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Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
— Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
— Oliver Goldsmith, Deserted Village

Lay the proud usurpers low,
Tyrants fall in every foe,
Liberty’s in every blow! –
Let us do or dee.
— Robert Burns,  Scots Wha Hae

Wilderness Inside And Out

I was born in the heart, not of darkness, but of London in the penultimate year of WWII. During air raids my mother carried me, as a babe-in-arms, to the ground floor–there being no basement–of the Ministry of Information. The self-same edifice Eric Blair characterized as the Ministry of Truth.(1) As a child, eagerly anticipating our voyage across the Atlantic, I surreptitiously gloated over the map of North America under my grammar-school desk, visions of Jack London’s Call of the Wild dancing in my head.

Does civilized man create wilderness? When does the split between man and beast divide us from the goddesses of the earth and from the wildness of our own heart?

Are we then doomed to be alienated “strangers in a strange land?”(2) Aliens landed, not as traditional gentry or peasantry, rooted in the soil, tied to the earth, but as space travellers seeking, like E.T., to “go home?”(3)

Or are we merely domesticated cattle, the wildness bred out of us, tamed, trained to the enclosure, the milking barn, and the yoke? 

Perhaps domesticated man is envious of indigenous people who live on and by the fruits of the land, still connected to a way of life we can only imagine. Perhaps that is one reason they have been systematically, often brutally, cleared off the land they have occupied for millennia.

This is being done, ostensibly, to create “sustainability”(4)–a term cooked up, not over a bubbling cauldron presided over by the cackling crones of “the Scottish Play,”(5) but by sly and slippery word-smiths spinning verbal dross with which to enchant the sedated somnambulists of the common people, the hoi poloi.

One could even suspect a conscious agenda driving the push to create “Wildways,”(6)(7)(8)(9) wide swaths of conserved, bottled and jarred countryside, corridors where no man, woman or child may set foot without permission of the overlords. To be preserved, not in aspic like cold cooked salmon, but for the use, and at their discretion even abuse, of the drafters of grand plans encompassing the entire globe, and every fish that swims, bird that flies, and creature that crawls. Could Agenda 21(10) be such a plan? What are the “sustainabilty goals” of the UN sustaining? 

Surely African Bushmen have now even more reason to believe that The Gods Must Be Crazy.(11) Like other indigenous tribes throughout the world, stripped of their traditional lands, forced off by force of arms, they now have no means of livelihood, and may only weep as they gaze from the margins at game-preserves for the wealthy, tree-farms for the greedy. 

This ongoing program, more and more vigorously pursued, may be of only marginal interest to the average denizen of the cities or ‘burbs, but it is of more than passing interest to small ranchers and farmers. They, too, are being marginalized, hemmed in, pushed off their own land, as a result of a deliberate scheme, a scenario of a future which precludes their traditional way of life.(12)

Three centuries ago, the Enclosure Acts(13) fenced off village greens throughout England, beginning the destruction of a way of life, if not Far From the Madding Crowd, (14) then mostly self-sufficient, a life that would have seemed destined to continue, essentially unchanged, for centuries to come. The Highland Clearances,(15) followed a similar pattern. Now we face–are having shoved in our masked and muffled faces–a series of enclosures: fences walling us in, cutting us off from each other, destroying our livelihoods, splitting us from our connection to the natural world, to the earth, the real source of our strength as humans having their being on this planet we were born on. To be borne, one fears, to the bourne from which none of us return unless perhaps reincarnated in another day and night of Brahma.

Let us invoke the courage that many now display, like latter-day Bravehearts, this time to prevail, as is often said: “We be many, they be few.”(16)

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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) George Orwell, 1984

(2) Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

(3) E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

(4 )James Corbett, What is Sustainable Development?

(5) Shakespeare, Macbeth

(6) The Wildlands Network

(7) Simulated Reserve and Corridor System to Protect Diversity – map

(8) North American Wildlands Network: Four MegaLinkages

(9) Western Wildway Network

(10) UN, Agenda 21

(11) The Gods Must Be Crazy

(12)  Rockefeller Foundation, Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development

(13) Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

(14) Enclosure Acts

(15) Britannia, Highland Clearances

(16) Percy Bysse Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy

Featured image: Fire along the border of the Kaxarari Indigenous territory, in Lábrea, Amazonas state. Taken August 17, 2020. CREDIT: © Christian Braga / Greenpeace

The instinct among parts of the left to cheerlead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones revealed in a column last week on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands.

The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and UK; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that unleashed a new regional trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria apart.

In fact, those weren’t really separate horror shows: they were instalments of one long horror show.

The vacuum left in Iraq by the west – the execution of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his armed forces – sucked in Islamic extremists from every corner of the Middle East. The US and UK occupations of Iraq served both as fuel to rationalise new, more nihilistic Islamic doctrines that culminated in the emergence of Islamic State, and as a training ground for jihadists to develop better methods of militarised resistance.

That process accelerated in post-Gaddafi Libya, where Islamic extremists were handed an even more lawless country than post-invasion Iraq in which to recruit followers and train them, and trade arms. All of that know-how and weaponry ended up flooding into Syria where the same Islamic extremists hoped to establish the seat of their new caliphate.

Many millions of Arabs across the region were either slaughtered or forced to flee their homes, becoming permanent refugees, because of the supposedly “humanitarian” impulse unleashed by George W Bush and Tony Blair.

No lesson learnt 

One might imagine that by this stage liberal humanitarianism was entirely discredited, at least on the left. But you would be wrong. There are still those who have learnt no lessons at all – like the Guardian’s Owen Jones. In a new column he picks up and runs with the latest pretext for global warmongering by the right: the Uighurs, a Muslim minority that has long been oppressed by China.

Those of us who oppose Western militarism and atrocities committed by Western allies must also stand in solidarity with China's Uighur Muslims.https://t.co/DarOxemAHN

— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) January 21, 2021

After acknowledging the bad faith arguments and general unreliability of the right, Jones sallies forth to argue – as if Iraq, Libya and Syria never happened – that the left must not avoid good causes just because bad people support them. We must not, he writes,

“sacrifice oppressed Muslims on the altar of geopolitics: and indeed, it is possible to walk and to chew gum; to oppose western militarism and to stand with victims of state violence. It would be perverse to cede a defence of China’s Muslims – however disingenuous – to reactionaries and warmongers.”

But this is to entirely miss the point of the anti-war and anti-imperialist politics that are the bedrock of any progressive leftwing movement.

Jones does at least note, even if very cursorily, the bad-faith reasoning of the right when it accuses the left of being all too ready to protest outside a US or Israeli embassy but not a Chinese or Russian one:

“Citizens [in the west] have at least some potential leverage over their own governments: whether it be to stop participation in foreign action, or encourage them to confront human rights abusing allies.”

But he then ignores this important observation about power and responsibility and repurposes it as stick to beat the left with: 

“But that doesn’t mean abandoning a commitment to defending the oppressed, whoever their oppressor might be. To speak out against Islamophobia in western societies but to remain silent about the Uighurs is to declare that the security of Muslims only matters in some countries. We need genuine universalists.”

That is not only a facile argument, it’s a deeply dangerous one. There are two important additional reasons why the left needs to avoid cheerleading the right’s favoured warmongering causes, based on both its anti-imperialist and anti-war priorities.

Virtue-signalling 

Jones misunderstands the goal of the left’s anti-imperialist politics. It is not, as the right so often claims, about leftwing “virtue-signalling”. It is the very opposite of that. It is about carefully selecting our political priorities – priorities necessarily antithetical to the dominant narratives promoted by the west’s warmongering political and media establishments. Our primary goal is to undermine imperialist causes that have led to such great violence and suffering around the world.

Jones forgets that the purpose of the anti-war left is not to back the west’s warmongering establishment for picking a ‘humanitarian’ cause for its wars. It is to discredit the establishment, expose its warmongering and stop its wars.

The best measure – practical and ethical – for the western left to use to determine which causes to expend its limited resources and energies on are those that can help others to wake up to the continuing destructive behaviours of the west’s political establishment, even when that warmongering establishment presents itself in two guises: whether the Republicans and the Democrats in the United States, or the Conservatives and the (non-Corbyn) Labour party in the UK.

We on the left cannot influence China or Russia. But we can try to influence debates in our own societies that discredit the western elite headquartered in the US – the world’s sole military superpower.

Our job is not just to weigh the scales of injustice – in any case, the thumb of the west’s power-elite is far heavier than any of its rivals. It is to highlight the bad faith nature of western foreign policy, and underscore to the wider public that the real aim of the west’s foreign policy elite is either to attack or to intimidate those who refuse to submit to its power or hand over their resources.

Do no harm 

That is what modern imperialism looks like. We play with fire, and betray anti-imperialist politics, when we echo the bad faith arguments of a Pompeo, a Blair, an Obama, a Bush or a Trump – even if they briefly adopt a good cause for ignoble reasons. To use a medical analogy, we join them in fixating on one symptom of global injustice while refusing to diagnose the actual disease so that it can be treated.

Requiring, as Jones does, that we prioritise the Uighurs – especially when they are the momentary pet project of the west’s warmongering, anti-China right – does not advance our anti-imperialist goals, it actively harms them. Because the left offers its own credibility, its own stamp of approval, to the right’s warmongering lies.

When the left is weak – when, unlike the right, it has no corporate media to dominate the airwaves with its political concerns and priorities, when it has almost no politicians articulating its worldview – it cannot control how its support for humanitarian causes is presented to the general public. Instead it always finds itself coopted into the drumbeat for war.

That is a lesson Jones should have learnt personally – in fact, a lesson he promised he had learnt – after his cooption by the corporate Guardian to damage the political fortunes of Jeremy Corbyn, the only anti-war, anti-imperialist politician Britain has ever had who was in sight of power.

Anti-imperialist politics is not about good intentions; it’s about beneficial outcomes. To employ another medical analogy, our credo must to be to do no harm – or, if that is not possible, at least to minimise harm.

The ‘defence’ industry 

Which is why the flaw in Jones’ argument runs deeper still.

The anti-war left is not just against acts of wars, though of course it is against those too. It is against the global war economy: the weapons manufacturers that fund our politicians; the arms trade lobbies that now sit in our governments; our leaders, of the right and so-called left, who divide the world into a Manichean struggle between the good guys and bad guys to justify their warmongering and weapons purchases; the arms traders that profit from violence and human suffering; the stock-piling of nuclear weapons that threaten our future as a species.

The War Industry has proved very lucrative for the UK. Two-thirds of all armies line up to train on British soil each year, including armies the UK itself lists as human rights abusers. Here I explain how war still lies at the heart of the western mission https://t.co/SL2MA1jhUJ

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 18, 2021

The anti-war left is against the globe’s dominant, western war economy, one that deceives us into believing it is really a “defence industry”. That “defence industry” needs villains, like China and Russia, that it must extravagantly arm itself against. And that means fixating on the crimes of China and Russia, while largely ignoring our own crimes, so that those “defence industries” can prosper.

Yes, Russia and China have armies too. But no one in the west can credibly believe Moscow or Beijing are going to disarm when the far superior military might of the west – of NATO – flexes its muscles daily in their faces, when it surrounds them with military bases that encroach ever nearer their territory, when it points its missiles menacingly in their direction.

REVEALED — The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.

The results of a months-long investigation by @pmillerinfo https://t.co/oaffNnJlZc

— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) November 24, 2020

Rhetoric of war

Jones and George Monbiot, the other token leftist at the Guardian with no understanding of how global politics works, can always be relied on to cheerlead the western establishment’s humanitarian claims – and demand that we do too. That is also doubtless the reason they are allowed their solitary slots in the liberal corporate media. 

When called out, the pair argue that, even though they loudly trumpet their detestation of Saddam Hussein or Bashar Assad, that does not implicate them in the wars that are subsequently waged against Iraq or Syria.

This is obviously infantile logic, which assumes that the left can echo the misleading rhetoric of the west’s warmongering power-elite without taking any responsibility for the wars that result from that warmongering.

But Jones’ logic is even more grossly flawed than that. It pretends that the left can echo the rhetoric of the warmongers and not take responsibility for the war industries that constantly thrive and expand, whether or not actual wars are being waged at any one time.

The western foreign policy elite is concerned about the Uighurs not because it wishes to save them from Chinese persecution or even because it necessarily intends to use them as a pretext to attack China. Rather, its professed concerns serve to underpin claims that are essential to the success of its war industries: that the west is the global good guy; that China is a potential nemesis, the Joker to our Batman; and that the west therefore needs an even bigger arsenal, paid by us as taxpayers, to protect itself.

Belligerent superpower 

The Uighurs’ cause is being instrumentalised by the west’s foreign policy establishment to further enhance its power and make the world even less safe for us all, the Uighurs included. Whatever Jones claims, there should be no obligation on the left to give succour to the west’s war industries.

Vilifying “official enemies” while safely ensconced inside the “defence” umbrella of a belligerent global superpower and hegemon is a crime against peace, against justice, against survival. Jones is free to flaunt his humanitarian credentials, but so are we to reject political demands dictated to us by the west’s war machine.

The anti-war left has its own struggles, its own priorities. It does not need to be gaslit by Mike Pompeo or Tony Blair – or, for that matter, by Owen Jones.

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

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.  Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.”    – Albert Camus, The Fall

Propagandists are smart people. They begin their devious machinations with the premise that people need to believe in something rather than remaining suspended in doubt or forced to accept the existential courage of despair that leaves them temporarily lost and without answers or masters, suffering from free-floating anxiety.

Propagandists are like Mr. Death.  They know people are afraid of death and aloneness and so use that fear to manipulate them into believing their cover stories for comfort.

Propagandists are like the Candy Man, handing out fictive life savers to the shipwrecked desperadoes willing to grasp on to anything even if it has a big hole in its center.

Propagandists take this need for belief and use it to create different scenarios that they develop into full-scale social theater pieces that will give the public various options to believe, all of which are meant to satisfy the public’s yearning for something rather than nothing but which conceal the truth.

Facts don’t matter with these offerings since they are completely illusory narratives.

These staged plays usually contain their opposites; one can choose what has already been chosen for one, even seemingly contradictory scripts with opposing roles. Seemingly is the relevant word, for the opposites are not opposites but counterparts, flip sides of the same coin. But each choice is a choice of belief that satisfies the need to believe no matter how unbelievable. It’s the coin that’s counterfeit.

For the propagandists, facts are fictions used to entice the audience into double-binds so entrancing that there is no exit.  Or so they hope.

The French sociologist Jacques Ellul put it this way in his classic book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes:

For no citizen will believe he is unable to have opinions.  Public opinion surveys always reveal that people have opinions even on the most complicated questions, except for a small minority (usually the most informed and those who have reflected most).  The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation.  For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions.  As most people have the desire and at the same time the incapacity to participate [except to vote for and support  pre-selected candidates], they are ready to accept a propaganda that will permit them to participate, and which hides their incapacity beneath explanations, judgments, and news, enabling them to satisfy their desire without eliminating their incompetence….He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.  Man cannot stay in this situation too long.  He needs an ideological veil to cover the harsh reality, some consolation, a raison d’être, a sense of values.  And only propaganda offers him a remedy for a basically intolerable situation.

Thus the need to choose a master, a prefabricated demigod. It is why the American presidents are presented and accepted by their followers as minor divinities. Yes, it is a civil religion, and yes, people will vehemently deny that they revere these figureheads.  But those denials ring false, as recent history and the pageantry associated with the installation of these demigods will attest.

Take the last three presidents, for example.

Barack Obama was considered by his followers and many others like a prayer come true, a black messiah come to redeem the country from its racist past and evil war-making deeds of his Muslim-hating, war-mongering predecessor George W. Bush.  That Obama then waged war on seven Muslim countries didn’t matter to his congregation. Not in the slightest. They revered him as strongly as they had denounced  Bush, the black-hatted white demon to their white-hatted black god,  for the western movie template underlies these political theater pieces. Obama was a dream come true and the dream factory went into overdrive. As the priestess Madonna prophesied with Like A Prayer in 1989:

Just like a dream
You are not what you seem
Just like a prayer, no choice
Your voice can take me there

Then the orange-halo-headed Trump was paraded in.  To his followers he was the savior who would re-redeem the country from the devilish divinity Obama, the false prophet.  He would drain the swamp. Desperate middle-Americans revered this NYC real-estate tycoon and reality TV star who for years was nothing but a running joke among those who actually knew who he was.  It didn’t matter to his congregation.  Not in the slightest. That he gave to the rich and screwed the middle-class and the poor, increased the military budget, waged secretive wars via drones and private mercenaries didn’t matter a bit.  He was a religious figure. To Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s acolytes, he was Satan himself, and for four years the anti-pageant play was presented by the corporate mainstream media to exorbitant box office receipts and ratings. God and Satan fought in the ring for the ultimate fighting championship.

Now Joseph Biden – just as Ronald Reagan, another acting president, had the coffee brewing for “Morning in America” – is greeted by the same media filmmakers as the latest savior, an aging but still virile demi-god who will usher in “a new day” in America.

The pageantry surrounding his recent virtual inaugural, like all inaugurals, was a religious ceremony choreographed within an ironic circle of 20,000-armed palace guards and barbed wire fencing protecting the erection of the new king, one who, like Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy, is presented as the savior who will defeat the viral plague attacking the new Thebes.  Unlike Oedipus, however, one can be assured that Biden will not seek to discover the murderer of Laius  (JFK), the former king, whose assassination resulted in the plague devastating the country.  Oedipus’s search for the truth didn’t end well, and Biden’s long insider career bodes well for no truth-seeking.  And like his predecessors’ inaugural ceremonies, this one featured cultural idols such as Hunger Games Lady Gaga, Madonna 2.0, promoting herself as befits idols, and  Bruce Springsteen offering his evenings “small prayer for our country” – Land of Hopes and Dreams:

Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder’s rollin’ down this track
Well, you don’t know where you’re goin’ now
But you know you won’t be back….

I said this train…
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train…
Faith will be rewarded

No, we won’t be back, unless you think Biden’s slogan – “Build Back Better” – which is also the slogan of the world’s rulings elites, means what it says.  Perhaps then your faith will be rewarded.

I’ll go with George Carlin when he said that to believe in the American Dream you have to be asleep.

My faith is that the corporate mass media hypnotists who work for the owners of the country will continue to pump out their religious spectacles and that the various congregations will support their masters as always. The will to believe runs very deep and hand-in-glove with the propaganda. Life’s hard and it’s tough to be without a master.  “Men don’t become slaves out of mere calculating self-interest,” writes Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, “the slavishness is in the soul, as Gorky complained.”

Propagandists’ ability to mesmerize the faithful has increase exponentially as the technological life has increased and been promoted as de rigueur.  This on-line life is propagated as a new religion whose embrace is said to be inevitable and whose faith one must accept as the missionaries for its miraculous nature spread the word far and wide.

Propagandists are smart people.

They hate freedom.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is the author of the new book: https://www.claritypress.com/product/seeking-truth-in-a-country-of-lies/

In September 2013, at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, presented his vision and plan for the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – an ambitious vast complex trade and commercial network for China with the wider world, with a greater mutual flow of, goods, services, capital and people. 

Arguably, BRI aims to revive and roll out the ancient Silk Road in the twenty-first century, redraw trade routes for Chinese products, secure access to natural resources from energy rich nations – and radically transform those nations with mega infrastructure projects and investments worth billions of dollars.  Although comparable to some degree with the American Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Western Europe after the Second World War, BRI surpasses it in scale and imagination.  Some argue the scope of the initiative is unmatched in history.  Recent reports claim the BRI impacts over 90 countries and 4 billion people.

The BRI flagship project of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – a 3000-kilometer corridor that runs from China’s Kashgar to Pakistan’s deep-water port of Gwadar – provides Pakistan over $60 billion in grants and soft loans worth of investment and on completion will allow China to have access to the Indian Ocean.  It will not only open the remote western region of China, Xinjiang, bordering Pakistan, to the rest of the world, it will connect China with the rest of Asia and Europe – by sea to Europe, Africa and other Asian regions and reduce its dependence on shipping via Singapore and the Melaka Straits.

Arguably, Pakistan is integral to the overall success of China’s BRI – and if CPEC fails the full potential of BRI may not materialise.  In his brilliant and insightful study, ‘The China-Pakistan Axis’, Andrew Small argues further, “Pakistan is a central part of China’s transition from a regional power to a global one.”

The long-term commitment of both sides from inception to future plans for CPEC is embedded in the strong foundation on which the China and Pakistan relationship already stands.

In 1950, Pakistan was one of the very first countries to recognise the People’s Republic of China.  From facilitating US President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, in turn, re-establishing formal ties between China and the West – to acting as the main conduit to the Islamic world, Pakistan is regarded by China not only as a key strategic partner, but an ‘Iron Brother’.  This friendship is cemented by the construction of the grand Karakoram Highway (started in 1959 and completed in 1979) – also known as the ‘China-Pakistan Friendship Highway’ connecting Pakistan with China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Since 1950, Pakistan has collaborated with China in extensive military and economic projects – and CPEC is viewed as the latest of these projects.  China has offered Pakistan materials to develop its nuclear arsenal – and today, Pakistan stands as the only Muslim country with nuclear missiles.  CPEC has implications for India-Pakistan relations.  India perceives CPEC as a direct challenge and threat – an economic initiative disguising the real intentions, which amounts to military co-operation for a potential two front military offensive against India over Kashmir region.  It allows China to have easy land access to Pakistan – and that it is less about economic development and more about larger political and strategic goals.

In December 2020, ‘The Hindu’, reported that when the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson was asked at a press conference whether the recent joint air force exercises between China and Pakistan were intended to send a “message to New Delhi”, he told the reporters the drills were part of “routine arrangement” between the two nations.  Holding these exercises during a military standoff between Chinese and Indian troops in Ladakh, the concerns are understandable.  This recent “routine” joint exercise lasted for 20 days – and according to the Chinese daily newspaper, ‘Global Times’, “air forces from both sides focused on large scale confrontation, including large scale aerial battles and use of forces in mass and close-quarters.”

Some observers argue CPEC is forcing India to rewire its foreign policy objectives, security strategies and trade policies.  India’s phenomenal rise as a regional and global economic competitor to China – and with its policies relating to Kashmir – India may have brought China and Pakistan even closer together.

There is a perception held by both China and Pakistan that serious attempts are being made to undermine and derail the CPEC project.  Terrorist attacks inside Pakistan have decimated thousands of lives and created instability.   In November 2020 the Pakistani newspaper, ‘The Express Tribune’, reported that Pakistani officials had, “unveiled a dossier, containing irrefutable evidence of India’s sponsorship of terrorism in Pakistan” and “India was trying to sabotage CPEC.”  India accuses Pakistan of harbouring and supporting terrorists and militants who are responsible for stirring unrest inside Indian controlled Kashmir.

Ongoing accusations and counter-accusations keep the Pakistan-India relations strained and volatile – and China continues to support Pakistan at the highest level.  “We are all-weather strategic cooperative partners.  In the past 69 years, this relationship has stood the test of the changing international landscape, and has remained firm as a rock,” said China’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, as reported in the Indian newspaper, ‘The Economic Times’, in May 2020.

India may wish CPEC fails – and many news media outlets in India report fall-outs and disagreements between Pakistan and China over CPEC.  China maintains relations with Pakistan are going from strength to strength.  The new Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan, Nong Rong, stated recently, “CPEC is a product of vision of two brotherly countries that goes beyond traditional business dealings reflecting decade’s old strong bonds of bilateral cooperation and shared goals with a win-win situation for all.”

The issue of Kashmir is at the heart of most problems between Pakistan and India – and between China and India.  The region is divided and controlled by the three nations and Pakistan and India have already engaged in three wars over Kashmir.

Despite the continuous threat of war looming over the Kashmir region – a potential military flashpoint between three nuclear powers – according to many observers CPEC is swiftly moving forward in 2021.

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Shahbazz Afzal is an independent writer and political activist.

Featured image is from OneWorld

US President Joseph Biden, a relic from Washington’s old political establishment will continue the same imperialist policies in Latin America as did his predecessors including that of Donald Trump.  There is a clear indication that Washington’s hostilities towards Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro will continue under a Biden administration.  

The day before Biden’s inauguration, Reuters’ had published a report on what we can expect from the new administration when it comes to Venezuela, ‘Biden will recognize Guaido as Venezuela’s leader, top diplomat says.’ which means that Washington will continue to support the opposition leader, Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate” president.  According to the report, Anthony Blinken said “U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will continue to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the South American country’s president.” Not only Washington would recognize a political figure who was selected by Washington, it would continue to use targeted sanctions on the Latin American country coinciding with humanitarian aid:

Blinken told members of the U.S. Senate that Biden would seek to “more effectively target” sanctions on the country, which aim to oust President Nicolas Maduro – who retains control of the country. Blinken said the new administration would look at more humanitarian assistance to the country

US hostilities towards Venezuela did not start with Trump, there were tensions between Washington and Caracas with the Obama and Bush regimes.  An article from the Associated Press (AP) in 2015 ‘Venezuela’s President Accuses Vice President Biden of Plotting to Overthrow Him’ said that Washington had imposed “new visa restrictions on Venezuelan officials and their families.” 

The former White House Communications Director under Obama, Jen Psaki who is now on Biden’s team as the White House Press Secretary said that “the U.S. was showing clearly that human rights violators and their families “are not welcome in the United States.”

Washington’s actions earned condemnation from Maduro who said that “he would write a letter to Obama over what he called an attempt to violate Venezuela’s national sovereignty” and that Washington’s long-time policies which are basically strong-arm tactics used on Venezuela and its close allies in the region will lead to failure “U.S. policy toward Venezuela has been kidnapped by “irresponsible, imperial forces that are putting the United States on a dead-end.”  Maduro’s response towards Washington’s sanctions at the time was on a televised national address which he criticized Obama’s Vice-President, Joe Biden:

In a televised address over the weekend, Maduro claimed that Biden sought to foment the overthrow of his socialist government during a Caribbean energy summit Biden hosted last month in Washington. According to Maduro, Biden told Caribbean heads of state that the Venezuelan government’s days were numbered and it was time they abandon their support.  “What Vice President Joseph Biden did is unspeakable,” Maduro said

And of course, Washington dismissed Maduro’s claims as “ludicrous.”  With Joe Biden in charge, expect more of the same bi-partisanship actions including more sanctions, regime change operations and even the possibility of an assassination attempt on  Maduro’s life.  With a number of war hawks appointed under this new administration including humanitarian interventionist, Samantha Power who will lead the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) tweeted “What’s happening in Venezuela is flying under the radar in the US, but it is incredibly serious” shows what direction Washington will move towards.  “In the past week, the opposition banned from competing in April presidential elections, UNICEF warns of child malnutrition crisis, IMF predicts 13,000% inflation in 2018” meaning that Power will push for a humanitarian intervention in some form or another.  Power has supported military interventions in Syria and was a cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan and Libya.  There will be bi-partisan support from both the democrats and republicans for regime change in Venezuela.  But a war against Venezuela under Biden is also quite possible since they have the world’s largest oil reserves on the planet.  Tensions between Washington and Caracas will only escalate in the upcoming months.

Nicaragua will be also on Washington’s radar as they are scheduled to have Presidential elections in November.  Expect some sort of election interference to oust long-time enemy of Washington, Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega.  In a September 5th tweet, Biden said

“Nicaraguan asylum seekers fleeing oppression deserve to have their cases heard.  Instead, they’re being deported back into the tyrannical grip of Daniel Ortega without a chance to pursue their claims.  President Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds.”

Venezuela and Nicaragua will experience hostilities from the Biden team, a continuation of policies from previous US regimes is assured.

Obama’s 2009 Coup in Honduras is a Warning to Anti-Imperialists in Latin America 

Joe Biden’s history with Latin America as vice-President to Obama should be considered a warning sign of things to come.  As soon as Obama was selected for office, they went to work on their backyard with a shovel in hand and set their sights on the small nation of Honduras.  Before, the US approved the coup against its Democratic leader, Manuel Zelaya because he wanted to rewrite the constitution. Zelaya administered an opinion poll for a referendum so that a constitutional assembly can legally reform the constitution that would allow Honduran citizens to have a legitimate voice in the political process.  Honduran officials, members of the Supreme Court and even members of his own party who are under Washington’s control declared Zelaya’s plans as unconstitutional.  Officials from the Obama regime including Hillary Clinton who was the Secretary of State at the time, all agreed Zelaya had to be removed from power.

Zelaya was also too friendly with Washington’s enemies in the region including Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.  Zelaya had also helped people in need as he raised the hourly minimum-wage, funded scholarships for students, authorized the distribution of milk and basic food necessities for children and even helped distribute energy-saving light bulbs among others for the Honduran people. Washington also considered Zelaya a threat to its interests concerning the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and its US troops stationed at the Palmerola military base if Zelaya decided to cancel the CAFTA deal or stop US troops from entering Honduras.  For decades, Washington has trained soldiers and officers in the Honduran military through the former U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) which is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

On June 28^th, 2009, with permission from the Supreme Court of Honduras issued an order for the military to arrest and detain President Zelaya  who was taken to the Hernan Acosta Mejia Air Base located in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and was exiled to Costa Rica.  The aftermath of the coup resulted in Honduras becoming one of the most dangerous countries on the planet with one of the highest murder-rates in Central America. Roberto Micheletti became the interim-president following the coup.  Under his leadership, the Honduras government became a repressive force that lead to an increase of Hondurans deciding to immigrate to the US.  Human rights groups and activists lives were threatened.  In 2016, one of the death threats became a reality for a well-known Indigenous rights and environmental activist by the name of Bertha Caceres who was assassinated in her home.

Caceres was known for preventing one of the world’s largest corporations that builds dams from completing the Agua Zarca Dam at the Río Gualcarque.  Life in Honduras became worst after Washington’s intervention to oust a democratically elected leader who wanted to make things a little better for his people which constitutes a criminal act under Washington’s political establishment.

What Does An Imperialist Power Under Joseph Biden Mean for Latin America?

The gloves will come off.  Joe Biden wants to get the job done for the Military-Industrial Complex.  The Biden regime will be more aggressive and dangerous to left-wing Latin American leaders who have disobeyed Washington’s political establishment.  That’s why they are all on the hit-list to be removed from power so that Washington’s preferred candidates can regain control to benefit their corporate and military interests that has plunged Latin America into a cycle of civil wars, debt and poverty since the end of the Spanish-American war.  Biden and the Democrats will try to prove to the Republicans who can be more “tough” on Latin American leaders and others around the world who defy Washington’s policies.  Biden’s presidency might prove that his administration will be more hawkish than the Republicans on Venezuela and the rest of Latin America’s anti-imperialist governments.

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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 Intercept

Many are noting happily that Joe Biden’s flurry of executive orders are “surprisingly” progressive … and decent. In an essay in Jacobin titled ‘If Joe Biden Moves Left, You Can Thank the Left’, Lisa Featherstone acknowledges that, though “deeply implicated in much of what is wrong with America and the world today,” Biden nevertheless appears to be doing the right thing. She assigns credit for Biden’s decisive departures from the old to: “the organized left, which has helped transform US politics.”

No such transformation appears to be on the horizon for Palestine and the “Middle East” in general. And, as far as I am concerned, you can blame the left for that.

The new Israeli envoy to Washington Gilad Erdan, whose appointment coincided with Biden’s inauguration, is certainly not “turning the page on Trump era” as a headline in The Hill stated, belying the content of the article:

Israel’s opposition to the U.S. engaging with Iran will be bolstered by key ties in Washington with Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’s envoy in the U.S., and Bahrain’s ambassador to the U.S. Abdullah Bin Mohammad Bin Rashed Al Khalifa — relationships formally brokered by the Trump administration under the agreement known as the Abraham Accords.

… Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of State, said during his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he and the president are “resolutely opposed” to the [BDS] movement and that it “unfairly and inappropriately singles out Israel, it promotes a double standard and a standard we do not apply to other countries.

Why do I blame the left? In her book The Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity, Fiona Wright gives us a complete picture about “the ambivalences” that attend anti-occupation, anti-colonial activism in Israel and participation in state violence against Palestinians.

Similarly, these complexities are entrenched in the organized left in the United States.

Take, for example, the account in The Atlantic describing the controversy over anti-Israel statements in the Movement for Black Lives 2016 political platform:

Jewish groups have been most upset about its use of the words “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions against the Palestinians, describing the terms as “offensive and odious.” Some progressive, social-justice-oriented organizations have condemned the statements in part; others have condemned the movement in full. Church groups have repudiated it. Jews of color have struggled with it. In the wake of what should have been a powerful moment, black activists have found themselves at odds with the one group [American Jews] that may have been most ready to support them as allies.

Emma Green, the writer of The Atlantic article, goes on to describe the conflict between Jews and blacks in America as “largely one of language, but this is also a conflict of history…a sign of how thoroughly elements of these groups have become alienated from one another — hoping for justice, but hearing different things when they try to speak its language.”

In 2016, commenting on the conflict that erupted over Black support of Palestinians, Janaé Bonsu, co-director of the Chicago-based activist group Black Youth Project 100, had this to say: “We remain unequivocally supportive of Palestine and critical of Israel, but I don’t think that precludes Jewish people who are pro-Israel from supporting other aspects of the platform.”

Among so many otherwise progressive or liberal Americans, core convictions about the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, now ensconced comfortably on all of the Palestinian homeland, allows them to repudiate Palestinian movements for justice and place their energies, instead, into digging for “coded” anti-Semitism in anti-Zionist speech.

When Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi speak the language of Martin Luther King and call for “accountability, truth and justice,” as we have heard them do recently, they are still conditioning their solidarity with Black Lives Matter and commitment to universal justice on the repudiation of Palestinian human rights.

The same image below, which is used by the Zionist so-called Foundation for the Defense of Democracy to portray the Palestinian-led boycott movement (BDS) as an “economic warfare campaign targeting Israel” and to present “policy recommendations for the U.S. government to consider,” in fact represents the history of Palestine’s cry for justice from 1948 to the present.

They are hearing different things from us Palestinians about justice and fairness when they try to speak the language of justice. They are hearing (and balking at) “de-legitimize Israel as a Jewish state in Palestine” rather than hearing “Justice for Palestine.”

President Biden is doing a lot of feel-good things by setting right some of Trump’s more egregious doings. We are a little giddy with relief, making affectionate fun of Sanders’ mittens, and not thinking about what it means to us as a nation that there is no room for Sanders (remember how feverish with hope he made us feel for a moment during the primaries?) as secretary of labor at Biden’s table. We are not thinking what it means that AOC’s fellow Democrats froze her out (in a secret ballot) of a position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Collage used by Zionist organization to portray the BDS movement as “war” (Source: Rima Najjar)

Speaking “as a member of the left,” Chris Hedges had this to say in an interview on New Economic Thinking, Jan 19, 2021:

I speak as a member of the left … we must build real relationships with the oppressed. I think the danger is that the oppressed become an abstraction… one of the things I’ve liked about the George Floyd protests is that, number one it skews young, it has been led by people of color, by people who have come out of the experience of urban oppression and police terror and know what they are talking about. I think there has been a political sophistication on the part of many people in the streets … because I worked in Gaza, because I worked in central America, because I teach in a prison and have taught in a prison for ten years … I have close relationships with people who have suffered the brunt of that oppression and I think that keeps you honest. I can’t walk out of that prison knowing that but for Clinton and Biden half of my students wouldn’t be in prison and then vote for Biden; I can’t spend months of my life in Gaza and then, as I did in 2016, listen to Barack Obama give a speech to AIPAC, which might as well have been written and was probably by AIPAC, and then betray the Palestinians … the only thing that will save us is standing unequivocally with the people who have been crushed and demonized and oppressed by this system … in the short term, it may seem counter-productive but in the long term it gives us a kind of credibility, which I see slipping away by essentially selling ourselves out. That’s what worries me, that’s what’s dangerous because … if you don’t stand up for these values … you have a population or a significant portion of that population, not only turn on that feckless, spineless liberal class, but eventually turn on the same purported values they support, which I do support and I think are important.

The fact remains, I am afraid, that Pelosi and Schumer, no less than McConnell, are both under the thumb of the billionaire class. That’s who they ultimately serve, which is why the left must step up its act on all issues of social justice and fairness.

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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.

Featured image is from Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Mark Twain is credited with the saying ‘History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.’ The echoes of history resonate as the new US administration prioritises the Afghan problem for policy review. 

The highlight of the White House readout following a phone call by the new National Security Advisor Jack Sullivan to his Afghan counterpart Hamdullah Mohib on January 22 is Washington’s intention to review the February 2020 US-Taliban agreement. The White House sidestepped Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to convey this important message and the readout avoided any expression of support for the Ghani government. 

History seems to be repeating. Exactly ten years ago, then Vice-President Joe Biden was witness to a similar agonising Afghan policy review at the Barack Obama White House. Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars recounts how Obama’s “war cabinet” was split down the middle with the security establishment and top White House political strategists locked in bitter infighting. 

While the security establishment led by the generals and military chiefs – David Petraeus, McChrystal and Mike Mullen, and Obama’s defence secretary, Robert Gates – argued for a surge and a commitment to keep the deployment to Afghanistan for as long as it took to contain Taliban, facing them down was Biden, who wanted the US to minimise its involvement and get out as soon as possible and invoked the lessons of Vietnam war. 

But eventually, the army men proved to be adept at public relations with Gen. Petraeus defying a White House gag and prompting newspaper stories that Obama was going to lose them the war. And Obama played safe and Biden’s warnings went unheeded. 

But history is not even rhyming this time around. President Biden has thoughtfully picked a national security team whose loyalty to him is never in doubt. Biden will have his way on troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Biden has been an early advocate of ending the war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken broadly outlined Biden’s thinking during his confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 19 when he said,

“We want to end this so-called forever war. We want to bring our forces home. We want to retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place.” 

But, he added, “We have to look carefully at what has actually been negotiated. I haven’t been privy to it yet.” Blinken was referring to the annexes to the Doha pact that have remained classified. Clearly, the forthcoming White House review of the Doha pact will examine the secret understandings reached between the US special representative Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban interlocutors at Doha with Pakistan as the sole witness-cum-facilitator. 

Conceivably, there could be an understanding regarding an interim government in Kabul replacing President Ashraf Ghani, which is linked to a ceasefire. At any rate, Ghani shows signs of nervousness. He’s warned of “severe” consequences in the event of an interim setup replacing his government in Kabul. Ghani indignantly asked, “Based on what authority are they talking about an interim government?” 

Ghani is unnerved probably over an Al Jazeera interview on Thursday by Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi who expressed hopes for greater engagement with the new US government and urged Biden to follow up on the Afghan peace process and US troop withdrawal. 

“I think they [Biden administration] should realise there is an opportunity in Afghanistan and they should persevere with what was initiated and not reverse things. Push them forward, because, after a long time, we have started moving in the right direction,” Qureshi said. 

Qureshi added,

“Pakistan has done a lot, we have really bent backwards to create an environment to facilitate the peace process… They [White House] should be supportive of what, I feel, is a convergence of interests. Our approach, thinking, objectives and shared visions are very much in line with the priorities of the new [US] administration. And that convergence can be built further.” 

Biden has enjoyed a warm relationship with the Pakistani leadership, civilian and military. The friendly references to US-Pakistan relations by Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at his US Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday testify to it. 

Austin said,

“Pakistan is an essential partner in any peace process in Afghanistan. Pakistan will play an important role in any political settlement in Afghanistan.”  Austin added, “I certainly would like to see this conflict end with a negotiated settlement. And I think we are going to make every effort to ensure that happens. We need to see an agreement reached in accordance with what the president-elect wants to see. I think we want to see an Afghanistan that doesn’t present a threat to America. So, focusing on some counterterrorism issues, I think in the future would be helpful.” 

“If confirmed, I will encourage a regional approach that garners support from… Pakistan, while also deterring regional actors from serving as spoilers to the Afghanistan peace process… Pakistan has taken constructive steps to meet US requests in support of the Afghanistan peace process. Pakistan has also taken steps against anti-Indian groups, such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Muhammed, although this progress is incomplete… many factors in addition to the security assistance suspension may impact Pakistan’s cooperation, including Afghanistan negotiations and the dangerous escalation following the Pulwama attack.” 

Austin assured the senate that he would continue to build relationships with the Pakistani military to “provide openings for the United States and Pakistan to cooperate on key issues.” 

Austin’s effusive statements on the senate floor underscored the high importance Biden attaches to rebooting the US-Pakistan relationship. The CNN has reported that Khalilzad is continuing in his position as special representative. Khalilzad enjoys excellent equations with the Taliban representatives at Doha and the Pakistani military leadership. (Ghani refused to meet him during a recent visit to Kabul.) 

Indeed, US-Pakistan relations are poised to touch a qualitatively new level under the Biden administration. Last week, visualising this upward trajectory, at a talk at the Washington-based think tank Wilson Centre and in a media interview, the Special Assistant to Pakistan Prime Minister on National Security, Dr Moeed Yusuf said Pakistan can work as a bridge between the US and China in the evolving global order. 

With Pakistani help, the US hopes to preserve the Doha pact and try to finesse it further to its advantage. Biden no doubt expects a big helping hand from Islamabad to persuade Taliban to agree to a reduction in violence. Biden will also seek an orderly withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, which would entail an extension of the May timeline in the Doha pact by, say, another six months. 

Again, Biden plans to keep some forces in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future in the post-settlement period. Pakistan’s help will be crucial to persuade the Taliban to stomach the idea. Finally, the issue of the interim government remains to be addressed at some point as well as iron-clad guarantees that Afghan soil will not be used against the US or its western allies by terrorist groups. 

Ghani is adamant he won’t step down. Maybe, an extension by a few more months will placate him. Ghani and his circle hope to dig in by rallying anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan and securing help from certain regional states. But in the final analysis, Ghani’s minuscule power base restricts his influence. Ghani’s mandate in the 2019 controversial presidential election rests on roughly five lakh votes from the 15-million Afghan electorate.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed a headline from its website claiming that “vaccines do not cause autism” following a legal challenge questioning that assertion.

The change was quietly made last August, with no announcement, following a lengthy legal battle with the group Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) that began in 2017.

Here is the original:

And here is the edited version:

From ICAN’s website:

Instead of walking away after the CDC effectively admitted it did not have the studies ICAN sought, ICAN sued the CDC in federal court. The suit focused on the CDC’s claim that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism” on the basis that the CDC had not specifically listed the precise studies that it asserts support that claim. This lawsuit also quoted from the deposition of Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the godfather of vaccinology, who admitted under oath that he was “okay with telling the parent that DTaP/Tdap does not cause autism even though the science isn’t there yet to support that claim.”

This resulted in the CDC, under court order, presenting 20 studies supporting the claim that vaccines don’t cause autism, which the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found did not hold muster.

The IOM concluded that it could not identify a single study to support that DTaP does not cause autism. Instead, the only relevant study the IOM could identify found an association between DTaP and autism.

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Featured image is from InfoWars

Eurostar, the company that operates the cross-Channel train service that connects the UK with France, Belgium and the Netherlands, is on the brink of collapse, the company’s management warned this week. With passenger numbers down 95% in the final quarter of 2020 and revenues down over 80% over the course of 2020, it is now “on a drip” and in desperate need of extra cash, says Christophe Fanichet, a senior executive of France’s state SNCF railways, which is the majority shareholder of Eurostar. “I’m very worried about Eurostar. The company is in a critical state, I’d even say very critical,” he said.

In 2019, Eurostar shuttled 11 million passengers back and forth between the UK and Continental Europe — London St Pancras on one side, and Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam on the other. While generally more expensive than budget air fares, it is quicker, more comfortable, and drops off passengers in the center of their chosen city of destination.

But like the airlines, its whole business model has been upended by the virus crisis. At present, the company is operating only two services a day, a far cry from the two trains an hour it used to operate during peak times before the pandemic. And most of those trains are less than a quarter full. More than 90% of its workers have been furloughed.

It’s a similar story across Europe’s railway sector. Passenger numbers have plunged between 70%-90% as lockdowns, social-distancing rules, and concerns about the risks of using public transport have taken their toll. The industry is estimated to have racked up losses of €22 billion in 2020, according to CER, a Brussels-based commerce group representing passenger and freight prepare operators. That’s similar to the total losses accrued so far by Europe’s airlines. Thousands of workers are on government-subsidized furloughs.

“It’s a totally extraordinary situation,” said Libor Lochman, CER’s executive director. “There is no comparison for it, and it can and will lead to the bankruptcy of a number of companies, unless there is the political will to prevent it”.

Just as happened last Spring, travel restrictions are tightening across Europe and borders are closing as countries try to counter the spread of new strains of the Covid-19 virus. France announced on Thursday that visitors from the UK, which is no longer part of the EU, will need to observe a seven-day quarantine and undertake a PCR test on their arrival. The UK already has a quarantine system in place for travelers from the EU.

These latest travel restrictions have compounded Eurostar’s woes. It could run out of money by April, according to industry sources. To stave off that fate, the company is asking for government support of the kind already doled out to many airlines. Eurostar has already tapped shareholders for €200 million and is apparently loath to do so again, particularly given the recent tightening of travel restrictions. So it is looking further afield for help.

“We have to see how we manage to help this company in the way that airlines have been helped,” said Jean-Pierre Farandou, the CEO of SNCF, which owns 55% of Eurostar. “It would not be unusual for Eurostar to receive aid to get through this bad patch.”

The company is requesting assistance from both the French and the UK governments. But there are a couple of problems:

The UK government already sold its 40% stake in the business in 2015, at a loss of £757 million (€850 million), to Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec (CDPQ), Canada’s second largest pension fund, a Crown Corporation, owned by the government, and the UK’s Hermes Infrastructure. Of the remaining 60% of Eurostar’s shares, 55% are owned by SNCF, which is wholly owned by the French State and has itself received emergency assistance from the government. The other 5% belongs to the Belgian State.

Eurostar is also a hot potato issue in France, where it is widely regarded as delivering far more benefit to the UK economy and tourism.

Unsurprisingly, the suggestion that London should help rescue a company it sold five years ago has raised hackles on the British side of the tunnel. The Financial Times said on Tuesday that while the UK government has already shelled out billions supporting UK rail concessions, “it would be eccentric for British taxpayers to bolster the equity that French counterparts hold in Eurostar via France’s national railway company.”

The Daily Telegraph put it even more bluntly: “The Channel Tunnel is not going anywhere. It is the operating company that runs the train services between Paris and London that is in trouble, a point worth remembering as the Government is pressured to spearhead a bailout. If it goes bust, another operator will step in.”

There are some important caveats to this argument, as even The Telegraphitself concedes:

• Given the current backdrop, there is not exactly a queue forming of potential suitors to replace Eurostar.
• Eurostar’s current troubles are through no fault of its own and are a direct result of UK and French government policy.
• The company is also estimated to contribute close to €1 billion a year to the British economy, when the economy is functioning at normal capacity. It also provides a vital travel link between the UK and the rest of Europe that benefits UK tourism and the City of London.
• The UK is already struggling with the logistical nightmare left behind by Brexit.

The UK might still offer to contribute to a bailout. One possible support measure would be reduce the amount it pays out in track charges. Another option under consideration would be for the Bank of England to provide funds from its Covid loan facility. Non-UK firms qualify as long as they’re deemed to provide “a material contribution to the UK economy.” As such, Eurostar would make the grade. But it should only be on the proviso that Eurostar’s actual shareholders — the government of France with its 55% stake, the governments of Belgium and Quebec, and the UK fund — dig much deeper into their own pockets.

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

A German court in a landmark ruling has declared that COVID-19 lockdowns imposed by the government are unconstitutional. Thuringia’s spring lockdown was a “catastrophically wrong political decision with dramatic consequences for almost all areas of people’s lives,” the court said, justifying its decision.

A German district court has declared that strict lockdown imposed by the government of the central state of Thuringia last spring are unconstitutional, as it acquitted a person accused of violating it.

The case was regarding a man violating strict German lockdown rules by celebrating a birthday with his friends.

Source: GreatGameIndia

The district court in the city of Weimar did not just acquit the defendant but also stated that the authorities themselves breached Germany’s basic law.

Thuringia’s spring lockdown was a “catastrophically wrong political decision with dramatic consequences for almost all areas of people’s lives,” the court said, justifying its decision.

It was this regulation that a local man violated by hosting a party attended by his seven friends.

However, the judge said that the regional government itself violated the “inviolably guaranteed human dignity” secured by Article 1 of the German basic law in the first place by imposing such restrictions.

According to the court, the government lacked sufficient legal grounds to impose the restrictions since there was no “epidemic situation of national importance” at that time and the health system was at no risk of collapsing as the Robert Koch Institute reported that the Covid-19 reproduction number had fallen below 1.

The judge also ruled that the regional government had no right to introduce such far-reaching measures at all since it was up to lawmakers to do so.

The lockdown imposed in Thuringia represented “the most comprehensive and far-reaching restrictions on fundamental rights in the history of the Federal Republic,” the court said while calling the measures an attack on the “foundations of our society” that was “disproportionate.”

Earlier, an American federal judge ruled coronavirus restrictions in Pennsylvania as unconstitutional.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s pandemic restrictions that required people to stay at home, placed size limits on gatherings and ordered “non-life-sustaining” businesses to shut down are unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV ruled.

Last year as GreatGameIndia reported, a Portuguese appeals court had ruled that PCR tests are unreliable and that it is unlawful to quarantine people based solely on a PCR test.

And only recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) changed its PCR test ctiteria to cover-up false positives and cautioned experts not to rely solely on the results of a PCR test to detect the coronavirus.

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In the first official contact between the new US administration and the Israeli government, President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan vowed to his Israeli counterpart that Washington will “closely consult with Israel on all matters of regional security”.

In a statement released early on Sunday, the US National Security Council (NSC) said Sullivan had also welcomed normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab states on Saturday’s call with Israel’s Meir Ben Shabbat.

“Mr Sullivan reaffirmed President Biden’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and expressed appreciation for Ben Shabbat’s contributions to our bilateral partnership,” the NSC statement said.

“They discussed opportunities to enhance the partnership over the coming months, including by building on the success of Israel’s normalisation arrangements with UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.”

Biden has previously promised to continue unconditional US military aid to Israel and voiced support for the normalisation deals.

But the pledge to “consult” with Israel on regional issues comes amid calls for an early return to the Iran nuclear agreement, which the Israeli government vehemently opposes.

“Mr Sullivan confirmed the United States will closely consult with Israel on all matters of regional security,” the NSC said.

“He also extended an invitation to begin a strategic dialogue in the near term to continue substantive discussions.”

Biden has said he would return to the pact then use it as a starting point for broader negotiations with Tehran, but a few days into his tenure there has not been any public move towards reviving the nuclear accord.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been publicly lobbying against the deal.

On Saturday, Israel’s Channel 12 news reported that Netanyahu would be sending Mossad head Yossi Cohen to meet with Biden in Washington next month to discuss the deal and Israel’s expectations for any overhaul of the treaty.

Reviving the JCPOA

The 2015 multilateral agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), saw Iran scale back its nuclear programme in exchange for lifting sanctions against its economy.

Former US president Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and embarked on a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions against Iran.

In turn, Iran has loosened some of its commitment to the pact, increasing its uranium enrichment and threatening to restrict UN inspectors’ access to its nuclear facilities.

On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called on Biden to “unconditionally” lift sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

“US President Joe Biden can choose a better path by ending Trump’s failed policy of ‘maximum pressure’ and returning to the deal his predecessor abandoned,” Zarif wrote in a column published by Foreign Affairs magazine.

“If he does, Iran will likewise return to full implementation of our commitments under the nuclear deal. But if Washington instead insists on extracting concessions, then this opportunity will be lost.”

‘Longer and stronger agreement’

Incoming US Secretary of State Tony Blinken told lawmakers earlier this week that Biden would revive the deal and use it as a “platform – with our allies and partners, who would once again be on the same side with us – to seek a longer and stronger agreement”.

But pro-Israel voices, including within the Democratic Party, have been urging the new administration to use sanctions as leverage against Iran to open negotiations over Tehran’s regional activities and ballistic missile programme.

Iran, however, maintains that it will not hold talks over subjects outside of the scope of the JCPOA before sanctions are lifted.

Biden has staffed his administration with many Obama-era diplomats who helped negotiate the pact, including Sullivan, who played a leading role in establishing early talks with the Iranian government in 2013.

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The Biden administration is pressing ahead with extending New START for the full five years allowed in the treaty:

President Biden proposed Thursday that a centerpiece U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty be extended for five years, a decision that marks the first major foreign policy action of his administration as he seeks to confront national security challenges while grappling with the coronavirus pandemic and economic distress at home.

Full extension of New START is the right decision, and it was really the only one that made any sense under the circumstances. The alternatives were either to let the treaty lapse or extend it for a shorter period of time, and neither of those was desirable or in the interests of the U.S. There was no time to negotiate anything beyond the extension. Russia has repeatedly said that it would commit to a five-year extension without preconditions. Keeping New START alive is a win-win for the U.S. and Russia, and it helps to stave off a new nuclear arms race for at least a few more years. The next step will be to engage Russia in further arms control negotiations to lay the groundwork for a successor treaty to take New START’s place. The full five-year extension gives the Biden administration time and breathing space to do this in a responsible way instead of the last-minute shenanigans that we saw from outgoing arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea.

For the last four years, the previous administration dragged its feet and tried running out the clock on the treaty in a vain attempt to use the treaty’s expiration as leverage. U.S. officials wrongly believed that they could compel Russia into making additional concessions in return for extending the treaty, but the Russians were not as desperate as these hard-liners imagined. Even now, former Trump administration officials keep boasting about the supposed leverage they had over Moscow, but this is just excuse-making for their failure to achieve anything on arms control for four years. Had the election gone the other way, New START would have ended this year and arms control as we have known it for half a century would have collapsed. The U.S., our allies, and Russia are all more secure because the treaty is going to survive.

The Russian government has responded to the U.S. offer favorably, and it appears that Moscow is just waiting on the formal proposal to arrive. Extending New START is an early, easy win for the Biden administration and the United States, and it is another reminder that elections can have very important foreign policy consequences.

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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image is by Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan noted the nuclear emperor had no clothes: “The only value in our two nations (the United States and Soviet Union) possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” Indeed it would. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)  tries to do so through a new normative settling point on the ethics, legality, and legitimacy of the bomb.

The TPNW enters into force on January 22, 90 days after the 50th ratification by Honduras and three-and-a-half years after adoption by the United Nations General Assembly. Shortly before the 50^th ratification—which triggered the countdown to entry into force of the first legally binding treaty to comprehensively prohibit possession, use, deployment, and testing of nuclear weapons—the Associated Press obtained a copy of a US letter to treaty states parties. Washington described the treaty as “dangerous” for the continued viability of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as the cornerstone of global non-proliferation efforts, said signatories had made “a strategic error,” and called on them to rescind their ratification.

The letter recognized “the sovereign right” of the countries that were party to the NPT to accede to the nuclear ban treaty. In my view it’s also their sovereign responsibility. According to Article 6 of the NPT, nuclear disarmament is the responsibility of every state party, not just the five nuclear weapon states that belong to the treaty: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” In the famous Advisory Opinion delivered on July 8, 1996, the World Court unanimously strengthened the nature of disarmament obligations under Article 6 from a commitment to pursue negotiations, into an obligation “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion” such negotiations.

In the 50 years that the NPT has been in operation since entry into force in 1970, the countries with nuclear weapons have in practice brought about a redefinition of Article 6. The five nuclear weapons countries quietly transitioned from claiming that the NPT permitted them to possess and deploy nuclear weapons, to behaving as though the NPT entitled them to possess the bomb in perpetuity, thereby legitimizing their monopoly status indefinitely. A good example of this “nuclear weapons states with attitude” syndrome is the derision on open display when, in a speech in London on February 11, the Trump administration’s top arms control official Chris Ford belittled the arms control community as naive virtue-signallers.

Given this reality, what’s a responsible sovereign NPT state party to do? One option is to exit the NPT, as indeed has been suggested by political scientists Tom Doyle, Joelien Pretorius, and Tom Sauer. Any such mass movement by non-nuclear weapon states  would certainly kill off the NPT. Instead those countries have chosen to make one last stand to complete the NPT Article 6 agenda on nuclear disarmament by means of a supplementary and reinforcing treaty.

To grasp the argument for the ban treaty as an expression of sovereign responsibility by parties to the NPT, it’s helpful to refer to the Responsibility to Protect principle adopted unanimously at the World Summit at UN headquarters in 2005. This was the largest gathering of world leaders until then. The Responsibility to Protect was formulated and adopted as a replacement for the widely criticized “humanitarian intervention” construct  used to justify the Kosovo war in 1999.

Some of the key distinctions between the old humanitarian intervention and the new Responsibility to Protect are relevant to the NPT-TPNW differences.

With humanitarian intervention, the major powers asserted a right to intervene inside the sovereign borders of other states alleged to be engaged in committing humanitarian atrocities, but without any corresponding obligations or restrictions with respect to who made the decision to intervene, the extent and types of force that could be employed, the duration of the intervention, and what they could and could not do as intervening powers. By contrast the Responsibility to Protect requires Security Council authorization for any international intervention for human protection and imposes the new normative framework on all states.

With the NPT, the nuclear-weapons countries have similarly asserted their right, as the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5), to enforce non-proliferation obligations on all non-nuclear-weapons states. In 1998 they even levied  sanctions on India and Pakistan, which had never signed the NPT, because they had allegedly violated the global norm against nuclear proliferation with their nuclear tests. But the P5 countries have steadfastly rejected any binding obligations under Article 6 to begin and complete their own nuclear disarmament. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon moves beyond the Non-Proliferation Treaty in imposing legally binding requirements to disarm and cease and desist from all nuclear-weapon-related activities on all states parties.

Again, the reasoning behind the TPNW is remarkably analogous to the Responsibility to Protect rationale. Every state party has a legal duty and all states have a moral responsibility to promote nuclear disarmament. After 50 years of NPT operation, the nuclear weapons states have manifestly failed to acquit their responsibility to disarm. Their insistence that nuclear disarmament is a matter solely for them in negotiations with one another, and that others have neither voice nor vote on it, is akin to the major powers asserting a right to unilateral intervention with no regulatory role for the UN. Moreover, a nuclear war would be an atrocity on an unimaginable mass scale. No state individually, nor the international system collectively, has the capacity to cope with the humanitarian consequences of such a catastrophic event.

Consequently, as part of its responsibility to protect all life and lives, the international community, acting through the UN, is fully justified in adopting a new treaty to ban nuclear weapons and associated activities. In the language of the humanitarian consequences initiative that led to the TPNW, it is in the  interests of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, and the only guarantee of non-use is no possession—by anyone. Of course, the Ban Treaty cannot impose legal obligations on non-parties, including all nine bomb-possessing states and their allies sheltering under the nuclear umbrella. But it will reorder the envelope of humanitarian laws, norms, practices, and discourse on nuclear weapons.

The ban treaty could have one other unintended but significant consequence. While the P5-controlled Security Council is the geopolitical cockpit of world order, the General Assembly is the normative centre of gravity, owing to universal membership. In practice this translates into a norm and standard-setting division of responsibility for the General Assembly and enforcement role for the Security Council. Once the international community has successfully stigmatized nuclear-weapon possessors, how can the P5 continue to function as the enforcement authority on nuclear issues? As there is no other body that can lawfully and legitimately substitute for the Security Council on this function, what will fill the enforcement gap with regards to nuclear threats to international peace and security?

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Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Senior Research Fellow, Toda Peace Institute; and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He was an R2P commissioner and one of three authors of its report. His most recent book is Reviewing the Responsibility to Protect: Origins, Implementation and Controversies(Routledge, 2019).

Featured image: The book of signatures at the signing ceremony for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, September 20, 2017. UN Photo/Kim Haughton.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) promised months ago that the state’s COVID-19 policy decisions would be driven by transparent data that would be shared with the public.

Now, his administration is refusing to disclose key information used to determine when lockdown orders are implemented or rescinded – and has denied a public records request filed with the California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Agency on May 28 by the Center for American Liberty (CAL) seeking both the data and science behind the state’s lockdown decisions, according to Fox News.

State health officials now say they rely on a ‘very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public,’ AP reports.

In short, California says you’re too stupid to understand their rationale for mandating thousands of businesses into financial ruin through what appear to be arbitrary and unscientific decisions. To wit, at least two California judges have struck down the state’s draconian mandates over lack of scientific evidence to support lockdowns and restaurant restrictions.

Not only that, according to SFGATE, there’s growing speculation that California’s ban on outdoor dining may have contributed to the state’s COVID-19 surge. Not the best of optics as as a GOP effort to recall Newsom continues to gain momentum.

According to CAL executive director Mark Trammel, the Golden State won’t answer why, for example, they won’t answer why indoor religious services are strictly forbidden while other venues where people gather are just fine.

“If it’s safe enough to go to a marijuana dispensary or Macy’s or Costco that same standard should apply to parishioners in our congregation they should be able to sep in pews and wear a mask,” Trammel told Fox News in a recent interview.

Dr. Lee Riley, chairman of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health infectious disease division thinks the state’s lack of transparency is troubling.

“There is more uncertainty created by NOT releasing the data that only the state has access to,” he told the Associated Press in an email.

More via AP:

Newsom, a Democrat, imposed the nation’s first statewide shutdown in March. His administration developed reopening plans that included benchmarks for virus data such as per capita infection rates that counties needed to meet to relax restrictions.

It released data models state officials use to project whether infections, hospitalizations and deaths are likely to rise or fall.

As cases surged after Thanksgiving, Newsom tore up his playbook. Rather than a county-by-county approach, he created five regions and established a single measurement — ICU capacity — as the determination for whether a region was placed under a stay-at-home order.

In short order, four regions — about 98% of the state’s population — were under the restrictions after their capacity fell below the 15% threshold. A map updated daily tracks each region’s capacity.

At the start of last week, no regions appeared likely to have the stay-at-home order lifted soon because their capacity was well below 15%. But within a day, the state announced it was lifting the order for the 13-county Greater Sacramento area.

Suddenly, outdoor dining and worship services were OK again, hair and nail salons and other businesses could reopen, and retailers were allowed more shoppers inside.

Local officials and businesses were caught off guard. State officials did not describe their reasoning other than to say it was based on a projection for ICU capacity.

State health officials relied on a complex formula to project that while the Sacramento region’s intensive care capacity was below 10%, it would climb above 15% within four weeks. On Friday, it was 9%, roughly the same as when the order was lifted.

“What happened to the 15%? What was that all about?” asked Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious-diseases control expert at University of California, San Francisco. “I was surprised. I assume they know something I don’t know.”

Trying to explain the quagmire, CA Health and Human Services Agency spokeswoman Kate Folmar said (with a straight face?) that officials are committed to transparency – and that projected ICU capacity is based on several variables – including available beds and staffing that can change regularly.

“These fluid, on-the-ground conditions cannot be boiled down to a single data point — and to do so would mislead and create greater uncertainty for Californians,” she said.

According to First Amendment Coalition Executive Director David Snyder, the state’s lack of disclosure is disturbing.

“The state is wielding extraordinary power these days — power to close businesses, to directly impact people’s livelihoods and even lives — and so it owes it to Californians to disclose how and why it makes those decisions,” he said, adding that secrecy “is exactly the wrong approach here and will only breed further mistrust, confusion and contempt for the crucial role of government in bringing us out of this crisis.”

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British MPs within his own party are demanding that Prime Minister Boris Johnson outline some sort of exit strategy for the nationwide lockdown in the country, with one senior minister warning that if he doesn’t people will begin to “rise up and bring it down”.

Speaking to Talk Radio, Sir Desmond Swayne, the MP for New Forest West, warned that the “goalposts keep moving” on the lockdown timeframe, and “We have to focus on hospital admissions and keep that focus rigorous…[or] at some stage people have got to rise up and bring it down.”

"People have to got to rise up and bring it down!"

Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne says the idea people will accept endless lockdown restrictions and "go on living like troglodytes is absurd."

📺 Watch the show ► https://t.co/qxuMRoepGw@JuliaHB1 | @DesmondSwayne pic.twitter.com/KjCXnTZ7xG

— talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) January 22, 2021

Swayne’s comments echo those of West Midlands Police commissioner David Jamieson, who warned back in October at the start of the second lockdown that “We’re sitting on a time bomb here.”

“We’re getting very near the stage where you could see a considerable explosion of frustration and energy,” Jamieson noted, adding “Things are very on the edge in a lot of communities and it wouldn’t take very much to spark off unrest, riots, damage.”

Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that it is ‘too early’ to say when restrictions will be lifted, while suggestions for easing the lockdown by other government figures keep moving to later and later in the year, with the Summer or beyond now being touted as a possible timeframe.

Seventy Conservative MPs have formed a coalition urging the government to start lifting the lockdown no later than early March.

MP Mark Harper, who is leading the coalition dubbed the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ said “People must see light at the end of the tunnel and feel hope for the future and businesses need to be able to plan our recovery.”

Meanwhile, Environment Secretary George Eustice has warned that even more ‘draconian’ restrictions may be introduced if people don’t obey the current ‘rules’.

“Generally, with this whole pandemic, we’ve had to take some quite extraordinary steps, very draconian steps, that are a big infringement on people’s liberty,” Eustice said.

“And yes, that does mean that we have to intervene in quite a draconian way and issue penalties, and we make no apology for doing that,” he continued, adding the further measures are “under review.”

As we have highlighted, at the behest of the government, police are using increasingly hardline measures to enforce the lockdown, including demanding powers to break into people’s homes, and issue ever increasing fines to anyone found flouting restrictions.

While all of this is going on, medical experts, scientists and researchers all over the globe are urging that lockdowns do not work in halting the spread of the virus, and will have long lasting consequences that far outstrip the damage being done by the disease itself.

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Today, January 22, 2021, is the day that can go down in history as the turning point to free humanity from those weapons that, for the first time, have the ability to erase the human species and almost every other form of life. In fact, the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons enters into force today. However, it can also be the day on which a treaty enters into force and, like many previous ones, will remain on paper. The possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons depends on all of us.

What is the situation in Italy and what should we do to contribute to the goal of a world free from nuclear weapons? Italy, a formally non-nuclear country, has for decades granted its territory for the deployment of US nuclear weapons: currently, B61 bombs, which will soon be replaced by the more deadly B61-12. It is also one of the countries that – NATO documents – “provide the Alliance with aircraft equipped to carry nuclear bombs, the United States maintains absolute control on it, and personnel trained for this purpose.” Furthermore, there is the possibility that intermediate-range nuclear missiles (similar to the 1980s Euromissiles) – the US are building these missiles after tearing up the INF Treaty that prohibited them – will be installed in our territory.

In this way, Italy is violating the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified in 1975, which states: “Each of the militarily non-nuclear States, party to the Treaty undertakes neither to receive nuclear weapons from anyone, nor control over such weapons, directly or indirectly .” At the same time Italy refused in 2017 the UN Treaty on the abolition of nuclear weapons – boycotted by all thirty NATO countries and by the 27 of the European Union – which establishes: “Each State party that has on its territory nuclear weapons, owned or controlled by another State, must ensure the rapid removal of such weapons.”

In the wake of the US and NATO, Italy has opposed the Treaty since the opening of negotiations decided by the General Assembly in 2016. The United States and the other two NATO nuclear powers (France and Great Britain), the other Alliance countries and their main partners – Israel (the only nuclear power in the Middle East), Japan, Australia, Ukraine – voted against. The other nuclear powers – Russia, India, Pakistan and North Korea also expressed their opposition opinion, and China abstained. Echoing Washington, Gentiloni’s Italian government called the future Treaty “a highly divisive element that risked compromising our efforts in favor of nuclear disarmament.”

The Italian Government and Parliament are therefore jointly responsible for the fact that the Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons – approved by a large majority of the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 and entering into force having reached 50 ratifications – was ratified in Europe so far only by Austria, Ireland, the Holy See, Malta, and San Marino: a worthy act but not sufficient to give force to the Treaty.

In 2017, while Italy rejected the UN Treaty on the abolition of nuclear weapons, over 240 parliamentarians – mostly from the Democratic Party and M5S, the current Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio was in the front row – solemnly committing to sign the ICAN appeal and promote Italy’s accession to the UN Treaty. They haven’t moved a finger in that direction in three years. Behind demagogic covers or openly, the UN Treaty on the abolition of nuclear weapons was boycotted in Parliament with some rare exceptions by the entire political spectrum, agreeing to link Italy to the increasingly dangerous NATO policy, officially called “Nuclear Alliance.”

All this must be remembered today, on the Global Day of Action called for the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, celebrated by ICAN activists and other anti-nuclear movements with 160 events mostly in Europe and North America. We need to transform the Day into a permanent and growing mobilization of a broad front capable, in each country and at international level, of imposing the political choices necessary to achieve the vital objective of the Treaty.

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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from http://nousnatobases.org

In the span of just one stint in the presidency, Donald Trump, with some assistance from MSM and a good part of the Washington establishment, has faced two impeachments. Finally, he has managed to lose the Presidency, the House of Representatives and Congress. “Make America Great Again” has become the slogan of dissidents.

The Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol building were dubbed “domestic terrorists”. The US President – Donald Trump – was permanently banned from mainstream social media, accused of inciting violence and of having revealed himself as a “complete tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

He was in his last days of office, and still the Democratic Party, headed by Nancy Pelosi, wished to impeach him in order to send a message to those who disagree with the rule of neo-liberalism that’s being imposed.

Resistance, evidently, is futile. The new authority has already begun to implement its own rules of the game, imposing a new “normality” and erasing any “red lines”. Democracy in the traditional understanding of this term has publicly ceased to be a political reality in the United States.

The U.S. military is removing any “potentially offensive” unit emblems, as well as its motto.

U.S. citizens are giving away the identities of their loved ones, because they are Trump supporters or took part in the Capitol storming.

Now we see only the beginning of the creation of a new type of dictatorship. Further fierce witch-hunts hidden behind claims of fighting against oppression and hate are to be expected. The Republican Party has all but capitulated to the Democrats and the new Presidential administration. Big Tech has also gained unprecedented power, resulting in a previously unthinkable censorship and the total control of public opinion. In spite of the fact that the mainstream propaganda engine is heavy and corrupt, the huge and direct support it is getting from Big Tech and government allows it to dominate the media space, especially when alternative sources of information can be simply cut off.

Amid a major split between Americans after the presidential elections, the main theme of the inauguration of Joe Biden will be “United America”, which should reflect his commitment to unify the country.

Meanwhile in the current political conditions any real consolidation of national unity can only be achieved if a significant external threat appears. Thus, the United States desperately needs an enemy. Customarily this would remain China and Russia and indeed this is unlikely to change – they need to be made to appear as ever worsening adversaries.

After all, Trump, a “tool of Putin” incited supporters to attempt the destruction of American democracy. There is no choice but to fight against this powerful enemy in the guise of Moscow.

Currently, the situation with COVID-19 lockdowns and a deepening global economic crisis is such that the new US administration can take advantage of it. In addition, the increased support of global corporations and quantitative easing is likely to follow close behind. The Trump administration’s focus on developing the national economy is forfeit.

In the advent of a further standoff in the struggle for global dominance, global elites will require more and more resources to promote their agenda. They also need to overcome the current crisis and return the West to some kind of sustainable development. The obvious measures to take are the capturing of new markets and gaining control over new territories, which should be rich in natural resources. As such Russia and the other post-Soviet states, with their vast territories, which are both quite rich in resources and relatively low in population, seem to be worthwhile targets from various points of view.

This process has already begun. The year 2020 revealed the globalists’ commitment to profit from the political destabilization in Kyrgyzstan, Belorussia, Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia. Their main target however seems to be Russia. In the short term, Russia could be fully suppressed either through stunning preventive nuclear strikes, or through a color revolution that would lead to its division into several small states.

Today, a more or less prolonged war with conventional weapons would lead to catastrophic consequences for Russia as well as for Western countries due to internal socio-economic and political factors. Such a crisis might well lead to the collapse of the current regimes and bring about a change of the established socio-political system.

At the same time, the very same internal factors force the Western elites to maintain their escalation course towards Russia. Moscow has been painted as an enemy of Western civilization for years. This easily understood and tangible image is intended to unite all the conservative and traditionally contradictory heritage of Western civilization.

The victory of Joe Biden equals the victory of the neo-liberals and globalists over the national-oriented part of the American elites. Thus, it is logical to expect a drastic increase of pressure on Russia via “soft power” methods, including economic sanctions, the expansion of specific propaganda and psychological operations to destabilize Russia and its system of governance. The strategic goal of such a campaign would be to weaken the Russian leadership and create conditions for carrying out a devastating preventive strike or to destroy its statehood and disrupt the country by non-military means.

If this approach does not succeed before 2024, the administration of the US neo-liberals, in order to remain in power, could raise the stakes and consider a nuclear conflict.

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In 2003, millions of people protested against the invasion of Iraq. If Britain and the US had genuine democracies, where the views of ordinary people matter, the invasion, slaughter and torture in Iraq would not have happened. Our governments ignored the protests.(1) The decision-makers tend only to take notice of what ordinary people want if it does not interfere with their plans.

Too Much Power Concentrated In The Hands Of A Few Sociopaths 

It has been widely recognised for many years that people can be corrupted by power. For this reason, genuine democracy requires a system of checks and balances so that no person or group has too much power. In theory, both the US and Britain have such a system. Law-makers in the US Congress and the British Parliament, together with the judges in the law courts, are supposed to be independent of top decision-makers (known as the executive). In practice these systems do not work very well. The executive appoints senior people in the judiciary, the police and the prosecution service, so these people are not really independent. The party system in both countries also makes it very difficult for politicians to operate independently from the executive.

Leaders in both countries surround themselves with a small group of advisers, leaving them isolated from the views of the mainstream population. In the UK this is sometimes called the Westminster bubble. Only a small number of people get direct access to information about what are called ‘security’ issues. In both the US and Britain we have small groups of people, such as presidents, prime ministers, their inner circles, together with senior bureaucrats in various government departments, with too much power and only limited ways of reining in that power. The US Congress is now little more than a rubber-stamp, and Parliament in Britain has been described as “God’s Gift To Dictatorship”.(2)

In the US, former President Bush introduced the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts. These created new laws that gave the President almost unlimited powers should he declare an emergency.(3) Presidents Obama and Trump have been no better. Obama’s early record was summarised in 2009 as follows:

“Obama continued with war in Afghanistan, built military bases there, and increased the scale of attacks in Pakistan…He excused torture… and demanded more secret government. He has kept at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. His lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not ‘persons’, and therefore had no right not to be tortured…The nation’s economy is still being run by the same fraudsters who destroyed it.”(4)

Gradual changes in the UK have given more power to ministers (among the most senior decision-makers) whilst by-passing Parliament, with new laws in 2004(5) and 2006, one of which was nicknamed the ‘abolition of parliament’ bill.(6) When he was Prime Minister, Tony Blair made decisions on invading Iraq, buying more nuclear weapons (Trident), and stealthily privatising parts of the health service without taking any account of public opinion. The recent coronavirus pandemic has given the British and US governments an excuse to introduce even more extreme laws, with the human rights organization Liberty describing them as “the biggest restriction on our freedom in a generation.”(7)

The Political System Rewards the Most Insane People 

Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have all been described as pathological liars or confidence tricksters. They have also been described by psychologists as showing signs of extreme personality disorders, such as psychopathy and narcissism.(8) If a psychologist were to examine our foreign policies, they would conclude that the people who make key foreign policy decisions in the Britain and the US are, literally, insane. Not in the sense of being illogical, but in the sense of being sociopaths – making decisions that lead to the deaths of huge numbers of people overseas, so they can control resources and trade. This is not an exaggeration. If our leaders worked in any other job and they wanted to destroy multiple countries and kill people, they would be sent to a psychiatrist. If the psychiatrist believed they might act upon their beliefs, they would be locked up in order to protect others. We have psychological screening for some jobs, such as the police, but there is no screening of that type for world leaders.

Lack of Accountability 

Governments pretend to take accountability seriously by holding occasional inquiries into government conduct, but the important inquiries in both Britain and the US in recent years have been smokescreens to protect important people. The US commission report into the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the Hutton inquiry in Britain regarding topics related to the Iraq war both deliberately ignored some of the key issues that should have been investigated.(9) A 2019 inquiry into the counter-terrorism strategy known as ‘Prevent’ was labeled a whitewash after the man appointed to lead it described it as “completely unnecessary”.(10) When the UK Serious Fraud Office tried to investigate corruption during weapons sales from British Aerospace (BAe) to Saudi Arabia, the British government stopped the investigation as it did not want its former crimes to come to light.(11) It also turned out that the Labour party held shares in BAe, which is a clear conflict of interest, as their wealth would be affected by an enquiry into BAe.(12)

Advanced societies have created complex systems for dealing with the most trivial crimes, yet if governments commit mass murder in other countries, they are currently able to evade the law. The top decision-makers are almost unaccountable. It is widely accepted that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair carried out an illegal war that destroyed Iraq, but they have never been charged with those crimes. President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron destroyed Libya,(13) but the media do not even discuss that as a crime. The police, the judiciary, and the prosecutors have made no effort to hold these people to account.

The Deep State

In 2014, a former US government insider named Mike Lofgren wrote an article entitled ‘Anatomy of the Deep State’.(14)  He explained that a great deal of political decision-making does not take place within the visible political system (by visible I mean Congress in the US and Parliament in the UK). A network of senior bureaucrats in the most important government departments, together with lobbyists, intelligence agencies, think tanks, the military, and big companies (particularly banking, IT, energy, food, and Private Military Contractors) is actively influencing political decisions behind the scenes, with no scrutiny or oversight. We have discussed some aspects of this in previous posts, but the combined effects of these activities creates what some people describe as ‘a state within a state’. Politicians come and go, but the senior bureaucrats who run departments are there for much of their careers. Various people who have experience within the British government have commented about the existing bureaucracy blocking attempts at reform.(15)

Lofgren summarises the two main purposes of the deep state as national security and corporate dominance. Politicians inevitably know less about many issues (such as the oil industry or foreign wars) than the specialists in government departments, or their corporate advisors. As Lofgren points out, if you say the word ‘terrorism’, most politicians quickly fall in line to support whatever policy the intelligence agencies or police are demanding. This appears to be just as true in Britain as it is in the US.(16)

Secrets and Lies 

The US and British Governments have a long history of being very secretive. Both governments have Freedom of Information laws (known as FOIA) that should enable ordinary people to find out what governments are doing. In practice, exemptions allow senior politicians and other decision-makers to continue to act in secret.(17) In the US, the Bush government (2001–2009) introduced new categories of ‘sensitive’ information, which do not have to be disclosed; it had a $50 billion ‘black’ budget that was not discussed by Congress; and it undertook a huge amount of spying under supposed anti-terrorism laws known as the Patriot Act.(18)

Until recently, Britain had laws that allowed the government to keep things secret for 30 years. This is gradually decreasing to 20 years. However, the British government has always tried to keep some things secret for much longer. A good example of this was ‘Operation Legacy’,(19) where the government tried to hide the documentation describing their worst crimes during the colonial era. An immense collection of files from various colonies was flown back to the UK to be hidden indefinitely. Even when information was legally required during court cases, the authorities illegally tried to claim the data did not exist. Eventually when some documents were discovered, the government was forced to admit the existence of the rest.

We have seen many examples recently where later evidence has shown that senior politicians deliberately lied about war and torture. There are countless examples of US Presidents saying “We want peace” as they ordered their bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs on other countries.(20) Clearly these are not people who believe in ideas such as truth, honesty or transparency in government.

Official Secrets and National Security are (mostly) propaganda 

The quantity of secret information published by Wikileaks shows that far too much government activity is still kept hidden from scrutiny. This information, revealing widespread crimes by our governments, would still be secret if it had not been exposed by whistleblowers. Edward Snowden revealed that the US NSA (National Security Agency) was carrying out an illegal global spying program, where they are able to store all electronic communication from most computers and phones, even when the phone is turned off. This was done in collaboration with the British spy agency GCHQ. It is now accepted that GCHQ’s activities are illegal, but they are continuing to spy on everyone anyway.(21)

The idea that governments should be able to keep lots of information secret almost indefinitely is not supportable in a genuine democracy. Examinations of the declassified files relating to wars and other foreign policies have shown that ‘official secrets’ and ‘national security’ are often used to hide the crimes and unethical activities of officials.(22) In the US, one senior insider admitted that:

“there is massive over-classification… the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another…There may be some basis for short-term classification while plans are being made, or negotiations are going on, but apart from details of weapons systems, there is very rarely any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to transactions in the past, even the fairly recent past.“(23)

In a genuine democracy, the default position should be for complete transparency and accountability. Governments should not keep secrets from the public, and should not have any reason to want to.(24) Governments should exist solely as tools for the people. Everything should be available to the public so that it can be scrutinised, questioned and challenged. Only in very limited circumstances should anything be kept secret.

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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 eighteenth 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) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti-war_protest

2) Simon Jenkins, ‘This House of Commons is God’s Gift To Dictatorship’, The Guardian, Nov 1, 2006, at www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1936287,00.html

3) Naomi Wolf, ‘Fascist America, in 10 easy steps’, The Guardian, 24^th April 2007, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment 

4) John Pilger, ‘Obama’s 100 Days: The Mad Men Did Well’, 30 Apr 2009, at http://johnpilger.com/articles/obama-s-100-days-the-mad-men-did-well

5) Nafeez Ahmed, ‘Occupy Planet Earth’, Counterpunch, 2 Dec 2011, discusses the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/02/occupy-planet-earth/ 

6) Guardian, ‘Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006’, 19 Jan 2009, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2008/dec/16/legislative-and-regulatory-reform-act-2006 

7) Liberty, ‘Coronavirus: New Law is Biggest Restriction on our Freedom in a Generation’, 26 Mar 2020, at https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/issue/new-law-is-biggest-restriction-on-our-freedom-in-a-generation/ 

8) Claudia Wallace, ‘Of psychopaths and presidential candidates’, Scientific American, 12 Aug 2016, at  ‘https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/of-psychopaths-and-presidential-candidates/ 

Steve Taylor, ‘Pathological power: the dangers of governments led by narcissists and psychopaths’, The Conversation, 19 Sep 2019, at https://theconversation.com/pathological-power-the-danger-of-governments-led-by-narcissists-and-psychopaths-123118

9) Simon Jenkins, ‘Basra is The Waterloo of The Napoleon of Downing Street’, The Times, Feb 25, 2007, at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/basra-is-the-waterloo-of-the-napoleon-of-downing-street-hqx6b9xw2xw 

Benjamin DeMott, ‘Whitewash As Public Service: How the 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation’, Harpers magazine, Oct 2004, (subscribers only) at https://harpers.org/archive/2004/10/whitewash-as-public-service/

10) Lizzie Dearden, ‘Legal challenge launched against government over ‘whitewash’ review of counter-extremism programme’, Independent, 20 Oct 2019, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/terrorism-extremism-uk-prevent-review-lord-carlile-legal-challenge-a9162301.html

11) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Yamamah

12) Jamie Wilson, Labour retains arms firm shares’, 20 Mar 2002, The Guardian, at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/mar/20/uk.armstrade1 

13) Geir UlfStein and Hege Fosund Christiansen, ‘The Legality of the NATO Bombing in Libya’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol.62, No.1, pp.159-171, Jan 2013, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/43302692?seq=1

14) Mike Lofgren, ‘Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State, 21 Feb 2014, at https://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/

15) Anthony Barnett, ‘Is there a UK “deep state”?, 26 July 2010, at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/is-there-uk-deep-state/

Craig Murray, The Deep State Breaks Surface’, 22 March 2018, at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/the-deep-state-breaks-surface/

Tony Greenstein, ‘Keir Starmer is the candidate that the Deep State and the British Establishment want you to vote for’, Feb 2020, at https://tonygreenstein.com/2020/02/keir-starmer-is-the-candidate-that-the-deep-state-the-british-establishment-want-you-to-vote-for/

Chris Mullin, A Very British Coup, 1982

16) Shami Chakrabarti, ‘The spycops bill undermines the rule of law and gives a green light to serious crimes’, The Guardian, 14 Oct 2020 

17) Rodney Austin, ‘Freedom of Information Act 2000 – A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing?’, in Jeffrey Jowell and Dawn Oliver (eds), The Changing Constitution, 26 July 2007, p.2285, at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=O-8ff7yzzC8C&pg=PA2285&lpg=PA2285&dq=freedom+of+information+a+sheep+in+wolf%27s+clothing&source=bl&ots=DfzQIxeVle&sig=ACfU3U2439BSi0XLUrRgbzly5yiUU5JwxQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiE767etebpAhUWQhUIHU8FAb4Q6AEwA3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=freedom%20of%20information%20a%20sheep%20in%20wolf’s%20clothing&f=false

US exemptions to FOIA:  https://www.foia.gov/faq.html

UK exemptions to FOIA: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/part/II

18) ‘Secrecy Report Card 2006: Report Finds Federal government Still More Secretive’, at, https://www.openthegovernment.org/secrecy-report-card-2006-report-finds-federal-government-still-more-secretive/ 

‘OTG Releases Annual Report’, 25 Jun 2019, at https://www.openthegovernment.org/open-the-government-releases-annual-report/

19) Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the History of a Modern Nation, 2016

20) Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death, 2006

21) Trevor Johnson, ‘UK: GCHQ/MI5 admit illegally spying on millions’, World Socialist Web Site, 2 July 2019, at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/02/surv-j02.html 

22) Mark Curtis, ‘Declassified: Censorship of Documents’, 19 Jan 2018, at http://markcurtis.info/2018/01/19/censorship-of-documents/

23) Erwin Griswold, former US solicitor general under President Nixon, ‘Secrets Not Worth Keeping: The Courts and Classified Information’, 15 Feb 1989, Washington Post, cited in The National Security Archive, ‘The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Audiotapes’, at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/supreme.html

24) Caitlin Johnstone, ‘Exposing war crimes should always be legal. Committing and hiding them should not’, RT, 18 Sep 2020, at https://www.rt.com/op-ed/501031-caitlin-johnstone-exposing-war-crimes/

Joe Biden‘s inauguration as US president was unprecedented in modern times. The US capital resembled a war zone as 25,000 National Guardsmen plus thousands of police enforced severe restrictions over civilian movement on the streets. Roadblocks policed by soldiers and armoured cars were everywhere as the city was divided into red and green zones.

Such scenes are very familiar to Western viewers from cities such as war torn Baghdad. However, they are a shocking sight in the capital of the US Empire which is supposed to be a bastion of peace and stability, exemplifying American exceptionalism.

The corporate media in America is heralding the Biden presidency with a great deal of sycophantic fanfare. The 46^th President of the United States will allegedly bring peace, stability and lay the ground for a return of prosperity; so that all can once again share in the American Dream.

Does this perspective for the Biden presidency have any prospect of being realised?

Domestic problems will take precedence

To assess the prospects for the Biden presidency we need to examine the domestic and geo-political challenges facing the new administration measured against the programme of the 46^th President and the composition of his cabinet.

At the outset, it is fairly safe to say that the focus of the Biden presidency during its first year will be the compelling domestic issues that pose a threat to the stability of the American Empire in its heartland.

The influential journal Foreign Policy has commented that the US first has to deal with pressing problems at home before it can take ‘on challengers like China’.

It has also observed that America’s moral claims and exhortations against China and Russia will be undermined unless it deals with civil rights issues and abuses of human rights at home. The summer of 2020 witnessed mass civil rights protests against police brutality and institutional racism that involved millions of people on a scale not seen since the early 1960s.

In its recent analysis Foreign Policy noted that:

“The United States cannot point to foreign adversaries at the expense of recognizing the systemic failures and problems at home. America’s own house must be set in order first, through policies that centre upon promoting the resilience of its system and society.’’

On the foreign policy front Biden will want to rebuild multilateral alliances aimed at isolating Russia and China and maintaining the squeeze on ‘pariah’ nations such as Venezuela and Iran. These alliances were undermined to some degree by Trump’s belligerent isolationist approach.

Having said this, it is unlikely that Biden will make any significant changes in US foreign policy until he has stabilized the domestic situation. Then again the global economic/health crisis has created a situation where volatility will be ever present in international relations and the US may get embroiled in conflicts not of its making.

The Domestic Situation

After being sworn in as President Joe Biden faces an unenviable situation. American capitalism faces an unprecedented socio-economic, political and health crises which will require a huge amount of resources and considerable time to rectify.

It could be argued that the severity of the various crises afflicting American capitalism are such that Biden’s administration will struggle to do little more than apply a large sticking plaster to temporarily patch up its many problems.

Close scrutiny of Biden’s policies suggest that they will do little to address the many structural problems facing American capitalism.

These range from a highly fragmented for-profit health system that has presided over one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the world to a decaying infrastructure that requires trillions of investment. Meanwhile, millions of workers jobs have disappeared as corporations offshore the work to factories in China which is linked to the massive trade deficits of the US that illustrate the continuing decline of American manufacturing.

Another problem for Biden is managing domestic expectations of his administration. His election has raised hopes amongst sections of the population that the simultaneous economic, political and health crises will be resolved over the next few years.

Wealth Transfer

The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has exposed the complete bankruptcy of corporate politicians and the medical/ scientific/ industrial establishment who have presided over massive suffering, death and economic devastation.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic we have witnessed yet another massive wealth transfer to the billionaire oligarchs who preside over American capitalism.

Billions of public money have poured into the coffers of private companies to provided PPE gear and vaccine/drug development.

Meanwhile, massive money printing by the US Federal Reserve, (its balance sheet has doubled during 2020 from $3.4 trillion to over $7.3 trillion) has fuelled a speculative frenzy in financial markets where the S&P 500, Dow Jones and others have reached all time highs when the real economy is in dire straits.

This has led to a gigantic wealth transfer. This is illustrated by the massive growth in the wealth of America’s 664 billionaires. Their collective wealth has grown by over $1 trillion during 2020.

Debt Mountain

Biden’s programme promises to massively swell the federal government’s astronomical budget deficit. By the end of fiscal year 2021 it will amount to $21.9 trillion which is equivalent to 104.4% of GDP. After all the Empire’s gigantic war machine has to be paid for. The Pentagon’s $750 billion dollar budget will not face any reduction quite the opposite.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal government’s budget deficit will balloon to an astounding $33.5 trillion by 2030. Biden, oblivious to the US government’s fiscal bankruptcy, has no proposals to deal with this issue.

Meanwhile, there is nothing in Biden’s programme that will address the massive increase in wealth inequality which has been a persistent trend since the late 1970s. Workers, whose wages have been stagnating for the last 4 decades, have been forced to take on ever larger amounts of debt to maintain their living standards.

In Q2 of 2020 consumer debt stood at a higher level than at the peak of the 2008-9 financial crisis at $14.27 trillion. This figure has undoubtedly increased as the severity of the economic crisis has intensified since then.

This eye watering debt pile which will never be paid back breaks down as follows:

• Auto loan debt stood at $1.34 trillion – Q2 of 2020,
• Mortgage debt stood at $9.78 trillion – Q2 of 2020
• Student loan debt stood at $1.54 trillion – Q2 of 2020
• Credit card debt stood at $820 billion – Q2 of 2020
• Unpaid rent in October 2020 stood at $7.2 billion

There is nothing in Biden’s programme that even hints at a debt jubilee to deal with this crushing debt burden on the working/middle classes.

Meanwhile, successive administrations of both Democrat and Republican have presided over an ever harsher environment for unions in which to operate leading to lower wages and worse conditions of service for millions.

$15 Minimum Wage

Biden’s promise of a $15 minimum wage is welcome to millions of workers. It follows pressure from a nationwide campaign on this issue. Since Seattle became the first major city in 2015 to approve the $15 minimum wage, thanks to a massive campaign led by unions and socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant, seven other large states have approved this measure.

Biden is aware of how universally popular the $15 minimum wage is with both Republican and Democrat voters. In the November election Trump won the state of Florida yet at the same time voters approved the $15 minimum wage for the state.

The under paid and underemployed workers of America can take comfort from Biden’s appointment of Marty Walsh as Labour Secretary. Walsh is notorious for covering up police corruption and the systematic harassment of black Bostonians during his term of office when mayor of Boston.

Eat the rich: wealth inequality

Biden may well reverse some of the Trump tax cuts but will do nothing to prevent US corporations holding profits in offshore accounts. This money could of course be used to improve cash starved public services.

In 2015 an academic study estimated that US based multi-national corporations held over $2.1 trillion offshore to avoid taxes.

The FinCEN files revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2020 illustrate how New York banks have facilitated hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money laundering over many years.

Much lauded new anti-money laundering legislation leaves open a multitude of loopholes for Wall Street to continue with this criminal activity. Never mind the fact that financial regulators have failed to carry out any criminal prosecutions against any Wall Street bank since 2008. Instead they get fines, which are part of the cost of doing business, and deferred prosecution agreements.

Wall Street and the rest of corporate America can sleep safe in their beds at night knowing that the Biden administration will do nothing to seriously address complex financial crime.

Nor will it take any measures that fundamentally address the ever widening social-economic equality that threatens the stability of the Empire in its heartland.

Biden’s Backers

Back in June 2020 Biden told a gathering of rich donors that the super rich were not to blame for wealth inequality. Ignoring the incredible damaging crime spree that Wall Street has engaged upon since the 2008 financial crisis. This is well documented in the work of former financial regulator and criminologist William Black, as well as corporate crime journalist Matt Taibi.

Biden reassured his rich donors in comforting tones:

“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change. …I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down. I promise you. … I need you very badly.”

His appointment of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary, a former Chair of the Federal Reserve, signals to the billionaire oligarchs that it is business as usual. Yellen is committed to maintaining the record low interest rates and monetary methadone (i.e. money printing/trillion dollar federal deficits) demanded by Wall Street.

Her record as Chair of the Federal Reserve shows that preserving the wealth of the 1% will be her top priority.

We shouldn’t forget that Yellen in June 2017 famously said that there will never another economic crisis in her lifetime. Yet here we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

As Fed Chair Janet Yellen also dismissed claims that financial markets were overvalued and in bubble territory. In the autumn of 2018 a 20% collapse of overvalued financial markets led to the Fed retreating hastily from reducing its $3.4 trillion balance sheet while it started cutting rates as demanded by Wall Street.

In the 2 years after leaving the Fed in 2018 Janet Yellen amassed $7 million in speaking fees from banks such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Barclays, who committed criminal acts while she was at the Fed. Will this wild eyed radical take on the speculators of Wall Street or take action to reverse the massive and growing income inequality in America?

Action to address unemployment and hunger

Biden says dealing with unemployment will be a top priority yet his proposed measures fall far short of the alphabet agencies that Roosevelt created to give work to millions in the 1930s. They don’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of the problem facing American capitalism.

In the week that Biden took office new unemployment claims totalled 900,000 far higher than any week during the peak of the 2008-9 financial crisis.

During 2020 over 38 million Americans claimed some kind of unemployment benefit. As of 19 December over 17 million Americans were claiming either state or federal unemployment relief. That figure is expected to rise during the first quarter of 2021. Over 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed while big corporations ranging from Amazon to Apple have made record profits.

Will he force US based multinational corporations to bring the millions of outsourced jobs back home? That seems unlikely. Let’s face it Apple and other companies are making too much money out of the workers paid low wages at their Chinese factories.

Meanwhile, over 50 million Americans are food insecure, including 17 million children. They are reliant on food banks and the government’s food stamp programme.

The new stimulus bill expected to be passed soon by the Democrat controlled Congress includes a $13 billion provision for expanded food stamp benefits but is still seen by many as insufficient for dealing with a level of hunger not seen the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Healthcare under Biden

This situation described above is compounded by the fact that during a global pandemic over 29% of Americans lost their health care cover so far. This has created the situation where 50 million Americans don’t have any health insurance. Between 50 to 100 million are under insured.

This situation is accentuating the devastating health crisis in the United States which has the highest number of deaths from Covid-19 in the world.

Biden’s programme will not introduce Medicare-for-all as apparently that it is ‘too expensive’ in the richest country on the planet. Yet the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Medicare For All could actually save the US up to $650 billionannually.

Nor will he eliminate the rapacious private health insurance industry. Instead, Biden is giving the private health insurance companies, who contributed handsomely to his election campaign, the opportunity to make even greater profits. The Daily Poster carried an article recently that notes that Biden’s health care plan will not expand government sponsored health coverage:

“Instead, 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.

Biden’s plan would shovel billions of dollars to private health insurers by providing subsidiesfor Americans to buy coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces, which are far more expensive than government health care programs and have at times been plagued by high rates of claim denials.’’

Biden’s healthcare plans won’t give comprehensive protection to Americans in the middle of a deadly pandemic. The Daily Poster has pointed out that:

“Biden is now proposing some of the most costly and inefficient ways to expand health insurance coverage. The moves could still leave people exposed to substantial out-of-pocket costs — from deductibles, copays, and coinsurance — that act as barriers to care.’’

Many people cannot even afford to get medical treatment due to the outrageous medical bills generated by the private health industry.

According to Fair Health, “The total average charge per COVID-19 patient requiring an inpatient stay is estimated at $73,300 and the total average estimated in-network amount per commercially insured patient at $38,221.’’

Biden’s health measures are unlikely to deal with the massive problem of medical debts. A 2019 study ‘Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act’ produced by the American Public Health Journal, noted that, ‘that despite the Affordable Care Act, middle-class Americans have been targeted with increasing co payments and deductibles’. This leads to half a million Americans each year declaringbankruptcy due to medical debts.

In August 2020 an analysis by consumer finance company Credit Karma found 20 million Americans to have over $45 billion of medical debts. Will the Biden administration wipe out those medical debts?

Back in 2019 the author of the above study, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, who is a Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard stated;

“The ACA was a step forward, but 29 million remain uncovered, and the epidemic of under-insurance is out of control. We need to move ahead from the ACA to a single-payer, Medicare for All system that assures first-dollar coverage for everyone.’’

Biden’s pick for Health Secretary is former attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra. His tenure as Attorney General of the Golden State doesn’t inspire optimism that he will take on the private health industry and protect the millions without health cover or facing huge medical debts.

This individual faced numerous lawsuits during 2020 for gerrymandering the ballot. According to the LA Times back in August 2020: “Becerra is facing a slew of lawsuits this election season from groups that accuse his office of writing titles and 100-word summaries for ballot measures that aim to tip the scales in favor of his political allies’’ in the Democratic Party.

In 2019 Becerra threatened legal action against journalists who had obtained records of the criminal offences committed by thousands of police officers many of whom were still serving in California.

David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition rejected Becerra’s demand that the journalist involved destroy the records, “It’s disheartening and ominous that the highest law enforcement officer in the state is threatening legal action over something the First Amendment makes clear can’t give rise to criminal action against a reporter”.

Prospects for the future

We should be under no illusions who really won the November presidential election. Corporate America won the November election hands down. The billionaire oligarch class that dominates American society has nothing to fear from a Biden administration. Wealth inequality and all of its attendant evils will continue to rise despite any tinkering reforms that are introduced.

However, the more far sighted oligarchs such as billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio are quite rightly concerned by the destabilising effect of this wealth inequality on American capitalism. Will Biden heed Dalio’s call to reform capitalism to save it from revolution from below? It seems unlikely.

Then again Biden may be forced to take more radical measures than he originally planned if the economic situation doesn’t improve this year and/or he faces pressure from an angry populace.

Over 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch warned prophetically, ‘An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics’.

Time will tell how this imbalance in American society plays out over the next few years. Biden and his fellow managers of the Empire ignore this at their peril.

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A deadly double suicide bombing ripped through a second-hand clothing market in Tayaran Square, located in Bab Al-Sharqi commercial district of Baghdad on Thursday.  Hassan Mohammed Al-Tamimi, Iraq’s Health Minister, said at least 32 people were killed and 110 others were wounded. Those at the scene report the bombers were able to move freely through the area after easing restrictions due to the Covid-19 virus, which has hit Iraq very hard.

A clothing vendor told reporters at the scene that the first bomber pretended to have a stomach ache, fell to the ground complaining, and then detonated his bomb.

The second bomber, working in collusion with the first, waited until people rushed to the scene, and then he detonated his bomb, with some witnesses saying he posed as an injured person.

This same market was targeted in January 2018, when at least 27 people died, which marked the last major attack.

Early on Friday, the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility via the group’s Telegram communications channel.

However, some locals and experts alike are questioning whether IS was behind the attack.

Islamic State

Suicide attacks had previously been a routine event in Baghdad, but since IS was defeated in 2017 they had stopped. Security improvement had brought a near-normal life back to Baghdad.

Since 2017, some IS fighters managed to find a safe-haven in the Hamrin mountains of northeastern Iraq. From this remote, rural landscape, IS has waged a low-level insurgency against Iraqi forces, relying mainly on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and small-arms fire in its attacks. They did not use suicide bombs, and their target was not civilians, with most attacks recorded in the northern provinces of Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk, and Nineveh, and in the western province of Anbar.

The military defeat of IS was accomplished through the efforts of many groups, some who coordinated their efforts, and others who did not, but all were working toward the same goal.  The US led a multinational coalition to defeat IS, while the local Iraqi security forces were part of the coalition; however, Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), which are officially sanctioned by the Iraqi government, are backed by Iran.  In this case, the US, Arab Gulf, Iraq, and Iran were all fighting to defeat the same enemy, on the same battlefield, in what should have been a coordinated military effort, but US politics prevented a collaboration.

IS once controlled 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of territory stretching from eastern Iraq to western Syria and imposed its brutal rule on almost eight million people.

The US occupation forces

Suicide attacks against civilian targets were a near-daily tactic of mainly Sunni Muslim insurgents during the US occupation of Iraq after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The Iraqi government had requested the US military to enter Iraq to fight IS.  However, once IS was defeated, the Americans never went home, and became an occupation force. The Iraqi people protested the US troops’ presence, and the Iraqi parliament voted to demand the full withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.

Last year, former US President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of half the American troops deployed in Iraq, saying he had confidence in the ability of local forces to prevent a resurgence of IS. The US presence was cut from 5,200 to 3,000 in September and was due to fall to 2,500 this month.

Popular Mobilization Units

The Chairman of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), also known as Hashd al-Sha’abi anti-terror force, Falih al-Fayyadh, condemned the suicide blasts in Baghdad and added that such “desperate terrorist attempts” cannot cause the Iraqi people and security forces to falter.

The Head of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq Movement, included in the PMU, Qais Khazali, blamed the Iraqi government.

Khazali said in a tweet “ISIS is not strong, but security negligence and the government’s lack of interest are the reason for the recent terrorist attacks in Diyala, Saladin, Anbar, Jurf al-Sakhar, and recently in Tayaran Square in Baghdad.”

He urged the Iraqi intelligence services to investigate the double suicide bombing, and to spend as much effort as they do in cases of targeting US interests.

The Iraqi government and parliament

The attacks come days after Iraq’s government said an early general election would be postponed from June until October to give electoral authorities more time to register voters and new parties, and amid a severe economic crisis.

Iraqi President Barham Salih strongly condemned the attack, saying that “we stand firmly against the rogue attempts aimed at destabilizing the country.” Salih tweeted blame for the explosions at ‘dark groups’.

Ali al-Bayati, a member of the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, tweeted that the bombings were an “indicator of the return of terrorism” and “the weakness of security institutions”.

Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi held an urgent meeting with top security commanders on Thursday, and then sacked key security and police commanders, deputy interior minister for intelligence affairs, director of counter-terrorism and intelligence in the interior ministry, and commander of federal police forces.

Regional countries statements

Saudi Arabia condemned the attack and added their support for the Iraqi people.  At one time, Iraqis had blamed Wahhabi terrorists supported by Saudi Arabia for frequent terrorist attacks.  However, during the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia has said they no longer support Radical Islam and the terrorism associated with the political ideology.

The Gulf Cooperation Council also condemned the attack with Secretary-General Nayef Al-Hajraf saying, the GCC has adopted “steadfast stances toward terrorism and extremism and its rejection of all its forms and manifestations, motives and justifications,” as well as sources that fund and support it. During the Syrian crisis which began in 2011, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other oil-rich Gulf states had funded and supported the terrorists following Radical Islam, in their US-NATO role to bring about ‘regime change’, which has since failed.

The foreign ministries of the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain also condemned the attack, with other Arab nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia, issuing similar statements.

Iran’s Embassy in Baghdad has also condemned the attacks.

Conclusions: differing motives by various players, and what next for Iraq

Regardless of what group was behind the double suicide attack in Baghdad, the violence and terrorism are aimed at destabilizing security in Iraq.  One PMU group, Hezbollah Brigades, blamed the US-Israeli-Saudi so-called “Triad of Evil”.

IS is usually in rural areas, and against security forces. This was a very different city-center target in the capital and targeted civilians of the poorest area of the city. The differences have raised red-flags among Iraqi security experts.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh expressed a possible motive for the blast, that the Baghdad bombing was aimed at prolonging foreign forces present in Iraq. Khatibzadeh added that IS terrorism has been resuscitated in Iraq and is planning to disrupt the country’s peace and stability and provide foreign forces with an excuse to continue their presence in the Arab country.

It will be up to the Iraqi leadership to ensure a peaceful exit of foreign troops from Iraq while improving domestic security forces’ capability to face IS. The stronger a country is, the better it can combat terrorism. The terrorists utilize division, chaos, and fractured social values to operate. In the current situation that the US faces domestically, the terrorists may be watching and planning for their chance to enter the stage.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

On January 22, legendary baseball Hall of Fame home run king Hank Aaron reportedly died in his sleep — no cause of death given so far.

More below on the loss of a figure Sports Illustrated said “transcended baseball like few ever did or will.”

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He was bigger than life on and off the field as a giant of the game and humble human being.

Mohammad Ali called him “(t)he only man (he) idolized more than” himself.

He was a sports giant I remember well from his playing days.

Growing up in Boston, I missed seeing him in person with the Braves that moved from the city to Milwaukee in 1953, before Aaron joined the team a year later.

His storied career began in the Negro Leagues around five years after Jackie Robinson became the first Black major league baseball player with the then-Brooklyn Dodgers.

I recall seeing him play against the Boston Braves in the late 1940s and be booed by fans in the stands — not for being an opposition player, for the color of his skin.

Boston like countless other US cities remain racist to this day — but not in ballparks of all sports any longer where Black athletes are the biggest stars and main attractions.

Aaron transcended stardom to the measure of what he was as a man.

He began playing baseball as a shortstop.

The Milwaukee Braves called on him to play in his first major league game because of an injury to regular outfielder Bobby Thompson.

As baseball’s highest-paid player in 1972, Aaron was paid $200,000. In 1976, got $240,000 — small fractions of what star players earn today.

He played in more baseball all-star games (21) than any other player to this day.

He overcame racial hatred and rose to stardom through great skill as a player — combined with humility and grace as a man.

Though Bobby Bonds broke his career home run record and Babe Ruth — the first player to hit 60 homers in one season — was know as the Sultan of Swat, Henry/Hammerin Hank Aaron will be baseball’s home run king for time immemorial.

From Mobile, Alabama sand lots to the Negro Leagues, then minors to the Majors in Milwaukee, then Atlanta, Aaron will always be one of the national pastime’s most iconic figures.

A gifted player offensively and defensively, impressive statistics alone don’t capture his importance to the teams he played on and communities where he lived — most prominently the Atlanta Braves in the peach state.

Calling him bigger than baseball, Sports Illustrated said he was “a beacon for civil rights, of humility and of honest work ethic, all qualities we associate with America at its best, not just in some sporting venture.”

He was part of major league baseball for nearly a generation as an active player from 1954 – 1976.

I defer everything about what he accomplished on the field to sports analysts now recounting them at length.

He’s remembered as the most transcendent player since Jackie Robinson broke the color line two years after WW II ended.

When Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record — a historic sports moment I saw live on television and remember vividly as he circled the bases and was greeted joyously at home plate while fans were cheering — announcer Vin Skully reported the moment as follows:

“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia.”

“What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.”

“A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep south for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol.”

“And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.”

“You wanted to add an ‘amen.’ ”

After achieving the moment at age-40, he addressed the crowd by microphone, saying:

“Thank God it’s over.”

After retiring on the field, he remained with the Braves organization as an executive involved in building its minor league system.

“He established Chasing the Dream, a foundation that provides grants to children age nine to 12 to seek advance study in arts, music, dance and sports,” Sports Illustrated reported, adding:

“Graciousness always was an Aaron hallmark, as much as” what he accomplished” as a player.

A giant on the field of dreams and throughout his life now belongs to the ages.

Aaron was vaxxed for seasonal flu/renamed covid with Moderna’s hazardous vaccine on January 5.

After his Friday death, no explanation of cause was reported.

After being vaxxed, he told AP News that he felt “wonderful,” adding:

“I don’t have any qualms about it at all.”

All vaccines are hazardous to health and should be avoided — especially experimental, unapproved, fast-tracked, DNA altering covid ones.

Since mass-vaxxing began in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, thousands of adverse events were reported, including serious ones, along with scores of known deaths.

Was Hank Aaron’s life cut short because he rolled up his sleeve to do what he thought was the right thing?

Noted anti-vax advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the following in response to Aaron’s death:

His “tragic death is part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly closely following administration of COVID vaccines.”

“Studies show that self-interested pharmaceutical company researchers, physicians, nursing homes and health officials seldom report vaccine injuries.”

“Instead, they dismiss injuries and deaths as ‘unrelated’ to vaccination.”

“Public health advocates worry that the vast majority of injuries and deaths will go unreported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), the notoriously broken voluntary surveillance system run by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).”

A 2001 HHS study concluded that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries” are reported to VAERS.”

Aaron’s family should order an autopsy to determine the cause of his passing — to be performed by trusted experts who’ll explain accurately what took is life.

While at this time it’s unknown, it’s well known that elders aged-80 or older are especially vulnerable to ill effects from vaxxing because of their weakened immune systems.

Vaxxing may well be responsible for taking Aaron’s life.

Everyone vaxxed for covid is playing Russian roulette with their health and lives — especially the elderly like Aaron.

I mourn his loss like many others.

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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: Aaron accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from US President George W. Bush in 2002 (Public Domain)

There is an agenda. A huge agenda. It is a Globalist agenda that is in the process of inflicting gigantic harm to humanity. It is called Covid-19 – The Great Reset, issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF), authored by its founder, Klaus Schwab. If left undisturbed, The Great Reset’s plan is a crime of epic dimensions, never seen before in our civilization. Mr. Trump did not want to be part of this agenda.

Donald Trump, for better or for worse, is not a Globalist. He calls himself a patriot. He wanted to Make America Great Again (MAGA). Sounds silly? Perhaps. But it’s not globalist. Therefore, Mr. Trump was not the guy of the Globalist Cabal, currently calling the shots on world events – way above Presidents like Donald Trump and those of the other 192 UN member countries.

This Globalist Cabal has enormous power. Jo Biden and his gang respond to this power.

What is behind Donald Trump’s “silly” idea of MAGA, the western globalist-brainwashed world cannot understand.

It was supposed to bringing the United States back to again becoming a sovereign, independent, economically autonomous nation. On more occasion than one Mr. Trump said, he wishes the same for every nation in the world. He also insinuated that NATO’s purpose was passé.

And he said before his 2016 election, under his Presidency the US would no longer be the policeman of the world. He may have tried on all of these scores, but the Powers That Be (PTB) had other ideas.

In foreign policy – interfering in other countries’ affairs – he certainly didn’t act according to his pre-election promises (or was not allowed to by the PTB); not in Syria, not in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea – not in Europe, not anywhere in the world where “American interests” are at stake – as they euphemistically call “interference” in other sovereign nations’ affairs.

Especially not in Russia and China. Quarreling with these sovereign nations, and menacing them, was a lost cause. He knew it, but it was good for cosmetics. It presents well as an international show of upmanship, for maintaining the image of a super-power and an emperor. Both of which are long gone. But perception is always limping behind facts.

However, you have to give him this: Against the wishes and pressure of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), Donald Trump did not start any new wars. He maintained those started under his predecessors – six active ones – give or take a conflict here and there. Thereby keeping the MIC at bay.

Donald Trump obviously did not fit the Globalist agenda. It was not his plan. Contrary to what many may think, he had no ambitions for a One World Order (OWO), which is clearly the Globalist’s goal. This is the plan behind the Great Reset (see this The World Economic Forum (WEF) Knows Best – The Post-Covid “Great Global Reset”). To achieve completion of the Great Reset, millions of people may have to die.

The Globalist Cabal doesn’t care. Jo Biden doesn’t care. Because Jo Biden is a Globalist, as well as his crew, inherited mostly from the Obama era – and so is Hillary (on her “demolish Libya” initiative, cynically laughing and referring to Muammar Gadhafi: “We came, we saw, he died”), still an important figure of this – let me call it what it is – a criminal clan.

The political career of Jo Biden was born in the swamp of Washington – and the way it looks today, it will end in the swamp of Washington, either with him as President – or without him as President. At this age, despite all the noble words spoken at his inauguration, Jo Biden will not reform his conscience. “I will be President not only for those who voted for me, I will be President also for those who didn’t vote for me; I will be President for all Americans.” This slogan-style wishy-washy palaver has no meaning.

There is not one US President who hasn’t used such words, at least during the inauguration – and most of them much earlier during their campaigns. “I will work to unite our badly divided America again.” When in the last 70 Years were the United States united? Never. Will Jo Biden meet the challenge?

During his inauguration speech, as well as in several previous occasions, including the pre-election Presidential Debates, Jo Biden referred to the coming “Dark Winter” – hoping that America will get through it without harm.

What is the “Dark Winter”? – Why the mystery, instead of transparency? Why talk in code-language, when the American people are, as Biden implied, his number one priority?

Did his remark refer to Operation Dark Winter which was a code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted on June 22–23, 2001, at Andrews Air Force Base Maryland? The simulation was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. The simulation was sponsored and carried out by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Note – the Johns Hopkins research and teaching complex is strongly supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Does this mean that there is or may be a plan for a biowarfare attack – in the form of Ebola, smallpox or a stronger strand of coronavirus? Or any other highly infectious and deadly disease? – If so, Mr. Biden, and all the others who mentioned a Dark Winter ahead, including Barack Obama, must know what’s behind it. And they hide it from the people.

The insinuation that such a catastrophe may be in the making, without openly warning the people, or better, preventing the Dark Winter – is certainly not a sign of caring for the people. To the contrary, it shows disdain for the people – the lower casts. Sounds like Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” in a 2016 Presidential campaign speech. Seems, the core of the Dems, as they pan out with Jo Bidens election, have a particular flair to feel above the rest of the people.

People, and unity within the United States seem clearly not to be a priority preoccupation of Jo Biden’s. Much more important, how can he – or rather the team behind him – be a driver in the implementation of the globalist agenda, the Great Reset. Because, he, Jo Biden, and the swamp behind him are committed to this cause. The Globalist Cabal, chose him over a continuation of Donald Trump’s Presidency.

Never mind that there was massive – but massive, proven voter fraud, possibly in the hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million votes were added to Biden or electronically switched from Trump to Biden. But Mr. Trump’s legal team was not successful in bringing forward and defending their evidence before any court, including the US Supreme Court. Imagine the Immense power behind this Global Cabal!

Mr. Trump, like him or not, for his country he had another agenda. He wanted to rebuild the US economy again. Bringing back outsourced labor, create jobs. His approach may have been inadequate, and at times he sounded awkward addressing economic issues, as well as the people. But he was not a Globalist, he did not strive for an OWO. That’s why 80 million Americans voted for him. They do not want an OWO. Most of the world – 99.99% – do not want an OWO.

Those who voted for Trump also sensed that the so-called Dems had not the least interest of the people in mind. Never had, at least not since JFK.

So, Donald Trump did not fit the agenda of the Global Cabal – also called “Deep State”. Those, who are way above the President of the US – and the leaders (sic) of the world. They are dead-set on implementing the Great Reset – grabbing more power for themselves, more wealth – and a technified, digitized, robotized world, a totally electronic plutocracy – a technocracy cum tyranny, under which the Epsilon-people (lowest cast in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) will behave and obey as they are digitally ordered – modern slaves – own nothing and be happy – the Great Omen of the Great Reset.

And if their eugenist wish comes through, they, the Globalist Cabal, will reign over a massively reduced population. That’s where the current western inoculation campaign comes in – all three of the most used vaccines, or rather toxic injections – Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraSeneca – contain mRNA, thus, DNA-altering substances – and have so far not proven effective as vaccines. To the contrary, dangerous side effects and death rates exceed by far the common measures of traditional vaccines. They also contain sterilization and infertility components which fits the eugenics agenda well.

Unfortunately, Russian and Chinese traditional live-attenuated vaccines (a weakened form of the virus) that creates a strong and long-lasting immune response, are not freely available in the west. Such vaccines do not affect the human DNA. However, the methodology is based on decades of experience.

The imminent question is – why suddenly a new type, never tested before vaccine? What is the agenda behind these new types of jabs? Do they have to do with the implementation of the Great Reset?

Why are scientists not allowed to talk openly about the effects and possibly long-term negative impacts of these new-type injections?

Why do governments around the globe keep any true science about them under wraps – prohibited – censored in the media – even forbidden under fine and in extremis arrest in psychiatric wards?

Why this immense drive to vaccinate everyone as fast as possible – under menace “if you are not vaccinated, you cannot move”? – And that for a virus – covid-19 – that has a mortality rate approximately comparable to, or in some years even less, than the common flu? – See Anthony S. Fauci, Director the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID / NIH – USA), in “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted”, New England Journal of Medicine – NEJM (28 February, 2020):

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)…

Among Jo Biden’s first decisions during his few days as President is an increased effort of vaccination – with the mRNA-type vaccines, as well as massive testing by the also proven ineffective and an totally inappropriate PCR test – in the US.

He vows to vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days if his Presidency. This is spot-on with the Great Reset and the Globalist Cabal’s agenda. He has already been warning about the spread of a new more infectious covid-mutation – which would require more of the unpopular repressive measures – also further infringing on the already hard-hit economy. And if Washington decides to “tighten the screws” on the population (Mme. Merkel’s expression), Europe will soon follow suit – and so will all the other western world’s vassals.

The Great Reset Agenda

Think that’s exaggerated? You may want to read up on the Great Reset and its follow-on White Paper, “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World” which is basically an implementation manual of the Great Reset. See also The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” – After “The Great Reset”. A Horrifying Future.

Following the agenda of the Globalist Cabal is Mr. Biden’s number one priority. On his first “work day”, actually on his Inauguration Day, he has not hesitated to sign 17 Executive Orders, of which the New York Times says:

“Despite an inaugural address that called for unity and compromise, Mr. Biden’s first actions as president are sharply aimed at sweeping aside former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, reversing his environmental agenda, tearing down his anti-immigration policies, bolstering the teetering economic recovery and restoring federal efforts to promote diversity.”

Among these measures are returning the US to WHO, making Anthony Fauci, Director NIAID / NIH, the head of the U.S. delegation to the organization’s Executive Board. “He will jump into the role with a meeting this week”, says the NYT. Mr. Fauci has long been known for his conflict of interest with the vaccine pharma-companies, and for working hand-in-hand with Bill Gates, who funds up to one third of WHO’s budget, and calls the shots on WHO’s vaccination policy. What does that say for Jo Biden, other than he plays already on his first day into the hands of the Globalist Cabal.

President Biden also signed a National Mask Mandate – or “the 100 days masking challenge”, when every serious scientist says how dangerous wearing masks is. However, this is a step towards the Globalist Cabal’s crackdown on humanity, that and social distancing, and isolation by quarantining – leading to lockdowns after lockdowns – all within a massive fear campaign. This is supposed to bring the populace at large to its knees, so that the implementation of the horrible steps within the Great Reset will encounter less resistance.

Mr. Trump never saw lockdowns or mask wearing as the solution to the covid-19 crisis – an opinion shared by many high-ranking scientists and professors the world over. He wanted the already covid-destroyed economy to get back running again, as quickly and as closely as possible to “normal” – thereby also improving the desperate employment situation of the people.

You may see the details of Mr. Biden’s 17 first-day Executive Orders here.

So, because Mr. Trump didn’t see eye to eye with the Globalist Cabal, he had to go. His quest for justice from the High Courts with regard to voter fraud was denied.

The Great Reset agenda, dictated by the Globalist Cabal, is to be implemented in its cruelest details under the supervision of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Medicine (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), WHO, the IMF, World Bank — and the entire UN apparatus. It is an integral part of the UN Agenda 21-30, which depicts to the world the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as the agenda’s glorious “raison d’être”.

In fact, the Great Reset is the key driver of the UN Agenda 21-30. The SDGs are but a noble gesture to tell the Global South how interested the West, or Global North is in the wellbeing of the poor and marginalized people of the nations of the Global South, also called Third World or “developing countries”.

The caveat for the implementation of the SDGs is that the “developing” countries are expecting massive funding from the IMF, World Bank and regional development banks, as well as western bilateral aid organizations, to implement these goals. But, as we know, these development assisting funds come with tight strings attached.

In the case of the SDGs, countries receiving foreign funding from the financial gods mentioned before, have to commit to following the rules and dictates of the Globalist agenda. i.e., the rules and narrative of the Great Reset. Plus, most of the funding comes in the form of loans. That means further debt-enslavement, further dependence on the west, the Global North, for trade and exploitation of their natural resources.

One may wonder, who needs more development the West / Global North or the Global South? – It depends on the criteria of development. It could be – the more digitized and uniformly controlled the world population is, the more developed it is. Or – alternatively, the more sovereign nations collaborate peacefully as independent nations, each with their own culture, their own money, their own fiscal policies and social coherence – the more developed, equal, just and peaceful the world will become.

You choose.

This article was first published by The Saker

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America.

He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: Donald Trump on the campaign trail in March 2016. Credit: Windover Way Photography

A censorship mania going far beyond the necessary social media banning of Trump’s fascist coup incitement is appearing in U.S. Democratic party leadership circles leading to the necessity to warn of the possibility that socialist and progressive social media presence and websites may be heavily censored or banned, and to urge that as a precaution multiple versions of progressive websites or at least of their databases should be located in multiple countries.

Congressional Representatives Anna Eshoo and Tom Malinowski have now written letters demanding that the CEO’s of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube (which is owned by Google) censor content which reinforces “existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear.” They have also refereed to uncensored social media as allowing the ‘pollution of Americans minds’.

Note that ‘existing political biases’ and “those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear” and the notion that we must not permit the ‘polluting of Americans minds’ is a ‘blankcheck’ formula allowing any political website to be targeted and censored.”

Even more sinister is the fact that the right-wing website Parler was targeted for removal and denied online space by Amazon cloud and shut-down.

I believe it would be a serious political mistake not to to prepare for the possibility of censorship or shutdown of independent and progressive online systems. The Democratic party shares one thing with Trump: a fear of socialism. The U.S. political elites who feel no compunction in ordering wars of aggression that slaughter hundreds of thousands in other countries are quite capable of trampling over the right of free speech and press.

The Secretive Plan to Shut Down the Internet

The U.S. state has, in fact, already a secretive plan in place to shut down the internet and mobile phone systems, or portions thereof. This plan, known as SOP 303, enables the shutdown and restoration process for use by commercial and private wireless networks during a self-defined ‘national crisis’.

In 2016 the U.S. Supreme court declined to hear a petition from the Electronic Privacy information center which would have required release of the SOP 303 details

What is known is that the plan gives officials of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security the power to shut down the internet with no consultation or input from either the U.S. Congress or the public. Determining what constitutes an ’emergency’ is left solely up to the Homeland officials. China, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria are just some of the countries where all or a local or regional portion of the internet have been previously shut down due to a supposed, emergency’, which was usually mass protests against government policies or social conditions.

Serious resistance by American workers to the ever-growing wars of aggression and deterioration of their living and working conditions has long been an inevitable.development. Amid the current depression-level economic conditions and other dislocations of life in the U.S., SOP 303 may well be implemented to shut down vital communication by workers – the vast majority of American people – as legitimate resistance grows ever stronger.

Implementation of the SOP 303 plan would not be technically difficult. It’s true that no individual organization or government agency directly controls the entire internet. But the major social media platforms – including Facebook, Youtube, and Google – as well as mobile phone networks such as Verizon, are already closely integrated with the U.S. state.

They have collaborated in the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) program of mass surveillance of online emails, social media, and phone calls by the American people and internationally They are also part of the new U.S. government program to have the online media giants censor the internet by downgrading or blocking access to socialist, ant-war, and progressive websites and systems – such as Counterpunch or World Socialist Website on the spurious grounds of blocking ‘fake news.

Google, to cite just one instance,, recently established a censorship algorithm and censorship staff group. Google censorship now effectively blocks access to at least 20 progressive websites. It does so by ensuring that users searching for information will not find those progressive sites because their links are placed very far down the search result on a second, third, or even fifth search page. Progressive sites have thereby lost 30, 40, even75% of their previous important traffic flow from Google.

It would therefore not take much for Homeland Security officials to end most online or phone communication. A few phone calls ordering the giant social media platforms and Google to shut down; a few more calls to the giant phone companies; and an order, enforced if necessary by police, for all or selected ISP’s (internet service providers) to shut down the websites they host, is all it would take to end most online or phone communication.

It should also be emphasized that the major social media systems, and mobile phone apps such as What’s app and Line, serve a large part of the world’s population. Facebook, for example, has two billion registered users from across the planet. It recently setup a censorship group of five hundred Facebook employees in Germany to monitor its content for information not to the liking of the German government.

To defend the basic democratic right of free communication, American and international workers -including IT workers – must organize to end all government surveillance, censorship, and use of the internet by governments to control the people of America and the world.

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Eric Sommer is an international journalist living in China.

Featured image is from InfoRos

In February last year, Trump was tried and acquitted by the Senate on the following two phony charges:

“Article I: Abuse of power, falsely claiming Trump sought foreign interference from Ukraine in the US 2020 presidential election.

Article II: Obstruction of Congress, falsely claiming he “directed the unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to its sole Power of Impeachment,”

adding:

“(W)ithout lawful cause or excuse, President Trump directed Executive Branch agencies, offices, and officials not to comply with those subpoenas. President Trump thus interposed the powers of the Presidency against the lawful subpoenas of the House…”

Trump’s unwillingness to participate in the sham process did not rise to the level of obstructing Congress.

Nor did urging current and former regime members not to cooperate with Dems because proceedings lacked legitimacy.

Charges against him were politicized, justifiable wrongdoing to hold him accountable were ignored because most congressional members and bureaucrats share guilt.

On January 13, Trump was impeached again.

The second time around was on the phony charge of “engag(ing) on high crimes and misdemeanors by inciting violence against the government of the United States (sic),” adding:

He “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government (sic).”

“He threatened the integrity of the democratic system (sic), interfered with the peaceful transition of power (sic), and imperiled a coequal branch of government (sic).”

“He thereby betrayed his trust as president, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States (sic).”

Cold, hard facts refute all of the above politicized rubbish.

January 6 events on Capitol Hill had clear earmarks of an orchestrated anti-Trump false flag — staged by elements wanting him blamed for what he had nothing to do with.

He urged supporters to protest against certification of rigged Election 2020 results nonviolently, not the other way around.

Public assembly and free expression are constitutionally guaranteed.

Perhaps not much longer based on recent events and if undemocratic Dems controlling Congress and the White House enact the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act Dem Senator Richard Durbin said he’ll introduce.

If it becomes the law of the land, it may equate dissent with domestic terrorism, along with hardening totalitarian rule.

In US history, three presidents faced trials by Senate members on politicized charges — Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.

Beginning on February 9 — unless changed to an alternate date — Trump will be tried again on the phony charge of inciting insurrection he had nothing to do with — this time as a former president.

While exoneration is likely because of a required two-thirds Senate super-majority needed to convict, orchestrated events of January 6  could result in proceedings against him concluding the other way around.

For the first time in US history, a current or former president could be convicted by Senate trial — in private citizen Trump’s case, by a phony charge against him.

If a sitting or former US president can be wrongfully charged and convicted, what chance for justice in America for anyone will ever exist henceforth.

What remains of the practically nonexistent rule of law in America will be in dock when Senate proceedings against Trump begin.

Wrongful conviction by a Senate super-majority for what he had nothing to do with will be a de facto obituary for rule of law in America that no longer exists.

One sham article of impeachment will be presented to the Senate on Monday.

They’ll be nothing fair about a trial on a phony charge — presided over by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

If convicted, Trump could be barred from holding public office again by a separate vote.

He could be denied benefits afforded former US presidents under the 1958 Former Presidents Act.

He could lose them by removal pursuant to Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution — including his pension and Secret Service protection.

However, the law states that presidents “whose service in such office shall have terminated other than by” removal from office office are entitled to benefits.

As a former president, Trump cannot be removed from an office he no longer holds.

Mostly likely, he’ll retain pension and Secret Service protection no matter the results of trial.

According to the Constitution’s Article ll, Section 2:

“The president…shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”

Trump cannot be pardoned after conclusion of politicized proceedings against him.

He or counsel representing him may or may not participate in what’s forthcoming.

No one should be above the law and that includes sitting and former presidents.

Of equal importance, no one should be falsely charged and held accountable when innocent.

Trump is guilty of high crimes of war and against humanity by hot and other means.

He’s guilty of enormous harm to most Americans so privileged ones could benefit at their expense.

He wasn’t impeached twice for these offenses. Nor did he earlier and will in February face Senate trial for them that would be justified and warrant conviction.

Instead, he faced two phony articles of impeachment earlier and a third one that’s the politicized basis for his upcoming sham Senate trial.

While unsympathetic toward him for high crimes I believe demand accountability, a nation of laws — not the whim of its ruling authorities to do what they please extrajudicially — is far more important.

It’s the difference between the rule of international, constitutional and statute laws v. rule of the jungle.

The latter standard defines how US governance operates.

Framing Trump on bogus charges while ignoring legitimate offenses against him and countless other current and former US ruling class members is one of many examples of a nation off the rails.

Governing by its own rules is what tyranny is all about.

That’s the disturbing state of things in the US on a path toward making it full-blown ahead if not challenged nonviolently in the streets to stop what no one yearning to breathe free should tolerate.

Edmund Burke long ago explained that “(t)he only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”

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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

Anthony Fauci, the director of the United States government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters Thursday that he was “knocked out” for about 24 hours after, on Tuesday, taking the second dose of experimental coronavirus vaccine. Fauci has thus joined the large and growing list of people who have suffered serious harm from the injections that he and other government officials have been encouraging Americans to take.

Back on December 22, Fauci said just before publicly having his first shot of the two-shot regimen that he was being injected with the experimental vaccine “as a symbol to the rest of the country that I feel extreme confidence in the safety and the efficacy of this vaccine and I want to encourage everyone who has the opportunity to get vaccinated.”

It turns out Fauci also ended up a symbol of harm that can arise from taking the experimental vaccine.

In a Friday Daily Mail article, Natalie Rahhal provides more information about Fauci’s post-vaccination trouble, as well as the resistance by medical workers and other Americans against pressure to be injected with the experimental vaccine. You can read that article here.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

One crackling theme streaking through the US elections of 2020 was the issue of mask wearing.  Critics initially felt that face masks were of the too important category in combating the novel coronavirus: purchasing and using them was tantamount to prizing valuable protective equipment from doctors and frontline workers.  But COVID-19 continued to rage, and various public health bodies including the World Health Organization revised their initially cautious approach.  Masks, manufactured in abundance, could be an affordable non-pharmacological method of halting the spread of the pandemic.

The facemask became the symbol of the now departed Donald Trump’s view of the world: to don such a covering was an admission of weakness, an effete alternative to the rugged, at times idiotic notion of pioneer individualism.  Had he stuck to a debate on scientific literature (causation not being correlation and vice-a-versa), he might have been on firmer ground.  Instead, he preferred to dismiss mask wearing as an act of political correctness.

Joe Biden, in contrast, promised to scotch any such reservations on coming to office.  On August 20, 2020, he declared in accepting the Democratic nomination that his COVID-19 plan would involve a “national mandate to wear a mask.”  He called it “a patriotic duty” rather than an onerous burden.

The logistics for any such national policies would always be challenging and potentially imperilling.  Trump, scoffing at the validity of such measures, suggested in a press briefing last year that Biden was incapable of identifying “what authority the president has to issue such a mandate or how federal law enforcement could possibly enforce it or why we would be stepping on governors throughout our country, many of whom have done a very good job and know what is needed.”

A prevailing conventional view is that the province of public health and safety remains the purview and power of state governments.  In 1905, the Supreme Court in Jacobson v Massachusetts held by 7-2 that states have the power to enact compulsory regulations in regulating public health.  The justices were particular interested in mandatory vaccination laws, and found that, states had “the police power … to enact a compulsory vaccination law, and it is for the legislature, and not for the courts, to determine in the first instance whether vaccination is or is not the best mode for the prevention of smallpox and the protection of public health.”

In July 2020, James Phillips of Chapman University and John Yoo of UC Berkeley expressed the view that the constitutional republic would find vast federally imposed measures, even those protecting the health of the populace, problematic and undesirable. “Our founders established a national government of limited, enumerated powers, and reserved the authority over everything else to the states.”

There was no shortness of irony in this, given Yoo’s advice to the George W. Bush administration when serving in the office of Legal Counsel advocating vast executive powers justifying, among other things, the use of torture and warrantless surveillance.  During times of national emergency, the executive power expands.  Not, it seems, during a public health crisis.

For all that, the authors do make valid points.  Biden would have to rely on Congressional measures that he himself could enforce.  One source of authorising power can be found in the Commerce Clause, empowering Congress to “regulate Commerce … among the several States.”  Mask wearing protocols might be tagged to interstate travel, though it would be problematic compelling non-travelling citizens to wear them.

According to the authors, wearing a mask might not be commercial in nature, but mandating mask wearing would increase commerce.  But Supreme Court jurisprudence on the subject, notably in the Obamacare case, has held that “Congress cannot create commerce in order to then regulate it.”

David Carillo of the California Constitutional Centre at UC Berkeley’s School of Law notes that Biden is on safe ground when it comes to mandating the use of masks in federal buildings and on federal property via executive order.  Such a power would not extend to mandatory mask wearing “on interstate buses and trains because only the US Congress can regulate interstate commerce by law, not the president by directive.”

Legal challenges are inevitable, and Quinnipiac University School of Law’s William Dunlap sees litigants pressing courts to “look and see what Congress has done and compare the president’s rules with existing congressional rules to see whether they contradict each other or support each other.”

On January 20, 2021, the new president signed an Executive Order on Protecting the Federal Workforce and Requiring Mask-Wearing, enacting regulations very much in line with Carillo’s advice.  “Put simply, masks and other public health measures reduce the spread of the disease, particularly when communities make widespread use of such measures, and thus save lives.”

The order also encourages a “masking across America,” with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tasked with engaging “as appropriate, with State, local, Tribal, and territorial officials, as well as business, union, academic, and other community leaders, regarding mask-wearing and other public health measures”.  The aim of such engagement is to maximise “public compliance with, and addressing any obstacles to, mask-wearing and other public health practices identified by CDC.”

A second Executive Order requires mask wearing on certain domestic modes of transportation covering airports, commercial aircraft, trains, public maritime vessels, intercity bus services and “all forms of public transportation as defined in section 5302 of title 49, United States Code.”  But Biden also acknowledges that consultation shall take place between the heads of agencies and “State, local, Tribal and territorial officials” along with “industry and union representatives from the transport sector; and consumer representatives.”  The fangs of the regulation seem, if not missing, then distinctly blunt.

Both orders, in other words, amount to a national mask framework of sorts but point to a grand suggestion rather than an imperative for mask wearing.  The orders do little to clarify the machinery of enforcement, and how strictly the task will be pursued.  Agencies will be given the lead, but this entire effort risks crumbling before the twin forces of confused bureaucracy and dedicated tribalism.  Republicans are already promising derailing lawsuits.  Representative Chip Roy (R-Texas) preferred the more vulgar alternative.  “On day one,” he tweeted in December in response to Biden’s promise, “I will tell you to kiss my ass.”

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

Featured image is from The White House Facebook

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”—Hank Aaron

My father, a rabid St. Louis Cardinals fan, listened to virtually all their ball games on the radio from our home in Peoria, Illinois. Occasionally, we would drive the three hours to St. Louis to see the Cardinals play in person.

On one of those trips, the Milwaukee Braves were playing the Cardinals. That day, I arrived at the park a Cardinals fan, like my Dad. By the time I left the park, however, I had been converted into a Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews fan.

It wasn’t so much the game itself that dazzled me, though. It was the Braves’ pre-game batting practice: one pitch after another, I watched as Aaron and his teammate Mathews smashed their balls over the fences. I had never seen ballplayers hit the ball so hard, and I haven’t since. Together, Aaron and Mathews hit the most home runs as teammates, for a combined total 863. Long after Mathews started to slow down, Hank kept smashing baseball records.

Yet no feat would match Aaron’s historic assault on Babe Ruth’s career record of 714 homeruns.

It was a watershed moment for sports history and the making of a civil rights icon.

Neither success story happened overnight.

Henry Louis Aaron, who died at the age of 86, was born on Feb. 5, 1934, in Mobile, Alabama. He came of age in a nation struggling with segregation, racism and the distant, yet-unrealized dream of a world in which “black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

From his early years spent swinging at bottle caps with a broomstick, Hank went on to play semiprofessional baseball. In 1952, he quit high school to join the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. His talent was apparent to the baseball scouts. In fact, after a brief stay as the Clowns’ shortstop, Hank was sold to the Braves for $10,000. After excelling in the Braves’ farm system for several years, Aaron joined the Braves in Milwaukee.

The year was 1954, and it didn’t look like the 20-year-old Aaron would make the team. But then one of the starting outfielders broke an ankle, and Hank was tapped to replace him. From there, Aaron never looked back.

In 1955, Hank batted .314 with 27 home runs and 106 runs batted in. The next season, Hank won his first of two National League batting titles.

In 1957, Aaron hit a National League-leading 44 home runs, while driving in 132 runs batted in and batting .322. To cap off the season, he hit an 11^th inning homer late in the season to clinch the pennant for the Braves. Aaron won the MVP that year, and the Braves went on to win the World Series.

Year after year, Aaron proved his hitting and fielding prowess. And although he was 6 feet tall, he was never a heavy man and only reached 190 pounds. The key to Aaron’s hitting was his supple, powerful wrists that allowed him to crack his bat like a buggy whip. Aaron credits hauling ice as a 16-year-old for developing his wrists, working from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. for $2.25 a day.

Maybe it was Hank’s laid-back style that allowed him to creep up on Babe Ruth’s homerun record before anyone realized it. One observer remarked that Hank seemed to be looking for a place to sit down when he approached the batter’s box. The Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts once remarked that Aaron was the only batter he knew who “could fall asleep between pitches and still wake up in time to hit the next one.”

Nevertheless, the chase to beat Babe Ruth’s home run record heated up in the summer of 1973. Unfortunately, so did the hate that simmered beneath society’s surface. Much of it came by way of the mailman, with Aaron receiving an estimated 3,000 letters a day, more than any American outside of politics.

Much of it was hate mail, more hateful and threatening than Aaron had ever imagined. “If you come close to Babe Ruth’s 714 homers,” one letter said, “I have a contract out on you. Over 700, and you can consider yourself punctured with a .22 shell.” Another read, “Dear Nigger Henry, You are (not) going to break the record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it. Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. My gun is watching your every black move.”

“The Ruth chase should have been the greatest period of my life, and it was the worst,” Mr. Aaron wrote in his autobiography, I Had a Hammer. “I couldn’t believe there was so much hatred in people. It’s something I’m still trying to get over, and maybe I never will.”

The summer of 1973 ended with Hank at 713 home runs, one run shy of tying the Babe’s record. Aaron was 39 years old.

In his first at bat in 1974, Aaron scored a home run, tying Ruth. Then on April 8, 1974, the largest crowd in Atlanta Braves history came out to witness the historic moment. Hank didn’t disappoint them.

With a mean whip of the bat, his first swing of the evening, Aaron sent the ball into the Braves bullpen in left center field, approximately 400 feet from home plate. The large message board blared “715.”

Just like that, Hank Aaron had eclipsed the Great Bambino to become the Homerun King.

When Aaron rounded third, he broke into a wide grin at the sight of his teammates waiting for him at the plate. With tears in his eyes, Aaron was met at home plate by his mother. Fireworks went off, as the crowd roared for ten minutes.

“I just thank God it’s all over,” said Aaron. He had endured months in the fishbowl of media coverage, death threats and hate mail.

Hank Aaron played several more years, amassing a career total of 755 home runs. He was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001. The following year, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

For all of his achievements, nothing equaled that night in April 1974 when Hammerin’ Hank stepped past Babe Ruth and racial hatred into history.

As MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred stated,

“Hank symbolized the very best of our game, and his all-around excellence provided Americans and fans across the world with an example to which to aspire. His career demonstrates that a person who goes to work with humility every day can hammer his way into history—and find a way to shine like no other.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the public domain

In her article “Iraq’s century of humiliation in the globalised age”, Aneela Shahzad writes:

“In May 2020, the Special Representative of Secretary General for the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq announced that the poverty rate in Iraq would double to 40% from around 20%, where it currently stands, ‘the Iraqi economy is expected to contract by 9.7% in 2020… (and) there will be a decrease in economic opportunities.’ How is there a 350% increase in oil production and only ‘decrease’ in economic opportunities for the Iraqi people? The people, whose cities have been bombed to ruins from Fallujah to Mosul; of whom over three million were killed and over two million displaced during the war; and who have been suffering disease and death due to shortage of food and medicine for the last four decades.”

Is it the oil-resource curse that has brought the Iraqi people to this deplorable condition? Or, have the US-installed political system and after them the Iranian influence over Iraqi politics, been the main reasons behind mischiefs such as the case of “an estimated $239.7 billion has left the country illegally since 2003”, currently being inquired by the Iraqi parliament. Most of this money was indeed oil money, meaning that both oil and revenue have been conveniently syphoned away from Iraq, leaving its people in harrowing dearth.” [1]

A Transparency International report, published March 16, 2005, states that: “The reconstruction of post-war Iraq is in danger of becoming ‘the biggest corruption scandal in history.”[2]

The analysis underneath tries to give an overview – although incomplete – of the rampant corruption imported by the US invaders and optimized by its installed Quisling government. It is only one aspect of the total destruction of the Iraqi state. This is the story of a country that was targeted to become a failed state, by design of the imperialist and neoliberal US/UK elites, or should we call them “the organized-crime world syndicate”. The sectarian political and neoliberal economic system they installed is totally broken, beyond repair. The Iraqis call the period after the withdrawal of US combat troops “the second face of the occupation”, leaving in place all the neoliberal sectarian laws the occupiers enacted.

The criminal activities of the occupiers are well documented, many times reported and analysed, but the US still refuses to accept responsibility and accountability for its gross violations of International Humanitarian Law. It’s very important that the true story of Iraq is repeatedly told, until it becomes part of humanity’s collective memory, because Iraq serves as a template for the nefarious consequences of what “humanitarian” imperial interventions really mean, as is the case for other “humanitarian” war zones, from Afghanistan to Libya. “Bringing democracy” is always the official narrative, the harsh reality however is destruction, plunder, submission, exploitation and oppression. The truths about corruption have to be documented, explained and repeated over and over again. Hence this article.

This is well formulated in the message that novelist, painter and poet John Berger (+ 02.01.2017) wrote on 18 June 2003 in support of the World Tribunal on Iraq initiative, the greatest achievement of the global peace movement ever:

“The records have to be kept and, by definition, the perpetrators, far from keeping records, try to destroy them. They are killers of the innocent and of memory. The records are required to inspire still further the mounting opposition to the new global tyranny. The new tyrants, incomparably over-armed, can win every war – both military and economic. Yet they are losing the war (this is how they call it) of communication. They are not winning the support of world public opinion. More and more people are saying NO. Finally this will be the tyranny’s undoing. But after how many more tragedies, invasions and collateral disasters? After how much more of the new poverty the tyranny engenders? Hence the urgency of keeping records, of remembering, of assembling the evidence, so that the accusations become unforgettable, and proverbial on every continent. More and more people are going to say NO, for this is the precondition today for saying YES to all we are determined to save and everything we love.”[3]

It was not Saddam Hussein who introduced a culture of endemic corruption

Saddam Hussein’s government had progressive plans to modernize Iraq and turn the country into a model society. In a region where government corruption is the norm, Saddam had decided he would ban corruption from his own country. According to him, corruption was not only morally wrong, it was treason. For example, in January 1979, four officials were executed for accepting bribes. This policy changed dramatically after the 2003 invasion.

Patrick Cockburn: “Why is the corruption in Iraq so bad? The simple answer that Iraqis give is that “UN sanctions destroyed Iraqi society in the 1990s and the Americans destroyed the Iraqi state after 2003”. Patronage based on party, family or community determines who gets a job. There are many winners as well as losers and all depends on Iraqi oil exports going up and prices staying high. “I only once saw panic in the cabinet,” says an ex-minister, “and that was when there was a sharp drop in the price of oil.”[4]

Of course there was corruption during Saddam’s reign, as is the case in all countries around the world, but many Iraqis recall that, after the devastating US air strikes during operation Desert Storm in 1991, power stations and other facilities were patched up quickly using only Iraqi resources, while, despite the $ 53 billion “aid” for the “reconstruction” spent since the 2003 invasion, 70 percent of Iraqis have no decent access to drinking water or electricity. The available funds went into the pockets of foreign contractors and corrupt officials.

Spot the difference.

From the first days after the invasion, the US and its coalition partners created a wasteful, opaque and corrupt system in Iraq. Massive theft, fraud, bribery and crimes of all kinds have failed reconstruction, infecting the government and wider society. There are hundreds of fraudulent, incomplete, failed or useless projects that have cost Iraq tens of billions of dollars. Judging from the final results, the projects have delivered surprisingly little lasting benefit to the Iraqis. These corrupt acts are a clear violation of the occupier’s responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Corruption (2003) and Security Council resolutions.

Transparency International ratings for Iraq

in the 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International, Iraq was ranked 160^th of 162 countries; in 2007: 178^th of 180 countries; in 2008: 178^th; in 2009: 176^th ; in 2010: 175^th out of 178 countries; In 2011: 175^th out of 182 countries; in 2012: 19th out of 174 countries; in 2013: 171th of 177 countries; 2014: 170^th of 175 countries; in 2015: 161th of 167 countries; 2016: 166^th out of 176 countries; in 2017:167^th of 180 countries; in 2018: 168^th; in 2019: 175^th in 182 countries.

Iraq is the most corrupt country in the Arab world, according to Transparency International reports. Deep-rooted corruption in Iraq is one of the factors hampering reconstruction efforts for more than a decade. The exact magnitude of the corruption and waste of Iraqi public funds is difficult to ascertain. But several officials have provided figures ranging between $229 billion and $1 trillion.

Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lost $ 500 billion during his tenure (2006-2014), according to the Iraqi Integrity Commission (CPI). “Nearly half of the government’s revenues during the eight-year period were ‘stolen’ ”, said Adil Nouri, the CPl spokesperson. He called this “the greatest political corruption scandal in history”. Iraq’s oil revenues were $ 800 billion between 2006 and 2014, and the Maliki government also received $ 250 billion in aid from various countries, including the US, during that time.[5]

Iraqi MP Khalid al-Alwani revealed on July 13, 2011, that the extent of financial and administrative corruption in Iraq could amount to $ 229 billion[6]. He said the scale of corruption in Iraq is “enormous” and attributed rampant corruption in Iraq to “the high volume of sales … the lack of accountability and lack of judicial oversight”.

Rahim al-Darraji, a former member of the Finance Committee in Parliament, estimated in 2020 the looted funds in Iraq at around $ 450 billion.[7]

“Since 2003, corrupt officials and politicians in Iraq have squandered about a thousand billion dollars in public money, without developing any service sector in the country”, The Arab Weekly wrote on 19/09/2020[8].

An Iraqi parliamentary committee estimated that about $ 239.7 billion has been smuggled out of Iraq since 2003. “The amount was smuggled in the form of false receipts and many commissions were paid to civil servants,” Taha al-Difai, a member of the Integrity Commission, told the official Iraqi News Agency on January 4, 2021. He cited political pressure on an anti-corruption committee formed by the government to investigate allegations of corruption in the country. “About $ 685 billion has been disbursed since 2003,” he said, adding that this amount was “wasted on contracts and rampant corruption.”[9]

After reading these staggering figures, take a moment to reflect on the acute humanitarian needs of the Iraqi population. 2.4 million people are in acute need in 2020-2021 compared to 1.8 million people in 2019-2020, with the proportion of out-of-camp IDPs in acute need increasing from 36 percent in 2020 to 45 percent in 2021.[10] Overall, 5.6 million people, including 2.6 million children, continue to need humanitarian assistance. This includes 1.8 million people (814,000 children and 15 per cent people with disabilities) facing acute humanitarian needs.[11]

As the World Bank has noted, oil has enabled Iraq to appear on paper as a middle-income country, a classification based on the simple math of taking its oil-inflated GDP and dividing it by population. But by almost every other measure, Iraq is a barely managing Third World economy.[12]

Does anyone still believe Iraq’s corrupt political process can be rectified? March 19, 2021 will commemorate the 18th anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq and since 2003 the situation for the Iraqi people has only deteriorated, while a small political and collaborationist elite and their foreign masters have shamefully enriched themselves.

Again, spot the difference with the Iraqi governments before 2003.

The Looting of Iraq

Soon after the conquest of Baghdad, American commanders and political leaders announced a massive program to rebuild Iraq and bring prosperity. President Bush even compared those efforts to the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II[13]. Washington spent billions of dollars of Iraqi oil revenues and billions of US grants to fund thousands of projects. But because of fraud, corruption, and theft, these programs failed and money was increasingly diverted to shadowy “security” operations. Gangsterism started in the earliest days of the occupation under the US-administered provisional government, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). It went even further after that, under the (approving) eyes of US officials and advisers. Corruption, imported by the occupier, was rampant thanks to the very weak government system they created.

Huge funds have been stolen or lost by the occupying authorities and their local accomplices. The US government had decided to acquire all Iraqi assets and funds around the world, totalling $ 13 billion. Subsequently, Iraqi funds in the US ($ 3 billion) were confiscated. And finally there was a forced transfer of funds from the Iraqi account at the Swiss bank UBS to the Anglo-Americans.

The occupation authorities also obtained the accumulated funds from the oil-for-food program (approximately $ 21 billion up to March 2003). In the first week of the occupation, US forces in government buildings in Baghdad collected about $ 6 billion from the Iraqi Central Bank and $ 4 billion from other Iraqi banks. Also, $ 2 billion of Iraqi funds in Arab and other foreign banks (national emergency reserves) was stolen.

Where have all those funds gone? Instead of depositing these funds – as well as the income from oil exports – in an account in the Iraqi central bank, the occupation authorities parked all these assets in an account Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) at the US central bank, New York- branch, where all financial transactions are done in utmost secrecy.

The invasion allowed the US to steal money from Iraq’s oil revenues. Christian Aid found that of the $ 5 billion of invested assets from Iraqi oil revenues after 2003, only about $ 1 billion could be recovered. The missing 4 billion was found in the Federal Reserve, after the investigation by Christian Aid[14]. This was in direct violation of the UN resolution requiring the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) to monitor these funds.

Paul Bremer Created a Garden of Eden for War Profiteers in Iraq

The clearest statement of intent for the future of the Iraqi economy was Bremer Order 39, which permitted full foreign ownership of Iraqi state-owned assets and decreed that over 200 state-owned enterprises, including electricity, telecommunications and the pharmaceuticals industry, could be dismantled. Order 39 also permitted 100 per cent foreign ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move their profits out of Iraq. It has been argued already in the British courts that Order 39 constitutes an act of illegal occupation under the terms of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Article 55 of the Hague regulations asserts that occupying powers are only permitted to administer public assets. The effect of Article 55 is to outlaw privatization of a country’s assets whilst it is under occupation by a hostile military power.[15]

Transnational corporations, mostly belonging to Western states have succeeded to negotiate very favourable contracts. Private or listed companies received at least $ 138 billion in government contracts from the US taxpayer for services such as providing security, infrastructure works and catering for the troops.

Ten companies received 52 percent of the funds, according to an analysis by the Financial Times in March 2013. Since the invasion, Halliburton (military/oil), Veritas (military/finance), the Washington Group (military/oil), Aegis (military), International American Products (electricity), Fluor (water/sewage), Perini (environmental cleanup), Parsons (military/construction), First Kuwaiti General (construction), HSBC Bank (finance), Cummins (electricity) and Nour USA (oil), to name just a few, have made huge profits at the expense of the Iraqi treasury and US taxpayers. US and UK companies received 85 per cent of the value of CPA contracts whilst Iraqi firms received just 2 per cent of the value of those. Most went to US firms[16]. No less than 60% went to the American Halliburton, on the basis of outrageous no-bid contracts. Financial reporting was shoddy or non-existent.

To illustrate the extent of the looting, waste and corruption, here are a few examples.

Billions of dollars in Iraq ‘s vital oil production have been stolen and smuggled out of the country since March 2003, with astonishingly little action by Coalition authorities or the Iraqi government[17]. Smugglers have also re-exported or sold stolen refined products like gasoline and diesel fuel. The government imported these products to make up for refinery shortages and sold them at highly-subsidized rates. Most oil loss was apparently due to corrupt officials who control the oil system. US officials were certainly involved alongside the Iraqis. Usually, oil operations are extensively metered, from well head to refineries to export terminals. But Iraq had no working meters, making it virtually impossible to monitor the flow of crude or refined products or to trace the location of smuggling operations and corrupt practices. “It’s like a supermarket without a cashier,” said Mike Morris, an oil industry expert who used to work for the State Department in Baghdad. “There is no metering [at the export terminal]. And there’s no metering at the well heads either. There is no metering at any of the major pipeline junctions.” Morris estimated that “between 200,000 and 500,000 barrels a day” are unaccounted for.[18]

The CPA could have installed metering immediately, but strangely did not. Bremer and his team were advised of the metering problem, but they repeatedly postponed action[19]. When the IAMB pointed to the lapse, neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organization nor US authorities could give a satisfactory explanation[20]. IAMB accountants noted that there were not even working meters on the export loading platforms, making it impossible to know the volume or value of Iraq ‘s crude exports. Officials have apparently been getting kickbacks from loading of tankers with hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil not included in the bill of lading.

Platt’s Oilgram, an industry newsletter, estimated the loss at $3 billion per year[21]. The Iraq Study Group suggested that until 2006 the rate of theft might have run as high as 180 million barrels, but a more recent report by the US Government Accountability Office suggested a figure of 110 million barrels annually, with a financial loss that can be calculated at about $5.5 billion. An audit of Iraq’s oil revenue management and accounting system found the plan to fully install and calibrate a full crude oil and products metering system by 2012 was only 39% complete, according to a report from Platts.[22]

James Glanz in The New York Times of May 28, 2004[23]: “As the United States spends billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq’s civil and military infrastructure, there is increasing evidence that parts of sensitive military equipment, seemingly brand-new components for oil rigs and water plants and whole complexes of older buildings are leaving the country on the backs of flatbed trucks.

By some estimates, at least 100 semitrailers loaded with what is billed as Iraqi scrap metal are streaming each day into Jordan, just one of six countries that share a border with Iraq.

American officials say sensitive equipment is, in fact, closely monitored and much of the rest that is leaving is legitimate removal and sale from a shattered country. But many experts say that much of what is going on amounts to a vast looting operation.

In the past several months, the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, has been closely monitoring satellite photographs of hundreds of military-industrial sites in Iraq. Initial results from that analysis are jarring, said Jacques Baute, director of the agency’s Iraq nuclear verification office: entire buildings and complexes of as many as a dozen buildings have been vanishing from the photographs. “We see sites that have totally been cleaned out,” Mr. Baute said.

The agency started the program in December, after a steel vessel contaminated with uranium, probably an artifact of Saddam Hussein’s pre-1991 nuclear program, turned up in a Rotterdam scrapyard. The shipment was traced to a Jordanian company that was apparently unaware that the scrap contained radioactive material.”

(…) ”There is a gigantic salvage operation, stripping anything of perceived value out of the country,” said John Hamre, president and chief executive of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan Washington research institute, which sent a team to Iraq and issued a report on reconstruction efforts at the request of the Pentagon last July. ”This is systematically plundering the country,” Dr. Hamre said. ”You’re going to have to replace all of this stuff.”

The great diversion

To cover up their own corruption, at a time when the search for imaginary weapons of mass destruction did not go well and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal came to widespread public attention in April 2004, the US decided to attack the Oil-For-Food program head-on. They urgently needed a distraction to make the world forget the US government’s lies to justify the invasion and the failed occupation that was marred with death, destruction, corruption… The UN was to be made a scapegoat. Was this an act of revenge because the UN Security Council refused to give green light for the invasion?

On February 4, 2005, Inter Press Service (IPS) reported in an article, “Iraq’s oil-for-food audit finds no widespread abuse”[24]: “After spending months combing through thousands of documents and questioning scores of officials, the investigators of alleged irregularities in the U.N.-led Oil-for-Food program in Iraq acknowledge that they have so far failed to find a smoking gun. However, in an interim report released Thursday, they accused the world body of failing to abide by the rules to assure fairness, transparency and accountability.”

The mainstream media made a big fuss about the alleged abuses in the Oil-for-Food program, including the Wall Street Journal. Obvious biases, exaggerations and unstated context about the United Nations oil-for-food program: this so-called “scandal” is perhaps one of the most poignant misinformation in recent times. And that is no coincidence. The story confirms the neoconservative worldview that the UN is populated by corrupt, incompetent and hostile anti-American bureaucrats whose sole purpose is – they believe – to restrict the United States from using its unparalleled – but ‘entirely benevolent’ – power. “Newspaper editors who play up the story are complicit in this ongoing virulent campaign against the U.N. by U.S. right-wing neo-conservatives,” said Jim Paul, executive director of the U.S.-based Global Policy Forum. In addition, the Baath Party and the Iraqi president had to be vilified and accused of unbridled corruption at all costs so that the truths about the corrupt and brutal occupation would not provoke too much protest. The US allegedly saw a mote in the UN’s eye without noticing the beam in its own eye.

Former Iraqi Humanitarian Coordinator Denis Halliday said in his testimony before the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul on June 2005: “To divert attention from the disastrous occupation in terms of cost and casualty rate, Washington has attacked the Oil-For-Food program, where apparently some irregularities have been observed: wrong management, lost funds for which no explanation can be found … and this for a total of perhaps $ 150,000. However, this unique and successful $ 65 billion project fed and met the basic needs for 24 million Iraqis from 1997 to 2004. The real scandal is not the wrong management of the UN. It is the sale of oil outside of this program, with US approval, allocating 30% of oil revenues to Kuwait, while Iraqi children died from holding back necessary contracts, leaving insufficient financial investment in electricity and water supply. The real scandal is the genocide of the Iraqi population that the UN caused by a 12-year strangulation of the country under the severe sanctions regime.”

Disappearing defence funds and weaponry

According to a confidential report and interviews with US and Iraqi officials published by Knight Ridder newspaper on August 11, 2005[25], US and Iraqi investigators had uncovered widespread fraud and waste in more than $ 1 billion in arms deals arranged by middlemen who received huge bribes for contracts to arm Iraq’s fledgling army.

Knight Ridder reported that $ 300 million in defence funds had been lost. But the report indicated that the audit committee had uncovered a much bigger scandal, with losses amounting to more than $ 500 million.

Those revelations provided a look at corruption reportedly thriving for eight months or more, even with about 20 US civilian advisers working with Iraqi defence chiefs. “There is no reconstruction, no weapons, nothing,” said Iraqi Lieutenant General Abdul Aziz al-Yaseri, who worked at the height of the alleged corruption at the Ministry of Defence. ‘There are not even real contracts. They just signed papers and took the money.[26]’

General Petraeus, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces, held weekly briefings with the Minister of Defence. Other Iraqi defence officials were rarely spotted without US civilian advisers around. The close relationship raises questions about how $ 500 million or more could disappear without US intervention to stop the suspicious contracts that ran for at least eight months.

A $ 75 million contract to Parsons to build a new Baghdad Police College should have become “the most essential civil security project in the country”, according to SIGIR, but after new recruits arrived in May 2006, cadets protested against the unbearable circumstances. Inspectors found that toilets overflowed into living areas, foundations sank and floors rose. Engineers eventually decided that the work was so seriously flawed that several of the newly constructed buildings had to be demolished and completely rebuilt. Dozens of other ‘security’ projects, such as police stations, prisons and army barracks, have also failed spectacularly.[27]

When funds for ‘security’ programs were increased, Iraqi politicians and government ministers demanded DFI funds for their own projects. A consortium affiliated with Pentagon favourite Ahmed Chalabi was initially awarded a $ 327 million contract in January 2004 for the supply of weapons, trucks, uniforms and other equipment, but the items apparently never arrived. General Hazem Shaalan, Secretary of Defence in the interim government, was awarded $ 1.3 billion for new tanks, helicopters, and armoured vehicles, as well as rifles, body armour and helmets. Subsequent investigations showed extensive corruption. Cash was transferred through intermediaries and secret accounts. Little records were kept.

British company Zeroline won a $ 8.48 million contract for 51 armoured vehicles for the Iraqi government in late 2003. Two other companies, APTx and Alchemy Technology, were also involved. The vehicles were contracted out to be built in Russia. Although the main contract was paid in full at the end of 2004, using DFI funds, the vehicles were never delivered.

On May 16, 2005, Iraqi warrants were issued for the arrest of former Defence Secretary Shaalan, the head of procurement, Ziad Cattan, and several others at the Ministry of Defence, based on findings of the Iraqi Supreme Audit Board. But Shaalan had already fled to London and Amman by then. A number of other accused ministers had also left the country. Judge Radhi al-Radhi, the official who investigated the corruption, told a journalist: “We have US experts in the Department of Defence. Why didn’t they act when they saw such violations?”[28]

The Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction

The US government has spent large sums of money on “reconstruction” in Iraq. In 2003, Congress voted approximately $ 21 billion to create the Iraq Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Fund (IRRF). The US also established the Iraq Security Forces Fund (ISFF), funded by the Department of Defence, for a total of $ 11 billion. Programs such as the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) added another $ 6 billion, bringing the total to $ 38 billion. From the outset, US authorities have blurred the distinction between spending on rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and spending on military programs. Most of the money originally approved was spent on the security sector.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction (SIGIR), had controlled the IRRF since October 2004. Bowen had mandatory access to financial data and was mandated to eradicate corruption. He was a protégé of President Bush, but Bowen became more critical of the White House as time went by. With a staff of 55 auditors, inspectors and investigators in 2006, he disclosed contract scandals, made incriminating statements in Congress on several occasions and referred cases to the courts for criminal prosecution. The Bush administration attempted (unsuccessfully) to close Bowen’s office in the fall of 2006. It seems tempting to view the inspector general as an undaunted advocate of a fair government. In fact, Bowen had to work within a carefully limited mandate and under heavy political pressure. Despite many achievements, he has not called the greatest war profiteers to account. Nor has he investigated the role of senior officials in the Bush administration or discovered scandals in the shadowy “security sector” spending.

The stolen and squandered “reconstruction” funds

About $ 40 billion from a post-Gulf War fund that Iraq maintained to protect the country from foreign claims have been “missing,” the Iraqi parliament speaker said on February 24, 2011. In a letter to the UN in May 2011, the Iraqi parliamentary committee of Integrity (COI) wrote: “There is evidence that US occupation authorities have stolen reconstruction funds from the people of Iraq or misappropriated through corruption, totalling $ 17 billion.” The Iraqi parliament described this loss of funds as ‘financial crime’.[29]

An Iraqi government watchdog agency, the Board of Supreme Audit, noted in 2012 that $ 800 million in profits from illicit activities was being transferred out of Iraq each week, effectively stripping $ 40 billion annually from the economy, according to Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) Stuart Bowen’s final report on the U.S. occupation.[30]

An estimate in the report of the Commission for Wartime Contracting on February 24, 2011 stated that fraud losses could amount to $ 12 billion in both war zones alone (Iraq and Afghanistan).

And when the US withdrew from Iraq, hundreds of abandoned or unfinished projects were left behind. SIGIR wrote in the March 2013 report that the United States Department of Defence was unable to properly account for at least $ 8.7 billion, “lost through fraud, waste and abuse”. 96 percent of $ 9 billion is missing. It is interesting to note that this money is not “aid” at all, but comes from the sale of Iraqi oil and gas, and from frozen funds and proceeds from Saddam Hussein’s fixed assets.

The Development Fund for Iraq

On May 22, 2003, just three months after the invasion, the UN Security Council established the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) to manage Iraq’s future oil revenues, as well as the remaining funds from the Oil-for- Food bill of the UN. The fund was turned over to the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The Security Council demanded that the money be “managed in a transparent manner” to “meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people”. That’s why they created the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) to oversee the Fund.

On the same day that the CPA was created by UNSCR 1483, Bush signed Executive Order 13303, which prohibited any ‘attachment, judgement, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process’ with respect to the Central Bank of Iraq-Development Fund for Iraq and all Iraqi petroleum, proceeds from the sale of petroleum, or any interests in Iraqi petroleum held by the US government or any national of the United States. This executive order granted immunity from prosecution for the theft or embezzlement of oil revenue, or incidentally, from any safety or environmental violations that might be committed in the course of producing Iraqi oil. Two months later, in June 2003, Paul Bremer issued CPA Order 17. This guaranteed that members of the coalition military forces, the CPA, foreign missions and contractors—and their personnel—would remain immune from the Iraqi legal process. This carte blanche provision of immunity was extended again in June 2004.[31]

Initially, the CPA completely controlled the fund. In just 13 months, CPA officials spent $ 19.6 billion – more than 90% of all DFI resources then available.

When the CPA was finally dissolved on June 28, 2004, management of the Development Fund for Iraq passed to the Iraqi Interim Government (IGC) and its successors. DFI spending then became even less transparent. The Iraqi Ministry of Finance only established an administrative unit for the DFI in February 2005, but at the end of 2006 it was still not possible to properly monitor DFI funds. At every stage, American advisers had significant and even decisive influence within the Treasury and Iraqi ministries.

Blocking and weakening the UN Supervisory Board

The International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) appeared to be a solid instrument of accountability. But the US cowboys have done everything they could to block and weaken the authority of the Board. Board members: the World Bank, the IMF, the Arab Development Bank and the United Nations had to negotiate the terms of reference with the CPA. Washington’s demands caused diplomatic bickering and delays for months. Although the parties finally agreed on the rules of the game in October 2003, the board did not hold its first meeting until December and did not sign an audit contract until April 2004. Ten months had passed and surveillance hadn’t even started yet.

Because of the boycott operations of the US, the Administration was not given access to financial documents (albeit mandatory). It had only limited investigative powers and no accountability or prosecution powers. Furthermore, the board never had a permanent full-time staff and its budget was so inadequate that it could do little more than hire accountants. The board “monitored” the oil sales and the inflow and outflow of money from the DFI, but could not guarantee liability. “We have no authority to require actions arising from our work,” said IAMB Chairman Jean-Pierre Halbwachs at a press conference in late 2005.[32] Another member acknowledged that the Council was not established to detect fraud and that the Council has not yet seen a single case of fraud.

When the IAMB audit team finally arrived in Baghdad in the spring of 2004, it received an frosty reception. Auditors tried for weeks to go to the “Green Zone”, where all CPA documents were kept. They had the greatest difficulty accessing CPA and Ministry data. When audits and accounts were eventually turned over, they were heavily censored and virtually useless. The board of directors could not issue its first audit report until mid-July – fourteen months after the oversight process was first approved by the UN. By then the CPA had already been disbanded.

The Council has repeatedly complained that the US and Iraqi authorities did not keep sufficient records, that basic money transfers could not be accounted for and that the authorities did not cooperate. The Council has also complained about erroneous bidding procedures, dubious work permits, and in particular the sale of oil without metering. Iraq Revenue Watch, a US-based NGO, has been monitoring this process and reporting its findings to the press. But the Security Council turned a blind eye and failed to take corrective action to protect “the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people”.

Airfreight of dollar bills

The occupiers were also lax in their management and supervision of Iraq’s oil revenues. Using a highly irregular and corruption prone method, Bremer and the CPA took a total of US $ 12 billion in the form of US notes from the DFI account in the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The money was then flown to Baghdad aboard US Air Force C-130 Hercules cargo planes, for alleged expenses on “reconstruction”, as well as “administration” and “miscellaneous services”.[33]

Cash outgoings on this scale are obviously difficult to verify and make verification nearly impossible. The CPA could have set up control systems through the right bank channels. Instead, the CPA steadily increased its payouts in currencies. In the last week the CPA was in power, officials ordered more than $ 4 billion in banknotes to be shipped from New York to Baghdad for last-minute issues. On June 24, 2004, a $ 2.4 billion airlift was the largest cash distribution in the history of the US Federal Reserve.

Over the course of thirteen months between May 2003 and June 2004, these currency shipments amounted to 363 tons in newly printed banknotes, with 281 million individual banknotes. Frank Willis, a former senior CPA official, commented that, “Iraq is drowning in cash – in dollar bills. Stacks and piles of money. We played soccer with some of the $ 100 bills for delivery. A crazy wild west. atmosphere, something none of us has ever experienced.”[34]

After the cash arrived in Baghdad, the CPA kept little track of who was being paid, much less what the money was to be used for. While the CPA’s own regulations required government accounts to “ensure that the Fund [DFI] is managed and used in a transparent manner,” an investigation later revealed that the small San Diego company hired for this purpose had no idea had never seen the CPA’s financial records or performed audits.

The CPA had to stockpile large amounts of cash, an invitation to theft, without secure safes, and without established procedures for using the money. Paul Bremer kept a coffers of nearly $ 600 million for which there was little or no administration. $ 200 million was reportedly kept in a single room in Saddam’s former Republican palace in the green zone where Bremer’s office was located.

Audits found that a “contracting officer kept about $ 2 million in cash in a safe in his bathroom” and “a stockbroker kept about $ 678,000 in cash in an unlocked locker.” An IAMB report notes that in one case $ 774,300 was stolen from a division’s safe. One contractor received a payment of $ 2 million in a plastic bag filled with shrink-wrapped bundles of dollars and one official received $ 6.75 million in cash and ordered to spend in one week. before the Iraqi interim government took control.

US authorities distributed millions of dollars in cash to local communities across the country to create “goodwill.” CPA officials handed piles of $ 100 bills to local leaders whose support they wanted and whose information they needed. $ 100,000 in cash allocated to a women’s centre in al-Hillah was turned over to a local dignitary who used it to fund his election campaign. In addition to unaccounted for direct expenditure, the CPA transferred $ 8.8 billion to Iraqi ministries during this period, an amount for which the expenditure could never be truly accounted for.

Congressman Henry Waxman’s investigation into the currency transfer ended in June 2004 with the closure of the CPA. After that, nobody investigated what happened with the money. Worse, when asked whether dollar-billed planes were still crossing the Atlantic, an IAMB spokesman claimed in early 2007 that the board “doesn’t know” if that was the case. However, there appear to have been shipments of US currency afterwards. A SIGIR audit in March 2006 found $ 7.2 million in cash – mostly in $ 100 bills – at a US military command post in Falluja.

Failed reconstruction by the major construction firms

Primary health centres should have been a key element of the health sector program, bringing medical services to Iraq’s cities and urban neighbourhoods. In March 2004, the Parsons Corporation received a $ 253 million contract to build 150 local clinics. Two years later, only five of the clinics had been completed, while $ 186 million of the budget had already been spent. The Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for oversight, was aware of the shortcomings and did nothing.

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has ceased working with Parsons because a dozen other Parsons projects had also been poorly implemented, including prisons, fire stations. . . and meters at the Basra Oil Terminal.

The Army Corps of Engineers was the wrong entity to handle oil contracts. Bunnatine Greenhouse, highest-ranking Army Corps civilian, on 27 June 2005: “When I did gain access to some of the high level planning meetings related to the implementation of the Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO) contract I sensed that the entire contracting process had gone haywire. I immediately questioned whether the Corps had the legal authority to function as the Army’s delegated contracting authority. The Corps had absolutely no competencies related to oil production. Restoration of oil production was simply outside of the scope of our congressionally mandated mission. How then, I asked, could executive agency authority for the RIO contract be delegated to the USACE? I openly raised this concern with high level officials of the Department of Defence, the Department of the Army and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I specifically explained that the scope of the RIO contract was outside our mission competencies such that congressional authority had to be obtained before the Corps could properly be delegated contracting authority over the RIO contract. Exactly why USACE was selected remains a mystery to me. I note that no aspect of the contracting work related to restoring the oil fields following the 1991 Persian Gulf War was undertaken by the USACE, and there was no reason why USACE should take over that function for the prosecution of the Iraq War.”[35]

Halliburton won a $ 2.4 billion contract without a bid to upgrade oilfield facilities to boost exports and generate more revenue. But the company screwed up the work. At a water injection facility in Qarmat Ali, near Basra, powerful new pumps burst open the obsolete pipes and the pumps themselves failed briefly. The factory operated so badly that Iraq’s southern oil fields were seriously damaged.

The Al-Fatah pipeline was another Halliburton oil project. North of Baghdad, the pipeline crossed the Tigris River on a bridge that was badly damaged in the US bombing in 2003. Halliburton subsidiary KBR had to restore the pipeline. But instead of repairing the bridge, an estimated $ 5 million job, the company insisted on drilling a tunnel under the river, requiring a budget of $ 75 million. Business engineers ignored warnings about unstable soil and rock formations. After wasting the entire budget, the company has stopped work and left the project unfinished.

Many of the major contracts suffered from serious shortcomings. Judging from the end results, the work has delivered surprisingly little lasting benefit to the Iraqis.

When Paul Bremer and his CPA team handed out their hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, smaller companies and individuals – not Iraqis – saw their opportunities for rapid enrichment clear.

Since December 2003, the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) had held nineteen oversight hearings on waste, fraud, and corruption in Iraq. Over the course of these hearings, the DPC listened to numerous witnesses, including former employees of the Department of Defence, the State Department, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Iraqi Government, Halliburton/KBR, and other American contractors in Iraq. The special report from August 13, 2009 revealed a disturbing pattern of abuse and mismanagement by the Department of Defence, the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the Iraqi government:

“In a report that has never been made public, the Iraqi Council of Supreme Audit (BSA) revealed that it could not properly account for more than $13 billion in American reconstruction funds. During their audit of American reconstruction contracts, BSA officials uncovered “ghost projects” that never existed, projects that the Iraqi government deemed unnecessary, and work that was either not performed at all or done in a shoddy manner by both American and Iraqi contractors.” (Salam Adhoob, former Chief Investigator, Commission on Public Integrity (Baghdad), Government of Iraq, 9/22/2008)

“I attended meetings in 2005 and 2006 between U.S. government officials, the Iraqi Minister of Justice and his Deputy, and representatives of the Parsons Corporation to discuss the Kahn Bani Sa’ad prison project. During one of the meetings, the Minister of Justice clearly stated that the government of Iraq did not want the prison to be built because, among other reasons, it was too close to the Iranian border. The U.S. government officials — in front of the American contractor — said that the prison was going to be built anyway, despite the opposition of the Iraqi government. Even now, four years and $40 million dollars later, roofs are missing, floors have collapsed, there is no plumbing or electricity, windows have not been installed, and roads in the complex remain unpaved.” (Testimony of Anonymous Witness, Former Senior Advisor to the U.S. Government in Iraq, 9/22/2008)

“Based on the cases that I have personally investigated, I believe that at least $18 billion have been lost in Iraq through corruption and waste — more than half of which was American taxpayer money. Of this $18 billion, I believe at least $4 billion have been lost due to corruption and criminal acts in the Ministry of Defense alone.” (Salam Adhoob, former Chief Investigator, Commission on Public Integrity in Baghdad, Government of Iraq, 9/22/2008)

“The abuse I observed called into question the independence of the [Army Corps of Engineers] contracting process. I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career.” (Bunnatine Greenhouse)

“In the 11 months that I served in Iraq, the Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT) was under-staffed for its mission and had NO operating budget. In fact, the proposed staffing of OAT was cut from 25 staff to 6 without knowledge or input from OAT staff, or any other known oversight. There was no transparency even within the office of transparency. Our job was to implement U.S. policy, but whenever we tried, our own officials blocked us.” (James Mattil, former Chief of Staff at the Department of State’s Office of Accountability and Transparency, 5/12/2008)[36]

The Cost of “Security”

Billions of dollars in reconstruction funds were lost by spending the money on “security.” As resistance to the occupation grew, millions of dollars were wasted protecting construction sites, bodyguards for VIPs, protecting building materials en route to the site, expensive armoured vehicles, and other ways to cope with a violent and unstable environment. Private security guards cost as much as $ 1,000 a day, and security firms charged heavy premiums for this type of work.

Beginning in the fall of 2004, Washington decided to cut spending on rebuilding. More than $ 5 billion of the total $ 21 billion has been “reprogrammed” into security. Nearly $ 2 billion for the water treatment and sewage sector was cut, halving this program, while cutting more than $ 1 billion from the failing electricity sector. Most of that money flowed to Iraq’s new military, command and police units through programs of training, weapons and other types of direct support, as well as programs for prisons, training camps and logistics.

Even more serious, the “security sector” budgets were channelled to irregular security forces and abuse in Iraqi prisons. When Washington allocated funds for the US reconstruction program to “security,” the largest sum – $ 1.4 billion – went to Interior Department projects, notorious for its dark covert operations, death squad activities, and other serious violations of human rights.

These monies paid for equipment, transportation, training, operations and “support” of unspecified troops. Reports have suggested that these funds, like the British monies, supported units involved in violent activity, such as the Special Police Commandos. The US Institute of Peace released a report that concluded that the Department of the Interior’s National Police “is a patchwork quilt of commando-style anti-riot units housing sectarian death squads.” Reconstruction Funds worth $ 73 million were also allocated to the Department of prisons, although the Department was responsible for notorious cases of prisoner abuse.

Ousted Minister of Electricity Defends Himself

If you want to play the game correctly, you will be fired ! That is the consequence of stepping into a corrupt political process.

In August 2011, the ex-Minster of Electricity of Iraq, ousted on allegations of corruption denied the charges and told the Iraqi parliament that his dismissal had nothing to do with corruption, but because he touched “taboos” by cancelling lavish investor contracts of more than $12 billion and replaced them with public sector projects that cost no more than $800 million. He said that he touched an even bigger “sacred taboo” by opening large economic relations with Iran and eastern countries like China to replace expensive similar western projects which would cost roughly two times as much.

In his struggle, ex-minister Raád Shallal Al Ani collided with and revealed an American banking system inserted in Iraq that would dictate on the Iraqi government which countries to deal economically with and which not.[37] Although he is a practicing religious Sunni, he considered only what is economically in the interest of his country and insisted on opening Iraqi economy on Iran. All of this caused serious anger from too much too powerful interests, and he was charged in a “corruption” case, proving that there was no money involved! The government, unable to prove corruption, turned into a set of other allegations of “weak accomplishment”, then “ignoring the instructions of the PM”, etc.

Here is the part of his revealing speech on his collusion with investors and the American Banking system in Iraq:

• “When I took charge of the ministry of Electricity, there was a project for four stations for “investors”, we should give them the machines and they would build the power stations, and then sell us electricity. I made my calculations and found that it cost the state $ 500 million per year, for a period of 25 years, and found that we only need 400 million for two years to get the same result, so I rejected it! I reclaimed 12 billion from investors for the people, that is the first reason for the fuzz.
• The second reason for the media fuzz is that when I came to the ministry, there were ongoing negotiations with Siemens for two years to install generators we had bought, to the Rumaila and Baiji plants, Sadr, Taza and Dibis. The last offer of Siemens would cost Iraq about $ 2 billion. So I stopped the negotiations with Siemens after two weeks, and succeeded in getting offers from Hyundai, Iran, and Orascom that would cost us less than a billion dollars. In this contract alone, we spared $1 billion for Iraq. So it has nothing to do with fake contracts and companies, it has to do with billions that are cut from investors and international companies, and they didn’t like it.
• The third reason for the fuzz is that I broke through the barrier of one of the biggest taboos, and that is openness on Iran. There is no solution to the problem of electricity without opening to Iran, and Iran is ready. They provide us with electricity for less than the international market price and kerosene oil for less than the market price, and they are ready to provide us with liquid gas for less than the market price. We owe them now $ 300 million for the price of electricity that we bought from them and they wait patiently for us to pay!
• The (TBI) (Trade Bank of Iraq) is choking the Iraqi economy. We are not allowed to transfer money to other countries but through the TBI. No letter of credit can be issued above the $ 3 million limit, without the consent of the TBI. I have objected to this officially.

The reason for this is that the corresponding bank of TBI is the US bank “JP Morgan” and it follows the American Administration laws and sanctions. This means that when a country is subject to US sanctions, we are obliged to also sanction it automatically, as happens now in the sanctions against Iranian banks, issued by the U.S. Administration, and Iraq is forced to join whether we want or not. We have now a $ 300 million debt to Iran and we cannot make the transfer!

I have written on this subject to the government and I said that we are obliged to conform to the decisions of the Security Council resolutions, not the U.S. administration, but it seems that these subjects are taboos for us!

These are the reasons why I am dismissed, because big companies and political decisions forbid to break the taboo. Iraq is not a free country.

I came today to explain to my children that their father led a clean life, and tell them to raise their heads high, and that I am committed to what I promised them not to feed them from stolen money, because the body that grows by theft, is due to go to hell.”

Corruption is at such a level that state funds are simply diverted to foreign companies, which are in the hands of Iraqi officials, while unemployment is (officially) between 25 and 40 percent. Inability to ensure an adequate electricity supply has sparked much popular protests in the post-Saddam era. Still, the Ministry of Electricity has managed to agree to pay $ 1.3 billion to a bankrupt German company and a non-existent Canadian company to rebuild the electricity. The government budget is mainly spent on the purchase of weaponry from the US and on salaries and pensions, especially for people associated with the parties in power.

No accountability

After many years of massive corruption in Iraq, surprisingly little accountability has been given for the atrocities. The IAMB, established by the UN, has not prosecuted any case of fraud, theft or corruption in relation to the Development Fund for Iraq, nor has it investigated whether the Fund, as specified by the Security Council, was meant “to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people”. Under heavy pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom, the Security Council has not addressed this serious failure, nor has it sought better means to enforce the Council’s own mandate.

The US Special Inspector General has been much more active. As of December 31, 2006, he had performed 85 detailed contract inspections, as well as many audits and investigations. He has uncovered and publicized numerous cases of corruption and, as of May 1, 2007, had referred 28 cases to the United States Department of Justice for prosecution, of which resulted in 10 arrests and 5 convictions.

The Iraqi government has established several anti-corruption agencies, including the Commission on Public Integrity, the Board of Supreme Audit, Ministerial Inspector Generals, and the Iraqi Joint Anti-Corruption Council. But they have not been able to turn the tide of increasing corruption, nor have they been able to punish corrupt practices by US or other foreign contractors.

No director of US war profiteers, such as Halliburton or Parsons, has been convicted, tried, charged, or even investigated by any supervisory body, and no serious fine has been imposed on any of the companies, even though their contract failures and misrepresentation were blatant and systematic.

No high-level US or military official has been charged with blatantly negligent surveillance and any other act that has led to mass corruption. Nor has anyone been held accountable for the failure to ensure proper oversight in Iraqi ministries – despite hundreds of US advisers serving in the ministries.

Washington has used every possible means to minimize the theft and fraud. The US and UK have severely cut the IAMB and the SIGIR mandate has not touched on many of the key issues. No wonder, then, that so few were called to account and that Iraq was second on the list of the world’s most corrupt nations during the occupation, behind Haiti.

Corruption of the Iraqi government

Iraq’s main anti-corruption law is the Accountability Act, which criminalizes active and passive bribery, attempted corruption, extortion, money laundering and abuse of office. However, the government does not implement anti-corruption laws effectively, and officials engaged in corruption with impunity.

On May 18, 2009, the BBC noted that a recent report by the Iraqi Commission Against Corruption, the culmination of its investigation of some 12,000 complaints of government corruption, indicated that among the most blatant offenders – in no particular order – the ministries of Defence, Interior, Finance, Education and Healthcare were involved.

A combination of ghost soldiers, the leaking of intelligence by corrupt Iraqi security officials, and the extortion of civilian populations has led to significant territory losses to ISIS in 2014. In 2016, Hoshyar Zebari, the former Finance Minister of Iraq, estimated that there were 30,000 ghost soldiers in the Iraqi army and that corrupt officers are pocketing their salaries[38]. A survey of people in the Mosul region, led by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and published in June 2020, found that they saw corruption as a chief cause of the emergence of ISIS.[39]

Electronic Iraq underlined that “hundreds of health, education and infrastructure projects have been delayed due to corruption and oil smuggling. Education and health projects are the most affected as hundreds of schools are in dire need of repair and hospitals are facing equipment shortages. and medicines.”[40]

According to a 2007 classified report on behalf of the United States Congress[41], reviewing the work (or attempted) of the Commission on Public Integrity (CPI), but also according to other anti-corruption departments within the Iraqi government, the Maliki government was “incapable of even the most rudimentary enforcement of laws against corruption”. Even worse, the report noted, was that Maliki’s cabinet has always hindered investigations into fraud and crime within the government. In addition, the report concluded that corruption “is the norm in many ministries.”

The report described the Iraqi government as steeped in corruption and crime, and corruption investigators could hardly do anything about it. Employees of the US State Dept. testified in May 2008 that the US “allowed corruption to proliferate at the highest levels of the Iraqi government,” leading to the loss of billions of US dollars in taxpayers’ money.

Officials have been known to demand bribes of up to tens of thousands of dollars to issue government contracts or even just sign a public document[42]. Also to arrange a lucrative position for a friend or family member. “Political parties refuse to leave the cabinet because they will no longer be able to dig into the treasury,” a senior member of the ruling coalition told AFP on 24 November 2019.

Many cabinet appointments, directors general in ministries and embassy personnel are relatives of Moqtada Sadr and Hadi Al-Ameri, the head of the Badr organization, the military wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the two largest parties in the Iraqi Parliament.

Amid the anticipated cabinet reshuffle, positions are already being ‘bought’, a senior Iraqi official said. “A political party is assigned a specific ministry and then sells that ministerial position to the highest bidder,” he described a transaction worth $ 20 million. It is a well-known script: the candidate pays the party for the position and then tries to appropriate as much public money as possible, with which the debt can be paid off. The system is so deeply ingrained, observers say, that there is little any Iraqi prime minister can do to stop it.[43]

Article 136(b) of the Iraqi Criminal Procedure Code allows ministers to shield ministry officials from work-related prosecution for corrupt acts. The Commission of Integrity did not publish any names of government officials involved in corruption in its 2016 semi-annual report. However, the commission investigated 13,226 corruption cases, of which 7,088 cases were adjudicated, while 1,891 were referred to the courts. Six ministers and 99 director general-level officials were involved in six of the corruption cases referred to the courts.[44]

Corruption and impunity are considered as serious problems within Iraq’s security apparatus and investigations or prosecutions of abuses and corruption of security forces are not publicly available. Corruption within the security apparatus is cited as one of the main reasons contributing to the security challenges the country is facing today.[45]

In September 2019, the Iraqi government had to shut down the nation’s border crossing with Mandali, Iran because of corruption. All of the employees at the location were transferred to different border crossings. An armed group had commandeered the crossing, which generates about 600,000,000 dinars of revenue a month[46].

In a widely published corruption case, several Iraqi high-ranking officials including senior officials at the oil ministry, such as ex-oil minister Hussein al-Shahristani, have been accused of receiving bribes from large corporations in return for winning business. Following an investigative report published in 2016 by several large media outlets including Fairfax Media, the Huffington Post, and The Age it was revealed that the Monaco-Based company Unaoil had allegedly served as an intermediary between large oil companies such as British Rolls-Royce, US giant Halliburton, Australia’s Leighton Holdings and Korea’s Samsung and Hyundai to win USD billions of government contracts in Iraq.[47]

In September 2020 the general manager of the Agricultural Bank, Adel Khudair, and 12 of his employees were arrested. Investigations linked him to the disappearance of huge sums of money in what is known as the “agricultural initiative” which dates back to the era of Nuri al-Maliki. Maliki took advantage of the simultaneous rise in oil prices and the increase in Iraq’s production of oil during his reign to obtain huge budgets, but despite this, his government achieved nothing and left behind the largest files of corruption and waste of public money. Maliki’s name appeared in another corruption case: a giant water project in Baghdad, having cost millions of dollars but has not been completed.

In the same month Iraqi authorities have carried out several arrests against high ranking officials accused of corruption. Bahaa Abdul-Hussein, director of Key Card, a company that was contracted to facilitate the payment of retirement pensions, was arrested at Baghdad Airport before he could flee. Saadi made confessions that led to the discovery of a wide network of money laundering, used by officials, politicians and parties, and relying on collaborators in Beirut. Abdul has strong ties to former officials and current leaders. The sources indicated that Abdel-Hussein’s arrest may lead to the arrest of other personalities and the recovery of embezzled funds at home and abroad.[48]

Corruption and poor governance were also seen as limiting factors for women in finding employment. Although this takes place in all sectors, this is particularly acute in the public sector, which is women’s preferred employer because of the economic benefits, fewer hours and better protection of rights. The patronage system affects both men and women, however because men have more social capital and therefore ability to network, it has a greater effect on women.[49]

Of course, Iraq is not the only corrupt country in the region. Most oil states in the Middle East and elsewhere use oil revenues to fund large arms purchases and other megalomaniac projects, and corruption is widespread. But while bribery is ubiquitous in Iraqi Kurdistan, roads, airports, bridges, power plants and houses are still being built there, while in Baghdad no infrastructure works are taking place or houses are being built.

There are few banks and they are still openly looted by government officials. The Trade Bank of Iraq (TBI) is also choking the Iraqi economy. Money can only be transferred to other countries through the TBI. The TBI is headed by the corrupt Ahmed Chalabi, and the US bank JP Morgan manages all of the TBI’s money transfers.

More than 3,124 diplomas were forged, according to Education Minister Mohammad Iqbal in 2015. But Iraqi Newspaper Azzaman reported already on 8 October 2011 that more than 30,000 Iraqi civil servants, among them high-level officials, had obtained their jobs on fake certificates and degrees, according to the parliamentary commission on integrity and transparency.[50]

Politicians never keep their promises. Restoration and improvement projects are promised, but scrapped before the ink has dried up and the money allocated disappears into corrupt pockets. Oil, which accounts for more than 90% of government revenues, is also the main raw material in the black market. Criminal networks, including oil ministry personnel, high-ranking political and religious figures, are reportedly involved in the corruption, in partnership with mafia networks and criminal gangs that smuggle oil and generate huge profits.

As the costs of fighting IS and the fall in oil prices have put a lot of pressure on an already troubled economy, rampant corruption is causing increasingly serious problems in Iraq. On August 11, 2016, Iraq signed an agreement with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help fight the endemic corruption that has paralyzed the country’s economy and institutions. The UNDP will seek to increase the Iraqi government’s capacity to detect and prosecute corruption. So far no substantial progress has been seen from this collaboration. On 9 December 2020 the UNDP and the Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office have reaffirmed their partnership by signing a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) designed to promote transparency, accountability and integrity in the public and private sectors.[51]

The Iraqi government has so far done little to restore the devastated cities of its largely Sunni population after the fight against ISIS. It has done little to bring about any other form of ethnic or sectarian unity, and far too much of its ‘oil wealth’ is consumed by its politicians, civil servants and a government sector that is one of the most paid and least productive in the developing world.

Whistleblowers risk retaliation, abuse, and even imprisonment for reporting fraud

“Under the False Claims Act, the Attorney General is supposed to join with whistleblowers to prosecute and punish war profiteers. The sad truth is that the Bush administration has not even tried to do this, on the contrary, it’s done all it could to prevent this”, Alan Grayson, attorney for whistleblowers, stated at the DPC Hearing 09/21/2007.

The Iraqi Council of Supreme Audit (BSA) reported dozens of deaths among its staff, while other employees were deterred from going to work over threats of violence against them or their families.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) reported in 2011 that parliamentary assistants, judges, lawyers, and other members of the judiciary involved in criminal and fraud cases, along with their family members, were targeted for murder and kidnapping. According to the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council, 38 judges had been murdered since 2003.

In 2007, Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, head of the Commission of Public Integrity (CPI) conducted up to 3,000 investigations into departmental corruption and missing funds amounting to $ 18 billion, although only 241 cases were brought to trial against junior officials. He identified the government’s contracting process as ‘the father of all corruption issues’[52]. Radhi quit his job after an attack on his home. His successor, Judge Mousa Faraj, continued his predecessor’s investigations, aided by US anti-corruption officials. In violation of the constitution, the Maliki government replaced Faraj with Judge Raheem Hasan al-Ugaili in January 2008.

In mid-2011, al-Ugaili reported that the CPI was “struggling with pressure from politicians and tribes” and that “corrupt influences … and that political parties try to corrupt CPI  investigators as a method to cripple their research, or use the staff as a tool against their political opponents.”

Ugaili resigned in protest just weeks after the publication of his report, after the CPI and BSA discovered widespread corruption and money laundering practices among political parties, officials and high-ranking bureaucrats and politicians in the Ministry of Defence and the Prime Minister’s Office.[53] A 2012 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) noted that 413 corruption cases were halted in the first three months of 2011 alone.

The October 2007 report of the Special Inspector General on Iraqi Reconstruction reported that “more than 30 staffers of the CPI (Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, the anti-corruption agency) have been murdered since 2003”. Targeted murders followed afterwards. The most recent murders of a staff member took place in Kirkuk on September 16, 2014 and October 18, 2015, when Ibrahim Jihad Hamad and Faeez Abdul Wahid were shot.

Iraq’s last Chairman of the Integrity Commission, Judge Ezzat Tawfiq, was killed in a car crash in March 2019. Although the car crash was officially categorized as an accident, some Iraqis were quick to question whether foul play was involved given the influence and power of the commission’s adversaries[54].

The following excerpts from a damning CPI report, quoted in an article in the US magazine The Nation, proved the unsustainable state of affairs in Iraq’s “thriving democracy”:

(…) Actions against corruption in the Department of Education have been particularly ineffective ….

“According to the study, several ministries are ‘so firmly in the hands of criminal gangs and militias “that it is impossible for investigators into corruption’ to work [there] given the absence of tactical [security] forces for protection of the researcher.”

(…) Maliki’s cabinet is part of the problem, the report said:” The Prime Minister has shown openly hostility to independent corruption investigations. His government has withheld operational resources from the CPI, the report said, and “there are a number of clear cases where governmental and political pressure have been used to change the results of investigations and prosecutions in favour of members of the Shia alliance” – which includes Maliki’s Dawa party.

(…) Maliki has also protected corrupt officials by reintroducing a law that prevents the prosecution of an official without the consent of the minister of the relevant agency.

(…) In another note obtained by The Nation – marked “Confidential and Secret” – in early 2007[55], Maliki’s cabinet ordered the Commission on Public Integrity not to send any case to a judge regarding the president of Iraq, the Prime Minister of Iraq, or any current or past minister without Maliki’s prior consent. According to the US embassy’s report on anti-corruption efforts, the government’s hostility to the CPI went so far as to lead visitors to a pornographic site for a time through the CPI link on the official Iraqi government website.

(…) CPI staffers were “accosted by armed militias within ministerial headquarters and denied access to officials and the administration.” They and their families are systematically threatened. Some sleep in their office in the Green Zone. In December 2006, a sniper fired three shots from the roof of an Iraqi government building in the Green Zone at CPI headquarters. Twelve CPI personnel were killed on the job.

Iraqi Militias Embrace Corruption

The first demand in the largest mass protests experienced by Iraq in October 2019 was to fight official corruption. But, anxious to protect the interests of the system of corrupt religious and sectarian parties, the government of former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, unleashed Iraqi militias, affiliated with Iran, on the peaceful protesters and killed +700 protesters and wounded + 20,000 more.

The militia leaders have joined the ranks of Iraq’s richest men, becoming famous for buying upscale restaurants, nightclubs and opulent farms on the Tigris.

Robert F. Worth reported in the New York Times on July 29, 2020: “The militias have been aided and abetted by a new Iraqi political class whose sole ethic is self-enrichment. Over the years, this cross-sectarian cabal has mastered scams at every level: routine checkpoint shakedowns, bank fraud, embezzling from the government payroll. Adel Abdul Mahdi, who was hailed as a potential reformer when he became Iraq’s prime minister in 2018, hoped to subordinate the militias to the state. Instead, they outmanoeuvred and overpowered him. His cabinet included people with ties to some of the worst graft schemes afflicting the country.

The United States is deeply implicated in all this, and not just because its serial invasions wrecked the country and helped ravage the economy. America provides the money that sustains it, even as U.S. officials wink at the self-dealing of Iraqi allies. The Federal Reserve of New York still supplies Iraq with at least $10 billion a year in hard currency from the country’s oil sales. Much of that is passed on to commercial banks, ostensibly for imports, in a process that was hijacked long ago by Iraq’s money-laundering cartels. At the same time, the United States inflicts punishing sanctions on two countries — Iran and Syria — with which Iraq shares notoriously permeable borders. It is the ideal breeding ground for corruption.”[56]

On September 3, 2009, the New York Times reported that a gang of robbers tied up eight guards in the Zuwiya branch of the Rafidain bank in Baghdad and shot them on the spot with muffled guns. They ran off with at least two full wagons of cash worth $ 4.3 million dollars. They didn’t have to worry about the police, because in that area they were the police themselves. Among them were several bodyguards of Adel Abdul Mahdi, who was the Prime Minister of Iraq from October 2018 until May 2020, he was Vice President of Iraq from 2005 to 2011 and served as Finance Minister in the Interim Government and Oil Minister from 2014 to 2016 .

World Bank Assessment of Iraq

In 1996, the World Bank established its Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), which have become the standard by which to measure government management in developing countries. The WGI consists of six indicators of governance dimensions used in more than 200 countries since 1996: voting rights and accountability, political stability and absence of violence / terrorism, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and corruption control.

• Voting Rights and Accountability: The extent to which the citizens of a country can participate in the selection of their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association and free media. This is Iraq’s best-performing governance indicator and reflects the formal freedoms and rights constitutionally guaranteed, as well as the electoral process. Nevertheless, Iraq was in the lowest category worldwide in 2018.
• Political Stability and Absence of Violence: The perception of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including domestic violence and terrorism. Here, Iraq’s performance is among the lowest in the world, ranked in the lowest percentile category in 2018.
• Government effectiveness: the quality of public services, the quality of public service and the degree of independence from political pressure, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies. Iraq was in the lowest category in 2018.
• Regulatory Quality: The government’s ability to provide sound policies and regulations that enable and promote private sector development. Iraq also scored here in the lowest category in 2018.
• Rule of law: adhere to the rules of society, including the quality of contract enforcement and property rights, the police and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence. Iraq’s performance is even worse in this case, in the lowest category of 3 percentiles in 2018.
• Corruption control: the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both minor and large-scale forms of corruption, as well as the ‘capturing’ the state by elites and private interests. Iraq scored in the lowest category in 2018.

When a Finance Minister Speaks About Corruption of His Own Government

The presentation by Professor Ali A. Allawi on 2-4 March 2020 in Berlin[57] is enlightening. Ali Abdul Ameer Allawi is an Iraqi politician who served as Minister of Commerce and Defence in the cabinet appointed by Iraq’s Interim Board of Governors from September 2003 to 2004, and then Minister of Finance in Iraq between 2005 and 2006 transitional government. Allawi was appointed as Finance Minister in Mustafa Al-Kadhimy’s cabinet in May 2020, so he can be called an unsuspected source, even if he was an integral part of previous corrupt governments and thus part of the problem. Will he be able to stop the watershed of corrupt practices? Iraqi protesters don’t think so. When you board a golden carriage and alien drivers determine the direction, you have two choices: either stay in the carriage and follow the drivers’ course or disembark. That’s why the protest movement wants to abolish the whole US-imposed political system and an end to foreign interference.

Here are some excerpts from his presentation:

“The chaos, arbitrariness and shallowness of the CPA’s “reforms” created the perfect platform to thrust Iraq into the lowest ranks of corrupt countries. These conditions were further exacerbated by the Iraqi governments that took over the mismanagement of the country since 2004.

The removal of the upper tiers of the bureaucracy for their Baathist affiliations created a leadership vacuum in the bureaucracy. This was filled by lower grade civil servants who were either incompetent, under-equipped for the task, or who had been sidelined by the previous regime for malfeasance or negligence.

Careless and chaotic packing of the government agencies by cronies and hangers-on of the new political class created a new layer of bureaucrats who had little or no training in modern administrative practices, duties, and constraints.

Job-hungry exiles returned in the tens of thousands with expectations of government posts and sinecures. A psychology of entitlement to government perks was a concomitant to their periods of exile.

Chaos, arbitrariness, incompetence, self-dealing, and plain ignorance characterized economic policy-making, further exacerbating the confused drift of the government and creating ample opportunities for unscrupulous and corrupt people to take advantage of the prevailing disorder. Rent-seeking by businessmen, government officials, ministers, and foreign adventurers became the assured path to enrichment. The main driver behind decision-making for the economy, at least in the public sector, was the frenzy for economic rents. Needless to say the distortions and costs to the economy grew in leaps and bounds. The new political class, many of whom had spent years in impecunious exile and in degrading circumstances were determined to have their period of suffering requited by feeding at the public trough- Leaders of this new order were equally determined to amass personal fortunes through their control over key ministries and government agencies. Whatever controls on corrupt practices had existed prior were severely weakened by a frightened and confused bureaucracy, a broken judicial system and the general degradation of the ethics of dealings and transactions- The old sanctions-busting criminal and business networks reasserted themselves often in partnership with the new political class, thereby creating a strong incentive to maintain the “crisis” economy of Iraq. A “perfect storm” that favoured the stratospheric rise in corruption evolved in the 2004-2019 period. In spite of the astounding levels of plunder, not a single senior official has been indicted, tried and then jailed for corrupt practices. The only one who had come near to it, a former Minister of Electricity, was incarcerated for a few days and then sprung from jail by a US-sanctioned jail break organized by the Black Water Co! The former Minister of Trade was placed under house arrest after being indicted on a minor administrative infringement.

Examples of corruption practices by the Iraqi government from 2003 to the present.

The Integrity Commission, the agency charged with monitoring and sanctioning corrupt practices, is itself prone to corruption in the form of extortion and blackmail of targeted culprits. Nevertheless, the heads of the Commission constantly complain of their inability to go after miscreants because of political protection. The Integrity Commission has literally thousands of cases of proven corrupt practices which have lingered in its files with no legal action.

• 2004-2009: Corruption in the imports of oil products Loss of about $1-$1.5 billion through overpricing and undersupplying
• 2014-Present: Corruption in the supply and trade of heavy fuel oil. Loss of about $ 400 million per annum
• 2006-2010: Corruption in the Ministry of Defense purchases of military equipment from the former Warsaw Pact countries: Loss of about $300 million
• 2009: Corruption in the Ministry of Interior in the supply of bomb-detection equipment: Loss of about $200 million through serious overcharging (useless equipment costing about $60 per piece sold for $16,000 each; Source: New York Times)
• 2008-2014: Corruption in the Ministry of Transport: Purchase of Bombardier aircraft, opaque port terminal licenses, truck transport contracts: Loss of about $500 million
• 2004-2019: Municipality of Baghdad: Major water works and sewerage contracts; land transfers and sales: Loss about $2,500 million
• 2004-Present: Ghost workers in government ministries, mainly the Ministry of Defense and Interior: Loss of about $250 million per annum
• 2004- 2010: Ministry of Sports; Alleged corruption in the building of stadiums
• 2004- 2016: The Haj and Umra Bureau; Alleged corruption in the procurement of travel and lodging services to pilgrims
• 2004 Present: Corruption in the supply of fertilisers and seeds by the Ministry of Agriculture
• 2004 Present: Corruption in the medicines procurement agency of the Ministry of Health, Kimadia.: Losses reach about $200 million per annum
• 2010 Present: Corruption in the award of hospital construction projects
• 2006 Present: Sustaining a large gap between official exchange rates for current account transfers and parallel market rates of between 3% 8%. Approximately 10% of currency purchases “round trip” between the official and parallel rates totalling about $750 million per annum in corruptly inspired leakages.

There is alleged corruption in the procurement of loans, advances and guarantees from all the state-owned financial institutions such as Rafidain Bank, Rashid Bank, and the TBI

There is alleged corruption in the land dealings of the religious endowments (Awqaf) and the transfer and sale of state land controlled by the Ministry of Finance

The opaqueness of the production-sharing contracts awarded by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to foreign oil companies masks a very probable carried interest to the major political figures of the KRG. The figures, if substantiated, will run in the billions.

In one of the most egregious acts of self-dealing, legally covered by their inclusion in the annual budgets, are the salaries and perks that the political class (parliamentarians, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Office of the President) has awarded itself

The costs of maintaining an Iraqi PM is one of the highest in the world (about $ 500 million per annum). The budgets of the Office of the Prime Minister reaches $900 million, most of which is excluded from line accounting; for the Presidency, the figure is about $400 million. In total, the 400 odd members of Iraq’s political class have awarded themselves about $2 billion per annum. The reform measures undertaken recently in 2014 and 2015 could have reduced this figure.

There is little doubt about the costs of institutional decay and corruption to the growth and development of the Iraqi economy.

The qualitative effects of loss of self-esteem, cynicism, mistrust, and a sense of pervasive injustice are equally great if not greater

Perhaps the greatest loss is the near-terminal decline of the informal rules and codes of conduct, mostly derived from the country’s ethno- religious traditions. These had made it possible to deal and transact in those very long periods in Iraq’s history when there were inadequate safeguards from the judicial system and the political authority”

Dual citizenship fosters unlimited fraud

Each of the 275 Iraqi MPs receives a monthly salary of approximately US $ 17,000 and has 30 bodyguards. Each minister earns more than US $ 30,000 monthly, the Prime Minister $ 60,000 and the President $ 75,000, excluding other “expenses,” according to the Iraq National Audit Office (2018 figures).

Many ministers from the various Iraqi cabinets since 2004 have the British nationality, such as (ex) Prime Minister Haider al Abadi and the (ex) Iraqi president Fuad Masoum, or are of Iranian nationality, such as al-Maliki, Ali al-Adeeb, ex-Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Hadi al-Amari, former Iraqi Minister of Transport and head of the Badr organization, military wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), also commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces.

Other senior Iraqi officials hold dual citizenship, including Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi (France), former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and former Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari (UK) and Speaker of Parliament Saleem al-Jibouri (Qatar). Of the 66 Iraqi ambassadors, 32 have dual citizenship, as well as an estimated 70 to 100 MPs.

Then there are the ministers in the current Iraqi government with a Western background: Mohamed Ali Alhakim – Minister of Foreign Affairs (UK and US), Fuad Hussein – Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister (Netherlands and France), Thamir Ghadhban – Minister of Oil and Deputy Prime Minister (UK)

Many officials accused of corruption by Iraqi authorities have fled the country to escape persecution thanks to their foreign passports, including former ministers Abdul Falah al-Sudani (trade), Hazim Shaalan (defence) and Ayham al-Samarrai (electricity).

Najah al-Shammari serves as the current Defense Minister in Adel Abdul Mahdi’s government from 2019. He is a Swedish citizen who is part of Mahdi’s cabinet. The minister is under investigation for benefit fraud for claiming housing and child benefits from Sweden, according to online news site Nyheter Idag and Swedish newspaper Expressen. He is being charged in Sweden with ‘crimes against humanity’.

President Barham Salih is a British citizen. A complaint was lodged against him by ‘Defending Christian Arabs’, who asked the Solicitor General in Scotland to open an investigation against him for’ authorizing crimes against humanity or being complicit in the widespread attack on civilian demonstrations in Scotland. Iraq that resulted in mass murders, injuries, illegal arrests and kidnapping ”.

Where Does the Money Go?

There are no robust statistics on the accumulated proceeds of corrupt practices since 2003 in Iraq.

Estimates of assets held abroad by Iraqis range from a minimum of $ 100 billion to $ 300 billion. The vast majority of these assets were acquired illegally. These figures are corroborated by discussions with Integrity Committee officials, along with estimates derived from inferences. Senior Lebanese bankers and Banque du Liban officials indicate that there was approximately $ 20 billion in deposits from Iraqis in Lebanese commercial banks at the start of the October 2019 banking crisis. These have now been effectively frozen within the Lebanese banking system. It’s a reasonable estimate to infer that there is a similar figure for Iraqi assets in Jordan. The other main Middle East destination of corrupt Iraqi funds is Dubai. It is very likely that a significant portion of Iraqi corrupt funds have been invested in real estate in Dubai, both residential and commercial. An often mentioned figure of the total amount of such funds is close to $ 25 billion.

A smaller percentage of Iraq’s corrupt funds are placed with Turkish banks and invested in Turkish real estate. It is very likely that this amount has increased significantly in recent years, partly due to the number of Iraqis now living in Turkey and of Turkish nationality. Other Middle East destinations for corrupt Iraqi funds are Kuwait and Egypt, but less than the four major countries mentioned before.

Outside the Middle East, London is the most important location. Iraqi corrupt funds finding refuge in the UK have been transferred from other locations in the Middle East. Money laundering and UK rules are very robust for banks and agents alike, but until recently, the identity of overseas funds earmarked for real estate investments in London escaped this scrutiny.

The total amount of funds invested by Iraqis in real estate in London is difficult to estimate. Real estate agents have reported that Iraqi funds have been deployed in large quantities in the residential property market in London. Entire floors of new-build apartments in London’s Nine Elms neighbourhood and other residential areas have been acquired by Iraqis directly, through nominees or through offshore companies. A good estimate of Iraqi corrupt funds invested in London real estate could be around $ 10 billion.

Switzerland is also a haven for Iraqi corrupt funds, but it is somewhat limited due to the high cost of holding a Swiss bank account and the lack of awareness of the new class of Iraqi ‘businessmen’ with the benefits of Switzerland. A very senior Swiss banker stated off the record that his bank alone holds about $ 1 billion in Iraqi funds.

Another destination for corrupt Iraqi funds is the USA. A large number of dual nationality Iraqis worked in various business ventures in Iraq and benefited from corrupt practices. In general, US citizens are not subject to the strict money laundering rules that apply to other nationalities when opening or managing bank accounts in the US. It has proven relatively easy for dual Iraqi / US citizens, who have been charged with corruption charges in Iraq, to ​​avoid freezing or seizing their assets in the US.[58]

The year 2019 saw the formation of a Supreme Anti-Corruption Council to take preventive measures to curb corruption. However, Moussa Faraj, the former chief of Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, revealed to an Iraqi publication that corruption starts at Iraq’s executive branch, and that this Anti-Corruption commission is extrajudicial and will not put an end to corruption. He said that MPs and government officials often intervened in and inhibited the work of independent bodies that stood in the way of their personal gain. This is seen through bribes, blackmail, blocking litigation, the incorrect placement of independent bodies under ministerial authority instead of parliamentary, etc. This is a flagrant violation of the rule of law – a clear demonstration that MPs, lawmakers, and decision-makers at every level engage in practices that seemingly place them above the law.[59]

Give Iraq Back to the Iraqi People

Iraqi MP Haider al-Mulla stated in an interview for As-Sumariya TV on January 16, 2013: “Allow me to tell you the following…. The entire political class and I repeat, the entire political class in Iraq, of which I am also a part, has their finances and those of their families very well organized so that they do not have to suffer when blood runs through the streets. The unfortunate population, on the other hand… ”

Mishan al-Jabouri, one of Iraq’s anti-corruption leaders said in a February 2016 interview: “There is no solution. Everybody is corrupt, from the top of society to the bottom. Everyone. Including me. At least I am honest about it. I was offered $5m by someone to stop investigating him. I took it, and continued prosecuting him anyway.”[60]

Corruption, the waste of government resources and the purchase of military equipment have increased Iraq’s budget deficit from $ 16.7 billion in 2013, $ 20 billion in 2016 to $ 23 billion for fiscal year 2019. And of course the IMF comes to the rescue and stands multi-billion dollar loans that make the country even more dependent on the US and other foreign creditors.

Should it come as a surprise that Iraq is witnessing a deficit of $ 43.9 billion in the 2021 budget? Should it come as a surprise that Iraq, as a middle-income country, isn’t capable of providing its people with the most basic necessities, like education, healthcare, housing, water, electricity….?

In March and April 2019, an extensive opinion poll carried out across Iraq found that the population were only united by very high levels of pessimism about the future of their country. At the centre of their concerns, and the key factor in driving mistrust, is the issue of corruption. In the poll, 82 per cent of Iraqis were concerned or very concerned about corruption at the highest levels of government; 83 per cent perceived corruption to be getting worse. It appears clear: politically sanctioned corruption among senior politicians and civil servants is systematically undermining popular faith in the Iraqi government and destroying the legitimacy of its leaders in the eyes of the population.[61]

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that the whole political and economic system, imported by the USA after the 2003 invasion, has to be reversed, because it was illegally imposed upon the Iraqi people and it serves only the Western interests and enriches the US installed Iraqi stooges. Perhaps it’s time to support the Iraqi uprisings against the unbridled corruption and foreign interference. Perhaps it’s time to give Iraq back to the Iraqis.

Dirk Andriensens is a renowned author, peace activist and criminologist, coordinator of SOS Iraq, member of the Executive Committee of the BRussell’s Tribunal, Belgium.  He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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Notes

[1] https://tribune.com.pk/story/2279259/iraqs-century-of-humiliation-in-the-globalised-age

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4353491.stm

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20050524205830/http://www.worldtribunal.org/main/?b=1

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-10-years-how-baghdad-became-city-corruption-8520038.html

[5] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/former-iraqi-pm-nouri-al-maliki-allegedly-siphoned-off-500bn-8-years-1526096

[6] http://dinarvets.com/forums/index.php?/topic/74763-a-quarter-trillion-dollars-the-size-of-corruption-in-iraq/

[7] https://www.yenisafak.com/en/world/iraqi-panel-says-2397-bln-smuggled-outside-iraq-3557960

[8] https://thearabweekly.com/kadhimi-going-after-big-fish-anti-corruption-crackdown

[9] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/iraqi-panel-says-2397-bln-smuggled-outside-iraq/2097655

[10] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/unicef-iraq-humanitarian-situation-report-idp-crisis-end-year-2020

[11] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/humanitarian-action-children-2021-iraq

[12] https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-iraq-is-rapidly-becoming-the-region-s-next-failed-state-1.9425548

[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/18/world/a-nation-challenged-the-president-bush-sets-role-for-us-in-afghan-rebuilding.html

[14] https://www.gicj.org/iraq_conference_speeches/Dr_Alkazaz_Presentation.pdf

[15] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/07/iraq.features11 

[16] Iraq Revenue Watch, Report No. 7, Disorder, Negligence and Mismanagement: How the CPA Handled Iraq Reconstruction Funds (September, 2004) p. 2. The contracts at issue were those over $5 million in value.

[17] James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton et al. “The Iraq Study Group Report” Vintage Books, New York (December 2006) p. 22

[18] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meters-cost-iraq-billions-in-stolen-oil/  

[19] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/fuelling-suspicion-coalition-and-iraqs-oil-billions

[20] http://www.twf.org/News/Y2005/0714-Money.html

[21] https://corpwatch.org/article/mystery-missing-meters-accounting-iraqs-oil-revenue

[22] https://www.iraq-businessnews.com/2011/05/13/iraq-lags-on-oil-metering/

[23] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/world/struggle-for-iraq-new-looting-jordan-s-scrapyards-signs-looted-iraq.html

[24] https://archive.commondreams.org/scriptfiles/headlines05/0204-23.htm

[25] https://corpwatch.org/article/iraq-fraud-weapons-deals-drained-1-billion

[26] http://blackkrishna.blogspot.com/2005/08/811-theres-no-rebuilding-no-weapons.html

[27] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/crucial-iraq-police-academy-a-disaster/

[28] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6076834.stm

[29] https://www.news.com.au/world/billion-missing-from-iraq/news-story/e6201af80c120a6f72afc195d1bc5041 

[30] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/the-failed-reconstruction-of-iraq/274041/

[31] https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/47/2/177/519163

[32] https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/977ABA699FB1D8E1852572F400648580-globalpolicyforum-waroccupationiraq-june2007.pdf

[33] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

[34] https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/977ABA699FB1D8E1852572F400648580-globalpolicyforum-waroccupationiraq-june2007.pdf

[35] https://www.dpc.senate.gov/dpcdoc.cfm?doc_name=sr-111-1-116

[36] https://www.dpc.senate.gov/dpcdoc.cfm?doc_name=sr-111-1-116

[37] https://web.archive.org/web/20150929035703/http://www.brusselstribunal.org/SaiebKhalil240811.htm

[38] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/19/post-war-iraq-corruption-oil-prices-revenues

[39] https://hhi.harvard.edu/publications/english-version-never-forget-views-peace-and-justice-within-conflict-affected

[40] https://www.gicj.org/NOG_REPORTS_HRC_22/educationsystem.pdf

[41] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iraq-paralyzed-by-corruption/

[42] https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/241120191

[43] https://www.france24.com/en/20191124-in-protest-hit-iraq-parties-cling-to-lucrative-posts

[44] https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/iraq/

[45] https://www.transparency.org/files/content/corruptionqas/Country_profile_Iraq_2015.pdf

[46] https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/100820191

[47] https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/iraq/

[48] https://thearabweekly.com/kadhimi-going-after-big-fish-anti-corruption-crackdown

[49] https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarianresponse.info/files/2019/07/IOM-Iraq-Perceptions-on-Women%27s-Economic-Opportunities-in-Urban-Areas-of-Iraq–Motivations-and-Mechanisms-to-Overcome-Barriers.pdf

[50] https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CESCR/Shared%20Documents/IRQ/INT_CESCR_CSS_IRQ_21658_E.pdf 

[51] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/transparency-accountability-integrity-new-agreement-help-combat-corruption-iraq-enar

[52] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/10/corruption-continues-destabilize-iraq

[53] https://www.giswatch.org/en/country-report/internet-and-corruption/iraq

[54] https://borgenproject.org/10-facts-about-corruption-in-iraq/

[55] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-report-corruption-norm-within-iraqi-government/

[56] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/magazine/iraq-corruption.html

[57] http://iraqieconomists.net/en/2020/05/19/the-political-economy-of-institutional-decay-and-official-corruption-the-case-of-iraq/

[58] http://iraqieconomists.net/en/2020/05/19/the-political-economy-of-institutional-decay-and-official-corruption-the-case-of-iraq/

[59] https://eaford.org/site/assets/files/1132/the_rule_of_law_in_iraq.pdf

[60] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/19/post-war-iraq-corruption-oil-prices-revenues

[61] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/10/corruption-continues-destabilize-iraq

“I believe that people should be aware that side effects can happened, that it is not good for everyone and in this case destroyed a beautiful life, a perfect family, and has affected so many people in the community. Do not let his death be in vain please save more lives by making this information news.” – Heidi Neckelmann, wife of Dr Gregory Michael, whose death was attributed to the Pfizer COVID vaccine.

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The vaccine for COVID is here.

While being told or left with the opinion it is the only relief to the burdens imposed over the last year, these new doses coming from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna arrived as a warm Christmas present for the locked down and masked masses.

As of 9:00am on January 22, fully 19,107,959 Americans had gotten at least one shot. More are planning to line up and take their dose in time. However, there are some reported difficulties with the MRNA Mimosas that could pose concern down the line.

In addition to a perfectly healthy 56 year old physician based in Florida who died after receiving Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, there was a story of a 41 year old woman in Portugal who died two days after getting the vaccine. And there was a 75-year-old Israeli man who had a heart attack only two days after receiving his dose.

In California, the State’s top epidemiologist, Dr Erica S Pan requested a halt on the huge batch of the Moderna vaccine on the grounds that it left people with “higher-than-usual number of possible allergic reactions.”

And in Norway, doctors have been advise to re-assess frail and terminally ill patients in the COVID inoculation crew after 33 elderly patients died shortly after the Pfizer-BioNTech injection.

Dr. William Wodarg and Dr. Michael Yeadon put out a petition in early December to call off all SARS-CoV-2 vaccine studies until a study design was put in place to address concerns about the vaccine and the inadequate study design behind it. The lack of testing the drug on animals, the lack of time to study the long-term effects, the accentuated process of an exaggerated immune reaction to a real or wide virus in a process known as antibody-dependent amplification (ADE), and the polyethylene glycol in the vaccine, a substance to which 70% of people have allergic and possibly fatal reactions, are just some of the concerns under consideration.

But COVID is a matter of life and death! According to some, heroic moves to rescue them with a cure cannot be held back on account of uncertain episodes.

The Global Research News Hour this week endeavours to explore the issue with three individuals all with somewhat different views and vantage points about the harm caused by these Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna potions.

First up, Dr. Meryl Nass returns to the show outlining what authorities did to endanger patients with the Emergency Use Authorization legislation and the virtually helpless situation they endure if they do get vaccine injured. Second, Dr. Allison McGeer shares her views spotlighting the necessity of supplying the drug in a timely manner and the dangerous consequences of giving in to vaccine hesitancy in the ‘Age of COVID.’ Finally, Mary Holland, a representative of the Children’s Health Defense, spelled out her reasons for disagreeing with the use of the vaccines, given what we know about them so far, and states her objections to what she sees as censorship plaguing her group.

Meryl Nass M.D. is a General Internal Medicine Physician with 40 years of experience. She is an epidemic and anthrax expert and composes a series of blogs for the site Anthrax Vaccine as well as Global Research. She’s based in Ellsworth, Maine.

Allison McGeer M.D. is a specialist in internal medicine and is a Canadian infectious disease specialist in the Sinai Health System, She has led investigations into the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Toronto and worked alongside Donald Low. During the COVID-19 pandemic, McGeer has studied how SARS-CoV-2 survives in the air.

Mary Holland is the vice chair and general counsel for Children’s Health Defense.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 303)

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Transcript – Interview with Dr. Allison McGeer, Jan. 19, 2021

Global Research: Should the COVID vaccine be banned in the face of numerous instances of allergic reaction and death?

Dr. Allison McGeer: The answer to that is absolutely not. You know, the…when we introduce new vaccines or start using new vaccines we are very, very careful about safety surveillance. And so that means that whenever we see something, okay, question of increased allergic reactions in California, appears to be associated with blood batch, batch gets pulled, until we sort it. It’s probably not anything important, it’ll probably go back in. But we just don’t know that.

In Norway, there have been a number of deaths in long-term care after vaccine introduction. My understanding from accounts is it’s actually less than the expected number of deaths in long-term care for that period of time. So it is entirely appropriate that people report them, that they investigate them that they ask whether there’s any potential association with the vaccine because we need to be very careful.

But it’s almost certainly true that in Norway those are expected deaths that occur when you vaccinate frail, elderly residents in long-term care, unfortunately, their case fatality rate from all sorts of diseases is relatively high. And so it’s unlikely that any of those will turn out to be associated with vaccine.

Norway has not stopped its vaccination program. It’s just recommended that a little bit of caution in elderly residents on long-term care specifically in the same way that the UK advocates caution with people who’d had anaphylactic reactions to previous vaccines initially, but now with more experience with knowing that the risk of anaphylaxis, well it’s not zero – never is with vaccine or for that matter with any medication you take – but it’s low enough that people don’t need to be worried about it any longer.

So we can expect with a new, very large vaccine program rolling out, that because of the extreme caution that we apply to new vaccines there’s going to be temporary holds on things there’s going to be lots of investigations. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the vaccine at all. And it certainly in this circumstance doesn’t mean that taking the vaccine is not the safer of two choices.

We tend to think that, “okay I’m choosing whether or not to get the vaccine.” But that’s not actually the choice. The choice is “I am choosing to get vaccinated or I am choosing to live exposed to COVID-19.” And living exposed to COVID-19 is not a risk free thing to do. COVID-19 is a dangerous virus. Three thousand people a day are dying from it in the United States. And so it’s a balance. You know, which is a riskier thing to do, get the vaccine or get COVID. And no question from the data we have at the moment. For a great many adults, particularly older adults, getting the vaccine is the safer option.

GR: Are they adequately being warned of this risk? I mean if they could get anaphylaxis or possibly even a remote chance of dying before they take this (vaccine) and they can decide would you rather have the vaccine or would you rather have COVID.

AM: Yes, I think the answer is yes. Whenever we give somebody a vaccine it should come with adequate information. I think there’s been lots of discussion which has been very useful about allergic reactions to vaccine. A lot of information about how (inaudible) they are. I think…anytime

that a health care provider offers you medication for people…a health care provider of any sort offers you any intervention whether it be medication or vaccine or manipulation or injections there should always be a discussion about risk benefits and people should be making an informed choice. And I would hope that that’s what people are doing with respect to COVID vaccines.

GR: The first vaccines are involving messenger RNAs. They’ve never been used before. First time that they’re going out. They weren’t using lab animals. The FDA, the Health Canada, they approved it. Is it possible that in some way they’ve operated in haste? They’re so active, so much of a hurry to get this vaccine, that, you know, better a bad vaccine than no vaccine at all. What do you say to that?

AM: Well, we do actually use mRNA vaccines the better name practice, a number of mRNA vaccines that people are using, we’ve been investigating them in humans for a long time. Most commonly in humans they’re used in testing in cancer vaccines so the attempt to vaccinate you against your own cancer cells so that your body will attack and kill cancer. But there are also some mRNA vaccines for influenza, for instance, that are in development, have not been widely in humans, in part because we didn’t expect them to work very well.

So, we can expect to see a lot more mRNA vaccines out there now that we’ve found they’ve worked so well against COVID-19. But they have been subject to exactly the same and very stringent safety assessments that any vaccine comes from our (inaudible) has.

This is not that we have not applied the same safety standards to these vaccines. It’s just that because COVID is out there and because we know how dangerous it is we’ve been careful to do that really quickly so it’s involved a great many people, and a lot of their time, but we haven’t cut corners on any of the safety assessments. These vaccines got tested in animals, they got tested in humans in small numbers initially, they’ve been through the entire usual process for vaccines. It’s just been more quickly than we usually do it.

GR: Two prominent doctors, there was William Wodarg, the former chair of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Health Committee and Michael Yeadon a former chief science adviser they submitted a petition in early December to stop the roll out of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines on the grounds that there were four perceived dangers. They include the formation of non neutralizing anti bodies which could result in exaggerated immune reaction if confronted by the real virus, the antibody-dependent amplification. Also they contain polyethylene glycol to which 70% of people are allergic and could develop a fatal reaction to the immunization. Also the vaccines contain antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins, however, they could trigger an immune reaction to syncyntin-1 which is essential for the formation of placenta in humans and could leave them infertile.

And the short duration of the study does not allow for a realistic assessment of the late effects, as happened a decade ago with vaccinations to H1N1.

European Medical Agency didn’t agree with them. Should they have been? What do you say to those concerns? WAS IT charged TOO SOON OUT OF THE GATES?

AM: So, the answer to that is unequivocally no.

You know, it is true that there are some allergic reactions to that vaccine, but we will know what that number is now, it’s about ten per million doses of vaccine administered. That’s a little bit higher than with some other vaccines, but it’s still very low. It’s still…again in the balancing act though – risk of COVID, risk of vaccine – it does not change that balance at all. So yes, allergic reactions do happen but they are distinctly uncommon and well within the range of making us decide that we should take the COVID vaccine.

The fact that we don’t know how long the COVID vaccine lasts is absolutely true. That is always true when we introduce new vaccines. And in this particular setting, even if the COVID vaccine only lasted for a year, that would be a very significant benefit, you know? That would get us back to normal and then we’d have to get re-vaccinated. Well okay, we get vaccinated against flu every year. You know? We can manage that.

And so if the price of getting our lives back to normal, getting our economy going is getting a shot every year to protect us from COVID, I think most people would be willing to accept that as reasonable. I actually think the evidence suggests now that the vaccine will last considerably longer than that but we will have to see. Nonetheless, every time we introduce a new vaccine, we don’t know how long it’s going to last, okay?

We introduced Hepatitus B vaccine in the 1980s, right? We had no idea how long it was going to last. If we waited to know we’d still be waiting, because the vaccine’s good for a lifetime, okay? So, you have to introduce vaccines and then you have to do the assessment.

It is also true that we don’t know whether this vaccine protects you from asymptomatic infection and transmission, and that is really important if you want to prevent transmission of this disease. But again, if all the vaccine does is prevent serious illness, and doesn’t prevent transmission, that’s not great, but it’s a lot better than nothing and that’ll mean that we’ll switch away from these vaccines ultimately to some other vaccine that does protect you. But if in the meantime all those vaccines do is prevent people from dying from COVID-19 for the six or eight months until we get other vaccines, that’s still well worth having.

GR: That was Canadian infectious disease specialist Allison McGeer.

Transcript – Interview with Mary Holland, January 21, 2021.

 

Global Research: Since the vaccines have been released there have been a number of severe allergies and even some deaths and your associate The Defender printed them up. Are you…are they related to any of the fears that you had in your list of concerns. I mean, what is a scenario that you foresaw?

Mary Holland: Sadly Michael, it was a scenario we foresaw.

So, the only two COVID vaccines available in the United States, and in Canada and in many countries right now are what are called messenger RNA vaccines. Many people say they should not be called vaccines. They are not traditional, typical vaccines in any way.

Some people say that it should be called simply genetic engineering. This is literally injecting into the human body for the first time in history ever, on very, very radically short clinical trials. Genetic information to tell individual cells to create a protein against which the body will develop antibodies. This is not the traditional technology. The observational period in the clinical trials is about three months. There are many problems with the clinical trials I’d be happy to talk with you about. And so we’re very concerned.

There have been reports of widespread death in the elderly community. So there’s been an attempt to target nursing homes. We have information that there were just thirty three deaths in a Norweigan nursing home. Norway has now called for patients to be assessed on their frailty to see if they’re actually fit for vaccination because this is a very severe immune system event.

China has called for suspension of using the Pfizer vaccine in the elderly population. In New York State, where I’m located, there is a story about a nursing home in Upstate New York that just had over twenty deaths immediately after giving the vaccine. And in there are cases of younger, healthy people. A 56-year-old obstetrician in Florida who died within weeks of getting the vaccine. He developed thrombocytopenia, something that is known as a severe adverse event from vaccination.

A younger woman, 42, in Portugal, died two days after getting the vaccine.

One of the things that we warned about, our founder Robert F Kennedy Jr and our chair, he wrote a letter to the FDA and to the NIH back in March saying we knew that they were going to be using something called polyethylene glycol in the lipid nanoparticle envelopes around the messenger RNA in the Moderna vaccine. And so he wrote to FDA and to NIH saying we know that 80 percent of the population has severe allergic reactions to PEG.

Many, many medications are what they call PEGillated. They contain PEG which is thought to be inert but the research now is suggesting it’s not inert at all. It can cause severe allergic reactions. We know that that’s going to cause anaphylaxis in 80 percent of people and they’re going to die if they don’t get epinephrine. And in fact, we said you have to screen people for PEG sensitivity and that wasn’t done. And immediately after the roll-out of these COVID vaccines in the United Kingdom, what it received: two people with severe anaphylactic shock. And those aren’t the only problems.

The real bottom-line is Michael, they skipped over animal trials, they had about three months of observations in predominantly extra-ordinarily healthy people, they exclude people with co-morbid conditions for political trials, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. But in the short period of time that we’ve already observed these products to be on the market, these mRNA vaccines, the CDC has reported about one in forty two serious adverse events, health outcome events they call it. One in forty two, that’s more than 2 percent. That’s a lot! And we’ve already got sixty-six reported deaths in our adverse event reporting system.

GR: A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital, I mean, she was going over that and she said that a lot of these sorts of instances can be expected because they’re very frail, and if you give one of them a shot, well, you don’t even know that… that the shot was responsible for killing them, according to her, because we got to get these people vaccinated right away. That the risk due to the vaccine is not like the risk due to COVID. So, what do you say to that?

AM: So, what we say to that is this is by its very definition, Michael, this is an experimental use authorization product. It is by its very definition experimental and we subscribe to the Nuremburg Code, the foundation of ethical medicine which says consent of the individual is absolutely essential.

So now in Norway they’re recommending that people who have a short life span ahead of them, they shouldn’t get this vaccine. Why should somebody’s life be cut short just because they’re frail. There’s no reason for that! So I think it’s an individual choice. I think the reality is is that we don’t know all of the adverse effects that are likely from this vaccine, and people are taking a calculated risk.

COVID is treatable! Ivermectin has now been recognized as an appropriate treatment by the FDA. Certainly there’s good science in other countries, not the US but about the hydroxychloroquine being used. Vitamin D deficiency is very closely associated with COVID morbidity and mortality. There are interventions for people who get COVID! The survival rate is in the high 90 percent.

So it’s an individual choice. Do people want to take the risk of taking the vaccine, or do they want to preserve the risk that they might get sick but that there are therapeutics available. That’s an individual choice, given that this is at this point still an experimental prize. .

GR: Do you think that the people are hearing the risk? I mean, anytime somebody, even doctors read…anytime somebody gets a shot, they should be warned of all the risk. Do you think that’s actually happening?

MH: No, I don’t think that people are being adequately given…I don’t think people are given sufficient information. I don’t think people are always being told that this is an experimental use authorization vaccine. It has not been licensed by the FDA. And that it is by its very nature experimental. And there may be known and unknown side effects, including death. I don’t think people are getting that information sufficiently. And that’s what they need to be told. In order to be able to give true, informed consent.

Consent implies that you have enough information on which to base a judgement, and if people are being told, “oh, there’s just going to be a little pinch in your arm but there’s nothing else that can go wrong,” that’s just false information.

GR: I was wondering, could you mention any of the other conflicts that causes your group to have doubts about accepting the vaccine?

MH: Well obviously, for instance the Moderna vaccine, which is the second one on the market in the U.S., it’s a co-production with the National Institute for Health. So this is a public-private partnership. Sadly, there’s an obvious conflict of interest that the government is not eager, likely, to decide that it’s own product is inadequate or is excessively dangerous. That’s an inherent conflict. It’s a very serious one.

Also, like I said, they skipped over animal trials. You know, the observation period’s very short. They didn’t do clinical trials in the target population. One of the target populations is the elderly. People of colour. They didn’t actually have large percentages of people in the clinical trials from those two target groups. So, we have to expect that there are going to be adverse events that we didn’t see in the clinical trial.

And furthermore, very problematic information that’s come to light in the British Medical Journal in the last couple of weeks by the Associate Editor Peter Doshi who did a deeper dive in information that’s just been published about the size of clinical trial by the FDA in four thousand pages, he uncovered that many people had suspected COVID but they didn’t have a matching polymerase chain reaction test that confirmed that COVID…well if you add any of the suspected COVID cases, which are people who have clinical symptoms, you know, fever, achiness, you know, sick, if you add in all of those people, you ended up with an efficacy rate of nineteen percent, or maybe twenty nine percent if you excluded some right after the Vaccination. That’s a world of difference from the ninety five percent efficacy that has been touted around the world.

So, there are just so many questions about this product that has been pushed out in this aggressive manner, as if we know that it’s going to solve the pandemic, when in point of fact we have no clue if it’s going to solve the pandemic.

Also, it was not tested for whether or not it stopped transmission. It was tested for whether it averted mild symptoms. What it’s going to do in terms of stopping transmission we have no idea.

GR: You know, one of the points that were raised in the conversation with Dr. McGeer was the fact that just because somebody gets the vaccine, well we don’t know for sure that they died from the vaccine. I mean there could have been other potential possibilities and that’s possibIe. But, it seems to me that when it comes to COVID, it doesn’t matter how you died. If you had COVID, it was COVID. So that it seems as if there’s a bit of a double-standard there. I mean, I don’t know. What do you think?

MH: I agree with that completely! I mean Dr. Birks from the COVID task force said that, you know, we are going to count anyone who dies with COVID as a COVID death. So literally, if somebody dies in a motorcycle accident because a car ran into them, but they test positive at death or on after death with COVID, that’s characterized as a COVID death.

That’s ridiculous! And yet that is what we have in the United States at least.

GR: Now, one of the other things she said, she talked about how long the COVID vaccine will actually be effective, and she herself said that if it only works against the virus for six or eight months, we may have to go out and get another vaccine. So, we are looking at every year, potentially, unless we’re really lucky, but every year potentially, we could have to go for our vaccine. Do you have any concerns that, not only about the vaccine but having to take it again an again and again?

MH: We have grave concerns about that! So, you know, we do a lot of study and put out a lot of information about the annual flu vaccine. So, this is not comparable, the ones that have come out on the market right now. These are novel technologies, these mRNA. But the flu vaccines we know cause the majority of the injuries in the national vaccine injury compensation program. It’s the majority of injuries that are compensated by the U.S. government.

Flu vaccines, people die from the flu vaccines. If we now have annual COVID vaccines or joint annual flu/COVID vaccines, you can be sure that they will cause injuries. I mean that’s just, you know, it is acknowledged that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. No one knows exactly how the given individual will react to this medication.

You know, we never give prescription medications without examining the individual patient. And yet,

somehow, we imagine that we can give “vaccines,” a particular type of medication, on a one size fits all basis. It doesn’t work that way! It just doesn’t work that way! You actually have to examine the patient to figure out whether this medication is really appropriate for this individual.

And fortunately, the Norwegian health authorities have now said that about COVID vaccine. You need to examine whether this particular patient is fit for vaccination. If they are very frail, they are not fit for vaccination.

GR: A little while ago you mentioned there were alternatives to vaccines. You mentioned things like ivermectin and Vitamin D and so on. But, I mean, surely you have to have…these things have to go through peer review at the very least before you can authorize it. Is that the case? Can we legally go along with this or is there a potentially a down side that has not been explored?

MH: I’m only talking about things that have been robustly peer reviewed Michael. So, the literature on Vitamin D and COVID and other respiratory conditions is robust. This is peer reviewed science. And I’m telling you that the FDA…. I’m sorry…the NIH, the National Institute of Health in the U.S., just issued a statement saying that ivermectin is now considered appropriate for use against COVID. The United States has not embraced hydroxychloroquine, however many physicians and scientists around the world have. And again there is robust peer reviewed science showing that hydroxychloroquine and other chloroquine drugs are effective against COVID.

There’s no such thing as a perfect drug that doesn’t cause side effects in some people. But there are now therapeutics. I mean, the peak of this pandemic was almost a year ago – was March, April of 2020. We’re now not in the peak, and we have discovered effective, you know, combinations of things that seem to work effectively to prevent death and severe cases.

GR: There’s been a tendency on the part of the media to avoid talking about harm, it seems to me. Plenty of pro-vaccination points, but the anti-vaccination point is generally ignored. Could you talk about your experiences dealing with media.

MH: Yes! So, we know that the media has really embraced the narrative of the pandemic and, you know, COVID 24/7, and the deaths and the horror. And we know that they have not published about anything about the therapeutics and have taken a very taken a very jaundiced view towards anyone whose critical in any way about the vaccines or disputing the numbers and so on.

I think it’s a disservice to talk about the anti-vaccine movement. We don’t consider ourselves at Children’s Health Defense to be anti-vaccine. We’re pro-science! We want to see robust science! We want to see robust discourse! We believe you can only arrive at the right conclusion if you have free and open discourse about these issues and you publish all of the science. The media has really fallen down on its job in covering this story about the pandemic from our perspective.

The media has really fallen down on its job in covering this story about the pandemic from our perspective. And because the media has so fallen down, we created at the end of 2020 an online newspaper that comes out five times a week called The Defender. And we are covering the adverse events. And people can put in their comments “we can want to have conversation” so it’s www.childrenshealthdefense.org/defender. And we think that it’s crucial we talk about the adverse event, and we talk about if the vaccine is working great. But we have reservations based on the critical trials and about the suppression of information that’s critical.

GR: Are there any other ways that you’ve been having difficulty in the pandemic era?

MH: Well, we are actively, Michael, we are actively censored! I mean we were thrown off of mailchip. We have been closed down on vimeo. On our facebook page for Children’s Health Defense. We are routinely blocked from putting up certain stories and videos and they are labelled as ‘false.’ So we are battling censorship on a daily basis. Robert F Kennedy Jr our chair has been demeaned and criticized in an Op-Ed in the New York Times and was unable to publish any kind of response. So we are facing very real censorship that is critical.

I grew up believing that in a democracy, the loyal opposition is essential. You cannot get to the right public policy conclusions without robust debate, or the ‘cauldron of debate’ as Robert Kennedy called it. That’s been dismissed! You know now we in sort of the cancel culture world and the idea that censorship is somehow good for the public, you know these ideas are very disturbing.

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Notes:

1. www.facebook.com/heidi.neckelmann/posts/10157817790183977

First published by Global Research on January 9, 2021

We are at war. Yes. And I don’t mean the West against the East, against Russia and China, nor the entire world against an invisible corona virus.

No. We, the common people, are at war against an ever more authoritarian and tyrannical elitist Globalist system, reigned by a small group of multi-billionaires, that planned already decades ago to take power over the people, to control them, reduce them to what a minute elite believes is an “adequate number” to inhabit Mother Earth – and to digitize and robotize the rest of the survivors, as a sort of serfs. It’s a combination of George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”.

Welcome to the age of the transhumans. If we allow it.

Vaccination

That’s why vaccination is needed in warp speed, to inject us with transgenic substances that may change our DNA, lest we may wake up, or at least a critical mass may become conscious – and change the dynamics. Because dynamics are not predictable, especially not in the long-term.

The war is real and the sooner we all realize it, the sooner those in masks and those in social distancing take cognizance of the worldwide “anti-human” dystopian situations we have allowed our governments to bestow on us, the better our chance to retake our sovereign selves.

Today we are confronted with totally illegal and oppressive rules, all imposed under the pretext of “health protection”.

Non-obedience is punishable by huge fines; military and police enforced rules: Mask wearing, social distancing, keeping within the allowed radius of our “homes”, quarantining, staying away from our friends and families.

Actually, the sooner, We, the People, will take up an old forgotten characteristic of human kind – “solidarity” – and fight this war with our solidarity, with our love for each other, for mankind, with our love for LIFE and our Love for Mother Earth, the sooner we become again independent, self-assured beings, an attribute we have lost gradually over the last decades, at the latest since the beginning of the neoliberal onslaught of the 1980s.

Slice by tiny slice of human rights and civil rights have been cut off under false pretexts and propaganda – “security” – to the point where we, drowned in propagated dangers of all kinds, begged for more security and gladly gave away more of our freedoms and rights. How sad.

Now, the salami has been sliced away.

We suddenly realize, there is nothing left. Its irrecoverable.

We have allowed it to happen before our eyes, for promised comfort and propaganda lies by these small groups of elitists – by the Globalists, in their thirst for endless power and endless greed – and endless enlargements of their riches, of their billions. – Are billions of any monetary union “riches”? – Doubtfully. They have no love. No soul, no heart just a mechanical blood-pump that keeps them alive, if you can call that a “life”.

These people, the Globalists, they have sunk so deep in their moral dysfunction, totally devoid of ethics, that their time has come – either to be judged against international human rights standards, war crimes and crimes against humanity – similar as was done by the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, or to disappear, blinded away by a new epoch of Light.

As the number of awakening people is increasing, the western Powers that Be (PTB) are becoming increasingly nervous and spare no efforts coercing all kinds of people, para-government, administrative staff, medical personnel, even independent medical doctors into defending and promoting the official narrative.

It is so obvious, when you have known these people in “normal” times, their progressive opinions suddenly turning, by 180 degrees, to the official narrative, defending the government lies, the lies of the bought “scientific Task Forces” that “advise” the governments, and thereby provide governments with alibis to “tighten the screws” a bit more (Ms. Merkel’s remarks) around the people, the very people the governments should defend and work for; the lies and deceptive messages coming from “scientists” who may have been promised “eternal, endless ladders of careers”, or of lives in a hidden paradise?

What more may they get in turn for trying to subvert their friends’, peers’, patients’ opinions about the horror disease “covid-19”? – Possibly something that is as good as life itself – and is basically cost free for the avaricious rich. For example, a vax-certificate without having been vaxxed by the toxic injections, maybe by a placebo – opening the world of travel and pleasurable activities to them as “before”.

By the way, has anybody noticed that in this 2020 / 2021 winter flu-season, the flu has all but disappeared? – Why? – It has conveniently been folded into covid, to fatten and exaggerate the covid statistics. It’s a must, dictated by the Globalists, the “invisible” top echelon, whose names may not be pronounced. Governments have to comply with “covid quotas”, in order to survive the hammer of the Globalists.

Other special benefits for those selected and complacent defender of the official narrative, the placebo-vaxxed, may include dispensation from social distancing, mask wearing, quarantining – and who knows, a hefty monetary award. Nothing would be surprising, when you see how this tiny evil cell is growing like a cancer to take over full power of the world – including and especially Russia and China, where the bulk of the world’s natural resources are buried, and where technological and economic advances far outrank the greed-economy of the west. They will not succeed.

What if the peons don’t behave? – Job loss, withdrawal of medical licenses, physical threats to families and loved ones, and more.

Screen Shot: NTD, December 16, 2020

The Globalists evil actions and influence-peddling is hitting a wall in the East, where they are confronted with educated and awakened people.

We are at war. Indeed. The 99.999% against the 0.001%.

Their tactics are dividing to conquer, accompanied by this latest brilliant idea – launching an invisible enemy, a virus, a plandemic, and a fear campaign to oppress and tyrannize the entire world, all 193 UN member countries.

The infamous words, spoken already more than half a century ago by Rockefeller protégé, Henry Kissinger, comes to mind:

“Who controls food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

Quoted below are some lines and thoughts of a 1 January 2021, RT Op-Ed article by Helen Buyniski entitled “Civil war, medical discrimination, spy satellites and cyborgs! How 2021 could make us yearn for 2020”. The article may point us in a direction of what may happen in 2021, that we certainly do not yearn for:

“People everywhere are eager to bid farewell to 2020, a year in which our lives were turned upside down by power-mad elites who seized the Covid-19 pandemic as a chance to go full police state.

But be careful what you wish for…. merely putting up a new calendar does nothing to address [the mounting repression and tyranny], which seem certain to reach a breaking point.

Humanity has been pushed to the limit with arbitrary rules, enforced poverty, and mandated isolation — it will only take a spark or two for things to explode.”

And it continues –

”As vaccines are rolled out to the general public, the divide between those obeying the rules and the dissidents will only grow. Those who decline to get the jab will be treated as pariahs, banned from some public spaces and told it’s their fault life hasn’t gone back to normal, just as so-called “anti-maskers” have been.”

And more glorious prospects

“Anyone who isn’t thrilled by the idea of ingesting an experimental compound whose makers have been indemnified from any lawsuits, will be deemed an enemy of the state, even separated from their children or removed from their home as a health risk. Neighbors will gleefully rat each other out for the equivalent of an extra chocolate ration, meaning even the most slavishly obedient individuals could end up in “quarncentration camps” for upsetting the wrong person.”

Yes, we are in the midst of war.

A war that has already ravaged our society, divided it all the way down to families and friends.

If we are not careful, we may not look our children and grandchildren in the eyes, because we knew, we ought to have known what was and is going on, what is being done, by a small dark power elite – the Globalists. We must step out of our comfort zone, and confront the enemy with an awakened mind of consciousness and a heart filled with love – but also with fierce resistance.

If we fail to step up and stand up for our rights, this war goes on to prepare future generations – to abstain from congregating with other people.

They are already indoctrinating our kids into keeping away from friends, school colleagues, peers, and from playing in groups with each other – as the New Normal.

The self-declared cupula – the crème of the crop of civilization – the Globalist evil masters, already compromised and continue to do so, the education systems throughout the globe to instill into kids and young adults that wearing masks is essential for survival, and “social distancing” is the only way forward.

Must see Video

Children of the Great Reset

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ncE5yYQvJY (6 min. video).

Breaking the Social Fabric. Towards Totalitarian Rule

They, the Globalists, know damned well that once a civilization has lost its natural cohesion – the social fabric is broken, the very fabric that keeps a civilization together and dynamically advancing, they have won the battle. Maybe not the war, since the war will last as long as there is resistance. The “dynamic advancing” – or simply dynamics itself – is their nightmare, because dynamics is what makes life tick – life, people, societies, entire nations and continents. Without dynamics life on the planet would stand still.

And that’s what they want – a Globalist dictator, controlling a small population of serfs, or robotized slaves, that move only when told, own nothing and are given a digital blockchain controlled universal income, that, depending on their behavior and obedience, they may use to buy food, pleasure and comfort. Once the slaves are dispensable or incorrigible, their electronically controlled brains are simply turned off – RIP.

This may turn out to be the most devastating war mankind has ever fought.

May We, the People, see through this horrendous sham which is already now playing out, in Year One of the UN Agenda 21 /30;

And may We, the People, the commons, win this war against a power-thirsty elite and its bought administrators and “scientists” throughout the world – and restore a sovereign, unmasked, socially coherent society – in solidarity.

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See the following Global Research articles by Peter Koenig on the “The Great Reset” 

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Knows Best – The Post-Covid “Great Global Reset”,

The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” – After “The Great Reset”. A Horrifying Future

Die Post-Covid-Welt, das teuflische Projekt des WEF: „Resetting the Future of Work Agenda“ – Nach dem „Großen Reset“. Eine erschreckende Zukunft

COVID and Its Man-Made Gigantic Collateral Damage: The Great Reset – A Call for Civil Disobedience

Covid-19: The Great Reset – Revisited. Scary Threats, Rewards for Obedience….

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have spoken. Issuing a remarkable memorandum to all members of the Armed Forces, the JCS have declared that Joe Biden will be the new president of the United States. The memo may have been not only one to military personnel but also to President Trump: No matter how convinced you are that the election was stolen from you, don’t even think about remaining in power because we will ensure your forcible exit from the White House.

Unfortunately, relatively few people, including libertarians, comprehend that the Pentagon, along with the CIA and the NSA and, to a certain extent, the FBI, are the part of the federal government in which ultimate power is being wielded. They are the ones who are ruling the roost in America. That’s why that memo is so important. It’s declaring how things will be.

This overwhelming power is usually exercised behind the scenes in order to make Americans feel comfortable that their government is different from other national-security governments. While the national-security branch of the government is driving the overall direction America will take, especially with respect to foreign affairs, it permits the other three branches to maintain the appearance of power. The idea is to convince Americans that the federal government operates the same as a national-security state as it did when it was a limited-government republic.

But it’s a lie, a very dangerous lie, one that unfortunately is lived by all too many Americans, especially those within the mainstream press.

If you haven’t read the book National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, you owe it to yourself to do so so. This is Glennon’s thesis — that the national-security establishment is the part of the federal government that is wielding and exercising the ultimate power within the governmental structure. At the same time, however, it permits the legislative, judicial, and executive parts of the government to continue appearing to be in charge.

Glennon is not some crackpot writer. He is professor of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He has served as a consultant to various congressional committees, the U.S. State Department, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. You can read a more complete biography here.

If Glennon is right — I am firmly believe that he is — then it requires people, including libertarians, to reevaluate everything they understand about the country, especially foreign affairs.

Consider, for example, the many laments against America’s “forever wars.” It’s a popular mantra, including among libertarians. But what good does it do to complain about “forever wars” if the root cause of such wars is left in place, where it is in charge?

In other words, the national-security establishment needs those forever wars, just as it needed the Cold War. Any national-security state necessarily depends of fear, crises, chaos, and emergencies — or “threats” of such things to sustain its existence, its power, and its money. They will always find something for people to be afraid of, even if they have to instigate it. Communism, terrorism, drug dealers, illegal immigrants, Muslims, Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran, Syria, insurrectionists, revolutionaries, invaders, or whatever. Without such fearful things, people are apt to ask why they need a national-security state instead of a limited-government republic, which was the type of governmental structure on which America was founded.

What is the distinguishing characteristic of a national-security state, as compared to a limited-government republic? Power — raw, unadulterated power. With its vast military and arsenal of weaponry, along with extreme powers of assassination and surveillance, a national-security establishment has the means of imposing its will on government and on society. No one wields the countervailing power to resist.

This why precisely why our American ancestors opposed the creation of a national-security state or what they called “standing armies.” They understood that once such a governmental apparatus comes into existence, there is no practical way for the citizenry, even a well-armed citizenry, to oppose it. In fact, if the Constitutional Convention had proposed a Constitution that called into existence a federal government that was a national-security state, rather than a limited-government republic, there is no way that Americans would have approved the Constitution.

Practically from the beginning of the conversion to a national-security state, the other three branches have deferred to the overwhelming power of the Pentagon and its vast military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA. All three of those branches have understood the nature of power.

For example, in the 1950s the Pentagon insisted that the Supreme Court grant it a state-secrets doctrine. Ordinarily, that is a legislative function; that’s the way things are ordinarily done in a democracy. The Supreme Court went along with what the Pentagon wanted, thereby circumventing the legislative process.

Consider assassination. The Constitution did not delegate such a power to the federal government. The Bill of Rights expressly prohibits the federal government from killing anyone without due process of law. Nonetheless, when the national-security establishment insisted on having the power to assassinate people, including Americans, the Supreme Court acceded to its demand.

Look at GItmo, where people have been held for for more than a decade without trial. Never mind that the Bill of Rights requires the federal government to grant people speedy trials. That doesn’t matter when it comes to the military and the CIA. The federal judiciary is not going to interfere.

Congress has proven to be just as deferential. For one thing, Congress is filled with people who   could be considered to be self-designated assets of the national-security establishment. This especially includes the military and CIA veterans. They are almost certain to go along with whatever the national-security establishment wants. For those who strenuously object, they encounter the threat of having military bases or projects in their districts canceled, in which case the mainstream media in their districts will go after them with a vengeance. And there is always the possibility of being “Hoovered” with the threat of having friendly assets in the mainstream press reveal compromising secrets about one’s personal life.

And woe to any president who takes on the national-security establishment. They all know this. That’s why there hasn’t been a president since John F. Kennedy willing to challenge them. For a while it looked like Trump was going to do so but it wasn’t long before Americans saw that he too quickly fell into line.

It’s time for Americans to do some serious soul-searching and to ask themselves some penetrating questions: Is a root cause of America’s many woes the fact that it is a national-security state, just like China, Russia, and North Korea? Is it time to restore America’s founding system of a limited-government republic? Which governmental structure is more likely to lead to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony?

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

I sat behind a trading terminal at two Wall Street firms from 1986 to 2006. I can assure you that if the President of the United States was refusing to accept the outcome of a presidential election and urging a coup d’é·tat by his civilian militia, the stock market would have sold off by double digits. This era’s stock market has yawned at the spectacle.

I can further assure you that if an actual, violent coup d’état did occur inside the halls of Congress and played out in real time on every television network and cable news program in the country and around the world, there would have been a crash in the stock market. (I was sitting behind my trading terminal on October 19, 1987 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 22 percent by the end of the trading day and the country was peaceful.)

The stock market of that prior era would not have greeted 20,000 National Guard troops descending on the nation’s Capitol and television pictures of hundreds of those troops guarding the halls of Congress with a meaningless loss of 8 points — a tiny fraction of one percent.

Clearly, today’s stock market is broken. And that’s a big problem for this country and the world because the U.S. stock market is supposed to be an early indicator of when things are going well and when things are going badly. When the U.S. stock market is sending a signal to the world that bloody coups of government are nothing to fret over, we’ve entered a dangerous dimension where fascist rule is deemed a good thing.

The stock market of my day reflected the composite wisdom of all of its participants. Today’s stock market appears to reflect the composite wisdom of only its fascist-inclined participants.

So how do we fix our broken stock market so that it is once again a barometer to lead the country in the right direction? We listen to our whistleblowers who love their country so much that they will put their careers on the line to blow the whistle on all that is wrong on Wall Street.

To read complete article click here

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Ms. Martens is a former Wall Street veteran with a background in journalism.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

The New Tang Dynasty (NTD) broadcast a Press Conference of 9 January 2021 of independent French medical doctors for the truth about Covid-19. It is called “Coordination Santé Libre” or “Free Health Coordination”.

The Group, based in France, represents more than 30,000 medical doctors, an equal amount of medical care personnel, and more than 100,000 citizens.

Conférence de presse: Santé Libre | Des collectifs de médecins indépendants pour la Covid19 – Une Initiative de médecins libresfrançais (12 Janvier 2021)

NTD Television is the largest independent Chinese international TV channel. It was created in 2001 in New York, from where it broadcasts its programs to more than 100 million people around the world.

In 2010, a French branch was created, to serve mainly European viewers. NTD has become an effective alternative news network.

Since the independent French “Free Health Coordinators” have no access to French and European mainstream media, they have decided to work with NTD – benefitting from the broadcast network’s large coverage. Their goal is to inform as many people as possible about the truth behind Covid-19, clearing up myth, mysteries, scientific controversies and outright lies.

The Medical Coordination Group has created 4 cells of research and public information, covering covid prevention, treatment, dialogue and information, notably

(i) the (French) government’s prohibition of using traditional and effective anti-inflammatory and infection medication, like Ivermectin and others;

(ii) analyzing and making public the “figures” – the often false or misleading statistics about new “infections” or new “cases” – the mortality rate (what does it mean) – and bringing these corrected concepts to the public;

(iii) the different aspects and risks of the currently available – largely untested – vaccines in the west, specially the dangers of mRNA-type vaccines; and

(iv) public information – which is currently a topic of misinformation, a chaos of scientific and medical contradictions, manipulation of facts, half-facts and untruths, and outright lies, as well as intense fear campaigns. People in fear become weak, morally, physically and more vulnerable for diseases – all kinds of diseases – as well as obedient and depressed which may lead to suicide.

It is truly amazing what this French Medical Coordination has already done and is planning to continue doing to counter the current almost worldwide false and incomplete covid narrative – and bring truth to the people. – With this fantastic French initiative, there is a flicker of hope on the horizon that more and more people will see through this criminal covid endeavor.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

While the saccharine continues to ooze from the mainstream media for the incoming Biden Administration, the real iron fist of what will be the Biden foreign policy is starting to materialize. As if on cue, major bombings in Baghdad – by ISIS…remember them? – have opened the door for the Biden Administration to not only cancel President Trump’s troop drawdown from Iraq but to actually begin sending troops back into Iraq.

Is this to be Iraq War 4.0? 3.7? 5.0? Anybody’s guess.

If Biden uses this sudden – and convenient – unrest in Iraq as a trigger to return US troops (and bombs), it should not surprise anyone. As Professor Barbara Ransby points out in this video, Biden did much more to make the disastrous 2003 attack on Iraq happen than just vote “yes” on the authorization to use force. As Professor Ransby reminds us, Biden used the full power of his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to ensure the Senate approved George W. Bush’s lie-based war on Iraq. Biden prevented any experts who challenged the “Saddam has WMDs and he’s about to use them” narrative from being heard by Members of Congress, guaranteeing that only the pro-war narrative was heard.

As much as Bush or Cheney, Biden owns the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which killed a million Iraqi civilians. And he may well be taking us back.

One figure in the Biden Administration who will play a pivotal role in returning the US to its hyper-interventionism in the Middle East is Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken. As a Biden Senate staffer in 2003, he helped the then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman put together a pro-war coalition in the Democratic Party to support President Bush’s Republican push for invasion.

Later on Blinken was Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, where he successfully made the case that destroying both Libya and Syria were fantastic ideas. Both countries drowned in the Obama Administration’s “liberation” bloodbath and neither country has recovered from the “democracy” brought by Washington, but being a neocon foreign policy ideologue means never having to say you’re sorry.

And Blinken isn’t.

Not surprisingly, Blinken is a favorite of the AIPAC-bankrolled Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, as Phil Giraldi reported, Tweeted that Blinken would be part of a “…superb national security team. The country will be very fortunate to have them in public service.”

We have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to thank for at least bringing up the fact that Blinken has blundered from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster – which only gets you promoted in Washington DC. In Blinken’s confirmation hearing, Paul reminded Blinken of his addiction to intervention in the Middle East and how that has worked out for everyone.

Paul reminded the Secretary of State nominee that his only criticism of the Syria “regime change” plan was that the US did not successfully overthrow Assad. But…the US was using jihadist proxies to overthrow the secular Assad, so what does this say about Blinken’s judgement?

“The lesson of these wars,” said Paul, is that ‘regime change’ doesn’t work!”

Paul added:

Even after Libya you guys went on to Syria wanting to do the same thing again… it’s a disaster.

You got rid of one ‘bad guy’ and another ‘bad guy’ got stronger.

Yes, Senator Paul is right. “Regime change” doesn’t work. It kills or destroys the lives of the most vulnerable. The poor and the innocent. The US enemies may occasionally find themselves on the wrong end of a noose or a knife rape, but it is the civilians who always suffer when they are “liberated” by Washington.

Buckle up, as incoming Senate Majority Leader Schumer advised, there’s a whole lot of interventionism in the queue. There’s a whole lot of death and destruction to be unleashed by Biden, Blinken, and their gang of “humanitarians.”

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If President Joe Biden intends to restore America’s credibility in the world, he needs to take these steps regarding Syria. Much of this applies to other countries as well:

1) End all sanctions and blockades. US sanctions are not benign means to put pressure on governments, they work in this way – to starve and isolate the economy and the people in order to make them so desperate they will rise up against their governments and do our malignant regime changes for us. They are in fact economic terrorism against entire populations.

2) End the illegal occupation by the US and allies of conventional troops, contractor/mercenaries, and proxies. The US is controlling almost 1/3rd of Syria’s lands – lands which not coincidentally contain Syria’s richest oil fields. America is selling off Syria’s oil to fund their arming, training and equipping of mercenary proxies to try to split Syria apart … Balkanization. It also serves to deprive Syrians of fuel they need for rebuilding; for their army to defeat the al Qaeda and other terrorists that hold Idlib province, ISIS cells in the west and south, and various terrorists still attacking in other areas of the country; for manufacturing, production and distribution; for heating and power for hospitals, schools, homes, businesses, etc. People are waiting for sometimes days in lines for gasoline.

3) Apply pressure on Israel and Turkey to end their illegal occupations of Syrian lands; to end their illegal, constant attacks against the sovereign nation of Syria; and to end their continued assistance to several terrorist groups.

In many ways, Syrians are suffering more now than ever. Since the collapse of Lebanon’s government and economy last year, their economy has spiraled down, out of control. Prices on even the most basic essentials for life are beyond the means of most people – to buy even a little chicken for example is a great extravagance. Corruption, war time inflation, smuggling, the black market and rise of mafias have exacerbated the misery of the people exponentially and many are without any hope for the future at all.

All of these problems are a direct result of the reckless and unjustifiable regime change efforts of the United States of America and its allies. The regime change aggression began under GW Bush; it escalated into violence under Obama; and has continued under Trump.

Joe Biden has signaled that instead of acting in good faith and ending US efforts to overthrow the government of Syria, he will escalate them and try to finish the job that Bush, Obama and Hillary (with Biden as VP) were all so determined to accomplish. High from getting Qaddafi tortured and killed and murdering Libya in the process, the Obama administration proceeded to try to rip Syria apart. They failed for the most part but Syria is bleeding. They’ve buried hundreds of thousands of their loved ones. Their army has been hemorrhaging blood – of their young men and old alike fighting ISIS, al Qaeda and other terrorist proxy armies all sponsored by the US and/or its allies, and the civilians as the victims of the violence by legions of terrorists.About ten million (out of a total population of 23 million) have been displaced, either having to relocate within the country or outside becoming refugees.

Huge swaths of their cities and infrastructure have been destroyed or heavily damaged both by the terrorists who were missioned with bringing death and destruction; and the efforts by the Syrian government and Army with their allies to defeat the mercenary thugs.

All the US has to do is end the aggression against that country which has never threatened America, in fact they’ve wanted only mutually beneficial and respectful relations with the West.

So President Biden – I call on YOU to end this murderous madness. End the terrorist proxy regime change attempt war against Syria. And do it NOW.

These people are not our enemies – we must stop treating them as such.

These photos are all from 2020/2021 with special thanks to Rida Ali and Roula Elias Naddour.

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Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

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The mother of Eric Garner, who was brutally murdered by New York City police officers applying a chokehold as he pleaded “I can’t breathe,” testified this week before the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States.

“They killed him. It is no justice for him. But we must still stand for justice,” Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said during the commission’s opening hearing on January 18, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “We must get justice for those who come behind him.”

Another mother to testify before the commission was Dominic Archibald, the mother of Nathaniel Pickett II, who was murdered by a San Bernardino County, California, deputy sheriff who saw him lawfully walking in a crosswalk. “In the final moments of the only life he had, my only child was stopped, beaten, and terrorized like a dog,” she testified. “My son had a civil right to social freedom and a human right to life.”

Powerful testimony about the police killings of Garner, Pickett and Freddie Gray kicked off the first hearings of the Commission of Inquiry, which will consider nearly 50 cases of unjustified police homicides of Black individuals during 18 days of hearings that are being broadcast online.

This commission was convened by the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) and National Lawyers Guild (NLG) after the Trump administration prevented the UN Human Rights Council from establishing a UN commission to investigate systemic racism and police brutality in the U.S. The Council ordered the High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to prepare a report about police violence against people of African descent, but not limited to the United States, by June 2021. Following the hearings, the NCBL-IADL-NLG Commission will write a report and submit it to the high commissioner to inform her task. The commission will publicize its report widely in the United States and globally for use in advocacy and litigation.

The cases of Garner, Pickett and Gray were presented to Commissioners Max Boqwana and Peter Herbert, two of the 12 eminent international lawyers serving on the Commission.

The Killing of Eric Garner

The killing of Eric Garner was the first case the commissioners heard. Garner died on July 17, 2014, after New York City Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a prohibited chokehold while arresting him for selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. A video of the killing showed Garner repeating the words “I can’t breathe” 11 times as he lay face down on the sidewalk. Garner remained on the ground for seven minutes after losing consciousness while officers waited for an ambulance to arrive. Garner was pronounced dead at the hospital one hour later.

After the video went viral, hundreds of demonstrations erupted throughout the country. One year later, Garner’s family agreed to a $5.9 million settlement. But neither state nor federal prosecutors ever brought criminal charges against Pantaleo. It took five years for him to be fired from the police force, and all that time, he continued to receive a full paycheck.

Carr invoked other mothers who have lost sons to racist police violence. “There’s tens of thousands of us out here,” she said. “Some of us are high-profile, as they call it. But each case should be high profile. One case is as bad as the next. Some of the mothers, they can’t get out of bed.” In a stinging indictment of the system, Carr charged, “They kill us twice. First, the police, they murder in broad daylight, they murder us in the night when they don’t think anyone’s looking, then they murder us in the newspaper, they bring out any little thing that they think that can criminalize us.”

Attorney Jonathan Moore, who represented Garner’s estate, testified at the hearing. He noted that none of the other five officers who helped Pantaleo kill Garner were ever brought up on disciplinary charges. “The problem is that the police have become an instrument of state control of mostly people of color and poor people as well,” he said. Policing in the United States is a reflection of our “horrible history of racism … beginning with slavery, and then with Jim Crow, and now with the rise of white supremacy,” Moore said. “It’s no coincidence that a number of those folks who assaulted the Capitol building on January 6 … were former military and law enforcement,” and even some current law enforcement.

The Killing of Nathaniel Pickett II

On November 19, 2015, Nate Pickett crossed the street in a marked crosswalk and walked toward the motel where he was living. Officer Kyle Woods yelled at Pickett to stop. Pickett continued to walk and then ran away, as he was legally entitled to do. But after Pickett tripped on some steps, Woods tackled him, punched him, and shot him twice in the chest. Woods never called for medical care after shooting Pickett, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

After the killing, Woods changed his story several times in an attempt to manufacture reasonable suspicion or probable cause to justify his illegal stop of Pickett. But the ride-along in Woods’s patrol car, a defense expert, and a videotape all put the lie to the officer’s story. After a civil jury trial, Pickett’s family received $15.5 million in compensatory damages but Woods was never charged with a crime. Archibald, Pickett’s mother, told the commissioners, “You could never pay me for my child. Whatever comes is just a down payment on justice.”

Archibald is a retired Army officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. “We have more stringent rules of engagement and human rights requirements against the known enemy than law enforcement has in the streets of America,” she said.

Dale Galipo, Archibald’s attorney, testified that he and Archibald went together to the district attorney “with the [civil] trial transcripts and all the evidence after we won … and he still would not press criminal charges.” Archibald continues her struggle to achieve justice for her son.

The Killing of Freddie Gray

After eating breakfast at a nearby restaurant, Freddie Gray and two friends were walking down the street in Baltimore on April 12, 2015. They were doing nothing illegal. Two Baltimore city police officers on bike patrol, with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause, rapidly rode toward the three young Black men. They “ran literally for their lives,” attorney William Murphy, who represented Gray’s family, testified at the hearing. When it was clear that Gray could not outrun the officers, he “stopped and laid on the ground to avoid being assaulted.” After they found a knife in Gray’s pocket, which he was legally allowed to possess, the officers “hogtied him by cuffing his hands behind his back, shackling his feet together, bending his legs behind his back and fastening his shackled feet to his cuffed hands.”

They placed Gray in a patrol van. Forty-five minutes later, after enduring a “rough ride,” Gray arrived at the precinct “unconscious with an 85% severed spine.” Following “an unwarranted delay,” Murphy said, Gray was ambulanced to the hospital, where he died two weeks later. Baltimore agreed to a $6.4 million settlement with the Gray family. The officers were brought to trial for the killing but they waived a jury trial and the judge acquitted them. After the U.S. Department of Justice demanded that Baltimore submit to federal supervision, the city and the Justice Department reached a consent decree, which is a court-ordered agreement after a major Justice Department investigation designed to correct long-standing unconstitutional practices in police departments. Baltimore remains under supervision.

Massive protests were held around the country after Gray’s death. Murphy told the commissioners, “There isn’t an African American in America that either hasn’t had a close friend or relative brutalized or themselves been brutalized [by the police].” He described the “two kinds of policing” — one for white people and one for Black people. “The police were originally employed to enforce slavery in America, and to catch escaped slaves,” Murphy noted. After the Civil War, they were used “to prevent Black people from voting. They were employed to terrorize Black communities all over this country, to prevent them from being involved in political activity.” Like Moore, Murphy drew a straight line from slavery to contemporary racist police violence.

The hearings will continue six days a week through February 6. The cases include the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Rayshard Brooks and many others. Click here to see a full schedule of cases and register for the hearings. Videos and transcripts of the hearings can be accessed here.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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

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

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 Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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/

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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.

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.

Featured image is from BAR

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

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.

Featured image is from Left Voice

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.

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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Featured image is from Shutterstock

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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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

 

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.

Why US troops may fight alongside al-Qaeda in Yemen against Houthi/Saleh forces, as Trump escalates https://t.co/yV6Pyi05vY

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 5, 2017

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 @StateDept's designation of Ansarallah will further isolate terrorists in Yemen while the United States takes available steps to facilitate continued humanitarian aid. https://t.co/KWVrQtTmn9

— Ned Price (@statedeptspox) January 11, 2021

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.

We are ceasing all operations in the United States for the time being, as well as putting a temporary halt to our intended plans for humanitarian fundraising.

Let it be known that the Trump Administration just criminalized foreign humanitarian aid to #Yemen. pic.twitter.com/uUDEgEu9hP

— Yemen Solidarity Council (@YSCouncil) January 11, 2021

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.

Terrorist designations of Ansarallah in Yemen confront its terrorist activity and seeks to deter further malign activity by the Iranian regime in the region.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 11, 2021

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.”

Few English-language journos have been able to get into Yemen to report on the US-Saudi war. Frontline managed to: https://t.co/iRPIV0hTzw

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 21, 2017

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.”

1 year ago, the US-Saudi coalition bombed a funeral hall in Sanaa, Yemen, killing 150 and wounding 500.
This is the rally Yemenis held today pic.twitter.com/QsHdBX64IX

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 8, 2017

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.

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.”

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.

In 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.

More here, too: "AQAP is enmeshing itself within some of those forces fighting against the Houthis." https://t.co/UKbqMA088n

— David Mizner (@DavidMizner) June 13, 2017

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.

“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.

The Saudi coalition promised not to transfer weapons it buys from the US to third parties. But an investigation shows it's putting them in the hands of al Qaeda-linked fighters and hardline Salafi militias waging war on behalf of the coalition in Yemen. https://t.co/wO0FsJK1cY

— CNN (@CNN) February 5, 2019

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)

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 6^th 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 6^th 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

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.

***

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)

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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