, I wrote a column outlining the constitutional violations of mask mandates and asking why the courts have failed to abide by the line of Supreme Court cases protecting the right to bodily integrity. Well, on Friday a Florida appeals court did exactly that, perhaps in more emphatic language than a Kentucky judge last week.

Although Florida has been largely free of state-based COVID restrictions and never had a mask mandate, several counties, such as Alachua, zealously instituted unconstitutional regulations until fairly recently. In a landmark ruling on Friday, Florida’s First District Court of Appeals ruled that a lower court had erred in tossing out the lawsuit against Alachua County’s mask mandate because it should be held as presumptively unconstitutional.

“Based on what the supreme court has told us about the scope of article I, section 23, Green (and anyone else in Alachua County) reasonably could expect autonomy over his body, including his face, which means that he was correct to claim an entitlement to be let alone and free from intrusion by Alachua County’s commission chairman,” Judge Adam Scott Tanenbaum, an appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), wrote. “The mask mandate, then, implicated the right of privacy. According to Gainesville Woman Care, the mask mandate was presumptively unconstitutional as a result.”

This language is very significant because it’s the first time a judge is using the principle of bodily autonomy to affirm a constitutional right not to have one’s breathing restricted. The lawsuit was originally brought last May by Justin Green, a Gainesville business owner, but he was denied an injunction against the mandate by Eighth Judicial Circuit Judge Donna Keim.

There are several very striking elements about this ruling, which will reverberate throughout the country even as the mask mandates officially expire. Defendants had argued that the mandate is now moot given the orders of the governor requiring all counties to end their mandates. However, the judge noted in a footnote, “Because of the nature of the various emergency orders that we have seen and the county’s continued commitment to public mask wearing, we are not convinced that this is the last that we will see of this issue.”

In other words, you can’t have a gross violation of the most fundamental rights hanging over our heads at any time and somehow suggest that we have no recourse to eliminate it. “We conclude, then, that this case fits within the exception to the mootness doctrine, which is for controversies that are capable of repetition, yet evading review,” presciently observed Judge Tanenbaum.

The judge also recognized that the pretext for these “fiats” and “diktats” is rooted in abuse of emergency powers, which can be repeated at any moment:

It would behoove the trial court also to consider that while article I, section 23 “was not intended to provide an absolute guarantee against all governmental intrusion into the private life of an individual,” Fla. Bd. of Bar Exam’rs re Applicant, 443 So. 2d 71, 74 (Fla. 1983), “even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.” Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 141 S. Ct. 63, 68 (2020). And there is this warning from William Pitt the Younger, roughly paraphrasing a similar sentiment in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.”

Drawing on precedent from the state’s supreme court, the judge ruled that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right. What this means is that the starting point for any mask mandate must begin with the government proving that masks absolutely work and are necessary to achieve a vital state interest. “The supreme court in Gainesville Woman Care told us multiple times what this special approach means for the evidentiary burden at a temporary injunction hearing: A plaintiff does not bear a threshold evidentiary burden to establish that a law intrudes on his privacy right, and have it subjected to strict scrutiny, ‘if it is evident on the face of the law that it implicates this right.'”

Also notable in this opinion is how the judge believes that the harm to plaintiffs is not just the threat of fines or denial of service.

Another consequence was being subjected to whispering informants, impelled by county-designed publicity like the following proposed signage encouraging citizens to inform on their disobedient neighbors.

The judge warned, “The threat of government-sponsored shaming was not an idle one. The chairman who issued the original mask mandate stated publicly that ‘masks are the only outwardly visible signal that you are contributing to the solution.'”

In other words, this line of reasoning will give plaintiffs throughout the country a continued cause of action to fight both the mask mandate and the vaccine mandate. Both of them violate bodily autonomy and use public shaming to coerce people to violate their autonomy. According to this ruling, any edict requiring masking for those not vaccinated would also violate the Constitution.

The next step for those seeking judicial relief would be a victory in federal court. It happens that the only lawsuit against the CDC mask mandate on public transportation, including airplanes, is in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Lucas Wall, a plaintiff from D.C., is suingthe TSA, the CDC, and other federal agencies in federal court because he was prevented from traveling without a mask and is now stuck in Florida. The well-written and researched complaint accuses the government of violating fundamental rights, usurping legislative power, and providing no data that any of the policies are effective.

It’s also possible that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ lawsuit (also brought in the Middle District of Florida) against the CDC’s mandates on cruise liners could result in the collapse of the entire federal mandate, including on airplanes. During oral arguments last Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven Merryday observed that the CDC’s own study showed that masks were “barely statistically significant” in stopping the spread of COVID-19. “Where does this mask efficacy theory come from?” Merryday said. “We’ve had masking and social distancing for a long time and we had a pandemic in the middle of it.”

Throughout the hearing, the judge seemed to oppose the entire premise that non-pharmaceutical interventions work against the virus, possibly opening the door for a very broad ruling against mask mandates, a ruling he promised “soon.”

At this pace, perhaps it’s a good thing for some of the mandates to remain in place just long enough to get standing to sue against them. For if we fail to destroy this ill-gotten government power while it’s unpopular, it will surely rear its ugly head next flu season.

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

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***

Data clearly show ivermectin can prevent COVID-19 and when used early can keep patients from progressing to the hyper-inflammatory phase of the disease. It can even help critically ill patients recover

Ivermectin has a long history of use as an antiparasitic, but its antiviral properties have been under investigation since 2012

Studies have shown ivermectin inhibits replication of SARS-CoV-2 and seasonal influenza viruses, inhibits inflammation through several pathways, lowers viral load, protects against organ damage, prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 when taken before or after exposure, speeds recovery and lowers risk of hospitalization and death in COVID-19 patients

Doctors have been told not to use ivermectin as large controlled trials are still lacking. However, once you can see from clinical evidence that something is working, then conducting controlled trials becomes unethical, as you know you’re condemning the control group to poor outcomes or death. In fact, this is the exact argument vaccine makers now use to justify the elimination of control groups and giving everyone the vaccine

The Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance recommends widespread use of ivermectin for all stages of COVID-19, including prevention

*

Watch the video here.

In the video above, DarkHorse podcast host Bret Weinstein Ph.D., interviews Dr. Pierre Kory about the importance of early treatment of COVID-19 and the shameful censoring of information about ivermectin, which has been shown to be very useful against this infection.

It’s no small irony then that YouTube deleted this interview, which is why I embedded a Bitchute version. How this interview could possibly be labeled as misinformation is a mystery, considering all they do is discuss published research. Not to mention, they’re both credentialed medical science experts.

Kory, a lung and ICU specialist and former professor of medicine at St. Luke’s Aurora Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the president and chief medical officer¹ of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Another founding member of FLCCC is Dr. Paul Marik² who, as noted by Kory, is the most-published intensive care specialist who is still practicing medicine and seeing patients.

Marik, known for having created an effective sepsis treatment protocol, was asked by a group of peers early on in the pandemic to help create a treatment protocol for COVID-19. The resulting collaboration led to the creation of the FLCCC. Each of the five founding members has treated critical illnesses for decades and, as Weinstein says, they are “unimpeachable. You couldn’t ask for better credentials. You couldn’t ask for a better publication record.”

Yet, despite stellar credentials and being on the frontlines treating hundreds of COVID-19 patients, they have been dismissed as “kooks on the fringe, making wild-eyed claims,” Weinstein says. How can that be? Initially, the FLCCC insisted, based on the evidence, that COVID-19 was a corticosteroid-dependent disease and that corticosteroids were a crucial part of effective treatment.

“I was actually invited to give Senate testimony back in May [2020] where I testified that it was critical to use corticosteroids; that lives are being lost [because we weren’t using it],”Kory says.

“As you might know, I got killed for that. We got killed for that. We were totally criticized for not having an evidence-base. [Yet] our reading of the evidence was that you had to use it. So that basically that’s how we came together, and that was the first components of our protocol.”

Ivermectin Suitable for All Treatment Stages

The FLCCC’s COVID-19 protocol was initially dubbed MATH+ (an acronym based on the key components of the treatment), but after several tweaks and updates, the prophylaxis and early outpatient treatment protocol is now known as I-MASK+³ while the hospital treatment has been renamed I-MATH+,⁴ due to the addition of ivermectin.

The two protocols — I-MASK+⁵ and I-MATH+⁶ — are available for download on the FLCCC Alliance website in multiple languages. The clinical and scientific rationale for the I-MATH+ hospital protocol has also been peer-reviewed and was published in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine⁷in mid-December 2020.

Since those early days, the FLCCC has been vindicated and corticosteroids, as well as blood thinners, are now part of the standard of care for COVID-19 in many places. The same cannot be said for the remainder of the protocols, however, including the use of ivermectin, which continues to be suppressed, despite robust clinical evidence supporting its use in all phases of COVID-19.^8,9As noted by the FLCCC:¹⁰

“The data shows the ability of the drug Ivermectin to prevent COVID-19, to keep those with early symptoms from progressing to the hyper-inflammatory phase of the disease, and even to help critically ill patients recover.

… numerous clinical studies — including peer-reviewed randomized controlled trials — showed large magnitude benefits of Ivermectin in prophylaxis, early treatment and also in late-stage disease. Taken together … dozens of clinical trials that have now emerged from around the world are substantial enough to reliably assess clinical efficacy.”

Kory has testified to the benefits of ivermectin before a number of COVID-19 panels, including the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in December 2020¹¹ and the National Institutes of Health COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel in January 2021.¹²

A Disease of Phases

As noted by Kory, they rather quickly realized that COVID-19 was a disease with very specific phases, and that successful treatment depended on the phase the patient was currently in. It starts out as a general viral syndrome, much like a cold or flu. Most patients recover without incidence. However, in a subset of patients, things take a turn for the worse after Day 5. Their oxygen level starts dropping and lung inflammation sets in.

“We now know that it’s a cell called a macrophage that gets activated and attacks the lungs,” Kory explains. “So, you have this sort of immune response that is attacking the lungs and the lungs start to fail … So, it’s predominantly a severe lung disease …

We knew relatively early on that by the time they get to the ICU … there’s not a lot of viral replication on going on. In fact, you can’t culture a virus after about Day 7 or 8. So, it’s actually a disease of inflammation, not viral invasion …

So, you didn’t have to go after the virus at that point, you had to actually check the inflammation … What we think triggers [the] inflammation is actually the viral debris. It’s the RNA that triggers this massive response. It’s not the virus. It’s actually the debris of the dead virus that does it.”

Kory notes that after having treated the first handful of patients, he realized that anticoagulants, blood thinners, were needed, as there was abnormal blood clotting going on in all of them. Yet for some reason the medical community was, again, told not to do it because there were no clinical trials supporting the use of anticoagulants for a viral illness.

“It was bizarre,” Kory says. “They were like, you can’t observe, you can’t make clinical reasoning, you can’t deduce, you need a trial before you do [anything] … Everyone talks about evidence-based. I’m like, what about experience-based medicine? I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Why can’t I do what my experience tells me to do? …

You couldn’t actually doctor. I felt like I was being handcuffed. I I’ve never seen that in my life before … I have the sense that doctors have been forcibly demoted from the position of scientific clinician to technician …

I’ve never been asked before to get advice from … desk jockeys. I mean, they’re not on the front lines … I’ve never been asked to do that before. I’ve always been asked to use the best extent of my experience and judgment and insight to best help the patient. That’s the oath I took …

Instead we’re in this situation where if we open our mouth and say the wrong word, suddenly there are warnings appended to what we’ve said. It’s insane. It’s limiting discussion, limiting choices, limiting approaches.”

Overwhelming Evidence for Ivermectin

Kory spends a significant portion of the 2 1/2-hour interview reviewing the evidence for using ivermectin. This drug has a long history of use as an antiparasitic. It’s been credited with virtually eradicating onchocerciasis (river blindness), a condition caused by a parasitic worm. The drug was originally made from a soil organism found in Japan. However, as early as 2012, researchers started looking at ivermectin’s antiviral properties.

In April 2020, an Australian group showed ivermectin eradicated all viruses studied in as little as 48 hours, at least in the petri dish. Due to the state of emergency the world was in, some countries, including Peru, decided to recommend ivermectin to their population. It was well-known that the medication was safe, so the risk of doing so was very low.

As was the trend, Peruvian officials were roundly criticized for using an “unproven” remedy, and shortly thereafter, they removed it from the national guidelines. Some states continued to give it out, however, and according to Kory, each ivermectin campaign resulted in a precipitous decline in cases and deaths.

Marik was the first in the group to really take notice of the remarkable consistency in the studies using ivermectin. Kory dove into the research right behind him, and came to the conclusion that there indeed was something special about this drug. The population-based evidence was also very strong.

With regard to calls for randomized controlled trials, Kory points out that once you can see from clinical evidence that something really is working, then conducting controlled trials becomes more or less unethical, as you know you’re condemning the control group to poor outcomes or death. In fact, this is the exact same argument vaccine makers now use to justify the elimination of control groups by giving everyone the vaccine.

“When I posted our preprint November 13 [2020], I literally thought the pandemic was over,”Kory says. “We showed the basic science level. We showed multiple clinical trials. We showed the epidemiologic effects.

Everything was there to show that this is an intervention on the par of vaccines that could literally extinguish the pandemic, and quickly. I thought at the beginning that it was as simple as putting the evidence out there … and what happened? Crickets! Nothing happened …

I cannot believe that this is occurring. Literally, people are dying because they don’t know about this medicine. Providers are being told not to use the medicine … And I’ve never studied a medicine which has more evidence than this …

You have dozens of randomized controlled trials conducted by interested and committed clinicians from oftentimes low and middle income countries around the world. And there’s no conflicts of interest. None of them is going to make a million dollars by finding out that ivermectin works in COVID. None of them have a conflict of interest.”

For example, studies have shown ivermectin:¹³

Ivermectin Has Been Intentionally Suppressed

As noted by Weinstein, ivermectin appears to be intentionally suppressed. It’s simply not allowed to be a go-to remedy. The obvious question is why? Don’t they want to save lives? Isn’t that why we shut down the world?

“I would have these data arguments,” Kory says. “But it’s not about the data. There’s something else. There’s [something] out there that is just squashing, distorting, suppressing the efficacy of ivermectin, and its egregious.”

Indeed, as noted by Weinstein, it’s not even difficult to prove that ivermectin is being suppressed and censored. Censorship of certain COVID-related information, such as ivermectin, is written into the community guidelines. You’re not allowed to talk about it. If you do, your post will be censored, shadow-banned or taken down. If you persist, your entire account will be taken down.

Mexico’s Experience With Ivermectin

Another population-based experiment that demonstrates ivermectin’s real-world usefulness occurred in Mexico. Kory explains:

“Mexico did something which I think is the model for the world. I think, on a public health level, it’s what every country in the world should adopt, at a minimum. They [had a] clinicians committee.

They actually got expert clinicians [and] they gave them a seat at the table at the public health level. It’s called IMSS, Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social. That’s the agency which controls a good portion of their healthcare infrastructure, mostly outpatient, I think …

In December, hospitals were filling. It was a crisis almost like in India. They decided to deploy ivermectin using a test and treat strategy. Basically, anyone who appeared at the testing booths, if you tested positive, you were given ivermectin at a reasonably low dose … 12 milligrams … and only two days’ worth. They got four pills [at 3 mg each].

And when they did that, you saw across Mexico this precipitous decline in deaths and hospitalizations. And, if you look a few months later, right now — and this is publicly available data — look at the occupancy of beds in hospitals in Mexico, throughout the entire country, we’re talking about 25% to 30% occupancy.

There’s nobody in the hospitals in Mexico. They’ve basically decimated COVID in that country by using a test and treat strategy … Those were real public health leaders. They made a risk-benefit decision. They used their clinical judgment and expertise to have the right people at the table.”

As noted by Kory, the IMSS was attacked by the federal health minister, but they fought back, and laid out the evidence supporting their decision. This included studies showing a 50% to 75% reduction in hospitalizations using just that four-pill regimen.

As for the FLCCC, they recommend dosages between 0.2 mg and 0.4 mg per kilogram when taken at first signs of mild symptoms. For mild disease, they recommend continuing the drug for five days. For moderate disease, of if you start taking it late, they recommend continuing until you’re recovered.

The in-hospital protocol involves higher doses. Keep in mind, however, that the FLCCC protocols include several other remedies, not just ivermectin, so be sure to review the latest guidance.^17,18

Some regions in India have also used ivermectin. Kory believes the minister of Goa made some of the boldest moves in the world with regard to ivermectin, recommending all adults over the age of 18 to take ivermectin for five days, as a preventive. Uttar Pradesh also gave it out, while other states, such as Tamil Nadu, outlawed it. Here too, population-based data suggest ivermectin is tightly correlated with a decline in hospitalizations and deaths.

Where You Can Learn More

While ivermectin certainly appears to be a useful strategy, which is why I am covering it, it is not among my primary recommendations. In terms of prevention, I believe your best bet is to optimize your vitamin D level, as your body needs vitamin D for a wide variety of functions, including a healthy immune response.

What’s more, although ivermectin is a relatively safe drug, it can still have side effects. Vitamin D, on the other hand, is something your body absolutely requires for optimal health, which is why I would encourage you to focus on vitamin D first.

As for early treatment, I recommend nebulized hydrogen peroxide treatment,^19,20 which is inexpensive, highly effective and completely harmless when you’re using the low (0.04% to 0.1%) peroxide concentration recommended.

All of that said, ivermectin and several other remedies certainly have a place, and it’s good to know they exist and work well. On the whole, there’s really no reason to remain panicked about COVID-19. If you want to learn more about ivermectin, there are several places where you can do that, including the following:

As noted by Lawrie during her closing address at the 2021 International Ivermectin for COVID Conference:²⁹

“The story of Ivermectin has highlighted that we are at a remarkable juncture in medical history. The tools that we use to heal and our connection with our patients are being systematically undermined by relentless disinformation stemming from corporate greed.

The story of Ivermectin shows that we as a public have misplaced our trust in the authorities and have underestimated the extent to which money and power corrupts.

Had Ivermectin being employed in 2020 when medical colleagues around the world first alerted the authorities to its efficacy, millions of lives could have been saved, and the pandemic with all its associated suffering and loss brought to a rapid and timely end …

With politicians and other nonmedical individuals dictating to us what we are allowed to prescribe to the ill, we as doctors, have been put in a position such that our ability to uphold the Hippocratic oath is under attack.

At this fateful juncture, we must therefore choose, will we continue to be held ransom by corrupt organizations, health authorities, Big Pharma, and billionaire sociopaths, or will we do our moral and professional duty to do no harm and always do the best for those in our care?

The latter includes urgently reaching out to colleagues around the world to discuss which of our tried and tested safe older medicines can be used against COVID.”

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Notes

^1, 2 FLCCC Alliance

^3, 5, 17 FLCCC Alliance I-MASK+ Protocol

^4, 6, 18 FLCCC MATH+ Hospital Protocol

⁷ Journal of Intensive Care Medicine December 15, 2020 DOI: 10.1177/0885066620973585

^8, 11 FLCCC December 8, 2020

⁹ Medpage Today January 6, 2021

¹⁰ Newswise December 8, 2020

^12, 15 FLCCC January 7, 2021 Press Release (PDF)

^13, 25 FLCCC Summary of Clinical Trials Evidence for Ivermectin in COVID-19 (PDF)

¹⁴ European Journal of Medical & Health Sciences 2020; 2(6)

¹⁶ Swiss Policy Research December 31, 2020

¹⁹ Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law July 2020; 2: 4-22 (PDF)

²⁰ A Holistic Approach to Viruses by Dr. Brownstein

²¹ Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd.

²² Ivermectin for COVID Conference

²³ Ivermectin for COVID Conference Speakers List

²⁴ Bird-group.org Conference videos

²⁶ Frontiers of Pharmacology 2020 DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2021.643369

²⁷ FLCCC FAQ on Ivermectin

²⁸ c19Ivermectin.com

²⁹ The Desert Review May 6, 2021

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On June 16, 2021, the late rap icon Tupac Shakur would have turned 50 had he survived a still unsolved drive-by shooting in Las Vegas 25 years ago. Few knew that behind his “gangsta rap” façade, Tupac was an activist leader who worked to counter CIA drug trafficking through street gangs.

Tupac did this with his Black Panther-extended family and others. Evidence supports that this and Tupac’s accumulating influence contributed to U.S. intelligence’s murderous targeting of him, his Panther family, and activist-converted gang leaders.

BMW in which Tupac was shot. [Source: hip-hop-music.fandom.com]

Panther Leader Tupac, Belafonte, and Black Panthers Politicize Gangs

By the time Tupac was 18 years old in 1989, the New Afrikan Panthers, a group active in at least eight cities and trying to replicate the Black Panthers, had elected Tupac as their national chairman.

Tupac only left that leadership position in 1990 to eventually produce five full CDs and hundreds of unreleased rap songs before his death in September 1996. He also acted in over six films, befriending his co-stars Janet Jackson, Mickey Rourke, Tim Roth, and Jim Belushi.

[Source: newafrikan77.wordpress.com]

In the early 1990s, former Black Panthers and other activists successfully developed a gang truce between several sections of the Bloods and the Crips, who vowed to fight police racism instead of each other.^[1] Former Panthers and civil rights activists such as singer Harry Belafonte helped the peace truce, and activist conversions spread to Oakland, which worried the intelligence community.^[2]

[Source: youtube.com]

The Bloods and Crips not only encompassed the majority of the estimated 100,000 gang members in Los Angeles. News articles also acknowledged that the two gangs had spread to states across the U.S. ^[3] and were reportedly active in all four branches of the armed services.^[4]

Tupac worked on this movement with his imprisoned radical stepfather Mutulu Shakur and they came up with Tupac’s Thug Life Movement as part of the gang peace truce movement. Mutulu had been a member of the Republic of New Afrika in the 1960s. Mutulu organized the gang peace truce movement in the federal prison system.^[5]

Tupac’s manager and longtime political mentor, Watani Tyehimba, confirmed that Tupac had decided to pretend to be a “gangsta” in order to appeal to gangs and then politicize them,^[6] as part of what he wrote out as a “Code of Thug Life.” This plan also had Tupac hosting gang leaders meeting for truce summits. Tyehimba had been a Revolutionary Action Movement-based Black Panther in Los Angeles and was the co-founding Security Director of the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO).^[7]

As the movement spread nationwide, it further included Latino gangs, while activists such as comedian Dick Gregory, NFL legendary running back Jim Brown, and others also got involved.^[8]

In Los Angeles, gang leader-turned socialist writer “Monster” Kody Scott and Congresswoman Maxine Waters helped the movement. Scott changed his name to Sanyika Shakur in deference to Tupac and Mutulu.^[9]

Gang-Activist Conversions Counter CIA Drug Trafficking, Death Row Link

Whistleblowers such as CIA agent John Stockwell have discussed CIA heroin trafficking during the Vietnam War, while Drug Enforcement Agency Director Robert Bonner detailed CIA cocaine trafficking in the 1980s and early 1990s, as reported by 60 Minutes.^[10] Mutulu Shakur had founded Lincoln Detox in the Bronx in the early 1970s, with Black Panthers and the Young Lords backing him. Lincoln was the first to use acupuncture to counter drug addiction.^[11]

New York City first de-funded Lincoln Detox, reportedly due to its radical political education work. It then used dozens of armed police to shut its doors completely for a time, and its director received death threats, just before his bizarre death.^[12]

In California, the late investigative journalist Gary Webb had researched and written extensively on the CIA’s work with the Nicaraguan Contras supplying cheap cocaine to the Los Angeles-based Freeway Ricky Ross. Ross then trafficked cocaine nationwide.^[13] Webb wrote that Michael “Harry-O” Harris worked as one of Ross’s two key buyers and understudies in trafficking crack cocaine.^[14]

Harris’s attorney, David Kenner, helped Harris start Death Row Records (Tupac’s last record label), while making himself owner of a parallel parent company, Godfather Productions.^[15]

Harris then went to jail for the next 30 years [he was pardoned in 2021 by Donald Trump], and Kenner continued operations. Investigating Los Angeles police detective Russell Poole found much support for the reports that Death Row was trafficking drugs and guns.^[16]

New York saw the conversion of thestate chapter of the Latin Kings into the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation(ALKQN). In The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang, published by Columbia University Press, it was reported that the 3, 000-strong group stopped drug dealing and started to get involved in activism.^[17] Former Young Lords activist Vicente “Panama” Alba influenced Latin Kings leader,Antonio “King Tone” Fernandez to make this conversion.^[18]

Vicente “Panama” Alba of the Young Lords on our left walking away in 1996. Antonio “King Tone” Fernandez on the far right. [Source: photo courtesy of author John Potash]

Furthermore, former top-level Wall Street insider and U.S. Deputy Housing Commissioner Catherine Austin Fitts explained how cash can increase stock values by twenty times, and this is why banks and other corporations that launder this money support the CIA drug trafficking.^[19] It is also why the Latin Kings’ conversion, alone, cost the CIA traffickers millions of dollars a year and the money launderers billions of dollars a year.

Law Enforcement’s Iron Fist Response

After King Tone converted the Latin Kings into the activist Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation, the NYPD arrested King Tone on many charges, but courts failed to convict him. Prosecutors finally sent King Tone to prison long-term for “conspiracy to sell and distribute heroin” in 1998. Panama Alba and other prominent leaders have said on film they believe it was a frame-up in line with other police machinations against ALKQN.^[20]

It came after the FBI and New York police spent a million dollars on Operation Crown that year. In a single raid during that operation, they used 1,000 federal, state and local police to kick down doors just before dawn but failed to find evidence against King Tone and 91 other ALKQN leaders in what was reportedly the largest raid in New York City since alcohol prohibition.^[21]

The law enforcement branch also responded fiercely in California, from the Los Angeles Police Department starting special gang units to U.S. Attorney General William Barr, saying gangs replaced Communism as the major domestic subversive threat. The FBI deployed a 100-agent unit to investigate the Bloods and the Crips. ^[22]

Police raided activists’ gang-truce meetings, gunmen murdered gang-truce leaders, and the government framed gang-truce leaders. For example, the government quickly freed a gunman accused of murdering gang-truce leader Tony Bogard in 1994.^[23]

Police also arrested gang-truce leader Dewayne Holmes at a gang-unity dance. Trial appearances on his behalf by California Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Governor Jerry Brown could not free him.^[24]

Los Angeles Bloods and Crips agree to a truce in 1993 but gang-truce leaders were afterwards arrested. [Source: finalcall.com]

The Shakur Extended Family’s Leftist Leadership and the Murderous Targeting of Tupac

One-time Harlem Black Panther leader Afeni Shakur named Los Angeles Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt (later Geronimo Ji Jaga), Tupac’s godfather, and Bronx Black Panther Assata Shakur, Tupac’s godmother. Afeni Shakur lived with Mutulu Shakur, Tupac’s stepfather, who was a member of the Republic of New Afrika. In 1984, Mutulu was arrested on charges of helping break Assata Shakur from jail in the 1970s and “conspiring” to rob a Brinks armored truck in 1981.^[25]

Afeni had worked with Watani Tyehimba on trying to free Geronimo Pratt and Watani introduced Tupac to New Afrikan People’s Organization national chairman Chokwe Lumumba. Tupac made Lumumba his national lawyer.^[26]

The author’s book that exposes the FBIs war on Tupac and other Black leaders. [Courtesy of John Potash]

Evidence supports at least four U.S. Intelligence attempts to murder Tupac before their successful fifth attempt. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro) had targeted Tupac’s Black Panther family before it officially ended in 1971.

FBI Cointelpro agent Wes Swearingen said in a memoir that Cointelpro actually continued into the 1990s under different names.^[27]

As a 2017 biopic on Tupac stated, evidence supports a Justice Department admission of more than 4,000 pages in Tupac’s FBI file.^[28]

Regarding Tupac, in 1991, just days after his first MTV video release, Oakland police stopped Tupac for jaywalking, choked him unconscious, and repeatedly banged his head against the curb. Both police actions had previously led to victims’ deaths. In 1992, police also passively watched as strangers punched and then shot at Tupac for no reason in Marin City, California.^[29]

At ten cents per page, the author had to pay over $400 to receive the FBI’s 4,000+ page file on Tupac. [Courtesy of John Potash]

In 1993, witnesses described how two purportedly off-duty police officers ran over to Tupac’s car, smashed his car window and shot at him using a gun stolen from an evidence locker. In 1994, a doctor’s affidavit confirmed how alleged muggers shot Tupac twice in the skull as he lay on the lobby floor of a Times Square recording studio. Tupac miraculously survived, but police refused to review lobby surveillance video of the incident and simply closed the investigation.^[30]

Tupac after being assaulted by police. [Source: 2paclegacy.net]

And finally, by September 1996, Tupac had completed his short three-CD recording contract with Death Row Records. Los Angeles Police Detective Russell Poole reported finding dozens of his fellow police officers at all levels of Death Row Records. In his book LAbyrinth, veteran reporter Randall Sullivan quoted Poole as saying his supervisors told him these Death Row cops could be considered “troubleshooters or covert agents.”^[31] Filmmaker Nick Broomfield said Poole stated that he believed his fellow cops were involved in Tupac’s murder.^[32]

Kevin Hackie, who was one of Tupac’s top bodyguards, said he was on the FBI’s payroll while working for Death Row.^[33] Hackie actually defied the FBI in telling Tupac not to go to Las Vegas the night of his murder. Death Row then fired Hackie, before the FBI then framed and jailed him. Hackie reported to Detective Poole that Santa Monica police had confiscated a gun that they gave to him. The FBI then told him to give that gun to police working for Death Row, and that was the gun that killed Tupac.^[34]

Tupac’s murder temporarily ended the gang truce as Death Row spread the word that the Crips gang killed Tupac, before activists quelled the week-long reignited gang war.^[35]

Continued Attacks and Coverup around the Shakurs?

In one of the few definitive media investigations of Tupac’s murder, A&E’s Who Killed Tupac? documentary series (2017), attorney Benjamin Crump and others provided some answers. For one, they showed the ridiculous weakness of Los Angeles police disinformation agent Greg Kading’s evidence that Sean “P Diddy” Combs paid Crips gang members to kill Tupac. Secondly, they stated that 28 people associated with Tupac and the investigation suffered early deaths since his murder.

One of the first two examples came when Watani Tyehimba’s son, Yakhisizwe Tyehimba, who acted as a Tupac bodyguard, died mysteriously soon after Tupac.^[36]

Then, Tupac’s backup singer, Yafeu “Kadafi” Fula, the son of Bronx Black Panther Sekou Odinga and Panther Yaasmyn Fula, was shot in the head a few months after Tupac was shot.^[37] Fula was the top forthcoming witness to Tupac’s murder but police never detained him for a statement.^[38]

In 2015, Afeni Shakur separated from her husband, and then filed for divorce in 2016. She died suddenly in 2016, at the age of 69, while in the middle of a court battle over Tupac’s $50 million estate. Afeni’s body was bizarrely given to that estranged husband instead of her adult daughter Sekyiwa Shakur.^[39] Authorities also denied Mutulu Shakur parole in 2016, as well as compassionate parole in 2020 when he was diagnosed with cancer. ^[40]

While such attacks continue on Tupac’s Shakur family, his legacy as a rap icon, film star, and particularly his important activism deserves more widespread attention.

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John Potash is the author of two books: The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders, and Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists.  Both books have been made into films. John can be contacted at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Jesse Katz, “Crips and Bloods Factions Prepare Ground for Widespread Gang Truce Cease-fire,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1994, p. 1. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-19/local/me-59703_1_city-s-black-gangs-crips-and-bloods-factions-widespread-gang-truce 
2. Joe Garofoli, “Singer Belafonte feels the beat of antiwar sentiment/Keynote speaker at Oakland rally hears international criticism,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 5, 2003, p. A15. 
3. Mitchell Landsberg and John Mutchell, “In Gang’s Territory, a Weary Hope,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2002, p. A1.
 
4. Reuters, “Gangs Found in Military, Magazine Says,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 17, 1995, p. A4. 
5. Bruck, “The Takedown of Tupac,” The New Yorker, July 7, 1997, p. 53. He reportedly started organizing the truce in the Lompoc federal prison, http://www.hitemup.com/tupac/family.html 
6. Tupac’s national lawyer, Chokwe Lumumba May 6, 2000. See John Potash, Drugs as Weapons Against Us (Walterville, Oregon: Trine Day, 2015), p. 337. Also see John Potash, The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders (Baltimore, MD: Progressive Left Press, 2007). 
7. See “Code of Thug Life” reprinted in Jamal Joseph, Tupac Shakur: Legacy (New York: Atria, 2006), pp. 37-38. See also Bruck, New Yorker,  http://www.hitemup.com/tupac/family.html . [NOTE: Why space below?] 
8. Plain Dealer Staff, “‘Stop the Killing’ Gang Summit: How it began and who was involved (with photo gallery),” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 24, 2013. 
9. Mike Davis, “Who Killed LA: Part Two: The Verdict is Given,” New Left Review 198, pp. 34-35; Kody Scott (aka Sanyika Shakur), Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. vii-viii, 347-49. 
10. Stockwell at 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf98TYr0MUc 
11. Mia Donovan, Dope Is Death (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11828284/ Lee Lew Lee, All Power to the People (1996) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210482/ 
12. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, A Life of Struggle, October 16, 1992, Chicago Full Interview; Ellinor R. Mitchell, “The Lincoln Story,” National Acupuncture Detoxification Association. 
13. Gary Webb and Rick Ross, as well as DEA agent whistleblower Michael Levine, on The Montel Williams Show, [NOTE: Is something missing here? If not, change comma to period.} 
14. Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998). 
15. Ronin Ro, Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records (New York: Doubleday, 1998), pp. 76-80. 
16. Police Detective Russell Poole said this on film in Nick Broomfield, Biggie and Tupac (2002). Poole names many of the cops working in Death Row throughout this book. Randall Sullivan, LAbyrinth, (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2018) pp. 40, 124, 166, 169-70, 191. Also, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/interviews/poole.html 
17. David Brotherton and Luis Barrios, The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). On membership, p. 199. Further see video, Black and Gold: The Latin King and Queen Nation, a documentary (Big Noise Films, 1999). 
18. “Seize the Hospital to Serve the People: An Interview with Activist Cleo Silvers, 2009,” www.socialmedicine.org/media/.
 Personal interviews with Vicente “Panama” Alba October 25, 1996 and May 1, 1998; also, personal interview with Antonio “King Tone” Fernandez and Hector Torres, April 25, 1997. [NOTE: Why space below?] 
19. Catherine Austin Fitts, “Narco Dollars for Beginners; How the Money Works in the Illicit Drug Trade; Part II: The Narco Money Map,” Narco News Bulletin, October 31, 2001; also, Michael Smith, “Banks Financing Mexico Drug Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal,” Bloomberg News, September 29, 2010. http://www.narconews.com/narcodollars2.html
20. Big Noise Tactical Media and PM Press, Black and Gold: The Story of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (2008). 
21. “Operation Crown: The Political Persecution of the Latin Kings,” Revolutionary Worker#959, May 31, 1998. 
22. Mike Davis, “Who Killed LA? A Political Autopsy,” New Left Review 197, 1993, p. 7;
Megan Garvey and Rich Winton, “City Declares War on Gangs,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2002. 
23. Jesse Katz, “Man Freed in Death of Gang Leader, Courts: Rodney Compton is to get one year probation in the slaying of Tony Bogard, who helped reach a truce between the Crips and Bloods,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1994, p. 3; activist witness broadcast on 99.1, WBAI radio in New York City, April 29, 2001.
 
24. Mike Davis, “Who Killed Los Angeles? Part Two,” New Left Review 198, 1993, p. 35. 
25. Connie Bruck, “The Takedown of Tupac,” The New Yorker, July 7, 1997, p. 47. On Assata Shakur, see editorial, “Thoughts and Notes on Tupac,” The Amsterdam News (New York), December 17, 1994, p. 24. 
26. Personal interview, Watani Tyehimba, May 2, 2000; personal interview with Chokwe Lumumba, May 10, 2000; Michael Eric Dyson, Holler If You Hear Me, p. 84. 
27. M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Exposé (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994); Jon Roland, FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Expose (a review of the Swearingen book). https://constitution.org/2-Authors/jroland/col/mwswear.htm 
28. This writer filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 1999. A Justice Department worker inadvertently admitted over 4,000 pages in Tupac’s FBI file, explaining it’s 10 cents a page so over $400 would be needed. See letter requesting that from this writer. Also, Benny Boom, All Eyez On Me (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1666185/ 
29. “Claim Against the City of Oakland, California, Claimant: Tupac Shakur” by John Burris, Esq., photocopied for Jacob Hoye and Karolyn Ali, eds., Tupac: Resurrection (New York: Atria Books, 2003), pp. 78-79; Danyel Smith “Introduction,” Vibe editors, Tupac Shakur (New York: Crown Publishing, 1997), p. 17; Robert McFadden, “At Two Rallies, Protesters Accuse Police in Killings,” New York Times, August 3, 2003, p. 32; Barry Paddock, Rocco Parascandola and Corky Siemaszko, “Homicide: Medical Examiner Says NYPD Chokehold Killed Staten Island Dad Eric Garner,” New York Daily News, August 21, 2014; Marku Reynolds, Thug Immortal (Documentary, Xenon Entertainment, 1997) starting at 51:30 minutes; Veronica Chambers, “Ain’t Nothing Changed but the Weather,” Premiere, August 1993. 
30. Personal interviews with Tupac’s Atlanta trial lawyer, Ken Ellis, May 12, 2000; eyewitness Watani Tyehimba, November 5, 2003, and eyewitness Billy Lesane, April 10, 1999; and Tupac’s national lawyer, Chokwe Lumumba May 6, 2000. Personal interview with Tupac’s Atlanta trial lawyer, Ken Ellis, May 12, 2000. Also see Danzy Senna, “Violence is Golden,” Spin Magazine, April 1994, pp. 43-47, and, Scruggs and Marshall, “Witness says off-duty cops fired first shot,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, p. D12, November 3, 1993. On bullets through head while on ground, see Deposition of Barbara Justice, MD, New York v. Tupac Shakur, December 21, 1994. 
31. Police Detective Russell Poole in Broomfield, Biggie and Tupac, and in Sullivan, LAbyrinth, pp. 40, 124, 166, 169-70, 191. Also, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/interviews/poole.html 
32. Originally in Nick Broomfied, Biggie and Tupac (2002), excerpted for John Potash, Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists (2019) trailer (long form). 
33. Billboard staff, “FBI Informant Testifies in B.I.G. Case,” Billboard, June 23, 2005. 
34. Former Detective Russell Poole and Michael Douglas Carlin, “The Facts Behind the Murder of Tupac Shakur,” Century City News, March 12, 2019. 
35. Nick Broomfield quoting police officer and FBI informant Kevin Hackie in documentary, Biggie and Tupac, starting at 1:08:44. Sullivan, LAbyrinth, pp. 141-43, 145 
36. Tupac’s national lawyer, Chokwe Lumumba May 6, 2000. Printed in John Potash, Drugs as Weapons Against Us (Walterville, Oregon: Trine Day, 2015), p. 337. Also printed in John Potash, The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders (Baltimore, MD: Progressive Left Press, 2007). 
37. Cathy Scott, “Shakur Shooting Witness Found Dead in New Jersey,” The Las Vegas Sun, November 13, 1996. 
38. On Las Vegas police ignoring Fula, see Cathy Scott, The Killing of Tupac Shakur (Las Vegas, Nevada, Huntington Press, 2^nd ed. 2002), pp. 111-12. 
39. Nancy Dillon, et al, “Gust Davis, estranged husband of Tupac Shakur’s mother, claims her body to be cremated,” New York Daily News, May 9, 2016. 

40. My Religion Is Rap Admin, “Tupac’s Stepfather Mutulu Shakur Denied Early Release from Federal Prison Even Though He’s Dying From Cancer,” My Religion Is Rap, November 6, 2020. 

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The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh is nearing another round of escalation with regular reports about new casualties in border regions. Some believe that the resumption of military hostilities could become a chance for Baku to take control of more territories in Nagorno-Karabakh but it would also be a possibility for external forces to strengthen their influence in the region through various public and clandestine measures.

In particular, the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh unveiled a large involvement of Syrian mercenaries in military activities. Dozens of them were killed while fighting along the Azerbaijani forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while thousands of militants were deployed there.

Turkey was the main partner of Baku during the last war, having sent its military equipment, military, as well as Syrian proxies.

The al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front (now known as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) is among the main Turkish suppliers of cannon fodder ready to take part in military conflicts all over the world in return for money, supplies and support.

However, Turkey is not the only supporter of the Syrian terrorist group. In the course of the conflict in Syria, the al-Nusra Front has established fruitful contacts with various actors, mostly NATO member states and Gulf monarchies, that funded and supported it to achieve own goals in the region. Diplomats and media outlets of these states tried to brand the terrorist organization as a “moderate opposition”. Furthermore, a new round of attempts to whitewash the al-Qaeda-linked terrorists has been picking up momentum in the West.

On May 31, Russian TASS news agency reported that the British MI6 intelligence agency’s representative met with the leader of the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front. According to the reports, the meeting took place near the Bab al-Hawa Border crossing on the Syrian-Turkish border.

A day later, former HTS commander Saleh al-Hamwi, commonly known as “As al-Seera fi al-Sham,” confirmed that the group leader Abu Mohamad al-Julani met with Jonathan Powell. He stressed out that the meeting was held four years ago, but this event still provides a useful insight at the core of relations between the al-Nusra Front and its Western partners.

The meeting established a close contact with international terrorist groups active in Syria. An agreement was reportedly reached on maintaining a permanent communication with international terrorists designated as such by the United Nations Security Council. The UK’s allies, primarily the US, were supposed to take part in rebranding of the al-Nusra group.

It is easy to notice that the media and diplomatic campaign to whitewash  HTS, al-Qaeda’s main branch in Syria, is still going in full force.

On April 2, the American Public Broadcasting Service published a part of an interview with the terrorist group’s leader Abu Mohamad al-Julani. The leader was interviewed by PBS journalist Martin Smith on February 1 and 14. The rare interview will be part of an upcoming FRONTLINE documentary examining al-Julani’s emergence.

The al-Nusra whitewashing serves the greater purpose of more freely funding of its activities aimed at combating government forces in Syria together with their Russian allies, as well as facilitating the deployment of Syrian mercenaries in other regions of the world, such as Nagorno-Karabakh.

Meanwhile, ties between London and Ankara have gained a new momentum amid tensions between Turkey and the United States. Thus, the UK finally gained the role of a good partner in crime for Erdogan.

A new escalation in Nagorno-Karabakh would serve interests of the whole ‘alliance’ of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Britain.

A crushing advance of Azerbaijan and its allies on Armenian forces in Karabakh would allow to destabilize once again the situation near the southern borders of Russia, which is London’s main interest. This will also trigger important military and diplomatic developments in the region.

Thanks to efforts of the anti-Armenian Pashinyan clique in Yerevan the Armenians already lost large territories and undermined relations with the only real ally of Armenia – Russia. Attempts of Pashinyan and his masters to hide the reality behind the defeat of the Armenians in Karabakh also had a negative impact on Moscow’s reputation in Armenia as their propaganda tried to paint Russia as the side responsible for the negative outcome of the recent Karabakh war for Armenia. Meantime, chances that Russia will intervene militarily in the escalation on the territory of the contested region in case of the resumption of large-scale clashes between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces still remain low. The potential Russian participation in the conflict will become possible only in case of a direct intervention of Azerbaijan into the internationally recognized territory of Armenia.

Thus, a further escalation of the military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan could be expected in the coming weeks. The UK-Turkish-Azerbaijani coalition will not waste time as long as the Western puppet Pashinyan still keeps in hands his crumbling power.

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It’s amazing how often Sweden still crops up in conversations. It didn’t impose tough lockdown, kept primary schools and core economic activities functioning, issued clear guidelines and relied on voluntary social distancing and personal hygiene practices to manage the crisis. For harsh lockdowns to be justified elsewhere, Sweden had to be discredited. Hence the harsh criticisms of Sweden’s approach last year by the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, CBS News and others.

But with Sweden’s demonstrable success, goalposts have shifted. Every time it’s mentioned as a counter to Europe’s high Covid-toll lockdown countries, the response now is: ‘But their Nordic neighbours did much better. Look at Denmark’. Let’s ‘interrogate’ this argument.

First off, the situation in any other country is irrelevant to assessing the utility of modelled projections on which the lockdowns were based. The 16 March 2020 Neil Ferguson model from Imperial College London (ICL), by now deservedly infamous, precipitated lockdowns with grim predictions of 510,00 British and 1.2 million American dead in an unmitigated spread of the virus.

The second sentence of the summary boasted its epidemiological modelling ‘has informed policymaking in the UK and other countries’. In an article in Nature last June, the team claimed lockdowns had ‘averted 3.1 million deaths’ in eleven European countries as of 4 May 2020.

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