U.S. Senator (Kentucky) Rand Paul recently challenged the new Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken on his history of pushing regime change in the Middle East and North Africa.

Sen. Paul began his argument by questioning Blinken’s role in the NATO intervention of Libya in 2001 and his support for the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003, which the Kentucky congressman said was a major disaster that paved the way for a stronger Iran.

The congressman argued that Blinken continued to push regime change in Syria, which he said was a significant blunder, especially with the amount of money spent training “moderate rebel forces”.

Sen. Paul said the administration of former President Barack Obama spent $250 million (USD) on training 60 rebels, which he said was a waste of money.

He would go on to question why Blinken would support the Syrian opposition groups on the ground, as he pointed out the most powerful fighters are those from the jihadist groups like the Al-Nusra Front.

Sen. Paul then shifted his attention to NATO, which he said Blinken was trying to strengthen for the purpose of combatting Russia.

The senator said Blinken’s policy on NATO would lead to war with Russia, which the latter responded would have the opposite effect.

He concluded by saying that regime change needs to end because it is involving the U.S. in long wars that are costly to the military.

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Featured image: Video thumbnail from Rand Paul’s comments on regime change to the U.S. Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken. (video courtesy of Rand Paul)

…Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre!

Assim começa O Senhor Presidente, obra fundamental da literatura latino americana, da qual procedem  ao mesmo tempo o realismo mágico e os grandes romances políticos sobre as ditaduras que causaram tanto sofrimento e destruição por todo o continente, como Eu, o Supremo do paraguaio Augusto Roa Bastos e O outono do patriarca do colombiano Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

O livro teve uma longa gestação, foi escrito entre meados dos anos 20 e início dos anos 30 do século passado por Miguel Ángel Asturias em Paris, onde se auto-exilou por mais de dez anos fugindo  da ditadura de Estrada Cabrera em seu país de origem, a Guatemala. À ditadura de Estada Cabrera, que durou de 1898 até 1920, sucedeu-se a ditadura de Jorge Ubico, o que fez com que o livro só fosse publicado em 1946, no México, ano em que também se publicou no Brasil o primeiro livro de um outro escritor fundamental: Sagarana  de João Guimarães Rosa. Os caminhos desses dois escritores se cruzariam em 1965, quando se realizou em Gênova o Congresso de Escritores Latino-Americanos e foi criada a Primeira Sociedade de Escritores Latino-Americanos, com Miguel Ángel Asturias e João Guimarães Rosa na sua direção. Em um intervalo durante este congresso em Gênova, Guimarão Rosa concedeu uma famosa entrevista ao crítico de literatura alemão Günter Lorenz , na qual fez um interessante comentário sobre Asturias ao responder a uma pergunta:

Guimarães Rosa: Acho que você me entendeu mal. Aparentemente está se referindo ao que aconteceu em Berlim. Acerca disto queria dizer que estou do lado de Asturias e não de (Jorge Luis) Borges. Embora não aprove tudo que Asturias disse no calor do debate, não aprovo nada do que disse Borges. As palavras de Borges revelaram uma total falta de consciência da responsabilidade, e eu estou sempre do lado daqueles que arcam com a responsabilidade e não dos que a negam.

Esta citação é muita curta, não contém muitas informações sobre o contexto,  mas ainda assim me parece suficiente para indicar que Guimarães Rosa reconhecia em Asturias um escritor com quem compartilhava  uma mesma posição: ambos assumiam a responsabilidade do escritor diante de sua época. 

Em O Senhor Presidente , Miguel Ángel Asturias confrontou a sociedade, a política e a literatura da América Latina de seu tempo como nenhum outro havia feito até então. Para o estudioso da literatura Latino-Americana Gerald Martin, autor do influente livro Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century , trata-se de um romance único na literatura Latino-Americana, o primeiro a ‘combinar sua chamada à revolução na linguagem e na literatura com uma chamada à revolução social e política e o primeiro a desmascarar o autoritarismo e o patriarcalismo ao nível da consciência, ou seja, da interiorização do totalitarismo.’ 

Relendo O Senhor Presidente hoje, enquanto o Brasil sucumbe à incompetência generalizada, à corrupção desenfreada e à ignorância voluntária de uma parte significativa da população, reconheço muito em comum entre nosso país e o mundo descrito por Asturias em seu romance,  o de uma sociedade sofrendo sob  uma ditadura militar mesquinha e violenta. E diante das ameaças do Senhor Presidente Bolsonaro de um golpe de estado  e do estabelecimento definitivo de uma ditadura, o romance de Miguel Ángel Asturias se revela uma mensagem, uma advertência sobre o que ainda pode se transformar o nosso país. Porque tudo pode, sempre, piorar: o poço não tem fundo, nem limites a estupidez.

Uma personagem do romance, o General Canelas, cai em desgraça junto ao Senhor Presidente e tem que fugir da ditadura militar que ajudou a impôr. E durante a fuga pelo interior do país, confrontado pela miséria que o governo ditatorial tinha criado e que até pouco tempo atrás era invisível para ele, escondida que estava pelos privilégios de que ele desfrutava, pensa consigo mesmo:

Qual era a realidade? Não ter  pensado nunca  com a sua própria cabeça, ter pensado sempre com o quepe . Ser militar para manter no comando uma casta de ladrões, exploradores e traidores egoístas (…).

Quem tiver ouvidos, ouça. Quem tiver olhos, veja.

Num outro episódio do romance, uma empregada de um comandante da polícia recebe a solicitação de uma mulher humilde que apenas quer saber onde foi enterrado seu marido assassinado nos cárceres da ditadura. A empregada promete ajudar e fala com o comandante da polícia, que responde deste modo:

Não tem que dar esperanças. (…) A gente permanece nestes postos porque faz o que lhe é dito e a regra de conduta do Senhor Presidente é de não dar esperança e de pisoteá-los e espancá-los a todos porque sim.

Diante dos milhares de mortos pela pandemia do COVID 19, diante da destruição da floresta amazônica e do pantanal, como não ver nestas palavras a descriçâo exata da condura do Ministro Pazuello, do Ministro Salles e de tantos outros em cargos importantes do governo do Senhor Presidente Bolsonaro?

Quem tiver ouvidos, ouça.Quem tiver olhos, veja.

Miguel Ángel Asturias

E diante da inércia de grande parte da classe política, incapaz  de tomar uma atitude diante de tanto descalabro, mortes e destruição, sem nenhuma vergonha de seu próprio oportunismo, estas palavras escritas por Asturias e ditas por uma  personagem do romance, parecem sair da boca de milhões de brasileiros:

Não há esperança de liberdade, meus amigos; estamos condenados a suportá-lo até que Deus queira. Os cidadãos que ansiavam pelo bem do país estão longe (…) As árvores já não dão frutos como antes. O milho já não alimenta. O sono já não descansa. A água já não refresca. O ar torna-se irrespirável. Às pragas seguem as pestes, as pestes às pragas e não tarda virá um terramoto para pôr fim a tudo isto. (…) Para onde virar os olhos em busca de  liberdade?

Miguel Ángel Asturias, prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 1967, desde seu pequeno e sofrido país manda sua mensagem para o Brasil de hoje. Há que ler O Senhor Presidente. Resistir e buscar forças nas palavras encantatórias do romance. Volto ao seu começo:

Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre, sobre la podredumbre! Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, sobre la podredumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre!Alumbra, alumbra, lumbre de alumbre…, alumbre…,alumbra…, alumbre de alumbre…,alumbra,alumbre…! 

Franklin Frederick

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Hoje, 22 de Janeiro de 2021, é o dia que pode ficar na História como o ponto de viragem para livrar a Humanidade daquelas armas que, pela primeira vez, têm a capacidade de fazer desaparecer a espécie humana e quase todas as outras formas de vida, da face da Terra. De facto, hoje entra em vigor o Tratado da ONU sobre a Proibição de Armas Nucleares. Mas também pode ser o dia em que entra em vigor um tratado destinado, como tantos outros anteriores, a permanecer no papel. A possibilidade de eliminar as armas nucleares depende de todos nós.

Qual é a situação da Itália e o que devemos fazer para contribuir para o objectivo de um mundo livre de armas nucleares? A Itália, um país formalmente não nuclear, concedeu há décadas o seu território para a instalação de armas nucleares americanas: actualmente bombas B61, que em breve serão substituídas pelas mais mortíferas B61-12. Também faz parte dos países que – como documentado pela NATO – “fornecem à Aliança aviões equipados para transportar bombas nucleares, sobre os quais os Estados Unidos mantêm um controlo absoluto, e pessoal treinado para o efeito”. Além do mais, existe a possibilidade de serem instalados no nosso território, mísseis nucleares de alcance intermédio (análogos aos euromísseis dos anos 80) que os EUA estão a construir depois de terem extinto o Tratado INF que os proibia.

Assim, a Itália viola o Tratado de Não-Proliferação de Armas Nucleares, ratificado em 1975, que estabelece: “Cada um dos Estados militarmente não nucleares, parte do Tratado, compromete-se a não receber de quem quer seja armas nucleares, nem a controlar tais armas, directa ou indirectamente”. Ao mesmo tempo, a Itália rejeitou em 2017 o Tratado da ONU sobre a Abolição de Armas Nucleares – boicotado pelos trinta países da NATO e pelos 27 da União Europeia – o qual estabelece: “Cada Estado Parte que tenha armas nucleares no seu território, possuído ou controlado por outro Estado, deverá assegurar a remoção imediata dessas armas”.

A Itália, na senda dos EUA e da NATO, opôs-se ao Tratado desde a abertura das negociações, decidida pela Assembleia Geral em 2016. Os Estados Unidos e as outras duas potências nucleares da NATO (França e Grã-Bretanha), os outros países da Aliança e os seus principais parceiros – Israel (a única potência nuclear do Médio Oriente), Japão, Austrália, Ucrânia – votaram contra. As outras potências nucleares, tais como a Rússia e a China (que se abstiveram), a Índia, o Paquistão e a Coreia do Norte, também votaram contra. Fazendo eco a Washington, o governo Gentiloni definiu o futuro Tratado como “um elemento de forte divisão que corre o risco de comprometer os nossos esforços a favor do desarmamento nuclear”.

Portanto, o governo e o parlamento de Itália são ambos responsáveis pelo facto do Tratado sobre a Abolição das Armas Nucleares – aprovado por larga maioria pela Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas em 2017 e que entrou em vigor por ter atingido 50 ratificações – até à data, ter sido ratificado na Europa somente pela Áustria, Irlanda, Santa Sé, Malta e São Marino: o que constituiu um acto meritório, mas que não é suficiente para dar força ao Tratado.

Em 2017, enquanto a Itália rejeitava o Tratado ONU sobre a Abolição das Armas Nucleares, mais de 240 parlamentares – na sua maioria do PD e do M5S, com o actual Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros Luigi Di Maio na primeira fila – comprometeram-se solenemente, através da assinatura do Apelo ICAN, a promover a adesão da Itália ao Tratado ONU. Em três anos não moveram um dedo nessa direcção. Por trás de coberturas demagógicas ou abertamente, o Tratado ONU sobre a abolição das armas nucleares é boicotado no Parlamento, com algumas raras excepções, por todo o arco político, que concorda em vincular a Itália à política cada vez mais perigosa da NATO, oficialmente a “Aliança Nuclear”.

Tudo isto deve ser recordado hoje, no Dia de Acção Global, que apela à entrada em vigor do Tratado da ONU sobre a Proibição das Armas Nucleares, celebrado pelos activistas da ICAN e de outros movimentos antinucleares com 160 eventos, na sua maioria na Europa e na América do Norte. Precisamos de transformar este dia, numa mobilização permanente e crescente de uma frente ampla capaz, em cada país e a nível internacional, e de impor as escolhas políticas necessárias para alcançar o objectivo vital do Tratado.

 

Artigo original em italiano :

L’Onu proibisce le armi nucleari e l’Italia che fa?

(il manifesto, 22 de Janeiro de 2021)

https://ilmanifesto.it/oggi-in-vigore-il-trattato-onu-che-proibisce-le-atomiche/

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

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In the 1980s, the US imposed a 100% tariff on virtually all Japanese electronics and forced Tokyo to sign a one-sided trade deal that reserved much of its domestic semiconductor sector for American companies.

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With just days left in office, the Trump administration has blacklisted an additional nine Chinese companies, adding them to a long list of firms on the U.S. military blacklist and escalating the trade war on Beijing as the U.S. attempts to suppress China’s economic rise.

The Department of Defense claimed that those on its list are secretly owned or controlled by the Chinese military and that it was “determined to highlight and counter” threats that “appear to be civilian entities” but are not. Those companies are now likely partially blocked from the U.S. market and from doing business with American companies.

Chief on the list is electronics giant Xiaomi, whose stocks plunged by 11% this morning and have not recovered. While still relatively unknown in the U.S., Xiaomi is a global giant, manufacturing televisions, smartwatches, tablets, and all manner of home appliances. They are surely best known, however, as makers of smartphones. In quarter three of last year, Xiaomi stormed past Apple to become the planet’s third-largest smartphone maker, behind only Samsung and fellow-sanctioned Chinese giant Huawei. Xiaomi sold 46.5 million units, a 42% increase on Q3 last year — an impressive jump, especially considering the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Airplane manufacturer Comac, oil giant CNOOOC and Chinese chipmaker SMIC were also added to the list.

Quickly developing a loyal base of customers, Xiaomi is increasingly seen across the planet as a major competitor to Apple, selling similarly specced units for a fraction of the price of an iPhone. By contrast, both Apple’s smartphone sales and market share have been falling dramatically, suggesting that, unlikely as it seems, Apple could go the way of Nokia or Motorola before them.

The government’s move is the latest episode in the ever-intensifying trade war against Beijing. The Trump administration has previously sanctioned other Chinese tech giants like smartphone manufacturer and 5G provider Huawei and video-sharing social media app TikTok, claiming them to be dangerous appendages of the Red Army. In 2020, the president threatenedto shut down TikTok, unless it was sold to an American corporation. Other pro-U.S. countries such as India went further, instituting an outright ban on the popular platform.

“Pivot to Asia”

It is unclear who, apart from American tech firms, have been the beneficiary of this trade war. A recently-published study found that Trump’s decisions on China have cost close to a quarter of a million American jobs already and will likely lead to the loss of 145,000 more by 2025.

The Trump administration has also built on President Obama’s military “Pivot to Asia,” attempting to encircle Russia and China with American military bases, and building alliances with Beijing’s neighbors in order to do so. U.S. warships and planes have been probing the Chinese coast for months, attempting to gain more knowledge about their defense systems. In July, the U.S.S. Rafael Peralta went within 41 nautical miles of the coastal megacity of Shanghai. Last month, the military also flew nuclear bombers over Chinese ships close to the province of Hainan Island.

The China tech ban mirrors the moves in the 1980s to destroy the Japanese semiconductor industry, which had rapidly risen and overtaken its American competitor. If nothing was done, Japan would have easily overtaken Silicon Valley to become the world’s electronics and communications capital. The U.S. imposed a 100% tariff on virtually all Japanese electronics and forced Tokyo to sign a one-sided trade deal that reserved much of its domestic semiconductor sector for American companies and opened the country up for American agribusiness. In no small part due to U.S. actions, much of the high-tech sector collapsed, and Japan has suffered over 30 years of economic recession since. Xiaomi also makes semiconductors.

China’s response to the news was to point the finger at the U.S. Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that the United States has a long history of civilian-military tech partnerships and accused the Trump administration of double-standards and bullying.

Lijian is not incorrect; virtually every big American tech firm has close links with the government or the military. In November, for instance, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services all signed a 15-year deal to provide the CIA and 16 other intelligence agencies with cloud computing and other digital services. In their book titled, “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” Eric Schmidt and fellow Google executive Jared Cohen wrote, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” suggesting that they saw big tech’s role as the tip of the American spear.

During the presidential debates, Trump and Biden appeared to be trying to outcompete each other on their hawkishness towards China, each presenting the other as a puppet of Chinese Premier Xi Jinping. While Biden might not have opted for a ban on Chinese companies like Trump has, analysts suggest that he is unlikely to reverse this decision, nor to change the direction of American policy. Thus, the Xiaomi restrictions are unlikely to be the last shots fired in the growing trade war against Beijing.

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Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in ReportingThe GuardianSalonThe GrayzoneJacobin MagazineCommon Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Can US Workers Be Dismissed for Refusing to Be Vaxxed?

January 22nd, 2021 by Stephen Lendman

According to Law Professor Dorit Reiss:

“Requiring a vaccine is a health and safety work rule, and employers can” fire noncompliant staff.

Attorney David Betras explained that “workplace vaccination requirements aren’t new, and they passed constitutional muster long ago,” adding:

“State and federal courts have repeatedly ruled providers can compel workers to be immunized against the flu and numerous other diseases.”

Not easily gotten exceptions exist under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for religious reasons.

Individuals whose health would be adversely impacted from vaxxing can be exempted under provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

At the same time, workers seeking exemption bear the burden of proof not easily gotten at times.

If denied by an employer and sue, it’ll be costly with no assurance of prevailing.

Chances for advancement on the job will be adversely impacted if prevail.

If fired for refusal to be vaxxed, it’ll become a permanent part of your employment history.

Dismissed workers for this reason may also be ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits.

Attorneys J. Andrew Salemme and Kenneth Scholtz agree with above assessment, adding the following from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), as follows:

During a “pandemic,” employers may legally require workers “to adopt infection-control practices.”

They may include “regular hand washing, coughing and sneezing etiquette, and proper tissue usage and disposal.”

Employees may be required “to wear personal protective equipment during a pandemic.”

“An employee may be entitled to an exemption from a mandatory vaccination requirement based on an ADA disability that prevents him from taking the influenza (or other) vaccine.”

“(U)nder Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, once an employer receives notice that an employee’s sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance, prevents him (or her) from taking the influenza (or other) vaccine, the employer must provide a reasonable accommodation unless it would pose an undue hardship as defined by Title VII (‘more than de minimis cost’ to the operation of the employer’s business, which is a lower standard than under the ADA).”

“Generally, ADA-covered employers should consider simply encouraging employees to (be vaxxed) rather than requiring…it.”

According to the Constitution Center, legal debate over vaxxing existed since the early 20th century.

Except for federal legislation like the above, it’s an issue for individual states and local communities to set standards.

In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme Court upheld state authority to mandate vaxxing.

Justice John Marshall Harlan ruled said that personal liberties might be suspended in cases of the “common good” of the community.

At the same time, the Court recognized the importance of exemptions for issues relating to health.

In Zucht v. King (1922), the High Court ruled that admittance to school classrooms could be denied for refusal to be vaxxed, adding:

Such denial would not violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

In Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), the Supreme Court held that states may require vaxxing regardless of objections for religious reasons, stating:

“(T)he right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease(s) or the latter to ill health or death.”

While the Court authorized individual states to require vaxxing, it hasn’t mandated the practice nationwide.

Unaddressed by the High Court is the issue of potential widespread harm to health and well-being by vaxxing — notably by hazardous experimental, fast-tracked, DNA altering covid vaccines.

At a time when these heavily promoted vaccines are being rolled out for mass-vaxxing nationwide, the issue of potential widespread harm should be taken up by the high court.

According to GazetteXtra, Rock Haven skilled nursing facility in Rock County, Wisconsin requires staff to be vaxxed for covid or be laid off.

Rock County administrator Josh Smith said a number of the facility’s staff were dismissed for refusal to be vaxxed with Moderna’s (high-risk) covid vaccine — known to be potentially hazardous to health he left unmentioned.

According to a Rock county employment ordnance:

“The appointing (county) authority may lay off an employee when an employee can no longer perform the essential functions of the job.”

Smith’s memo said dismissed nursing facility staff “will not be allowed to return to work until they have completed the COVID-19 vaccine series.”

According to an anonymous Rock Haven staff member, facility employees accepted layoffs as a price for declining to risk potential harm from vaxxing, adding:

A total of 27 facility employees sent letters to the county’s Health Services Committee that explained their concerns about wanting to protect their health by refusing to be vaxxed.

“There have been individuals who have had pretty severe reactions. We have had multiple worker’s comp claims needing to be filed because of them having to go out because of what has happened after the vaccine,” the anonymous employee explained.

For his part, Smith dismissively and inaccurately claimed that reported adverse events from vaxxing by Moderna’s vaccine doesn’t mean it’s “unsafe.”

Moderna and Pfizer covid vaccines are unapproved by the FDA.

Their use is permitted under emergency conditions that don’t exist.

Whether that argument and refusal to be vaxxed for self-protection can hold up in state or federal courts have yet to be tested.

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Round Up the Usual Suspects; Don’t Forget Putin

January 22nd, 2021 by Ray McGovern

Interviewed by Mrs. Clinton Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi eagerly rose to the bait when Clinton spoke of “her concerns that the outgoing commander-in-chief was compromised by the Kremlin”. Setting the stage, Clinton expressed the hope that “we’ll find out who he [Trump] is beholden to, “who pulls his strings”.

Clinton added ominously: “I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol”. She then asked Pelosi if the nation needs “a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything they can pull together.”

Pelosi agreed on the need for such a commission, and proceeded to burnish her own anti-Putin credentials:

“As I said to him [Trump] in that picture with my blue suit … pointing rudely at him, ‘With you Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin.’’ Pelosi conceded that she does not know ‘what Putin has on him politically, financially, or personally, but what happened last week was a gift to Putin.”

Putin’s Useful Idiots?

Pelosi added, “And these people, unbeknownst to them, they are Putin puppets. They were doing Putin’s business when they did that at the incitement of an insurrection by the president … so, yes, we should have a 9/11 commission and there is strong support in the Congress for that.”

What leaps out of this Clinton-Pelosi pas de deux is who is leading the dance. Clinton hints broadly (not, of course, for the first time) that Putin is pulling Trump’s strings. It is Clinton who voices suspicion that Trump and Putin were somehow coordinating on the phone on Jan. 6; and it is she who suggests that “a 9/11-type commission” might be needed.

Due largely to the captive “mainstream” media, ‘Russia Russia Russia’ has proved to be the gift that keeps giving for the Democrats. Are there limits to the degree of credence Americans will give to corporate media spinning all the sins attributed to Russian President Putin? Why the insinuation that he may be partly to blame for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Russia is Convenient

It’s a matter of convenience. For the Democrats it has been super-convenient to blame Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in 2016 on Russia, although key aspects of that case (Russian “hacking” of the DNC, for example) have been debunked.

But, don’t go away, Russia, not just yet. The MICIMATT still finds you convenient as the kind of “threat” it can cite to justify spending untold billions of dollars on defense, enriching the already rich. Please see “Why Russia Must Be Demonized.”

The way the U.S. system is structured, it matters little in the grand scheme of things on where the money is spent – whether a Republican or Democrat sits in the Oval Office. In short, the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex rules the roost (MEDIA in all caps, as the linchpin). Clinton wonders aloud who Trump “is beholden to”. Well, speaking of beholden, Joe Biden enters office with zero vaccination against being beholden – to the MICIMATT. It is fair to say that, without that the MICIMATT’s blessing, candidates end up like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.

Uncertainties

There are just enough straws in the wind to make the MICIMATT and its clients and supporters nervous. What would happen, should Putin and Russia become less demonized? Could there be a thaw in the unnecessarily chilly relations with Moscow? What could that mean for bloated defense spending – particularly at a time when those funds are so desperately and demonstrably needed at home?

It appears likely that strategic arms negotiations with Russia will be high on President Joe Biden’s agenda, as will cooperation with Russia and the other parties to the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew. Assuming William Burns, former ambassador to Russia, is confirmed as CIA director, Biden will have at his beck and call a straight-speaking, highly experienced expert who has dealt with President Putin. Burns was also one of the chief US negotiators of the Iran nuclear deal.

In my view, it is also significant that President-elect Biden has held back from explicit condemnation of Russia by name amid the recent flurry of accusations of Russian hacking of several US institutions over the past several months. Yes, he has referred to what Secretary of State Pompeo and Attorney General Barr have said blaming Russia, and it can be argued that he has indirectly implicated Russia in the context of his sparse statements on this issue.

In my experience, though, the Kremlin is likely to have taken note of the caution that Biden has exercised on this neuralgic issue. Nor has this likely escaped the attention of the MICIMATT and induced some worry about the long-term viability of the portrayal of Putin as villain.

The Kremlin Is Watching

Oliver Stone told me recently that, in one of his conversations in Russia, Mr. Putin, somewhat exasperated, said something along the lines of, “Now Russians are thought of like Jews before World War II”. Think about that. Amid the Russia Russia Russia over the past four-plus years, Putin has kept his voice down – and his powder dry – while staying open to negotiations to reduce arms competition, cyber warfare, and other facets of bilateral tension. If past is precedent, he is likely to see opportunities to take a fresh look at US intentions under President Biden – especially during the traditional “honeymoon” period normally accorded a new president.

But clearly, Putin is also aware of the parallels between the demonization of him and Russia and how Jews were blamed for just about everything during the Thirties. Evidence-free accusations by the likes of Pelosi and Clinton will make the task of restoring a modicum of trust an uphill battle.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and prepared/briefed The President’s Daily Brieffor three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

“Democracy has little meaning when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, transportation, and communication, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda”. (US philosopher John Dewey(1))

Different systems of government have been tried in different countries over the years, but it is sometimes said that democracy is the least-worst method of running a country.(2) Democracy is supposed to mean ‘rule by the people’, where everyone has a say in how their country is run, and having real influence over decisions that affect their lives. In theory, everyone has an equal voice in shaping policy. There was a time, between approximately 1950-1970, that democracy in Britain and the US seemed to be working. In Britain the government created the National Health Service. The US made significant progress with civil rights. The gap between the rich and the poor (inequality) in both countries decreased tremendously. However, wealthy people and business leaders did not like the high taxes, which peaked at 98% in the UK, so they worked hard behind the scenes to change things. In the 1980s US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher began a trend that is still continuing. They gave more and more power to big companies, and took less and less tax from the rich. Inequality in both countries has returned to levels that we have not seen since early last century,(3) and life for poor people has become harder and harder. This post and the next one will explain the main problems with US and British democracy.

Political Capture 

In practice, it is not too difficult for wealthy and powerful people and organisations to create a system that gives the appearance of democracy but does not really give ordinary people much say. Having a vote once every few years is not genuine democracy if the candidates are too similar. In his book entitled ‘Tragedy and Hope’, Carroll Quigley explained that what America needed was a system where:

“The two parties should be almost identical so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy”(4)

This has been called ‘faux’ (false) democracy.(5) The US and Britain are good examples of this. The US has the Democratic and the Republican parties. Britain has the Labour and the Conservative parties. For some years now there has been little difference on key policies between the two main parties in each country.(6) Supposedly left-wing parties have moved further and further to the right. This means that many of their policies are intended to benefit big companies and the rich. The British parties became so similar that the former Labour leader, Tony Blair, and the former Conservative leader, David Cameron, were described as clones of each other.(7) In the US, Wikileaks released emails showing that the Democrats’ Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, was paid over $600,000 for 3 speeches to Goldman Sachs bankers explaining that her true policies, in favour of big business, and her public statements, are not the same.(8) This is called political capture.

In both countries there have also been few practical differences in foreign policy. In particular, both parties in each country have committed war crimes. The Russian leader, Stalin, said after World War Two that the Labour party were more conservative than the Conservatives when it came to preserving the British ruling class’s interests abroad.(9) Iraq was destroyed when Labour were in power, Libya was destroyed when the Conservatives were in power. In the US, a former official of the National Security Agency compared US President Bush (Republican) and his staff to the Corleone mafia family from the movie The Godfather.(10) Obama (Democrat) was just as criminal and started multiple wars. The same applies to all recent presidents, whichever party they are from. Even President Carter (Democrat), who was thought to be much more moderate about foreign intervention, was President when Afghanistan was de-stabilised by the CIA in 1979, leading to the creation of al-Qaeda (see earlier post on terrorism).

The extent of political capture has recently become clearer, as evidence has shown that the people who run the UK Labour Party, and the people who run the US Democratic Party, deliberately worked against politicians who wanted a fairer society. In the US they rigged the internal elections to make sure that Bernie Sanders did not become their Presidential candidate. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn successfully became the leader of the Labour Party, but insiders actively undermined him when he tried to become Prime Minister.

The existing form of government in the US should really be called plutocracy, which means a country governed by the wealthy. The same is true, to a slightly lesser extent, in Britain. Various commentators have indicated that the extreme form of capitalism we have today, known as neoliberalism, where excessive wealth is concentrated into a few hands, and the rich have significant influence over politics, is incompatible with genuine democracy.(11)

Companies write our laws 

Many laws are heavily influenced by big companies. (This was discussed in the previous post on lobbying). Some laws are even written by corporate lawyers. As one commentator wrote about the US:

“Monsanto writes agricultural and food policy; ExxonMobil writes energy and foreign policy and Goldman Sachs writes financial policy for the federal government.”(12)

Up until 2016 there was an attempt to create what was known as the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership).(13) This was an immensely powerful set of regulations being made by, and for the benefit of, big business. This was described as a trade agreement, but it is more accurate to call it an agreement about the rights of investors. A key part of the TTIP is that an international company could sue a government because they might lose profits in the future due to new laws. The system would bypass existing legal systems, and be heard in a secret court that is heavily biased towards the companies. The effect of this would be to stop governments introducing new legislation to protect the environment, worker rights, safety standards or food standards. Public pressure stopped the TTIP, but similar rules already exist in some trade agreements, and they have seriously affected the ability of governments to regulate corporations. Corporate lobbyists will continue to pursue this type of agreement, which is intended to undermine democracy.

Regulatory Capture 

Many senior regulators come from the companies that are being regulated. These people see the world from the point of view of those companies. In 2008 there was a global financial crisis. It became clear that banks were engaged in widespread fraudulent activity that created serious instability. The main financial regulators in Britain and the US did not see their role as ‘policing’ corrupt financiers. They saw their role as enabling financiers to achieve their goals. The government had deliberately structured the regulator in this way. Experts from business helped the government write the laws and regulations in the first place. This is known as regulatory capture. Following the crisis, it was widely expected that new laws would be introduced to limit the activities of banks and other financial companies. Whilst there have been some changes, rules that might seriously limit the ability of banks to defraud everyone have not been introduced.

In the US, up until 2017, the internet companies were regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). There was regular criticism of the FCC that it had been captured by the biggest companies that it was supposed to regulate.(14) Those companies successfully lobbied politicians to change the system so that in future, some parts of their business will be regulated by a different regulator that has significantly less power, and less expertise, than the FCC.(15) The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is notorious for failing to properly regulate pharmaceutical companies,(16) and Donald Trump re-structured the Environmental Protection Agency (FDA) deliberately to serve corporate interests.(17)

The propaganda role of the media in perpetuating the illusion of democracy 

There have been a number of recent scandals in Britain where contributors making generous political donations were given honours, such as Knighthoods.(18) The media rightly criticised this. However, this is a good example of how media propaganda works. They criticise a trivial aspect of the system, but do not discuss the much deeper problems with the whole political system, which is much more important than the knighthoods.

Any observer of US politics can see that the two parties are extremely similar and that the elections in the US have become a form of theatre, where the media turn elections into an immense spectacle lasting for years, knowing that there is little difference between the two main parties on the key issues. The same is now true in Britain. The mainstream media play an essential role in 2 main ways. Firstly, they maintain the charade that we live in a genuine democracy and rarely discuss the problems with the system explained in these posts. Secondly, they destroy the reputations of anyone who challenges the system, such as Jeremy Corbyn or Wikileaks‘ founder Julian Assange, by repeatedly smearing them.

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the seventeenth in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.

Notes 

1) John Dewey, cited in Werner A. Meier, ‘Media Ownership: Does It Matter?’ at www.lirne.net/resources/netknowledge/meier.pdf 

2) This quotation is attributed to Winston Churchill, see discussion by J.K Baltzersen, ‘Churchill On Democracy Revisited’, Jan 24, 2005, at

www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0105/0105churchilldem.htm

3) Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, ‘Income Inequality’, Oct 2016, at https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality

4) Carroll Quigley, ‘Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time’, quoted at  

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/386296.Carroll_Quigley 

5) Scott Timberg, 4 April 2015, Salon, at 

https://www.salon.com/2015/04/04/how_the_1_percent_always_wins_we_live_in_a_faux_democracy_which_is_why_everyones_so_cynical_and_nobody_votes/ 

George Tyler, 2 Feb 2018, Democratic Audit UK, at

 https://www.democraticaudit.com/2018/02/02/american-democracy-sold-to-the-highest-bidder/

6) Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People

 7) Armando Iannucci, ‘Time Trumpet’, “changes” video excerpt from showing similarities between Tony Blair and David Cameron at 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yEi72XfNbA

8) Chelsea Gilmour, ‘Clinton stalls on Goldman Sachs speeches’, 7 March 2016, at 

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/07/clinton-stalls-on-goldman-sachs-speeches/ 

9) Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War To Cold War

10) Philip Golub, ‘The sun sets early on the American Century’, Le Monde Diplomatique, at http://mondediplo.com/2007/10/04empire 

11) Noam Chomsky really existing capitalism talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uuYjUxf6Uk

12) Rob Urie, ‘Capitalism and the Illusion of Democracy’, Counterpunch, 24 April 2020, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/24/capitalism-and-the-illusion-of-democracy/ 

13) Corporate Europe Observatory, 11 April 2016 

https://corporateeurope.org/en/international-trade/2016/04/eus-ttip-position-regulations-be-made-and-big-business

Clare Provost and Matt Kennard, The Guardian 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/10/obscure-legal-system-lets-corportations-sue-states-ttip-icsid

14) Brian Kushnick, ‘Regulatory capture of the FCC – Yime to Clean House’, Huffington Post, 25 March 2013, at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/regulatory-capture-of-the_b_2936693 

15) Tom Wheeler, A goal realized: Network lobbyists sweeping capture of their regulator, Brookings, 14 Dec 2017, at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2017/12/14/a-goal-realized-network-lobbyists-sweeping-capture-of-their-regulator/ 

16) Donald W. Light, Joel Lexchin and Jonathan J. Darrow, ‘Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs’, The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Vol. 41, Issue 3, 1 Oct 2013, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/jlme.12068 

17) Bryan Bowman, ‘Captured: How the Fossil Fuel Industry Took Control of the EPA’, TheGlobePost, 12 March 2019, at https://theglobepost.com/2019/02/01/epa-regulatory-capture/ 

18) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_for_peerages

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The Fatal Consequences of High Atmospheric Methane Levels

January 22nd, 2021 by Dr. Andrew Glikson

It is hard to think of a more Orwellian expression than that describing the increase in toxic atmospheric methane gas as “gas-led recovery.”

Several of the large mass extinctions of species in the geological past are attributed to an increase in atmospheric methane (CH₄), raising the temperature of the atmosphere and depriving the oceans from oxygen. Nowadays a serious danger to the atmosphere and for the life support systems ensues from the accelerated release of methane from melting Arctic permafrost, leaks from ocean sediments and from bogs, triggered by global warming.

As if this was not dangerous enough, now methane is extracted as coal-seam-gas (CSG) by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) of coal and oil shale in the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.

Methane-bearing formations, located about 300m-1000m underground, are fracked using a mixture of water, sand, chemicals and explosives injected into the rock at high pressure, triggering significant amounts of methane leaks into the overlying formations and escaping into the atmosphere (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Schematic illustration of coal-seam-gas fracking (R. Morrison, by permission).

CSG is made primarily of about 95-97% methane, which possesses a radiative greenhouse potential close to X80 times that of carbon dioxide (CO₂). The radiative greenhouse effect of 1 kg methane is equivalent to releasing 84 kg of CO₂ and decreases to 20 and 34 times stronger than CO₂ over a 100-year period.

Global methane deposits (Figure 2) and Australian methane-bearing basins (Figure 3) are proliferating. Fugitive emissions from CSG are already enhancing the concentration of atmospheric methane above drill sites and range from 1 to 9 percent during the total life cycle emissions. The venting of methane from underground coal mines in the Hunter region of New South Wales has led to an atmospheric level in the region of 3,000 parts per billion, with methane levels of 2,000 ppb (parts per billion) extending to some 50 km away from the mines. Peak readings in excess of 3000 ppb represent an amalgamation of plumes from 17 sources. The median concentration within this section was 1820 ppb, with a peak reading of 2110 ppb. Compare this with mean methane values at Mouna Loa, Hawaii, of 1884 ppb.

Figure 2. Global gas hydrate potential regions.

Fugitive methane emissions from natural, urban, agricultural, and energy-production landscapes of eastern Australia. The chemical signature of methane released from fracking is found in the atmosphere points to shale gas operations as the source.

Figure 3. Australian basins, oil and gas resources.

The accumulation of many hundreds of billions tons of unoxidized methane-rich organic matter in Arctic permafrost, methane hydrates in shallow Arctic lakes and seas, bogs, and as emanated from cattle and sheep, has already enhanced global methane growth over the last 40 years at rates up to 14 ppb/year (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Growth of atmospheric methane, Mouna Loa, Hawaii, between 1980-2020 and 2017-2020. NOAA.

The current methane level of 1884 ppb, ~2.5 times the <800 ppb level in 1840AD, indicating a mean growth rate of ~7 ppb/year (Figure 4), is attributable to in part to animal husbandry, permafrost melting, release from marine hydrates and bogs, and in part emissions from shale gas and fracking. as in the United States and Canada.

High levels of methane reduce the amount of oxygen breathed from the air, with health consequences. The toxicity of methane is corroborated in a 2018 study in Pennsylvania showing children born within a mile or two of a gas well were likely to be smaller and less healthy. New York State, Maryland, and Vermont have banned fracking, as have France and Germany.

According to Hansen (2018) reserves of unconventional gas exceed 10,000 GtC (billion tons carbon). Given the scale of methane hydrate deposits around the world (Figure 5), sufficient deposits exist to perpetrate a global mass extinction of species on a geological scale.¹

Figure 5. Estimates of methane held in hydrates worldwide. Estimates of the Methane Held in Hydrates Worldwide. Early estimates for marine hydrates (encompassed by the green region), made before hydrate had been recovered in the marine environment, are high because they assume gas hydrates exist in essentially all the world’s oceanic sediments. Subsequent estimates are lower, but remain widely scattered (encompassed by the blue region) because of continued uncertainty in the non-uniform, heterogeneous distribution of organic carbon from which the methane in hydrate is generated, as well as uncertainties in the efficiency with which that methane is produced and then captured in gas hydrate. Nonetheless, marine hydrates are expected to contain one to two orders of magnitude more methane than exists in natural gas reserves worldwide (brown square) (U.S. Energy Information Administration 2010). Continental hydrate mass estimates (encompassed by the pink region) tend to be about 1 per cent of the marine estimates.

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Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist, Canberra, Australia.

Note

¹ For 2.12 billion ton of carbon (GtC) raising atmospheric CO₂ by 1ppm, and assuming about 50% of CO₂ remaining in the atmosphere, future drilling and fracking could in principle raise atmospheric CO₂ level to about or more than 2000 ppm.

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The US share of the global economy has shrunk dramatically since 1960.  On the other hand, China is on pace to surpass the U.S. in GOP terms in 2030. 

This past week, the United States celebrated another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. King’s murder occurred not a year after he came out in full opposition to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Vietnam, In the spirit of King’s anti-imperialist legacy and in remembrance of the “Cold War” which shaped the historical moment from which King arose, this is a previously unpublished article explaining why the U.S.’ New Cold War on China must be approached from a historical perspective as Biden replaces Trump at the helm of Commander in Chief of imperialism.

On September 3rd, China celebrated the 75th anniversary of its victory against Japanese aggression. Earlier this summer, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) joined Russian military forces to celebrate the anniversary of Victory Day. China and the Soviet Union lost upwards of fifty million people  in total during the Second World War. The end of the Second World War also marked the beginning of the Cold War. Unlike the Second World War, which was largely a war between capitalist countries over the redivision of the world, the Cold War set the stage for a decades-long battle between contending social systems: capitalism and socialism.

The United States came out of World War II as the imperial hegemon and the largest capitalist economy in the world. Despite devastating losses to life and economic infrastructure, the Soviet Union emerged as a global power by employing a socialist model of development. There are many tragedies associated with the “old Cold War” between the United States-led capitalist bloc and the Soviet Union-led socialist bloc. Perhaps the biggest is that the U.S. maintained a monopoly on the ways in which the Cold War has been narrated historically. In the name of defeating the existential threat of socialism, the United States spent more than fifty years downplaying imperial violence during the Cold War as a benign and necessary precondition toward the preservation of democracy and liberty.

At no other point in history has it become more important to remember the casualties of the first Cold War to inform opposition to the New Cold War that has emerged against China. The dangers of the New Cold War against China are clear. According to renowned documentary filmmaker John Pilger, more than 400 military bases form a ring around China in the Asia Pacific.  On July 3rd 2020, two naval aircraft carriers and a B-52 bomber with nuclear capacity were deployed to the South China Sea . The Indo-Pacific Command will be in charge of over fifty percent of all U.S. military assets and sixty percent of U.S. naval assets by the end of 2020. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration has rebranded the Obama Administration’s “Pivot to Asia” with a strategy of “Great Power Competition” at the barrel of a gun.

The U.S.-led New Cold War is not merely fought on the military front. Sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials for evidence-free claims of Uyghur oppression, covert support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for “pro-democracy” protestors in Hong Kong, threats to ban popular Chinese apps such as Tik Tok and WeChat, the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, and a host of other hostile measure have been taken by the United States to foment tensions with China. All of these measures foster an atmosphere of war not dissimilar to the one that existed throughout the latter half of the 20th century. The COVID-19 pandemic, which China contained in three months, has only given the United States further reason to scapegoat China to deflect from its own criminality. And because China possesses a different social system to the United States, peace-loving people should be very much concerned that the U.S. will commit further war crimes in its bid to contain China as it did during the first Cold War.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has only given the United States further reason to scapegoat China to deflect from its own criminality.”

The U.S. operated as a force of mass destruction throughout the duration of its crusade against communism from 1945-1991. U.S.-led covert military operations and occupations were commonplace in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Two of the most notable U.S. occupations in Asia during the Cold War took place in Korea and Vietnam. From 1950-53, the Truman administration deployed weapons of mass destruction to prevent the Korean revolution from uniting the country along socialist lines. Over three million Koreans died over this period and cities such as Pyongyang were completely obliterated by the U.S. strategy of “bombing anything that moved.”  An armistice was signed in 1953, but the U.S. has yet to sign a formal peace treaty to truly put an end to the war.

While the U.S. invasion of Korea is known as the “Forgotten War,” many activists remember the U.S. war in Vietnam as the spark that set the anti-war movement ablaze. The U.S. initially provided indirect support to the brutal puppet regime in South Vietnam after the ouster of French colonial forces in the mid-1950s. However, by the latter half of the 1960s, the U.S. stepped up its campaign to defeat the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. Carpet bombings, torture campaigns, and massacres of women and children were just some of the brutal atrocities conducted by U.S. forces . An estimated four million Vietnamese were killed before the war’s formal end in 1975 and three million liters of deadly toxins of Agent Orange dropped onto Vietnam’s agricultural lands . Both the Vietnamese diaspora and former U.S. soldiers continue to struggle with the wide-ranging biological effects of Agent Orange toxins.

“The U.S. war in Vietnam was the spark that set the anti-war movement ablaze.”

Much of the Cold War was characterized by U.S. coups and proxy wars that installed compliant governments in countries deemed vulnerable to the influence of communism. In 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engineered a coup of the progressive and democratically-elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz’s violent ouster laid the basis for a three-decade long “civil war” that took the lives of over 200,000 Guatemalans, with the U.S. consistently supporting the puppet government militarily throughout the war. Guatemala was but one country in Latin America that was devastated by U.S. Cold War interventions. U.S.-backed contra wars, coups, and death squads murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Brazil, Chile, and Nicaragua over the course of the so-called Cold War.

Africa was viewed as an equally important battleground in the U.S. Cold War against communism. One of the most prominent examples of U.S. meddling in Africa during the Cold War occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The CIA, Belgium, and Congolese elites collaborated to assassinate the nation’s first democratically-elected president, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. In 1966, Ghana’s first post-independence president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup. Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso met a similar fate not two decades later. Each one of these leaders were viewed as threats for their potential to align an independent Africa with the Soviet Union. Their demise laid the basis for the proxy wars, sanctions, and Western financial debt traps that plague the continent to this very day.

This only scratches the surface of the U.S.’ destructive role in the Cold War. Another casualty of the old Cold War was the struggle for a more egalitarian world. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 paved the way for the normalization of capitalist and imperialist ideology, namely the notion that no alternative exists to the U.S. hegemony. All sectors of official society in the U.S. participated in the erasure of the domestic consequences of the Cold War such as the heavy-handed repression of socialists, communists, peace activists, and Black movement leaders throughout the 20th century. Hegemonic imperial narratives of American exceptionalism concocted and repeated ad nauseam since the fall of the socialist bloc have justified the decline of living standards for much of the world, including workers and poor people in the U.S.

A New Cold War against China has emerged from this backdrop to shine a light on a changing global landscape. China survived the onslaught of U.S. unipolar dominance and Cold War hostilities by integrating into the global capitalist economy. Few remember that China was once a very poor country that found itself completely isolated diplomatically and economically for more than two decades after the Chinese Revolution of 1949. China is no longer in such a position. China not only carries prestige in world affairs as the second largest economy in the world, but is also highly integrated with the economies of both the Global South and the Western world in ways that the Soviet Union was not.

China’s rise has also come during a period of U.S. decline in many areas, not least in the economic realm. The U.S. share of the global economy has shrunk dramatically since 1960.  On the other hand, China is on pace to surpass the U.S. in GDP terms by 2030. This is likely to accelerate due to the role that the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 in the United States is playing in sinking the U.S. capitalist economy into a prolonged depression. The Trump administration has thus taken the position that if the U.S. cannot compete with China economically, then it will use whatever weapons possible to bully China into submitting to the dictates of the United States.

Make no mistake, the New Cold War against China is a bipartisan project. Biden and Trump used a great portion of the 2020 presidential election campaign to chastise each other over who is softer on China. The bipartisan character of the New Cold War is most starkly represented by the recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in July. Both chambers of Congress agreed to counter the “China threat” with a two billion dollar increase in the defense spending budget from 738 billion to 740 billion for fiscal year 2021. While Republican Congressmen Mitt Romney, Joshua Hawley, and Jim Inofe have been the most visible advocates of increased military hostilities toward China, the Democratic Party has done little to nothing to stem the tide of the New Cold War.

What this means is that the military industrial complex and its handful of private contractors have free reign to use anti-China hostilities to fuel a dangerous militarization of the Asia Pacific. The influence of the military industrial complex in the New Cold War against China is clearly spelled out in the Trump administration’s approval of up to ten billion USD worth in arms sales to Taiwan —a blatant violation of the One China policy. That the New Cold War against China is quite literally being fought on China’s doorstep should be enough to garner opposition from peace loving people in the United States and the world at large.

However, there are many more reasons why the U.S.’ New Cold War should be rejected. Increased hostilities toward China come at a time when U.S.-based workers are facing a devastating economic crisis on top of a pandemic that the U.S. government has utterly failed to contain. Furthermore, the U.S. has absolutely no authority to lecture China or any other nation on the treatment of ethnic minorities. Massive protests occurred nearly every day over the summer to protest the regularity with which Black Americans such as George Floyd are killed by U.S. police departments and incarcerated in U.S. jails.

Lastly, support for the New Cold War against China has reached dangerous levels of popularity in the United States. Over seventy percent of people in the U.S. hold a negative view of China. Anti-China racism is nearly two centuries old, and has been encouraged by both political parties in recent years to deflect blame onto China for the negative effects of globalization. Blaming China for U.S. economic policy detracts from the solidarity that is needed to address pressing global problems such as poverty, climate change, and war. No amount of hatred toward China will change the fact that its economic influence is here to stay. China will be a global leader in high-tech industrial production, green technology, and infrastructure development for years to come. The only question is whether the people of the United States will continue to abide by a hostile posture toward China which serves no one but the ultra-rich overlords of the American Empire.

This question cannot be answered without reference to historical memory. Tens of millions were sacrificed by the old Cold War to fulfill U.S. foreign policy objectives. The U.S. remains dedicated to endless war and its New Cold War against China only makes the world a more dangerous place for humanity. U.S. military expansion in the Asia Pacific only adds to the possibility of catastrophic confrontations between the U.S. and China, or more likely China and its regional neighbors. A more peaceful world where domestic and international problems can be resolved is only possible if and when the U.S. is forced to relate to other countries on the basis of cooperation and respect for self-determination.

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Danny Haiphong is a contributing editor to Black Agenda Report and co-author of the book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. Follow his work on Twitter @SpiritofHo and on Youtube as co-host with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report Present’s: The Left Lens. You can support Danny at www.patreon.com/dannyhaiphong.

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Biden’s Mask-Wearing Mandate

January 22nd, 2021 by Stephen Lendman

Biden and his press agent media won’t explain what’s vital for everyone to know.

On his first day in office as selected, not elected, president, he signed a blizzard of executive orders.

Among them was mandatory wearing of face masks in federal buildings and on its land. More on this below.

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Face masks don’t protect and risk harm to health from extended use.

Porous to permit breathing, minuscule viral spores penetrate them easily, concentrate, and are inhaled.

When masked, normal breathing is impaired and exhaled air can go into eyes and irritate them.

Noted neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock explained the following about their use:

“As for the scientific support for the use of face masks, a recent careful examination of the literature, in which 17 of the best studies were analyzed, concluded that:”

“None of the studies established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”

“(N)o studies have been done to demonstrate that either a cloth mask or the N95 mask has any effect on transmission of the COVID-19 virus.”

“Any recommendations, therefore, have to be based on studies of influenza virus transmission.”

“The fact is, there is no conclusive evidence of their efficiency in controlling flu virus transmission.”

Dr. Jim Meehan cited the following reasons why face masks aren’t needed and don’t work:

“Masks are ineffective, unnecessary and harmful,” noting peer-reviewed data. The don’t protect as falsely claimed.

“Risks outweigh the benefits.”

“Your CO2 inhalation is increased to dangerous levels.”

“Viral particles move through face masks with relative ease.”

“Your mask is a petri dish experiment” by permitting viral spores to penetrate, concentrate in nasal passages, “enter the olfactory nerves and travel to the brain.”

“Asymptomatic transmission of (covid…aka seasonal flu) does not occur to any significant level.”

Studies showed that “masked subjects were infected at the same rate as unmasked subjects.”

“You can take vitamin D,” C, and zinc for protection.

Reported numbers of covid cases “are deceptive.” Positive PCR tests are nearly always false.

“Successful, proven, affordable treatments exist” — harmful to health vaccines not needed.

The safe, effective, inexpensive treatment includes:

  • HCQ 200 mg tabs #16 (hydroxychloroquine)
  • Zinc sulfate 22O mg (or elemental Zinc 50 mg) # 15
  • Azithromycin 500 mg # 5 (Z pack) or
  • Doxycycline 100 mg # 10
  • Ivermectin 3 mg tabs #8 are also effective and safe.

Dr. Meehan explained that “(y)ou fight this virus with truth…Healthy people should not wear face masks.”

Voluntary house arrest under lockdown and quarantine do enormous harm and no good.

“Never before had anyone beaten a virus by quarantining the healthy,” said Meehan.

“We were not told that quarantining healthy people was a first-of-its kind experiment. And the experiment failed.”

We’re told and increasingly mandated to do polar opposite to what benefits health and well-being.

“(E)vidence shows that (when) healthy people (wear) face masks, (they pose) serious health risks to wearers” from extended use.

What’s gone on since early last year reflects “political agendas, symbolism, fear, and dividing and isolating the people.”

“It has nothing to do with science.”

“As a physician and former medical journal editor, I’ve carefully read the scientific literature regarding the use of face masks to mitigate viral transmission.”

“I believe the public health experts have community wearing of masks all wrong.”

Their use “decrease(s) oxygen, increase(s) carbon dioxide, and alter(s) breathing in ways that increase susceptibility and severity of” seasonal flu renamed covid.

“Mask wearers frequently report symptoms of difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, headache, lightheadedness, dizziness, anxiety, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and other subjective symptoms while wearing medical masks.”

Despite scientific evidence about ineffective, potential harm from wearing face masks, incremental mandating of their use perhaps is heading toward requiring them for access to public places.

Biden’s executive order falsely claimed that he’s “relying on the best available data and science-based public health measures (sic),” adding:

“Such measures include wearing masks when around others, physical distancing, and other related precautions (sic).”

“(T)o protect the federal workforce and individuals interacting with the federal workforce, and to ensure the continuity of government services and activities, on-duty or on-site federal employees, on-site federal contractors, and other individuals in federal buildings and on federal lands should all wear masks, maintain physical distance, and adhere to other public health measures (sic).”

Complying with the above will have no positive effect on personal or public health — just possible harm from extended use of face masks.

Biden’s order also “encourag(es) masking across America. Will mandating it follow?

Will going unmasked in public places be criminalized ahead and subject to punishment?

Will removing face masks for dining in restaurants risk punishment if caught?

Will mass-vaxxing with hazardous to health, experimental, inadequately tested, DNA altering,  vaccines be mandated?

Will Biden’s executive order be followed by numerous other repressive ones and congressional legislation that aim to replace remaining freedoms with tyranny?

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is from The White House Facebook

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The Biden administration will continue to recognize Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela and maintain devastating sanctions. For Venezuelans, there is no lesser evil — imperialism is bipartisan.

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Anthony Blinken, President-Elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, has announced that the incoming administration will continue to recognize Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela. He made the remarks on Tuesday, adding that Biden would also continue sanctions on the country but target them “more effectively.” These actions are part of the United States’ ongoing effort to oust President Nicolas Maduro. 

In January of 2019, the government of Donald Trump, supported by far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, attempted a military coup against the Maduro government. The plan, orchestrated by Mike Pompeo and Elliot Abrahams, was to install right-wing opposition leader Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela.

A few days after the failed coup attempt, tens of thousands mobilized in Caracas to watch Guaido swear himself in as interim president. Guaido argued that the 2018 elections, which saw Maduro elected to a second six-year term, were unconstitutional and illegitimate. He went on to say that he would use “the full weight of United States economic and diplomatic power to press for the restoration of Venezuelan democracy,” oblivious to the macabre irony of his statement.

In addition to the failed coup, Venezuela has been subjected to cruel U.S. sanctions and economic blockades, even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. These measures, together with the disastrous administration of President Maduro, have had devastating consequences for Venezuelans.

Biden’s recognition of Guaido as the president of Venezuela demonstrates that these aggressive imperialist policies will continue under his government. Even during the presidential campaign, he often sought to out-flank Trump from the right with anti-Venezuelan chauvinism, referring to Maduro as a “thug” and “dictator” whom he would be tough on.

Imperialism is a bipartisan affair in the United States — Republicans and Democrats alike have helped foment military coups and install governments aligned with U.S. interests to plunder Latin America’s resources. For the region’s masses, there is no lesser evil.

How can the bipartisan regime speak of restoring democracy to justify military interventions, coups, and regime changes when the decline of U.S. democracy has been exposed by the assault on the Capitol and the profound delegitimization of U.S. institutions?

Socialists must be anti-imperialists. The Left in the United States has the obligation to organize the struggle against the Biden government with an anti-imperialist perspective and to denounce the coup attempts, sanctions, and economic blockades against Venezuela, Cuba and the rest of Latin America.

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Otto is a psychology PhD student in New York City and former English teacher.

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Boris Johnson Has Done Modi a Favour

January 22nd, 2021 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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This Week’s Most Popular Articles

January 22nd, 2021 by Global Research News

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On Friday, January 22, people in cities and towns across in the United States and around the world, will celebrate the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Those gathering, online and elsewhere, stand in sharp contrast with the electric sense of fear felt by policy makers and others that President Trump might push the nuclear button in the immediate aftermath of his failed coup. With President Trump facing possible criminal conviction and terminal bankruptcy, and having the power to initiate nuclear war on his own authority, Nancy Pelosi had good reason to press the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, to ensure that the president couldn’t take us all with him as he went down. For several days, headlines focused on the danger of nuclear war, which should facilitate arms control and disarmament advocacy in coming months.

For decades, absent such desperate circumstances, many world leaders and policy makers have understood that accidents and miscalculations—including the belief the nuclear war can be fought and won—could lead to nuclear catastrophe and urged action to eliminate nuclear weapons. A year before President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev went “eyeball to eyeball” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, speaking from the dais of the U.N. General Assembly, Kennedy warned:

“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” The weapons of war, he urged “must be abolished before they abolish us.”

Since that day, during international crises and wars—on at least 24 occasions—U.S. presidents have prepared and/or threatened to initiate nuclear war. Similarly, leaders of each of the eight other nuclear powers has made similar threats at least once. Human survival indeed hangs from the slenderest of threads, a reality confirmed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists expert panel who have set their Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest to catastrophe since the clock was created in 1953 at the height of the Cold War.

During the 75 years since the unnecessary and functionally criminal indiscriminate atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, A-bomb survivors, scientists and physicians, scholars, community-based activists, diplomats and many national leaders have worked to prevent apocalypse and to create a nuclear weapons-free world.

A high point came in 1970 when, after years of protests, diplomacy and negotiations, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty came into effect. This seminal treaty was a grand bargain made between the nuclear haves and have nots. In exchange for the non-nuclear weapons states foreswearing development or possession of nuclear weapons, the nuclear powers recognized their right to generate nuclear power for peaceful purposes (a mistake) and, in article XI, committed to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

Refusing to compromise their omnicidal power and bowing to the interests of their respective military-industrial complexes, the “good faith” negotiations never occurred. India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have since become nuclear powers, thus increasing the threats to human survival. Quantitative and qualitative nuclear arms races also followed, with the United States now on track to spend $2 trillion (an unimaginable sum) to replace its entire nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems.

Concerned about the prospects for human survival, and with the nuclear powers refusing to take meaningful steps year after year to fulfill their Article VI commitment, countries as diverse as Sweden, South Africa, Ireland and Mexico sought a means to break through the nuclear powers’ rationale; that national security concerns and the need to maintain nuclear deterrence required the maintenance of “modernization” of their nuclear arsenals. In 2013 the non-nuclear weapons states found their way to the obvious alternative paradigm: what nuclear weapons do to people.

The first of three Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons conferences, held in Oslo that year, diplomats from 127 nations and civil society activists gathered to learn what nuclear weapons actually do and the dangers they represent. At the second conference, held the following year in Nayarit, Mexico, with all the nuclear powers absent except North Korea, conference organizers felt free to begin the conference with the testimonies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors. They described their suffering, losses, and the literal “Hell on earth” that they had witnessed, and they repeated their fundamental truth that “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” Power point presentations by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Chatham House in London demonstrated why no institution can meaningfully respond to the massive death and destruction inflicted by a single nuclear weapons detonation in a city.

The most telling moment in Nayarit came when, after hearing these testimonies and details about nuclear weapons “modernizations” and warfighting doctrines, a young African diplomat rose. With his pleading arms outstretched, he cried out “What are these people thinking?”

The outcome of the third and final Humanitarian Consequences conference, held in Vienna in December, 2014, was sealed shortly after it began. Following opening statements came the testimonies by a courageous Hiroshima survivor and an Australian Maori who described the deadly impacts of uranium mining. These framed the conference, but the coup de grace came from a woman who was assisted onto the stage in her wheelchair. Beginning with a heartrending cry that “My government has killed me” and in her passionate and unscripted speech, she explained how fallout from nuclear weapons testing (underground as well as atmospheric) had sickened her with cancer and taken the lives of many patriotic citizens of St. George, Utah. No one in the Palace hall was left unmoved, and the pathetic rebuttal by the U.S. ambassador was painfully embarrassing to all.

Following speech after speech by the assembled diplomats, the conference closed with the Austrian government’s pledge, joined by nearly all of the participating states. It reiterated the risks posed by nuclear weapons, described what it termed as the “legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons” that must be filled (i.e. a means to hold the nuclear powers accountable to Article VI of the NPT,  and urged governments to join Austria in taking action to reduce the dangers of nuclear war).

That appeal led to the convening in 2017 of negotiations at the United Nations which concluded with the promulgation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by 122 governments—none of them nuclear weapons states.

Having secured the necessary ratifications, the Treaty enters into Force on January 22, 2021. While opposed by the nuclear weapons states and their military allies, the Treaty further undermines the legitimacy of nuclear weapons and is designed to reinforce the NPT. It prohibits the development, production, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, transfer, stationing, installation, and the threat to use nuclear weapons. Among its most important articles are those that forbid non-nuclear weapon states to assist the nuclear activities of the nuclear powers, for example refueling nuclear-capable bombers, the mandate to assist nuclear weapons victims, and the requirement that Treaty nations “encourage States not party to this Treaty to sign, ratify, accept, approve or accede to the Treaty.” “Encouragement” could take many forms: lobbying government officials, funding nuclear disarmament advocates, discouraging investments from corporations and financial institutions involved in the production of nuclear weapons. Ultimately, even sanctions!

There are no guarantees that the TPNW will move any of the nuclear powers, all of which are spending vast fortunes to upgrade their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, and whose political systems are deeply influenced by their military-industrial complexes. The authors of the Prohibition Treaty understand that there are no short cuts to universalizing adherence to the treaty. They know that road to nuclear weapons-free world is a long and difficult one.

While activists in the United States take inspiration and encouragement from the TPNW, over the next several years, the most critically important campaigning will be in the so-called “umbrella states.”  These are the NATO nations, others in the Asia-Pacific, and the Russian dominated Commonwealth of Independent States, functionally protectorates that rely on the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. Should one or more of these dependent states break ranks by signing and ratifying the Treaty, it will threaten to unravel the political fabric of the world’s nuclear disorder.

That possibility is not farfetched. A massive majority of Japanese want their government to sign the TPNW. Australia’s Labor Party, which was narrowly defeated in the country’s 2019 election, is committed to signing the treaty. And in the Netherlands a parliamentary majority voted in favor on the Treaty.

Those of us here in the United States who have confronted the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and understand the urgency of nuclear disarmament have our own work cut out for us. In addition to doing all that we can to preserve constitutional democracy, to stanch the pandemic, and support revitalization of our economy, we can hold President Biden’s feet to the fire. He has pledged to extend the New START Treaty with Russia, due to expire in February, and to rejoin the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran. Biden previously stated his opposition to the U.S. “first use” nuclear warfighting doctrine that could lead to miscalculations and “use them or lose them” missile launches by U.S. rivals. With Senator Markey and others in Congress urging a no first use policy, we should be encouraging our president to spend his political capital to ensure human survival.

And, as we look for the funds to revitalize our pandemic ravaged economy, we should be encouraging the president (and Congress) to act on his doubts about the value of replacing U.S. ground-based ICBMs and standoff cruise missiles which undermine rather than augment our real security.

The TPNW provides an encouraging opening. Human survival could well depend on taking advantage of it.

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Joseph Gerson is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmaent and Common Security, Co-founder of the Committee for a SANE U.S. China Policy and Vice President of the International Peace Bureau. His books include Empire and the Bomb, and With Hiroshima Eyes.

WHO Finally Admits COVID-19 PCR Test Has a ‘Problem’

January 22nd, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

In an “inauguration” of its own while Joe Biden was being sworn into office, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated new rules regarding the PCR assays used for testing for COVID-19.

Even though they’ve been widely used across the U.S. and around the world to determine who has a positive case of COVID, PCR assays are not designed to be used as diagnostic tools, as they can’t distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones.

Besides that, previously, the WHO had recommended 45 “amplification” cycles of the test to determine whether someone was positive for COVID or not.

The thing is, the more cycles that a test goes through, the more likely that a false positive will come up — anything over 30 cycles actually magnifies the samples so much that even insignificant sequences of viral DNA end up being magnified to the point that the test reads positive even if your viral load is extremely low or the virus is inactive and poses no threat to you or anyone else.

What that means in plain language is that the more cycles a test goes through, the more false positives that are reported.

Now, with the WHO’s lower PCR thresholds, it’s practically guaranteed that COVID “case” numbers will automatically drop dramatically around the world.

Here’s in-part what the WHO notice says:

Users of IVDs must read and follow the IFU carefully to determine if manual adjustment of the PCR positivity threshold is recommended by the manufacturer.

WHO guidance Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 states that careful interpretation of weak positive results is needed (1). The cycle threshold (Ct) needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to the patient’s viral load. Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.

WHO reminds IVD users that disease prevalence alters the predictive value of test results; as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases (2). This means that the probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity.

Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.

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US President Biden: How to Deal With China

January 22nd, 2021 by Tom Clifford

The lexicon has changed. Words and phrases that seemed to define our world until quite recently now belong to a bygone era. Remember BRICs? The grouping of the next economic superpowers. Well, Brazil, Russia, India and China now resemble a brash start-up promising a whole new way of doing things only to fall out among themselves.

Pivot to Asia? US forces redeploying. For what? Washington’s response has been half-hearted and ponderous. The South China Sea has been turned into a Chinese military zone. End of story. No amount of US redeploying will change that fact on the ground or in this case on the sea.

OK, how about Belt and Road? China was going to establish new markets along the traditional trade routes on both land and sea. We are not masking the truth when we acknowledge that in a time of COVID these trade routes will not be as active as once envisaged. And the Thucydides Trap? This suggested that a rising power challenging an established power will probably end in conflict. From China’s point of view that type of talk is redundant. China is no longer rising, it has emerged. No conflict.

Sanctions on China? Exports from China to the US rose 7.9 percent over 2019 to $45.2 billion despite tariff hikes on most Chinese goods by the Trump administration. You can hardly blame them in Beijing if they are asking for more sanctions.

Make America Great Again? America always was great not just through its economic muscle but because, at its best, it inspired. The American dream was not fantasy. But the storming of Congress showed an ugly side, a brush with fascism, that its opponents, China among them, will capitalise on.   After the storming many US politicians repeated, on cue, the mantra “This is not who we are.”

In Asia and China they asked, who are you? There have been times when it was who you were. The treatment of Native Americans, the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala, at the behest if the United Fruit Company opposing labor reforms, Allende overthrown and killed in 1973 in Chile, yes on 9/11.  Marcos in the Philippines. There are many more instances. Washington has a long history of organizing the storming of parliaments in other countries.

The main problem facing the administration of US President Joe Biden is how to deal with China, how to work with it. Climate change, and the urgent need to tackle it, dictates that the Beijing dictatorship is embraced rather than shunned. Besides, establishing an anti-China coalition is pointless. There are countries in Africa, South America and Europe that just won’t buy, literally, into any such a sentiment.  Australia, Japan and South Korea have had and hope to have, a profitable relationship with China, even allowing for setbacks. The US has to mend fences, not lecture, after the Trump debacle. The tombstone of failed leadership on the grave marking US abandonment of international obligations reads; the Paris Agreement, the World Health Organization, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership; NATO; weakened World Trade Organization; and imposed trade barriers on Washington’s closest allies.

Biden has his work cut out. But China and the US are not enemies. They share common interests, such as climate change and the battle against the pandemic.  China also faces huge challenges. In the rush to modernize its environment has paid a heavy toll. Its banking system is sclerotic. To describe it as Dickensian would be to give it a veneer of efficiency it does not merit. The largest note in domestic circulation is the 100 yuan bill (US$16 approx). The main reasons for this are fear of counterfeiting and to prevent large amounts of cash leaving the country. China urgently needs to introduce foreign competition and expertise to reform its financial sector.  Then there is human rights.  Xinjiang is a stain on China’s reputation and Beijing will be increasingly accountable for what is happening there. The great hope of Chinese modernizers that affluence would lead to more openness seems cruelly dashed. Chinese President Xi Jinping has one goal: to enhance the party’ leading role in society. In short, he believes that too much prosperity can damage the party’s health and that it lost too much ground in the years of largely coastal-region affluence, roughly 1990-2008, post Tiananmen to the financial crisis.

China will not be bullied but that does not mean Washington acquiesces.

Yes, the US is back. But China has arrived. Biden will be the first US president to deal with this. It will require a new lexicon.

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L’Onu proibisce le armi nucleari e l’Italia che fa?

January 22nd, 2021 by Manlio Dinucci

Entra in vigore il Trattato Onu che proibisce le armi nucleari, ma la Nato proibisce all’Italia di aderirvi. Il governo non vede, non sente e non parla. Restano così in Italia, paese “non-nucleare”, le vecchie bombe nucleari Usa tra poco sostituite dalle nuove.

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Oggi, 22 gennaio 2021, è il giorno che può passare alla storia come il tornante per liberare l’umanità da quelle armi che, per la prima volta, hanno la capacità di cancellare dalla faccia della Terra la specie umana e quasi ogni altra forma di vita. Entra infatti in vigore oggi il Trattato Onu sulla proibizione delle armi nucleari. Può essere però anche il giorno in cui entra in vigore un trattato destinato, come i tanti precedenti, a restare sulla carta. La possibilità di eliminare le armi nucleari dipende da tutti noi.

Qual è la situazione dell’Italia e cosa dovremmo fare per contribuire all’obiettivo di un mondo libero dalle armi nucleari? L’Italia, paese formalmente non-nucleare, ha concesso da decenni il proprio territorio per lo schieramento di armi nucleari Usa: attualmente bombe B61, che tra non molto saranno sostituite dalle più micidiali B61-12. Fa inoltre parte dei paesi che – documenta la Nato – «forniscono all’Alleanza aerei equipaggiati per trasportare bombe nucleari, su cui gli Stati uniti mantengono l’assoluto controllo, e personale addestrato a tale scopo». Inoltre, vi è la possibilità che vengano installati sul nostro territorio i missili nucleari a raggio intermedio (analoghi agli euromissili degli anni Ottanta) che gli Usa stanno costruendo dopo aver stracciato il Trattato Inf che li proibiva.

Carico di missili su un aereo F-16 nella base aerea statunitense di Aviano, Pordenone

In tal modo l’Italia viola il Trattato di non-proliferazione delle armi nucleari, ratificato nel 1975, che stabilisce: «Ciascuno degli Stati militarmente non nucleari, parte del Trattato, si impegna a non ricevere da chicchessia armi nucleari, né il controllo su tali armi, direttamente o indirettamente». Allo stesso tempo l’Italia ha rifiutato nel 2017 il Trattato Onu sulla abolizione delle armi nucleari – boicottato da tutti e trenta i paesi della Nato e dai 27 dell’Unione europea – il quale stabilisce: «Ciascuno Stato parte che abbia sul proprio territorio armi nucleari, possedute o controllate da un altro Stato, deve assicurare la rapida rimozione di tali armi».

L’Italia, sulla scia di Usa e Nato, si è opposta al Trattato fin dall’apertura dei negoziati, decisa dalla Assemblea generale nel 2016. Gli Stati uniti e le altre due potenze nucleari della Nato (Francia e Gran Bretagna), gli altri paesi dell’Alleanza e i suoi principali partner – Israele (unica potenza nucleare in Medioriente), Giappone, Australia, Ucraina – votarono contro. Espressero così parere contrario anche le altre potenze nucleari: Russia e Cina (astenutasi), India, Pakistan e Nord Corea. Facendo eco a Washington, il governo Gentiloni definì il futuro Trattato «un elemento fortemente divisivo che rischia di compromettere i nostri sforzi a favore del disarmo nucleare».

Il governo e il parlamento italiani sono quindi corresponsabili del fatto che il Trattato sull’abolizione delle armi nucleari – approvato a grande maggioranza dall’Assemblea generale delle Nazioni Unite nel 2017 ed entrato in vigore avendo raggiunto le 50 ratifiche – è stato ratificato in Europa fino ad oggi solo da Austria, Irlanda, Santa Sede, Malta e San Marino: atto meritevole ma non sufficiente a a dare forza al Trattato.

Nel 2017, mentre l’Italia rifiutava il Trattato Onu sulla abolizione delle armi nucleari, oltre 240 parlamentari – in maggior parte del Pd e M5S, con in prima fila l’attuale ministro degli Esteri Luigi Di Maio – si impegnavano solennemente, firmando l’Appello Ican, a promuovere l’adesione dell’Italia al Trattato Onu. In tre anni non hanno mosso un dito in tale direzione. Dietro coperture demagogiche o apertamente il Trattato Onu sull’abolizione delle armi nucleari viene boicottato in parlamento, con qualche rara eccezione, dall’intero arco politico, concorde nel legare l’Italia alla sempre più pericolosa politica della Nato, ufficialmente «Alleanza nucleare».

Tutto questo va ricordato oggi, nella Giornata di azione globale indetta per l’entrata in vigore del Trattato Onu sulla proibizione delle armi nucleari, celebrata da attivisti dell’Ican e altri movimenti anti-nucleari con 160 eventi per la maggior parte in Europa e Nordamerica. Occorre trasformare la Giornata in mobilitazione permanente e crescente di un ampio fronte capace, in ciascun paese e a livello internazionale, di imporre le scelte politiche necessarie a realizzare l’obiettivo vitale del Trattato.

Manlio Dinucci

 

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The Making of US Empire at the Dawning of Its End

January 22nd, 2021 by Pepe Escobar

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

As the Exceptional Empire gets ready to brave a destructive – and self-destructive – new cycle, with dire, unforeseen consequences bound to reverberate across the world, now more than ever it is absolutely essential to go back to the imperial roots.

The task is fully accomplished by Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, by Stephen Wertheim, Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

Here, in painstaking detail, we can find when, why and especially who shaped the contours of US “internationalism” in a roomful of mirrors always disguising the real, ultimate aim: Empire.

Wertheim’s book was superbly reviewed by Prof. Paul Kennedy. Here we will concentrate on the crucial plot twists taking place throughout 1940. Wertheim’s main thesis is that the fall of France in 1940 – and not Pearl Harbor – was the catalyzing event that led to the full Imperial Hegemony design.

This is not a book about the U.S. industrial-military complex or the inner workings of American capitalism and finance capitalism. It is extremely helpful as it sets up the preamble to the Cold War era. But most of all, it is gripping intellectual history, revealing how American foreign policy was manufactured by the real flesh and blood actors that count: the economic and political planners congregated by the arch-influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the conceptual core of the imperial matrix.

Behold Exceptionalist nationalism

If just one phrase should capture the American missionary drive, this is it: “The United States was born of exceptionalist nationalism, imagining itself providentially chosen to occupy the vanguard of world history”. Wertheim nailed it by drawing from a wealth of sources on exceptionalism, especially Anders Stephanson’s Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of the Right.

The action starts in early 1940, when the State Dept. formed a small advisory committee in collaboration with the CFR, constituted as a de facto proto-national security state.

The CFR’s postwar planning project was known as the War and Peace Studies, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and boasting a sterling cross-section of the American elite, divided into four groups.

The most important were the Economic and Financial Group, headed by the “American Keynes”, Harvard economist Alvin Hansen, and the Political Group, headed by businessman Whitney Shepardson. CFR planners were inevitably transposed to the core of the official postwar planning committee set up after Pearl Harbor.

A crucial point: the Armaments Group was headed by none other than Allen Dulles, then just a corporate lawyer, years before he became the nefarious, omniscient CIA mastermind fully deconstructed by David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard.

Wertheim details the fascinating, evolving intellectual skirmishes along the first eight months of WWII, when the prevailing consensus among the planners was to concentrate on the Western Hemisphere only, and not indulge in “balance of power” overseas adventures. As in let the Europeans fight it out; meanwhile, we profit.

The fall of France in May-June 1940 – the world’s top army melting down in five weeks – was the game-changer, much more than Pearl Harbor 18 months later. This is how the planners interpreted it: if Britain were the next domino to fall, totalitarianism would control Eurasia.

Wertheim zeroes in on the defining “threat” for the planners: Axis dominance would prevent the United States “from driving world history. Such a threat proved unacceptable to U.S. elites”. That’s what led to an expanded definition of national security: the U.S. could not afford to be simply “isolated” within the Western Hemisphere. The path ahead was inevitable: to shape world order as the supreme military power.

So it was the prospect of a Nazi-shaped world order – and not U.S. security – that shook foreign policy elites in the summer of 1940 to build the intellectual foundations of global U.S. hegemony.

Of course there was a “lofty ideal” component: the U.S. would not be able to fulfill its God-given mission to lead the world towards a better future. But there was also a much more pressing practical matter: this world order might be closed to liberal U.S. trade.

Even as the tides of war changed afterwards, the interventionist argument ultimately prevailed: after all, the whole of Eurasia could (italics in the book) eventually, fall under totalitarianism.

It’s always about “world order”

Initially, the fall of France forced Roosevelt’s planners to concentrate on a minimum hegemonic area. So by midsummer 1940, the CFR groups, plus the military, came up with the so-called “quarter sphere”: Canada down to northern South America.

They were still assuming that the Axis would dominate Europe and parts of the Middle East and North Africa. As Wertheim notes, “American interventionists often portrayed Germany’s dictator as a master of statecraft, prescient, clever and bold.”

Then, at the request of the State Dept., the crucial CFR’s Economic and Financial Group worked feverishly from August to October to design the next step: integrating the Western Hemisphere with the Pacific Basin.

That was a totally myopic Eurocentric focus (by the way, Asia barely registers on Wertheim’s narrative). The planners assumed that Japan – even rivaling the US, and three years into the invasion of mainland China – could somehow be incorporated, or bribed into a non-Nazi area.

Then they finally hit the jackpot: join the Western Hemisphere, the British empire and the Pacific basin into a so-called “great residual area”: that is, the entire non-Nazi dominated world except the USSR.

They found out that if Nazi Germany would dominate Europe, the U.S. would have to dominate everywhere else (italics mine). That was the logical conclusion based on the planners’ initial assumptions.

That’s when U.S. foreign policy for the next 80 years was born: the U.S. had to wield “unquestionable power”, as stated in the CFR planners “recommendation” to the State Dept., delivered on October 19 in a memorandum titled “Needs of Future United States Foreign Policy”.

This “Grand Area” was the brainchild of the CFR’s Economic and Financial Group. The Political Group was not impressed. The Grand Area implied a post-war peace arrangement that was in fact a Cold War between Germany and Anglo-America. Not good enough.

But how to sell total domination to American public opinion without that sounding “imperialistic”, similar to what the Axis was doing in Europe and Asia? Talk about a huge P.R. problem.

In the end, U.S. elites always came back to the same foundation stone of American exceptionalism: should there be any Axis supremacy in Europe and Asia, the U.S. manifest destiny of defining the path ahead for world history would be denied.

As Walter Lippmann succinctly – and memorably – put it: “Ours is the new order. It was to found this order and to develop it that our forefathers came here. In this order we exist. Only in this order can we live”.

That would set up the pattern for the subsequent 80 years. Roosevelt, only a few days after he was elected for a third term, stated it was the United States that “truly and fundamentally…was a new order”.

It’s chilling to be reminded that 30 years ago, even before unleashing  the first Shock and Awe over Iraq, Papa Bush defined it as the crucible of a “new world order” (incidentally, the speech was delivered exactly 11 years before 9/11).

Henry Kissinger has been marketing “world order” for six decades. The number one U.S foreign policy mantra is “rules-based international order”: rules, of course, set unilaterally by the Hegemon at the end of WWII.

American Century redux

What came out of the 1940 policy planning orgy was encapsulated by a succinct mantra featured in the legendary February 17, 1941 essay in Life magazine by publishing mogul Henry Luce:  “American Century”.

Only six months earlier planners were at best satisfied with a hemispheric role in an Axis-led world future. Now they went winner takes all: “complete opportunity of leadership”, in Luce’s words. In early 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, the American Century went mainstream – and never left.

That sealed the primacy of Power Politics. If American interests were global, so should be American political and military power.

Luce even used Third Reich terminology: “Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space. But Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny.” Unlike Hitler’s, the unbounded ambition of American elites prevailed.

Until now. It looks and feels like the empire is entering a James Cagney Made it, Ma. Top of the World! moment – rotting from within, 9/11 merging into 1/6 in a war against “domestic terrorism” – while still nurturing toxic dreams of imposing uncontested global “leadership”.

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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.

The US State Department designated Yemen’s Houthi movement — the most effective force in fighting al-Qaeda — as a “terrorist” organization. Meanwhile Washington and Saudi Arabia have supported al-Qaeda.

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The United States government has designated the main enemy of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the Houthi movement, as a terrorist organization, after spending years backing al-Qaeda in the country.

Like the US-led wars on Syria, Libya, former Yugoslavia, and 1980s Afghanistan, Yemen represents an example of an armed conflict where Washington has supported al-Qaeda and similar Salafi-jihadist extremists in order to foment regime change and extend its hegemony.

Since March 2015, the United States has helped oversee a catastrophic war on Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, aiding Saudi Arabia as it launched tens of thousands of air strikes on its southern neighbor, bombing the impoverished nation into rubble — and unleashing the largest humanitarian crisis on Earth.

Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died in this US-backed war. Tens of millions of civilians have been pushed to the brink of famine, as a result of intentional US-backed Saudi targeting of food production. Yemen’s health infrastructure was ravaged by the Western-sponsored bombing, precipitating the worst cholera outbreak in recorded history.

Throughout the war, al-Qaeda and other Salafi-jihadist groups have metastasized across the south of Yemen. The spread of these dangerous extremists is not a mere coincidence; it is the result of US government policy choices.

For years, forces in Yemen backed by the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have fought in alliance with al-Qaeda. (And it is not the only ongoing conflict in the Middle East where the terror group has been allied with Washington. Former top Hillary Clinton advisor Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security advisor, chirped in a 2012 email, “AQ is on our side in Syria.”)

There is overwhelming evidence exposing this de facto alliance between Washington and al-Qaeda. It has been documented even by mainstream corporate media outlets, from the Associated Press to the Wall Street Journal.

Western governments and Gulf monarchies are allied with al-Qaeda in Yemen because they share a common enemy: the Houthis, an indigenous, politically orientated Shia movement that emerged out of local struggles to resist Saudi Arabia’s extremist Wahhabi influence in the northern border area of Yemen.

The Houthis, who officially call themselves Ansar Allah, govern the northern regions of Yemen, where the majority of the population lives. They took control of the country after overthrowing an unelected and deeply corrupt US-backed authoritarian regime on September 21, 2014, in what they dubbed the September 21 Revolution.

Since March 2015, the United States and its allies Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have proven unable to dislodge Ansar Allah from power. In desperation, the coalition has collectively punished the entire Yemeni civilian population, destroying much of the country around them in the process.

On January 10, 2021, the US State Department took its hybrid war on Yemeni civilians to the next level by officially designating the Houthi movement as a terrorist organization.

The terror label constituted a major blow to the international aid organizations working to prevent a famine and save civilian lives in Yemen. Because the Houthis run the government in most of Yemen, the designation effectively criminalized aid work in the majority of the country not under Washington’s de facto control.

The southern part of Yemen not governed by Ansar Allah is run by a US puppet government, ostensibly led by unelected President Abed Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who has spent nearly the entire war living in Saudi Arabia.

Yemen’s US- and Saudi-backed southern government is closely linked to al-Qaeda. And with the full knowledge of officials in Washington, it has used al-Qaeda as the tip of the spear in its war on the Houthis.

US- and Saudi-backed coalition forces in Yemen have actively recruited al-Qaeda extremists in their fight against Ansar Allah, and the US military halted drone strikes on the Salafi-jihadists.

Yemeni al-Qaeda extremists who are individually named on the US terrorism list have been supported and funded by US-backed Gulf monarchies, and have carved out top positions in Yemen’s southern puppet government.

The Salafi-jihadist militants in Yemen are part of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, one of the terror group’s most extreme and brutal international affiliates, which used an ISIS-style flag for years before the self-declared Islamic State emerged out of the US-backed wars on Iraq and Syria.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed the terrorist designation was part of Washington’s drive to weaken Iranian influence in the region, as part of the US-led propaganda drive to paint the group as a mere “Iranian proxy.”

But though the Houthis have received political and media support from Iran, they are an independent indigenous group whose resistance struggle is deeply ingrained in Yemen’s history.

Like the Lebanese nationalist group Hezbollah, which is often compared to Ansar Allah, the Houthis are allies of Iran, but they are independent. Both grew out of indigenous struggles against attempted foreign domination of their countries – the Israeli war on Lebanon in the case of the former, and Saudi aggression in the case of the latter.

Ansar Allah, which adopted the slogan “Death to America, Death to Israel,” has also demonstrated a consistent anti-imperialist ideology and support for global resistance movements.

The Houthi government refuses to recognize Israel and vociferously promotes the Palestinian liberation struggle. It has also backed the Syrian government and its allies against Western-sponsored Salafi-jihadist militants.

Consistent with their ideology, the Houthis publicly expressed solidarity with Venezuela against the US-led coup attempt to install Juan Guaidó in 2019. Back in 2015, a senior Ansar Allah leader told journalist Safa al-Ahmad, “We will help oppressed people all over the world… We support Chávez in Venezuela. Why this insistence that we receive support from Iran, other than wanting to turn the struggle in this country and the region into a sectarian one, based on the American and Zionist agenda?”

The US terrorist designation is clearly meant to criminalize the Houthi movement, and the majority of Yemen as a whole, for its resistance to Washington’s geopolitical interests.

This labeling is ironic, because Yemenis have themselves held numerous protests under the banner, “No to American Terrorism on Yemen.”

During a protest marking the anniversary of the US-Saudi coalition bombing of a funeral hall that killed more than 140 people and wounded 600 more, Yemenis erected a blood-stained, demonic Statue of Liberty holding American and Israeli bombs, alongside a sign reading, “USA Kills Yemeni People.”

In a viral photo, a Yemeni man dressed up as Donald Trump, posing with an American flag cape and hat reading “oil” in front of a cow covered by a Saudi flag, standing above an Israeli flag.

Yemen protest Trump US cow Saudi Israel

A Yemeni man at a “Stop U.S. Terrorism on Yemen” protest in Sanaa in 2017

The US terrorist designation of Ansar Allah recalls similar labels applied to other national-liberation movements in the Global South.

South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was on the US government’s terrorism list until 2008 (after the CIA helped the apartheid regime imprison him for 27 years).

Mandela’s African National Congress, or ANC, was designated a terrorist organization by Washington because of its support for armed struggle against South Africa’s US-backed apartheid regime. The ANC remained on the US terrorist list even after it became the elected government of the country’s post-apartheid democracy.

Further compounding the hypocrisy, Washington announced its terrorist designation against the Houthis just weeks after removing the Uighur extremist militia the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) from the US terrorist list. This Salafi-jihadist group, which is also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), has launched hundreds of terror attacks against the Chinese government and civilians, and seeks to carve off the western Chinese region of Xinjiang and establish an Islamic state called East Turkestan.

TIP is closely linked to al-Qaeda and is active in the war in Syria, in the al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib province, where the US has greenlighted missiles shipments. TIP is still recognized by the United Nations, European Nation, and many other countries as a terrorist organization, despite Washington’s de-listing.

But the US government’s terrorist labeling of the Houthis is doubly hypocritical, considering Washington enjoys a very cozy relationship with al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Mainstream corporate media extensively documents US alliance with al-Qaeda in Yemen

The existence of a de facto alliance between the United States, Saudi Arabia, and al-Qaeda is not just speculation by anti-war journalists; it has been acknowledged by mainstream corporate media outlets.

The Western and Gulf monarchy alliance with the notorious Salafi-jihadist terrorist group has been known since the very beginning of the international war on Yemen in 2015.

In July 2015, the Wall Street Journal published a report acknowledging that “Local militias backed by Saudi Arabia, special forces from the United Arab Emirates and al Qaeda militants all fought on the same side this week to wrest back control over most of Yemen’s second city, Aden, from pro-Iranian Houthi rebels.”

The Journal continued: “Saudi-backed militias are spearheading efforts to roll back Houthi gains and reinstate the government that the rebels drove into exile in neighboring Saudi Arabia. But they have turned to Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, for help, according to local residents and a senior Western diplomat. This puts the U.S.-allied Gulf kingdom on the same side as one of the world’s most notorious extremist groups.”

Wall Street Journal al Qaeda Yemen Saudi UAE US

After al-Qaeda helped US-backed Yemeni forces expel the Houthis from the major southern city of Aden, “AQAP militants celebrated the victory alongside the militias, parading cadavers of Houthis on a main commercial street in the city to a cheering crowd,” the Wall Street Journal wrote.

Aden residents told the newspaper that they saw al-Qaeda flags flying all across the city.

The US government was well aware of the fact that it was strengthening al-Qaeda in Yemen. However, it continued to place the responsibility on Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement. The Journal reported, “American officials acknowledge that AQAP is one of the war’s biggest benefactors, but say Houthi rebels are ultimately to blame.”

In February 2016, video evidence of the dark alliance emerged for the first time. Journalist Safa al-Ahmad filmed forces from the US-, Saudi-, and UAE-backed coalition fighting alongside al-Qaeda against the Houthis, battling for control of the major city of Taiz. She published the footage with the BBC.

BBC Yemen al Qaeda coalition US SaudiIn January 2017, a United Nations panel of experts published an annual report on the Yemen war. The document (PDF) acknowledged that al-Qaeda “members have also taken part in the fight in Ta’izz on the side of the ‘resistance’ against Houthi and Saleh forces” (referring to previous President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had formed an uneasy alliance with the Houthis until he turned on them and was killed in 2017).

A few sentences before in the same report, the UN experts added, “The Panel also assesses that AQAP is actively working towards preparing terrorist attacks to be launched against the West using Yemen as a base.” The statement represented a clear warning about the same kind of potential “blowback” attacks that American and European civilians have endured thanks to their governments’ sponsorship of Salafi-jihadist fanatics.

Washington’s support for al-Qaeda in Yemen under President Barack Obama was quietly acknowledged, but mostly ignored. When President Donald Trump came into office, however, corporate media outlets that had long whitewashed and ignored the Yemen war began to report more critically.

The Associated Press published a detailed investigation in August 2018 further documenting how US- and Saudi-backed coalition forces in Yemen “cut secret deals with al-Qaida fighters, paying some to leave key cities and towns and letting others retreat with weapons, equipment and wads of looted cash… Hundreds more were recruited to join the coalition itself.”

“Coalition-backed militias actively recruit al-Qaida militants, or those who were recently members, because they’re considered exceptional fighters,” the AP wrote.

The news outlet noted that some Yemeni al-Qaeda extremists on the US terrorism list were simultaneously being funded by Gulf monarchies to lead troops in the US-backed coalition.

“Key participants in the pacts said the U.S. was aware of the arrangements and held off on any drone strikes,” the report added.

AP Yemen al Qaeda US allies

“The larger mission is to win the civil war against the Houthis, Iranian-backed Shiite rebels. And in that fight, al-Qaida militants are effectively on the same side as the Saudi-led coalition — and, by extension, the United States,” the AP report stated bluntly.

The news outlet quoted a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a Cold War-era neoconservative think tank close to the CIA, who admitted, “Elements of the U.S. military are clearly aware that much of what the U.S. is doing in Yemen is aiding AQAP and there is much angst about that… However, supporting the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against what the U.S. views as Iranian expansionism takes priority over battling AQAP and even stabilizing Yemen.”

The damning AP investigation was followed by a 2019 CNN report which acknowledged that weapons sold by the United States to Saudi Arabia and the UAE were then transferred to al-Qaeda in Yemen.

In branding the Houthi movement as terrorists, the United States has not only evinced a staggering level of hypocrisy; it has effectively given a gift to the same extremist organization it used to justify its so-called “war on terror.”

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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

Featured image: Militants from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which has been supported by the US and Saudi Arabia in Yemen (Source: The Grayzone)

Pompeo’s Last Stand

January 22nd, 2021 by Philip Giraldi

It is finally over. Joe Biden has been inaugurated President of the United States while his predecessor Donald Trump has retired to Florida. Trump intends to remain the driving force in the Republican Party but there are many in the GOP who would like to see him gone completely and the national media is obliging by depriving him of a “voice,” cutting him off from his preferred social media. The Democratic Party’s top “megadonor” Israeli film producer Haim Saban goes one step farther, recommending that all the media stop reporting on Trump and his activities, thereby taking away his platform and making him disappear politically speaking.

Prior to the inauguration, which proceeded protected by an unprecedented display of military and police, there had been so much going on in and around Washington that other serious developments worldwide were not getting the attention that they merited. President Donald Trump was impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to his alleged encouragement of the January 6th rioting at the U.S. Capitol building, but to my mind the recent travels and meetings involving Secretary of State Mike Pompeo could turn out to be far more damaging to America’s long-term interests. One wonders why Pompeo was engaging in frenetic activity with the Administration that he represented being about to vanish in a few days, but the answer is perhaps obvious. Trump and Pompeo want to lay a foreign policy mine field for the Joe Biden White House, locking the new administration into policies that will prove difficult to untangle.

Pompeo has been most active in four areas: Iran, China, Cuba and Yemen. Iran, as has often been the case with the Trump Israeli-driven policy in the Middle East, has been the principal focus. The Trump Administration has consistently responded to Israeli and also Saudi perceptions of the threat from Iran to the entire region, even though those claims were generally based on self-interests and deliberately falsified intelligence. Washington has withdrawn from the nuclear agreement with Iran signed in 2015 and has been waging incrementally expanded economic warfare against the Iranians for the past three years. It has collaborated with the Israelis on assassinations and air attacks on primarily civilian targets in Syria and Lebanon.

During Trump’s last two weeks in power there was much talk about the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran. The Israeli military was on alert and there was a surge in attacks on Syria, frequently using Lebanese airspace. One incident in particular on January 6th used U.S. intelligence to enable multiple bombing attacks on targets inside Syria, killing 57. Pompeo reportedly dined publicly in a well-known Washington restaurant Café Milano on the day after the carnage to discuss the “success” with Israel’s head of Mossad Yossi Cohen.

The public meeting with Cohen was a sign from the Trump Administration that the U.S. supports Israel’s bombing campaign against claimed Iranian targets in Syria. If Biden wishes to change that, he will have to do so publicly, earning the ire of Israel’s friends in the Democratic Party and media. And more was to come. Last Tuesday, Pompeo gave a speech in which he accused al-Qaeda and the Iranian government of being “partners in terror” , constituting an “axis” of terrorism. He further claimed that al-Qaeda has a “new home base” and a “new operational headquarters” built for it in Tehran, an assertion that ran counter to the intelligence collected by U.S. counterterrorism officials, who said there was no evidence to support such a claim. In fact, the Intelligence Community has long asserted that al-Qaeda is fundamentally hostile to Shi’ite Iran and that the Iranians return the favor. In other words, Pompeo is either lying or making something up that will be an impediment if Biden tries to improve relations with Tehran. Pompeo also went so far as to declare that Iran is the “new Afghanistan” for al-Qaeda, which is meant to imply that Iran is now its home base and safe haven. There is also no evidence to support that claim.

The Trump Administration has also included Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, based on nothing whatsoever, apparently as something of a throw away item to shore up support from the rabid Cuban exile community in Florida. So too the decision to designate the Houthis of Yemen as terrorists to give a parting gift to the Saudis and the UAE. Yemen is suffering from famine and the terror designation will have a drastic impact on imports of food and medicine, condemning many Yemenis to death. Daniel Larison opines that the “Houthi designation is by far the worst thing that Pompeo has done as Secretary of State, because if it is not quickly reversed it will lead directly to the deaths of tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. It takes severe cruelty to look at a war-torn, famine-stricken country that depends heavily on outside aid and imports and then choose to suffocate the survivors with additional economic warfare. That is what Pompeo has done, we shouldn’t forget that.”

And, incidentally, the United States gains absolutely nothing from killing thousands of people in Yemen, but that is not all. Pompeo has also opened the door to new problems with China. His easing of the longstanding restrictions on contacts between American diplomats and Taiwanese has been described by the State Department as a strong gesture of support for the democratic government and “ally” in Taipei. It overturns more than forty years of “strategic ambiguity” which has prevailed since Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing and recognized the communist People’s Republic of China as China’s only legitimate government, to include over Taiwan by implication. The so-called “One China” principle states that Taiwan and China are part of the same China with the U.S. recognizing, though not necessarily endorsing, that the PRC has a historic claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.

Apart from locking in policies that Biden will find hard to shift, Pompeo also has a secondary motive. It is widely believed that he would like to run for president in 2024. He will need the support of the Israelis and their powerful domestic lobby as well as the Cubans in Florida and it does not hurt to show him playing hardball in the Middle East and against an increasingly vilified China. The so-called neocons, who have again become influential in the Republican Party and the media, demand tough talk and even tougher action from their candidate and Pompeo is already running hard to oblige them.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Biden Exploits His Capitol Gains

January 22nd, 2021 by Diana Johnstone

First published by Consortium News on January 11, crossposted on Global Research on January 13, 2021

Joe Biden’s own language certainly sounded less like a magnanimous winner uniting his people than like that used by autocrats and dictators to hold onto power, argues Diana Johnstone.

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What happened in the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not surprising. It could have been avoided. It could have been prevented if the Democratic Establishment which held onto keys of power throughout Trump’s mandate had truly wanted a smooth presidential transition. For months prior to the election, the elite Transition Integrity Project was spreading the alarm, loudly echoed by liberal media, that Trump would lose and refuse to acknowledge his loss.

There was a simple, obvious way to avoid such a drama. In an article for Consortium News last August, I suggested how this could be done.

It seems to me that if the Democratic establishment gave priority to a peaceful election and transition, against the possibility that Trump might reject the results, the smart and reasonable thing to do would be to reassure him on the two counts which they suggest might incite him to balk: postal vote fraud accusations and the threat of criminal charges against him. […]

As for postal balloting, it should be conceivable that Trump’s misgivings are justified. […] In an age when anyone can photocopy any document, when mails are slow and when there are many ways in which ballots might be destroyed, such misgivings are not far-fetched. […]

For the sake of domestic peace, why not try to find a compromise? Kamala Harris has introduced legislation to generalize postal balloting. Why not, instead, extend polling time, opening polls not only on the second Tuesday in November but on the preceding Saturday and Sunday? This would provide time to allow voters afraid of Covid-19 to keep distances from each other, as they do when they go to the supermarket. It would reduce the number of absentee ballots, the time needed for counting and above all the suspicions attached to postal voting. But the more wary Trump is of postal voting, the more Democrats insist on making it universal.

It becomes clearer and clearer that hatred of Trump has reached such a pitch, that for the Democratic establishment and its hangers-on, defeating Trump at the polls is not enough. They are practically inciting him to contest the election. Then they can have something more exciting and decisive: a genuine regime change.”

So indeed what we got was something more exciting. Not exactly regime change, because we are seeing instead a powerful reaffirmation of the regime that was really still there during Trump’s largely deformed four-year term. The haste with which his aides and allies desert him in his last hour makes this clear. He was always a president without a team, operating on hunches, rhetoric and advice from his son-in-law and a few insiders who were really outsiders.

But what we are getting is indeed exciting: an alleged “insurrection” supposedly incited by Trump to “steal the election” (which it had absolutely no way of doing). The scenes of disorder have been instantly exploited to plunge him and his followers into an abyss of ignominy, if not criminal proceedings and imprisonment.

More Like Otpor

Image on the right: Otpor graffiti in Belgrade, 2001. (Wikimedia Commons)

What happened on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection. Anyone wanting to know what an insurrection is should look up the U.S.-sponsored armed uprising that overthrew duly elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. The Capitol disturbance was more like what happened when U.S.-trained “Otpor” militants broke into the Serbian parliament in the midst of that country’s 2000 presidential election and set fire to ballot boxes.

Or check out a particularly pertinent insurrection when truly violent demonstrators took over the Ukrainian Parliament in 2014 and overthrew the government, an event hailed by then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden as a great victory for democracy. Then there was the Hillary-endorsed coup in Honduras, the almost successful attempt to overthrow democracy in Bolivia, the U.S.-backed Guaido farce in Venezuela, etc., etc., etc.

No, an insurrection is not when a large crowd of people who feel their candidate has been cheated vent their indignation by managing to break into “their” parliament with no purpose in mind. Most of the intruders milled about taking selfies with no clear idea what to do next. By world standards, the “violence” on Jan. 6 was very mild indeed, the only gun violence being the fatal shooting of an unarmed Trump enthusiast, Ashli Babbitt, who could easily have been pushed back from her adventurous attempt to climb over a barricade.

The intrusion was so far from carrying out a pro-Trump plan that it had the opposite effect. The immediate political result of the eruption of the undisciplined crowd was to prevent Republican Senators who were so inclined from presenting their arguments against the legitimacy of the November vote. If anything, the action worked in the favor of President-elect Biden.

One might think that in his moment of victory, a true statesman would demonstrate the qualities it takes to lead a nation by offering to bring all people together as fellow Americans. He did quite the opposite.

The very next day after the Capitol happening, in his small fiscal haven home state of Delaware, Biden raged against his opponents as a terrorist mob, no less.

They weren’t protestors,” he proclaimed. “Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”

Trump, said Biden, “has unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy from the outset, and yesterday was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack.” Trump had poisoned the political environment by using “language that autocrats and dictators use all over the world to hold on to power.”

Biden’s own language certainly sounded less like a magnanimous winner uniting his people than like that used by autocrats and dictators to hold onto power. Trump was trying to “deny the will of the American people,” he said, much as Trump said of him. The whole problem was that “the will of the American people” was far from unanimous.

The Authoritarian Center

So even before his inauguration, President-elect Biden has given us a bitter taste of days ahead. There is to be no sacred unity, but deepened division between The Good (woke liberals), the Bad (Russians and other enemies of Our Democracy) and the Ugly Americans, to be labeled Domestic Terrorists, White Supremacists and fascists.

The authoritarian center, ranging from opportunistic Republicans to The Squad, can rally around the necessary purge of Domestic Terrorists, silencing their communications and getting them properly fired from their jobs.

The Establishment has long been determined to crush Trump. But there is talk of “purging” all his followers as well. Biden is already speaking like a War President, calling for measures to combat the internal enemy such as accompany major wars.

The oligarchic nature of the American War Party is revealed by the haste with which privately owned social media enterprises silence dissent – even the still acting President of the United States. Indeed, who really rules the United States? Is the president only an agent of economic powers whose role is to serve their interests? And the trouble with Trump is that he had not been picked for the job.

Trump managed to appeal to millions of discontented Americans without offering any coherent practical program to replace the War Party with policies capable of transforming the nation into a haven of peace and prosperity. His confusion mirrored the ideological confusion of a population scandalously undereducated in history and political ideas. The illusion that Trump was the leader dissident Americans needed cost Ashli Babbit her life and led thousands of Trump voters into what amounts to a trap. Trump himself was led into the trap.

A completely different approach to politics is needed to restore democracy to America. All appeals to identities and ideologies can only deepen the confusion and divisions, because they prevent people from understanding each other.

The Biden administration appears intent on strengthening such confusion and divisions precisely by recourse to identities and ideologies. I firmly believe that only a scrupulously rational, open-minded, factual and pragmatic approach to clearly defined practical problems could bring peace to the United States, a peace that could favor peace in the world.

From outside the melee, it is easy to define the serious issues that should dominate political debate in the United States. But instead of that, we hear a torrential exchange of insults. The establishment elite cannot stoop to exchange viewpoints with populists denounced as deplorable, racist, misogynist, white supremacist, fascist and now even “terrorist.”

The populists’ unfocused denunciation of the elite describes Wall Street Democrats as “socialists” and veers off into accusations of genocidal vaccination campaigns, occult pedophile rites and Satanism. Instead of anything resembling a clear political division, America is increasingly split by blind, burning mutual hatred.

What American political life needs is not more censorship, but the self-censorship of reason. That is very far away.

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Diana Johnstone lives in Paris.  Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at [email protected]

Diana Johnstone is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: Storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (TapTheForwardAssist/Wikimedia Commons)

全球研究文章现已提供中文

January 22nd, 2021 by Global Research News

亲爱的读者,我们很高兴地宣布,我们最近向Global Research推出了翻译插件。

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القراء الأعزاء ، يسعدنا أن نعلن أننا قدمنا ​​مؤخرًا مكونًا إضافيًا للترجمة إلى Global Research. تقع القائمة المنسدلة "ترجمة موقع الويب" في الجزء العلوي من موقع الويب ، وتتيح لك الاختيار من بين 27 لغة مختلفة يمكن ترجمة الموقع الإلكتروني بالكامل إليها بنقرة زر واحدة. ندعوك لاختباره ولا تتردد في إرسال أي ملاحظات قد تضطر إلى ذلك إلى [email protected]
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Selected Articles: President Joe Biden’s “Dark Winter”

January 21st, 2021 by Global Research News

President Joe Biden’s “Dark Winter”: Code Name for a Scenario in Which a Biological Weapon Was Used Against the American Populace

By Michael Snyder, January 21 2021

First published in November 2020. “Dark Winter” was mentioned in the course of the election campaign.  According to Michael Snyder in an incisive and carefully researched article “Joe Biden specifically warned us about a “dark winter” during the final presidential debate in October… that the U.S. was “about to go into a dark winter.”

“Q Anon” May Have Been an FBI Psyop

By Swiss Policy Research, January 21 2021

Given the recent revelations by British investigator David J. Blake – who for the first time was able to conclusively show, at the technical level, that the “Russian hacking” operation was a cyber psyop run by the FBI and FBI cyber security contractor CrowdStrike – the Reuters report may in fact indicate that “Q Anon” was neither a hoax nor “Russian”, but another FBI psychological cyber operation.

Fauci Now Says COVID-19 Vaccine May Become Mandatory

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, January 21 2021

Will the COVID-19 vaccine become mandatory? That’s a question many are asking these days and, by the looks of it, the answer may well be yes — although as I’ll explain later, I suspect the harms of the vaccine will become so apparent that it’ll kill such efforts before they become widespread.

Barrage of New Countries and Airlines to Adopt Vaccine Passports

By Steve Watson, January 21 2021

New York Times admits schemes could lead to “a dystopic system that would limit the rights of people who have been careful to avoid infection and are unable or unwilling to be vaccinated”

Video: “The New Normal” Documentary

By happen.network, January 21 2021

We bring to the attention of GR readers this outstanding documentary entitled the New Normal which investigates the corona crisis, as well as it’s aftermath. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” under the World Economic Forum’s ” Great Reset has been put forth. What are the consequences for the World’s 7.8 billion people.

Vaccine Injury Reporting Systems ‘Utterly Inadequate,’ Independent Researchers Say

By Children’s Health Defense, January 21 2021

New peer-reviewed study of adverse events following MMRV vaccines highlights the urgent need for independent research on vaccine safety and the importance of informed consent and vaccine choice.

The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test: How to Mislead All Humanity. Using a “Test” To Lock Down Society

By Dr. Pascal Sacré, January 21 2021

The misuse of the RT-PCR technique is used as an intentional strategy by some governments, supported by scientific safety councils and by the dominant media, to justify the violation of a large number of constitutional rights, the destruction of the economy with the bankruptcy of entire active sectors of society.

The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 21 2021

We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in modern history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the flow of events since January 2020 has been blurred. Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media.
.

That $2.6 Trillion Stimulus Was One Heck of a Holiday Bonus to Defense Contractors

By Ross Marchand, January 21 2021

America’s debt has more than doubled over the past ten years, skyrocketing from $13 trillion to more than $27 trillion over just two presidential administrations. And, despite successive presidents’ promises to “wind down” conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the defense budget has only gone in one direction— up.

Washington’s 40-year North Korea Policy: Success or Failure?

By Prof. Joseph H. Chung, January 21 2021

Washington’s 40-year offensive policy of North Korean regime change has gone nowhere. Bill Clinton created a chance of peace with North Korea in 1994 and he blew it. George W. Bush accepted the 2005 agreement for peace, then, he threw it away. Donald Trump had the golden chance for peace at 2018 Hanoi Summit, but he lost the chance. Barack Obama has made North Korea a Nuclear State.

UK Mega Meddling – UK Sets Up Media Influencing Project in Venezuela Amid Secretive £750,000 ‘Democracy Promotion’ Programme

By Matt Kennard and John McEvoy, January 21 2021

The UK government has established a journalism project to ‘influence’ Venezuela’s ‘media agenda’ while a Foreign Office-funded foundation is spending £750,000 on a secretive ‘democracy-promotion’ programme in the country, as Britain appears to deepen efforts to remove the Maduro government.

How to Buy Politicians: Corruption and Lobbying

By Rod Driver, January 21 2021

The term corruption conjures up images of brown envelopes stuffed full of used notes being passed furtively under a table as a bribe. However, this is just one type of corruption. In Britain, Europe and the US, the corruption that really matters is built into the system, in the forms of donations, favours and influence.

Farmers’ Protests Reflect Existential Crisis of Indian Agriculture

By Colin Todhunter, January 21 2021

With over 800 million people, rural India is arguably the most interesting and complex place on the planet but is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing unemployment, increased informalisation, indebtedness and an overall collapse of agriculture.

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Global Research Editor’s Note

This article was published on November 29, 2020.

“Dark Winter” was mentioned by Joe Biden in the course of the election campaign. 

 According to Michael Snyder in this incisive and carefully researched article “Joe Biden specifically warned us about a “dark winter” during the final presidential debate in October that the U.S. was “about to go into a dark winter.”

Biden stated in the immediate wake of the November elections: “There is a need for bold action to fight this pandemic…”, “We’re still facing a very dark winter.”

Will this “Very Dark Winter” mentioned incessantly by Joe Biden during the election campaign be addressed in the course of the first 2-3 months of the Biden-Harris administration? 

On the day preceding his inauguration, Biden intimated that “he would take office amid a “dark winter,” and the outlook is only getting bleaker”. Does this not suggest a political scenario (coupled with a renewed fear campaign) of an epidemic “spiralling out of control”. 

In his acceptance speech, Biden referred to a “winter of peril and possibility”, intimating that the Virus (rather than government policy makers) should be held responsible for mass poverty, unemployment and bankruptcy.

“A once-in-a-century virus silently stalks the country”.

“It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War Two. Millions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed.”

And immediately upon assuming office, the Biden White House announced drastic Covid policy measures including a “100 Days Masking Challenge” “to reduce the spread of the virus”.

An executive order created “a COVID-19 response coordinator, who will be tasked with coordinating the government’s response to the pandemic, including the vaccine rollout, and who will report directly to Biden.”

Michel Chossudovsky, GR Editor, January 21, 2021

***

Could it be possible that the phrase “dark winter”  has some sort of deeper meaning that most of us are not meant to understand?  We have heard that phrase over and over again in recent weeks, and usually it has been used in discussions regarding the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But it also turns out that “Dark Winter” was also a code name for a high level simulation that was conducted back in 2001.  That simulation envisioned a scenario in which a widespread smallpox attack was unleashed inside the United States.  As you will see below, the simulation was “designed to spiral out of control”, and the hypothetical consequences were absolutely disastrous.

The reason why this is a concern is because so many of these “simulations” and “exercises” end up mirroring real life events that happen at a later date.

For example, most of you have probably heard about Event 201 by now.  On October 18th, 2019 a group of prominent individuals gathered in New York City to simulate what would happen during a worldwide coronavirus pandemic

Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.

Of course COVID-19 started spreading in China just a few weeks later.

We have seen this same pattern happen so many times, and now we are being told over and over again that a “dark winter” is ahead.

For example, Joe Biden specifically warned us about a “dark winter” during the final presidential debate in October

Joe Biden warned at Thursday night’s presidential debate that the U.S. was “about to go into a dark winter,” echoing the concerns of public health experts who caution about increased daily Covid-19 case counts converging with the annual flu season.

“We’re about to go into a dark winter. A dark winter,” Biden said. “And he has no clear plan, and there’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year.”

It is interesting to note that he repeated the phrase twice.

It is almost as if he was determined to make sure that he said it correctly.

And then he started using the phrase over and over again on the campaign trail and he kept using it even after the voting was over.

For example, here is an instance where he used the phrase on the Monday after the election

Joe Biden on Monday warned that a “very dark winter” is approaching as the U.S. coronavirus case count nears 10 million.

“There is a need for bold action to fight this pandemic,” Biden said in Delaware. “We’re still facing a very dark winter.”

I never thought too much about his use of that phrase, but could it be possible that it is actually some sort of a code word or signal?

We do know that it was a code word for a high level exercise that was held in 2001.  The following comes from Wikipedia

Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted on June 22–23, 2001. It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.

It is interesting to note that smallpox is a highly infectious disease that involves sores appearing on the skin.

For those that have read my latest book, you already understand why that detail is so important to me.

And as I already mentioned above, this exercise was specifically designed “to spiral out of control”

Dark Winter’s simulated scenario involved an initial localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, with additional smallpox attack cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease’s rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America’s emergency response capabilities.

Could it be possible that Biden and others are using the phrase “dark winter” to signal that something is about to spiral out of control?

I don’t know.  I am just asking the question.

In Operation Dark Winter, the spread of smallpox also resulted in a “massive loss of civilian life”

The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures. Discussing the outcome of Dark Winter, Bryan Walsh noted “The timing–just a few months before the 9/11 attack–was eerily prescient, as if the organizers had foreseen how the threat of terrorism, including bioterrorism, would come to consume the U.S. government and public in the years to come.”

So let me try to summarize what we have learned.

Operation Dark Winter envisioned a scenario in which a highly infectious disease that causes sores on the skin spirals out of control and causes a “massive loss of civilian life”.

And suddenly Joe Biden and other elitists have begun repeating this phrase over and over again as we head into 2021.

Be sure to bookmark this page so that you can refer back to it later.

Reality is often stranger than fiction, and the table has been set for some really, really strange things to happen.

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Michael Snyder’s brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to his new book, he has written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The EndGet Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. He has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News which are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.

Featured image is from TheFreeThoughtProject

Post-9/11, war on dissent in the US raged.

In 2010, the ACLU said “freedom is under fire in the US.”

“There is a pall over our fire. (There are) attempts to squelch dissent.”

“A chilling message has gone out across America: Dissent if you must, but proceed at your own risk.”

Post-9/11, (AG John Ashcroft) “used his bully pulpit to shut down dissent and debate.”

It’s ongoing in Washington. Legitimate protesters are considered enemies of the state.

Divergence from the official narrative is at risk of being criminalized.

During Obama/Biden’s tenure, the Center for Constitutional Rights said the following:

“The growing threat to the right to dissent has been demonstrated in the US government’s efforts to silence speech, and criminalize and target peaceful movements,”

adding:

“These efforts are becoming more aggressive, emboldened further by the Supreme Court’s increasingly conservative decisions, for instance regarding material support in the form of humanitarian aid to so-called terrorist organizations.”

Diverging from the official narrative increasingly is considered a threat to national security.

Speech, media and academic freedoms are threatened — censorship the new abnormal.

Supreme Court Justice William Brennan long ago stressed:

“(I)f there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.”

Justice Thurgood Marshall once said: “(A)bove all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”

Separately he said:

“If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.”

In 2017/18/and 19 congressional sessions, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act was introduced but not passed by both houses of Congress.

Ahead of Wednesday’s transition of power in Washington — Biden/Harris to replace Trump — Dem Senator Richard Durbin said he’ll reintroduce the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.

Durbin is using the January 6 anti-Trump Capitol Hill false flag as a pretext to more greatly assault free expression and other freedoms in the US than already.

“After the attack on the Capitol, I hope that Congress can finally come together and do something to address (the) threat” of domestic terrorism, he said.

Notably since the 9/11 mother of all false flags, invented domestic terrorism has been used as a pretext for waging war on a free and open society — totalitarianism replacing it.

According to Durbin, legislation he’ll introduce calls for establishing government offices at the DOJ, FBI and DHS — on the phony pretext of preventing future incidents like what happened on January 6.

“It would require these offices to regularly assess the domestic terrorism threat,” he said.

If enacted into law, it’ll be another nail in the coffin of disappearing freedoms in the US — by targeting  for elimination what free and open societies hold dear.

When dissent is redefined as terrorism, censorship becomes the new abnormal, along with totalitarian rule.

Biden falsely blamed pro-Trump elements for what happened on January 6, calling them domestic terrorists and insurrectionists — a gross perversion of reality.

What happened on Capitol Hill was all-about slamming Trump for what he had nothing to do with.

It was to push the envelope for denying him a run for a second term in 2024.

It was to permanently smear him for invented reasons, ignoring justifiable ones.

It was to ease Biden/Harris’ transition to power, enabling them and a Dem-controlled Congress to more greatly wage war on fundamental freedoms.

Earlier I called the Capitol Hill incident America’s Reichstag fire. What followed in its wake needs no elaboration.

Will history repeat in similar form? Will what’s inconceivable become reality?

In response to earlier congressional introduction of the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, the ACLU said the following:

Enactment of the legislation risks more greatly “undermin(ing) and violat(ing) equal protection, due process, and First Amendment rights.”

It’ll “double down on an already flawed domestic terrorism framework” that’s been used to crack down on invented domestic threats.

“This bill codifies authorities and actions of national security and counterterrorism components of the (DOJ and DHS), authorizing domestic terrorism units or offices to monitor, investigate, and prosecute incidents of (alleged) domestic terrorism” — that’s likely to be invented, not real.

“These kinds of government abuses are not new, and they are ongoing.”

They’ve been around throughout the republic’s history.

Hardening them over time is especially worrisome.

At risk is eliminating free and open expression, along with other fundamental freedoms that are too precious to lose.

Proposed legislation authorizes the  FBI’s Counterterrorism Division to more aggressively investigate alleged domestic terrorism — ignoring agency abuses of civil liberties since established in 1908 under J. Edgar Hoover.

The ACLU stressed that the proposed legislation “would not only entrench a system that lacks meaningful oversight, transparency, and legitimate standards, but also (will) codif(y) a framework that is used to target and discriminate against the very communities Congress (pretends) to protect.”

The measure is a further assault on a free and open society — already threatened by other police state laws.

If enacted into law, it’ll hasten the arrival of tyranny instead of all-out efforts to prevent it.

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is from Occidental Observer

Video: “The New Normal” Documentary

January 21st, 2021 by happen.network

We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in World history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.

Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 “pandemic”.  

We bring to the attention of GR readers this outstanding documentary entitled the New Normal which investigates the corona crisis, as well as it’s aftermath.

A “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” under the World Economic Forum’s ” Great Reset has been put forth. What are the consequences for the World’s 7.8 billion people. 

(M. Ch. GR Editor)

 

Watch the video below.

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Donald Trump has used his four years as US president to demonstrate his deep commitment to the Zionist state of Israel. He has striven to enable Israel to take control of occupied Palestine with an iron grip, and given it the upper hand in the region. No other US president has given Israel as much as Trump: none dared to recognise Jerusalem as the unified capital of the colonial state; none dared to move the US Embassy to the holy city; none dared to acknowledge Israel’s annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights; none dared to give legitimacy to Israel’s settlements on occupied land; and none dared to accept Israeli annexation, including Benjamin Netanyahu‘s plans to impose sovereignty on the occupied Jordan Valley. For good measure Trump also stopped US donations to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in an effort to annul the whole refugee issue.

Trump’s most recent gift to the Israelis was the so-called Abraham Accords. Under his patronage, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco normalised relations with Israel last year.

His parting gift to the occupation state, however, is the integration of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) alongside Arab troops within US Central Command (CENCOM), which has a base at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. (image below)

This is something Israel has been waiting and hoping for. From this we can deduce that Gulf reconciliation between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain on one side, and Qatar on the other, was achieved on direct orders from the Trump White House.

American Jewish organisations have been pressing Washington to include the IDF in CENTCOM in order to link Israeli national security to America’s, but previous administrations have always refused this, given the sensitivity between the Arab countries and the occupation state.

The latest decision seems a bit academic, however, given that the IDF has had a strong presence at the heart of US military decision-making for a number of years, and the fact that America’s wars in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, have been fought in defence of the occupation state and to maintain its hegemony.

This was actually confirmed after the second Gulf War, when General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the US Central Command between 1988 and 1991, proudly told Israeli leaders that he had destroyed the Iraqi army on their behalf in Operation Desert Storm.

The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), the members of which include former US and Israeli military leaders, has finally succeeded in pressuring Trump to make this dangerous decision. It will allow the occupation state to officially and effectively participate under the umbrella of CENTCOM in any military operation alongside Arab forces.

Before this move, Israel was within the scope of the US leadership in Europe but not the Middle East, to avoid any problems about coordination between Israel and Arab troops. With the exception of Egypt and Jordan, no Arab countries had peace treaties with Israel. That has all changed.

The Trump administration has thus put the other Arab countries on the spot as they are facing a fait accompli of having to coordinate military activities with Israel. This affects Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in particular, as they already coordinate militarily with the US forces based in their countries which are subject to the authority of CENCOM. Qatar too, of course, which hosts the command structure, under General Frank Mackenzie. With Israel now also under CENCOM, Arab countries will be under more pressure to accept normalisation after the occupation state has basically become a protector of them and their regimes.

The US Central Command is the most powerful military force in the Middle East. It was established in 1983 to enhance American capabilities in confronting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and in light of the escalation of the Iran-Iraq war. This imposed US domination over the Middle East. Having achieved its target in that respect, the new target became Islam.

Under the banner of the so-called “war on terror”, sparking a low level third world war, CENTCOM became responsible for managing it, with operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and the Gulf. It has specific strategic goals set by the Pentagon, as it supervises coordination with the countries that “host” — not that they have much choice — US forces operating from military bases in the Gulf. Strategies drawn up include all Arab armies in the Middle East, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, in addition to the security mission against Iran. Adding Israel to these forces makes it an active element in US military operations in the Middle East.

This necessarily means coordination, planning and military cooperation between the occupation army and the Arab armies; they are now arms of the same body, as we will see in any war in the region, with Iran for example; or another crisis in Gaza against which war will be waged under the pretext of fighting “terrorism”. What will the Arab position be in such scenarios if their forces are allied with Israel? Who will they stand with?

This “Arab-Israeli NATO” is supported by the US and I predicted that it would happen in the wake of the Abraham Accords, because political, economic and cultural normalisation falls short unless it is crowned with military normalisation. The latter is the whole point of these normalisation deals, which were pushed through solely to serve the interests of the Zionist entity.

Arab issues are now surrounded completely by America, all within the broader project known as the deal of the century. General Frank MacKenzie can go anywhere in the region without being controlled or monitored, and can collect intelligence about any and all Arab countries. Of course, this will be shared with Israel, which will expose Arab security even more in the next phase of the colonial re-conquest of the Middle East. Indeed, what we call Arab national security may disappear from the political lexicon, becoming “Israel-Arab national security” instead.

“The easing of tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbours subsequent to the Abraham Accords has provided a strategic opportunity for the United States to align key partners against shared threats in the Middle East,” said the Pentagon. According to JINSA, placing Israel within CENCOM was delayed due to the hostility of the Arab countries towards the state. “But the agreements opened the doors to achieve a strategic goal that was not possible [before].”

Indeed, this military normalisation would not have happened had it not been for the deals struck last year which dealt a blow to the notion of Arab unity; there will be catastrophic consequences. Nevertheless, the ordinary people are optimistic that they will be able to overcome this latest disaster that the dictatorial regimes have created. The regimes may be Zionist, but their people are not.

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Dr Amira Abo el-Fetouh is an Egyptian political columnist.

Featured image: US President Donald Trump speaking at an AIPAC conference, Washington DC, 21 March 2016 [Lorie Shaull/Flickr]

Democracy USA? Biden’s Neoliberal “Far Left Wing Agenda”

January 21st, 2021 by Philip A Farruggio

You look at what they call ‘The Industrialized world’ and you can get a feel for how they run their democracies. Canada, France, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and Scotland, to name a few, all have at least FIVE viable political parties. Germany and Italy have SIX. The UK has SEVEN. Japan and Sweden have EIGHT. Norway has NINE. Turkey has TEN. Switzerland has TWELVE. The Netherlands and Poland have THIRTEEN. Spain tops the list with FOURTEEN. Now, we know that in most of those nations there are one or two, perhaps three or four prominent parties. Yet, in many instances coalitions are needed to run their governments. Not so in the good ole USA.

Historically, many times in our nation there have been popular third party movements. What happened in most cases? Duh, the empire, through its powerful leverage using this Two Party system, has either Co-opted third parties by overwhelming them by outspending them severely, or using the controlled media to disenfranchise them in the eyes of the ‘Sucker Public’.

Recently, we have seen how the Sanders’ Democratic Socialist campaign was vilified by both the Republican and Democratic run news stations as being ‘Far Left wing radicals and Marxists’. If you wish to scare the ‘Sucker Public’ just label someone as a Marxist AKA Communist. This has been successfully done for as long as this writer can remember.

What the movers and shakers of this empire want is a Compliant Voter/Citizen.

The Chinese restaurant joke still resonates well: Just choose from Column A or Column B… either way you LOSE… with no ice cream dessert!

Thus, the Two Party/One Party scam has allowed our republic to move more and more to the Right politically. If Richard Nixon was a politician today he would be labeled as a ‘Moderate Republican’.. or perhaps even a Democrat!

They labeled Bill and Hillary Clinton as Marxists, ditto with Obama, and now his chosen successor Biden. Today, Senator Lindsay Graham warned of the Biden administration coming in as having a ‘Far Left wing agenda’. Did Graham see how many Neo Liberal appointees Biden has named?

The ‘War Hawks’ will fill the halls of our Capitol!

We won’t see any Medicare for All under Biden.

We won’t see large corporate America being taxed along with the super rich.

No Universal Basic Income to save hundreds of millions of us.

Just a few band-aids to stop some of the bleeding.

Why, he won’t even institute Sanders’ idea of a $2000 per person stimulus check (one time only by the way). He plans to deduct the $600 we already got from that total.

If we had a viable multi party system here in the ‘Land of the Free’ perhaps there would be more adjustments. Instead, we stay with this phony Two Party/One Party fantasyland. Sure, they joined together to get rid of the craziness of Trump.

Imagine if there was more than just the Chinese menu, Trump may have never been elected in the first place… or Biden now.

If there was a viable Libertarian Party, along with ditto for a Green Party, or Socialist Party, the obscene military spending (accounting for 50% of our federal taxes) would have never been allowed to surge to such high numbers. Same for those nearly 1000 overseas military bases our taxes throw down the rabbit hole.

We would still have major problems inside of this empire. As the Jack Nicholson character said in the film ‘ One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ after he failed to win a bet by lifting the stone water fountain: “At least I tried. That’s more than I can say for you guys!”

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

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On the eve of incoming US President Joe Biden’s inauguration, as if in celebration of his “success”, quite a few things coincided in the Middle East, most of them to America’s detriment.

These include: the anniversary of the killing of Iranian Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani, the new killing of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and a ramping up of Israeli airstrikes on Iranian targets in Syria.

As a result, the American Forces in the Middle East appear to be fresh out of luck in the first weeks of 2021. A series of misadventures has befallen US soldiers in Syria and Iraq.

On January 19th, a US AH-64 Apache attack helicopter allegedly crashed in the northeastern Syrian province of Hasakah.

It reportedly crashed inside the US base at the al-Jabsa oil field near the city of al-Shaddadi. There is no information on any casualties as yet, but there were likewise initially none when Iranian ballistic missiles hit the US al-Asad base in Iraq back in January 2020.

On January 9th, disaster had struck in the central and southern regions of Iraq as 3 US convoys were reportedly hit by IEDs. These attacks were an unsurprising adverse effect of the standoff between the US-led coalition and the Iranian-aligned Axis of Resistance in the Middle East.

Days later a series of explosions hit positions of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) southwest of Baghdad. The PMU are aligned with Iran, a major force in the fight against terrorism and a part of the Iraqi Armed Forces.

This attack was attributed to Israel and the United States, but Washington vehemently denied playing any part in it.

The U.S. encountered all of these misfortunes while Iran was carrying out a brand-new military drill, by the name of Eqtedar 99, which is taking place on the southeastern Makran coast, just after two American B-52 strategic bombers flew close to the region.

In an interesting spin, Tehran claimed this close fly-by as a sign that Washington is fearful of Iran’s “defensive might”. The bombers, which are capable of dropping nuclear gravity bombs, were deemed “void of operational value” by Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri.

Even on Donald Trump’s last day in office, on January 19th, the Middle East is still on the brink of a devastating escalation with every side attempting to forward its agenda and damage that of its adversaries.

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Sweden’s growing ties with NATO over the past half-dozen years make many observers wonder whether the Nordic country will soon join the transatlantic bloc, but it actually doesn’t even have to do so formally since it’s already a de facto member considering its close security cooperation with it, which means that Sweden is still a security threat to Russia despite not crossing Moscow’s red line of officially joining NATO.

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Sweden’s been in popping up more frequently in international news over the past month after lawmakers approved the largest defense spending increase in 70 years on 15 December which will boost expenditures by 40% by 2025. The Hill opined that “Russia Prompts Sweden To Revive Its Defense”, while Bloomberg later reassured everyone that “Sweden’s NATO Skepticism Endures While Russia Flexes Muscles”, pointing to the fact that Swedes are pretty much evenly split between joining NATO, declining to do so, and remaining undecided. Importantly, Sweden adopted the so-called “NATO option” of neighboring Finland for the first time ever where it’ll ambiguously not rule out NATO membership sometime in the future. In possible connection with that, Sputnik reported that “’When The War Comes’ Miniseries By Swedish Armed Forces Features Russia As A Threat”, hinting that the country’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) are working hand-in-glove with the media to promote future NATO membership on an anti-Russian basis.

Nevertheless, Sweden doesn’t need to join NATO to be a security threat to Russia. As The Hill noted in its earlier cited op-ed, “Sweden and Finland not only have increasingly integrated their own forces but, as members of the European Union, have committed themselves to the defense of their EU partners, which include the three small Baltic states that border Russia. In addition, in 2014, both countries signed cooperative arrangements with NATO, permitting NATO exercises on their soil. Both participated in NATO’s 2015 Arctic Challenge exercise. Moreover, Finland and Sweden signed new agreements with the U.S. Department of Defense, which call for much closer American cooperation with each country bilaterally and, as of 2018, with both countries in a trilateral arrangement.” It also bears mentioning that Sweden pushed the factually false narrative about a so-called Russian phantom sub hunt back in 2015 that I analyzed at the time as providing the pretext for strengthening subregional military integration into what I described as the “Viking Bloc”.

This concept refers to Sweden’s leading role in organizing the anti-Russian military capabilities of “Greater Scandinavia” — itself, Norway, and Denmark (“Traditional Scandinavia”) as well as their historical-cultural partners in Finland, the Baltics, and Iceland. All but Sweden and Finland are NATO members, but the latter two’s close security cooperation with the bloc as was earlier explained makes them de facto members. As such, just like Ukraine which is also a member of “Shadow NATO” (my term for the alliance’s informal members), Sweden already represents a security threat to Russia even though it hasn’t yet and might not ever cross Moscow’s red line of formal membership. The reason for this assessment is that the bloc is clearly calling the shots when it comes to Sweden’s security strategy, relying on it to flex its historic leadership muscles to expand its “sphere of influence” throughout “Greater Scandinavia” on the pretext of helping its historical-cultural partners “defend themselves from Russian aggression”.

This is part of the larger strategy pushed by the US since 2015 which I analyzed in a January 2015 piece for Sputnik titled “Lead From Behind: How Unipolarity Is Adapting To Multipolarity”. The gist is that America realized that it’s much more financially, militarily, and organizationally efficient to delegate leadership responsibilities to its top regional allies so that they can take the lead on its behalf in pursing shared security objectives such as “containing” Russia. In the specific context of the present article, this relates to Sweden’s “Lead From Behind” role in assembling the “Viking Bloc” across “Greater Scandinavia”. Readers should be reminded that that Swedish “deep state” never forgot the Russian Empire’s victory over them in the early 18th century Great Northern War which directly led to their country’s demise as one of Europe’s Great Powers. Just like with the nearby Poles, historical memory pervades throughout all levels of its “deep state” and endured for centuries as Sweden waited for the right moment to finally take its revenge against Russia.

Sweden is striving to support NATO’s anti-Russian “containment” policy in Northern Europe despite not being a formal member of the bloc, hoping that it’ll be rewarded with American approval for its own “sphere of influence” over the lands of “Greater Scandinavia” in which its “deep state” believes that they have the historical right to exercise a form of hegemony. Truth be told, they’ll likely succeed for the most part since the smaller surrounding countries (especially the Baltics) have jumped on the anti-Russian bandwagon and are eager to receive as much military support from America’s new de facto Swedish ally as possible. They seem to hope that submitting themselves to this emerging regional order will work out to their national benefit in some way or another, perhaps economically through a “deluge” of Swedish investments after having accepted that their countries are unable to survive as truly independent states. If this growing “sphere of influence” remained economic and cultural, then it wouldn’t be a threat to Russia, but the problem is its dark military dimension.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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America’s debt has more than doubled over the past ten years, skyrocketing from $13 trillion to more than $27 trillion over just two presidential administrations. And, despite successive presidents’ promises to “wind down” conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the defense budget has only gone in one direction— up. 

The dysfunctional budgeting process was on full display during the last week of 2020 when lawmakers crammed through a $740 billion defense funding deal as part of a massive $2.3 trillion spending bonanza. This included $696 billion for the Pentagon, and the rest for non-DoD spending like the nation’s nuclear weapons program under the Department of Energy. Members of Congress didn’t have all that much time to speed read through the bill’s more than 5,500 pages, allowing special interests to insert massive giveaways to the military-industrial complex. One government watchdog called the overstuffed stimulus package “a sweetheart deal for defense contractors.”

Washington needs to ramp up accountability, not goodies to contractors with clout.

Of the many egregious items baked into the combined COVID-omnibus bill, the handouts to the over-budget F-35 fighter jet program take the cake. The spending agreement greenlights 96 new F-35s, or 17 more than the Trump administration requested. The cost of these expensive new toys is $9.6 billion, enough money to pay for the grocery bills of America’s poorest households for a month. These expenditures might be understandable if the F-35 was capable of protecting America at an affordable price-tag. But the fighter jet has proven to be a high-speed disaster for taxpayers.

The Drive contributor Thomas Newdick notes,

“All three F-35 variants have in the past been plagued by a litany of deficiencies, including performance limitations, difficulties operating in extreme weather, dangerous cockpit pressure incidents, faults in the helmet-mounted display, serious safety concerns in the event of a blown tire, and more.”

And due in part to “technical difficulties,” operational testing of the F-35 in the Joint Simulation Environment has been delayed and won’t commence until mid-to-late 2021. But even without proper testing and evaluation against simulated threats, lawmakers are insisting on buying more F-35s at an outrageously-high cost.

The bill also showers $23.3 billion on the Navy for 10 ships, including funding of an extra Virginia-class submarine for the low, low price of $2.3 billion. At first glance, this seems like an eminently reasonable request. Unlike the F-35 program, Virginia-class attack submarines have a reliable track-record of ahead-of-schedule production, without significant cost overruns. It’s not the program itself that’s the problem, but rather the timing. The Navy is also constructing the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine this year, leading to concerns that building an additional Virginia-class ship would strain the Navy’s industrial bandwidth.

Even though the chief rationale for the extra Virginia-class submarine is countering Chinese naval might, the U.S. is actually on stronger footing than some defense hawks suggest, at least for now. According to some observers, Chinese submarines tend to be smaller and shorter-ranged than their U.S. counterparts. We should not discount our allies’ efforts to supplement deterrence in the region, either. Taiwan’s submarine program today sends a strong message that we are not alone and should be thinking about opportunities for sharing the burdens of balancing power in the western Pacific.

Additionally, Defense News contributor Joe Gould notes that the omnibus bill funds “the Army long-range hypersonic weapon at $861 million, or $60 million above the request; provides $88.1 million above the request for systems integration and testing in support of the Army’s mid-range missile development; and provides $161 million to support the Army’s enduring Indirect Fire Protection Capability program.” These programs may well be worthwhile, but it’s unclear why lawmakers continue to insist on putting in funding above initial requests. The military, after all, would surely have no issue requesting additional funding if they felt they needed it.

Perhaps the most egregious area of spending, however, is the $77 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations expenditures. OCO is a black hole of waste devoid of any accountability, yet lawmakers continue to fund these open-ended operations. In theory, this spending category is supposed to go to the fight against Middle East militants and the war in Afghanistan. But watchdogs realized years ago that OCO has become a yearly “slush fund” to pay for non-war related items. Back in 2017, the Government Accountability Office found that “the amount of OCO appropriations DoD considers as non-war increased from about four percent in fiscal year 2010 to 12 percent in fiscal year 2015.”

Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it best when he proclaimed the national debt to be the number one threat to national security. That doesn’t mean not having a Pentagon or national defense, but it does mean getting serious about how such spending is prioritized.

By scrapping the F-35 program and committing to a more sustainable pace of submarine production, the U.S. can ensure an effective national defense without breaking the bank. The entire world — including U.S. taxpayers — is watching.

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Featured image: F-35 Lightning II demonstration team members sprint to their positions during the ground show at the Defenders of Liberty Air & Space Show at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., May 17, 2019. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Alexander Cook)

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“Q Anon” May Have Been an FBI Psyop

January 21st, 2021 by Swiss Policy Research

A recent Reuters investigation may indicate that “Q Anon” was in fact an FBI cyber psyop.

The “Q Anon” phenomenon has generally been regarded as a hoax or prank, originated by online message board users in late October 2017, that got out of control. The “Q Anon” persona was preceded by similar personae, including “FBI anon”, “CIA anon” and “White House insider anon”.

“Q Anon” originally called himself “Q clearance patriot”. Former CIA counterintelligence operative Kevin M. Shipp explained that an actual “Q clearance leaker” – i.e. someone possessing the highest security clearance at the US Department of Energy, required to access top secret nuclear weapons information – would have been identified and removed within days.

However, in November 2020 Reuters reported that the very first social media accounts to promote the “Q Anon” persona were seemingly “linked to Russia” and even “backed by the Russian government”. For instance, the very first Twitter account to ever use the term “Q Anon” on social media had previously “retweeted obscure Russian officials”, according to Reuters.

These alleged “Russian social media accounts”, posing as accounts of American patriots, were in contact with politically conservative US YouTubers and drew their attention to the “Q Anon” persona. This is how, in early November 2017, the “Q Anon” movement took off.

But given the recent revelations by British investigator David J. Blake – who for the first time was able to conclusively show, at the technical level, that the “Russian hacking” operation was a cyber psyop run by the FBI and FBI cyber security contractor CrowdStrike – the Reuters report may in fact indicate that “Q Anon” was neither a hoax nor “Russian”, but another FBI psychological cyber operation.

Of note, US cyber intelligence firm New Knowledge, founded by former NSA and DARPA employees and tasked by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, in 2018, with investigating alleged “Russian social media operations” relating to the 2016 US presidential election, was itself caught faking a “Russian social media botnet” in order to influence the 2017 Alabama senate race.

If the “Q Anon” persona – similar to the Guccifer2.0 “Russian hacker” persona played by an FBI cyber security contractor – was indeed an FBI psychological operation, its goal may have been to take control of, discredit and ultimately derail the supporter base of US President Trump. In this case, the “Q Anon” movement may have been a modern version of the original FBI COINTELPRO program.

Postscript

Contrary to some media claims, the person or people behind the “Q Anon” persona have never been identified. Some media speculated that James Watkins, the owner of the 8chan/8kun message board, on which “Q” was posting his messages, might be “Q” or might be linked to “Q”, but Watkins denied this. In September 2020, the owner of QMap, a website aggregating “Q” messages, was identified as a Citigroup employee, but again no actual link to “Q” could be established.

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Biden’s Inaugural Address: An Exercise in Mass Deception

January 21st, 2021 by Stephen Lendman

Four years ago on January 20, Trump vowed to transfer power from Washington “and give it back to you, the people (sic).”

Saying while privileged Americans prospered, ordinary ones struggled to get by.

“That all changes starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment. It belongs to you (sic),” he said, adding:

“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer (sic).”

“The American carnage stops right here and stops right now…The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans (sic).”

We know how Trump’s mass deception turned out.

Time and again, political candidates promise one thing, then deliver something entirely difference if elected, notably in the US.

Government of, by, and for all Americans equitably is pure fantasy.

Like most of his predecessors, Trump served privileged interests exclusively at the expense of ordinary people he was indifferent toward.

Will that all change right here, right now under Biden/Harris?

Will the sun henceforth rise in the West and set in the East?

Dissembling is what politicians do. It goes with the territory, especially in the West, the US most of all.

It’s why they can never be trusted. Rare exceptions prove the rule.

Biden built a near-half century political career on a foundation of Big Lies and mass deception.

They’ll surely continue as long as he remains in office.

Believing otherwise is naive and wishful thinking.

What almost never happens in the US surely isn’t what’s coming ahead. Expect the opposite.

Prepare to be betrayed because it’s baked in the cake.

Once a servant of privileged interests and his own exclusively over the general welfare, always one.

Biden is a longstanding “deep state” tool — controlled by higher powers.

That’s what he’s always been all about. The same goes for Harris over a shorter duration.

Otherwise they wouldn’t have been chosen to replace Trump.

They’re reliable, controllable, and vitually certain to make an already bad situation worse on their watch for ordinary people at home and abroad.

That’s the only change I expect ahead — a dark chapter in US history growing darker, dystopia on their watch to deepen.

Harris is president in waiting, a hardline former prosecutor to take over when cognitively impaired Biden can no longer fake it even in sound bites.

He long ago abandoned public addresses, a lookalike double making them for him — including his inaugural address.

Roots of tyranny already exist in the mythical land of the free and home of the brave.

Follow their further sprouting ahead as dark forces controlling Biden/Harris likely snuff out what remains of a free and open society to solidify unchallenged deep state control.

Biden’s tenure began by mandating harmful-to-health face masks that don’t protect in federal buildings and on its lands by executive order.

It “call(s) on governors, public health officials, mayors, business leaders and others to implement masking, physical distancing, and other measures to control Covid-19,” according to the new regime’s seasonal flu (renamed covid) czar Jeff Zients.

Will the above be mandated ahead nationwide — followed perhaps by mandated vaxxing with what risks great harm or worse when taken as directed?

Will the above and mandated vaccine passports for access to public places become part of the new abnormal?

Will dissent against unacceptable Biden/Harris regime policies be criminalized as domestic terrorism?

Will we be cowed into submission to US dark forces for our own good?

Will war on humanity at home and abroad harden under selected, not elected, Biden/Harris — an illegitimate duo now empowered?

What Will Happen to US-Russia Relations?

After attending their inauguration with the capital under unprecedented lockdown and militarization, Russia’s envoy to Washington Anatoly Antonov said the following:

“I would like to believe that a new chapter in the development of the (US) begins today and, of course, that a new chapter in the development of Russian-American relations begins as well,”

Adding, After monitoring Wednesday’s events and public remarks on US television, “I can’t say that we found a lot of positive in the speeches” made by elements of the new Biden administration.

Antonov, other Russian officials, and their counterparts in other nations free from US control know that chances for improved relations between their countries and Washington is virtually nil.

The new adminstration’s geopolitical agenda is sure to be uncompromisingly hardline against all nations unwilling to sacrifice their sovereign rights to a higher power in Washington.

On Tuesday, Russia’s lower house State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin acknowledged reality in police state America, saying the following:

“Those who participated in unauthorized political actions everywhere were anointed by Washington as fighters for freedom and democracy.”

“When the same thing happen(s) in the (US), (they’re) labelled…domestic terrorists who face 15-20 years in prison.”

“(They’ll) be real political prisoners. Let’s call a spade a spade.”

That’s part of how the US operates at home and abroad — a take no prisoners approach to governing.

Biden/Harris replaced Trump by coup d’etat, likely to enhance swamp rule that’s festered and hardened for decades — the American way’s ugly face.

No government of, by, and for everyone ever existed from inception, no democracy other than a fantasy version wrapped in the American flag to foster the illusion of what doesn’t exist and never did.

The US is run by deep state militarists, corporatists, and other tyrannical elements for their own self-interest at the expense of ordinary people everywhere — to be exploited, not served.

Biden/Harris were chosen to front for the dirty system at a time of imperial USA’s deepening decline en route to history’s dustbin where it belongs.

They’re beholden to dark forces controlling them.

Will martial law be declared ahead on the phony pretext of foreign threats and domestic terrorism to counter?

Will what remains of a free and open society be replaced by full-blown totalitarian rule, enforced by police state harshness?

Make no mistake. Biden/Harris and members of their regime are enemies of ordinary people, hostile to their interests, wanting them exploited, not served.

Along with likely escalated foreign aggression against one or more invented enemies, homeland despotism will likely harden on their watch for our own good we’ll likely be told.

With history in mind in my lifetime since Franklin Roosevelt goaded imperial Japan to attack the US, knew Pearl Harbor was coming but failed to warn its commander to give him the war he wanted, America has been on a downward trajectory toward full-blown despotism.

JFK, RFK and MLK were eliminated for standing in the way of what US dark forces have been pursuing for generations.

Trump was an aberration so had to be denied a second term, brazen fraud the vehicle to elevate Biden/Harris to power.

Big Media-proliferated mind manipulation promotes the official narrative by suppressing hard truths.

Public mind control convinces most people to go along with what harms their health, welfare, safety, and a nation unfit to live  in.

A permanent war on humanity rages at home and abroad, Biden/Harris appointed the latest maestros of misery over ordinary Americans.

Their diabolical mission is hidden behind smiling faces, a facade that’s part of mass deception.

They’ll preside over affairs of state extrajudicially like most of their predecessors.

Wreckage they inherited may be shattered beyond repair before passing the baton to what’s likely to be full-blown tyranny under whoever succeeds them — based on what’s been happening post-9/11, greatly escalated last year.

Russian State Duma Speaker Volodin got it right saying:

A nation “which lectures the whole world about the standards of democracy” denies it to its own people and tolerates it nowhere else.

That’s the agenda Biden/Harris inherited, charged with serving the interests of dark forces controlling them.

Forewarned is forearmed. The only solution is popular revolution.

The alternative is ruler/serf USA ahead.

It’s baked in the cake without all-out resistance to reject what no one should accept.

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is from The White House Facebook

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Washington’s 40-year North Korea Policy: Success or Failure?

January 21st, 2021 by Prof. Joseph H. Chung

Washington’s 40-year offensive policy of North Korean regime change has gone nowhere.

Bill Clinton created a chance of peace with North Korea in 1994 and he blew it.

George W. Bush accepted the 2005 agreement for peace, then, he threw it away.

Donald Trump had the golden chance for peace at 2018 Hanoi Summit, but he lost the chance.

Barack Obama has made North Korea a Nuclear State.

Joe Biden, 46th president of the U.S. has quasi impossible mission of saving America from the murderous corona-virus, the torn economy and, above all, the deeply divided society. The virus will go away and the economy will be eventually recovered. But, the task of unifying the society is something else. The divide of the American society is essentially due to poor management of the 150-year old racial relations and disorderly neo-liberal economic growth and there is no guarantee that the Biden will be able to unify the country. One thing sure is that Biden should give priority to the solution of internal racial problem instead of trying to change regimes of other countries including North Korea.

Biden will eventually have to do something about North Korean problems. It is hoped that he will not spend eight years of “strategic patience” which was the North Korean policy of his former boss, Barack Obama. I presume that Biden’s perception of North Korean problems is based on the views of American media, think tanks, academia and politicians. Their perception of North Korean issues is based on the 70-year old mistrust and hatred toward North Korea. What these views are saying is that the failure of Washington’s North Korea policy is attributable to the dishonesty and unreliability of North Korea. Unfortunately, as long as Biden relies on these views, his North Korea policy will fail just like his predecessors’ policies have failed.

In this paper, I am presenting alterative view which is, I believe, more objective and more useful for the solution of North Koreans problems. I may add that my view is shared by most of the liberal minded North Korean affaires experts in South Korea including former Ministers of Unification of Korea.

Image on the right: President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, walk together to their one-on-one bilateral meeting, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, at the Capella Hotel in Singapore. (Official White House Photo by Stephanie Chasez)

In this paper, I am asking two questions. What has been the nature of Washington’s North Korea policy for last 40 years? Was it a failure or a success?

The primary objective of Washington’s North Korea policy has been the: regime change and the denuclearization of North Korea. One may add that China containment policy and the sales of military equipment were its objective as well, although they were not officially recognized objectives.

Policy of Regime Change has failed 

The change of North Korean regime has been the core of Washington’s North Korea policy. This policy is based on West’s negative perception – even demonization – of North Korean regime of Juchéism. In the eyes of the media, think tanks and politicians of the West, Juchéism is a dangerous ideology which, if spread, can pollute the Western value of democracy.

Washington’s strategy of regime change is built up on two tactics: total war or/and internal revolt. The total war was planned several times since as early as 1950. The U.S. had an idea of attacking North Korea with nuclear weapon during the Korean War (1950-1953). In 1992, Bill Clinton was going to bomb North Korea. In 1968, after the capture by Pyongyang of the USS Pueblo, a spy ship, Washington was going to attack North Korea. In 2017, Trump was ready to invade North Korea

But, none of these plans was carried out because of the huge human casualties. According to John Bolton, one of the most ardent supporter of the war mentioned that within 30 minute of the war, several millions of citizens of Seoul city will be sacrificed, apart from the deaths of American troops and their families.

The alternative option taken by Washington along with the conservative forces in South Korea was to provoke internal revolts, topple the Juché government and establish a democratic regime.

To provoke the internal revolt against the North Korean government, the U.S. and its allies have used several tactics.

First, the tactic used was the creation of fear so that the people would blame the government for its failure of assuring citizens’ security. This has been done for decades by U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises. According to the people who have lived in North Korea, these military exercises were so extensive, so violent and so intense that that the North Koreans people became utterly frightened and even terrorized. This tactic was a failure. The North Koreans have endured without complaining against the government. On the contrary, they rather blamed the U.S. and its allies.

Second, the U.S. and its allies have been relying on anti-Juché propaganda through radio, TV, seminars with North Korean refugees and even the air-born propaganda balloons. The propaganda was designed to show the superiority of democracy of South Korea over Juchéism of North Korea. This approach has failed primarily, because North Koreans had contempt for the South Korean regime for its corruption, its being vassal regime of Washington and its being pro-Japan. North Koreans knew that South Korea was richer than North Korea, but they seemed to think that the North Korean government looked after the ordinary citizens far better than the conservative South Korean counterparts.

Third, Washington and the conservative South Korean government have been trying to isolate Pyongyang from the international community through diplomatic pressure and economic aid, but this tactic has not produced the expected results. North Korea has diplomatic relations with 164 countries, although the number of embassies abroad is much smaller.

Fourth, Washington has been imposing on North Korea endless sanctions against the North. Washington and the conservative government of South Korea thought that these sanctions would lead to the massive complaints against the government, but this has not happened in North Korea for the simple reason that the people had been used to it on the one hand and, on the other, North Korea enforced self sufficiency and increasingly used the underground trade with China and other neighbouring countries to get daily necessities and even oil.

Despite all these harsh tactics deployed by the U.S. and its allies, the citizens of North Korea have not revolted and the Juchéism has survived.

This can be explained by two additional factors. On the one hand, Juchésim has evolved from militarism (Sun-gun) to double priority of military force and economic development (Byun-jin) and now, to economic development. In other words, Juchéism has been evolving from the military-oriented system to people’s welfare-oriented system.

On the other hand, we must know the cultural impact of the leader-people relation embodied in the Juchéism. The ideology of Juché is highly inspired by Confucianism in which the people regard the head of state as father and obey. In the West, one wonders how the Kim’s family has been able to maintain the power for 70 years. Given the harsh living conditions, the North Koreans could have risen up and try to topple the government. But this has not happened, because the government-people relation is not necessarily one of ruler-ruled coercive relations but rather one of ruler’s paternalistic care-people’s gratitude. However, as the North Korean society becomes more open and globalized, such Confucian relations will have to go through changes. And, the regime will become more open and more globally acceptable regime.

Policy of Denuclearization has gone no where

Politicians and bureaucrats in Washington have been trying to convince the world that Washington’s North Korea policy of denuclearization is the best assurance of peace on the Korean peninsula. In fact, the U.S. had good opportunities to achieve the objective of denuclearization. But, unfortunately, Washington blew all these opportunities.

The first opportunity was the Framework Agreement of October 21, 1994 by virtue of which North Korea would stop all nuclear program in return of the construction of two civil use light water nuclear reactors and provision of oil. But this was cancelled because of the non-implementation of the Agreement by Washington and Seoul. One of the reasons of the non-implementation of the Agreement was the death of Kim Il-sung in July 1994. Washington hoped that Kim-il-sung’s death would provoke popular revolt and topple the government.

But there was no popular revolt and the regime was still there. This meant that Washington and Seoul had to implement the Agreement. But, neither South Korea nor the U.S. wanted the implementation of the Agreement. So, Washington and Seoul were looking for events which could justify the non-implementation of the Agreement, Well, North Korea provided an event.

On August 31, 1998, Kim Jong-il, successor of Kim Il-sung made a test of Missile Taepodong-1 to show the dissatisfaction with the non-implementation of the Agreement. This gave Washington the justification for scraping the Agreement. And, in 2002, the Agreement just disappeared into thin air, when George W. Bush declared that North Korea was a part of ” Axis of Evil”.

The second was the 2005-Agreement which was produced as a result of the 6-Party Talks. George W. Bush blew the chance of denuclearization. North Korea was quite disappointed with Washington’s hesitation to implement the 1944-Agreement and, in December of 2002, Pyongyang announced that it would reactivate the Yongbyon nuclear facilities. This obviously alarmed the Bush government and in 2003, the 6-party Talk began under the presidency of China. The member countries included the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the U.S.

On August 9, 2003, the first meeting of the 6-Party Talk took place. The talk was difficult because of Pyongyang’s uranium enriching program which North Korea denied, while The U.S. suspected. In order to put pressure on Pyongyang, the U.S. froze 25 million USD deposited by North Korea in a bank (Banco Delta Asia) in Macao.

Nevertheless, on September 19, 2005, a joint statement was announced. In this Statement, North Korea pledged to abandon nuclear program and respect the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) Safe Guards rules as well as its return to NPT (Non-proliferation Treaty) in exchange of non-aggression of the U.S. However, there was no positive sign of realization of the Statement. Then, in order to speed up the process and to show its potential nuclear capacity, Pyongyang undertook the first nuclear test on October 9, 2006.

The 6-Party Talk continued until 2007. In 2007 the group announced the Action Plan of the 2005 Statement. In this plan North Korea would go further by promising no export of nuclear products, while the U.S. would provide 900,000 tons of oil. Moreover, North Korea will be removed from the list of terrorism sponsor countries.

Then February 2008, the anti-Pyongyang conservative party of Lee Byong-bak took over the power in South Korea and the 6-PartyTalk mechanism disappeared. Nevertheless, Washington could, if it wanted, implement the 2005 Joint Statement despite the Lee Myong-bak’s anti- North Korea policy.

Barack Obama who succeeded George W. Bush could continue the 6-Party talk, but he failed. He could try to improve the bilateral relations, but he did not. Rather, he spent 8-year of “Strategic Patience”, which has led to 3 nuclear tests out of 6 nuclear tests ever undertaken by Pyongyang and 83 missile tests representing 57% of all missile tests undertaken by North Korea. In this way Obama made North Korea a de facto Nuclear State and a missile super power.

The third was Trump’s engagement policy designed to bring peace to the Korean peninsula. But, he had to deal with North Korea which was deeply disappointed by the 8-year “strategic patience”. When Donald Trump took over the power on January 20, 2017, Pyongyang was in a difficult situation because of Obama’s North Korea policy of doing nothing. But it had a high hope for Trump’s more positive policy of peace dialogue and engagement. But, nothing happened. To show its disappointment, North Korea tested on July 4, 2017 the ICBM, Hwasung-14 with a range of 8,500 KM and undertook test of hydrogen bomb on September 3, 2017. Trump reacted violently and threatened Pyongyang with “fury and fire”.

Here, we can see that Americans felt insecure. And, Trump felt the need for engagement with Kim Jong-un. But, having no experience in managing international crisis, Trump relied on Moon Jae-in, president of South Korea, for the engagement and the Singapore Summit took place on June 12, 2018 leading to joint statement on some basic guiding principles of the bilateral engagement. But the real test took place in Hanoi on February 27-28, 2019, which was sabotaged by hardliners in Washington. It was just too bad. Remember this. Kim Jong-un went to Hanoi by train taking three days travel to Hanoi. He did this to show his sincerity of solving the nuclear crisis. It was a golden opportunity to find the solution. But Trump blew it.

Image below: U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster during September briefing on North Korea. (White House)

What emerges from these episodes is the pattern of Washington’s North Korean denuclearization policy. The pattern may be summarized:

American nuclear threat→North Korean deterrent reactions (missile tests or nuclear tests)→fear in the U.S.→Washington-Pyongyang Peace Agreement→restoration of calm in the U.S.→Cancellation of the agreement

Let us apply this pattern to what happened to the 1994 Framework Agreement.

  • Prior to the 1994 Framework Agreement, North Korea was threatened by possible nuclear attack by the U.S. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989 meant for Pyongyang the end of Soviet protection against American nuclear attack and North Korea felt the need for nuclear development for defensive purpose.
  • In 1992, Pyongyang withdrew from NPT, which alarmed Washington. Bill Clinton planed military intervention-most likely nuclear attack.
  • Owing to the Jimmy Carter’s mediation, Washington and Pyongyang signed the 1994 Agreement.
  • Calm was restored in the U.S.
  • The U.S. and its allies looked for an excuse for cancelling the Agreement. In 1998, North Korea launched missile to complain the delay of the Agreement implementation.
  • And, in 2002, George W. Bush made North Korea as a part of the “Axis of Evil”. In this way, the 1994 Agreement has gone with the political wind.

Now let us look at the end of 2005 Joint Statement.

  • Having lost the chance of peace through the 1994 Agreement, North Korea needed to put pressure on the U.S. Pyongyang said that it could reactivate the Yongbyon nuclear facilities.
  • Being alarmed, Washington persuaded China, in 2003, to organize the 6-Party Talk.
  • On September 19, 2005, the 6-Party Talk signed the Joint Statement in which North Korea would stop all nuclear programmes in return of non aggression of the U.S.
  • North Korea being fed up with the non-fulfillment of the joint Statement, undertook the first nuclear test on October 9, 2006
  • In 2007, the 6-Party-Talk tried to continue its dialogue and the Action Plan was announced.
  • Calm was restored in the U.S.
  • George W. Bush put North Korea back on the list of terrorism-sponsor country. The 2005-Agreement disappeared with no trace.

Now, let us see the episode of the 2019 Hanoi Summit

  • For 8 years (2009-2017), Barack Obama relied on “Strategic Patience” to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis. But he did nothing to undertake dialogue with Pyongyang
  • North Korea was hoping that Donald Trump would open the door for bilateral peace dialogue in vain.
  • Being disappointed, North Korea launched in July 2017 the ICBM Hwasung-14 which can reach Alaska. And on September 3, Kim Jong-un tested hydrogen bomb. So, Americans felt insecure.
  • Trump was alarmed
  • Through productive mediation of Moon Jae-in, Donald Trump met Kim Jong-un three times. The Hanoi Summit has given the golden chance for the solution of the North Korean nuclear crisis. But Trump let the chance to fly away.

When we see the 40-year experience of the American North Korea policy, we are made to wonders if Washington really desires denuclearization. If Washington really wanted denuclearization, it has had three occasions for denuclearization, but it has let them to go away. Why? Does Washington really want denuclearization of North Korea? But, what it has shown so far make us doubt its sincerity for denuclearization.

What has happened makes us to believe that Washington does not really want North Korean denuclearization. What has taken place makes us to think that Washington prefers a nuclear North Korea and resulting tension which justifies the presence of U.S. military in South Korea for the China containment policy and which assures the lucrative market of American military equipment in Korea and Japan.

To sum up, the general evaluation of Washington’s 40-year North Korea policy is very negative. It has failed in changing Juchéism. The denuclearization policy has gone nowhere. The regime Juchéism is still there intact. The number of nuclear bombs may be increasing.

If there is anything which the U.S. has accomplished, it is the expansion of market of American military equipment and the enhancement of China containment. It is hoped that Biden will come up with North Korea policy that aims at real denuclearization, the lasting peace in Korea and in the region.

It is hoped that Biden will not repeat what his predecessor have done. His policy should be based on mutual trust and respect and find solution through dialogue and negotiation.

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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the East-Asia Observatory (OAE) of the Research Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM), Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

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The UK government has established a journalism project to ‘influence’ Venezuela’s ‘media agenda’ while a Foreign Office-funded foundation is spending £750,000 on a secretive ‘democracy-promotion’ programme in the country, as Britain appears to deepen efforts to remove the Maduro government.

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As Venezuela’s political crisis continues, the UK government has initiated a new project promoting investigative journalism in Latin America which furtively covers Venezuela.

The project, launched last summer and intended to “influence” the media agenda in the country, follows a long history of the British government using journalism as an influencing tool. It raises suspicions that it aims to help remove the leftist government of Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro.

In a separate programme, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), a majority UK-government funded organisation, has spent over £750,000 to “strengthen democracy” in Venezuela since 2016, according to documents obtained by Declassified.

The WFD’s programmes in the country are shrouded in secrecy due to apparent concerns about the security of its staff, although its country representative advertises his affiliation to the organisation online.

The British government controversially recognises Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó as president and is running a number of anti-government programmes in the country using the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) which supports projects designed “to tackle instability and to prevent conflicts that threaten UK interests”.

The aim of the fund’s new journalism project is stated to be the creation of a “new platform that strengthens media organisation [sic] throughout the region and provides journalists with a platform in which they can collaborate and build regional stories”.

Programme literature notes that successful applicants should display “a capacity to link into – and ultimately influence – local and national media agendas”.

But they are warned that “the British government — and its resourcing of the project — should not be expressly referred or linked to the individual outputs of the project (i.e. individual articles, events etc).”

Run by the British embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, the call for applications noted that successful bids would start in August 2020. There has been no public update since, although the Foreign Office told Declassified there had been delays due to the coronavirus pandemic.

On the public advert, applicants are advised to budget up to £250,000 for their projects, but the Foreign Office told Declassified: “it is not currently possible to confirm what budget will be available for this project.”

Declassified’s repeated questions about the project to its two coordinators in Bogotá went unanswered. However, a Foreign Office spokesperson told Declassified:

“It is inaccurate to conflate this call for bids with the UK position on Venezuela, which has not changed. We want to see a democratic transition with free and fair elections take place in Venezuela.”

The CSSF put out a public call in June last year for applications from journalists seeking to cover crime and corruption in Colombia, Peru and Panama, adding there was the “potential to cover linked events in other neighbouring countries”. The word Venezuela did not appear.

However, CSSF documentation published three days before the advert outlined the same programme with the addition of Venezuela in its title. The furtive inclusion of the country appears to reflect Foreign Office reticence to publicise its increased involvement in Venezuela.

The summary of another CSSF programme, again in Colombia for the year ending March 2020, includes the recommendation to “engage” Foreign Office officials “about options to develop CSSF programmes in Venezuela”.

A September 2019 job advert for a CSSF programme manager in Lima, Peru, notes that the successful applicant will work “with colleagues in Colombia, Panama and, potentially, Venezuela”. 

Declassified recently revealed that the CSSF has spent £450,000 setting up an anti-government coalition in Venezuela, again by furtively adding the project to an existing programme focused on Colombia and beginning in 2019.

Journalism as information war

The UK government has long used the media to undermine foreign leaders and political movements it perceives as a threat to British business interests.

Declassified recently revealed that a secretive Cold War propaganda unit, named the Information Research Department (IRD), tried to prevent Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from winning presidential elections in 1964 and 1970.

Declassified files also reveal that during the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964-1985, the IRD “assiduously cultivated” one of Brazil’s leading left-wing publishers, Samuel Wainer.

Though the unit was shut down in 1977, Britain has continued to sponsor journalistic ventures in Latin America. In response to a freedom of information request, the Foreign Office revealed that, between January 2016 and September 2018, it funded Venezuelan news outlet Fundación Efecto Cocuyo, as well as the Instituto Radiofónico Fe y Alegría and Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Prensa.

While receiving funds from the British government, Efecto Cocuyo teamed up with two British organisations — Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture — to “call for more evidence” regarding the killing of Óscar Pérez at the hands of Venezuelan police. Pérez, a police officer, had hijacked a police helicopter and, on 27 June 2017, used it to attack a number of government buildings in central Caracas.

In July 2019, Efecto Cocuyo’s editor, Luz Mely Reyes, spoke at the UK government’s “Global Conference for Media Freedom” event in London. Then foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, addressing the conference, said Reyes “has defied the Maduro regime by co-founding an independent news website, Efecto Cocuyo”, without mentioning the website’s links to the British government.

London’s support for media projects in Venezuela appears to mirror that of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). According to its accounts, the NED has funded “freedom of information” projects in Venezuela aimed at fostering a “greater understanding of the spillover effects of Venezuelan corruption and criminal activity” by working with “investigative journalists and partner organisations”.

A 2017 NED project, with a budget of over $60,000, aims to “increase transparency and accountability in the Venezuelan government procurement processes. And to foster collaboration with journalists across the region”.

Media freedom group, Reporters Without Borders, which is also funded by the NED, notes: “Venezuela’s president since 2013, Nicolás Maduro persists in trying to silence independent media outlets and keep news coverage under constant control.”

It adds: “The climate for journalists has been extremely tense since the onset of a political and economic crisis in 2016, and is exacerbated by Maduro’s frequent references to ‘media warfare’ in an attempt to discredit national and international media criticism of his administration.”

Venezuelan journalist Luz Mely Reyes speaks at the UK government’s Global Conference for Media Freedom alongside Jeremy Hunt, then UK foreign secretary, London, 10 July 2019. (Photo: Twitter / Press Gazette)

The embassy in Bogotá

One of the two Foreign Office points of contact for the project at the British embassy in Bogotá is Claudia Castilla, a Colombian national who was a UK government-funded Chevening Scholar in London from 2017-18.

Castilla appears to be a strong supporter of the Venezuelan opposition, writing in February 2014 “I think I fell in love with Leopoldo López”, referring to a leading opposition figure. At the time US-educated López was promoting street protests in a strategy known as “The Exit”, after Maduro won presidential elections in April 2013.

From 2014-15, Castilla worked as a research assistant for the Colombian chapter of Transparency International, where she “formulated public policy recommendations”. Declassified recently revealed the UK government funded Transparency International’s Venezuelan chapter to set up an “anti-corruption” coalition in the country.

From 2012 to 2013, Castilla worked for the Cerrejón Foundation, the charitable arm of the controversial Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia which is run by three London-listed mining multinationals. For the latter period of her employment, Castilla was the foundation’s “social control advisor”.

‘Democracy promotion’

Documents obtained by Declassified also show that the Westminster Foundation for Democracy — Britain’s “democracy promotion” arm — has been running expensive programmes in Venezuela.

The WFD claims to be “the most effective organisation sharing the UK democratic experience”, but its operations are shrouded in secrecy.

Venezuela hosts the WFD’s only full-scale programme and permanent office in Latin America as part of a project which began in 2016. Since then the WFD has spent £760,680, according to figures obtained by Declassified.

The largest outlay was £248,725 in 2017-2018, as the EU announced a sanctions regime against Venezuela and British officials intensified calls for “different people at the helm” of the Venezuelan government.

Alan Duncan, then minister of state for the Americas, said in 2018: “Maduro’s double crime is that his destruction of the economy has been followed by the systemic undermining of democracy.” He added: “The revival of the oil industry [in Venezuela] will be an essential element in any recovery, and I can imagine that British companies like Shell and BP, will want to be part of it.”

Last year, the WFD spent £113,193 on its Venezuela operations, while Declassified understands a bid for funding of just over £27,500 for next year is awaiting approval. The WFD has two full-time staff in Venezuela.

In December, UN human rights experts found that “since November 2020 Venezuela has systematically stigmatised and persecuted civil society organisations, dissenting voices and human rights defenders”.

The WFD has no similar programmes in UK government-allied dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, or the United Arab Emirates.

The Foundation told Declassified: “WFD works to strengthen democracy around the world. We are funded by the UK as well as other governments (including Canada, Germany, Norway and Switzerland) and international organisations (such as the United Nations Development Programme) and are operationally independent.”

But the vast majority of the WFD’s funding comes from the British government. In the year to March 2020, it provided £11.4-million to the Foundation, while all other sources of income added up to £1.5-million.

The WFD said that in Venezuela it works “with a range of MPs, National Assembly staff, civil society, and academics” but it refused to disclose to Declassified information about who those partners are. It said this was “to avoid endangering the physical health or safety of those partners”.

However, the WFD’s country representative in Venezuela advertises his position on his public Linkedin page, and his email and phone number are available through WFD job adverts.

As its Venezuela programme began in 2016, the WFD published an article on the independent news site openDemocracy in association with Daniel Fermín, a Venezuelan researcher.

The article asked: “Can Venezuela’s president [Nicolás Maduro] be unseated peacefully?”. In the following two years, openDemocracy was awarded $99,661 (£74,131) by the US analogue of the WFD, the National Endowment for Democracy.

According to a 2018 WFD posting for a job in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, its country representative is expected to work with the British embassy and must “contribute to development of future business opportunities in Venezuela”.

When asked why it focused on Venezuela, the foundation told Declassified: “WFD programmes have been active in other countries across Latin America. We stand ready to launch new programmes and country offices when the opportunity arises.”

Neutrality 

The WFD says that it “works on a cross-party basis” in Venezuela, “seeking to engage all sides of the political divide while supporting democratic institutions in the country”.

In January 2019, shortly after Guaidó proclaimed himself president, the WFD’s country representative wrote that “last years elections [sic] were a sham and therefore Maduro is an usurper”.

The next month — after trucks of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) attempted to enter Venezuelan territory — he said: “Non-intervention cannot be an absolute principle that doesn’t consider other factors”.

On 30 April, when Guaidó launched an armed coup attempt in Caracas, the WFD’s representative announced that Guaidó’s actions were “not an assault on democracy but the other way round”. Elsewhere, he has described Chavismo — referring to former president Hugo Chávez — as a “plague”.

UK parliamentarians overseeing WFD’s operations have also disparaged the Venezuelan government. Conservative MP Richard Graham, the chair of WFD’s board of governors for the duration of its Venezuela project, said in December 2019 that “Islington Corbynsistas [sic] don’t get that extreme left ideas never work, whether in 2019 Venezuela or 80s Liverpool”.

The WFD’s board is appointed by the UK foreign secretary and is modelled on the NED, which has beendescribed by the Washington Post as the “sugar daddy of overt [US] operations”. Since Chávez’s election in 1998, the NED has been the guiding hand behind a number of efforts to overthrow the government in Venezuela.

While the NED’s operations abroad have received some independent scrutiny, the WFD – has largely operated under media silence.

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Matt Kennard is head of investigations at Declassified UK.

John McEvoy is an independent journalist who has written for International History Review, The Canary, Tribune Magazine, Jacobin, Revista Forum, and Brasil Wire.

Featured image: UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab meets Juan Guaidó, recognised by Britain as Venezuela’s ‘interim president’, in London, 21 January 2020. (Photo: UK government)

In the wake of the January 6 insurrection, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have us believe that the United States and Israel have a common enemy.

Pelosi implies that the American insurrectionists whose ideologies are rooted in racism, xenophobia and supremacy represent a threat to both the US and Israel — i.e., she believes antisemitism threatens the well-being and sanctity of the apartheid Jewish state, just as its existence among the ranks of the insurrectionists threatens American democracy.

That’s a big lie. What helped create Israel is the antisemitic motivations of British politicians. What poses a threat to Israel is anti-Zionism not antisemitism.(See: How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel: At a desperate moment in World War I, British elites appealed to what they saw as the monolithic, all-powerful forces of “international Jewry” to turn the tide of the conflict — and promised them Palestine.)

Israel fights its domestic anti-Zionist threat by, among other things, reining in human rights groups such as B’Tselem when they tell the truth about the nature of the state as an apartheid state. For example, Israel’s education minister has banned B’Tselem from lecturing at schools because its mission of ensuring “human rights, democracy, liberty and equality to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea” is antithetical to the Zionist creed.

Worth noting is that “so far neither the New York Times or Washington Post have reported on the B’Tselem report.”

For both Israel and the United States, the security threat today is deeply rooted in their histories and how they came to be. One difference is that supremacist, discriminatory and apartheid ideology is today enshrined in Israel’s Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (the equivalent of a constitution), but thankfully not in the American Constitution any longer. (Although slavery is never mentioned in the Constitution, there are 11 clauses that allude to its existence.The 13th amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in 1865; the 14th amendment of 1868 granted citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” thereby granting citizenship to former slaves; the 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to Black males, etc.)

To understand the parallel between the two settler-colonial states better, read the following words [min 18:33] by Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University Eddie S. Glaude Jr. about the United States, while transposing specific references (in bold):

We’ve been having this conversation for a number of years. We saw it in real time over this last election [the Palestinian intifadas] when we think back on American [Israeli] history, we know that what is challenged, what has been the contradiction, what has been the serpent wrapped around the legs of the table upon which the constitution [Israel’s basic law] was signed, the declaration of independence was crafted, was this belief that white [Jewish] people matter more than others [certainly Palestinian Arabs], this ideology of whiteness [Jewishness] … we think about every moment of crisis that challenged the basic precepts of democracy [colonization and apartheid] it has been in defense of this belief that this country ought to remain a white [Jewish] nation.

In both Israel and the United States, as their respective histories indicate, the underlying cause of injustice is supremacy or, in other words, hate, intolerance and a sense of entitlement by one group of people over another. (See: ‘Yes, we’re racists. We believe in racism’: Embracing racism, rabbis at pre-army yeshiva laud Hitler, urge enslaving Arabs)

Today, the situation is much worse in Israel than it is in the United States. The US continues to lie about Israel while at the same time being more honest about itself than it has been for decades. So, whereas the news media and politicians are finally trying to reattach people to reality and facts, especially the fact that the majority of all terrorist plots and attacks (57% of 893) from 1994 to 2020 were perpetrated by right wing terrorists, they continue to lie about the apartheid nature of the Israeli state.

In connection with Israel, the big lie is two-fold. One has to do with its vaunted claim as the “only democracy in the Middle East,” when in fact it is an apartheid state (see: This is apartheid: The Israeli regime promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River).

The second big lie has to do with what Tony Blinken, Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state, calls “the Jewish homeland,” which in fact is a denial of Palestinian centuries-long history in their homeland and an embrace of the Zionist concept of Jewish nationalism. (See: Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha, in which the Palestinian historian clearly shows that Palestine is grounded in a distinctive Palestinian culture that long predates the Old Testament narrative of Israelite conquest, a history where Jews, Christians, Muslims and others lived together peacefully. Israel continues to ignore and erase this history in the interests of a modern invention rooted in ancient myths.)

For a refutation of Jewish nationalism, see The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, which, according to a 2009 review, is “a definitive and learned polemic against this idea [the Zionist idea of Jewish nationalism] which has caused so much terror in our world today.”

Trump’s racist acts/speech are being denounced — from his Muslim Ban to his “good on both sides” in Charlottesville, to his outrageous remarks about Mexican immigrants or his “China virus” taunts, to his refusal to condemn white supremacy and the Proud Boys by saying “stand back and stand by,” etc., etc.

However, what continues appallingly to be listed on Trump’s positive side of the ledger, without question or irony, includes this: the move of the American embassy in Israel to occupied and annexed Jerusalem and “renewed peace in the Middle East,” which has no Palestinian support and was recognized early on as being all “about shoring up Trump’s slumping electoral campaign and improving Netanyahu’s battered image in Israel [rather] than bringing peace to the Middle East.”

Writing in Newsweek on the day before Trump’s departure from D.C., Yishai Fleisher, International Spokesman, Jewish illegal “settlement” of Hebron, praises the disgraced Republican leader for attacking “calcified anti-Israel lies and instead [telling] the plain truth — and by doing so, lift[ing] the Jewish state’s international standing many-fold.” Trump’s inversion of reality about Israel is as effective as his big lie about the American election. But now that he is toppled, the U.S. fights supremacy at home but continues to defend supremacy in Israel.

To my mind, the most positive aspect of Trump’s legacy in the United States is the change we are now observing in the national discourse, i.e., bringing to the fore that which commentators have been describing as “hiding in plain sight” — the white supremacist history and character of this nation. Because of that slow and painful shift in discourse since the Black Lives Matter protests began over George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white policeman on May 25, 2020, we have all become better educated.

For example, I now know (and I didn’t before) about the Tulsa Race Massacre (also known as the Tulsa Race Riot), which occurred over 18 hours on May 31-June 1, 1921, when a white mob attacked black residents, homes and businesses; I know (and I didn’t before) that when racist laws in Oregon were put on the ballot for repeal in 2002, 30% of electors voted against the repeal.

The big question is whether, even with such facts in the foreground, the Biden administration can “pivot” or roll back the setbacks to its pluralistic aspirations that are now in high relief. With millions still supporting Trump, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. below, slightly paraphrased (originally, they were about Vietnam and the Vietnamese people), still ring true:

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam [America], that we have been detrimental to the life of… [many peoples]. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

America is talking about what the January 6 insurrection represents: the entrenchment of white supremacy and racism in American society at the highest levels.

It is not talking honestly about its closest ally, about what Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians represents. US politicians on both sides of the aisle lie about it every chance they get. US Secretary of State Pompeo’s declaration that the Israel boycott (BDS movement) is anti-Jewish, for example.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib had this to say on Democracy Now!:

It is so critically important that we call it [Israel’s racism] out. Our country continues to enable that country and enable Netanyahu, who continues to spew anti-Arab rhetoric that allows violence towards Palestinians to continue in a way that is so inhumane and doesn’t follow international human rights.

Bringing anguish to millions of Palestinians, the United States continues to support the fascist violence and aggression to which Israel resorts so as to continue to exist and expand as an apartheid Zionist Jewish state on Palestinian land.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: The Israeli and American flags displayed on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem (Photo: Yonatan Sindel)

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How to Buy Politicians: Corruption and Lobbying

January 21st, 2021 by Rod Driver

“Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying”(1)

Until recently, the terms Public Relations (PR) and lobbying were used slightly differently. Lobbying means direct communications with policy-makers. PR is more general and refers to all communications. The US introduced regulations to restrict the activities of lobbyists, so lobbyists tried to get around these regulations by labelling their activities as PR. There is now considerable overlap between the two activities. This post discusses activities that have traditionally been known as lobbying.

Political Corruption – It’s Not A Bribe If You Call It A ‘Donation’ 

The term corruption conjures up images of brown envelopes stuffed full of used notes being passed furtively under a table as a bribe. However, this is just one type of corruption. In Britain, Europe and the US, the corruption that really matters is built into the system, in the forms of donations, favours and influence. (This is sometimes called collusive corruption, where politicians and business people collude with each other). Big corporations are happy to spend a few million dollars/euros/pounds on political ‘donations’ if they get back billions in extra profits due to laws and regulations biased in their favor,(2) or from existing laws being weakened. In any other context we would call this bribery.

Politics in the US is expensive. Many US businesses now make large bribes to both of the major US political parties.(3) The main method is known as a ‘fundraiser’. This is an event where corporations pay large sums to politicians using a lobbyist as an intermediary. The politicians know where the money has come from, and they know who expects favourable legislation in return.(4) US politicians are therefore dependent on their most successful lobbyists, and their wealthiest supporters. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that money and wealth influence policy.(5) One former insider said of their work:

the more money you have, the more your voice is heard …It was an endless cycle of money trading hands for votes…every fundraiser is a legal bribe”(6)

America is effectively a business-run society. A good example would be the insurance and drug companies, who make big profits from the existing US healthcare system. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year bribing politicians to avoid changes that would decrease their profits.(7) President Obama introduced some changes, but the final legislation was so watered down that the US healthcare system is still nowhere near the type of National Health Service that is commonplace elsewhere. Some of the changes will actually increase the profits of the health insurance companies.(8) The donations in Britain are smaller than in the US, but they have been effective in distorting Britain’s economy so that it benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. European health services, including Britain’s, are slowly and steadily being privatised.(9) This is not about making the health service better or more efficient. It is to enable corporations to extract profits.

Lobbying is a Huge Industry 

The exact scale of lobbying is unknown. It has been a multi-billion dollar industry in the US for many years, where the official expenditure on lobbying is $7 billion per year, but there is a great deal of secret lobbying, so the estimated total is believed to be closer to $14 billion. More recently, lobbying in Brussels to manipulate European legislation has reached a similar scale.(10) It was estimated in 2017 that there were 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels. Britain has the third biggest lobbying industry in the world, estimated at £2 billion each year.(11) However, lobbying in Britain is even more secretive than in the US, so whilst many examples of lobbying have been well-documented, we do not have a clear picture of everything that goes on.

To make their lobbying even more effective, companies in an industry will get together to form organisations, such as the European Banking Federation, to lobby on their behalf. There are more than 1,000 of these in Brussels. Even larger groups, such as Business Europe, will represent a wide range of businesses. These groups are well-funded and influential. Due to their expertise they will initiate discussions about legislation, and even draft first proposals for new laws or regulations. The bank, Citigroup, wrote US legislation in 2014 to ensure that banks could be bailed out following a future financial crisis. Key politicians who supported the bill received large contributions from financial companies.(12)

David vs Goliath 

In theory, other groups, such as consumer groups, unions, environmentalists and non-government organisations (NGOs) are also able to lobby, but their spending and influence add up to a small fraction of corporate lobbying. One researcher concluded that “For every $1 spent by public interest groups and unions…corporations spent $34.”(13) A US analysis in 2010 found that the financial companies alone employed 5 lobbyists for each member of congress.(14) In some industries, such as banking, there is no organised opposition to the corporate lobby.(15)

The nature of lobbying can also be quite personal, involving long-term social and working relationships, lunches, dinners, and job opportunities for relatives and friends. Billionaires, such as Richard Branson, can invite Prime Ministers to holiday on their private island. Rupert Murdoch, owner of multiple media outlets in many countries, was able to have personal meetings with US President Trump, various Prime Ministers, and their closest advisors. This type of meeting is considered mutually beneficial to both parties.  NGOs and other groups do not generally have these close connections. Corporate lobbyists spend more money, employ more people, with more contacts and better insider knowledge, have better access to policymakers and better information. This undermines democracy, and creates governments that work well for the rich and powerful, but not for everyone else.(16)

Echo Chambers 

Lobbying strategies are more successful if information appears to come from several, apparently independent, sources. Therefore lobbyists use many of the same strategies as PR consultants, such as the media, think tanks and academics, as echo chambers to reinforce their message. This is important because companies are not trusted as honest sources of information. Their relationship with the media can be quite complex. Lobbyists actively recruit former journalists because of their political contacts. Lobbyists feed stories to the press, but they also try to stop negative stories appearing.(17) They are sometimes able to persuade journalists to drop a story, either by offering an alternative story, or by threatening to cut access to their clients in future. This works because journalists get so many stories from lobbyists, so loss of access would have serious consequences for them. If all else fails lobbyists will threaten legal action. This has been very effective, particularly in the UK.

Lobbying services are also offered by think tanks, lawyers, management consultants and accountants. This creates serious conflicts of interest, as accountancy firms and consultants often advise governments on regulations, but then advise clients on how to get around those same regulations. This has been particularly clear in the banking sector, where accountants operate lucrative businesses advising their wealthiest clients on activities such as setting up layers of subsidiaries and holding companies, so that they can hide their assets overseas in tax havens, or game the system so that their profits appear in the lowest tax jurisdiction.(18)

Revolving Doors and Conflicts of Interest 

The issue of ‘revolving doors’, where people move from jobs in government to jobs in big business, and vice versa, was mentioned in an earlier post about the weapons industry. The problem is extremely widespread and affects the most important business sectors in Britain, Europe and the US. When former business-people go to work with the government, they will see the world from the perspective of big business, irrespective of the downsides to the rest of society. In Britain this is most clear in the Health Service, where former staff of the biggest US Healthcare companies have been gradually re-structuring the National Health Service (NHS), and privatizing parts of it, so that shareholders can extract wealth from it. (This will be discussed in detail in a later post about the NHS).

The problem is also important when people move in the opposite direction, from government to business. For example, lots of British politicians involved in decisions about the privatisation of the healthcare system have gone on to take well-paid jobs with private companies who benefitted from those decisions. A conflict of interest refers to a situation where a person is making decisions about an issue, but gains personally from those decisions. In the UK in 2008 there were 30 former government ministers (who were still politicians) who had jobs with corporations.(19) A later study in 2010 showed there were over 140 members of the House of Lords with financial connections to healthcare companies.(20) Their main role is to help the business manipulate government, by utilizing their contacts, or exploiting their knowledge of weaknesses in existing legislation.

A growing trend is for policymakers to join lobbying companies, and vice versa. Lobbyists actively headhunt government employees who have been involved in writing legislation. In the US, “about half of retiring senators and a third of retiring House members register as lobbyists.”(21) The average salary is approximately 10 times as much as in their government job. The same happens in Europe, where banking regulators go on to earn big salaries working as bank lobbyists, and former lobbyists get appointed to senior roles with organisations that are supposed to regulate particular industries(22). In 2019 the chief lobbyist for Santander Bank, Jose Manuel Campa, became the new head of the European Banking Authority. It is therefore unlikely that banks will be properly regulated in the near future.

The Most Powerful Lobbying Organisation in the World is the US Government 

There is an additional layer of lobbying which is extremely important, but almost never discussed openly by the mainstream media. Individual governments lobby other governments and organisations. This is notable in finance, where the British government lobbied hard to avoid stricter financial regulation by Europe following the 2008 financial crisis. In a later post we will talk about political and regulatory capture (this is sometimes called ideological capture), where politicians see the world from the point of view of big companies. Politicians lobby for regulations that will be profitable for companies, but might have serious consequences for citizens.(23)

The US government uses a combination of threats and bribes to achieve its goals all over the world. It lobbies at the UN to create support for its illegal wars; it lobbies other governments so that its tobacco companies can be allowed to sell and advertise their cigarettes abroad; it uses its diplomats and trade negotiators to arrange deals that benefit its exporters. Government lobbying is just as secretive as corporate lobbying, involving backroom deals, and promises of aid and loans in exchange for votes. Many countries try to do the same, but the scale of the US’s economic threats and bribes, backed up by its willingness to impose sanctions and overthrow governments using its military, means that it is usually able to get its way, irrespective of the downsides for people in other countries. This creates huge advantages for US companies.

Transparency Is Important, But It Won’t Change Anything By Itself 

One of the big problems with lobbying is that most of it is secret. Greater transparency might help, but is probably only a small part of any future solution. Many people have argued for information about what executives are paid. We now have a fairly good idea of executive pay, but it has not led to serious change.

From 2005-2010 there was an annual award known as the Worst EU Lobby Award, where people voted for the worst corporate offenders, and the worst conflicts of interest by politicians who are helping to manipulate laws on behalf of corporations. In 2005, the fake grassroots organisation, C4C (Campaign for Creativity) lobbied for stronger patents. In 2006 the oil company ExxonMobil won for paying millions of dollars in order to fund 39 groups of climate skeptics. This gave the impression that climate change skeptics come from respectable sources, when many of them are paid to write corporate propaganda.(24) In 2007 BMW, Daimler and Porsche won for lobbying against carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions. In 2008 agrofuel (crops used as fuel) lobbyists tried to claim that they are sustainable, when they are not. In 2010, Goldman Sachs and the derivatives lobby group ISDA lobbied to protect their most complex financial products, despite the dangers they create, and the energy company, npower, claimed it was green while trying to keep coal powerplants open. Whilst these awards irritated people in business and the lobbying industry, they did not receive mainstream media coverage, so few people were aware of them, and they had little effect in changing anything.

Various ideas have been discussed to make lobbying more transparent, but none of the measures attempted so far has teeth. Lobbyists don’t want their activities to be out in the open, and governments like having secret connections with the wealthiest parts of society. The EU and UK have what are known as transparency registers to monitor lobbyists, but they are ineffective. The UK register has been described as “completely unfit for purpose”.(25) At the same time, corporate lobbyists keep working behind the scenes to actually decrease transparency.(26) Transparency by itself is not enough. It is just a starting point. The whole concept of corporate lobbying needs to be challenged much more seriously.

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the sixteenth in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media. 

Notes

1) This quote is attributed to a writer named Steven Magee, but I have been unable to find the original source. 

2) Bill Allison and Sarah Hakins, ‘Fixed Fortunes: Biggest Corporate Political Interests spend billions, get trillions’, Sunlight Foundation, 17 Nov 2014, at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2014/11/17/fixed-fortunes-biggest-corporate-political-interests-spend-billions-get-trillions/

3) Laura McCamy, ‘Companies donate millions to political causes to have a say in government – here are 10 that have given the most in 2018’, 13 Oct 2018, at https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-are-influencing-politics-by-donating-millions-to-politicians-2018-9?r=US&IR=T

4) RepresentUs, ‘5 Crazy Facts About Lobbyists’, 11 Feb 2016, at https://represent.us/action/5-facts-lobbyists/

5) Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics, Sep 2014, Vol.12, No. 3, at https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf 

6) Jimmy Williams, ‘I was a lobbyists for more than 6 years. I quit. I couldn’t take it any more’, Vox, 29 June 2017, at https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/6/29/15886936/political-lobbying-lobbyist-big-money-politics 

7) ‘Sector Profile: Health’, at https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/sectors/summary?id=H

8) John Nichols, ‘Kucinich’s Health Reform Dissents Merit Consideration’, The Nation, 9 March 2010, at http://www.thenation.com/blog/kucinichs-health-reform-dissents-merit-consideration 

9) Rachel Tansey, ‘The creeping privatization of healthcare: Problematic EU policies and the corporate lobby push’, 2 June 2017, at https://corporateeurope.org/en/power-lobbies/2017/06/creeping-privatisation-healthcare

10) Lobbying Database at, http://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/

11) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014, p.8

12) Mansur, Gidfar, ‘There’s Something Absolutely Insane Happening In The House Right Now’, bulletin.represent.us, 29 Oct 2103, at https://bulletin.represent.us/theres-something-absolutely-insane-happening-house-right-now/

13) https://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10775788/revolving-door-lobbying

14) The Center for Public Integrity, 21 May 2010, updated 19 May 2014, at https://publicintegrity.org/politics/five-lobbyists-for-each-member-of-congress-on-financial-reforms/

15) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014

16) Sarah Clarke, ‘Inequality is spiraling because our democracy is broken’, 16 May 2019, at https://leftfootforward.org/2019/05/inequality-is-spiraling-because-our-democracy-is-broken/ 

17) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014

18) Rachel Tansey, ‘Accounting for Influence: how the big four are embedded in EU policy-making on tax avoidance’, Corporate Europe Observatory, July 2018, at https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/tax-avoidance-industry-lobby-low-res.pdf

19) ‘Pressure To Reveal ex-Ministers’ Outside Pay’, Financial Times, Wed, Mar 26

20) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014, p.34

21) Lee Drutman, ‘About half of retiring senators and a third of retiring House members register as lobbyists’, Vox, 15 Jan 2016, at https://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10775788/revolving-door-lobbying 

22) Duncan Lindo, 22 Feb 2019, ‘Still going round in circles: The revolving door between banks and their regulators’, Finance Watch, 22 Feb 2019, at https://www.finance-watch.org/still-going-round-in-circles-the-revolving-door-problem-between-banks-and-their-regulators/

23) Vicky Cann and Belen Belanya, ‘Captured States: When EU governments are a channel for corporate interests’, Corporate Europe Observatory, Feb 2019, at https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/ceo-captured-states-final_0.pdf

24) Corporate Europe Observatory, ‘A bird’s eye view on 15 years CEO’, 2 May 2012, at https://corporateeurope.org/en/power-lobbies/2012/05/bird-eye-view-15-years-ceo

25) Tamasin Cave, ‘Theresa May’s chance to shine a light on lobbying’, Spinwatch, 2 Sep 2016, at http://spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/lobbying/item/5893-theresa-may-s-chance-to-shine-a-light-on-lobbying 

26) Jonathan Cook, Capitalism is double-billing us: We pay from our wallets only for our future to be stolen from us’, 25 Oct 2020, at https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-10-25/capitalism-double-billing/

About Suffering: A Massacre of the Innocent in Yemen

January 21st, 2021 by Kathy Kelly

In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder created The Massacre of the Innocents, a provocative masterpiece of religious art. The painting reworks a biblical narrative about King Herod’s order to slaughter all newborn boys in Bethlehem for fear that a messiah had been born there. Bruegel’s painting situates the atrocity in a contemporary setting, a sixteenth-century Flemish village under attack by heavily armed soldiers. 

Depicting multiple episodes of gruesome brutality, Bruegel conveys the terror and grief inflicted on trapped villagers who cannot protect their children. Uncomfortable with the images of child slaughter, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, after acquiring the painting, ordered another reworking. The slaughtered babies were painted over with images such as bundles of food or small animals, making the scene appear to be one of plunder rather than massacre.

Were Bruegel’s anti-war theme updated to convey images of child slaughter today, a remote Yemeni village could be the focus. Soldiers performing the slaughter wouldn’t arrive on horseback. Today, they often are Saudi pilots trained to fly U.S.-made warplanes over civilian locales and then launch laser-guided missiles (sold by Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin), to disembowel, decapitate, maim, or kill anyone in the path of the blast and exploding shards.

For more than five years, Yemenis have faced famines while enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already caused 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 deaths from such indirect causes as lack of food, health services, and infrastructure.

Systematic destruction of farms, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation plants, and health-care facilities has wrought further suffering. Yemen is resource-rich, but famine continues to stalk the country, the United Nations reports. Two-thirds of Yemenis are hungry and fully half do not know when they will eat next. Twenty-five percent of the population suffers from moderate to severe malnutrition. That includes more than two million children.

Equipped with U.S.-manufactured Littoral Combat Ships, the Saudis have been able to blockade air and sea ports that are vital to feeding the most populated part of Yemen—the northern area, where 80 percent of the population lives. This area is controlled by Ansar Allah (also known as the “Houthi”). The tactics being used to unseat the Houthis severely punish vulnerable people—those who are impoverished, displaced, hungry, and stricken with diseases. Many are children who should never be held accountable for political deeds.

Yemeni children are not “starving children.” They are children being starved by warring parties whose blockades and bomb attacks have decimated the country. The United States is supplying devastating weaponry and diplomatic support to the Saudi-led coalition, while additionally launching its own “selective” aerial attacks against suspected terrorists and all the civilians in those suspects’ vicinity.

Meanwhile, the United States, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has cut back on its contributions to humanitarian relief. This severely affects the coping capacity of international donors.

For several months at the end of 2020, the United States threatened to designate Ansar Allah as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” Even the threat of doing so began affecting uncertain trade negotiations, causing prices of desperately needed goods to rise.

Five CEOs of major international humanitarian groups jointly wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on November 16, urging him not to make this designation. Numerous organizations with extensive experience working in Yemen described the catastrophic effects such a designation would have on delivery of desperately needed humanitarian relief.

Nevertheless, Pompeo announced, late in the day on Sunday, January 10, his intent to go ahead with the designation.

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, termed this terrorist designation a “death sentence” for thousands of Yemenis. “Ninety percent of Yemen’s food is imported,” he noted, “and even humanitarian waivers will not allow commercial imports, essentially cutting off food for the entire country.”

U.S. leaders and much of the mainstream media responded vigorously to the shocking insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and the tragic loss of multiple lives as it occurred; it is difficult to understand why the Trump Administration’s ongoing massacre of the innocents in Yemen has failed to generate outrage and deep sorrow.

On January 13, journalist Iona Craig noted that the process of delisting a “Foreign Terrorist Organization”—removing it from the government’s list—has never been achieved within a timeframe of less than two years. If the designation goes through, it could take two years to reverse the terrifying cascade of ongoing consequences.

The Biden Administration should immediately pursue a reversal. This war began the last time Biden was in office. It must end now; two years is time Yemen doesn’t have.

Sanctions and blockades are devastating warfare, cruelly leveraging hunger and possible famine as a tool of war. Leading up to the 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq, U.S. insistence on comprehensive economic sanctions primarily punished Iraq’s most vulnerable people, especially the children. Hundreds of thousands of children died tortuous deaths, bereft of medicines and adequate health care.

Throughout those years, successive U.S. administrations, with a mainly cooperative media, created the impression that they were only trying to punish Saddam Hussein. But the message they sent to governing bodies throughout the world was unmistakable: If you do not subordinate your country to serve our national interest, we will crush your children.

Yemen hadn’t always gotten this message. When the United States sought United Nations’ approval for its 1991 war against Iraq, Yemen was occupying a temporary seat on the U.N. Security Council. It surprisingly voted then against the wishes of the United States, whose wars of choice around the Middle East were slowly accelerating.

“That will be the most expensive ‘No’ vote you will ever cast,” was the U.S. ambassador’s chilling response to Yemen.

Today, children in Yemen are being starved by monarchs and presidents colluding to control land and resources.

“The Houthis, who control a large part of their nation, are no threat whatsoever to the United States or to American citizens,” declares James North, writing for Mondoweiss. “Pompeo is making the declaration because the Houthis are backed by Iran, and Trump’s allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel want this declaration as part of their aggressive campaign against Iran.”

Children are not terrorists. But a massacre of the innocents is terror. As of January 19, 268 organizations have signed a statement demanding an end to the war on Yemen. On January 25, “The World Says No to War Against Yemen” actions will be held worldwide.

It was of another painting of Bruegel’s, The Fall of Icarus, that the poet W.H. Auden wrote:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

. . . How everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster.

This painting concerned the death of one child. In Yemen, the United States—through its regional allies—could end up killing many hundreds of thousands more. Yemen’s children cannot protect themselves; in the most dire cases of severe acute malnourishment, they are too weak even to cry.

We must not turn away. We must decry the terrible war and blockade. Doing so might help spare the lives of at least some of Yemen’s children. The opportunity to resist this massacre of the innocents rests with us.

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Kathy Kelly has worked for nearly half a century to end military and economic wars. At times, her activism has led her to war zones and prisons. She can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image is from Yemen Press

The Cuba Solidarity Campaign adds its voice to the worldwide condemnation of the outgoing Trump administration’s listing of Cuba as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’.

Trump’s move is designed to hinder the incoming Biden administration from reprising the Obama era’s rapprochement with Havana. Obama’s decision to formally remove Cuba from the terrorism list in 2015 was an important step that led to the restoration of diplomatic relations later that year.

Returning Cuba to the list is a unilateral measure that has been widely condemned and ridiculed. It is further evidence, if any is needed, of how sections of the right-wing in the US bully those who oppose its neo-liberal policies.

The move panders to the powerful, far-right anti-Cuba groups in Florida, who wield significant power within the Republican Party and form part of Trump’s core support.

Richard Burgon MP said it was “a disgraceful decision made for cynical political objectives and based upon lies. Obama rightly removed Cuba from this classification and I hope that Joe Biden does so too, and swiftly.”

There are already so many sanctions in place, tightened further by Trump, that the terrorism listing is unlikely to have significant or immediate effects. However it will entrench the sanctions policy, adding weight to the threats against international companies wishing to trade with Cuba, and it will make it more difficult for the incoming US administration to move towards an alternative policy of rapprochement and engagement with the island.

The US announcement is discredited, dishonest and comes from a morally bankrupt administration. Cuba is not in any way ‘a state sponsor of terrorism’. The opposite is true: Cuba is a state victim of terrorism. Since 1959, over 3,000 Cubans have lost their lives to terrorist acts, most of which have emanated from the US. These include numerous early acts of aggression and sabotage following the 1959 Revolution, peaking in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 killing 73 people, and the hotel bombings in Havana in the 1990s designed to destroy the growing Cuban tourist industry.

The only terrorist aggression involving Cuba is coordinated, sponsored and perpetrated from the territory of the US, whose government is complicit and responsible for these atrocities.

We call on the incoming Biden administration to reverse this outrageous decision, and for good people across the world to join the campaign for an end to the US’s illegal blockade. Countries need to be able to engage and cooperate with each other in a spirit of mutual respect and understanding. At this time of worldwide pandemic, friendship across frontiers is surely the only way forward.

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Vehicles move slowly a few metres down the crowded main street of Aizarya, a Palestinian suburb east of Jerusalem, before stopping again.

Islam Rabea, a 23-year-old minibus driver, pulls on the handbrake and begins musing again.

“This town is more crowded than a can of tuna fish,” he says. “There’s one entrance, which is also the only exit, and I drive people to it back and forth all day.”

Aizarya’s only route to the outside world is to the east via an Israeli-built road, facing the entrance of Maale Adumim, the largest illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, built almost entirely on lands belonging to the Palestinian town.

To the west is Abu Dis, another Jerusalem suburb flanked by Israel’s separation wall, which forces all Abu Dis’s traffic to pass through Aizarya and exit east.

Last week, however, the Israeli government approved a project that would build extensive new sections of its separation wall around Aizarya’s north and east, severing it from the Israeli road and direct route to Jerusalem it has enjoyed for centuries, which now would be only accessible to Israeli settlers.

Israel’s government has allocated 14m shekels ($4.3m) for the project, according to Israeli NGO Peace Now.

Aizarya wouldn’t be totally cut off by the scheme. A new entrance to the town and Abu Dis would be erected to the north. That would move traffic towards Ramallah, away from the settlers’ view, and sever it from Jerusalem, the city that Aizarya has always been a satellite of.

map

“It wouldn’t change much for me, as a minibus driver. I’d still have to drive through this crowded cage to the new way out. But it would cut the town off completely from Jerusalem,” Rabea says.

‘Greater Jerusalem’ and Israeli annexation

This is not merely a traffic issue.

By funnelling Aizarya’s people away from Jerusalem and running the separation wall along the edge of the town, the suburb would be further cut off from the surrounding lands that Palestinian residents for centuries have worked and lived on.

The more would see Aizarya’s lands not already settled on by Israel as “effectively annexed”, according to its mayor, Issam Faroun, who says that his town would be “stripped of its lands – to the bone”.

Israel would also be “crippling its urban growth by expropriating the remaining lands the town had left to build on”, he says.

Faroun insists that the new Israeli project is “part of the ‘greater Jerusalem project’ and Israeli annexation plans”.

The Israeli separation wall to the west of Aizarya and Abu Dis (MEE/Qassem Maaddi)

The Israeli separation wall to the west of Aizarya and Abu Dis (MEE/Qassam Muaddi)

Last summer, Israel appeared set to unilaterally annex parts of the West Bank, including settlements around East Jerusalem such as Maale Adumim. Those plans faltered because of international pressure, and were allegedly delayed as part of Israel’s normalisation deal with the UAE.

However, Israel continues to pursue a longstanding policy of surrounding East Jerusalem with settlements that over time has been cutting it off from the West Bank.

That “greater Jerusalem project”, also known as E1, would see Aizarya’s lands swallowed up for settlement expansion. Eventually, it is believed, Israel intends to annex all settlements ringing East Jerusalem.

“The space they plan to annex is equivalent to the surface of East Jerusalem,” notes Bassam Bahar, an activist from Abu Dis. “The idea is to make the settlements part of the holy city, while leaving us, Palestinian suburban areas, out of it.”

Settlement activities east of Jerusalem began in the early 1970s, after the area was seized from Jordan and occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

“Back then, we used to walk to Jerusalem. There were only a handful of settler trailers on two hilltops that the Jordanian government had made public land back in the 1950s,” recalls Faroun. “The Israeli government started expropriating more land around those hilltops and building on them. Those were supposed to be Aizarya’s future urban growth space. Today, it is the Maale Adumim settlement.”

Aizarya has lost 5,000 dunums of land to Maale Adumim, and another 2,000 to a buffer zone between the two that the Israeli authorities created.

The town’s residents were left with just 3,000 dunums of surrounding land on which to live and grow their crops, from the original 11,000 dunums they had before the occupation.

map

However, Aizarya remained connected to Jerusalem from the west, and to the West Bank cities of Jericho, Bethlehem and Hebron to the east. The main road between both directions crossed through the town.

That changed in the late 1990s, when the entire West Bank was separated from Jerusalem by a checkpoint system, following the Oslo Accords.

That’s about the time Rabea was born. “I remember, growing up, that people would go to Jerusalem through Aizarya and the neighbouring town of Abu Dis,” Rabea says.

“But when the Israelis built the wall in 2005 to the west of the town, it became a dead-end. The town grew more crowded and the main road to Jerusalem became the jammed street that we are now driving on. It often takes an hour to drive from one end of the town to the other.”

Using the last days of Tump

Aizarya’s highly strategic location between Jerusalem and the West Bank has long kept it in Israel’s sights, and its future remains key for any plans to expand settlement blocs around the holy city.

“The Israelis have had this project in mind for years,” says Bahar.

“The only thing which held them back from implementing it was international pressure. We explained the project to several European and American diplomats in 2008. They were all shocked, and pressured Israel to suspend its plans.”

Over the past four years, however, the Trump administration has given Israel almost carte blanche to pursue its expansionist policies at the expense of the Palestinians. Settlement building has skyrocketed, and the Israeli government has been using the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency to push through schemes and projects that would be frowned upon by the incoming Biden administration.

“The Israeli government is using the last days under the Trump administration to push its annexation plans in the east of Jerusalem forward, and it is us who pay the consequences,” Faroun laments. “I can’t plan for the future. There is no future.”

“Back in 1998, we elaborated a full-scale development plan for Aizarya, including a sewage system, housing, jobs and healthcare, but we couldn’t do any of it because we have no space left. All our lands were taken,” he adds.

As Israel has altered Aizarya’s routes over time, the town’s people have suffered the consequences. Children who once attended school in neighbouring towns and cities found the commute impossible, swelling classes in Aizarya and spurring dropouts.

“Our youth used to go to schools in Ramallah in high numbers before the wall was built. Those who had the Jerusalem ID went through the checkpoint every day,” Faroun says.

“After the wall was built, we have had to use roads that take two hours to reach both cities. Education rates dropped dramatically.”

Rabea was one of Aizarya’s affected youth.

“Growing up, I thought more of confronting the settlers and the occupation than I thought of studying. That eventually got me arrested at the age of 18. I was the youngest Palestinian in my prison,” he says.

After his release, Rabea never went back to school. Instead, he began making a living driving passengers through Aizarya’s and Abu Dis’s crowded streets. But history and politics have never left his mind.

“At one point I used to have some hope that these settlements were temporary, that they will withdraw and let us have a country in the 1967 borders,” he says, adding sarcastically: “Yes, I believed that, but at least I have the excuse that I was a kid.”

For Bahar, the story of Aizarya is the story of Palestine – and it has no happy ending.

“This is not only about Aizarya, Abu Dis and East Jerusalem. This is about Palestine never having a chance to become a state,” he says. “It is not about blocking another road or colonising another piece of land. It is about making life so difficult for us here, that we eventually leave.”

Releasing the handbrake and rolling his bus a little further down the road, Rabea insists he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

“I’m too young to give up,” he says with a resigned smile. “I’m not leaving anywhere.”

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Featured image: Issam Faroun pointing a 1930s panoramic photo of Aizarya (MEE/Qassam Muaddi)

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Russia’s Financial Strategy for Africa

January 21st, 2021 by Kester Kenn Klomegah

In order to raise its geopolitical influence, Russia has been making efforts identifying mega infrastructure projects such as nuclear power and energy, natural resources exploration and talks consistently about increasing trade with Africa. On the other hand, Russia primarily needs to work on a coordinated mechanism for financing these corporate policy initiatives and further push for increased trade with Africa.

On November 23, a videoconference organized by Federation Council of Russia, Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Russia and Business Russia Association, focused partly on identifying funding sources for exports, concretizing proposals for increasing exports to Africa and looking at facilitating amendments to the Russian legislation if required to promote exports to the African market.

Senator Igor Morozov, a member of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy, and newly elected Chairman of the Coordinating Committee on Economic Cooperation with Africa, noted during the meeting that in conditions of pressure from sanctions, it has become necessary to find new markets, new partners and allies for Russia.

“This predetermines the return of Russia back to Africa, makes this direction a high priority both from the point of geopolitical influence and in the sphere of trade and economic context.”

“It is important for us to expand and improve competitive government support instruments for business. It is obvious that over the thirty years when Russia left Africa, China, India, the USA, and the European Union have significantly increased their investment opportunities there in the region,” Morozov stressed.

With a renewed growing interest in the African market, Russians are feverishly looking for establishing effective ways of entry into the huge continental market. As result, Senator Igor Morozov unreservedly suggested creating a new structure within the Russian Export Center – an investment fund. He explained thus:

“Such a fund could evaluate and accumulate concessions as a tangible asset for the Russian raw materials and innovation business.”

The Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation with African States was created on the initiative of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation and Vnesheconombank with support from the Federation Council and the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. It has had support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economy and Trade, the Ministry of Natural Resources, as well as the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.

During a restructuring meeting with the Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation with African States, President of the Russian Chamber of Chamber and Industry, Sergei Katyrin, said

“the primary task now to accelerate Russia’s economic return to African continent, from which we practically left in the 90s and now it is very difficult to increase our economic presence there in Africa.”

According to Katyrin, Russia’s economic presence in Africa today is significantly inferior in comparison to the positions of leading Western countries and BRICS partners.

“It’s time to overcome this yawning gap. Today, we face a difficult task to ensure the activities of Russian entrepreneurship on the African continent in the new conditions, taking into account all the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.”

Katyrin stressed the necessity to resolve financial mechanism for business and for infrastructural projects.

“We need a state financial mechanism to support the work of Russian business in Africa otherwise it will be very difficult to break through the fierce competition of Western companies with such support. We need to focus on those areas where you can definitely count on success,” he told the meeting.

With the participation of representatives of business and expert circles, this committee’s primary task is to consolidate the efforts of business, government and public structures of Russia, facilitate the intensification of economic activities in Africa. It has the responsibility for adopting a more pragmatic approach to business, for deepening and broadening existing economic collaborations and for the establishment of direct mutually beneficial contacts between entrepreneurs and companies from Russia and African countries.

During this October meeting, the participants discussed various issues and acknowledged that the committee has achieved little since its establishment. The meeting identified factors that have hindered its expected achievements and overall performance since 2009. Admittedly, a quick assessment for over one decade (2010 to 2020) has shown very little impact and tangible results.

The committee’s document listed more than 150 Russian companies as members, most of them hardly seen participating in business events in order to get acquainted with investment opportunities in Africa.

Notwithstanding the setbacks down these years, Russians are still full of optimism. Completely a new team was put in place during the meeting hosted by the Russian Business Chamber. Russian Senator Igor Morozov was elected as the new Chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation with African States.

Over the years, experts have reiterated that Russia’s exports to Africa could be possible only after the country’s industrial based experiences a more qualitative change and argued the benefits for introducing tariff preferences for trade with African partners.

“The situation in Russian-African foreign trade will change for the better, if Russian industry undergoes technological modernization, the state provides Russian businessmen systematic and meaningful support, and small and medium businesses receive wider access to foreign economic cooperation with Africa,” Professor Alexey Vasileyev, former director of the Institute for African Studies (IAS) under the Russian Academy of Sciences.

As a reputable institute established during the Soviet era, it has played a considerable part in the development of African studies in the Russian Federation. For over 25 years, Professor Vasileyev directed the Institute for African Studies. His research interests extend beyond the Middle East. For instance, he carried out analysis of socio-economic problems of Africa, including Sub-Saharan Africa. He has many books and monographs including the one titled Africa: The Stepchild of Globalization and Africa, the Challenges of the 21st Century.

Professor Vasileyev, now the Chair for African and Arab Studies at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (since 2013), and Special Representative of Russian President for Relations with African leaders (2006–2011), pointed out that the level and scope of Russian economic cooperation with Africa has doubled in recent years, “but unfortunately Russian-African cooperation is not in the top five of the foreign players in Africa.”

Speaking particularly about trade, the professor noted that not all African countries have signed agreements with Russia, for example, on the abolition of double taxation. He urged African countries to make trade choices that are in their best economic interests and further suggested that Russia should also consider the issue of removal of tariff and non-tariff restrictions on economic relations.

In order to increase trade, Russia has to improve its manufacturing base and Africa has to standardize its export products to compete in external markets. Russia has only few manufactured goods that could successfully compete with Western-made products in Africa. Interestingly, there are few Russian traders in Africa and African exporters are not trading in Russia’s market, in both cases, due to multiple reasons including inadequate knowledge of trade procedures, rules and regulations as well as the existing market conditions, he said.

He believes that it is also necessary to create, for example, free trade areas.

“But before creating them, we need information. And here, I am ready to reproach the Russian side, providing little or inadequate information to Africans about their capabilities, and on the other hand, reproach the African side, because when our business comes to Africa, they should know where they go, why and what they will get as a result,” Professor Vasileyev explicitly added.

The United States, European Union members, Asia countries such as China, India and Japan, have provided funds to support companies ready to carry out projects in various sectors in African countries. Some have publicly committed funds, including concessionary loans, for Africa.

For example, during the last Ministerial Conference of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Chinese President Xi Jinping said

“China will expand cooperation in investment and financing to support sustainable development in Africa. China provided US$60 billion of credit line to African countries to assist them in developing infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing and small and medium-sized enterprises.”

It fully understands Africa’s needs and its willingness to open the door to cooperation in the field of scientific and technological innovation on an encouraging basis. The method for financing the building of infrastructure is relatively simple. In general, governments obtain preferential loans from the Export-Import Bank of China or the China Development Bank, with the hiring of Chinese building contractors.

The Chinese policy banking system allows leading Chinese state-owned enterprises to operate effectively in Africa, with the majority of these active in infrastructure and construction in Africa. China has always been committed to achieving win-win cooperation and joint development with Africa. Russia could consider the Chinese model of financing various infrastructure and construction projects in Africa.

Official proposals for all kinds of support for trade and investment has been on the spotlight down the years. In May 2014, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wrote in one of his articles:

“we attach special significance to deepening our trade and investment cooperation with the African States. Russia provides African countries with extensive preferences in trade.”

Lavrov wrote:

“At the same time, it is evident that the significant potential of our economic cooperation is far from being exhausted and much remains to be done so that Russian and African partners know more about each other’s capacities and needs. The creation of a mechanism for the provision of public support to business interaction between Russian companies and the African continent is on the agenda.”

After the first Russia-Africa Summit in the Black Sea city, Russia Sochi in October 2019, Russia and Africa have resolved to move from mere intentions to concrete actions in raising the current bilateral trade and investment to appreciably higher levels in the coming years.

“There is a lot of interesting and demanding work ahead, and perhaps, there is a need to pay attention to the experience of China, which provides its enterprises with state guarantees and subsidies, thus ensuring the ability of companies to work on a systematic and long-term basis,” Foreign Minister Lavrov explicitly said.

According to Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Ministry would continue to provide all-round support for initiatives aimed at strengthening relations between Russia and Africa.

“Our African friends have spoken up for closer interaction with Russia and would welcome our companies on their markets. But much depends on the reciprocity of Russian businesses and their readiness to show initiative and ingenuity, as well as to offer quality goods and services,” he stressed.

Amid these years of Western and European sanctions, Moscow has been looking for both allies and an opportunity to boost growth in trade and investment. Currently, Russia’s trade with Africa is less than half that of France with the continent and 10 times less than that of China. Asian countries are doing brisk business with Africa. According to UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2020, the top five investors in the African continent are Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and China.

In 2018, Russia’s trade with African countries grew more than 17 per cent and exceeded $20 billion. At the Sochi summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would like to bring the figure $20 billion, over the next few years at least, to $40 billion.

In practical reality, from January 2021 marks the start of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), gives an additional signal for foreign players to take advantage of this new opportunity in Africa. As trumpeted, the AfCFTA has a lot more on offer besides the fact that it creates a single market of 1.3 billion people.

That said however, Russia, of course, has its own approach towards Africa. It pressurizes no foreign countries neither it has to compete with them, as it has its own pace for working with Africa. With the same optimism towards to taking emerging challenges and opportunities in Africa, Russia has to show financial commitment especially now when the joint declaration from the first historic Summit held in October 2019 ultimately seeks a new dynamism in the existing Russia-Africa relations.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, previously worked for Inter Press Service (IPS), and now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research.

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Why Hardly Anyone Trusts the Virus Experts

January 21st, 2021 by John Rubino

Early in the pandemic, “trust the science!” could actually be used in a debate without attracting derisive laughter. But as the flip-flops, mistakes and, yes, lies have accumulated, a consensus seems to be forming that the health care authorities are no more trustworthy than the people running Congress or the Fed.

For proof, let’s start with vitamin D, which sure seems to lessen the severity of coronavirus infections. As the chart below illustrates (couldn’t find the source, but google “covid vitamin D” and you’ll find lots of studies that track with this data), people with higher levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream tend to experience covid-19 as a non-event while people low levels found the infection life-threatening.

vitamin D covid virus experts

There are obvious questions about causality here, so calling vitamin D a “cure” is going way too far. But if it has even a marginal effect – and the data suggest considerably more — a rational government would, you’d think, be handing out vitamin D like Halloween candy. In fact, since we’re mandating/prohibiting all kinds of other behaviors, we might expect vitamin D consumption to be required along with masks and social distancing.

Even covid-czar Anthony Fauci recently said:

“If you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending — and I do it myself — taking vitamin D supplements.”

So why aren’t family-sized bottles of vitamin D arriving in the mail from the CDC? A cynic might wonder if the fact that Big Pharma doesn’t make much money from cheap, widely available supplements plays a role in the government’s apparent lack of interest.

Now about those lockdowns. Tom Woods has been producing charts that appear to show virtually no difference in virus outcomes between US states with aggressive lockdown policies and those without. California, for instance, has shuttered most of its small businesses and imposed widespread curfews, while Florida hasn’t. Here’s the result:

covid Florida California virus experts

As for the rest of the world – where they’re supposedly doing better than the US – the pattern of zero correlation between lockdowns and virus spread seems to be holding. France imposed a full national lockdown in March – after which the virus spiked. Then they added mask mandates (indoor and outdoor), with fines attached. And daily new cases soared.

France covid virus experts

Then of course there’s the lying. Dr. Fauci first claimed that masks don’t help – when he believed they did help — because he feared mask shortages for health care workers. He also admits to changing the official line on herd immunity according to what he thinks we’re ready to hear.

And, in what sounds more like incompetence than dishonesty, he’s apparently been answering the question “when will life go back to normal?” with whatever pops into his head at the time. In early 2020, it was the coming Autumn. In July, it was “a year or so.” More recently it’s “well into 2021.”

But the biggest and by far the most outrageous reason for this growing mistrust has to be the World Health Organization which, well, read for yourself:

WHO official urges world leaders to stop using lockdowns as primary virus control method

The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 urged world leaders this week to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method.”

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr. David Nabarro said to The Spectator’s Andrew Neil. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

Nabarro went on to point out several of the negative consequences lockdowns have caused across the world, including devastating tourism industries and increased hunger and poverty.

“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” he said. “Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”

In the United States, lockdowns have been tied to increased thoughts of suicide from children, a surge in drug overdoses, an uptick in domestic violence, and a study conducted in May concluded that stress and anxiety from lockdowns could destroy seven times the years of life that lockdowns potentially save.

The health care establishment could have saved a lot of time — and embarrassment — by just asking regular people about this stuff.  But then they would have made a lot less money.

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Fauci Now Says COVID-19 Vaccine May Become Mandatory

January 21st, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Will the COVID-19 vaccine become mandatory? That’s a question many are asking these days and, by the looks of it, the answer may well be yes — although as I’ll explain later, I suspect the harms of the vaccine will become so apparent that it’ll kill such efforts before they become widespread.

In a January 1, 2021, Newsweek interview,1 Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was “sure” some institutions and businesses will require employees to be vaccinated, and that it’s “quite possible” the vaccine will be required for overseas travel.

When asked about the possibility of mandating the vaccine on a local level, such as for children attending school, he stated that “Everything will be on the table for discussion.” That said, he pointed out that since “we almost never mandate things federally” — with regard to health — he doesn’t believe a national vaccine mandate will be enacted.

In related news2 December 21, 2020, presidential candidate Joe Biden rolled up his sleeve to get publicly inoculated against COVID-19, stating that the vaccine was “nothing to worry about.” He’s also gone on record saying he will push for a 100-day mask mandate in federal buildings if he wins the presidency.3

Can Experimental Vaccines Be Mandated?

While many vaccines are required by state or local law, the thing that sets the COVID-19 vaccine apart from all others is the fact that it is still an experimental vaccine. While Moderna and Pfizer have been granted emergency use authorization for their respective vaccine candidates, they still haven’t even completed Stage 3 clinical trials yet.

The mRNA technology used in these vaccines is also experimental, and the sheer speed at which the vaccines have been developed and tested precludes us from knowing much about their side effects, especially in the long term.

As of December 18, 2020, the adverse event rate in the U.S. was 2.79%.4 This means your risk of harm from the vaccine is far greater than your risk of dying from COVID-19, which has an overall noninstitutionalized infection fatality rate of just 0.26%.5 Among those under the age of 40, the infection fatality rate is a mere 0.01%.6

If an experimental vaccine were to be mandated, it would set a frightening precedent and pave the way for all sorts of nonconsensual medical experimentation on the general public, going forward.

In a December 29, 2020, article7 in JAMA, the authors discuss the legal possibility of mandating COVID-19 vaccines, stating that “SARS-CoV-2 vaccines hold promise to control the pandemic and help restore normal social and economic life.”

However, this is questionable, considering the fact that the effectiveness of the vaccines is only measured by their ability to lessen moderate to severe COVID-19 symptoms such as cough and headache. Presumably, this would lower the risk of hospitalization and death for vaccinated individuals.

However, as explained in “How COVID-19 Vaccine Trials Are Rigged,” the vaccines were not evaluated for their ability to actually prevent infection and transmission of the virus. And, if the vaccine cannot reduce infection, hospitalizations or deaths, then it cannot create the vaccine-acquired herd immunity required to end the pandemic.

What’s more, in a November 26, 2020, BMJ article,8 Peter Doshi, associate editor of The BMJ, points out that while Pfizer claims its vaccine is 95% effective, this is the relative risk reduction. The absolute risk reduction is actually less than 1%. He also stresses that severe side effects appear commonplace:

“Moderna’s press release states that 9% experienced grade 3 myalgia and 10% grade 3 fatigue; Pfizer’s statement reported 3.8% experienced grade 3 fatigue and 2% grade 3 headache. Grade 3 adverse events are considered severe, defined as preventing daily activity. Mild and moderate severity reactions are bound to be far more common.”

New York Considers Forced Vaccination Bill

None of these open questions is stopping the New York Senate from considering a forced vaccination bill (A4169). As reported by constitutional attorney KrisAnne Hall:10

“January 6 New York Assemblymen will be asked to vote on a bill that will authorize the Governor and/or health officials to seize custody of New Yorkers, imprison, and force vaccinate them without due process.

This bill is not only a threat to the Constitution of New York, the people of New York, but also everyone in America if you consider the way certain legislation can spread throughout America in the age ‘crisis’ …

If passed this legislation will place in the hands of the Governor, or his designated agent, the full and autonomous authority to ‘order’ the ‘removal’ and ‘detention’ of every person the Governor or his ‘delegee’ determines ‘may pose’ a ‘significant and imminent threat to public health’ …

Once some health department worker thinks a New Yorker is a carrier or contact to a carrier, that person will be seized and held without hearing, trial, due process, or bond for a period of time to be determined by the health department.”

As noted by Hall, this bill violates the U.S. Constitution in several different ways. For starters, it eliminates your right to due process before forcing you into the custody of health officials, as well as your right to trial “as required by Article I sec 1 and Article VI Sec 18a of the New York Constitution.”

It also “arbitrarily reduces the well-established standard of strict scrutiny required for the infringement of these fundamental rights to the lesser standard of ‘clear and convincing evidence’ which will be determined solely by the Governor or some worker in the New York Health Department.” This, in turn, violates the constitutional principle of separation of powers.

Thirdly, “A-416 is a bold violation of Article 1 sec 5 and Article 1 sec 12 of the New York Constitution” as it would deprive you of your “inherent rights to due process related to a search and seizure” of your property and/or your body.

“New Yorkers cannot allow that to happen. Everyone in New York needs to contact their Senator and Assemblyman and DEMAND they vote no on A-416. Everyone in America needs to contact their State and demand that such legislation never be drafted,” Hall writes.11

In her blog post, Hall includes sample letter and phone scripts you can use when contacting your representatives.

Blackmailing the Public to Force Vaccine Uptake

Getting back to the JAMA article12 discussing the legal possibility of mandating COVID-19 vaccines, the authors point out that mandating a vaccine while it’s still under an emergency use approval is “legally and ethically problematic.”

“Vaccine mandates are unjustified because an EUA requires less safety and efficacy data than full Biologics License Application (BLA) approval. Individuals would also likely distrust vaccine mandates under emergency use, viewing it as ongoing medical research,” the article states.

Once the vaccine is fully licensed, however, vaccine mandates “could be imposed in multiple sectors,” according to the authors. Still, they point out that “Given the rarity of adult mandates, states are unlikely to enact mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for the adult population, especially in the absence of long-term safety data.”

Private companies, on the other hand, can require vaccination as a condition of employment, and according to a Yale CEO survey, 71% of company executives supported the implementation of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the workplace.13

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already ruled that businesses can compel their employees to get vaccinated, and that they may fire those who refuse. Employers must, however, allow for medical exemptions and “offer reasonable accommodations based on religion or disability.”14

Schools may also end up requiring COVID-19 vaccination for students, faculty and staff, and it seems likely the vaccine may simply be added to the ACIP-recommended list of childhood vaccinations. Most troubling, however, is the proposal to require vaccination as a condition of service. According to the JAMA article:15

“It is foreseeable that businesses in certain high-risk settings could require proof of vaccination as a condition of service, such as in long-distance travel (plane, rail, bus), restaurants, and entertainment (sports, movies, theater).

While states might be constitutionally barred from requiring vaccines to participate in religious worship, it is conceivable that some churches, synagogues, or mosques might consider such conditions for congregants. Local or state governments could also require vaccination as a condition of service.”

To be clear, even if state and federal governments don’t mandate the vaccine, by barring unvaccinated people from traveling, participating in social events and even entering into government buildings, they are essentially mandating it. Unvaccinated people would become second-class citizens that aren’t permitted to work, travel, conduct business or engage socially. What kind of life is that?

Yet this is precisely what we may be facing. As noted by the JAMA authors, “If scientific and logistical challenges can be overcome, linking vaccinations as a condition of providing service could be an effective incentive for vaccination.” They really should call it what it is: blackmail.

Many Front-Line Workers Refuse COVID-19 Vaccine

Distribution of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines began at the end of December 2020. In the U.S., most states have elected to begin distribution among front-line health care workers and in senior care facilities. However, despite media fanfare, many health care workers are leery of the vaccine.

According to news reports, about half of all front-line workers in Riverside County, California, have refused the vaccine,16 as have 60% of nursing home staff in Ohio,17 40% of staff at Chicago’s Loretto Hospital18 and 40% of LA’s front-line workers.19 Similar rates of vaccine refusal are being reported in several European countries.20

Interestingly, a survey by the National Association of Health Care Assistants revealed a whopping 72% of certified nursing assistants plan to refuse the vaccine,21 as are 55% of firefighters in New York, according to a December 2020 poll by the Uniformed Firefighters Association.22 The reason for this widespread hesitation is as understandable as it is justifiable. As noted in the Western Journal:23

“Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, any skepticism about the virulence of the virus or wisdom of draconian shutdowns was met with the mantra ‘follow the science’ to stifle any serious debate.

All along the way, however, officials did anything but as they imposed useless mask mandates, allowed Black Lives Matter protests despite closing businesses and imposing social distancing on everyone else, and even expressed skepticism about any vaccine simply because it was developed at the behest of President Donald Trump.

But worst of all, officials undermined science by suggesting that vaccination distribution begin based on race rather than in the nursing home populations that were actually ravaged by the virus.

In short, governments and the medical community killed any credibility they had at the beginning of the pandemic with their repeated hypocrisy and mixed messages. It’s no wonder these workers are reluctant to follow them now and are instead relying on their gut instincts to mistrust the untested vaccine and COVID-19 agenda.”

Side Effects and Deaths Are Stacking Up

The fact that high rates of side effects and sudden deaths are already being reported will hardly improve matters in coming weeks and months. For example, January 4, 2021, RT reported24 that health authorities in Portugal were “on alert” after the sudden death of a 41-year-old pediatric surgery assistant who had been in good health. She was found dead in her bed just two days after being inoculated with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

December 30, 2020, the Daily Star reported25 the death of an elderly resident in Lucerne, Switzerland, five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. The man had previously “reacted negatively” to the seasonal influenza vaccine. According to the report, he suffered from dementia but was otherwise in good health.

December 26, 2020, a Boston doctor with severe shellfish allergy suffered a life-threatening anaphylactic reaction to the Moderna vaccine. As reported by RT:26

“Within minutes, Sadrzadeh’s tongue and throat began to tingle and go numb, a reaction that he associated with his shellfish allergy. Even more concerning, his blood pressure then dipped so low that it wasn’t even detectable with a monitor. Luckily, the doctor had brought his own EpiPen, which he administered on himself before hospital staff rushed him to the emergency room …

‘I feel that if I did not have my EpiPen with me, I would be intubated right now, because it was that severe,’ he said, adding that it was the worst allergic reaction he had experienced since he was 11 years old. The physician said he now recommends that people with allergies receive the vaccine in a hospital setting, instead of getting it from a clinic or local provider …

The concerning case is the first of its kind to be linked to the Moderna jab. Officials with the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating at least six cases of severe allergic reactions occurring in people who took the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.”

A December 21, 2020, article27 in The Defender reported the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating a series of allergic reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. Aside from the Boston doctor, other reports of allergic reactions, including anaphylactic shock, include four health care workers in Illinois and three health care workers in Alaska.28 Cases of anaphylaxis also emerged within days of the rollout of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines in the U.K.29

Thousands Injured in Mere Days

According to the CDC,30 by December 18, 2020, 112,807 Americans had received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Of those, 3,150 suffered one or more “health impact events,” defined as being “unable to perform normal daily activities, unable to work, required care from doctor or health care professional.”

That’s 2.79%. Extrapolated to the total U.S. population of 328.2 million, we can then expect 9,156,780 Americans to be injured by the vaccine if every single man, woman and child is vaccinated. Is this really reasonable for a virus that has an average survival rate of 99.74%?31

V-safe active surveillance for COVID-19 vaccines

In the end, I suspect and predict that widespread mandates for COVID-19 vaccination will not take place. I believe there will simply be too many injuries and deaths from the first and second rounds of vaccinations, and that will destroy any and all vaccine mandate arguments.

Allergy Alert

Many suspect polyethylene glycol (PEG), found in both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, might be the culprit causing allergic reactions and anaphylaxis. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “studies show that 1 in 7 Americans may unknowingly be at risk of experiencing an allergic reaction to PEG.”32

Kennedy believes “everyone should be screened for anti-PEG antibodies before getting the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines,” adding that “It is unconscionable that, instead, the FDA and CDC are encouraging people to go ahead and risk a life-threatening anaphylactic reaction and just assume that someone will be on hand to save them.”33

It’s worth noting that the CDC has updated its vaccine guidance in response to reports of allergic reactions to the Pfizer vaccine, stating that:34

“If you have had a severe allergic reaction to any ingredient in an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, you should not get either of the currently available mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. If you had a severe allergic reaction after getting the first dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, CDC recommends that you should not get the second dose.

CDC has also learned of reports that some people have experienced non-severe allergic reactions within 4 hours after getting vaccinated (known as immediate allergic reactions), such as hives, swelling, and wheezing (respiratory distress).

If you have had an immediate allergic reaction — even if it was not severe — to any ingredient in an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, CDC recommends that you should not get either of the currently available mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

If you had an immediate allergic reaction after getting the first dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, you should not get the second dose … People who are allergic to PEG or polysorbate should not get an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”

COVID-19 Outbreaks Occurring Among Vaccinated

Yet another interesting problem that has arisen is that many newly vaccinated individuals are suddenly testing positive for COVID-19. In a San Jose, California, hospital, 51 employees tested positive within 10 days of vaccination, although it’s unclear whether all of them had actually received the vaccine.35

One died from COVID-19 complications. Interestingly, the outbreak is being blamed on an employee who showed up wearing an inflatable Christmas costume. The same pattern has been reported elsewhere.

For example, in Israel, 21 residents of a retirement home tested positive for the virus after receiving the vaccine.36 Authorities pointed out that since two doses are required to provide protection against SARS-CoV-2, you can still catch it after the first dose. The same argument was made in the San Jose hospital case.

A doctor in Philadelphia also tested positive after taking the vaccine,37 as did a nurse in San Diego.38In each case, health authorities have insisted that it’s not the vaccine causing the problem but, rather, the fact that the shot needs time to work.

Overall, there’s plenty of reason to be cautious and delay COVID-19 vaccination as long as possible. As mentioned earlier, I believe that, in time, the harms will become apparent enough that any talk about mandating these vaccines will simply evaporate.

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Notes

1 Newsweek January 1, 2021

2 NBC News December 21, 2020

3 9 News Australia December 4, 2020

4, 29, 30 CDC.gov Anaphylaxis following mRNA COVID-19 vaccine receipt (PDF)

5, 6, 31 Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-5352

7, 12, 13, 14, 15 JAMA December 29, 2020 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2020.26553

8 The BMJ Opinion November 26, 2020

9 New York Senate Assembly Bill A416

10, 11 KrisAnneHall.com

16, 17 NBC News December 31, 2020

18 NPR January 1, 2021

19 Newsweek December 31, 2020

20 Zerohedge December 27, 2020

21, 23 Western Journal January 4, 2021

22 NBC New York December 6, 2020

24 RT January 4, 2021

25 Daily Star December 30, 2020

26 RT December 26, 2020

27, 28, 32, 33 The Defender December 21, 2020

34 CDC.gov COVID-19

35 ABC 7 News January 5, 2021

36 The Jerusalem Post January 3, 2021

37 NBC Philadelphia December 31, 2020

38 Kiro7 News December 30, 2020

Featured image is from Health Impact News

Cuban blood left its stamp on the conscience of the world after the Angolan Wars of 1975-1988.  Corporate politicians are united in their desire for us to ignore this reality.

Fed up with foreign wars, Portuguese officers overthrew Prime Minister Marcello Caetano on April 25, 1974.  Many former colonies had the opportunity to define their own future.

Angola had been the richest of Portuguese colonies, with major production in coffee, diamonds, iron ore and oil.  Of the former colonies, it had the largest white population, which numbered 320,000 of about 6.4 million.  When 90% of its white population fled in 1974, Angola lost most of its skilled labor.

Three groups juggled for power.  The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), headed by Agostinho Neto was the only progressive alternative.  The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (NFLA), led by Holden Roberto, gained support from Zaire’s right-wing Joseph Mobutu, a conspirator in the assassination of Patrice LumumbaJonas Savimbi, who ran the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), worked hand-in-hand with South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Portugal told South Africa to remove its troops from Angola, which it did by October, 1974.  Recently defeated in Viet Nam, the US felt unable to send troops.  Encouraged by the Ford administration South Africa returned to Angola within a year.

Meanwhile, Fidel Castro’s representatives met with Neto along with the head of MPLA’s recently organized militia, the Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA).  Not eager to intervene, Cuba declined to give financial support.

The South African invasion began October 14 when many of its white troops pretended to be UNITA forces by darkening their faces with “Black Is Beautiful” camouflage cream.  By November, Fidel knew that without help the Angolan capital would fall to apartheid forces and he approved military assistance.  The small number of Cubans who arrived were critical in stopping the South African drive to Angola’s capital, Luanda.

Intense hostility between UNITA and the FNLA resulted in the latter being crushed by early 1976, simplifying the conflict to battles between the MPLA and UNITA, with their allies.  Cuban troops reached the southern border with Namibia, completely pushing out the forces of apartheid.

Multiple factors propelled Cuba’s entry.  The 1959 revolution was so intensely opposed by the US that it became clear that the best defense of Cuba would be an offense.  A campaign in Africa would be less likely to provoke a direct confrontation, largely because most Americans did not see Africa as part of their backyard.  A huge number of Cubans are of African descent and revolutionaries saw anti-racism as core to their politics.  Fidel referred to the anti-apartheid struggle as “the most beautiful cause.”

The second phase of war 

Since the fighting seemed to decrease, the number of Cuban soldiers in Angola dropped from 36,000 in April 1976 to under 24,000 within a year.  However, when France and Belgium sent troops to Zaire, Cuba halted its troop withdrawal.

Throughout the Angolan conflict, South Africa and the US ignored international law and acted as if it was perfectly natural for South Africa to dominate Namibia.  After South African planes massacred Namibian refuges at the Cassinga camp in Angola in May 1975 US President Jimmy Carter brushed it aside and quipped that “we hope it’s all over.”

Memories of that massacre stayed in the mind of a 12 year old girl, Sophia Ndeitungo: “The first Cubans I ever saw were the soldiers who came” to rescue them.  Most Cubans were white, so she “…thought they were South Africans.  Later, we understood that not all whites are bad.”  Sophia was relocated to Cuba’s Isle of Youth to study.  She graduated from Havana’s medical school, married another Cassingan refugee, returned to Namibia, and became head of its armed forces medical services in 2007.  For thousands of black Africans, Cubans were the only white people who showed them any kindness.

Exuberant over the 1980 US election of Ronald Reagan, South Africa stepped up its raids in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana.  In August 1981 South Africa poured 4000 to 5000 troops into southern Angola with tanks and air support.  It expanded tactics to include poisoning wells, killing livestock and destroying food distribution and communications.  It was in this context that Cuba began sending 9000 troops back to Angola during August 1983.

Savimbi: Ally of US and South Africa 

Throughout the Carter administration and the early Reagan years, the US increased its flow of weapons to UNITA.  As early as 1974 UNITA’s leader Savimbi had established contacts with the Portuguese dictatorship and promised South Africa that he would help them build an anti-communist bloc.  Savimbi spoke fluent English, oozed self-confidence, cleverly manipulated his audience, knew just what Americans wanted to hear, and was “without scruple.”  In other words, his combination of qualities was a perfect fit for a CIA front man.

Savimbi consolidated his local power by executing village opponents as “sorcerers.”  He had total control and did not tolerate dissent.  By 1980, in addition to ridding UNITA of those who challenged him, Savimbi had “…the wives and children of the dissenters burned alive in public displays to teach the others.”

Special Forces Colonel Jan Breytenbach saw Savimbi as a “manipulator extraordinaire … As a political leader, he was very good.  I would compare him to Hitler.”  This comparison to Hitler was not a slighting of Savimbi – it was a compliment, as multiple top South African politicians had been members of pro-Nazi groups.

Among those who overlooked Savimbi’s campaigns of mass destruction was President Jimmy Carter, who took time out of his schedule of human rights advocacy to arrange the flow of secret US dollars to UNITA.  In 1985 Steve Weissman summed up attitudes that spanned both parties:  “We wanted to hurt Cuba, and we wanted to help people who wanted to hurt Cuba.  When Savimbi said that he was ‘fighting for freedom against Cuba’ – this was his trump card.  It was impossible to counter it. Savimbi had one redeeming quality: he killed Cubans.”

South African attitudes toward Savimbi fit into its broader perspective of utter contempt for blacks.  Deaths of whites were followed by announcements from the army and newspaper obituaries in the press.  Deaths of black soldiers were not broadcast either by their military superiors or by the press at home.

South African views mirrored those of US politicians.  A 1971 amendment to the US sanctions bill by former KKK member and Democrat Senator Harry F. Byrd (VA) exempted chrome, thereby pulling all teeth from consequences to the white minority government of Rhodesia.  A much-publicized July 1986 speech by Reagan lavished praise on South African whites who he said gave great opportunity to blacks.

Conflicts between allies

Considerable discord between allies arose from the marriage of necessity between Cuba and the Soviet Union.  Cuba’s strategy had been for it to confront the better armed and trained South African forces and for Angola’s FAPLA to counter internal enemies in guerrilla warfare.  The Soviets believed that FAPLA should develop a conventional army with tanks and heavy weapons to fight South Africa.

But Angolan troops had virtually no formal education.  Officers might have reached the second, third or fourth grade, but the army’s rank and file typically had never been to school and were unable to master sophisticated weapons provided by the Soviets.

While Cuba advocated FAPLA’s concentrating on UNITA, it simultaneously cautioned that the Angolan military should have Cuban backup whenever venturing into territory largely surrounded by UNITA and South African troops.  President Neto died in September 1979 and his successor, José Eduardo dos Santos, was often lured by Soviet visions of having a conventional army strong enough to overcome both opposition forces.

Throughout the conflict, the Soviets acted as if the primary weapons of war were logistical plans, tanks and weapons, while for Cuba the maps of war were drawn from the hearts and minds of those who used these weapons.  Cuba understood that the Angolan front was part of a broad campaign against racist domination across southern Africa.

By March 1976, Cuba’s initial victory over South Africa let loose a “tidal wave” against white racist rule as blacks became joyfully aware that apartheid forces were vulnerable.  In September 1977 Steve Biko died in police custody and within a month the government had banned 18 organizations and the most important black newspaper.  In September 1984 a new South African constitution bestowed political participation upon “coloreds” and Indians while denying the same rights to blacks.  Black townships in the industrial centers of the country exploded.  Massive demonstrations, strikes, school walkouts and boycotts of white owned stores spread like wildfire.  Soon funerals for victims of state repression were added to the events.

The ceremony for awarding the Noble Peace Prize to Bishop Desmond Tutu drew a huge rally.  Open opposition to apartheid mushroomed hand-in-hand with intensification of the war in Angola.  By 1987 the South African demonstrations were so large that thousands of white solders were assisting police within its borders.

Soviets were generally aloof from those they came to protect.  Africans themselves noticed how quickly Cuban soldiers, doctors, and others stationed near them melded into their society.  One recruit remembered that “The Cubans ate what we ate, slept in tents like us, lived as we did.’”  Physician Oscar Mena described his work in Angola as a “beautiful experience.”  Soviets in Angola seemed to think of it more as a job.  Battlefields reflected the cultural chasm – Soviet advisers stood on the sidelines of fighting while Cubans always joined in combat.

Dancing barefoot on a razor’s edge

In 1985 the Soviets persuaded Angola to attack UNITA’s stronghold in Mavinga, despite dire warnings from Havana that they would have to go through an area controlled by UNITA and create a supply line that it could not possibly defend.  It met with a disastrous defeat.  The same tragedy was repeated in 1987.

Afterwards, South Africa’s General Geldenhuys boasted of its victory to the press, which sparked intense global repudiation since that country had claimed non-involvement in Angola.  Was the time now ripe for Cuba to launch an all-out attack on South Africa’s forces?  This decision had Fidel dancing on a razor’s edge.

The most delicate balancing act was with the Soviet Union.  Without its financial aid, Cuba could not carry out the war.  Without its donation of military supplies, Angola’s FAPLA would be unable to fight.  But its repeated bungling of strategic decisions threatened every aspect of the war.

No less sensitive was Angola, which seemed mired in corruption.  Yet, the MPLA government was vastly superior to whatever Savimbi would usher in.  A victory in Angola would strike a mortal blow into the heart of apartheid; but, Cuba could not go forward without approval from Luanda.

Cuba had saved its most powerful weapons for self-protection in the event of a US invasion.  As Cubans drew weary of a decade and a half of sacrifice, Fidel and Raúl knew that being too cautious might mean missing an opportunity that would never repeat itself.  However, moving too quickly could cause a defeat that would demoralize and exhaust the Cuban troops, doctors, and people at home.

They also knew that thousands of white soldiers became unavailable for service in Angola because they were needed in South Africa to suppress dissent.  Reagan’s embroilment in the Iran-Contra scandal left the US unable to go on an attack.

Cuba’s leaders agreed that the hour had arrived to send vastly more troops and arms to Angola, including its best planes, its best pilots and its most sophisticated weapons.  In March 1988 FAPLA and Cuba defended the town of Cuito Cuanavale as it was attacked by South African and UNITA troops.  Enough Cuban planes and pilots had arrived for them to score a victory in the air.  At the same time Angolan troops drove back the ground attack.  South African troops were demoralized as it signaled the beginning of the end.  Nelson Mandela observed that this key battle “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.”

Despite the clear defeat of apartheid forces, US diplomats continued to tell their Soviet counterparts that South Africa would not leave Angola until all Cuban troops were gone.  Fidel told the Soviet negotiator to “… ask the Americans why has the army of the superior race been unable to take Cuito, which is defended by blacks and mulattoes from Angola and the Caribbean?”

Cuban negotiator Risquet politely told them “The South Africans must understand that they will not win at this table what they have failed to win on the battlefield.”  Knowing that a full invasion of Angola would be rebuffed internationally, result in thousands of casualties, and potentially leave the country unable to defend itself from internal black rebellion, South African politicians gave the nod to its commanders to leave.  Its troops were withdrawn from Angola by August 30, 1988.

In Angolan elections dos Santos of the MPLA defeated Savimbi (49.8% to 40.1%).  In April 1990 South African president Frederick de Klerk legalized the African National Congress and South African Communist Party as he freed Nelson Mandela, who was elected to head the country in April 1994.

Many of the parallels between the US in Viet Nam and Cuba in Angola were striking and both foreign interventions had a profound effect on public consciousness.  Yet, Cuba was defending an actual country from invasion while the division of Viet Nam into “North” and “South” was a figment of the imaginations of French and Americans, which is to say that no foreign invasion occurred.  It was no coincidence that Cuba treated Angola as a sovereign state (despite many differences) while US politicians had as much respect for Vietnamese as a puppeteer has for his many toys.

No one appreciated the political reality more than South Africans who opened Freedom Park in Pretoria in 2007.  Its Wall of Names includes 2103 Cubans who lost their lives in the Angolan war.  Cuba is the only foreign country represented on the Wall.

Note.  This article is based on the following: information documented in Piero Gleijeses’ Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (2013); interviews by Hedelberto López Blanch which appear in his book Historias Secretas de Médicos Cubanos (2005); interviews by the author reported in his book Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution (2020); and interviews by Candace Wolf in her unpublished paper, The Zen of Healing (2013).  A version of this article appeared in openDemocracy.

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Don Fitz ([email protected]) is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought.  He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor.  His book on Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution has been available since June 2020 and has citations for all quotations in this article.

With over 800 million people, rural India is arguably the most interesting and complex place on the planet but is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing unemployment, increased informalisation, indebtedness and an overall collapse of agriculture.

Given that India is still an agrarian-based society, renowned journalist P Sainath says what is taking place can be described as a crisis of civilisation proportions and can be explained in just five words: hijack of agriculture by corporations. He notes the process by which it is being done in five words too: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. And another five words to describe the outcome: biggest displacement in our history.

In late November 2018, a charter was released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of around 250 farmers’ organisations) to coincide with the massive, well-publicised farmers’ march that was then taking place in Delhi.

The charter stated:

“Farmers are not just a residue from our past; farmers, agriculture and village India are integral to the future of India and the world; as bearers of historic knowledge, skills and culture; as agents of food safety, security and sovereignty; and as guardians of biodiversity and ecological sustainability.”

The farmers stated that they were alarmed at the economic, ecological, social and existential crisis of Indian agriculture as well as the persistent state neglect of the sector and discrimination against farming communities.

They were also concerned about the deepening penetration of large, predatory and profit hungry corporations, farmers’ suicide across the country and the unbearable burden of indebtedness and the widening disparities between farmers and other sectors.

The charter called on the Indian parliament to immediately hold a special session to pass and enact two bills that were of, by and for the farmers of India.

If passed by parliament, among other things, the Farmers’ Freedom from Indebtedness Bill 2018 would have provided for the complete loan waiver for all farmers and agricultural workers.

The second bill, The Farmers’ Right to Guaranteed Remunerative Minimum Support Prices for Agricultural Commodities Bill 2018, would have seen the government take measures to bring down the input cost of farming through specific regulation of the prices of seeds, agriculture machinery and equipment, diesel, fertilisers and insecticides, while making purchase of farm produce below the minimum support price (MSP) both illegal and punishable.

The charter also called for a special discussion on the universalisation of the public distribution system, the withdrawal of pesticides that have been banned elsewhere and the non-approval of genetically engineered seeds without a comprehensive need and impact assessment.

Other demands included no foreign direct investment in agriculture and food processing, the protection of farmers from corporate plunder in the name of contract farming, investment in farmers’ collectives to create farmer producer organisations and peasant cooperatives and the promotion of agroecology based on suitable cropping patterns and local seed diversity revival.

Now in 2020, rather than responding to these requirements, we see the Indian government’s promotion and facilitation of – by way of recent legislation – the corporatisation of agriculture and the dismantling of the public distribution system (and the MSP) as well as the laying of groundwork for contract farming.

This legislation comprises three acts: The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act 2020, Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act 2020 and Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act 2020

Although the two aforementioned bills from 2018 have now lapsed, farmers are demanding that the new pro-corporate (anti-farmer) farms laws are replaced with a legal framework that guarantees the MSP to farmers.

According to an article by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), it is clear that the existence of MSPs, the Food Corporation of India, the public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks constitute an obstacle to the profit-driven requirements of global agribusiness interests who have sat with government agencies and set out their wish-lists.

RUPE notes that India accounts for 15 per cent of world consumption of cereals. India’s buffer stocks are equivalent to 15-25 per cent of world stocks and 40 per cent of world trade in rice and wheat. Any large reduction in these stocks will almost certainly affect world prices: farmers would be hit by depressed prices; later, once India became dependent on imports, prices could rise on the international market and Indian consumers would be hit.

At the same time, the richer countries are applying enormous pressure on India to scrap its meagre agricultural subsidies; yet their own subsidies are vast multiples of India’s. The end result could be India becoming dependent on imports and the restructure of its own agriculture to crops destined for export.

RUPE concludes:

“Vast buffer stocks would still exist; but instead of India holding these stocks, they would be held by multinational trading firms, and India would bid for them with borrowed funds.”

Instead of holding physical buffer stocks, India would hold foreign exchange reserves.

Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital and India’s foreign exchange reserves have been built up by borrowing and foreign investments. The fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain these inflows and maintain market confidence by ceding to the demands of international capital.

This throttling of democracy and the ‘financialisation’ of agriculture would seriously undermine the nation’s food security and leave almost 1.4 billion people at the mercy of international speculators and foreign investment.

But agricapital’s free-for-all bonanza and the planned displacement of tens of millions of cultivators mirrors what has been happening across the world for many decades: the consolidation of a global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping (often with non-food commodities taking up prime agricultural land) linked to sovereign debt repayment and foreign exchange inflows and earnings and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives.

The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the dominance of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of countries from food self-sufficiency to food deficiency. Little wonder then that among the owners of global agribusiness family firm Cargill 14 are now billionaires – the very company that profited from running down India’s edible oils sector in the 1990s.

It is not that India needs these people. It is already the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton. This is despite India’s farmers already reeling from the effects of 30 years of neoliberal policies, decades of public underinvestment/disinvestment and a deliberate strategy to displace them at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations.

If unrepealed, the recent legislation represents the ultimate betrayal of India’s farmers and democracy as well as the final surrender of food security and food sovereignty to unaccountable corporations. This legislation is wholly regressive and will eventually lead to the country relying on outside forces  to feed its population – and a possible return to hand-to-mouth imports, especially in an increasingly volatile world prone to conflict, public health scares, unregulated land and commodity speculation and price shocks.

A shift towards food sovereignty – encompassing local people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and their ability to define and control their own food and agriculture systems – is key to achieving genuine independence, national sovereignty, food security and facilitating farmers’ demands.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

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New York Times admits schemes could lead to “a dystopic system that would limit the rights of people who have been careful to avoid infection and are unable or unwilling to be vaccinated”

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Several more countries have indicated that they are to adopt vaccination passports, meaning anyone crossing their borders will need to be able to prove they have been inoculated against coronavirus.

It is being reported that the South African government is working on implementing an entire Covid-19 vaccine ‘ID system’, which will not only encompass the so called ‘passports’, but will also include “management and surveillance of the Covid-19 vaccine,” as well as “an integrated track-and-trace system,” and “a dashboard system… to capture the reasons given for vaccine refusal.”

The country’s COVID battle has come under scrutiny in recent weeks with a purported super ‘mutation’ of the virus being discovered there.

The South African Department of Health has announced that all citizens who are vaccinated will be placed on a national register and provided with a vaccination card.

Meanwhile, in Europe, another country has indicated it will adopt the vaccination passport scheme with Ukrainian health officials announcing that all vaccinated people will be entered into an electronic health care database.

“When mandatory vaccination passports are introduced at the international level, Ukrainian doctors will be able to promptly issue a certificate of vaccinations,” said chief sanitary doctor of Ukraine Viktor Liashko.

Another country said to be mulling the introduction of COVID passports is Russia. The New York Times reported that

“The Russian government is considering issuing coronavirus health certificates that could ease travel and commerce for people who have been vaccinated.”

The Times quoted the head of the Russian Parliament’s committee on public health, Dmitri Morozov, who said that a Covid passport was “very important and needed.”

“This is great, this is the new world,” Morozov reportedly stated.

The Times also noted that

“A regional governor in Russia, Radi Khabirov, proposed on Monday that Covid passport holders receive discounts at stores, as an incentive for people to obtain the certificate.”

The report also noted that

“President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Tuesday that the government is considering issuing Covid passports.”

After the Times report was published, Russian state media denied that a COVID passport scheme to limit travel had been discussed by Peskov or the Kremlin.

“We are far from a unified point of view on this subject right now, there are no consistent approaches or a consensus on this subject,” Peskov said, but added that “this subject is circulating, it’s being worked out.”

Interestingly, while the likes of the New York Times has reported on other countries adopting the COVID passports, in its coverage of Russia potentially doing the same, it paints a much darker picture, stating that

“Opponents fear a dystopic system that would limit the rights of people who have been careful to avoid infection and are unable or unwilling to be vaccinated.”

“Russia has a grim history rooted in the Soviet era of controlling citizens’ movements, through a residency permit system that was never fully abolished,” the Times report continues.

So when Russia do it, it’s bad, but when other countries do it, it’s part of restoring ‘open society’. Hmmmm.

While scores of countries are now slowly moving toward the implementation of vaccination passports, airlines appear to have fully embraced the idea and essentially already have them in place.

Emirates airlines has announced that it will be trialling the IATA Travel Pass ‘digital passport’ which shows passengers’ proof of Covid-19 tests and other entry requirements when flying.

Adel Al Redha, Emirates’ Chief Operating Officer said that

“While international travel remains as safe as ever, there are new protocols and travel requirements with the current global pandemic.”

“We have worked with IATA on this innovative solution to simplify and digitally transmit the information that is required by countries and governments into our airline systems, in a secure and efficient manner,”Al Redha continued, adding “We are proud to be one of the first airlines in the world to pilot this initiative, which will provide an enhanced customer experience and conveniently facilitate our customers’ travel needs.”

As we reported last November, the IATA, the world’s largest air transport lobby group, expects its COVID travel pass app to be fully rolled out in the first months of 2021.

Other airlines, including United Airlines and Cathay Pacific have already trialled the IATA’s scheme.

Meanwhile, American Airlines has reportedly partnered with biometric authentication provider VeriFLY to develop its own COVID passport app, which will be rolled out within days.

“We support the implementation of a global program to require COVID-19 testing for travelers to the United States, and we want to do everything we can to make travel a seamless experience for customers,” Julie Rath, the vice president of customer experience at American Airlines, said in a statement.

Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson has also thrown his weight behind the vaccination passport idea, telling CNBC he hopes that soon

“there will be a proof-of-vaccination piece of paper that people can use to be able to get on a plane without having to be tested or without having to quarantine.”

“Vaccination is everything. Once vulnerable people, in particular, have been vaccinated, I think all kinds of businesses can start opening up again: restaurants, travel companies, cruise companies,” Branson declared.

The narrative of adopting vaccination passports is now so ubiquitous that it would be surprising not to see them adopted world-wide, despite the fact that even the World Health Organisation has warned that such schemes should absolutely not be implemented while there is no proof that vaccinations can provide immunity to coronavirus.

“Being vaccinated should not exempt international travellers from complying with other travel risk reduction measures,” the WHO committee stressed during its meeting held on January 14.

Others have warned that the adoption of vaccination passports will inevitably lead to a two-tier society, and must be prevented.

“The immunity passport could become a ‘passport for privilege,’ accentuating the divide between those who already have a comfortable position in society and those on the margins,” warns Dr Israel Butler, Head of Advocacy, at the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, Liberties.

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New peer-reviewed study of adverse events following MMRV vaccines highlights the urgent need for independent research on vaccine safety and the importance of informed consent and vaccine choice.

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As health officials strive to brush off as “coincidences” the mounting number of deaths and other serious adverse reactions occurring worldwide in connection with Pfizer’s and Moderna’s experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, the need for independent scrutiny of vaccine safety data has never been more apparent.

A new peer-reviewed study about adverse events following immunization (AEFI) and the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine brings home the urgent need for independent research.

The study, published by two northern Italian researchers on an open access platform suggests that most existing safety monitoring systems, whether in Italy or the U.S., are “utterly inadequate to document the real incidence of serious AEFIs and that current methods of assessing [vaccine-related] causality may be questioned.”

The study also reveals how an unbiased reanalysis of adverse event data puts the lie to the “reassuring conclusions” officials like to disseminate about vaccine safety.

Scrutinizing the existing data

Italy made MMRV vaccination compulsory for young children in 2017. In their 2021 open access study, Italian researchers Paolo Bellavite and Alberto Donzelli indirectly assess the impact of this policy by examining the incidence of MMRV-related AEFI as reported to or studied by Italy’s pharmacovigilance system.

Bellavite and Donzelli note that while Italy’s vaccine surveillance “is mainly of the ‘passive’ type” (characterized, as in the U.S., by vast underreporting), it also includes occasional “active vigilance” studies.

Bellavite and Donzelli summarize the findings of one such study, conducted in the region of Apulia in 2017 and 2018. The Apulia study’s university- and health-department-based researchers asked the parents of more than 2,500 children to keep diaries for three weeks post-MMRV-vaccination. The researchers then followed up with phone calls and review of relevant hospitalization records.

The Apulia researchers detected 992 post-MMRV adverse events among the 2,149 children for whom they were able to complete the three-week telephone follow-up — an AEFI reporting rate of 462 events per 1000 enrolled children. One hundred nine of the 992 adverse events (11%) met World Health Organization (WHO) criteria classifying them as “serious,” meaning fatal or life-threatening; requiring intervention or hospitalization; or causing persistent disability or incapacity.

The most common serious adverse events experienced by young MMRV recipients in Apulia were hyperpyrexia (very high fever in excess of 106°F — a medical emergency), neurological symptoms (including balance disorders and agitation), gastrointestinal problems and thrombocytopenia (abnormally low platelet levels). All of the adverse events are listed as side effects in the package insert for the Merck-manufactured MMRV vaccine (brand name ProQuad) as well as in the inserts for a number of other childhood and adult vaccines. (Notably, the healthy 56-year-old Florida doctor who recently died after getting Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine developed an ultimately fatal form of thrombocytopenia three days after vaccination.)

The MMRV insert also lists dozens of other post-vaccination reactions, including anaphylaxis, febrile seizures, muscle and joint pain, arthritis, bleeding disorders, autoimmune problems and serious infections, including both measles and varicella (chickenpox)!

The next step for the Apulia investigators was to apply the WHO’s causality assessment algorithm to their findings. According to the inflexible and somewhat paradoxical WHO criteria,

“Only reactions that have previously been acknowledged in epidemiological studies to be caused by the vaccine are classified as a vaccine-product-related-reaction. New serious adverse reactions that emerge post-licensure “are labelled as ‘coincidental deaths/events’ or ‘unclassifiable.’”

Even so, the Apulia study showed that 82 of 109 serious adverse reactions displayed a causal association “consistent with MMRV immunization.” This translates to 38 serious adverse events per 1,000 children enrolled — or one in 26.

In the U.S., which relies almost exclusively on passive surveillance, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has received 13,382 reports of MMRV-related adverse events since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved ProQuad in 2005 — an average of 836 reported incidents annually over the 16 years.

VAERS classifies roughly one in 20 of these (4.7%) as “serious,” including 19 deaths. Over the same time frame (that is, since 2005), VAERS accumulated another 40,070 reports of adverse events following MMR vaccination (2,500 annually on average), with one in 10 categorized as serious.

A 2016 FDA study that looked at 204 VAERS reports (through 2014) for infants who, largely due to “vaccination errors,” received the MMR or MMRV vaccines before nine months of age (rather than at the recommended 12 to 15 months of age) found that nearly one in six of the reported adverse events (17%) were serious.

Critiquing the spin

Knowledgeable experts have roundly criticized the WHO algorithm for being biased toward rejecting vaccine-related causality (describing the algorithm as being “not fit for purpose”).

Thus, the fact that there was one serious WHO-confirmed adverse event for every 26 enrolled children should have been extremely noteworthy.

Apparently, the Apulia researchers did not think so. As Bellavite and Donzelli note, though the Apulia study was unique in applying WHO causality assessment methods to comprehensive active surveillance data, the investigators vastly downplayed their own results, describing serious AEFIs as “absolutely rare” and reporting that “the active surveillance program confirmed and reinforced the safety profile of the [MMRV] vaccine.”

Bellavite and Donzelli dispute this tame characterization of the Apulia findings, explaining the following:

  • An AEFI rate of 38 per 1000 — one in 26 — should appropriately be classified as “common” rather than “absolutely rare.”
  • Apulia’s active surveillance data, when compared with Italian health authorities’ passive surveillance data, show a MMRV-related rate of serious AEFIs “hundreds of times higher than expected.”
  • Comparing the serious AEFIs that showed a consistent MMRV-related causal association (as per the WHO algorithm) to the Italian Medicines Agency’s passive surveillance data reveals an even greater “977 times difference.”
  • The frequency of serious, MMRV-related neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms identified through active surveillance — which stands out in comparison to the incidence documented in the literature and passive surveillance systems — should be interpreted as a safety signal.
  • Projecting the AEFI rate of 38 per 1000 onto an Italian birth cohort would yield “tens of thousands of serious AEFIs.”

In the U.S., the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers maintain that neither the MMR nor MMRV vaccines display “any major safety concerns,” despite the thousands of adverse events reported each year and the vast iceberg of additional adverse reactions that go unreported.

U.S. regulators’ nonchalance is further contradicted by a U.S. government study estimating that one of every 39 vaccines administered results in vaccine injury.

Bellavite and Donzelli also call attention to other considerations typically ignored or overlooked by researchers for whom a “confirmed” vaccine safety profile is the a priori conclusion — considerations that are as pertinent in the U.S. as they are in Italy. For example:

  • Studies focusing on vaccine-related adverse events should take into account each and all rounds of vaccination. The Apulia research was limited to reactions following the first MMRV injection only.
  • Vaccine safety surveillance rarely (if ever) accounts for administration of multiple vaccines at one time, yet the same-day injection of the MMRV and hepatitis A vaccines in Italy — and multiple combination vaccines in one healthcare visit in the U.S. — could be a factor contributing to elevated AEFI rates.
  • In persons with underlying genetic susceptibilities or a concomitant infectious or inflammatory disease, vaccination “can act as a synergistic or triggering factor” and should not be discounted when considering causality.

Drawing appropriate conclusions

Overall, Bellavite and Donzelli are unsparing in their critique of the systems usually relied on to monitor vaccine safety. Discussing “the inadequacy of passive surveillance to represent the real incidence of even short-term AEFIs, both of mild and serious kind,” they recommend directing more resources toward active surveillance of representative samples of the population, while also continuing to collect spontaneous reports through passive surveillance to capture “rare events that active surveillance would have little chance to intercept.”

These and other recommendations, articulated by Children’s Health Defense and many others, have fallen on deaf ears in the U.S.

More broadly, the Italian authors emphasize the fundamental principles of vaccine choice and informed consent, stating that “the choice of whether to vaccinate or not [is] a choice that must be made by the patient or by parents of underage children, properly advised by their doctors.”

They also noted how vaccine mandates alter doctors’ roles and turn them into “public officer[s] enforcing the government’s decisions.” Americans who are leery of experimental COVID-19 vaccines — and the improbable fairy tales being spun about the vaccines’ risk-benefit calculus — would likely agree with the Italians’ conclusions. The principle of informed consent cannot be satisfied “by a generic statement of a ‘safe profile’ or ‘lack of worrying signals,’” particularly when researchers ignore evidence of serious adverse effects in a significant percentage of vaccine recipients.

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Selected Articles: The New Domestic War on Terror Is Coming

January 20th, 2021 by Global Research News

The New Domestic War on Terror Is Coming

By Glenn Greenwald, January 20 2021

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago.

A Belligerent Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: The Legacy of US President Donald J. Trump

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, January 20 2021

As the Trump era is coming to an end, his legacy in the Middle East will be described by the Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians and the rest of the Arab world as aggressive, dangerous and extremely reckless.

Biden’s Key Role in the Crime of the Century: The 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, January 20 2021

Joe Biden presents himself as an empathetic guy who is willing to go the extra mile to help people overcome their personal tragedies. However, Biden has throughout his career endorsed policies that caused countless personal tragedies for millions of people.

“Covid Relief Plan”: Biden Lifts Health Care Plan from Insurance Lobbyists

By Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, January 20 2021

It adopts proposals from health insurance lobbying groups’ recent letter to lawmakers demanding lucrative new subsidies for insurance companies, at a moment when those corporations have recorded record profits as millions lose coverage and many face claims denials.

The Deep State’s Stealthy, Subversive, Silent Coup to Ensure Nothing Changes

By John W. Whitehead, January 20 2021

No doubt about it: the coup d’etat was successful. That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys.

Video: The Silent Enemy: The Lockdown Concerto of Dr. Ronald B. Brown, PhD

By John C. A. Manley, January 20 2021

He disrupted the academic world with his peer-reviewed paper exposing the exaggerated threat of an “invisible enemy” (the novel coronavirus). In an interview, Dr. Brown said that “the public’s overreaction to the coronavirus pandemic was based on the worst miscalculation in the history of humanity.”

British Medical Journal: Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% Effective” Vaccines—Let’s be Cautious and First See the Full Data

By Dr. Peter Doshi, January 19 2021

In the United States, all eyes are on Pfizer and Moderna. The topline efficacy results from their experimental covid-19 vaccine trials are astounding at first glance. Let’s put this in perspective.

China Health Experts Call for Suspension of COVID Vaccines as Norway Investigates 33 Deaths, Germany Probes 10 Deaths

By Children’s Health Defense, January 19 2021

Norway upped the number of deaths under investigation, from 23 last week to 33, while in Germany, health officials said they are investigating 10 deaths that occurred among elderly patients who received the COVID vaccine.

Dystopia Now! – Surveillance Through Vaccine Certificates, Digital IDs, and Biometric Data

By Jesse Smith, January 19 2021

No matter the origin or true lethality of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus pandemic has been utilized to implement broader agendas that have been planned well in advance.

Destroying the Web of Life: The Destruction of Earth’s Biodiversity Is Accelerating

By Robert J. Burrowes, January 19 2021

In August 2010, the secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, warned that ‘We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate.’ According to the UN Environment Program, ‘the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life’ with scientists estimating that ‘150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours’ which is nearly 1,000 times the ‘natural’ or ‘background’ rate.

We’re Being Locked-down for an Infection Fatality Rate of Less than 0.2%? Dr. Richard Schabas to Ontario Premier Doug Ford

By Dr. Richard Schabas, January 19 2021

The national lockdown was never part of our planned pandemic response nor is it supported by strong science. Two recent studies on the effectiveness of lockdown show that it has, at most, a small COVID mortality benefit compared to more moderate measures. Both studies warned about the excessive cost of lockdowns.

The Basic Principles of War Propaganda: The US Lies About Every War

By Rod Driver, January 19 2021

Propaganda as a science really got under way during World War 1 (WW1). The British and the German governments both brainwashed their populations into believing that the other country was a demonic enemy that had to be defeated.

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The situation in Syria’s Idlib appears to be, once again, on the brink of escalation, with the US preoccupied with what’s happening at home, and Turkey attempting to push towards Ain Issa, while being targeted by its own proxies.

The terrorist threat is far from removed, and attacks are common, moments of calm in the country’s east and northwest appear to be few and far between. The situation that’s transpiring is, to a large degree, due to Turkey’s actions and its policies.

Ankara, too, is suffering from it, since the many of the groups that it backs, officially or otherwise, seem to be eager to bite the hand that feeds. On January 16th, Turkish troops in observation posts in Idlib were targeted by sniper fire from a group that calls itself “Saryat Ansar Abu Baker As-Siddiq”. According to the group itself, three Turkish soldiers were shot. One appears to be in critical condition.

This is the group’s third attack against Turkey, with the first taking place in November of 2020, and then in December of 2020. The December attack resulted in one Turkish soldier’s death. Other reports of Turkish proxies attacking Ankara’s armed forces occasionally take place.

The Turkish military maintains more than 60 posts, camps and bases throughout Greater Idlib. Most of them are located in terrorist-controlled areas, and attacks on them are rather infrequent due to Ankara’s close ties with terrorists operating in the area. Nonetheless, as the recent attacks show, this policy has some weak sides for the Turkish personnel deployed.

Ankara is attempting to encroach near the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)-controlled area, attempting to establish an observation post near Ain Issa. A push on SDF positions is expected, but there will be a defense.

Meanwhile, Iran has been expanding its presence in Syria despite the endless Israeli-US attempts to oppose this. Tehran’s forces deployed a signal intelligence system along Syria’s border with Jordan. This may be used to either spy on the US forces deployed in Jordan, or even on Israel.

Iran has ample opportunity, Tel Aviv is likely to be on the back foot, since the US’ Biden administration is likely to support Israel less than that of Trump. This provides Tehran with a chance to dig in and reinforce its position and prepare an asymmetric response to its geopolitical opponents.

There is likely to be an advent of a new round of confrontation in the conflict zone, with the Syrian Arab Army still struggling to get rid of ISIS cells in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert, Turkey focused on the SDF and being targeted by militants in Idlib, and Iran attempting to focus on its opponents.

Both Ankara and Tehran are likely taking a chance to improve their positions in Syria due to the lull in American activity in the face of the unprecedented chaos in the United States. At the same time, the new US administration would not likely support the Trump-announced troop withdrawal effort. So, Washington still has a word to say.

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War-gaming the Politics of Personality

January 20th, 2021 by S. M. Smyth

War is merely the continuation of politics by other means(1) — Claus Von Clausewitz

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game. — R.D. Laing

“A continuation of politics by other means.”  

One could just as easily say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. And perhaps surmise that the strategies of war games can also be pursued within a “predatory culture”(2) via interpersonal games.

The battle for dominance in the fields of war, sports and business often mirrors personal struggles for domestic one-upmanship. Family politics may follow patterns of office politics and vice versa. Fear and greed as demonstrated on Wall Street can poison human relationships in a more personal arena.

Games of all sorts often use the terminology of war, as the pursuit of war uses the terminology of games. People put on their “game face” in the bathroom rmirror as they prepare to sally forth to engage with the citadel of commerce. They put on their game masks, their “personas”(3), to face the world. Now, alas, even that is insufficient, and must be further disguised with one more layer behind which to hide.

Just as there are tactics of war, there are tactics in business. How many aspiring CEOs pursuing an MBA have a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in their college backpack? And how many acknowlege warlike tactics in personal games with friends and family?(4)

Is it any less satisfying to feel one’s power over a lover, than to feel the thrill of martial music, while astride a prancing charger viewing one’s invincible army massed on the plain below? Is the art of seduction not often compared to a successful military campaign? The “battle of the sexes,” though now a tired cliche, could appear to a warring couple as a fight to the death with the enemy they are in bed with. 

So the question left hanging out to dry, if not twisting gently in the breeze, is how these tactics relate to the shaping of personality. Do the power politics of the larger world insert themselves into our personas to shape our personal strategies, the strategies we use to engage with others in our everyday social relationships? 

If the pursuit of power shapes the landscapes of war, sports and business, it can also shape our personal landscape and even the expression of our personality–of who we think we are. Conscious or unconscious shaping of our personality can be a means to pursue strategic advantage in love or war. 

If “all the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players,”(5) can we not assume an appropriate persona to suit our desires? Do we not learn who we would like to be “when we grow up” as children playing house or doctor? Perhaps we may craftily weave a “tangled web,” when “first we practice to deceive,”(6) far better than we let on, even to ourselves. 

It could be possible that some of us have taken, not Hamlet’s advice to the players: “Suit the word to the action, the action to the word,”  but follow another path to “smile, and smile, and be a villain.”(7)

As Shakespeare’s Richard III prepares to play the part of the lover, confiding to the audience his plans to transform his discontent, so might we prepare to play parts on our own personal stages. And even disguise from ourselves our true intentions, much as a Method(8) actor gets lost in the part, virtually “becoming” the role.

Perhaps in a culture of dissembling, of dark and smokey mirrors, we may be better actors than we think. 

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S. M. Smyth was a founding member of the 2006 World Peace Forum in Vancouver and organized a debate about TILMA at the Maple Ridge City Council chambers between Ellen Gould and a representative of the Fraser Institute. 

Notes

(1) The phrasing of the Clausewitz quote has been disputed.

(2) Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

(3) Wikipedia, Persona

(4) Eric Berne, Games People Play

(5) Shakespeare, As You Like It

(6) Walter Scott, Marmion

(7) Shakespeare, Hamlet

(8) Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, Method acting

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So far, it’s unclear if Trump will face Senate trial on the fraudulent charge of inciting insurrection — as a private citizen.

He had nothing to do with the January 6 storming of Capitol Hill. Nor did his nonviolent supporters in Washington.

Anti-Trump elements were responsible for what Dems in Washington falsely blamed him.

According to Trending Politics:

“(F)ederal law enforcement officials have told CNN that they believe the January 6th storming of the Capitol was planned ahead of time by bad actors instead of a random riot inspired by President Trump’s speech.”

Nothing Trump said or tweeted called for inciting insurrection, just the opposite.

He urged legitimate nonviolent protests, not the other way around.

What happened was well-planned in advance by forces hostile to Trump — wanting him further demonized for the wrong reasons, not legitimate ones.

They want him banned from politics to prevent him from running again for president in 2024.

There’s plenty of wrongdoing to hold him and most other US elected and appointed officials accountable for.

Impeachment charges against Trump on December 18, 2019 and on January 13, 2021 had no constitutional or US statute law validity.

They were and remain politicized for the above reasons.

Throughout US history, 15 Senate trials were conducted in response to 19 officials impeached by the House, including judges.

Three US presidents were impeached, Trump alone twice — both times on politicized charges with no validity.

What’s clear based on facts is unreported by hostile-to-Trump establishment media.

Yet most Americans believe what’s false because of anti-Trump media propaganda.

According to Pew Research on January 15, “68% of the public does not want Donald Trump to remain a major political figure in the future.”

In stark contrast, “64% of voters express(ed) a positive opinion of” Biden.

Pew Research also reported that 54% of respondents supported Trump’s removal from office despite nearing the end of his term.

Overall, “Republicans and (Dems) remain deeply divided” as they have been throughout Trump’s tenure, according to reported findings by Pew Research on January 15.

Only 52% of Republicans and “Republican-leaning independents say Trump bears any responsibility for” the Capitol Hill incident.

Only 21% of these respondents believe Trump should be removed from office before end of his tenure — in stark contrast to virtually all Dems and Dem “leaners (95%).”

“(A)nd 83% (of this group) favor his removal as president.”

At the same time, “a large segment of Trump voters” believe he was reelected on November 3 last year.

Among all respondents, “65%” believe Biden defeated Trump.

Clearly it was the other way around.

Most Americans are at least largely unaware of Biden’s betrayal of the public trust in office for a near-half century as senator and vice president.

They know little or nothing about his support for wars by hot and other means on invented enemies, corporate profiteering, and indifference toward peace, equity, justice, and the rule of law.

Hostile-to Trump throughout his time in office CNN actually reported the following:

“Evidence uncovered so far, including weapons and tactics seen on surveillance video, suggests a level of planning that has led investigators to believe the attack on the US Capitol was not just a protest that spiraled out of control, a federal law enforcement official says.”

The above is correct for mentioning pre-planning and incorrect at the same time.

There was nothing happenstance about orchestrated January 6 storming of Capitol Hill’s main building — no evidence that Trump promoted or otherwise supported it.

Establishment media overall and anti-Trump Dems refuse to admit the above.

Militant anti-Trump elements want him tried and convicted of phony charges by Senate trial.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell shifted from Trump backer to antagonist, on Tuesday saying to following:

Storming of Capitol Hill on January 6 was “provoked by (Trump) and other powerful people (sic).”

“The mob was fed lies (sic).”

“(T)hey tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like (sic).”

He hasn’t decided whether to go along with trying Trump for the charge of inciting insurrection — he and at least most other congressional members know is politicized, not true.

A two-thirds super-majority is required to convict if a Senate trial is held — requiring 17 Republicans to conspire with 50 undemocratic Dems against Trump after leaving office.

A separate vote would be required to ban him from seeking public office again.

Reportedly, McConnell and Senate Dem leader Chuck Schumer met to set rules for a Senate trial if held.

The evenly divided Senate is Dem-controlled because in case of 50 – 50 votes, Harris becomes the tie-breaking one.

Without GOP support, convicting Trump won’t happen. Enough Republicans have to go along for a required two-thirds majority.

What earlier seemed highly unlikely is now uncertain but very possible.

As things now stand, a politicized Senate trial is likely.

Nothing stands in its way with McConnell willing to conspire with Schumer in conducting one.

While its outcome is more likely not to convict Trump, the other way around could be its outcome.

If thing turn out this way, Trump will be the only US president ever impeached, tried and convicted.

Notably it would be after leaving office for politicized reasons lacking legitimacy, justifiable ones ignored.

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Montenegro’s military — and maybe NATO — want the Sinjajevina Highlands for maneuvers; traditional herding communities want these biodiverse alpine pasturelands conserved.

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Mileva “Gara” Jovanović’s family has been taking cattle up to graze in Montenegro’s Sinjajevina Highlands for more than 140 summers. The mountain pastures of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor Massif are the largest on Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, and they’ve provided her family not only with milk, cheese, and meat, but with an enduring livelihood and the means to send five of her six children to university.

“It gives us life,” said Gara, an elected spokesperson for the eight self-described tribes who share the summer pasture.

But, Gara says, this alpine pasture — “the Mountain,” she calls it — is under serious threat, and with it the tribes’ way of life. Two years ago, Montenegro’s military moved ahead with plans to develop a training ground where soldiers would carry out maneuvers and artillery practice in these grasslands.

No stranger to the daunting challenges of life as an alpine herder, Gara said that when she first heard of the military’s plans, it brought her to tears. “It’s going to destroy the Mountain because it’s impossible to have both the military polygon there and cattle,” she told Mongabay.

A map showing the approximate location of the proposed military polygon in the Sinjajevina pasturelands. Image courtesy of Pablo Dominguez (inset courtesy of Google Earth Engine).

A map showing the approximate location of the proposed military polygon in the Sinjajevina pasturelands. Image courtesy of Pablo Domínguez (inset courtesy of Google Earth Engine).

Anthropologists who have studied the region say that pastoralists have been bringing their herds to the Sinjajevina grasslands for around 3,000 years. Now, Gara fears that the military’s use of the land will utterly disrupt the current natural balance that 250 local families have carefully cultivated.

The tribes are all part of the same ethnic group, and they meet periodically to discuss the management of the pasturelands. Thanks to their nurturing efforts, verdant grasses carpet the Mountain each spring that feed not only their cattle, sheep and horses. The long-sustained partnership between natural and human communities also engenders a unique and richly specied landscape, while snowmelt flowing down from Sinjajevina supplies Montenegro with water and supports its human population.

“Maintaining a diversity of uses and practices up there is helping conserve some very valuable stuff,” Pablo Domínguez, an environmental anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Toulouse, told Mongabay.

Milan Sekulović, who leads the Save Sinjajevina Association, with a horse on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of Milan Sekulović.

Milan Sekulović, who leads the Save Sinjajevina Association, with a horse on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of Milan Sekulović.

The battle over Sinjajevina’s future — whether it remains a rare example of nature coexisting alongside humanity, or becomes a proving ground for kitted-out troops and heavy artillery — has embroiled not just Gara, the eight tribes, and the government of a small Balkans nation; it may also figure significantly into the global geopolitics of NATO and the European Union.

To many, including Gara, the two paths are incompatible. That stance led to a 51-day protest in late 2020. Around 150 farmers and activists camped on the Mountain in the fall, blocking the military’s deployment with little more than their presence and sheer determination.

For now, at least, they’ve succeeded, coinciding with a seismic, generational political shift in Montenegro. Today, the challenge that preservation proponents like Gara and Domínguez face is to parlay this ephemeral triumph into permanent protections for Sinjajevina and its people.

A highland and homeland of surprising diversity

The Sinjajevina grasslands cover a rocky, rolling plain in northern Montenegro of more than 450 square kilometers (147 square miles), according to the government, amid the craggy dolomitic peaks and limestone karsts of the Dinaric Alps.

Average elevations of 1,600 meters (5,250 feet) mean that impassable snows blanket the high pastures for five or six months each year. During that time, herders vacate their katuns — small, seasonal alpine outposts — until the warmth of late spring returns.

These grasslands border Durmitor National Park and the Tara River Basin Biosphere Reserve, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites where the rivers that drain these heights converge, plunging into Europe’s deepest river gorge.

At first glance, Sinjajevina appears boundless and quiet — even barren. In the military’s view, “It is empty,” said Petar Glomazić, a documentary filmmaker. Since 2019, Glomazić has co-led a coalition of international and local human rights groups, environmental NGOs and the European Union’s Green Party in a push to stop Montenegro’s military from commandeering the heart of Sinjajevina.

A katun on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of the Save Sinjajevina Association.

A katun on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of the Save Sinjajevina Association.

Those initial impressions of the region’s emptiness can be deceiving. Sinjajevina’s pastures are capable of fattening 10,000 cattle and 70,000 sheep each summer, according to estimates by agricultural scientists. But through the ages, these “semi-natural” grasslands — a designation given because the ecosystem’s persistence depends in part on human activities — have remained an oasis of ecological stability.

“That way of life, that very sustainable way of life, has been there for centuries,” Glomazić said.

Beyond Sinjajevina, in the lands below, the people and the environment alike have been hammered by centuries of human-induced tumult in a politically turbulent region. The Balkans sit at the nexus of trade routes connecting Europe and Asia and along the borders between now-defunct empires and religious divisions. That location has led to repeated conflicts amid shuffled power structures over many centuries.

Gara’s tribe, the Bjelopavlići, trace their legal claim to Sinjajevina back to the 1880s. After a war with the Ottoman Empire, King Nikola I gave the Bjelopavlići the legal right to graze their herds there in recognition of their efforts and sacrifice in holding off the Turks.

Gara and her six children descend from that line of pastoralists who have shepherded their flocks to the Mountain, first by foot, a journey that took three to four days, and now with trucks. They’ve endured two world wars, the formation and disintegration of nation-states, the rising and falling tide of Communism, and a vicious ethnic conflict that brutalized the Balkan Peninsula in the 1990s.

For their part, Gara’s children remain committed to preserving the way of life that their mother and others have kept alive, said her daughter, Persida Jovanović.

A cow on the pastures of Sinjajevina. Image courtesy of the Save Sinjajevina Association.

A cow on the pastures of Sinjajevina. Image courtesy of the Save Sinjajevina Association.

The eight tribes feel certain that stripping human influence from the grasslands would trigger an immediate change in the landscape, Gara said — one that could bankrupt the ecosystem and profoundly disrupt the balance that exists there today.

“Our ancestors, and us today, have unwritten laws how to keep the Mountain clean, especially the spring water,” Gara said. This code governs how early in the season people can bring their livestock to the high pastures, the number of animals allowed, where they can drink to keep waters free of pollution, and other considerations to encourage the renewed production of grasses year after year.

These handed-down strategies have in turn helped preserve wild animal and plant life.

“It is really a beautiful example of symbiosis of humans and nature. That nature would be different without the humans,” Glomazić said, “and vice versa.”

Vanishing global grasslands

Maintaining this time-honored balance requires a delicate dance between traditional pastoral livelihoods and nature — a dance that’s dying out around the world, especially on grasslands as humanity converts them for industrial agribusiness and other modern uses.

In 2020, a team of researchers in Japan, led by Taiki Inoue of the University of Tsukuba in Nagano, looked at plant communities in the Sugadaira Highland grasslands. Japan’s Sugadaira, like Sinjajevina, has hosted herders for thousands of years. More recently, pastoralists have abandoned parts of these Asian grasslands, as they find it harder to make a living herding in today’s world.

The researchers compared the number of plant species living in the grasslands with those living in the forests that sprung up in the herders’ absence and in new grasslands created after loggers cleared some of those forests. They found that the old grasslands — at least 160, and in some cases thousands, of years old — had the widest plant variety by far. Younger grasslands, stemming from deforestation over the past 52 to 70 years, had fewer plant species, but still more than the forest itself.

The authors note that, globally, grasslands are diminishing. About 13% of Japan’s land area was covered by grassland in the early 20th century, a figure that dropped to 1% by the early 2000s. Likewise, in recent decades, Brazil lost half of its vast Cerrado savanna biome, the largest grasslands now left on Earth. Given these precipitous declines, the authors suggest that conservation efforts should target the oldest “hotspot grasslands” where biodiversity is greatest — places like Sinjajevina.

Collecting herbs on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of Milan Sekulović.

Collecting herbs on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of Milan Sekulović.

Part of what makes the hotspots “hot” stems from their susceptibility to takeover by powerful institutions such as modern governments or corporations, which in turn derives from how grasslands are typically managed by traditional communities, Domínguez said.

Grasslands are often communally shared, rather than being privately owned by a single individual, family or other legally deeded entity. Domínguez noted that it doesn’t make much sense to divide up a grass-covered landscape among herders for individual exploitation. In expansive range systems like Sinjajevina, livestock need vast spaces so they do not overexploit the grasses available on a single plot. Sometimes, these commonly managed pastoral areas are even pejoratively referred to as “badlands.” He said this misnomer is due to the incorrect assumption that land is only good when it can be exploited intensively. In fact, he added, such so-called badlands often sustain many times more natural and cultural values than does intensive farming.

In contrast with conventional modern agriculture, the herders of Sinjajevina share the sprawling pastures, across which they move their animals from place to place, adhering to a strict code of self-imposed regulations to avoid overtaxing any one location. As a result, the pastures can offer people sustainable livelihoods almost indefinitely. Gara’s family is living proof that this approach to caring for the commons works, Domínguez said.

But the small population — 250 families in the case of Sinjajevina — leaves these herders in a position where they can “hardly oppose a central state or NATO in their land grabbing,” he said.

Humans and nature in concert

Though Sinjajevina has thrived in balance for centuries, it turns out that the “beautiful” symbiosis” found there — so rare, and becoming more so in the world’s grasslands, rainforests, and other landscapes — isn’t well understood by scientists.

Ecologist Vladimir Pešić said that the dearth of data on Sinjajevina makes it “very difficult to talk [about] from a scientific point of view” what would happen if the military turns part of it into a training ground.

“We can only speculate,” said Pešić, a professor at the University of Montenegro. But, he added, “For sure there will be an impact on the Tara River canyon ecosystem.”

Milan Sekulović, the secretary-general for the Montenegrin NGO Save Sinjajevina Association, still walks with his family’s herds to the Mountain every spring. He noted that the military incursion risks ruining “one big ecological resource because we still don’t know what we exactly have.”

A lake on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of the Save Sinjajevina Association.

A lake on Sinjajevina Mountain. Image courtesy of the Save Sinjajevina Association.

In fact, the government’s Agency for Nature and Environmental Protection of Montenegro (EPA) probed the ecology of Sinjajevina before the military had — publicly, at least — shown interest in the Mountain. That research, released in 2018, was an initial step toward protecting the Sinjajevina Highlands as a regional nature park.

The study revealed a striking amalgam of plant and animal species, many found in few other places. Researchers recorded 1,300 plant species, 56 of which live only on the Balkan Peninsula. The massif boasts dozens of bird and mammal species, as well as a handful of protected amphibian and reptile species, including the karst viper (Vipera ursinii macrops), a small, venomous snake that thrives in mountain grasslands but whose numbers have dwindled along with its favored habitat.

The EPA study led to the promise of funding from the European Union to establish a park that would protect both the ecosystem and the herders’ way of life.

Other government documents attest to Sinjajevina’s ecological value. A 2015 reportfrom the Montenegrin Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism notes that Sinjajevina is a bulwark for threatened mammals, of both the wild and domesticated sort, including the Piva sheep that local shepherds developed.

What’s more, scientists say Sinjajevina feeds Montenegro’s other regions. Every spring, alpine rivers swell with melting snow, gushing down from limestone peaks and providing a vital source of clean freshwater for Montenegro’s population. Pešić, the lead editor of a book called The Rivers of Montenegro, explained that the snowfall on the Mountain was a “very important” water source for the Balkan nation.

Montenegrin Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapić (left) and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg speak to the press on Dec. 15, 2020, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. Image courtesy of NATO.

Montenegrin Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapić (left) and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg speak to the press on Dec. 15, 2020, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. Image courtesy of NATO.

Zdravko Krivokapić, the country’s new prime minister, recently acknowledged this reliance, noting the urgent need to better understand how altering Sinjajevina will impact not just the immediate environment and the people who live there, but also the broader population of Montenegro.

“We have to be very careful about everything that we are doing,” Krivokapić told NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at a joint press conference on Dec. 15, 2020. “We have to find the best solution in order to meet the needs of NATO requirements and our [national] plans, and to preserve the essential value, which is, first and foremost, our environment.”

Gara was more forthright in her assessment. “If they do the military exercises in Sinjajevina, they’re going to pollute our rivers and mountains,” she said. “The waters that come from Sinjajevina — I think they go to half of the country. If those waters are polluted, everything else is polluted.”

Winds of (geo)political change

Considering these concerns, why, then, would Montenegro have chosen to move ahead with military plans that could endanger the country’s environment and water supply?

Several sources speculated to Mongabay that the push for a Sinjajevina training ground wasn’t driven by Montenegro’s army alone, which at full muster comprises fewer than 2,400 active soldiers. Instead, it is possible that Montenegro’s position on Europe’s southeastern flank is seen as strategic by NATO, and perhaps the European Union, of which Montenegro is not yet a member. But those military goals could also put Montenegro at odds with the EU’s stringent requirements for protecting nature.

Through a spokesperson, NATO declined to comment, except to direct Mongabay to the press conference held by the organization’s secretary-general and Montenegrin Prime Minister Krivokapić on Dec. 15.

European Commission spokesperson Ana Pisonero, on behalf of the EU Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, acknowledged to Mongabay that the military training area overlaps with a UNESCO World Heritage Site — the Tara River Biosphere Reserve — and that Sinjajevina is a candidate for inclusion in the European Community’s Natura 2000 network.

Milan Sekulović and another protester at the Margita camp, where activists blocked a military exercise for 51 days in late 2020. Image courtesy of Milan Sekulović.

Milan Sekulović and another protester at the Margita camp, where activists blocked a military exercise for 51 days in late 2020. Image courtesy of Milan Sekulović.

The Natura 2000 program includes threatened species habitat and breeding areas, often in places where humans also use the landscape. These spots don’t have the strict protections of national parks and preserves, but EU bylaws require member nations to manage them sustainably.

Pisonero noted that a 2020 EU report required Montenegro to prioritize “urgent measures to preserve and improve the ecological value of protected areas and potential Natura 2000 sites.”

She said the report called for any military operations in Sinjajevina to “be planned and monitored in line with the UNESCO principles of socio-cultural and ecological sustainability.” Pisonero also pointed out that the remaining unfulfilled requirements related to the environment and climate change for Montenegro’s admission to the EU were “among the most demanding.”

“To progress on the EU-accession path, the country must deepen and speed up reforms,” Pisonero said. “The faster Montenegro aligns with EU legislation, [and] conducts and implements necessary reforms, the faster it will be in a position to join.”

Military incursions begin

In the summer of 2019, the movement to protect Sinjajevina called for the cancelation of the March 2019 decree creating the military training ground. The activist coalition argued that, in addition to the risks to the environment, the government hadn’t carried out the necessary consultations and assessments to comply with the international principle of free, prior and informed consent.

“No negotiations with anybody,” Domínguez said. “They just declared it.”

To draw attention to the military’s plans, close to 10,000 people signed a series of petitions organized by Save Sinjajevina and groups from abroad, including Land Rights Now, the Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Areas and Territories (ICCA) Consortium, the International Land Coalition, and the Common Lands Network. And nearly 100 local and international NGOs from as far away as the Philippines, Indonesia and Burundi signed a statement supporting the measures.

Gara, along with Save Sinjajevina’s Sekulović, said that the tribes weren’t even told the size or the location of the troop training ground.

The Montenegrin Ministry of Defense did not respond to telephone and emailed requests for comment. However, available estimates put the proposed area at between 100 and 250 km2 (39 and 97 mi2). Wider ecological impacts could also occur as military missions travel to and from alpine areas.

In September, Thomas Waitz, a member of the European Parliament and co-chair of the EU Green party, visited Sinjajevina and voiced his support via tweet for keeping the military out.

“Military exercises here will have devastating consequences for farmers, animals, and the natural environment,” Waitz later told Mongabay in an email. “We need to protect this vital ecosystem and say no to military destruction.”

Still, in late September 2019, an international contingent of around 300 soldiers armed with explosives moved into Sinjajevina for military exercises.

“Now we are in the situation when you must fight for your home against your own army,” Sekulović said in an interview. “It’s a strange situation, but it’s real.”

Proponents of militarizing Sinjajevina have called the protesters traitors, saying they’re standing in the way of national defense in a volatile region. And the conservation movement’s leaders worried that their movement’s resistance wouldn’t be sufficient to end the military’s plans.

New government, new resistance

Then, in August 2020, the results of Montenegro’s elections buoyed the hopes of Sinjajevina’s defenders.

In all but a few of the past 30 years, Milo Djukanovic has led Montenegro as either president or prime minister. But Djukanovic’s grip on power in the Balkans appears to be on the wane: In last August’s election, the loss of seats by Djukanovic’s Democratic Party of Socialists meant that a new government coalition would soon rule Montenegro. That has opened the door for a ruling coalition that’s ostensibly more attuned to environmental issues and specifically Sinjajevina.

One of the members of that new coalition, the United Reform Action (URA) party, recently became a member of the EU Green Party. URA leader Dritan Abazović, who in December 2020 became Montenegro’s deputy prime minister, signaled his support of conservation prior to the formation of the new government in a tweet, writing in October, “There will be no military exercises on #Sinjajevina!” He called the preservation of the Mountain’s pastures a “significant victory” for the people and the environment of the little Balkan nation.

But that claim quickly collided with reality, as hundreds of soldiers, including not just Montenegrins but also international troops, reportedly planned to camp and carry out shelling exercises in the Margita area of Sinjajevina.

The Save Sinjajevina Association responded with dogged resistance. Beginning Oct. 16, some 150 protesters camped in the Margita area, where they believed the exercise would take place. They stayed for nearly two months, withstanding plummeting temperatures and winter storms and standing in the way of a military takeover at the heart of Sinjajevina.

Throughout November 2020, the soldiers remained close to Margita, to the frustration of Domínguez and other supporters of the Save Sinjajevina movement.

In Podgorica, the capital, talks among the newly elected members of the coalition failed to produce a working government, first missing one deadline in November, and then another. That led to concerns about whether URA leader Abazović, even with the support of the EU Greens, would in fact have the final say on the military training ground.

Relief on the Mountain

Finally, on Dec. 5, the coalition came together and formed a new government. The same day, incoming Minister of Defense Olivera Injac announced that the protesters should “go home freely.”

“I will be very happy to visit our natural pearl together with my colleagues and talk to the locals as soon as the opportunity arises,” Injac said, according to the Montenegrin newspaper Vijesti — an announcement that was “welcomed” by the European Commission, spokesperson Ana Pisonero said.

That same day, the protesters decamped, based on a promise from Injac that the military’s presence on the Mountain would be reevaluated. Still, the activists remain steadfast in calling for the permanent cancelation of the decree that created the training ground. They also want to see a park designated in Sinjajevina and created with the involvement of local communities and protection of traditional livelihoods in a region buffeted by political vagaries.

However, they worry whether the initial support their movement has marshaled will last, particularly in the context of global politics involving NATO, the EU and Montenegro’s place in Europe. Montenegro, after all, is a country in flux: The new governing coalition represents the first meaningful change in the country’s leadership in three decades, and it remains a young nation that only arose in its current form out of the former Yugoslavia less than two decades ago.

“It is surely too early to say if this decision is going to be stable and definitive,” Domínguez said in an email to Save Sinjajevina supporters, “and we will have to look very carefully at the developments.”

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John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Twitter: @johnccannon

Featured image: Activists on Sinjajevina celebrated a victory on Dec. 5 when the newly formed government promised to reevaluate the military’s use of the pasturelands. Image courtesy of Milan Sekulović.

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Zakaria acts as the informal Democratic Party CNN “spokesperson,” especially on international issues. The following may possibly provide us with an idea of what Biden is thinking. Aired January 17, 2021.

Guest: CNN Global Affairs Analyst and New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser.

From the full extract of the official CNN Transcript dealing mainly with Cuba:

ZAKARIA: Secretary Pompeo spent the better part of the week making big pronouncements and bigger moves on the world stage. He said that al-Qaeda’s new home base is in Iran. He labeled Cuba a state sponsor of terror and the Houthis in Yemen a foreign terrorist organization.

GLASSER: And so you have it as an example, I think, of how the U.S. has, sort of, abdicated leadership in the region. And, you know, there’s real costs to this. He’s also seeking to impose political costs, of course, on the incoming Biden administration if they seek to reverse this, if they reverse the Cuba designation, that they are somehow going to be in league with terrorists. You can just imagine, you know, the campaign commercials that—that Mike Pompeo is cutting in his mind.

ZAKARIA: Right. So—and if you look at the Cuba and the Iran ones, they seem both entirely of that—of that nature. You know, he’s designating Cuba as a state sponsor of terror. You know, it falls on the Biden administration to awkwardlyhave to, you know, undo that designation.

But both of them are—would be very awkward, politically, to undo, right?

GLASSER: Well, that’s exactly it, or they think that they will.
ZAKARIA: Unfortunately, Susan—I’m so sorry, but I’ve got to—I’ve got to let you go. We will—we will come back to this and to you because it’s always a pleasure.

GLASSER: Thank you, Fareed.”

***

Both Zakaria and Glasser go on to predict that, should Biden try to undo these designations, Pompeo and Trump will have a perfect excuse to attack the new administration. Yet, if they were at all honest, both would argue against this excuse rather than allowing it to hang in the air as a reasonable alibi for the State Department’s parting shot.

Compare this CNN transcript to the statement by eight US Senators. Furthermore, why did the CNN not cite this?

“Klobuchar, Leahy, and Colleagues Demand Answers from The State Department About Move to Designate Cuba a State Sponsor of Terrorism

WASHINGTON – On Friday January 8, 2021, U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Jack Reed (D-RI), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Tina Smith (D-MN) sent a letter to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo expressing concern over reports that the Trump Administration would designate Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism without formal consultation and review by Congress. The Senators also asked the State Department to commit to conducting a formal review before designating any nation a state sponsor of terrorism or removing any such designation. Without consulting Congress, today the State Department announced its intent to redesignate Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism.” 

We note that Pompeo placed Cuba on the list without a formal review by the Congress. However, if Pompeo could do this so easily, then Biden, far from feeling “awkward,” could remove Cuba from the list on January 20.

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Arnold August is a Montreal-based author and journalist whose articles are published in web sites across North America, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East in English, Spanish and French. He is a Fellow at the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute.

After condemning the pro-Trump invasion of the Capitol, the incoming Biden administration invited Carlos Vecchio – a coup leader charged in the 2014 torching of the Venezuelan Attorney General’s office – to its inaugural ceremony.

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As Washington recovered from shock and outrage caused by pro-Trump hooligans storming the United States Congress – breaking windows, smashing doors, and intimidating police officers in order to push their way inside – a sense of pre-inaugural excitement began to sweep the nation’s capital. Who would be attending incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, scheduled to take place exactly two weeks following the Capitol riot?

While heavily armed National Guard troops descended onto Washington’s streets to set up check-points, construct fences around government buildings, and establish their military presence, news about the upcoming swearing-in ceremony began to trickle out in the media.

Lady Gaga was booked to belt out the National Anthem, while Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Bruce Springsteen, and a host of other Democratic Party-aligned pop artists were scheduled to perform throughout the day. Former Trump cabinet members, including Vice President Mike Pence, Supreme Court Justices, and lawmakers were all expected to attend, though the National Mall would be closed to the general public.

Beyond entertainers and high-level federal officials, foreign dignitaries were invited to join a smaller-than-usual group of individuals permitted to witness the day’s festivities. Among those dignitaries is Carlos Vecchio, a former Exxon lawyer who currently serves as US-recognized “Interim President” Juan Guaidó’s envoy in Washington. When the Trump Administration initiated a coup against Venezuela’s government in January of 2019, Vecchio became Guaidó’s ambassador, and has risen to prominence as the de facto leader of a US-based exile lobby dedicated to toppling Venezuela’s UN-recognized government.

The Biden team’s decision to invite Vecchio was a disappointing sign to those hoping the new administration would break from Trump’s failed and destructive policy of recognizing Guaidó as Venezuela’s leader. In the two years since Washington appointed the previously unknown opposition figure to lead its attempt at regime change, Guaidó has failed to rally public support in Venezuela or gain control of any government ministry. The country’s military remains loyal to President Nicolás Maduro and the United Nations still recognizes the Maduro government’s authority.

Beyond giving the appearance that Biden will continue the Trump Administration’s doomed Venezuela policy, Vecchio’s presence at the presidential swearing-in ceremony was filled with irony. In the days following the Capitol riot, Biden and his allies have denounced the violent takeover of Congress as an assault on democracy, with the incoming president himself declaring the rioters to be “domestic terrorists.”

Yet Carlos Vecchio, the Guaidó ally with a fresh ticket to Biden’s inauguration, is responsible for leading his own assault on his home country’s democracy – and is currently wanted in Venezuela for inciting a violent attack on the Attorney General’s office in Caracas.

Biden’s guest charged with inspiring a violent assault on Venezuela’s public institutions

On February 12, 2014, right-wing opposition leader Leopoldo López led a feverish rally of his supporters in the heart of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas. For over a month, López and his political allies had been holding demonstrations aimed at overthrowing newly-elected president Nicolás Maduro, who came into office following snap elections held in the aftermath of Hugo Chávez’s death.

Carlos Vecchio, the corporate lawyer who went on to represent Juan Guaidó in Washington, also spoke at the demonstration, and stood loyally by López’s side as he delivered his incendiary speech calling for an angry march to the Attorney General’s office, and whipping the crowd into chants of, “No fear! No fear!”

López’s supporters heeded his call and charged straight for the office of Venezuela’s Public Prosecutor, eventually setting the building on fire. Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression project concededthe mayhem “resulted in the death of two people and considerable damage to public property.”

López and his allies, including Vecchio, were charged for their role in inciting the destruction. López was eventually sentenced to 13 years in prison for his actions, while Vecchio fled to the United States to escape “incitement of violence” charges.

The attack on Venezuela’s public institutions in February of 2014 mirrored events that would take place in Washington DC roughly six years later, when President Donald Trump delivered a speech on the White House eclipse instructing his supporters to march to the Capitol as lawmakers voted to cerity his election loss. Within minutes of arriving at Congress, Trump’s followers overwhelmed the meager crowd of police deployed to protect the legislature and forced their way inside – unafraid to shatter doors and windows as they did so.

Following the violent breach of the Capitol, incoming president Joe Biden characterized the mob’s actions as “an unprecedented assault on our democracy, an assault literally on the citadel of liberty, in the United States Capitol itself” and “an assault on the rule of law.” Democrats in the House of Representatives quickly moved to impeach Trump, charging the president with “incitement of insurrection.”

In light of their outraged response to the Capitol raid, which they branded an act of illegal insurrection, Biden and his allies might be sympathetic to the Venezuelan government, which similarly moved to charge López and his co-conspirators, including Vecchio, for their role in encouraging a blitz on government buildings after the country’s Attorney General’s office was torched by a politically-charged mob.

Instead, the wanted coup leader Vecchio was welcomed by a bipartisan crew of top Washington politicians including President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Florida neocon Senator Marco Rubio, and former Democratic Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The violent actions of Vecchio and his allies were hardly limited to the events of February 12, 2014. The chaotic demonstrations they led lasted until May of that year, resulting in the deaths of 49 people and roughly 10 billion dollars in damage. Regime change rampages by Venezuela’s opposition have featured assaults on journalists, the construction of barricades manned by vandals, and the burning to death of political opponents.

On June 13, 2017, activists set Venezuela’s Supreme Court on fire following jailed opposition leader López’s call for a rebellion against the Maduro government. Days later a police officer named Óscar Pérez hijacked a government helicopter and attempted to launch four grenades at the Court while firing live bullets at the country’s Interior Ministry. (Trump honored Pérez during a political rally in South Florida on February 18, 2019).

For his part, Juan Guaidó has led two failed campaigns of violent insurrection against Venezuela’s government. In April of 2019, he called for an uprising against President Maduro while a group of a few dozen soldiers launched an attack on the La Carlota Air Base in Caracas. While the rebellion failed to generate popular support, López was broken out of house arrest during the day’s events, leading to his eventual exile in Spain.

Roughly a year later, Guaidó was exposed at the center of yet another coup plot when former U.S. Green Beret Jordan Goudreau accused the politician of contracting his services to carry out a botched capture or kill operation targeting President Maduro. Goudreau, who previously provided private security for Trump campaign rallies, produced a contract containing Guaidó’s signature along with a voice recording of Guaidó allegedly discussing the deal though Guaidó himself has denied involvement.

Biden and the Democrats reacted with indignation when the U.S. Capitol was breached for just one afternoon, immediately initiating Trump’s second impeachment by the House of Representatives. Within days, the Capitol was surrounded with unscalable fencing and 25,000 National Guard soldiers were summoned to occupy central Washington DC – more than three times the amount of troops deployed to Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined.

It would be instructive to imagine how Democrats would have responded if Trump or his supporters attempted anything like the years-long campaign of insurrection by Venezuela’s opposition – and did so with the full-throated support of a foreign power. What if Trump supporters had set up barricades around Washington DC, preventing residents from leaving or entering their own neighborhoods? What if they had lit the Supreme Court on fire and bombed it from the air in a stolen military helicopter? And how would Democrats have reacted if Trump had contracted foreign mercenaries to capture or kill Biden?

Anyone troubled by these hypothetical scenarios should be equally disturbed that Carlos Vecchio, a veteran coup leader allied with seditious forces in his home country, will be present at Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

Sen. Durbin lobbies for Venezuelan coup leaders hours after condemning Trumpist “insurrection”

In the lead up to the House vote on President Trump’s impeachment, on January 11, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin tweeted, “The President and his Republican enablers incited a violent mob into storming the Capitol… This was an assault on our democracy, our national security, and our Constitution. There must be accountability, including impeachment.”

Hours later Durbin took to Twitter again to boast of his meeting with incoming Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, saying the two discussed “his plan for the State Department in the Biden Administration.”

According to the senator’s office, Durbin explicitly advocated the Biden administration preserve support for Juan Guaidó, whom he described as Venezuela’s “Interim-President.”

“We thank you Senator Durbin for addressing with the nominee for U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken the critical situation of Venezuela, the actions to restoring democracy hijacked by Nicolas Maduro’s dictatorship, and the necessary support to the Venezuelan people,” Vecchio tweeted in response to news of the conversation.

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Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

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He disrupted the academic world with his peer-reviewed paper exposing the exaggerated threat of an “invisible enemy” (the novel coronavirus).

In an interview, Dr. Brown said that “the public’s overreaction to the coronavirus pandemic was based on the worst miscalculation in the history of humanity.”

Now, in this music video, Dr. Ronald B. Brown, PhD, presents a melancholy tapestry of sounds and images exposing the understated harm of a real, yet “silent enemy” (the coronavirus control measures)…

SILENT ENEMY

This classical composition was performed and recorded by Brown in his home studio, using samples of orchestral instruments. In addition to pursuing a second PhD in epidemiology, Dr. Brown is a professional timpanist with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra in Ontario, Canada.

In an interview, Dr. Brown said that “the public’s overreaction to the coronavirus pandemic was based on the worst miscalculation in the history of humanity.”

Dr. Ronald B. Brown’s paper, Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation, has remained the most read article in the journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness for last six months. A follow up article is currently under peer review with the same journal.

“I can promise readers many more insights about the pandemic,” says Dr. Brown, “assuming the manuscript gets published.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors. Since March 2020, he has been writing articles that question and expose the contradictions in the COVID-19 narrative and control measures. He is also completing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

The New Domestic War on Terror Is Coming

January 20th, 2021 by Glenn Greenwald

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.

We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” “treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.

Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security website, touting a trademarked phrase licensed to it in 2010 by the City of New York, urging citizens to report “suspicious activity” to the FBI and other security state agencies

The more honest proponents of this new domestic War on Terror are explicitly admitting that they want to model it on the first one. A New York Times reporter noted on Monday that a “former intelligence official on PBS NewsHour” said “that the US should think about a ‘9/11 Commission’ for domestic extremism and consider applying some of the lessons from the fight against Al Qaeda here at home.” More amazingly, Gen. Stanley McChrystal — for years head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of the war in Afghanistan — explicitly compared that war to this new one, speaking to Yahoo News:

I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America….I think we’re much further along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem as a country, than most Americans realize.”

Anyone who, despite all this, still harbors lingering doubts that the Capitol riot is and will be the neoliberal 9/11, and that a new War on Terror is being implemented in its name, need only watch the two short video clips below, which will clear their doubts for good. It is like being catapulted by an unholy time machine back to Paul Wolfowitz’s 2002 messaging lab.

The first video, flagged by Tom Elliott, is from Monday morning’s Morning Joe program on MSNBC (the show that arguably did more to help Donald Trump become the GOP nominee than any other). It features Jeremy Bash — one of the seemingly countless employees of TV news networks who previously worked in Obama’s CIA and Pentagon — demanding that, in response to the Capitol riot, “we reset our entire intelligence approach,” including “look[ing] at greater surveillance of them,” adding: “the FBI is going to have to run confidential sources.” See if you detect any differences between what CIA operatives and neocons were saying in 2002 when demanding the Patriot Act and greater FBI and NSA surveillance and what this CIA-official-turned-NBC-News-analyst is saying here:

The second video features the amazing declaration from former Facebook security official Alex Stamos, talking to the very concerned CNN host Brian Stelter, about the need for social media companies to use the same tactics against U.S. citizens that they used to remove ISIS from the internet — “in collaboration with law enforcement” — and that those tactics should be directly aimed at what he calls extremist “conservative influencers.”

“Press freedoms are being abused by these actors,” the former Facebook executive proclaimed. Stamos noted how generous he and his comrades have been up until now: “We have given a lot of leeway — both in the traditional media and in social media — to people with a very broad range of views.” But no more. Now is the time to “get us all back in the same consensual reality.”

In a moment of unintended candor, Stamos noted the real problem: “there are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than people on daytime CNN” — and it’s time for CNN and other mainstream outlets to seize the monopoly on information dissemination to which they are divinely entitled by taking away the platforms of those whom people actually want to watch and listen to:

(If still not convinced, and if you can endure it, you can also watch MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski literally screaming that one needed remedy to the Capitol riot is that the Biden administration must “shutdown” Facebook. Shutdown Facebook).

Calls for a War on Terror sequel — a domestic version complete with surveillance and censorship — are not confined to ratings-deprived cable hosts and ghouls from the security state. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”

Meanwhile, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) — not just one of the most dishonest members of Congress but also one of the most militaristic and authoritarian — has had a bill proposed since 2019 to simply amend the existing foreign anti-terrorism bill to allow the U.S. Government to invoke exactly the same powers at home against “domestic terrorists.”

Why would such new terrorism laws be needed in a country that already imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world as the result of a very aggressive set of criminal laws? What acts should be criminalized by new “domestic terrorism” laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because — just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws — their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition.

The answer to this question — what needs to be criminalized that is not already a crime? — scarcely seems to matter. Media and political elites have placed as many Americans as they can — and it is a lot — into full-blown fear and panic mode, and when that happens, people are willing to acquiesce to anything claimed necessary to stop that threat, as the first War on Terror, still going strong twenty years later, decisively proved.

An entire book could — and probably should — be written on why all of this is so concerning. For the moment, two points are vital to emphasize.

First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to “incite violence.” The bastardizing of this phrase was the basis for President Trump’s rushed impeachment last week. It is also what is driving calls for dozens of members of Congress to be expelled and even prosecuted on “sedition” charges for having objected to the Electoral College certification, and is also at the heart of the spate of censorship actions already undertaken and further repressive measures being urged.

This phrase — “inciting violence” — was also what drove many of the worst War on Terror abuses. I spent years reporting on how numerous young American Muslims were prosecuted under new, draconian anti-terrorism laws for uploading anti-U.S.-foreign-policy YouTube videos or giving rousing anti-American speeches deemed to “incite violence” and thus provide “material support” to terrorist groups — the exact theory which Rep. Schiff is seeking to import into the new domestic War on Terror.

It is vital to ask what it means for speech to constitute “incitement to violence” to the point that it can be banned or criminalized. The expression of any political viewpoint, especially one passionately expressed, has the potential to “incite” someone else to get so riled up that they engage in violence.

If you rail against the threats to free speech posed by Silicon Valley monopolies, someone hearing you may get so filled with rage that they decide to bomb an Amazon warehouse or a Facebook office. If you write a blistering screed accusing pro-life activists of endangering the lives of women by forcing them back into unsafe back-alley abortions, or if you argue that abortion is murder, you may very well inspire someone to engage in violence against a pro-life group or an abortion clinic. If you start a protest movement to object to the injustice of Wall Street bailouts — whether you call it “Occupy Wall Street” or the Tea Party — you may cause someone to go hunt down Goldman Sachs or Citibank executives who they believe are destroying the economic future of millions of people.

If you claim that George W. Bush stole the 2000 and/or 2004 elections — as many Democrats, including members of Congress, did — you may inspire civic unrest or violence against Bush and his supporters. The same is true if you claim the 2016 or 2020 elections were fraudulent or illegitimate. If you rage against the racist brutality of the police, people may go burn down buildings in protest — or murder randomly selected police officers whom they have become convinced are agents of a racist genocidal state.

The Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer and hard-core Democratic partisan, James Hodgkinson, who went to a softball field in June, 2017 to murder Republican Congress members — and almost succeeded in fatally shooting Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) — had spent months listening to radical Sanders supporters and participating in Facebook groups with names like “Terminate the Republican Party” and “Trump is a Traitor.”

Hodgkinson had heard over and over that Republicans were not merely misguided but were “traitors” and grave threats to the Republic. As CNN reported, “his favorite television shows were listed as ‘Real Time with Bill Maher;’ ‘The Rachel Maddow Show;’ ‘Democracy Now!’ and other left-leaning programs.” All of the political rhetoric to which he was exposed — from the pro-Sanders Facebook groups, MSNBC and left-leaning shows — undoubtedly played a major role in triggering his violent assault and decision to murder pro-Trump Republican Congress members.

Despite the potential of all of those views to motivate others to commit violence in their name — potential that has sometimes been realized — none of the people expressing those views, no matter how passionately, can be validly characterized as “inciting violence” either legally or ethically. That is because all of that speech is protected, legitimate speech. None of it advocates violence. None of it urges others to commit violence in its name. The fact that it may “inspire” or “motivate” some mentally unwell person or a genuine fanatic to commit violence does not make the person espousing those views and engaging in that non-violent speech guilty of “inciting violence” in any meaningful sense.

To illustrate this point, I have often cited the crucial and brilliantly reasoned Supreme Court free speech ruling in Claiborne v. NAACP. In the 1960s and 1970s, the State of Mississippi tried to hold local NAACP leaders liable on the ground that their fiery speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores “incited” their followers to burn down stores and violently attack patrons who did not honor the protest. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew that they were metaphorically pouring gasoline on a fire with their inflammatory rhetoric to rile up and angry crowds.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated to commit crimes in the name of that cause (emphasis added):

Civil liability may not be imposed merely because an individual belonged to a group, some members of which committed acts of violence. . . .

[A]ny such theory fails for the simple reason that there is no evidence — apart from the speeches themselves — that [the NAACP leader sued by the State] authorized, ratified, or directly threatened acts of violence. . . . . To impose liability without a finding that the NAACP authorized — either actually or apparently — or ratified unlawful conduct would impermissibly burden the rights of political association that are protected by the First Amendment. . . .

While the State legitimately may impose damages for the consequences of violent conduct, it may not award compensation for the consequences of nonviolent, protected activity. Only those losses proximately caused by unlawful conduct may be recovered.

The First Amendment similarly restricts the ability of the State to impose liability on an individual solely because of his association with another.

The Claiborne court relied upon the iconic First Amendment ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a KKK leader who had publicly advocated the possibility of violence against politicians. Even explicitly advocating the need or justifiability of violence for political ends is protected speech, ruled the court. They carved out a very narrow exception: “where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” — meaning someone is explicitly urging an already assembled mob to specific violence with the expectation that they will do so more or less immediately (such as standing outside someone’s home and telling the gathered mob: it’s time to burn it down).

It goes without saying that First Amendment jurisprudence on “incitement” governs what a state can do when punishing or restricting speech, not what a Congress can do in impeaching a president or expelling its own members, and certainly not social media companies seeking to ban people from their platforms.

But that does not make these principles of how to understand “incitement to violence” irrelevant when applied to other contexts. Indeed, the central reasoning of these cases is vital to preserve everywhere: that if speech is classified as “incitement to violence” despite not explicitly advocating violence, it will sweep up any political speech which those wielding this term wish it to encompass. No political speech will be safe from this term when interpreted and applied so broadly and carelessly.

And that is directly relevant to the second point. Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of “Democrat v. Republican” or even “left v. right” is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.

The last several months of politician-and-journalist-demanded Silicon Valley censorship has targeted the right, but prior to that and simultaneously it has often targeted those perceived as on the left. The government has frequently declared right-wing domestic groups “terrorists,” while in the 1960s and 1970s it was left-wing groups devoted to anti-war activism which bore that designation. In 2011, British police designated the London version of Occupy Wall Street a “terrorist” group. In the 1980s, the African National Congress was so designated. “Terrorism” is an amorphous term that was created, and will always be used, to outlaw formidable dissent no matter its source or ideology.

If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about “right v. left” and most definitely do not care about “Republican v. Democrat” — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order.

Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status. The one who put this best was probably Barack Obama when he was president, when he observed — correctly — that the perceived warfare between establishment Democratic and Republican elites was mostly theater, and on the question of what they actually believe, they’re both “fighting inside the 40 yard line” together:

A standard Goldman Sachs banker or Silicon Valley executive has far more in common, and is far more comfortable, with Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan than they do with the ordinary American citizen. Except when it means a mildly disruptive presence — like Trump — they barely care whether Democrats or Republicans rule various organs of government, or whether people who call themselves “liberals” or “conservatives” ascend to power. Some left-wing members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) have said they oppose a new domestic terrorism law, but Democrats will have no trouble forming a majority by partnering with their neocon GOP allies like Liz Cheney to get it done, as they did earlier this year to stop the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Germany.

Neoliberalism and imperialism do not care about the pseudo-fights between the two parties or the cable TV bickering of the day. They do not like the far left or the far right. They do not like extremism of any kind. They do not support Communism and they do not support neo-Nazism or some fascist revolution. They care only about one thing: disempowering and crushing anyone who dissents from and threatens their hegemony. They care about stopping dissidents. All the weapons they build and institutions they assemble — the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, oligarchical power — exist for that sole and exclusive purpose, to fortify their power by rewarding those who accede to their pieties and crushing those who do not.

No matter your views on the threat posed by international Islamic radicalism, huge excesses were committed in the name of stopping it — or, more accurately, the fears it generated were exploited to empower and entrench existing financial and political elites. The Authorization to Use Military Force — responsible for twenty-years-and-counting of war — was approved by the House three days after the 9/11 attack with just one dissenting vote. The Patriot Act — which radically expanded government surveillance powers — was enacted a mere six weeks after that attack, based on the promise that it would be temporary and “sunset” in four years. Like the wars spawned by 9/11, it is still in full force, virtually never debated any longer and predictably expanded far beyond how it was originally depicted.

The first War on Terror ended up being wielded primarily on foreign soil but it has increasingly been imported onto domestic soil against Americans. This New War on Terror — one that is domestic in name from the start and carries the explicit purpose of fighting “extremists” and “domestic terrorists” among American citizens on U.S. soil — presents the whole slew of historically familiar dangers when governments, exploiting media-generated fear and dangers, arm themselves with the power to control information, debate, opinion, activism and protests.

That a new War on Terror is coming is not a question of speculation and it is not in doubt. Those who now wield power are saying it explicitly. The only thing that is in doubt is how much opposition they will encounter from those who value basic civic rights more than the fears of one another being deliberately cultivated within us.

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War Propaganda: The Cult of Militarism

January 20th, 2021 by Rod Driver

This is the second of two posts about war propaganda, and the last of four posts about propaganda more generally.

“War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today” (John F.Kennedy(1))

War Propaganda Runs Through Our Culture 

Hollywood movies about war or spying tend to portray the US military, or James Bond, as the ‘good guys’ involved in ‘goodies vs baddies’ conflicts, with little discussion of the crimes of the US and British militaries and their spy agencies. The US military cooperates closely with these productions provided that they have final script approval, and can change scripts or scenes that they do not like. Where movies have tried to say anything negative about the US military, cooperation has been refused. They expect to have a generally patriotic view of the US, with the military portrayed as heroes, always with good intentions. These films actually help to recruit people for the military. The US navy provided planes, pilots and warships for the 1986 movie ‘Top Gun’. This led to a big rise in applications for people to become US fighter pilots. A more recent development has been the use of internet adverts for Hollywood movies, which deceptively take people to disguised army recruitment websites.(2)

One of the best examples of CIA propaganda is their manipulation of the film version of George Orwell’s book ‘Animal Farm.’ The book highlights the fact that politicians in both capitalist and communist countries can be corrupted by power. The CIA bought the film rights, knowing that it could be used as a propaganda tool. The CIA’s film version omits the most important part of the ending (which criticises capitalism) creating the impression that it is only a criticism of communism.(3)

The developers of many computer video games work closely with the US military. There is increasing use of drones in the military, piloted by soldiers thousands of miles away. What they see on their control screens is indistinguishable from a video game. The content of some games involves overthrowing governments in countries such as Venezuela.(4)  Evidence from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq indicates that US soldiers participate in war as if they are playing a video game, and therefore they can convince themselves that their actions have no consequences.

Never Question The Soldiers 

One of the strongest parts of any pro-war propaganda system is convincing everyone that whatever criticisms they make, they must always support the troops. But the job of a British or American soldier has nothing to do with freedom or democracy. They are trained killers whose job is to invade and occupy other countries, and kill anyone who gets in the way. Britain’s military is much smaller than that of the US, but British propaganda plays an important role in generating support for war.(5) Military veterans are always praised on television when they appear at public events. When large numbers of people are being slaughtered in Iraq, there is a big difference between saying ‘The valiant British and American soldiers in Iraq were viciously attacked by terrorists, but successfully defended themselves’ and ‘The British and American occupation forces murdered large numbers of Iraqi people’. Variations of the first comment appear in US and British media regularly, but the second is a more honest way of describing what is going on.

Groups of former soldiers, such as ‘Veterans for Peace’, are now coming forward to explain that basic training is a form of brainwashing, and that the version of war that they experience, which is the mass slaughter of innocent people, is completely different from the propaganda.(6)

Brainwashing Begins In Childhood 

Children’s comic books about World War 2, such as Commando and War Picture Library, were very popular for decades after the war. They had a strong focus on patriotism and heroism. They stereotyped people from enemy countries as cruel or cowardly, and used derogatory terms such as jerries, huns or krauts for German people, eyeties for Italian people, or nips for Japanese people.(7) A generation of children grew up with a very distorted view of the war and people in other countries.

Astute readers will have realised that the materials in these blogs are not taught in schools. Most young people reach adulthood with no understanding of how the world really works. This is because governments do not want citizens to understand the crimes they commit.

In 2007 the British government decided to increase its military propaganda in schools and society more generally. It is encouraging more schools to have cadet forces. Sports competitions for injured soldiers, such as the Invictus games in the UK, and the Warrior games in the US, are intended to present former soldiers as heroes.(8) The link between the military and the British Royal family also plays a propaganda role. More recently, Britain’s cybersecurity agency, GCHQ, started running courses in schools teaching hacking skills, and inviting young children to visit them.(9) One campaign group noted:

“Armed Forces Day, Remembrance Day, Uniform to Work Day, Camo Day [where people wear camouflage], in the streets, on television, on the web, at sports events, in schools, advertising and fashion – the military presence in UK civilian life is increasing daily”(10)

All of the activities described above are forms of militarism, where people are encouraged to see the military, and spying, in positive terms; to think of violent, military solutions as the best way to solve international disagreements; and to ignore peaceful alternatives. There is no discussion of British and US war crimes, or the illegal spying activities of GCHQ(11) and its US equivalent, the NSA. Encouraging children to play with military vehicles and weapons, and to watch military parachutists or airshows, is intended to indoctrinate them. School trips to war museums have a similar effect. Ideas learned at a young age come to seem like common sense, as opposed to propaganda intended to serve the interests of rich and powerful people. These activities play a direct role in recruiting soldiers, but just as importantly, they recruit a large number of people to support militarism unquestioningly.(12)

The Power of Patriotism 

The military activities mentioned above also indoctrinate people into thinking about patriotism and nationalism, which are incredibly powerful propaganda tools.(13) Putting the head of a Monarch or an Emperor onto coins was one of the earliest forms of propaganda, and stamps with the Queen on them have a similar purpose. Royal pageants and processions are celebrated as major national events. We are encouraged to think of our country as a single entity, to be proud of it, and to forget, ignore, or be unaware of the crimes of our government, and the fact that most people have little in common with the billionaires and millionaires who dominate political decision-making. It makes it easy for decision-makers to generate support for foreign wars, and to describe others as ‘the enemy’.

Propaganda Works on Politicians Too 

It is important to realise that some government propaganda is targeted at politicians. This is where the intelligence services come in. Most people think that intelligence services exist to provide accurate information. This is only partly true. Some parts of the intelligence services have a secondary role, which is to present information that supports policy. The US decided to invade Iraq a long time before the invasion actually happened. From that point onwards, they were trying to find intelligence that would give them a good excuse to invade. Intelligence officers in Britain were told that if they did not sign up to a dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction, that they knew was untrue, that would be the end of their careers. In the US, whole new departments were set up. The Office of Strategic Influence was set up in 2001 to support the war on terror through psychological operations (PSYOPs), which includes creating fake stories and propaganda. The Office of Special Plans was set up in 2002 specifically to ‘re-interpret’ data to create a case for war. If the data did not support war, officers would be told that this was not what their superiors wanted to hear, and they should try again until they came up with the ‘right’ result.(14)

Anti-war opinions are being censored – Manipulating Information on the Internet 

The internet is becoming increasingly important as a source of information, particularly for young people. Wikipedia began as an online encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone. On some non-political topics, it is a useful source of information. Unfortunately, most edits are now made by a small number of people. There is strong evidence that some of these people are not honest, independent researchers. They work to protect the establishment against its critics.(15) Critical websites such as The Grayzone have been blacklisted by Wikipedia, even though it has an outstanding track record of investigative journalism.(16) Many anti-war activists, including the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, discovered that their Wikipedia entries had all been changed hundreds of times in very negative ways by a single individual (or, more likely, a group of people operating under a single username).

Critical writers have noted that Facebook and Twitter censor their output, and Google manipulates search results so that critical work does not appear on the first page of results. This means that it is becoming more and more difficult for people to find information that challenges the mainstream view.

Some Propaganda is More Subtle – Newspeak and Euphemisms 

Most of the war propaganda discussed so far is reasonably obvious, once people have been made aware that it is propaganda. However, as with other forms of propaganda, war propaganda actually permeates our society.

We saw in an earlier post about the weapons industry that the word defence is actually a euphemism for invasions, occupations, mass murder and maiming. There are many other words that are intentionally used to give a misleading impression of what’s going on. The following is just a short selection of the more obvious ones:

  • National interest means the interests of the biggest corporations, and the rich and powerful more generally
  • International community means the US government and any country that can be bribed or threatened to support the US
  • Rogue state is a country that the US does not like. In reality, the biggest rogue state is the US, with Britain also having a global reputation for ignoring international law and committing war crimes.
  • Official secrets and national security are mechanisms to help the most powerful people cover up their crimes.

George Orwell, the author of ‘1984’, used the term ‘Newspeak’ to describe how the government and the media use language as a weapon to limit the range of ideas that people consider reasonable, and to distort our understanding of important issues. For example, politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, who object to invasions or drone assassinations, are labeled as ‘soft-on-defence’ or ‘soft-on-terror’,(17) when in fact they are objecting to serious crimes by our government. If you watch any mainstream news program, particularly on the BBC, you eventually realise that Newspeak is being used all the time.

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the fifteenth in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.

Notes 

1) John F. Kennedy, cited in David Swanson, War is a Lie, 2011, p.133

2) Jonathan McIntosh, ‘Military recruitment and Hollywood’, Pop Culture Detective, 28 Sep 2016, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5xfBtD6rLY 

3) Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, 2001

Laurence Zuckerman, ‘How The Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Culture’, The New York Times, 18 March 2000, at https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/18/books/how-the-cia-played-dirty-tricks-with-culture.html

4) Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, ‘War games: Pentagon/CIA push regime change propaganda in video games’, The Grayzone, 15 April 2019, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72v7PWJUyxY

5) Mark Curtis, Web Of Deceit, 1998, p.22

6) https://www.veteransforpeace.org/

https://vfpuk.org/

7) James Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History, 2011

8) John Kelly, ‘Western Militarism and the Political Utility of Sport’, 17 August 2017, at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297917074_Western_Militarism_and_the_Political_Utility_of_Sport 

9) Matt Kennard, ‘Revealed: The UK’s largest intelligence agency is infiltrating British schools’, DeclassifiedUK, 2 June 2020, at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-06-02-revealed-the-uks-largest-intelligence-agency-is-infiltrating-british-schools/#gsc.tab=0 

10) War School (2018) synopsis, at https://www.war.school/test

11) Russell Brandon, ‘UK admits it spied illegally for 17 years, is sorry, won’t stop’, The Verge, 7 Oct 2016, at https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13305270/uk-illegal-surveillance-gchq-investigatory-powers-tribunal 

12) www.ppu.org.uk/everyday-militarism

13) David Cromwell and David Edwards ‘Patriotism as Propaganda – Part 1’, Medialens, 8 Jan 2007, at https://www.medialens.org/2007/patriotism-as-propaganda-part-1/ 

David Cromwell and David Edwards, ‘Patriotism as propaganda – Part 2: Voluntary Subjection Cannot be Forced’, 9 Jan 2007, Medialens, at https://www.medialens.org/2007/patriotism-as-propaganda-part-2/

14) Craig Murray, ‘Murder in Samarkand – Document 1 – FCO Comment’, pp.158-159,  http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/craig-murray/FCO_Comment.html 

Seymour M. Hersh, ‘Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?’, New Yorker, 5 May 2003, at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Influence

15) Craig Murray, The Philip Cross Affair, 18 May 2018, at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/

16) Ben Norton, ‘Wikipedia Formally Censors Grayzone as Regime-change Advocates Monopolize Editing, Global Research, 10 June 2020, at https://www.globalresearch.ca/wikipedia-formally-censors-grayzone-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/5715810

17) Boris Johnson, ‘Corbyn has been soft on terror for 30 years’ – video, The Guardian, 6 Jun 2017, at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2017/jun/06/boris-johnson-corbyn-has-been-soft-on-terror-for-30-years-video

Featured image by Nathaniel St. Clair

As the Trump era is coming to an end, his legacy in the Middle East will be described by the Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians and the rest of the Arab world as aggressive, dangerous and extremely reckless.  Israelis will say that Trump was one of the most supportive and loyal American presidents to the State of Israel. The Israeli government even named a settlement after Trump in the Golan Heights called ‘Trump Heights.’ 

So how will history judge Trump’s Middle East policies?

For starters, Trump had increased tensions with all of Washington’s and Israel’s long-time enemies including the one country whose been on the hit list since 1979, Iran.  In mid January 2021, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani criticized Trump’s policies towards Iran, “a president who lacked political understanding took the helm of a country, and was accompanied by a stupid foreign minister and an ignorant and radical national security advisor. He handled everything with his gambling and business-oriented mind, and we finally saw how his term ended” and that “no one could believe this law-breaker [Trump] would order riot against his own nation, his own security, and the country’s legislature, and provoke people against the very democracy they believe in”  proclaimed Rouhani.  On February 2017, Trump’s former National Security advisor Michael Flynn presented a short and threatening statement towards Iran:

Recent Iranian actions involving a provocative ballistic missile launch and an attack against a Saudi naval vessel conducted by Iran-supported Houthi militants underscore what should have been clear to the international community all along about Iran’s destabilizing behavior across the entire Middle East

Flynn spoke on the types of threats that come from Iran “including weapons transfers, support for terrorism and other violations of international norms.”  Flynn’s final words of the statement did not at all sit well with Tehran “as of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.”  Not a good start to diplomatic relations.  Fast forward to May of 2018, taking advice from Israel’s Prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump announced the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran, calling it “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made” and that “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.”  

The next day, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called Trump’s decision “inane and superficial.” In the following months, the Trump regime prepared to impose economic sanctions on Iran targeting its banking, energy, shipbuilding, and financial sectors if they did not follow Washington’s demands.  As tensions, increased, Washington designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces as a “foreign terrorist organization,” Iran retaliated by designating the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) as a “terrorist organization.”

In the following year, President Trump then imposed new sanctions on Iran by targeting numerous areas of production including aluminum, copper, iron and the steel sectors.  A number of incidents including tanker explosions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a pipeline attack in Saudi Arabia prompted Trump to order US troops to the region and that created more tensions between Tehran and Washington.  Then in early 2020, the Trump regime approved a drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the well-respected commander of Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Forces who led the fight against terrorists in the region and Mahdi al-Muhandis, the vice president of Hashd al-Shaabi group.  Trump said “what the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago.”   Tehran condemned the attack vowing to retaliate. History will remember when Trump threatened to hit 52 Iranian targets including cultural sites as a response to any attack on U.S. citizens on twitter:

Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

A few days later, Iran made its threat a reality when the Revolutionary Guards Corps fired several missiles at the Ain al-Assad airbase in Iraq where US and Iraqi forces were based. The Revolutionary Guards released an official statement after the retaliation:

In Operation Martyr Soleimani in the early hours of Wednesday, tens of ground-to-ground missiles were fired at the U.S. base and successfully pounded Ain al-Asad Base

Luckily, a war between the US and Iran did not happen.  On January 20th, Trump is set to depart from the White House, now Iran will have to wait and see what happens under the new President-Elect and self admitted Zionist and long-time supporter of Israel, Joe Biden.

From Planning the Assassination of Bashar al-Assad to Stealing Syrian Oil

In September 2020, The Hill published a report on Trump’s plan to assassinate Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad titled ‘Trump says he wanted to take out Syria’s Assad but Mattis opposed it’ claimed that Trump had admitted to a plan to have Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad assassinated while he criticized former Defense Secretary James Mattis.   Trump’s “assassination operation” was discussed on Fox & Friends when he said that “I would’ve rather taken him out. I had him all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general.” According to The Hill “The president added that he did not regret the decision not to target Assad, saying he “could’ve lived either way.”

The report also noted another quote from Trump on the idea of assassinating the Syrian president in a book written in 2018 by mainstream-media journalist Bob Woodward titled ‘Fear; Trump in the White House’ which Trump denied when he was asked about the plot and said that it was “never even discussed” and “No, that was never even contemplated, nor would it be contemplated and it should not have been written about in the book.”

However, according to Woodward “Trump urged Mattis that the U.S. should f—— kill Assad” after a chemical attack that occurred on April 2017 on civilians in the town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib Syria. “Mattis reportedly went along with the president’s demands during the phone call, but immediately told aides after hanging up that they would take a “much more measured” approach.” Despite the fact that the mainstream media journalists have an extreme hatred towards Trump, it is quite possible that Israel did attempt to influence him to assassinate Assad and create a political crisis in Syria.

Trump also has been calling for the US to take Iraq and Syria’s oil for some time.  An ABC news report has claimed that Trump said that the “U.S. will be keeping the oil” in Northeastern Syria  after that his administration was “looking into the specifics” of the situation at hand. In 2020, Trump kept his promise.  Last August, Newsweek published a report ‘Syria Says Donald Trump ‘Stealing’ Its Oil, After U.S. Company Makes Deal to Drill.’ The report said that Crescent Delta Energy and ‘Pentagon-backed militia’ or elements of ISIS and other terrorist groups who are allied with US and Israeli forces are operating in Syria’s oil fields:

Syria has accused President Donald Trump of stealing the country’s oil, after U.S. officials confirmed that a U.S. company has been allowed to operate there in fields under the control of a Pentagon-backed militia.

In remarks delivered Tuesday and sent to Newsweek by the Syrian permanent mission to the United Nations, representative Bashar al-Jaafari told the U.N. Security Council that “the U.S. occupation forces, in full view of the United Nations and the international community, took a new step to plunder Syria’s natural resources, including Syrian oil and gas” through the recent establishment of a company called “Crescent Delta Energy.”

This firm, “with the sponsorship and support of the US Administration, has entered into a contract with the so-called ‘Syrian Democratic Forces/SDF’ militia, an agent of the US occupation forces in northeastern Syria, with the aim of stealing Syrian oil and depriving the Syrian state and Syrian people of the basic revenues necessary to improve the humanitarian situation, provide for livelihood needs and reconstruction,” he added

Last December, another development took place against Syria with the Trump regime sanctioning President Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma and several members of her family.  Sanctions were also imposed on the Central Bank of Syria, a member of parliament and several businesses that are associated with the Assad government according to The Hill“Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the sanctions mark the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Security Council resolution aimed at laying out a political solution to end the conflict in Syria.”  

Trump Announces Jerusalem As Israel’s Capital

In 2017, Trump announced the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the new location of the US embassy that was originally located in Tel Aviv, the Palestinians responded by the ‘Day of Rage’,setting off  protests in several areas including where 2 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded after Israeli forces bombed the Gaza strip and many more were injured by either live fire or by rubber bullets in the West Bank.  Fast forward to January 2020, the Associated Press reported on Trump’s Mideast peace plan that favored Israel which at this point in time, should not have surprised anyone:

Trump’s plan envisions a disjointed Palestinian state that turns over key parts of the West Bank to Israel. It sides with Israel on key contentious issues that have bedeviled past peace efforts, including borders and the status of Jerusalem and Jewish settlements, and attaches nearly impossible conditions for granting the Palestinians their hoped-for state

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called it “nonsense” and Netanyahu called it a “historic breakthrough” and that “it’s a great plan for Israel. It’s a great plan for peace.” Then Netanyahu promised to move forward to annex the Jordan Valley and the rest of the illegal Israeli settlements.

The US-Saudi Arms Deal and the Houthis Are Now a State Sponsor of Terror

Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace between Israel and UAE which was not about peace between the two, it’s was about creating a US-Israel-UAE alliance against Iran and creating long-term buyers of US and Israeli made weapons to the Emiratis.  Israel and the UAE have been collaborating in the areas of security in terms of protecting the UAE’s oil fields for more than a decade or so.  Israel’s Mossad has a long-time relationship with the UAE’s military that conduct covert spying operations against Iran adding to the fact that high-level Israeli officials had been visiting the UAE for many years.  So Trump’s peace deal was another complete farce.  The US and Israel basically have a good-long standing relationship with the Gulf State monarchies who both view Iran as their common enemy.

One of Trump’s first visit to the Middle East as US president was to Saudi Arabia to sell US weapons which he did successfully after sealing a $110 billion deal plus an additional $350 billion deal over a 10-year period.  The US is preparing Saudi Arabia for a long-term war with its adversaries in the region which brings us to the Houthis of Yemen who the Trump regime will designate as a terrorist organization by January 19th.  The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo released a statement on the matter and said that “the designations are also intended to advance efforts to achieve a peaceful, sovereign, and united Yemen that is both free from Iranian interference and at peace with its neighbors.”   

Despite the fact that Trump fired his advisor at the time, Neocon John Bolton, a war hawk who wanted to launch more wars in the Middle East was a good move. However, Trump’s legacy based on his decisions during his time in the White House will be remembered as a disaster, a president that made Israel great for Israelis and America hated even more than ever.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author


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Nine Hurdles to Reviving the Iran Nuclear Deal

January 20th, 2021 by Seyed Hossein Mousavian

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on January 8 that Tehran was in no rush for the United States to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but, he also said, sanctions on Iran must be lifted immediately. “If the sanctions are lifted, the return of the Americans makes sense,” he insisted. President-elect Joe Biden has announced his plan to return to the deal soon after he is sworn into office. “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal,” he wrote in an op-ed for CNN, “the United States would rejoin.” His Iranian counterpart, President Hassan Rouhani, has also expressed willingness to return to the deal, stating that, “Iran could come into compliance with the agreement within an hour of the United States doing so.”

Five years ago, after years of intensive negotiations, six world powers managed to sign the world’s most comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran. While the agreement was a political one, it was also ratified by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. And, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the organization tasked with verifying the agreement’s technical aspects, Iran was fully complying with the deal for about three years, until President Trump withdrew from it in May 2018. In response to the US violations of the nuclear agreement, Iran too reduced some of its commitments. Most recently, on January 4, Iran announced that it had increased its uranium enrichment levels to 20 percent.

Although reviving the agreement is certainly still possible, it won’t be easy. The two sides will need to overcome nine hurdles to make it happen.

First, the sequencing of a mutual return could be an immediate problem. Iran expects the United States to lift sanctions first, because it  was the Trump administration that withdrew first. While Tehran’s demand is legitimate, Washington may ask that Iran come into full compliance before lifting sanctions. Indeed, a straightforward reading of the quotation from Joe Biden’s op-ed suggests just that. In this scenario, after Joe Biden’s executive order rejoining the deal, Iran and the world powers can meet and agree on a realistic plan with a specified timeline of proportionate reciprocal actions.

Second is the issue of what compliance constitutes. During the Obama administration there was one major barrier to the full realization of the terms of the agreement: Many US primary sanctions, targeting US citizens and permanent residents, organizations, and individuals that engage in trade and business with their Iranian counterparts, remained intact. These sanctions limited the economic benefits of the deal for Iran. The 29th paragraph of the deal clearly states that all signatories will refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran. This cannot be achieved without abolishing the primary sanctions.

Third, the Trump administration imposed numerous sanctions against Iran under the guise of terrorism and human rights, aimed at preventing the Biden administration from returning to the deal. For a clean implementation of the agreement, Biden will need to remove all of these sanctions as well.

Fourth, Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement and violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 as well as other international commitments has damaged US credibility abroad. There is now a widespread belief among policy makers in Iran that the United States will simply not live up to its end of the bargain, no matter what that bargain is. This naturally raises the important question: What guarantees are there that the United States will remain committed to the deal in the post-Biden era?

Fifth, because of Trump’s maximum pressure policy, the Iranian economy has suffered hundreds of billions of dollars of losses while Iran was in full compliance with the terms and conditions of the deal. Some Iranian leaders, including Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, have demanded compensation for the economic damage the country suffered after the United States withdrew. The challenge will be to find a mechanism to compensate for the economic damages that the Trump administration inflicted on the Iranian economy.

Sixth, the “snapback” mechanism built into the agreement allows any country to force the UN Security Council to reimpose multilateral sanctions against Iran if Iran fails to fulfill its commitments. But this is one-sided: There is no such remedy for Iran if other parties fail to do their part. This became abundantly clear when the Trump administration first withdrew from the deal and then tried to unilaterally re-impose multilateral sanctions on Iran through the snapback mechanism. It was as if the injurer was demanding punishment for the injured. Although the UN Security Council rejected the US demand, the stunt revealed the structural flaw of the snapback.

Seventh, in the first week of December 2020, the Iranian parliament passed a bill mandating Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization to resume enriching uranium to 20 percent purity. The legislation also requires the Iranian government to cease voluntary implementation of the IAEA’s Additional Protocol within two months of the bill’s enactment if the other signatories fail to fully deliver on their commitments under the agreement. And after three months, the Atomic Energy Organization is obliged to begin using at least 1,000 second generation centrifuges. In short, president-elect Biden will need to move fast.

Eighth, there are some in the United States who are worried that Trump may start a reckless last-ditch war with Iran before leaving office. While this concern is overblown, there should be no doubt that US partners in the region will do whatever they can to prevent Biden’s return to the deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already said as much. To be sure, the hardliners in Iran are also fundamentally opposed to the deal.

Ninth, some pundits and politicians in Washington want Biden to leverage the Trump administration’s sanctions to pressure Iran to accept additional commitments beyond the original agreement as a condition for US return to compliance. These include limiting Iran’s missile capability, extending the so-called “sunset” clauses within the deal, or resolving regional disputes. But from Iran’s perspective, such demands are a non-starter. As the spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry said recently, “No negotiation has been, is being, or will be held about Iran’s defense power.”

Despite these hurdles, Biden should nevertheless seek a reentry into the deal. Only a clean and full implementation by all parties can save the world’s most comprehensive nuclear agreement, contain rising US-Iran tensions, and open the path toward more confidence building measures. That path should include, upon Biden’s issuing an executive order to rejoin the JCPOA, the creation of a working committee of parties to the agreement tasked with ensuring full compliance by all signatories, and a forum, organized by the UN secretary general, in which Iran and the Gulf countries can discuss a new structure for improving security and cooperation in the region.

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Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian is a Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist at Princeton University and a former chief of Iran’s National Security Foreign Relations Committee. His book, A Middle East Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was published in May 2020 by Routledge. His latest book, A New Structure for Security, Peace, and Cooperation in the Persian Gulf, was published in December 2020 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.