This week’s number of reported deaths among all age groups following COVID vaccines passed the 5,000 mark, up 759 from last week, according to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data comes directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Today’s data show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and May 28, a total of 294,801 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 5,165 deaths — an increase of 759 over the previous week. There were 25,359 serious injuries reported, up 3,822 compared with last week.
Among 12- to 17-year-olds, there were 40 reports of heart inflammation and 16 cases of blood clotting disorders.
In the U.S., 292.1 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of May 28. This includes 123 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 158 million doses of Pfizer and 11 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine.
4,740 total adverse events, including 117 rated as serious and four reported deaths among 12 to 17-year-olds. The youngest deaths reported include two 15-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1187918and 1242573), a 16-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1225942) and one 17-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1199455). There were other reported deaths in children under 17 that could not be confirmed or contained obvious errors.
635 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to17-year-olds with 97% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 2% to Moderna and 0.31% (or two cases) to J&J.
40 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation) all attributed to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
Of the 2,876 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 52% were reported after Pfizer vaccinations, 41% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 253 cases, or 9%, of Bell’s Palsy cases were reported in conjunction with J&J.
Seven cases of heart inflammation reported in teen boys, new study shows
On June 4, The Defender reported seven boys between the ages of 14 and 19 in the U.S. reportedly developed chest pain and heart inflammation within four days of receiving a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, according to a study published today in Pediatrics.
Heart imaging tests detected a rare type of heart muscle inflammation called myocarditis and pericarditis. None of the teens were critically ill but all were hospitalized.
Only one of the seven boys in the Pediatrics report displayed evidence of a possible previous COVID infection, and doctors determined none of them had a rare inflammatory condition linked with COVID or pre-existing conditions. It is possible myocarditis or pericarditis may be an additional rare adverse event related to systemic reactogenicity, but currently no causal association has been established between this vaccine and myopericarditis, the authors concluded.
A search in VAERS revealed 628 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, among all age groups reported in the U.S following COVID vaccination between Dec.14, 2020 and May 28. Of the 628 cases reported, 392 cases were attributed to Pfizer, 206 cases to Moderna and 27 cases to J&J’s COVID vaccine.
Of the 628 total cases of heart inflammation, 40 cases occurred in children ages 12 to 17, all attributed to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
Israeli health officials find probable link between Pfizer vaccine and heart inflammation
As The Defender reported June 2, Israeli health officials found a probable link between Pfizer’s COVID vaccine — which the country has relied on almost exclusively in its vaccination drive — and dozens of cases of heart inflammation in young men following the second dose.
A study by Israeli health officials identified 275 cases of myocarditis in Israel between December 2020 and May 2021, including 148 cases that occurred within a month after vaccination. Of those 148 cases, 27 occurred after the first dose and 121 after the second dose. About half of the cases involved people with previous medical conditions.
Many of the cases were reported among men 16 to 30 years old, and most often in 16- to 19-year-olds. Most of the patients were discharged from the hospital in less than four days, and 95% of the cases were considered mild.
New research shows COVID vaccine spike protein travels from injection site
On June 3, The Defender reported on research obtained by a group of scientists showing the COVID vaccine spike protein can travel from the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues including the spleen, bone marrow, liver, adrenal glands and in “quite high concentrations” in the ovaries.
COVID vaccine researchers had previously assumed mRNA COVID vaccines would behave like traditional vaccines. The vaccine’s spike protein — responsible for infection and its most severe symptoms — would remain mostly in the injection site at the shoulder muscle or local lymph nodes.
The new research for the first time provided scientists the opportunity to see where messenger RNA [mRNA] vaccines go after vaccination.”
Woman who almost died after J&J vaccine stuck with $1 million in medical bills
As The Defender reported June 2, a 38-year-old woman who suffered multiple organ failure from J&J’s COVID vaccine said victims should be compensated by the government for taking the risk.
Kendra Lippy was diagnosed with severe blood clots resulting in 33 days of hospitalization. She suffered organ failure, and was left without most of her small intestine — and with crippling medical bills.
Because the government shielded vaccine makers from liability, Lippy can’t sue J&J. She also doesn’t have a legitimate legal route to sue the government. The only current option for people who have suffered COVID vaccine injuries is the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program(CICP), which turns down most applicants. Fewer than one in 10 people receive compensation after applying.
According to data from CICP, more than 701 claim filings since 2010 have been received from individuals requesting compensation for injuries. Of the 701 claims, only 29 claims were compensated totaling $6 million. Another 452 claims were deemed ineligible. There are 210 cases pending. As of May 26, CICP had received 152 claims involving COVID vaccines, and 293 involving other treatments.
Moderna applies for full FDA approval of its COVID vaccine
On June 1, CNBC reported Moderna asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for full U.S. approval of its COVID vaccine — the second drugmaker in the U.S. to seek a biologics license that will allow it to market the shots directly to consumers. The mRNA vaccine is currently only approved under an Emergency Use Authorization, which was granted by the FDA in December. The FDA approval process is likely to take months.
On May 10, the FDA amended the Emergency Use Authorization for Pfizer’s COVID vaccine to include 12- to 15-year-olds. On May 7, the vaccine maker also applied for full approval of its vaccine. Currently, only Pfizer’s vaccine is approved for emergency use in the 12 to 15 age group.
88 days and counting, CDC ignores The Defender’s inquiries
According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”
On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. After repeated attempts, by phone and email, to obtain a response to our questions, a health communications specialist from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force contacted us on March 29 — three weeks after our initial inquiry.
The individual received our request for information from VAERS, but said she had never received our list of questions, even though employees we talked to several times said CDC press officers were working through the questions and confirmed the representative had received them. We provided the list of questions again along with a new deadline, but never received a response.
On May 19, a CDC employee said our questions had been reviewed and our inquiry was pending in their system, but would not provide us with a copy of the response. We were told we would be contacted by phone or email with the response.
On June 4, the CDC employee we contacted said our request was pending in the system, but nobody had responded to our inquiries. We were advised to submit our questions again, which we have done numerous times.
It has been 88 days since we sent our first email inquiring into VAERS data and reports.
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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The CDC released a misleading and inaccurate statistic about the rate of outdoor COVID-19 transmission, placing it at a “hugely exaggerated” 10%
A study from Ireland analyzed 232,164 cases of COVID-19; only 262 resulted from outdoor transmission — a transmission rate of just 0.1%
In a Chinese study, researchers analyzed 318 outbreaks with three or more cases, comprising 1,245 confirmed cases; all of them occurred indoors
Separate research revealed that even if 10% of the population is infected, it would take an average of 31.5 days of continuous outdoor exposure for a person to inhale enough virus to get infected — and even then the dose would only cause infection in 63% of those exposed
Even though transmission risk is extremely low outdoors, the CDC still advises unvaccinated people, including children and those with natural COVID-19 immunity from prior infection, to continue to wear masks outdoors in many cases
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Only about 52% of the U.S. public says they have trust in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll.1
After the year we’ve just had, I’m surprised it’s that many. The latest CDC blunder came when it released a misleading and inaccurate statistic about the rate of outdoor COVID-19 transmission, placing it at a “hugely exaggerated” 10%.2
The error was egregious enough that it prompted The New York Times to release what it described as “a special edition of the newsletter on a misleading CDC statistic,” featuring a number of epidemiologists who say the CDC’s reports on outdoor transmission risk for COVID-19 vastly overestimate the risk.3
Initially, the CDC stated that unvaccinated people should wear masks in most outdoor settings and vaccinated people should continue to wear them at “large public venues.”
The CDC updated their guidelines May 13, 2021, to state that vaccinated individuals no longer need to wear a mask outdoors and in most spaces indoors,4 but implies that unvaccinated people, including children and those with natural COVID-19 immunity from previous infection, must continue to do so in many cases, even outdoors.
Vaccinated or not, and with a mask or without, however, the rate of outdoor transmission of COVID-19 is typically extremely low — and it’s time the CDC’s guidance acknowledged this.
Outdoor COVID Transmission Makes Up Less Than 1% of Cases
In a White House press briefing held April 27, 2021, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, stated, “There’s increasing data that suggests that most of transmission is happening indoors rather than outdoors; less than 10 percent of documented transmission, in many studies, have occurred outdoors.”5 But as noted by David Leonhardt in his article for The New York Times:6
“Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving. This isn’t just a gotcha math issue. It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate effectively, and leaving many people confused about what’s truly risky.”
Going outdoors mask-free is not an example of a risky activity, regardless of vaccination status, because the transmission rate in most outdoor settings is extremely low — far lower than the 10% rate the CDC reported.
Nonetheless, the CDC still recommends that children at summer camps wear masks virtually “at all times” except when eating, drinking or swimming, as should all camp operators and staff, even if they’re vaccinated7 — and despite research showing masks are ineffective.
There’s also the growing realization that nanoplastics and other pollutants, such as lead, antimony and copper, in disposable face masks are poised to be an environmental health crisis and likely pose a health risk to those who inhale them for long periods of time, such as children being forced to wear them during school and summer camp.8
What’s more, Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, told The New York Times that the CDC’s 10% benchmark is “a huge exaggeration.” “In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me,” Leonhardt said.9
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases and HIV doctor at UCSF, tweeted several examples of studies showing the low rate of outdoor COVID transmission.10,11
Research Supports Negligible Rates of Outdoor Transmission
One study cited by Gandhi took place in China, with researchers analyzing 318 outbreaks with three or more cases, comprising 1,245 confirmed cases.12 All of them occurred indoors. Even when the criteria were widened to include 7,324 cases, only one outdoor “outbreak” could be found, and it only involved two people:
“Our study does not rule out outdoor transmission of the virus. However, among our 7324 identified cases in China with sufficient descriptions, only one outdoor outbreak involving two cases occurred in a village in Shangqiu, Henan. A 27-year-old man had a conversation outdoors with an individual who had returned from Wuhan on January 25 and had symptom onset on February 1. This outbreak involved only two cases.”
Another extensive review from the Canterbury Christ Church University’s Centre for Sport, Physical Education & Activity Research stated, “There are very few examples of outdoor transmission of COVID-19 in everyday life, suggesting a very low risk.”13 They added:
“The science of transmission of COVID-19 concludes the risk of COVID-19 infection is low outdoors … if normal conventions of personal space and natural social distancing are not breached.”
Leonhardt also cited cases in Singapore14 that were classified as outdoor transmission, but it turned out that very broad definitions were used to define “outdoors.”
For some studies, an indoor case referred only to transmissions that occurred in mass accommodation, such as nursing homes, and residential facilities, while all other settings were deemed to be outdoors, which included “workplace, health care, education, social events, travel, catering, leisure and shopping.”15 “I understand why the researchers preferred a broad definition,” Leonhardt wrote:16
“They wanted to avoid missing instances of outdoor transmission and mistakenly suggesting that the outdoors was safer than it really was. But the approach had a big downside. It meant that the researchers counted many instances of indoors transmission as outdoors. And yet even with this approach, they found a minuscule share of total transmission to have occurred outdoors.”
Perhaps most revealing of all is a study Gandhi shared from Ireland, which analyzed 232,164 cases of COVID-19. Only 262 resulted from outdoor transmission, which is just 0.1% of the total.17 The Irish Times also spoke with Mike Weed, a professor at the University of Canterbury, who evaluated 27,000 COVID-19 cases, finding that those associated with outdoor transmission were “so small to be insignificant.”18
‘Outdoor Masks Should Not Have Been Mandated at All’
Cevik, the University of St. Andrews virologist, told The New York Times in April 2021, “I think it’s a bit too much to ask people to put the mask on when they go out for a walk or jogging or cycling … I think outdoor masks should not have been mandated at all. It’s not where the infection and transmission occurs.”19
In February 2021, a group of Italian researchers used mathematical models to calculate the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 in outdoor air along with the risk of outdoor airborne transmission.20They found very low average outdoor concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 in public areas (<1 RNA copy/m3) “excluding crowded zones, even in the worst-case scenario and assuming a number of infects up to 25% of population.”
Further, even if 10% of the population is infected, they found it would take an average of 31.5 days of continuous outdoor exposure for a person to inhale enough virus to get infected — and even then the dose would only cause infection in 63% of those exposed.21,22
Despite the science showing the miniscule risk of catching COVID-19 outdoors, the CDC only recently stated that vaccinated individuals could shed their masks in outdoor settings — raising questions about their faith in the vaccines’ effectiveness — and is still advising everyone else to wear them in many cases. But as Leonhardt stated about the CDC’s initial guidelines:23
“These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not. There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.”
Where’s the Guidance for Those With Natural COVID Immunity?
In their latest guidance, the CDC makes it clear that their expectation is for everyone to get vaccinated. “If you are fully vaccinated, find new guidelines for fully vaccinated people,” they advise, linking to their recent update, and “If you are not vaccinated, find a vaccine,” linking to ways to find a COVID-19 vaccine near you.24
A sizeable percentage of the population, however, has made it clear that they have no intention of getting vaccinated with an experimental gene therapy. Everyone has their own reasons for this decision, including an unknown risk of side effects and death, but for some, their reasoning is that they’ve already had COVID-19 and therefore have natural immunity.
If you’ve had COVID-19, you have some level of immunity against the virus. It’s unknown how long it lasts, just as it’s unknown how long protection from the vaccine lasts.
Even the CDC admits that it’s rare to get sick again if you’ve already had COVID-19, yet they say those who have recovered from COVID-19 should still get vaccinated.25 If they don’t, they should still mask up in virtually every setting, according to CDC’s logic, even though they have immunity that’s likely superior to that provided by the vaccine.
Robust natural immunity has been demonstrated for at least eight months after infection in more than 95% of people who have recovered from COVID-19.26,27 A Nature study also demonstrated robust natural immunity in people who recovered from SARS and SARS-CoV-2.28
What’s more, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, a cardiac surgeon and patient advocate, has repeatedly warned the FDA that prescreening for SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins may reduce the risk of injuries and deaths following vaccination, as the vaccine may trigger an adverse immune response in those who have already been infected with the virus.29
Without such screening, he wrote in one letter to the FDA, “this indiscriminate vaccination is a clear and present danger to a subset of the already infected.”30
Unfortunately, the CDC’s guidance gives the impression of only two options if you want to get back to “normal” pre-COVID life: Get vaccinated … or get vaccinated. In so doing, they’ve — literally overnight — pushed us into a world in which only the “impure” unvaccinated individuals must be masked, creating a new form of segregation and second-class citizens.
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The American media with a straight face reports that Biden intends to confront Putin at their meeting with “the human rights issue.”One can only marval at the audacity of this intention.The US government is the leading abuser of human rights.Think Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the overthrown Latin American democratic governments, and Washington’s protection of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
On an individual basis think Julian Assange who Washington has managed to keep imprisoned for a decade without charges presented in court and conviction.Even Stalin gave his victims performa due process.
Washington gets away with accusing others of its own crimes because the Western presstitutes cover up for Washington and only the Chinese point out Washington’s hypocrisy.
What human rights issue is Biden planning to lay on Putin?Most likely it is Navalny’s imprisonment that Navalny himself brought about.He had been released on condition that he keep his parole agreement, which he refused to do.His Washington masters wanted him in prison where Washington could turn him into a propaganda weapon against Putin.Ask yourself, would you rather be in Assange’s shoes or Navalny’s?
Or perhaps the issue will be Putin’s support of Assad who Washington and its whore media continue to call a dictator despite having won reelection in a free democratic vote with a 95% majority. In contrast Biden stole his “election.” Assad and Russia’s support of him are in the way of Israel and Washington’s plans for the Middle East.Thus Assad’s demonization.
One wonders what Putin is going to do when presented with Biden’s human rights accusation. Is Putin going to sit there politely and take the abuse or is he going to point out that unlike Navalny who was convicted of violating the law, Washington has kept Assange imprisoned for a decade without even giving him a show trial?
Will Putin follow up with mentioning the millions of people murdered and dispossessed by Washington’s war crimes against Muslim countries?Why hasn’t there been a resolution introduced in the UN by Russia to condemn the US for its unambigious war crimes?
At some point Putin will have to stand up for himself and his country or lose credibility with the Russian people and his friends abroad.
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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.
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Emails show Mark Zuckerberg reaching out to the doctor to provide social-media messaging and financial assistance, including ‘authoritative information from reliable sources,’ and the ‘very exciting’ redacted offer.
Recently published emails revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg collaborated directly with Dr. Anthony Fauci, offering “resources” for COVID-19 vaccine development and a redacted offer Fauci described as “very exciting.”
The emails, released earlier this week, were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by media organizations.
In one message from February 2020, Zuckerberg wrote to Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and then to the top White House COVID-19 adviser, offering help to facilitate development of coronavirus vaccines.
“I was glad to hear your statement that the covid-19 vaccine will be ready for human trials in six weeks. Are there any resources our foundation can help provide to potentially accelerate this or at least make sure it stays on track?” the Facebook CEO asked.
“If we start in April (~6-7 weeks from now) with a phase 1 trial of 45 subjects, it will take another 3-4 months to determine safety and some immunogenicity,” Fauci responded. “We may need help with resources for the phase 2 trial if we do not get our requested budget supplement. If this goes off track, I will contact you. Many thanks for the offer.”
Not the usual catchall b(5) deliberative process here.. but a less common b(4) "trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential" on Zuck's offer to Fauci.
On March 15, Zuckerberg again wrote to Fauci, this time with a proposal to highlight a video with Fauci on Facebook’s centralized COVID-19 “hub.” He noted another unknown offer as well that federal officials appear to have been even more interested in.
“I wanted to send a note of thanks for your leadership and everything you’re doing to make our country’s response to this outbreak as effective as possible. I also wanted to share a few ideas of ways we could help you get your message out,” Zuckerberg said.
“This isn’t public yet, but we’re building a Coronavirus Information Hub that we’re going to put at the top of Facebook for everyone (200+ million Americans, 2.5 billion people worldwide) with two goals: (1) make sure people can get authoritative information from reliable sources and (2) encourage people to practice social distance and give people ideas for doing this using internet tools,” he told Fauci. “As a central part of this hub, I think it would be useful to include a video from you,” Zuckerberg added.
“Your idea and proposal sound terrific. I would be happy to do a video for your hub. We need to reach as many people as possible and convince them to take mitigation strategies seriously or things will get much, much worse,” Fauci wrote back, despite having downplayed effectiveness of mitigation methods in other emails.
Zuckerberg also made another offer to Fauci, though it remains redacted as a FOIA b(4) exemption, that pertains to “trade secrets” or other confidential “commercial or financial information.”
Fauci called it “very exciting.” An NIAID official likewise described the redacted proposal as “an even bigger deal” than the video.
“The sooner we get that offer up the food-chain the better. I gave Bill Hall a heads-up about this opportunity and he is standing by to discuss this with HHS and WH comms, but I didn’t want him to do anything without being aware of the offer,” the official, Courtney Billet, told Fauci.
“Is it OK if I hand this aspect off to Bill to determine who the best point of contact would be so the Administration can take advantage of this offer, soonest?” she asked. Within days of Billet’s email, reportsemerged that Facebook was working with the White House to provide the federal government with location data of social media users.
Facebook admittedly has been in close communication with the U.S. government throughout the COVID-19 crisis, consulting the Biden White House on alleged coronavirus misinformation, for example.
Besides offering resources for COVID-19 vaccines, Zuckerberg notably poured around $400 million of private money into election processes across the country last year ahead of the 2020 election. Many of the details of the unprecedented funding remain unclear, though experts who obtained documents from entities sponsored by Zuckerberg have estimated it gave Democrat-leaning counties massive spending advantages in battleground states.
Wisconsin lawmakers announced last week that they will be expanding an investigation into Zuckerberg’s funding after revelations that employees of a group backed by the tech founder may have violated election law and had access to ballots.
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In very early 2020 there was a lot of chatter about where the virus, later named SARS-CoV-2, actually came from. In an excellent, detailed article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former NY Times science writer Nicholas Wade describes how two short pieces published in The Lancet and Nature Medicine in Feb-March 2020 determined how this chatter would be channeled.
These two extraordinarily influential pieces, each simply titled as a “Correspondence,” were parroted by the mainstream media for a year. Each was plainly intended to shut down any discussion of a possible lab origin.
I happened to read both Correspondences in March 2020 and it was immediately apparent to me that each was designed as a propaganda tool. Neither had anything to do with science. In fact, the Andersen Correspondence butchered the science. Each had an unusual concatenation of authors.
I was so intrigued by these articles that I kept searching the net to understand them, and discovered that Francis Collins, the NIH Director, had blogged on March 26 about the Nature Medicine Correspondence, suggesting it should put an end to conspiracy theories about lab origin.
I further found the letter from the 3 heads of the US National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which had been referred to by the Lancet Correspondence authors. But it had not yet been published when the Lancet correspondence was written, suggesting again some hidden connection (or mutual effort) involving the author(s) of the National Academies letter and the Lancet Correspondence author(s).
I wondered why 5 otherwise credible scientists would sign their names to the Nature Medicine Correspondence, when the arguments made in the paper were nonsensical. I concluded that they had been put up to it by a ‘hidden hand,’ and when I was interviewed for the film that became Plandemic 2: Indoctornation I said so. (The film has been banned and shadowbanned, as have many of my writings, so it is impossible to find using google or a standard search engine. Here it is on Bitchute, using the Ecosia search engine.)
Months ago, in another email drop obtained by US Right to Know, we learned that Peter Daszac, CEO of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, was the primary but hidden author of the Lancet Correspondence. He was also the primary beneficiary, since his organization had been used as the pass through to send money from the NIAID to the Wuhan coronavirus lab. (Some might consider this method of giving out grants as a fancy way of money laundering.) Daszac, like Fauci, earned over $400,000/year. He was also a member of the WHO Covid origins investigative team, and had been selected as the head of the Lancet Covid origins investigative team. But the Lancet-sponsored investigation looks like it is now dead in the water. The WHO and the Lancet thus seem to be co-conspirators, choosing the fox (Daszac) to guard the henhouse (the natural origin theory of Covid).
Today, I was sent a link to a specific one of Fauci’s emails, and the mystery of why 5 well known scientists coauthored drivel, which the venerable Nature Medicine journal published, and which was then used as the foundation supporting the claim of Covid’s natural origin, was solved. Here’s the email.
The first author of the Nature Medicine paper thanks 3 incredibly important people for their “advice and leadership” regarding the paper. All 3 are MD researchers, and they dole out more money for medical research than anyone else in the world, perhaps excepting Bill Gates. Fauci runs the NIAID; Collins is the NIH Director (nominally Fauci’s boss) and Sir Jeremy Farrar is the director of the Wellcome Trust. Jeremy also signed the Lancet letter.
And he is the Chair of the World Health Organization R&D Blueprint Scientific Advisory Group, which put him in the driver’s seat of the WHO’s Solidarity trial, in which 1000 unwitting subjects were overdosed with hydroxychloroquine in order to sink the use of the drug for Covid. Jeremy had worked in Vietnam, where there was lots of malaria, and he had also been involved with SARS-1 there. He additionally was central in setting up the UK Recovery trial, where 1600 subjects were overdosed with hydroxychloroquine. I think he had some idea of the proper dose of the chloroquine drugs from his experience in Vietnam. But even if he didn’t, Farrar, Fauci and Collins would have learned about such overdoses after Brazil told the world about how they mistakenly overdosed patients in a trial of chloroquine for Covid, published in the JAMA in mid April 2020. Thirty-nine percent of the subjects in Brazil who were given high doses of chloroquine died, average age 50.
Yet the Solidarity and Recovery hydroxychloroquine trials continued into June, stopping only after their extreme doses were exposed.
Fauci made sure to control the treatment guidelines for Covid that came out of the NIAID, advising against both chloroquine drugs and ivermectin. Fauci’s NIAID also cancelled the first large-scale trial of hydroxychlorquine treatment in early disease, after only 20 of the expected 2,000 subjects were enrolled.
What does all this mean?
1. There was a conspiracy between the five authors of the Nature Medicine paper and the heads of the NIH, NIAID and Wellcome Trust to cover up the lab origin of Covid.
2. There was a conspiracy involving Peter Daszac, Tony Fauci and others to push the natural origin theory.
(See other emails in the recent drop.)
3. There was a conspiracy involving Daszac to write the Lancet letter and hide its provenance, to push the natural origin theory and paint any other ideas as conspiracy theory. Collin’s blog post is another piece of this story.
4. Farrar was intimately involved in both large HCQ overdose trials (in which about 500 subjects total died).
5. Farrar, Fauci and Collins withheld research funds that could have supported quality trials of the use of chloroquines and ivermectin and other repurposed drugs that might have turned around the pandemic.
6. Are the 4 individuals named here intimately involved in the creation of the pandemic, as well as the prolongation and improper treatments used during the pandemic?
Below are my two early posts on this subject from March and April 2020, and a snippet from the Lancet Correspondence, with a list of signatories.
I don’t want to take credit improperly. Dan Sirotkin noticed the Nature Medicine article before I did, and wrote lucidly about it. I did not see his writing until much later.
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Comments Off on The Real Conspirators Who Lied About COVID’s Origin, Funded Fraudulent Trials of Therapeutics, and Controlled the COVID Pandemic Are the Top Public Health Leaders
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In this crisply written, well-researched book, Lesley Blume, a journalist and biographer, tells the fascinating story of the background to John Hersey’s pathbreaking article “Hiroshima,” and of its extraordinary impact upon the world.
In 1945, although only 30 years of age, Hersey was a very prominent war correspondent for Time magazine – a key part of publisher Henry Luce’s magazine empire – and living in the fast lane. That year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Bell for Adano, which had already been adapted into a movie and a Broadway play. Born the son of missionaries in China, Hersey had been educated at upper class, elite institutions, including the Hotchkiss School, Yale, and Cambridge. During the war, Hersey’s wife, Frances Ann, a former lover of young Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, arranged for the three of them to get together over dinner. Kennedy impressed Hersey with the story of how he saved his surviving crew members after a Japanese destroyer rammed his boat, PT-109. This led to a dramatic article by Hersey on the subject – one rejected by the Luce publications but published by the New Yorker. The article launched Kennedy on his political career and, as it turned out, provided Hersey with the bridge to a new employer – the one that sent him on his historic mission to Japan.
Blume reveals that, at the time of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey felt a sense of despair – not for the bombing’s victims, but for the future of the world. He was even more disturbed by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki only three days later, which he considered a “totally criminal” action that led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Most Americans at the time did not share Hersey’s misgivings about the atomic bombings. A Gallup poll taken on August 8, 1945 found that 85 percent of American respondents expressed their support for “using the new atomic bomb on Japanese cities.”
Blume shows very well how this approval of the atomic bombing was enhanced by US government officials and the very compliant mass communications media. Working together, they celebrated the power of the new American weapon that, supposedly, had brought the war to an end, producing articles lauding the bombing mission and pictures of destroyed buildings. What was omitted was the human devastation, the horror of what the atomic bombing had done physically and psychologically to an almost entirely civilian population – the flesh roasted off bodies, the eyeballs melting, the terrible desperation of mothers digging with their hands through the charred rubble for their dying children.
The strange new radiation sickness produced by the bombing was either denied or explained away as of no consequence. “Japanese reports of death from radioactive effects of atomic bombing are pure propaganda,” General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, told the New York Times. Later, when, it was no longer possible to deny the existence of radiation sickness, Groves told a Congressional committee that it was actually “a very pleasant way to die.”
When it came to handling the communications media, US government officials had some powerful tools at their disposal. In Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the US occupation regime, saw to it that strict US military censorship was imposed on the Japanese press and other forms of publication, which were banned from discussing the atomic bombing. As for foreign newspaper correspondents (including Americans), they needed permission from the occupation authorities to enter Japan, to travel within Japan, to remain in Japan, and even to obtain food in Japan. American journalists were taken on carefully controlled junkets to Hiroshima, after which they were told to downplay any unpleasant details of what they had seen there.
In September 1945, US newspaper and magazine editors received a letter from the US War Department, on behalf of President Harry Truman, asking them to restrict information in their publications about the atomic bomb. If they planned to do any publishing in this area of concern, they were to submit the articles to the War Department for review.
Among the recipients of this warning were Harold Ross, the founder and editor of the New Yorker, and William Shawn, the deputy editor of that publication. The New Yorker, originally founded as a humor magazine, was designed by Ross to cater to urban sophisticates and covered the world of nightclubs and chorus girls. But, with the advent of the Second World War, Ross decided to scrap the hijinks flavor of the magazine and begin to publish some serious journalism.
As a result, Hersey began to gravitate into the New Yorker’s orbit. Hersey was frustrated with his job at Time magazine, which either rarely printed his articles or rewrote them atrociously. At one point, he angrily told publisher Henry Luce that there was as much truthful reporting in Time magazine as in Pravda. In July 1945, Hersey finally quit his job with Time. Then, late that fall, he sat down with William Shawn of the New Yorker to discuss some ideas he had for articles, one of them about Hiroshima.
Hersey had concluded that the mass media had missed the real story of the Hiroshima bombing. And the result was that the American people were becoming accustomed to the idea of a nuclear future, with the atomic bomb as an acceptable weapon of war. Appalled by what he had seen in the Second World War – from the firebombing of cities to the Nazi concentration camps – Hersey was horrified by what he called “the depravity of man,” which, he felt, rested upon the dehumanization of others. Against this backdrop, Hersey and Shawn concluded that he should try to enter Japan and report on what had really happened there.
Getting into Japan would not be easy. The US Occupation authorities exercised near-total control over who could enter the stricken nation, keeping close tabs on all journalists who applied to do so, including records on their whereabouts, their political views, and their attitudes toward the occupation. Nearly every day, General MacArthur received briefings about the current press corps, with summaries of their articles. Furthermore, once admitted, journalists needed permission to travel anywhere within the country, and were allotted only limited time for these forays.
Even so, Hersey had a number of things going for him. During the war, he was a very patriotic reporter. He had written glowing profiles about rank-and-file US soldiers, as well as a book (Men on Bataan) that provided a flattering portrait of General MacArthur. This fact certainly served Hersey well, for the general was a consummate egotist. Apparently as a consequence, Hersey received authorization to visit Japan.
En route there in the spring of 1946, Hersey spent some time in China, where, on board a US warship, he came down with the flu. While convalescing, he read Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which tracked the different lives of five people in Peru who were killed when a bridge upon which they stood collapsed. Hersey and Shawn had already decided that he should tell the story of the Hiroshima bombing from the victims’ point of view. But Hersey now realized that Wilder’s book had given him a particularly poignant, engrossing way of telling a complicated story. Practically everyone could identify with a group of regular people going about their daily routines as catastrophe suddenly struck them.
Hersey arrived in Tokyo on May 24, 1946, and two days later, received permission to travel to Hiroshima, with his time in that city limited to 14 days.
Entering Hiroshima, Hersey was stunned by the damage he saw. In Blume’s words, there were “miles of jagged misery and three-dimensional evidence that humans – after centuries of contriving increasingly efficient ways to exterminate masses of other humans – had finally invented the means with which to decimate their entire civilization.” Now there existed what one reporter called “teeming jungles of dwelling places . . . in a welter of ashes and rubble.” As residents attempted to clear the ground to build new homes, they uncovered masses of bodies and severed limbs. A cleanup campaign in one district of the city alone at about that time unearthed a thousand corpses. Meanwhile, the city’s surviving population was starving, with constant new deaths from burns, other dreadful wounds, and radiation poisoning.
Given the time limitations of his permit, Hersey had to work fast. And he did, interviewing dozens of survivors, although he eventually narrowed down his cast of characters to six of them.
Departing from Hiroshima’s nightmare of destruction, Hersey returned to the United States to prepare the story that was to run in the New Yorker to commemorate the atomic bombing. He decided that the article would have to read like a novel. “Journalism allows its readers to witness history,” he later remarked. “Fiction gives readers the opportunity to live it.” His goal was “to have the reader enter into the characters, become the characters, and suffer with them.”
When Hersey produced a sprawling 30,000 word draft, the New Yorker’s editors at first planned to publish it in serialized form. But Shawn decided that running it this way wouldn’t do, for the story would lose its pace and impact. Rather than have Hersey reduce the article to a short report, Shawn had a daring idea. Why not run the entire article in one issue of the magazine, with everything else – the “Talk of the Town” pieces, the fiction, the other articles and profiles, and the urbane cartoons – banished from the issue?
Ross, Shawn, and Hersey now sequestered themselves in a small room at the New Yorker’s headquarters, furiously editing Hersey’s massive article. Ross and Shawn decided to keep the explosive forthcoming issue a top secret from the magazine’s staff. Indeed, the staff were kept busy working on a “dummy” issue that they thought would be going to press. Contributors to that issue were baffled when they didn’t receive proofs for their articles and accompanying artwork. Nor were the New Yorker’s advertisers told what was about to happen. As Blume remarks: “The makers of Chesterfield cigarettes, Perma-Lift brassieres, Lux toilet soap, and Old Overholt rye whiskey would just have to find out along with everyone else in the world that their ads would be run alongside Hersey’s grisly story of nuclear apocalypse.”
However, things don’t always proceed as smoothly as planned. On August 1, 1946, President Truman signed into law the Atomic Energy Act, which established a “restricted” standard for “all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons.” Anyone who disseminated that data “with any reason to believe that such data” could be used to harm the United States could face substantial fines and imprisonment. Furthermore, if it could be proved that the individual was attempting to “injure the United States,” he or she could “be punished by death or imprisonment for life.”
In these new circumstances, what should Ross, Shawn, and Hersey do? They could kill the story, water it down, or run it and risk severe legal action against them. After agonizing over their options, they decided to submit Hersey’s article to the War Department – and, specifically, to General Groves – for clearance.
Why did they take that approach? Blume speculates that the New Yorker team thought that Groves might insist upon removing any technical information from the article while leaving the account of the sufferings of the Japanese intact. After all, Groves believed that the Japanese deserved what had happened to them, and could not imagine that other Americans might disagree. Furthermore, the article, by underscoring the effectiveness of the atomic bombing of Japan, bolstered his case that the war had come to an end because of his weapon. Finally, Groves was keenly committed to maintaining US nuclear supremacy in the world, and he believed that an article that led Americans to fear nuclear attacks by other nations would foster support for a US nuclear buildup.
The gamble paid off. Although Groves did demand changes, these were minor and did not affect the accounts by the survivors.
On August 29, 1946, copies of the “Hiroshima” edition of the New Yorker arrived on newsstands and in mailboxes across the United States, and it quickly created an enormous sensation, particularly in the mass media. Editors from more than thirty states applied to excerpt portions of the article, and newspapers from across the nation ran front-page banner stories and urgent editorials about its revelations. Correspondence from every region of the United States poured into the New Yorker’s office. A large number of readers expressed pity for the victims of the bombing. But an even greater number expressed deep fear about what the advent of nuclear war meant for the survival of the human race.
Of course, not all readers approved of Hersey’s report on the atomic bombing. Some reacted by canceling their subscriptions to the New Yorker. Others assailed the article as antipatriotic, Communist propaganda, designed to undermine the United States. Still others dismissed it as pro-Japanese propaganda or, as one reader remarked, written “in very bad taste.”
Some newspapers denounced it. The New York Daily News derided it as a stunt and “propaganda aimed at persuading us to stop making atom bombs . . . and to give our technical bomb secrets away . . . to Russia.” Not surprisingly, Henry Luce was infuriated that his former star journalist had achieved such an enormous success writing for a rival publication, and had Hersey’s portrait removed from Time Inc.’s gallery of honor.
Despite the criticism, “Hiroshima” continued to attract enormous attention in the mass media. The ABC Radio Network did a reading of the lengthy article over four nights, with no acting, no music, no special effects, and no commercials. “This chronicle of suffering and destruction,” it announced, was being “broadcast as a warning that what happened to the people of Hiroshima could next happen anywhere.” After the broadcasts, the network’s telephone switchboards were swamped by callers, and the program was judged to have received the highest rating of any public interest broadcast that had ever occurred. The BBC also broadcast an adaptation of “Hiroshima,” while some 500 US radio stations reported on the article in the days following its release.
In the United States, the Alfred Knopf publishing house came out with the article in book form, which was quickly promoted by the Book-of-the-Month Club as “destined to be the most widely read book of our generation.” Ultimately, Hiroshima sold millions of copies in nations around the world. By the late fall of 1946, the rather modest and retiring Hersey, who had gone into hiding after the article’s publication to avoid interviews, was rated as one of the “Ten Outstanding Celebrities of 1946,” along with General Dwight Eisenhower and singer Bing Crosby.
For US government officials, reasonably content with past public support for the atomic bombing and a nuclear-armed future, Hersey’s success in reaching the public with his disturbing account of nuclear war confronted them with a genuine challenge. For the most part, US officials recognized that they had what Blume calls “a serious post-`Hiroshima’ image problem.”
Behind the scenes, James B. Conant, the top scientist in the Manhattan Project, joined President Truman in badgering Henry Stimson, the former US Secretary of War, to produce a defense of the atomic bombing. Provided with an advance copy of the article, to be published in Harper’s, Conant told Stimson that it was just what was needed, for they could not have allowed “the propaganda against the use of the atomic bomb . . . to go unchecked.”
Although the New Yorker’s editors sought to arrange for publication of the book version of “Hiroshima” in the Soviet Union, this proved impossible. Instead, Soviet authorities banned the book in their nation. Pravda fiercely assailed Hersey, claiming that “Hiroshima” was nothing more than an American scare tactic, a fiction that “relishes the torments of six people after the explosion of the atomic bomb.” Another Soviet publication called Hersey an American spy who embodied his country’s militarism and had helped to inflict upon the world a “propaganda of aggression, strongly reminiscent of similar manifestations in Nazi Germany.”
Ironically, the Soviet attack upon Hersey didn’t make him any more acceptable to the US government. In 1950, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover assigned FBI field agents to research, monitor, and interview Hersey, on whom the Bureau had already opened a file. During the FBI interview with Hersey, agents questioned him closely about his trip to Hiroshima.
Not surprisingly, US occupation authorities did their best to ban the appearance of “Hiroshima” in Japan. Hersey’s six protagonists had to wait months before they could finally read the article, which was smuggled to them. In fact, some of Hersey’s characters were not aware that they had been included in the story or that the article had even been written until they received the contraband copies. MacArthur managed to block publication of the book in Japan for years until, after intervention by the Authors’ League of America, he finally relented. It appeared in April 1949, and immediately became a bestseller.
Hersey, still a young man at the time, lived on for decades thereafter, writing numerous books, mostly works of fiction, and teaching at Yale. He continued to be deeply concerned about the fate of a nuclear-armed world – proud of his part in stirring up resistance to nuclear war and, thereby, helping to prevent it.
The conclusion drawn by Blume in this book is much like Hersey’s. As she writes, “Graphically showing what nuclear warfare does to humans, ‘Hiroshima’ has played a major role in preventing nuclear war since the end of World War II.”
A secondary theme in the book is the role of a free press. Blume observes that “Hersey and his New Yorker editors created `Hiroshima’ in the belief that journalists must hold accountable those in power. They saw a free press as essential to the survival of democracy.” She does, too.
Overall, Blume’s book would provide the basis for a very inspiring movie, for at its core is something many Americans admire: action taken by a few people who triumph against all odds.
But the actual history is somewhat more complicated. Even before the publication of “Hiroshima,” a significant number of people were deeply disturbed by the atomic bombing of Japan. For some, especially pacifists, the bombing was a moral atrocity. An even larger group feared that the advent of nuclear weapons portended the destruction of the world. Traditional pacifist organizations, newly-formed atomic scientist groups, and a rapidly-growing world government movement launched a dramatic antinuclear campaign in the late 1940s around the slogan, “One World or None.” Curiously, this uprising against nuclear weapons is almost entirely absent from Blume’s book.
Even so, Blume has written a very illuminating, interesting, and important work – one that reminds us that daring, committed individuals can help to create a better world.
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Lawrence S. Wittner (lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
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On 15 April 2021 about 15 women seized a local state administration building in Kyrgyzstan to demand a debt relief and a stop to housing repossessions. Barricading themselves inside the building, the women in black mournful headscarves, threatened to pour gasoline over their bodies and set themselves alight if the country’s Prime Minister did not arrive to negotiate with them. Gas cylinders were placed along the office windows and gasoline on floors set the scene for a large explosion. Struggling to breathe in the room full of toxic fumes, the women announced: ‘We’re sick of financial slavery! Eradicate the usury!’ These were at the end of their tether after years of struggling against financial oppression.
‘My Gotovy szhech sebya!’ translated ‘We are ready to set ourselves alight.’ (Source: Kaktus Media)
In 2019, Kyrgyzstan had the fifth highest real lending interest rate in the world. Many rural women have been protesting against debt, housing repossessions and exorbitant interest rates for the past 13 years. In 2016, their anti-debt struggles culminated in protests in front of the US Embassy in Bishkek, where they blamed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) for creating and funding exploitative microcredit companies in the country. In neighbouring Kazakhstan, urban residents of Nur-Sultan and Almaty held numerous anti-debt protests in front of the central bank, blaming it for predatory lending arising from Western credit flows.
Photo by an anti-debt movement member. Protests outside the US embassy in Kyrgyzstan held on 26 May 2016
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the debt oppression in the region by causing job losses. In Kyrgyzstan, thousands of migrants returned home, causing unprecedented decrease in remittances. The Kyrgyzstani state could not offer income support to its work force, of which 75% is self-employed. The pandemic pushed an additional 700,000 people into poverty, worsening the existing situation where 38% of the population is classified as poor. In oil rich Kazakhstan, 42% of the population lost income, and applied for income support of 42,500 tenge (US$99). The government made a one-off payment in full in the first month, and a partial payment in the second month. In order to provide some relief, the central banks in the region recommended loan payments to be deferred up to three months. But commercial banks and microfinance institutions (MFIs) continued to charge interest on outstanding loans and commission fees for changing loan terms. Despite rising default rates, they refused to write off debt or suspend the accrual of interest, deepening indebtedness.
How did the debt problem begin?
When the Central Asian countries gained their independence in 1991, much of the population did not have personal or commercial debt. The Soviet economic system prohibited lending at interest, viewing it as speculative gains. In the Soviet economy, ‘non-labour’ (or unearned) income was condemned and strictly regulated. But after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Central Asian countries experienced a severe shortage of capital, and they borrowed from US and other Western financial institutions at high interest rates. The near monopoly on credit coerced Central Asian citizens, especially low-income groups, into high risk and exploitative credit relations.
Starting in the mid-1990s, international donors and investors developed the microcredit industry in Kyrgyzstan by funding four MFIs. The International Finance Corporation and other international donors mandated these MFIs to become fully commercialized to achieve high returns on equity. The average interest rate was 44%. By 2010, these MFIs served 77% of the microcredit borrowers, and controlled 52% of the microcredit portfolio. By 2016, three of them became fully-fledged banks, and continued to have a significant portfolio of microlending.
In Kazakhstan, the oil boom in early 2000s fueled a rapid expansion of credit in the banking sector. By 2007, Kazakhstani banks amassed external debt of US$46 billion, or 44% of gross domestic product (GDP). About 70% of loans were linked to the real estate sector that skyrocketed house prices. Housing costs in Nur-Sultan and Almaty became more unaffordable than in exclusive cities such as San Francisco and Vancouver. Today, over 80% of Kazakhstanis are in debt with mortgage and consumer loans.
In both countries, the governments deregulated the financial system by allowing banks and MFIs to determine themselves their own size of loans, interest rates, penalties and commission fees, and to operate with very minimum capital and licensing requirements. Bolstered by the neoliberal legal framework, some lenders charged interest rates as high as 180%. Penalties sometimes doubled the principal loan, and some lenders had up to 25 different commission fees. In addition, financial regulations in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan minimized legal protections for borrowers. Individual bankruptcy laws were blocked by the financial industry. In cases of default, the courts viewed credit as lenders’ property and assets, and justified its return on the basis of the rule of law and the sanctity of the contract.
Indebting women
In Central Asia, women constitute a large share of debtors. Like in many parts of the Global South, international donors and investors targeted vulnerable women for microcredit lending. This reflected a global neoliberal strategy for debt-based growth, which recasted marginalized groups as a high-yielding investment opportunity. High interest loans were sold as an effective way to combat poverty, empower women, and stimulate entrepreneurial activity. Yet when pressed to explain the obvious tension between the social framing and for-profit lending, one of the managers at the International Finance Corporation in Bishkek defensively responded, ‘We are not a charity but an investment bank! So of course, we need to make a profit.’ Perversely, by indebting poor women, international investors gained both a handsome profit and a public image of do-gooders.
For many women loans were not a matter of choice, but a necessity as a result of cuts to state expenditure on social and economic programs. The cumulative impact of market ‘reforms’ in the region facilitated poor women’s dependence on high interest credit. First, the privatization of state enterprises significantly reduced pay and job opportunities for women. If in 1988 the Soviet Union had the highest female labour force participation rate of any industrialized society (with 90% of working-age women engaged in full-time work or study), by 2017 Kyrgyzstan’s female participation rate fell to 48 %. For instance, in 1995, fewer than 10,000 people worked in Kyrgyzstan’s light industry sector, which used to employ over 100,000 mostly female workforce during the Soviet period. Moreover, the privatization of agriculture and rural land made women asset poor. Most assets, including 80% of land and 61% of real estate were transferred to a small minority of owners, mostly men. Many women, who were previously employed as factory and agricultural workers, and as teachers and healthcare specialists, were forced into petty trading through Western sponsored microcredit schemes. The commodification of labor and poor income fueled the expansion of debt.
Second, many women borrowed money to pay for services, such as health care and education, which were previously available for free. Key social services saw significant cuts in state spending, which not only reduced public sector pay but privatized and commodified basic necessities, enabling affluent groups to access better quality services while low-income groups were deprived of them. In Kyrgyzstan, the commodified provision of reproductive care led to the highest maternal mortality rate in the post-Soviet space, with 90% of death found to be preventable. A 2021 survey of online microcredit borrowers in Kazakhstan showed that 29% of respondents took out loans to pay for emergency expenses, 21% to make ends meet, and 16% to pay off debt on bank loans. The rest used the loans to pay for medical treatment, utilities, educational fees. Only a small minority of loans was linked to buying consumer goods.
Third, the withdrawal of state provision of free housing, and the adoption of mortgage-based housing schemes resulted in fewer new affordable housing units, and an inflation of real estate prices. High cost of mortgages has failed to meet most people’s social needs and has been a key driver of economic disparity. Currently over 6 million out of 8.4 million economically active population in Kazakhstan cannot afford to buy a house. Many households took out US dollar-denominated mortgage loans at 15-20% interest rates as their only means of obtaining housing.
In Central Asia credit/debt rather than social rights has enabled people to access basic goods. Responsibilities for well-being have shifted from the welfare state to individuals through private lenders. Debt has become foundational, a way of life. Women, in particular, have been forced into debt to cope with the increasing costs of a commodified society and as a way of staying afloat or getting ahead in life.
Debt, dispossession and death
Almost three decades of debt expansion has produced immense misery and violence in the lives of many ordinary people in the region. After the 2008 financial crisis, over 70,000 Kazakhstanis defaulted on their mortgage loans and 62,889 new apartment owners were left stranded with their housing complexes partly built. In Kyrgyzstan, over 30% of all borrowers were over-indebted. A director of a microfinance association in Kyrgyzstan admitted that the majority of borrowers paid back ‘at the cost of sacrificing their food security, education and health, which obviously caused them immense misery.’ There has been a very little take-up of small and medium-sized enterprises by women in Kyrgyzstan.
Faced with an increase in non-payments, the financial sector pursued an aggressive strategy of foreclosures by undertaking extra-judicial seizure of borrowers’ properties. Until recently, a delay in payment of over a 60-day period allowed lenders to seize the collateral without a court order. In Kyrgyzstan, many borrowers lost their homes over microcredit loans of around US$ 1,000 or so. Unlike in other countries, MFIs in Central Asia secured their small loans with collaterals. Many borrowers did not anticipate being made homeless over small loans.
The rise in evictions caused many borrowers to commit suicides because of overwhelming shame and loss of control. In Kyrgyzstan, during 2011-2012 there were 17 suicides of women, who were facing repossessions. In Kazakhstan, it was common to read news headlines of debt-related tragedies. In 2011, Marat Nurkenov, aged 39, jumped off from a 9-storey building in Pavlodar, when law enforcement agents were evicting his parents from the apartment. The same year Kezhegul Alinkulova, a mother of five children, set herself alight during a forced eviction in Almaty. In 2014, 27 indebted military personnel had taken their own lives. In 2015, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Defense started a registry of heavily indebted personnel as a suicide prevention strategy in the army, officially acknowledging that debt-related suicides had become a major problem.
The death of a borrower does not dissolve their debt. Existing banking and microfinance laws make family members responsible for loans that are secured against property registered under their names. In such cases, banks and MFIs collect the remaining balance on the debt from surviving family members. In Kyrgyzstan, a borrower recounted how collectors would show up at funerals, pulling aside the crying family members, and saying, ‘Make sure to give us the money that people have brought for the funeral.’ It is a custom for visitors to donate money to the family of the dead person to help pay for expenses. The dead collectors’ lack of sympathy for the grieving family members, and the blatant disrespect for social customs shocked and infuriated many. Local activists tried to incriminate banks and MFIs for driving borrowers to their death but found it difficult to prove. Financial institutions were not held responsible even when death notes were left behind.
Debt, gendered violence and fraud
The daily lives of the indebted are filled with intense feelings of shame, fear and anxiety because shame and other aggressive debt collection methods are employed to maximize the rate of repayment. In Central Asia, it is common for debt collectors to publicly humiliate borrowers and threaten them with legal action or bodily harm. One of the female borrowers, who worked as a schoolteacher, described how debt collectors came to her school and shamed her in front of her students and the school director. The intense level of public humiliation and intimidation was a novel experience for many borrowers. They recounted feelings of tremor, heart palpitations and panic attacks every time someone knocked on their doors or the phone rang.
Local debt recovery tactics employed gendered violence. The financial industry often exploited cultural norms to shame and dis-honour women. In Kyrgyzstan, some lenders and debt collectors involved regional governors and the courts of male elders (aksakals) to shame women for missing loan repayments. In some cases, the damage to women’s social reputation and honour led to them being condemned by family members and being social marginalized. The mechanism of shaming proved to be very effective, explaining the paradox of a high repayment rate by vulnerable women.
To ensure repayments, MFIs promoted group-based loans on female borrowers. Group loans intensified social scrutiny in comparison to individual market transactions between lenders and borrowers. When members of the family or social network turned into quasi-debt collectors, it personalized debt and discipline, exacerbating the feeling of shame. Group loans produced tensions and conflicts within close-knit communities when someone defaulted. In one case, a group of women borrowers were greatly distressed by ‘the pain they inflicted on each other’ when one of them had to use her meager pension to meet the liability for the group debt.
Since 2006, in Kazakhstan, illegal private debt collection agencies have grown. Although there are only 193 officially registered private debt collection agencies, at least a thousand operate illegally in the country. In 2019, Kazakhstani banks sold problem loans worth 611.6 billion tenge to collection agencies. These agencies commit gendered violence on the basis of enforcing the law and defending the sanctity of contracts.
For instance, the Kazakhstani social media have many video and voice recordings that expose agencies’ abuse and physical assaults. In 2019, one video attracted a lot of attention and criticisms. It showed a young male collector from an unregistered agency Almaty Collection Group, intimidating a young female debtor to repay the loan, and calling her ‘dirt-eating trash’ and ‘a mistake to be born.’ When the young woman filed a legal complaint against the debt collector with the help of a law company, he and two other assailants attacked a senior law partner, breaking his nose and ribs. In 2019, the Kazakhstani courts reviewed 353 complaints against debt collectors. The maximum punishment for debt collectors, who are guilty of violating rules and regulations that govern their practices, is 180 hours of correctional labor. The judiciary has largely sanctioned gendered violence in defense of the interests of lenders. The private debt collectors can act with impunity, using threats and physical force to extract debt.
Recently, private debt collection firms were able to open in parallel private law enforcement agencies to increase their coercive powers. This development was preceded by contracting out law enforcement services to private enforcement agencies. Private debt collection firms gained more powers by doubling up as private law enforcement agencies. Now debt collectors can access state and commercial databases on debtors, and can use extensive legal powers, such as seizure of property, sale at auction, access to bank accounts, and imposition of travel restrictions. Agencies’ access to records on debtors has been responsible for the development of sophisticated fraudulent tactics to ‘recover’ debt. For instance, in a recent case, a debtor, a mother of five children, was on a waiting list for state subsidized rental housing. One day, she received a telephone call informing that her application had been approved, but the paperwork was on hold because of her outstanding loan. She was urged to borrow money to pay off the bank loan in order to complete the process. After paying off the debt, she learnt that she was scammed by the debt collectors.
Doom or hope?
The debt oppression in Central Asia echoes debt problems in other parts of the world. But the difference is that Central Asian financial industry has employed extreme coercive tactics to make money with little regard to human dignity and well-being. Women have been the biggest victims of the financial cartel. The shaming tactics and intimidation by male debt collectors is a form of gendered violence sanctioned by state and judicial authorities in support of the financial industry.
We do not know the extent of social dispossession caused by the debt peonage. The economic inequality in the region is among the highest in the world. Debt has transferred income from the poor to the rich. Michael Hudson aptly calls interest a regressive form of income distribution. Between 1995-2012, microcredit was responsible for transferring up to US$125 billion from poor communities in the Global South to financial centers in the Global North. This regressive distribution of global wealth was partly achieved at the expense of poor rural women.
The women in Central Asia have tried to resist ‘financial slavery.’ But their anti-debt protests did not achieve meaningful changes to predatory lending practices in Central Asia. The political regimes have suppressed protests. The indebted women are often demonized and stigmatized by the media as unscrupulous and irresponsible borrowers, who lack financial literacy and discipline.
There is a huge power imbalance between lenders and borrowers. The indebted women alone cannot take on the global power of financial institutions. People’s passivity and resignation over the regulation of finance reflect the degree to which the neoliberal moral order came to be accepted as just and natural. To overcome the economic and moral stranglehold of finance over society, progressive supranational institutions and global anti-debt movements are required to regulate financial capital in service of people’s well-being rather than lenders’ economic interests.
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Dr Elmira Satybaldieva is a Senior Research Fellow at Conflict Analysis Research Centre, University of Kent. Her main area of research interest is politics in the post-Soviet space, with a particular focus on grassroots activism and international development in Central Asia. She is currently researching Chinese, Russian and western investment strategies in Central Asia and their varied implications for the region. She has been researching the region for over 15 years, and published widely on social movements, development and political economy in the region.
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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Photos circulating on social media show Colombian government forces using Israeli weapons against protestors and Israeli-made Sand Cat armored vehicles patrolling the streets of Colombian cities. Alan Macleod investigates the growing ties between the unlikely allies.
For exactly one month now, a nationwide strike has crippled Colombia and has been met with deadly repression by the far-right government of Ivan Duque. As trade unions have shut down major cities, halting mass transit and bringing economic gridlock to the country, government forces have responded with violence. According to government figures, at least 44people have been killed in protests that began on April 28. A further 500 people have been “disappeared,” more than 100 shot with live fire, and at least 28 have been wounded in the eye by police, the notorious ESMAD riot squad, or by paramilitary organizations linked to the state.
The crackdown on dissent is being abetted by the Israeli government, which itself is dealing with widespread economic, military and social revolt from its captive Palestinian population. Outside of the United States, Israel is the Colombian military and paramilitaries’ chief weapons supplier, and the Colombian police and army have been putting their Israeli training and weapons to use against their own domestic revolt.
The state has essentially declared war on the citizenry, turning streets and neighborhoods into battlefields in an attempt to push through President Duque’s highly controversial neoliberal policies that would eliminate public healthcare, privatize pensions, reduce the minimum wage and levy a 19% tax on staple foods, moves which critics deem an all-out attack on Colombia’s working-class majority. The president is showing no sign of backing down, despite his approval rating slumping to 18%— an all-time low for Colombian heads of state.
Military connections
Pictures circulating on social media show government forces using Israeli weapons against protestors, while Israeli-made Sand Cat armored vehicles are on the streets of Colombia’s major cities. The standard issue rifles for all branches of the military and the police are Israeli; the Army uses the IMI Galil, Special Forces use the IWI Tavor, while the Air Force, Navy, and police favor the IWI Ace.
Embedded below is an image of Colombian police using the Israeli-made Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle on the streets.
— Max Power A.C.A.B 🇨🇴💚🇧🇷👍🏽🇫🇷 (@DonPornHoli0) May 4, 2021
Duque has sent the army into many of Colombia’s largest cities to deal with the national strike, a decision condemned by human rights groups. These forces have been trained in “counterterrorism and combat techniques” by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) attachés to share their expertise in crushing domestic resistance. Thus, any Palestinians who dropped into Colombia right now might feel an eerie sense of familiarity with what is going on.
“Private Israeli military contractors are heavily involved with the Colombian military in terms of military training, the conduct of counter-insurgency operations, intelligence gathering, targeted assassinations, cross-border military interventions into states like Venezuela, alongside hybrid warfare in general, and more. As the second most important military partner after the U.S.A., Israel can be characterized as a key supporter of Colombia’s proven record of state terrorism,” Oliver Dodd told MintPress by phone from Bogota. Dodd is a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Nottingham covering the Colombian Civil War.
In September 2020, as right wing paramilitaries carried out numerous massacres in Colombia, the Israeli military gave a several-day training to special forces of the Colombian military. They even made these hideous patches to commemorate their alliance. https://t.co/m8TqIoLBmPpic.twitter.com/oXaoAEoj2Q
Israeli drones have also been spotted in the skies over Colombia, as the government uses them for surveillance and military intelligence. AMnetpro SAS, a company started by two Israeli businessmen, also provides facial recognition and other security technology to Colombian forces.
Perhaps most worryingly, Israel has also directly trained far-right paramilitary groups responsible for much of the worst terror inside the country over the past half-century. Carlos Castaño, commander of the AUC, perhaps the most notorious and remorseless of them all, traveled to Israel to study and was trained by infamous Israeli mercenary and former IDF Lieutenant Colonel Yair Klein, who claims that he was invited to Colombia to train the national police. Dodd explained the attraction of using Israeli knowhow for the Colombian government:
IDF veterans are also heavily involved in Colombia’s conflict. The Colombian state relies on these Israeli mercenaries — called ‘private military contractors’ by apologists — a lot in the sense that they are recruited to import their vast counter-insurgency expertise developed in the fight against Palestinians. The fact that these mercenaries are not technically members of Colombia’s Armed Forces and do not wear the official uniforms of the military, allows them to lend the state plausible deniability for crimes of aggression against the revolutionary movement and other progressive forces.”
So normalized have Israeli mercenaries become in Colombian society that, while president Juan Manuel Santos appeared in an advertisement for Israeli mercenary firm Global CST. “They are people with a lot of experience. They have been helping us to work better,” he states.
Political ties
Palestine also has connections to Latin America, and the Palestinian community there has done well for itself. In recent times, a number of Palestinians have risen to high office across the region, including Carlos Roberto Flores, President of Honduras from 1998 to 2002, Antonio Saca, President of El Salvador from 2004 to 2009 and Yehude Simon, Prime Minister of Peru from 2008 to 2009.
As the continent moved leftwards in the 2000s, almost the entire region began to recognize Palestine as an independent state. For years, Colombia was the sole South American holdout, only doing so in 2018.
Yet, at the same time, President Duque was making it clear where he stood. Last year he spoke at AIPAC, America’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby group, where he announced that Colombia would open an “innovation office” in occupied Jerusalem, one step away from defying international law by moving the Colombian embassy there. He has also denounced a supposed Hezbollah presence in neighboring Venezuela, designating the Lebanese group and Israeli military foe a terrorist organization — a move likely more to do with garnering friends than genuine security fears.
Throughout this latest bombardment of Gaza, an action which has left around 250 in the strip dead, nearly 2,000 wounded and tens of thousands displaced, the Colombian government has stood side-by-side with its ally, condemning the firing of rockets into Israel. “Colombia expresses its deep concern over the terrorist acts and attacks against Israel and expresses its solidarity with the victims of these actions,” it wrote. There was no rebuke of the far more deadly Israeli missiles hitting Gaza.
A cycle of dependency
The burgeoning political alliance has brought with it deepening economic ties. In 2013, the two nations signed a free trade agreement.
“This is a historic moment in the relationship between the State of Israel and the Republic of Colombia,” announced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “These decisions create a platform of cooperation between us that will bring our partnership, our friendship, our brotherhood…to new political and economic levels.”
For the most part, trade between the two states consists of Israeli weaponry and know-how going to Colombia in exchange for the South American nation’s mineral reserves. In 2011, military-grade arms comprised 49.6% of all Israeli exports to Colombia. Coal makes up around 89% of what goes back the other way. The rest is primarily agricultural produce (coffee, fruit, sugar, etc.).
Colombia’s mineral wealth is only exploitable after a decades-long push by the military and associated paramilitaries to clear black and indigenous people off their valuable land, making way for transnational agribusiness and energy corporations to set up shop. Israeli weaponry and technical advice have been crucial in achieving this. As a result, Israel is able to reap some of the benefits, keeping the lights on at home thanks to cheap Colombian coal in a deal that benefits them and big business but hurts the people and contributes to ethnic cleansing on both sides of the world.
“Key outposts of U.S. power”
Colombia and Israel are the U.S.’ most favored allies in their respective regions. Israel receives billions of dollars in military aid yearly, weapons which it often tests on civilian Palestinian populations and can thereafter be sold at arms fairs worldwide as “battle tested.”
Likewise, Colombia receives enormous sums of free American weapons (over $461 million worth in 2021) mainly under the guise of the discredited War on Drugs. Plan Colombia — the militarization of the drug war in Latin America — is most associated with the Bush administration. However, the brains of the operation was actually Joe Biden. “I’m the guy who put together Plan Colombia…straighten[ing] that government out for a long while,” he bragged last year. While in office, Biden plans to expand his policy from Colombia to Central America.
Neither Israel nor Colombia’s most recent repression has drawn censure from the Biden administration, with the president immediately announcing that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” as it was pummelling civilian targets in Gaza. Likewise, there has been no official word from Washington on the Colombian government’s deadly crackdown on protesters. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with his Colombian counterpart Diego Molano earlier this week, where he “expressed his commitment to strengthening our defense relationship” in his own words.
“Israel and Colombia are key outposts of U.S. empire and as such are permitted to terrorize civilian populations in the name of fighting terror,” said Belén Fernández, a journalist who covers Middle East-Latin America relations closely. “The two states are firmly bound to the U.S. and each other in what amounts to a military-economic ménage à trois predicated on the perpetuation of insecurity, forced displacement, and right-wing tyranny,” she added.
MintPress also spoke with Manuel Rozental, a physician and longtime activist living in Cauca, where the recent repression has been most extreme. Rozental saw a number of parallels between Israel and Colombia.
“At the moment there is an uprising in Colombia from people fed up with a regime that only exploits and resorts to violence and force. The same is happening in Gaza,” he said.
In both cases, the U.S. either says nothing or it presents both sides as part of a process of polarization to cover up the fact there is one illegitimate regime suppressing and oppressing people. None of this violence in Colombia would be taking place if not for the support of the U.S. and its corporate interests. And such is the case as well in Israel.”
Colombia’s role in the system is distinctly similar to that of Israel’s, being the United States’ chief lieutenant in the region, attacking Venezuela, Bolivia, or any of its other progressive neighbors. It is also the chief location for American military bases in the area. For Rozental, the parallels between Colombia and the Israel-Palestine situation are “obvious”:
Israel spearheads U.S. interests in the Middle East in exchange for massive funding for the government for support for an increasingly fascist regime under the control of Benjamin Netanyahu as a strongman, like [former] President Uribe is in Colombia. This model generates enormous amounts of money for the U.S. military industry and transformed Israel into both a military superpower and a producer and exporter of security of war throughout the Middle East and the world.”
Protestors in both countries are being hit with tear gas that comes from the same Pennsylvania-based arms maker supplying both regimes. Both nations are also willing to do the dirty work that the United States would rather not get caught doing. Israel, for instance, became the main supplier of weapons to the Chilean fascist dictatorship under General Pinochet after public pressure forced the U.S. government to suspend military aid. It also supplied an estimated 95% of all arms to the pro-U.S. Argentinian military junta while it was in power (1976-1983).
Meanwhile, increased scrutiny of American training of tens of thousands of Latin American police and military officers in the tactics of repression has made the U.S. less keen to continue the practice, especially as many of the graduates of the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA, have now been found guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Evan King, Colombia Program Director for the Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective in Bogota, told MintPress:
Colombia is the Israel of South America because they have started to export these tactics throughout the region. The U.S. loves this, the offshoring of indoctrinating military forces abroad. They don’t have to do it because the Colombians now do it. So you see Colombian forces training Honduran, Salvadoran or Mexican police. Most recently, you saw Colombian special forces going to Haiti to train Haitian security forces, who are now also gunning down protestors in the streets.”
Settler colonial states
The phrase “the Israel of Latin America” was originally an epithet against Colombia by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, highlighting how Colombia is a tool of American imperialism. However, former Colombian President Santos appropriated it as a compliment, declaring his people honorary Israelites, noting their similarities.
The two states are indeed far more similar than many realize. They are both highly militarized governments conducting seemingly endless wars against their indigenous populations, all the while using the rhetoric of pursuing a “peace process” which never seems to bring peace.
Likewise, both governments smear their opponents as “terrorists.” In Colombia, it is trade unions, leftist guerilla groups and indigenous and social leaders; in Israel, it is doctors, journalists and the Palestinian population more generally. Thus, essentially anyone standing in their way can be designated a terrorist and therefore, becomes a legitimate target.
Protesters block the entry of an Israeli Sand Cat, the same variety sold to Colombia, to a UK arms fair. Mark Kerrison | Alamy
“The kind of peace that the Israeli government would like is one where they could do whatever they wanted with the land and never give it back. And there is a similar approach to the conflict that continues here [in Colombia]. The government is in favor of the peace process, but mainly as a tool to open the country up to foreign investment,” King said, adding:
That’s where I think Colombia and Israel are very similar; counterinsurgency is no longer a tactic or a strategy to deal with a threat, but it is a way of governing and a reason for the state. The state is no longer to provide social services or guarantee people’s rights, but to protect against an internal enemy at all times and at all costs.”
The Colombian government under Duque’s mentor Alvaro Uribeoversaw a longstanding series of extrajudicial murders and massacres that resulted in as many as 10,000 deaths. Dubbed the “False Positives Scandal,” government forces would murder anyone they wished, later claiming their victims were members of narcoterrorist organizations. This allowed the government to eliminate opposition to it and intimidate other would-be foes into silence. This is why it was particularly notable when, last year, Prime Minister Netanyahu applauded Duque, stating: “Ivan, your leadership in the fight against terrorism sets an example for the rest of Latin America.” One week after the current protests were launched, Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano stated that the country “faces the terrorist threat of criminal organizations.”
Both governments are also carrying out what amounts to settler colonial projects. In Colombia, it is a decidedly white elite attempting to clear the land of indigenous and Afro-Colombian farmers to make way for multinational corporations, while in Israel, it is the construction of a Jewish supremacist state on top of an already existing Palestinian one. Almost unknown in the West is the scale of the violence in Colombia; the United Nations estimates that there are currently 7.4 million displaced Colombians, a figure larger than even the highest estimates of Palestinian refugees.
“The treatment of indigenous and Afro-Colombians by the central government is as second-class citizens. They don’t really give them rights. It is not a formal thing, but if you go to black majority cities like port city Buenaventura, the difference is stark,” King said. “The way people are living there is, I assume, closer to the conditions in Gaza than in the rest of Colombia. There is no formal apartheid regime but it is clear that the whole point is for them to leave the land and create such extreme economic and humanitarian hardship that they will just depopulate the land themselves, without the need of force.”
Israel across Latin America
Throughout Latin America, Israel is a partisan issue. While leftist movements the continent over have offered their support to the Palestinians, seeing their struggle against imperialism as intertwined with theirs, the right have taken up Israel as their cause.
In 2010, President Chavez offered his full support towards Palestinian independence. “From the bottom of my soul, damn you, state of Israel! Terrorists and assassins! Long live the Palestinian people” he said. Four years later, in the wake of another Israeli attack on Gaza, Bolivian President Evo Morales formally declared Israel a “terrorist state.”
Almost as soon as Morales was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in 2019, the new, far-right government re-established ties with the Middle Eastern state and immediately invited IDF officials to the country to help deal with the nationwide protests against the coup. “We’ve invited them to help us. They’re used to dealing with terrorists. They know how to handle them,” new Interior Minister Arturo Murillosaid of his guests. Foreign Minister Israel Katz expressed his satisfaction that a new “friendly government” had taken charge in Bolivia. In Venezuela, one of the first things Juan Guaidó did after he announced himself president of the country was to reveal he is working on renormalizing relations with Israel.
In Brazil, far-right president Jair Bolsonaro seems almost obsessed with Israel, so much so that he is rarely to be seen at a rally without multiple Israeli flags nearby. The 66-year-old former army officer also opened a trade office in Jerusalem and hinted that the embassy would soon follow. Other right-wing states such as Honduras have promised to do the same. Bolsonaro’s children also allowed themselves to be photographed wearing IDF and Mossad shirts. Netanyahu expressed his appreciation, stating that his government had “no better friends than the people and government of Brazil.”
Jair Bolsonaro’s sons pictured wearing shirts glorifying the Israeli military. Photo | Twitter
The reason for the preoccupation with Israel across much of the region comes from the rise and power of the conservative Evangelical church. As journalist and ordained minister Chris Hedges explained to MintPress last week, many right-wing Christian prophecies about the end times include the Jews returning to the Holy Land and the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Only then will the righteous ascend to heaven and the damned (including the Jews and other non-believers) be cast into hell. Bolsonaro and other new right leaders draw their most loyal support from these groups.
Israel is also helping to prop up Chile’s beleaguered president Sebastian Piñera amid nationwide protests and widespread contempt, like it did with Pinochet 40 years ago. As Fernández noted, Israel has sold weapons and anti-riot gear to Chile, as well as training their army and police force, know-how that no doubt came in useful while dealing with a national revolt.
A better future?
While violence in Colombia and Palestine has captured headlines, there is some hope on the horizon for those suffering in both countries. Polls show that Duque’s government looks weakened as a political force and that former leftist guerilla Gustavo Petro is leagues ahead of his competitors for next year’s presidential election.
Petro lost in 2018, amid threats on his life, widespread vote buying, and rigging, and a generalized threat from far-right paramilitaries promising to kill anyone who dared vote for him. However, Duque’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and his all-out push for economic shock therapy has alienated much of his base. If Petro can stay alive until next year — not an easy task for progressive Colombian politicians — victory could be his.
On Palestine too, the mood appears to be shifting. Where once only unquestioning support for Israel was the norm, senior politicians, cable news presenters and columnists have unequivocally denounced Israeli aggression, with many echoing human rights organizations in labeling it an apartheid state. The Black Lives Matter movement has offered its support to Palestine, with many elected officials openly linking the violence against Palestinians with the violence against people of color in the United States.
“I rise today in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” beganRep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) speech in Congress earlier this month, a statement unthinkable just a few years ago. “The equipment that they used to brutalize us [at Ferguson] is the same equipment that we send to the Israeli military and police to terrorize Palestinians,” she added.
“The ethnic cleansing continues now,”said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib at a protest outside the State Department. “What they are doing to the Palestinian people is what they continue to do to our black brothers and sisters here; …it is all interconnected.”
With their myriad of links, we should also see the violence against Colombians and Palestinians as interconnected. Perhaps their liberation will be, too.
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The well-reputed online magazine Nature.com published on May 24, 2021, a research-report finding that people who had a corona infection have also developed antibodies and will most likely be immune against the disease for the rest of their lives. See this. Let’s hope it will not be “fact-checked” out.
Censuring the truth. What a pity! What can now be called “Covid Deep State” – the same “superior and super-rich elite” buys practically all the mainstream media – television, radio and print – in basically all the 193 UN member countries. Looks like there is no escape. That’s what they would like. That’s why the entire world had to be locked down for the virus at once on or around the 15th of March 2020.
It is an epidemiological impossibility that the entire world at once is affected by a virus, let alone by what WHO then dared to call a “pandemic”. However, the truth always seeps through, sooner or later. Just think of Leonard Cohen’s extraordinary anthem “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. The truth will always sooner or later penetrate the darkness.
Right now, it looks like the time is coming when the huge heavy vessel that carries this somber elite’s lies and deceits straight ahead, ignoring all objections and arguments, and as if there was no obstacle to hold it back – as money buys everything – this vessel is slowly but gradually and it seems unstoppably turning. People are awaking around the globe.
Independent scientists, virologists, medical doctors with integrity and the warmth of true humanity have abandoned the matrix and taken the Red Pill. This is in reference to the 1999 movie, “The Matrix” – where taking the red pill means the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth, or remaining in contented dark ignorance with the blue pill. Amazingly, the movie has not yet been banned and “fact-checked” off the screens and internet.
And so, the study referred to by Nature.com of acquired immunity – probably for life – makes vaccination not only redundant, but outright dangerous. The text is also available in German, see here. The study has revealed that after 11 months of infection antibodies are still present.
Dr, Mike Yeadon, former Vice President Pfizer and Chief of Science at Pfizer, a top virologist, has studied SARS cases in 2019 from the SARS outbreak in China of 2002 / 2003. He found still antibodies in all of his examined former SARS-infected people. He concludes that SARS, alias covid antibodies are therefore, effective for at least 17 years and following his experience he assumes for life. See here.
This actually means that all those who have had the covid infection have developed various degrees of antibodies which make vaccination not only unnecessary, but dangerous, as the vaccine, especially the mRNA-type “emergency gene therapy” – never approved by CDC / DFA as a vaccine – could affect and destroy a person’s naturally acquired immune system, not only against covid, but against a wide range of diseases. Therefore, coercing people with natural antibodies into taking the jab is a crime. So-called mRNA “scientists” know exactly what they are doing.
Dr. Mike Yeadon goes a step further, claiming that the mRNA-jab contains a spike protein, called syncytin-1, vital for the formation of human placenta in women. If the “vaccine” – or rather the CDC-called emergency gene therapy – works, Yeadon says, “we form an immune response against the spike protein, then we are also training the female body to attack syncytin-1 which could lead to infertility of women of an unspecified duration.” In other words, likely for the rest of their child-bearing life.
On 1 December 2020, Dr. Yeadon and German Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg wrote to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), urging them to carry out vaccine trials, including for their effect on women’s infertility. They never received an answer.
In an article published by Global Research on 22 April, here, Nathaniel Linderman referred to a study by Dr. Bart Classen, claiming that mRNA Pfizer jabs – allow me to repeat: Not vaccines but emergency gene-therapies – caused different kinds of neurodegenerative diseases, including the risk of Prion disease, see this.
Dr. Bart Classen’s research indicates that the Pfizer untested mRNA vaccine, creates new proteins that can actually integrate into the human genome, as reported by the National Library of Medicine. In other words, degenerative brain conditions may appear at any time in your life after receiving the vaccine.
The Pfizer vaccine is, however, not the only type of untested inoculation that causes neurodegenerative defects, many of them deadly and most of them unreversible or only partially curable. There are Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca and more.
Founder Robert Kennedy Jr. of Children’s Health Defense – The Defender – reports on 2 June 2021 about a 38-year-old woman, who nearly died after a J&J covid-vaccine. She suffered various organ failures. The woman was healthy until she received the J&J untested covid “vaccine”. Within a week, she started experiencing headaches, abdominal pain and nausea and was eventually diagnosed with severe blood clots that caused most of her vital organs to fail. Only intense medical treatment, 33 days of hospitalization, of which 22 days of intensive care, saved her life – and left her with a medical bill of over a US$ 1 million – for which nobody admits responsibility. See this.
God only knows how many unreported cases there are – some very likely even worse and many deaths. And more injuries and death may be expected by vaccinated people as time goes on – see Dr. Yeadon’s suspicion that we may be set up for mass depopulation.
The young lady, who received the untested J&J covid “vaccine”, is now in occupational and physical therapy. She has to learn basic motor skills, including writing and using a fork, and she had to relearn how to walk. However, she will never again be the same as before the disastrous jab.
And there is as of yet no relief for her one-million-dollar medical bills.
Since the government shields vaccine makers from law suits under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 which effectively granted vaccine manufacturers freedom from civil tort liability. Instead, several years later, the US government established the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICO), which turns down most of the applicants, i.e., fewer than one in ten injured people receive compensation. And this is in the US. In other countries such compensation does not exist, unless the government assumes the risks – which is not (yet) formalized in most countries, if in any.
For example, in Europe, no EU country has declared assuming the covid-vaxx injury compensation risk. When not too long ago a journalist asked the Swiss Health Minister, what about compensation for vaccination injuries? – He was taken aback by the question and stuttered something to the effect, “We haven’t thought of it yet, but there are unlikely going to be injuries.”
In the meantime, by the end of May 2021, the EU recorded more than 12,000 deaths related to covid vaccines and more than 100,000 serious injuries – and these figures may be vastly underreported. Yet, no official compensation scheme has been established. And governments who follow the Covid Deep State orders on fulfilling quotas of vaccinated people, are quiet and ignore the topic.
No wonder, the “Covid Cabal”, those ultra-rich who claim to call the shots on covid and its eugenist agenda are getting nervous. With such messages of immediate vaxx-injuries and predictions of mass depopulation within the next 3 to 4 years, people may wake up – and start resisting. See this byDr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Mike Yeadon, this and this.
In the heat of the vaxx-haste and people becoming increasingly alert, representatives of the Deep Dark Covid State, the instigators of the crime of recent human history, have to take recourse to threats. The Editor in Chief of the reputed Natur.com online research paper claimed having recently received two anonymous calls from people who pretended to work for the US government – is it true? – saying that they are themselves not taking the vaccination, but there was a quota that on average 70% of the world population had to be vaccinated by 2022.
Something to think about – but always with the premise – they will not win. Our human spirit and will power to resist is much stronger than their Luciferian plan. We must wake up in solidarity – and we will, that’s why they are so desperate to “vaccinate” as many people as possible – 70% of the world population is their target – as fast as possible, before we wake up. Once you are vaccinated its too late to change. The effects maybe irreversible.
But we are already awake – right?
As of 2 June 2021, according to WHO, a worldwide total of 1 581 509 628 have been vaccinated. See this. Out of an estimated 7.8 billion (2020), that’s about 20%. There is a long way to go to 70%, notwithstanding the hundreds of millions, if not in the billions, who outright refuse the jab. And if 70% is really their target, then coercion might have just begun.
But not to worry.
People are just about to wake up, as they start realizing that there is a much more sinister agenda behind the forced and coerced vaccination – and especially as their injury and death rates increasingly surface and are becoming known. Our human mind and collective will-power is much stronger than their diabolical darkness – no matter the money they put behind their sinister objective.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Italian physician Dr. Andrea Stramezzi defied his government by continuing to use hydroxychloroquine on his patients even after it was banned based on the World Health Organization’s recommendation which was based on a fraudulent study published in the Lancet medical journal.
The Biden Administration has proposed what it calls a $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” legislation which it calls the “American Jobs Plan.” Far from addressing the huge deficit in America’s highway, bridges, railway, electric grid, water supply and such economically vital infrastructure that would address critical problems in the functioning of the economy, the Biden planners have cynically taken a politically popular word, “infrastructure,” and packed hundreds of billions of dollars into economically wasteful, destructive initiatives having more to do with the Green Agenda than rebuilding a healthy economy.
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Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us. Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us. Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us. And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.
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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.”
There are two certainties regarding the global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. The first is that governments and the vast majority of the mainstream media are pushing with all their might to get these experimental drugs into as many people as possible. The second is that those who are willing to face the scorn that comes with asking serious questions about vaccines are critical players in our ongoing effort to spread the truth.
In order to encourage American workers to get vaccinated, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has suspended the legal requirement for employers to report work-related injuries resulting from vaccinations aimed at combating the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.
Proponents argue self-disseminating vaccines could mean they no longer have to run complex mass vaccination programs. Critics say the vaccines pose many health risks and would also spell the end of informed consent. In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security co-sponsored the “pandemic exercise,” Event 201.
Lebanon is in crisis, both political and economic, and this promises to deteriorate further. According to the World Bank, the country’s economic collapse is likely to rank among the world’s worst financial crises since the mid-19th century. The complete meltdown of Lebanon’s economy during the past 18 months is widely blamed on corruption and mismanagement by the country’s hereditary political elite.
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I don’t often restate my twitter posts here on the blog, but today’s development by Biden is so historic a betrayal and reversal to satisfy corporate friends and Republicans it deserves a repost. It’s a ‘double reversal’ and so typical a Democrat party betrayal.
Today Biden announced he was CUTTING corporate taxes to 15%. Trump had cut corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden ran for office pledging to raise that back to 28%. He then reneged and said it would be only 25%. He then agreed with European Union finance ministers to cut taxes on US multinationals to only 15%. Now he announces he’ll CUT US corporate taxes to 15%–instead of raising to even 25%. This comes after talks with Republicans.
Not to outdo himself, Biden next CUTS his proposed infrastructure bill further as well. Starting out at $2.25T, he last week reduced that to $1.7T. Now, however, he offers to CUT that to $1T!
In the past two weeks it was apparent that Biden and Republicans were engaging in a ‘smoke and mirrors’ negotiations on the so called American Jobs Act, aka Infrastructure bill: Biden had agreed to break out negotiations on a separate track on $400B in the bill that was actually a subsidy to US auto and tech corporations, to pay for their R&D on electric car investments. It included as well $50B subsidy to US auto corps for semiconductor chip production.
Auto companies had cut production (i.e. gone on strike) claiming a chip shortage and began laying off workers. All this just as Congress was taking up proposals on chip subsidy of $50B. Once it appeared the $50B would pass, however, somehow auto companies–despite their claimed chip shortage–now miraculously boosted production once again. The alleged chip shortage was clearly a lobbying pressure ploy by the companies. They’ll now get the $50B chip subsidy, plus another $173B in the infrastructure bill to subsidize their electric car development and charging stations build out. The rest of the $400B corp subsidy in the Infrastructure bill will benefit tech corps’ R&D and manufacturers.
The $400B subsidy has nothing to do with infrastructure. But will now fast track in passage while the rest of the human investments in the infrastructure bill of $2.25T, then $1.7T, and now $1T will lag.
Biden’s cut of his infrastructure proposals to $1T brings it in line with Republican counter proposals of roughly $928B. However, McConnell & Co. $928B includes moving $350B in spending allocated in the already passed Covid Relief Act (aka American Rescue Plan) in March. It also includes $308B also already allocated to be spent in transportation funding.
So the Republican bill is just agreeing to spend what has already been spent!
It’s almost certain Biden will include the $308B already allocated for transport spending in his reduced $1T infrastructure offer. That’s West Virginia blue dog Democrat Senator, Manchin’s, proposal. So Biden’s only proposing $700B–a long way from his original $2.25T.
Biden’s dual move to CUT corp taxes even more than Trump had and to cut his proposed infrastructure spending by more than $1.5T, represent unilateral moves by him without any real concessions by the Republicans. It all looks like a well orchestrated ‘deal’ from the beginning, overlaid with a public appearance that there are ‘negotiations’ under way
One is reminded of last summer, when Shumer-Pelosi reduced their proposed spending by $1T on their ‘Heroes Act’, which McConnell and Republicans simply refused to counter. Democrats have a history of capitulation, poor negotiating strategy and ability, and a general capitulation to Republicans on fiscal policy.
Further back, one is also reminded of Obama’s policy. In 2009 his fiscal stimulus was a mere $787B (of which $300B were tax cuts for businesses). He then CUT social program spending in August 2011 by twice that amount, $1.5T.
Biden’s lastest moves are deja vu Democrat party perfidy. Biden reveals he–like Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton before him–is intent on continuing the Neoliberal fiscal policy of cut, cut, cut corporate and investor taxes + promise social program spending, cut that back, and then take even more back in subsequent austerity proposals once the immediate crisis has passed.
In the interim, Neoliberalism means the Fed giving trillions of dollars in free money to banks, investors and corporations. In one year the Fed has pumped $4T of virtually free money into these folks, matching in one year the amount Obama gave them in four years, 2009-13!
By these recent moves Biden and Democrats are on board, in other words, with the decades long policy of continual further corporate tax cutting, temporary fiscal program spending during a crisis, followed by eventual austerity take-backs.
Biden’s just announced CUTS to corporate taxes and proposals for infrastructure spending are clearly Republican-McConnell demands. Biden and Dems once again clearly capitulate. Then again, maybe the capitulation was all planned out months ago!
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Jack Rasmus.
Dr. Jack Rasmus is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Washington is about to control the data of all financial transactions in the world. With the objective of combating financial crimes, the American government is about to pass a law that greatly expands the inspection power of financial regulatory agencies, which will have the freedom to use new technologies that allow them to supervise operations outside American territory. In practice, this could create a scenario of global data enforcement, in which all individuals and organizations would be subject to US agencies.
In early 2021, the US Congress overturned the presidential veto on a last year’s bill that called for new measures to combat money laundering. This law provides new technologies and financial resources to FinCen (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network), an agency under the US Department of the Treasury, which regulates and monitors suspicious financial transactions globally. The project has corporate transparency at its core, which requires all companies to reveal their owners and beneficiaries in the new FinCEN registry, creating a comprehensive data control system.
If this project is put into practice, events such as massive data leaks, as happened last year, could become more and more common. In 2020, FinCen unveiled more than 2,000 money laundering financial transaction documents across multiple countries. In all, illegal transactions amounted to 2 trillion dollars. While the benefit of uncovering illicit schemes is positive, the invasive US policy to monitor transactions in other countries can be a major problem and a real attack on the sovereignty of countries where there are supposedly happening illegal transactions. Last year, FinCen managed to reveal illegal transactions in more than 3,000 financial organizations in the UK, as well as banks in the UAE and Germany, among others. The practice of violating jurisdictions to incriminate bank users and impose new sanctions can be truly dangerous and cause great legal uncertainty in countries monitored by Washington. Still, with these new measures, the American agency will receive much more resources and it is speculated that it will acquire practically unlimited power, “invading” any country to “regulate” financial transactions.
However, it should be noted that currently the focus of American policy to combat money laundering is the control of the cryptocurrency market. The reasons for this are obvious. Cryptocurrencies are an extremely difficult financial mechanism to control and allow virtually any transaction to be carried out by anyone anywhere in the world, from simple individual applications to massive funding of terrorist organizations. Gaining control over the electronic currency market is a challenge for any sovereign national state today, but this obviously does not justify measures that violate the jurisdiction of other states. The cryptocurrency market is currently valued at 1.5 trillion dollars, which motivates Washington to try to impose a strict framework for these assets, considering that the absence of adequate supervision over the circulation of electronic currencies allows the creation of new and more complex forms of money laundering, increasing financial crimes and threatening the financial well-being of businesses and individuals. Recently, the first US government interdepartmental meeting on cryptocurrencies took place. Officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation discussed joint strategies regarding cryptocurrencies, elevating the topic to a national security issue under strict control of the US state.
Late last year, FinCen tried to impose strict measures on cryptocurrencies, proposing to force cryptocurrency traders and digital wallets to collect personal information from users. Given the impact that such a measure could have on various financial sectors, Biden interrupted the procedures for implementing the proposal in his first days in power, but the topic remained extremely strong and forced the White House to resume the discussion. Now, the matter is being addressed from the perspective of combating financial crimes and money laundering, which will likely motivate the Biden government to authorize the measures previously proposed.
In short, the US is developing a strategy to combat financial crimes that consists of granting FinCen unlimited powers and a large number of resources for investments in new technologies, which will allow the agency to comprehensively oversee financial transactions carried out across the planet, without any respect for the sovereignty and jurisdiction of States. In addition, FinCen’s new focus will be the control of transactions in cryptocurrencies, which raises even more concerns about how the method of investigation and inspection will take place, considering that the virtual and dynamic flow of these assets will certainly demand even more invasive measures on the part of the American agency for data collection.
Although there is great concern regarding the sovereignty of countries that will be harmed by US inspections, the new measures to combat financial crimes will certainly have a profound impact on the global economy itself. In order to identify some criminal transactions, US authorities will collect data from millions of people and companies, breaking privacy principles and harming lawful businesses. As far as financial crime is concerned, the result will be the development of more complex and confidential forms of money laundering and illegal transactions, while lawful operations will be the most affected.
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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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With the participation of the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Latvia and other partner countries of NATO, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and the U.S.’ European Command will hold massive joint drills from June 28 to July 10. These exercises are so huge in fact that it involves about 4,000 military personnel, 40 combat ships, vessels and auxiliary craft, 30 aircraft and over 100 armored vehicles.
Although the joint Ukraine-NATO military training, dubbed Sea Breeze 2021, is undoubtedly aimed at improving the inter-operability between participants in a hypothetical war against Russia, the most alarming fact is that the Ukrainian military and the Far-Right militias will be supplied with advanced weapons and munitions over the course of the exercises – this was supposed to be hidden from Russia.
The Sea Breeze 2021 exercise comes as Russia condemns NATO activities which have become frequent in recent years near its western border. NATO, for its part, says it wants to contain so-called Russian aggression by sending reconnaissance ships, planes and drones to the Black Sea region.
On March 19, NATO launched the Sea Shield-21 exercises in the Black Sea. The exercises had more than 2,400 soldiers, 18 warships and 10 planes. On March 17, the Spanish frigate Méndez Núñez entered the area showing its support for Ukraine and Georgia after NATO had already strengthened its presence there for a few weeks. On February 25, the Spanish and Greek mine hunters Tajo and Evropi also entered the Black Sea. In early February, two American destroyers, the USS Donald Cook and the USS Porter, left the Black Sea after participating in military maneuvers. These are only but a few examples of NATO activity in the Black Sea aimed at pressuring and containing Russia.
After a mostly respected ceasefire during the second half of 2020, clashes have been increasing since early 2021 between NATO-backed Ukrainian military/Far-Right militias and the local defense forces of Donbass. At the same time, tensions increased with Moscow, which deployed tens of thousands of soldiers near the Ukrainian border, raising fears of a large-scale military operation. Ukraine accuses Russia of looking for a pretext to invade it, while Moscow continually assures that it is not “threatening anyone” but is prepared to respond to any provocation.
Emboldened by this Western support, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky announced last month his plans to build two entire naval bases in the south of the country “to protect the Black Sea region.”
Following the Joint Effort 2020 military exercise in the Mykolaiv region in southern Ukraine, which had the participation of 450 British paratroopers, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that he would like the British to stay there. He emphasised that Britain has always supported Ukraine’s struggle for independence and helped to resist “Russian aggression.”
So far, London has not responded to Kiev’s call, but does continue to work actively in this region against Russia, especially as British Navy vessels regularly visit the Black Sea. Military technical cooperation between the two countries is expanding though.
Earlier this year, Zelensky signed an agreement with a British credit agency. Under its terms, the British will build NATO-compliant missile boats for the Ukrainian Navy. Before Kuleba, no one had the idea of a British base in the Mykolaiv region. The deployment of foreign military infrastructure is prohibited by Article 17 of the Ukrainian Constitution, although a special agreement was reached for Russia to have a base in Sevastopol when Crimea was still under Ukrainian sovereignty. Theoretically, the Ukrainians can make an exception for the British if they wanted.
Although it is unlikely for the British to have a permanent base in Ukraine’s Black Sea territory, they will certainly not shy away from militarizing the country. It is for this reason that under the guise of needing specific equipment for the Sea Breeze 2021 exercises that NATO, particularly the U.S. and UK, will arm Ukraine.
Earlier this year, when it appeared that simultaneous operations by the Ukrainian and Azerbaijani military in their respective conflict zones would occur, Russia’s rapid mobilization to respond to any aggression against Russian passport holders in Donbass deterred such ideas.
NATO quickly realized that Ukraine had little chance of success and delayed military operations against Donbass until better preparations could be made. It now appears that NATO is working towards this goal by endlessly conducting military exercises with Ukraine. Now they are using Sea Breeze 2021 exercises to covertly deliver high-tech equipment to Ukraine. Russia’s mobilization earlier this year revealed the short-comings of Ukraine’s military and NATO is now attempting to compensate for these shortcomings, suggesting that a new conflict in Donbass has only been delayed, not deterred.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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In order to encourage American workers to get vaccinated, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has suspended the legal requirement for employers to report work-related injuries resulting from vaccinations aimed at combating the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.
OSHA enforces the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
The statute covers “most private sector employers and their workers, in addition to some public sector employers and workers in the 50 states and certain territories and jurisdictions under federal authority. Those jurisdictions include the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Wake Island, Johnston Island, and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands.”
This suspension of the law by OSHA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), doesn’t change the liability faced by employers under workers’ compensation laws or under civil personal injury laws, according to the nonprofit group Liberty Counsel.
Earlier in May, the OSHA website stated that employers could be held liable if they required employees to receive COVID-19-related injections as a condition of employment and said employees then experienced adverse reactions.
According to Liberty Counsel, a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) section of OSHA’s website stated: “If you require your employees to be vaccinated as a condition of employment (i.e., for work-related reasons), then any adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related. The adverse reaction is recordable if it is a new case under 29 CFR 1904.6 and meets one or more of the general recording criteria in 29 CFR 1904.7.”
But visitors to the same website’s FAQ section now see a different message, which reads:
“DOL and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904’s recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination through May 2022. We will reevaluate the agency’s position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.”
Liberty Counsel apparently inferred from the changed guidance that the White House influenced the decision to drop enforcement of the reporting requirement from a year.
“No doubt receiving pressure from the Biden administration, OSHA suspended the enforcement requirement to record adverse injuries or death from COVID shots until May 2022 in order to push the COVID shots. This politically motivated change by OSHA is unprecedented,” the group stated in a release.
Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver criticized the decision to change the OSHA guidance.
“Employers that require employees to take a COVID shot may be held liable for adverse injuries and death. The fact that OSHA will not enforce recording requirements does not alter the legal liability of employers who require, coerce, or incentivize employees to take COVID shots,” he said in a statement.
“OSHA’s suspension of the recording requirement so as not to discourage experimental COVID shots reveals that the Biden administration could care less about the collateral damage being caused by the COVID shots. The people can see this biased agenda. They are not stupid.”
OSHA confirmed in a statement to The Epoch Times why it suspended the reporting requirement.
“OSHA reconsidered its policy in recognition of federal agencies’ ongoing work to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations,” a Department of Labor spokesperson said.
“The agency does not want to give any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination or disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts.”
None of the available COVID-19 shots are approved or licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Liberty Counsel noted. They have instead been classified as an emergency use authorization (EUA), which means their use can’t be required.
The FDA acknowledges on its website that it “must ensure that recipients of the vaccine under an EUA are informed, to the extent practicable given the applicable circumstances … that they have the option to accept or refuse the vaccine, and of any available alternatives to the product.”
EUA authority under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, permits the FDA to take steps to protect public health against “chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats including infectious diseases, by facilitating the availability and use of medical countermeasures needed during public health emergencies.”
When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declares that an EUA is needed, as it did on March 27, 2020, regarding the ongoing pandemic, the FDA may authorize otherwise unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used “in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”
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Featured image: A hand holding an mRNA vaccine vial. (Spencer Davis / Unsplash)
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Joe Biden’s extensive interest in Ukraine during his tenure as Obama’s vice president meant that US attention towards the country would instantly be elevated once the new administration came into power. The Burisma scandal which implicated Hunter Biden and which became a problem for Joe Biden on the campaign trail, combined with Biden’s own apparent frailty and avoidance of extensive public engagements, have meant that Biden himself is in fact yet to have a telephone conversation with Zelensky.
However, whether he deliberately chose to outsource Ukraine policy to his trusted advisors or they are taking initiative in order to fill the vacuum of power left by their boss’ incapacity, US Ukraine policy has taken a number of new twists and turns in the less than two months of the Biden Administration.
The Biden Administration’s actions so far indicate a certain degree of impatience with the goings-on in Kiev which is behaving in an all too independent fashion on many issues. Kiev’s decision to nationalize Motor Sich, an aircraft engine manufacturer whose purchase was sought by Chinese investors thus robbing Ukraine of a significant influx of badly needed hard currency, took place after Washington had expressed displeasure at Chinese companies’ foothold in Ukraine which moreover brings with it access to Soviet-era technologies attractive to China’s aerospace industries.
This action was taken in spite of the considerable risk of Chinese retaliation, which indeed occurred in the form of China’s Foreign Ministry informing its Ukrainian counterpart that it would no longer respect their wishes concerning economic activities in the Crimea, something that Chinese firms have thus far shied away from. The US Embassy in Kiev’s instant endorsement of Zelensky’s shutdown of three opposition TV stations and the placement of sanctions, in violation of Ukraine’s own laws, on one of Ukraine’s opposition leaders Medvedchuk on the grounds that these were involved in spreading so-called “Russian disinformation” suggests that Washington was at the very least aware of the move and may even have prompted it. US sanctioning of Igor Kolomoysky on the basis of his corrupting Ukraine’s politics indicates that Zelensky had not gone far enough in fulfilling Washington’s wishes. In doing this Washington demonstrated it is willing to publicly humiliate Zelensky should he fail to display appropriate deference to their wishes. The question at this point becomes, in which direction will Washington push Zelensky? How far, what means will Washington use to get its way, and to what extent will Zelensky resist?
The greatest service that Ukraine could render Biden’s administration is to launch an all-out assault on Novorossia. A pitched battle between Ukrainian and DPR/LPR forces would instantly create the appropriate headlines and provide the necessary additional pretexts to condemn Russia and introduce more economic sanctions. It would then deliver the outcome that no amount of phony poisonings of Navalny could, namely the suspension or even shut-down of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has become such a thorn in the side of the Anglo-Saxon powers.
A major military campaign involving several brigades supported by airpower and the now-operational Bayraktar TB-2 drones in an effort to replicate Azerbaijan’s success against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh would place Moscow before the unenviable choice of abandoning the Donbass to its fate or committing its regular military forces to battle in Novorossia’s defense.
Whether Ukraine’s political leadership is willing to undertake such a desperate measure, in a country whose president suffers from a 20% approval rating and which has seen extensive protests against the recent sharp increase in utility costs, is another question. On the one hand, Ukrainian troop movements near the Donbass have generated considerable attention, and exchanges of fire between Ukrainian and Novorossian forces appear to have continued at an elevated pace over the past several weeks. At the same time, no extraordinary measures such as the recall of reservists or closure of borders in order to prevent military-age males from leaving the country have been observed. While Ukraine’s Rada is considering laws making draft evasion more harshly punishable, these laws will not have an immediate impact, and appear to be a reaction to the failure to build up a professional army of volunteers or even to give the draftees a positive reason to serve. It has even been pointed out that the Ukrainian troop movements have been so ostentatious and lacking in even elementary efforts to preserve concealment and surprise that they represent a “war of nerves”, an exercise in brinksmanship, and possibly an effort to simulate action for the benefit of Washington, rather than genuine preparations for an offensive. A train carrying a reinforced tank company that had been spotted slowly passing three different railroad crossings in eastern Ukraine over the course of several days looks much like an operation staged for the benefit of ubiquitous smart phone cameras.
Therefore the likelihood of the Ukrainian military opting for a large-scale offensive remains low due to the fear of heavy and pointless losses which might cause Ukraine’s military morale to collapse, with unpredictable consequences. Small-scale raids to capture select positions, shelling of Novorossia’s towns and cities, even a staged atrocity, remain more plausible and attractive from the political point of view. Ukraine’s most dangerous military capability is represented by Bayraktar drones, cruise missiles like the Neptun, and short-range ballistic missiles currently in service and being developed, because their use would not entail the danger of major Ukrainian personnel losses. Moreover, Novorossia’s forces would be hard pressed to retaliate in kind against such strikes and Russian efforts to do so would be highly provocative internationally and would carry the risk of causing Ukrainian civilian casualties. Fortunately for Novorossia, the drone park remains fairly small and the drones themselves are vulnerable to Novorossia’s air defenses, while the cruise and ballistic missiles are still years from large-scale operational deployment. The sort of missile bombardment that would represent a genuine threat to Novorossia’s unrecognized republics is still years away. By the time such a serious threat could materialize, Novorossia’s forces would likely have their own means of retaliation in the form of barrage munitions, also referred to as “suicide drones” that could be produced on the spot in Donetsk and Lugansk. However, Ukraine’s current capabilities are sufficient to launch provocations, including the bombardment of civilian targets as was the case in Mariupol in 2014.
That Ukraine’s military is unwilling to risk another misadventure against Novorossia is evident enough, as is Zelensky’s reluctance to go down in history as the president who destroyed Ukraine. These considerations are unlikely to be salient for decisionmakers in Washington, who need Ukraine to advance US interests and are rather less concerned about the US advancing Ukraine’s interests. But the lengths to which Washington is willing to go to pressure Zelensky are still unclear, though the possibility of outright blackmail raised its head when a prominent Maidan propagandist Dmitry Gordon announced that on March 15, the “Ides of March” immortalized by the assassination of Julius Caesar, Ukraine would face a trial of historic proportions once a certain bombshell news story was revealed. While March 15 came and went with no bombshells or even duds, Gordon did reveal that the event consisted of a Bellingcat “investigation” into the SBU plot to lure Wagner PMC contractors into Ukraine in order to have them put on trial. The “bombshell” aspect of the Bellingcat effort is that the plot failed because of a highly placed source in Zelensky’s own presidential cabinet, who leaked it to Russian intelligence services. Considering Bellingcat’s reputation as a firm which does info-warfare “hits” on designated targets and Gordon’s hyping of the potential impact of the film once it becomes public, one has to consider the possibility that Bellingcat is part of a campaign to blackmail or even oust Zelensky from office should he fail to satisfy Washington’s demands.
As noted previously, Zelensky has taken a dim view of Washington’s meddling in Ukraine’s affairs, though it remains to be seen whether he is able to stand up to even his own national security officials who ostensibly are subordinate to him but in reality take orders from Washington. Lacking the independent power base that allowed Poroshenko to resist Washington’s initiatives for “reforming” Ukraine’s economy, Zelensky may yet prove the ideal president from Washington’s perspective, if not Ukraine’s.
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Italian physician Dr. Andrea Stramezzi defied his government by continuing to use hydroxychloroquine on his patients even after it was banned based on the World Health Organization’s recommendation which was based on a fraudulent study published in the Lancet medical journal.
Stramezzi gives a detailed explanation of covid as a disease, it’s progression, and how to treat it while naming the culprits responsible, he says, for killing millions by ignoring and suppressing proper treatment of covid (which he says could have been brought under complete control by now), while promoting dangerous, unnecessary vaccines instead.
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The Biden Administration has proposed what it calls a $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” legislation which it calls the “American Jobs Plan.” Far from addressing the huge deficit in America’s highway, bridges, railway, electric grid, water supply and such economically vital infrastructure that would address critical problems in the functioning of the economy, the Biden planners have cynically taken a politically popular word, “infrastructure,” and packed hundreds of billions of dollars into economically wasteful, destructive initiatives having more to do with the Green Agenda than rebuilding a healthy economy. If passed, it will have negative consequences for the world’s once-leading economy with serious geopolitical implications.
In March Biden signed another huge extra-budget bill, the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” That one was allegedly to aim at dealing with the impact of COVID. The bill dealt in fact with almost everything but COVID. The act is a grab bag of partisan pet projects. Among other things the act provided $12 billion for foreign aid; $15 billion for health care for illegal immigrants; $112 billion for welfare benefits and a generous $350 billion for Democrat-run states. Less than 10% was directed at COVID relief measures. In politics how you frame or package a bill is more important than the true content. Critics claim these huge spending bills are aimed at buying a future Democratic voter base with government handouts.
‘Everything is Infrastructure’
No surprise then that now the Biden team has rushed another multi-trillion bill to Congress. The $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan is a bill where way less than half of the measures have to do with conventional infrastructure investment in roads, rails, electric grids, water supplies, ports or airports—all the areas essential to the efficient functioning of the economy. A total of $750 billion or only 32% of the total actually goes for infrastructure such as highway or bridge repairs. Yet even that total includes only $115 billion of real infrastructure for highways, bridges, and surface streets. But the $750 transportation infrastructure section proposes $174 billion for more government subsidies for Green Agenda electric vehicles in what might be called a “make Elon Musk richer” subsidy. The White House fact sheet says that this will help make the US more competitive with China’s electric cars. But the best selling E-car in China today is Musk’s Tesla. That $174 billion is far more than the total $115 billion earmarked for real highway, bridge and transportation infrastructure spending. Yet the White House promotes the bill by referring to the need to address America’s crumbling highways and bridges as though this was what the bill is focused on.
The Biden bill defines pretty much everything as “infrastructure.” His American Jobs Plan calls among other items for spending on what it terms “care infrastructure.” They define this as $25 billion to upgrade child care facilities and $400 billion expenditure on care for the elderly and disabled, spending which might be justifiable, but not as “infrastructure.”
Buried in the text of the bill’s $100 billion to go to electric grid modernization and another $27 billion for something called a “clean energy and sustainability accelerator,” is a proposal that would extend generous tax credits to promote solar and wind energy alternatives to reach “zero carbon” electricity by 2035, a ruinous idea. It has been estimated that to make US electricity 100% carbon free, it would require a staggering 25% to 50% of all land in the United States. Today’s coal, gas and nuclear grid requires 0.5 percent of land in the United States. Clearly Biden’s Green jobs plan is hiding a far more sinister agenda.
What the Administration also hides is the fact that it would be a huge boon to China which has a global near-monopoly on production of solar panels, and Denmark or Germany which make most windmill turbines today. Those do not create American jobs as Biden Climate Czar John Kerry once claimed. Ironically, the Biden Administration sees Germany as the model, the place where the Merkel green energy program has created the highest electric costs in all Europe.
Then the Biden bill proposes $10 billion to create something called a “Civilian Climate Corps,” something that deliberately sounds like Roosevelt’s Depression era Civilian Conservation Corps, but with Green New Deal politically correct “woke”update. The White House says that it will “put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience (?), and advancing environmental justice (whatever that means-w.e.) through a new Civilian Climate Corps.” No doubt in Biden-Harris America that has something to do with race and gender, but not with infrastructure.
Another $20 Billion should go “to Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice.” Apparently that means destroying existing highway infrastructure in cities where it is claimed to divide neighborhoods racially. Further an impressive $213 Billion will go to build or retrofit 2 Million Houses and Buildings. Then it adds another $40 billion for public housing, arguing this will “disproportionately benefit women, people of color, and people with disabilities.” For anyone familiar with America’s inner-city public housing ghettoes, this is hardly positive for the people who should live in the places.
In one of the most curious “infrastructure” proposals, Biden would spend $100 billion for New Public Schools and Making School Lunches “Greener.” This comes just after the COVID bill in March gave an unprecedented $128 billion for public schools. The American system gives control over education to local municipal governments and not the Federal government, leading some to suggest the agenda of the Biden crew is imposing a stealth Federal government takeover of public school education. What the Biden people mean by “green lunches” includes “reducing or eliminating the use of paper plates and other disposable materials.” Presumably that includes eliminating plastic knives and forks, leaving the children perhaps to eat with their fingers?
And, for good “infrastructure” measure, more billions will go to “Eliminate ‘Racial and Gender Inequities’ in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) research and development.” How that helps America’s crumbling basic infrastructure is not made clear.
All this $2.3 billion grab bag of mainly Green Agenda projects will be financed by the largest tax increases since the 1990’s as well as a wider Federal deficit.
The Real Infrastructure Deficit
The entire Green New Deal and UN Agenda 2030 is a fraudulent cover to deliberately deindustrialize not only the United States, but also Europe and the entire industrialized world. No economy in history outside of damages of war or depression has deliberately gone from a more energy efficient infrastructure to a lower one. Notably China, while pledging agreement, also says it will comply with Net Zero Carbon, but only ten years after the US and EU, by 2060. Right now they are adding new coal plants at a rapid pace.
The real infrastructure deficit in the US economy is in hundreds of thousands of miles of national Interstate highways. As well, a deteriorating electric grid is made more vulnerable by forced purchase of high-cost unreliable solar or wind energy.
In March the American Society of Civil Engineers released its analysis of US infrastructure, before the Biden $2.3 billion proposal. The report evaluates the state of bridges, roadways, public transit, ports, airports, inland waterways, water supplies. It does so every four years. They estimate that a total of at least $6 trillion is needed to repair or fix America’s deteriorated infrastructure. This is basic infrastructure, not Green Agenda. The report notes that infrastructure that brings clean water to major cities, as well as thousands of miles of wastewater pipelines, sewer systems built decades ago, are badly in need of renewal. The report adds that the drinking water infrastructure system, some 2.2 million miles of underground pipes, is ageing and badly in need of renewal. Local water utilities are replacing some 1% to 5% a year, far too little, due to lack of funding.
The ASCE report notes that of the 617,000 bridges across the United States, “42% are at least 50 years old, and 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition.” Alone the backlog of urgently needed bridge repair would require $125 billion. And they estimate that over 40% of the nation’s roads and highways are in poor or mediocre condition.
This is just a partial indication of the huge deficit in real economic infrastructure needed to maintain and improve the economic performance of the US economy. The fact that the Green Agenda of the pro-global warming Biden Administration is misusing popular calls for maintaining this basic necessary infrastructure in favor of inefficient and destructive Green and other schemes will mean that the economic foundation of the United States will weaken at an accelerated pace. Some influential circles such as BlackRock apparently want this. Biden’s two senior economic advisers are from BlackRock. Brian Deese, head of green or sustainable investment (ESG) at BlackRock, is director of the National Economic Council, and Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, former chief of staff to BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, is Deputy Treasury Secretary under former Fed head Janet Yellen. BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm with more than $9 trillion under management, is a lead player in the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset agenda and clearly, in the Biden “infrastructure” agenda.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image is from NEO
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index
List Price: $25.95
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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
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***
Proponents argue self-disseminating vaccines could mean they no longer have to run complex mass vaccination programs. Critics say the vaccines pose many health risks and would also spell the end of informed consent.
In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security co-sponsored the “pandemic exercise,” Event 201.
A little more than a year later, when the Event 201 scenario morphed from “hypothetical” to concrete, it became clear that sponsors of the event intended to see the majority of the world vaccinated against COVID-19.
Accomplishing this goal is a “monumental challenge,” however. In the U.S., more than one-third (38% to 45%) of adults continue to decline the unlicensed, Emergency Use Authorization injections, despite a marketing blitz that has included both carrots (ranging from the chance to win cash payments to a free order of fries) and sticks (such as nasty calls to “get personal” and “shun” the unvaccinated).
U.S. gov funded vaccine research to the tune of $9 billion+, spent $22 billion to support vaccine distribution, shelled out another $10 billion to expand access + $3 billion to spend on ad campaign to combat vaccine hesitancy. #TheDefenderhttps://t.co/TxqaIHWiS0
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) May 25, 2021
Although some of the uninjected tell pollsters they plan to eventually get the vaccine, a solid minority remains committed to never doing so. The same pattern appears to hold true globally: Roughly one-third of adults worldwide said they will not take a COVID shot.
While social and behavioral science researchers apply “soft science” techniques in an attempt to maneuver vaccine confidence into more acquiescent territory, bench scientists have a different option potentially waiting in the wings — genetically engineered vaccines that “move through populations in the same way as communicable diseases,” spreading on their own “from host to host.”
Not mainstream (yet)
In theory, self-spreading vaccines (also referred to as self-disseminating or autonomous) can be designed to be either transferable (“restricted to a single round of transmission”) or transmissible (“capable of indefinite transmission).”
Vaccine scientists concede transmissible vaccines “are still not mainstream, but the revolution in genome engineering poises them to become so.”
For Johns Hopkins, the appeal of vaccines that are intentionally engineered to be self-disseminating seems obvious. The university’s Center for Health Security made its case explicit in a 2018 report, “Technologies to Address Global Catastrophic Biological Risks.” The report stated, “These vaccines could dramatically increase vaccine coverage in human … populations without requiring each individual to be inoculated.”
Further spelling out the utilitarian implications of self-disseminating vaccines, the report’s authors stated, “only a small number of vaccinated individuals would be required to confer protection to a larger susceptible population, thus eliminating the need for mass vaccination operations.”
From a programmatic standpoint, this strategy would have the advantage of being “cheaper than vaccinating everyone by hand.” Perhaps even more significantly, however, it would override one of the “thorny ethical questions” that mass vaccination programs routinely wrestle with: informed consent.
As the university’s Center for Health Security briefly acknowledged in its report, self-disseminating vaccines would essentially make it impossible for “those to whom the vaccine subsequently spreads” to provide informed consent at all.
Blame the animals
Writing in 2020 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers observed that viral zoonoses (diseases theorized to jump from animals to humans) have become an entrenched part of the “global mindset” and a central element of the pandemic-obsessed global health zeitgeist.
Despite SARS-CoV-2’s unproven zoonotic origins (cast into doubt by figures such as Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the past year’s coronavirus hype has helped reinforce the popular perception that wildlife populations represent a menacing cauldron of latent viral threats — requiring only the right set of circumstances to spring into humanity-endangering action.
Parlaying the COVID moment into a convenient scientific opportunity, researchers suggest that the purported “failure to contain the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic” furnishes a rationale for accelerating the rollout of self-disseminating vaccines. As some journalists have phrased the question du jour, “Wouldn’t it be great if wild animals could be inoculated against the various diseases they host so that those microbes never get a chance to spread to humans?”
At least officially, the primary focus of self-spreading vaccine research has thus far been on wildlife populations. Although the practice of direct wildlife vaccination (for example, against rabies) has been around since the 1960s, it is the longstanding efforts to develop sterilizing vaccines in wildlife (euphemistically called “immunocontraception”), as well as recent advances in genetic engineering, that “have provided a foundation for transmissible-vaccine research.”
Researchers explain how the targeting of wildlife reservoirs is intended to work:
“The idea, essentially, is to vaccinate a small proportion of a [wildlife] population through direct inoculation. These so-called founders will then passively spread the vaccine to other animals they encounter either by touch, sex, nursing, or breathing the same air. Gradually, these interactions could build up population-level immunity.”
When put to the test by Spanish researchers in a limited field trial in rabbits, about 50% of the unvaccinated rabbits developed antibodies after being housed with vaccinated rabbits who had received a transmissible vaccine either via injection or orally. When the researchers assessed second-generation transmission (that is, development of antibodies in another batch of rabbits moved in with the first batch of unvaccinated rabbits), the transmission rate was much lower (two of 24 rabbits).
What could possibly go wrong?
As the Johns Hopkins report made clear in 2018, there is no technical reason why the self-spreading approach could not be applied to humans. The authors admitted to “several big challenges,” however, including the fact that autonomous vaccines (as mentioned above) would render informed consent a moot point and would make it impossible to screen individuals for contraindications such as allergies.
According to Johns Hopkins and others, another major challenge is the “not insignificant risk of the vaccine virus reverting to wild-type virulence,” creating an opportunity for the vaccines to propagate disease rather than prevent it.
In fact, the world is already familiar with this phenomenon in the form of oral polio vaccines. Though not “intentionally designed that way,” oral polio vaccines are considered “a little bit transmissible” and are acknowledged to cause polio.
Hopkins’ researchers pointedly characterized the reversion challenge as “both a medical risk and a public perception risk.” Another Catch-22 articulated in the university’s report is that while reversion risks could perhaps be lessened by engineering the vaccines to be more “weakly transmissible,” this could defeat the purpose of getting vaccines to “go” on their own.
On the other hand, the two scientists who are most strongly promoting transmissible vaccines argue that “even … where reversion is frequent, [their] performance will often substantially exceed that of conventional, directly administered vaccines.”
These same authors have also developed models suggesting that starting the transmissible ball rolling with direct vaccination of newborns could be particularly impactful.
In September 2020, two researchers writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists agreed that self-spreading vaccines may have significant downsides and could “entail serious risks,” particularly given that scientists lose control of their creation once released. They noted, “While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases … with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?” They outlined several additional questions:
Who makes the decisions about the “where and when” of the vaccines’ release?
What happens when there are “unexpected outcomes” and “unintended consequences” such as mutation, species-jumping or border-crossing? About unintended consequences, the two authors added, “There always are.”
What about bioweapons and “dual use” risks — that is, using the technology to “deliberately cause harm” rather than prevent disease? Advances in pharmacogenomics, drug development and personalized medicine, the two noted, could enable “ultra-targeted biological warfare.”
On the latter point, the Bulletin authors drew readers’ attention to immunocontraception efforts in animals as well as an infamous example of “weaponized biology” against humans in apartheid-era South Africa, called Project Coast, which sought — reportedly unsuccessfully — to develop an “infertility ‘vaccine’ to be used on black women without their knowledge.”
Other scientists have made an even more direct case against transmissible vaccines, arguing the risks of autonomously spreading vaccines do, in fact, “far outweigh potential benefits.” Risks, in their view, include “the unpredictability of mutations of the virus, the inability to safely test at a large scale and the grave potential threat to biosecurity.”
Vaccine science: many unknowns
When measles, rather than COVID, was dominating the headlines a couple years ago, the unvaccinated were heavily scapegoated for apparent outbreaks. This non-evidence-based finger-pointing (used to usher in draconian new vaccine mandates), ignored the well-documented “phenomenon of measles infection spread by MMR (live measles-mumps-rubella vaccine), which has been known about for decades” and has resulted in “detectable measles infection in the vast majority of those who receive it.”
The experimental Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines use new messenger RNA (mRNA) technology rather than the traditional live-virus technology featured in vaccines like the MMR, and thus, we are told, they cannot produce the same type of “shedding.”
However, many unvaccinated individuals are reporting unusual symptoms or illness after spending time in proximity to COVID-vaccinated individuals. Pointing to Pfizer’s protocol acknowledging the possibility of exposure via inhalation or skin contact with vaccinated individuals, concerned health professionals have raised the question of whether some novel form of shedding is occurring.
Some of the people raising these questions have pointed to the September 2020 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, subtitled, “What could possibly go wrong?” By May 2021, the Bulletin’s editors, apparently uncomfortable with the attention the September article had attracted, were trying to distance themselves by stating the Bulletin’s content was being misused to further conspiracy theories about “highly effective and safe COVID-19 vaccines.”
Whether the COVID injections are “self-spreading” in any sense of the word is a question that cannot currently be answered. However, there is at least one plausible molecular mechanism that could explain the observed vaccinated-to-unvaccinated “shedding” effects.
GreenMedInfo’s Sayer Ji explains that “horizontal information transfer within biological systems [is] mediated by extracellular vesicles, which include a virus-like phenomenon known as microvesicle shedding and/or exosome-mediated transfer of nucleic acids.” Citing a 2017 peer-reviewed study on the “biology and biogenesis of shed microvesicles,” Ji states:
“[I]t is possible that [mRNA vaccines] do, in fact, contribute to microvesicle shedding, which represents an even greater, more persistent threat than live-cell vaccine shedding when it comes to the persistent biological impact the vaccinated can have on the unvaccinated.”
What is even more certain is that scientists themselves do not have all the answers. Some may wish to believe in the possibility of simply genetically engineering a vaccine “in ways that thwart its ability to evolve into something nasty.” But others note “the inevitability of evolutionary change resulting from [transmissible vaccines’] ability to self-replicate and generate extended chains of transmission.”
Techno-thriller author Michael Crichton predicted in 2002 that with the advent of nanotechnology and other technological innovations, the pace of evolutionary change was likely to be “extremely rapid.” Crichton cautioned, “human beings have a poor record of addressing the hazards of new technologies as they arrive.”
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Russia’s sovereign wealth fund will ditch its holdings in dollars from its $185 Billion Reserve Fund, dramatically increase its holdings of Chinese yuan and invest in gold for the first ever time, Russia’s Finance Ministry said Thursday.
Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) that Russia’s $186-billion national welfare fund (NWF) would completely divest its $41 billion worth of holdings in dollars within a month.
“Today we have about 35% of NWF investments in dollars,” Siluanov said. “We’ve decided to get out of dollar assets completely, replacing investments in dollars with an increase in euros and gold.”
The share of euros in the fund will be increased to 40%, the Chinese yuan will account for 30% and another 20% will be stored in gold.
The move will affect the liquid part of the NWF, which currently stands at around $120 billion. Despite the vast sums involved, the shift is unlikely to affect markets, since the NWF represents just a slice of Russia’s overall $600 billion worth of international reserves. The transaction will not involve the actual sale of dollars, as it will be carried out through internal transfers and an accounting shift within the Central Bank, Bloomberg reported.
First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov, one of the country’s most influential economic policymakers, said Thursday the decision would not affect the ruble’s exchange rate. The Russian currency was flat against the U.S. dollar at 73.2 on Tuesday afternoon in Moscow trading.
Russia’s Central Bank has also been reducing the share of U.S. dollars within its overall reserves over recent years, a policy which is set to continue, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, as Russia seeks to reduce its dependence on the greenback under the specter of possible new sanctions.
Renaissance Capital’s Sofya Donets said the move was largely technical, and dubbed the decision “a political declaration, rather than a necessary step.”
“Although sanction risks are present, I assume that risks for the Central Bank’s reserves kept in U.S. dollars are basically non-existent,” she told The Moscow Times.
The U.S. levelling sanctions against Russia’s Central Bank would “be in conflict with the current international monetary settings — like a third world war.”
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Cuba, the first Latin America country to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines, presently is short of syringes for immunizing its population against the virus. It’s not feasible for Cuba to make its own syringes. The U.S. blockade prevents Cuba from importing them from abroad.
The lack of syringes is a global problem. The New York Times estimates an overall need of between “eight billion and 10 billion syringes for Covid-19 vaccinations alone.” Manufacturing capabilities are increasing, but that’s of no use to Cuba.
According to Global Health Partners, “Cuba needs roughly 30 million syringes for their mass Covid vaccination campaign and they’re short 20 million.” Solidarity organizations are seeking donated funds to buy syringes and ship them to Cuba. (Readers may donate by contacting Global Health Partners or visiting here.)
The shortage of syringes poses great hardship for the Cuban people. That’s not new. Calling for economic blockade in 1960, State Department official Lester Mallory was confident that making Cubans suffer would push them toward overthrowing their government.
The U.S. blockade causes shortages of basic materials. Buses lack fuel and spare parts; bus routes have been dropped. Food supplies are precarious. Cuban laboratories and production facilities have developed five kinds of COVID-19 vaccines despite short supplies of reagents and laboratory materials.
Cuba can’t buy ventilators needed for critically ill COVID-19 patients. Two Swiss manufacturers stopped selling ventilators to Cuba after a U.S. company purchased them. But Cuban technicians devised their own ventilator model which is in production now.
The impact of the blockade is by no means haphazard. Institutionalized processes aimed at asserting U.S. domination involve laws, administrative decrees, regulations, officials’ interpretations of regulations, and caution on the part of third-country traders and financiers.
Authority for the ban on U.S. sales of goods to Cuba stems from legislation accumulating over many years. Then the Cuba Democracy Act of 1992 ensnared foreign companies into the blockade system. That law authorized the Treasury Department to license the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to export goods to Cuba. It actually created an opening for almost all applications for licensure to be denied.
Since then, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), enforcer of the blockade, has found leeway to regulate the foreign corporations themselves. Foreign corporations contemplating sales to Cuba contend with U.S. sanctions if they have branches in the United States, partner with U.S. corporations, or handle U.S. dollars.
Most of the world’s syringes are manufactured by three U.S. companies and five companies elsewhere. Each of the latter has ties with a U.S. entity and is prohibited from exporting syringes to Cuba.
For example, Germany’s B. Braun Melsungen Corporation partners with Concordance Healthcare Solutions, “one of the largest independent, healthcare distributors in the U.S.” Tokyo-based Terumo Corporation has a headquarters in New Jersey. Osaka-based Nipro Corporation recently “announce[d] the creation of a Vascular Division in the U.S.” “Healthcare heavyweight Cardinal Health” is headquartered in both Ireland and the United States.
Hindustan Syringes and Medical Devices, in India, came under OFAC purview in January 2021 by virtue of associating with Envigo Global Products as its “digital marketing partner.” Envigo is headquartered in Indianapolis.
Officers of foreign companies presumably seek legal advice. One lawyers’ group maintains that, “OFAC has long held that if a non-U.S. company engages in business transactions in U.S. dollars, the foreign party is availing itself of the U.S. financial system and hence becomes subject to the U.S. sanctions laws.”
Another indicates sanctions are likely if “the foreign party has a requisite level of contacts with the U.S., such as engaging [with] U.S. products, software or technology.” The National Law Reviewrecommends that, “Foreign companies…need to be aware of board members, directors, or employees who hold U.S. citizenship or U.S. green cards.”
President Barack Obama eased many blockade regulations and re-established U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba. He never pushed to end the blockade. The Biden Administration has choosen not to prioritize improved relations with Cuba. Biden recently upheld the Trump Administration’s reassignment of Cuba to the U.S. list of terrorist-sponsoring nations.
The Helms-Burton Law of 1996 required, for the first time, that Congress determine the fate of the blockade. Except for legislation in 2000 allowing U.S. food products to be exported to Cuba, Congress has protected that policy.
In February Oregon Senator Ron Wyden introduced his “United States-Cuba Trade Act of 2021,” which would end the blockade. The bill has four co-sponsors. Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who reintroduced the “Freedom to Export to Cuba Act” on May 20th. That bill would facilitate U.S. exports to Cuba, especially agricultural products; allow some Cuban goods to enter the United States; and would retain sanctions imposed because of alleged human rights violations.
In March 2021, 80 congresspersons sent a letter to President Biden urging him to use executive action to reverse restrictions imposed by President Trump.
The U.S. economic blockade of Cuba is calculated, systematic, all-encompassing, and savage. Opponents offer varying pleas. For some, the blockade is cruel and illegal. Others call for defending Cuba, because it’s a model both of human solidarity and of how to provide health care and education. Many insist on respect for Cuba’s sovereignty.
These arguments are disconnected, one from the other. Blockade critics appear to lack a central focus on root causes. Having such would be essential, it seems, for fashioning a cohesive strategy. Were that in place, new possibilities might exist for recruitment and unity. Anti-racism struggle in the United States displays similar dynamics, and maybe offers lessons.
Reacting to various symptoms of oppression, defenders of racial equality have gone from pillar to post opposing police killings, an unjust criminal justice system, and Black people’s high poverty and death rates. Now, increasingly, analysts link manifestations of racial oppression with durable systems of repression involving capitalism. Writing about a notorious slave-trading firm, historian Joshua Rothman captures that association in the title of his new book, The Ledger and the Chain.
Similarly, if the campaign against the blockade paid more attention to the long history of U.S. ambition to dominate Cuba, it might gain strength by going to the heart of the matter. The premise would be that the European powers and the United States have long sought to draw Cuba and other dependent Latin American territories into their capitalist orbit.
The syringe story reflects U.S schemes in the 19th century to absorb Cuba, U.S. control of Cuba after Spain’s departure in 1902, and U.S. determination after 1959 to restore hegemony lost to the Revolution.
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Investing in nuclear technology is presented by philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates as a means to combatting global warming and CO2 emissions. What nonsense.
The Bill Gates project is generously funded by the US Department of Energy.
Let us be under no illusion, the so-called civilian use of nuclear technology does not contribute to “clean energy”. Moreover the development of “advanced” reactors (for civilian uses) is related (indirectly) to the Biden administration’s nuclear weapons program.
Bill Gates is investing in so-called advanced nuclear reactors. His company TerraPower LLC’s most recent project is in Wyoming:
TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant is expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels than traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change.
“This is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative,” Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon said. “Nuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy” in Wyoming, the country’s top coal-producing state.
The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system’s power output to 500 MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1 billion.
Late last year the U.S. Department of Energy awarded TerraPower $80 million in initial funding to demonstrate Natrium technology, and the department has committed additional funding in coming years subject to congressional appropriations. (Business Today)
Gates calls these “advanced nuclear reactors”. They are tagged as “Carbon free technology”.
Scientific evidence confirms that the Bill Gates advanced reactors are more dangerous than conventional nuclear reactors. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists
… newly built reactors must be demonstrably safer and more secure than current generation reactors. Unfortunately, most “advanced” nuclear reactors are anything but.
The Union of Concerned Scientists undertook a comprehensive analysis of the most prominent and well-funded non-light-water reactor (NLWR) designs. …Based on the available evidence, we found that the NLWR designs we analyzed are not likely to be significantly safer than today’s nuclear plants. In fact, certain alternative reactor designs pose even more safety, proliferation, and environmental risks than the current fleet.
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Thanks to a rapidly changing political context the new UN Human Rights Council commission announced on May 27th may be different from those in the past — this one may actually help hold Israel accountable.
The May 27th vote of the UN Human Rights Council to establish an ongoing commission of inquiry to report on rights violations in Israel, the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip is very similar to the many commissions that have come before. Established with a majority vote in favor of Resolution A/HRC/S-30/L.1, this commission reaffirms state responsibilities to protect human rights and international humanitarian law as the bases for peace.
The UN and other international coalitions have launched dozens of previous similar commissions. Many have been prompted by an uptick in spectacular violence in the Gaza Strip. This latest commission comes in response to eleven days of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, which began on May 10, killed at least 253 Palestinians, including 66 children, and wounded more than 1,900 people, with 13 people killed in Israel. Among other recent UN investigations was one in 2014 and another in 2009, known as the Goldstone Mission, which investigated the 2008–
Unique to this most recent commission, however, is the context in which it has emerged, marked by a resurgence of international legal and activist efforts to challenge Israel’s systematic abuse and dispossession of Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel, and the diaspora—including efforts among Jews. Although a UN commission on its own can do little to change Israel’s actions, within today’s shifting social and political dynamics, it can play a role in coalescing attention and mobilizing meaningful action to stop and reverse Israel’s settler-colonial project.
In specifying that this investigation should collect evidence of violations “to maximize the possibility of its admissibility in legal proceedings,” the text of this latest UN resolution points to one important new contextual factor. Namely, that the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided on February 5, 2021 that it has jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territory, allowing the Prosecutor to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity that have taken place in the occupied Palestinian territory.
In opening last week’s special session in Geneva, Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, referred to Israel’s attacks on Gaza this month as possibly constituting war crimes. Attention to possible war crimes also was central in the Goldstone Mission findings and the report of that commission focused on ending impunity. Although, as I note in my book, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine, this marked a turning point in the international legal language used to analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it did not lead to actions to end Israel’s impunity. Residents of the Gaza Strip continue to suffer life under restrictions and siege imposed since the 1990s and intensified in 2007, maintaining this sliver of land as an open air prison for the 1.8 million Palestinians who live there. If this latest commissions of inquiry does “identify, where possible, those responsible, with a view to ensuring that perpetrators of violations are held accountable,” the ICC may be able to make use of that evidence.
The groundswell of analysis identifying Israel as an apartheid state is a second crucial distinguishing element of the world into which this commission is being born. Issued in April 2021, the report by the international human rights NGO, Human Rights Watch (HRW), condemned Israel for committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution. It is just the latest in a string of similar reports. In 2017, ESCWA, a UN body, issued a report on Israel’s apartheid practices against Palestinians. Many Palestinian organizations have been part of this chorus, too. In 2019, eight Palestinian, regional, and international organizations, including Al-Haq, BADIL, and Addameer submitted a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, detailing Israel’s practices that constitute the crime of apartheid under international law. Like that of Human Rights Watch, the report in January 2021 by Israeli NGO B’Tselem suggests that international recognition of Israel as an apartheid state is going mainstream. Given that the new permanent Commission of Inquiry aims to investigate “all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict” including “discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity,” we may be seeing more authoritative evidence of Israel’s crimes of apartheid leading to pressure on states to stop it.
Like what happened in response to South Africa’s apartheid regime, an international boycott movement has galvanized academics, activists, and artists in speaking out for freedom, justice and equality for Palestinians. BDS, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, is a third distinctive feature of today’s context. BDS promotes public education about Palestinians’ conditions while pressuring Israeli institutions to end their complicity with state oppression of Palestinians, and demanding that Israeli government comply with international law.
What is not new is Israel’s ongoing refusal to engage with international legal processes such as the commission of inquiry and the ICC— and US efforts to shield Israel from scrutiny. The US often justifies its rejection of international legal investigation of Israel with the claim that it would threaten progress in resolving the conflict. There has been no progress on this front for a very long time. If people of conscience take up the opportunity afforded by the latest UN effort to grow public awareness of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, this might be that rarest of commissions that helps dislodge Israel-Palestine from the quagmire in which it has been stuck for so long.
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Featured image: THE HUMAN RIGHTS AND ALLIANCE OF CIVILIZATIONS ROOM IN THE UNITED NATIONS OFFICE IN GENEVA, SWITZERLAND WHERE THE HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL FREQUENTLY MEETS. (PHOTO: UN PHOTO/JEAN-MARC FERRÉ)
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Today’s TASS cites Major General Igor Konashenkov, spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, warning that the U.S. and NATO will exploit this year’s Sea Breeze military exercise in Ukraine to smuggle advanced weaponry and munitions to the nation’s armed forces and fascistic paramilitaries and mercenaries of the infamous Azov Battalion and similar units. The arms will be used for the ongoing war in the Donbass region.
“Advanced armaments, munitions and materiel are planned to be delivered precisely to that region for Ukrainian troops under the guise of holding the drills.
“Eventually, as was the case in previous years, all this weaponry will be delivered to the Ukrainian troops and nationalist formations stationed close to the areas in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions uncontrolled by Kiev.”
This year’s version of the annual U.S.-NATO Sea Breeze exercise in the Black Sea region will run from June 28 to July 10 and include 4,000 troops, forty combat ships and other vessels, thirty military aircraft and over 100 armored vehicles from 29 NATO member and partner states.
Before the U.S.-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s legally-elected, internationally-recognized government in 2014 in a violent uprising supported by NATO and the European Union, Sea Breeze war games were largely conducted from Crimea.
“The Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation will closely follow the preparations for and the course of the Ukrainian-American exercise Sea Breeze with the involvement of NATO countries and will, if necessary, react appropriately to the developing situation in the interests of ensuring Russia’s military security.”
It’s evident the Russia defense establishment and military see this year’s U.S.-led exercise posing a more direct threat than its predecessors have; and not only to the Donetsk and Lugansk republics but perhaps to Crimea and Belarus as well.
The Russian Defense Ministry described the land, sea and air components of the drills as including, in the first two cases, the training of partners according to NATO combat standards, the deployment of troops and equipment to “combat employment areas” and “organizing and conducting an offensive in the maritime area in interaction with a seaborne assault force.”
The maritime drills will include “forming and ensuring the cohesion of a multinational naval task force, organizing the navy’s interaction with the ground forces and aircraft, planning and conducting joint operations, employing an amphibious assault force in joint operations with land troops.”
The TASS account described the air component of the upcoming exercise as using combat aircraft in support of naval and ground forces, conducting reconnaissance operations and “delivering strikes against sea and ground targets….”
The warfighting scenario entails U.S., NATO and partner states – notably Ukraine – “stabilizing a crisis” incited by the actions of “some armed formations outlawed in Ukraine and enjoying the all-out support of a neighboring state,” the Defense Ministry spokesman added.
That is a dress rehearsal for an invasion of the Donbass region, pure and simple; though as noted above regarding Belarus and Abkhazia an assault on the Donbass may not be all that’s planned.
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The Biden administration issued a proposed rule today allowing oil companies operating in the Beaufort Sea and Western Arctic to harass polar bears and Pacific walruses when drilling or searching for oil for the next five years.
“It’s maddening to see the Biden administration allowing oil companies to continue their noisy, harmful onslaught on polar bears. Oil in this sensitive habitat should stay in the ground,” said Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “President Biden promised bold action to address the climate crisis, yet his administration is proposing to allow business-as-usual oil drilling in the Arctic. Polar bears and walruses could pay a terrible price.”
The Southern Beaufort Sea population is the most imperiled polar bear population in the world. With only about 900 bears remaining, scientists have determined that the survival of every individual bear is vital to the survival and recovery of the population.
The heavy equipment used in seismic exploration and drilling activities can crush polar bears in their dens or scare polar bears out of their dens too early, leaving cubs to die of exposure or abandonment by their mothers. The noise generated by routine operations can disturb essential polar bear behavior and increase their energy output.
Walruses are also incredibly sensitive to human disturbance. Without summer sea ice for resting, walrus mothers and calves have been forced to come ashore, where they are vulnerable to being trampled to death in stampedes when startled by noise.
In addition to seismic exploration, the rule covers construction and operation of roads, pipelines, runways, and other support facilities. It also covers well drilling, drill rig transport, truck and helicopter traffic, and other activities.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act generally prohibits killing, harming or harassing a marine mammal. The statute allows the federal government to authorize certain industrial activities to harm and harass marine mammals, provided such activities will take only a “small number” of animals and have no more than a “negligible impact” on the population.
The proposed rule covers existing and planned activities across a wide swath of Alaska’s Arctic, including 7.9 million acres in the Beaufort Sea, and onshore activities from Point Barrow to the western boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It includes the Willow development project that the Center and allies have challenged in court, and which the Biden administration this week submitted a brief defending.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be accepting public comment on the proposed rule for 30 days.
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Featured image: Arctic polar bear with cubs. (Credit: USFWS)
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On Tuesday, the new head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency suggested more Israeli covert attacks and assassinations inside Iran should be expected even as the US and other world powers are negotiating a revival of the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.
“The Iranian program will continue feeling Mossad’s might. We are well acquainted with the nuclear program and its various components, we know personally the factors that operate in it and also the forces that drive them,” David Barnea said at his swearing-in ceremony, as quoted by Israel’s Ynet.
Barnea said the JCPOA negotiations show that Israel might have to act alone against Iran.
“The agreement with world powers that is taking shape only reinforces the sense of isolation in which we find ourselves on this issue,” he said. “I say it clearly — no, we do not intend to act according to the majority opinion since this majority will not bear the consequences for the erroneous assessment of this threat.”
Israel has a long history of covert attacks inside Iran. Most recently, Israel sabotaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, causing an explosion. The attack took place in April when the US and Iran began indirect negotiations in Vienna to restore the JCPOA. Last November, Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was gunned down in an apparent Israeli plot as tensions between the US and Iran were simmering in the final weeks of the Trump administration.
Yossi Cohen, Israel’s outgoing Mossad chief, also spoke on Tuesday and boasted about Israeli actions against Iran that took place under his watch.
“We penetrated into the heart of hearts of the enemy Iran,” he said. “We acted to constantly gather intelligence and uncover its secrets, and undermined its self-confidence and haughtiness.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuchimed in at the ceremony and said he was willing to attack Iran’s nuclear program even if it risked “friction” with the US.
“If we have to choose, I hope it doesn’t happen, between friction with our great friend the United States and eliminating the existential threat — eliminating the existential threat,” he said.
The Israeli officials all claim Iran is moving quickly to develop a nuclear bomb. But if that were truly their concern, Israel would favor a revival of the JCPOA since it strictly limits Tehran’s nuclear program.
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The older generation takes a strange pleasure in reiterating comments about the absence of responsibility, the lack of focus and the indulgence of young people, using these arguments as a means of excusing the bleak future that their children and grandchildren face. Those arguments are rarely original, but rather they are force-fed to baby boomers by the media as a means of relieving them of all responsibility and of distracting them from the true causes of the tragic shifts that they observe obliquely.
It is assumed that for reasons unknown, somehow, young people are less capable, less attentive, less motivated and less concerned with planning for their careers and their futures. This argument makes the previous generation feel somehow more worthy and superior and that is precisely the hook that is lodged in the sweet treat.
Nowhere in the discussion about the challenges youth face is any mention made of how corporations have targeted them and exploited them, from cradle on, or of how the fundamental structure of government has shifted since the end of the Cold War so that it no longer plays the role of defending or of protecting the citizen, the child, against the vultures and jackals of the corporate world, but rather serves as a marionette with a smiling face through which arguments to justify the dictatorship of finance are promulgated and made to seem scientific, authoritative, and even ethical to the public.
To be sure, the breakdown of a sense of community, of the concepts of personal responsibility and of ethical commitment among youth is a sad reality. It is accompanied by isolation, loneliness, and uncertainty about the future that undermines all aspects of life.
But the problems that our children face are not brought on by themselves, but rather the result of a brutal assault on their childhood by corporations that seek to dominate their values and their thinking from the cradle on so that they are unable to think for themselves, unable to create their own communities, or their own lives, and dependent on content, and on relations, supplied by those corporations, and the investment banks that lurk behind them.
When our children should be playing outside, catching frogs in the woods, building forts out of tree branches, or helping their parents to plant lettuce and carrots—and thereby understand the relationship between humans, water, soil and nature, they are encouraged, compelled, to get all information from the television or internet which is dominated by these multinational corporations, organizations that see our children not as future citizens, or as the building blocks for a constitutional democracy, but as consumers to be mined and manipulated so as to increase profits.
When our children should gain wisdom and insight from their own experiences, from their interactions with friends and teachers, and should learn first from their parents and grandparents, uncles, aunts and neighbors, they are forced to watch television, to surf the internet and to play various video games from an increasingly young age. Their parents are told that exposure to technology will make their children competitive and modern—it is a sickening lie.
The purpose of getting children connected with images presented by television, movies and the internet from an early age is addict them to a consumption economy, to reduce their ability to think for themselves, and to encourage superficial thinking dominated by excitement and quick action that destroys their capacity to understand complex issues, and their ability to concentrate.
The bombarding of our children with commercial images that suggest how they should behave, and what is of value, is a direct assault on the Constitution because it intentionally undermines the capacity of the individual to be a citizen. That is to say that the advertising and public relations employed in the commercial media and entertainment is illegal.
Also, the assault on our children through the commercial media cannot be detached from pornography. Even in the most innocent cartoons, corporations insidiously insert messages suggesting that we should evaluate others in terms of how they please us, that humans are commodities and that we must market ourselves, and our sexuality, in order to be successful.
This subtle attack on the core values in children feeds into real pornography, starting with boys. Corporations plant sick images of violence and humiliation of women in the minds of young boys in an attempt to addict them to a false, violent and perverse sexuality which can only be purchased, and that is incompatible with love for women.
If boys have their sexuality torn away from love, and attached to competition and narcissism, girls will be the clear victims. Whether they end up with boys who can no longer express affection, or are compelled to behave like the women in pornographic movies so that they can get attention, girls are sacrificed to profit in this debased culture.
This whole process of degrading and destroying our children must stop now.
We must understand that the commercial advertising with which our children are bombarded is not primarily aimed at selling products. The primary agenda of what had degenerated into brainwashing and propaganda is to inculcate in them a passive, dependent, reactive and flippant attitude that will render them incapable of thinking for themselves, of searching for solutions on their own. They are indoctrinated to turn to the media, controlled by corporations, for solutions to every aspect of their personal lives.
It is a scientific fact that the use of social media and internet surfing remaps the connections between brain cells, training the individual to favor short-term stimulation, constant changes, and exciting and stimulating scenes.
As a result of such behavior modification, the capacity of the individual to read and comprehend long and complex texts, to understand multidimensional problems in the economy and society, and to engage others in meaningful dialog is destroyed. A few years soaking in the narcissistic consumer culture forced on youth produces people incapable of anything other than working to feed themselves and releasing accumulated stress by indulging in self-centered video games, pornography, food consumption, or action films.
For those marinated in this consumption culture, what does not appear on TV, or on the internet, seems unreal, insubstantial. By contrast, the falsehoods propagated through commercial media are assumed to be real, more substantial than the reality that surrounds them.
When this political crisis, this social disaster, is brought up in polite conversation, the knee-jerk response is that we must make our messages brief and dumb them down so that youth will listen. No one in the room suggests that we need to create a culture so as to protect our youth from this war, to allow them to focus, to concentrate, to read and digest books, to enjoy art and music, and to create it themselves.
Children assaulted by the commercial media from infancy have no chance to preserve their own liberty. They are not permitted to develop their own metaphysical compass. No moral or scientific forces exist for them other than what can be seen, and especially can be seen in the commercial media.
Many are left incapable of evaluating the impact of forces that are not explicitly visible. They do not even realize that the smartphone that they hold in their hand does not belong to them at all, but is constantly updated and changed so as to manipulate them by multinational corporations pursuing agendas about which they understand little.
The commercial media, advertisers and entertainment moguls have intentionally created a culture of forgetfulness. We are trained by the media to forget what happened yesterday, to lack any historical perspective on politics, culture, society and technology. But if we cannot remember our past, other than the slick images fed to us by the media, then we cannot establish our own interpretations, and democracy becomes impossible.
So also, we forget what happens to the plastic that we dispose of. We forget what the implications for the world of foreign wars are. We forget what will happen to future generations if we continue to destroy the ecosystem in the pursuit of a narcissistic consumption culture.
The commercial media also wants to crush our imaginations, our creativity.
Of course commercials suggest that somehow using your Iphone will make you more creative, more innovative. A closer look reveals that what is called “innovative” and “imaginative” is the manipulation of images and symbols supplied by the multinational corporation. There is no freedom and no autonomy to be found anywhere in that world.
Imagination means also the ability to imagine things that are not visible. That is a skill that the corporations wish to crush. They do not want us to be able to imagine the hidden powers that shape our world for profit. They do not want children to have the imagination to see how the cynical players on Wall Street and Madison Avenue set out to destroy their minds, how the brutal road ahead is decided for them by invisible powers.
The Constitution defends freedom of speech for the citizen. It does not grant corporations the right to brainwash and destroy the minds of citizens from childhood, rendering them incapable of making their own decisions.
As long as this criminal operation is tolerated, we will have no democracy and no government. This criminal operation must end now and the kings of advertising and public relations must face jail terms for their criminal actions against our youth, their use of technology and marketing to enable the “rape of the mind.”
Corporations, banks and the advertising and public relations firms that they fund are destroying our minds, and our ability to perceive reality. Because they attack stealthily the means by which we perceive, we are unaware of the tremendous damage that they do. Just as the brain does not feel pain, so also our schemata for perception of the world are blind to how they are undermined by false narratives and stimulation aimed at behavior modification.
Nothing less than a revolution can end this war on our children, this extermination campaign against our future.
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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
I Shall Fear No Evil
Why we need a truly independent candidate for president
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Lebanon is in crisis, both political and economic, and this promises to deteriorate further.
According to the World Bank, the country’s economic collapse is likely to rank among the world’s worst financial crises since the mid-19th century.
The complete meltdown of Lebanon’s economy during the past 18 months is widely blamed on corruption and mismanagement by the country’s hereditary political elite.
Israel as a “good neighbor” uses every chance it is given to attempt and deepen the crisis.
On June 1st, reports began flooding the media of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah’s death.
The group is a staple of stability with its many helpful, albeit populist efforts. Of course, it is also one of Israel’s mortal enemies.
Nasrallah allegedly succumbed to COVID-19 complications, or was in a coma. These reports flooded the MSM, and especially Israeli outlets for longer than a day when they were debunked.
Lebanese Al Joumhouria newspaper reported that rumors of Nasrallah’s demise were hugely exaggerated. He simply has pneumonia and seasonal allergies.
Prior to the reports of his death, Hezbollah deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem said the secretary-general needed several days of rest and supervision, but instead wished to appear for his May 25th address, because missing it would cause people to worry.
The situation in Lebanon would have likely turned much worse if Hezbollah’s leader had passed. It would make it easier for Tel Aviv and its allies to pressure the country into submission.
During the 11-day hostilities in the Gaza Strip when Israel Defense Forces carried out an asymmetrical bombardment of Palestinian armed groups and civilians alike, several rockets were launched from Lebanese territory.
As such, the US deemed Hezbollah a threat to stability in Lebanon, mostly because it doesn’t support Tel Aviv’s policy.
The US has provided support for more than 15 years to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), but the increasing influence of the terrorist-designated Hezbollah in Lebanese politics has strained the partnership.
The financial and political crisis in Lebanon has seen the value of the local currency plunge, wiping out people’s savings and salaries.
The crash has placed increasing pressure on members of the LAF. As such the chance to exert even more pressure and attempt to undermine Hezbollah’s influence shouldn’t be missed.
Starting from May 31st, political calls and meetings intensified in Lebanon in what was described as possibly “the last attempt” to salvage the process of forming a new government. There appears to be little progress, as a massive blackout looms in the country.
And help is only coming with extremely strict and heavy demands tied to it.
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Life is full of slips.
Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us. Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us. Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us. And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.
Slips are double-edged.
It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control. Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.” Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.
Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.
In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide. They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations. This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior. Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories. It is not just words that have etymologies.
When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today. Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown. It slips in when people are asleep.
John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:
Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.
And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control. For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life. This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines. A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign. In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:
… the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual. The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything. Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.
Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively. Ellul again:
It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary). Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.
The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds. This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.
In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses. This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness. To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.
Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.” First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem. A slippery slope indeed.
But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare. It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.
In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum. I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously. The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality. Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it. And it will. But don’t say this out loud.
So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:
So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.
A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility. Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion. Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.
The other day I was going grocery shopping. My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.” Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred. “I prefer whipping,” she said.
I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”
We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she. She slipped, and I found humor in that. Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.
But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things. Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them. Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.
Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down. In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies. We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.
It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many. A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”
But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate. To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society. Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.
So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?
This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.
I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.
We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells. Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television. Close the computer. Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others. Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away. Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe. Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly. Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite. Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow. It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing. In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:
It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.
I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us. But without it we are lost. Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought. Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.” Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset. If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation. Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.
There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks. It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness. Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”
It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Reporters joke the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions and say “No comment’ before heading to Happy Hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information about itself.
Sold under the pretence of a quest for optimising well-being and ‘happiness’, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. What really matters is the strive to maintain viable profit margins. The prevailing economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption and needs a certain level of annual GDP growth for large firms to make sufficient profit.
It’s very hard to look back on the events of the last 15 months and not suspect that there is more to this Covid story than meets the eye; that while the infection does, in fact, kill mostly older people with multiple underlying conditions, that, perhaps, the virus has been used to promote a political agenda of which we know very little.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been a staunch defender of the natural-origin theory for SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in May 2020, CNN used Fauci’s statements on the issue as proof that then-President Donald Trump was spouting a ridiculous conspiracy theory.
From the “absolute risk reduction” you can calculate the “Number Needed to Vaccinate” which signifies approximately how many people must be injected to hypothetically benefit just one person. It is a metric every person needs to understand before taking the Covid injection.
A Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor blasted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for ignoring crucial data on natural immunity from COVID-19, saying that “probably half the country has natural immunity from prior infection. This is the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history.”
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin.
Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.
U.S. Army Europe and Africa announced today that during the Swift Response 21 airborne military exercise last month along what is now called NATO’s Eastern Flank – from the Baltic to the Black Sea – troops with the 173rd Airborne Brigade ran a training exercise to practice seizing a decommissioned air base in Bulgaria that went terribly awry.
Africa Day for this year was called under the theme “Arts, Culture and Heritage: Levers for Building the Africa We Want.” The resurrection and enhancement of the African Personality is essential in the efforts to realize a better standard of living based upon the interests of the majority of workers, farmers, women and youth within the AU region.
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Reporters joke the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions and say “No comment’ before heading to Happy Hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information about itself. They meanwhile choose to profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.
Leon Panetta, the Director CIA from 2009 to 2011 explained bluntly his CIA did influence foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method, Panetta said, was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.”
The CIA has been running such information ops to influence foreign elections since the end of WWII. Richard Bissell, who ran the agency’s operations during the Cold War, wrote of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.” A report on the CIA in Chile boasts the Agency portrayed its favored candidate in one election as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.” At one point in the 1980s foreign media insertions ran 80 a day.
The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, simply paying a reporter to run a story, or, as was done in Iraq, simply operating the media outlet yourself (known as the Orwellian Indigenous Media Project.) The problem is such direct action is easily exposed, destroying credibility.
A more effective strategy is to become a source for legitimate media such that your (dis)information inherits their credibility. The most effective is an operation so complex one CIA plant is the initial information source while a second CIA plant acts seemingly independently as a confirming source. At that point you can push information to the mainstream media, who can then “independently” confirm it, sometimes unknowingly, through your secondary agents. You can basically write tomorrow’s headlines.
Other techniques include exclusive true information mixed with disinformation to establish credibility, using official sources like Embassy spokesmen to appear to inadvertently confirm sub details, and covert funding of research and side gigs to promote academics and experts who discredit counter-narratives. The academics may never know where their money comes from, adding to their credibility.
From the end of WWII to the Church Committee in 1976, this was all just a conspiracy theory. Of course the US would not use the CIA to influence elections, especially in fellow democracies. Except it did. By its nature reporting on intelligence always requires one to work with limited information. Always give time a chance to explain.
Through Operation Mockingbird the CIA ran over 400 American journalists as direct assets. Almost none have ever discussed their work publically. CIA documents show journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.
The New York Times alone willingly provided cover for about ten CIA officers over decades and kept quiet about it.
Such long term relationships are a powerful tool, so feeding a true big story to a young reporter to get him promoted is part of the game. Don’t forget the anonymous source who drove the Watergate story was an FBI official who through his actions made the careers of cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Bernstein went on to champion the Russiagate story. Woodward became a Washington hagiographer. Ken Dilanian, formerly with the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and now working for NBC, maintains a “collaborativerelationship” with the CIA.
That’s the tradecraft and the history. The problem for America is once again the tools of war abroad have come home. The intelligence community is currently operating against the American people using established media.
Some of it can’t be more obvious. The CIA always planted stories in foreign media for American outlets to pick up. The Agency works directly with Hollywood to control movies about itself. Turn on any of the advocacy media outlets and you see panels of former CIA officials. Journalist Matt Taibbi even created a list (and since ex-‘s need agency clearance to speak, all are of the officially approved class.) None is more egregious than John Brennan, former Director CIA, who for years touted Russiagate when he knew from information gathered while he was still in office it was all a lie. The uber-lie that Trump was dirty with Russia was leaked to the press most likely by Brennan in January 2017 as the kick off event to the info op still running today.
Brennan’s role is more than speculation. John Durham, the US attorney leading the ongoing “how it happened” Russiagate investigation into the intelligence community, has requested Brennan’s emails and call logs from CIA. Durham is also examining whether Brennan changed his story between his public comments (not under oath, say anything) and his May 2017 testimony to Congress (under oath, watch out for perjury) about the dossier. Reporter Aaron Mate is less delicate, laying out the evidence Brennan was “a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception.” Even blunter is Senator Rand Paul, who directly accuses Brennan of trying “to bring down a sitting president.”
Let’s see how that worked to understand how info ops intertwine with covert ops. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report shows the FBI unleashed a full-spectrum spying campaign based on the root of the information op, the Dossier. Horowitz’s report shows it was a team effort among the 5 Eyes — Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his nation’s intel services, arranged a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos to set in motion FBI FISA surveillance.
Trump officials were also monitored by British GCHQ. The op used CIA assets, the shadowy academics Mark Halper and Joseph Mifsud, as dangles. We see a honey trap run in classic style, with a female FBI undercover agent inserted into social situations with a Trump staffer. Dossier author and ex-British intel officer Christopher Steele created a textbook officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source.
It was all based on nothing but disinformation and the American press swallowed every bit of it, turning the op into a three year tantrum falsely convincing a vast number of citizens their nation was run by a Russian asset. Robert Mueller, whose investigation was supposed to propel all this nothing into impeachment hearings, ended up exercising one of the last bits of political courage Americans will ever see in walking right to the edge of essentially a coup and refusing to step off into the abyss.
The CIA is a learning institution, and recovered well from Russiagate. Details can be investigated. That’s where the old story fell apart. The dossier wasn’t true. But the a-ha discovery was since you’ll never formally prosecute anyone, why bother with evidence. Just throw out accusations and let the media fill it all in for you. The new paradigm included let the nature of the source — the brave lads of the intelligence agencies — legitimize the accusations this time, not facts. Go overt and use the new, unexpected prestige of the CIA as progressive heros to substantiate things.
So in December 2017 CNNreportedDonald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive. Within an hour, NBC’s Ken Dilanian and CBS both claimed independent confirmation. It was a complete lie, based on fabricated documents. How do you confirm a lie? Ask another liar.
In February 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) briefed the House Intelligence Committee the Russians were election meddling again to favor Trump. A few weeks earlier, the ODNI briefedBernie Sanders the Russians were also meddling in the Democratic primaries in his favor. Both briefings were leaked, the former to the New York Times to smear Trump for replacing his DNI, the latter to the Washington Postahead of the Nevada caucuses to damage Sanders.
In June 2020 The New York TimesstatedCIA officials concluded the Russians “secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The story ran near another claiming Trump had spoken disrespectfully about fallen soldiers. Neither story was true. But they broke around the same time Trump announced his plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, aimed at discouraging pro-military voters.
Earlier this month The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, claimed the FBI gave a defensive briefing to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he traveled to Ukraine. Giuliani supposedly ignored the warning. The story was “independently confirmed” by both NBC and The New York Times. It was totally false.
The American system always envisioned an adversarial role for the media. One of the earliest challenges to freedom of the press was the Colonial-era Peter Zenger case, which established the right of the press to criticize politicians free from libel charges. At times when things really mattered and even as other journalists hid under their beds, men like Edward R. Murrow worked their craft to preserve democracy. Same for Walter Cronkite finally reaching his opposition to the Vietnam War, and the New York Times reporters weighing imprisonment to publish the Pentagon Papers.
In each of those instances the handful of reporters who risked everything to tell the truth were held up as heroes. Seeing the Times fighting for its life, the Washington Post co-published the Pentagon Papers to force the government to make its case not just against a rival newspaper, but the 1A itself.
Not today. Journalism is today devoted to eliminating practitioners unwilling to play the game. Few have been targeted more than Glenn Greenwald (with Matt Taibbi as runner up.) Greenwald exploded into a journalistic superhero for his reporting on Edward Snowden’s NSA archive, founding The Intercept to serve as a platform for that work (Greenwald’s downfall parallels Julian Assange, who went from liberal hero for exposing the foundational lies of the Iraq War to zero when his Wikileaks was demonized for supposedly helping Donald Trump.)
Greenwald’s criticism of the media for accepting Deep State lies as truth, particularly concerning Russiagate, turned him into a villain for progressives. MSNBC banned him, and other media outlets ran stories critical of him. Then something very, very odd happened to make it appear The Interceptouted one of its own whistleblower sources. Evidence suggests the source was a patsy, set up by the intel community, and exposed via Matt Cole, one of The Intercept journalists on this story.
Cole was also involved in the outing of source CIA officer John Kiriakou in connection with torture claims. Either way new whistleblowers will think twice before turning to The Intercept. Greenwald recently quit the site after it refused to publish his article on Hunter Biden’s ties to China unless he deleted portions critical of Joe Biden.
Greenwald seems to have figured out the intel community’s game, writing
“the most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate… Every journalist, even the most honest and careful, will get things wrong sometimes, and trustworthy journalists issue prompt corrections when they do. That behavior should be trust-building. But when media outlets continue to use the same reckless and deceitful tactics — such as claiming to have ‘independently confirmed‘ one another’s false stories when they have merely served as stenographers for the same anonymous security state agents while ‘confirming’ nothing — that strongly suggests a complete indifference to the truth and, even more so, a willingness to serve as disinformation agents.”
Democracy has no meaning if people simply vote uninformed, as they are propagandized. It will be sport for future historians to mark the thing that most pushed America into decline. Seeing decades of success abroad in using info ops, the CIA and others turned those weapons inward. So seeing her Deep State meddle in presidential politics, simultaneously destroying (albeit mostly with their cooperation) the adversarial media, while crushing faith in both our leaders and in the process of electing them, will certainly be a top qualifier.
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Important article first published in June 2020
Politicians from the German Green Party are playing a leading role in a new transatlantic anti-China alliance of legislators. Anti-Chinese hardliners, Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, are considered the driving forces in the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), [June 2020] currently involving members of twelve parliaments.
Officially, the organization seeks to forge a common western policy toward China. A concrete aim appears to be the implementation also in Europe of the US sanctions policy against Beijing. IPAC is mobilizing legislators, there where national governments are still rejecting the sanctions. In the wings of the Munich Security Conference, last February, Reinhard Bütikofer, a Green Party member of the EU parliament had already proposed the creation of such a legislator pressure group. He is now acting as IPAC co-chairman. The alliance, which is calling for the development of “security strategies” against China, has an Ex-CIA specialist on its advisory board.
IPAC
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) was launched [in June 2020] by legislators of eight parliaments. In the meantime, it includes politicians of twelve parliaments – eleven national [1] and the EU parliament. States, which recently have shown a particularly aggressive attitude toward China, are also involved: the USA, Australia and Japan. US Senators Marco Rubio (Republican) and Bob Menendez (Democrat), who, since some time, have distinguished themselves as anti-China hardliners, are playing a leading role in IPAC. Two politicians from the German Green Party, Margarete Bause, as member of the German Bundestag and Reinhard Bütikofer, as member of the EU parliament are among the Alliance’s Co-Chairs. Likewise, Michael Brand, Spokesperson for Human Rights in the CDU/CSU Bundestag group is also involved.
Typical Western Double Standards (I)
IPAC explicitly aims at promoting a “coherent response” to China’s rise.[2] The new alliance – comprising transatlantic states and close allies, Japan and Australia – is demanding that China abide by standards that western powers have repeatedly violated: The People’s Republic of China must be held to the “standards of the international legal order.”
There is no mention of the wars against Yugoslavia (1999), Iraq (2003) or Libya (2011), which western powers have waged in various constellations in violation of international law. IPAC founding member Bütikofer, for example, supported the war against Yugoslavia in 1999 as the political administrator of the then coalition governing Green Party. IPAC also declared that China be held to the standards of the rules-based order of the WTO. The Trump administration’s practices violating those rules are not mentioned. Beijing should also not be permitted to compromise the sovereignty of recipient countries for example through credits. IPAC does not mention the practice of the western dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposing draconian austerity programs against the will of credit recipients.
“At Last a Sanctions Mechanism”
It is particularly becoming apparent that the IPAC seeks to have Europe enforce the US sanctions policy. US Senators Rubio and Menendez are the main forces behind the introduction of the relevant US laws, which, using the excuse of seeking to take action against Beijing’s measures in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang, open the door to punitive actions against the People’s Republic of China. US President Donald Trump should soon be signing the Xinjiang bill into law [June 2020]. The bill pertaining to Hong Kong has already been in effect since last November. Bütikofer recently spoke in favor of “at last installing a concerted pan-EU global sanctions mechanism,” to eventually “be able to “impose sanctions for human rights violations on Chinese officials.”[3] IPAC has chosen this means of having influence through parliaments, where the US government has yet to be successful in forcing other governments through direct pressure to adopt its sanctions policy. One example is Great Britain, where, since some time, particularly pro-USA Tory backbenchers are adamantly insisting that their government’s decision to a limited Huawei participation in setting up the British 5G network be revised. IPAC now permits such practices to be expanded.
The ex-Colonial Governor and the Greens
In Germany, the Greens constitute the backbone of this policy. This could be observed recently, when the last British colonial governor of Hong Kong, the former EU External Relations Commissioner, Chris Patten, launched an appeal – based on China’s new security law for Hong Kong – calling for joint action to be taken by the western countries and their allies against the People’s Republic of China. This appeal also sought to mobilize the largest possible number of parliamentarians to adopt an aggressive confrontational policy toward Beijing – circumventing their national governments. It has already garnered the signatures of 853 politicians from Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, most being legislators of national parliaments and the EU Parliament.
The former colonial governor’s appeal has received particularly strong support from the German Greens, whose names are listed alongside right-wing hardliners such as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.[4] The Green politician Bütikofer plays a leading role also in IPAC. In the wings of the Munich Security Conference (MSC), the head of the EU Parliament’s China delegation made a plea for forming a transatlantic China caucus, with the objective of bringing US Congressional representatives in close contact with members of the EU Parliament.[5] IPAC now gets various additional national parliaments onboard.
Typical Western Double Standards (II)
The, at first sight, astonishing, cooperation German Greens have with hardliners from the right-wing of the US Republicans, has a long tradition in the fight against China. For many years, German Greens, like US Republicans, have been supporting Tibetan circles linked to the Dalai Lama, who occasionally have resorted to violence in their opposition to Beijing – even demanding that Tibet secede from the People’s Republic of China.[6] Protesting Beijing’s measures in Xinjiang, US Republicans and German Greens are standing shoulder to shoulder – another example of typical western double standards: Whereas China’s fight against the Uighur jihad in Xinjiang (german-foreign-policy.com reported [7]) is being sharply attacked, massive crimes committed since September 11, 2001, during the West’s “War on Terror” – abduction and torture of terrorist suspects – are passed over in silence. Germany’s SPD/Greens coalition government at the time had been involved.[8] Bütikofer was then the political administrator of the Green Party.
Advisory Board Member with CIA Career
The composition of IPAC’s Advisory Board corresponds to its above-mentioned agenda. Among its members are activists from Hong Kong, including a British surgeon with experience in war and violent conflict zones,[9] as well as the Vice President of the Munich-based World Uighur Congress (WUC, german-foreign-policy.com reported [10]). IPAC Advisory Board member Robert L. Suettinger, on the other hand, was a long-time employee in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence.[11]
“Security Strategies”
IPAC’s declared objectives do not ultimately indicate its long-term orientation. “Democracies,” the organization declares, must develop complementary “security strategies” to address “challenges” presented by the PRC.[12] This falls in line with considerations being made in transatlantic circles, to position NATO against China – also explicitly militarily. german-foreign-policy.com will soon report.
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Notes
[1] The national parliaments of Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Canada, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Czech Republic and the USA.
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Sold under the pretence of a quest for optimising well-being and ‘happiness’, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. What really matters is the strive to maintain viable profit margins. The prevailing economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption and needs a certain level of annual GDP growth for large firms to make sufficient profit.
But at some point, markets become saturated, demand rates fall and overproduction and overaccumulation of capital becomes a problem. In response, we have seen credit markets expand and personal debt increase to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages have been squeezed, financial and real estate speculation rise (new investment markets), stock buy backs and massive bail outs and subsidies (public money to maintain the viability of private capital) and an expansion of militarism (a major driving force for many sectors of the economy).
We have also witnessed systems of production abroad being displaced for global corporations to then capture and expand markets in foreign countries.
The old normal
Much of what is outlined above is inherent to capitalism. But the 1980s was a crucial period that helped set the framework for where we find ourselves today.
Remember when the cult of the individual was centre stage? It formed part of the Reagan-Thatcher rhetoric of the ‘new normal’ of 1980s neoliberalism.
In the UK, the running down of welfare provision was justified by government-media rhetoric about ‘individual responsibility’, reducing the role of the state and the need to ‘stand on your own two feet’. The selling off of public assets to profiteering corporations was sold to the masses on the basis of market efficiency and ‘freedom of choice’.
The state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of the public sector was relentlessly undermined by neoliberal dogma and the creed that the market (global corporations) constituted the best method for supplying human needs.
Thatcher’s stated mission was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit by rolling back the ‘nanny state’. She wasted little time in crushing the power of the trade unions and privatising key state assets.
Despite her rhetoric, she did not actually reduce the role of the state. She used its machinery differently, on behalf of business. Neither did she unleash the ‘spirit of entrepreneurialism’. Economic growth rates under her were similar as in the 1970s, but a concentration of ownership occurred and levels of inequality rocketed.
Margaret Thatcher was well trained in perception management, manipulating certain strands of latent populist sentiment and prejudice. Her free market, anti-big-government platitudes were passed off to a section of the public that was all too eager to embrace them as a proxy for remedying all that was wrong with Britain. For many, what were once regarded as the extreme social and economic policies of the right became entrenched as the common sense of the age.
Thatcher’s policies destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in just two years alone. The service sector, finance and banking were heralded as the new drivers of the economy, as much of Britain’s manufacturing sector was out-sourced to cheap labour economies.
Under Thatcher, employees’ share of national income was slashed from 65% to 53%. Long gone are many of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. In their place, the country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime and low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, macjobs, call centre jobs – many of which soon went abroad) as well as a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which helped to keep the economy afloat.
However, ultimately, what Thatcher did was – despite her rhetoric of helping small-scale businesses and wrapping herself in the national flag – facilitate the globalisation process by opening the British economy to international capital flows and allowing free rein for global finance and transnational corporations.
Referring back to the beginning of this article, it is clear whose happiness and well-being counts most and whose does not matter at all as detailed by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book ‘Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making‘. Members of the superclass belong to the megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world and come from the highest echelons of finance, industry, the military, government and other shadow elites. These are the people whose interests Margaret Thatcher was serving.
These people set the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
And let us not forget the various key think tanks and policy making arenas like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and Chatham House as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF), where sections of the global elite forge policies and strategies and pass them to their political handmaidens.
Driven by the vision of its influential executive chairman Klaus Schwab, the WEF is a major driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.
The new normal
The great reset envisages a transformation of capitalism, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as livelihoods and entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceutical corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.
Under the cover of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which smaller enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs and roles will be carried out by AI-driven technology.
The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
At the same time new (‘green product’) markets are being created and, on the back of COVID, fresh opportunities for profit extraction are opening up abroad. For instance, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns that have been implemented in response to the Covid-19 crisis. This ‘help’ will be on condition that neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.
Many people waste no time in referring to this as some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny). Economies will be monopolised by global players, not least e-commerce platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google and their multi-billionaire owners.
Essential (for capitalism) new markets will also be created through the ‘financialisation’ and ownership of all aspects of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the fraudulent notion of protecting the environment.
The so-called ‘green economy’ will fit in with the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. A bunch of billionaires and their platforms will control every aspect of the value chain. Of course, they themselves will not reduce their own consumption or get rid of their personal jets, expensive vehicles, numerous exclusive homes or ditch their resource gobbling lifestyles. Reduced consumption is meant only for the masses.
They will not only control and own data about consumption but also control and own data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. Independent enterprises will disappear or become incorporated into the platforms acting as subservient cogs. Elected representatives will be mere technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants and have cemented their dominance. Many small and medium-size independent enterprises have been pushed towards bankruptcy. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID19 government measures.
Politicians in countries throughout the world have been using the rhetoric of the WEF’s great reset, talking of the need to ‘build back better’ for the ‘new normal’. They are all on point. Hardly a coincidence. Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms given that, in the ‘green new normal’, unfettered consumption will no longer be an option for the bulk of the population.
It has long been the case that a significant part of the working class has been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – three decades ago, such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. They have had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services.
But what we are now seeing is the possibility of hundreds of millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. Forget about the benign sounding ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and its promised techno-utopia. What we are witnessing right now seems to be a major restructuring of capitalist economies.
With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D printing/manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc), a mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – will no longer be required. As economic activity is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed.
In a reorganised system that no longer needs to sell the virtues of excessive individualism (consumerism), the levels of political and civil rights and freedoms we have been used to will not be tolerated.
Neoliberalism might have reached its logical conclusion (for now). Making trade unions toothless, beating down wages to create unimaginable levels of inequality and (via the dismantling of Bretton Woods) affording private capital so much freedom to secure profit and political clout under the guise of ‘globalisation’ would inevitably lead to one outcome.
A concentration of wealth, power, ownership and control at the top with large sections of the population on state-controlled universal basic income and everyone subjected to the discipline of an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
Perception management is of course vital for pushing through all of this. Rhetoric about ‘liberty’ and ‘individual responsibility’ worked a treat in the 1980s to help bring about a massive heist of wealth. This time, it is a public health scare and ‘collective responsibility’ as part of a strategy to help move towards near-monopolistic control over economies by a handful of global players.
And the perception of freedom is also being managed. Once vaccinated many will begin to feel free. Freer than under lockdown. But not really free at all.
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“All is not lost, the unconquerable will… and the courage never to submit or yield.” — John Milton
Have you given any thought to the strange events of the last 15 months?
Have you wondered why so many countries adopted the same policies that had never been used before and had no scientific foundation?
Have you wondered why effective ‘life-saving’ medications and therapies were actively and aggressively suppressed?
Have you wondered why world-renowned scientists, virologists and epidemiologists were banned on Twitter and removed from Facebook?
Have you wondered why all of the cable news channels and print-media covered daily developments with the same breathless hysteria as their competitors?
It’s very hard to look back on the events of the last 15 months and not suspect that there is more to this Covid story than meets the eye; that while the infection does, in fact, kill mostly older people with multiple underlying conditions, that, perhaps, the virus has been used to promote a political agenda of which we know very little. Even so, there are things of which we can be reasonably certain, such as, that all of the fear-mongering and hysteria has been suspiciously manipulated to promote universal vaccination. That seems fairly obvious. In fact, managers of this Covid operation have stated quite openly that their goal is to inoculate “all 7 billion people” on planet earth. Wow. There’s not alot of gray-area in that comment, is there?
And, if that’s the case, we can safely assume that much of the hysteria was exaggerated to achieve the stated goal. It’s a pretty simple formula really: “Scare the hell out of everyone and then stampede them towards the vaccination depots.” At least, that appears to be the operating theory. And, I’m certainly not alone in feeling that way. There’s also, Dr. Peter McCullough, who is a Doctor of Internal Medicine and a Board-Certified Cardiologist. Here’s how he summed it up in a recent interview on Rumble:
“I think this whole pandemic, from the beginning, was about the vaccine. All roads lead to the vaccine. There are already places in southeast Asia and Europe where they are laying the groundwork for compulsory vaccination. Compulsory! The means someone pins you to the ground and puts a needle in you. That’s how bad the stakeholders want vaccination.” (16-minute Interview with Dr Peter McCullough, Mercola. )
Repeat: “It’s all about the vaccine.”
What that means is that all the hoopla of the last year –including the masks, the social distancing, the lockdowns, the closed schools, the ruined businesses, the shuttered churches, the Daily Death Count and the endless footage of hospital emergency rooms where anxious-looking medical professionals wheel comatose patients hurriedly down the halls and into ICU– was all concocted with one objective in mind; to prepare the sheeple for industrial-scale inoculation with a foreign substance which has not been approved by the FDA, did not conclude Phase 3 Clinical Trials, and for which the long-term adverse effects remain completely unknown. Could it get any weirder?
Probably.
Of course, now the focus has shifted to China. China, China, China. It’s all China all the time. The Chinese were supposedly fooling around with lethal pathogens at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Security was reportedly lax which suggests that the virus– that infected the world and crashed the global economy– probably escaped from a Chinese lab. So, let’s blame the Chinese.
It all makes sense until you dig a little deeper and find out that the US National Institutes of Health, “had funded the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology” to the tune of “$3.7 million project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses” (from 2014 to 2019) and shortly after, “another $3.7 million” (for a) “project appears to have included work on “gain-of-function”: research that investigates how a virus can gain the ability to infect a new type of animal.”
This funding from the NIH looks alot like a subcontracting agreement, although we need more details. But at the very least, the arrangement suggests that there might be some shared responsibility for the alleged leak?
Maybe, I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that the “blame China” folks might be too hasty in their judgement. After all, the “blame China” meme could just be another diversion conjured up to conceal US involvement. We just don’t know.
Secondly, there’s no reason to assume that the alleged “leak” was an ‘accident’ at all, in fact, there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence suggesting otherwise. For example, how do we explain the fact– way back in October, 2019– elites from the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, big media, big pharma, the UN, the CDC, the CIA, the Chinese Center for Disease Control, and John Hopkins University, conducted a “live simulation exercise to prepare public and private leaders for a pandemic response”?
Now there’s an interesting coincidence. Some conspiracy nut might think these bigwigs actually knew what was coming? What a crazy idea, eh?
The confab was called “Event 201” and it gathered representatives from the main global power centers to walk through the operational plan that would be implemented to affect the outcome they collectively sought. Here’s how Johns Hopkins tried to dismiss questions about the suspicious event. They said:
“For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus, are not similar to nCoV-2019.” (Armstrong Economics)
Is that the lamest excuse you’ve ever heard?
Indeed. Are we supposed to believe that none of these elites had the slightest inkling that a few months later, the world would be thrust into a global pandemic in which the advice of their respective “public health experts” would override parliaments and legislatures everywhere conferring upon them political powers they never earned at the ballot box and authority to mandate everything from universal mask wearing to effective house arrest? They never saw that coming? They never mapped that out? The confab was just an innocent bull-session with their high-powered buddies?
Pardon my skepticism, but I think that Johns Hopkins might be stretching the truth a bit. Certainly, honchos from big finance and the intelligence community did not attend the meeting simply to “chew the fat” or to express their love for humanity. No, they were undoubtedly focused on more practical issues like putting the finishing touches on a plan to restructure the global economy and political system in a way that better served the interests of their fellow elites. A plan like that, would require a crisis of some magnitude, a really big blowout, like a global pandemic with all the bells and whistles.
And, even then, it would require a competent and resourceful steering committee, a detailed operational-plan for mobilizing public health officials, heads of state, giant marketing firms, state governors, big Tech, big pharma, a battery of behavioral psychologists, and a small army of social media honchos. No doubt about it; it’s a giant undertaking that would take considerable time and energy.
And that’s why we think it’s inconceivable that anyone would put that much time and effort into plotting and planning, logistical coordination and tabletop exercises, and all the hard work and bureaucratic drudgery if they were simply interested in saving lives or easing the suffering of the infected masses.
That’s not why these elites convened Event 201. They had other goals in mind, and on the top of their list was mass vaccination. They want to vaccinate everyone-everywhere ASAP, and all of the developments of the last 15 months have been aimed at achieving that singular objective.
But what does that tell us?
If you believe, as I do, that the pandemic is being managed by powerbrokers who operate behind the fig leaf of political leaders, compromised physicians and dodgy public health officials; then what should we be able to deduce about the vaccine itself?
Answer– That they know what’s in it. And they know what it does.
You see, none of us really know that, not with any degree of certainty, that is. All we know is that the vaccine was rushed through the regulatory process without FDA approval, that Phase 3 clinical trials were never completed, and that the animal trials– that were conducted years before– ended with a pile of dead ferrets. That’s about all we know, BUT we can reasonably assume that the managers of this operation know what’s in the vaccines, because they never would have put as much time and effort into this grandiose project if they didn’t know. Right?
So, we’re dealing with asymmetrical knowledge here. One party has a clear advantage because they know something critical that the other party does not know. YET. But we will know, (eventually) because independent researchers are gradually piecing together a patchwork of information on how the substance in the injection effects the people that have been vaccinated. But that takes time which is why the stakeholders are going to use every trick in the book to vaccinate as many people as possible before the truth is revealed and their house of cards comes crashing down around them. Unfortunately, much of the damage will have already been done by then.
So, what do we actually know about these vaccines?
Let’s start with Dr McCullough since he testified before Congress and is clearly an expert on the matter. Here’s what he said in the same interview we linked to earlier:
“People are dying from this vaccine — the internet is full of these cases — so why is it being pushed like it is?… They want a needle in every arm… But why, especially when there are known severe adverse side effects?”
‘Don’t fall for the trap because it’s only going to make things worse.
This is a bioweapon, far beyond anything we have ever seen …The vaccine’s not safe.” (Mercola.com)
That’s a good summary, but we’re looking for a little more detail, something that pinpoints elements in the vaccine that make it so controversial. Here’s a quote from Prof. Byram Bridle, Viral Immunology University of Guelph, who helps to explain the shortcomings of the vaccines as they relate to the serious adverse effects which are showing up by the boatload.
“The conclusion is: We made a big mistake…we didn’t realize it til now… we thought spike protein was a great target antigen… We never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein… So by vaccinating people, we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin, that gets into circulation, and when that happens, it can cause damage, especially in the cardio-vascular system. And, there are many other legitimate questions about the long-term safety of this vaccine. For example, with it accumulating in the ovaries, my question is: Will we be rendering young people infertile?” (@DrPeterMoloney, Prof. Byram Bridle, Viral Immunology University of Guelph)
Ahh, so now we’re getting somewhere. The spike protein generated by the vaccine is no different than the spike protein in Covid itself; both wreak havoc on the vascular system.
Keep in mind, “gene-based” vaccines are a hybrid concoction that bear no resemblance to traditional vaccines which inject live or dead virus into the recipient triggering an immune response. The new vaccines don’t do that, in fact, they do not operate like a vaccine at all. (Note– “Vaccine” is just a public relations moniker the drug companies settled on to build public confidence and shirk legal liability. The term does NOT apply to the new injections.) What they do, is penetrate, then hijack the cells in the lining of the blood vessels (endothelium) where they begin to produce spike proteins which generate an immune response. But here’s the problem: There’s a big difference between an “immune response” and rewiring your immune system so it reflexively produces toxins that accumulate anywhere that blood flows throughout your body.
It’s the spike protein that’s produced by vaccine-penetrated cells, has been identified as the “culprit” that is responsible for the terrible incidents of blood-clotting, excessive bleeding and autoimmune disease. The vaccines essentially flush millions upon millions of these potentially-lethal proteins into the bloodstream of recipients greatly increasing the odds that they will suffer the life-threatening conditions mentioned in the previous sentence.
Ask yourself this: Do you know what you are putting in your body when you allow yourself to be vaccinated? Here’s how Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D answered that question:
“COVID-19 vaccines are instruction sets for your body to make a toxic protein that will eventually wind up concentrated in your spleen, from where prion-like protein instructions will be sent out, leading to neurodegenerative diseases.” (“Interview with Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D”,Mercola.com)
The point is, this is not a vaccine. As one scientist put it: “Is a benevolent hijacking of the immune system.” Can you see the difference?
Most people think they are taking a medication that will help their body fight the virus.
Wrong.
This is a reprogramming of the immune system.
The cells now produce a spike protein which they did not produce before. In theory, this protein will spark an immune response that will prime the system for fighting future infection. But it’s all theory. No one really knows what’s going to happen because the vaccines are experimental and the clinical trials have not been concluded, so the long-term effects remain completely unknown. So, when we say the whole thing is a crap shoot, we’re not exaggerating. It’s a high-risk procedure and there are no guarantees. Here’s more from an article titled “57 Top Scientists… Demand Immediate Stop to ALL Vaccinations”:
“Vaccines for other coronaviruses have never been approved for humans, and data generated in the development of coronavirus vaccines… show that they may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)...Vaccine-driven disease enhancement in animals vaccinated against SARS-CoV … is known to occur following viral challenge, and has been attributed to immune complexes….which augment… inflammation …
The recently identified role of …Spike (protein) for inducing endothelial damage characteristic of COVID-19, even in absence of infection, is extremely relevant given that most of the authorized vaccines induce the production of Spike glycoprotein in the recipients. Given the high rate of occurrence of adverse effects, and the wide range of types of adverse effects that have been reported to date, as well as the potential for vaccine-driven disease enhancement….
Spike glycoprotein alone causes endothelial damage and hypertension in vitro and in vivo in Syrian hamsters by down-regulating angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and impairing mitochondrial function [26]. Although these findings need to be confirmed in humans, the implications of this finding are staggering, as all vaccines authorized for emergency use are based on the delivery or induction of Spike glycoprotein synthesis. In the case of mRNA vaccines and adenovirus-vectorized vaccines, not a single study has examined the duration of Spike production in humans following vaccination. Under the cautionary principle, it is parsimonious to considervaccine-induced Spike synthesis could cause clinical signs of severe COVID-19, and erroneously be counted as new cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections. If so, the true adverse effects of the current global vaccination strategy may never be recognized unless studies specifically examine this question. There is already non-causal evidence of temporary or sustained increases in COVID-19 deaths following vaccination in some countries (Fig. 1) and in light of Spike’s pathogenicity, these deaths must be studied in depth to determine whether they are related to vaccination…” (“57 Top Scientists… Demand Immediate Stop to ALL Vaccinations”, en-volve.com)
Okay, let’s break this down into simple English.
1–Vaccines for other Coronaviruses have never been approved because they made the disease worse, mainly because by creating conditions in which the immune system attacked its own blood vessels and vital organs. (ADE)
2–The spike protein can wreak havoc on the blood vessels and vital organs even if there no evidence of viral infection. Thus, injecting people with vaccines that force the cells to produce spike proteins poses grave risks to their health.
3–The adverse effects from the vaccines are so similar to Covid symptoms, that they could be “erroneously counted as new cases of Covid”. In other words, the media and Fauci might be blaming the ‘variants’ for fatalities that should be attributed to the vaccines.
4–No one has any idea how long the spike proteins will remain in the lining of the blood vessels (not a single study has examined the duration of Spike production in humans following vaccination.”) or other the body. Also, no one knows how deadly or destructive the long-term effects will be.
Here’s more from an article at Conservative Woman:
“EVIDENCE is growing that Covid-19 vaccines may worsen the disease in some recipients.The danger arises when a vaccinated person meets the actual virus. Antibodies developed as a result of the jab can end up enhancing disease rather than protecting against infection.
Previous warnings about this potentially lethal effect, known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), have been downplayed or dismissed as theoretical by the manufacturers. The phenomenon has been seen with vaccines against other viruses but is considered very rare.
After reviewing published evidence concerning the effect, however, two US experts [1] have concluded it is ‘non-theoretical and compelling’. Receiving the vaccine could convert a subject from someone who experiences mild disease ‘to someone who experiences severe disease, lasting morbidity or even death’.” (“How the vaccine can make Covid worse“, Conservative Woman)
Of course, professional virologists knew that ADE was a possibility even before the vaccine campaign was launched, but they were blacklisted by the MSM, censored on social media, and removed from Twitter. Which is why so few people have ever even heard of the condition. Many people don’t even know it exists.
Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Doesn’t that seem like something you should have been told about before you agreed to get injected? We don’t want to believe that our government would knowingly authorize programs that could lead to our suffering or death. But how else do we explain what’s going on? Here’s more:
“… an international group of doctors and scientists have published an appeal to governments, regulators and vaccine developers worldwide to halt mass-vaccination programmes until safety issues, especially ADE, have been resolved. They say that given the high rate of adverse effects there is a need for better understanding of the benefits and risks, particularly in sections of the community who were excluded in most of the clinical trials. These included the elderly and people with prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19.
Exclusion of the latter, the group says, is particularly unfortunate ‘as it denied the opportunity of obtaining extremely relevant information concerning post-vaccination ADE in people that already have anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.’ Without careful monitoring, cases of ADE or similar immune pathology caused by the vaccine would be indistinguishable from severe Covid-19.” (“How the vaccine can make Covid worse“, Conservative Woman)
Did you catch that last part about: “cases of ADE or similar immune pathology caused by the vaccine would be indistinguishable from severe Covid-19”?
This is the (evil) genius of the Covid vaccine, that is, when people start dying, their deaths are going to be blamed on Covid “variants” rather than the vaccine. Why?
Because the symptoms are nearly identical. As a recent study by the Salk Institute showed, Covid is primarily a vascular disease. In other words, it is the action that takes place in the bloodstream (inflammation, ADE, blood clots and bleeding) that kills people, not the respiratory virus. Unfortunately, the substance from the vaccines enters cells in the lining of the blood vessels producing spike proteins that are similar the spike proteins generated by Covid. The spike proteins attract platelets that cause blood clots, or they lead to bleeding (after the platelets are used up) or they create waste that is attacked by killer lymphocytes which damages blood vessels and organs. Bleeding, blood clots or auto immune disease; any of these conditions are possible following vaccination, perhaps, even probable.
So far, no one in the pro-Vaxx camp has acknowledged the potential dangers of ADE. Why is that? Why has Fauci remained silent on an issue of such glaring importance? Here’s more:
“The same may be true of damage caused by a toxin, the so-called ‘spike’ protein, production of which is triggered in our body cells by the vaccine. The protein is a uniquely dangerous characteristic of the virus, and the aim of the vaccine is to alert the immune system to it so as to block infection.
But not a single study has examined how long the toxin continues to be produced in us following vaccination,the doctors say. The jab itself may be causing the very symptoms it is designed to protect against, symptoms then erroneously diagnosed as ‘coincidental’ cases of infection. ‘If so, the true adverse effects of the current global vaccination strategy may never be recognized unless studies specifically examine this question.’” (“How the vaccine can make Covid worse“, Conservative Woman)
See? Like we said, the fatalities caused by the vaccine are going to be attributed to Covid which means that the media will continue to promote their silly “variants” theory even while the truth stares them in the face. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to figure out how this shell game is going to play out. Scores of people will die, but the vaccine manufacturers and their allies will escape blame by diverting attention to the goofy variants chimera. It’s a clever strategy and it already appears to be working. There’s been a spike in fatalities in nearly every country that has launched a mass vaccination campaign, but no one has placed the blame where it belongs; on the vaccines themselves. Who knew killing could be so easy?
So, the question we should all be asking ourselves is this: Did the authors of the Covid operation know that the vaccines were dangerous before the campaign was launched?
Yes, they did, they must have. But they rushed ahead regardless. They want to vaccinate the world whatever the cost in terms of lives-lost. Here’s more from the “now censored” UK Column:
“There is overwhelming evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (that is also synthetically produced by the Covid vaccines) is a central part of the mechanisms of morbidity and mortality of SARS-CoV-2, and therefore is also a risk of the vaccine. In regard to clotting, that risk is greater if you receive a vaccine.
The data clearly demonstrate that the last thing you would ever want to do is make a vaccine that produces a spike protein. As the literature clearly showed, it would cause significant damage, including brain clots and death. And that literature, for the most part, was available before the release of Covid vaccines to the public.” (“Clotting and Covid Vaccine “Science”, Dr Mike Williams, UKColumn)
“Overwhelming evidence”?
Yes, and yet the vaccination campaign races ahead even while the mountain of evidence continues to grow. How do you explain that? Here’s more:
“…Autopsy studies have yet to find clear evidence of destructive viral invasion into patients’ brains, pushing researchers to consider alternative explanations of how SARS-CoV-2 causes neurological symptoms…. If not viral infection, what else could be causing injury to distant organs associated with COVID-19?
The most likely culprit that has been identified is the COVID-19 spike protein released from the outer shell of the virus into circulation. Research cited below has documented that the viral spike protein is able to initiate a cascade of events that triggers damage to distant organs in COVID-19 patients.
In other words, researchers have known for a long time that these types of proteins produce clotting, bleeding and autoimmune issues, all of which can cause death. Are you going to tell me that the scientists who created these vaccines and the managers of this campaign, didn’t know the risks involved?
Nonsense. That’s just not credible. They must have known, and even if they didn’t know, they know now. So, why aren’t they doing something to stop their campaign or notify vaccine candidates about the dangers involved? So far, they haven’t even put a warning label on the side of the needle. They’ve done nothing; not a thing.
Would you call that evil?
I would, just like withholding life-saving medications in the middle of a pandemic is evil. There’s simply no other term for it. Evil is evil. Check out this final snippet from a piece by the Doctors for Covid Ethics to the European Medicines Agency (EMA):
“Our concerns arise from multiple lines of evidence, including that the SARS-CoV-2 “spike protein” is not a passive docking protein, but its production is likely to initiate blood coagulation via multiple mechanisms…..CSVT, cerebral venous thrombosis, is always a life-threatening condition that demands immediate medical attention. The number of cases you conceded had occurred can represent just the tip of a huge iceberg.…
Given that there is a mechanistically plausible explanation for these thromboembolic adverse drug reactions, namely that the gene-based products induce human cells to manufacture potentially pro-thrombotic spike protein, the reasoned & responsible assumption must now be that this may be a class effect. In other words, the dangers must be ruled out for all emergency-authorized gene-based vaccines, not merely the AZ product.” (“Open Letter to the EMA from Doctors for Covid Ethics”, Doctors for Covid Ethics)
There you have it, multiple blurbs from three papers each claiming that the spike protein generated by the vaccines creates a myriad of problems. And we’re just scratching the surface on this topic; there’s much more research available if you know where to look. But we’ll stop here because we think we’ve showed that the mass-vaccination bosses know what the risks are but have chosen to conceal them from the public.
But, why? And why are they now pushing to vaccinate children whose chance of dying from Covid is zero, but whose risk of adverse effects from vaccination is significant?
It’s because there’s something else going on here. What we’re seeing is the implementation of a broader strategic agenda in which mass vaccination is an essential part. What that means for humanity, we don’t really know. But we’re pretty sure that if people don’t wipe the mud from their eyes and figure out what’s going on fast, we’re going to be in dire straits.
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Michael Whitney, renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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It has been 58 years since the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) the forerunner to today’s African Union (AU) which was inaugurated in 2002.
Since 1963, Africa has undergone tremendous social change and political re-awakenings where in 2021 there are 55 member-states within the AU with only one, the Western Sahara, lacking national independence.
Africa Day for this year was called under the theme “Arts, Culture and Heritage: Levers for Building the Africa We Want.” The resurrection and enhancement of the African Personality is essential in the efforts to realize a better standard of living based upon the interests of the majority of workers, farmers, women and youth within the AU region.
Yet the AU region is by no means free of the clutches of imperialism. The current COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of the 1.3 billion people on a continent which remains dependent upon former colonial and present neo-colonial powers that drain the economic resources found in such abundance.
Similar to the situations in the Caribbean, Central America, South America and large areas of the Asia-Pacific geo-political regions, the AU member-states along with Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the provisional government of the Western Sahara which is recognized also by the United Nations, continues to struggle for genuine liberation and sovereignty. The Western Sahara was conceded to the Kingdom of Morocco in 1975 after the departure of colonial Spain.
In an article written about the stance of the SADR and its politico-military wing, the Polisario Front, in relationship to Africa liberation, it says:
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) affirmed today that the ‘declaration of the leaders of independent African countries at the beginning of the sixties of the last century on the constitution of a continental organization has the objective of promoting and supporting the peoples of the continent who fight against colonialism and Apartheid ‘. In a statement made public on the occasion of the celebration of Africa Day, the Saharawi MF highlighted that ‘today we celebrate, like the other African peoples, the day on which Africa commemorates the 58th Anniversary of the founding of the Organization for African Unity, on May 25, 1963. The founding of this continental organization represented a strong reason that contributed to accelerating the independence processes in African countries and highlighted its unique character that framed its objectives and priorities in the fight for human rights, self-determination and independence’”.
Morocco and Spain are now involved in a diplomatic dispute due to the medical treatment of Polisario Front leader and President of the SADR, Brahim Ghali, for Covid-19 in a Spanish hospital. Morocco has expressed its opposition through official diplomatic channels with Spain.
In response to the anger of Rabat, the government has allowed the outmigration of thousands of people seeking entry into the Spanish controlled territories off the coast of Morocco. Most of the migrants, who come from Africa and West Asia, have been returned to Morocco soon after arriving in Spanish controlled territory.
The problem of migration is not exclusively centered in Morocco. Other North African states such as Libya and Tunisia have the same difficulties of being largely forced to detain migrants fleeing from the horrendous conditions which have their origins in imperialist militarism.
Large scale migration has been utilized by right-wing politicians in Europe to form parties which call for a total ban on those in need of asylum. This same atmosphere prevails as well in the U.S. when the political landscape became even more polarized with the advent of the previous administration of President Donald Trump and the failure of the current presidency of Joe Biden to take bold initiatives aimed at lessening racial oppression.
Imperialism and Militarism in 21st Century Africa
The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was operationalized in February 2008 with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. During 2007 and 2008, no African government was willing to accept offers by the then President George W. Bush to host the primary base of AFRICOM.
However, with the advent of Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, AFRICOM was strengthened and enhanced. There is currently an operational base of AFRICOM in the strategically located Horn of Africa state of Djibouti which houses over 3,000 Pentagon troops.
An investigative report done by the South African-based Mail & Guardian in 2020 stated that:
“Although U.S. commandos operate on the African continent with the agreement of host governments, ordinary Africans are rarely told about the full extent of U.S. activities — nor offered a say in how and why Americans operate in their countries. Even basic information, like the sweep and scope of deployments by elite U.S. troops and clandestine combat by American commandos on the continent, is mostly unreported across Africa…. In 2019, U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 22 African countries: Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Côte D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Tanzania and Tunisia.
This accounts for a significant proportion of U.S. Special Operations forces’ global activity: more than 14% of US commandos deployed overseas in 2019 were sent to Africa, the largest percentage of any region in the world except for the greater Middle East.”
Despite the interventions of AFRICOM for more than a decade, the security situation in many African states is far worse than in 2008. In Nigeria, an insurgency which began in 2009 in the northeast of Africa’s most populous state on the continent, has not been defeated. The current President Muhammadu Buhari, a former military general with ties to the U.S. Pentagon, has asked for the construction of an AFRICOM base in Nigeria.
Although Buhari declared while running for the presidency in 2015 that he would eliminate the threat of Boko Haram within six months, there are today other criminal groupings which have emerged causing instability through theft, murder, kidnappings for ransom and recruitment. During April, Buhari said he had requested from the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a virtual meeting that:
“I asked the U.S. to consider re-locating the AFRICOM HQ from Germany to Africa — near the Theatre of Operation; against the backdrop of growing security challenges in West & Central Africa, Gulf of Guinea, Lake Chad region & the Sahel,” Buhari said in a Twitter post after the meeting.” (See this)
Such a controversial request by a former military general now heading a government with, in excess, of 200 million residents, illustrates the degree to which neo-colonialism has penetrated the African continent. Nigeria due to police misconduct faced a national rebellion late last year where scores were killed and billions in property damages occurred. There was sharp criticism levelled against Buhari inside of Nigeria while many military experts in the U.S. believe that the relocation of AFRICOM headquarters to West Africa would be highly unlikely. Nonetheless, the desperation of U.S. imperialism in its competition with China and other rivals, cannot be ignored in its efforts to remain dominant militarily in Africa and internationally.
African Unification and Socialism Provides the Only Real Alternative to Neo-Colonialism
The present role of the national military structures in Africa has proved incapable of guaranteeing the material interests of the majority of working people, farmers, youth and women. These mass elements within African societies must be empowered before genuine development can be realized.
Development and regional security are inextricably linked. In Chad, Mali, Libya and other states, the military forces have been trained by the Pentagon, France, Great Britain and other NATO countries. Until there is a categorical break with these imperialist governments and their military institutions, genuine independence and sovereignty will remain elusive.
A continental-wide military high command is called for within the charter of the AU. However, the mandate for taking responsibility for the internal security of Africa is in essence a political question. This necessity will be achieved by a revolutionary movement that is region-wide and committed to the abolition of capitalism and imperialism along with the construction of socialism.
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the founder of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) and the architect of the modern state in Africa, spoke and wrote extensively against foreign economic and military intervention on the continent. One analyst of African affairs and the role of AFRICOM said of the Nkrumah legacy:
“Nkrumah addresses foreign military intervention directly and warns that ‘military aid … marks the last stage of neo-colonialism and its effect is self-destructive.’ Moreover, he argued that African unity would not be possible until the ‘defeat of neo-colonialism,’ and argued for an African High Command. While Nkrumah envisioned the African High Command to be led by Africans and directly oppose foreign meddling, at its core AFRICOM is American-devised and managed, leading us to believe that Nkrumah would in fact be vehemently opposed to the establishment of an AFRICOM headquarters in Accra, or anywhere on the continent.” (See this)
These ideas are just as relevant if not more so in the 21st century as when Nkrumah articulated them during the period from the conclusion of World War II up until the time of his death in 1972. The AU member-states are at a critical juncture and the decisions made in the current period will determine the outcome of the struggle for the control of Africa, its people and resources.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has defended the natural-origin theory for SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic
In his biggest about-face to date, Fauci is now saying he’s “not convinced” the virus had a natural origin after all, and that we must continue to investigate “what went on in China until we find out, to the best of our ability, what happened”
Considering Fauci’s opinion has been used by mainstream media and fact checkers to censor any and all other experts, this very public 180 is no doubt causing embarrassment among mainstream reporters
Fauci is now also denying ever having funded gain-of-function research, even though there’s irrefutable evidence that he did. It seems he’s trying to redefine “gain-of-function,” such that none of the research he paid for will fall under that definition
National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins is backing Fauci’s denials in what appears to be a preemptive attempt to distance the NIAID/NIH from future blame, should the lab leak theory be determined to have caused the COVID-19 pandemic
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been a staunch defender of the natural-origin theory for SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in May 2020, CNN used Fauci’s statements on the issue as proof that then-President Donald Trump was spouting a ridiculous conspiracy theory:1
“For weeks now, President Donald Trump has been making the case that the coronavirus originated not in nature but in a lab in Wuhan, China,” CNN wrote.2
“Enter Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and perhaps the single most prominent doctor in the world at the moment. In an interview with National Geographic … Fauci was definitive about the origins of the virus …
‘If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,’ [Fauci said].
Now, before we play the game of ‘he said, he said’ remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it’s not Donald Trump.”
Oh, the difference a year can make. Mainstream media is finally forced to face the fact that Fauci and a number of other so-called “experts” they’ve paraded before their viewers and readers have been no more reliable than your average armchair scientist.
Fauci Pulls Biggest 180 Yet
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci has been front and center, spouting recommendations, over time changing his mind again and again.
A virtuoso of contradiction, he’s flip-flopped on the usefulness and need for masks multiple times, from “Americans shouldn’t be wearing masks because they don’t work,” to masks definitely work and should be worn by everyone, to you should wear not just one but two, for safe measure.
He’s gone from promising a mask-free existence once the vaccine rolls out, to insisting mask-wearing is still necessary after vaccination because vaccine-resistant variants might pop up, to proposing we might need to wear masks every flu season in perpetuity.
His biggest flip-flop to date, however, has to be his stance on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. As reported by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti in a May 24, 2021 “Rising with Krystal & Saagar” episode (see video above), Fauci is now claiming he’s “not convinced” the virus had a natural origin after all, and that we must continue to investigate “what went on in China until we find out, to the best of our ability, what happened.”
Considering Fauci’s opinion has been used by mainstream media pundits and fact checkers to censor any and all other experts — including people with far more impressive credentials than Fauci, who at the end of the day is an administrator, a paper-pusher, not a working scientist — this very public 180-degree turn is no doubt causing embarrassment among many mainstream reporters.
Krystal and Saagar both look uncomfortable having to explain how the media, en masse, ended up being so wrong for so long.
Mainstream Media Scramble to Justify Their Errors
According to Krystal and Saagar, new information indicating workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) fell ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 now make the lab leak theory the most plausible.
What’s so ironic about that statement is that this isn’t new information that would definitively tip the scale. It’s just that now, all of a sudden, it’s not being dismissed off-hand. The weight of the evidence has, for over a year now, strongly leaned in the direction of SARS-CoV-2 being a lab creation that somehow escaped.
Now, mainstream media are scrambling to save face, and it’s rather hilarious to watch them trying to justify their previous refusal to do what journalists and reporters are expected to do: Report the facts without interjecting their own personal opinions and biases.
Of course, you’d be hard-pressed to find an unbiased news outlet these days — it’s all tightly and centrally controlled, as detailed in “Reuters and BBC Caught Taking Money for Propaganda Campaign” — so in all likelihood, the only reason mainstream media are now starting to report on the lab leak theory is because of the success of alternative media.
Their viewers simply aren’t buying what they’re selling anymore, so they have no choice but to acknowledge what a majority of people already know, or lose what little credibility they have left.
The Case for the Lab-Leak Theory
In the video above, Freddie Sayers interviews3 Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, about the two primary origin theories. Wade recently published a widely-read article4detailing the evidence supporting the lab-leak and natural-origin theories.
As reported by Wade in “Origin of COVID — Following the Clues: Did People or Nature Open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?”5 if we are ever to solve the mystery of where this novel virus came from, we must be willing to actually follow the science, as “it offers the only sure thread through the maze.”
“It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory,” Wade writes.6“Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction.”
In summary, the preponderance of clues leans toward SARS-CoV-2 originating in a lab, most likely the WIV, and having undergone some sort of manipulation to encourage infectiousness and pathology in humans.
As just one example, there’s research dating as far back as 1992 detailing how inserting a furin cleavage site right where we find it in SARS-CoV-2 is a “sure way to make a virus deadlier.” One of 11 such studies was written by Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the WIV.
The arguments laid out in support of natural origin theories, meanwhile, are grounded in inconclusive speculations that require you to throw out scientifically possible scenarios. From a scientific standpoint, doing so is ill advised.
“It seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence,” Wade writes.7
Fauci Pulls 180 Turnabout on Gain-of-Function Backing Too
Getting back to Fauci, he’s also now denying ever having funded gain-of-function research, even though there’s irrefutable evidence that he did. As reported by the National Review:8
“Dr. Roger Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and biosafety expert, is contesting … Fauci’s testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on [May 11, 2021].
Dr. Fauci’s claim — made during an exchange with Senator Rand Paul9 — that ‘the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’ is ‘demonstrably false,’ according to Ebright …
A research article written by WIV scientists, ‘Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus,’10 for example, qualifies as gain-of-function and was clearly a product of NIH-funding.
Ebright insists that the research can be classified as gain-of-function under a number of different definitions, including those found in two pieces of Department of Health and Human Services guidance on the subject.
The firstdetails the Obama administration’s 2014 decision to halt domestic gain-of-function research, which it defines as that which ‘may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.’11
The second — drafted in 2017 as Fauci was pushing to renew government funding for gain-of-function research — provides a definition of what are called ‘enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)’ or those pathogens ‘resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.’12
Ebright claims that the work being conducted at the WIV, using NIH funds originally granted to Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, ‘epitomizes’ gain-of-function research under the definition HHS provided in its guidance, and is the exact kind of research that led the Obama administration to conclude that gain-of-function was too dangerous to continue domestically.”
Fauci and NIH Try to Redefine ‘Gain-of-Function’
Essentially, Fauci is now trying to redefine what “gain-of-function” actually is. However, as explained above, the type of research Fauci has been funding at the WIV has always and repeatedly been referred to as gain-of-function.
It appears as though Fauci and National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins are preemptively trying to position themselves in such a way as to distance themselves from future blame, should the lab leak theory be proven true. In a May 19, 2021, statement, Collins backed Fauci’s convoluted word-wrangling and attempts at rewriting the definition of gain-of-function research, stating:13
“Based on outbreaks of coronaviruses caused by animal to human transmissions such as … SARS and … MERS, NIH and the NIAID have for many years supported grants to learn more about viruses lurking in bats and other mammals that have the potential to spill over to humans and cause widespread disease.
However, neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
In other words, both admit they funded research at the WIV and other places, but they insist none of it was gain-of-function specifically, so even if the COVID-19 pandemic turns out to have been the result of a lab leak at the WIV, Fauci and Collins had no part in the creation of that particular virus — or any other virus capable of causing a deadly pandemic — and should not be on the list of people to be held accountable.
Wordplay Won’t Save Fauci
Considering what the NIH has stated previously, and what we already know about the coronavirus research the NIAID/NIH funded, Collins’ statement appears to be a desperate lie, issued to prop up Fauci’s indefensible stance that no gain-of-function research was ever funded.
For example, as reported by the National Review,14 we know that the WIV received NIAID/NIH funding to create novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses capable of infecting both human cells and lab animals. “Chimeric viruses” refers to artificial man-made viruses, hybrid organisms created through the joining of two or more different organisms. This is precisely what gain-of-function research is all about. So, as noted by the National Review:15
“Fauci appears to have been, at best, mistaken while sparring with Senator Paul … At worst, he was playing tenuous word games meant to deceive.”
Of course, Fauci and Collins have good reason to develop sudden amnesia when it comes to the definition of complicated words like “gain-of-function.” While statistics have been massively manipulated to overcount COVID-19 deaths, there’s no doubt that this pandemic has been one of the most destructive in modern history.
Sure, we can blame global and regional leaders for playing along with the globalist game to use a hyped-up pandemic to justify a Great Reset of our global economic and societal systems, but without doubt, the creators of this virus will not get off scot-free, and neither will those who enabled its creation. And those people may well include Fauci and Collins at the NIAID and NIH.
At the end of it all, should SARS-CoV-2 be deemed a man-made bioweapon, even if its release was a total accident, which appears to be the case, a number of individuals stand to lose their careers, and perhaps their freedom, as the punishment for having anything to do with the creation of biological weapons includes both potentially hefty fines and lengthy jail sentences. The Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 states:16
“Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon, or knowingly assists a foreign state or any organization to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both.”
Gain-of-Function Research Is the Real Threat
I believe research cooperation and sharing between nations is such that blame will ultimately be shared by multiple parties. The key issue, really, if SARS-CoV-2 did in fact come from a lab, is how do we prevent another lab escape? And, if it turns out to have been a genetically manipulated virus, do we allow gain-of-function research — based on the conventionally accepted definition — to continue?
I believe the answer is to ban research that involves making pathogens more dangerous to humans. As it stands, the same establishment that is drumming up panic by warning of the emergence of new, more infectious and dangerous variants is also busy creating them.
World leaders need to realize that funding gain-of-function research is the real threat here, and take action accordingly to forestall another pandemic. As long as researchers are allowed to mutate and create synthetic pathogens, they’re creating the very risk they claim they’re trying to prevent. We got off easy this time, all things considered. The next time, we may not be as lucky.
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U.S. Army Europe and Africa announced today that during the Swift Response 21 airborne military exercise last month along what is now called NATO’s Eastern Flank – from the Baltic to the Black Sea – troops with the 173rd Airborne Brigade ran a training exercise to practice seizing a decommissioned air base in Bulgaria that went terribly awry. In landing and attacking bunkers and other structures at the site in Cheshnegirovo the American paratroopers also assaulted a building that housed a private business with employees on site.
Last month’s Swift Response war games included the participation of 7,000 airborne troops from the U.S. and ten of its NATO allies. It concentrated on “joint forcible entry exercises” in Estonia, Bulgaria and Romania. It began with 800 82nd Airborne paratroopers engaging in a large-scale, night-time jump over central Estonia, linking up with other American paratroopers already in Lithuania, and from there moved to the Black Sea. The entire purpose of the drills was to confront Russia and its allies (e.g, Belarus and Abkhazia) in the Baltic and Black Sea regions.
On May 10 hundreds of paratroopers from the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania parachuted into Romania. The nation’s Mihail Kogalniceanu Airbase was the headquarters for the entire Swift Response exercise this year. The base was employed by the U.S. for the 2003 war against Iraq even before Romania joined NATO in 2004. Since then it has been used for the U.S.’s and NATO’s war in Afghanistan. In 2009 the Pentagon established a Permanent Forward Operating Site there. Since 2018 the British Royal Air Force has based four Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft at the air base as part of NATO’s Enhanced Air Policing mission targeting Russia in the Black Sea.
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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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The fear of killer robots is as old as robots themselves — thinkers like Elon Musk and Sam Harrishave long argued that AI poses a serious threat to human civilization. But if you’re at all panicked about AI or robots, a new UN report may add to your anxiety, as it explains that a drone attacked (and possibly killed) soldiers all on its own.
It’s thought to be the first recorded case of an autonomous drone attack.
The incident occurred in March 2020 in Libya, a country that was in the midst of a civil war. Turkey, a key combatant in the war, deployed the STM Kargu-2 drone, according to the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya report. The drone, which the report refers to as a “lethal autonomous weapon,” then found and attacked Libya’s Haftar Armed Forces.
Logistics convoys and retreating forces were “hunted down and remotely engaged by lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2,” the report reads. “The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability.”
The creator of the Kargu drone, STM, says the device “can be effectively used against static or moving targets through its indigenous and real-time image processing capabilities and machine learning algorithms embedded on the platform.”
The UN in 2018 attempted to begin working on a treaty that would ban autonomous weapons, but the move was blocked by both the US and Russia, Politico reported at the time. Human Rights Watch has been campaigning against such weapons since 2013, and has backed a campaign to stop their spread.
“Killer robot proliferation has begun,” tweeted Max Tegman, a machine learning researcher at MIT. “It’s not in humanity’s best interest that cheap slaughterbots are mass-produced and widely available to anyone with an axe to grind. It’s high time for world leaders to step up and take a stand.”
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Featured image: The STM Kargu-2, which its manufacturer describes as a “rotary wing attack drone loitering munition system.” (Source: STM)
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On April 20, The Lancet published an analysis on the efficacy of the Covid injections. This analysis supports conclusions made in my earlier analysis. That being: the Covid injections are NOT “95% efficacious”.
Beyond the analysts’ tepid language couched in scientific jargon, the graphic that appears is quite startling. As is often true, the devil lies in the details, in this case, the difference between relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction. (For elaboration on these metrics, please see my article linked above).
Relative risk reduction (RRR) and Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNV) for leading Covid “vaccines” (Source: The Lancet)
From the “absolute risk reduction” you can calculate the “Number Needed to Vaccinate” which signifies approximately how many people must be injected to hypothetically benefit just one person. It is a metric every person needs to understand before taking the Covid injection.
Below are the Numbers Needed to Vaccinate (NNV) metrics for Covid “vaccines”:
Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNV) = 1/Absolute Risk Reduction
For Pfizer, this number is estimated at 119. This means 119 people must be injected for it to reduce a “Covid” case in one person. Therefore, 118 of those people incurred (potential) risk with no benefit whatsoever.
Some estimates are even higher, according to The Lancet, data from the Pfizer rollout in Israel suggests an NNV of 217!
These NNV figures are likely underestimates, as there is significant obfuscation with trial data. The actual efficacy is likely even less than 1% as some of the injected groups who became ill with “Covid like symptoms” were fallaciously labelled as side effects, rather than potential breakthrough infections.
Also unaccounted for, in the lucky 0.84% of people who hypothetically benefitted from the “vaccine”, are the side effects. Efficacy metrics do not include adverse events from the injections. In other words, safety and efficacy are entirely different considerations. For example, even an efficacious intervention may not be safe if the risk of harm is high.
This “vaccine” experiment is only a few months old, yet the passive VAERS reporting system in the USA has accounted for deaths following Covid injections as already being greater than the previous 21 years of deaths from all other vaccines combined, as well as over 227,000 other non-fatal adverse events. What’s more, it is reported that the VAERS system records only approximately 1% of actual adverse events.
Many alarmed researchers and doctors around the world have called to halt this experiment, citing a growing body of unusual side effects and associated deaths. For Covid injections, it must be clear that the complete safety profile is unknown.
Furthermore, the “reduction” is not a decrease in deaths and hospitalizations, rather a reduction of symptoms. The majority of these supposedly alleviated symptoms being of a generic cold and flu variety. To quote the Lancet study:
These considerations on efficacy and effectiveness are based on studies measuring prevention of mild to moderate COVID-19 infection; they were not designed to conclude on prevention of hospitalization, severe disease, or death, or on prevention of infection and transmission potential.”
On top of that, these mild “cases” which are being “prevented” are determined by the unvalidated PCR assays.
As mentioned, the efficacy is based on reduction in symptoms, and even then possibly only for a limited period of time. Already it has been announced that boosters are necessary, perhaps annually or twice a year.
This paltry efficacy is not unusual for the vaccine regime that is justified on the basis of benefitting the overall population. However, in this case, the argument for benefitting the overall population cannot apply, as no definite evidence for a reduction in transmission has been povided.
In addition, these injections are still experimental. Phase 3 trials are ongoing and this synthetic gene “therapy” technology has never been dispensed before. Every day, new information is coming to the fore, such as this animal pharmacokinetic study which shows that the injected vectors ended up in different organs, especially ovaries and spleen. Canadian researcher, Dr. Bridle, shared his concerns on recent findings of biodistribution of lipid nano-particles and the spike proteins in injected people.
Tragically, panic-stricken masses are deluded with the propaganda that these injections are 95% efficacious. This is a useless metric based on relative risk reduction. The absolute risk reduction is around 1%. Millions are unwittingly participating in an unprecedented experiment. The Nuremberg Code and principles of Informed Consent are violated daily.
It is advisable to print out the above table and request one’s vaccinator to explain this metric. To properly exercise ethical and legal informed consent, every trial participant must understand the potential benefits and risks from the injections, the potential risks from Covid (based on age and health status) as well as the efficacious treatment alternatives for those who may need them.
Would you feel comfortable suited up with a parachute that worked about 1% of the time? Would you then say that it is 95% effective because that particular parachute worked 95% better than the competition?
A product with very questionable, miniscule efficacy and many concerns regarding potential severe short and long-term side effects (including deaths), might be more accurately classified as a poison.
A poison can be described as ‘any substance which when introduced into or absorbed by a living organism, destroys life or injures health’. The adverse effects may take many forms from immediate death to subtle changes not realized until months or years later.” Definition of “poison”, according the Royal Society of Chemistry
One can hope that as this nefarious experiment unfolds, data and rationality will trump fear, hysteria, and the etiolated minds of the masses. May Justice prevail and these crimes against humanity be brought to account.
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Sadaf Gilani MD is a Canadian entrepreneur and activist.
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Since Joe Biden’s ascendency into the White House on January 20, he has emphasised that the U.S.’ foreign policy will be guided by human rights, even if it means calling out traditional allies. However, Washington is completely silent about the repression of anti-government demonstrations in Colombia, its closest ally in Latin America.
At the end of the May 28 meeting with his Colombian counterpart Marta Lucía Ramírez, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken even expressed “his concern and condolences for the loss of life during recent protests in Colombia and reiterated the unquestionable right of citizens to protest peacefully.” However, on the same day as Blinken’s statement, 13 deaths and hundreds of injuries were reported in Cali, the third city of Colombia. This occurred following demonstrations which degenerated into clashes between protestors and security forces.
People with bulletproof vests and guns shot at demonstrators in front of the police. The situation degenerated so badly that the military arrived to aid police to suppress protests against a new tax reform which will send many in the Middle Class into poverty. According to an official count, there are at least 59 deaths, including two police officers. There are also at least 2,300 injuries and 123 missing since protests began at the end of April. Human Rights Watch reported there were a total of 63 deaths as of May 27.
Yet, the U.S. is highly unlikely to denounce Colombia for this gross treatment of civilian protestors.
Colombia is Washington’s main ally in Latin America. For this reason, it is unsurprising that Colombia is one of the countries with the most security and military cooperation agreements with the U.S. These agreements mostly revolve around drug trafficking, civil conflict and destabilising neighbouring Venezuela.
In addition, Colombia is the only Latin American country to gain recognition as a global partner of NATO. This was achieved in 2018 only because of Washington’s insistence. This agreement allows Colombia to associate with the activities of the Atlanticist alliance, including maritime security and countering terrorism and organized crime. In exchange, Colombia receives military material and equipment from the U.S.
This agreement does not constitute a blank check for decisionmakers in the Colombian capital of Bogota. The bilateral relationship between Washington and Bogota proved to be more fluid under the aegis of Donald Trump, who at the time was being influenced by warhawk John Bolton, his National Security Adviser. However, as Colombia’s right-wing President Iván Duque is not completely ideologically aligned with Biden, many speculate that Washington wants to maintain some distance with the current administration in Bogota.
In order to take the opposite view of his predecessor Trump, who successfully used conservative and quasi-patriotic rhetoric to ascend to power, Biden wants to restore the image of American leadership internationally that was destroyed over the past two decades, particularly following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, through terrorizing journalists and whistleblowers like Julian Assange. Such an approach involves the promotion of human rights and reviving the idea of Western-styled democracy against so-called authoritarianism – hence Biden’s willingness to take any opportunity to demonize Russia and China as they do not conform to Western liberal standards.
Under this banner of human rights, the Biden administration raised its tone vis-à-vis China, with Blinken accusing the Asian Giant of genocide against the Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang province. In addition, Blinken also attempts to incriminate Moscow over the Navalny affair. The American President even promised to discuss human rights issues during his scheduled June 16 meeting in Geneva with his Russian counterpart Putin.
The unrest and fierce crackdown that ensued in Colombia came at the worse time for U.S. diplomacy as it does not correspond to the global image that Biden is attempting to project. The U.S. is faced with a dilemma as it appears that the fundamentals of bilateral relations in Biden’s view, based around human rights, is overlooked in the case of Colombia.
It is likely that Washington is discreetly encouraging Duque to settle the crisis without additional repressive excess. That being said, even if Colombia is to continue its violent repression against protestors, it is unlikely to deeply affect its relationship with the U.S. as the South American country is now an indispensable ally and enacts all of Washington’s demands, even to the detriment of its relations with its neighbours, like Venezuela.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan – a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus – was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with China.
Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.
Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.
For many years, scientists at labs like Wuhan’s have conducted Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses. They have modified naturally occurring infective agents – often found in animals such as bats – to try to predict the worst-case scenarios for how viruses, especially coronaviruses, might evolve. The claimed purpose has been to ensure humankind gets a head start on any new pandemic, preparing strategies and vaccines in advance to cope.
Viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan’s many times before. And there are now reports, rejected by China, that several staff at Wuhan got sick in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 exploded on to the world stage. Did a human-manipulated novel coronavirus escape from the lab and spread around the world?
No interest in truth
Here we get to the tricky bit. Because nobody in a position to answer that question appears to have any interest in finding out the truth – or at least, they have no interest in the rest of us learning the truth. Not China. Not US policy-makers. Not the World Health Organisation. And not the corporate media.
The only thing we can state with certainty is this: our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.
We now know that we were misdirected a year ago into believing that a lab leak was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia – when it was very obviously neither. And we should understand now, even though the story has switched 180 degrees, that we are still being misdirected. Nothing that the US administration or the corporate media have told us, or are now telling us, about the origins of the virus can be trusted.
No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact, quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.
Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.
Virus experiments
Last year, the safest story for the western political and scientific establishments to promote was the idea that a wild animal like a bat introduced Covid-19 to the human population. In other words, no one was to blame. The alternative was to hold China responsible for a lab leak, as Trump tried to do.
But there was a very good reason why most US policy-makers did not want to go down that latter path. And it had little to do with a concern either to refrain from conspiracy theories or to avoid provoking unnecessary tension with a nuclear-armed China.
Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out in May, in an in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically strong, citing some of the world’s leading virologists.
But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for US elites: just before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with the US scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus experiments – what is known, in scientific parlance, as “gain-of-function” research.
Gain-of-function experiments had been paused during the second Obama administration, precisely because of concerns about the danger of a human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under Trump, US officials restarted the programme and were reportedly funding work at the Wuhan lab through a US-based medical organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance.
The US official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr Anthony Fauci – yes, the US President’s chief medical adviser and the official widely credited with curbing Trump’s reckless approach to the pandemic. If the lab leak theory is right, the pandemic’s saviour in the US might actually have been one of its chief instigators.
And to top it off, senior officials at the WHO have been implicated too, for being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like EcoHealth.
Colluding in deceit
This seems to be the real reason why the lab-leak theory was quashed so aggressively last year by western political, medical and media establishments without any effort to seriously assess the claims or investigate them. Not out of any sense of obligation towards the truth or concern about racist incitement against the Chinese. It was done out of naked self-interest.
If anyone doubts that, consider this: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the US, to investigate the lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO’s spokesman on the matter. To say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the problem.
He, of course, has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak and, perhaps not surprisingly, continues to direct the media’s attention to Wuhan’s wet market.
The extent to which major media are not only negligently failing to cover the story with any seriousness but are also actively continuing to collude in deceiving their audiences – and sweeping these egregious conflicts of interest under the carpet – is illustrated by this article published by the BBC at the weekend.
The BBC ostensibly weighs the two possible narratives about Covid’s origins. But it mentions none of Wade’s explosive findings, including the potential US role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Both Fauci and Daszak are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures who have the most to lose from a serious investigation into what happened at the Wuhan lab.
Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests.
Media blackout
So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public with the possibility of a China lab leak?
The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade’s article, in particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated with Trump or a “conspiracy theory” have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out of the bag.
Or as the Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, “the driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had dismissed the theory”.
The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letterfrom 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories were equally “viable” and that the WHO’s earlier investigation had not given “balanced consideration” to both – a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.
And so we are now being subjected by the Biden administration to Plan B: damage limitation. The US President, the medical establishment and the corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak, but are excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate Fauci and the US policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred. (Meanwhile, Fauci and his supporters have been preemptively muddying the waters by trying to redefine what constitutes gain-of-function.)
The growing clamour on social media, much of it provoked by Wade’s research, is one of the main reasons Biden and the media are being forced to address the lab-leak theory, having previously discounted it. And yet Wade’s revelations of US and WHO involvement in gain-of-function research, and of potential complicity in a lab leak and a subsequent cover-up are missing from almost all corporate media reporting.
Evasion tactic
Biden’s so-called investigation is intended to be cynically evasive. It makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it is nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media that might otherwise be expected to dig out the truth themselves. The narrow focus on the lab leak theory displaces the wider story of potential US and WHO complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay while the investigation is carried out readily exploits Covid news fatigue as western publics start to emerge from under the pandemic’s shadow.
The Biden administration will hope the public’s interest rapidly wanes on this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In any case, the investigation’s findings will most likely be inconclusive, to avoid a war of duelling narratives with China.
But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese, the Biden administration knows that the western corporate media will loyally report its accusations against China as fact – just as they loyally blacked out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the past few days.
Illusion of truth
The Wuhan story provides a chance to understand more deeply how elites wield their narrative power over us – to control what we think, or are even capable of thinking. They can twist any narrative to their advantage.
In the calculations of western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the western system – despite all its flaws – is the best possible one for arranging our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes rocky, path towards progress.
The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly lively – but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive – debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.
The media’s task is to manage smoothly the transition from last year’s unquestionable certainty – that the pandemic had an animal origin – to a more hesitant, confusing picture that includes the possibility of a human, but very much Chinese, role in the virus’ emergence. It is to ensure we do not feel any cognitive dissonance as a theory we were assured was impossible by the experts only weeks ago suddenly becomes only too possible, even though nothing has materially changed in the meantime.
What is essential for the political, media and scientific establishments is that we do not ponder deeper questions:
How is it that the supposedly sceptical, disputatious, raucous media once again spoke mostly with a single and uncritical voice on such a vitally important matter – in this case, for more than a year on the origins of Covid?
Why was that media consensus broken not by a large, well-resourced media organisation, but by a lone, former science writer working independently and publishing in a relatively obscure science magazine?
Why did the many leading scientists who are now ready to question the imposed narrative of Covid’s animal origin remain silent for so long about the apparently equally credible hypothesis of a lab leak?
And most importantly, why should we believe that the political, media and scientific establishments have on this occasion any interest in telling us the truth, or in ensuring our welfare, after they have been shown to have repeatedly lied or stayed silent on even graver matters and over much longer periods, such as about the various ecological catastrophes that have been looming since the 1950s?
Class interests
Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests – or those of their class or professional group.
Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community’s failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.
Similarly, journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media corporations that want to maintain the public’s faith in the “benevolence” of the power structures that reward billionaires for their supposed genius and ability to improve the lives of the rest of us. The corporate media has no interest in encouraging the public to question whether it can really operate as a neutral conduit that channels information to ordinary people rather than preserves a status quo that benefits a tiny wealth-elite.
And politicians have every reason to continue to persuade us that they represent our interests rather than the billionaire donors whose corporations and media outlets can so easily destroy their careers.
What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern for truth and transparency.
Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.
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Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
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A Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor blasted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for ignoring crucial data on natural immunity from COVID-19, saying that “probably half the country has natural immunity from prior infection. This is the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history.”
Dr. Marty Makary, also a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, made the remarks during an interview on the Vince Coglianese Show, where he excoriated public health officials for denying the reality of a natural immunity to COVID-19, acquired through natural infection.
Makary explained that the CDC’s numbers on those who have contracted a COVID-19 infection are artificially low, giving a false impression of the spread of the virus and the herd immunity that has already arisen therefrom.
Referencing the roughly 30 million COVID infections cited on the CDC’s dedicated COVID-tracker webpage, Makary said “those are just the people who are confirmed to have had the infection. It’s probably five times higher, about 150 million people.”
Makary spoke positively of the broad spread of the virus in relation to immunity: “When you get natural immunity from a severe COVID infection, you have natural immunity that’s probably lifelong.”
Various studies have shown this to be the case, Makary noted, paying attention to data from Denmark, where only “six-tenths of one percent of people who had COVID ever get the infection a second time.” “And that’s when they’re around it (COVID) all the time, that’s in healthcare workers,” he added.
“Studies out of California prove that and show 38 percent of Californians had antibodies back in March before the vaccine was really kicking off. About half the country has natural immunity.”
And this “natural immunity works,” Makary continued, adding that “there is more data on natural immunity than there is on vaccinated immunity, because natural immunity has been around longer.”
Though the virus has been around “for 15 months,” Makary explained that “in the U.S. we’re not seeing re-infections.” Additionally, he recognized that Italy too, once the epicenter of the crisis, is “not seeing re-infections.”
“When they do happen, they’re rare and their symptoms are mild or they’re asymptomatic. You get breakthrough infections with natural immunity, and you get breakthrough infections with vaccine immunity. They’re mild and often asymptomatic,” he explained.
Makary voiced dismay at CDC and White House officials who routinely push for near-universal vaccination in spite of the data on natural immunity. In fact, governing bodies are guilty of “demonizing” people who decide not to get vaccinated, even when they have recovered from a COVID infection and have the antibodies, forming a natural immunity.
So incensed was the professor by the intellectual negligence displayed by public health officials that he actively discouraged recourse to their advice on COVID-related matters: “I never thought I’d say this, but please ignore the CDC guidance.”
“One of the biggest failures of our current medical leadership is ignoring natural immunity,” he said. “They’ve given out no guidance to those who’ve had the infection, they just tell them to get the vaccine as if they don’t already have antibodies and they demonize them when they’re hesitant.”
He added that the medical establishment “don’t know what to do with those who already had the infection,” leading them to simply suggest taking one of the experimental vaccines.
But the vaccines themselves are no guarantee of protection against the very virus they were created to shield from. In addition to myriad health problems arising from the currently experimental COVID vaccines, including life-threatening blood clots, the jabs have not proved adequate in preventing infection after being “fully vaccinated.”
Reports in April confirmed almost 6,000 so-called “breakthrough cases” of COVID-19 in the United States – that is, contraction of the virus two weeks after receiving a full vaccine regimen – 74 of whom died.
In fact, as more breakthrough cases were beginning to be reported, the CDC made the decision to alter how it tests and records COVID infection in vaccinated individuals, raising the COVID test-positive bar higher than that of tests from unvaccinated individuals. The CDC also announced that it would stop reporting weekly COVID breakthrough infections unless they result in hospitalization or death, subsequently suppressing the figures.
Although breakthrough cases continue to rise, Makary suggested that taking just one shot of a two-shot-recommended vaccine is sufficient for protection against COVID-19. He did note, however, that “when you get the second dose it can knock you down,” and that “getting the infection is like getting a dose.”
The medical doctor soon turned his attention to destigmatizing the decision not to vaccinate, saying that such a choice should be considered “reasonable too,” especially given that “we have fewer daily COVID cases now than we have daily flu cases in a mild flu year.”
“We’ve got to start respecting people who choose not to get the vaccine instead of demonizing them,” he said.
Makary blamed the Biden administration, as well as the CDC, for misleading the nation regarding the need for high vaccine uptake, thus hindering the perceived progress toward herd immunity. “They ignore natural immunity which changes the path to herd immunity,” he said.
“When you ignore the fact that half of the unvaccinated have natural immunity, the path to get to 85 percent immunity in the population is much more difficult, it’s much more dire. If you ignore natural immunity, the only way to get to 85 percent population immunity is to have mandates for the vaccine, and require kids to get them, and convert those who are hesitant, and demonize them. That is why you are hearing a totally different story from public health officials who ignore natural immunity.”
“Right now in America, 62 percent of all adults have been vaccinated and half of the unvaccinated have natural immunity. That means 80 to 85 percent of adults in America today have immunity. The virus can’t jump around … when 8.5 out of 10 people are protected, they’re barriered.”
“That’s called herd immunity and we are there.”
“This is the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history. They’re taking talking points from the WH and it’s a disgrace,” he said.
On account of the neglect of natural immunity, Makary said the government has effectively “prolonged the pandemic,” prompting him to encourage Americans who are “unvaccinated and have not had the infection … to be careful and evaluate your own individual risk.” Otherwise, “please ignore the CDC. Live a normal life.”
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Poland’s counterproductive foreign policy of depending so much on former US President Trump’s re-election, ruining relations with Russia, and openly opposing Moscow’s Nord Stream II gas pipeline with Germany are responsible for its present predicament wherein the leading Central European country now finds itself in an extremely disadvantageous geopolitical position.
No country is more upset than Poland is at US President Biden for passively allowing the Nord Stream II gas pipeline to finish construction with only the most superficial of sanctions. Its representatives have described the project as both a threat to energy security and also most recently “a gas bomb placed under European integration” due to Warsaw’s belief that Moscow will capriciously cut off the tap to its Western customers. The Eurasian Great Power would never do such a thing since it’s arguably just as dependent on its customers as they are on Russia, if not more considering its disproportionate budgetary dependence on such energy sales, which Poland is well aware of.
What worries Warsaw the most, however, is that Moscow and Berlin might “collude” with one another to jointly “manage” the geostrategic Central & Eastern European (CEE) space across which Poland envisions itself becoming the regional leader through the “Three Seas Initiative” (3SI) that it leads as well as that structure’s “Lublin Triangle” core. Poland had hitherto based almost the entirety of its recent foreign policy on former US President Trump’s re-election due to his desire to stop Nord Stream II in order to compel Europe to purchase more expensive US LNG. It also appreciated his support of the 3SI, which irked Germany because Berlin is adamantly against Poland flexing its geopolitical muscles in CEE.
In pursuit of its goal to stop Poland from regaining its historical regional hegemonic status and perhaps even expanding it beyond its prior “sphere of influence”, Germany has been waging an ongoing Hybrid War on Poland intended to overthrow its conservative-nationalist government. The Biden Administration also seems unsupportive of Poland’s current authorities at the very least, if not silently hostile even if only for simple ideological reasons. Nevertheless, both Germany and the US appreciate Poland for playing a leading role in the West’s Hybrid War on neighboring Belarus, which advances very important anti-Russian foreign policy goals. Warsaw isn’t just doing this to please them, but as part of its hegemonic ambitions through the 3SI.
The problem for Poland is that it already burned all of its bridges with Russia so it’s incapable of realistically balancing with Moscow against an increasingly hostile Berlin and perhaps soon even an equally hostile Washington, the latter two of which behave as “frenemies” by being “cordial” for the most part in public but extremely pernicious behind the scenes. Germany’s Hybrid War on Poland through its support of the liberal-globalist Color Revolution opposition pairs perfectly with what Poland regards as the US’ so-called “betrayal” through Nord Stream II and Warsaw’s suspicions of Washington’s grand strategic motives ahead of the upcoming Putin-Biden Summit to put Poland in a very disadvantageous position.
The country’s “negative nationalism”, which builds a large part of its contemporary nationalism solely around its differences (whether real, imagined, or exaggerated) with Russia, blinded it to the strategic shortcomings of its prior policies and resulted in Poland counterproductively burning its bridges with Moscow with passion. Poland recently enhanced its military cooperation with Turkey through a combat drone deal which might in the future provide some pragmatic balancing options considering Ankara’s problems with both Berlin and Washington, but the West Asian country could never repair Warsaw’s balancing act like a rapprochement with Moscow could. That latter option is unlikely though for the earlier mentioned reasons, but it remains the most optimal.
Should Poland ever be able to muster up the political will to stop meddling in Russia’s “Near Abroad” (Belarus & Ukraine), then a breakthrough might in theory be achieved, but this is regrettably unrealistic to expect from the country since it’s convinced itself that its national security is dependent on countering Russian-friendly forces in those two neighboring nations between them. Poland as a state is simply too psychologically traumatized by its history with Russia to ever trust Moscow’s strategic intentions, which was exploited by Germany and the US in order to take advantage of this leading CEE country without its leaders even realizing it until it was too late. This leads to the worst-case scenario from its perspective.
Poland now might have to confront the prospect of being compelled by circumstances to pragmatically deal with Russia if Biden makes progress on advancing a so-called “New Detente” during his upcoming summit with President Putin. Moscow would hold more cards in this case than Warsaw could since the latter couldn’t rely as much on Berlin or Washington to support its regionally destabilizing Russophobic foreign policy to the same extent as before considering the perceived consequences of Nord Stream II’s impending completion. At the same time though, Germany and the US might continue pushing Poland to meddle in Russia’s “Near Abroad”, hoping that if anything goes wrong, then Warsaw can just take the fall for it instead of them.
To put it bluntly, Poland is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t, and this dilemma vexes its strategists. They riskily bet everything on former US President Trump’s re-election, only to have their entire grand strategy suddenly sabotaged by Biden. They’re too deep into their regional Russophobic destabilization operations in Belarus and Ukraine to pull back now, at least without “losing face” among their people, yet even a pragmatic recalibration of their politics could be seen by their citizens as having been done under so-called “geopolitical duress”, which might reduce the ruling party’s domestic support among certain nationalist forces. Although the ruling party is still prettypopular, its coalition might crack in the future under such foreign pressures.
These considerations make it very difficult to suggest the optimal course of action for Poland since there might be some heavy costs for it either way. All told, though, it would objectively be best if Poland began exploring the options for an incipient rapprochement with Russia even if only for pragmatism’s sake, perhaps seeking solely to agree to so-called “rules of engagement” for “managing” their competition in Belarus and Ukraine. In any case, Poland should seriously consider taking the initiative in independently engaging Russia without Germany or the US’ approval since neither of those two sought Poland’s in doing what they recently did. If Poland aspires for regional leadership, then it’s about time that it starts acting more like a leader and less like a follower.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The left has said it for a year and last week Cummings confirmed it: the government’s handling of the pandemic has consistently prioritised private profit over public health. Now we must hold them to account for their crimes against us, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
Last week’s explosive testimony by Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to the Prime Minister, revealed, if true, the extent of the government’s deadly handling of the pandemic.
The most shocking admission was that, due to government negligence, unpreparedness and sheer arrogance, many thousands of people died unnecessarily because of decisions made in Number 10.
Cummings was frank in his assessment: “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.” If we trust a word of it, there is no need to wait for an independent inquiry, the Prime Minister must urgently apologise for this deadly dereliction of duty to everyone who lost a loved one due to his government’s carelessness. Then he must resign.
It was also unearthed that, contrary to government mistruths at the time, there were significant PPE shortages with British stocks continually being sent abroad even as the pandemic accelerated.
Cummings said that Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock “should’ve been fired for at least 15-20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions.”
Perhaps the most severe and deadly of these “lies” was that, despite persistent government promises, there was no protective ring around care homes in the early stages of the pandemic.
As Cummings put it, “infected people went back to care homes and then infected people and it spread like wildfire inside the care homes. Also the care homes didn’t have the PPE to deal with it and they didn’t have the testing for the staff, so you had this cascading series of crises — like a domino effect, rippling through the system.”
It would be easy to write Cummings off as a self-confessed liar giving evidence to Parliament about a Prime Minister whom he branded a liar and further whom Cummings indicates was surrounded by liars in Parliament. Or perhaps the Conservatives in power have run out of opposition or people to fight with so they are eating themselves.
However, we know the government’s lack of preparedness meant that NHS staff were fatally exposed. Tragically, more than 500 NHS and care workers have died after exposure to Covid-19, amid a shameful failure to provide them with suitable PPE.
This underlines the selflessness of those who dedicate their lives and even put themselves at risk to help others.
Any reasonable government would ensure that those who have contributed most to our national effort receive a fair compensation for their heroic efforts, including a 15 per cent pay rise. Yet sadly, we do not have a reasonable government.
The details of Boris Johnson’s negligence and sheer carelessness are sickening.
Cummings confirmed that herd immunity was the initial policy of the government, which they knew would have cost at least 220,000 lives. Yet, the government denied that this was ever the policy, despite being on record saying exactly that, and got away with it due to our compliant media class.
Indeed, it should not have taken a disgruntled government employee to expose this government’s deadly handling of the coronavirus. This was a damning indictment of our media ecosystem and reveals the cosy relationship between government and client journalists, which Cummings himself exposed.
Johnson’s personal culpability and ineptitude was laid bare in the testimony. Johnson was said to regard Covid as “the new swine flu” at the start of 2020 and held a complete disregard for widespread loss of life — keen as he was to prioritise the economy over public health.
In a clear bid to grab our attention and headlines, Cummings described how officials had talked of getting the chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, to inject Johnson live on TV with the coronavirus “so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of.”
This graphic description is only a few steps removed from Donald Trump’s encouraging people to inject bleach to combat the virus and reveals how utterly unfit for office our Prime Minister is.
What this tells us is that the government’s mishandling throughout the Covid pandemic amounts to what Friedrich Engels termed “social murder.”
Engels used this to describe conditions in Manchester in 1845, in which the ruling class places masses of workers “in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death.”
There is no other way to describe the government’s handling of the pandemic. It follows that everyone at the top of government associated with this utter calamity must resign.
Every community has been hit by this crisis, but it has especially impacted the poor, vulnerable and the oppressed including those in lower-paid work and who cannot work from home. African, Asian and minority ethnic communities, the disabled and those in poorer housing are among those hit hardest by this crisis.
My own community of Leicester East has been under lockdown or enhanced restrictions longer than virtually any other area. As one of the most diverse areas of Britain, Leicester is more deeply affected by the disproportionate impact of the virus.
A leaked government report found that “existing socioeconomic inequality” had left African, Asian and minority ethnic communities at greater exposure to Covid-19 as they were more likely to live in cramped and multigenerational housing in deprived areas and hold public-facing jobs.
Workers were denied proper sick pay and were forced to work, even whilst ill, in conditions which were not Covid-secure otherwise, they would suffer a loss of pay. Such were the conditions of wage exploitation in Leicester’s garment Industry.
The disproportionate suffering of areas like Leicester is a damning indictment of the government’s failure to prioritise public health and implement a Zero-Covid strategy to suppress the virus. Yet the government continues to make the same mistakes over and over again.
It should have been made simple: if you get contacted by test and trace, you must be provided with the material means to isolate. It was estimated that, at the peak of the virus, at least 20,000 people a day were not complying fully with isolation orders, allowing the virus to spread.
This is not due to moral failures on behalf of the public — but because it is impossible for people living on poverty wages to comply with guidance on self-isolation and social distancing.
Yet the government failed to ensure this for working-class people in Leicester and across Britain. They were happy to squander billions to enrich private companies but flinched at ensuring that people were not faced with a choice between destitution or infection.
A Zero-Covid approach was necessary, to suppress the virus and prioritise public health over private profit. This would have avoided a cycle of confusing and ineffective local lockdowns. Even today with the concerning rise of the B.1.617 variant, it would protect both lives and livelihoods by driving down the virus so that the economy can properly restart when it is safe to do so.
The government’s handling of the pandemic has been defined by a belief that there is a trade-off between health and the economy. It is clear which side they are on, as they have consistently prioritised private profit over public health.
Yet this is a false dichotomy. Partly due to the government’s many attempts to prioritise the economy, from the initial herd immunity strategy, the Eat out to Help Out scheme and the rush to allow people into high-streets to do their Christmas shopping, we have the highest number of excess deaths in Europe, one of the worst death rates in the world and are also facing our worst recession for over 300 years.
Across the world, countries that have pursued a zero-Covid strategy are returning to normality, with all the economic benefits that brings. The government must follow the best examples set by countries across the world, especially across East Asia and the Pacific and adopt a zero-Covid strategy. This is the only way to prioritise the protection of everyone in Britain and especially those whom the virus has disproportionately affected.
This episode must be a wake-up call. We have a government responsible for “social murder,” yet they are still running high in the polls — it us up to us on the left to tell the truth in our neighbourhoods, communities and workplaces and continue to fight for a society which is built around people’s needs, health and wellbeing.
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Before we give in to hopes that the Biden/Putin Summit will result in better relations between the US and Russia, we should remember the Trump/Putin Summit in Helsinki in July 2018. The US media and the Democrat Party used the Trump/Putin Summit to blacken the event as where Putin “cemented his status and the status of Russia as US public enemy #1.”
The American Establishment made certain the summit would fail. Three days prior to the summit the Department of Justice indicted 12 Russian GRU officers. Two days prior to the summit Senate Democrats urged Trump to cancel the summit meeting.
CIA Director John Brennan said that the press conference following the summit showed that Trump exceeded “the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecile, Trump is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
In other words, the Democrat Party, the US military/security complex, and the American media considered Trump’s meeting with Putin an act of treason. Regardless of whether anything good happened at the Trump/Putin Summit, the media presstitutes, Democrats, and CIA controlled the narrative.
The question before us is: If it was treason for Trump to meet with Putin, why is it permissible for Biden to meet with Putin?
The answer perhaps is that the Biden/Putin Summit is a propaganda trap for the Kremlin. Just as the Kremlin walked into a propaganda trap when it allowed Navalny to take his poison complaint to Germany, the Kremlin might be repeating the folly by agreeing to the meeting with Biden.
We know from reports of the pre-summit meeting of Lavrov and the US Secretary of State that Biden’s agenda is a list of accusations against Russia. In other words, Biden’s intent is to hold Putin accountable. Obviously, no improved relations can come from such a meeting unless Putin confesses to the accusations and promises to behave better in the future. Otherwise Washington’s narrative will be that the summit was a failure due to Putin’s unreasonableness. Putin wouldn’t agree to stop poisoning people. Putin wouldn’t agree to stop invading countries. Putin would not agree to stop interfering in elections. Putin would not agree to stop cyber attacks.
In other words, Washington will use the summit to reiterate the status of Putin’s Russia as “US public enemy #1.” This is almost certain to be the outcome. Washington is using the Russian desire to be accepted by the West to draw an incautious Kremlin into a propaganda trap.
The Biden regime consists of ideologues and is probably the least professional government in US history. But professionalism has nothing to do with it. Biden has many of the same people—Victoria Nuland for example—who organized the “Maidan Revolution” and installed in Ukraine a government hostile to Moscow. Despite Kremlin diplomatic efforts in the European Union, recently the European Parliament voted to support regime change in Russia. With such a high degree of Western hostility toward Russia, how can the Kremlin expect any positive result from a summit?
The Kremlin has not understood that Russia is worth far more to Washington as an enemy than as a friend. The “Russian threat” is the basis for the one thousand-billion-dollar annual budget of the US military/security complex and the power that goes with this enormous sum. Without the “Russia threat,” what is the justification for the budget.
The “Russian threat” also keeps Western Europe and NATO in line with US policy. If there is no Russian threat, what is the point of NATO? What would prevent European countries from having independent foreign policies, thus contributing to a multi-polar world? Biden’s interest is to heighten, not reduce, tensions with Russia. We should remember that the CIA, FBI, Democrats, and the US media orchestrated “Russiagate” in order to prevent Trump from normalizing relations with Russia. There is no basis for believing that Biden will be permitted to do what Trump was prohibited from doing.
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Abstract
Background
After COVID-19 emerged on U.S shores, providers began reviewing the emerging basic science, translational, and clinical data to identify potentially effective treatment options. In addition, a multitude of both novel and repurposed therapeutic agents were used empirically and studied within clinical trials.
Areas of Uncertainty
The majority of trialed agents have failed to provide reproducible, definitive proof of efficacy in reducing the mortality of COVID-19 with the exception of corticosteroids in moderate to severe disease. Recently, evidence has emerged that the oral antiparasitic agent ivermectin exhibits numerous antiviral and anti-inflammatory mechanisms with trial results reporting significant outcome benefits. Given some have not passed peer review, several expert groups including Unitaid/World Health Organization have undertaken a systematic global effort to contact all active trial investigators to rapidly gather the data needed to grade and perform meta-analyses.
Data Sources
Data were sourced from published peer-reviewed studies, manuscripts posted to preprint servers, expert meta-analyses, and numerous epidemiological analyses of regions with ivermectin distribution campaigns.
Therapeutic Advances
A large majority of randomized and observational controlled trials of ivermectin are reporting repeated, large magnitude improvements in clinical outcomes. Numerous prophylaxis trials demonstrate that regular ivermectin use leads to large reductions in transmission. Multiple, large “natural experiments” occurred in regions that initiated “ivermectin distribution” campaigns followed by tight, reproducible, temporally associated decreases in case counts and case fatality rates compared with nearby regions without such campaigns.
Conclusions
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.
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Introduction
In early 2020, on the onset of the spreading pandemic, many providers and institutions began to continuously review the rapidly emerging basic science, translational, and clinical data to identify potentially effective treatment options for COVID-19. Although there is now a small and increasing number of therapeutics showing some efficacy in important clinical outcomes, chief of which are corticosteroids in moderate to severe illness, the world continues to suffer from a worsening crisis with the potential of again overwhelming hospitals and intensive care units (ICU). As of February 21, 2020, the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the United States reached 510,248 with more than 9.3 million active cases, the highest number to date. In addition, multiple European countries have imposed new rounds of restrictions and lockdowns.
Further compounding these alarming developments was a wave of recently published results from therapeutic randomized controlled trials conducted on medicines believed effective for COVID-19 that found a lack of impact on mortality in hospitalized patients with the use of remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir, interferon, convalescent plasma, and monoclonal antibody therapy.1–4 One year into the pandemic, the only therapy considered “proven” as a life-saving treatment in COVID-19 is the use of corticosteroids in patients with moderate to severe illness.5,6 Similarly, most concerning is the fact that no agent has yet proven effective in outpatients to prevent disease progression to prevent hospitalization.
More recently, trial results of ivermectin, a widely used antiparasitic medicine with known antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties, have been showing benefits in multiple important clinical and virologic outcomes, including mortality. Although growing numbers of the studies supporting this conclusion have passed through peer review, approximately half of the remaining trials data are from manuscripts uploaded to medical preprint servers, a now standard practice for both rapid dissemination and adoption of new therapeutics throughout the pandemic. Following is a comprehensive review of the available efficacy data as of December 12, 2020, taken from in vitro, animal, clinical, and real-world studies all showing the above impacts of ivermectin in COVID-19.
History of ivermectin
In 1975, Professor Satoshi Omura at the Kitsato institute in Japan isolated an unusual Streptomyces bacterium from the soil near a golf course along the southeast coast of Honshu, Japan. Omura, along with William Campbell, found that the bacterial culture could cure mice infected with the roundworm Heligmosomoides polygyrus. Campbell isolated the active compounds from the bacterial culture, naming them “avermectins” and the bacterium S. avermitilis for the compounds’ ability to clear mice of worms.7 Despite decades of searching around the world, the Japanese microorganism remains the only source of avermectin ever found. Ivermectin, a derivative of avermectin, then proved revolutionary. Originally introduced as a veterinary drug, it soon made historic impacts in human health, improving the nutrition, general health, and well-being of billions of people worldwide ever since it was first used to treat onchocerciasis (river blindness) in humans in 1988. It proved ideal in many ways, given that it was highly effective, broad-spectrum, safe, well tolerated, and could be easily administered.7 Although it was used to treat a variety of internal nematode infections, it was most known as the essential mainstay of 2 global disease elimination campaigns that has nearly eliminated the world of two of its most disfiguring and devastating diseases. The unprecedented partnership between Merck & Co. Inc, and the Kitasato Institute combined with the aid of international health care organizations has been recognized by many experts as one of the greatest medical accomplishments of the 20th century. One example was the decision by Merck & Co to donate ivermectin doses to support the Mectizan Donation Program that then provided more than 570 million treatments in its first 20 years alone.8 Ivermectin’s impacts in controlling onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis, diseases which blighted the lives of billions of the poor and disadvantaged throughout the tropics, is why its discoverers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 and the reason for its inclusion on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) “List of Essential Medicines.” Furthermore, it has also been used to successfully overcome several other human diseases and new uses for it are continually being found.7
Preclinical studies of Ivermectin’s activity against SARS-CoV-2
Since 2012, a growing number of cellular studies have demonstrated that ivermectin has antiviral properties against an increasing number of RNA viruses, including influenza, Zika, HIV, Dengue, and most importantly, SARS-CoV-2.9–17Insights into the mechanisms of action by which ivermectin both interferes with the entrance and replication of SARS-CoV-2 within human cells are mounting. Caly et al18 first reported that ivermectin significantly inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication in a cell culture model, observing the near absence of all viral material 48 hours after exposure to ivermectin. However, some questioned whether this observation is generalizable clinically given the inability to achieve similar tissue concentrations used in their experimental model using standard or even massive doses of ivermectin.19,20 It should be noted that the concentrations required for an effect in cell culture models bear little resemblance to human physiology given the absence of an active immune system working synergistically with a therapeutic agent, such as ivermectin. Furthermore, prolonged durations of exposure to a drug likely would require a fraction of the dosing in short-term cell model exposure. Furthermore, multiple coexisting or alternate mechanisms of action likely explain the clinical effects observed, such as the competitive binding of ivermectin with the host receptor-binding region of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, as proposed in 6 molecular modeling studies.21–26 In 4 of the studies, ivermectin was identified as having the highest or among the highest of binding affinities to spike protein S1 binding domains of SARS-CoV-2 among hundreds of molecules collectively examined, with ivermectin not being the particular focus of study in 4 of these studies.27 This is the same mechanism by which viral antibodies, in particular, those generated by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The high binding activity of ivermectin to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could limit binding to either the ACE-2 receptor or sialic acid receptors, respectively, either preventing cellular entry of the virus or preventing hemagglutination, a recently proposed pathologic mechanism in COVID-19.21,22,26–28 Ivermectin has also been shown to bind to or interfere with multiple essential structural and nonstructural proteins required by the virus to replicate.26,29 Finally, ivermectin also binds to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), thereby inhibiting viral replication.30
Arevalo et al investigated in a murine model infected with a type 2 family RNA coronavirus similar to SARS-CoV-2, (mouse hepatitis virus), the response to 500 μg/kg of ivermectin versus placebo.31 The study included 40 infected mice, with 20 treated with ivermectin, 20 with phosphate-buffered saline, and then 16 uninfected control mice that were also given phosphate-buffered saline. At day 5, all the mice were killed to obtain tissues for examination and viral load assessment. The 20 nonivermectin-treated infected mice all showed severe hepatocellular necrosis surrounded by a severe lymphoplasmacytic inflammatory infiltration associated with a high hepatic viral load (52,158), whereas in the ivermectin-treated mice a much lower viral load was measured (23,192; P < 0.05), with only few livers in the ivermectin-treated mice showing histopathological damage such that the differences between the livers from the uninfected control mice were not statistically significant.
Dias De Melo et al32 recently posted the results of a study they did with golden hamsters that were intranasally inoculated with SARS-CoV-2 virus, and at the time of the infection, the animals also received a single subcutaneous injection of ivermectin at a dose of 0.4 mg/kg on day 1. Control animals received only the physiologic solution. They found the following among the ivermectin-treated hamsters: a dramatic reduction in anosmia (33.3% vs. 83.3%, P = 0.03), which was also sex dependent in that the male hamsters exhibited a reduction in clinical score while the treated female hamsters failed to show any sign of anosmia. They also found significant reductions in cytokine concentrations in the nasal turbinates and lungs of the treated animals, despite the lack of apparent differences in viral titers.
Despite these mounting insights into the existing and potential mechanisms of action of ivermectin both as a prophylactic and treatment agent, it must be emphasized that significant research gaps remain and that many further in vitro and animal studies should be undertaken to better define not only these mechanisms but also to further support ivermectin’s role as a prophylactic agent, especially in the optimal dose and frequency required.
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Full authors
Kory, Pierre MD; Meduri, Gianfranco Umberto MD; Varon, Joseph MD; Iglesias, Jose DO; Marik, Paul E. MD
Featured image is from Novikov Aleksey / Shutterstock
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“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”—Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype
We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.
This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.
Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.
Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.
Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.
It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
For instance, imagine what the government could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals.”
We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall mass surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA Patriot Act look like child’s play.
Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
These are all part and parcel of the widening surveillance dragnet that the government has used and abused in order to extend its reach and its power.
The COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in acclimating us even further to being monitored, tracked and reported for so-called deviant or undesirable behavior.
Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.
This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.
Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like.
The question of how to deal with government agencies and programs that operate outside of the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution forces us to contend with a deeply unsatisfactory and dubious political “solution” to a problem that operates beyond the reach of voters and politicians: how do you hold accountable a government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then absolves itself of wrongdoing?
Certainly, the history and growth of the NSA tracks with the government’s insatiable hunger for ever-great powers.
Since its official start in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman issued a secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the government’s foreign intelligence activities, the agency—nicknamed “No Such Agency”—has operated covertly, unaccountable to Congress all the while using taxpayer dollars to fund its secret operations. It was only when the agency ballooned to 90,000 employees in 1969, making it the largest intelligence agency in the world with a significant footprint outside Washington, DC, that it became more difficult to deny its existence.
In the aftermath of Watergate in 1975, the Senate held meetings under the Church Committee in order to determine exactly what sorts of illicit activities the American intelligence apparatus was engaged in under the direction of President Nixon, and how future violations of the law could be stopped. It was the first time the NSA was exposed to public scrutiny since its creation.
The investigation revealed a sophisticated operation whose surveillance programs paid little heed to such things as the Constitution. For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on telegrams to and from the U.S., as well as the correspondence of American citizens. Moreover, as the Saturday Evening Post reports, “Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two active U.S. Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents.”
Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
The result was the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and collated. The law requires that the NSA get clearance from the FISA Court, a secret surveillance court, before it can carry out surveillance on American citizens. Fast forward to the present day, and the so-called solution to the problem of government entities engaging in unjustified and illegal surveillance—the FISA Court—has unwittingly become the enabler of such activities, rubberstamping almost every warrant request submitted to it.
The 9/11 attacks served as a watershed moment in our nation’s history, ushering in an era in which immoral and/or illegal government activities such as surveillance, torture, strip searches, SWAT team raids are sanctioned as part of the quest to keep us “safe.”
Nothing changed under Barack Obama. In fact, the violations worsened, with the NSA authorized to secretly collect internet and telephone data on millions of Americans, as well as on foreign governments.
It was only after whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the American people fully understood the extent to which they had been betrayed once again.
Even so, nothing really changed.
Since then, presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and gone, but none of them have done much to put an end to the government’s “technotyranny.”
At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency, accountability and a representative democracy by an establishment culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our knowledge, and do not answer to “we the people.”
Most recently, the Biden Administration indicated it may be open to working with non-governmental firms in order to warrantlessly monitor citizens online.
This would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and share our personal data.
Cue the dawning of what The Nation refers to as “the rise of a new class in America: the cyberintelligence ruling class. These are the people—often referred to as ‘intelligence professionals’—who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last [20] years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit.”
The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.
As Ezra Marcus writes for the New York Times, “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: tattling.”
This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, technologically-wired age.
“Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a byproduct of nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital architecture of the pandemic era — specifically when it comes to software designed for remote work and Covid-tracing… Contact tracing apps … have started to be adapted for other uses, including criminal probes by the Singaporean government. If that seems distinctly worrying, it might be useful to remember that the world’s most powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance, collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users. The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”
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Today Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu chaired and addressed a Defence Ministry Board Session at the National Centre for State Defence Control in Moscow. The second half of his comments dwelt on plans for upgrading capabilities in the Western Military District.
‘Terrifying’ new research finds vaccine spike protein unexpectedly in bloodstream. The protein is linked to blood clots, heart and brain damage, and potential risks to nursing babies and fertility.
A Canadian family doctor says he has been punished by his local health authority because he raised concerns about side effects he observed in some of those who had received the Moderna COVID-19 jab within his community.
Ms. Jovita Moore is the evening news anchor for WSB-TV Channel 2 News in Atlanta. She’s work at the station since 1998 and has held the evening anchor position since 2012. Ms. Moore received the second dose of experimental Pfizer mRNA on April 2, according to her Facebook page. Her Facebook post that day is full of sad, dramatic irony.
We are now witnessing shocks within Israel behind the Green Line, something that Israel had hitherto been able to contain. In the process, it pretended, along with much of the western world, that it is the “longest-lived democracy in the Middle East” and that only its continued occupation of the West Bank and its harsh blockade of Gaza undermine its “constitutional ideals”- ideals now exposed for what they’ve always been: Jewish supremacist in nature.
One month prior, in Canada, labour and community organizations took out a full-page advertisement in the Toronto Star voicing their support of the farmers. Despite only recently gaining attention in the West, the farmers’ protests in India have been ongoing for over half a year, making them, by Time magazine’s estimate, “the world’s largest ongoing demon- stration and perhaps the biggest in human history.”
The Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshisaid on May 13, “We will not allow boots on the ground or military bases on our territory.” He was referring to the future US security operations in the region.
A citywide initiative in Mexico City to prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients resulted in a plunge in hospitalizations and deaths, two studies found. Hospitalizations were down by as much as 76%, according to research by the Mexican Digital Agency for Public Innovation, Mexico’s Ministry of Health and the Mexican Social Security Institute, according to a TrialSiteNews report highlighted by LifeSiteNews.
Several things are happening simultaneously. Most important, Israel has lost the public opinion war in much of the world through its brutality during the recent attack on Gaza and it continues to lose ground even in the wake of a cease fire due to mass arrests of Palestinians and armed police intrusions in and around the al-Aqsa mosque.
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Fearing a new conflict over Taiwan, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg has released a shocking account showing how the Joint Chiefs pressed Eisenhower to launch a nuclear war on China.
A previously censored account of the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis that was sponsored by the Pentagon has been published in full by the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. The report provides a hair-raising portrait of a reckless US military leadership relentlessly pressing President Dwight Eisenhower for the authority to carry out nuclear attacks on communist China.
After holding the still-classified version of the account in his possession for fifty years, Ellsberg said he decided to release it because of the growing threat of US war with China over Taiwan, and the danger that such a conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange.
A May 22 New York Times report on the account offered only general details of the role the US Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the run-up to the 1958 Taiwan crisis. However, it is now clear from the original highly classified documents as well as other evidence now available that from the beginning, the Joint Chiefs aimed first and foremost to exploit the tensions to carry out nuclear strikes against Chinese nuclear military targets deep in highly-populated areas.
Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang regime and the Joint Chiefs were allies in wanting to embroil the United States in a war with China.
Deputy Secretary of State Christian Herter feared that the Nationalist regime was determined to drag the US into conflict, according to the Pentagon-sponsored account. The reason, according to the author of the account, Morton Halperin, was that involving the United States in a war with the Chinese Communists “was clearly their only hope for a return to the mainland.”
Quemoy and Matsu, the two main offshore islands occupied by Nationalist troops, were less than five miles from the mainland and had been used by Chiang’s forces as bases to mount unsuccessful commando raids inside the mainland. And Chiang, who was still committed to reconquering the mainland China with the ostensible support of the United States, had stationed a third of his 350,000-man army on those two islands.
In May 1958, the Joint Chiefs adopted a new plan (OPS PLAN 25-58), ostensibly for the defense of the offshore islands. In fact, the plan provided a basis for attacking China with atomic weapons.
It was to begin with a brief preliminary “Phase I”, which it called “patrol and reconnaissance” and was said to be already underway. “Phase II”, which would have been triggered by a Chinese attack on the offshore islands, would involve US air forces wiping out the attacking forces.
But the new plan envisioned a possible third phase, in which the Strategic Air Command and forces under the command of the US Pacific Command would carry out strategic attacks with 10 to 15 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons “to destroy the war-making capability” of China.
According to the account authored by Halperin, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, told State Department officials in an August meeting that the third phase would require nuclear strikes on Chinese bases as far north as Shanghai.
The Joint Chiefs played down the threat to civilian casualties from such tactical atomic weapons, emphasizing that an airburst of tactical atomic explosions would generate little radioactive fallout. But the account indicates that they provided no concrete information on expected civilian casualties.
Given the fact that both the Chinese gun emplacements across the Taiwan Strait and a key airbase serving the Chinese military forces in any conflict over the offshore islands would have been located close to significant population centers, such atomic explosions would have certainly caused civilian casualties on a massive scale.
The Joint Chiefs did not acknowledge that the bombs they planned to detonate with airbursts would have had the same potential lethality as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nor would they concede that the targets of such bombings were located in the immediate vicinity of Chinese cities that were roughly the same population as Hiroshima.
The city of Xiamen, for example, was close to military targets in the Amoy area, while Ningbo was close to the main Chinese airbase in Zhejiang province that would have been attacked by US forces. Like the Hiroshima bomb, the nuclear explosions would have been triggered in the air, where blast damage is greatest, destroying or damaging nearly everything within a radius of three miles from the blast, killing much of the population.
The Joint Chiefs also assumed that China would respond to the US use of atomic weapons by retaliating with atomic weapons, which the Joint Chiefs presumed would be made available to the Chinese government by the Soviet Union.
The Halperin report recounts that Twining told State Department officials that the bombing of the intended targets with tactical nuclear weapons “almost certainly would involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa….” That assumption was based on a Special National Intelligence Estimate that had been issued on July 22, 1958. The estimate had concluded that, if the U.S. “launched nuclear strikes deep into Communist China,” the Chinese would “almost certainly” respond with nuclear weapons.
Despite the acceptance of the likelihood that it would lead to nuclear retaliation by China, JCS Chairman Twining expressed no hesitation about the plan, asserting that in order to defend the offshore islands, “the consequences had to be accepted”.
The Joint Chiefs seek to appropriate war powers
The Joint Chiefs’ plan betrayed the military chiefs’ hope of removing the power of decision over nuclear war from the hands of the president. It said the plan would be put into operation when “dictated by appropriate U.S. authority” – implying that it would not necessarily be decided by the president.
In his own memoirs, Eisenhower recalled with some bitterness how, during the 1958 crisis, he was “continuously pressured — almost hounded — by Chiang [Chinese nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek] on one side and by our own military on other requesting delegation of authority for immediate action on Formosa [Taiwan] or the offshore islands….” He did not refer, however, to the efforts by the Joint Chiefs efforts to gain advance authorization for the use nuclear weapons on the Chinese mainland.
The wording of the JCS plan was changed to read “when authorized by the President” at Eisenhower’s insistence to provide that only conventional means could be used at least initially for defense of the islands, while leaving open the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons if that failed.
But the Joint Chiefs were not finished. In a paper presented to Eisenhower on September 6, the chiefs proposed that they be authorized to “oppose any major attack on Taiwan and attack mainland bases with all CINPAC force that can be brought to bear” in the event of “an emergency arising from an attack on Taiwan and the offshore islands moving so rapidly that it would not permit consultations with the President…”
Further, they asked for the authority to respond to a “major landing attack on offshore islands,” by “[u]se of atomic weapons and U.S. air attack in support of [Chinese Nationalist] Air Force…as necessary, only as approved by the President.” Eisenhower approved the paper with those qualifiers.
When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned that Japan would object strongly to using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland, and forbid the launching of nuclear weapons from their territory, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke suggested that the opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan was “inspired by the Communists,” and that foreign leaders would soon recognize that the use of nuclear weapons by the US “was in their interests”.
Burke closed his argument by claiming that if the US did not maintain the threat of tactical nuclear weapons in conflicts, it would “lose the entire world within three years.” That obviously absurd argument suggests that the intense desire among the Joint Chiefs to use nuclear weapons against China was less motivated by any threat from Communist Chinese than by their own institutional interests.
In pre-Cold War Washington, the US Navy served as the primary bureaucratic ally of the Kuomintang regime. The relationship was forged when Chiang provided the Navy with the home base for its 7th Fleet at Tsingtao in Northern China.
Navy brass in the Pacific had urged unconditional support for Chiang’s regime during the civil war with the Communists and derided as “pinkies” those State Department officials – beginning with Secretary George C. Marshall – who entertained any doubts about the Kuomintang leader.
By 1958, the Air Force was so strongly committed to its role as an exclusively nuclear-weapons delivery organization that it insisted on being able to able to using nuclear weapons in any war it fought in the Pacific region.
The account of the crisis reveals that, when the Air Force Commander in the Pacific, Gen. Lawrence S. Kuter, learned of Eisenhower’s decision to defend the offshore islands with conventional weapons, he relayed the message to Gen. John Gerhart, the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff. Shockingly, Gerhart responded that the Air Force “could not agree in principle” to the use of SAC forces for such non-nuclear operations.
Beyond the desire of the Navy and Air Force chiefs to ensure their long-term presence and reinforce the importance of their respective roles in the Pacific, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have always aspired to maximize their influence over US policy in any conflict where U.S might use military force.
It turned out that the Chinese never intended full-scale war over the offshore islands. Instead they sought to mount a blockade of resupply to the islands through artillery barrages, and when the US military provided armed escorts for the ships carrying out the resupply, they were careful to avoid hitting American ships.
As the Halperin report observed, once the Chinese recognized that a blockade could not prevent the resupply, they settled for symbolic artillery attacks on Quemoy, which were limited to every other day.
It was the eagerness of the Joint Chiefs for a nuclear war against China, rather than the policy of communist China, that presented the most serious threat to American security.
Although the circumstances surrounding the U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan have changed dramatically since that stage of the Cold War, the 1958 Taiwan crisis provides a sobering lesson as the US military gears up for a new military confrontation with China.
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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
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Several things are happening simultaneously. Most important, Israel has lost the public opinion war in much of the world through its brutality during the recent attack on Gaza and it continues to lose ground even in the wake of a cease fire due to mass arrests of Palestinians and armed police intrusions in and around the al-Aqsa mosque. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is by its actions making clear that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine will continue at a time that he chooses. This in turn has produced a storm of criticism, including from Jewish groups and individuals, that is condemning the bloodshed and also sometimes explicitly seeking to distance Judaism the religion from Zionism, the political movement.
Some have suggested that we have finally reached a tipping point in which Israel has gone too far, evident in the Irish Government’s condemnation of Israeli “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land. Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told the Dial that
“The scale, pace and strategic nature of Israel’s actions on settlement expansion and the intent behind it have brought us to a point where we need to be honest about what is actually happening on the ground …”
The Jewish state has even succeeded in alienating many who are normally supporters in countries like the United States, quite possibly leading to an eventual shift in policy in Congress and at the White House. That view might be exaggerated given the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to make past atrocities go away, but it might obtain some back-handed credibility from the ferocity of the counter-attack being waged by Israel and its friends against the celebrities and politicians who have finally developed backbones and have spoken out in defense of Palestinian rights.
The Jewish state’s reaction to criticism is being fueled by repeated assertions that anti-Semitism is surging in the United States and Europe. The media has become relentless on the issue, which is in any even irrelevant even if it were true. Last Saturday, internet news site Yahoo featured links to no less than three articles on increasing attacks on Jews, two coming from NBC and one from BBC.
Despite the recent one sided slaughter in Gaza, American Jewish organizations even had the hubris to declare last Thursday “In light of the surging wave of antisemitic violence, “A Day of Action Against Antisemitism.” Frustration of many people with Israeli behavior is indeed increasing, but the assumption that any shouted insult or organized protest directed at Netanyahu and/or his gang of cutthroats at a time when they are mass-killing Arabs represents pure hatred of Jews is quite frankly unsustainable. It is hatred not of religion but of what Israel is doing, supported by Washington and Israel’s powerful domestic lobby, and most people understand clearly that distinction.
The underlying narrative being offered is that Jews are always the victims, even when they initiate violence, because, they would argue, they are only acting of necessity and preemptively as self-defense. That argument means that they are never guilty of what many might call war crimes, and they are adept at fabricating stories about their opponents labeling them as both terrorists and cowards willing to use civilians as human shields to protect themselves. This effort to burnish the apartheid regime’s record also means in practice that there have to be regular invocations of the tale of increasing anti-Semitism as well as direct attacks on anyone who dares to appropriate or in any way diminish the so-called holocaust.
Numerous critics of the Israeli bombing of Gaza have been attacked by the Israel Lobby and its allies in the media. The idea is to humiliate the critic and put so much pressure on him or her that he or she will actually apologize for what was either said or written. Even better, the Israeli partisans often push far beyond that point to obtain a complete recantation of what appeared in the first place. In the case of actors or entertainers, for example, the weapon used is obvious. If one wants to continue to be gainfully employed in an industry that is dominated by Zionist Jews it is necessary to either keep one’s mouth shut or quickly apologize claiming that one was “misinformed” or “misspoke.”
Several recent mea culpa’s for criticizing Israel have made the news as has also the virtual crucifixion of a congresswoman for her citation of the holocaust. Actor Mark Ruffalo may have believed that he was doing the “right thing” by speaking out on Palestinian suffering. He tweeted
“Over 30 children killed. Mothers dead. Hundreds injured. We are on the brink of a full-scale war. Sanctions on South Africa helped free its Black people – it’s time for sanctions on Israel to free Palestinians. Join the call” and also in another tweet referred to the killing as “genocide.”
He came under intense pressure and soon apologized, tweeting
“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’. It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
Ruffalo did not quite crawl on his belly to preserve his career, but the metaphor certainly comes to mind. And what Ruffalo experienced was a walk in the park compared to what was dished out to British pop singer Dua Lipa who was subjected to a full-page New York Times ad paid for by no less than “America’s rabbi” Shmuley Boteach’s World Values Network. The singer Dua Lipa as well as Palestinian-descended models Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid were accused of “anti-Semitism” after they expressed public support of the pro-Palestine cause. The Boteach ad claimed that the three women were “ignorant” and spreading “disgusting libel,” calling on them to instead “condemn [Hamas] now” arguing that “the three mega-influencers have vilified the Jewish state in a manner that is deeply troubling… Hamas calls for a second Holocaust.”
Dua Lipa did not however recant when confronted by the hideous Boteach’s rant. She responded in part
“This is the price you pay for defending Palestinian human rights against an Israeli government whose actions in Palestine [include both] persecution and discrimination.”
A number of other celebrity-critics of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza also stood firm, including comedian John Oliver and Susan Sarandon, but there were also more victims of the wrath of Zion. The Associated Press, itself having been on the receiving end of the Israeli bombing of Gaza, fired a reporterEmily Wilder for what were alleged to be pro-Palestinian views while an undergraduate at Stanford several years before. Wilder, who is Jewish, recently also posted a question which was used against her, asking why the US media regularly uses the word Israel but avoids referring to Palestine, legitimizing the statehood of the former at the expense of the latter.
In Fairfax County Virginia there were demands to remove a school board member Abrar Omeish who, during the attack on Gaza, had tweeted
“Hurts my heart to celebrate while Israel kills Palestinians & desecrates the Holy Land right now. Apartheid & colonization were wrong yesterday and will be today, here and there.”
She soon came under pressure and quickly recanted with
“War is terrible for everyone. I hear those hurting. I’m here for each of you. People of all faiths deserve Holy Land peace. Ensuring justice & honoring humanity of all remain urgent. I look ahead to robust & empathetic engagement with Jewish leaders. Let’s build together.”
Local resident Jennifer Katz was not satisfied, however, telling the board that the tweet “could be reasonably interpreted as a microaggression” against Jewish students.
But perhaps the most bizarre nonsense to surface from the knee-jerk defense of Israel effort played out, perhaps not surprisingly, on Capitol Hill where Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, to put it mildly, got in trouble. The first-term Republican Representative from Georgia had already attracted widespread criticism from both Democratic and Republican colleagues for her alleged trafficking in conspiracy theories but she unleashed the hounds of hell when she made an observation regarding the government’s compelling people working in grocery stores to submit to the COVID vaccines. She said
“You know, we can look back in a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star. And they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”
Congresswoman Greene is not renowned for her brain power and it was the sort of comment that is so stupid that it is best handled by ignoring it, but as it concerned the so-called holocaust that was not the end of it. She has been shredded by the leadership of both parties and also by individual legislators as well as the usual suspects in the media. She had previously been stripped of some of her committee assignments over other misdemeanors, but this time around her “colleagues” have been calling for her censure at a minimum and even possible expulsion from the House of Representatives. The lesson learned is that you trifle with the sanctity of the holocaust at your peril. It belongs to Jews and is a vital component of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering narrative.
Over the next few weeks there will no doubt be a flood of stories and commentary reminding everyone in America about just how much the Israelis were victims of a premeditated Hamas attack and what wonderful people they really are. It will be an attempt to regain the propaganda advantage for the Israel Lobby. And yes, more heads of critics will be rolling in the dust, with recantations by celebrities adding sparkle to the event. But even at the end of that process the true horror that modern day Israel represents will be remembered by many and as the game goes on there will hopefully be many more American voices raised in protest.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Another attack on Gaza: Israel squeezing the life of Gaza – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
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A citywide initiative in Mexico City to prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients resulted in a plunge in hospitalizations and deaths, two studies found.
Hospitalizations were down by as much as 76%, according to research by the Mexican Digital Agency for Public Innovation, Mexico’s Ministry of Health and the Mexican Social Security Institute, according to a TrialSiteNews report highlighted by LifeSiteNews.
Earlier this month, as WND reported, a significant decrease in cases in India coincided with the national health ministry’s promotion of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine treatments.
In Mexico City, after a spike in cases in December, the city’s Ministry of Health created a home-treatment kit for residents. The city’s metro population is 22 million.
At the time, the head of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, Oliva López, said told reporters her agency had determined “that there is enough evidence to use in people positive for SARS-CoV-2, even without symptoms, some drugs such as ivermectin and azithromycin.”
Beginning Dec. 29, people who tested positive for COVID from an antigen test and who were experiencing at least mild symptoms began receiving one of the government’s ivermectin-based treatment kits, TrialSiteNews reported.
The Mexican government then began a study to track the impact of the early treatment of COVID with ivermectin on the city’s population.
The study tracked 200,000 people, dividing in two cohorts — those who received ivermectin and those who did not.
Are governments preventing the public from getting treatments that actually help defeat COVID?
Through a phone-call-based monitoring system and hospital data on admissions for COVID-19, the researchers found a reduction of between 52% and 76% in hospitalizations for those who took ivermectin compared to those who did not.
The government’s findings were corroborated by Dr. Juan J. Chamie-Quintero, a senior data analyst at private Colombian university EAFIT.
He found that excess deaths in the city dropped sharply only a few weeks after the ivermectin treatments began.
Chamie-Quintero also conducted a study in Peru, where the government approved ivermectin as a treatment for the virus in May 2020.
In the 24 Peruvian states that adopted early use of ivermectin treatment, excess deaths plummeted on average by 59% just 30 days after the peak death rate. And it had dropped 75% after 45 days in those over 60 years old.
‘Large, statistically significant reductions in mortality’
Worldwide, more than 50 peer-reviewed studies have shown the effectiveness of ivermectin as a treatment and prophylaxis against COVID-19.
A study by the American Journal of Therapeutics that analyzed 18 randomized controlled treatment trials found ivermectin elicited “large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance” in COVID patients.
The study concluded that “the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”
In February, a peer-reviewed study found that invermectin reduces coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths by about 75%.
Ivermectin, in more than 30 trials around the world, causes “repeated, consistent, large magnitude improvements in clinical outcomes’ at all stages of the disease,” according to the study, which was published in the U.S. journal Frontiers of Pharmacology.
The evidence is so strong, the researchers believe, the anti-parasitic drug should become a standard therapy everywhere, hastening global recovery.
“The data is overwhelming – we are in a pandemic, and this is an incredibly effective way to combat it. If we use ivermectin widely, our societies can open up,” said study co-author Professor Paul Marik, director of emergency and pulmonary care at Eastern Virginia Medical School.
A previous study by Professor Andrew Hill of Liverpool University also found ivermectin cuts death rates by about 75%.
‘Inaction in front of mounting evidence’
Dr. Pierre Kory, the chief medical officer of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, is known for his congressional testimony about the effectiveness of ivermectin. In a live Zoom conference May 13, he showed the promising data from various states in India in the two weeks after ivermectin was promoted.
In a Senate hearing in December, Kory presented evidence that ivermectin prevents infection and saves lives.
“Although we, like many, are extremely encouraged by the apparent successes in developing effective vaccines, we also are dismayed at the near complete absence of guidance and research on effective early, at-home, or preventative treatment options apart from vaccines, a reality we find unconscionable,” he said in his statement.
Kory said he and his colleagues are “worried that if our call to action is not followed through, confidence in our health care leaders and agencies will be irreparably tarnished.”
“Inaction in front of mounting evidence of safety and effectiveness during a catastrophic pandemic may also compromise widespread vaccination support,” he warned.
“We will look back to the impact that actions versus inaction had on the U.S. and the globe two months from now,” Kory said. “If we do nothing, the present trend will continue. History will judge.”
See testimony of a life saved by ivermectin:
Politicization of treatments
Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, is one of many health experts who decry the politicization of COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
“You can hardly believe what anybody says anymore,” Risch said in an interview in December with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “We’ve lost 300,000 lives in the United States because our government has basic told everyone to go home, stay home, and if you can’t breathe, go to the hospital.”
That’s not a form of treatment, he said, “it’s what we call therapeutic nihilism.”
He said the federal government, through the FDA, CDC and National Institutes of Health, have misrepresented the benefits of the drugs.
“These are drugs that everywhere else in the world they are being used very effectively,” he said.
Risch contends the COVID-19 mortality rate is five times lower in the Third World “because that’s all they can afford to do.”
“And we’re here twiddling our thumbs and telling everyone to stay home. It’s absurd,” he said.
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The western analysts feel agitated about Iran’s refusal to play by the rule book of liberal democracy. They feel indignant even as Tehran released on Tuesday the final list of candidates found qualified by the Constitutional Council to run for president in the June 18 election.
A consensus is forming that the election is gerrymandered by the powers that be. In reality, they are applying western norms of democracy, although the 1979 Iranian revolution created a unique political system in Iran devolving upon the unassailable supremacy of the concept of velayit-e-faqih, (guardianship of the jurists in power) but renewable through free elections on the basis of universal suffrage.
Such a political system based on Islamic principles with popular support was conceived as the best means to preserve the revolutionary ideals and ensure stability as well as create a firewall against predatory strikes by inimical foreign powers. Iran’s modern history is replete with brazen foreign interventions and it is no secret that the Iranian revolution is today at a crossroads.
A transition is looming large for the position of the Supreme Leader, which Ali Khamenei has been occupying since 1989 at the age of 50. The position carries immense responsibilities as the spiritual head of the system as well as being the most powerful political authority with either direct or indirect control over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, as well as the military and media.
Interestingly, Khamenei had served as the third President of Iran from 1981 to 1989 before being elected as the Supreme Leader by the Assembly of Experts.
With the lifting of the US sanctions, which is in the cards, Iran’s integration into the world economy is expected to enter a new phase, and foreign influences and pressure on the country’s decision making are bound to intensify as never before. Iran is a potentially very rich country in resources and there is going to be a scramble for its minerals, in particular.
There is a wonderful 2006 book Overthrow authored by veteran New York Times foreign correspondent and author Stephen Kinzer about the US’ involvement in the overthrow of foreign governments from the late 19th century to the present.
Kinzer contends that “establishing military bases around the world and bringing foreign governments under American control were never ends in themselves” but were “ways for the United States to assure itself access to the markets, resources and investment potential of distant lands.” He adds to it as a supplementary factor that US intervention came also from humanitarian hubris as well — “the power of the noble idea of American exceptionalism.”
Both greed and hubris are present in the US’ fraught relationship with Iran, which will remain in adversarial terms for a foreseeable future even if diplomatic ties are established. The US fancies that there is a huge pro-American sentiment in Iran and it is far from a situation of every Iranian being militantly anti-Israel, anti-American, or in favour of the system of velayit-e-faqih.
Again, there is a notion that Iran’s support the resistance movement is in reality skin deep only and people don’t want to see the country’s resources being squandered to support militant groups such as Hezbollah or Hamas at a time when the economy ought to be the priority.
These self-serving notions, with no empirical data to back up, have led to the USG appropriating $75 million to go to the promotion of democracy and a more “open” society in Iran.
Kinzer writes in his book,
“The United States uses a variety of means to persuade other countries to do its bidding… By the end of the twentieth century, it had become more difficult for Americans to stage coups because foreign leaders had learned how to resist them. Coups had also become unnecessary.”
When it comes to Iran, the system is based on checks and balances that prevents concentration of political power. But dispersal of power also has a flip side — it can not only create a dysfunctional system but is also vulnerable to foreign penetration.
It is critically important that the three main pillars of the political system — the presidency, the Majlis and the judiciary — are broadly in harmony with each other despite whatever differences on specific issues. Factionalism has been the Achilles heel of Shia politics historically.
All these considerations prevail when the list of approved presidential candidates is announced. The Guardian Council, which vets candidates for the presidential election, is appointed by the Supreme Leader and is a constitutionally mandated 12-member body of six Islamic jurists (faqihs, or, experts in Islamic Law) and six jurists specialising in different areas of law, to be elected by the Majlis from among the Muslim jurists nominated by the Chief Justice. In principle, the Supreme Leader can demand a revision of the recommended panel of presidential candidates and once, in the presidential election in 2005, it did happen.
Now, this may not conform to the practice of democracy in America. But then, as in America, it is any country’s choice in terms of its history and culture and exigencies of politics to adopt the most suitable electoral system. When it comes to this year’s election, the so-called reformist wing could not agree on a consensus figure while the conservative faction (Principalists) has several candidates in the fray.
Chief justice Seyyed Ebrahim Raeisi, who is being mentioned as front runner, and apparently enjoys broad support in the conservative camp, had opposed the candidacy of incumbent president Hassan Rouhani in the last election in 2017 but polled only 15.8 million votes as against the latter’s 23 million votes. Clearly, being the favourite of the conservative faction alone does not necessarily assure election victory. Surprises are galore when the voters make their choice.
There are other formidable candidates in the fray beyond Raeisi — notably, Mohsen Rezai, former IRGC commander; Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2007-2013 (presently a member of the a Expediency Council which arbitrates between parliament and the Guardian Council in any dispute); Abdolnasser Hemmati, the central bank governor (a “moderate” technocrat) who has worked under two presidents from the opposing wings of Iran’s political factions. By the way, all three candidates are PhD holders.
All in all, from the western perspective, the real problem with the current election in Iran is that the outlook for a moderate candidate is bleak. And this has profound implications at a juncture when the sanctions are likely to be lifted on Iran and the country will be embarking on a new journey to realise its full potential for growth and development for the first time after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
A joint survey of the Iranian public conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and IranPoll in April provides fascinating insights into how Iranians view this pivotal moment for their country. The US think tank estimated that “Iranians view Rouhani’s policies quite negatively, especially his economic policies… As the election nears, nearly two-thirds of Iranians say they would prefer a critic of Rouhani to be the next president of Iran.”
That is to say, if no credible reformist candidate has not appeared in the electoral arena, it is not because any superior power ordained so but simply because the reformist platform stands discredited today in the eyes of the electorate.
The top contenders in the electorate arena are mostly conservative candidates. Raeisi scored 27%, but then, a plurality of Iranians also say they are undecided (35%). The undecided portion may swing the election in either direction. Clearly, no decisive favourite has volunteered in the upcoming election.
Interestingly, while half of Iranians think it is likely that sanctions would be loosened during the Biden presidency, there is little expectation of improvement for the US-Iran relations over the next four to eight years.
The crux of the matter is that elections in Iran are never about foreign policy. Iran has a very animated political culture. Both in its symbolism and its pragmatism, it stood out that Presidential candidate Raeisi began his election campaign on Wednesday with two events: a meeting with businessmen and a visit to Tehran Grand Bazar.
The election will not produce the results that the western world would hope for. The compass for Iran’s foreign policy is not going to be reset. It is anchored on strategic autonomy. Therein probably lies the West’s disappointment.
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Featured image: Iran’s presidential candidate Seyyed Ebrahim Raeisi began his election campaign with two events: a meeting with businessmen and a visit to Tehran Grand Bazar, May 26, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchline)
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A bipartisan vote closed debate on the omnibus US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which many argue includes provisions that could escalate trade disputes between the US and China and could further rising anti-Asian racism
The United States Senate has advanced sweeping trade and technology bills targeted at China, opening up yet another front in the trade wars. On Thursday, May 27, the Senate voted for closure on debate to the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), with a vote of 68-30. The bipartisan support will overturn any attempt at filibuster against the bill, having crossed the 60-vote threshold.
The more than 800-page draft bill, which would approve a funding of USD 250 billion, has a plethora of provisions originally proposed by senators from the right-wing Republican Party which have been added as amendments to the larger bill. 18 of the 50 Republican senators supported the closure of debate on the bill, in addition to the 50 votes from Democratic senators.
Republican senator Mike Crapo, a co-sponsor of one of the bills added as an amendment with an overwhelming 94-1 vote split, has called the omnibus bill “the intersection between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate on trade policy.”
Certain parts of the omnibus bill seek to address a recent shortage in semiconductors, microchips and telecommunications technologies, for which the US relies heavily on China, and boosting technological innovation in the country, dedicating close to USD 54 billion towards for the purpose.
But, large parts of the bill are dedicated to putting up an aggressive policy in dealing with China, with the inclusion of bills like the Endless Frontier Act, the Strategic Competition Act, and the Meeting the China Challenge Act, as amendments. Several of these bills include provisions to sanction entities or businesses in China against supposed anti-competitive activities.
The Strategic Competition Act has come under major criticism from social movements as it includes provisions for US entities to “remain vigilant to the risks posed by undue influence of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” pour millions of dollars in a “Countering Chinese Influence Fund,” and also dictates foreign relations with nations having extensive trade with China.
Social movements and anti-imperialists have argued that the bill could aggravate anti-Asian racism in the US, which has been on the rise since former president Donald Trump’s aggression towards China.
“This reinvigorated wave of McCarthyism, Yellow Peril rhetoric, and military funding focused solely on “containing” and destabilizing an emerging China will only escalate tensions and increase the potential for war, while further emboldening Sinophobic violence against Asians and Asian Americans within the US,” stated Madison Tang, coordinator of the China Is Not Our Enemy campaign.
Anti-imperialist and anti-war group, CODEPINK, has launched a national campaign calling for people to pressure their respective senators to reject the Strategic Competition Act. In the campaign, the group argued that it “would increase military funding to escalate U.S. aggression towards China and endanger Asians and Asian Americans at home.”
Similarly, earlier this month, a group of 65 civil society organizations, including CODEPINK, Union of Concerned Scientists, People’s Action, Quincy Institute and Working Families Party, among others, released a joint letter expressing their opposition to the “growing Cold War mentality” in how the US approaches China.
Calling out the “worryingly… short-sighted worldview” of presenting China as the existential threat to the US that “both political parties are increasingly latching onto,” the letter argued that the anti-China narrative for initiatives in industrial and technological advancement is “not only politically unnecessary; it is harmful, as it inevitably feeds racism, violence, xenophobia, and white nationalism.”
The letter added that
“the prosperity of working people in the United States and China alike demands building a more equitable global economy that maximizes human well-being overall rather than corporate profits. Wasting more money on the Pentagon and inflaming ethnonationalism and racism will not serve these goals.”
Apart from civil society groups, even progressive lawmakers and political figures like Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Mark Pocan, have also spoken out against the recent push to paint China as the enemy and the threats to Asian-American communities it poses in the US.
Nevertheless, the US government under the Joe Biden administration and most of the federal lawmakers in the Congress have expressed their inclination to favor policies to escalate tensions with China.
This was best expressed in House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics, scheduled to be held in Beijing, and also president Biden’s order to intelligence agencies to investigate and submit a report on COVID-19 origins, which many argued builds on Trump’s and US right-wing’s unsubstantiated accusations of man-made origins of the virus in China.
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Today Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu chaired and addressed a Defence Ministry Board Session at the National Centre for State Defence Control in Moscow. The second half of his comments dwelt on plans for upgrading capabilities in the Western Military District.
He did not provide an historical overview of NATO’s encroachment along his country’s Western border; did not, for example, describe NATO’s induction of former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia five years later, which began the process of NATO moving into and effectively taking control of the Baltic and Black Seas. Nor did he itemize the Pentagon’s and NATO’s flooding those regions with fighter jets, nuclear-capable bombers, anti-ballistic missiles, training centers, cyber warfare centers, radar installations, battle groups, special forces operations and other military assets and personnel.
Instead he cited the recent escalation of NATO activities along Russia’s western frontier. Among other developments he mentioned:
U.S. Air Force strategic bomber flights in Europe have increased fourteen times in the last seven years
NATO guided-missile warships are deployed with increased incidence in the Baltic Sea, with such warships exercising off the coast of Russia’s Kaliningrad territory three times in the past year
Since 2016 Russia has recorded eighteen similar deployments “to the alleged launch areas of cruise missiles”
The Pentagon and NATO have continued to expand the scale of operational and combat training and drills near Russia’s borders
The number of such exercises has increased by a time and a half in recent years
The U.S. and NATO are currently conducting the largest war games since the end of the Cold War, Defender Europe – 21, with 40,000 troops participating (Shoigu’s estimate)
That exercise has as its main objective “to practice the transfer of a full-fledged division from the United States to Europe.”
The defense chief provided diagnosis and prescription:
“The actions of our Western counterparts are destroying the security system in the world and forcing us to take adequate countermeasures. We are constantly improving the combat composition of the troops. By the end of the year, about 20 formations and military units will be formed in the Western Military District.”
Try finding mention of any of the above outside the Russian news media. One fears the results of NATO’s military encirclement of Russia will only garner headlines when an irreversible catastrophe occurs.
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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.
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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Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko met with his country’s members of parliament, members of the Constitutional Commission and other representatives of his government last week amidst the current crisis with the West that has been escalating since last summer and has intensified since the Ryanair incident of May 23.
“The time has chosen us. We have found ourselves on the frontline of a new cold, even freezing cold war. Only countries that will be able to resist this hybrid pressure will hold out.”
Belarus has been under Western scrutiny and criticism and has been the victim of Western subversion since last August’s presidential election, with the U.S. and the European Union supporting opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya against the incumbent Lukashenko. The nation will soon face American sanctions as well.
Lukashenko’s address focused on patriotic values and activities as would be expected under the circumstances, situating the crisis within the current global context:
“Everyone is trying to tear us apart or to drag us to their side. But we should stay strong. I have said several times: the price for sovereignty and independence is high. Every Belarusian may be directly affected by this amid the increased competition in the world.”
He referred to a multi-dimensional, multi-level hybrid war being conducted against his government and his nation, stating:
“The goal is clear. We also know who would benefit from demonizing Belarus. We are a small country, but we will respond appropriately. The world knows examples of similar situations. Before making any rushed moves, remember, that Belarus is in the center of Europe, and if things spin out of control here – it will be another world war.”
World war or not, Northeastern Europe is as likely a location for triggering a nuclear war as any on the planet.
By way of disclaimer, there are different ways of interpreting his ordering the diversion of a passenger airline en route to Lithuania and the subsequent detention of a person described as an opposition activist: Roman Protasevich. It can be asserted that, the West looking for any pretext to further discredit, isolate and undermine his government, such an action was feeding into its plans. On the other hand the adage may as well be hung [for stealing] a sheep as a lamb comes to mind.
“Sensible people understand what is happening. I would like to ask those who are behind the provocation: don’t you realize what catastrophic consequences it may bring? Do you understand what you are doing? You know that we are in the right and that you will have to answer anyway. Please, stop!”
Sounding defiant (or bluffing, as you will), he added:
“We will respond to all sanctions, attacks, and provocations accordingly. We do not want to start a fight in the center of the continent. We do not want this, we have had enough. But the West does not leave us other options.”
Belarus is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) with Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and as such could appeal to its fellow members for assistance in the event of military aggression by NATO from neighboring Lithuania and Poland. However, after Georgia invaded South Ossetia in 2008 and the resultant war with Russia, the CSTO did not support Russia. Lukashenko embraced Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the aggressor in the conflict, immediately afterwards, as he’s recently done with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev following the latter’s invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh and armed conflict with Armenia (a CSTO member) last year.
In language bold (and rather grand) for a small and besieged nation, Lukashenko also stated:
“If the West does not want to be our friendly neighbor – so be it. We will compensate for the sanctions by stepping up our activities and presence in other markets. We will turn away from the ageing Europe to rapidly growing Asia. Belarus is ready to become a part, an outpost of new Eurasia.”
“Ukraine and Belarus should be admitted to NATO in order to eliminate the ‘gray zone’ that has arisen between Russia and the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance. Belarus is the hardest challenge of all, with alliance membership inconceivable for quite some time. Yet however difficult it may be, the U.S. cannot leave Belarus to Moscow uncontested.”
He also noted that, as always, under the guise of human rights the West is undermining the sovereignty of a non-aligned nation and in doing so is launching a direct attack on its independence.
Today Foreign Minister Makei is cited, in what one hopes is not mere wishful thinking, contending that Russia has at long last dropped its blinders, abandoned its prostrate position and recognized what the West – the U.S., NATO and the European Union – is up to. A consummation devoutly to be wished – if true.
In a statement that may be nine-tenths bravado but is interesting nonetheless, he claimed the West is “very nervous about the fact that the world is becoming multipolar, that there have emerged many major geopolitical players, the opinion of which should be taken into account.”
“I agree with my colleague Sergey Lavrov, who said that the world has ceased to be Western-centric. For the five hundred years, the West dictated to us the conditions of how to live, what to do, what rules to live by. Today there are major geopolitical players: China is one of the largest economies in the world, India has been growing rapidly, Russia has taken off rose-colored glasses that it had in the 1990s and early 2000s, got up from its knees and now sees what the West is like.”
Such a realization, and actions commensurate with it, had they occurred decades ago may have saved humanity almost incalculable suffering from the Middle East to South Asia, from North and Northeast Africa to Eastern Europe. Pray it’s not too late to reverse the course of the past thirty years, the era of global NATO and its wars against defenseless nations on three continents.
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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.
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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A Canadian family doctor says he has been punished by his local health authority because he raised concerns about side effects he observed in some of those who had received the Moderna COVID-19 jab within his community.
“I am no longer allowed to work in the ER,” British Columbia Dr. Charles Hoffe said, according to a True North News report.
Hoffe added that his suspension from the ER came at the end of April, after his local health authority “suspended” his clinical privileges “for the crime of causing ‘vaccine hesitancy,’ for speaking out about my vaccine injured patients.”
In an April 5 letter, Hoffe had written to British Columbia Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry that he was “quite alarmed at the high rate of serious side effects from this novel treatment,” in reference to Moderna COVID-19 injections given to 900 mostly Indigenous people in Lytton, British Columbia.
Hoffe said he had observed one patient death, “numerous” allergic reactions, along with three individuals who had “disabling” neurological deficits completed with chronic pain, which persisted “for more than 10 weeks after their first vaccine.”
“So in short, in our small community of Lytton, BC, we have one person dead, and three people who look as though they will be permanently disabled, following their first dose of the Moderna vaccine. The age of those affected ranges from 38 to 82 years of age,” wrote Hoffe.
Following his letter, Hoffe said, he is no longer allowed to work in the ER department of St. Bartholomew’s Health Centre due to his views on the COVID injection. He still can work in his private practice.
“I am still permitted to see patients in my private practice, which is not under the jurisdiction of the Interior Health authority,” Hoffe said. Losing the ability to work in the ER has resulted in his income being slashed by half, which he explained is “the price of advocating for the safety of my patients.”
A community note which was posted on the Lytton Medical clinic door states that Hoffe’s “suspension” by the local health authority will “likely” mean that the “emergency room in Lytton will be closed for at least two weeks out of every month.”
In a recent statement, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) and the First Nations Health Authority (FNHA) said they were aware of “public statements from physicians that contradict public health orders and guidance [being] confusing and potentially harmful to patients.”
CPSBC registrar and CEO Dr. Heidi Oetter threatened to take action against doctors who speak out against the government narrative, saying in the statement that those who “put the public at risk with misinformation may face an investigation by the College, and if warranted, regulatory action.”
Just recently, Hoffe was one of ten doctors who spoke in a video calling for an end to “ethically unjustifiable” COVID-19 lockdowns. The video was published by Professionals Against Lockdowns, which was created by Liberty Coalition Canada.
The physicians in the video said parents need to “demand” change from those in charge so that kids can live their lives again without masks or “social distancing.”
In the video, Hoffe stated that “children are not the main spreaders of this disease,” and urged people to not “risk ruining their life with this experimental vaccine in order to protect them from a disease that really poses no risk to them at all.”
“So if anyone tells you that your child needs to be vaccinated against COVID to protect you or their teacher or their grandparents or anyone else, it makes absolutely no sense at all,” said Hoffe.
He also mentioned other side effects his patients sufferend following vaccination with the COVID jab, including “constant pain, headaches, muscle weakness, and dizziness.”
“These were three previously healthy people whose lives have now been ruined by this experiment,” Hoffe emphasized.
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Author John Leake recently interviewed Dr. Peter McCullough in Dallas. YouTube phenom Austen Fletcher, known online as “Fleccas Talks,” has done a masterful job in post-production by summarizing the 1 hour and 45 minutes interview down to less than 17 minutes.
You won’t find this on his YouTube channel, for obvious reasons, but he also publishes on Rumble now, and you can find both the edited summary version and the full version on his Rumble channel.
Dr. Peter McCullough is already well-known to Health Impact News readers. Here is a list of his credentials again.
Dr. McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist. Since the outset of the pandemic, Dr. McCullough has been a leader in the medical response to the COVID-19 disaster and has published “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection” the first synthesis of sequenced multidrug treatment of ambulatory patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the American Journal of Medicine and subsequently updated in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine.
He has 40 peer-reviewed publications on the infection and has commented extensively on the medical response to the COVID-19 crisis in TheHill and on FOX NEWS Channel.
On November 19, 2020, Dr. McCullough testified in the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and throughout 2021 in the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, Colorado General Assembly, and New Hampshire Senate concerning many aspects of the pandemic response.
Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, FACP, FACC, FAHA, FCRSA, FCCP, FNKF, FNLA
For more information about Dr. McCullough, please visit: heartplace.com/dr-peter-a-mccullough (Source.)
Dr. McCullough is pro-vaccine, and in the beginning he did administer the COVID-19 shots to some of his patients.
But now he states:
“Based on the safety data now, I can no longer recommend it.”
If you have watched any of the previous interviews we have published with Dr. McCullough, you will see that this man appears to be an honest physician who truly wants to help his patients, and therefore has apparently not bought into the whole spirit behind the implementation of the New World Order by the Luciferians who have no regard for human life at all.
Dr. McCullough was a leader among the physicians who developed early treatments for whatever COVID-19 is, using simple, older drugs with a long history of safety, and as a result he saved many lives.
He was the lead author on a major published study on the use of these older drugs, and when he put up a YouTube video about the study to help people, he was shocked that it was removed. He knew then that something nefarious was happening worldwide.
In this most recent interview, one can observe that he is doing his own research now, and he even quotes some people in the alternative media, which shows he is making the effort to get around censorship in the corporate media and Big Tech to learn the truth.
This is the first time, to my knowledge, that he referred to the COVID-19 shots as “bioweapons.”
He also uses the term “Globalists”:
This is what Globalists have been waiting for. They’ve been waiting for a way of marking people. That if you get the vaccine, you’re marked in a database.
And this can be used for trade, for commerce, for behavior modification – all different purposes.
He also states:
“Here, in the United States, we have 100 million people vaccinated (with the COVID-19 bioweapon shots so far). This is far and away the most lethal, toxic, biologic agent ever injected into a human body in American history.”
For Health Impact News readers who have been following the vaccine topic for years, and following the holistic doctors who have been warning about the dangers of vaccines in general, and the eugenic plans of the Globalists in the roll out of the COVID-19 bioweapons in particular, there probably is no new information in this interview with Dr. McCullough.
So why are we publishing it?
Because as a pro-vaccine world leader in his medical field, he takes much more risk to bring this information to the public, putting his own life and career on the line.
And that’s big news!
At the end of this short clip he is asked if any agency or individual has tried to silence him through threats or intimidation, to which he replied:
My personal situation, professional situation, is a position of strength.
And those who have attempted, in any way, to pressure, coerce, or threaten me with reprisal, have paid an extraordinary price.
And I think that’s an important message to get out there.
There is a position of strength based on principles of compassionate care, and of the Hippocratic oath, and of the fiduciary relationship that a doctor has to a patient, and a prominent doctor has to a population, that supersedes all of those other ill intents.
And what I say is, bring them on.
So what do you think Health Impact News readers? I know that there are literally hundreds of doctors who subscribe to Health Impact News. What advice would you give to Peter McCullough?
Do you think he has any idea what is awaiting him, even though he has apparently already weathered some storms by the opposition?
This man needs our prayers! Because I suspect that not only is his career in danger, but his very life. He may be grossly underestimating the enemy.
Watch this short clip from Fleccas Talks’ Rumble channel. (Thank you Austen!!!) It is currently approaching a half million views, and I know that Health Impact News readers can easily add a few hundred thousand more. The full interview is here.
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Rentier Capitalism and its Discontents
