Global Research

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

“Investing illusions can continue for a surprisingly long time. Wall Street loves the fees that deal making generates, and the press loves the stories that colorful promoters provide. At a point, the soaring price of a promoted stock can itself become the ‘proof’ that an illusion is reality. Eventually, of course, the party ends, and many business ’emperors’ are found to have no clothes.” Warren Buffett (1930- ), America investor, (in his annual letter of Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021).

“All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.” John K. Galbraith (1908-2006), Canadian-born American economist, (in ‘A Short History of Financial Euphoria’, 1994).

“History shows that once an enormous debt has been incurred by a nation, there are only two ways to solve it: one is simply declare bankruptcy, the other is to inflate the currency and thus destroy the wealth of ordinary citizens.” Adam Smith (1723-1790), Scottish economist, father of modern economics, (in ‘The Wealth of Nations’, 1776).

***

Over the last few weeks, investors’ sentiment about future inflation and future interest rates has changed. It seems that complacency about inflationary pressures in some parts of the economy is coming to an end.

Even during the economic slowdown brought about by the economic impact of the pandemic, some prices are clearly on the way up. Besides the exuberance in the financial sector where stock and bond prices are frothy, some important prices in the real economy are also strongly increasing.

Sustained price pressures in some important economic sectors

For example, oil prices have increased by more than 50 percent since last year. Construction material prices (lumber, copper, steel, etc.) have skyrocketed by as much as 73% in one year. Because of a strong demand and higher construction costs, real estate prices and rents are rising. For instance, the median home price in the U.S. increased 15% in 2020, while average house prices increased 23% in Canada, during the same period. Food prices have also increased 3.8% in the U.S. and 2.3% in Canada in 2020, and are likely to continue their trend upward in 2021. Even some of the extra liquidity injected into the system has found its way into the cryptocurrency craze, a phenomenon reminiscent of the Tulip mania in Holland in the 17th Century!

The only place where there seems to be little inflation is in the official measures of inflation. In the U.S., the all-items Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) rose only 1.4% in 2020. Even the Producer Price Index (PPI) is up only 1.76% from one year ago. [N.B.: In Canada, the figures are 0.7% (or 1.3% for the CPI excluding gasoline) and 1.4% for durable goods, in 2020].

Currently, the actual inflation rate could be severely underestimated by official figures

Three factors can explain the low inflation reported by official figures. First, one must realize that official inflation indexes are lagging indicators, because important shifts in consumer spending patterns are adjusted every two years. Therefore, during the 2020 pandemic, even though consumers did substantially alter their consumer spending, that shift has not yet been reflected in the official inflation measures.

Secondly, some important sectors (tourism, travel, hotels, restaurants, retail, art and culture, etc.) did experience substantial drops in demand, production and employment, and the prices of their services have declined, artificially pushing the official inflation indexes down. It can be expected that prices in those depressed sectors will bounce back, maybe with a vengeance, once the economic recovery takes hold.

Thirdly, the prices of oil and gasoline were very depressed during most of 2020, and they have since bounced back. Higher energy prices will most probably filter into future measures of inflation.

My tentative conclusion would be that official measures of inflation have seriously underreported the true inflation rate experienced by consumers during the 2020 pandemic.

Many investors have also reached that conclusion. They have realized that the easy-money monetary policies pursued by central banks to boost inflation toward the 2% threshold may have been pushed too far, and that interest rates have been kept ultra low for too long.

This does not mean that more fiscal stimulus is not needed to help workers who have lost their job because of the pandemic and may have trouble going back to their old line of employment.

The clash between central bankers and investors

That is why there has recently been a clash between central bankers and investors about where inflation and interest rates are going to be, once the pandemic is a thing of the past and the economic recovery is well on its way.

The clash pits central bankers, who have been gradually pushing interest rates to ultra low levels with easy-money policies over the last 10 years, and investors, who fear that the after-pandemic economic rebound could be stronger than expected and lead to a resurgence of inflation.

This was epitomized last Thursday March 4, when U.S. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell ruffled investors by declaring that he had no plan to raise interest rates, i.e. not until labor-market conditions are consistent with “maximum employment and inflation is sustainable at 2 percent”. The Governor of the Bank of Canada Mr. Tiff Macklem also seems to subscribe to Mr. Powell’s thesis.

What is the basis for such a clash of perceptions? Essentially, there is a disagreement about how much excess supply there really is in the economy and  how robust the economic recovery will be after the pandemic has been vanquished.

On the one hand, central bankers would prefer to keep interest rates on the floor until the economy reaches its full employment level and a higher moderate rate of inflation is attained. On the other hand, investors remember that central banks are known to procrastinate and wait too long to tackle inflationary pressures, ending  up overshooting their inflation targets. Indeed, if central bankers wait too long to address inflationary pressures, sooner or later they must step on the monetary brakes, and interest rates shoot up, causing market disruptions.

The pre-1980 period, when central banks waited too long before fighting the creeping inflation, is a good example. In 1980, they pushed interest rates way up, and this brought about the deep 1980-1982 economic recession. [N.B.: In the U.S., the Fed funds rate hit 21% in June 1981, while in Canada, the Bank of Canada interest rate peaked also at 21%, in August 1981.]

Many investors believe that economic conditions are currently reminiscent of what happens after a war, when governments have built up huge debts, and there is a strong pent up demand on the part of consumers who wish to resume spending. By the end of the pandemic, they are forecasting a stronger economic rebound than the one some central banks are expecting.

The Central bankers’ rationale to keep easy-money policies a bit longer

Central bankers presently have two fears, which may explain why they would prefer to keep interest rates ultra low for a few more years.

First, the Fed sees that there are still 10 million fewer jobs today, in the United States, than there were in March 2020. [A similar soft labor market prevails in Canada, as there were 858,000 fewer jobs in January 2021 than in February 2020.] Central bankers think that some structural damage has been done to their economies, especially in the service sector and among young workers, and that it will take time to bring back full employment.

Secondly, the high levels of debt worldwide preoccupy central bankers. Indeed, they see the global financial system becoming overloaded with debt, at all levels, governments, corporations and consumers. They fear that any rise in interest rates would increase the burden of debt service and reduce aggregate demand and, possibly, trigger a financial crisis and an economic recession.

Total global debt is historically very high

Global debt, private and public, is well on its way to reach the unsustainable threshold of 400 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2021. When interest rates begin rising, this could cause havoc in many ways. Paradoxically, it was the artificially low interest rates of central banks that encouraged such over-indebtedness. And today, those same central banks find themselves trapped in their past policies, and they fear that if they reverted to normal interest rates, it could trigger a global debt crisis.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, central bankers were very innovative in finding new ways of accommodating politicians who wanted, all at the same time, large tax cuts, higher fiscal deficits, super low interest rates, and faster economic growth, without inflation. This was too good to last for very long.

Central banks in Europe, the U.S., and Japan began to load their balance sheets with government bonds and other financial assets, in the hope of controlling both nominal and real interest rates, and, in so doing, boost economic growth. For example, since March 2020, the NY Fed has been buying $120 billion in Treasury bonds in various maturities and mortgage-backed securities each month, in order to keep interest rates ultra low.

The U.S. Fed’s balance sheet of financial assets, which was less than $1 trillion in 2008, now stands at $7 trillion. The Bank of Canada’s balance sheet stood at C$51 billion in 2008 and now is at C$573 billion. – Central banks can do that (i.e. inject large quantities of new money into the economy), for a while, provided that deflationary pressures are such that inflation does not result. If interest rates start rising, the entire policy could begin unraveling.

Attempts to keep interest rates ultra low in such an environment could simply be impossible, without creating unsustainable financial bubbles.

What could happen if central bankers keep interest rates ultra low for too long?

If central bankers nevertheless attempt to keep nominal interest rates artificially low by increasing the money base and the money supply, it would be like adding fuel to the fire. This will create even more inflationary expectations.

Since the mission of central banks is to prevent excessive inflation from taking hold, while keeping employment high, they have to be careful and make sure that an easy-money policy does not generate strong inflationary expectations.

Already, the unorthodox and unprecedented monetary policy implemented during the last decade has created huge financial bubbles in real estate, in the bond market and in the stock market, with little positive influence on the overall real economy.

It’s possible that central banks have been pursuing short-run financial and economic gains at the cost of serious long-run financial and economic pain. Indeed, if they were to persist in creating bigger and bigger financial bubbles, sooner or later, the day of reckoning will take the form of financial crashes.

Will consumers’ extra savings lead to more spending after the pandemic?

It would seem logical to expect that consumers, both in the U.S. and in Canada, and elsewhere, are going to spend at least part of their extra savings, once the pandemic is conquered. Such a pent up demand is another factor that could boost the economy in the next few years.

This could create a period of economic and financial euphoria with booming markets, fueled by the central bankers’ wholesale printing of money, possibly leading into 2023-2024, (provided, of course, that there is no third wave of virus variants).

Extra high public debts will bring about slower economic growth in the future

Because of the economic impact of the pandemic, many governments around the globe are more indebted than ever, even more so than after World War II, with public debts in advanced economies being over 120 percent of GDP, and growing.

Such a high level of over-indebtedness is bound to be a drag on future economic growth. This is because high public debts tend to push long-term interest rates up, and higher borrowing costs discourage private capital investment and hurt productivity. Extraordinarily high public debts may force governments to raise taxes to meet their ballooning debt service requirements, and this could also be another drag on future economic growth.

Conclusion

Economic conditions in most advanced economies, especially in the U.S. and in Canada, but also in Europe, are at a crucial juncture. There is hope now that the pandemic’s economic drag is about to end, because of the widespread vaccination programs implemented in most countries.

However, is it possible that a fear on the part of investors that inflation could quickly rise during a strong economic recovery, might push long-term interest rates way up? Or will central bankers be able to stick to their policies of ultra low interest rates for another year or two? Both outcomes carry their own risks.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay.

Please visit Dr Tremblay’s site or email to a friend here.

Featured image is from Public Domain

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Fukushima was an avoidable disaster, fuelled by Australian uranium and the hubris and profiteering of Japan’s nuclear industry in collusion with compromised regulators and captured bureaucracies.

The Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission ‒ established by the Japanese Parliament ‒ concluded in its 2012 report that the accident was “a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented” if not for “a multitude of errors and wilful negligence that left the Fukushima plant unprepared for the events of March 11”.

The accident was the result of “collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO”, the commission found.

Mining

But overseas suppliers who turned a blind eye to unacceptable nuclear risks in Japan have largely escaped scrutiny or blame. Australia’s uranium industry is a case in point.

Yuki Tanaka from the Hiroshima Peace Institute noted:

“Japan is not the sole nation responsible for the current nuclear disaster. From the manufacture of the reactors by GEto provision of uranium by Canada, Australia and others, many nations are implicated.”

There is no dispute that Australian uranium was used in the Fukushima reactors. The mining companies won’t acknowledge that fact — instead they hide behind claims of “commercial confidentiality” and “security”.

But the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office acknowledged in October 2011 that:

“We can confirm that Australian obligated nuclear material was at the Fukushima Daiichi site and in each of the reactors — maybe five out of six, or it could have been all of them”.

BHP and Rio Tinto, two of the world’s largest mining companies, supplied Australian uranium to TEPCO and that uranium was used to fuel Fukushima.

Tsunamis

The mining companies have failed to take any responsibility for the catastrophic impacts on Japanese society that resulted from the use of their uranium in a poorly managed, poorly regulated industry.

Moreover, the mining companies can’t claim ignorance. The warning signs were clear. Australia’s uranium industry did nothing as TEPCO and other Japanese nuclear companies lurched from scandal to scandal and accident to accident.

The uranium industry did nothing in 2002 when it was revealed that TEPCO had systematically and routinely falsified safety data and breached safety regulations for 25 years or more.

The uranium industry did nothing in 2007 when over 300 incidents of ‘malpractice’ at Japan’s nuclear plants were revealed – 104 of them at nuclear power plants.

It did nothing even as the ability of Japan’s nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis came under growing criticism from industry insiders and independent experts.

Vicious cycle

And the uranium industry did nothing about the multiple conflicts of interest plaguing Japanese nuclear regulators.

Mirarr senior Traditional Owner Yvonne Margarula ‒ on whose land in the Northern Territory Rio Tinto’s Ranger mine operated ‒ said she was “deeply saddened” that uranium from Ranger was exported to Japanese nuclear companies including TEPCO.

No such humility from the uranium companies. They get tetchy at any suggestion of culpability, with the Australian Uranium Association describing it as “opportunism in the midst of human tragedy” and “utter nonsense”.

Yet, Australia could have played a role in breaking the vicious cycle of mismanagement in Japan’s nuclear industry by making uranium exports conditional on improved management of nuclear plants and tighter regulation.

Even a strong public statement of concern would have been heard by the Japanese utilities – unless it was understood to be rhetoric for public consumption – and it would have registered in the Japanese media.

Safety

But the uranium industry denied culpability and instead stuck its head in the sand. Since the industry is in denial about its role in fuelling the Fukushima disaster, there is no reason to believe that it will behave more responsibly in future.

Successive Australian governments did nothing about the unacceptable standards in Japan’s nuclear industry. Julia Gillard ‒ Australia’s Prime Minister at the time of the Fukushima disaster ‒ said the disaster “doesn’t have any impact on my thinking about uranium exports”.

Signification elements of Japan’s corrupt ‘nuclear village’ ‒ comprising industry, regulators, politicians and government agencies ‒ were back in control just a few years after the Fukushima disaster. Regulation remains problematic.

Add to that ageing reactors, and companies facing serious economic stress and intense competition, and there’s every reason for ongoing concern about nuclear safety in Japan.

Professor Yoshioka Hitoshi is a Kyushu University academic who served on the government’s 2011-12 Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations.

Regulation

They said in October 2015:

“Unfortunately, the new regulatory regime is … inadequate to ensure the safety of Japan’s nuclear power facilities. The first problem is that the new safety standards on which the screening and inspection of facilities are to be based are simply too lax.

“While it is true that the new rules are based on international standards, the international standards themselves are predicated on the status quo.

“They have been set so as to be attainable by most of the reactors already in operation. In essence, the NRA made sure that all Japan’s existing reactors would be able to meet the new standards with the help of affordable piecemeal modifications ‒ back-fitting, in other words.”

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon called for an independent cost-benefit inquiry into uranium trade. The Australian government failed to act.

Inadequate regulation was a root cause of the Fukushima disaster yet Australia has uranium supply agreements with numerous countries with demonstrably inadequate nuclear regulation, including China, India, Russia, the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Ukraine.

Overthrow

Likewise, Australian uranium companies and the government turn a blind eye to nuclear corruption scandals in countries with uranium supply agreements: South Korea, India, Russia and Ukraine among others.

Indeed, Australia has signed up to expand its uranium trade to sell into insecure regions.

In 2011 ‒ the same year as the Fukushima disaster ‒ the Australian government agreed to allow uranium exports to India.

This despite inadequate nuclear regulation in India, and despite India’s ongoing expansion of its nuclear weaponry and delivery capabilities.

A uranium supply agreement with the United Arab Emirates was concluded in 2013 despite the obvious risks of selling uranium into a politically and militarily volatile region where nuclear facilities have repeatedly been targeted by adversaries intent on stopping covert nuclear weapons programs. Australia was planning uranium sales to the Shah of Iran months before his overthrow in 1979.

Forced labour

A uranium supply agreement with Ukraine was concluded in 2016 despite a host of safety and security concerns, and the inability of the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out safeguards inspections in regions annexed by Russia.

In 2014, Australia banned uranium sales to Russia, with then prime minister Tony Abbott stating:

“Australia has no intention of selling uranium to a country which is so obviously in breach of international law as Russia currently is.”

Australia’s uranium supply agreement with China, concluded in 2006, has not been reviewed despite abundant evidence of inadequate nuclear safety standards, inadequate regulation, lack of transparency, repression of whistleblowers, world’s worst insurance and liability arrangements, security risks, and widespread corruption.

Civil society and NGO’s are campaigning to wind back Australia’s atomic exposures in the uranium trade with emphasis on uranium sales to China.

China’s human rights abuses and a range of strategic insecurity issues warrant a cessation of uranium sales. China’s ongoing human rights abuses in Tibet and mass detention and forced labour against Uyghurs in Xinjiang are severe breaches of international humanitarian law and UN Treaties.

Weapons

China proliferated nuclear weapons know-how to Pakistan, targets Australia in cyber-attacks, and is causing regional insecurity on the India border, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and in the Pacific.

BHP’s Olympic Dam is the only company still selling Australian uranium into China. There is a case for the ‘Big Australian’ to forego uranium sales overall and an onus to end sales to China.

A federal Parliamentary Inquiry in Australia is investigating forced labour in China and the options for Australia to respond. A case is before this inquiry to disqualify China from supply of Australian uranium sales  – see submission 02 on human rights abuses and submission 02.1 on security risks.

Australia supplies uranium with scant regard for nuclear safety risks. Likewise, proliferation risks are given short shrift.

Australia has uranium export agreements with all of the ‘declared’ nuclear weapons states – the US, UK, China, France, Russia – although not one of them takes seriously its obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue disarmament in good faith.

Carte blanche

Australia claims to be working to discourage countries from producing fissile – explosive – material for nuclear bombs, but nonetheless exports uranium to countries blocking progress on the proposed Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty.

And Australia gives Japan open-ended permission to separate and stockpile plutonium although that stockpiling fans regional proliferation risks and tensions in North-East Asia.

Despite liberal export policies, Australian uranium sales are in long-term decline and now represent only 8.9 percent of world uranium usage.

With the Ranger mine shut down and no longer processing ore for uranium exports, there are only two operating uranium mines in Australia: BHP’s Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine and the smaller General Atomics’ Beverley Four Mile operation ‒ both in South Australia.

Uranium accounts for less than 0.3 percent of Australia’s export revenue and less than 0.1 percent of all jobs in Australia.

One wonders why an industry that delivers so little is given carte blanche by the government to do as it pleases.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.

David Noonan is an independent environment campaigner. For further information on BHP’s Olympic Dam mine click here.

Featured image: Senior Traditional Owner Yvonne Margarula was “deeply saddened” that uranium from Rio Tinto’s Ranger mine on Mirarr country in the Northern Territory was exported to Japanese nuclear companies including TEPCO. Photo by Dominic O’Brien via The Ecologist

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan and Harry is a perfect case study of how an important political debate about the corrupting role of the monarchy on British life gets shunted aside yet again, not just by the endless Royal soap opera but by supposedly progressive identity politics. 

As so often, a focus on identity risks not only blunting our capacity for critical thinking but can be all too readily weaponised: in this case, as the media’s main take-away from the Oprah interview illustrates, by providing an implicit defence of class privilege. 

The racism directed at Markle – sorry, the Duchess of Sussex – and baby Archie is ugly, it goes without saying (but maybe more to the point, must be stated to avoid being accused of ignoring or trivialising racism).

The concern expressed by a senior royal during Markle’s pregnancy about Archie’s likely darker skin colour does indeed reveal how deeply ingrained racism is in the British establishment and how much it trickles down to the rest of British society, not least through the billionaire-owned media. 

Princely ‘birthright’

But more significant is how the racism demonstrated towards Markle and Archie has played out in the media coverage of the interview and the resulting “national conversation” on social media – nowadays, the only real barometer we have for judging such conversations. 

The problem is that, via Oprah, the Sussexes get to frame the significance of the House of Windsor’s racism: both in the threat that, when Charles ascends to the throne, grandson Archie will be deprived of his princely “birthright” because he is of mixed race; and in the fact that Harry and Meghan have been hounded from Palace life into celebrity-style exile in the US.

Let's be clear: only someone still deeply immersed in a lifetime of propaganda would be cheerleading one side or the other in this royal soap opera. It's an endless drama designed to obscure the fact that the system itself ensures privilege for some, exploitation for others https://t.co/TDq0yuAoym

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 8, 2021

In the process, an important, democratic conversation has yet again been supplanted about why Britain still maintains and reveres these expensive relics of a medieval system of unaccountable rule based on a superior (if no longer divine) blood line.

Instead, the conversation initiated by Oprah is a much more politically muddled one about whether it is right that a “commoner” woman of colour and her mixed-race son are obstructed from fully participating in this medieval system of privilege.

Image makeover 

A real political debate about privilege – one that demands greater equality and an end to racist presumptions about blood lines – has been obscured and trivialised once again by a row of the kind preferred by the corporate media: whether most of the Royal Family are too racist to realise that a woman of colour like Meghan could help them with a twenty-first-century image makeover.

As a result, we are presented with a false binary choice. Either we cheer on the Royal Family and implicitly condone their racism; or we cheer on Meghan and implicitly support her battle to better veil the feudal ugliness of the British monarchy.

It ought to be possible to want Archie to live a life equal to “white” babies in the UK without also wanting him to live a life of pomp and circumstance, designed to ensure that other babies – white, black and brown – grow up to be denied the privileges he enjoys by virtue of royal birth.

This is your reminder that Versailles gets double the number of visitors compared to Buckingham Palace.

The way for the country to really get an economic boost from the royal family is therefore to chop all their heads off.

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 8, 2021

Divisive and enervating 

What the Oprah interview does – is designed to do – is derail the intersection of class and race in politically damaging ways.

A meaningful democratic struggle prioritises class unity as the battering ram against establishment power that long ago learnt to protect itself by dividing us through our competing identities. Class struggle does not ignore race; it embraces it and all other socially constructed identities used by power to rationalise oppression. Class subsumes them into a collective struggle strengthened by numbers.

Struggle based on identity, by contrast, is inherently divisive and politically enervating, as the Meghan Markle case illuminates. Her challenge to Royal “tradition” alienates those most invested in ideas of monarchy, “Britishness” or white identity. And it does so while offering no more than a sop to those invested in breaking glass ceilings, even of the kind that aren’t worth smashing in the first place.

Meghan’s fight for the first mixed-race British prince is no more politically progressive than the celebration by the media two years ago of the news that for the first time women were in charge of the military-industrial complex – the one that rains down death and destruction on “Third World” men, women and children.

"Women controlling the military-industrial complex is not feminism, it’s toxic masculinity. The fruit of a sick valuing system that is poisoning our environment and risking nuclear annihilation, writes Caitlin Johnstone." ~ via @consortiumnewshttps://t.co/GPqItPJClh

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) January 7, 2019

Value for money 

Strange as it is to recall now – in an age of social media, when anyone can comment on anything, and the “mainstream” media’s billionaire gatekeepers have supposedly been sidelined – ordinary Britons discussed abolishing the monarchy far more in the 1970s, when I was a child, than they do nowadays.

Getting rid of the Royal Family – like getting rid of nuclear weapons, another topic no one talks about seriously any more – was mainstream enough then that Royalists were often forced on to the defensive. As the mood soured among a vocal section of the population, the Queen’s defenders were forced hurriedly to switch from arguments rooted in deference and tradition to more utilitarian claims that the Royals offered “value for money”, supposedly boosting commerce and tourism.

Prince Charles’ engagement in 1981 to a beautiful, demure teenage “English rose”, Princess Diana, looked to many, even at the time, suspiciously like a move to reinvigorate a tired, increasingly unpopular brand.

The media spectacle of a fairytale romance and wedding, followed by years of controversy, disillusionment and betrayal, culminating in divorce and finally Diana’s death / murder, very effectively distracted the British public for the next 16 years from the question of what purpose a Royal Family served. It became only too clear what role they played: they kept us engrossed in a real-life, better-than-TV drama.

Champions of identity 

Diana’s supposed struggle to grow from adolescence to womanhood in the glare of media intrusion and under the strictures of “The Firm” created the prototype for a new type of apolitical, Mills and Boon-style identity politics.

Following Diana’s escapades – from the secular saint who cleared landmines to the raunchy princess who had illicit sex with her riding instructor, an army major no less – was far more thrilling than the campaign to end the monarchy and the regressive landed class it still represents.

Diana’s life story helped pave the way to the reinvention of the left through the 1990s – under Tony Blair in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US – as champions of a new social issues-obsessed non-politics.

Both were ushered into power after reassuring the newly triumphant corporate elite that they would harness and divert popular energy away from dangerous struggles for political change towards safe struggles for superficial social change.

In the UK, that was achieved most obviously in Blair’s assiduous courtship of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Importantly, Blair persuaded Murdoch that, as prime minister, he would not only preserve the economic legacy of the Thatcher years but head further down the path of deregulation.

Murdoch – himself no fan of a British monarchy that had always looked down on him as a vulgar Australian – also understood that the inevitable soap opera quality of exceptional individuals battling the UK’s rigid hierarchy of privilege, spurred on by Blair’s New Labour, would prove great for sales of his newspapers. Just as Oprah knows that the only tangible consequence of the Harry and Meghan interview is that it will rake in many more millions for her own media empire. 

Sticking It to the Man 

In the new era of identity-saturated non-politics, demands for equality mean removing obstacles so that more women, people of colour and the LGBT community can participate in institutions that represent power and privilege.

These battles are not about overthrowing those systems of privilege, as earlier identity-based struggles such as the Black Panthers’ were. Success serves simply to placate identity-focused groups by helping those of most “merit” elbow their way into the preserves of established power.

Those achievements started with the most visible, least significant areas of the economy, such as sport and celebrity, and led over time to greater access to the professions.

The current excitement among some on the left at Meghan’s “Sticking It to the Man” appears to derive from the disruptive threat she poses to the House of Windsor – not to its economic, social and political power, but to its status as the last hold-out against Blair’s identity-fuelled “revolution”.

The Queen has an opaque, little-discussed prior consent power over legislation she secretly abused to give herself a unique right, decades ago, to conceal from the public the scale of her vast private wealth.

Pluocracy still rules in the UK https://t.co/LZaDEU6PSd

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 8, 2021

Narrative twist 

Diana’s emancipation story helped distract us for nearly two decades from confronting central questions about the nature and role of the British establishment in preserving and veiling power.

Now Meghan Markle is expanding the identity story in a new direction, one that once again embraces the story of a young, “headstrong” woman scorned by the Royal Family for snubbing tradition. But this time there is an alluring contemporary twist to the narrative: the Family’s resistance to diversity and its refusal to own its racist past.

Unlike Diana who stood alone and seemingly fragile, Meghan and Harry offer a more relevant, modern picture of a confident, professional young couple standing and fighting together for what is fair, for what should be theirs by right.

This feels important, bold and empowering. But it is the precise opposite. It is more Mills and Boons, but this time with diversity thrown in to generate more appeal on one side and more hostility on the other.

Meghan’s story will continue to work its magic: fascinating, infuriating and pacifying us in equal measure as we focus on what is private, unknowable and can be endlessly contested rather than what is universal, visible and impossible to refute.

Meanwhile, the Royal Family, the perpetuation of privilege and the erosion of democracy will march on as before, in the same long and glorious British tradition.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

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.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

As reported by New Delhi-based World Is One News (WION),¹ Pfizer is demanding countries put up sovereign assets as collateral for expected vaccine injury lawsuits resulting from its COVID-19 inoculation. In other words, it wants governments to guarantee the company will be compensated for any expenses resulting from injury lawsuits against it.

WION reports that Argentina and Brazil have rejected Pfizer’s demands. Initially, the company demanded indemnification legislation to be enacted, such as that which it enjoys in the U.S. Argentina proposed legislation that would restrict Pfizer’s financial responsibility for injuries to those resulting from negligence or malice.

Pfizer rejected the proposal. It also rejected a rewritten proposal that included a clearer definition of negligence. Pfizer then demanded the Argentinian government put up sovereign assets — including its bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings — as collateral. Argentina refused. A similar situation occurred in Brazil. Pfizer demanded Brazil:

1. “Waive sovereignty of its assets abroad in favor of Pfizer”
2. Not apply its domestic laws to the company
3. Not penalize Pfizer for vaccine delivery delays
4. Exempt Pfizer from all civil liability for side effects

Brazil rejected Pfizer’s demands, calling them “abusive.” As noted by WION, Pfizer developed its vaccine with the help of government funding, and now it — a private company — is demanding governments hand over sovereign assets to ensure the company won’t lose a dime if its product injures people, even if those injuries are the result of negligent company practices, fraud or malice.

Aside from Argentina and Brazil, nine other South American countries have reportedly negotiated deals with Pfizer. It’s unclear whether they actually ended up giving up national assets in return.²

Vaccine Maker Accused of Abusing Its Power

According to STAT News,³ “Legal experts have raised concerns that Pfizer’s demands amount to an abuse of power.” Lawrence Gostin, law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law told STAT:⁴

“Pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be using their power to limit lifesaving vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. [This] seems to be exactly what they’re doing … Some liability protection is warranted, but certainly not for fraud, gross negligence, mismanagement, failure to follow good manufacturing practices. Companies have no right to ask for indemnity for these things.”

Mark Eccleston-Turner, a lecturer in global health law at Keele University in England, added:⁵

“[Pfizer] is trying to eke out as much profit and minimize its risk at every juncture with this vaccine development then this vaccine rollout. Now, the vaccine development has been heavily subsidized already. So there’s very minimal risk for the manufacturer involved there.”

Don’t Expect Compensation if Injured by COVID-19 Vaccine

In the U.S., vaccine makers already enjoy full indemnity against injuries occurring from this or any other pandemic vaccine under the PREP Act. If you’re injured, you’d have to file a compensation claim with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP),⁶ which is funded by U.S. taxpayers via Congressional appropriation to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

While similar to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), which applies to nonpandemic vaccines, the CICP is even less generous when it comes to compensation. For example, while the NVICP pays some of the costs associated with any given claim, the CICP does not. This means you’ll also be responsible for attorney fees and expert witness fees.

A significant problem with the CICP is that it’s administered within the DHHS, which is also sponsoring the COVID-19 vaccination program. This conflict of interest makes the CICP less than likely to find fault with the vaccine.

Your only route of appeal is within the DHHS, where your case would simply be reviewed by another employee. The DHHS is also responsible for making the payment, so the DHHS effectively acts as judge, jury and defendant. As reported by Dr. Meryl Nass,⁷ the maximum payout you can receive — even in cases of permanent disability or death — is $250,000 per person; however, you’d have to exhaust your private insurance policy before the CICP gives you a dime.

CICP will only pay the difference between what your insurance covers and the total payout amount established for your case. For permanent disability, even $250,000 won’t go far. The CICP also has a one year statute of limitations, so you have to act quickly.

This too is a significant problem, as no one really knows what injuries might arise from the COVID-19 vaccine, or when, and this makes tying the injury to the vaccination a difficult prospect. Employers that mandate the COVID-19 vaccine will also be indemnified from liability for side effects. Instead, claims will be routed through worker’s compensation programs.

If the COVID-19 vaccines are as safe as the manufacturers claim, why do they insist on so much indemnification? Do they suspect or know something they’re refusing to admit publicly?

Side Effects Are Inevitable

Of course, those of us who have been looking at the science behind the mRNA technology used to create these novel “vaccines” have long since realized there are tremendous risks involved. For starters, mRNA vaccines are most accurately referred to as gene therapies, as this is what they are.

They effectively turn your cells into bioreactors that churn out viral proteins to incite an immune response, and there’s no off-switch.⁸ Based on historical and preliminary evidence, significant short- and long-term side effects are, quite frankly, inevitable.

For starters, your body sees the synthetic mRNA as “non-self,” which can cause autoantibodies to attack your own tissues. Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., explained this in her interview, featured in “How COVID-19 ‘Vaccines’ May Destroy the Lives of Millions.”

Free mRNA also drive inflammatory diseases, which is why making synthetic mRNA thermostable — i.e., slowing the breakdown of the RNA by encasing it in lipid nanoparticles — is likely to be problematic. The nanoparticles themselves also pose a risk. COVID-19 vaccines use PEGylated lipid nanoparticles, which is known to cause allergic reactions and anaphylaxis.^9,10

What’s more, previous attempts to develop an mRNA-based drug using lipid nanoparticles failed and had to be abandoned because when the dose was too low, the drug had no effect, and when dosed too high, the drug became too toxic.¹¹ An obvious question is: What has changed that now makes this technology safe enough for mass use?

As detailed in my interview with Mikovits, the synthetic RNA influences the gene syncytin, which can result in:

• Brain inflammation
• Dysregulated communication between the microglia in your brain, which are critical for clearing toxins and pathogens
• Dysregulated immune system
• Dysregulated endocannabinoid system (which calms inflammation)

Pathogenic Priming and Antibody-Dependent Enhancement

Another significant problem is that we don’t know whether antibody production is protective or pathogenic in coronavirus infections. If pathogenic, vaccinated individuals may be at increased risk of severe illness if they’re exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in the future. As reported in a December 11, 2020, Vaccine: X paper:¹²

“The first SARS-CoV-2 vaccine(s) will likely be licensed based on neutralizing antibodies in Phase 2 trials, but there are significant concerns about using antibody response in coronavirus infections as a sole metric of protective immunity.

Antibody response is often a poor marker of prior coronavirus infection, particularly in mild infections, and is shorter-lived than virus-reactive T-cells … Strong antibody response correlates with more severe clinical disease while T-cell response is correlated with less severe disease; and antibody-dependent enhancement of pathology and clinical severity has been described.

Indeed, it is unclear whether antibody production is protective or pathogenic in coronavirus infections. Early data with SARS-CoV-2 support these findings. Data from coronavirus infections in animals and humans emphasize the generation of a high-quality T cell response in protective immunity.”

A number of reports in the medical literature have indeed highlighted the risk of pathogenic priming and antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). As explained in “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire? Due Diligence Warranted for ADE in COVID-19”:¹³

“ADE is an immunological phenomenon whereby a previous immune response to a virus can render an individual more susceptible to a subsequent analogous infection.

Rather than viral recognition and clearance, the prior development of virus-specific antibodies at a non-neutralizing level can facilitate viral uptake, enhancing replication; a possible immune evasion strategy avoiding intracellular innate immune sensors, or pattern recognition receptors …

ADE of SARS-CoV has also been described¹⁴ through a novel FcγRII-dependent and ACE2-independent cell entry mechanism. The authors state¹⁵ that this warrants concern in the safety evaluation of any candidate human vaccines against SARS-CoV.”

Similarly, “Pathogenic Priming Likely Contributes to Serious and Critical Illness and Mortality in COVID-19 Via Autoimmunity,” published in the Journal of Translational Autoimmunity, warns that:¹⁶

“Failure of SARS and MERS vaccines in animal trials involved pathogenesis consistent with an immunological priming that could involve autoimmunity in lung tissues due to previous exposure to the SARS and MERS spike protein. Exposure pathogenesis to SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 likely will lead to similar outcomes.”

So, to be clear, what all of this means is that if you get vaccinated, you may actually be at increased risk for serious illness if/when you’re exposed to any number of mutated SARS-CoV-2 strains in the future.

This is why the recommendation to vaccinate individuals who have previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2, or who have an active SARS-CoV-2 infection, may actually be quite dangerous. Dr. Hooman Noorchashm recently sent a public letter¹⁷ to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner detailing these risks.

How mRNA Injections May Trigger Prion Disease

What’s more, in a paper¹⁸ titled, “COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease,” published in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, Dr. Bart Classen warns there are also troubling evidences suggesting some of the mRNA shots may cause prion diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS. He writes:

“In the current paper, the concern is raised that the RNA based COVID vaccines have the potential to cause more disease than the epidemic of COVID-19. This paper focuses on a novel potential adverse event mechanism causing prion disease which could be even more common and debilitating than the viral infection the vaccine is designed to prevent …

Analysis of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 identified two potential risk factors for inducing prion disease is humans. The RNA sequence in the vaccine contains sequences believed to induce TDP-43 and FUS to aggregate in their prion based conformation leading to the development of common neurodegerative diseases.

In particular it has been shown that RNA sequences GGUA, UG rich sequences, UG tandem repeats, and G Quadruplex sequences, have increased affinity to bind TDP-43 and or FUS and may cause TDP-43 or FUS to take their pathologic configurations in the cytoplasm.

In the current analysis a total of sixteen UG tandem repeats were identified and additional UG rich sequences were identified. Two GGΨA sequences were found. G Quadruplex sequences are possibly present but sophisticated computer programs are needed to verify these.

The spike protein encoded by the vaccine binds angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), an enzyme which contains zinc molecules. The binding of spike protein to ACE2 has the potential to release the zinc molecule, an ion that causes TDP-43 to assume its pathologic prion transformation.”

mRNA Technology Has Potential to Cause Microvascular Injury

Additionally, Dr. J. Patrick Whelan, a pediatric rheumatologist specializing in multisystem inflammatory syndrome, submitted a public comment¹⁹ to the FDA back in December 2020, in which he expressed concern that mRNA vaccines have “the potential to cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver and kidneys in ways that were not assessed in safety trials.”

He cited research showing that “the spike protein in brain endothelial cells is associated with formation of microthrombi (clots),” and that since no viral RNA has been found in brain endothelium, “viral proteins appear to cause tissue damage without actively replicating virus.”

“Is it possible the spike protein itself causes the tissue damage associated with Covid-19?”he asks. “In 13/13 brains from patients with fatal COVID-19, pseudovirions (spike, envelope, and membrane proteins) without viral RNA are present in the endothelia of cerebral microvessels …

It appears that the viral spike protein that is the target of the major SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is also one of the key agents causing the damage to distant organs that may include the brain, heart, lung, and kidney.

Before any of these vaccines are approved for widespread use in humans, it is important to assess in vaccinated subjects the effects of vaccination on the heart … Vaccinated patients could also be tested for distant tissue damage in deltoid area skin biopsies …”

Reports of Side Effects Are Rapidly Mounting

Around the world, reports are now pouring in of people dying shortly after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. In many cases, they die suddenly within hours of getting the shot. In others, death occurs within the span of a couple of weeks.

In the wake of 29 senior citizen deaths,²⁰ Norway is reportedly considering excluding the very old and terminally ill from getting the AstraZeneca vaccine. According to the Norwegian Medicines Agency:²¹

“Most people have experienced the expected side effects of the vaccine, such as nausea and vomiting, fever, local reactions at the injection site, and worsening of their underlying condition.”

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health further noted that “for those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences,” and that “For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.”²²

In Sweden, hospitals in Sörmland and Gävleborg suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine in mid-February 2021 after a full quarter of the vaccinated hospital staff reported side effects. To prevent staff shortages and conduct an investigation, the vaccination push was temporarily paused.²³Examples of side effects reported after vaccination with Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and AstraZeneca’s vaccines from around the world include:

• Persistent malaise^24,25
• Bell’s Palsy^26,27,28
• Extreme exhaustion²⁹
• Swollen, painful lymph nodes
• Severe allergic, including anaphylactic reactions^30,31,32
• Thrombocytopenia (a rare, often lethal blood disorder)^33,34
• Multisystem inflammatory syndrome³⁵
• Miscarriages^36,37
• Chronic seizures and convulsions^38,39
• Severe headache/migraine that does not respond to medication
• Paralysis⁴⁰
• Sleep disturbances
• Psychological effects such as mood changes, anxiety, depression, brain fog, confusion, dissociation and temporary inability to form words
• Cardiac problems, including myocardial and tachycardia disorders⁴¹
• Blindness, impaired vision and eye disorders^42,43
• Stroke^44,45

In the U.K., there were 49,472 reported side effects to the Pfizer vaccine and 21,032 reactions to the AstraZeneca vaccine as of January 24, 2021. As reported by Principia Scientific International,⁴⁶“For both vaccines this equates to 1 in every 333 people suffering an adverse reaction. This rate could actually be higher as some cases may have not been reported …”

Perhaps most concerning of all are rapidly mounting reports of sudden death,^{47,48,49,50,51,52} mostly in the elderly but also in much younger, healthy individuals. In the U.S., COVID-19 vaccines accounted for 70% of vaccine-related deaths between January 2020 and January 2021.

As of February 12, 2021, the number of side effects reported to VAERS totaled 15,923, including 929 deaths.⁵³ Of the 799 deaths reported within the U.S., one-third occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 21% of them were cardiac-related.

Pfizer’s vaccine was the most dangerous in terms of death, being responsible for 58% of deaths while Moderna’s vaccine accounted for 41% of deaths. Pfizer’s vaccine was also responsible for 75% of Bell’s Palsy cases, compared to Moderna’s at 25%.⁵⁴

Curiously, based on the data submitted to the FDA, Moderna’s vaccine has a death rate 5.41 times higher than Pfizer’s, yet both are dramatically lower than the national average. As noted by The Defender, the dramatic discrepancy in death rates “deserves notice and requires explanation,” adding:⁵⁵

“If Moderna’s on-vaccine death rate is so far below the national death rate and also simultaneously more than five times greater than Pfizer’s on-vaccine death rate, then Pfizer’s study sample appears even less representative of the entire population …

Moderna’s screening process and exclusion criteria in the trial led to evidence that the general population is dying at a rate 6.3 times greater than the death rate in the Moderna trial — which means the Moderna study, including its estimated efficacy rate and the vaccine’s alleged safety profile — cannot possibly be relevant to most of the U.S. population.

The super-healthy cohorts studied by Moderna are in no way representative of the U.S. population. Most deaths from COVID-19 involve pre-existing health conditions of the types excluded from both Pfizer and Moderna trials …

Those enrolling in the post-market surveillance studies deserve to know the abject absence of any relevant information on efficacy and risk for them. In their zeal to help humanity, or to help themselves, these people may very well be walking into a situation that will cause autoimmunity due to pathogenic priming, potentially leading to disease enhancement should they become infected following vaccination.”

Do a Risk-Benefit Analysis Before Making Up Your Mind

To avoid becoming a sad statistic, I urge you to review the science very carefully before making up your mind about this experimental gene therapy. Also remember that the lethality of COVID-19 is actually surprisingly low. It’s lower than the flu for those under the age of 60.⁵⁶

If you’re under the age of 40, your risk of dying from COVID-19 is just 0.01%, meaning you have a 99.99% chance of surviving the infection. And you could improve that to 99.999% if you’re metabolically flexible, insulin sensitive, and vitamin D replete.

So, really, what are we protecting against with a COVID-19 vaccine? These mRNA vaccines aren’t even designed to prevent infection, only to reduce the severity of symptoms. Meanwhile, they could potentially make you sicker once you’re exposed to the virus, and/or cause persistent serious side effects such as those reviewed above.

While I won’t tell anyone what to do, I would urge you to take the time to review the science and weigh the potential risks and benefits based on your individual situation before you make a decision that you may regret for the rest of your life, which can actually be shortened with this vaccine. Undoubtedly, Pfizer and other vaccine makers suspect this as well, which is why Pfizer is bullying nations into covering for any and all of its mistakes.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.

The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.

In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.

Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Notes

¹ WION February 24, 2021

^{2, 3, 4, 5} STAT News February 23, 2021

⁶ HRSA.gov CICP

⁷ Antraxvaccine.blogspot.com December 4, 2020

⁸ Technology Review February 5, 2021

⁹ Bioregulatory Medicine Institute December 28, 2020

¹⁰ Science Magazine December 21, 2020

¹¹ Stat News January 10, 2017

¹² Vaccine: X December 11, 2020; 6: 1000076

¹³ Microbes Infect. October 2020; 22(9): 405-406

^14, 15 Hong Kong Medical Journal 2016; 22(Suppl 4): S25-31 (PDF)

¹⁶ Journal of Translational Autoimmunity 2020; 3: 100051

¹⁷ Medium February 15, 2021

¹⁸ Microbiology & Infectious Diseases 2021; 5(1): 1-3 (PDF)

¹⁹ University of California Public Comment related to consideration of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, December 8, 2020 (PDF)

^20, 21, 22 Bloomberg January 16, 2021

²³ The Local February 13, 2021

²⁴ Facebook Haley Nelson December 30, 2020

²⁵ Facebook Tara Sekikawa December 27, 2020

²⁶ Mirror December 11, 2020

^{27, 36, 42, 44, 51} Gov.UK Weekly Summary of Yellow Card Reporting February 25, 2021

^{28, 37, 43, 45, 46, 52} Principia Scientific International February 9, 2021

²⁹ Facebook Karl Dunkin case January 5, 2021

³⁰ RT December 26, 2020

³¹ The Defender December 21, 2020

³² CDC.gov Anaphylaxis following mRNA COVID-19 vaccine receipt (PDF)

³³ The New York Times February 8, 2021 (Archived)

³⁴ Newsweek February 10, 2021

³⁵ The Defender January 12, 2021

³⁸ Facebook, Shawn Skelton January 7, 2021

³⁹ WioNews January 2, 2021

⁴⁰ Facebook, Alanna Tonge-Jelley January 9, 2021

⁴¹ The Defender February 16, 2021

⁴⁷ Daily Star December 30, 2020

⁴⁸ RT January 4, 2021

⁴⁹ The Defender January 7, 2021

⁵⁰ The Vaccine Reaction January 24, 2021

^53, 54 The Defender February 19, 2021

⁵⁵ The Defender January 25, 2021

⁵⁶ Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-5352

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The prism of power which holds together the American empire, that filters public perception, breeds manic worry amongst citizens about imagined enemies. To justify its existence, the military oligarchy that runs America needs enemies. Thus it views peace as an existential threat and invests serious resources into steering the thought and behaviour of the public to serve the murder machine. Although imperialism has targeted varied countries throughout its life, its strategy has remained constant, and forms a pattern of state behaviour that reveals the depravity of American motives in international relations.

The latest target to be confronted by a hostile US geostrategic agenda is China. In terms of its economy and political system, China is nonconformist in a global economy where western capital writes the rules. China represents the threat to US unilateral interventionism of a multipolar world, based on peaceful multilateral cooperation. China is the strongest strategic bulwark against the US agenda to privatise the public infrastructure of foreign nations whose resources the US desires, because western elites aspire to mastery of the globe.

Enmity towards China is supposed to blind captive citizens of capitalist states to the fact China’s system of power is more logical than bourgeois democracy, offering power to skilled public administrators rather than ambassadors of inherited wealth. China’s public administration ethic values and upholds organisational competencies, instead of uncritically obeying the profit motive. All in all, Chinese governance is more in harmony with the ideal of a state that is rationally planned than the chaos of cartel capitalism.

But China is not perfect. Unfortunately, it embraces techniques of surveillance capitalism etc to shut down critique of the state. China’s communications policy conforms to the trend of the state restricting the liberatory flow of ideas on the internet. The public is only as strong as the power of free intelligence within it, and China’s repression of electronic dissidence and whistleblowing on inevitable public corruption puts it in bad company.

Freedom of speech is only as strong as the power of critical inquiry, so we ought to be confident in challenging establishment narratives on China.

But we should avoid becoming patriots for China, lest we live in ignorance of the sublime truth of international human fraternity that transcends the state. All in all, China better represents the spirit of international consensus than America, and it could teach us how to develop capabilities in our public administration, were organised lies not blinding our minds.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

By any historical measure, it was a game-changer: the first meeting since the 7^th century between a Roman Catholic Pope and a Shiite spiritual leader regarded as a “source of emulation.”  

It will take a long time to assess the full implications of the immensely intriguing 50-minute face-to-face conversation, with interpreters only, between Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Sistani at his humble home in a Najaf alley near the dazzling Imam Ali shrine.

An avowedly imperfect parallel is that for the Shiite community of the faithful, Najaf is as pregnant with meaning as Jerusalem is for Christianity.

The official Vatican spin is that Pope Francis went on a carefully choreographed “pilgrimage” to Iraq under the sign of “brotherhood” – not only in terms of geopolitics but as a shield against religious sectarianism, be it Sunnis against Shiites or Muslims against Christians.

Francis went back to the main theme in an extremely frank exchange (in Italian) with the media on his plane back to Rome. Yet what’s most extraordinary is his candid assessment of Ayatollah Sistani.

The Pope stressed,

“Ayatollah Sistani has a saying, I hope to recall it properly: ‘Men are either brothers by religion or equal by creation.’” Francis sees the bridging of this duality also as a cultural journey.

He qualified the meeting with Sistani as delivering a “universal message,” and praised the Grand Ayatollah as “a sage” and “a man of God”: “Listening to him, one cannot but notice it. He’s a person who carries wisdom and also prudence. He told me that for over ten years he has not received ‘people who come to visit me but have other political aims.’”

The Pope added:

“He was very respectful, and I felt honored, even in the final salutations. He never stands up, but he did, to salute me, twice. A humble, and wise, man. It felt good to my soul, this meeting.”

A glimpse of the warmth was revealed in this image, absent from Western mainstream media – which, to a large extent, tried to gaslight, sabotage, ignore, black out or sectarianize the meeting, usually under barely disguised layers of “Shiite threat” propaganda.

Source: Government of Iraq

They did that because, at the core, Francis and Sistani were delivering an anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-sectarian, and anti-occupation message, which cannot but incur the wrath of the usual suspects.

There were a few frantic attempts to portray the meeting as the Pope privileging quietist Najaf over militant Qom in the Shiite universe – or, in raw terms, Sistani over Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. That’s nonsense. For context, see the contrast between Najaf and Qom in my Persian Miniatures e-book published by Asia Times.

The Pope has recently written to Ayatollah Shirazi in Iran. Tehran keeps an ambassador in the Vatican and has collaborated for years on scientific research protocols. This pilgrimage, though, was all about Iraq. Unlike those of the West, the media of the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) gave it wall-to-wall coverage.

That crucial fatwa

I have been privileged to track Ayatollah Sistani’s movements since the early 2000s, and have visited his office in Najaf several times.

In 2003, when the scarecrow du jour, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, literally blew up revered Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim in front of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, Sistani pleaded for no retaliation: The American occupation machine was too powerful and Sistani saw the divide-and-rule dangers of a sectarian Sunni-Shiite war.

Yet in 2004 he single-handedly stared down the mighty occupation apparatus and the dreadful Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) when they were contemplating a bloodbath to get rid of the incandescent cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, then holed up in Najaf.

In 2014, Sistani issued a fatwa conferring legitimacy upon the weaponizing of Iraqi civilians to fight ISIS/Daesh – especially as the takfiris were aiming to attack the quadruple, sacred Shi’ite sanctuaries in Iraq: Najaf, Karbala, Kazimiya and Samarra.

So it was Sistani who legitimized the birth of armed defensive groups which coalesced in the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), or Hashd a-Shaabi, later incorporated into the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.

The PMUs were – and remain – an umbrella group, with some closer to Tehran than others and working under the strategic supervision of Major General Qassem Soleimani until his assassination via an American drone strike at Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

Never promised you a rose garden

For all the warmth between them, the meeting between the Pope and Sistani may not have been the proverbial rose garden. My colleague Elijah Magnier, the foremost reporter on all things Axis of Resistance, confirmed some startling details with his sources in Najaf:

Sayyed Sistani refused to have his own photographer and did not want any Shiite cleric, nor the directors of his office, to be present at Al-Rasoul Street, where he received His Holiness the Pope…. The Vatican did not issue any statement or take any overt position to recognize and support the Shiites who were killed while resisting ISIS and defending the Christians of Mesopotamia. Thus, Sayyed Sistani did not consider it necessary to issue a “joint document” as the Pope desired and was aiming for, and as he had done in Abu Dhabi when meeting with the Sheikh of Al-Azhar.

Magnier correctly focuses on the subsequent communiqué issued by Sistani’s office – and especially on its roll call vote of No, No, No …. Every No indicts the hegemon.

Sistani denounces the “besieging of populations” – including sanctions; he denies that Iraqis want US troops to stay; when he denounces “violence,” he refers to American bombing.

Additionally, “No to injustice” is Sistani’s message not only to politicians in Baghdad – mired in corruption, not delivering basic services or job opportunities – but also to Washington’s “language of war” in the wider Middle East, from Syria and Iran to Palestine.

Rome sources confirmed there had been negotiations for months aiming at convincing Baghdad to normalize relations with Israel. A “message” was sent through the Vatican. Sistani replied sharply that normalization is impossible. The Vatican remains mum.

One reason to remain mum is that the statement from Sistani’s office makes it clear the Vatican is not doing enough to support Iraq. According to the Najaf source quoted by Magnier, between 2014 and 2017 “the Vatican was silent when the Shiites lost thousands of men defending the Christians (and other Iraqis) and did not receive any attention or even an overt statement of recognition from the Pope for all these years since.”

The statement from Sistani’s office explicitly refers to “displacement, wars, acts of violence, economic blockades, and the absence of social justice to which the Palestinian people are exposed, especially the Palestinian people in the occupied territories.”

Translation: Iraq supports the Palestinian cause.

A crown of thorns

The meeting of Catholicism and Shia Islam did revolve around a geopolitical crown of thorns. Take, for instance, the fact that spokespersons or underlings of a Catholic POTUS, as well as American mainstream media, demonize the enemy du jour as “Iran-backed militias,” “Shiite-backed militias” or “Shiite militias affiliated with Iran.”

This is nonsense. As I found when meeting some of them in Iraq in 2017, PMUs harbor brigades composed not only of Shiites but Iraqis of other religions. For instance, there’s the Council of Scholars of the Sacred Ribat of Muhammad; the Council for Combating Takfiri-Thinking of the Sunnah Fallujah and Anbar; and the Christian Chaldean Brigade led by Rayan al-Kildani, who met Pope Francis.

To be fair, Pope Francis in his pilgrimage did condemn those who instrumentalize religion to engineer wars – to the benefit of Israel, the Saudi oily hacienda, the empire, and all of the above. He prayed at a church destroyed by ISIS/Daesh.

Significantly, Pope Francis handed a rosary to al-Kildani, the head of the Babylon militia of the PMUs. The Pope considers al-Kildani as nothing less than the savior of Christians in Iraq. And yet, al-Kildani is the only Christian on the planet featured on the US terrorist list.

It’s never enough to remember that the PMUs were the target of the recent Biden-Harris excellent bombing adventure on February 25/26: militants were actually bombed in Iraqi, not Syrian territory. The previous overall field commander of the PMUs was Abu al-Muhandis, who I met in Baghdad in late 2017. He was assassinated side by side with Soleimani.

Pope Francis was able to embark on his Iraqi pilgrimage only due to the Hashd al-Shaabi – who were absolutely key, front line actors saving Iraq from partition by takfiris and/or becoming a (fake) Caliphate.

Francis did retrace some of the Prophet’s steps in his Abrahamic pilgrimage, especially in Ur in Babylon; but echoes reach way farther, to al-Khalil (Hebron) in Palestine all the way to modern Syria and Jordan.

A mere pilgrimage won’t change harsh facts on the Mesopotamian ground: 36% unemployment (nearly 50% among the youth); 30% of the population living in poverty; an incoming NATO surge; the hegemon unable to let go because it needs this empire-of-bases hub between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; widespread political corruption by an entrenched oligarchy.

Francis insisted this was only a “first step,” and it involves “risks.” The best one may hope for, as it stands, is that the Pope and his “humble and wise” interlocutor keep stressing that divide and rule, fanning the flames of religious, ethnic and communitarian strife, benefits only – who else? – the usual suspects.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Maybe you have noticed the rise in public incredulity toward the coronavirus narrative that you hear all day from the mainstream media. More doubts. More opposition. More protests. And far less trust. You are hardly alone. What began as a spark in the Spring of 2020 is now a raging fire. Try as they might to put it out, it is burning hotter and higher than ever before. 

The data are already in and the lockdown elites are getting worried. Rightly so.

The great epidemiologist Donald Henderson in 2006 made two firm predictions of the consequences of lockdowns. First, he said, doing so would have no benefit in terms of disease mitigation. Indeed, lockdowns did not work.

Second, he said that doing so would result in discrediting public health and cause a “loss of public trust in government.” The loss in public trust – not just officials but also in media – is palpably obvious.

Turn your attention to a new round-up of surveys published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It specifically relates to vaccines but the results reflect a much broader loss of trust in general. Indeed, the surprising lack of public enthusiasm for the vaccines is but a symptom of a much larger problem.

However, despite scholarship emphasizing the role of trust in institutions to provide relevant information, polls suggest that sources of technical information about safety are not greatly trusted. Specifically, there is limited trust in the media or pharmaceutical companies to provide Covid-19 vaccine information: as few as 16% and 20% of respondents, respectively, say they have “a great deal/quite a bit” of trust in these organizations to provide such information. The public also has only moderate trust in information provided by the Food and Drug Administration.

The loss of trust was triggered by using an egregious and destruction means – lockdowns – in order somehow to achieve the unachievable; that is, the control of a widespread respiratory virus with severe outcomes for the elderly and sick but which is mostly mild for everyone else. It so happened that SARS-CoV-2 was not the universally deadly plague it was presumed to be one year ago, so these measures were wildly disproportionate.

Even if the pandemic had been as grim as the models predicted, there is no evidence in the historical record of lockdowns doing anything about a virus except to disrupt and destroy social and market functioning in a way that makes dealing with severe health outcomes even more difficult.

Consider one huge and unprecedented mitigation measure deployed last year: the stay-at-home order. Most states imposed them and enforced them with police power. It was not that different from near-universal house arrest – right here in the United States.

The claim was that this would slow or stop the spread or somehow cause the virus to be controlled, resulting in fewer severe disease outcomes. The propaganda became outrageous at points, with signs everywhere ordering people to “stay home and save lives,” as if leaving your house would result in lives lost.

People undertook enormous personal sacrifices to comply, at great personal expense. The economic costs were huge but so were the psychological and social costs. The result was an epidemic in loneliness and a rise in deaths of despair.

How did it work? A new study in Nature by four epidemiologists looked at the experience of 87 countries with a variety of policies, some loose and some extreme in strigency. They sought to correlate state-at-home orders with virus control. The results: they were unable to do so. The relationship does not exist, which is to say that it is consistent with randomness. The policy was worse than useless.

This study is the 31st that AIER has assembled using data nationally and internationally showing that lockdowns achieved nothing and cost everything. You are welcome to peruse the list and share it with your friends, who will be astonished (or maybe not) to discover that the public health edicts were unscientific and pointlessly brutal. All that sacrifice for nothing.

How many other things did public health authority get wrong? Thanks to a large email dump, from an account used by Anthony Fauci, we know that he was warned in early March 2020 that PCR testing was giving inaccurate results. As a result, almost all the data we thought we had now lives under a cloud. If testing is wrong, so too could be death data and so on. It’s a mess of confusion. The same email dump revealed that a US delegation went to China in mid-February to learn from the best in the politics and arts of locking down a society.

Incredibly, these policies were implemented at a time when American trust in government is at the lowest point it has been since 1972. Only 8% are willing to say that they trust government in domestic affairs a “great deal” whereas 20% say they trust government “not at all.” It will be fascinating to watch these polls move during this year, as more and more information comes out about what our governing elites did to the economy and our lives during the pandemic. It could be generations before trust returns to what it was before.

The last poll taken specifically about public health officials dates to September 2020, and it documented that trust in the CDC and Dr. Fauci were already evaporating. How does that compare with today? And what becomes of that trust over the next six months as more people discover just how terrible and thoroughly unscientific the policies were?

This collapsing trust is hitting about the time that the CDC has finally begun to put on its website some clarifying data. These charts for example make it clear that another public health measure from last year was wildly wrong: that getting the virus was very nearly a death sentence. We are at least getting some accurate data on the demographics of severe outcomes.

In truth, this was known since late March 2020. We reported on it on April 5. Even earlier, from March 8, we reported accurately on the nature of this virus, and fully expected that once the information was revealed, public fear would decline and the world would reopen. Instead, a combination of media and government messaging stoked that fear and fed more and longer lockdowns, disastrous policies that governors are racing to repeal even as the federal government warns against it.

The longer lockdown policies last – in practice especially but also when defended by public health authorities – the more that elites in government and media risk a devastating loss of credibility. The rebuilding of reputation might prove impossible for at least a generation or two.

There is a potential social cost to this loss in trust. Public health in the last century largely did good for humanity, with its emphasis on holistic perspectives on human well-being, the distribution of therapeutics and vaccines, the education on clean water and wise disease mitigation, its focus on rational science and calm over disease panic, and so much more. With lockdowns, and the tremendous public confusion sown by so many, this entire well-deserved reputation for science in the public interest is in tatters.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email.  Tw | FB | LinkedIn

Featured image is from Shutterstock

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

In the latest episode of “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kennedy sat down with the iconic Naomi Wolf for a spirited discussion on abuse of power, standing up to tyranny and preserving our Constitution. Wolf explained how tyrants always follow the same predictable route in their attempts to bring democracies to a close and how she believes our society has reached “Step 10” of her “Fascism in 10 Easy Steps.”

Highlights of their conversation include:

• We’re reaching a point reminiscent of what led to the American Revolution: People were willing to die rather than give up their rights.
• The Constitution wasn’t written for easy times but for emergencies such as the current COVID crisis.
• Arbitrary restrictions are being put in place by those abusing emergency powers at local, state and federal levels.
• In a free society, points are made and arguments won through free speech and open debate rather than censoring opinions that differ from ours.
• Authoritarianism has no place in medicine although most liberals are accepting edicts promoted by Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates.
• Direct-to-consumer advertising that started in 1997 marked the beginning of Pharma’stakeover of American media.
• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation neutralized once-independent media including The Guardian, NPR and public television through financial gifts.
• Democrats are leading the “biofascism” charge.
• There’s no science to back up the widespread suspension of our Constitutional rights.
• Non-partisan grassroots efforts are gaining momentum and can preserve our freedom and prevent totalitarian takeover.

All “Truth” episodes can be found on Children’s Health Defense’s social media and on Children’s Health Defense’s channel found on Peeps TV, a network on Roku. Roku is accessible from any Smart TV and can be purchased separately for older TVs.

Click here to watch the video. 

or click video image above

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

As new COVID cases tumble across North America, sleepy British Columbia has just reported a new outbreak of the virus at a nursing home in the province where both staff members and patients had already been vaccinated.

According to the CBC, a new outbreak of COVID-19 has been declared at the Cottonwoods Care Center, located in the Interior Health region. BC’s provincial health officer first acknowledged the outbreak yesterday.

During a live news conference about the outbreak, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry emphasized being vaccinated doesn’t mean transmission will be stopped and that precautions must remain in place for seniors and care homes. Dr. Henry said two staff members and 10 residents have tested positive at the Cottonwoods facility, which is a long-term care home with 221 publicly-funded beds. Henry said that all staff and residents at the home were offered immunizations and that there was very high uptake of the vaccine. She said some of the cases were among people who had received two doses of the vaccine.

“You can have transmission even when people are fully vaccinated,” she said. “The illness seems to be milder and doesn’t transmit as much [and we] won’t see rapid explosive outbreaks.”

Despite the outbreak, Dr. Henry said the province will offer new guidance by the end of month that will allow for increased visitation at  long-term care homes like this.

Source: CBC

Source: CBC

Increasingly, people around the world are questioning how and why outbreaks can still occur among populations with high vaccination rates. In Israel, where a spate of post-vaccination reactions and deaths were documented and reported as the tiny Mediterranean Country scrambled to be the world leader, the Jerusalem Post has just published an explainer piece entitled “Why would someone fully vaccinated still catch corona?”

In the article, the writer identifies four reasons why an individual might test positive and/or be severely sickened.

Here’s more from the JPost.

There are several reasons why one might develop COVID-19 after vaccination, according to Prof. Jonathan Gershoni of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at Tel Aviv University.

The first reason is that the clinical trials for Moderna and Pfizer indicate that the vaccine is 95% efficient in protecting against the disease meaning, according to Johns Hopkins University, that about one out of 20 vaccinated people may not be protected and could still get sick.

The efficacy of protection is calculated based on the number of people who were actually infected in the clinical trials, not on the total number of those that were vaccinated.

It should also be noted that 95% efficacy does not mean that 5% of the people in the Pfizer clinical trial caught coronavirus. According to an article published by Live Science, the percentage was much less – around 0.04%.

The second reason is variants.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed based on the original coronavirus strain as discovered and genetically sequenced in Wuhan, China. Since then, the virus has replicated and mutated into thousands of different variants, some of which might render the vaccine less effective.

“We know in Israel that now, the majority of infections are from the UK variant,” Gershoni said.

While these vaccines have already proven to be highly effective against the UK variant, they are not as effective against the South African strain, Gershoni said. Furthermore, he added, there could be other variants that are even more vaccine resistant.

The third reason is that immunity is “a numbers game,” the scientist explained.

The disease – or the vaccine – causes our bodies to develop antibodies against the virus. But if someone has an extremely high viral load and sheds that potent load, it is possible that this large amount of virus could break through the existing protection and infect the person. In this case though, it would likely only cause a mild disease.

The fourth and final reason, each person is unique and has her or his own molecular immunological makeup.

“We know some people have a tendency to be very robust and stand up to infections, and other people can be a bit more sensitive,” Gershoni said. “When talking in terms of vaccinating five million people in Israel, you are seeing the full spectrum of people with various levels of immune competence.”

But he cautioned that when we talk about “breakthrough infections,” sometimes people were infected before they got their second dose or even their first.

As more older Americans receive the vaccine (the US is now doling out more than 2MM doses per day of the three approved jabs from Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and JNJ), it appears many are already booking trips to see family and friends, or take a brief vacation, after being essentially stuck in their own homes for a year. A recent BofA survey found that older Americans’ spending on airline tickets has surged 4x since June.

Although the CDC yesterday eased restrictions on certain domestic activities for people who have been “fully vaccinated”, any form of travel is still against the federal guidelines, especially if patients are deemed high risk. Still, as worries about the mutations intensify, what might this new trend portend?

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Did Joe Biden read the Democratic platform that he ran under? Elect us and we will “move away from military intervention” in the Middle East. Diplomacy will protect Syrians’ human needs and rights and “find a peaceful resolution for this horrific war.” All the “forever wars” will end.

Instead, Biden and the military men under his command did what the military is supposed to do: kill and destroy – or, as they prefer to put it, drop “precision-guided munitions” on “targets.” Among targets of the February 25^th attack on Syria were at least 22 people.

Congressional reactions did not follow party lines. Several Democrats objected to the President’s violation of the constitutional war power of Congress. Some of their GOP colleagues praised the bombing, but Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) saw no right to attack a sovereign country. His father, ex-Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), called for Biden’s impeachment.

Few pay much attention to international laws against aggression, particularly three U.S. treaties prohibiting it. Forcible violation of the territorial rights of one state by another has been considered a war crime since the infamous trials following World War II.

But everything is good, from what administration spokesmen say. Don’t grieve for the 22. They were all “believed” to be members of “Iran-backed militias” accused of recent rocket attacks on US targets in Iraq. (Rest assured that no children, women, or non-militant men are ever harmed by our clever weapons, only “militants,” “insurgents,” and “terrorists.”)

The media reported that the raid was designed to “send a message” to Iran. Whatever that message said, it was expensive. You can send one far cheaper by e-mail, phone, fax, or airmail letter. You’d think the cost would concern the budget-minded congressional Republicans, if nothing else does.

As far as relations with Iran were concerned, the Dems’ platform pledged to call off the race to war; reject the goal of regime change in Tehran; emphasize “diplomacy, de-escalation, and regional dialogue”; and restore the nuclear agreement. If any of those things were in that message, you probably wouldn’t need to send it via bomb.

Our defense establishment tells us that the aggression was “defensive,” yet also “retaliatory”: We attacked Syria because our forces in Iraq had been attacked, though not by Syria. (Needless to say, our forces had a perfect right to be in Iraq. As California’s Senator S. I. Hayakawa once said about Panama, “We stole it fair and square.”)

What about the president’s decision to commit an act of war, when Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution reserves that power to Congress?

According to an aide of the National Security Council, “Biden acted under his constitutional authority to defend US and deter the risk of additional attacks.” (I’m quoting a Bloomberg story by eight writers. It said the aide “commented on condition of anonymity.” I would want to be anonymous too, if I had to dispense stuff like that.) Don’t bother searching through your Constitution for such authority; it’s not there.

Biden did not lose much time before tending to what the platform called “this horrific war.” The five weeks of abstention compare with 11 weeks into Trump’s term before he bombed Syria. Obama, before him, had waited five years before initiating his bombing of Syrians. Of course Trump and Obama did plenty of killing elsewhere throughout their terms. Biden is just getting started.

Biden (2021) Should Listen to Biden (1991)

Thirty years ago, President George H. W. Bush was massing US troops in the Saudi desert, preparing for war with Iraq over its seizure of Kuwait. Bush and his yes-men in the Defense and State Departments contended that the president, as commander-in-chief of the military, had the authority to start a war.

Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called a hearing on “The Constitutional Roles of the Congress and the President in Declaring and Waging War.” In an introductory speech, Senator Biden found the Bush view of the war power at odds with the Constitution. The Founders, he said, took great pains to ensure that the new government would differ from that of King George III. The chief difference was how the decision to go to war would be made.

“In England the king alone could decide to take a nation to war.” Here, the legislature would have that power. “The Constitution’s language says that the war power rests in the Congress…. The Constitution’s founders all understood this to be a key principle of our republic…. Yes, the president is the commander-in-chief….”

Senator Biden thereupon quoted Alexander Hamilton, who wrote about the (then) proposed Constitution in The Federalist, 69. “The president is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy… It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces as first general and admiral….” His authority would be much inferior to that of the British king, which “extends to the declaring of war and the raising and regulating of fleets and armies” – all of which would be the legislature’s functions under the Constitution.

“In short,” said the senator, “Congress decides whether to make war, and the president decides how to do so…. We have been told that the congressional debate on war could tie the president’s hands or limit his discretion….. Exactly right. Americans once lived under a system where one man had unfettered choice to decide by himself whether we could go to war or not go to war, and we launched a revolution to free ourselves from the tyranny of such a system.”

Senator Biden noted that President Bush was claiming that his impending war on Iraq would uphold the rule of law by undoing Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The former commented, “If the crisis is really about upholding the law of nations abroad, the President must start by upholding the law at home, and our law begins with the Constitution.”

Bush backed down and submitted to a congressional vote. It supported the war he wanted. Biden voted “nay.”

Gullible and Contradictory

Having opposed Bush Senior’s war on Iraq over the Kuwait seizure, Biden avidly supported the second war on Iraq, started by Bush’s son, George W. It was based on “weapons of mass destruction,” which Bush Jr. falsely claimed that Iraq possessed and would likely give to terrorists.

Biden fell for those lies and, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke in favor of a resolution (prepared in the White House) to let Bush decide whether war on Iraq would be warranted. The measure would be unconstitutional, for such a decision was up to Congress to make, not the president, as Biden himself had pointed out 11 years earlier.

Biden has shown similar gullibility in swallowing disputed allegations of Syrian use of poison gas and Russian “bounties” on lives of US servicemen in Afghanistan. Some US intelligence agents doubt that the bounty tale is true.

In foreign affairs, Biden is full of contradictions. Nine examples follow. JoeBiden –

• Opposed one Bush attack on Iraq and supported another.
• Ran for president on a promise of rejoining the nuclear agreement with Iran that Trump renounced, but hesitates to keep the promise, and now comes that “message.”
• Condemns the bombing of Yemeni civilians and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, yet – without congressional permission – commits the US to defend the Saudi monarchy that committed those crimes.
• Talks of having the US, Europe, and Asia “work together to secure the peace,” while confronting China with US warships provocatively close to its coast.
• Renews the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russian Federation (New START) for five years, but heightens tensions by anti-Russian rhetoric and sanctions
• Considers the climate crisis a top concern, yet the world’s single biggest producer of climate-changing gases is the US military, and war intensifies their production.
• Resolves to work with allies on critical issues, but disregards his own country’s Congress.
• Has repeatedly paid homage to “the rule of law,” contrary to his positions in favor of lawless actions in Syria, Iraq, and Yugoslavia (Bill Clinton’s 1999 war).
• Conducts an act of war that is incompatible with the platform he ran under and his own comments about the war power, made to fellow senators 30 years ago.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Paul W. Lovinger, of San Francisco, is a journalist, author, editor, and antiwar activist (see www.warandlaw.org).

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”— George Washington

It’s a given that the government is corrupt, unaccountable, and has exceeded its authority.

So what can we do about it?

The first remedy involves speech (protest, assembly, speech, prayer, and publicity), and lots of it, in order to speak truth to power.

The First Amendment, which is the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights, affirms the right of “we the people” to pray freely about our grievances regarding the government. We can gather together peacefully to protest those grievances. We can publicize those grievances. And we can express our displeasure (peacefully) in word and deed.

Unfortunately, tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.

The American Police State has shown itself to be particularly intolerant of free speech activities that challenge its authority, stand up to its power grabs, and force it to operate according to the rules of the Constitution.

Cue the rise of protest laws, the police state’s go-to methods for muzzling discontent.

These protest laws, some of which appear to encourage violence against peaceful protesters by providing immunity to individuals who drive their car into protesters impeding traffic and use preemptive deadly force against protesters who might be involved in a riot, take intolerance for speech with which one might disagree to a whole new level.

Ever since the Capitol protests on Jan. 6, 2021, state legislatures have introduced a broad array of these laws aimed at criminalizing protest activities. Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are being marketed as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.

It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.

However, as Human Rights Watch points out, these assaults on free speech are nothing new. “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”

Make no mistake: while many of these laws claim to be in the interest of “public safety and limiting economic damage,” these legislative attempts to redefine and criminalize speech are a backdoor attempt to rewrite the Constitution and render the First Amendment’s robust safeguards null and void.

For instance, there are at least 205 proposed laws being considered in 45 states that would curtail the right to peacefully assemble and protest by expanding the definition of rioting, heightening penalties for existing offenses, or creating new crimes associated with assembly.

No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.

In Alabama, lawmakers are pushing to allow individuals to use deadly force near a riot. Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire are also considering similar stand your ground laws to justify the use of lethal force in relation to riots.

In Arizona, legislators want to classify protests involving seven or more people as felonies punishable by up to two years in jail. Under such a law, traditional, nonviolent forms of civil disobedience—sit-ins, boycotts and marches—would be illegal.

In Arkansas, peaceful protesters who engage in civil disobedience by occupying any government property after being told to leave could face six months in jail and a $1000 fine.

In Minnesota, where activists continue to protest the death of George Floyd, who was killed after police knelt on his neck for eight minutes, individuals who are found guilty of any kind of offense in connection with a peaceful protest could be denied a range of benefits, including food assistance, education loans and grants, and unemployment assistance.

Oregon lawmakers wanted to “require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.” In Illinois, students who twice infringe the rights of others to engage in expressive activities could be suspended for at least a year.

Proposed laws in at least 25 states, including Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Florida, would give drivers the green light to “accidentally” run over protesters who are preventing them from fleeing a riot. Washington wants to levy steeper penalties against protesters who “swarm” a vehicle, punishing them for a repeat offense with up to 40 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Responding to protests over the Keystone Pipeline, South Dakota enabled its governor and sheriffs to prohibit gatherings of 20 or more people on public land if the gathering might damage the land. At least 15 other states have also adopted or are considering legislation that would levy harsher penalties for environmental protests near oil and gas pipelines.

In Iowa, all it takes is for one person in a group of three of more people to use force or cause property damage, and the whole group can be punished with up to 5 years in prison and a $7,500 fine.

Obstruct access to critical infrastructure in Mississippi and you could be facing a $10,000 fine and a seven-year prison sentence.

A North Carolina law would have made it a crime to heckle state officials. Under this law, shouting at a former governor would constitute a crime.

In Connecticut, you could be sentenced to five years behind bars and a $5,000 fine for disrupting the state legislature by making noise or using disturbing language.

Indiana lawmakers wanted to authorize police to use “any means necessary” to breakup mass gatherings that block traffic. Lawmakers have since focused their efforts on expanding the definition of a “riot” and punishing anyone who wears a mask to a peaceful protest, even a medical mask, with 2.5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Georgia wants to ban all spontaneous, First Amendment-protected assemblies and deny anyone convicted of violating the ban from receiving state or local employment benefits.

Virginia wants to subject protesters who engage in an “unlawful assembly” after “having been lawfully warned to disperse” with up to a year of jail time and a fine of up to $2,500.

Missouri made it illegal for public employees to take part in strikes and picketing, only to have the law ruled unconstitutional in its entirety.

Oklahoma created a sliding scale for protesters whose actions impact or impede critical infrastructure (including a telephone pole). The penalties range from $1,000 and six months in a county jail to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. And if you’re part of an organization, that fine goes as high as $1,000,000.

Talk about intimidation tactics.

Ask yourself: if there are already laws on the books in all of the states that address criminal or illegal behavior such as blocking public roadways, trespassing on private property or vandalizing property—because such laws are already on the books—then why does the government need to pass laws criminalizing activities that are already outlawed?

What’s really going on here?

No matter what the politicians might say, the government doesn’t care about our rights, our welfare or our safety.

Every despotic measure used to control us and make us cower and comply with the government’s dictates has been packaged as being for our benefit, while in truth benefiting only those who stand to profit, financially or otherwise, from the government’s transformation of the citizenry into a criminal class.

In this way, the government conspires to corrode our core freedoms purportedly for our own good but really for its own benefit.

Remember, the USA Patriot Act didn’t make us safer. It simply turned American citizens into suspects and, in the process, gave rise to an entire industry—private and governmental—whose profit depends on its ability to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights.

In much the same way that the Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program criminalizes otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities such as peaceful protesting.

Clearly, freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

Yet the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

In other words, if we no longer have the right to voice concerns about COVID-19 mandates, if we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws or government policies by voicing our opinions in public or on social media or before a legislative body—no matter how politically incorrect or socially unacceptable those views might be—then we do not have free speech.

What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s what those who founded America called tyranny.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

As the great George Carlin rightly observed: “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”

In other words, we only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

Remember: if the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Israel has rapidly deteriorated into a segregated culture that discriminates against people who have not received experimental COVID-19 vaccinations, say Israeli citizens who are reaching out for help on media platforms.

“It’s very intense over here in Israel. I don’t know how much you see,” said Ilana Rachel Daniel in a video posted March 3^rd on Bit Chute. “It’s terrible. It’s a very, very, very frightening situation.”

“They’re making this green passport where half the population cannot get into theaters or malls or all sorts of things unless you have taken the vaccination. They are creating a medical Apartheid,” Daniel said.

Part of a program dubbed Operation Back to Life , the “Green Pass” system restricts entry to registered gyms, theaters, hotels, restaurants, universities and secondary schools to holders of scannable vaccine passport only.

“This is the first step back to an almost normal life,” Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said at a briefing about the program which began rolling out last week.

The Israeli government announced a number of new rules on March 6 in a statement released jointly by the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Transportation. The government paper will be in effect until the next government review on March 20.

Students in Grades 7 to 10 were to be allowed to return to classes this week in jurisdictions where 70% of the population over age 50 had been vaccinated.

Universities and other educational institutions were to open for in-person classes as of Sunday to green pass holders only. Those who have not been vaccinated will be permitted to attend online classes only.

Restaurants are to allow vaccinated green pass holders the right to eat indoors, while non-vaccinated people are allowed to eat outside only.

Violators of the government order are to be fined 5000 New Israeli Shekels (NIS) which is about $1,500 USD.

Israeli students have been required to have COVID vaccine injections to allow them to sit their end of high school matriculation exams, according to a BBC report in January.  Matriculation exam results can affect whether or not they go to university and their placement in the compulsory military service.

The passport is delivered by a government-run website which issues a green certificate featuring a high-security scannable QR code by text, email or regular mail delivery, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.

People in Israel are expected to present their green passport for scanning along with personal identification before entering registered businesses.

The government statement issued Saturday said that the prohibition on the entry of Israelis by air to the country is cancelled (land crossings remain in place), allowing Israeli citizens and permanent residents to enter Israel.

“Those holding vaccination or recovery certificates will be able to exit Israel freely,” however, the statement adds.

Earlier in the month, Edelstein told the public that “vaccines won’t be mandatory, but anyone who forges a vaccine certificate will go to jail.”

The Israeli Health Minister has also said that soon employers will be required to have their staff vaccinated, or to undergo coronavirus testing every 48 hours.

Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination drive has been the fastest in the world where 10% of the population received experimental vaccines between December 19 and the end of 2020, and 50% of the country’s nine million residents had received at least one COVID vaccine shot by February 26, according to a statement by Health Minister Edelstein.

“I agreed with my friend, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla, that we would bring shipment after shipment and complete the vaccination of the over-16 population in Israel during March,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted on January 10.

Pfizer’s Bourla canceled a scheduled trip to Israel because he has not received his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, the Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday. The CEO said he did not want to “cut in line” for his company’s injection and has delayed his visit to the country where he is looking at establishing a manufacturing site.

On February 24^th the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the government to share the names, addresses and phone numbers of people who had not received a COVID vaccine with other authorities in the ministries of education and welfare.

“They’re making people wear an ankle bracelet, a security bracelet when they come back from travelling,” said Daniel who is affiliated with the Rapeh party. “It’s absolutely insane.”

People are being offered electronic security ankle bracelets, similar to those worn by prisoners, to monitor their whereabouts after they travel outside of Israel instead of being forced to house in quarantine facilities, The Jerusalem Post reported February 25th.

“We call it a ‘freedom bracelet’ because we are not locking anybody up, but rather giving them the opportunity to go home,” Ordan Trabelsi, president and CEO of SuperCom, the company behind the surveillance system told the paper.

“They’re censoring us and attacking us and they won’t allow any media. Nothing. They took away the head of the party’s medical license,” said Ilana Rachel Daniel. Daniel is affiliated with the Israeli political party, Rapeh, which means “heal” in English.

The Rapeh Party was founded by medical doctor Aryeh Avni whose medical license was revoked by Israel’s Health Ministry on February 24^th when a judge ruled he was “a ‘stumbling block,’ whose behavior poses a real danger to public safety and health.”

“They removed our platforms from Facebook and now they won’t let the media even write about us. So we want to ask all the international [inaudible] – anywhere we can get – to publicize what we are saying.”

“If I stop to think about it I will cry you know,” said Daniel, who can be heard breaking down in tears. “We just keep fighting you know, fighting as much as we can.

“We need everybody’s help because whatever happens here will happen everywhere,” she said. “So, we’re fighting for ourselves and we’re fighting for the whole world.  We need to help…every hand on deck.” Daniel has since recorded an hour-long interview with British journalist James Delingpole.

In another video, posted on the Facebook page Radiant Israel on February 18, Israeli Gilad Rosinger described the green passport system as a “pre-holocaust agenda.”

“If you do not submit to this wicked, demonic, tyrannical agenda, if you choose to say, ‘you know what, I’m not ready to participate in this experimental program,’ then you are now considered a second class citizen in Israel,” Rosinger said.

“My grandfather was the only survivor out of his whole family of the Holocaust and this is exactly how it started. With discrimination, with essential and non-essential businesses, with people saying that Jews are second class citizens,” he said.

“Well, now it’s not about Jew, it’s not about Arab, it’s not about that. No, it’s about who will take the vaccination,” Rosinger said. “If you don’t do it, you’re wicked, you’re evil, you’re a second-class citizen.”

High level Israeli government officials are talking about sending police to the homes of unvaccinated people and demanding that their names be released, Rosinger said.

Despite its aggressive vaccination campaign, Israel enforced a strict third national lockdown on January 7, 2021 following a surge of new COVID cases. Israeli media reported that 4,500 people were diagnosed with COVID after receiving a first coronavirus vaccine, and that of those 375 were hospitalized.

Calling the new Israeli society a “Twilight zone” that is being “cheered on” by mainstream media, he added that many people are afraid to speak out.

“We need to sound the alarm,” said Rosinger. “Where are the international human rights courts on this? Where are the lawsuits? Where is the outrage? You don’t even have to believe in God to know that this is wrong.”

“Israel, unfortunately has been used as a prototype for the nations because if it succeeds here it’s coming to a town near you, it’s coming to a country near you. It’s coming to your town,” Rosinger said. “That’s why you have to care.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from TRAVELWILD / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Corporate news sources are reporting that Austria has suspended their roll-out of the experimental AstraZeneca COVID vaccines after a 49-year-old nurse has died “as a result of severe coagulation disorders,” and a 35-year-old nurse developed a pulmonary embolism following the COVID injections.

A pulmonary embolism is an acute lung disease caused by a dislodged blood clot.

Both nurses reportedly worked at the Zwettl clinic in Lower Austria province.

The Austrian Federal Office for Safety in Health Care (BASG) said blood clotting was not among the known side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

An AstraZeneca spokesman said: “There have been no confirmed serious adverse events associated with the vaccine.”

However, the statistics published by the UK Government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency last week reported 244 deaths and 157,637 injuries following injections of the experimental AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK.

A recent CDC report in the U.S. found that 62% of nursing home workers are refusing the experimental Pfizer and Moderna COVID “vaccines.” (Source.)

Since long-term healthcare residents were targeted as among the first to receive the new experimental COVID vaccines in almost every country that has begun COVID injections, and where many deaths are being reported following the injections, it is easy to understand this “vaccine hesitancy” among healthcare workers who are observing these deaths and reactions firsthand.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Health Impact News

The CDC Mandate Masks Study: Is the CDC About to be Canceled by Google and Facebook for “COVID Heresy”?

By Simon Black, March 09 2021

Looking at the county-by-county data, the CDC concludes that mask mandates were associated with an average 1.32% decrease in the growth rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the first 100 days after the mask policy was implemented.

No COVID Vaccine? No Travel, Air Force Officials Say

By Pam Long, March 09 2021

The U.S. Air Force Air has created policies intended to restrict the movement of personnel based on their COVID-19 vaccination status — despite the fact that the vaccines are not mandatory, are still in phase 3 clinical trials and are still considered experimental, having been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Emergency Use Authorization

We Should Have Known! “To Those Born Later”

By Bertolt Brecht and Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, March 08 2021

In his poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (To those born later), published in June 1939, Bertolt Brecht gave an honest, harrowing and admonishing account of his life in dark times.

Is the US Heading for Confrontation with China? The Pentagon’s Multibillion Dollar Indo-Pacific Military Deployment

By Stephen Lendman, March 09 2021

China and Russia pose the main challenge to US hegemonic aims, especially united. Longstanding US policy seeks control over all world community nations, their resources and populations. Will US war on China by other means turn hot by accident or design?

The Battle for Lithium: The UK Supported the Coup in Bolivia to Gain Access to Its ‘White Gold’

By Matt Kennard, March 09 2021

After a coup in the South American country of Bolivia in November 2019, democratically elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee. Foreign Office documents obtained by Declassified show Britain saw the new military-backed regime, which killed 18 protesters, as an opportunity to open up Bolivia’s lithium deposits to UK firms.

Biden Iran Envoy Boasted of Depriving Civilians of Food, Driving Up Iranian Inequality in “Art of Sanctions” Manual

By Max Blumenthal, March 09 2021

Richard Nephew has taken personal credit for depriving Iranians of food and driving up their unemployment rates, celebrating the economic destruction he caused as “a tremendous success.” Under Biden, he will help direct policy on Iran.

The Federal Reserve is Enabling Biden and Congress’ Destructive Economic Agenda

By Rep. Ron Paul, March 09 2021

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2021 will be the second year in a row in which the federal debt exceeds Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CBO also projected that this year’s federal deficit will be 2.3 trillion dollars, which is 900 billion dollars less than last year. However, CBO’s projections do not include the 1.9 trillion dollars “stimulus” bill Congress is likely to pass.

India, Pakistan on the Road to Peace

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, March 09 2021

Seizing the emergent opportunities could make all the difference. Both countries are endowed with abundant diplomatic talent to perceive this reality that is still below the radar. The imperatives of development are increasingly felt in both countries in their post-pandemic mindset, which is also leading to a new awakening that there is nothing like absolute security in the life of nations.

Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman and the Perils of Racial Profiling

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 09 2021

A recent incident involving Amanda Gorman, the United States youth poet laureate, who was hailed after her presentation at the inauguration of recently elected President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, revealed the continuing threat of racial profiling.

Attacks on the Rights of Transgender People Are Rising; Fight Back

By Margaret Flowers, March 09 2021

A growing and coordinated attack on the rights of transgender people is taking place through state legislation and sadly it is receiving support from people across the political spectrum.

Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali: 50 Years Ago, The Heavyweight “Fight of the Century”

By Adeyinka Makinde, March 09 2021

Half a century has now passed since the third and last bout dubbed ‘The Fight of the Century’ during the 20th century. The first bout between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali was a unique clash of undefeated heavyweight champions.

L’Accordo Ue-Cina sugli investimenti, siglato il 30 dicembre dalla Commissione europea, potrebbe non essere ratificato dagli europarlamentari in base all’accusa che Pechino viola i diritti umani. È il paravento dietro cui si nasconde il vero motivo: la crescente pressione esercitata dagli Stati uniti sull’Europa per creare una coalizione contro la Cina. La strategia di Washington – da Obama a Trump e ora a Biden – è quella del «contenimento» della Cina, la cui crescita mette in discussione l’ordine economico mondiale dominato finora dagli Stati uniti e dalle maggiori potenze occidentali.

Sono le multinazionali e altre imprese statunitensi ed europee che hanno delocalizzato da decenni gran parte delle loro produzioni in Cina, realizzando enormi profitti. La Cina non è rimasta però semplicemente la «fabbrica del mondo» in cui si va a produrre perché la manodopera costa meno. Ha realizzato un proprio sviluppo produttivo e tecnologico e, su tale base, progetti come la Nuova Via della Seta. In fase avanzata di realizzazione, essa consiste in una rete viaria e ferroviaria tra la Cina e l’Europa attraverso l’Asia Centrale, il Medio Oriente e la Russia, abbinata a una via marittima attraverso l’Oceano Indiano, il Mar Rosso e il Mediterraneo. Per le infrastrutture viarie, ferroviarie e portuali in oltre 60 paesi sono previsti investimenti per oltre 1000 miliardi di dollari. In tale quadro, la Cina è divenuta il principale partner commerciale della Russia. Le relazioni economiche tra i due paesi si sono rafforzate, soprattutto dopo le sanzioni imposte da Stati uniti e Ue alla Russia, con un interscambio che ha superato i 100 miliardi di dollari annui ed è in crescita.

L’interscambio tra Stati uniti e Cina resta sei volte maggiore. Ma, dato che molti prodotti sul mercato statunitense sono fabbricati in Cina da multinazionali Usa o forniti da società cinesi, gli Stati uniti registrano nel commercio bilaterale un deficit di oltre 300 miliardi di dollari annui. Si è verificato inoltre un crollo degli investimenti cinesi negli Usa a scopi produttivi, calati del 90% in tre anni (da 46,5 a 4,8 miliardi di dollari), mentre quelli statunitensi in Cina sono rimasti a circa 13 miliardi. Allo stesso tempo la quota del debito statunitense di oltre 27.000 miliardi di dollari, posseduta dalla Cina, è diminuita dal 14% nel 2011 al 5% nel 2020. Ancora più grave per Washington è il fatto che la quota in dollari delle riserve valutarie cinesi è calata in quattro anni dal 79% al 59% e che la Cina cerca monete alternative al dollaro da usare nel commercio internazionale.

Non potendo arrestare tale processo che può mettere fine al predominio economico degli Stati uniti, Washington getta la spada sul piatto della bilancia. Il «contenimento» economico diventa «contenimento» militare. L’ammiraglio Phil Davidson, che è a capo del Comando Indo-Pacifico degli Stati uniti (la cui area di responsabilità copre la Cina e altri 35 paesi), ha richiesto al Congresso oltre 27 miliardi di dollari in cinque anni per costruire attorno alla Cina una cortina di basi missilistiche e sistemi satellitari, compresa una costellazione di radar su piattaforme spaziali. «Dobbiamo cominciare ad affrontare la Cina da una posizione di forza», ha dichiarato al Senato Antony Blinken, segretario di Stato dell’amministrazione Biden.

Alla Conferenza di Monaco sulla Sicurezza, il 19 febbraio, il segretario generale della Nato Stoltenberg ha ribadito: «Europa e Nord America devono difendere l’ordine internazionale, che Cina e Russia sfidano tentando di riscrivere le sue regole a beneficio dei propri interessi». Dopo aver accusato la Russia di «comportamento destabilizzante», ha dichiarato che «l’ascesa della Cina è una questione determinante per la comunità transatlantica». Ha quindi annunciato un prossimo «aggiornamento del concetto strategico della Nato» perché «abbiamo bisogno di rafforzarci militarmente» insieme a «stretti partner come Australia e Giappone». Chiamata alle armi dunque per gli alleati degli Usa, non solo contro la Russia in Europa ma contro la Cina in Asia. Col risultato che Russia e Cina rafforzano la loro alleanza anche sul piano militare.

Manlio Dinucci

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

This is the sort of stuff barnacles clinging on the antiquated raft known as British Royalty were waiting for.  One of the royal couples makes a dash for it, shirking and then shedding their subsidised duties.  They get in touch with that great squeeze and fluff of publicity, Oprah Winfrey.  Being interviewed by Winfrey is not going to get you kudos for aristocratic virtue but will appeal to a certain demographic. (New fashion design in the offing?  Perfume line?)

The Prince Harry-Meghan Markle revelations were boring, uninspiring, tedious, self-promoting celluloid slush.  For a moment, royalty gorgers and gloaters could forget the pandemic, the deaths of over 500,000 Americans, millions of job losses and incompetent governance.  They could feast their eyes on a privileged couple being interviewed in the environs of Californian luxury talking about their terrible hardships.

Press outlets such as Associated Press were merely stating the obvious in claiming that the interview revealed a “picture of racism, insensitivity and deep-rooted dysfunction” in the royal family.  On the racist charge, Meghan revealed that there had been “concerns and conversations” between Prince Harry and the family “about how dark” the skin of their offspring would be.  Meghan was adamant that her treatment in the British media was different to that offered to other royals, particularly Prince William’s wife Catharine.  It was one thing to be “rude”, another to be “racist”. 

The discussion of racism was less bombshell than damp squib; Meghan had come into the House of Windsor.  The records, satirised, anatomised, and scoured, suggest that if you want to join such a concern, you must expect a system that rejects evolution.  But the couple, and certainly Meghan, might have believed that their marriage was somehow a change in the order of things, a sprinkling of diversity to the institutional monochrome. 

This was itself almost amusing in its derangement, given Harry’s own past of race-related behaviour. When training at the Sandhurst military academy, the prince was recorded calling a soldier “our little Paki friend”.  Another video revealed the royal saying the following to a combat helicopter pilot before training: “Fuck me, you look like a rag-head.”  To comedian Stephen K. Amos, Harry remarked that he did not “sound like a black chap.”  Then there was that rather infamous case of donning Nazi uniform at a fancy dress party.  “Harry the Nazi,” roared The Sun at the time.  The fruit never falls far from the tree.  

In this, Harry shares much with his grandfather, Prince Philip.  For years, anybody interested in the royals would be waiting for the dotty utterances of a man whose mouth really ought to have been taped.  The Duke of Edinburgh, currently recovering from heart surgery, is Britain’s national treasure of petrified prejudice, incapable of changing and always ready with an incautious remark.  Perhaps it was he who ventured the colour question.  To dampen such speculation, which evidently had the opposite effect, Winfrey revealed that Harry confirmed “it was not his grandmother nor his grandfather [who] were a part of those conversations.” 

The bleeding obvious category was also filled by observations aimed to inspire audience sympathy and garner click bait.  Harry claimed to be trapped but initially suffered from false consciousness.  “I was trapped but I didn’t know I was trapped.”  His father and brother were similarly trapped.  “They don’t get to leave.”  Evidently, the prince lacks understanding on the difference between roles and people.   

The issue of mental health was also given a generous airing to add to victim standard bearing.  Meghan revealed she had suicidal thoughts.  “And that was a very clear, and real, and frightening, constant thought.”  The palace’s human resources insufficient support.  In this, the Duchess of Sussex ticked another self-promoting box: as aspiring mental health advocate.  This conversion certainly worked for Serena Williams, who wrote of those “mental health consequences of systematic oppression and victimization” and how they were “devastating, isolating and all too often lethal.”  Billie Jean King also joined the party.  “Her honesty will hopefully lead to more acceptance and more help for those who need it.” 

Even the White House was bewitched.  “For anyone to come forward and speak about their own struggles and mental health and tell their own personal story, that takes courage,” babbled the barely credible press White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

What Meghan and Harry have done is publicise the tedious and the personal as a platform.  Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, sees a cultural coup at work, an enterprise on the couple’s part “to seize the throne of the victim industry and consolidate their cultural power in the post-traditional world.”  At the very least, they have become publicity harlots, modern royals with a link to their own celebrity creating machine.  They feed that machine even as they complain before an audience of 17.1 million viewers about breaches of their privacy. 

In the aftermath of the showing, the couple’s efforts yielded much nauseating fruit.  The whole exercise shows that Meghan is merely continuing the shallowness of showbiz by other means.  Harry has become a tag along, an essentially useless royal who had already expressed dissatisfaction with the institution before meeting his wife.  The lack of utility for the royals was already in evidence before the couple decided to step back from their duties.  Leave that orbit, and you are merely a spec in search of vacuity masquerading as relevance. 

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Richard Nephew has taken personal credit for depriving Iranians of food and driving up their unemployment rates, celebrating the economic destruction he caused as “a tremendous success.” Under Biden, he will help direct policy on Iran.

The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. As the former principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obama’s State Department, Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile industry, and driving up unemployment rates.

Nephew has described the destruction of Iran’s economy as “a tremendous success,” and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country’s capital despite mounting US sanctions.

Nephew’s appointment to a senior diplomatic post suggests that rather than immediately returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran is unlikely to join.

After coordinating Obama’s sanctions regime against Iran, Nephew left the administration for a position at the energy industry-funded Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. There, he published a book outlining in blunt terms how he honed the craft of economic warfare and applied it against Iran.

Entitled “The Art of Sanctions: A View From The Field,” the book’s cover image features two Caucasian hands drawing a rope for a noose, presumably to strangle some insufficiently pliant Global South government. Its contents read like a list of criminal confessions, detailing in chillingly clinical terms how the sanctions Nephew conceived from inside an air-conditioned office in Washington immiserated average Iranians.

With his candor, Nephew has shattered the official US rhetoric about “targeted sanctions” that exclusively punish “bad actors” and their business cronies while leaving civilian populations unharmed.

I just read @RichardMNephew's "The Art of Sanctions."

Nephew, ex-Obama State Dept sanctions coordinator, clinically & chillingly details how pain is the essence of the US global sanctions regime.

Unfortunately, he hasn't been honest about the contents of his own book. Thread: pic.twitter.com/r5y9bc93eU

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 13, 2020

The application of pain to a country’s civilian population is central to Nephew’s sanctions strategy. As he explains in “The Art of Sanctions,” for the unilateral coercive measures to succeed, they must impose significant pain to a state’s most vulnerable sectors, shatter the state’s political and social resolve, and ultimately force the state to cry uncle in the face of Washington’s demands.

An excerpt from Richard Nephew’s book The Art of Sanctions

Nephew detailed how, as JCPOA negotiations got underway in January 2012, he led a process to reduce Iran’s oil revenue and starve its economy.

After the Obama administration successfully pushed for a wholesale reduction in oil exports and other unilateral coercive measures, Iran’s economy went from a period of growth to a sudden and staggering contraction, while the value of its currency tumbled.

Nephew pronounced the economic assault he engineered to be “a tremendous success.”

An excerpt from Richard Nephew’s book The Art of Sanctions

Nephew also patted himself on the the back for tripling the price of chicken “during important Iranian holiday periods,” thereby “contribut[ing] to more popular frustration in one bank shot than years of financial restrictions.”

Next, he boasted of more sanctions targeting civilians to prevent Iranians from obtaining the assistance they needed to repair their cars. “Iran’s manufacturing jobs and export revenue were the targets of this sanction,” Nephew wrote.

There were some goods that Nephew wanted Iran to import, however. In hopes of fomenting social unrest, he said Washington “expanded the ability of US and foreign companies to sell Iranians technology used for personal communications” so they could “learn more about the dire straits of their country’s economy…”

During a December 6, 2017 panel discussion about his book at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, Nephew detailed with a chilling smile how he not only sabotaged Iran’s automotive industry, but targeted “things like unemployment, to try to drive that up and make things a little more sticky.”

While discussing his book, "The Art of Sanctions," @richardmnephew boasted with a wide grin that the economic warfare tactics he devised drove up unemployment rates in Iran.

Nephew was just appointed as Biden's deputy Iran envoy.

My full story here: https://t.co/FWTYO7Ab4G pic.twitter.com/m5431czF8i

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 8, 2021

In response to online criticism, Nephew has claimed that “the main target” of the sanctions regime he designed was “the oligarchs.” But his book on “The Art of Sanctions” tells another story.

Nephew fondly recalls how he structured sanctions to sabotage Iranian economic reforms that would have improved the purchasing power of average people. The Obama administration destroyed the economic prospects of Iran’s working-class majority while ensuring that “only the wealthy or those in positions of power could take advantage of Iran’s continued connectedness,” he wrote. As “stories began to emerge from Iran of intensified income inequality and inflation,” Nephew pronounced another success.

As he made clear, the rising inequality “was a choice” that Washington “made on the basis of helping to drive up the pressure on the Iranian economy from internal sources.” Nephew went on to claim credit for October 2012 protests brought on by the devaluation of Iran’s currency.

In a fairly stunning admission, Nephew admits at one point that despite providing Iran with supposed humanitarian exceptions on US sanctions, the economic war he helped design caused a catastrophic shortage of medicine and medical devices, largely because average Iranians could not afford them.

Despite acknowledging the heavy toll of human suffering brought on by the sanctions he personally conceived, suggesting they could have prompted high numbers of excess deaths, Nephew appears to be devoid of contrition.

During a December 2016 trip to Moscow, he complained that despite the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US, food was still widely available at local restaurants – “hardly a level of pain” that was necessary to bring the Kremlin to heel.

He called to “develop a strategy to carefully, methodically, and efficiently increase pain on those areas [of the Russian economy] that are vulnerabilities and avoid those that are not.”

So who is Richard Nephew? Does he lurk in the shadow world of intelligence intrigues and spook wars, keeping a low profile while he waits to strike the enemy? Or is he a fire-breathing hardliner bellowing threats against America’s adversaries from Beltway think tank panels? The reality is much more banal.

When he is not snatching chicken from Iranian kids during their winter holiday, Nephew is spending quality time with his own, amusing them with his tattered dad rock t-shirts and flashing arms adorned with tribal tattoos.

Boom!

Immediate reaction
Wife: “Oh lord.”
Son: “you look like a pirate!”
Daughter 1: “how old is that shirt?” Told answer. “Oh that makes sense.”
Daughter 2: softly, “oh my god.” pic.twitter.com/TyhdHEr0tK

— Richard Nephew (@RichardMNephew) March 18, 2020

In an administration filled with fun-loving, ethnically diverse characters who moonlight as rock guitarists, decorate the walls of their homes with Haitian art, bob their heads to Tupac, and even enjoy an occasional toke, all while keeping the gears of a ferociously violent empire grinding along, the tattooed sanctions artist seems like a perfect fit.

Meanwhile, in Iran, where a leading daily recently portrayed Nephew as Keanu Reeves in the horror film The Devil’s Advocate, his elevation to a senior diplomatic role is viewed as a sign of more pain to come.

Vatan-e Emrooz highlights Richard Nephew’s appointment as deputy special envoy for Iran.
The outlet highlights the fact that he was one of the designers of the Iran sanctions regime pic.twitter.com/vZHJlJIqU4

— Omer Carmi (@CarmiOmer) March 2, 2021

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

All images in this article are from The Grayzone

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

A recent incident involving Amanda Gorman, the United States youth poet laureate, who was hailed after her presentation at the inauguration of recently elected President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, revealed the continuing threat of racial profiling.

Gorman, a best-selling and award-winning author of books for adults and children, was walking near her home in Los Angeles, California, when she noticed being trailed by a security guard.

The author was later told that she “looked suspicious”, implicating her as a potential suspect in committing a criminal offense. Such attitudes by police, vigilantes and corporate security agents have often been the precipitating factor in unjust arrests, physical assaults and even shooting deaths.

In response to the experience, the 23-year-old woman said that this was the plight of Black girls in the present period inside a racist country. The episode received national and international press coverage due to the heightened sensitivity and intolerance towards institutional racism and police misconduct.

A post on twitter by Gorman said of the situation that:

“A security guard tailed me on my walk home tonight. He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious.’ I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. This is the reality of Black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.”

This tweet from the youth poet laureate illustrates the hypocrisy of the U.S. society in regard to race relations. As a Harvard graduate and renown author, she can be praised for her accomplishments professionally within official circles and the corporate media. Nonetheless, as an African American, the social atmosphere within the U.S. makes her a threat to the stability of the government and economic structures.

Gorman went on to say in a following tweet in response to the provocation:

“In a sense, he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”

The statements via Twitter were immediately met with condemnations of the security personnel and accolades of emotional support. Many people within the African American communities across the country and other peoples of color could readily identify with the widely known phenomenon of racial profiling by law-enforcement, private security officers and racist whites in general.

Hundreds of high-profile cases have been given publicity over the last year since the brutal racist executions of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many others. Demonstrations and rebellions throughout the U.S. heightened the consciousness of the oppressed and working people as a whole in regard to the impact of state-approved targeting and violence. Calls for the defunding and dismantling of police agencies in major municipalities has prompted debate over the role of law-enforcement historically and on a contemporary level.

The youth poet laureate welcomed the groundswell of support through social media, saying:

“I am so thankful for the outpouring of support since the incident last night. It won’t change the truth of what happened, and continues to happen to Black Americans, but it reassures me of what I already know: There is always far more good in this world than bad.”

Gorman has overcome many obstacles in her journey towards academic, intellectual and literary success at such a young age. Born in Los Angeles on March 7, 1998, the product of a single mother who was an educator, he poet laureate worked on an auditory and speech impediment to become an acclaimed writer and public lecturer.

Her life ambitions and goals are related to deep interests in oppressive systems, feminism, race relations, social marginalization and the African Diaspora. A good deal of Gorman’s focus is on mentoring other young women in their desires to realize their full academic, artistic and professional potentials.

Not an Isolated Incident: A History of Racial Profiling and Struggle

Many other African Americans have undergone similar acts of racism as experienced by Gorman. One important figure of the 20th century, Mahalia Jackson (1911-1971), superseded many societal and economic hurdles to win international praise as a gospel singer and social activist.

Jackson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1911 under the draconian post-slavery structures euphemistically known as Jim Crow. Racial segregation was the law of the land in New Orleans during the early 20th century. Although exhibiting talent as a singer of spiritual music, after moving from Louisiana to Chicago, Jackson had to work for several years as a domestic to earn a living.

In 1947, she released a million-selling recording, Move On Up a Little Higher, gaining her fame and stature within the music industry. Despite her success, Jackson was a victim of racist violence in Chicago beginning in 1950.

According to an account of her early success as a public figure:

“Intense racism plagued her, though she had become an international star. When she moved into a white neighborhood in Chicago, someone shot through a window in her home. This struck no fear in her heart but only made her pursue social justice with more vigor. The New York Times reported that she once said, ‘I have hopes that my singing will break down some of the hate and fear that divide the white and black people in this country.’” (See this)

Jackson went on to provide food and other support to poor people in Chicago. She became a committed activist within the Civil Rights Movement befriending Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the 1950s and 1960s. She performed at the historic March on Washington in August 1963 and helped shape the groundbreaking address delivered by Dr. King on that fateful day.

This is just one example of the contradictions existing within U.S. society for artists and public intellectuals. The character of institutional racism is very much an oppressive force hampering the full freedom and right to self-determination among African Americans.

Racism in the U.S. Must be Completely Eradicated

Of course, these are not issues of individual prejudice amongst misguided and uninformed persons, racial profiling and its concomitant dangers, are deeply embedded within the U.S. capitalist and imperialist system. The domestic nature of institutional racism is reflected in the foreign policy imperatives of the ruling class and its military-industrial-complex.

However, Amanda Gorman has already identified her life’s mission related to ending oppression, racism and gender discrimination for African Americans and other people of African descent throughout the globe. Her objective is to become a major contributor in the struggle for human rights.

The fact that Gorman spoke out forcefully after the racial profiling incident is a strong indication of her courage and fortitude. She has also weighed in on the controversy now surrounding revelations of prejudice and racism inside the British royal family as represented by the treatment of Megan Markle, the wife of Prince Harry.

In the widely viewed interview with media personality Oprah Winfrey which aired initially on March 7, both Harry and Megan said they feared for their safety and suffered mental anguish as a direct result of racism within the British monarchy.

Newsweek magazine emphasized in a March 8 article that:

“Amanda Gorman has said the British royal family had missed out on its ‘greatest opportunity for change, regeneration and reconciliation in a new era’ by mistreating Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.”

Both Britain and the U.S. were instrumental in the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and modern-day imperialism. Domestic institutional racism remains prevalent in U.S. and British society.

Therefore, notwithstanding the personal educational and professional achievements of African American women they continue face the pervasiveness of racial profiling and violence. Only a successful struggle to eliminate oppression and exploitation will lay the groundwork for the total eradication of color prejudice and racial discrimination.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

All images in this article are from the author

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Chaos is brewing in the Aleppo countryside, as the Syrian Arab Army reportedly prepares for a decisive push on the Turkish-occupied areas.

All eyes are set on the town of Al-Bab and the surrounding area.

On March 7th, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) shelled the outskirts of the Turkish-occupied town of al-Bab. According to sources from the “moderate opposition”, at least ten mortar rounds fired by the SAA landed in the towns of Bratah and al-Dana near al-Bab.

There was one reported casualty, and one injury. The previous day saw shelling from the SAA on the same location, without any casualties and damage being reported.

These developments followed the incident on March 5 when, the Syrian military used ballistic missiles and rockets to pound Turkish-affiliated smugglers in the areas of al-Himran and Tarhin. According to reports, over 40 criminals were injured and more than 200 oil trucks and storage facilities were destroyed.

More than three years ago, the Turkish Armed Forces wrestled the city of al-Bab away from ISIS. Since then, the SAA has been waiting for an opportunity to liberate it from the successive occupations.

Nearby, in the northeastern part of Aleppo city itself, there appears to be a Turkish-funded insurgency rising.

On March 4th, saboteurs burned a minivan of the al-Quds Brigade in the district of Hannano. The al-Quds Brigade, made mostly of Palestinians, is one of the largest pro-government factions in Aleppo. The group Youth of Aleppo al-Shahba Regiment for Special Missions claimed responsibility for the attack. Their allegiance is formally unknown, but it is obvious.

It comes down to speculation, but pro-Turkish groups could have carried out the sabotage, in order to spread chaos and impede the SAA’s attack on the Turkish-occupied cities in the countryside.

Nearby, in Greater Idlib, the soon-to-be-rebranded Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) terrorists are attempting to merge with the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL).

This proposed military council is clearly meant to provide a legitimate cover for the rebranded terrorist activities of HTS and other al-Qaeda factions in Greater Idlib.

Sure enough, on March 6th, an infamous propagandist of HTS, Tahir al-Omar, confirmed that work was ongoing to establish a “Defense Ministry” in Greater Idlib. HTS, in the past, has attacked the NFL occasionally, despite the fact they’ve been allied. For the purposes of the “moderate opposition” and the rebranding of terrorists, those issues have been left in the past.

Greater Idlib is still the greatest source of the terrorist threat, and no amount of rebranding of terrorists can change that.

A sense of urgency should be growing with in HTS and the Turkish-proxies in Greater Idlib, as their turn is likely coming shortly after any operation to recapture the Turkish-occupied towns in the Aleppo countryside.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

SUPPORT SOUTHFRONT:

PayPal: [email protected], http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

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

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

A growing and coordinated attack on the rights of transgender people is taking place through state legislation and sadly it is receiving support from people across the political spectrum. The attack is successful because its proponents are using myths about transgender people to cloak their efforts under a veneer of feminism and concerns about children’s health. In reality, this attack is anti-feminist and threatens the well-being and lives of not only the transgender community, particularly the youth, which is one of the most vulnerable communities in our society, but also of all of us.

It is necessary to understand where this attack is coming from and the facts that dispel these myths so we can all take action to protect the rights of transgender people. The media is largely silent about what is happening. We need to raise awareness and halt these bills. Solidarity is critical to stop the assault and protect us from being divided against each other at a time when we need to struggle together for our People(s)-Centered Human Rights.

This week, I interviewed Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the ACLU who is a national leader in the fight for the rights of transgender people, on Clearing the FOG (available Monday night). We discussed the state bills, the impact they will have if they are made into law and how to stop them.

A coordinated attack on transgender rights in the states

The number of states that have introduced bills restricting the rights of transgender people has increased from 20 states in 2020 to 26 states so far in 2021. The bills range from those that prevent transgender people from participating in sports, using gender-appropriate facilities or obtaining identification documents to ones that make providing health care to transgender youth a felony and allow religious discrimination. You will find a list of the states, the bills and their current status here.

One bill that is imminent in Alabama would make it a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and up to a $15,000 fine for health professionals who provide hormone therapy, hormone blockers or surgery to transgender youth. The bill also requires school staff to inform parents if a student has the “perception that his or her gender is inconsistent with his or her sex.” A version of the bill recently passed in both the Alabama House and the Senate. Sixteen other states have introduced similar legislation.

Both of these measures put transgender youth at a serious risk of lifetime harm or suicide if they are not able to receive appropriate medical therapy during puberty or are outed to parents who may not support them. A study from 2018 finds that suicide, the second leading cause of death in teenagers, and self-harm rates are higher in transgender adolescents than cisgender teens. In the Minnesota study of teens aged 11 to 19, nearly a third of transgender girls and more than half of transgender boys had attempted suicide, two-thirds had suicidal thoughts and more than half had injured themselves. The National Center for Transgender Equality finds that of the 1.6 million homeless youth in the United States, 20 to 40% of them are transgender youth while transgender people are less than 1% of the overall population. They face family rejection, denial of access to spaces in homeless shelters that are consistent with their gender and discrimination when they seek to rent or buy a home.

The bills also run counter to standard medical practice. After more than 100 years of work to provide gender-affirming health care to transgender youth and adults, this area of medicine is well-documented and supported by major institutions such as the American Association of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society and the American Psychological Association. At a time when the medical establishment is working to improve care for transgender people in all settings, these state bills would be a huge impediment to that progress.

Another major set of bills currently present in 26 states would prohibit transgender students from participating in school sports on the same teams as their cisgender peers. As the ACLU writes, these bills are less about sports and more about “erasing and excluding trans people from participation in all aspects of public life.” The fight to exclude trans people from restrooms that are consistent with their gender failed, so this is the new tool to attack their rights.

Transgender girls and boys and women and men already compete in sports all over the world and their participation is supported by major institutions such as the Women’s Sports Foundation, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education and the National Women’s Law Center. Nearly two dozen organizations signed onto a letter supporting the full inclusion of transgender people in athletics. Depriving transgender youth of the right to participate in sports harms their physical, social and emotional well-being. Transgender youth already face obstacles to being accepted in society and not being allowed into sports worsens that while preventing them from crucial areas of their development such as being part of a team and discovering their physical capabilities.

Creating barriers to participation in sports harms everyone, but especially women who as a group already face discrimination over their gender and attempts to control their bodies. In order to exclude transgender people from sports, all participants will be required to ‘prove’ their gender. As the National Women’s Law Center states,

“The law allows anyone, for any reason, to question whether a student athlete is a woman or girl, and then the student has to ‘verify’ her gender by undergoing invasive testing.” They add that by “allowing coaches, administrators, and other athletes to become the arbiters of who ‘looks like’ a girl or a woman,” the  laws “will rely on and perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes.”

Chase Strangio and Gabriel Arkles dispel four of the common myths about transgender athletes. They point out that the effort to exclude transgender women from sports is being done in a way that “reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection. Politicians have used the ‘protection’ trope time and time again, including in 2016 when they tried banning trans people from public restrooms by creating the debunked ‘bathroom predator’ myth.” These myths are being spread widely, so it is critical that we understand the facts so we can stop them.

The groups behind the attacks on the rights of transgender people

There are a host of right-wing and conservative groups behind the attacks on transgender people. The major players involved in the state legislative efforts are the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The Alliance Defending Freedom is a conservative Christian group formed in 1994 that does legal advocacy against women’s right to an abortion and for discrimination against lesbian, gay and transgender people. It is a well-funded ($35 million budget) and powerful group that trains “future legislators, judges, prosecutors, attorneys general, and other government lawyers.” It is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its support for the criminalization of same sex marriage, sterilization of transgender people and bigoted beliefs.

One way that conservative groups have gained credibility with liberals is by portraying their work as in the interest of women’s rights. They project a zero sum view that somehow advocacy for the rights of transgender women takes away from the long struggle for ciswomen’s rights, as if transgender women and men have not struggled for recognition and for their rights for a long time too. They falsely argue that transgender women spent part of their life as ‘privileged’ males and so they either cannot understand what women have experienced or they are bringing patriarchal views into women’s spaces. This view conflicts with the reality that transgender women experience greater discrimination and violence than cisgender women. They are hardly a privileged group. Similarly, they falsely portray transgender men as ‘victims of patriarchy.’

This bigotry has entered some radical feminist spaces that actively exclude transgender woman and portray them as threats to their safety. Left Voice provides a history of the rise of what is called “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or TERFs,” their violence against transgender women and their alliances with the alt-right. Katelyn Burns explains who some of these groups are and their attempts to dominate political space in the United Kingdom. Fortunately there is not much support for them in the United States, but it does exist.

Trans-exclusionary groups use fear as a weapon against transgender women by portraying them as threats to the physical safety of cisgender girls and women without solid evidence to back this claim. The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence finds that around half of transgender and nonbinary people have been sexually assaulted and more than half have experienced domestic partner violence. This is far less than the 18% of cisgender women who are victims of sexual violence. This use of a concocted threat of violence to discriminate against transgender women is similar to that used to justify repression against Muslims, immigrants and Black people.

Building an inclusive society

The increasing attacks on the rights of transgender people in the United States needs to be a concern to all of us. We cannot create an inclusive society that supports the healthy development and rights of all people if we remain silent as the most vulnerable among us are targeted with damaging and deadly discrimination. We cannot teach our children tolerance if they see their friends being prohibited from basic childhood activities such as participation in sports. We cannot deny people the right to determine who they are and to live in ways that support them. Transgender people are our neighbors, our friends and our family members.

Chase Strangio describes five specific ways we can take action to end discrimination against transgender people and to affirm them as members of our communities. There is something for everyone to do no matter where you are. We can all strive to point out and correct bigotry where we see it, work to educate people around us and donate to groups doing this work that are led by transgender people. If you live in a state where these bills are introduced, contact your state lawmaker and let them know of your opposition to them. You can also join local groups to advocate for the rights of transgender people.

Let’s stop the attack on transgender people in the United States before it is allowed to escalate further.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Margaret Flowers is director of Popular Resistance where this article was originally published. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Penelope Barritt/Rex/Shutterstock.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2021 will be the second year in a row in which the federal debt exceeds Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CBO also projected that this year’s federal deficit will be 2.3 trillion dollars, which is 900 billion dollars less than last year. However, CBO’s projections do not include the 1.9 trillion dollars “stimulus” bill Congress is likely to pass.

The CBO’s report was largely ignored by Congress and the media. One reason the report did not get the attention it deserves is Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s continued commitment to making sure Fed policies enable Congress to spend as much as Congress deems necessary to address the economic fallout from the coronavirus panic.

As financial analyst Peter Schiff points out, the Fed’s commitment to ensuring the government can run up massive debt means the Fed will not allow interest rates to increase to anywhere near what they would be in a free market. This is because increasing interest rates would cause the federal government’s debt payments to rise to unsustainable levels. Yet, the Fed cannot admit it is going to keep rates near, or even below, zero indefinitely without unsettling the markets. So, the Fed continues to promise interest rate hikes in the future and the markets pretend to believe the Fed. When (or if) the lockdowns end, the Fed will find a new crisis justifying “temporarily” keeping interest rates low.

The Federal Reserve has not just endorsed massive federal spending, Fed Chairman Powell has also endorsed masks, vaccines, and social distancing to defeat the coronavirus and restore the economy. It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see the Fed go full Fauci.

The overreaction to coronavirus is a cause of the explosion in federal spending and debt we have witnessed over the last year. However, federal spending already greatly increased from January 2017 until the lockdowns. This spending growth occurred under a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and, from 2017 to 2019, a Republican House. One bright spot in Democratic control of the presidency and both houses of Congress is more Republicans will fight excessive spending and claim to be “deficit hawks.”

Republican hypocrisy in claiming to care about spending and debt only when a Democrat sits in the Oval Office is one reason why Democrats can so easily disregard debt. Another reason is the left’s embrace of Modern Monetary Theory. Modern Monetary Theory is the latest version of the fairy tale that politicians need not worry about debt and deficits as long as the central bank can monetize the federal debt.

Unless the government changes course, America will experience a crisis greater than the Great Depression. The crisis will include a final rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. There will also be much increased price inflation. At that point Congress will have no choice but to limit spending, although it will try to hide cuts in popular entitlement programs by “adjusting” government measures of inflation. Congress could then blame the Fed for the reduction in value of government benefits.

Those who know the truth have two responsibilities. First, ensure they and their families are protected when the crash comes. Second, redouble efforts to spread the ideas of liberty and grow the liberty movement so politicians are pressured to cut spending and debt and to end the Fed.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

China and Russia pose the main challenge to US hegemonic aims, especially united.

Longstanding US policy seeks control over all world community nations, their resources and populations.

Will US war on China by other means turn hot by accident or design?

On Sunday, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi repeated what he and other Beijing officials stressed many times before.

China seeks cooperative relations with the US.

Washington’s rage to dominance prevents it, prioritizing containment of China along with seeking to undermine and isolate the country politically, economically, technologically and militarily.

US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) head Admiral Philip Davidson urged Congress to appropriate over $27 billion for new regional military construction, missiles, air defense installations, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges to confront China.

The US Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) is all about increasing its military presence in a part of the world not its own to confront China.

Like US hostility toward Russia, Iran, and other nations free from its control, false accusation against Beijing are made with disturbing regularity.

Defense News.com hyped a nonexistent China threat, saying it “boost(ed) (its) defense budget again (that now) exceed(s) $208 billion” — citing a figure released by the country’s finance military.

The amount pales in comparison to countless trillions of US dollars poured down a black hole of waste, fraud, and abuse for militarism, belligerence, and maintenance of the Pentagon’s worldwide empire of bases.

In stark contrast to the US, China’s military spending is for defense, not forever wars.

Threatened by US rage to dominate the country, including by surrounding it with heavily armed Pentagon bases, China must react defensively.

Preparing for possible US aggression is the most effective deterrent against it.

Despite no threat of an attack by China against the US in the Indo/Pacific or anywhere else, Davidson considers Guam-based 360-degree Aegis Ashore missile defense his top priority, along with high-frequency radar in Palau.

He also wants space-based radar systems built and “specialized manned aircraft (for) multi-source intelligence” gathering.

He asked for “highly survivable, precision-strike networks (with) increased quantities of ground-based weapons.”

“These networks must be operationally decentralized and geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos using service agnostic infrastructure,” he said, adding:

“We must convince Beijing that the costs to achieve its objectives by military force are simply too high.”

Unlike US-dominated NATO and Israel, China pursues its geopolitical aims cooperatively with other nations.

Brute force is how the US and its imperial partners operate.

China is the top US target for transformation into a pro-Western vassal state.

According to military analyst Song Zhongping, the “People’s Liberation Army is developing new types of weapons, including hypersonic weapons, to counter the offensive and defensive military strategy by the US.”

If trillions of dollars spent by the US for war on humanity at home and abroad were used to serve its people over exploiting them and others in targeted countries, peace and stability would end forever US wars on invented enemies.

The world and nation would be safer and more fit to live in.

Things are the other way around and getting steadily worse because of US rage to rule the world unchallenged.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

After a coup in the South American country of Bolivia in November 2019, democratically elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee. Foreign Office documents obtained by Declassified show Britain saw the new military-backed regime, which killed 18 protesters, as an opportunity to open up Bolivia’s lithium deposits to UK firms.

On 10 November 2019, after the head of the army called for his resignation, Bolivia’s socialist president, Evo Morales, stepped down. It followed weeks of protests after the release of a report by the Organisation of American States (OAS) alleging irregularities in the election Morales had won the previous month.

Persecution from the new regime forced Morales to flee the country and an “interim president”, Jeanine Áñez, was installed. Widely condemned as a coup, resulting protests were met with lethal force.

Days after taking power, on 14 November 2019, the Áñez regime forced through Decree 4078 which gave immunity to the military for any actions taken in “the defence of society and maintenance of public order”.

The following day, on 15 November, Bolivian military forces shot and killed eight protesters in the city of Sacaba. On 21 November, regime forces killed another 10 protesters in the neighbourhood of Senkata just outside the capital La Paz.

Despite the deadly violence, which was condemned by human rights groups, the British embassy in La Paz moved quickly to support Bolivia’s new regime, Declassified can reveal from documents we have obtained. 

We have seen a project list for a Foreign Office programme in Bolivia called “Frontline Diplomatic Enabling Activity”, which the UK government describes as a “small pot of money that [embassies] receive and have authority over to spend on projects supporting [embassy] activity”.

The deposits

Bolivia has the world’s second-largest reserves of lithium, a metal that is used to make batteries and which has become increasingly important due to the burgeoning electric car industry.

The UK government has stated that lithium battery technology is a priority for its “industrial strategy”. In June 2019, it announced it was investing £23-million in “electric car battery development”.

The government has further noted: “It’s estimated that South America holds 54% of the world’s lithium resources, which are increasingly in demand to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles and energy diversification programmes.”

It added:

“The UK aims to have a thriving, sustainable battery industry, which would translate to a £2.7 billion opportunity … and our bilateral partnerships are essential to ensure this.”

In February 2019, Evo Morales’ government had chosen a Chinese consortium to be its strategic partner on a new $2.3-billion lithium project which would focus on production from the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars (salt flats under which the lithium is deposited).

But after the coup, the regime’s new minister for mining cast doubt on whether the deal would be honoured by the new government.

These particular salt flats were of interest to the UK embassy.

One project it co-funded from 2019-20 sought to “optimise Bolivia’s lithium exploration and production (in the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars) using British technology”.

After the coup, this project was quickly moved forward.

The abstract for the project was authorised by its main funder – the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) – on 25 November 2019, two weeks after the coup and days after the Senkata massacre.

The project gained full approval for funding of $100,000 weeks later, in mid-December 2019.

The IADB told Declassified: “The implementation of [grant] activities are conducted in close coordination with designated government authorities and their technical teams.” At that point its “close coordination” would have been with the Áñez regime.

Satellite Applications Catapult

The British embassy in La Paz provided £5,000 towards this lithium project in 2019-20, but the Foreign Office refused to tell Declassified if these funds were disbursed after the coup in November 2019.

The goal was to “design and implement a satellite data-based application that can optimise exploration and exploitation of large/best lithium sources in the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars in Bolivia”, the documents outlined.

The Foreign Office noted that the project was to be implemented by Satellite Applications Catapult, an Oxford-based organisation “helping organisations harness the power of satellite-based services”.

The company receives about a third of its funding from the UK government but it did not respond to Declassified’s questions about the Bolivia project.

However, we found that on 19 December 2019 – two days after the IABD gave final approval to the project – the UK Foreign Office transferred £33,220 to Satellite Applications Catapult, in a payment listed as “programme spend”.

The department refused to tell Declassified if this funding was for the lithium exploitation project in Bolivia. The IADB told us: “Coordination with the British Embassy has been particularly cooperative in search for synergies”.

A picture of the Coipasa salt flats in Bolivia, photographed by an Expedition 33 crew member on the International Space Station. (Photo: Nasa)

International seminar

Then, in March 2020, four months after the coup, the British embassy in La Paz partnered with the regime’s Ministry of Mining to organise an “international seminar” for more than 300 officials from the global extractives sector.

A British company, Watchman, was brought in by the UK embassy to give the keynote presentation and outline the “creative solutions” it had enacted in Africa to bring local communities onside with mining projects.

The Foreign Office documents note:

“Watchman UK and other consultancies are now in line to offer services in this important field to a number of Bolivia mining companies who wish to achieve win-win solutions to their controversies with indigenous inhabitants and towns located in the area of influence of their activities”.

Watchman is a risk management company set up in 2016 by Christopher Goodwin-Hudson, a nine-year veteran of the British Army who was later executive director of global security for the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The company supports corporate clients “across the extractive, agribusiness and capital project sectors” who are having trouble operating because of local resistance. Watchman’s website carries the logo of the UK Foreign Office.

The firm’s associate director, Gabriel Carter, has held a number of senior roles in the private security industry and in 2012 founded an Afghanistan-focused security company that “supported numerous British and US development projects”.

Carter, also a veteran of risk management at Goldman Sachs, is a member of the Special Forces Club, an exclusive and secretive private members’ club for senior intelligence and special forces veterans in Knightsbridge, London.

Watchman did not respond to Declassified’s questions about the event and the UK Foreign Office refused to answer questions related to it.

Click here to read the document

UK Foreign Office documents from 2015-20 documenting a range of programmes run by the British embassy in Bolivia.

A long courtship 

The quick moves of the British embassy on the lithium project followed years of trying to court Bolivia’s socialist government over the country’s reserves of the metal, the new documents show.

Morales had moved Bolivia away from the country’s traditional reliance on Western corporations since taking power in 2006. His government was widely praised for reducing poverty and increasing investment in schools, hospitals and infrastructure.

The Foreign Office notes that its “first engagement with the Bolivian Lithium Company”, known by its Spanish acronym YLB, was in 2017-18 when it paid £31,500 to organise a scientific UK mission. It focused on training the YLB on new technologies to explore and produce lithium in a “sustainable” way.

The documents note this project “allowed British organisations … to carry over projects on lithium in Bolivia with [Inter-American Development Bank] and [UK government] funding in the following years”.

The UK government noted:

“Relationship with the Bolivian Lithium Company might also prove relevant as Bolivia becomes a supplier of lithium (a critical material) to the UK”, and referenced its “effort to connect Bolivia, Chile and Argentina (ie the Lithium Triangle) with the London Metal Exchange”.

The following year’s programme notes that “stronger links” developed between the YLB and the British embassy in Bolivia.

The documents also outline how in April 2019, the British embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, hosted a “high-level technical meeting” with the mining and lithium authorities of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, as well as senior representatives of the London Metal Exchange.

Those three countries together share ownership of the “lithium triangle”, the region of the Andes rich in lithium reserves. At the time Argentina and Chile had right-wing governments friendly with the UK.

Also in attendance was Bolivia’s vice-minister of lithium and the chief executive of YLB. “The project from the British Embassy in Bolivia … consisted in securing and facilitating the presence of the Bolivian authorities in the meeting”, the Foreign Office documents note.

It added that, after the meeting, the Bolivian government was now “aware of the relevance of the London Metal Exchange” and particularly “its interest to establish a lithium standard” which was to be based upon the lithium triangle production. Such standards serve “to promote understanding and communication between metal producers and users”.

The following sections in this passage are redacted under two exemptions related to “international relations” and “commercial interests”. These are the only redactions made on the programme documentation for the five years of operations seen by Declassified.

The London Metal Exchange, the world centre for industrial metals trading. (Photo: UK government)

Darktrace

There is further evidence Britain was always priming the country for a change in government. In the year before the coup, the British embassy was promoting the UK cyber sector, bringing a company to Bolivia founded by the UK intelligence community, and with close links to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In 2009, Morales had expelled a US diplomat who he claimed was a CIA asset heading an operation to infiltrate Bolivia’s state-owned oil company.

Eight months before the coup, the UK embassy spent more than £4,500 organising a “major event” in Laz Paz on cybersecurity for financial institutions, attended by 150 executives and senior officials from the Bolivian financial sector, according to the Foreign Office documents.

Delivered in coordination with the Bolivian Stock Exchange, Bolivian banks were said to “now be acquiring specialised services to protect their systems from cybercrime”. Further, the bankers were now aware that fighting cybercrime had to be “based upon adequate and state-of-the-art technology”.

Presentations were delivered by British company Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm set up by Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, and its signals intelligence agency, GCHQ. The company was incorporatedthe day after the first of whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s exposures was published in The Guardian.

Since its founding, Darktrace has hired personnel from the US intelligence community, including directlyfrom the CIA and the National Security Agency, where Snowden used to work.

Recruits from the CIA

Alan Wade, who sits on Darktrace’s advisory council, is a 35-year veteran of the CIA and its former chief information officer.

Darktrace also recruited Marcus Fowler, a former US Marine and 15-year veteran of the CIA, as its “director of strategic threat”. At the CIA, Fowler worked on “developing global cyber operations and technical strategies” and “conducted nearly weekly briefings for senior US officials”, he says.

In July 2013, Evo Morales’ presidential plane was grounded in Austria after US intelligence agencies suspected it had Snowden on board.

Morales blamed the US and other international actors for the November 2019 coup. “It was a national and international coup d’état,” he said soon after. “Industrialised countries don’t want competition.” He added: “I’m absolutely convinced it’s a coup against lithium.”

The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables show that the US embassy in La Paz worked closely with the political opposition in Bolivia to remove the Morales government after it took power in 2006.

Morales expelled the US Drug Enforcement Agency in 2008 and the US Agency for International Development in 2013, accusing them of “conspiring” against his government.

For the March 2019 event, the UK embassy also brought an expert from the London-based think tank Chatham House, whose co-president is Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former director-general of MI5.

Its funders include the US State Department, UK Foreign Office, the British Army, and the oil companies BP and Chevron.

After the event, Britain’s Foreign Office noted that “several companies in the field [are] now being hired and consulted”. It is not known if Darktrace was one of them.

The embassy kept up the engagement soon after. “New dialogue with the Bolivian government on cyber”, notes the Foreign Office in its 2019-2020 programme. It is unclear if this referred to the coup regime.

‘Important input’

The day after the Bolivian election on 20 October 2019, the Washington-based Organisation of American States – the grouping of countries in North and South America – released a report on the vote which Morales had marginally won. It cited “an inexplicable change” that “drastically modifies the fate of the election”.

It also raised doubts about the fairness of the vote and fuelled a chain of events that led to the November coup.

However, a subsequent study by independent researchers using data obtained by The New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities found that the OAS statistical analysis was flawed.

Its conclusion that Morales’ share of the vote jumped inexplicably in the final ballots relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques, the researchers found.

Declassified can now reveal that the British embassy provided data for the OAS’s discredited report.

The British embassy spent £8,000 putting together an alliance of civil society organisations which “coordinated an operation for citizens’ observation of the elections in 2019”.

This alliance carried out a survey on voting intentions before the elections, which “was an important input for the OAS mission report, which identified irregularities in the process”, the Foreign Office notes.

The OAS failed to respond to Declassified’s questions about the UK embassy’s role in its discredited report and the Foreign Office refused to answer any questions about it.

The British embassy’s projects to prepare for the election went even further. In February 2019, it spent £9,981 to bring the Thomson Reuters Foundation to the country to train 30 Bolivian journalists on “verification techniques and pre-planning an election on coverage that is balanced, accurate and free of polarisation”.

The Foundation said that “ahead of the elections in Bolivia” it was teaching “practical skills and tools to recognise fake news and attempts to influence the electorate with false information”.  

Declassified previously revealed how the British government is using journalism as an influencing tool in Latin America. Also recently revealed was that the British government secretly funded Reuters in the 1960s and 1970s at the behest of an anti-Soviet propaganda unit linked to British intelligence.

‘Marxist solidarity’

Days after the November coup in Bolivia, the UK Foreign Office released a statement saying:

“The United Kingdom congratulates Jeanine Áñez on taking on her new responsibilities as interim President of Bolivia.” It added: “We welcome Ms Áñez’ appointment and her declared intention to hold elections soon.”

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stated:

“We hope that the current crisis in Bolivia can now be resolved swiftly, peacefully and in a democratic way. The Bolivian people deserve to have the opportunity to vote in free and fair elections.”

Then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn offered a completely different view, saying: “I condemn this coup against the Bolivian people and stand with them for democracy, social justice and independence.”

Raab proceeded to attack Corbyn, quote-tweeting him and stating:

“Unbelievable. The Organisation of American States refused to certify the Bolivian election because of systemic flaws. The people are protesting and striking on an unprecedented scale. But @jeremycorbyn puts Marxist solidarity ahead of democracy.”

But Raab and the Foreign Office made no further comments as the new regime’s forces carried out the Sacaba and Senkata massacres the following week.

In March 2020, four months after Morales was overthrown, the new regime was organising a series of new initiatives “with the UK as a strategic partner”, the documents note.

That same month, Britain’s ambassador during the coup, Jeff Glekin, offered a glimpse of the UK interests involved in backing the new regime.

Glekin spoke to the Bolivian media about British Week, which was bringing 12 British companies to the country for the first time.

“Many are looking for new markets in the world and Bolivia can be an opportunity to grow,” he said. “Due to the political changes in Bolivia, a more open environment for foreign investment is perceived and I believe that this will open new doors to companies that want to share their technology, their products and make alliances with different companies.”

Glekin, who remains in post, added:

“We are working with the Santa Cruz Mayor’s Office … and we invite Santa Cruz corporations to participate in the event.”

In the documents seen by Declassified, a disproportionately high number of UK embassy projects have focused on the eastern city of Santa Cruz, which was the centre of opposition to Evo Morales’ government.

Glekin continued:

“The previous government was not very in favour of foreign investment. So, with the changes that we are going to see, it will be easier to enter the market and do business. The companies to come are from different parts of Great Britain and from various sectors. They are modern firms that are doing innovative things and want to enter the market and share their services and products in Bolivia.”

Glekin added:

“The demand for lithium is growing and Bolivia must take advantage of that opportunity.”

When new elections took place in October 2020, Evo Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo won 55% of the votes against six rivals on the ballot, easily avoiding the need for a runoff. The runner-up was former President Carlos Mesa with just under 29%.

A Foreign Office spokesperson told Declassified:

“Presidential elections held in Bolivia in October 2020 were free and fair. There was no coup. The UK has a strong and constructive relationship with current and former Bolivian administrations.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Matt Kennard is head of investigations at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world. 

Featured image is from People’s Dispatch

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

It saddens us to have to report that as a result of receiving a dose of either the Pfizer / BioNTech MRNA vaccine or the Oxford / Astrazeneca Viral Vector (still MRNA technology), a total of twenty women have now had to suffer the grief of having a miscarriage and losing their unborn child.

Adverse reactions to both jabs reported to the MHRA Yellow Card scheme up to the 21st February shows that the number has almost doubled in just seven days when compared with the previous weeks data, which included adverse reactions to both jabs. As of the 14th February 2021, a total of eleven women had lost their baby with three of those being due to the Oxford vaccine and eight of those being due to the Pfizer vaccine.

The MHRA Yellow Card data now shows that the Oxford jab has caused four women to sadly lose their unborn child, an increase of one on the previous weeks data.

However the Pfizer jab has now caused, as of the 21st February, a total of sixteen women to sadly lose their unborn child, a figure which has doubled from the eight seen in the previous week up to the 14th February.

As of the 14th February there had been 8.3 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine administered, with the Oxford jab lagging behind by 1.4 million at just 6.9 million doses administered. But fast forward to the 21st February, a further 1.1 million doses of the Pfizer jab were administered, and a further 1.5 million doses of the Oxford jab.

However the number of adverse reactions to the Oxford jab is nearly double than what has been reported for the Pfizer jab, with 157,637 adverse reactions to the Oxford Jab being reported, compared with 85,179 adverse reactions to the Pfizer jab being reported as of the 21st February 2021.

Whilst the Oxford vaccine outnumbers the Pfizer jab significantly in terms of adverse reactions, the data now clearly shows the Pfizer jab to be much more dangerous when it comes to being administered to pregnant women.

But why is this happening?

Well when the Pfizer jab was first approved for emergency use only in the United Kingdom, meaning the manufacturer is not liable for any harm or injury caused by their product, the Government’s advice was as follows –

‘Pregnancy

There are no or limited amount of data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2.

Animal reproductive toxicity studies have not been completed. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine
BNT162b2 is not recommended during pregnancy‘

‘For women of childbearing age, pregnancy should be excluded before vaccination. In addition, women
of childbearing age should be advised to avoid pregnancy for at least 2 months after their second dose.

This was taken from a document released by the Government titled ‘REG 174 INFORMATION FOR UK HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS’, of which we reported to you back in December 2020.

However the Government has since updated it’s advice within the document, for reasons unknown to the following –

4.6 Fertility, pregnancy and lactation

Pregnancy

There is limited experience with use of the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in pregnant women.

Animal studies do not indicate direct or indirect harmful effects with respect to pregnancy, embryo/foetal development, parturition or post-natal development. Administration of the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in pregnancy should only be considered when the potential benefits outweigh any potential risks for the mother and foetus.

So now we know why pregnant women have started to be inoculated with the experimental jabs, because the Government quietly changed its own advice based on zero evidence to support it. Even going as far as to remove the recommendation that women of child bearing age being told to avoid pregnancy for at least two months after their second dose.

Statistically these women stood no chance of suffering from serious illness due to the alleged SARS-CoV-2 virus and the alleged resulting disease Covid-19, now sadly they have to suffer the misery of losing their unborn children.

How many more women need to suffer a miscarriage to stop this madness?

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

All images in this article are from The Daily Expose

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

On Friday afternoon, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (still called the CDC, even though they added a ‘P’) released a heretical report about mask-wearing and COVID-19.

The report, authored by at least a dozen medical doctors, PhD researchers, and, bizarrely, a handful of attorneys, examined how mask mandates across the US affected COVID cases and death rates.

You’d think with all of the media propaganda about mask effectiveness… and all the virtue signaling, with politicians and reporters appearing on live TV wearing masks… that the data would prove incontrovertibly and overwhelmingly that masks have saved the world.

But that’s not what the report says.

According to the CDC’s analysis, between March 1 and December 31 last year, statewide mask mandates were in effect in 2,313 of the 3,142 counties in the United States.

And, looking at the county-by-county data, the CDC concludes that mask mandates were associated with an average 1.32% decrease in the growth rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the first 100 days after the mask policy was implemented.

Wait, what? Only 1.32%?

You read that correctly, they didn’t misplace the decimal: according to the federal government agency that is responsible for managing the COVID-1984 pandemic, the difference between mask mandates and no mask mandate is literally just a 1.32% difference.

And bear in mind, it’s entirely possible that the real figure is even lower than that, given all the questionable COVID statistics.

For example, the CDC reports that influenza cases in the United States have dropped to almost zero in the 2020-2021 flu season, down from 56 MILLION the previous year.

It’s amazing they expect anyone to take this data seriously.

Are we honestly supposed to believe that the flu has been eradicated? Or is it possible, that, maybe just maybe, at least some influenza cases have been misdiagnosed as COVID?

If that’s the case, then the real impact of masks on COVID growth rates is potentially much lower than 1.32%.

Even the CDC seems to understand this, because at the end of its report, they inspidly conclude by stating that mask mandates “have the potential to slow the spread of COVID-19. . .” [the bold is mine, obviously]

Really? “Potential”? That’s HERESY! And an obvious contradiction to WHO guidance. It makes we wonder whether Google and Facebook are gearing up to censor this report, given they have self-appointed themselves as the Ministry of Truth.

Frankly it’s pretty incredible that the data was too weak for the CDC to make a clear assertion about the benefits of mask mandates.

(though I did say there were a couple of lawyers who co-authored this paper… and using non-committal language like “potential” certainly sounds like typical weasel lawyer-speak.)

Now, please don’t misunderstand the point of this letter. I’m not here to bash masks or say that they don’t work, or go on some anti-mask rant.

The point is that I’m pro-data. And pro-reason.

Public health policies come with consequences. There are always costs, and there are (hopefully) benefits.

The CDC has just published an official analysis of the benefits, quantified at precisely 1.32%.

What are the costs of their decisions? Well there’s plenty of data about that too.

For example, a recent study published earlier this month in the premier scientific journal Nature shows that Americans who wear masks are more likely engage in riskier activities, like, you know, leaving the house.

The study conclude that mask mandates “lead to risk compensation behavior” and mask wearers “spend 11-24 fewer minutes at home on average and increase visits to some commercial locations– most notably restaurants, which are a high-risk location.”

Other consequences are more grim.

There have been several studies which chronicle the alarming rise in severe mental health issues, including a spike in youth suicide, as a result of various public health policies, including mask mandates and lockdowns.

For example, another study published in Nature from early January reported that, in late 2020, suicide rates among children in Japan jumped 49%.

And the US government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service (SAMHSA) reported an incredible 890% increase in call volume to its nationwide suicide hotline last April.

Then there are the economic consequences to consider: Do mask mandates boost the economy by giving people more confidence to go out and spend? Or do mask mandates compel more people to stay home to avoid the hassle, and hence reduce economic activity?

There’s still no conclusive analysis on the subject. But you’d think that policymakers would want to know.

You’d think that they would look at all the data, all the pro’s and con’s, economic consequences, public health consequences, etc., and make an informed, rational decision.

But that doesn’t seem to happen anymore.

There can be no rational discourse on the topic. You’re not allowed to ask any questions or express any intellectual dissent, otherwise you’ll be denounced as a conspiracy theorist.

You have one job: obey. It’s not even about ‘trusting the science’ anymore, as we’ve been told to do over and over again during the pandemic. Because now the science tells us that mask mandates “have the potential” to reduce Covid growth rates by just 1.32%.

Not that you’ll hear this in the media.

There actually was a bonanza of coverage over the weekend about the CDC’s new report. The Washington Post headline read “After state lift restrictions, CDC says mask mandates can reduce deaths”.

The New York Times reported that “Wearing masks, the [CDC] study reported, was linked to fewer infections with the coronavirus and Covid-19 deaths.”

NBC called the report “strong evidence that mask mandates can slow the spread of the coronavirus. . .”

But very little of the media coverage bothered to mention the real data, i.e. the marginal 1.32% reduction in growth rates.

Just like the CDC’s influenza data, it’s incredible that the media expects to be taken seriously, or that they pass themselves off as an objective, unbiased source of information.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

James (aka Simon Black) is an international investor, entrepreneur, and founder of Sovereign Man. His free daily e-letter Notes from the Field is about using the experiences from his life and travels to help you achieve more freedom, make more money, keep more of it, and protect it all from bankrupt governments.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Half a century has now passed since the third and last bout dubbed ‘The Fight of the Century’ during the 20th century.

The first bout between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali was a unique clash of undefeated heavyweight champions. One of the most anticipated events in sporting history, it was promoted as reflecting the ongoing battle in America between the forces of conservatism and those of the counterculture, represented respectively by Frazier and Ali.

Only two other fights had carried a similar level of significance: Joe Louis’s return confrontation with the German Max Schmeling on the eve of World War Two, and the duel between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries in 1910. While Louis-Schmeling was touted as a contest between opposing ideological camps on the threshold of war, the encounter between Johnson and Jeffries was perceived and promoted as a clash between black and white, and nothing short of a battle for racial hegemony.

Held at Madison Square Garden, Ali-Frazier I was attended by an extraordinary array of people. New York’s nobility and the city’s underworld sat ringside with celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, who worked on assignment as the official photographer for Life, and Miles Davis. Burt Lancaster worked as a co-commentator.

But beyond the hyperbole and the mischaracterization of what both men represented (Frazier was not a man of the Establishment and Ali, then a member of the Black separatist Nation of Islam, was not an aficionado of the counterculture) was the display of skill and courage over 15 gruelling rounds. Ali, who had been stripped of his world title by a vengeful Establishment over his refusal to be drafted into the United States Army during the Vietnam War, and whose religious affiliations had engendered widespread public animus, fought Frazier having had only two bouts after an absence of three and a half years.

Although he caused Frazier a significant amount of physical damage, which necessitated Frazier’s stay in a hospital after the bout, Ali, himself was also significantly corroded by the contest, during which he was felled in the last round by a patented left-hook. Frazier won the bout in which both fighters shared equally, the then colossal sum of 5 million dollars.

And while the sport of boxing then as now is criticised for its raison d’etre for the purposeful infliction of violence and its tendency to criminally exploit fighters, nothing can take away from its capacity for spectacle, as well as its ability to function as a vehicle for expressions of ideological sentiment and sociological undercurrents.

Ali-Frazier I embodied this.

It is arguable that no two other athletes have commanded the world’s attention as they did in the build up to their fight.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Adeyinka Makinde.

Adeyinka Makinde is the author of Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal and Jersey Boy: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula. He is also a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Boxing.

Featured image is from Flickr

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The U.S. Air Force Air has created policies intended to restrict the movement of personnel based on their COVID-19 vaccination status — despite the fact that the vaccines are not mandatory, are still in phase 3 clinical trials and are still considered experimental, having been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Emergency Use Authorization (EAU).

The Air Force is actively coercing uptake of the vaccines in violation of medical ethics, federal law and, in the case of Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, Calif., in violation of California state law.

On Jan. 13, Lt. Col. Joseph Rountree, Commander 30th Healthcare Operations Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base created a policy to strong-arm uptake of an experimental drug for all personnel without regard for individual contraindications and without providing information on alternatives, as required by the Emergency Use Authorization.

Rountree, who is not a doctor, may not be aware that the clinical trials were designed to measure symptom mitigation, and neither Pfizer-BioNTech’s nor Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine have demonstrated efficacy to prevent infection or transmission.

In a memo obtained by The Defender, Rountree misinforms on the potential protective benefits of the vaccine and omits the risks of adverse reactions:

“While the vaccine is not currently mandated, vaccine research reports that it produces a highly effective immune response in those who receive it. The vaccine provides robust protection, and cannot be forgotten or removed like masks and sanitizers; therefore is more powerful than other precautions.”

In an unprecedented policy that undermines the right of refusal for an EUA drug, Rountree states that he will not approve travel outside the state of California for personnel who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine, thereby restricting the freedom of movement of healthy people:

“The travel waiver request form has been modified to include information about your COVID-19 vaccination status (see attached). I will place significant weight on your vaccination status when reviewing travel requests. Leisure travel outside of the state of California is very likely to be disapproved if you have not been vaccinated.”

Rountree also established a new form and counseling session with the chain of command for personnel to justify why they choose to exercise their rights to opt-out of what amounts to participating in a phase 3 clinical trial of an experimental drug, thus creating a culture of coercion in violation of medical ethics:

“BLUF, if people are not vaccinated I will likely NOT approve travel outside of CA. I will listen to exceptions on a case-by-case basis, so please encourage our people to set up a meeting (flight leadership, them, me and MSgt Hill) to discuss if there is a compelling reason they should stay unvaccinated but need to travel.”

COVID vaccine policy — unlawful coercion?

OnFeb. 21, Col. Anthony Mastalir, Commander of Vandenberg AFB in California  issued Public Health Directive #8 applying to all personnel at Vandenberg and authorizing  leave and pass privileges only to personnel who choose to take a COVID-19 vaccine:

“We continue to employ a rigorous medical and legal review process to ensure base policies remain relevant and lawful. Accordingly, some restrictions need not apply to those individuals who have chosen to receive the vaccine, Exceptions for fully vaccinated individuals identified in this directive have been found to be medically permissible, legally sufficient and consistent with the current directives of higher authorities. For the purposes of this directive, an individual is deemed fully vaccinated two weeks after completing an FDA-approved vaccine treatment (including vaccines authorized for emergency use). For the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, this means two shots plus two weeks (2+2).

“The local area for Vandenberg AFB is defined as San Luis Obispo County and Santa Barbara County. However, effective immediately, fully vaccinated individuals are exempt from this local area definition and, therefore, may resume leave and pass processes consistent with unit policies and AFI 36-3003, Military Leave Program.”

Mastalir’s policy potentially violates federal law protections in 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3 authorization for medical products for use in emergencies. For an unapproved product the statute (section 564(e)(1)(A)(iii)) requires that individuals are informed “that they have the option to accept or refuse the EUA product and of any consequences of refusing administration of the product; and of any available alternatives to the product and of the risks and benefits of available alternatives.”

Mastalir’s policy also possibly violates California Health & Safety Code § 24172 which is the state’s experimental subject’s bill of rights, with a list of rights including: “Be given the opportunity to decide to consent or not to consent to a medical experiment without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, coercion, or undue influence on the subject’s decision.”

Clearly, Mastalir’s policy has overstepped into coercion, most likely due to the lack of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to supervise investigational trials of drugs with human subjects, with contact information for the IRB given to participants. Lack of IRB oversight is a violation of federal law 21CFR 50.23.

Mastalir’s policy does not even acknowledge that taking the vaccine is voluntary participation in a phase 3 clinical trial of the COVID-19 vaccine.

COVID-19 vaccine trials didn’t prove prevention

The COVID-19 vaccines do not have data demonstrating efficacy in preventing infection or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trials were designed to study symptom reduction.

Table 23 on page 37 of the Moderna clinical trial compares the symptom differences of fever, headache, fatigue, myalgia, arthralgia, nausea/vomiting and chills between the vaccine group and placebo group after each dose in the 18 – 64 age group with a significant greater symptom percentage in the vaccine group:

This Moderna data does not demonstrate a reduction of symptoms in the vaccine group compared to the placebo group. “Fully vaccinated” results in more COVID symptoms in 81.9% of subjects.

Table 19 on page 39 of the Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trial, compares the symptom differences of pain, fatigue, pyrexia, chills, myalgia, arthralgia, headache, diarrhea, and nausea between the vaccine group and placebo group after the second dose in the 16 years and older age group with a significant greater symptom percentage in the vaccine group.

If COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection, do not prevent transmission and do not decrease symptoms, then what is the justification for coercing service members to take this drug?

Our military personnel deserve evidence-based medicine that also honors medical ethics. Evidence and ethics are currently being ambushed by compliant commanders.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Pam Long is graduate of USMA at West Point and is an Army Veteran of the Medical Service Corps.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Opportunities missed and opportunities seized in the chronicle of international diplomacy in modern history provide two outstanding illustrative examples. 

After centuries of enmity and the colossal destruction inflicted by two devastating world wars in the last century, France and Germany seize an opportunity to turn a new page in their relations, which eventually blossomed into the European Union and is today a major factor of peace and stability in Europe. 

Equally, on the contrary, the catastrophic failure of the West to consolidate the peace dividends of the end of the Cold War by inviting Russia into a “common European home” (to borrow Mikhail Gorbachev’s memorable words) is threatening to possibly trigger a new cold war or even morph into hostilities. 

Today, India and Pakistan are also poised on a threshold of similar Big History in the region. Seizing the emergent opportunities could make all the difference. Both countries are endowed with abundant diplomatic talent to perceive this reality that is still below the radar. 

The imperatives of development are increasingly felt in both countries in their post-pandemic mindset, which is also leading to a new awakening that there is nothing like absolute security in the life of nations. 

Without doubt, the US Special Representative on Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad’s call with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Sunday can lead to a passage opening into a “rose-garden”.  The timing of Khalilzad’s call needs to be understood properly. He is on a regional tour that has already taken him to Kabul and Doha and is arriving in Islamabad later today. In Kabul, he had met with President Ashraf Ghani and other Afghan statesmen and in Doha he confabulated with senior Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. 

Khalilzad has unveiled in Kabul a US plan about a “participatory government” to be formed in Afghanistan as an interim arrangement of six months for the drafting of a new constitution leading to a final settlement. In a swift follow-up, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spoken with Ghani and since addressed a letter to him (and to Abdullah Abdullah). 

Blinken’s letter is in public domain and in it the US proposes, amongst other things, to convene under the UN auspices a meeting of foreign ministers and envoys from Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, India and the US to discuss a unified approach to supporting peace in Afghanistan. 

The intention behind it is to legitimise the transfer of power to an interim government in Kabul on the lines of the 2001 Bonn conference that paved the way for the transition following the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. 

The good part is that despite the testy equations currently among and betwixt the US, Russia and China and the US-Iranian atomic tango, there is a broad international recognition that the Taliban should form part of any inclusive government in Kabul in the prevailing conditions when they control half of Afghanistan. 

As in 2001-2002, when the so-called Northern Alliance set-up that seized Kabul following the Taliban’s removal from power needed some robust persuasion to agree to give way peacefully to the interim government under Hamid Karzai, a similar piquant situation arises today with Ghani and his faction ensconced in power adamantly digging in and will need to be brought down to terra firma so that the pace process can be pushed through. 

This is where the opportunity arises for India. Conceivably, there are only a handful of world capitals that wield the degree of influence over Ghani (and his close circle of security czars) as New Delhi does. Suffice to say, India finds in the same situation as 19 years ago when at Bonn, it was called upon by Washington to persuade the Northern Alliance to move over and accept Karzai’s interim leadership. 

The Vajpayee government in 2001 was eager to be helpful in Bonn sensing how much it mattered to the George W Bush administration reeling under the trauma of the 9/11 attacks. But then, India wasn’t a mentor of the Northern Alliance government (led by Burhanuddin Rabbani) as it is today in providing rock solid support to Ghani. Besides, from the Indian perspective, Karzai and Taliban are like cheese and chalk. 

Truly, India’s Afghan policy is at a cross-roads. The criticality of the opportunity to be seized in the upcoming Afghan transition cannot be understated. It is a historic opportunity not only to recalibrate India’s Afghan policies and bring them in sync with the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) but also to transform the climate of India-Pakistan relationship. 

A constructive Indian role in the Afghan transition facilitating the formation of an interim government in Kabul that includes Taliban can be tuned into a profound confidence-building measure vis-a-vis Pakistan. Simply put, such an Indian role can complement the recent India-Pakistan ceasefire agreement and create underpinning to put a moratorium on cross-border activities altogether that has inflicted countless bleeding wounds on each other’s body polity through the past several years and brought no tangible benefits to either side. 

The point is, if a beginning is to be made to cut the Gordian knot of India-Pakistan relations, the first move could be by removing the Afghan problem from their cauldron of contentious issues. Pakistan has vital security interests in having a friendly government in Kabul, which are no less compelling than, say, India’s concerns in having a friendly cooperative Nepal, which has an open border with our country. 

Of course, such a first step to harmonise over Afghanistan cannot be a substitute for India-Pakistan bilateral dialogue, but it will help matters. It is no coincidence that Ambassador Riaz Mohammad Khan, a former foreign secretary of Pakistan, wrote an op-ed yesterday titled Kashmir talks: reality & myth, which concluded that “If ever diplomacy revives for a (Kashmir) peace plan, its contours will be no different than those outlined through the 2005-06 effort. Political realities and demography impose limits on what diplomacy can achieve.” 

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Ambassador Riaz Khan is a highly respected figure who had played a key role at a somewhat similar defining moment in regional politics in negotiating the so-called Geneva accords that led to the withdrawal of Soviet troops in Afghanistan in 1989. 

The prospects are brighter than ever that an orderly Afghan transition in the coming weeks or months is entirely conceivable. A constructive role by India in this process would not only safeguard its security interests but also could provide the opportunity to engage with the Taliban for crafting a forward-looking relationship based on mutual trust and mutual respect. Trust Pakistan not to meddle with such a positive scenario. 

The road ahead will be long and winding and much resistance can be expected from the high-flying “hawks” in our skies. But that should not deter the policymakers from planning a road map with the “big picture” in mind. Logically, the time is approaching for India to give thought to resuscitating the SAARC at an early opportunity so that any India-Pakistan bilateral processes would also get synergy from regional cooperation. 

The bottom line is that India needs to foster a sense of urgency, a new way of thinking that gives precedence to the resolution and not simply the management of conflict situations, to avoid disaster rather than merely dealing with its consequences, to be able to prioritise the national agenda of development that ought to have precedence over all other sideshows in our country’s current history. 

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Indian Punchline

On International Women’s Day 2021: Palestinian Women on the Front Lines of the Liberation Struggle

By Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, March 08 2021

To our colleagues, to Palestinian students and those around the world, from the heart of the Zionist prisons. On the occasion of 8th of March, we long for freedom, justice and equality for all women of the world, including students, inside and outside the prison cells.

From Afghanistan to Syria: Women’s Rights, War Propaganda and the CIA

By Julie Lévesque, March 08 2021

Western heads of state, UN officials, military spokespersons will invariably praise the humanitarian dimension of the October 2001 US-NATO led invasion of Afghanistan, which allegedly was to fight religious fundamentalists, help little girls go to school, liberate women subjected to the yoke of the Taliban.

Further Reflections on Women’s Suffrage and African American Emancipation

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 08 2021

A cursory re-examination of the early years of what became known as the women’s suffrage movement and abolitionism represented the embryonic phases of self-organization and mass struggle politics within United States society.

Women’s Day 2021: Mainstream Media Islamophobia and Women’s Rights in Muslim Countries

By Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu, March 08 2021

It is the media’s solemn duty in the name of fairness to exhaust all angles of representation in as far as Islamic diversity is concerned before the media ventures to ascribe undesirable judgments on Islam and Muslims.

International Women’s Day: Lucy Parsons’ Fight Against America’s Robber Barons and the Ku Klux Klan

By William Loren Katz, March 08 2021

Lucy Gonzales started life in Texas. She was of Mexican-American, African-American, and Native-American descent and born into slavery. The path she chose after emancipation led to conflict with the Ku Klux Klan, hard work, painful personal losses, and many nights in jail.

Vaccine Diabolus and the Impending Wave of Rare Neurodegenerative Disorders

By Mike Whitney, March 08 2021

The problem with the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine, is not that it’s a vaccine. It’s that it’s not safe. That’s the issue: Safety. This view is shared by a great many professionals who believe that these potentially-toxic concoctions pose a significant threat to the health and well-being of anyone who chooses to get inoculated.

Is China Planning on Blocking US Sanctions Imposed on Iran?

By Shahbazz Afzal, March 08 2021

According to some reports China has developed a ‘blocking statute’ to subvert US sanctions imposed on Iran. This follows President Joe Biden’s stance, which amounts to enforcing the policies of the previous US President, Donald Trump, against Iran.

Video: It’s Here: First Court Case Against Mandatory Vaccination — Attorney Interview

By Ana Garner and Spiro Skouras, March 08 2021

Garner represents her client Isaac Legaretta, an officer at the Doña Ana County Detention Center and a military veteran, who is suing the county over its new policy for first responders to receive the COVID-19 vaccinations or face termination.

5 Ways They’re Trying to Trick You into Taking the COVID “Vaccine”

By Kit Knightly, March 08 2021

The sale of the century is very much on. The powers that be want every single person to be vaccinated, and they’re pulling out all the stops to make sure it happens. Here are the five main ways the establishment is trying to manufacture your consent.

Despite US Senate $1.9 Trillion “Stimulus Bill”, Main Street Depression Prevails, Guess Who Will the “Lion’s Share”.

By Stephen Lendman, March 08 2021

The Senate adopted the plan by a narrow 50 – 49 margin, GOP Senator Dan Sullivan away at a family funeral not voting. The $15 minimum wage and other provisions benefitting ordinary Americans were stripped from the measure. It’s heavy on benefitting special interests, what federal legislation nearly always prioritizes.

India’s Farmers Resistance Movement. Repeal the Three Farm Laws

By National Alliance of People’s Movements, March 08 2021

The movement continues to challenge the notorious ‘Three Farm Acts’ that would herald unprecedented levels of corporate control over agriculture, nullifying the mandi system, diminishing the significance of the Minimum Support Prices (MSP) and opening up the possibility of alienation of farmlands to big corporations.

Nicaragua’s Indigenous People: Neocolonial Lies, Autonomous Reality

By Stephen Sefton, March 07 2021

The interviews confirm the success of Nicaragua’s indigenous and afro-descendant peoples in their historic struggle to reclaim their ancestral rights. The conversations also confirm that the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast have achieved progressive restitution of their rights.

Sounds of Silence: Extinction Is Erasing the Earth’s Music

By Kathleen Dean Moore and Tara Lohan, March 08 2021

What does a biodiversity crisis sound like? You may need to strain your ears to hear it. In the past 50 years, America’s bird populations have fallen by a third, and worldwide the average mammal population has dropped 60%.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

(image) Bertolt Brecht with son Stefan

***

Dr. Rudolf Hänsel first brings to our attention this poem by Bertolt Brecht which was written (while in exile) in Stockholm two months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in early September 1939. 

Dr Hänsel then proceeds to reflect on the ongoing Worldwide corona crisis which is affecting humanity in its entirety, the lives of Planet Earth’s 7.8 billion people with its diverse cultures, histories and social identities;

All of whom share common values with families, children and friends, living in diverse communities in the planet’s towns, villages and cities,

All of whom cherish humanity and the “value of life” including civil rights, social justice, the right to employment, education, health, culture, music, artistic creation,

Standing in solidarity in one another. 

The global lockdown started on March 11, 2020. And simultaneously the lives of millions of people in all major regions of the World were in jeopardy.

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provided a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair. 

And in turn, analysis of what is happening (to our fellow citizens and our children) is the object of massive censorship. 

“What are these times when a conversation about trees is almost a crime” says Bertolt Brecht

What is required is the development of a Worldwide grassroots network which confronts both the architects of this crisis as well as the governments involved in implementing the lockdown, the closure of economic activity and the derogation of fundamental human rights. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 2021

***

In his poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (To those born later), published in June 1939, Bertolt Brecht gave an honest, harrowing and admonishing account of his life in dark times:

“Really, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. The laughing man
Has not yet received
Only not yet received.

What are these times when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it includes a silence about so many misdeeds!
He who walks quietly across the street
Is probably no longer accessible to his friends
Who are in need?”

Bertolt Brecht, June 1939

***

Three generations later, we are again living in dark times. Those born after us are to become transhuman beings, disembodied human machines, servants and energy carriers for the small number of “chosen ones”.

We could have known, should have known!

This future, which is to be only theirs, they’ve been announcing it openly for a long time.

But we could not interpret the flaming writing on the wall, this portent, like Belshazzar.

Could not believe that the despots and Satan’s followers, consumed with power, would actually carry out their diabolical plans.

Our minds are not free, we have not thrown off fearfulness.

From childhood we believe in authorities, are in bondage to them, handing over power and not having the courage to use our common sense – we are only capable of obeying.

These unscrupulous despots fuel the fears of citizens of hunger and enslavement, of death and hell.

They also employ the services of corrupt philosophers, psychologists and natural scientists who sell their souls.

Their aim is to subjugate the people, to take away all their rights, to transform them into transhuman beings so that they will obey… and serve.

In this, the throne and the altar would be henchmen… who would understand each other, like two cutthroats.

***

This was the opinion of Jean Meslier, the 17th century French philosopher, an atheist in a priest’s skirt (1)

In the preface to his famous “Memoir of Thoughts and Sentiments”, he wrote that he had recently encountered a man who “was not a student, but who evidently possessed sufficient common enough common sense to recognise and condemn the abominable abuses and condemn the abominable abuses,” for he had said that:

“all the great men of the earth should be killed should be strangled with the intestines of priests and hanged by the neck…”

Meslier adds:

“This way of speaking certainly seems harsh, rude and offensive, but it must be admitted that it is frank and open. frank, succinct and impressive.” (2)

Among the greats of the earth today are the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, the Brzezinskis, the Kissingers and their ilk, the Coudenhove-Kalergis and the other wise men.

When they created the New World Order – a One World Government, a One World Religion, and for us ordinary citizens, Dante’s hell. they were sure they were going to win.

And that is how it looks!

Many great women and men – also in modern times – tried, to draw our attention, to warn us:

Baron d’Holbach, for example. or Prince Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin or Karl Marx, Count Tolstoy or Johannes Messner, Emma Goldmann or Bertha von Suttner, Siegmund Freud or Alfred Adler, Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, Rosalie Bertell or Maria Mies, Albert Schweitzer or Carl Friedrich, von Weizäcker, Hannah Arendt or Michel Chossudovsky.

***

But we did not listen to them because we knew better.
Nor did we want to know because it disturbed our circles.
That is why today the urgent question is: What to do?

“What to do?”, said Zeus,
“the gods are drunk and making a mockery of Olympus.”

A friend meant well and gave me the advice:
Dare to be wise and surrender power to no one!
Live your life, but also be the guardian of your brothers and sisters!
Make public spirit the guiding idea!
Protect the youth, encourage and challenge them!
Give if you can and do not hate if you can!

Intervene as an intellectual and show a constructive and non-violent way out!

And non-violent way out!

Have compassion for all creatures, for only this makes you a real human being!

Really a human being!

Rudolf Hänsel, March 2021

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a graduate psychologist and educationalist.

Notes

(1) Hagen, Friedrich (1977). An atheist in a priest’s skirt. Jean Meslier and the French freethinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries. A polemic by Friedrich Hagen. Leverkusen and Cologne, p. 42

(2) Op. cit. Blurb on the back of the book

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Time and again, both right wings of the US war party unjustifiably justify endless preemptive wars by manufacturing nonexistent threats to US national security.

The Biden regime’s so-called Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (INSSG) maintains the myth of barbarians at the gates.

It falsely claims that US and other democracies — in name only — are threatened, referring to the increasingly totalitarian West and apartheid Israel.

Remarks ghost-written for Biden drip with references to democratic values, fundamental freedoms, prosperity for all, peace and dignity — notions abhorred by US-led Western countries and Israel.

“(B)uild back better” is all about handing the nation’s wealth to privileged interests at the expense of exploiting most others.

It’s about spending unlimited trillions of dollars for militarism and warmaking.

It’s about handing trillions more to Wall Street and other corporate favorites.

It’s about going all-out to prevent peace and stability from ending forever wars.

It’s about subjugating world community nation-states and ordinary people at home and abroad.

It’s about enforcing new world order harshness by police state control.

It’s polar opposite virtually everything just societies hold dear.

There’s nothing remotely benign about hardline US domestic and geopolitical policies.

Media supported mass deception pretends otherwise.

INSSG pretends that the Biden regime like its predecessors aims “to keep Americans safe, prosperous, and free (sic).”

Totalitarian rule — enforced with police state harshness — pursues polar opposite aims.

“Anti-democratic forces” are headquartered in Washington with branch offices in Western European capitals and Tel Aviv.

Enemies mentioned are invented, not real, notably China and Russia, nations prioritizing peace, stability, cooperative relations with other nations, and adherence to international law — notions long ago abandoned by the US-dominated West.

Iran and North Korea are longstanding invented US enemies, nations at war with no others, threatening no one.

Nations reinvented as barbarians at the US gates wage peace, not war, cooperation with other states, not confrontation — in sharp contrast to how the US and its imperial partners operate, an unprecedented threat to humanity’s survival.

Names and faces change in Washington over time. Farcical elections assure continuity.

Imperial rage for dominance through the barrel of a gun remains hard-wired policy.

So does police state harshness to prevent governance of, by, and for everyone equitably from ever breaking out.

Before taking office, Biden assured US privileged interests that nothing will change on his watch.

Governance serving them exclusively at the expense of most others will continue like always before.

Endless wars and occupations will continue.

Public wealth will shift entirely to powerful interests, ordinary Americans impoverished, resistance crushed when surfacing.

The state of the nation and other Western societies will become more unsafe and unfit to live in than already.

The type world US ruling authorities have in mind for ordinary people everywhere is too unacceptable to tolerate.

Invented threats — including barbarians at the gates — aim to cow ordinary people into submission.

They’re manipulated to believe everything is all right so they’ll learn to love their Big Brother oppressor.

Mass resistance is essential to challenge the worst of all possible worlds US dark forces want imposed on humanity.

Otherwise we’re all doomed.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

According to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines continues to climb.

Between Dec. 14, 2020, and Feb. 26, a total of 25,212 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 1,265 deaths and 4,424 serious injuries.

In the U.S., 70.45 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of Feb. 26.

VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before confirmation can be made that the reported adverse event was caused by the vaccine.

According to the latest data, 1,136 of 1,265 reported deaths were in the U.S. Of the total, 31% of the deaths occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, and 47% of deaths occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated. Twenty percent of deaths were related to cardiac disorder.

Fifty-three percent of those who died were male, 45% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased. The average age of those who died was 77.8 and the youngest death confirmed was a 23-year-old.

As of Feb. 26, 180 pregnant women had reported adverse reactions to COVID vaccines, including 56 reports of miscarriage or premature birth. None of the COVID vaccines approved for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) have been tested for safety or efficacy in pregnant women. Yet health officials are urging pregnant women to get the vaccine, and many are enthusiastically doing so. As The Defender reported:

“Even without data from Pfizer or Moderna sufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy, expectant doctors, nurses and others appear eager for the shots, perhaps influenced by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which states that ‘neither a conversation with a clinician nor even a pregnancy test are necessary prerequisites.”

The World Health Organization on Jan. 27 issued guidance advising against pregnant women getting Moderna’s COVID vaccine — only to reverse that guidance two days later, as The New York Times reported. Pfizer announced last month that it was beginning COVID vaccine trials for pregnant women, but they don’t expect the trials to wrap up until January 2023.

This week’s VAERS data also included 1,414 reports of anaphylaxis, with 60% of cases attributed to the Pfizer-Bio-N-Tech vaccine and 40% to Moderna, and 298 reports of Bell’s Palsy.

As of Feb. 26, only the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been approved for emergency use in the U.S., but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week gave Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine approval for emergency use. The one-shot vaccine started rolling out this week.

On Mar. 3, The New York Times reported that some people are experiencing an “angry-looking skin condition” after their first dose of the COVID vaccine –– with arms turning red, sore, itchy and swollen a week or more after the shot. Doctors said they wanted to share the information to “help prevent the needless use of antibiotics and to ease patients’ worries and reassure them that they can safely get their second vaccine shot.”

Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, an accomplished surgeon and patient safety advocate, wrote a second letter to the FDA urging the agency to require pre-screening for SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins in order to reduce COVID vaccine injuries and deaths. Noorchasm argued that at least a fraction of the millions of already infected Americans — especially the elderly, frail and those with serious cardiovascular comorbidities — are at risk of being harmed by a dangerous exaggerated immune response triggered by the COVID vaccine, reported The Defender on March 3.

On March 1, The Defender also reported that 25% of residents in a German nursing home died after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Reiner Fuellmich and Viviane Fischer, attorneys and founding members of the German Corona Investigative Committee, interviewed a caregiver in a Berlin nursing home who described what happened during and after the rollout of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. According to the FDA, as part of a vaccine’s EUA, it is mandatory that pharmaceutical companies and vaccination providers report “all serious adverse events, cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome and cases of COVID-19 that result in hospitalization or death to VAERS.”

In the UK, where only the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are being distributed, injuries related to both vaccines are coming into the government reporting system there.

As The Defender reported this week, between Dec. 9, 2020 (when the first COVID vaccine was administered in the UK) and Feb. 14, 2021, 402 deaths following COVID vaccines were reported to YellowCard, the UK government’s system for reporting side effects to COVID-related medicines, vaccines, devices, and defective or falsified products. More reportes were associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine, not yet approved in the U.S., than with the Pfizer product. In a letter written to but not published by The BMJ, John Stone wrote:

“It is also remarkable how unfavorably the Oxford-AstraZeneca data compare with the Pfizer data. MHRA data show 26,823 reports related to Pfizer vaccines, including 77,207 reactions, and 31,427 reports related to Oxford-AstraZeneca, including 114,625 reactions.

“Thus the Pfizer reports run at ~3.2 per 1,000 while the Oxford-AstraZeneca reports run at ~4.6 per 1,000: which translates to 43% more reports associated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine compared with Pfizer.

“However, the Pfizer reports have an average of 2.9 reactions per report compared with 3.6 for the Oxford-AstraZeneca (again Oxford 24% higher) — so the rate of reactions reported is actually 77% higher overall for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.”

According to “Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System,” a research project focused on improving the quality of physician adverse vaccine event detection and reporting to the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are ever reported.

“Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health,” according to researchers.

On March 3, KUTV reported that there was a lack of information on how and where to report vaccine side effects. “Nationally, there have been very few reports on possible side effects and where to report them. Here in Utah, guiding people to the right resources post vaccine has not been a priority,” The news outlet said.

Children’s Health Defense asks anyone who has experienced an adverse reaction, to any vaccine, to file a report following these three steps.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

By now, anybody speaking about vaccine equality and equity of access must surely be coming across as slightly deranged.  In the field of COVID-19, traditional proprietorial instincts remain.  Add to this the disparity in terms of manufacture, bureaucracy and the nasty flavour of politics, and we would all be entitled to long draughts of cynicism.

The COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility) scheme, supposedly a levelling measure in ensuring global equitable and cheap access to vaccines, risks looking like a rhetorical bauble. 

Co-led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO), these collaborators seek to “accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every country in the world.” 

The aim of the group is to supply 2 billion doses by the end of 2021.  Last month, the WTO reported that 130 countries, comprising 2.5 billion people, had yet to receive a single dose.

The project has hit a rather large snag.  Many countries are not willing to play along.  If they do, they are doing so in two-timing fashion.  WHO senior adviser, Bryce Aylward, is worried that “some countries are still pursuing deals that will compromise the COVAX supply.”  This lack of fidelity to the cause is also of concern to the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.  “We can’t beat COVID without vaccine equity. Our world will not recover fast enough without vaccine equity, this is clear.”

A suggestion of dealing with the problems of accessing COVID-19 vaccines has been put forth by several states and international bodies.  Last Friday, the WHO called for an agreement dealing with the waiver of intellectual property rights to vaccines. “If not now, when?” asked Ghebreyesus.

In October 2020, India and South Africa submitted a proposal for waiving “certain provisions of the TRIPS [Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19.”  The waiver would be granted to WTO members so that they would not have to apply or enforce certain provisions under Part II of the TRIPS Agreement, namely section 1 (copyrights and related rights), 4 (industrial design), 5 (patents), and 7 (protection of undisclosed information).  The waiver would be in place for a duration agreed to by the General Council and till widespread global vaccination had taken place, with the majority of the world’s population rendered immune. 

A briefing document on the proposal, authored by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), merely confirms that the proposed waiver was specific, applicable only to COVID-19 and not “all TRIPS obligations, nor does it suggest a waiver beyond what is needed for COVID-19 prevention, containment and treatment.”  Were the waiver to be granted, patents would not be enforced or granted on “all COVID-19 drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and other technologies, including masks and ventilators, for the duration of the pandemic.”  Collaboration in research and development (R&D), manufacturing, scaling up and supplying COVID-19 tools could also take place.

In discussions held by WTO members at the TRIPS Council over October 15-16 last year, the opponents nailed their colours to the mast.  Australia, Brazil, Canada, EU, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States were either formally opposed to the measure, or not in support of it. The COVID-19 vaccine world had been clearly demarcated: the wealthy and the rest.

The justifications from such states do not make for pretty reading.  All centre on one essential theme: the importance of maintaining an ironclad IP system in the name of innovative practice.  An EU spokesman suggested somewhat speciously that no evident nexus could be shown between access to vaccines and IP barriers. “There is no evidence that IP rights in any way hamper access to COVID-19 related medicines and technologies.” The UK government decided to upend the cart with its reasoning, underlining the importance of having strict IP rules if access to new products to battle the pandemic were to be made available. The chair of the WHO Solidarity Trial of COVID-19, John-Arne Røttingen insists that “IP is the least of the barriers” relative to necessary facilities for production, knowledge and infrastructure. 

South Africa sought to address such claims on October 16 at the TRIPS Council meeting and again at the Council Meeting on November 20.  Examples included the manufacturers of monoclonal antibody therapeutics, such as Regeneron and Eli Lilly, which had restricted their capacity via bilateral arrangements.  Specifically on vaccines, South Africa could point to the struggle between MSF and Pfizer being waged in India over the pneumococcal vaccine, protected by a patent effectively blocking the development of alternatives.

As if further proof was needed about efforts by pharmaceutical behemoths to freeze and halt both innovation and access in the field of vaccines with generous IP shields, one need look no further than the case of South Korea’s SK Bioscience. The company was embroiled in patent litigation with Pfizer in developing a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PVC) by the name of Skypheumo.  SK Bioscience lost the suit, with the Supreme Court ruling that it could not sell Skypheumo until 2026, when Pfizer’s composition patent for Prevenar 13 expires.

Given that WTO decisions tend to be made through consensus, the waiver proposal has been stuck in diplomatic purgatory in the TRIPS Council.  Requests from Chile, Australia and Canada for evidence that the waiver would achieve increased capacity for vaccine manufacturing and assist ameliorate shortages have not helped.  Burcu Kilic, research director for access to medicines at Public Citizen sees the unfolding of a crude agenda.  “What [high-income countries] are hoping is that they can discuss and drag the issue out that things will be OK by the summer.”

The WTO General Council meeting held at the start of this month did not see a change of heart from high-income countries towards the South African-Indian proposal.  Neither the US nor EU wished to even discuss it.  What instead kept delegates busy was the proposal by WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to pursue a meek third way alternative.  That option would involve, according to Okonjo-Iweala, the licensing of manufacturing to countries ensuring “adequate supplies while still making sure that intellectual property issues are taken care off”. 

Ahead of officially commencing her duties as Director-General, she reiterated the idea that there was a way of increasing access “through facilitating technology transfer within the framework of multilateral rules” and for pharmaceutical giants to make licensing arrangements permitting other manufacturers to produce vaccines.  Music, no doubt, to representatives of Big Pharma.

To date, the doses-ordered per capita read as a comparison of states looks stark.  The US has 10.2 doses per person, the UK 7.6, the EU 6.5, and Australia 5.  David Legge and Sun Kim, both of the People’s Health Movement, note that the African Union (AU), in sharp contrast, has deals covering a mere 970 million doses for 1.34 billion people.  Vaccine coverage, at this point, looks meagre. 

Some 115 European Parliamentary members, on February 24, issued a declaration pleading for the European Commission, and the European Council to review their opposition to the TRIPS waiver proposal. Certain EU member states and the European Commission had spoken about COVID-19 medical products “as global goods” but there were no “actionable realities.”   A waiver, the members urged, would not only cast aside onerous legal barriers to production but enable “the sharing of know-how and technologies with GMP manufacturers from third countries”.  EU strategy had, however, been tribal, emphasising domestic production with the potential to exacerbate “a dangerous North-South divide when it comes to affordable COVID-19 diagnostics, personal protective equipment, treatment and vaccines.”

The vaccine fault lines suggest different timetables and differently filled pockets.  Regions of the world risk remaining unvaccinated, with infections and deaths set to continue.  Legge and Kim rightly see this as an abandonment by wealthier countries to chance, death and despair in favour of self-interest.  Should low- and middle-income countries have to wait another year or two in the face of wealthier states “commandeering the vaccines, there will be about 40-50 million more cases of infections and perhaps 2 to 3 million additional deaths.”  A good number on those charts of mortality will be health workers.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

Featured image is from OffGuardian

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully intervened in pushing state health officials scrub a public report showing that by July 2020, nearly 10,000 New York nursing home residents had died in the pandemic, according to a late-Thursday report in the Wall Street Journal.

At the urging of Cuomo advisers, the report excluded nursing home residents who later died in hospitals after becoming sick in long-term facilities, resulting in a “significant undercount of the death toll attributed to the state’s most vulnerable population,” according to the report.

“The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the [full] data for another eight months,” according to the Journal.

State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls. -WSJ

The published version of the data said just 6,432 nursing home residents had died, when in fact over 15,000 residents of nursing homes were either confirmed or presumed to have died of COVID-19 since last March. Notably, Cuomo’s administration issued a March 25 directive that no nursing home could refuse to readmit residents or admit new residents who had COVID-19.

In February, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked the Cuomo administration to produce information on nursing-home deaths from the July report, said people familiar with the matter.

This “incident” begs the question: what other things did “they” lie about in 2020, and why? https://t.co/yzXg1VqlsI

— Barbarian Capital (@BarbarianCap) March 5, 2021

When asked for comment, Cuomo’s office said on Thursday that they had concerns over the accuracy of out-of-facility deaths, which is why they advocated to exclude that data.

“The out-of-facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified,” said Beth Garvey, special counsel and senior adviser to Cuomo – while “one official familiar with the back-and-forth between the Health Department and Mr. Cuomo’s advisers said state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker agreed the out-of-facility data shouldn’t be included in the report.”

“[The Department of Health] was comfortable with the final report and believes fully in its conclusion that the primary driver that introduced Covid into the nursing homes was brought in by staff,” said Health Department spokesman, Gary Holmes.

The Health Department updated the report on Feb. 11 to include out-of-facility deaths of nursing-home residents, saying its conclusions remained unchanged by the new data.

State lawmakers from both parties have said the out-of-facility death data was critical for them to evaluate nursing-home policies that could prevent future fatalities. They said the Cuomo administration’s decision to delay its release constitutes a coverup of data the governor knew would be damaging to his political stature. -WSJ

Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, infuriated state lawmakers during a Feb. 10 virtual meeting, when she admitted to sidelining a legislative request for the data due to fears that the Trump DOJ would use it to investigate. Of note, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division began requesting data on nursing home deaths from New York and other Democratic-leaning states in August.

According to the July report, nursing homes were already full of COVID patients when the March 25 policy was enacted, and was attributed to staff who brought it with them to work.

Cuomo, who is also embroiled in two sexual harassment allegations, has refused to step down following repeated calls from both sides of the aisle.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

An earlier version of the measure was adopted by the House.

The revised bill heads back to the body for an early in the week vote, passage highly likely. 

It’ll then be sent to the White House for Biden to enact it into law in the next few days.

The Senate adopted the plan by a narrow 50 – 49 margin, GOP Senator Dan Sullivan away at a family funeral not voting.

The $15 minimum wage and other provisions benefitting ordinary Americans were stripped from the measure.

It’s heavy on benefitting special interests, what federal legislation nearly always prioritizes.

Most Americans will get a one-time $1,400 stimulus check.

Individuals earning $80,000 or more and couples with incomes of $160,000 or more are excluded — based on pre-economic collapse 2019 income.

Unemployed individuals or others adversely affected by made-in-the-USA Depression conditions whose income was at or greater than the above thresholds in 2019 — no longer thereafter — are excluded from receiving a stimulus check when most needed.

It’s at a time when economist John Williams explained that “(s)evere systemic structural damage from (last year’s) shutdown will forestall meaningful rebound into 2022 and beyond.”

“Unemployment remains in deep non-recovery territory (at) 25.8%” — based on how calculated pre-1990.

Over the past year, CPI inflation is 9.1%. Reported numbers of the above data conceal reality.

Williams added that “systemic turmoil is just beginning, with both the Fed and US government still driving uncontrolled US dollar creation.

The $1.9 trillion stimulus plan will likely spike inflation higher.

Weekly unemployment insurance (UI) for unemployed US workers was reduced from $400 to $300 through September 6 in the Senate passed measure.

Most provisions are similar to a version passed earlier by majority House members.

Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) for self-employed individuals and contractors was renewed.

So was Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) that adds additional weeks of state benefits.

The child tax benefit was increased to $3,000 per child up to age-17, $3,600 for children under age-six through yearend.

Affordable Care Act premium subsidies for low and middle-income households, making up to 400% of the poverty level, were extended for two years.

The measure provides $170 billion for public schools, $46 billion for monitoring, diagnosing, and tracing seasonal flu outbreaks now called covid, $75 billion for testing and mass-jabbing with experimental, high-risk drugs — causing widespread numbers of adverse events and deaths when taken as directed.

States, local communities and US territories are to get $350 billion.

HHS gets $4.5 billion to help low-income households pay energy and water bills.

Much of what’s in the measure goes to special interests, much too little for the nation’s unemployed and low-income workers.

In the latest BLS reporting period, another 1.2 million jobless workers applied for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.

It was the 50th straight week of about a million or more claims — reflecting the most dire ever Main Street economic conditions in US history while privileged interests never had things better.

The divergence between super-rich and struggling daily to survive households was never before as extreme as now.

On Friday, a deceptive BLS report showed 379,000 jobs created in February.

Well over 90% were in the hospitality sector, mostly waiters, bartenders, cooks and related jobs.

Education, construction and mining jobs declined. Black unemployment increased.

With Main Street Depression-level conditions little changed, there’s no just cause for optimism.

One of many examples of how privileged interests are benefitting while ordinary Americans are struggling to get by was reported by Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) on March 3, saying:

The Wall Street owned and controlled Fed handed a dozen or more of the largest US banks “a cumulative $9 trillion or more in repo loans” from mid-September 2019 “though at least September 30, 2020.”

So-called emergency repo loans (Wall Street handouts) “began began months before” covid outbreaks were first reported early last year.

According to WSOP, it’s highly likely that “a handful of the largest derivative-laden banks got the lion’s share of the bailouts.”

At the same time, ordinary Americans consistently get sold out, notably since last year with no end of draconian horrors in sight — the worst highly likely ahead.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

According to some reports China has developed a ‘blocking statute’ to subvert US sanctions imposed on Iran. This follows President Joe Biden’s stance, which amounts to enforcing the policies of the previous US President, Donald Trump, against Iran.

In 2015, following intense negotiations between China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, the US, Germany, the European Union and Iran, a milestone agreement was concluded – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – commonly known as the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’.

The deal was completed during the Obama administration and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

The deal restricts Iran’s nuclear activities. It allows Iran to be subject to rigorous and continuous monitoring by the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – allowing its inspectors to enter Iran to confirm full compliance with the nuclear-related provisions and requirements set in the deal. According to many reports the IAEA has devised the most intrusive international monitoring system specifically for Iran – and no other nation in history has ever been subject to such robust scrutiny.

In exchange for compliance, the other signatory nations to the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’ are committed to lifting sanctions against Iran.

Despite Iran’s full compliance with the deal, as repeatedly confirmed by the IAEA, President Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the deal on May 8, 2018, and subsequently re-imposed the US primary and secondary sanctions on Iran. Other signatories made strong declarations they would remain committed to the agreement, which raised harsh criticism from the Trump administration. US allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, welcomed the steps taken by the US to sabotage the deal.

In a National Security Presidential Memorandum, President Trump directed the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury to immediately take steps to reinstate US sanctions lifted or waived in connection with the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’. The Trump administration would later implement further sanctions against Iran beyond the reinstated sanctions.

According to recent reports China has developed a potentially effective instrument, a ‘blocking statute’, which would allow China to do some trade with Iran and circumvent the US sanctions.

On January 9, 2021, China’s Ministry of Commerce – MOFCOM – issued its first order of the year, the ‘Rules on Counteracting Unjustified Extra-Territorial Application of Foreign Legislation and Other Measures’. These ‘rules’ are designed to counteract the impact of US secondary sanctions – and are similar to the EU’s Blocking Statute.

The EU’s Blocking Statute was first introduced in 1996 to counteract the US’s sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Libya at that time.

On 6 June 2018, the EU adopted a delegated act amending Regulation (EC) No 2271/96 of 22 November 1996 protecting against the effects of the extra-territorial application of legislation adopted by a third country, and actions based thereon or resulting therefrom (the Blocking Statute) in order to counteract the extra-territorial application of certain US sanctions in the EU.

However, the EU Blocking Statute has been considered a ‘toothless tool’, with limitations on the practical enforcement of it.

China has a different set of priorities with Iran, than the EU does with Iran.

The Chinese leadership has made clear Iran is a strategic partner as outlined in the 18-page document titled, ‘Iran-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’.

This concludes a long-term trade and military negotiations between China and Iran – and would see China invest $400 billion over the next 25 years in Iran. It would “vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects” and allow China to receive Iranian oil at a reduced price in order to meet its growing energy needs. All of this will motivate China to ensure its own ‘blocking statute’ will be robust and achievable.

China needs Iran to advance its global ambitions – and ensuring the success of its ‘blocking statute’ will be a priority.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Shahbazz Afzal is an independent writer and political activist.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

First published by Global Research on February 25, 2019

A cursory re-examination of the early years of what became known as the women’s suffrage movement and abolitionism represented the embryonic phases of self-organization and mass struggle politics within United States society.

As we pointed out in an earlier essay, the campaigns aimed at winning the right of women to exercise the franchise emerged directly from the demands for the outlawing of African enslavement.

William Lloyd Garrison as leader of the American Anti-slavery Society (AASS) provided an opportunity for both free African men and women to enhance their avenues of expression in work related to the achievement of ending involuntary servitude. The Philadelphia Female Anti-slavery Society (PFASS) and its national component of the Anti-slavery Convention of American Women during the 1830s attracted people of both African and European descent creating the conditions for the early calls for full equality eventually leading to the demands for universal suffrage.

None of these efforts would have been possible absent of the flight and rebellion taking place among the enslaved African people. By the early 19^th century concerns about the untenable nature of the Atlantic Slave Trade and its containment of the impacted populations created the material basis for the stiffening of repressive measures aimed at controlling the African people residing in the U.S.

Although there was a gradual reversal of the legalization of slavery and the limited enfranchisement of African people in the Northeastern states after the War of Independence from Britain, the rapid expansion of slave labor production occurred during the opening decades of the 19^th century after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, prompting the large-scale European settlement of South. Rebellions and rumors of unrest in Richmond (VA) in 1800, Charleston (SC) 1822 and the South Hampton County (VA) uprising led by Nat Turner in 1831, fueled the notions of the potential for a collapse of the slave system through violent upheaval.

The Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804 and the founding of the Black Republic born in the military defeat of French empire on Hispaniola Island actually worsened the conditions for enslaved Africans on the plantations of the South during subsequent decades. By the 1830s and 1840s the demand for cotton continued to rise in order to supply the textile industries of the North and in England.

Seneca Falls, Women’s Suffrage and the Intervention of Frederick Douglass

Organizers of the Seneca Falls, New York July 19-20, 1848 convention through writings and speeches have placed this event as the genesis of women’s suffrage claims. However, these demands had been raised before in other fora including the Liberty Party platforms earlier in the same year (June 14-15) by presidential candidate Gerrit Smith and within the work of previously organized female societies opposed to slavery. Ernestine Rose delivered addresses as early as 1846 in support of abolition and universal suffrage. (See this and this)

Many of the concerns which were initially addressed at Seneca Falls were related to the right of property ownership, inheritance and marital status. Even leading women activists were unsure about the timeliness of demands for universal suffrage.

In fact it was Frederick Douglass (image on the right), the publisher of the North Star, a leading abolitionist, who spoke to the delegates on the second day of the Convention urging the gathering to pass a resolution calling for the right of women to vote. Douglass, said to have been the only Black person and one of very few men in attendance, rose militantly to pronounce:

“If there is any argument to be made, it must be made by opponents, not by the friends of woman suffrage. Let those who want argument examine the ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote. They will find that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of woman to vote.” (See this)

Yet Maria Stewart of Boston had written and spoken publically as early as 1831 on the need to end African enslavement as well as advocating equality for women. Stewart published in the Liberator newspaper initiated by Garrison, and beginning in 1832, delivered at least four lectures on the horrors of slavery along with the need for women’s emancipation. It is important to acknowledge that Stewart is often referred to as the first woman to speak in public settings where audiences were composed of diverse genders.

Speculation is that Stewart spoke within the same mode as other 19^th century African women preachers such as Jarena Lee (image on the left) and Julia Foote. Lee preached after much struggle and opposition in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) founded by Richard and Sara Allen in 1794 in Philadelphia. Foote was ordained as the first woman deacon in the African Methodist Zion Church (AMEZ) and would later become a well-known evangelist associated with the spiritualist tradition which reached fruition in the early 20^th century.

The Women History Blog notes that:

“Maria Stewart’s essays and speeches presented original ideas that were to become central to the struggles for African American freedom, human rights and women’s rights. In this she was a clear forerunner to Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and generations of the most influential African American activists and political thinkers. Many of her ideas were so far ahead of their time that they remain relevant more than 180 years later.” (See this)

Another notable personality of the era was born into slavery in the early 1820s in Dorchester County, Maryland. Harriet Tubman ran away from her master to become a leader in the Underground Railroad. She liberated many Africans from bondage and would later serve as a member of the Union Army in the Civil War where she provided intelligence on the locations of plantations.

Divisions Intensify After the Civil War

Tubman later worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony after the Civil War in efforts aimed at acquiring women’s suffrage. These efforts linking African emancipation and women’s rights would be strained over events surrounding the enactment of 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution.

A leading section of the women’s movement led by Stanton and Anthony opposed the passage and ratification of the 15^th Amendment which was purportedly drafted to guarantee the right to the franchise for African American males formerly enslaved in the Confederate states. This disagreement prompted the split within the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) founded in 1866 with the stated purpose of winning civil rights for African Americans and women of all races. The AERA would collapse by 1870 resulting in the advent of two rival women’s suffrage organizations.

Even Douglass’ alliance with Stanton and Anthony would be strained during this period as one historical source describes how:

“After only three years, the AERA dissolved over heated fights about whether to support the 15th Amendment, with which Black men won the right to vote (in the South, this victory would be short-lived). At a pivotal convention in May 1869, Douglass argued that the AERA should support the amendment while continuing to fight for women’s suffrage. Stanton not only disagreed, she gave an address filled with racist stereotypes about the male immigrants and male former slaves whom the amendment would enfranchise.” (See this)

This fragile victory gained through the passage of the 15^th Amendment would be liquidated through the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states, the passage of Jim Crow legislation by southern state governments instituting peonage for African American farmers and the widespread usage of racial terror by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.  Lynch law became the order of the closing decades of the 19^th century.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an educator, journalist and political organizer was driven out of Memphis after her militant opposition to the 1892 triple lynching of three African American men by leading white officials and businessmen in the city. Launching an international campaign against racist mob violence and state approved repression, Wells-Barnett would also become a leading force in the African American women’s club movement of 1890s and early 1900s.

After relocating in Chicago, Wells-Barnett was a key figure in the struggle for full political rights through the founding of the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. Despite here valiant efforts, members of the renewed white-dominated women’s movement sought to segregate her along with dozens of other African Americans at a demonstration for voting rights in Washington, D.C.

An account of this episode says:

“In March 1913, Wells-Barnett traveled to the first suffrage parade in Washington D.C., an event organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. On the day of the parade, Wells-Barnett and sixty other Black women arrived to march with the Illinois delegation, but were immediately advised, as women of color, to march in the back, so as to not to upset the Southern delegates. Wells-Barnett refused, arguing: ‘Either I go with you or not at all. I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.’ She initially left the scene, therefore convincing the crowd that she was complying with the request. However, she quickly returned and marched alongside her own Illinois delegation, supported by her white co-suffragists Belle Squires and Virginia Brooks. This event received massive newspaper coverage and shed light on the reality for African-American participation in politics.” (See this)

Lessons for the 21^stCentury Struggles Related to Gender Equality and Anti-Racism

Over a century later these unresolved contradictions remain a serious impediment to inter-racial political unity aimed at the realization of full equality and self-determination for women and the oppressed nations in the U.S. Gaining the right to the franchise through the 15^th (1870) and 19^th Amendments (1920) was the result of decades of tireless work and sacrifice.

During the mid-20^th century, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on race, religion, gender and national origins was the direct outgrowth of mass initiatives and legal challenges. The following year, the 1965 Voting Rights Act empowered the federal government once again to exercise its authority to guarantee universal suffrage. Moreover, the international pressures from the world socialist movement and the national liberation struggles were an important element in the transformation of the superstructure of U.S. political culture.

Nevertheless, the existence of these civil rights cannot be guaranteed under a capitalist system which is committed to the reversal of every gain won by popular movements. This historical reality requires the building of independent revolutionary organizations based within the working class and the masses of oppressed peoples.

The acquisition of sustainable guarantees for democratic rights and self-determination cannot be secured by the two existing ruling class oriented political parties. A party of the working class and nationally oppressed must come into existence which can speak in the name of those who have been the victims of the centuries-long class domination and economic exploitation.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

All images in this article are from the author

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Some politicians can’t stop coming up with new ways of bossing people around and preventing the return of normal life, all in the name of countering coronavirus. A prime example of such coronavirus tyrants is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

This week, Cuomo, who has been imposing on people in New York for a year some of the harshest coronavirus-related restrictions in America, announced he is rolling out yet another rights abuse. Cuomo is requiring in a new “pilot program” that people obtain and present vaccination passports to gain entrance to certain places and take part in various activities that have been curtailed by government over the last year.

Cuomo calls the vaccination passports Excelsior Passes. No matter the name the state’s vaccination passports are marketed under, they are a mechanism for government tracking people’s movements, pressuring people into taking experimental coronavirus vaccines that carry risk of serious injury and death, and implementing a vaccinations-based caste system.

Elizabeth Elizalde writes at the New York Post that in the New York state pilot program people are being required to present their vaccination passports “in order to enter sports arenas, theaters and other businesses.” To receive a vaccination passport, Elizalde writes, a person must prove he has received one of the experimental coronavirus vaccines or that he has recently tested negative for coronavirus.

With time — after the experimental coronavirus vaccines have become more widely available — expect Cuomo to adjust the program so proof of injection with one of the not-really vaccines will be the only means to receive an Excelsior Pass and, thereby, the ability to take part legally in many activities.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

In this interview, which was initially banned by YouTube before it was even published (but now reversed), Spiro is joined by Attorney Ana Garner of New Mexico. Garner represents her client Isaac Legaretta, an officer at the Doña Ana County Detention Center and a military veteran, who is suing the county over its new policy for first responders to receive the COVID-19 vaccinations or face termination.

Attorney Garner explains the significance of this case and what is at stake, as it is the first of its kind and may set a new standard for legal precedent regarding mandatory vaccination. Garner says she is prepared to take this case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Spiro and Ana Garner also discuss another case of hers that is ongoing currently. A case that challenges not only the Governor of New Mexico, but the emergency itself.

You can see this important interview on the free speech platform BitChute … or watch it on YouTube if you must.

Click image to watch the BitChute video

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Korea’s new virus cases continued to stay around the 400-range on Friday, with the health authorities expressing concerns about possible resurgence amid the eased restrictions in the spring season.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KCDA) confirmed 398 new patients, including 381 local infections, down slightly from Thursday. The cumulative caseload rose to 91,638 as of midnight Thursday. Imported cases also decreased to 17 from 23.

The death toll stayed at a single-digit figure as the KCDA reported eight more fatalities, pushing the death toll to 1,627 with a fatality rate of 1.78 percent. An additional 398 patients fully recovered and returned to their everyday lives, increasing the total to 82,560. The country has tested 6,789,011 people since Jan. 3 last year.

With recent daily cases hovering around the 400-range, the nation is speeding up its vaccine rollout.

The health authorities have inoculated 225,853 people as of Friday – 221,944 with the AstraZeneca vaccine and 2,742 with Pfizer’s vaccine. Officials also confirmed a steep uptick in side effects after injection by confirming 849 new cases on Friday. The total adverse reaction cases tied to the vaccination have risen to 1,558.

While most of them showed mild symptoms, such as fever and muscle pain, authorities have confirmed 13 suspected anaphylaxis cases, one seizure, and six deaths. All of the severe adverse reactions were related to AstraZeneca’s vaccine.

Officials are investigating if the vaccine had any relations with severe side effects or deaths.

While the increase in side effects has increased concerns about the AstraZeneca vaccine among Koreans, especially older adults, more European countries have recently approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for senior citizens.

The German government approved AstraZeneca’s vaccination for people over 65 on Thursday, and the Swedish and Austrian health authorities have also expanded vaccination to people over 65. Hungary and Belgium also have decided to use AstraZeneca’s vaccine for citizens over 60 and 55, respectively.

The upward adjustment of inoculation age for AstraZeneca’s vaccine comes after Public Health England published a research result on Monday, which showed that the vaccine has a great preventive effect after three or four weeks of injection among the age group over 80 who received the first dose of the vaccine.

Various Korean medical associations also stressed that even people with underlying diseases, such as diabetes and respiratory diseases, need to receive the Covid-19 vaccine.

The Korean Diabetes Association has asked diabetes patients not to avoid vaccination opportunities and actively receive the jabs. “The way to prevent Covid-19 is to trust and participate in vaccinations administered under government approval,” it said.

The Korean Academy of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases also stressed patients with underlying diseases should receive the vaccine. Various scientific clinical trials have proven the effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccine, while its side effects are rare and mostly mild.

Cheong Wa Dae also announced that President Moon Jae-in plans to receive AstraZeneca’s vaccine this month to ease the public’s resistance to vaccination. A Cheong Wa Dae spokesperson said that they would determine the exact vaccination timing for President Moon after taking into account his schedule of the G7 Summit scheduled for June 11.

On Friday, the government unveiled its plan to introduce AstraZeneca’s vaccine for 1.05 million people from March to May.

“The government will introduce AstraZeneca’s vaccine for about 350,000 people this month and about 700,000 people from April to May,” Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said. “The KCDA should reschedule the vaccine schedule so that they can inoculate as many people as possible during the first half of the year.”

Meanwhile, the government unveiled a draft plan of its new four-tier social distancing scheme on Friday. The country has been using a five-tier social distancing system since November.

Excluding some entertainment facilities, such as clubs, the government will allow businesses, such as coffee shops, restaurants, and movie theaters, to operate their shops even during Level 4, the new distancing plan’s highest level.

The government has also changed the index for adjusting the distance stage from the weekly average daily confirmed cases to the weekly average daily number of patients per 100,000 people.

If the number is below 0.7, authorities will impose Level 1 distancing rules while setting Level 4 if the number is above three.

Therefore, if the government starts implementing the new measure, the country would be under a Level 2 scheme.

Regarding banning private gatherings, there is no restriction during Level 1.

However, the government will start banning private gatherings of more than eight people during the Level 2 scheme and require people to keep eight square meters apart.

During Level 3, the government will ban the private gathering of more than four people while advising citizens to stay home. Some businesses, such as karaoke, will have to close after 9 p.m.
In Level 4, health authorities will still allow private gatherings of less than four people. However, they will ban private gatherings of more than two people after 6 p.m.

Most businesses will also have to close down after 9 p.m, with some entertainment facilities, such as clubs, having to close down entirely.

While various authorities, such as the local and provincial government, and Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters, share the decision to implement Level 1 to 3 distancing scheme, only the headquarters can raise the distancing regime to Level 4.

The government plans to finalize the final draft within this month after coordinating opinions with related associations, ministries, and local governments for an additional one to two weeks.

However, they will implement the new distance system only when the Covid-19 epidemic stabilizes considerably throughout the country.

“The transition to the new system will ease quarantine measures, and there may be side effects if we start implementing the new scheme during a time when we do not know whether the Covid-19 epidemic will grow or slow down,” Ministry of Health and Welfare Spokesperson Son Young-rae said. “The government will start the new measures only if the nation reaches a Level 1 figure under the revised plan.”

Read this supplementary article by the author.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from cetusnews.com

Originally published on March 6, 2012

During the late-Nineteenth-Century struggles against America’s Robber Barons and the Ku Klux Klan, Lucy Gonzales Parsons was a brave fighter for human rights.

On March 7, 1942, fire engulfed the simple home of 89-year-old Lucy Gonzales Parsons on Chicago’s North Troy Street, and ended a life dedicated to liberating working women and men of the world from capitalism and racial oppression.

A dynamic, militant, self-educated public speaker and writer, she became the first American woman of color to carry her crusade for socialism across the country and overseas. In 1905, she was credited with the idea of striking workers sitting down at their work place rather than going outside, a concept that has resonated through time with the lunch counter sit-ins for civil rights and today’s Occupy movement.

Lucy Gonzales Parsons, a battler for labor and human rights.

Lucy Gonzales started life in Texas. She was of Mexican-American, African-American, and Native-American descent and born into slavery. The path she chose after emancipation led to conflict with the Ku Klux Klan, hard work, painful personal losses, and many nights in jail.

In Albert Parsons, a white man who’s Waco Spectator fought the Klan and demanded social and political equality for African-Americans, she found a handsome, committed soul mate. The white supremacy forces in Texas considered the couple dangerous and their marriage illegal, and soon drove them from the state.

Lucy and Albert reached Chicago, where they began a family and threw themselves into two new militant movements, one to build strong industrial unions and the other to agitate for socialism. Lucy concentrated on organizing working women and Albert became a famous radical organizer and speaker, one of the few important union leaders in Chicago who was not an immigrant.

In 1886, the couple and their two children stepped onto Michigan Avenue to lead 80,000 working people in the world’s first May Day parade and a demand for the eight-hour day. A new international holiday was born as more than 100,000 also marched in other U.S. cities.

By then, Chicago’s wealthy industrial and banking elite had targeted Albert and other radical figures for elimination — to decapitate the growing union movement. A protest rally called by Albert a few days after May Day became known as the Haymarket Riot when seven Chicago policemen died in a bomb blast. No evidence has ever been found pointing to those who made or detonated the bomb, but Parsons and seven immigrant union leaders were arrested.

As the corporate media whipped up patriotic and law-and-order fervor, a rigged legal system rushed the eight to convictions and death sentences. When Lucy led the campaign to win a new trial, one Chicago official called her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” When Albert and three other comrades were executed, and four others were sentenced to prison, the movement for industrial unions and the eight-hour day was beheaded.

Lucy, far from discouraged, accelerated her actions. Though she had lost Albert — and two years later lost her young daughter to illness — Lucy continued her crusade against capitalism and war, and to exonerate “the Haymarket Martyrs.” She led poor women into rich neighborhoods “to confront the rich on their doorsteps,” challenged politicians at public meetings, marched on picket lines, and continued to address and write political tracts for workers’ groups far beyond Chicago.

Though Lucy had justified direct action against those who used violence against workers, in 1905 she suggested a very different strategy. She was one of only two women delegates (the other was Mother Jones) among the 200 men at the founding convention of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the only woman to speak.

First she advocated a measure close to her heart when she called women “the slaves of slaves” and urged IWW delegates to fight for equality and assess underpaid women lower union fees. In a longer speech, she called for the use of nonviolence that would have broad meaning for the world’s protest movements.

She told delegates that workers shouldn’t “strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.”

A year later Mahatma Gandhi, speaking to fellow Indians at the Johannesburg Empire Theater, advocated nonviolence to fight colonialism, but he was still 25 years away from leading fellow Indians in nonviolent marches against India’s British rulers.

Eventually Lucy Parsons’s principle traveled to the U.S. sit-down strikers of the 1930s, Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the antiwar movements that followed, and finally to today’s Arab Spring and the Occupy movements.

Lucy was an unrelenting agitator, leading picket lines and speaking to workers’ audiences in the United States, and then before trade union meetings in England. In February 1941, poor and living on a pension for the blind, the Farm Equipment Workers Union asked Lucy Parsons to give an inspirational speech to its workers, and a few months later she rode as the guest of honor on its May Day parade float.

After the fire that took her life, federal and local lawmen arrived at the gutted Parsons home to make sure her legacy died with her. They poked through the wreckage, confiscated her vast library and personal writings, and never returned them.

Lucy Parsons’s determined effort to elevate and inspire the oppressed to take command remained alive among those who knew, heard, and loved her. But few today are aware of her insights, courage and tenacity. Despite her fertile mind, writing and oratorical skills, and striking beauty, Lucy Parsons has not found a place in school texts, social studies curricula, or Hollywood movies.

Yet she has earned a prominent place in the long fight for a better life for working people, for women, for people of color, for her country, and for her world.

 William Loren Katz adapted this essay from his updated and expanded edition of Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage [Atheneum, 2012]. Website: williamlkatz.com. This essay also appears at the Zinn Education Project:  http://zinnedproject.org/posts/16855

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The vaccine rollout is in full flow now, the daily tickers have had “people vaccinated” added to their red counters, and the improbably large number grows more improbably large every day.

The sale of the century is very much on. The powers that be want every single person to be vaccinated, and they’re pulling out all the stops to make sure it happens.

Here are the five main ways the establishment is trying to manufacture your consent.

1. Bribery

It’s being reported that everyone getting vaccinated is the only way to get “back to normal”.

Don’t you want to go to the pub again? Or the gym? Or see granny? Or hug people?

Well, just take the shot. Take the shot and all this lockdown and social distancing economic collapse and mounting poverty, it will all just go away.

It’s a common refrain, one which rather clashes with “new normal” we’ve been hearing about for a over year.

In fact, it looks like “back to normal” may come with a qualifying asterisk. For example embattled New York governor Andrew Cuomo has said vaccines will help the state “get back to normal*”…

…where “normal” involves an “Excelsior Pass”.

You don’t need me to explain the complexities of this technique. It’s simple coercion. “Do as we say, and you’ll get a treat.”

Important to remember: “Getting back to normal” is a lie. As much as people repeat the mantra in soundbites and social media posts, the “experts” are clearer – many have said we will NEVER be going back to normal, and others have said we need to maintain anti-Covid measures until at least 2022. The “vaccine” itself does not even claim to limit transmission, even those vaccinated are still being ordered to follow the restrictions.

2. Celebrity Endorsement

One of the oldest and most widely used marketing gimmicks. Partly because it works, but mostly because it’s cheap and easy: Simply find a bunch of tools and put them to work.

The NHS was not shy about this approach, claiming they were planning to enlist “sensible celebrities” who are “known and loved” to combat anti-vax sentiment.

For example, Patrick Stewart:

How do we say thank you to the health workers and scientists for their sacrifice and service? Receive the vaccine as soon as one can to lessen their load and keep wearing a mask to protect fellow citizens. In my 80th year, I am grateful and hopeful for better days ahead. pic.twitter.com/emGDlnYL2E

— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) January 22, 2021

Or Elton John and Michael Caine:

Or even Her Majesty:

‘It was very quick. It didn’t hurt at all.’

The Queen shares her experience of getting the #COVIDVaccine with England’s NHS Vaccine Deployment Lead Dr @Emily_JR_Lawson, and encourages those who might be hesitant to get theirs when invited. 👑 @RoyalFamily pic.twitter.com/MsR7uqSmK2

— NHS England and NHS Improvement (@NHSEngland) February 25, 2021

Important to remember: Celebrities – especially actors and TV personalities – are simply paid to repeat lines. Even if their intentions are correct, there’s no reason to assume any of them have any understanding of what they’re talking about. And none of these people has anything to lose should you or a loved one suffer any harm from taking an untested vaccine.

3. Forced “Scarcity”

For weeks now we’ve been seeing headlines about “dwindling stock” of vaccines. How people in Europe are desperate for doses or some states are being prioritised over others. It goes on and on and on.

Everyone who has ever been inside a store knows this trick. “While stocks last”, “limited time offer”, or a thousand other variants designed to create the idea that if you don’t acquire product X right now, you will miss your chance.

A corollary of this is fake exclusivity, the way credit card companies tell absolutely everyone they call that they “qualified for our exclusive introductory rate”.

By creating the idea that the vaccine is hard to come by, they also create the idea that anyone who gets their hands on a dose is fortunate, or somehow a de facto member of some special club.

Important to remember: It’s all total nonsense. They are not in any danger of “running out” of vaccines. And even if they are, scarcity is a marketing ploy, not an argument.

4. Fake “Popularity”

You can’t underestimate the idea of peer pressure when it comes to marketing, one of the oldest tricks in the book is culturing popularity through the idea that popularity already exists. It’s why people buy likes and views on youtube and concerts have seat fillers.

And it’s why Matt Hancock was reported to have said this:

Incredible take up: Matt Hancock says 94% of Britons have taken a coronavirus vaccine or will do so when offered.

— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) March 1, 2021

Is this true? No source is cited, so it’s hard to say. It could be entirely made up, a lot of statistics are. Even if the figure is technically real, it’s likely just from some opinion poll. And, as Yes Minister has taught us, polls are totally meaningless.

To quote (ironically enough) Peter Hitchens:

Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it.”

The UK is reporting that 1/3rd of the population has already had at least one dose of vaccine, a number which seems very high (it equates to roughly 250,000 vaccinations per day since the first shot was given on December 8th), this follows early reports that vaccine uptake was “better than expected”.

Even if that’s the case – and the past year has proven there’s never any reason to trust government figures – Hancock’s “94%” seems very unlikely to have any bearing on reality, given the number of reports of low uptake – especially in poorer regions, amongst ethnic minorities, and NHS workers.

Important to remember: An opinion poll is no measure of reality, popularity is no measure of quality, and it is in the establishment’s interest to make all dissenters feel they are in a tiny minority.

5. “Resistance Is Useless”

This is an interesting one. There’s been a lot of talk about Vaccine Passports recently, and perhaps they will become a thing, but the vast majority of the public discourse is spreading the idea they are “inevitable”.

Now, the idea of inevitability is a powerful tool. You can encourage it as a way of preparing the ground for a policy role out, sure, but you can also use it to engender feelings of defeat in your opposition and thus gain their consent without force.

You can see this defeatist language taking hold in some hitherto staunch Covid sceptics.

Peter Hitchens recently announced he was being vaccinated, claiming he was defeated and vaccine passports were inevitable:

I get the strong sense that any sort of travel, and plenty of other things, will be impossible if I don’t have the necessary vaccine certificate.

Just today, Lord Sumption essentially caved on the same exact issue in the very similar language:

Lord Sumption Capitulating to Vaccine Passports. pic.twitter.com/oL4jkjYNFy

— WE GOT A PROBLEM (@problem_we) March 4, 2021

Desmond Swayne MP, another longtime Lockdown sceptic, also capitulated today:

I’ve just had my jab: make sure you can get yours, so that we can all get back to normal life pic.twitter.com/m0ChCRpkTX

— Desmond Swayne (@DesmondSwayne) March 4, 2021

“Get vaccinated now, because you’ll probably have to eventually” is the message, and it’s not hard to see the utility of it.

From a purely logistical point of view, making people think there are going to be vaccine passports is much, much easier (and cheaper) than actually introducing them.

As a follower said to us on twitter:

I believe it is the next level of the psyop- make people believe they are the minority when in fact the opposite is likely true but because the mind is beaten and manipulated more just ‘tag’ along for the ride

— S.G Truth (@patriotic1966) March 4, 2021

Will they eventually issue Vaccine Passports? Maybe.

Maybe all these tricks will fail and they’ll be forced to use less carrot and more stick. But it seems equally possible that – for now at least – they’re being dangled over people to encourage defeatism in those of us who are resisting, and thereby increase vaccine up take.

Important to remember: vaccine passports will only ever become “inevitable” once the vast majority of people have had the vaccine. If enough people refuse to take part, the program will never work.

So, there’s the breakdown of all the broad marketing categories being used to sell this vaccine. But what’s the final takeaway?

Honestly, not an un-positive one I would say. Because what all these strategies have in common is the increasingly hysterical air of desperation.

If vaccine take-up was really at 94%, there’d be no need to sell the vaccine so much. If they were really running out of vaccines, the papers wouldn’t be advertising it, they’d be telling people not to panic.

They’ve publicly turned several notable anti-lockdown voices for this campaign, these are key cards they have played all at once. That’s a desperate move.

In short, there’s good reason to think the resistance to the “new normal” is a lot more widespread than the establishment ever expected it to be.

You don’t put the Queen on a zoom call when you’re winning the argument.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Sergiy Maidukov

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

What does a biodiversity crisis sound like? You may need to strain your ears to hear it.

In the past 50 years, America’s bird populations have fallen by a third, and worldwide the average mammal population has dropped 60%, writes acclaimed environmental philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore in her new collection of essays, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. 

And with all that loss comes an unsettling silence.

“Unless the world acts to stop extinctions, I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half as song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write,” she explains in the book’s preface. “My grandchildren will tear out half the pages in their field guides. They won’t need them.”

Her book uses sound as a reference point to better understand what we stand to lose as extinction rates climb higher. But the essays are also a celebration of the natural world’s chorus and the joy of learning to hear what’s still there.

The essays are also being set to music in a series for Oregon State’s Spring Creek Project that will feature 20 4-minute-long concerts combining live musical performance with excerpts from Earth’s Wild Music.

“I’ve never been so excited about a project in my life,” Moore tells us. “It combines everything I care about with the cause that I believe in more than anything else.”

The Revelator spoke to Moore about the moral stakes of our environmental crisis, what it’s like to find a truly quiet place to listen, and what we lose as wild songs disappear.

You’ve been writing about nature for 50 years. During that time our environmental problems have become graver. Has this changed how you approach your work?

At first I was a celebrant. I believed Mary Oliver when she said, “My work is loving the world … which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” And that went along fine for years and years, but then it became clear that what I was writing celebrations of were disappearing.

I was right in the midst of an essay on frog song, and bulldozers came and took away the marsh and put in a condominium. I was writing about a bald eagle nest, and the nest — and the tree it was in — burned to the ground in a forest fire. So it was starting to become clear to me that I was going to have to do more than celebrate. I was going to have to demonstrate. I was going to have to protect. I was going to have to defend the natural world.

Why did you decide to focus this collection on sound?

I started thinking about how I could open people’s hearts without breaking them. How I could point to the onrushing extinctions and not force people to turn away in absolute grief. I decided that I was going to have to write in a way that was like a wave — I would lift people and smash them at the same time.

What is it that reaches people without breaking them? What is it that goes straight into people’s hearts? What do they love about the world and will call them to action?

I decided that of all the things I loved about the world, what I loved the most was the music. What I loved the most was the sound. I’ve been writing about this for quite some time, so I had a couple of essays already under my belt, and I couldn’t think of a more wonderful writing assignment for myself then to go outside and listen.

Nature may be getting quieter. But people are getting louder. How is our noise affecting wildlife?

We are deafening. Noise that we create is causing extraordinary harm to the creatures. Think about the pain caused to the whales from the exploratory thudding of those machines that go through the ocean and stamp to try to find oil.

Think about the meadowlarks that lived in the fracking fields and had to endure endless noise of drilling and trucks. And as a result, the songs of the meadowlarks are fractured and abbreviated. They haven’t been able to hear their parents well enough to imitate them.

Many of us may be out of practice at listening. In fact, a lot of folks walk around with earphones on so we can’t hear what’s around us. How do we get better at both listening to and understanding the sounds of nature?

Listening is an art that we should practice because it does two things. It makes us shut up and it makes us open up. We stop listening just to the songs of “me, me, me”. When we set aside our own stories, it opens us up so we can listen to the stories of other beings. It’s a skill of empathy, isn’t it? Listening to other people’s stories and other creatures’ sounds is a way of understanding the world from their point of view. It’s a moral training.

When it comes to understanding what we hear, Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and cared so much about bird song, took pains to tell us that it doesn’t matter if we know the names of what we see. That comes later. But the first thing that has to happen is love.

So I’m not so concerned about knowing which bird is calling. I’m surrounded by people who could do that in a majestic way. My husband can identify birds by their call. My neighbor can. I think it’s a beautiful skill that I don’t have.

But I do have the ability to catch a song. To hear it, which isn’t nothing. It can catch my attention and I can seek it out and I can listen to it. Knowing its name — maybe that’s not so important as knowing its tune.

How are people affected by this loss of nature’s song, and what’s the importance of preserving silent places where we can still experience what’s left?

We lose joy. Let’s face it — the sounds of the natural world are beautiful and they make us happy. I think we also lose a connection to the world around us.

In the book, I write about going with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton to One Square Inch of Silence, a small spot in Olympic National Park [possibly the quietest place in the United States]. It was a wonderful experience. At the time, we were in pouring rain. Nature itself was cacophonous, but we didn’t hear a human sound for 20 minutes, which is the definition in Gordon’s mind of a quiet place.

Gordon now is recording in a jungle somewhere that can only be reached by canoeing down a wild river, because it’s one of the last places on Earth he can find that’s silent.

He’s famous for these recordings called the Dawn Chorus that captured the outpouring of bird song that’s triggered by morning light. But he couldn’t do that anymore, because that music box is broken. We’re in the process of wrecking what we should be treasuring.

It’s hard to find a balance between grief and celebration. But you know, people often ask me, “What can one person do?” And I say, “Stop being one person.”

You don’t have to do it all. Other people are working all around the world on the same causes you believe in. Find them, join up with them. You’ll find your place in the choir.  [Author and teacher] Joanna Macy says to choose what you love and devote yourself to it. That, she says, is enough.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Tara Lohan is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist, Pacific Standard and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis.

Featured image: A Marsh wren defending its territory in mid-song at Las Gallinas Wildlife Ponds, Marin County, CA. Photo: Doug Greenberg, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

After confirming its jurisdiction on 5 February 2021, the ICC announced on 3 March the opening of a formal investigation into crimes committed in the Palestinian territories. This is a victory for international law, even if we are still a long way from a trial.

It all began in 2009, following the Israeli operation in Gaza dubbed “cast lead” (2008–2009). Palestine mounted a diplomatic offensive based on its claim to statehood and sent a declaration to the ICC accepting the court’s jurisdiction in order that it should investigate the crimes committed by the Israeli army.¹ What was at stake here was to determine whether or not Palestine is a State, since only States are entitled to become a party to the Rome Statute.²

2009-2014: Recognition of the Palestinian State

Seized of this matter, the ICC Prosecutor’s Office the issued a public call for contributions to help resolve this thorny problem of international law. Several dozen memoranda emanating from NGOs, universities or legal experts were submitted and published on the ICC’s website. In the meantime, Palestine had become a member of UNESCO(October 2011) and taken steps at the UN to become a Member State and then, faced with the US veto, to become an “observer State,” a request which was granted in November 2012 when Resolution 67/19 was passed by the General Assembly.

The Prosecutor’s Office did not issue a response until April 2012, three years after the Palestinian request had been submitted. Considering that the issue of Palestine’s status was uncertain, the prosecutor felt that it was not up to him to decide the matter and that only a clear-cut position taken by the Assembly of the States parties to the ICC or by the UNGeneral Assembly could provide a solution. It is surprising, to say the least, that such a disproportionate length of time should have been necessary to provide an answer to such a rudimentary question. The document is less than two pages long and is open to criticism on many counts, in particular the fact that Palestine’s admission to UNESCO is not even mentioned, whereas this in itself provided irrefutable proof that a majority of Member States recognized Palestinian statehood.

Season 2: after operation “Protective Edge” launched in Gaza by Israel forces during the summer of 2014, the Palestinian Minister of Justice tried to “reactivate” the 2009 declaration, basing the attempt on Palestine’s UN status as an Observer State, granted following the prosecutor’s decision in April 2012. This effort was also to remain fruitless. In a statement published on 2 September 2014, the new prosecutor Fatou Bensouda indicated that “the Office has examined the legal implications of this development (the upgrading of Palestine’s status at the UN, from observer entity to observer State) for its purposes and concluded that while this change did not retroactively validate the previously invalid 2009 declaration lodged without the necessary standing, Palestine could now join the Rome Statute”.

This position raised many legal problems. The prosecutor’s April 2012 decision did not “invalidate” the declaration; it seems merely to have “suspended’ it until such time as the status of Palestine should be clarified. Since the General Assembly’s vote had subsequently brought about this clarification, it cleared the way for a future accession of Palestine to the ICC since all the uncertainties concerning its status seem to have been dispelled.

2015–2019: The “Palestine Situation”

At this point, a third phase began, with Palestine’s formal accession to the Rome Statute in January 2015³, together with a declaration recognizing the ICC’s jurisdiction for crimes presumed to have been committed “on the Palestinian occupied territory, including East-Jerusalem, as of 14 June 2014.”⁴ Soon afterwards, the prosecutor opened a “preliminary examination” of the “situation in Palestine”⁵ to determine whether the conditions of jurisdiction for the Court are met and ascertain whether war crimes, crimes against humanity or acts of genocide have been committed there.

This preliminary phase of the proceedings, before any actual investigation was opened, lasted no less than five years, a delay which once again raised doubts as to the ICC’s genuine determination to proceed with the Palestinian case, in a context where many States allied with Israel, including some in Europe, have made no bones about their disapproval of the Palestinian efforts.

Finally, in December 2019, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that the preliminary examination had been completed and that it was prepared to open an investigation. It considered that Palestine had legitimately joined the ICC Statute and that the Court is competent to try crimes committed on its territory, including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The prosecutor identified four broad categories of war crimes he intended to investigate:

• crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian groups in the context of the 2014 war in Gaza, consisting mainly of rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilian populations:
• crimes committed in the same context by the Israeli army, mainly consisting of the targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians and the destruction of civilian buildings.
• crimes committed by the Israeli army during the 2018 “March for Gaza” when Israeli soldiers opened fire, killing some 200 Palestinian civilians and wounding many others;
• finally, the crimes committed in the context of the colonisation policies, especially the implanting of an Israeli civilian population.

Reaffirming the 1967 Borders

However, a new turn of events occurred when the prosecutor insisted that a “pre-trial chamber” should define the extent of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction, considering the doubts that might persist on this issue, with an eye to strengthening any future investigation. This caused another delay of over a year before the Chamber’s verdict was handed down in February. However, this delay was useful, since the Pre-trial Chamber has confirmed the position taken by the prosecutor’s office: the Court is indeed competent to investigate all crimes committed on occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, since June 2014, thus clearing the way for a formal investigation.

The Chamber begins by establishing that Palestine must be seen as a “State Party to the ICC Rome Statute” following its recognition in 2012 as a “non-member observer State in the UN.” It can therefore trigger the jurisdiction of the ICC, in particular its territorial jurisdiction, and submit a complaint to the prosecutor’s office, which it did in 2018.

The second crucial point consists in determining the exact extent of the territories over which the court may exercise its criminal jurisdiction. In order to establish that the jurisdiction comprises all the occupied territories, the Chamber bases its findings mainly on the Palestinian people’s right of self-determination as set forth in the many resolutions of the UNGeneral Assembly. Especially resolution 67/19, which granted Palestine the status of Observer State, and which “reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.”

And finally, the Chamber considers that the Oslo accords which exempt Israeli citizens from the criminal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority have no effect on the determination of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction.

In spite of its assertion to the contrary, the points dealt with by the Chamber go beyond the strict framework of the procedure before the ICC and involve a larger legal and symbolic dimension. The judges based their decision on texts of absolutely general significance which may be regarded as establishing under international law the statute of the Palestinian State and the borders to which it is entitled. From this point of view, the difficulties associated with the practical observance of these findings have less to do with the law proper than with the lack of political willingness to comply with it, as is seen from the persistent refusal of most European countries to recognize the State of Palestine.

Investigating Under Pressure

Unsurprisingly, Israel has accused the ICC of “pure anti-Semitism,” and the USA has rejected the Chamber’s conclusion. They have been joined by other Western countries like Canada, Australia, Hungary and even Germany, which declared on Twitter that “the Court is not competent because of the non-existence of the Palestinian State according to the criteria of international law.”⁶

These reactions and the embarrassed silence of other Western diplomatic corps show that the future of these proceedings will probably not be exempt from outside pressures and that the task ahead for newly appointed prosecutor Karim Khan, who takes office in June, will be challenging.

Indeed, the formal investigation which was opened by the Office of the Prosecutor on 3 March will be long and fraught with difficulties, and it is far from easy to predict how it will end. Normally, it should make it possible to determine precisely what crimes were committed and who were the culprits, all of which would be predicated on a detailed factual review and the presentation of concrete evidence. This task will no doubt be easier with regard to Palestinian suspects since Palestine, as a state party to the Statute, has an obligation to cooperate. On the other hand, Israel has no such obligation and will do all it can to obstruct the work of the investigators. The prosecutor will also have to determine whether other crimes or characterisations need to be taken into consideration. The document submitted to the Pre-trial Chamber refers only to war crimes, whereas the occupation and colonisation policies, as a whole, systemic and discriminatory as they are, could also be qualified as crimes against humanity, most especially as the crime of apartheid, a term employed in two recent reports by Israeli NGOs (Yesh Din, B’tselem).

International Law on the Move

Another tricky issue will be the ICC’s interpretation of the principle of “complementarity” which holds that it must refrain from looking into a case which is already under investigation or the object of prosecution in the country concerned. Israel is in the habit of opening investigations of “incidents” involving its armed forces, generally dismissing the case a few weeks later. Thus, a considerable amount of work awaits the Prosecutor’s Office, verifying the “credibility” of such proceedings carried out in Israel.

But the most serious accusations brought against Israeli decision-makers concern specific combat techniques or colonisation policies which constitute the implementation of unabashedly proclaimed official doctrines and as such are never subject to investigation of any kind. For these crimes, it should be a simple matter to demonstrate the absence of any internal criminal procedures and the principle of complementarity easy to dismiss. Proof of this type of crime should be easy to provide as well, since it will be based on documents and public decisions in the framework of well-established state policies and duly authenticated chains of responsibility.

There is still a long way to go before the opening of individual cases based on precise accusations with the possible issuance of arrest warrants, let alone the organisation of trial proceedings knowing that these can only be held in the presence of the accused. Nonetheless, the decision handed down by the Pre-Trial Chamber already constitutes a huge legal victory, both as a step towards establishing accountability for crimes committed under Israeli occupation and more generally for taking international law into account in resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Shedding light on the international crimes committed systematically by Israeli authorities might also help to increase the pressure on Western States in view of a reconsideration of their special relations with Israel, along the lines of the evolution which finally materialised with regards to South Africa in the nineteen-eighties.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Francois Dubuisson is a Professor of international law at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

Featured image is from IMEMC

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Adm. Philip Davidson, the head of US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), is defending a $27 billion wishlist his command submitted to Congress to confront China in the region.

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Davidson recognized that the plan, known as the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), is “not without controversy” but argued it was worth the massive price tag. He compared it to the European Defense Initiative (EDI) that the PDI was based on.

“It’s been fascinating to me, the relative ease at which the conversation happens year to year when it comes to the EDI when compared to PDI,” Davidson said. He is requesting about $27 billion in spending between 2022 and 2027, with $4.6 billion of that for the 2022 fiscal year alone.

One of the top priorities of the plan is a $1.6 billion missile defense system for the US military base in Guam. The Guam defense system requires a $200 million radar system in Pulau and $2.3 billion of space-based radars.

Perhaps the most provocative proposal of the PDI is a $3.3 billion request to place a long-range missile system throughout the First Island Chain, which stretches from south of Japan, through Taiwan, the Philippines, and down to Malaysia.

According to a copy of the PDI review by Nikkei Asia, the plan calls for “the fielding of an Integrated Joint Force with precision-strike networks west of the International Date Line along the First Island Chain, integrated air missile defense in the second island chain, and a distributed force posture that provides the ability to preserve stability, and if needed, dispense and sustain combat operations for extended periods.”

With the Biden administration making China a top foreign policy priority and Congress keen to confront Beijing, Davidson has a good chance of getting his funds. A group of House Republicans sent a letter to President Biden on Thursday urging him to increase military spending to combat China.

The Republicans called on Biden to increase military spending by 3 percent to five percent over inflation to compete with the Chinese military. The letter was signed by top House Armed Services Committee members. The effort was led by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL).

Biden’s Pentagon is currently conducting a review of its China policy which is being led by Ely Ratner, a China hawk who was appointed to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Asian matters.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dave DeCamp is the assistant news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image is from Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The conversation held by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with opponent Juan Guaidó is evidence that Joe Biden’s government will continue to use the former Venezuelan parliament member to appropriate all the resources Venezuela holds abroad, according to international analyst Laila Tajeldine, Sputnik reported.

Blinken held a telephone conversation with Guaidó on March 2 and reiterated that the U.S. government continues to support all kinds of pressure on President Nicolás Maduro, with allies such as the European Union, the Lima Group, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the International Contact Group.

“The United States is completely following Citgo (a subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela), which is still in a legal process, and the figure of Guaidó allows it to retain Venezuelan assets abroad; until that is not done, the United States is going to continue using the figure of Guaidó to steal all the resources, and once the objectives are fulfilled it will discard it,” Tajeldine said.

Pair this with Blinken's explicit admission of support for "Interim President Juan Guaido" (https://t.co/1B9dwoeZEK ) and it's clear the attempted coup in Venezuela is only beginning. Reluctant continuation of Trump policy? Doubtful. Imperialists stick together: blue and red. https://t.co/4UmP0LxhyG

— drew (@undercover_drew) March 4, 2021

According to the lawyer, Venezuela is not surprised by this stance of the new U.S. administration since Blinken had vowed publicly before assuming his current position a continuation of the Trump policies (2017-2021).

Early in the year, President Maduro had indicated hope in a change in relations with the United States “on the basis of mutual respect, dialogue, communication and understanding” after Biden’s arrival to power.

However, the analyst emphasizes the existence of a right-wing sector in the U.S. opposed to any change in the current status of confrontation because it bets on the destabilization of Venezuela to get hold of its resources.

“The U.S. economic lobby opts rather for the destabilization or destruction of the institutions and the State in Venezuela, and that lobby is the one that is saying that it is more convenient a destroyed Venezuela, a failed State in which they can arrive through intervention and steal all the resources,” he argued.

In his dialogue with Guaidó, Blinken also highlighted the “importance of a return to democracy in Venezuela through free and fair elections.”

In that sense, the international analyst pointed out that the call for elections is the United States’ strategy to justify its actions against Venezuela.

“Calling for free and fair elections is part of a repetitive discourse, worn out, and that evidently exposes that the only thing they want is to have more time to finish stealing Venezuela’s assets,” she commented.

The Venezuelan government has reiterated that the United States stole more than 30 billion dollars with the imposition of coercive measures, which prevents it from any type of financing.

The executive has requested the lifting of the economic sanctions to face the COVID-19 pandemic and to be able to purchase vaccines, supplies, and medicines freely.

#FromTheSouth News Bits | Venezuela has detained two citizens linked to operation “Red October,” led by former opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido, which included destabilization acts in Apure, Tachira and Maracaibo, according to the announcement made by lawmaker Freddy Bernal. pic.twitter.com/QT1oT3iyJq

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) January 26, 2021

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Sky News

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The Jerusalem International Airport, the oldest airport in Palestine, formerly known as Qalandia Airport, lies on a road connecting the cities of Ramallah and Jerusalem, near the town of Qalandia in the northern West Bank. It was built in 1920 during the British mandate on a land of 650 dunams (160 acres) initially. More than 50 years later, this very airport has turned into an abandoned site devoid of any luggage, planes or flight attendants. The cracks inside the concrete floor of the airport are now covered with dry and green grass.

Israel seized the airport after it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, and it annexed it in 1981 based on the so-called Jerusalem Law. Israeli airlines used it for commercial and domestic flights to and from Jerusalem until they closed it in 2000. Its name was changed to the Atarot Airport, of which only the runway, the control tower and the arrival and departure hall remain.

Khalil Tufakji, head of the map department at Jerusalem’s Arab Studies Society, told Al-Monitor,

“The largest Israeli settlement project that has been underway for several years now in Jerusalem seeks to seize and confiscate 1,300 dunams [321 acres] of the Jerusalem International Airport and the lands surrounding it. It aims at implementing Israel’s Greater Jerusalem project to expand the existing Israeli settlements and expel Palestinians to increase the number of Jews and settlers in the city of Jerusalem.”

He said,

“Since 1994, the Israeli authorities have set up the Greater Jerusalem project, which includes, according to Israeli plans, the settlements of Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev and Gush Etzion. They have also controlled all roads leading thereto in order to cut off Palestinian neighborhoods from the Jerusalem municipality, such as Shuafat, Kafr Aqab and Anata, among others.”

Tufakji noted,

“The Israeli seizure of the Jerusalem International Airport primarily aims at killing the Palestinians’ dream of their capital — Jerusalem — given that the airport is located on lands belonging to the Palestinian capital. It also aims at tilting the demographic balance [in Jerusalem] toward the Israelis at the expense of the Palestinians. The Israeli control of the airport also aims at connecting the Israeli settlements that lie outside the boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality to the ones within it.”

He added,

“East Jerusalem includes 14 Israeli settlements that are home to 220,000 Israeli settlers. Those settlements account for ​​87% of the area of Jerusalem, leaving only 9,300 dunams [2,298 acres] for the Palestinians, estimated at only 13% of the area of ​​Jerusalem. Through the so-called Jerusalem 5800 project for the year 2050, the [Israeli] occupation is looking to link the Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem with the settlements in the west by a network of railways and bridges and establish an international airport in Wadi Musa.”

Of note, the separation barrier in the West Bank is 712 kilometers (442 miles) long, which is double the length of the so-called Green Line that extends over 320 kilometers (199 miles). Meanwhile, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, the barrier extends over about 202 kilometers (125 miles), according to data from Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights, told Al-Monitor,

“The Israeli authorities took control of the Jerusalem International Airport after occupying the West Bank in 1967, and they subsequently used it to operate domestic flights from and to Jerusalem, Eilat and Tel Aviv. Israel closed it completely with the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in 2000.”

He said,

“The airport was the lung through which the Palestinians would catch a breath and travel to the Arab world. Several planes took off from this airport to land in Lebanon, Jordan and some Gulf countries. But with the Israeli control over it, it turned it into a new settlement outpost that serves Israeli goals and plans aimed at controlling the West Bank as a whole, and not just Jerusalem.”

Hammouri noted,

“The new settlement project will witness the construction of 15,000 to 25,000 settlement units on the land of the airport, and these will be connected to the settlements of Maskiyot and Atrout through a tunnel to be built starting April. The tunnel dives deep below the Qalandia checkpoint, as it helps settlers avoid traffic jams when they move either from Ramallah, the Jordan Valley or the northern West Bank areas to Israel without the need to go through the checkpoint.”

He added,

“The Israeli authorities are working to encourage the immigration of Israelis to settlements near Jerusalem by establishing many infrastructure projects and huge commercial centers that would lure thousands of Israelis into living there. Consequently, the Zionist plans show that the Palestinian Authority’s bet on the Oslo Acoord was a failure, let alone the postponing of negotiations on several core issues, such as the Jerusalem issue, during the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

Nasser al-Hadmi, head of the Jerusalem Committee for Resisting Displacement, told Al-Monitor that the settlement projects the Israeli authorities are carrying out in the city of Jerusalem in particular and the West Bank in general go beyond the goal of garnering the support of a large segment of the Israeli community for the extreme right, which has been ruling Israel for several years.

He said that the majority of Israeli society has become extremist and does not believe in the principle of peace or in a two-state solution between the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

Hadmi noted,

“In 2021 the Israeli occupation intensified its attacks on the city of Jerusalem, as it demolished houses it claimed were illegal and prevented Jerusalemites from obtaining building permits.”

He said that the Israeli authorities grant only 4% of the population in Jerusalem permits for construction. Also, Israeli approvals usually require five to 10 years and cost $50,000 to $100,000 for one housing unit.

“Over the years, the Israeli authorities have issued several laws aimed at controlling and seizing the property of Jerusalemites, including the Custodian of Absentee Property Law, which aims at facilitating the Israeli control over the property of Jerusalemites who left Jerusalem in 1967 and never returned. This [law] allows the Israel Land Administration to control and transfer such properties to settlement associations that establish settlements and outposts thereon and hand them over to settlers,” Hadmi concluded.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

‘For whether or not the age of revolutions is over, the age of state-formation has only just begun.’ — T. J. Clark, Farwell to an Idea, 1999

We are approaching the first anniversary of the coronavirus crisis in the UK, and more and more people — on the Twitter account of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the Facebook pages set up to share censored interviews with scientists, in the online platforms not yet shut down for discussing the evidence against lockdown, in the illegal meetings of friends in the homes of the people that host them, in the thousands of discussions and exchanges that happen at every act of resistance, every demonstration, every march — know that this crisis has been manufactured. We know now that Government strategies for responding to a viral epidemic that had been in place for years were abandoned in favour of the historically unprecedented policy of national lockdown.

We know that Government contracts for the campaign of propaganda worth £119 million were signed with PR firms 3 weeks before the first lockdown. We know that, in April 2020, the Cabinet Office approved over £216 million for advertising on what it called the ‘COVID-19 Campaign 20/21’.

We know that the criteria for attributing deaths to COVID-19 were changed back in March to exaggerate the official number of fatalities.

We know that 95 per cent of the deaths attributed to the disease are of people with pre-existing health conditions like cancer, dementia, heart disease or diabetes.

We know that 84 per cent are over 70 years of age, and that the average age of those whose deaths are attributed to COVID-19 is the average age of death in the UK.

We know that, a year into this so-called ‘pandemic’, just over 600 patients under the age of 60 without a pre-existing health condition have had their deaths in English hospitals attributed to COVID-19. We know that, in April last year, the World Health Organisation issued instructions to medical practitioners that, if COVID-19 is merely the ‘suspected’ or ‘probable’ or ‘assumed’ cause of death, it must always be recorded as the ‘underlying cause’ on death certificates, whether this is ‘considered medically correct or not.’

We know that the WHO’s recommendations on the use of face masks by the public changed in June following political lobbying by the governments of, among other countries, the UK, and that even then it was primarily to encourage compliance with other restrictions on our rights and freedoms.

We know that the first and only randomised control trial of the effectiveness of face masks in stopping coronavirus transmission, which was rejected by several leading medical journals, when finally published reported that the benefits were ‘not statistically significant’. We know that, for a long time, the UK Government deliberately exaggerated the number of so-called ‘COVID-19 deaths’ by including anyone who has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, no matter how long afterwards they died and of what illness.

We know that, even now, anyone who tests positive within 28 days of their death is still recorded as a ‘COVID death’. We know that, according to the WHO, 30 per cent of infections, even in high GDP countries like the UK, are contracted in intensive care units, meaning anyone dying in a UK hospital has an equivalent chance of being designated a ‘COVID death’. We know that, even with the withdrawal of medical care for nearly 68 million people for the best part of a year, the age-adjusted mortality rate in 2020 was the highest in only 12 years, and that the population fatality rate from the coronavirus ‘epidemic’ is equivalent to a bad season of influenza.

We know that, as even these inaccurately identified deaths have fallen, the Government has turned to the promotion of RT-PCR tests for the virus that, according to its own advisors at SAGE, have a false-positive rate higher than the percentage of the UK population testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 with these tests.

We know that between 20 and 80 per cent of infections with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic, and therefore calling them ‘cases’ is medically inaccurate. We know from a study of nearly 10 million residents in Wuhan, the epicentre of the infection in China, that asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is statistically non-existent. We have known for the past 55 years that at least four coronaviruses circulate freely in UK on a seasonal basis, providing prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in around 30 per cent of the population before it reached these shores. We know that any RT-PCR test reliant on encoding the spike protein unique to coronaviruses can incorrectly detect as SARS-CoV-2anyone having a common cold from other coronaviruses at the time of sampling or carrying traces of dead and therefore non-infectious virus. We know that, despite this, the governments of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are using these meaningless statistics to impose tiered lockdownsacross the UK, in further violation of our human rights and civil liberties. We know that this is being done under legislation that only authorises such actionswhen justified by medical evidence that has not been produced for Parliament but merely alluded to in press conferences.

We know that the predictions of escalating infections and increased numbers of deaths by senior medical figuresemployed by the Government have been shown time and again to be wildly inaccurate fabrications based on predictive models challenged by the most eminent scientists around the world. We know that, as of publication, 351 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments have been made into law without a draft being presented to Parliament in advance for debate, without medical or other proof being provided of their justification or proportionality, and without an assessment being made of their impact, and that every one of these pieces of legislation requiring it has been rubber stamped in retrospect by virtual sittings of that Parliament.

We know that £22 billion of public monies has been awarded in coronavirus-justified contracts without prior competitive tender to privately-owned companies with financial links to members of Parliament, the Government and their business colleagues. We know that more and more of the functions of the state are being outsourced to private companies unaccountable to the public that provides the money with which they are paid. We know that the coronavirus-justified restrictions imposed on the UK population since March 2020 have cost the country £280 billion, the equivalent of £4,112 for every man, woman and child in the UK.

We know that, in contrast, the wealth of the world’s 2,200-plus billionaires increased by 20 per cent and US$1.9 trillion in 2020, more than in any previous year in history. We know that, by the end of 2020, the number of people in low to middle-income countries facing acute food insecurity will double to 265 million as a result of coronavirus-justified restrictions. We know that, under the cloak of this crisis, the Government and its financial partners have massively expanded the surveillance, monitoring and control of UK citizens through regulations, programmes and technologies that are implementing the UK biosecurity state.

We know that, at the peak of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in April, more than 40 per cent of acute care bedsin NHS hospitals were unoccupied. We know there is strong evidence that, at a conservative estimate, at least half the 80,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020 were caused by lockdown restrictions that denied UK citizens emergency, elective, social and community care in order to free up hospital beds for an epidemic that was never in danger of arriving. We know that the renewal of lockdown over the winter of 2020-2021 is killing thousands more. We know that this lockdown was decided back in July, before the manufactured rise in so-called ‘cases’ consequent upon a huge rise in RT-PCR tests producing an even greater rise in false positives. We know that over the next five years, hundreds of thousands more people in the UK will fall into poverty, unemployment, bankruptcy and despair that will shorten their lives by many tens of thousands of years because of restrictions justified by these manufactured figures.

We know that, although the GDP of the UK is rising slowly back to pre-crisis levels, the restrictions that continue to be imposed on the population are redistributing wealth from the public purse into the pockets of the rich and the powerful on a scale never before seen even in the UK.

We know that the mental health of millions of UK citizens is being deliberately and systematically attacked through Government-funded campaigns of terrorism, fearmongering and lies designed to reduce the population to compliance, obedience, resignation and despair. We know that self-harming and thoughts of suicide, particularly among British children, are increasing.

We know that the fines for the newly-created crimes of not wearing a mask, meeting friends or leaving our home without permission have been raised and will continue to be raised to levels sufficient to financially ruin anyone who disobeys Government regulations. We know that non-compliance with certain coronavirus-justified Regulations can now be punished with up to 10 years in prison.

We know that the Government has looked at the legal barriers to making vaccination compulsory for a disease with a fatality rate of 0.23 per cent across the population and 0.05 per cent for those under 70, and has not ruled out making taking such a vaccine a condition of access to public life. We know that UK police forces are being given more power with reduced accountability to enforce these regulations with increased brutality and greater impunity from prosecution.

We know that the legal profession, the media, the press, academia, the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry, the financial and banking sector, the passenger transport industry, the civil service, the security services, the armed forces and every other public institution are collaborating in affecting the revolution of the UK into a biosecurity state.

We know that this state is being implemented through the private sector as much as through the public sector, with the information technology industry, the healthcare industry, the education industry, the tourism industry, the hospitality industry and the retail industry all being compelled by coronavirus-justified regulations to enforce compliance with the technologies and programmes of the biosecurity state as a condition of using their services.

We know that these technologies will not stop there, but under the guise of monitoring and protecting our biosecurity, not only from SARS-CoV-2 but from any other virus designated a threat to public health in the future, are penetrating and influencing every aspect of our private life, biological existence and social behaviour.

We know all this and more.

But the question more and more people are now asking is: why?

Why is this being done, and to what end?

Of what benefit, and to whose benefit, is the impoverishment of the population of the UK and of most other Western liberal democracies around the world?

Why would the governments of capitalist economies deliberately set out to bankrupt millions of small businesses and drive tens of millions of workers into unemployment and destitution?

And what, if anything, can we do to resist it? This article is my attempt to respond to these questions, although not necessarily by answering them.

The above text is part of a longer article on the corona crisis

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Government data show that, compared with the Pfizer vaccine, there have been 43% more reports of injuries related to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK, including 77% more adverse events and 25% more deaths — but no red flags from UK regulators.

Between Dec. 9, 2020 (when the first COVID vaccine was administered in the UK) and Feb. 14, 2021, 402 deaths following COVID vaccines have been reported to YellowCard, the UK government’s system for reporting side effects to COVID-related medicines, vaccines, devices, and defective or falsified products.

Britain’s regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), runs YellowCard, which is the nearest British equivalent to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System or VAERS in the U.S.

So far, only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines have been administered in the UK. The Pfizer vaccine was deployed during the second week of December 2020, and Oxford-AstraZeneca at the beginning of January. (Moderna’s COVID vaccine is approved for emergency use in the UK, but the country has not as of yet obtained any vaccines from the company).

The MHRA has expressed no concern about the number of reports of adverse events connected with these new products, even failing to note how much worse the Oxford product has performed in comparison to the Pfizer vaccine.

Similarly, the accumulation of hundreds of deaths has failed to register a flicker of concern from them.

In January, the deaths of 23 frail elderly in Norway made international news — and raised questions about whether we should even be vaccinating people who are already near death. While it’s true that thousands of frail elderly people inevitably die every week, the lack of evidence of an active attempt to find out what is going on in individual cases is troubling.

The MHRA responded to the Norwegian report by saying “it did not currently anticipate any specific concerns,” a highly prejudicial statement. At the time The British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a short on-line response from the author under the title “Is the MHRA up to it?”:

“But the MHRA also did not detect concerns with narcolepsy and the Pandemrix vaccine in 2009 and was unapologetic nine years on in these columns (while Clifford Miller going through the available data found as many as 178 potentially related reports in the first 67 days) … More recently they did not anticipate problems with PEG and anaphylaxis before the rollout of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, though these were already identified by others…”

However, it is even more worrying that even after 400 reported deaths the BMJ (British Medical Journal) would not publish my letter critiquing the MHRA data.

A major difficulty is that the MHRA system breaks down the data so that it is impossible to connect these deaths with preceding adverse events, although most reports are said to include multiple reactions.

Yet it is reasonable to assume that the preponderance of these reported deaths were preceded by a sequence of events — otherwise no one would have thought to make a report. However, the YellowCard format masks this information.

As with any passive reporting database we are met with the paradox that no single vaccine death is confirmed (and any doctor who confirmed one would likely say good-bye to their career in the UK). We also know vaccine-related injuries are generally  under-reported by many times.

Nevertheless, the very distinct event profiles of two products filtered through the same same system after 15 million vaccine administrations would suggest that there is something to be investigated and explained.

The BMJ has declined to publish my successive letters on the subject of investigating COVID vaccine injuries and deaths, but here’s my latest (unpublished) letter to the BMJ:

Dear Editor:

Paul Thacker raises important concerns over transparency and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, but I believe there are also questions about safety.

In January, eyebrows were raised because of 23 deaths in frail elderly Norwegian patients following the Pfizer vaccine. Since then we seem to have come a dangerous distance.

MHRA data so far lists a combined 402 fatal reactions to the Pfizer BioNTech (197) and Oxford AstraZeneca (205) products. According to the MHRA publication, the data was updated Feb. 14 when approximately 8.3 million Pfizer and 6.9 million Oxford AstraZeneca products had been administered.

It is also remarkable how unfavorably the Oxford-AstraZeneca data compare with the Pfizer data. MHRA data show 26,823 reports related to Pfizer vaccines, including 77,207 reactions, and 31,427 reports related to Oxford-AstraZeneca, including 114,625 reactions.

Thus the Pfizer reports run at ~3.2 per 1,000 while the Oxford-AstraZeneca reports run at ~4.6 per 1,000: which translates to 43% more reports associated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine compared with Pfizer.

However, the Pfizer reports have an average of 2.9 reactions per report compared with 3.6 for the Oxford-AstraZeneca (again Oxford 24% higher) — so the rate of reactions reported is actually 77% higher overall for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

When it comes to fatalities, the Oxford-AstraZeneca product records a rate of 3 in 100,000 while Pfizer has 2.4 in 100,000 which is again 25% higher for Oxford-AstraZeneca.

Tabulated, as of 14 Feb:

Pfizer BioNTech: 26,823 reports, 77, 207 reactions and 197 deaths (per 8.3 million doses).

Oxford Astra Zeneca: 31,427 reports, 114,625 reactions and 205 deaths (per 6.9 million doses)

Pfizer BioNTech:

Reports 1 in 309.5 doses

Reactions 2.9 per report

Fatal reactions 1 in 42,131

Oxford AstraZeneca:

Reports  1 in 219.5 doses

Reactions 3.6 per report

Fatal reactions 1 in 33,659

It is important to recognize that these data are by no means random: The reports are filtered through the same system (even though it is passive and likely to represent only a fraction of cases) and these products have quite distinct profiles.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca safety profile should also be borne in mind considering that the company is planning to conduct trials with children.

Whether it is ethical to administer vaccines with such open safety issues is one thing, but it is another when the data from one product seems to be so markedly inferior to the other.

Note that the linked MHRA documents (here, here and here) have a rolling update and this data will only be correct for the week Feb. 26 – March 4, 2021.

Finally, I would be grateful to have any errors of transcription or mathematics pointed out to me.

*

John Stone is the UK Editor of the Age of Autism

An Earlier version of this article was published by Children’s Defense and Age of Autism

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

France has recently sent one of its nuclear attack submarines over 10,000 kilometers to the South China Sea for a “patrol.” It is the latest indicator of how strained the underlying credibility is of US foreign policy regarding the South China Sea and its growing conflict with Beijing.

France24 in an article titled, “France wades into the South China Sea with a nuclear attack submarine,” would claim:

The week in France kicked off with a Twitter thread by Defence Minister Florence Parly revealing that French nuclear attack submarine SNA Emeraude was among two navy ships that recently conducted a patrol through the South China Sea.

“This extraordinary patrol has just completed a passage in the South China Sea. A striking proof of our French Navy’s capacity to deploy far away and for a long time together with our Australian, American and Japanese strategic partners,” she tweeted along with a picture of the two vessels at sea.

The mention of Australia, America and Japan is clearly a reference to American efforts to create a united front against China in the Indo-Pacific region.

Red line denoting the Pentagon’s “first island chain” (Wikimedia Commons)

The omission of India, one of the supposed “Quad Alliance” members, should not go unnoticed. Even though it is mentioned elsewhere in the article, it is done as an afterthought.

France is the second European nation to sign up for Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, following the UK which has pledged to send a carrier strike group to the region later this year.

The UK Defence Journal in an article titled, “British Carrier Strike Group heading to Pacific this year,” would note that the UK’s latest aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, would also become involved in the South China Sea dispute along with what the journal reported as:

NATO’s most sophisticated destroyers — the Royal Navy’s Type 45s HMS Diamond and HMS Defender and US Navy Arleigh Burke-class USS The Sullivans as well as frigates HMS Northumberland and HMS Kent from the UK.

It wouldn’t take much imagination to predict the reactions in the West if China, Russia and Iran created a “strike group” and sailed it thousands of miles around the globe to menace the shores of Western nations, yet the provocative and revealing nature of Washington’s policies and the participation of nations in its Indo-Pacific strategy being drawn from further and further away from the actual region is treated as entirely normal, even necessary by the Western media.

The inclusion of the French and British in Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy is necessary because the actual nations in the region, specifically in Southeast Asia, have little interest in provoking China or turning relatively common maritime disputes into a regional or international crisis.

The US, by attempting to do just that, is actually endangering peace, prosperity and stability in the region, despite posing as the underwriter of all three and on behalf of the very nations refusing to join its provocative naval exercises. Nations in the actual region refuse to join US military activities there specifically because they are seen as counterproductive and a needless, even dangerous escalation.

Creating Conflict, Not Resolving It 

The US, Australia, France and the UK have contributed to the most destructive conflicts of the 21st century including the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the 2011-onward wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen, and numerous regime change campaigns around the globe.

France in particular also has its military deployed across the continent of Africa, including in several of its former colonies.

The notion that France, alongside its other partners in carrying out military aggression worldwide, is becoming involved in the Indo-Pacific to confront aggression and expansionism rather than to participate in it itself, is dubious at best.

The France24 article would also note that:

In this increasingly tense maritime geopolitical context, France wants to restate that it has its own interests to look out for in the region. In 2019, the French defence ministry released a policy report, “France and Security in the Indo-Pacific” recalling that around 1.5 million French nationals live between Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and the overseas territory of French Polynesia. This means that Paris views its Indo-Pacific zone as stretching from the Gulf of Aden to beyond Australia.

In other words, Paris’ mission to the Indo-Pacific is a continuation of its colonial injustices in the region in past centuries, pursuing everything and openly for itself and its own sense of hegemony, that it, London and Washington are accusing Beijing of.

The West’s failing fortunes across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia will not benefit from their collective economies and armed forces being stretched further still to confront an Asian nation in Asia, and one that is poised to surpass them all economically and militarily in short order.

For Beijing’s part, it has successfully reached this point through careful and patient planning, strategy and diplomacy. It will be very unlikely that Beijing will find itself drawn into a conflict with the West and will instead continue building ties within the region, particularly with Southeast Asia, creating its own regional order, and one built on economic cooperation rather than military confrontation, a process already well under way and why Washington feels the need to recruit Western European nations for its “Indo-Pacific” strategy in the first place.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Pope Francis arrived yesterday at the Baghdad International Airport to begin a three-day visit, the first of its kind, and the first visit for the Pope abroad since the COVID-19 pandemic began one year ago.  Critics have wondered what difference the compassionate tourist could make, but the Pope has aimed to stand in solidarity with Iraqis, and their Christian fellow citizens.

While most of Iraq has yet to be vaccinated, the Pope and his entourage have been.

Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi welcomed the pontiff, although Kadhimi oversees a government that is riddled with corruption and struggles to provide basic services.

The pope’s vehicle was escorted by police motorcycles as he passed miles of concrete blast walls that were put up during Iraq’s sectarian violence after 2003, the road was one of the most dangerous in Baghdad, with frequent roadside bombs and suicide car bombs.

The official slogan for the trip is, “we are all brothers”, while the trip’s agenda begins in Baghdad, goes to Najaf, Irbil in the north, as well as Mosul.

Outside the airport, hundreds lined the roads, holding flags and waving as the pope passed by the site of a Trump-ordered drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and a senior Iraqi security official a year ago.

The wreckage of one of the vehicles has been preserved by Iraq’s government as a memorial to the dead and in sharp criticism of the attack.

On Wednesday, 10 rockets were fired at a military base in western Iraq that houses US forces. The Iraqi parliament has voted last year to order the US troops to leave the country, but the US under Trump, and now Biden, have refused.  The US is illegally occupying both Iraq and Syria.

Iraq’s church leaders have said they are threatened with “extinction” in the Muslim-majority country.

“Over the past several decades, Iraq has suffered the disastrous effects of wars, the scourge of terrorism and sectarian conflicts often grounded in a fundamentalism incapable of accepting the peaceful coexistence of different ethnic and religious groups,” the Pope said.

“I come as a penitent,” the Pope said, “asking forgiveness of heaven and my brothers and sisters for so much destruction and cruelty.”

The Christians of Iraq are one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. Most Iraqi Christians are indigenous Eastern Aramaic-speaking ethnic Assyrians of the Syriac Christian tradition. Non-Syriac Iraqi Christians are largely Arab Christians and Armenians, and Christians have been present in areas now known as Iraq since around the 1st century AD.

In 1916, the Turkish Ottoman Empire committed a genocide that left at least two million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks dead. Nearly all were Christian.

The US state department seized upon a weak spot on the underbelly of Iraq, knowing there were ideological differences between Sunnis and Shiites, which are sects of Islam.  By instigating attacks and propaganda campaigns creating hatred between the two neighbors who have lived side by side in the Middle East for centuries, the west was able to leverage the sectarian strife to their advantage.  This allowed not only harvesting the Iraqi energy resources but maintaining an occupation presence in the region to this day.

The US, along with its allies, invaded Iraq in 2003 and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and maimed and displaced even more. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the UN’s Hans Blix confirmed that before the invasion while he was in Iraq. There was not a big Al Qaeda presence in Iraq, but the invasion caused them to arrive on the scene to repel the invaders.  The invasion of Iraq is the cause of the suffering of Iraqis and especially their Christian communities.

”Americans and the West were telling us they came to bring democracy, freedom, and prosperity,” said Louis Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon. He added, ‘‘What we are living is anarchy, war, death and the plight of three million refugees.’’

In Palestine, Syria, and Iraq the Christians are under attack.  Ethnic cleansing of Christian communities was perpetrated by the Israeli Army, the US-sponsored Free Syrian Army, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.

Iraq was once a rich tapestry of faiths, but during the period from 2013–2017 Christians fled as ISIS rapidly swept through western Iraq executing, maiming, and kidnapping.

Mosul was decimated by the US attacks on ISIS.  The Pope will visit the Syriac Catholic Church ruins in Mosul.

Saddam Hussain led the Ba’ath Party, with a secular socialist platform.  He was an authoritarian leader who ruled with an iron fist, and many citizens suffered during his tenure as president of Iraq, but the Christians were secure under secularism.

Because of the fall of Saddam Hussein, Christians began to leave Iraq, and the population shrank to less than 500,000 today from as many as 1.5 million in 2003.

The Arab Spring, a US-NATO project, only made things worse. As dictators like Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya were toppled, their longstanding protection of minorities also ended. The US supported sectarian terrorists like the Free Syrian Army, sometimes called the “John McCain Army”, who from the outset of conflict unfurled sectarian banners against Christians and non-Sunni sects.  While the US ‘regime change’ projected failed in Syria, the US remains illegally occupying the northeast and supporting the Kurds as they drive Christians from their ancestral homes and lands.

Andrew White is known as the vicar of St George’s Church, Baghdad, the only Anglican church in Iraq, until his departure in November 2014.

Andrew White supported the US-UK invasion of Iraq.  He knew the Christians would be slaughtered and decimated.  He corralled the Christians in his church in Baghdad while being guarded by US Army snipers and tanks.  He treated the Iraqi Christians like circus animals: soon to be extinct, and valuable assets for charity donations. He moved them to Jordan and perpetuates the notion that they are only safe in a country that has an Israeli peace agreement. He was found culpable of charity fraud in his former organization, and he has formed a new charity that has faced similar fraud accusations.

Middle Eastern Christians are in solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The blind, and unconditional support of the Jewish State of ‘Israel’ is the central core belief of the American Evangelical political ideology. Instead of defending the human rights of Christians throughout the Middle East, the birthplace of Jesus, most American Christians feel no empathy for their counterparts in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria.

In 2015, Senator Ted Cruz admonished an audience of Middle Eastern Christians at an ‘In Defense of Christians’ event in Washington, telling them that Christians ‘‘have no better ally than the Jewish state.’’ The audience booed Cruz.

Iraqi Christians cannot safely return home to Iraq.  The government and society have become sectarian. The US insisted on an Iraqi constitution which kept the country firmly divided between the Sunni and Shiite sects. The US prides itself on being secular but demands that Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq be cut-up in sectarian strife.  Only Syria has determinedly resisted the US demands for a “New Middle East”.

The Sunnis and Shiites have been pitted against each other, and the Christians are a minority without a safety net.  Perhaps, if a new secular government was formed, and school children were educated in tolerance and respect for all religions, we might see a future for Iraqi Christian returning and reestablishing their rights to live in their ancestral homes.

Bashar Matti Warda, the Chaldean archbishop of Irbil, said of the Pope’s visit,

“It’s not going to help the Christians materially or directly,” Warda conceded, “because we are really in a very corrupt political and economic system. No doubt about that. He [Pope Francis] will hear nice words … But when it comes to day-to-day issues, no, I think that’s a different story.”

“Our fortune is not in oil,” said Saad Salloum, a political scientist, “It is in diversity.”

‘‘We’ve been here as an ethnicity for 6,000 years and as Christians for 1,700 years,’’ says Dr. Srood Maqdasy. ”We have our own culture, language, and tradition. If we live within other communities, all of this will be dissolved within two generations.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Middle East Eye

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Ten U.S. presidents,^[1] 20 CIA directors,^[2] and 56 years of covert action^[3] screwed over Brazil’s poor and paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro

Covid-19, murder, evangelical Christianity, crime, environmental destruction, drugs, shantytowns, inequality, corruption, doesn’t matter what you pick, Brazil is a world leader in them all—and more.

With the Worker’s Party now waning, a tiny minority dominates the country’s economy. About 1% of the population, i.e., 1.5 million people control 47% of all real estate.^[4] Brazil’s poverty rate stands at around 20 percent—which Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, has no problem with.

The perils of large-scale privatization initiatives under Bolsonaro were evident when the Amazon city of Manaus ran out of oxygen to help COVID-19 patients.

Even when a private contractor informed the government that it could not adequately supply the city, the government did nothing, stating—against all scientific evidence—that early treatment for COVID-19 did not work.

Gun ownership meanwhile has risen considerably since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, exploding in 2020.^[5]

It’s the law of the jungle, a jungle which Bolsonaro is busy burning down. It’s tropical neoliberalism. Nothing is sacred, least of all the lives of common people.

Bolsonaro has put the economy in the hands of a team of “Chicago boys,” disciples of so-called “free-market” theorist Milton Friedman.^[6]

The leader of this team, Economy Minister Paulo Guedes—a former investment banker—was a graduate of the University of Chicago where he studied under Friedman. He has appointed other Chicago grads to top posts, including Joaquim Levy to run a major state bank, Rubem Novaes another, and Roberto Castello Branco to manage oil giant Petrorbras.^[7]

Guedes himself lived in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and liked what he saw. His plan for Brazil is to cut taxes, cut pensions and cut government. In other words, he wants the wealthy at the top to own even more of Brazil.

It wasn’t meant to be like this

Brazil began to modernize itself in 1930. The centralization of the Brazilian state followed a “lieutenants rebellion.”

Building and strengthening the nation became the rule. This included the mobilization of the masses. It meant industrialization and development. All under the guiding eye of the Brazilian government.

The leader of this brave new Brazil was Getúlio Vargas (1882-1954). This predominantly benevolent dictator unleashed the power of the state.

Breaking with the semi-feudalism of Brazil’s First Republic (1889-1930), Vargas politicized Brazil’s working class. And therefore subverted the traditional power of a tiny minority who owned everything.

And by developing Brazil’s natural resources for the good of Brazil (Vargas created Petrobras—the government owned oil company—in 1953), he subverted the “foreign markets and foreign investors,” which had dominated Brazil since the 16th century.

How do we know that he subverted the local aristocracy and the global imperialists? Because Vargas said as much in his 1954 suicide note:

How can we trust his words? Because the dynamic or dialectic he describes explains perfectly the decades which followed his suicide. Time proved him right.

The presidents who succeeded Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61) and João Goulart (1961-64), continued the project which Vargas started: the construction of a popular state-led Brazilian economy. However, an underground campaign of international groups and national groups brought this project to a dramatic end in the infamous 1964 coup.

The national dimension of this coup that ended the vision of Vargas—known as “the father of the poor”—involved the overt actions of the Brazilian military. And the international dimension involved the covert activities of the U.S. government, which was the main instigator of the coup.

Washington, D.C. had a code name for the removal of João Goulart—”Operation Brother Sam”—and was prepared to invade if the coup did not go according to plan.

U.S. warships (for example, the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal) were sent to Brazil to assist if necessary. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was the architect of the operation.

It funded and linked the domestic opposition to Goulart’s popular nationalism. One million dollars was provided to the AFL-CIO’s USAID funded American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which instructed trade union leaders on how to organize strikes and demonstrations against Goulart.^[9]

Afterwards, the CIA, under the cover of USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), ramped up training of the Brazilian police, who set up Operation Bandeirantes, a forerunner of the Phoenix program whose focus was to round up and torture leftist dissidents.^[10]

New York Times (August 5, 1978) [Source: nytimes.com. See also pando.com]

Foreign automakers collaborated with the new military junta by helping to identify “subversives” on their payrolls who were arrested or detained as part of Bandeirantes.

Lincoln Gordon, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil from 1961-1966, claimed that the 1964 coup was “the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.”^[11]

Freedom for U.S. elite interests, that is—and that of U.S. corporations and a minority of Brazilians who monopolized most of the wealth.

In the middle of the Cold War, Washington did not want another Cuba or another China. It viewed the popular agenda of Vargas and his successors as a threat to its global elitism as well as continued access to Brazil’s oil, minerals, and other natural resources. By acting the way it did in Brazil, the U.S., in effect, was directly conserving the semi-feudal social relations which Vargas sought to modernize.

It was the signal foreign investors and foreign creditors were waiting for. Foreign money flowed into Brazil after 1964—while Brazil’s workers and peasants were once again trapped in their own country and forced to accept the lowest wages and worst working conditions. In the eyes of the U.S.-backed elite minority inside (and outside of) Brazil: It was an “economic miracle.”

Never mind the fact that, according to the National Truth Commission, which released a report in 2014, 8,000 indigenous people and at least 434 political dissidents were killed during the period of military rule.

Today, when Jair Bolsonaro celebrates the coup of 1964, he is celebrating a U.S. plutocratic version of Brazil. He is rejecting Brazilian sovereignty and reviving a National Security Doctrine which the U.S. exported to Brazil during the Cold War—a doctrine that highlights an “internal enemy” (working class politics or environmental politics or landless politics or Indio politics).

In short, he is celebrating a doctrine that criminalizes modern social relations and institutionalizes semi-feudal social relations.

After World War Two, this doctrine was transmitted from the U.S. to Brazil via military colleges and the U.S. School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. And its purpose was anything but Brazil’s “national security.” On the contrary, it was designed to secure the economic and geopolitical interests of the U.S. and its constituency in Brazil—the tiny minority which owned everything.^[12]

Washington, D.C.’s top Cold War planner, George F. Kennan, succinctly summed up the idea behind the doctrine (and therefore outlined the future of Brazil) in 1950—when writing about Latin America:

The final answer might be an unpleasant one, [a military dictatorship, extreme inequality, but] we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful, since the communists [popular and nationalistic politicians] are essentially traitors […] It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by communists [socially progressive nationalists].^[13]

Considering the 1964 coup a “triumphant strike against communism,” Bolsonaro directly served the military government in Brazil in the late 1970s as an army captain.

His superior officers stated that he “had aggressive ambition”including for “financial and economic gain,” a reference to Bolsonaro’s attempt to mine gold in Bahia state.

The Obama administration helped facilitate Bolsonaro’s rise by failing to condemn the illegal impeachment in August 2016 of Dilma Rousseff of the Brazilian Workers Party, who in her youth had been tortured by the Brazilian army.^[14]

Rousseff was accused of illegally manipulating government accounts, but the charges were heavily politicized.

Her successor, Michel Temer, was later arrested on more substantiated charges that included accepting a $1 million bribe in exchange for awarding three companies a construction contract for a nuclear power plant.^[15]

The day after Rousseff’s impeachment, the leader of Brazil’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Aloysio Nunes, came to the U.S. and met with Thomas Shannon, the Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, which signaled backing for the de facto coup that brought an end to what the World Bank called Brazil’s “golden decade” under Workers Party rule, during which millions were lifted out of poverty.^[16]

Aloysio Nunes and Brazilian Ambassador Sergei Amaral present the Grand Cross of the Rio Branco order to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Shannon in 2018. [Source: twitter.com]

Bolsonaro has continued Brazil’s great reversal, never hiding his allegiance to the U.S.

Nor is he hiding his contempt for the Brazil which Vargas and his successors tried to build. In March 2019, after becoming Brazilian President in January—in an act of homage and an act of obedience—he visited the U.S. headquarters of the CIA—the architects of the 1964 coup.

In August 2019, Bolsonaro declared that it is his intention, by 2022, to completely privatize Vargas’s greatest legacy—Petrobras—the state-owned oil company.

There is one more U.S. doctrine which encapsulates post-1964 Brazil and particularly the Brazil of Bolsonaro: the Low-Intensity Conflict doctrine. This is “characterized by the military taking on police roles and the police acting more like the military.”^[17]

When a minority owns a disproportionate share of the wealth, the tendency is to criminalize the majority poor. The class war begins to feel like a low-intensity war.

Since the U.S.-made coup of 1964, Brazil has been caught up in a low-intensity conflict in which—to paraphrase President Bolsonaro—people die like cockroaches. Since the beginning of the 21st century—more than 1,000,000 people have been murdered in Brazil.^[18] It is safe to say that almost all were poor people—“the children of Vargas.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Aidan O’Brien is a hospital worker in Dublin, Ireland. On break last year, he visited Brazil and conducted in-country research. Aidan can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

[1] Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush1 Clinton, Bush2, Obama, Trump.

[2] Dulles, McCone, Raborn, Helms, Schlesinger, Colby, Bush, Turner, Casey, Webster, Gates, Woolsey, Deutch, Tenet, Goss, Hayden, Panetta, Petraeus, Brennan, Pompeo.

[3] 1964-2018.

[4] Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “For Brazil’s 1 Percenters The Land Stays In The Family Forever,” August 25, 2015, https://landportal.org/news/2015/08/brazils-1-percenters-land-stays-family-forever

[5] Alicia Prager and Laís Martins, “Firearms exports to Brazil surge as gun ownership increases under Bolsonaro,” July 31, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com

[6] David Biller and Raymond Colitt, “Milton Friedman’s Brazil Moment: Band of Disciplines Take Charge,” Bloomberg News, December 12, 2018.

[7] Biller and Colitt, “Milton Friedman’s Brazil Moment.”

[8] Getúlio Vargas “suicide note,” August 24, 1954, quoted in Thayer Watkins, “Getulio Vargas and the Estado Nôvo,” San José State University Department of Economics, https://www.sjsu.edu 

[9] Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 69.

[10] Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 225; Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

[11] David Binder, “U.S. Assembled a Force in 1964 For Possible Use in Brazil Coup,” December 30, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com; The Dominion news from the grassroots, “US Role in 1964 Brazilian Military Coup Revealed: National Security Archive,” April 6, 2004, https://www.dominionpaper.ca; James G. Hershberg and Peter Kornbluh, “Brazil Marks 50th Anniversary of Military Coup,” April 2, 2014, The National Security Archive, https://www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu;  Wright, Thomas C., Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001).

[12] Eduardo Munhoz Svartman, “Brazil-United States Military Relations during the Cold War: Political Dynamic and Arms Transfers,” January 2011, brazilianpoliticssciencereview, https://www.oaji.net 

[13] George F. Kennan, 1950, quoted in Anthony W. Pereira, “The US Role in the 1964 Coup in Brazil: A Reassessment,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12518

[14] Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 303.

[15] Anna Jean Kaier, “Brazil’s Former President Michel Temer Arrested in Corruption Investigation,” The Guardian, March 21, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/21/brazils-former-president-michel-temer-arrested-in-corruption-investigation

[16] Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 303, 304.

[17] Joseph Nevins and Timothy Dunn, “Conflict of a Different Sort,” October 31, 2008, NACLA Report, https://www.nacla.org 

[18] Robert Muggah, “Brazil’s Murder Rate Finally Fell – and by a Lot,” April 22, 2019, https://www.foreignpolicy.com 

Featured image is from Antonio Scorza / Shutterstock

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

A book that has a very narrowly defined title often fails to look at the larger context, either regional or global.  In “Decolonizing Palestine – Hamas Between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial”  Somdeep Sen succeeds surprisingly well in placing the struggles of Hama/Gaza/Palestine well beyond the regional into a thought provoking global perspective.

What is missing from the title is one of his fundamental themes, that of liberation.   Not only is Hamas caught between the anticolonial and the postcolonial, but the idea of liberation, of freeing Palestine from the Israeli colonial-settler context is also caught between the two ideas.  In short, liberation is not a point in time, not a date in a history book, but an ongoing process that precedes that noted timeline and succedes the same.

Liberation then becomes not only just Palestine, but Palestine as a liberating idea within the global network of postcolonial acts of liberation.

Hamas

The focus is on Hamas, but does not cover its full history as a grassroots organization that in its early formation provided much needed social services to the refugees and victims from the 1948 nakba.  Sen concentrates on Hamas’ current predicament of being both a resistance force to settler-colonialism and a governing force in an area nominally ‘liberated’ from Israeli settlements, while still carrying the burden of both forwards.

One of the more striking ideas was the concept that even as Hamas is criticized for its sometimes coercive and violent control of Gaza, those very acts create and sustain the idea of ‘Palestine’. The inhabitants of Gaza recognize Hamas not just as Hamas but as the government, as the nation – as Palestinian.   Even earlier than Hamas’ takeover of Gaza’s government, Sen discusses the idea that the the postcolonial moment began with the Oslo Accords, and in spite of all its flaws and the poverty of its intentions, it put into writing the concept of ‘Palestine’ – undefined and subject to many onerous conditions, but still – Palestine.

Liberation in this context starts well before Oslo.  Palestine has been seeking liberation since the end of World War I:  first from the British empire and its League of Nations imposed mandate; and subsequently from Jewish settler-colonialism during the mandate and on into the establishment of Israel.

What is occurring in Gaza today is the ongoing struggle for liberation within both an anticolonial and a postcolonial set of ideas and actions:

“Hamas’ persistence with the simultaneous roles of resistance and assumption of governmental authority confirmed that the anticolonial and postcolonial can indeed exist in the era of colonial rule in service of the liberation struggle….[it] is also a microcosm of the entirety of the Palestinian long moment of liberation….it is the Palestinian coastal enclave that exemplifies the long moment before the withdrawal of the colonizer in its entirety, consolidated under a single leadership….”

“Despite the their faults and inadequacies, both resistance and governance somehow evoked the colonized’s retort, “We are here, we exist, we are organized”…And even though actual liberation is far from being realized [it] has already begun under the auspices of Hamas’ rule over Gaza.”

Global perspective and liberation

When Sen extends his arguments to global comparisons his ideas take on a more powerful significance.  His arguments are well founded as he incorporates examples from around the world.

Sen’s correlations with other liberation struggles cover much of the rest of the world.  South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Cuba, India, Ecuador, Algeria, and North America are mentioned in his discussions.  Early in the work he writes “…characterizing the socioeconomic crisis as extreme overlooks the reality that the treatment meted out to Gaza is the norm under settler colonial rule.”

If I take my home country Canada as an extended example of North American settler-colonialism, all Sen’s arguments are applicable. Canada (and the U.S.) were attributed as being “empty land”, a “land without people.”  The indigenous people were removed from the land by various devices – wars, starvation, forced removal – and the remnant populations were placed on “reservations”, the North American system of apartheid.  Those that were not removed from settler society were subject to racist and discriminatory legislative and judicial action.

Physical genocide/ethnic cleansing was accompanied by cultural ‘cleansing’.  The indigenous celebrations were forbidden (here on the West Coast, the tradition of the Potlatch was outlawed) and children were forcibly removed from their families in order to “civilize” the “savages”, without granting them even then the right of equality.

Under the concept of liberation, the indigenous people of Canada are still resisting colonization and all its depredations and are undergoing a “long liberation”, claiming their rights, protecting their land against militarized police forces, and still seeking equality before the law even as their inequality is written into the constitution.

Sen’s description becomes universal as in the end he suggests “that the nature of the (settler) colonial endeavor, and its ability to alienate their sense [of] self, is such that the struggle for liberation from the legacies of colonial rule may persist perpetually.”   Society itself is changed, and the liberation process includes the adaptation to those changes, “the colonized are undone from their sense of self in a way that they do not have any memory of an identity sans the legacies of the colonization.”   Society is changed, there is no reset button, liberation involves finding a national identity, part of that being “the national anticolonial struggle itself.”

Sen’s work, “Decolonizing Palestine – Hamas Between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial” is a powerful and well argued presentation on Hamas’ actions in Gaza.  At the same time he very thoughtfully extends his arguments as being part of the global system of settler-colonialism.

These arguments my sound rather esoteric in light of the brutality and racist attitudes of the colonial projects around the world, but ultimately they find the truth:   no person is free, no person is liberated until all are liberated, until all the constructs of colonial settler activities, all the racism, the economic dominance, the cultural denials are deconstructed and remade into a society that provides equality in all areas to all the people of the world.  We are, in that sense, all Palestinians.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Between November 11 and 16, 2020, between the passing of Hurricane Eta and the arrival of Hurricane Iota, the Tortilla con Sal media collective visited Nicaragua’s Autonomous Region of the Northern Caribbean Coast. There we interviewed representatives of different indigenous and afro-descendant territorial governments in Siuna, Bilwi, Waspam and community members of the Miskito communities of Wisconsin and Santa Clara. We also spoke with cattle farmers, residents and officials from the municipalities of Siuna and Prinzapolka about various aspects of the area’s social and economic development. The interviews confirm the success of Nicaragua’s indigenous and afro-descendant peoples in their historic struggle to reclaim their ancestral rights.

The conversations also confirm that the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast have achieved progressive restitution of their rights in large part due to the commitment to the reincorporation of the Caribbean Coast by the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) ever since their historic program of 1969. While in government in 1987, the FSLN passed Law 28 “Statute of Autonomy of the Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua”. Later, while in opposition, the FSLN in 2005 managed to secure the passage of Law 445 “Law of Communal Property Regime of the Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities of the Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and of the Bocay, Coco, Indio and Maíz Rivers”.

To date on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, 23 original peoples’ territories have been titled and delimited, covering 314 communities with a territorial extension of 37,859.32 km² in which lives a population of more than 200,000 people in more than 35,000 families. The area is equivalent to 31% of the national territory and more than 55% of the territory of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. A significant body of laws, administrative norms and declarations attest to the reality of an innovative and ambitious process vindicating the rights of Nicaragua’s indigenous and afro-descendant peoples.

The interviews collected here also explain how these legislative and administrative advances were achieved in various extremely adverse contexts. For example, in 1987 Nicaragua was in the seventh year of a war imposed by the U.S. government in which much of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast was the scene of constant military conflict.

Then, after 1990, during the period of the Liberal party governments, the process of defending and promoting the rights of Nicaragua’s native peoples was in effect deliberately undermined. So, when Daniel Ortega and the FSLN took office in January 2007, they inherited a process seriously sabotaged and damaged by the neoliberal policies of the previous sixteen years.

The interviews collected here demonstrate, too, the great scope of the process of restitution of the rights of Nicaragua’s original peoples since 2007, in all its social, political, economic and cultural complexity. For example, they clarify that the leaders of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant Territories are people elected by their communities not on the basis of political allegiances but on the basis of community criteria.

Their Territorial Governments and their Community Governments are two of the five levels of government working together in the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. The two levels of government of the indigenous peoples collaborate intimately with the relevant instances of the National Government, with the Regional Governments and with the respective municipal authorities.

This system of government has enabled important changes on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, for example, in terms of electrification and the development of health and water infrastructure and land communications with the Pacific Coast and also in terms of judicial practice, education and health care.

On the Northern Caribbean Coast, the new road to Bilwi, which includes the construction of a 240-meter long bridge over the Wawa River, will shorten the overland travel time to Managua from 24 to 12 hours. In 2021, the entire northern Caribbean coast will be connected to the national electric power system.

A new regional hospital and a new drinking water system are being built in Bilwi. Economic democratization promoted by the central government has promoted new commercial possibilities for the region’s agricultural, fishing and other producers.

In this context of infrastructure modernization and important social and economic advances, the political opposition desperately uses downright falsehoods exploiting the issue of property conflicts in order to attack the Sandinista government led by President Comandante Daniel Ortega.

The big lie promoted by the political opposition in relation to the phenomenon of property conflicts in the territories and communities of the native peoples is that the Sandinista government promotes the invasion by mestizo families of indigenous and afro-descendant lands.

These interviews with indigenous and afro-descendant leaders completely disprove this gross lie. Instead, they explain the historical context in which indigenous leaders associated with the Miskito Yatama political party, have sold lands that were allocated to them under the government of Violeta Chamorro.

Subsequently, during the period in which Yatama and the ruling government Liberal party controlled the regional government and most of the region’s municipal authorities, various corrupt indigenous leaders continued with the illegal sale of indigenous lands to mestizo families. The natural consequence of this process has been that the mestizo families who bought those lands, in turn sold them on to other mestizo families, thus making the problem progressively more complicated and difficult to solve.

The problem of property conflicts only became international news from 2012 onward because in that year the FSLN displaced Yatama in the municipal elections as the region’s main political force and then in 2014 managed to gain control of the regional government.

The following table indicates the development of the change of political control in the Northern Caribbean of Nicaragua at the municipal level through the results of municipal elections from 2008 to 2017.

In 2009 Yatama and the Constitutional Liberal Party controlled seven of the eight municipalities in the Northern Caribbean Region. In the 2012 municipal elections Yatama and the Independent Liberal Party won four municipalities between them and the FSLN also four. Then in 2014 Yatama lost the regional elections to the FSLN and in the 2017 municipal elections the FSLN won seven municipalities, leaving only the municipality of Mulukukú in the hands of the PLC. Yatama and the PLC still won a good number of municipal councilors, but without overall control of any municipality.

In response to this decline in the power and influence of Yatama and the Liberal parties in the region, an intense smear campaign has been mounted against the Sandinista government. The campaign is promoted by Yatama and its allies in Nicaragua’s non-governmental organizations associated with the national political opposition, such as the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, financed from the United States and countries of the European Union.

Similarly, Yatama lost influence at the territorial government level partly because of the deep internal differences within the party and partly because many community members stopped giving the same level of support they had previously given to Yatama’s historic leader Brooklyn Rivera and the indigenous leaders associated with him.

This reality of the unfolding political scene in the Caribbean Coast region of Nicaragua has been systematically suppressed, both by national opposition aligned media and intellectuals and, internationally, by foreign academics and intellectuals allied with Yatama and the MRS. However, the testimony of the indigenous leaders in these interviews convincingly demonstrates the reality, completely disproving the lies that have been spread internationally.

In relation to the issue of bad faith on the part of non-governmental human rights organizations, it may well be worth noting the personal testimony from our visit to interview community members of the Miskito communities of Wisconsin and Santa Clara in the Tasba Raya area, southwest of Waspam. Since 2013, this area has been the scene of some of the most violent incidents of conflict between the indigenous peoples and mestizo settlers.

We arrived in Wisconsin around four o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, November 14th, 2020. Despite the heavy rains from Hurricane Eta, the road had not deteriorated so badly as to prevent our journey. We went to Wisconsin and Santa Clara because we wanted to talk to people there about their version of local history and events in their community since 2012.

However, the people we were seeking in Wisconsin told us they did not want to be interviewed because they were being watched by community members collaborating with the Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN) led by Lottie Cunningham Wren. One of the people we wanted to talk to told us, in the presence of three witnesses, they were especially afraid to be interviewed because shortly before our visit, at a community assembly with CEJUDHCAN, Lottie Cunningham Wren had incited hatred against this person, saying that they deserved “to have their throat cut”.

Wisconsin is an impoverished community. However, the people observing our visit had the latest smart phones with which they filmed us. When we asked how it was possible for these very poor people to have such expensive cell phones, we were told that the phones were given out by Lottie Cunningham Wren and her colleagues to CEJUDHCAN collaborators in the community. In any case, we agreed with the community members at that time to record some brief interviews on the subject of local property conflicts and their possible resolution, which we did in a superficially friendly but somewhat tense atmosphere.

Indeed, without the presence of the territorial authorities who accompanied us, we believe it would not have been possible to record interviews in this community. Subsequently, after recording the interviews in Wisconsin, we went to the community of Santa Clara.

There, the community members spoke freely, without fear. They explained what had happened to them in previous years. They spoke of their anxieties and fears regarding the Mestizos and explained their hopes of being able to resolve the problem of property conflicts according to the law.

In both communities, Wisconsin and Santa Clara, the community members insisted that they wanted to avoid the kind of violent incidents of the past and called on the regional and central government authorities to provide the necessary support to expedite the last phase of the titling of their lands, which is called remediation. This term is interpreted in different ways, but the Wisconsin and Santa Clara community members believe that this phase requires clearing a direct lane between the already established trig points in order to clearly define the limits of each territory on the ground.

Taken together, this series of interviews provides an extensive overview of the reality of the Northern Caribbean Coast region based on the concrete experiences of five of the region’s territorial leaders as well as local community members. An undeniable part of that experience has been the incitement to violence by political forces and allied organizations in opposition to the government.

The interviews make clear the mercenary role of foreign funded neocolonial clients like Lottie Cunningham Wren and CEJUDHCAN in that regard. But they also make clear how Liberal party activists and municipal officials have historically promoted the illegal invasion of indigenous lands.

They also highlight the political aspect of organized crime activities in the region, for example the massacre of three police officers in June 2018 near Mulukukú. That massacre occurred in the context of a long-running campaign of systematic harassment in the Mining Triangle of Siuna, Rosita and Bonanza in which dozens of Sandinista militants have been killed in recent years.

It has been a campaign of violence promoted by people associated with the region’s Liberal parties very similar to what has happened in the South Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. There, the activities of the so-called Anti-Canal Movement have been used to cover up organized crime activities aimed at displacing Sandinista families from the area on the municipal border between Nueva Guinea and Bluefields.

The interview series “Nicaragua 2018 – Uncensoring the Truth” extensively details the criminal activities promoted at the time by Anti Canal Movement leaders Francisca Ramirez and Medardo Mairena. Similarly, the interviews compiled here on the reality of Nicaragua’s Northern Caribbean Coast region reveal how opportunist local NGOs such as CEJUDHCAN distort the truth under the guise of promoting the rights of indigenous peoples.

These interviews demonstrate once again that international human rights organizations by no means rigorously and seriously corroborate the denunciations they receive. On the contrary, they act in a morally obtuse, methodologically incompetent and politically biased way, in effect promoting the sinister anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian political agenda of the U.S. government and its allies.

In doing so, they harm and betray the human rights of the very populations they falsely claim they want to defend. Their bad faith has been demonstrated on multiple occasions in the case of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela as well as other countries defending their autonomy and sovereignty against the North American and European imperialist powers.

When former UN Human Rights Rapporteur Alfredo de Zayas said in relation to Venezuela “I realized that the media narrative does not correspond to reality” he could just as well have been talking about Nicaragua. Taken together, the interviews compiled here offer yet more confirmation of the moral bankruptcy of the Western human rights industry and the international media that disseminate their reports with no serious effort to corroborate them, while suppressing other information, such as interviews like these, which contradict them.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Featured image is from Tortilla con Sal

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Is Wi-Fi sickness a disability? The California Court of Appeal just said it is in Brown v. Los Angeles Unified School District (2d Dist., Div. Eight), Case No. B294240. In a case that tests the limits of California’s liberal pleading standard, the appellate court green-lighted a claim of a woman who asserted a disability of “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” or, as the concurring justice put it, “Wi-Fi sickness.”

The trial court had sustained a demurrer, granting judgment for the employer, a school district. The appellate court revived the plaintiff’s claim for failure to provide a reasonable accommodation.

The court acknowledged that it is likely the first to recognize Wi-Fi sickness as a disability under laws against discrimination. In fact, the court discussed contrary federal court authority, distinguishing those cases by concluding that the definition of “disability” in California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act is broader than in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Apart from the holding that Wi-Fi sickness is a disability under FEHA, California employers should take note of the facts alleged about the failure to provide a reasonable accommodation.

After the school district installed a new Wi-Fi system, the plaintiff teacher complained of headaches and other symptoms caused by exposure to the electromagnetic waves. The school district initially tried to accommodate the teacher by turning off the Wi-Fi in her classroom and an adjacent one. The teacher said that her symptoms persisted and asked for additional accommodations. By that point, the school district’s consultant had reported that the Wi-Fi and radio frequencies at the school “evidenced a safe and non-hazardous working environment.” Based on that report, the school district did not grant any further accommodation, and the teacher sued.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Wiley expressed reluctance “about giving any sort of green light to this unprecedented and unorthodox disability claim.” But that’s exactly what the court did.

The decision serves as a reminder of just how easy it is to survive a pleading challenge in California.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific region submitted a request to Congress March 1 for $27.3 billion in new anti-China spending. Admiral Philip Davidson, who can fairly be termed an anti-China fanatic, leads the Indo-Pacific Command made up of 380,000 military and civilian personnel and a vast array of air, land and sea weaponry. It is the largest of the 11 commands that span the globe and outer space — the enforcers of the most far-flung empire in history.

The funding increase that Davidson is seeking for his command — not the total allocation — is greater than the entire budget of the whole armed forces of Brazil.

In an October 2020 public forum, Davidson stated: “I believe China is the strategic threat of the century to the U.S., but really certainly to the entire free world.” Extreme hostility toward China has been expressed by other top officials in the new administration, including by President Biden himself.

In reality, it is the United States which has engaged in endless war for many decades that is the real “strategic threat” to its allies as well as it enemies.

Red line denoting the Pentagon’s “first island chain” (Wikimedia Commons)

The Indo-Pacific Command covers 34 countries encompassing 60% of the world’s population. As a part of the “pivot to Asia” announced under the Obama administration — and continued under Trump and now Biden — a major shift is underway. The aim is to base over 70% of U.S. overseas military forces in the Asia/Pacific region, clearly aimed at the People’s Republic of China.

The additional request comes on top of the $738 billion Pentagon budget for this year which passed — as do all military budgets — with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. The Pentagon budget is larger than the military budgets of the next 13 countries combined, and four times the size of China’s.

The Pentagon and virtually the entire political establishment falsely promote Cold War-style propaganda depicting China as an aggressor. But it is not China that is encircling the United States with military power — it is the other way around. Davidson’s request for additional funding is explicitly meant to accelerate the encirclement.

The ‘First Island Chain’ — A sacrifice zone in Pentagon planning

In his demand for extra funds, Davidson wrote that the United States “requires highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the first island chain, featuring increased quantities of ground-based weapons. … These networks must be operationally decentralized and geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos.”

The “first island chain” in Pentagon-ese are those island states and provinces ringing China’s east coast, including Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, northern Philippines, Borneo and smaller islands. As a glance at a map of the region shows, Taiwan — a province of China still ruled by the side of the civil war that was defeated in 1949 — is the key link of the chain and would be of immense strategic importance in case of a war. This motivates the vast U.S. military sales to Taiwan.

The words “requires highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the first island chain” means that the Pentagon anticipates those countries would suffer major losses in case of a U.S. war on China. John Foster Dulles, the former U.S. secretary of state who devised the island chain strategy in the 1950s, referred to these countries as “unsinkable aircraft carriers.”

Such an outcome means nothing to the war planners. Nor do they regard participation as optional. “These networks must be … geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos” (writer’s emphasis).

Contrary to the media propaganda here, China is not seeking either a new war or global domination. Nor do any of the peoples of the region, who have suffered greatly at the hands of imperialism, want a new war.

As the latest demand for ever-greater military spending makes clear, the grave danger of new wars comes from the Pentagon, the military-industrial corporations, and the capitalist politicians in Washington. They are fanning the flames of racism and chauvinism to prepare public opinion for aggression to come.

A new U.S. war with China would threaten the world with unthinkable destruction. The danger of such a war cannot be ignored, it must be resisted.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Public Domain