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Mexico’s relationship with the US opens a new stage with the beginning of the Joe Biden government. According to the Democrat’s plans, the focus of the binational dialogue will be directed to strategic and humanitarian issues, such as migration, combating drug trafficking, international trade, and investment commitments. Mexicans are very hopeful that several improvements can be achieved, especially in terms of migration, but certainly many challenges still need to be overcome.

In fact, of all Biden’s promises, the one that most arouses interest and good expectations among Mexicans is the plan to naturalize around 11 million currently irregular and undocumented immigrants, of which more than half are of Mexican origin, completing the migratory reform project. President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador said, when commenting on Biden’s inauguration ceremony, that he expects the new president to fulfill his promise to consolidate a migratory reform.

What Mexicans fear is that Biden will act like former Democrat President Barack Obama, who has promised to reform immigration policy but has never did so. Biden, as vice president, worked on drafting the proposed migration reform, but Democrats failed to get the minimum number of votes needed due to frontal opposition by Republicans – whose more protectionist and nationalist view of the migration issue became official during the Trump era.

Now, despite Biden’s promise, there is no guarantee that Democrats will not face the same challenges, especially considering the current American scenario, which is much more polarized and violent than in Obama’s days. If Biden makes any decision that directly confronts Republican interests, the response may be severe not only within Congress or institutional sphere, but also among the people with Trump supporters, who form a mass of activists with broad mobilizing power. This, of course, worries the Mexican government, which fears that Biden will withdraw from his promises to avoid suffering reprisals.

Last week, Biden and Obrador talked by telephone to discuss plans, strategies, and joint partnerships for the years to come. Among the issues, in addition to a migratory reform, both presidents addressed topics such as international cooperation in the fight against COVID-19, economic revitalization plans, among others. Subsequently, during a speech, Obrador said that during the conversation Biden promised to offer aid valued at 4 billion dollars for the three nations that make up the so-called North Central American Triangle, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, as part of an economic support plan. The American interest is strategic, because, helping to reduce poverty, the migratory flows tend to be more balanced, and it helps to establish a softer migration policy. However, the very fact that Obrador publicly revealed the content of the conversation, before Biden did so, shows that the Mexican government handles American promises with warning – by making the pledge public, Obrador allows three countries that are meant to receive the aid to require it even before Biden notifies them of this.

This scenario of collective distrust is further aggravated by another factor: the American policy to combat drug trafficking. Recently, cooperation between Americans and Mexicans in combating drug trafficking has been profoundly affected by the arrest of General Salvador Cienfuegos. The general, a former Mexican national defense secretary, was arrested in October last year on charges of having links to drug trafficking cartels, which the Mexican government vehemently denied.

At the time, Obrador not only defended Cienfuegos, but also accused the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of having produced false evidence against the general. The Mexican accusation is not by chance: Cienfuegos was investigated in a completely confidential manner, without any information being provided to the Mexican government. His arrest surprised Mexican civil society, as he is a well-known and beloved public figure in his country. The American action completely violated the bilateral security cooperation agreements between the US and Mexico, but more than that, it hurt the national pride of the Mexican people, which deeply irritated Obrador and his team. Subsequently, both governments consented to repatriate Cienfuegos so that he could be investigated in his country, provided he was exonerated from all his positions. But the case continues to profoundly influence the direction of bilateral relations, as the Mexican government expects a more diplomatic attitude from the Democrats, such as the end of investigations, but at no time did Biden promise to do so.

The Cienfuegos case goes far beyond the mere figure of the General, as long as the investigations are not closed, it will mean that Washington will maintain a position of unilateral conduct of policies to combat drug trafficking, conducting investigations and intelligence operations against Mexican people without the consent of the Mexican government, which will certainly negatively influence relations. In fact, for Mexicans, it is not enough to prevent the construction of the wall at the border, it is necessary to create a scenario of mutual respect, recognition of sovereignty and bilateral cooperation. Obrador has taken more and more emphatic positions in favor of Mexican sovereignty and respect not only for his country, but also for the neighbors of Central America.

In fact, the domestic crisis scenario in the United States is profound and does not allow Washington to choose to continue to conduct relations between these countries unilaterally – Mexico will increasingly seek to impose its interests, regardless of the effects of this on migration policy.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

First published in March 2017. The 5G Rollout is taking place alongside the corona crisis

We have become thoroughly accustomed and habituated to endless advertising by drug makers to buy into the promises of pharmaceutical drugs or to consent to the nutritional value of junk food.  Yet the drug and food industries are completely indifferent to their products’ dangerous adverse effects. They give no thought to what it does to our health. All that matters is the business’ bottom line.  Fortunately, we have the freedom to make informed choices about most areas that impact our lives, whether it be living a healthy lifestyle or eating nutritious foods. But that is about to  change completely due to the brilliant marketing campaigns to make life easier with the arrival of 5G’s Internet of Things into our homes, bedrooms, offices and streets and avenues. What we are not being told is that as 5G technology increases, we will eventually be living in a 24 hour cycle that carries threats that are potentially far more dangerous than the occasional hamburger, pizza or beer.

Nobody seems to be asking whether the introduction of 5G will truly improve the quality of our lives.  Is there any redeeming truth to telecom’s promises? There are none. But unlike a drug or unhealthy habits that can cause death, the FCC under the Clinton presidency passed legislation through Congress that hands over carte blanch permission to the telecommunications industry to directly violate our democratic freedoms of choice. Privacy will disappear altogether since this new technology increases surveillance capabilities exponentially.

And the average citizen has no choice. You cannot prevent Verizon or any of the other telecom giants from installing 5G transmission antennae in your neighborhoods, grade schools and playgrounds, apartment complexes, hospitals, and parks. And this enormous technological feat will also require a minimum of 50,000 new satellites orbiting the heavens above our heads to beam transmission signals to every habitable place on the planet. This new network will be five times greater than the number of operative satellites in space already.

The precautionary principle is intended to avoid inflicting unnecessary harm and injury in order to reduce avoidable health risks, and more importantly death.  But this principle is being completely ignored with the full frontal assault to implement 5G at maximum speed. During a Congressional hearing, Senator Richard Blumenthal asked a very poignant question. Do you have any science confirming that 5G is safe? Is money being spent on studies to determine electromagnetic frequency radiation’s safety. At the hearing, every representative of the telecom industry said there were none that they were aware of.

Imagine for a minute that the FDA were to approve and register a drug or vaccine that had never been tested for safety on humans? That would never be permissible; however the telecom industry is doing just that. And their primary market is the millennial and iGen generations who are also most susceptible to EMF’s adverse effects. These are the generations who grew up with social media and chat rooms and who virtually live through the internet. It is their panacea that is fully integrated into their purpose and meaning in life.

This dark and deadly side of EMF emitting technology, especially 5G, is being hidden by our multimedia system that is being paid to manufacture both consent and doubt: consent that 5G will somehow miraculously improve our lives, and doubt against the 10,000-plus studies that show 5G will be one of the greatest health and environmental risks humanity has ever faced.

This month, IEEE Access published a special study out of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India as part of its Special Section on Antenna and Propagation for 5G. The article, “Electromagnetic Radiation Due to Cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Technologies: How Safe are We?,” is an excellent summary of the state of the science regarding 5G’s future threats based upon the confirming evidence at present. To date there are already 15 billion wireless local area network routers connected with the Internet of Things and 9 billion mobile connections.  Almost 70% of the world’s current population is using mobile phones.

Thousands of studies have been collected that indicate EMF’s health risks. The BioInitiative Report has compiled 1800 studies alone showing serious impact on both humans’ and animals’ gene transcriptions, genotoxicity, DNA damage, chromatin condensation, loss of DNA repair capacity, reduction of free-radical scavengers, neurotoxicity, decreased sperm morphology, and impaired development of brain and cranial bone. Worse, Igor Belyaev’s research at the Slovak Academy of Sciences has found evidence that some frequencies emitted by this technology damages all cells, including fibroblasts, lymphocytes and stem cells. The Indian scientists breakdown EMF’s health risks into seven main headings.

Cancer

Back in 2011, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans. Nine years later, this threat has been confirmed by thousands of medical professionals. No longer are the risks simply possibilities. It is a reality. The US’ National Toxicology Program’s final report on mouse and rat studies in late 2018 confirmed cancerous heart tumors due to the earlier 2G and 3G cell phone technologies. One of the world’s leading experts in wireless technology’s cancer risks, oncologist Leonard Hardell at the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden, concludes that “the evidence that RF radiation exposure is a risk factor for cancer is particularly worrying, taking the present deployment of the fifth generation (5G) for wireless communication.” Dr. Hardell, along with hundreds of other scientists and medical doctors have demanded a moratorium against 5G until further independent studies are performed to assure the industry’s denials of its hazards can be confirmed.

In a study published in the August 2018 issue of Journal of Medical Imaging and Health Informatics, after an extensive review and analysis of the medical literature researchers concluded that “incidence of cancer cases was remarkably higher among people who resided in 400 meters from mobile antennas, in comparison to those who lived further away. Inhabitants living close to cellular antennas are also at increased risk for developing neuropsychiatric complaints.” Under the 5G regimen every American in a suburb or city will be living 100 meters or less from a 5G antenna. In 2016, the Europa EM-EMF guideline found “strong evidence that long-term exposure to certain EMFs is a risk factor for diseases such as certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and male infertility…Common EHS (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) symptoms include headaches, concentration difficulties, sleep problems, depression, lack of energy, fatigue, and flu-like symptoms.”

Populations living within 350 meters of a 850 MHz, 1500 watt cell phone tower in Netanya, Israel experienced a 400 percent cancer increase (i.e., carcinoma of the breast, ovary, lung, kidney, bone, and Hodgkin’s disease)

Pregnancy and Infertility

The science is conclusive that EMF’s erratic pulses from mobile phones induces oxidative stress that damage testicular tissues and decreases sperm quality and motility. EMF exposure results in sperm mutations that have been shown by scientists at the University of Mainz in Germany to contribute to testicular cancer. Prof John Aitken at the University of Newcastle has shown that sperm exposed to mobile phone radiation revealed a 300 percent increase in mitochondrial damage.

We need to take the precautionary principle at heart when animals studies confirm the serious health risks. We are irresponsible when we draw a distinction between alarming animal studies that have yet to be adequately tested in humans and then make assumptions there can be no correlation. Therefore, when research shows that pregnant animals are exposed to even low levels of EMF will show uterine congestions, dead and reabsorbed fetuses, hemorrhage, unequal and asymmetrical distribution of fetus implantation, and genetic malformation, we must consider its risks against pregnant women as well. But the FCC and FDA have been horribly negligent in this regard to warn women.

Auditory System Damage

When our phones are linked to the wireless network, our entire auditory system — skin, inner and middle ear, cochlear nerve and our brain’s frontal lobe — are absorbing EMF radiation. EMFs are damaging the highly sensitive hair-like cells in the cochlear and likely contributing to the neurological disorder known as tinnitus. Tinnitus is becoming increasingly more common. The high pitch sounds associated with this illness disturb normal sleep patterns and in more serious cases interfere with normal cognitive abilities and has even led to suicides, according to a study conducted by the Medical University of Vienna and published in the British Medical Journal. Additional studies have associated long-term mobile use with hearing loss.

Adverse Childhood Development

In addition to EMF’s adverse effects on the developing fetus, the younger generations are the most exposed population to EMF radiation through excessive wireless device use. It is well-known that children’s brain tissue displays much more electrical conductivity when compared to an adult. A child’s brain also absorbs EMF radiation more readily. The geometry of a child’s head significantly increases mobile phone EMF absorption in the brain, eye, cortex, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. According to a study published in the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology, children have especially high bone marrow conductivity, greatly increasing EMF absorption.

Consequently, a study out of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute looking at 7th through 9th graders found that cumulative phone use decreased memory.

Blood-Related Disorders

Even very low intensity EMF frequencies — much lower than what 5G will expose us to — interrupt the blood brain barrier that hinders toxic chemicals from disrupting various tissues, including the brain. EMFs interfere with this protective barrier. Dr. G Salford at Lund University in Sweden, observed that a single two-hour cellular phone session will produce leakage in this barrier and after 50 day use can lead to neuronal damage.

DNA Damage

Medical scientists are quick to warn about the mechanisms by which our cellular DNA interact with EMF radiation. In fact, the DNA’s double helix structure “causes it to act like a fractal antenna” whereby it interacts with a wide range of different electromagnetic frequencies. For this reason DNA is highly susceptible to damage across the wide spectrum of wireless frequency ranges. The DNA-EMF interaction creates free radicals that contribute to stress proteins and ultimately gene mutations, including in stem cells.

Mental and Cognitive Risks

The scientific literature increasingly reveals that EMF exposure is contributing to the growing rates in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. EMF’s effects on brain tissue and neurons is an established fact based on epidemiological studies of populations living close to cell towers. 5G will bring these towers into everyone’s neighborhoods. An article in Reviews of Environmental Health introduces a new observed disorder — “Chronic multi-system illness” (CMSI).  CMSI correlates to milder electromagnetic hypersensitivity to 3 MHz-300 GHz, with headaches, concentration difficulties, sleep problems, depression, lack of energy, fatigue, and flu-like symptoms. However, beside these milder effects, long-term exposure to these high output towers are also contributing to severe brain and cognitive disabilities, including paralysis, stroke and psychosis.

In our opinion, the 5G rollout is an irresponsible experiment with potential holocaust-like consequences in the long-term. Neither the US nor China have ever felt obliged to follow UNESCO’s Precautionary Principle to avoid “morally unacceptable harm” when the science is plausible but still uncertain. In the case of 5G, the harm to human life is conclusive, and in the view of Dr. Lennart Hardell, it may be in violation of the Nuremberg Code.

In addition there is something largely missing from the 5G debate in the US, whereas some European nations are paying attention to it; that is, existing safety standards for wireless technology are obsolete. This conclusion was arrived at independently by Vienna Medical University in Austria and Carl Blackman at the University of North Carolina, published in the journal Pathophysiology. The problem herein lies in the failures of federal regulatory agencies to be truthful to the scientific evidence rather than show favoritism to the wireless industry’s own junk science and commercial interests. Again, private interests profit and the public is harmed.

Unfortunately, the FCC standards for mobile phones have remained the same since 1996. Since 1997, secondary insurance providers have refused to cover health damages due to wireless radiation. During the past two and a half decades, the technology has changed dramatically, and not for the better. This is not simply the words of independent 5G critics in the medical profession announcing health warnings. The FDA also acknowledges the problem. On its website, we find “the FDA does not review the safety of radiation-emitting consumer products such as cell phones and similar wireless devices before they can be so, as it does with new drugs or medical devices…. However, the FDA does have the authority to take action if cell phones are shown to emit radiofrequency energy at a level that is hazardous to the use.” Unfortunately, the FDA has never taken charge of this mandate and injunction it has been assigned with.

Dr. Devra Davis is the founder of the Environmental Health Trust and a Visiting Professor of Medicine at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School and a Visiting Professor of Medicine at Ondokuz Mayis University, Turkey. For years Dr Davis has served as the director of the Center for Environmental Oncology, which she founded, at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute —­ the first institute of its kind in the world to examine the environmental factors that contribute to the majority of cases of cancer.

During a recent lecture for the 2020 Expert Forum on 5G and emerging EMF technologies, Dr. Davis outlined many of the gold standard studies that should have us worry about the future ahead as the telecom industry with the blessing of governments roll out 5G. It is not simply EMF exposure from phones and wireless routers that pose dire risks. It is also the accumulative EMF radiation people are exposed to daily — from laptops, cellular phones, towers and antennas, wi-fi routers, and microwave ovens,

In addition to the above risks, Dr. Davis has observed other worrisome EMF effects. Dementia for example has become an epidemic and even young adults as young 30 are starting to show signs of this neurodegenerative condition. Recently dementia has been called “diabetes of the brain.” Davis has noted that due to EMF exposure brain scans reveal an increase in glucose levels in brain tissue and increases lipid peroxidation that results in cell damage. Mobile phones also significantly reduce glutathione, an essential enzyme necessary for DNA repair.

As we reported in the past, the mainstream media, in particular the New York Times, which has a collaborative agreement with the leading 5G provider Verizon, have no intention to warn the public about any of the scientific findings mentioned above. There is a growing consensus in the scientific and medical community that 5G will usher an epidemic of disease never before witnessed in human history. It is too difficult to make forecasts. Nevertheless, if the past and current research on EMF’s adverse effects on health and the environment during the past 50 years are any indication, we are entering a new epoch of disease and neurological disorders that humanity is completely unprepared to handle.

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including The War on Health, Poverty Inc and Plant Codes.

Featured image: Demonstrators at the anti-5G protest in Bern on Friday. (© Keystone / Peter Klaunzer)

Important article first published by Global Research in April 2019

We are in the midst of a 5G wireless technology rollout, and politicians have yet to address safety concerns. I recently used Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as an example, but it’s happening worldwide. It’s one of many examples that illustrates how large corporations completely control politics. I also recently wrote about Robert F. Kennedy explaining how this came to be, and how they’ve been able to completely compromise government, big media, and our federal regulatory agencies that are supposed to be protecting and informing us.

In the video, he uses Big Pharma as an example, as they provide the most money to congress; even more so than big oil and gas. In that article I also outline multiple examples of fraud so readers can get a clearer picture of what’s going on and see some actual evidence of it.

It’s clear that we are not being protected, and politicians are simply abiding to the the will of their masters, the big corporations, who in turn act as slaves to their ‘financial overlords,’ the big banks. We continue to see products and services being approved and implemented without ever going through any safety testing. This is a big problem, and one of the main reasons why we could be seeing a drastic rise in multiple diseases and ailments, especially when it comes to neuropsychiatric disorders.  A study titled “Microwave frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produce widespread neuropsychiatric effects including depression” published in the Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy outlines this quite clearly, and it’s only one of thousands of peer-reviewed studies raising multiple concerns in regards to this type of technology.

Is there really any concern for the well being of humanity within these institutions? If not, why do we continue to support them? Is it because we’re under the illusion that there is actual concern? And why do we continue to take power away from ourselves by electing corrupt politicians?

Anyways, in this article, I’d like to draw your attention to Dr. Martin L. Pall (image on the right), PhD and Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences at Washington State University. Taken from his report titled “5G: Great risk for EU, U.S. and International Health! Compelling Evidence for Eight Distinct Types of Great Harm Caused by Electromagnetic Field(EMF) Exposures and the Mechanism that Causes Them,” he states that:

“Putting in tens of millions of 5G antennae without a single biological test of safety has got to be about the stupidest idea anyone has had in the history of the world.”

That report goes through a lot of science, which only adds to all of the science that’s already available regarding the harmful effects of 5G technology. If you’re looking for more information, I often point people toward the Environmental Health Trust because it’s a great resource that gives you access to more science.

This is not new information. For years, numerous studies have been published proving the health concerns regarding 5G technology and hundreds of scientists have petitioned the United Nations about them. These initiatives started as a result of the work done by Dr. Marin Blank from Columbia University’s Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics.

According to him, with regards to wireless radiation in general:

“We have created something that is harming us, and it is getting out of control. Before Edison’s light bulb there was very little electromagnetic radiation in our environment. The levels today are very many times higher than natural background levels, and are growing rapidly because of all the new devices that emit this radiation. Putting it bluntly they are damaging the living cells in our bodies and killing many of us prematurely.”

Again, it’s unbelievable that these technologies are being rolled out without any safety testing done. How is this even allowed to happen? The thing is, if there was safety testing done, there would likely be no changes made anyways, and these corporations would be allowed to rollout and utilize these technologies.

Seeing how this article is about the work of Dr. Pall, below is a lecture that goes into detail about his research and why we should be concerned with 5G technology.

It’s alarming that some people have been made to believe that this is “pseudoscience.” Not only is this surprising, but it’s also very concerning.

During the “Health in Buildings Roundtable” sponsored by the NIH and co-organized by the US CDC and several other organizations, Dr. Martin Pall from Washington State University (WSU) concluded that the “5G rollout is absolutely insane.” In this short presentation, Dr. Pall confirmed that the current 2G/3G/4G radiation the population is exposed to has been scientifically linked to: lowered fertility, insomnia, fatigue, depression, anxiety, major changes in brain structure in animals, cellular DNA damage, oxidative stress, hormonal disruption, cancer, and much more. Dr. Pall briefly explained the mechanisms of how the electro-smog emitted by our cell phones, wifi routers, cell phone antennas, and other wireless technologies affect human cells.

We’ve written about this topic in depth, and below are some recent articles we’ve published that go into more detail if you’re looking for more information.

On a side note, a lot of this information can spark a fearful reaction, and that’s normal. It could elicit the same fearful reaction you may have to other humanitarian issues including the massive amounts of pesticides being sprayed in our environment and on our food, the rising deforestation rates, and several other aspects of the human experience that need to be changed. As important as it is to not react with fear and panic, it’s even more important not to completely ignore these things and think everything will magically be okay.

Earth has become engulfed with this mess as a result of our ignorance, as a result of us ignoring important scientific findings such as these. If we continue along this path, disease rates will continue to rise. Awareness is key, and simply being informed about this issue is a huge step in the right direction.

So, what can you do? You could purchase some EMF protective clothing and bedding, or you could even paint your home with EMF protective paint. You can unplug your computer when not in use, turn off your cell phone, and unplug all your electronic devices before you go to sleep. You could have a wired internet connection, which is actually much faster than any wireless connection. You can live a healthy lifestyle, and you can use mind-body healing techniques to help you.

I write a lot about parapsychology, and it’s quite clear that our minds can have a significant impact on our biology. I know it sounds a little ‘new agey,’ but the truth is, if you don’t believe you are being harmed, odds are that the impact on your biology will be significantly different than someone who is fearful and stressed out about health concerns. Consciousness is huge, and it is one of the biggest factors in regards to preventative measures.

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International Warmongers Beat the War Drums for War Against Russia

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, January 27 2021

The only certain thing about this so-called security conference – postponed because of the Corona plague – is that the world’s worst warmongers are again beating the war drums. This year, possibly for a new war against Russia.

Russian-American Relations Under Biden: More of the Same Except for One Thing

By Andrew Korybko, January 27 2021

Russian-American relations will remain just as bad under Biden as they were under Trump except for the 46th President’s desire to extend the New START for another five years as part of an implied nuclear detente with Moscow after his administration also announced that it’ll investigate Russia for alleged cyber spying.

What Happened to JFK and a Foreign Policy of Peace?

By Rick Sterling, January 27 2021

Sixty years ago, John F Kennedy (JFK) was inaugurated as president of the USA. In less than three years, before he was assassinated in November 1963, he initiated major changes in foreign policy.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Individual Rights and Freedoms Under Siege in Era of COVID

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr, January 27 2021

“The COVID-19 pandemic has proven an opportunity of convenience for totalitarian elements who have put individual rights and freedoms globally under siege,” said CHD chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his letter to 100,000 lawyers.

Serious Health Impacts of Wireless and Power Frequency EMFs: “Impact Oxidative Balance”: Swiss Expert Group

By Environmental Health Trust, January 27 2021

The Swiss expert group on electromagnetic fields and non-ionising radiation BERENIS just released a major evaluation of the scientific evidence on oxidative stress in their January 2021 newsletter.

In the 1930s, UK and US Business Ties to Nazi Germany. Churchill’s “Admiration” of Adolph Hitler

By Shane Quinn, January 27 2021

Early this century Winston Churchill was voted “the greatest Briton of all time” in a nationwide British poll, which attracted more than a million votes, as he finished ahead of figures like the naturalist Charles Darwin. It is little known, however, that Churchill had favourably viewed European fascism during the 1920s and 1930s.

French Court Hears Case Against Chemical Corporations Over Agent Orange Use in Vietnam

By Brett Wilkins, January 27 2021

A court in France on Monday heard a case brought by a French-Vietnamese woman against over a dozen multinational corporations she accuses of causing grievous harm by selling the defoliant Agent Orange to the United States government.

Neonic Pesticides Could Spell Disaster for Our Food Supply

By Daniel Raichel, January 27 2021

Humanism in Painting: Remembering the Art of Symeon Shimin. NY Whitney Museum

By Prof. Sam Ben-Meir, January 27 2021

Note: All Global Research articles are now accessible in 27 languages by activating the Translate Website Drop Down Menu on the top banner of our home page.

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Governments, news and even hospitals are claiming that without locking down society the healthcare system would collapse.

Yet, we only need take a look at headlines of flu seasons gone by to see that hospitals have dealt with far greater surges of respiratory illnesses without collapsing.

Here are just a few samples:

…

2019: “Some of Ontario’s biggest hospitals are filled beyond capacity nearly every day”

Before the “pandemic” hit Canada, on January 22, 2019, CBC News wrote this article stating that “hospital gridlock… is the new normal.” See for yourself:

Overcrowding has become so common in Ontario hospitals that patient beds are now placed in hallways and conference rooms not only at times of peak demand, but routinely day after day…

An exclusive analysis of the data by CBC News shows that hospital gridlock — a phenomenon that used to be restricted to surges in patients during flu season — is the new normal.

In contrast, today, during this so-called “new normal,” hospitals are being under-utilized. “Ontario’s hospital capacity is better than before pre-pandemic….” wrote Roman Baber, a minister of the Ontario parliament in a recent letter to the province’s premier. “Urban area hospitals are always above capacity at this time of the year — that’s why we campaigned on ending Hallway Healthcare.”

2018: “Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents”

A year earlier, January 18, 2018, Time Magazine wrote:

The 2017-2018 influenza epidemic is sending people to hospitals and urgent-care centers in every state, and medical centers are responding with extraordinary measures: asking staff to work overtime, setting up triage tents, restricting friends and family visits and canceling elective surgeries, to name a few.

Extraordinary measures; but not insane. They were facing a veritable epidemic, yet they did not even propose healthy people stay in their homes as some kind of far-fetched remedy.

2018: Rapid increase in seasonal flu cases taxes area hospitals

2018 was a big year for the flu, as we can see from this January 11, 2018 article in University of Alabama News:

UAB Hospital Emergency, Critical Care, Ambulatory and Prime Care services have experienced a 50 percent increase in seasonal influenza cases in the past 72 hours alone. These events led Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to issue a State of Emergency this evening.

Yes, Alabama had an emergency. But Spain didn’t go into lockdown to avoid getting the Alabama flu.

2018: “California hospitals face a ‘war zone’ of flu patients — and are setting up tents to treat them

The same month, on January 16, 2018, the LA Times reported:

Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread the flu. Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots so they can triage the hordes of flu patients.

I wonder if these journalists, who throw around this “war zone” hyperbole, have ever been to a real war zone. Typically, bullets and grenades make far gorier injuries than pneumonia.

2017: “French hospitals cancel operations amid brutal flu epidemic”

A year earlier, on November 1, 2017, France 24 reported:

“Emergency rooms are at breaking point,” François Braun, head of France’s Samu-Urgences de France ambulance group, told AFP on Wednesday. “All regions of France are affected.”

Yet did they order everyone in France to start wearing masks? No. Maybe masks weren’t invented yet.

2014: “CDC says nation hits epidemic status“

On December 31, 2014, Dayton Daily News reported:

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention said this week that the flu has reached the epidemic threshold nationally and is widespread in 36 states. Four pediatric flu-related deaths have been confirmed in Ohio, including an infant less than six months old in Cincinnati.

Four children sadly died from the flu, yet kids were still allowed to go to school. In my province of Ontario, no children have died from COVID, yet none are allowed to attend school.

2013: “Hospitals overwhelmed by flu and norovirus patients”

On January 10, 2013, CTV News reported:

“In our emergency rooms, we would normally see about 150 patients a week with influenza; now it’s nearly 700,” Dr. Bill Dickout, medical director for the Edmonton zone of Alberta Health Services, told reporters Wednesday.”

So how is COVID-19 any different? Or has influenza simply hired a better PR team?

2011: “Hospitals overwhelmed by surge of flu cases”

The Globe and Mail, January 11, 2011, printed this shocking statement:

A surge in seasonal influenza cases in parts of the country has clogged hospital emergency rooms, postponed elective surgeries…

Is not COVID sounding like that Shreddies commercial? You know, the one where they tilt the square breakfast cereal on the side and rebrand it “Diamond Shreddies.”

2009: “Swamped hospitals fear an ER emergency”

On May 1, 2009, the LA Times reported:

On Long Island, N.Y., hospitals are scrambling to bring extra workers in to handle a 50% surge in visitors to emergency rooms. In Galveston, Texas, the local hospital ran out of flu testing kits after being overwhelmed with patients worried about having contracted swine flu.

At Loma Linda University Medical Center near San Bernardino, emergency room workers have set up a tent in the parking lot to handle a crush of similar patients. In Chicago, ER visits at the city’s biggest children’s hospital are double normal levels, setting records at the 121-year-old institution.

Obviously, hospitals are prepared (or at least should be) for seasonal rises in respiratory illnesses.

2009: “‘Walking well’ flood hospitals with — or without — flu symptoms”

May 5, 2009, CNN reported:

This week, some hospitals saw record numbers of patients. A few emergency departments shut down to paramedics because of overcrowding. “We have had a lot of nervous patients with minimal respiratory tract symptoms,” said Dr. Mark Bell, principal of Emergent Medical Associates, which operates 18 emergency departments in Southern California. “It has caused significant amount of delays in emergency care. They’re all walking well.”

This reminds me of the testimony of undercover nurse Erin Olszewski. She said patients with anxiety and mild respiratory issues were being intubated at New York hospitals.

2000: “Early Flu Outbreak Has Hospitals Overflowing”

January 1, 2000, the New York Times brought in the New Year with these words :

This year’s wave of influenza has become widespread across the nation, overwhelming emergency rooms in cities from Boston to Los Angeles, filling hospital beds and forcing postponements of operations as staff members turn to treating the rising number of flu patients….

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said this year’s outbreak had arrived much earlier than usual and had increased death rates from pneumonia and flu-related illnesses.

Of course, they didn’t shut down businesses. Indeed, since health care is very expensive, ruining the economy probably didn’t seem like a viable solution.

1999: “Health Lorry used as mortuary as ‘flu strikes hospitals”

Over in England, on January 5, 1999, BBC News shared this familiar story:

A hospital spokesman said emergency admissions were up 50% on last year, and fewer burials and cremations over Christmas and the New Year had created a body jam.

Sounds like New York City, in the spring of 2020; sans the world-wide hysteria.

1993: “Beijing Flu Outbreak Pounds L.A. County”

The LA Times, December 29, 1993, reported:

An outbreak of Beijing flu has swept Los Angeles, boosting absenteeism at local companies, schools and government offices and sending droves of feverish people to doctors’ offices and hospitals, health officials said Tuesday.

As a Toronto-area nurse wrote in an open letter, regarding the second wave of COVID: “Bottlenecks have always occurred in [urban hospitals]; old, inadequate infrastructure, for a baseline, unhealthy population.”

1978: “Texas-Type Flu Sweeps Across Area“

Lastly, going back to the year of my birth, January 7, 1978, the The Washington Post wrote:

Influenza has hit the Washington metropolitan area with such force that the emergency room staff at the Children’s Hospital National Medical Center has been overwhelmed and has called for volunteer help from other hospital staffers.

That was just a sample of what you can find searching the archives of mainstream news sites. It becomes clear that flu outbreaks appear every year. Some years are worse than others. They are typically not labelled as a global pandemic.

How to Rebrand the Flu For Prime Time News

But just consider how easy it would be to give separate cold and flu outbreaks — appearing in, let’s say, China, Italy and New York — the same name. Then, instead of keeping it on the back pages of the newspapers, you print it on the front page. Instead of the last few minutes of a newscast, you make it the feature story. Every day. Week after week.

Then you have government tell everyone to wear masks. Which they do. Then you tell them the masks have stopped the flu. What a relief!

But sadly, this other new virus is so much smarter than the flu. Indeed, it is now killing about the same amount of people as the flu was. What a coincidence!

Alas, no one would fall for that. They’d see right through such an obvious ploy. Wouldn’t they?

John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors. Since March 2020, he has been writing articles that question and expose the contradictions in the COVID-19 narrative and control measures. He is also completing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca.

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

***

Following House impeachment on the phony charge of inciting insurrection, Trump’s politicized Senate trial to begin on February 9 lacks legitimacy.

It’s all about wanting him hung out to dry for partisan reasons — unrelated to the rule of law.

It reveals deep-seated undemocratic Dem contempt for the rule of law.

Throughout Trump’s tenure, they savaged him for the wrong reasons consistently, ignoring legitimate wrongdoing to hold him accountable for because most congressional members share guilt.

The same goes for the corporate-owned fourth estate that long ago abandoned what journalism is supposed to be.

The US political system is too debauched to fix — a fantasy democracy from inception, it’s intolerant of the real thing wherever it exists.

It’s contemptuous of what just societies hold dear.

Long ago having abandoned the rule of law, governing is by the law of the jungle instead while pretending otherwise.

Only the ignorant and naive are fooled. Unfortunately they comprise a large segment of US society, perhaps a majority — brainwashed to accept what demands rejection.

All but five GOP senators expressed opposition to Trump’s upcoming Senate trial.

The Constitution is unclear on whether a former president or other US official can be impeached and put on trial.

Constitutional experts disagree on this issue. While nothing in the document explicitly permits impeachment of a former US official, nothing rules it out.

If a former US official is convicted by a required two-thirds Senate majority, the ruling could be contested in federal court to the highest level.

If so, a Supreme Court majority would decide this issue, what hasn’t happened so far.

Trump’s Senate trial is all about wanting him prevented from seeking public office again.

It also aims to greatly humiliate him more than already that could backfire on Dems by exposing their chicanery.

Law Professor Jonathan Turley explained that Chief Justice John Roberts won’t be present for Trump’s trial because he’s no longer president.

Someone else will be chosen for the dubious task. Turley asked and answered the following questions:

“(W)ho is being tried. Is (Trump) a president? Obviously not.”

“Is he a civil officer? No, he is a private citizen.”

“A private citizen is being called to the Senate to be tried for removal from an office that he does not hold.”

Turley cited congressional “opportunism” as a greater danger than holding a former US official justifiably or unjustifiably accountable by Senate trial.

“A new Congress with a new majority can seek retroactive impeachments and disqualifications for figures in an opposing party” — at any time for any reasons when they’re private citizens to prevent them from ever holding public office again by separate majority vote.

By this standard, a future GOP controlled Congress could impeach and try Obama and Clinton, even 96-year-old Jimmy Carter if still living at the time.

Turley: A future Congress “could insist that there is no escaping impeachment by merely leaving office.”

Turley also criticized what he called a “snap impeachment” of Trump — with no hearing, no chance for rebuttal by DJT or his counsel.

He stressed that while Trump’s upcoming Senate trial may or may not be “extraconstitutional, it should (be) view(ed) as constitutionally unsound.”

In discussing the above, Turley left unaddressed the issue of impeaching and trying Trump for inciting insurrection he had nothing to do with.

Storming Capitol Hill on January 6 was an orchestrated anti-Trump false flag for what’s happening now.

Going way beyond Trump’s trial by Senate, it’s a diabolical scheme to advance the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset that aims to establish ruler-serf societies worldwide — enforced by police state harshness.

In 2012, Occupy Wall Street activists in US cities nationwide were wrongfully demonized as domestic terrorists.

Today it’s dissenting from the official narrative. It’s speech, media and academic freedoms.

It’s a free and open society US dark forces want replaced by full-blown tyranny on the phony pretext of protecting national security at a time when the only threats to the nation are invented, not real.

On Tuesday, GOP senators voted overwhelmingly against Trump’s upcoming second Senate trial — only five party members supporting it.

The measure on whether to proceed with trial passed by a 55 – 45 margin — way short of a two-thirds Senate majority to convict.

Proceedings against Trump remain scheduled to begin on February 9.

Based on Wednesday’s Senate vote, exoneration seems certain.

Trump will be the only former US president to be impeached and tried twice — while in office and as a private citizen, both times on phony charges, not legitimate ones.

As things now stand, he’ll be exonerated again next month.

The same judgment cannot apply to a nation of, by, and for privileged interests exclusively at the expense of most others — where the rule of law no longer exists.

*

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

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image: President-elect Trump with retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, who would soon become Secretary of Defense in between stints at General Dynamics. (By a katz/Shutterstock)

The Swiss expert group on electromagnetic fields and non-ionising radiation BERENIS just released a major evaluation of the scientific evidence on oxidative stress in their January 2021 newsletter finding that the majority of research studies have found effects which could be more severe  for those with preexisting conditions and the more vulnerable young and old.

This issue is central to the landmark US federal case EHT et al. v FCC which contends the FCC has ignored the scientific evidence presented to them showing harm.

The BERENIS review confirms that yes there is scientific evidence showing adverse impacts from non ionizing radiation as the  “majority of the animal and more than half of the cell studies provided evidence of increased oxidative stress caused by RF-EMF or ELF-MF.”

Despite the methodological issues in the body of research “EMF exposure, even in the low dose range, can lead to changes in oxidative balance.”

Furthermore as pre-existing conditions, such as immune deficiencies or diseases (diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases), compromise the body’s defence mechanisms, including antioxidative protection, “it is therefore possible that individuals with these conditions experience more severe health effects.”

Straightaway after replacing Trump by election theft, the illegitimately installed Biden/Harris regime targeted Russia, China, and domestic freedoms — the latter by inventing a domestic terrorist threat that doesn’t exist except when state-sponsored.

It’s an ominous sign for what’s likely coming — continued erosion of a free and open US society with intent to eliminate it altogether, along with no end to war by other means on Russia, China, and by extension other nations free from US control.

That’s the disturbing state of things in America under growing tyrannical rule on track toward becoming full-blown if not checked.

Russia denounced what had earmarks of US orchestrated pro-Navalny protests in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities over the past weekend.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov slammed what he called US “support for the violation of the Russian law.”

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said “we will respond to” unacceptable US meddling in Russian internal affairs.

The Biden/Harris regime “will have to provide explanations to the foreign ministry for the conduct of the US embassy in Moscow and for the statements from the Department of State.”

“We will continue to address this matter because it is just the tip of an iceberg — what was published by the US official structures, the recommendation given by foreign ministries of some Western countries.”

The only language US ruling authorities understand is toughness, diplomacy a waste of time, accomplishing nothing when undertaken with sovereign independent nations.

Already the die is cast on Biden/Harris regime foreign policy toward nations free from US control.

Dirty business as usual is certain ahead as earlier — perhaps with a new hot war or two in mind against one or more invented enemies.

No real ones exist so they have to be invented when unjustifiably justifying an attack on another nation preemptively in flagrant breach of the UN Charter and US constitutional law.

US dirty hands were all over weekend protests in Russia with more of the same virtually sure to follow.

US war on China by other means is certain to continue, chances of improved bilateral relations virtually nil.

Straightaway after being sworn into office as US war secretary, former 4-star army general Lloyd Austin called on Washington’s key Asian allies to support its hostile-to-China agenda — in less than so many words.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, he said he’ll “work to update (US geopolitical) strategy.”

“We’ll have to have capabilities that allow us…to present a credible threat, a credible deterrent…to China in the future.”

“(C)apabilities (are) need(ed) to be able to (check) large pieces of Chinese military inventory…”

“(W)e still have the qualitative edge and the competitive edge over China.”

“I think that gap has closed significantly and our goal will be to ensure that we expand that gap going forward.”

US “strategy will be arrayed against the threat and China presents the most significant threat going forward because China is ascending.”

“Russia is also a threat, but it’s in decline (sic).”

Like China, Russia is rising as the US steadily declines because of its imperial madness war on humanity worldwide and unwillingness to change.

On January 22, Austin was confirmed as Biden/Harris war secretary.

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Monday, he called on key US Asian allies to support its hostile to China agenda without naming it directly.

The US opposes “any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” he told his Japanese counterpart Nobuo Kishi.

According to the Pentagon, Austin urged Kishi to “strengthen Japan’s contribution to the role the alliance continues to play in providing security (sic) in the Indo-Pacific region.”

He made similar remarks to his South Korean counterpart Suh Wook.

Separately, Biden/Harris national security advisor Jake Sullivan told his South Korean counterpart Suh Hoon that the bilateral relationship is a “linchpin” of regional peace and security.

Polar opposite is true wherever the US shows up in parts of the world where it doesn’t belong — its hegemonic presence always assuring trouble that too often includes preemptive war on nations threatening no one, along with other hostile actions.

US relations with China and Russia are tense, the same true with other nations free from its control.

Once again on Saturday, a US carrier group provocatively entered the South China Sea for military exercises near Chinese waters.

Time and again, the US unjustifiably justifies what’s unacceptable by falsely claiming the right of freedom of navigation.

Its military-related actions near borders of nations on its target list for regime change are provocative and confrontation.

They have nothing to do with national security or free navigation.

At this time, Biden/Harris appear likely to continue Trump’s hardline anti-China agenda that’s fraught with risk of direct confrontation if things are pushed too far.

A Final Comment

Last week, Beijing sanctioned 28 former Trump regime officials in retaliation for their involvement violating China’s sovereign rights.

They’re “prohibited from entering the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao of China.”

“They and companies and institutions associated with them are also restricted from doing business with China,” according to information from its People’s Daily, adding:

This “countermeasure of China demonstrated the country’s firm resolution to safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests.”

*

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

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is by Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons

„Liebesgrüße nach Moskau: Biden droht der ‚Tyrannei‘ Putins mit dem Ende.“ Dieses vergiftete „Versprechen“ gab Biden dem russischen Präsidenten bereits lange vor seiner gestohlenen Wahl zum neuen US-Präsidenten (1). Über das in München anstehende private Treffen ausgewählter Kriegstreiber sagt er: „Wie kein anderes globales Forum verbindet München europäische Führungskräfte und Denker mit Gleichgesinnten aus der ganzen Welt (2).“ Das einzig Sichere bei dieser so genannten Sicherheitskonferenz – die wegen der Corona-Plandemie verschoben wird – ist jedoch die Tatsache, dass die weltweit schlimmsten Kriegstreiber wieder die Kriegstrommeln rühren. In diesem Jahr möglicherweise für einen neuen Krieg gegen Russland. Völker hört die Signale!

Vor nahezu 80 Jahren – im Sommer 1941 – überfiel das faschistische Deutschland – nicht ohne Unterstützung westlicher Staaten – die Sowjetunion und hinterließ eine Bilanz des Schreckens: Schätzungsweise 13 Millionen tote Soldaten, 14 Millionen tote Zivilisten und 3 Millionen tote Kriegsgefangene (3). Und nur drei Generationen später werden die Kriegstrommeln für einen neuen Krieg gegen Russland gerührt. Unterzeichnen Sie deshalb weiterhin die Öffentliche Erklärung vom 8./9. Mai 2018 in der „Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung (NRhZ)“ (4): „Wir Europäer sagen NEIN zu einem Krieg gegen Russland!“

Für die jüngere Generation, die nicht weiß, was Krieg bedeutet, beschreibt der kirgisische Schriftsteller Tschingis Aitmatow in der Erzählung „Goldspur der Garben“, wie der „Große Vaterländische Krieg“ über die Sowjetunion hereinbrach und das Leben von Jung und Alt augenblicklich veränderte (5). Oft erreichen nur ganz persönliche Schilderungen das Herz der Menschen.

In einem Gespräch mit Mutter Erde in Aitmatows Erzählung sagt Mutter Tolgonai, die in diesem Krieg ihren Ehemann und einen Sohn verlor:

„Bedenke doch, teure Erde, gerade deine besten Arbeiter, deine geschicktesten Meister mordet der Krieg. Ich bin damit nicht einverstanden, mein ganzes Leben bin ich nicht einverstanden damit! Die Menschen können und müssen dem Krieg Einhalt gebieten (6).“

„Das Glück des Ackerbauern liegt im Säen und Ernten“

Zu Beginn der Erzählung beschreibt Tolgonai, Tochter eines kirgisischen Taglöhners, wie sie als 17jährige bei der Ernte Suwankul, ihren zukünftigen Ehemann kennenlernte:

„Flammend stieg die Sonne auf, die schneebedeckten Berggipfel erglänzten in goldenem Schimmer, wie ein tiefblauer Fluss strömte uns aus der Steppe der Wind entgegen. Diese frühen Sommermorgen waren die Morgenröte unserer Liebe. Die ganze Welt verwandelte sich wie im Märchen, wenn wir zusammen dahingingen. Und das Feld, grau, zerstampft und aufgewühlt, wurde zum schönsten Feld der Erde… (S. 435).“

Vom Glück beseelt fragte sie ihren Liebsten flüsternd: „Suwan, was glaubst du, wir werden doch glücklich sein, ja?“ Und er antwortete:

„Wenn Land und Wasser gleichmäßig unter alle verteilt werden, wenn auch wir unser eigenes Feld haben, wenn auch wir pflügen, säen und unser eigenes Getreide dreschen – dann wird das unser Glück sein. Ein größeres Glück braucht der Mensch nicht, Tolgonai. Das Glück des Ackerbauern liegt im Säen und Ernten (S. 436).“

Mit ihren Händen schufen beide ihr Leben. Sie arbeiteten und legten sommers und winters den Ktmen (Hacke) nicht aus der Hand: Viel Schweiß haben sie vergossen, viel Mühe aufgewandt. Sie bauten sich ein Haus und schafften sich ein paar Stück Vieh an. Sie begannen wie Menschen zu leben. Das Großartigste aber war, dass ihnen drei Söhne geboren wurden. Die Zeit verging und fast unmerklich wuchsen die Söhne heran. Jeder wählte seinen eigenen Weg.

„Es ist Krieg, Mama!“

Im Sommer 1941, an einem Morgen vor Sonnenaufgang, erblickten Tolgonai und die anderen Bauern beim Mähen auf einem neuen Getreidefeld direkt am Fluss, wie am anderen Flussufer plötzlich ein Reiter auftauchte. Er kam hinter den letzten Höfen des Ails (kirgisisches Dorf) hervorgeprescht und jagte in wildem Galopp geradewegs durch Gestrüpp und Schilf, als wäre eine Meute wilder Hunde hinter ihm her.

Was trieb diesen Menschen? Es war ein junger Russe. Er fuchtelte mit den Armen und rief ihnen etwas zu, aber durch das Getöse des Flusses war nichts zu verstehen. Als der Reiter den reißenden Fluss durchquert hatte und bei einem Mähdrescher ankam, war plötzlich ein großes Geschrei. Von allen Seiten stürzten Menschen dorthin, manche zu Fuß, andere zu Pferd, wieder andere standen auf ihren Fuhrwerken und hieben mit der Peitsche auf die Pferde ein. Auch Tolgonai lief los:

„‘Gott behüte! Gott behüte!‘, flehte ich, im Laufen die Hände emporgestreckt. (…) Als ich endlich ankam, war der Mähdrescher von einer lärmenden Menge umringt. Ich konnte nichts hören, nichts verstehen. Verzweifelt versuchte ich, mir einen Weg durch die Menge zu bahnen: ‚Macht Platz! Lasst mich durch!‘ Die Leute traten auseinander, und als ich Kassym und Aliman nebeneinander am Mähdrescher stehen sah, streckte ich wie eine Blinde die zitternden Arme nach meinem Sohn aus. Kassym kam auf mich zu und fing mich auf.

‚Es ist Krieg, Mama!‘, hörte ich wie von weitem seine Stimme. Ich blickte ihn an, als ob ich nicht begriffe, was das für ein Wort sei.

‚Krieg? Krieg, sagst du?‘, fragte ich zurück. ‚Ja, Mama, Krieg ist ausgebrochen‘, antwortete er. Mir aber kam immer noch nicht klar zum Bewusstsein, was sich hinter diesem Wort verbarg. ‚Wie denn, Krieg? Warum Krieg? Krieg, sagst du?‘ wiederholte ich dieses unheimliche Wort, und dann packte mich jähes Entsetzen, und ich begann leise zu weinen nach all der ausgestandenen Angst und der unerwarteten Nachricht. Als die Frauen mein tränenüberströmtes Gesicht sahen, fingen sie an, laut zu jammern und zu klagen. (…).

Mit dieser Minute begann ein neues Leben – das Leben im Krieg.

Wir hörten nicht den Schlachtenlärm, aber unsere Herzen hörten die Schreie der Menschen (S. 454ff.).“

Leben im Krieg

Ein Mann nach dem anderen bekam vom Boten des Dorfsowjets die Einberufung. Auch Ehemann Suwankul und Sohn Kassym mussten Abschied nehmen. Die Zurückgebliebenen aber arbeiteten weiter:

„Sie arbeiteten in der Mittagsglut und in den schwülen Trockenwindnächten, bei der Mahd, beim Drusch, beim Einfahren, sie arbeiteten unentwegt und kannten keinen Schlaf und keine Ruh. Dabei wurde die Arbeit immer mehr, denn immer weniger Männer blieben übrig (S. 456).“

Tolgonai gürtete sich nun wie ein Mann, wie es ihr der Kolchosvorsitzende gesagt hatte, setzte sich aufs Pferd und kam ihren Pflichten als Brigadier nach:

„Gesunde Männer gab es nicht mehr in den Ailen, nur noch kranke und lahme, und die übrigen Arbeitskräfte waren Frauen, Mädchen, Kinder und Greise (S. 469).“

Alles, was geerntet wurde, lieferten sie an die Front ab. Auch die Kinder mussten ran. Eines Tages kam der Kolchosvorsitzende mit dem Schulleiter in die Klasse und sagte zu den Schülern:

„Ich bin zu euch gekommen, Kinder, weil ein paar von euch vorübergehend weg müssen von der Schule. Wir dürfen keine Zeit verlieren, müssen die Zugpferde für die Frühjahrsbestellung vorbereiten, dabei graust einen, sie anzusehen, sie halten sich kaum noch auf den Beinen. Wir müssen das Pferdegeschirr instand setzen, es ist völlig hinüber, müssen die Pflüge und Sämaschinen reparieren, unser ganzes Inventar vergammelt unterm Schnee. Warum sag ich euch das alles? Weil wir auf den Flächen, wo kein Wintergetreide eingebracht ist, Sommergetreide sähen müssen. Unbedingt, ohne Widerrede. (…) Woher aber die Arbeitskräfte nehmen, auf wen sich stützen? (…) Frauen können wir nicht schicken! Das Land liegt weit ab, in Aksai – keine Leute. Uns blieb nichts anders übrig, als euch um Hilfe zu bitten (7).“

Für viele Jungen begann ein schweres Erwachsenenleben.

Als Tolgonai eines Abends nach getaner Arbeit nach Hause ritt, erfuhr sie von ihren Nachbarinnen vor ihrem Haus, dass ihr Mann Suwankul und ihr Sohn Kassym gefallen sind. Sie schrie auf, dass es über die ganze Straße gellte. Und auf einmal wurde sie ganz taub:

„Wahrscheinlich war ich von meinem Schrei taub geworden. Die Straße wankte, mir war, als fielen die Bäume um und stürzten die Häuser ein. In der unheimlichen Stille wechselten vor meinen Augen die Wolken am Himmel, vor mir erschienen entstellte, stumme Gesichter (S. 484).“

Ihre Sonne war erloschen.

„Mutter Erde, können die Menschen leben ohne Krieg?“

Nach einiger Zeit ging Tolgonai in einem dunklen gesteppten Beschmet (Halbrock) über dem frisch gewaschenen weißen Kleid und um den Kopf ein weißes Tuch langsam zum Feld hinaus und sprach lange mit der Mutter Erde:

„Warum, Mutter Erde, stürzen nicht die Berge ein, warum treten nicht die Seen über die Ufer, wenn solche Menschen fallen wie Suwankul und Kassym? Beide, Vater und Sohn, waren tüchtige Ackerbauern. Seit Urgedenken lebt die Welt durch solche Männer, von ihnen wird sie ernährt, von ihnen im Krieg verteidigt, sie werden als erste Soldat. Wäre der Krieg nicht gewesen, was hätten Suwankul und Kassym noch alles vollbringen können, wie viele Menschen hätten sie mit den Früchten ihrer Arbeit beschenken, wie viele Felder bestellen und wie viel Korn ausdreschen können. Und sie selbst, hundertfach belohnt mit den Früchten der Arbeit anderer, wie viel Schönes hätten sie noch erleben können. Sag mir, Mutter Erde, sag mir die Wahrheit: Können die Menschen leben ohne Krieg?“

„Eine schwierige Frage hast du mir da gestellt, Tolgonai. Es gab Völker, die durch Kriege ausgerottet wurden, es gab Städte, die in Schutt und Asche fielen, und es gab Jahrhunderte, da ich davon träumte, eine menschliche Spur zu finden. Und jedes Mal, wenn die Menschen wieder einen Krieg anzettelten, rief ich ihnen zu: ‚Haltet ein, lasst das Blutvergießen!’ Und auch jetzt wiederhole ich: ‚Ihr Menschen hinter den Bergen und Meeren! Ihr Menschen auf der ganzen Welt, was fehlt euch – Land? Hier bin ich – das Land, die Erde! Ich bin für euch alle dieselbe, und für mich seid ihr alle gleich. Nicht euren Hader brauche ich, sondern eure Freundschaft, eure Arbeit! Werft ein einziges Korn in die Furche, und ich gebe euch hundert Körner dafür zurück. Steckt ein winziges Reis in den Boden, und ich ziehe euch eine Plantage groß. Legt einen Garten an, und ich überschütte euch mit Früchten. Züchtet Vieh, und ich werde Gras sein. Baut Häuser, und ich werde Mauer sein. Pflanzt euch fort, vermehrt euch, und ich werde euch allen eine herrliche Heimstatt sein. Ich bin unendlich, ich bin grenzenlos, ich bin tief, und ich bin hoch, ich habe Platz für euch alle!’ Und da fragst du noch, Tolgonai, ob die Menschen ohne Krieg leben können. Das hängt nicht von mir ab, das hängt von euch Menschen ab, von eurem Willen und eurem Verstand.“

„Bedenke doch, teure Erde, gerade deine besten Arbeiter, deine geschicktesten Meister mordet der Krieg. Ich bin damit nicht einverstanden, mein ganzes Leben bin ich nicht einverstanden damit! Die Menschen können und müssen dem Krieg Einhalt gebieten.“

„Denkst du denn, Tolgonai, ich leide nicht unter den Kriegen? Doch! Ich leide sehr. Ich sehne mich nach den Händen der Bauern, ewig beweine ich meine Kinder, die Ackersleute, immer werden mir Suwankul, Kassym und alle gefallenen Soldaten fehlen. Wenn ich ungepflügt bleibe, das Getreide ungemäht und ungedroschen bleibt, rufe ich sie: ‚Wo seid ihr, meine Pflüger, wo seid ihr, meine Säer? Steht auf, meine Kinder, meine Ackersmänner, kommt und helft mir, ich ersticke, ich sterbe!‘ Wie schön wäre es, wenn dann Suwankul mit dem Ketmen in der Hand, Kassym mit seinem Mähdrescher und Dshainak mit seinem Fuhrwerk kämen! Doch sie geben keine Antwort…“

„Hab auch dafür Dank, Erde! Du trauerst also um sie wie ich, du beweinst sie also wie ich. Hab Dank, Erde (S. 489f.).“

*

Der vorliegende Artikel erschien erstmals in NRhZ 552 vom 09.03.2016 und wurde geringfügig überarbeitet.

Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Diplompsychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.

Quellen und Anmerkungen

(1) https://de.rt.com/nordamerika/93854-liebesgruesse-nach-moskau-biden-droht/

(2) Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz https://securityconference.org/

(3) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tote_des_Zweiten_Weltkrieges

(4) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24807
https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/zwei-weltkriege-sind-genug
https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-europeans-say-no-to-a-war-against-russia/5638772

(5) Aitmatow, Tschingis (2008). Erzählungen und Novellen I und II. Unionsverlag Zürich

(6) Aitmatow, Tschingis (2008). Erzählungen-Novellen I. Goldspur der Garben. Unionsverlag Zürich, S. 431-540. Die Seitenangaben im Text beziehen sich auf diese Erzählung

(7) Aitmatow, Tschingis (2008). Erzählungen-Novellen II. Frühe Kraniche. Unionsverlag Zürich, S. 347f.

This article can be read in 27 languages including Russian and Chinese by activating the Translate Website Drop Down Menu on the top banner of our home page.

The author’s article in German is available on our German language page.

***

“Love greetings to Moscow: Biden threatens to end Putin’s ‘tyranny'”. Biden made this poisoned “promise” to the Russian president long before his stolen election as the new US president (1). About the upcoming private meeting of selected warmongers in Munich, he says: “Like no other global forum, Munich connects European leaders and thinkers with their peers from across the world (2).” However, the only certain thing about this so-called security conference – postponed because of the Corona plague – is that the world’s worst warmongers are again beating the war drums. This year, possibly for a new war against Russia. Peoples hear the signals!

Almost 80 years ago – in the summer of 1941 – fascist Germany invaded the Soviet Union – not without the support of Western states – and left behind a record of horror: an estimated 13 million dead soldiers, 14 million dead civilians and 3 million dead prisoners of war (3). And only three generations later, the war drums are being beaten for a new war against Russia. Therefore, continue to sign the Public Declaration of 8/9 May 2018 in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRhZ)” (4): “We Europeans say NO to war against Russia!”

For the younger generation, who do not know what war means, the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov describes in the story “Gold Trail of Sheaves” how the “Great Patriotic War” broke out over the Soviet Union and instantly changed the lives of young and old (5). Often only very personal accounts reach people’s hearts.

In a conversation with Mother Earth in Aitmatov’s narrative, Mother Tolgonai, who lost her husband and a son in that war, says:

“Consider, dear Earth, it is precisely your best workers, your most skilled masters, that war murders. I do not agree with it, my whole life I do not agree with it! People can and must put a stop to war (6).”

“The happiness of the farmer lies in sowing and harvesting”

At the beginning of the story, Tolgonai, daughter of a Kyrgyz day labourer, describes how she met Suwankul, her future husband, while harvesting at the age of 17:

“The sun rose flaming, the snow-covered mountain peaks shone with a golden glow, the wind flowed towards us from the steppe like a deep blue river. These early summer mornings were the dawn of our love. The whole world changed like a fairy tale when we walked together. And the field, grey, trampled and churned, became the most beautiful field on earth… (p. 435).”

Moved by happiness, she asked her beloved in a whisper, “Suwan, what do you think, we will be happy, won’t we?” And he replied:

“When land and water are equally distributed among all, when we too have our own field, when we too plough, sow and thresh our own grain – then that will be our happiness. Man needs no greater happiness, Tolgonai. The happiness of the cultivator lies in sowing and reaping (p. 436).”

With their hands they both created their lives. They worked and did not put down the ktmen (hoe) in summer or winter: much sweat they shed, much toil they expended. They built themselves a house and got themselves a few head of cattle. They began to live like people. But the greatest thing was that three sons were born to them. Time passed and almost imperceptibly the sons grew up. Each one chose his own path.

“It’s war, Mama!”

In the summer of 1941, one morning before sunrise, Tolgonai and the other farmers were mowing a new grain field right next to the river when they saw a rider suddenly appear on the other side of the river. He came dashing out from behind the last farms of the ail (Kyrgyz village), galloping wildly straight through the brush and reeds as if a pack of wild dogs were after him.

What was driving this person? It was a young Russian. He was waving his arms and shouting something at them, but nothing could be understood through the roar of the river. When the rider had crossed the raging river and arrived at a combine, suddenly there was a great clamour. People rushed there from all sides, some on foot, others on horseback, still others standing on their carts and lashing the horses with their whips. Tolgonai also ran:

“‘God forbid! God forbid!’ I pleaded, stretching out my hands as I ran. (…) When I finally arrived, the combine was surrounded by a noisy crowd. I could hear nothing, understand nothing. Desperately I tried to make my way through the crowd: ‘Make way! Let me through!’ The people dispersed and when I saw Kassym and Aliman standing next to each other at the combine, I stretched out my trembling arms like a blind woman towards my son. Kassym came towards me and caught me.

‘It’s war, Mama!’, I heard his voice as if from far away. I looked at him as if I did not understand what that word was.’War? War, you say?’, I asked back. ‘Yes, Mama, war has broken out,’ he replied. But it was still not clear to me what was behind this word. ‘What do you mean, war? Why war? War, you say?’ I repeated this sinister word, and then sudden horror seized me and I began to cry quietly after all the fear I had endured and the unexpected news. When the women saw my tear-streaked face, they began to wail and complain loudly. (…).

With that minute, a new life began – life in the war.

We did not hear the noise of battle, but our hearts heard the cries of the people (p. 454ff.).”

Life in the war

One man after the other received the draft from the village Soviet’s messenger. Husband Suwankul and son Kassym also had to say goodbye. Those who stayed behind, however, continued to work:

“They worked in the midday heat and in the sultry dry windy nights, mowing, threshing, driving in, they worked incessantly and knew no sleep and no rest. In the process, the work became more and more, for fewer and fewer men remained (p. 456).”

Tolgonai now girded herself like a man, as the kolkhoz chairman had told her to do, sat on her horse and fulfilled her duties as brigadier:

“There were no healthy men left in the ailes, only sick and lame ones, and the remaining labourers were women, girls, children and old men (p. 469).”

Everything that was harvested they delivered to the front. Even the children had to do it. One day the kolkhoz chairman came to the class with the headmaster and said to the pupils:

“I have come to you, children, because some of you have to leave school temporarily. We have no time to lose, we have to prepare the draft horses for the spring tillage, and it makes me dread to look at them, they can hardly stand on their feet. We have to repair the harness, it is completely broken, we have to repair the ploughs and the seed drills, our whole inventory is rotting under the snow. Why am I telling you all this? Because we have to sow summer cereals on the areas where no winter cereals have been sown. Absolutely, without argument. (…) But where do we get the labour, on whom do we rely? (…) We cannot send women! The land is far away, in Aksai – no people. We had no choice but to ask you for help (7).”

For many boys, a difficult adult life began.

One evening, as Tolgonai rode home after her work was done, she learned from her neighbours outside her house that her husband Suwankul and her son Kassym had fallen. She cried out so loudly that it rang out all over the street. And suddenly she went completely deaf:

“I had probably gone deaf from my scream. The street swayed, I felt as if the trees were falling and the houses were collapsing. In the eerie silence, the clouds in the sky changed before my eyes, disfigured, mute faces appeared before me (p. 484).”

Her sun had gone out.

“Mother Earth, can people live without war?”

After some time, Tolgonai, wearing a dark quilted beschmet (half-skirt) over his freshly washed white dress and a white cloth around his head, walked slowly out to the field and spoke at length to Mother Earth:

“Why, Mother Earth, do not the mountains collapse, why do not the lakes burst their banks, when such people fall as Suwankul and Kassym? Both father and son were capable farmers. From time immemorial the world has lived through such men, by them it is fed, by them it is defended in war, they are the first to become soldiers. Had it not been for the war, what more could Suwankul and Kassym have accomplished, how many people could they have bestowed with the fruits of their labour, how many fields could they have cultivated and how much grain could they have threshed. And they themselves, rewarded a hundredfold with the fruits of others’ labour, how many beautiful things they could still have experienced. Tell me, Mother Earth, tell me the truth: can people live without war?”

“A difficult question you have asked me there, Tolgonai. There have been peoples wiped out by wars, there have been cities reduced to rubble, and there have been centuries when I dreamed of finding a human trace. And every time people started another war, I called out to them: ‘Stop, stop the bloodshed!’ And even now I repeat: ‘You people beyond the mountains and seas! You people all over the world, what do you lack – land? Here I am – the land, the earth! I am the same for all of you, and for me you are all equal. It is not your strife that I need, but your friendship, your work! Throw a single grain into the furrow and I will give you back a hundred grains in return. Put a tiny rice in the ground and I will raise you a plantation. Plant a garden and I will shower you with fruit. Raise cattle, and I will be grass. Build houses, and I will be a wall. Plant yourselves, multiply, and I will be a glorious home for you all. I am infinite, I am boundless, I am deep, and I am high, I have room for you all!’ And there you are still asking, Tolgonai, whether people can live without war. That does not depend on me, that depends on you people, on your will and your mind.”

“Remember, dear earth, it is precisely your best workers, your most skilful masters, who are murdered by war. I do not agree with it, all my life I have not agreed with it! Men can and must put a stop to war.”

“Do you think then, Tolgonai, that I do not suffer from wars? Yes, I do! I suffer a lot. I long for the hands of the peasants, eternally I weep for my children, the cultivators, always I will miss Suwankul, Kassym and all the fallen soldiers. When I remain unploughed, the grain unmown and unthreshed, I call out to them: ‘Where are you, my ploughmen, where are you, my sowers? Arise, my children, my ploughmen, come and help me, I am choking, I am dying!’ How nice it would be if Suwankul then came with ketmen in hand, Kassym with his combine and Dshainak with his cart! But they give no answer…”

“Have thanks for that too, earth! So you mourn for them like I do, so you weep for them like I do. Have thanks, earth (pp. 489f.).”

*

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This article first appeared in NRhZ 552 of 09.03.2016 and has been slightly revised.

Dr Rudolf Hänsel is a qualified psychologist and educationalist.

Notes

(1) https://de.rt.com/nordamerika/93854-liebesgruesse-nach-moskau-biden-droht/

(2) Munich-Security-Conference https://securityconference.org/

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

(4) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24807
https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/zwei-weltkriege-sind-genug
https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-europeans-say-no-to-a-war-against-russia/5638772

(5) Aitmatov, Chingiz (2008). Narratives and novellas I and II. Union Publishing House Zurich

(6) Aitmatov, Chingiz (2008). Narratives-Novellas I. Gold Trail of the Sheaves. Unionsverlag Zurich, pp. 431-540. The page references in the text refer to this story.

(7) Aitmatov, Chingiz (2008). Narratives-Novellas II. Early Cranes. Unionsverlag Zurich, p. 347f.

Featured image is from InfoRos

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***

In 2021, the United States and its allies’ focus has shifted heavily towards the Arctic.

The Arctic region was dubbed as the next battlefield of various interests, but the situation was only rhetorically tense, for a while.

According to Scramble, the US Air Force is planning a Bomber Task Force (BTF) deployment, with four Rockwell B-1B Lancers, to Ørland (Norway) in February 2021.

The date of arrival is not yet clear, but is said to be somewhere late in week 7 or early in week 8. This means end of February.

Ørland Main Air Station (hovedflystasjon) is situated at the mouth of the Trondheimsfjorden in the municipality of Ørland, in Trøndelag county, in the centre of Norway.

The air base has a 2,714 metres (8,904 feet) runway, oriented north-west to south-east (15/33) and a ramp with four parking spots for large aircraft.

The air station is the home of 332 skvadron, operating the F-35A Lightning II. Also, a detachment of 330 skv with the Sea King Mk43B is based at this air station.

This is a rare occurrence, since US strategic bombers typically operate out of the UK, but with focus shifting on the Arctic, the closer proximity will play a significant role.

Back in September 2020, B-1B Lancers assigned to the 345th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron conducted training with the Norwegian air force.

The 16-hour sortie that crossed directly over the North Pole as part of a Bomber Task Force mission here.

The 6,100 nautical mile mission received air refueling support over the Arctic Ocean before spending several hours training with the Norwegian forces off the coast of Greenland and over the Norwegian Sea. It highlighted the U.S. Air Force’s capacity to conduct complex operations in multiple areas of responsibility with NATO allies and partners.

Col. Christopher Hawn, 345th EBS commander, said the ability to operate in the Arctic region is important in supporting U.S. European Command (EUCOM) initiatives and in fulfilling the objectives of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reoriented the U.S. military’s focus from the Middle East to near-peer concerns in Asia and Europe.

“It is about access,” he explained. “In a near-peer conflict, the closest point of access could require us to go through the Arctic, so we need to ensure we are well versed in that operational environment.”

Operating out of Eielson Air Force Base proved to be an invaluable training opportunity for the unit, whose home station is Dyess AFB, Texas.

“The fact that we can conduct operations at a moment’s notice from Alaska to anywhere within the EUCOM area of responsibility sends a strong message,” said Lt. Col. Andrew Marshall, 345th EBS director of operations.

Training in the Arctic has grown increasingly important, as the region holds strategic value for U.S. Air and Space Forces as well as its allies and partners. It is also vital to homeland security, as it provides avenues of approach to the U.S. from space, air, sea, and land.

“The harsh conditions and limited access throughout the region make it easy to overlook the value of the Arctic,” Marshall said. “However, the increase in global competition for access and control of the region solidifies the Arctic’s status as a key territory.”

The situation in the Arctic promises to become hotter as time goes by, it should be reminded that recently it was revealed that Russia was working on floating airfields to be used in the arctic, and it is also constructing an airfield in the region.

*

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The virtual Davos Agenda is finally on, from Monday to Friday this week, promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

No, this is not The Great Reset. At least not yet. The Agenda is the  aperitivo towards the Great Reset apotheosis at the WEF’s Special Annual Meeting, which will take place this coming spring in Singapore.

The Agenda’s theme for 2021 is “A Crucial Year to Rebuild Trust.”

Oops. Davos, we got a problem: trust is always earned, never built.

Trust, anyway, in Davos speak, must always lead towards – what else – the Great Reset, introduced here in a Tik Tok-ready clip crammed with catchy slogans such as “a new dashboard for the new economy” or “right people, right place, right time”.

The message clincher is “tune in, turn on, get involved”, borrowing shamelessly from 1960s Timothy Leary (but ditching “drop out”).

It obviously escaped the clip’s producers that their P.R. opus indirectly admits to rigged elections and blanket censorship on social media.

The Agenda’s P.R. blitz must have a hard time dismissing the predominant perception this is all about Davos Man – and Woman – losing their sleep over global wealth inequality while enthusiastically applauded by a bunch of glitterati sociopaths.

Onwards with the sessions.

Here’s your new social contract

On day one, a “Leadership Panel” examined how to restore growth, advising the public and private sectors on how to build a “new economic agenda”. Sleep-inducing platitudes were the norm.

WEF’s Agenda sessions cannot possibly address the iron imperative: the implosion of the old economic order under a Green camouflage, conducted by self-appointed, sub-Platonic sages which belong to the world’s wealthiest, will only benefit this 0.0001%.

The Great Reset is not an organic grassroots movement coordinated and benefitting the over 99%. It will lead, inevitably, to techno-feudalism, as I previously argued. Herr Schwab, the Oracle of Ravensburg and Davos supremo, insists in his writings “you will own nothing”.

A WEF graph – Top Ten Most Likely Fall Out for the World – should in fact be interpreted as The Great Reset’s ultimate targets. This is not a warning: it’s the road map ahead.

A session on advancing the new social contract neatly merged with a discussion about “stakeholder capitalism”. That’s a clever P.R. advertisement – what else – for Herr Schwab’s new book: Stakeholder Capitalism, which advances a “more sustainable, resilient and inclusive” global economy and argues for – what else – a “clearly defined social contract” which will allow “governments, business and individuals to produce the most optimal outcomes.”

So here’s how it works. You don’t earn trust: you rebuild it (italics mine). This trust metastasizes into the social contract – which is absolutely necessary for The Great Reset. Selling this new social contract is a matter of rebranding turbo-capitalism globally as “stakeholer capitalism”, or capitalism with a human face.

Not a peep about the Great Reset as a mechanism of unbridled expansion of mega-corporate power, hermetically securing/serving the 0.0001%, which are not, and will never be, suffering The Great Depression.

Stripped to the bone, that’s also one of the key themes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: consolidating, crushing and shepherding the working class masses into the unstable gig economy, commanded by “emotionally intelligent” leaders.

The Who nailed it half a century ago: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

A realpolitik stunner

It’s still unclear what China, Russia and Iran – the real Three Sovereigns in this Brave New World, and the key nodes of progressive Eurasia integration – will counter-propose when faced with the Great Reset.

Into this toxic mix steps in none other than President Xi Jinping, the leader of the global superpower in the making. Instead of Reset platitudes, his Davos Agenda address was quite a realpolitik stunner.

Xi stressed, “to build small circles or start a new Cold War, to reject, threaten or intimidate others, to willfully impose decoupling, supply disruptions or sanctions, and to create isolation or estrangement will only push the world into division and even confrontation (…) We cannot tackle common challenges in a divided world, and confrontation will lead us to a dead end.”

Xi might be interpreted as aligning with Herr Schwab. Not really. Xi stressed solutions to our current plight must be multilateral; but the key is how to implement them geopolitically.

It’s unclear how the new dispensation in the US – humanitarian imperialists, Dem oligarchs, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Media – will react to Xi’s call: “The misguided approach of antagonism and confrontation, be it in the form of a Cold War, hot war, trade war or tech war, would eventually hurt all countries’ interests (…) “Difference in itself is no cause for alarm. What is alarming are arrogance, prejudice and hatred.”

Xi emphasized a straight to the point definition of multilateralism as “having international affairs addressed through consultation and the future of the world decided by everyone working together (…) To beggar thy neighbor, to go it alone, and to slip into arrogant isolation will always fail.”

What Xi has made it crystal clear, once again, is the acute contrast between relative Asian serenity and stability and the volcanic chaos engulfing the West’s top power centers. How this intertwines – in realpolitik terms – with Her Schwab’s Brave New World will be a work in progress. For the moment, Xi has just read the Multilateral Riot Act at Davos. The whole Global South is paying attention.

This article was originally published on Asia Times.*

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

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.

Early this century Winston Churchill was voted “the greatest Briton of all time” in a nationwide British poll, which attracted more than a million votes, as he finished ahead of figures like the naturalist Charles Darwin.

It is little known, however, that Churchill had favourably viewed European fascism during the 1920s and 1930s; that is, before the expansionist policies of the fascist dictators began to affect British interests.

In October 1937, almost five years into Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany, Churchill wrote in the Evening Standard about, “The story of that struggle” regarding Hitler’s rise to power which

“cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him [Hitler] to challenge, defy, conciliate or overcome, all the authority or resistances which barred his path”. (1)

Churchill refused to criticise either Hitler’s brutal suppression of those who opposed him, nor his erecting of concentration camps, which by 1934 were under the direct control of the SS.

Churchill continued that “history is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim and even frightful methods” but “when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler”.

Less than four years later, by June of 1941, Churchill was calling Hitler over the radio “a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder”, because as can be safely assumed, Hitler was directly challenging Britain’s diminishing empire and her financial concerns.

Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran. (Public Domain)

Through the 1930s Churchill had wanted to accommodate Hitler, while forming a solid alliance between Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which he hoped would deter the Third Reich from advancing westwards. Churchill suggested as much in a May 1936 letter to Violet Bonham-Carter, daughter of former British prime minister Herbert Asquith. Churchill believed there was a good chance these policies would convince the Führer to, instead, turn his military might to the east: against the Soviet Union, a state which Churchill disliked and distrusted considerably more than Nazi Germany; while he professed that “Britain and France would maintain a heavily-armed neutrality”.

The English historian John Simkin wrote, “Churchill believed that the right strategy was to try and encourage Adolf Hitler to order the invasion of the Soviet Union… He expected that Hitler would turn eastwards and attack the Soviet Union, and he proposed that Britain should stand aside while his old enemy Bolshevism was destroyed” (2). Churchill was one of the few British politicians who had read Hitler’s 1925 book ‘Mein Kampf’, in which the Nazi leader outlined bluntly his aim to conquer vast territories in the east.

Churchill was an admirer of fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini, whom he praised for having “thought of nothing but the lasting good” regarding the Italian people. While visiting Rome in January 1927 Churchill wrote to his wife, “This country gives the impression of discipline, order, goodwill, smiling faces. A happy strict school… The Fascists have been saluting in their impressive manner all over the place”. (3)

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Churchill’s support for fascism extended to General Franco’s forces, and he was firmly against the left-leaning Republican government. Churchill denounced the Republicans as “a poverty stricken and backward proletariat” that was resisting Franco’s “patriotic, religious and bourgeois forces” who were “marching to re-establish order by setting up a military dictatorship”.

David Lloyd George, a liberal and British prime minister from 1916 to 1922, felt it necessary to visit Nazi Germany in September 1936 to see Hitler. Lloyd George subsequently wrote about his meeting with the dictator in the Daily Express, and he enthused about Hitler being “a national hero who has saved his country from despondency and degradation” while he called him “the George Washington of Germany” and “a born leader of men” who possessed “a magnetic and dynamic personality”. (4)

Admiration for Hitler even came through the British Labour Party, with plaudits pouring forth from George Lansbury, the Labour leader from 1932 to 1935. Like Lloyd George, Lansbury thought it apt to go and see Hitler in the flesh, which he did in April 1937. Lansbury said later, “I think history will regard Hitler as one of the great men of our time” and it was “sheer nonsensical folly” to suggest that he wanted a European war. (5)

The Western corporate world had been enthralled at the investment potential European fascism presented, with its destruction of leftist parties, labour power and trade unions. British and American businessmen flocked at first to Mussolini’s Italy from the early 1920s, a regime that the Western powers would continue supporting, until the commencement of war.

By 1933 the human rights violations in the new Nazi Germany, growing in severity from the opening months of Hitler’s reign, were no obstacle either to Western elites. The Nazis wiped out the democratic threat in Germany, creating what was viewed as a perfect environment for big business to blossom in. Warm ties were developed between the UK’s Conservative-dominated governments and the Hitler dictatorship; particularly through the formation of Anglo-German commercial, industrial and financial relations. In the face of popular pressures in Europe, close links to Hitler’s regime allowed the British establishment a strategy of self-preservation.

On 4 July 1934, Britain’s government and the Third Reich signed the Anglo-German Trade Agreement, regarded as a cornerstone of British policy with the Nazis. Under this deal, the Germans were allowed to accumulate a considerable trade surplus with London – ensuring that Berlin could purchase commodities that would assist in building up its war machine, including the acquisition of mineral resources like rubber and copper, critical to a war industry.

In early December 1934 the influential governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, advanced Hitler a £3 million loan to “facilitate the mobilisation of German commercial credits” (6). This was a nice gift which sent out another message of British support. The following year, 1935, the Anglo-German Fellowship was founded, through which large British corporations partook in, like Dunlop Rubber, Unilever and Price Waterhouse. The Anglo-German fellowship was an elitist organisation sympathetic to Nazism. Several British MPs, mostly Conservatives, joined this society such as the pro-Nazi Thomas Moore; rather revealingly, among its members too was the aforementioned Montagu Norman, Bank of England governor, and Frank Cyril Tiarks, a director at the Bank of England. The Anglo-German fellowship was forced to dissolve at the outbreak of war.

On 18 June 1935 the UK government, under its new Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin, concluded the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. For the time being, this ensured that Britain would retain a much larger navy than the Germans. US-born author Guido Giacomo Preparata, who has studied US-British connections to Hitler’s regime, wrote that with the payment from the Bank of England and the naval agreement secured, “Hitler won from Britain no less than her official and financial military support. The Führer was exultant”. (7)

One of Britain’s foremost arms manufacturers, Vickers-Armstrong, was selling heavy weaponry to Nazi Germany (8). Herbert Lawrence, chairman of Vickers-Armstrong and a heavily decorated English general, was asked in 1934 to give an assurance that his company was not covertly helping to re-arm the Germans. General Lawrence failed to assuage fears by replying, “I cannot give you assurance in definite terms, but I can tell you that nothing is done without the complete sanction and approval of our own government”.

By 1937, the Third Reich was providing a bigger market for British goods than which existed between any two continents on earth. At the end of the 1930s, with Hitler set to initiate another European war, Britain’s principal trading partner was Nazi Germany (9). British investment with the Germans significantly rose from 1933, an indication that corporations fare best where the democratic threat is least. This may explain why Conservative governments, usually supportive of corporate investment, had persisted in appeasing Hitler for so long, through fear of losing their most lucrative client.

Churchill was undoubtedly aware of the British-Nazi business relations, and he had been an advocate of appeasement for years. In April 1936, with Hitler’s dictatorship consolidated, Churchill requested that the League of Nations invite Nazi Germany “to state her grievances and her legitimate aspirations” so that “justice may be done and peace preserved”.

This statement came a month after Hitler had invaded the demilitarised Rhineland, in March 1936, a stark violation of the Treaty of Versailles, unjust and all that it was. Shortly afterwards, writing in an article in the Evening Standard, Churchill praised France for not “retaliating with force of arms, as the previous generation would have”, after the Wehrmacht had marched through the Rhineland without a glove laid on it (10). The Nazis would have been dealt a serious blow, had France’s much larger army reacted with force, but the French government’s response was timid. This did not seem to bother Churchill, however.

Prime minister Baldwin gave a silent nod of approval to Hitler’s march on the Rhineland. London informed Paris that they would not back them militarily over an issue of no concern to them. The British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said, “Hitler was only going into his own back garden”, an irresponsible attitude which dismayed France. Baldwin’s successor as British leader, Neville Chamberlain, another Conservative, would in the autumn of 1938 willingly consent to the Munich Agreement – or Munich Betrayal – which dismembered Czechoslovakia and further strengthened the Nazi position in central Europe. Chamberlain thought the prospect of conflict with Germany unnecessary over “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

The Conservatives’ notorious appeasement of Hitler was backed by US president Franklin Roosevelt. His close adviser Sumner Welles said that the 1938 Munich Agreement provided an opportunity to establish “a new world order based upon justice and upon law” (11), in which the moderate Hitler, then stepping up his persecution of the Jews, would play a central role.

As with their British counterparts, American corporate leaders invested large sums in the Third Reich. US Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox remarked that, in 1934 and 1935, Hitler received hundreds of state-of-the-art aircraft engines from America (12). Preceding this in 1933 the US firm, United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, reportedly signed a secret deal with German airplane manufacturer, Junkers, through which $1,775,000 worth of aircraft engines and rifles were sent to Nazi Germany. This US arms deal with Junkers was highlighted on 14 August 1947, by Krasnaya Zvezda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Ministry of Defence; whose report seems plausible but has virtually disappeared from history. (13)

Junkers would construct such military aircraft as the Junkers Ju 88, one of the Luftwaffe’s key fighter planes – while Junkers also built the feared Stuka dive-bomber, the design of which was made possible “with techniques learnt in Detroit”, as Preparata wrote, a senior lecturer in political economy and social sciences. (14)

On 16 March 1935, the day that the Wehrmacht was formally established, Hitler announced that he was introducing conscription, and bolstering the size of his land forces to over half a million men. Nazi Germany was now publicly rearming, though in secret for months she had been gradually augmenting her fighting power, with assistance coming from the US and British centres of power. In July 1934, the Conservative leader Baldwin said of Germany in the House of Commons, “she has every argument in her favour, from her defenceless position in the air, to make herself secure”.

In October 1936 the US Ambassador to Nazi Germany, William Dodd, who was previously a history professor, wrote a letter to president Roosevelt elaborating on US-Nazi business collaboration. In the letter Ambassador Dodd revealed that “more than a hundred American corporations have subsidiaries here [Nazi Germany] or cooperative understandings” (15). Dodd noted that the US chemical corporation, DuPont, has links to German companies “that are aiding in the armament business”. DuPont’s chief partner was the German chemical corporation IG Farben, which was centrally involved in strengthening the Nazi war machine. IG Farben was later implicated in slave labour practices and the Holocaust.

According to US Ambassador Dodd, the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey sub-company) sent $2 million to Nazi Germany in December 1933. Standard Oil was also making $500,000 a year in helping the Germans to produce ersatz gas, that is synthetic fuel, an important substance for war purposes. Such dealings as this, we can presume, would not have been rebuked by the US State Department. They concluded in 1937 that European fascism was suitable to American economic needs (16). As early as 1933, the US chargé d’affaires in Berlin wired to Washington that US expectations lay in “the more moderate section” of the Nazi Party “headed by Hitler himself” which appeals “to all civilized and reasonable people” and that seems to have “the upper hand” on its extreme elements. (17)

Ambassador Dodd wrote that US aircraft people had developed relations with the German steel corporation, Krupp; which, like IG Farben, ably supported the Nazi regime while Krupp played a decisive part in strengthening Hitler’s armed forces. The Krupp company was later incriminated in human rights abuses, such as pertaining to slave labour. A month after his ambassadorship in Nazi Germany ended, Dodd acknowledged in a January 1938 interview, “Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there”. (18)

Moreover, the German business tycoon Gustav Krupp, owner of the company that bore his family’s name, had assisted in bringing Hitler to power in 1933 through his influence (19). Other powerful German industrialists and bankers had, likewise, performed a part in securing the chancellorship for Hitler, like the magnate Fritz Thyssen (of Thyssen AG steel company) and Hjalmar Schacht (Reichsbank president).

Image on the right: Prescott Bush (Public Domain)

Thyssen, born into one of Germany’s wealthiest families, was introduced to Hitler in 1923 by the country’s former dictator Erich Ludendorff, who persuaded the industrialist to attend a rally where Hitler was to speak. Later on, Thyssen became intimately linked with the New York-based Union Banking Corporation, managed by American banker Prescott Bush, who was also a director at this company which represented Thyssen’s US business interests. Prescott Bush was the father and grandfather of future presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Prescott Bush, whose dealings with the Nazis lasted until 1942, was a shareholder at a number of other companies connected to Thyssen. Prescott Bush had links to a separate firm that was involved in Nazi slave labour, the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC). He made substantial profits from his transactions through Thyssen, who had joined the Nazi Party in December 1931. Thyssen dispensed with hundreds of thousands of Reichsmarks to Hitler’s cause, while he encouraged other industrialists to bankroll the Nazis.

As a result of Prescott Bush’s extensive doings with Thyssen, and therefore the highest echelon of Nazi business, his name is closely linked with Hitler’s rise to power (20). The money accrued by him in these shady businesses assisted in setting up his son, George H. W. Bush, in the US oil industry from the late 1940s. Prescott Bush would become a senator by 1952.

Schacht, reinstated as Reichsbank president by Hitler and another who contributed financially to the Nazi Party, was a close friend of Montagu Norman, the long-time Bank of England governor. Norman, as stated, had in 1934 sent millions of pounds to the Nazis, and he was a godfather to one of Schacht’s grandchildren. In March and June 1939 the Bank of England, still under Norman’s guidance, helped to sell huge quantities of gold bars that the Nazis had stolen from occupied Czechoslovakia. (21)

A major US manufacturer, the International Harvester Company (IHC), was investing in Germany through selling weaponry there. In the mid-1930s IHC’s dealings with the Nazis was growing by 33% each year, as divulged by IHC president Sydney G. McAllister to Ambassador Dodd.

Other big name US multinationals were profiteering in Nazi Germany, such as Coca-Cola, which had a bottling plant in the city of Essen. Coca-Cola sold 4.5 million cases of its beverage in Germany during 1939, a massive increase from 100,000 such cases in 1933. Coca-Cola was one of the main sponsors of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, an event which aided in legitimising the Nazi state on the international stage (22). In the summer of 1940, as the Germans conquered most of western and northern Europe, Coca-Cola followed along with other corporations by expanding into Nazi-occupied countries.

General Motors (GM), the world’s largest auto maker and a US multinational, fully bought up an Opel factory in the German city of Rüsselsheim in 1931. General Motors’ dealings with Germany soared from 1933 with Hitler’s takeover – and the company’s president from 1937 to 1940, William S. Knudsen, was an outspoken admirer of Hitler; in September 1938 Knudsen met in person with Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe commander. Furthermore, a General Motors senior executive, James D. Mooney, saw Hitler on a number of occasions, including after European hostilities began in September 1939. Hitler had awarded Mooney the Order of Merit of the Eagle in August 1938 for his “distinguished service to the Reich”.

Following the D-Day Landings of early June 1944 – with American soldiers capturing their first German vehicles in Normandy, France – they were bemused to discover that many of the Wehrmacht engines were produced by General Motors, along with the mighty Ford Motor Company (23), another US transnational, and also Opel, owned by General Motors. This might not have been so surprising. The American magnate Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and a virulent anti-Semite, was an early fan of Hitler. Ford operations in Germany recorded booming profits, from 25.8 million Reichsmarks in 1933, to 60.4 million Reichsmarks in 1939.

In July 1938 a grateful Hitler awarded Ford the Order of the German Eagle, First Class, the most prestigious decoration that could be granted to a non-German. Hitler had read Ford’s anti-Semitic writings from the early 1920s, which may have had some influence on the Nazi leader.

The powerful US multinational, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), undertook various deals with the Nazis, under IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson, a Nazi sympathiser. Watson, one of the world’s richest men, saw Hitler at separate times and wrote in a letter to Reichsbank president Schacht outlining “an expression of my highest esteem for himself [Hitler], his country, and his people” (24). As with Ford, IBM’s ventures in Germany increased sharply after 1933, especially under IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag. Having made a profit of $1 million in 1933, Dehomag’s net worth in Germany almost doubled from 7.7 million Reichsmarks in 1934, to 14 million Reichsmarks by late 1938. Dehomag provided the Nazis with the punch-card machine, which was needed to automate production.

Image below: Junkers Ju 87 Ds over the Eastern Front, winter 1943–44 (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

ITT Corporation, a big US manufacturing firm, had initially secured a 25% share with Focke-Wulf, the German aircraft producer, which would rise to 29% by 1943 – and so ITT, with its main headquarters in New York, was helping to produce military aircraft for the Luftwaffe, even after Hitler had declared war on America in late 1941. Despite Germany now being an enemy of America, ITT was also continuing to provide the Nazis with high-tech communications systems. The ITT founder, US businessman Sosthenes Behn, had met Hitler as long ago as August 1933 – while the historian, Antony C. Sutton, claimed that ITT subsidiaries in Germany funnelled cash to SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

By 1939, at World War Two’s outset, Ford and General Motors’ subsidiaries controlled a remarkable 70% of the automobile market in Germany (25). That same year the General Motors chairman, Alfred P. Sloan, was forced to defend his business operations with the Nazis, by pointing to the profits that GM were amassing there. Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister from 1942 to 1945, was reported to have admitted that Germany “could not have attempted its September 1939 Blitzkrieg of Poland, without the performance-boosting additive technology provided by Alfred P. Sloan and General Motors”.

In the late 1930s/early 1940s, the Germans were manufacturing arms at more than 60 factories in the Third Reich owned by American capital (26) (27), according to Nikolay Inozemtsev, a respected Russian economist and journalist; Inozemtsev was later the director for over 15 years at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, a leading independent research organisation based in Moscow.

The Nazi armaments program, meanwhile, was proving a boon to American corporations, a welcome remedy for unscrupulous businessmen not long after the Great Depression had first hit. A 1940 US Senate investigation revealed that American industrialists – belonging to manufacturers like Pratt & Whitney, Douglas and Bendix Aviation – were freely selling military patents to the Nazis, with the assent of Roosevelt’s government. (28)

President Roosevelt’s position had been compromised. His administration was partly made up of high-level businessmen like Edward Stettinius Jr., a former vice-president at General Motors and chairman of US Steel. Stettinius, who first met Roosevelt in the early 1930s when he was at GM, quickly rose through the ranks of government, becoming Secretary of State before war’s end.

At the time of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, US corporate investment in Nazi Germany came to an estimated $475 million. By 1942, of the Wehrmacht’s 350,000 trucks in service, around 33% of them were produced at Ford factories in the Reich (29). Between 1942 and 1944 the Ford plant in Cologne, for example, constructed about 10,000 half-tracks for the German Army (30); half-tracks consist of large armoured vehicles, equipped with a mounted machine-gun or cannon, and a half-track can hold half a dozen soldiers at a time.

Many of the Ford-built trucks and half-tracks were being used by German troops on the Eastern front, against the USSR, America’s official ally in the war. Deep-seated ties between US business and the Third Reich can hardly have escaped the Soviets’ attention, as Red Army troops captured large caches of Wehrmacht weaponry from 1942. Newspaper reports connected to the Soviet Ministry of Defence, such as the one mentioned earlier from 1947, simply confirm what the Russians already knew.

Ford previously exported partially assembled trucks to Nazi Germany, which were shipped directly from the US. Construction of these vehicles was completed at the Ford plant in Cologne, and were ready just in time for Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. A US Army report compiled by investigator Henry Schneider, on 5 September 1945, correctly accused Ford manufacturers in Germany of being “an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles”, having acted with the “consent” of the parent Ford company at headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. (31)

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 John Simkin, “Was Winston Churchill a supporter or opponent of Fascism? Spartacus International, September 1997 (updated January 2020)

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Stephen J. Lee, European Dictatorships 1918-1945 (Routledge, 4th edition, 19 Feb. 2016) Chapter 5, Dictatorship in Germany

5 Oliver Kamm, “The Britons who have stood with Hitler”, The Times, 4 March 2014

6 Guido Giocomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (Pluto Press; Illustrated edition, 20 May 2005) p. 224

7 Ibid., p. 234

8 Rob Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism (Wellred; Illustrated edition, 19 Oct. 2018) Chapter 1, The Rise of German Social Democracy

9 Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 224

10 Simkin, Spartacus International, September 1997 (updated January 2020)

11 Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Penguin, 1 Jan. 2004) p. 68

12 Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 226

13 Krasnaya Zvezda, 14 August, 1947

14 Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 226

15 Mark Turley, From Nuremberg to Nineveh (Vandal Publications, 27 Sep. 2008) p. 109

16 Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Vintage, New edition, 3 Jan. 2006) p. 41

17 Ibid.

18 Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st ed. 2019 edition, 4 Feb. 2019) p. 19

19 Jacques R. Pauwels, “Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler”, Global Research, 7 June 2019

20 Ben Aris, Duncan Campbell, “How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power”, The Guardian, 25 September 2004

21 BBC, “Bank of England helped in sale of looted Nazi gold”, 31 July 2013

22 Hayley Richardson, “This is the shocking reason why Fanta was created”, The Irish Sun, 24 May 2017

23 Pauwels, Global Research, 7 June 2019 

24 Glen Yeadon, The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century (Progressive Press, 17 Nov. 2008) p. 91

25 Michael Dobbs, “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration”, Washington Post, 30 November 1998

26 Nikolay Inozemtsev, Foreign Policy of the USA in the Epoch of Imperialism, p. 309, Moscow 1960

27 Soviet Life, Issues 7-12, p. 18

28 Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 226

29 Yuji Nishimuta, Nazi Economy and U.S. Big Businesses – The Case of Ford Motor Co., Jstor, October 1995, p. 8 of 14

30 Ibid., p. 12 of 14

31 Dobbs, Washington Post, 30 November 1998 

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“The COVID-19 pandemic has proven an opportunity of convenience for totalitarian elements who have put individual rights and freedoms globally under siege,” said CHD chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his letter to 100,000 lawyers.

In a letter to 100,000 lawyers, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) chairman and chief legal counsel, urges his fellow attorneys to read “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19,” a special report prepared by the CHD team.

The report explores the legal rights to informed consent, bodily integrity, the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, religious expression and autonomy. All of these rights will be “dramatically constricted” if employers, states and/or the federal government impose vaccine mandates.

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Dear Colleague,

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven an opportunity of convenience for totalitarian elements who have put individual rights and freedoms globally under siege. A medical cartel composed of pharmaceutical industry, government regulators, financial houses, and telecom and internet billionaires are systematically obliterating freedom of speech and assembly, religious worship, property rights, jury trial, due process, and — ultimately — America’s exemplary democracy.

That’s why I am sending you this new Special Report, “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19.”

As a fellow lawyer who has practiced in our country’s courts for more than 40 years, I am alarmed by the growing power of global corporations to overwhelm our justice system, obliterate our constitutional liberty, and destroy public health. Throughout my career as a litigator, law professor, public advocate and author, I have worked to hold corporate giants and government institutions accountable. My life’s work has provided me with a unique perspective on our individual rights to clean air, clean water, unobstructed access to the commons, and our rights to make our own decisions about our bodies.

As chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), I have now dedicated myself to protecting children’s health by ending harmful environmental exposures to children, ending the exploding chronic disease epidemic that has debilitated over half of American kids born after 1989, and to holding those responsible accountable.

A 2006 Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) study found that 54% of America’s children today have chronic health conditions — allergies, ADHD, autism, eczema, asthma, obesity, autoimmune conditions and more. When I was growing up, most of these conditions were rare or unknown. When I was a boy, I received three vaccines. Today, children receive 72 mandated doses of 16 vaccines, prior to age 18. A mountain of peer-reviewed studies points to vaccines as the primary culprit in this public health calamity. That isn’t stopping our health authorities from mandating more hugely subsidized, shoddily tested, zero-liability vaccines for children. Our vaccine safety program falls dangerously short of what our children deserve.

The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed captive corporate regulators to hold the population hostage to justify the transfer of $45 billion of taxpayer money to pharmaceutical companies to finance a gold rush of new vaccines.

Protecting individual rights in the era of COVID-19 is essential 

I urge you to read this short legal dossier, “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19”, with an open mind and to draw your own conclusion about the legal and ethical implications of one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates for zero-liability, heavily subsidized mandatory vaccines.

Current vaccine mandates now require most school children to receive between 50-75 shots just to attend school. A vaccine-injured child, or adult, cannot sue the healthcare provider or the vaccine producer — but rather must go to a rigged national injury compensation program to sue the very government that ordered vaccine compliance in the first place. After studying this subject for years, I am more horrified than ever by the system’s pervasive corruption.

Given existing federal legislation and judicial precedents, it is all but impossible to hold vaccine manufacturers or healthcare providers accountable for vaccine injury in the courts. Vaccine injuries are not rare — HHS’s own studies show that the agency claims that injuries only occur with “1 in a million” vaccines is a mendacious canard. The true injury rate is actually 1 in every 39 vaccines, according to the Federal Agency for Health Research Quality.

Problems with vaccine safety aren’t isolated just to children 

Federal and State officials are considering mandates for the new COVID-19 vaccine. The New York State Bar Association, an organization for which I have great respect, has given its imprimatur to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all New Yorkers if “experts” deem that necessary. But those experts are mainly regulators from captured public health agencies with pervasive and corrupt financial entanglements with pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The pharma-controlled media’s advice that we “trust the experts” is anti-democratic and anti-science. You and I know that “experts” can differ on scientific questions and that their opinions can vary in accordance with and demands of politics, power, and financial self-interest. In every lawsuit, leading, highly credentialed experts from opposite sides routinely offer diametrically antithetical positions based on the same set of facts. The trouble is that today, in the political arena, dissenting voices that question government policies and corporate proclamations are silenced by censorship and vilification.

In this special report, our CHD Team explores the legal rights to informed consent, bodily integrity, the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, religious expression and autonomy. All of these rights will be dramatically constricted if employers, states and/or the federal government impose vaccine mandates.

I hope that “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19” can help you work with any future clients as you navigate the uncertain COVID-19/vaccine mandates landscape.

Sincerely yours,

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Chairman, Children’s Health Defense

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Russian-American relations will remain just as bad under Biden as they were under Trump except for the 46th President’s desire to extend the New START for another five years as part of an implied nuclear detente with Moscow after his administration also announced that it’ll investigate Russia for alleged cyber spying, interfering in last year’s elections, poisoning anti-corruption blogged and accused US intelligence asset Navalny, and putting out bounties on American servicemen in Afghanistan.

As New York’s Whitney Museum exhibits the work of the great Mexican muralists – Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros – this is a moment to revisit and reflect on the work of Russian-born artist Symeon Shimin. During his life, Shimin illustrated over 50 children’s books, including two that he authored himself; his masterpiece, however – influenced in part by ‘Los Tres Grandes’ – was the mural painting, “Contemporary Justice and the Child” (1936), located on the third floor of the Department of Justice, where it still stands today.

In 2019, Mercury Press International published The Art of Symeon Shimin, an exceptionally fine compilation of his work, featuring not only dozens of gorgeous, high-resolution color plates, but a short autobiography by the artist, as well as essays by noted art journalists Josef Woodard and Charles Donelan. Edited and curated by the artist’s daughter, Tonia Shimin, this book was more than 30 years in the making, and represents the first complete collection and overview of Shimin’s fine art.

While he enjoyed a long and successful career as an illustrator and commercial artist for Hollywood films (including the original, iconic poster for Gone With the Wind), Shimin never quite received the recognition that his work truly merited. Undoubtedly, this was largely due to the fact that Shimin was fundamentally a figurative and representational painter working at a time when various forms of modernism and avant-garde art, such as abstract expressionism, were ascending and gaining influence.

Mural by Symeon Shimin, Contemporary Justice and the Child, Tempera on Canvas, 1936-1940, Awarded by competition for the Public Works Arts Project, Department of Justice Building, Washington DC

The book provides exquisite reproductions of over 70 paintings, including a detailed look at the gestation and development of “Contemporary Justice and the Child.” Commissioned by the Public Works Art Project, Shimin understood that this was, as he put it, “not a slight matter” – it was the artist’s “moment of truth,” as Donelan observes, and he would choose his subject both “carefully and wisely.” Having travelled to Mexico in the 1930s, and soaked up the Mexican Mural Renaissance, Shimin was committed to seeing his work serve the cause of social justice, not only as a condemnation of child labor, but as a meditation on racial and gender equality, the social pursuit of knowledge and science, and much else besides.

Shimin arrived with his family at Ellis Island in 1912, when he was ten-years old; and growing up in Brooklyn, he learned first-hand what it meant to be exploited at an early age, delivering groceries from five in the morning until six in the evening, for three dollars a week. He sought and found refuge in music, and originally was determined to become a musician. While music would remain for Shimin a life-long passion, that ambition was quickly quashed by his parents, and his uncle, who was himself a “disillusioned composer.” It was not long after this that he discovered his gift for drawing “with fidelity to reality” – and “as if by some mystery it was revealed to me that I am an artist.”

Shimin’s experiences as a child would stay with him and inform his masterpiece, which is, on the left-hand side, about the hardship and injustice endured by countless children subjected to desperate poverty, hunger, and the soul-sapping labor of the factory. A large group of impoverished children are gathered together, drained of color, looking directly at the viewer with mixed expressions of sadness, anger, worry and hopelessness. Above them a large factory stretches endlessly into the distance, topped by three smokestacks that spew their sooty fumes into the darkening sky. In the lower left corner, a tight crawl space is occupied by two young boys, ragged, weary, and half-starved.

The centerpiece and heart of the mural is a young woman, in front of whom stands a wide-eyed boy, presumably her son, whose hands she gently holds in her own. Both figures face the viewer, as if she is offering him to us, to the world; as if she is saying, “Here he is, take him, care for him, and he will do great things.” On the right-hand side we see what some of those things are – the creative, scientific, and athletic pursuits of young men and women, black and white, working and thinking intently together, or engaged in the healthy competition of sport.

The expressivity of hands were crucially important for Shimin – and they constitute a motif running through much of his work, including his great mural. At the bottom center, a large pair of hands are not merely part of the foreground, but actually jut out, almost as if they are part of the viewer’s space, or the hands of the artist himself. One holds a drafting triangle, and the other a compass; and both are oriented towards the right, the hopeful and colorful side of Shimin’s multi-layered mural, hovering above the heads of a young man and woman who study an architectural blueprint.

Shimin was able to convey the wide array of human emotion through the hands no less than through the face of his subjects. In “Lovers” (1980), for example, the faces are almost entirely hidden, but all four hands are visible, and together they manage to carry the nearly monochrome painting and convey all the tenderness, gentleness and warmth of the man and woman. In the extraordinarily powerful “Woman with Hands at Chest” (1973-76), the two clenched fists that the subject brings together above her breast seem to reflect both the grief and determination, the sadness and strength that we find in her striking profile.

Hands figure prominently also in “The Pack” (1959), a painting which is otherwise unique in Shimin’s oeuvre. A profound meditation on violence which brings to mind Hobbes’ assertion that ‘man is a wolf to man’, “The Pack” arose out of the artist’s confrontation with a street gang “that left him injured and traumatized.” In Shimin’s blood red painting, which was shown at the Whitney Museum’s 1959 Annual Exhibition of American Art, the entangled figures appear to be metamorphosizing into hyenas and jackals. At the bottom, an arm lies outstretched on the ground, the palm facing upward, a victim presumably of street violence who now lies surrounded by the pack like a fresh kill.

Symeon Shimin’s art was chiefly concerned with using the human form to express the inner life of the individual, and the weight of existence that each of us carries. Through his portraiture, through his careful observation and representation of the human figure, he was able to find and express the intrinsic value of the human person as such. His work is imbued with a deep and abiding sympathy for the humanity of his subjects, the need we have for each other, for understanding and being understood, with all the difficulty and riskiness that this implies. Shimin always used live models because, he said, “I believe the individual characters to be more meaningful.” That unflagging devotion to the human individual, to the inherent value and dignity of the individual human being is his lasting legacy; and as long as we seek to understand and express the value and significance of human experience as such, there will be a place for artists such as Shimin.

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The last remaining arms control agreement between Russia and the US expires on February 5 unless extended at the 11th hour.

Hardline Trump regime’s arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea rejected Vladimir Putin’s good faith offer to extend it for another five years with no pre-conditions.

Russia’s chief arms control negotiator/Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov called his unacceptable demands “a nonstarter for us.”

His lack of good faith assured no extension while Trump remained in office surrounded by hardline Russophobes like him and Pompeo.

Ryabkov and other Russian officials said the Kremlin would respond appropriately if the US side let New START expire.

If Washington expands its nuclear arsenal, Russia “would be ready to counter this,” he explained.

Earlier, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the following:

“We made clear our position on multiple occasions.”

“China has no intention to take part in so-called China-US-Russia trilateral arms control negotiations. This position is clear and consistent,” adding:

“China’s nuclear power is not on the same order of magnitude as that of the US and Russia.”

New START worked well for a decade, why Russia is willing to extend it for five more years or another period of time with no pre-conditions.

Any extension would give the new US regime time to negotiate a further time frame ahead.

In early January, Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan said the following:

“(R)ight out of the gate in the early days and weeks of the administration…we will have to look at extending that treaty in the interests of the United States.”

Numerous US arms control experts urged Biden to accept a five-year extension without pre-conditions straightaway in office.

Trump regime hardliners were never serious about extending the landmark agreement.

Throughout their tenure, they never negotiated in good faith — why no extension was agreed on.

Ryabkov stressed that they made unacceptable demands, showing no interest in reaching common ground.

If Russian and Biden regime negotiators reach agreement before February 5, various steps must follow under Russian law, including approval by its parliament.

Days earlier, Ryabkov said “(w)e are prepared to…do our utmost to be there in time (but) the situation is challenging.”

According to the Washington Post on Thursday, Biden seeks a five-year New START extension, citing two unnamed senior US officials.

At the same time, his regime will demand “new costs on Russia pending a newly requested intelligence assessment of its recent activities (sic).”

There’s the rub. What Biden regime hardliners say they seek may depend on Moscow’s willingness to go along with unacceptable demands that will likely leave things at stalemate as the clock runs out.

Unnamed Biden officials said “reset” with Russia is ruled out, another negative sign.

Dealmaking requires all sides to negotiate in good faith. Time and again, the US fails the test.

With about two weeks to go before New START expires, it’s uncertain at best if extending it is coming or for how long.

It won’t be Russia’s fault if the landmark agreement expires.

Another unnamed Biden official signaled where the new regime in town is going with Russia ahead.

And by extension, it appears to be its intention in dealings with all nations free from its control, saying the following:

“(W)e (will) work to hold Russia accountable for their reckless and aggressive actions (sic) that we’ve seen in recent months and years (sic).”

“Reckless and aggressive actions” reflect longstanding US policy, the same true for its imperial partners.

Russia operates by higher standards the US and partners in high crimes long ago abandoned.

The above remarks show where bilateral relations are likely going ahead — perhaps on the rocks before Biden regime officials are confirmed and settle into their new jobs.

Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other nations unwilling to be subservient to US demands can expect no change in its hardline treatment.

On Friday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia “definitely favors the preservation of New START and its extension so as to buy some more time for proper negotiations.”

As of now like always, the US side has a lot of proving to do to achieve anything positive between both countries.

Hostile remarks by senior Biden regime official concealing their identify behind a cloak of anonymity are unacceptable twice over.

In 2017, NYT public editor Liz Spayd said use of unnamed sources leaves readers “unconvinced,” adding:

The public “despise(s)” their use, including vague designations like “government official,” “congressional aide,” or “those familiar” with the issue at hand.

A letter to the editor called their use “poor journalism,” leaving readers with no way to evaluate the credibility of the source, or even it one exists.

I’ve been quoted a number of times by others. I stand by my remarks and always prefer full attribution.

Anonymity is unacceptable. Unwillingness to be identified with remarks suggests something to hide.

At the same time, exceptions to the rule exist under special circumstances, especially when the lives and livelihoods of sources are at risk from what’s revealed.

For the vast majority of what I cite or quote from the Times or other publications, the above exceptions don’t apply.

According to WaPo, Biden’s secretary of state nominee Blinken is amenable to a five-year New START extension, based on his remarks to Congress.

In contrast, neocon hardliner Victoria Nuland favors a one or two year extension of the agreement in hopes of gaining more leverage over Moscow that won’t come whatever the fate of the deal.

Russia is ready to walk away from talks if the US side continues acting in bad faith.

Other Biden/Harris regime officials are split on whether to extend New START and for how long, WaPo reported.

In response to reports of Biden moving ahead with a five-year extension if followed through on, Billingslea slammed the idea, saying it “shows stunning lack of negotiating skill.”

The above remark reflects his failure to achieve anything positive in talks with Russia on this vital issue.

Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball said the following:

“There is no evidence that Russia is desperate to extend the treaty or that a shorter-term extension would make Russia more likely to negotiate a follow-on agreement,” adding:

“A straightforward five-year extension would provide the new president with an early win and positive momentum, help restore US credibility on arms control issues, and create the potential for more ambitious steps to reduce the nuclear danger and move us closer to a world without nuclear weapons.”

In the coming days, it’ll be clear whether New START will be extended for five years, a shorter period, or not at all.

As for Biden/Harris regime relations with Russia and other nations free from US control, its first few days offer no encouragement about positive domestic or geopolitical moves coming — just the opposite as expected.

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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/

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***

“This is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends. What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? [The proposed legislation could create] a very dangerous undermining of our civil liberties, our freedoms in our Constitution, and a targeting of almost half of the country.”—Tulsi Gabbard, former Congresswoman

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.

Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

In a déjà vu mirroring of the legislative fall-out from 9/11, and the ensuing build-up of the security state, there is a growing demand in certain sectors for the government to be given expanded powers to root out “domestic” terrorism, the Constitution be damned.

If this is a test of Joe Biden’s worthiness to head up the American police state, he seems ready.

As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to confront and defeat “a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” Biden has also asked the Director of National Intelligence to work with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out a “comprehensive threat assessment” of domestic terrorism. And then to keep the parallels going, there is the proposed Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021, introduced after the Jan. 6 riots, which aims to equip the government with “the tools to identify, monitor and thwart” those who could become radicalized to violence.

Don’t blink or you’ll miss the sleight of hand.

This is the tricky part of the Deep State’s con game that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

It follows the same pattern as every other convenient “crisis” used by the government as an excuse to expand its powers at the citizenry’s expense and at the expense of our freedoms.

As investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald warns:

“The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This New War on Terror—one that is domestic in name from the start and carries the explicit purpose of fighting ‘extremists’ and ‘domestic terrorists’ among American citizens on U.S. soil—presents the whole slew of historically familiar dangers when governments, exploiting media-generated fear and dangers, arm themselves with the power to control information, debate, opinion, activism and protests.”

Greenwald is referring to the USA Patriot Act, passed almost 20 years ago, which paved the way for the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

Source: KSLA-12.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since Sept. 11, 2001.

Some members of Congress get it.

In a letter opposing expansion of national security powers, a handful congressional representatives urged their colleagues not to repeat the mistakes of the past:

“While many may find comfort in increased national security powers in the wake of this attack, we must emphasize that we have been here before and we have seen where that road leads. Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people… To expand the government’s national security powers once again at the expense of the human and civil rights of the American people would only serve to further undermine our democracy, not protect it.”

Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

This is the power grab hiding in plain sight, obscured by the political machinations of the self-righteous elite. This is how the government continues to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of national security. Indeed, this is exactly how the government added red flag gun laws, precrime surveillance, fusion centers, threat assessments, mental health assessments, involuntary confinement to its arsenal of weaponized powers.

The objective is not to make America safe again. That has never been the government’s aim.

Greenwald explains:

“Why would such new terrorism laws be needed in a country that already imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world as the result of a very aggressive set of criminal laws? What acts should be criminalized by new ‘domestic terrorism’ laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because—just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws—their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition.”

So you see, the issue is not whether Donald Trump or Roger Stone or MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell deserve to be banned from Twitter, even if they’re believed to be spouting misinformation, hateful ideas, or fomenting discontent.

Rather, we should be asking whether any corporation or government agency or entity representing a fusion of the two should have the power to muzzle, silence, censor, regulate, control and altogether eradicate so-called “dangerous” or “extremist” ideas.

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose.

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Yet where many go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

Eventually, all you will really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

The groundwork has already been laid.

The trap is set.

All that is needed is the right bait.

With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents have been busily spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers by way of AI (artificial intelligence) now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

For instance, police in major American cities have been using predictive policing technology that allows them to identify individuals—or groups of individuals—most likely to commit a crime in a given community. Those individuals are then put on notice that their movements and activities will be closely monitored and any criminal activity (by them or their associates) will result in harsh penalties.

In other words, the burden of proof is reversed: you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.

Dig beneath the surface of this kind of surveillance/police state, however, and you will find that the real purpose of pre-crime is not safety but control.

Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to one FBI latest report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

Additionally, according to Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, the bureau now “classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority extremism, animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism.”

In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

Again, where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.

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

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.

You will be tracked wherever you go.

You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the corporate sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

Connect the dots.

Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.

To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones and balloons that are beginning to blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify so-called criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.

Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata.

There’s always a price to pay for standing up to the powers-that-be.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.

All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.

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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].

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

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***

Sixty years ago, John F Kennedy (JFK) was inaugurated as president of the USA. In less than three years, before he was assassinated in November 1963, he initiated major changes in foreign policy.

These foreign policy changes are documented in books such as “JFK and the Unspeakable” (2008) and “Betting on the Africans” (2012). One of the foremost scholars on JFK, James Di Eugenio, has an excellent new article of the Kennedy foreign policy at Covert Action: “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’Etat over Foreign Policy?”. Despite this literature, many people in the West do not realize the extent to which JFK was an exception. This article will briefly review some of the actions he took while alive, and what happened after he was gone.

While JFK was a staunch advocate for capitalism and the “free world”, in competition with the Soviet Union and communism, he promoted acceptance of non-aligned countries and supported nationalist movements in Africa, the Middle East and Third World generally.  In the summer before he was killed, he reached out to the Soviet Union and proposed sweeping changes to promote peace and prevent war.

The previous Eisenhower administration was hostile to post WW2 nationalist movements in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In 1953 the CIA supervised the overthrow of Iran’s elected government. They supported the Saudi monarch and undermined the popular Egyptian Nasser. In contrast, Kennedy was sympathetic to the “winds of change” in Africa and beyond. He criticized France’s repression of the Algerian independence movement and was sympathetic to Patrice Lumumba leading the Congo’s independence from Belgium. Kennedy worked with UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold to preserve Congo’s independence and try to restore Lumumba to power. The CIA managed to have Patrice Lumumba executed three days before Kennedy’s inauguration.

Under Kennedy, the United States started voting against the European colonial powers in Africa. Kennedy provided tangible aid to Nasser in Egypt. After Kennedy’s death, the US policy returned to support for European powers and CIA intervention. The US supported NATO ally Portugal in its wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau. The US supported secessionist and tribal forces in the Congo, Angola, Somalia, and many other countries with hugely damaging results. The US supported apartheid South Africa until the end. The US supported the sectarian Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser.

This was also a critical time for Israel Palestine. JFK was more objective and balanced that most US politicians. Just 22 years old in 1939, Kennedy visited Palestine and wrote his observations / analysis in a 4 page letter to his father. He is thoughtful and recognizes the Palestinian perspective. He speaks of the “unfortunately arrogant, uncompromising attitude” of some Jewish leaders. In May 2019, more documents were released from the National Security Archives. They show that JFK, as president, was intent on stopping Israel from surreptitiously building a nuclear weapon. In a letter to the new Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol, Kennedy gives a diplomatic ultimatum that US support of Israel will be “seriously jeopardized” if Israel did not comply with inspection visits to the Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona. After JFK’s death, the Johnson administration was submissive to Israel and pro-Israel supporters. Johnson showed the ultimate political subservience by preventing the rescue and hiding Israeli treachery regarding the USS Liberty. The Israeli attack killed 34 and injured 172 US sailors. Would Israel have had the arrogance and chutzpah to do this if Kennedy had been in the White House? Unlikely.

The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs took place just three months after Kennedy took office. The CIA and generals expected Kennedy to provide US air support for the anti-Castro attackers. Kennedy said no and resolved to get rid of the long-standing CIA Director who had managed the operation. Allen Dulles and two Deputy Directors were forced to resign by the end of the year. The Pentagon, CIA and anti-Castro Cubans were furious at JFK. When the Soviet Union sent nuclear capable missiles to Cuba, the hawks demanded that the US attack. Kennedy opposed this and ended up negotiating an agreement whereby the US removed its nuclear missiles in Turkey as Soviet nuclear missiles were removed from Cuba.

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country with vast natural resources and strategic location. President Sukarno led the country to independence and was a leader in the global Non-Aligned Movement seeking a middle ground between the poles of the USA and Soviet Union. The Eisenhower/Dulles administration tried to overthrow Sukarno. In contrast, JFK changed the policy from hostility to friendship. Sukarno invited JFK to visit the country and the invitation was accepted. Following JFK’s assassination, the policy returned to hostility and just two years later, in 1965, the US engineered a coup leading to the murder of about half a million Indonesian citizens suspected of being communist.

JFK visited Vietnam in 1951 as the French colonial powers were trying to assert their control. He saw the situation as 400,000 French soldiers were losing to the Vietnamese nationalist movement. Thus, when he became president, he was skeptical of the prospects. President Kennedy authorized an increase of US military advisers but never sent combat troops. As the situation deteriorated, JFK finally decided the policy was wrong. In October 1963 Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 directing US withdrawal to begin in December and be completed by the end of 1965. After JFK’s death, President Johnson reversed course and began sending massive numbers of US soldiers to Vietnam. Twelve years later, after 58,000 American and about two million Vietnamese deaths, the US military departed Vietnam.

The Soviet Union was the largest communist country and primary challenger to the US and capitalist system. The Cold War included mutual recriminations and a huge amount of military spending as both sides designed and produced ever more hydrogen bombs, air and sea delivery systems. During the Cuba crisis, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khruschev both realized how dangerous the situation was. Nuclear war could have accidentally or intentionally begun. In June1963, JFK delivered the commencement address at American University. It was probably his most important speech yet is little known. JFK called for a dramatic change in US posture, from confrontation to mutual acceptance. He called for re-examination of US attitudes toward peace, the Soviet Union, the Cold War and peace and freedom within the USA itself. He called for a special communication line between Washington and Moscow to allow direct communications between the two leaders. And then Kennedy declared that the US would end nuclear testing as a first step toward general and complete disarmament.

In the last months before his death, JFK opened secret communications with Soviet Premier Khruschev and used a journalist to communicate directly with Fidel Castro. JFK proposed face-to-face talks aimed at reconciliation with Cuba.

Kennedy’s initiatives toward reconciliation and peace were opposed by the CIA and militarist elements in the government. As reported in the NY Times, Kennedy privately told one of his highest officials he “wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”. Before that could happen, JFK was assassinated, and his policy changes reversed.

From Moscow to Cairo to Jakarta, Kennedy’s death was met with shock and mourning. Leaders in those countries sensed what the assassination meant.

The day after JFK’s funeral, President Johnson supplanted Kennedy’s planned withdrawal from Viet Nam with National Security Action Memorandum 273. This resulted in 12 years of aggression and bloodshed in southeast Asia. Coups were carried out in the Dominican Republic and Indonesia. US resumed support for South African apartheid and Portuguese colonial wars. Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro escalated while military coups took place in numerous Latin American countries. In the Middle East, the US solidified support for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The author of “JFK and the Unspeakable”, Jim Douglas, writes “President Kennedy’s courageous turn from global war to a strategy of peace provides the why of his assassination. Because he turned toward peace with our enemies, the Communists, he found himself at odds with his own national security state.”

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Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at [email protected]

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***

Industry would have us believe that pesticides help sustain food production—a necessary chemical trade-off for keeping harmful bugs at bay and ensuring we have enough to eat. But the data often tell a different story—particularly in the case of neonicotinoid pesticides, also known as neonics.

Despite being the most widely used family of pesticides in the United States, research has shown that the largest uses of these neurotoxic chemicals do little to nothing to help crop yields or farmers’ bottom lines.

If we look closer, it’s easy to see why: The vast majority of neonics are applied as coatings on seeds for crops like corn, soybean, and wheat—where they are most often used indiscriminately, rather than in response to specific pest problems. For many conventional seed varieties, farmers have no choice but to buy neonics-treated seeds, thanks to the near monopolies enjoyed by agrochemical giants, which manufacture both the seeds and the pesticides.

The result? Tens to hundreds of millions of acres are needlessly sown with bee-toxic seeds. And while these wasteful practices may spell good news for the profit margins of chemical manufacturers—to the tune of more than $3 billion per year—they are catastrophic news for the surrounding ecosystems.

That’s because neonics are pervasive ecosystem contaminants. When coated on seeds, they’re absorbed “systemically” as plants grow—up through the roots and into the nectar, pollen, and fruit itself—which then get eaten by other wildlife. What doesn’t make it into the plant (usually more than 95 percent of the toxic seed coating) leaches out into the soil, where it can travel long distances, carried by rain and agricultural runoff into new soil, plants, and water supplies. Once in the ground, neonics are long-lived—building up in the soil over time and continuing to harm or kill bugs and other wildlife for years after application.

Unsurprisingly, our agricultural system is now 48 times more harmful to insect life than it was just two decades ago, with neonics accounting for more than 90 percent of that increase. That’s why it’s also no surprise that neonics have been recognized as a primary cause of the massive losses of U.S. honey bee colonies every year—the unfortunate new normal. Neonics are also linked to mass die-offs of native bees, birds, fish, and harm to other important insects and earthworms, which keep our soil healthy and nutrient-dense.

This contamination poses a clear ecological crisis but it’s also a crisis for how we eat.

In a recent study out of Rutgers University, researchers looked at seven different crops in 131 commercially managed fields across North America to see how many crops were “pollinator-limited”—i.e., crops whose yields would be higher were there more pollinators.

Distressingly, five out of every seven crops they analyzed were pollinator-limited—including favorites like apples, cherries, and blueberries. “Honeybee colonies are weaker than they used to be and wild bees are declining, probably by a lot,” said the paper’s senior author, Rachael Winfree. “Fewer bees, in turn, mean less food, and more pressure on struggling honeybee populations to replace pollination from native bees.”

As Winfree notes, this reliance on a single species is risky, “setting us up for food security problems.” Worse yet, the study shows the likely impact of neonics on our food supply isn’t decades away; it’s already happening right now.

For the present, industries can use stopgap solutions—like breeding and shipping out more honeybees to make up for lost colonies—but these strategies may ultimately fail if we don’t address the source of the vast and wasteful neonic contamination.

Looking into the future, low yields may mean that some of our favorite foods become far pricier or unavailable entirely—an outcome with high human and economic costs.

In the United States, the production of crops that rely on pollination is valued at more than $50 billion annually. Indeed, one in every three bites of food is reliant on pollinators. Food workers—an umbrella term for a behemoth industry that includes everyone from farm workers to restaurant cooks and servers to grocery store clerks—could experience increased job disruptions, too, should the markets for these foods become upended.

Recently, a group of local New York chefs—recognizing their reliance on bees and an abundant and diverse food supply to keep restaurants open, workers employed, and their food healthy and delicious—asked state legislators to rein in wasteful neonic use statewide.

Faced with rising food costs, more families may also struggle to put food on the table. Already, more than 10.5 percent of all U.S. families—or more than 35 million Americans—experienced food insecurity at some point in 2019. During the COVID-19 crisis, that number has ballooned. For those unsure where their next meal may come from, even moderate increases in food costs are felt acutely. Potentially significant changes to food costs or availability—particularly for our most nutrient-dense produce—would likely hit low-income families hardest.

The stakes are high, but the solution is simple: We must rein in needless neonic use that threatens our food supply and contaminates our land and water on a vast scale.

In the same turn, we must also support regenerative agriculture practices, which eliminate the need for synthetic pesticides like neonics. A more just and sustainable food system that protects workers, consumers, and the wild world also protects our food security—it’s what we need and it’s within reach.

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Daniel Raichel is a Staff Attorney, Pollinator Initiative, Wildlife Division, Nature Program

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***

As the Canadian Parliament is about to start its next session on January 25, on January 22, Don Davies, Member of Parliament for Vancouver Kingsway (British Colombia), New Democratic Party (NDP) Health Critic tweeted: “In his last days, Donald Trump declared Cuba a “state sponsor of terrorism” without a shred of evidence. This makes a mockery of the concept and was driven by a President who was actually spurring terrorism in his own country. President Biden should reverse this travesty at once.”

The New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament for Hamilton Centre (Ontario), Matthew Green retweeted by adding: “I stand alongside my colleague and comrade @DonDavies in solidarity with Cuba.”

Background: From Reagan to Obama to Trump/Pompeo

The State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) list was created in 1979 as part of the Export Administration Act, and according to the Washington Post, was a legal clause intended to give the Executive Branch the ability to restrict exports, arms transfers, and other commercial transactions. On March 1, 1982, the Reagan administration formally added Cuba to the list. No clear rationale was given at the time.

The 1979 SST list was created as part of existing legislation of providing it with a legal clause intended to give, let us emphasize, the Executive Branch, not the Congress, the ability to restrict exports, arms transfers, and other commercial transactions to certain countries.

On December 17, 2014 simultaneous statements were made by Raúl Castro and Barack Obama with a view to reopening embassies in the respective capitals and re-establishing diplomatic relations. However, the Cuban side insisted that it be removed from the SST list. On April 17, 2014, Obama said: “I’ve instructed Secretary Kerry to review Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. This review will be guided by the facts and the law.”

By following this formal procedure, Obama did order a review of Cuba’s presence on the list, making it part of his major policy shift announced on December 17. On April 14, 2015, the State Department reported that Obama notified the US Congress of his intent to remove Cuba from the list. The Congress had 45 days to object, which they neglected to do. In May 2015, Cuba was therefore removed and no longer a state sponsor of terrorism. Just weeks before, diplomats had met in Washington, but failed to come to an agreement about opening embassies. This was solved by removing Cuba from the SST.

Moving on to January 11, 2021, just nine days before the end of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a State Department directive stating that it “has designated Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.”  Note, there is not even a pretence to have followed the formal procedure, as Obama had done, to remove Cuba from that spurious list.

In anticipation of the expected announcement about the SST that was circulating in Washington, on Friday January 8, 2021, Patrick Leahy (Democrat ,Vermont) and eight other Senators issued a statement indicating that Cuba should be removed and that Pompeo had designated Cuba without formal consultation and review by Congress.”

Thus, we see that Pompeo did not listen to the senators. He did not carry out any formal consultation and review by Congress.

Why wait when Cuba is being bled – again?

It seems to be an open and shut case as far as procedure is concerned. If Pompeo could unilaterally redesignate Cuba as a member of the SST list, then the Biden administration and Secretary of State Antony Blinken could do the same. As far as political motivations are concerned, everything points to swift action being taken by Biden, as he was himself Obama’s vice president when Cuba was taken off the list. Furthermore, the Democrats control both houses.

However, as mentioned in a previous article, some Obama/Biden apologists seem to be providing a pretext for Biden not to move. For example, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, an Obama presidential endorser for 2008, and informally since then, reaching a climax for the 2020 elections in the wide anti-Trump coalition. In a barely veiled suggestion, he warned on his CNN program that it would be “awkward” for Biden to take Cuba off the list because this would play into the hands of Trump and Pompeo who would accuse Biden “that they are somehow in league with terrorists.”

Whether for the attention of Biden or CNN, one has to keep in mind that Pompeo mentions in the very second sentence of his SST designation on Cuba: “The Trump Administration has been focused from the start on denying the Castro regime the resources it uses to oppress its people at home, and countering its malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.” Regime change for Venezuela is a bipartisan program in Washington. Another reason for the Democrats to be stalling?

However, what is more worrisome was revealed in Antony Blinken’s Senate confirmation hearing as Secretary of State on January 19, 2021. Throughout the four-hour meeting, hard-line anti-Cuba right-wingers Robert Menendez (Democratic), Marco Rubio (Republican) and other Republicans, also participated. Yet, neither the Republicans nor Blinken said anything about Cuba and SST. Strange?

The only explanation is the following. The Republicans, Democrats and Blinken in the Senate have agreed on Venezuela and all other issues such as Israel, Iran, China, Russia and even non-SST-related issues related to Cuba. However, by quietly leaving the Cuba SST controversy out of the conversation, they achieved consensus on the Biden team’s foreign policy. In other words, with overt or hidden consensus of the Republicans and Democrats, Blinken threw Cuba under the bus by not raising the Cuba SST issue. Republicans would give Blinken a pass on his confirmation as Secretary of State. Quid pro quo?  In effect, on January 26, the Senate voted overwhelming in favour of Blinken by a vote of 78 to 22, with many Republicans voting in favour of him.

What does this say to Canadian deputies, members of the US Congress, and all of us together, with both governments and social organizations all over the world demanding that Cuba be taken off the list right away? Given what seems to be underhanded tactics, this is another reason to put the pressure on our respective governments to raise their voices so that Biden moves now.

At the same time, what Cuba-US expert, Peter Kornblue writes in The Nation has also to be taken into account:

“Although Biden can reverse many of Trump’s executive directives with a stroke of a pen, removing Cuba from the SST list requires a series of time-consuming, statutory steps: a formal State Department review; a presidential certification to Congress, and a 45-day waiting period during which Congress can object before Cuba can be, once again, rescinded.”

However, why give up on the demand that “what is good for the goose, is good for the gander”? If Pompeo can punish Cuba with the stroke of a pen, why cannot Biden undo it with a flick of the wrist? The addition of Cuba to that list has far-reaching effects on the economy and day-to-day life of Cubans. They and their government are already under the cruellest of stresses based on the 240 blockade measures implemented by the Trump administration in the last four years. Speaking to some Cuban colleagues over the phone, they fear far-reaching effects on trade and commerce as to what little is left of US trade with Cuba, access to the International Monetary Fund and other such institutions, as well as with other countries. Just to provide one example, it was explained that Cuba is currently carrying out about 12,000 tests per day to detect and trace Covid-19. This requires funding, which will be more difficult to obtain under the SST.

This is no times for niceties of formal procedure when it can be avoided. And it can. If Biden does not move now, he will be asked: what about that “historical struggle” against the Trump/Pompeo “fascist administration”?

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This article was originally published on The Canada Files.

Arnold August is a Montreal-based author and journalist whose articles are published in web sites across North America, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East in English, Spanish and French. He is a Fellow at the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute.

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***

A court in France on Monday heard a case brought by a French-Vietnamese woman against over a dozen multinational corporations she accuses of causing grievous harm by selling the defoliant Agent Orange to the United States government, whose use of the deadly chemical during the Vietnam War has killed, maimed, or seriously sickened hundreds of thousands of people to this day. 

Agence France-Presse reports the suit was brought by Tran To Nga, 78, an activist and journalist who was working in Vietnam when she was exposed to Agent Orange. Tran suffers from diabetes and a blood disorder she transmitted to her second daughter; her first daughter died of a heart defect when she was 17 months old. Tran also contracted tuberculosis twice, had cancer, and suffers from an extremely rare insulin allergy.

Initially, Tran blamed herself for the afflictions that have plagued her and her children.

“I asked myself, what have I done to transmit this incurable disease to my children?” she said in a 2015 France 24 interview.

“Now I know that I am not at fault,” she said. “We can identify the culprit of my children’s illnesses… It’s these dioxins.”

In 2014, Tran sued 14 companies that made or sold Agent Orange, including Monsanto—now owned by the German firm Bayer—and Dow Chemical for their roles in selling the chemical to the U.S. government.

#JusticePourTranToNga et toutes les victimes de l’Agent Orange-dioxine. Depuis 45 ans, ni le gouvernement américain, ni les fabricants de l’Agent Orange-dioxine n’ont reconnu leur responsabilité vis-à-vis des victimes vietnamiennes. Un procès historique.https://t.co/pDHrNLSCrO

— LDH France (@LDH_Fr) January 25, 2021

Agent Orange contains TCDD dioxin, a known carcinogen and one of the most toxic chemicals ever invented. In addition to numerous cancers, research has shown that Agent Orange exposure causes severe birth defects, diabetes, spina bifida, cardiovascular, digestive, neurological, respiratory, skin, and other ailments.

The U.S. government knew about the dangers of Agent Orange when the John F. Kennedy administration approved Operation Ranch Hand (pdf) in 1961 as part of a growing counterinsurgency operation in Vietnam.

“When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide,” Dr. James R. Clary, a former senior scientist at the Chemical Weapons Branch of the U.S. Air Force Armaments Development Laboratory, later admitted.

“We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture,” added Clary. “However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned.”

The communist Viet Cong insurgency against the oppressive U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem dictatorship was proving more difficult to defeat than anticipated by U.S. planners, who sought novel ways to combat the resistance. In a bid to deny fighters the cover provided by the dense jungle foliage, the U.S. sprayed an estimated 76 million liters (20 million gallons) of Agent Orange over Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian rainforests.

Agent Orange was also sprayed over farmland, as U.S. planners sought to eradicate the crops that were feeding Viet Cong and North Vietnamese fighters, their families, and supporters.

The effects on the people of Vietnam have been devastating. As many as 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed, with the country’s government claiming 400,000 deaths and millions of cancer cases caused by the decadelong spraying. More than 50,000 babies over three generations have suffered severe birth defects, which will continue to affect future generations.

Soil and water contamination due to Agent Orange continue to sicken and kill to this day. Around 800,000 Vietnamese currently require medical and other assistance due to the lingering effects of exposure.

Tens of thousands of U.S., South Vietnamese, South Korean, and Australian troops were also exposed to Agent Orange, which has caused serious health problems for many of them, and some of their children.

While U.S. victims of Agent Orange were awarded $180 million in a class-action lawsuit in 1984, nearly all attempts by the people of Vietnam to gain desperately needed direct compensation have been rejected by the U.S. government and American courts.

This, despite a U.S. promise as part of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement to pay $3.25 billion over a five-year period, plus an additional $1.5 billion, in reparations to Vietnam. Not a penny was paid.

Vietnamese also watched with great interest as Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million in damages to an American man who said that its Roundup weed killer caused his cancer.

Since 2007, the U.S. Congress has appropriated (pdf) nearly $60 million for dioxin cleanup and related healthcare services in Vietnam as relations between Washington and Hanoi have improved, but victims’ advocates say this is nowhere near enough, as some 6,000 children are diagnosed with congenital deformities each year due to Agent Orange.

Tran says her lawsuit is meant for these and other victims who have been denied relief over the decades.

“I’m not fighting for myself, but for my children and the millions of victims,” she told AFP.

Vietnam is not the only place the U.S. has used toxic weapons in recent decades. The firing of depleted uranium rounds in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO air war against Yugoslavia, and during 2003-2011 Iraq War have been blamed for a rise in birth defects and other often deadly ailments.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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***

Boeing’s troubled 737 Max returned to US skies last month. American Airlines was the first domestic carrier to fly the Max and has since operated more than 200 flights. While other domestic and international carriers gear up for a much wider re-launch of the aircraft, a former senior manager at Boeing’s 737 Max plant in Seattle has published a new report warning that the Max is “still not fixed.” 

Ed Pierson, the report’s author, retired from Boeing in August 2018 and worked at the Max factory in Renton, Washington, claims more investigations are needed into the aircraft’s electrical system and production quality problems at the factory.

Pierson alleges that the US and European regulators have primarily ignored factors that he points out in the report, which may have played a role in Lion Air flight JT610 and Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 crashes that killed 346 people. He links both crashes back to conditions at the factory in Renton.

Pierson firmly believes Boeing’s effort to redesign Max’s flight control system, called MCAS software, ensures a single sensor failure would not happen in flight is not enough.

“The paper underscores the likely role a chaotic and dangerously unstable production environment played in the accidents. Mr. Pierson also puts forth three other plausible accident scenarios not addressed in the accident investigations. The 14-page report includes a timeline and an analysis that ties the two 737 MAX airplane crashes together in ways not previously reported. Most importantly, Mr. Pierson’s analysis raises serious doubts as to the safety of the 737 MAX. Alarmingly, the FAA’s recertification fixes do not address the problems identified in the report,” the report’s abstract reads.

In late 2019, Pierson testified during a House Transportation Committee hearing on both Max crashes where he described the Renton factory as “chaotic” and “dysfunctional.”

With the planes returning to the air, he is worried that Boeing and regulators have overlooked many of the issues he pointed out.

In the report, he believes the production defects of critical Max parts were defected when they entered service, adding that the aircraft’s complex wiring systems may have contributed to the random deployment of the MCAS system in flight.

Pierson said the MCAS sensor failures contributed to both crashes but asked why they were happening to new aircraft.

All of this suggests, Pierson explained, “point back to where these airplanes were produced, the 737 factory”.

Pierson’s report was analyzed by famed pilot Chesley Sullenberger who said the “report is very disturbing, about manufacturing issues in the Boeing factories that go well beyond just the Max, and also affect… the previous version of the 737.” 

“Like electricity, Boeing and the FAA have taken the path of least resistance throughout the entire design, development, certification, production, and now recertification of the 737 MAX,” Pierson said in the report.

“The design of the 737 MAX, MCAS software and the failure to provide vital information and training to pilots did not trigger these accidents. Neither did corporate decision making made years ago, unethical behavior, deceptive marketing, or a misguided leadership culture that prioritized profits over safety. Nor did deregulation, regulatory capture, or a completely broken aircraft certification process. In fact, all of these things contributed mightily to these tragedies. Unfortunately, every MAX airplane ever manufactured shares this same wretched history. The pilots are certainly not to blame. They did everything they could to save the lives of the people who trusted them. The triggering event for these crashes was a defective AOA Sensor part, and quite possibly, a malfunctioning electrical system stemming from a dangerously unstable production environment,” he said.” 

Pierson concludes: “We can either investigate these production problems and fix them, or we can wait for another disaster.”

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***

The Biden administration plans to re-open Palestinian diplomatic missions that were shuttered under former President Donald Trump and restore US aid to Palestine, the acting US ambassador to the UN has announced.

Speaking to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Ambassador Richard Mills said the US plans to renew relations with Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people, lamenting that those ties had “atrophied” under the Trump administration.

“President Biden has been clear in his intent to restore US assistance programmes that support economic development and humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people. And to take steps to reopen diplomatic missions that were closed by the last US administration,” Mills said.

The Trump administration cut some $200m in aid to Palestine in 2018 in an attempt to pressure leadership into accepting the administration’s controversial “deal of the century”.

The cuts did not result in further diplomacy, instead leading to a financial crisis that plunged tens of thousands of Palestinians further into poverty. Food and medical aid initiatives, as well as educational programmes suffered, among other humanitarian efforts.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany and Ireland expressed “deep concern” regarding the “critical financial situation” that the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) has experienced since the Trump administration’s funding cuts began.

Meanwhile, Mills stressed that the reinstatement of US financial aid and support to the Palestinians was not a sign that the administration was set to act in favour of Palestinian leadership, but that the funding assists “millions of ordinary Palestinians and helps preserve a stable environment that benefits both Palestinians and Israelis”.

“At the same time, the US will maintain its steadfast support for Israel. Under the Biden administration, the US will continue its long-standing policy of opposing one-sided resolutions and other actions in international bodies that unfairly single out Israel,” Mills said.

“The US will work to promote Israel’s standing and participation in UN bodies and other international organisations,” he continued.

Mill’s statements echo those made by other Biden administration officials and congressional Democrats.

‘New possibilities’

Earlier this month, the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Gregory Meeks, said he planned to back Biden’s major policy reversals, including the resumption of humanitarian aid and the return of a Palestinian diplomatic presence in Washington.

Later on Tuesday, press secretary Jen Psaki stressed that the Biden administration’s view is that “a two-state solution is the only path forward” for Palestine and Israel.

During his address, Mills also stressed the US’s intentions to support the two-state solution, which would see the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

In doing so, Mills said Washington will expect concessions from both countries, noting the need for Israel to halt its settlement expansion and annexation plans, and for the Palestinian leadership to rollback its welfare scheme for the families of those killed or imprisoned following anti-Israel attacks.

“The United States will urge Israel’s government and the Palestinian Authority to avoid unilateral steps that make a two-state solution more difficult, such as annexation of territory, settlement activity, demolitions, incitement to violence and providing compensation for individuals imprisoned for acts of terrorism,” Mill said.

The ambassador added that the Biden administration “welcomes” the normalisation deals between Israel and several Arab countries that have taken place since August – a major foreign policy point of the Trump administration. Mills said that the US will continue “to urge other countries” to follow suit in normalising relations with Israel.

“We recognise that Arab-Israeli normalisation is not a substitute for Israeli-Palestinian peace. The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians may not be the major fault line in the Middle East, but its resolution nevertheless would significantly benefit the region as a whole,” Mills said.

“It is the hope of the US that normalisation can proceed in a way that unlocks new possibilities to advance the two-state solution.”

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***

More than 300 anti-war and humanitarian organizations across the world have signed a statement calling for an end to the Saudi war against impoverished Yemen.

The statement called for an international day of action on January 25, just days after US President Joe Biden’s inauguration and the day before Saudi Arabia’s “Davos in the Desert” Future Investment Initiative.

It pointed to the Saudi-led bombing and blockade of Yemen, which have killed tens of thousands of Yemeni people, saying despite the dire circumstances the Yemenis are in, including a devastating COVID-19 outbreak, Saudi Arabia is escalating its war and tightening its blockade.

“The war is only possible because Western countries — and the United States and Britain in particular — continue to arm Saudi Arabia and provide military, political and logistical support for the war,” it said. “The Western powers are active participants and have the power to stop the world’s most acute human crisis.”

Saudi Arabia launched its war on Yemen war in 2015 in a bid to reinstall Yemen’s former pro-Riyadh government. The military campaign has turned the poor Arab country into the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, with tens of thousands of civilians killed and many more suffering the calamities of the war.

Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, which effectively administers most of the country, has said the Saudi-led coalition will pay dearly for its atrocities.

“Invasion of Yemen is a crime. So is the siege of the country. And continuation of these two amounts to a double crime,” Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

The signatories of the anti-war statement were organizations from Yemen, the US, Britain, Austria, Bangladesh, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and some other countries.

They said the war on Yemen is man-made, and therefore, it can be ended.

They also demanded that their governments immediately “stop foreign aggression on Yemen; stop weapons and war support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; lift the blockade on Yemen and open all land and sea ports; and restore and expand humanitarian aid for the people of Yemen.”

“We ask individuals and organizations everywhere to call for protests — with masks and other safety precautions — in their towns and cities on that day and make clear that the WORLD SAYS NO TO WAR ON YEMEN,” the rights groups added.

It came a day after 22 aid groups working in Yemen called on Washington to revoke a last-minute move by the administration of Donald Trump to designate Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement as a foreign terrorist organization.

“This designation comes at a time when famine is a very real threat to a country devastated by six years of conflict, and it must be revoked immediately. Any disruption to lifesaving aid operations and commercial imports of food, fuel, medicine and other essential goods will put millions of lives at risk,” the aid groups said in a statement on Sunday.

The Biden administration has already begun to review the designation, following worldwide condemnation as well as calls on the new administration to reverse it.

“As noted by Secretary-designate [Anthony] Blinken, the State Department has initiated a review of Ansarullah’s terrorist designations,” a spokesperson at the State Department said on Friday.

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***

Israel’s continued treatment of Palestinian political prisoners is unconscionable. Mohammad El Halabi, an aid worker from Gaza, has been in prison for four years while he awaits his trial; this is nothing short of cruel absurdity. He has been forced before the court over 150 times, many of those appearances secret, without word of when his trial will begin. His last court appearance was January 14, and he and his family still have no word of when his case will begin.

Israel’s case against El Halabi—whom it accuses of diverting humanitarian funds to Hamas—has been widely condemned as flimsy at best. The amount of funds it claims El Halabi diverted from his employer, the charity World Vision, is more than the organization’s entire annual operating budget; furthermore, World Vision as well as independent auditors found no financial irregularities as has been claimed. In addition, the Israeli government has refused to provide any further information or evidence regarding its claims. This case has not only led to a man’s indefinite imprisonment, but the suspension of significant humanitarian aid to Gaza, which will further impact adversely on the living conditions in the territory, which does not serve Israel’s interests in the least.

El Halabi is being imprisoned under the cruel practice of administrative detention, a holdover from British-era Mandatory Palestine which allows for an individual to be held without trial indefinitely, under the belief that they may break the law once they are released. El Halabi is not the only Palestinian to whom this legal loophole has been applied; Israel has consistently and heavily used this shameful practice against Palestinian political prisoners. Nelson Mandela adeptly put it when he said, “Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.”

The irony here is that while all right-wing Israeli parties and politicians know that they have no choice but to live side-by-side the Palestinians indefinitely, they spare no efforts to alienate the Palestinians in every which way they can. Some, in fact, bask in the illusion that if they make the Palestinians’ lives miserable by incessantly abusing them, many will end up leaving their country. By doing so, these morally hollowed right-wingers will not need to deal with the demographic time bomb. Do these political parties and the politically blind operatives ever stop and think where all this will lead to?

Sadly, the incarceration of Palestinians with no trial is just one of many egregious acts that the Israeli government employs routinely against the Palestinians; other violations include, among other things, nights raid that terrify children, house demolitions, expropriation of land for any (or often no) purpose, uprooting of olive trees, and arbitrary searches and seizures—all of which are utterly uncharacteristic to a people who have gone through similar tragic experiences for centuries.

A single act of injustice against any Palestinian casts a wide shadow over all Palestinians, as they collectively feel robbed of their rights and their human dignity. Acts of mercy are remembered for a long time, but an act of horrifying injustice is remembered for much longer as it continues to painfully reverberate within the family and community.

This of course is not limited to El-Halabi. Thousands of Palestinians prisoners who have no blood on their hands are languishing in Israeli jails as incarceration without trial is used as a deterrent. I do not suggest that every Palestinian is innocent, rather that he or she must be treated as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. This is one of the fundamentals of a true democracy, governed not only by laws but also by compassion, which Israel takes pride in proclaiming.

If Israel wants to maintain its status as a democracy—and indeed it has never missed an opportunity to assert itself as the sole democracy in the Middle East—it must treat its prisoners with dignity and respect, regardless of their race, religion, or creed. It should provide them with a full accounting of the accusations against them, and bring them to trial in a reasonable and timely manner—not leave them to languish in prison for years with no hope of seeing the light again.

It is a stain on Israel—a country that claims to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East—to engage in such cruel, vindictive practices that go beyond the pale of humanity. It is not too late, however, to right the wrong, not only for the sake of the Palestinians but for the sake of all Israelis, because if the moral tenet of the country is forsaken it diminishes Israel’s reason for being.

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After COVID, Davos Moves to The “Great Reset”

By F. William Engdahl, January 26 2021

With China making loud pledges about meeting strict CO2 emission standards by 2060, now the World Economic Forum is about to unveil what will transform the way we all live in what WEF head Klaus Schwab calls the Great Reset. 

The “Smoking Gun” is the PCR Cycle Threshold (Ct): Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive – You Still Might Not Have COVID-19

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, January 26 2021

New York’s state lab has access to the Cycle Threshold (Ct) values from the PCR tests they process. Last July, the lab identified 872 positive tests based on a threshold of 40 cycles. If the lab has used a cutoff of 35 cycles, 43 percent of those tests would have been considered negative.

The Futility and Dangers of Covid Lockdowns: Doctors Letter to Premier of Ontario Doug Ford

By Dr. Stephen Malthouse, January 26 2021

Below is a letter from Canadian doctors supporting Roman Baber MPP who penned an open letter to Premier Doug Ford asking to end the COVID-19 lockdown.

Discrepancies in Moderna’s FDA Report Demand Answers

By Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, January 26 2021

Search the scientific literature for examples of long-term vaccine randomized clinical trials that use inert placebos — you will not find them. Short-term studies are the preferred mode of vaccine manufacturers — even when there is no emergency — leaving long-term vaccine safety to be assessed after the vaccine goes to market.

“Privacy Poor” vs. “Privacy Rich” in a “Digital Bastille”. The “Death of Privacy” under the Helm of the World Economic Forum (WEF)

By Prof. Bill Willers, January 26 2021

The World Economic Forum (WEF), the Switzerland-based NGO of “elites” noted for political power and extreme wealth, has taken it upon itself to dictate the future of the world.

Pandemic, Lockdown, Economic Disaster: Are We at War?

By Peter Koenig, January 26 2021

Are we at War? This has become a legitimate question over the last 12 months in the western world. And we are not talking of war by the west against Russia or China, or the east in general. It’s a war of the people against ever-more tyrannical governments around the world, that under the guise of health security against an invisible enemy, called Covid-19 – are repressing people of the entire planet.

Biden’s First 48 Hours Affirm U.S. ‘Greatest Purveyor of Violence’

By Black Alliance for Peace, January 26 2021

In this annual ideological battle, those of us attempting to define Dr. King’s legacy highlight one of his statements because of its poignance and continued relevance: He said the United States is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

US Targets China over Tibet

By Brian Berletic, January 26 2021

The US Congress has recently passed the so-called Tibetan Policy and Support Act (TPSA) – slipped into a COVID-19 relief package and a 1.4 trillion dollar government spending bill, US State Department-funded Voice of America reported in their article, “US Congress Passes Landmark Bill in Support of Tibet.”

The US-Kenya Bilateral Free Trade Agreement. Garbage In, Garbage Out

By Asad Ismi, January 26 2021

Washington hopes a free trade pact with Kenya will give it a beachhead in its hot war with Al-Shabab and cold war with China—and an African dumping ground for GMOs and plastic waste. What Kenya gets in exchange is not at all clear.

Action Education in Morocco: An Enduring Throwback for the Future

By Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir, January 26 2021

As we experientially learn about the roots of social challenges, poverty, social stratification, and persistently-generational unrealized potential, we uncover shared basic features. It involves members of local communities discussing these very patterns and identifying local projects for change, livelihood, and justice.

Death by 1,000 Cuts: Are Major Insect Losses Imperiling Life on Earth?

By Liz Kimbrough, January 26 2021

Scientists warn of ongoing global insect abundance losses and say we lack a full understanding of invertebrate extinction causes and synergies. Action to curb extinction rates desperately needed: Studies.

When fear of covid-19 was at its peak, we were told it was killing 3.4% of those who got the disease, similar to the famous “Spanish flu” of 1918, which killed 60 million people worldwide. The New York Times editorial board said this was a world war 2 level problem that deserves an equal level of national commitment, they claimed that in the worst case scenario over 1.7 million Americans would die from the virus.

On cable news stations on the right and the left there was a constant ticker on the bottom of the screen showing how many cases and deaths there were, something we’d never seen until this pandemic. There were videos of people “panic buying” necessities at the start of the lockdowns or stay at home orders, & later videos of filled hospitals or body bags being carried out of hospitals.

First it was China locking down, then Italy, then eventually the rest of the world (no longer a handful of countries). We were told we had no other choice. Many have forgotten now, but even right wingers were down with the program this spring, 42 states including the majority of the ones with Republican governors, had “stay at home” orders. These states made up 95% of the us population. Tucker Carlson was on Fox News telling his viewers to be terrified of the new coronavirus, and apparently he even personally drove to go see President Trump and tell him how serious this was. Soon after, Trump himself was talking about how deadly the virus was and how serious of a problem it was, he also supported stay at home orders. There was non stop talk about a “new normal”.

Certain terms have become ubiquitous, like “social distancing”, and “flattening the curve”. How scared is the public? A recent vox poll showed 52% of Americans support a 1 month national lockdown. Back in April, at peak level of panic, an AP poll showed 87% of Americans supported stay at home orders, including 78% of republicans! America wasn’t so polarized then, was it? And obviously it’s not just America, the rest of the world is frightened to and has been since last February. Many people across the world think covid has already killed off a decent chunk of humanity.

A survey taken in July asked 1 thousand people in several different countries what percentage of their country they thought was killed off by covid, answers ranged from 3% in the us to 9% in Germany, this is several times the actual percentage and something you’d see in a scifi movie. Even after the public was told in some reports maybe this virus really didn’t kill 3.4%, and that we were missing a lot of asymptomatic cases, we were still told to be terrified (and most media outlets kept using the higher death rates when discussing COVID-19 anyway).

It was still considered “at least 10 times deadlier than the flu” (1 % vs .1%) and anyone who compared it to the flu was ridiculed, despite the similarity in symptoms. We were told that the experts overwhelmingly supported the stay at home orders, that anyone who was against them was akin to a climate change denier who did not respect science, or, just a psychopath.

There was also the question of the origin of the virus, while technically a mystery, it was said that the virus having come from a lab was highly unlikely. The virus was first noticed in Wuhan, China, which happens to also have a high level bio research lab, this obviously had many thinking of the possibility the virus snuck out. The most commonly accepted theory is this virus somehow jumped from a bat or some other closely related animal, but we don’t know for sure. This mysterious element of the story almost certainly added to peoples fear and paranoia. The thing is, this was all a farce, we were and are not dealing with anything comparable to the 1918 flu. We were dealing with something more like a normal bad flu season in some parts of the first world, and a very light one in most of the world.

Most experts and peer reviewed papers were not calling for mass quarantines or “stay at home” orders. Most places were not “following the science”. The most logical conclusion that can be made is that the virus has been exaggerated so big business can swallow as much of small business as possible and so the ruling class can move forward with its fourth industrial revolution or “great reset” at a rapid pace. This involves things like the increased use of automation, artificial intelligence, 3d printing, increased online shopping & working from home, the move toward ending paper money, & increased big tech censorship. This has all happened when it’s happened most likely because the super rich were going to end up needing another giant bailout, and they knew people weren’t going to accept that under normal circumstances. Here’s what Michael Parenti would call a “conspiracy analysis” of this crazy situation.

Let’s start with the lies about the lethality of the virus.

At this point it’s settled science that covid mainly kills the old and the frail (this doesn’t mean it can’t kill young people, just that it’s extremely rare). An unusually high percentage of covid deaths are in nursing homes where studies show the average person only lives 6 months after entry anyway. In the us nursing home patients make up less than 1% of the population but are 39% of covid deaths.

A recent peer reviewed study published by the WHO showed that when you look at antibody studies done worldwide, which is the best way to see who has and hasn’t been infected, the virus actually only kills about .2 to .3% of those who get it. In the third world the number was much lower, and for people under 70 worldwide it was .05%. That’s a 1 in 2000 chance of dying after catching covid if you’re under the age of 70. To put this in perspective, that’s the infection fatality rate for about 90% of the world and about 80 to 85% of the richest countries.

So, how is it that this virus I just described has scared people so much? How have they been convinced this virus kills at several times the actual rate?

Well, as already mentioned, there was mass media hysteria, the constant case/death numbers on the screen, the constant anecdotal evidence, but propaganda by omission has also been huge. Many people either aren’t aware or seem to have forgotten death is a daily thing, it’s always sad when it’s a loved one but it happens, about 150,000 people die every day on average. This is the type of context that was never given to the covid case and death numbers on local and cable news.

Reports of full hospitals in covid hot spots like NYC and cities in northern Italy weren’t given context either, those are places that constantly have full hospitals during the winter. Another big factor is the under estimation and misunderstanding of influenza or “the flu”. For starters, there isn’t just one flu, there’s a bunch strains of influenza, some more deadly than others.

Us regular folks outside the medical community just call all of them the flu. Many influenza strains are also more deadly than .1% according to many experts. The German network for evidence based medicine and the German health ministry says 2017/2018 flu season was .4 to .5% infection fatality ratio.

According to the CDC covid would only be a level 2 out of their 5 level pandemic severity index, showing that influenza strains clearly get higher than 0.1% . The WHO says up to 650k per year die of influenza like viruses and a bad year can obviously be much worse. Another thing the average person probably doesn’t understand, because of the mainstream media, is that there are many coronaviruses too.

The “common cold” is usually either a coronavirus or a rhinovirus (usually the latter). Yet at the beginning of the pandemic and to a lesser extent now, people have referred to this virus as THE coronavirus. This is extremely deceptive and makes Covid-19 seem more unique and deadly than it is, which causes panic.

Not only is it not very unique but it’s not even the most deadly coronavirus. SARS and MERS, both of which are coronaviruses that have been dealt with in the last 20 years are far more deadly than Covid-19. Why would it be referred to as THE coronavirus if it’s not the most deadly? Of course deaths aren’t the only measure of lethality, there’s been tons of stories of people getting sick for longer periods of time with covid, but this can happen with different kinds of influenza as well, it’s called post viral syndrome. There are also things like myocarditis, and the even more rare instance where something crazy can happen like becoming paralyzed. These headlines about covid causing these things in rare instances frighten people but once again, influenza can do these things too. Since they’re rare, people don’t fear monger about them.

As far as the full hospitals, since covid is more of a nursing home problem than most influenza strains and hits kids a lot less hard, it actually has caused less hospitalizations than a normal bad winter season in several places. According to CDC numbers more people were hospitalized during the 2017 /2018 flu season in the United States than during the worst stretch of covid (an estimated 800k hospitalizations in 6 months that season), there were less hospitalizations the first 6 months of covid (hospitalization rate doesn’t equal 800k here).

Stanford professor John Ionniadis, one of the most cited infectious disease experts on earth, called this a “once in a century evidence fiasco” back in March. As I said earlier, politicians around the world were not “following the science” as we were told in the mainstream media, how do we know? Simple. As former NY Times reporter Alex Berenson has pointed out in his book unreported truths, before COVID-19, the WHO had prepared for the possibility of pandemics of airborne viruses deadlier than this. What did they recommend? Nothing close to a lockdown/stay at home order, in fact they weren’t even confident in basic things like mask wearing or hand washing. They changed their tune radically in early 2020 without scientific justification.

In the US the CDC had pandemic guidelines too, and again, they prepared for airborne viruses more deadly than this, and did not recommend lockdowns even in the worst imaginable scenario. Similar things happened in other countries, many of them first world countries with even better health care systems than the United States. It’s leaked out in the media that Norway, Denmark, Italy, Russia, all ignored their health ministers and went with lockdowns that were not recommended, in the case of Denmark, because not locking down would be “politically undesirable”. The UK downgraded the status of covid, taking it off the “high consequence infectious disease” list the day before it locked down on March 19. Who downgrades a viruses lethality while upgrading the measures taken against it? Another country with an elite health care system, Singapore, went far beyond what was recommended too. Their health ministry didn’t recommend anything close to what Europeans were doing at the very beginning of the pandemic, and even commissioned a study that ended up in the lancet medical journal that didn’t call for anything close to the harsh lockdown they ended up doing.

In late March right before most of the world shut down the WHO expert group on mass gatherings said in the lancet medical journal that there wasn’t enough evidence to shut down mass gatherings like concerts or sporting events and warned of the possible negative effects of stopping these events. All over the world there are plenty of examples of political leaders not following their own rules, which is extremely shady to say the least . It’s as if they know the truth, that we aren’t really in as much danger as they tell us we are. To make matters worse, we have dealt with much more damaging airborne viruses in recent history. The ’57 and ’68 pandemics are not really known outside the medical community but both of those pandemics killed much more than what Covid-19 has on a global scale adjusted for population growth.

In the United States, which has the most total covid deaths, the number of deaths is slightly higher than in ’57. But this was a year life went on as normal, and seniors old enough to remember the year don’t discuss it as a pandemic year. Furthermore those older pandemics were much more deadly for kids and working age people which technically makes it worse for society. All these restrictions are outrageous, even if you accept their death count, which many experts don’t since you can die of other causes while having the virus.

As I mentioned earlier, the experts who are calling for lockdown are in a minority, and many prominent ones who publicly call for them have gone back and forth or are clearly politically or financially motivated. Take for example the “John snow memo” which calls for harsher restrictions and was made in response to “the great barrington declaration” which was signed by thousands of experts and calls for allowing life to continue as normal outside nursing homes. This was obviously political. Not because they responded, but because while listing examples of countries that “did it right” they listed japan, which has the least restrictions of any first world country including Sweden.

They listed it next to New Zealand which had an extremely harsh lockdown, Japan didn’t do any of the mass testing they wanted and kept almost its entire economy open. It looks like they just chose a random country with a low death count and said “hey, do it this way!”. So far the great barrington declaration has gotten more signatures than the John snow memo. The same exact mistake regarding Japan was recently made by Dr. Michael T Osterholm, an infectious disease expert from the university of Minnesota and member of Joe Biden’s new covid task force. He’s one of the top experts in the country and one of those peculiar cases I was talking about. On March 10 he went on the Joe Rogan podcast and it was viewed by millions of people. In this interview he basically said there was nothing we can do about the virus, that cloth masks were useless, and that it was going to kill 450k Americans before we know it. About 2 weeks later, he wrote an op Ed in the Washington post saying lockdowns would cause way too much damage and weren’t worth it. Months later he was calling for a lockdown himself.

The man who many say is the top infectious disease expert in the country, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is also in the same boat. In late March the New England journal of medicine published a paper by Dr. Fauci where he only recommends possible school closures, working from home *when possible*, and *voluntary isolation*. Compare this with his comments months later, where he’s praised New York’s harsh stay at home order and told people not to have a normal thanksgiving. What’s causing all these doctors to do this?

Aside from political or personal reasons, like the fact that panic sells and some people just like being on tv. There could be big conflicts of interest, for example with pharmaceutical companies. This was recently brought up by the editor in chief of the British medical journal. He said “Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain.

Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health”. What kind of damage have covid restrictions done? Globally, there will be more extra deaths from other diseases being neglected than from covid itself. Many more malaria, hiv, and tuberculosis deaths. The increase in starvation deaths worldwide will also single handedly outnumber covid deaths. In the first world there will be many preventable deaths coming from things like missed cancer screenings and a huge drop in blood donations. There have already been plenty of deaths from people being too scared to seek care because of Covid-19 and dying of a stroke or a heart attack. Aside from all the death these restrictions have caused, there is also the long term effects of unprecedented economic collapse worldwide.

Quality of life is very important and there are multiple studies that have shown the huge gap in life expectancy between the top and bottom one percent in places like the United States, so many people who weren’t poor before the pandemic who lost their job because of it are almost certainly going to have years taken off their life as they stay unemployed for an extended period of time. There’s about 3 million people in the United States in that category, along with another 17 million who have become “food insecure” during the pandemic. An additional 135 million have become food insecure globally, too.

Depression is also on the rise all over the world, and also lowers quality of life as well as life expectancy, a recent CDC survey showed that 1/4th of young Americans aged 18 to 24 contemplated suicide recently. The closing of many schools and universities for a long period of time will have incalculable effects on children, young adults, and society as a whole. Elective surgeries are way down since the pandemic started as well. These aren’t surgeries which you may not need to survive but skipping them can have a terrible effect on your quality of life and maybe even keep you from working.

On rare occasions the the truth can be found about this pandemic in mainstream media but it’s outnumbered by the craziness, on top of flooding the zone, there has also been some crazy censorship (Both mentioned in event 201 here from about 9:20 to 9:55). YouTube at one point censored one of the ten most cited scientists on earth, Stanford epidemiology professor John Ioannidis, before having to put the video back up after a large amount of complaints. He was presumably censored because he said covid was similar to seasonal influenza, but who has YouTube hired that’s more qualified than him? YouTube also recently censored the former chief scientific advisor for Pfizer, again, presumably because he said covid wasn’t that deadly.

Facebook censored Dr. Carl Hennegan, a professor of evidence based medicine at Oxford university. What did he do? Say the earth is flat? No, he attempted to post his article from the website the spectator where he cites and discusses peer reviewed studies. With all this censorship of expert opinion, and cherry picking by mainstream media, most people think covid restrictions have saved lives. The truth is, if you look at deaths per capita by country on the widely used “worldometer” website, you have to go down pretty far to reach a non lockdown country. If these harsh restrictions worked, there would be some correlation between them and deaths per capita but there isn’t.

A study in the Lancet medical journal by researchers from the university of Toronto found “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people” on a global scale, which again we could see just from looking at the worldometer site, it’s been obvious for awhile. Even in the United States, there is no correlation between restrictions and deaths. South Dakota basically did nothing and they rank 9th in deaths per capita while New York and New Jersey are 1 and 2, with a per capita death rate that is much much higher. All of this clever deception, lying, suppression of scientific debate, and over the top fear mongering has been going on for economic reasons. The biggest corporations and financial institutions were headed for another huge crash similar to ’08 before this virus arrived. People all over the world would would not have accepted another giant bailout of the biggest financial institutions and corporations again under normal circumstances, political crisis would emerge. There was likely to be a left populist backlash from this (pink tide, or Corbyn style movements).

Now, after the scam has got rolling, a total restructuring of the global economy that has been in the works for years can get fast tracked. All those stats about the economy doing terrible, people starving, they don’t tell us how the ruling class is doing. Wall Street profits are up over 80% this past year, big tech companies are doing better than ever, the biggest corporations either didn’t stop running during the pandemic or got paid as a part of a federal reserve program that gave the biggest companies in the country 500 billion dollars. They weren’t even required to preserve jobs to get this money. Similar bailouts are taking place all over the world. Furthermore, small business has been destroyed, which opens up more opportunities for the biggest companies in the world as their competition shrinks and their market share grows.

As of June, 3 million American small businesses were closed, 40% of jobs lost during the pandemic are gone for good, similar patterns can be seen in other countries. Billionaire wealth has increased this year even after a gigantic stock market crash in the end of winter/early spring. As well as the ruling class is doing now, there was a huge crisis in 2019. In order to understand how this crisis was going to go global and how there could be global coordination in the exaggeration of COVID-19 one must understand how the world is run on a macro level. For starters, there’s 3 main global powers (us and its “ally democracies”, China, Russia), each with a sphere of influence, the United States & it’s minions having by far the largest one. This is who runs the world sans a handful of places. This isn’t controversial, it’s mainstream political science. And who runs these countries? Big money, simple, the biggest companies, financial institutions and asset managers are who runs the show, and they get help from their puppet governments/national security states when ever necessary. Their number one goal? Make more money. In China, they may call themselves communist, but the reality is there are plenty billionaire in the Chinese “communist party”, and there are giant companies like alibaba with huge influence. The inequality there is now approaching us levels according to economist Thomas piketty, it’s been on the rise for the last 40 years, working conditions are terrible as well. How about Russia? Inequality there is also terrible and in the west we even ironically make fun of them for “oligarchs”. The US, the biggest global power, is also ran by big giant corporations and billionaires.

A Princeton study in 2014 came to the conclusion that the US isn’t a democracy but an oligarchy ran by a small group of rich powerful people. Senator Bernie Sanders, and even at times Donald Trump would constantly complain about the power of “political donors”. The US allies have some big multinational corporations but they’re tied at the hip with the US security state and the US elite are invested heavily in these companies too. Like Samsung, or BP. Even though these powerful countries like us and China are technically enemies, there is still plenty trade between them (especially the us and China), us/China financial systems are also intertwined in many ways. In this financialized/globalized economy if one of them crashes it could domino effect to the entire world as happened in 08. Most of the big central banks are intertwined in someway, and the federal reserve is the most powerful of them all. Now, to the crisis. Instead of public debt or “the trade war” causing a crisis, it’s once again corporate debt, private banking, and lack of regulation that caused the crisis.

There was a repo loan crisis, caused mainly by the big 6 us banks who were no longer confident in lending to each other or to other financial institutions. Once the system reaches this point in the United States, a global meltdown isn’t far off. Pam and Russ martens at Wall Street on parade have been covering this more than anyone in their ongoing series on the financial crisis. They describe in detail the conspiracy, how the mainstream media is complicit with their silence from September 2019 to February 2020 when the fed opened up emergency programs it hadn’t opened since the last crisis and spent trillions before the cares act or any covid related shut downs.

According to CNBC 2019 also set a record for most ceo departures, even more than 08 which was second, they referred to it as a ceo exodus. The repeal of glass steagall made this possible, as the biggest commercial banks are allowed to make risky investments with deposit money. The federal reserve is a private institution collectively owned by the biggest banks, and has bailed out private financial institutions with trillions of dollars the public will have to pay back in the long run. All this without a vote, before the cares act, and to make matters worse they put the biggest asset manager on earth (blackrock) in charge of choosing who gets bailed out. The federal reserve is buying corporate debt and junk bonds at their direction.

Congresswoman Katie porter has called out some of this corruption but not all of it. She referred to the fed as corrupt for their relationship with Blackrock. I don’t think she mentioned Blackrock had been overseeing 25 million of fed chairman Powell’s money & 7 trillion in assets under management overall before getting control of the feds huge corporate bailout program. They also wrote the bailout program that ended up getting rolled out before anyone knew there was even a crisis in August of last year, the people at blackrock who authored the bailout were former central bankers from some of the most powerful countries.

Much like the last crisis it looks like the big banks and the super rich kept a coming collapse secret. Blackrock is incredibly powerful owning a portion of big media companies, and now having several former employees in important positions in the new Biden administration. An analysis by political scientists from the university of Amsterdam 3 years ago showed how the big 3 asset managers, of which black rock is the biggest, own a big portion of corporate America and coordinate their investments. They’ve only grown bigger in influence since. They also look after assets from rich people not just in the us but all over the world and even have influence with some us enemies like China. The asset managers and billionaires are also the biggest shareholders of big pharma stocks and have made a killing on the vaccines.

Vaccines, that’s a topic I’ve not touched on yet, many big corporations are planning on requiring vaccinations for people to come in their place of business, odds are you’ll need to be vaccinated to do a lot of things. There’s been some talk of attempting to vaccinate everyone on earth. I don’t believe there’s some evil plot to kill billions of people or anything, but i do believe vaccine profits play a role in this. I think it’s just simply about the money, in 2010 the WHO was called out by the British medical journal and an official eu medical organization for their advisors having big pharma ties which led to overproduction of vaccines for the swine flu. Bill Gates, his foundation and other billionaires and their foundations are big investors in big pharma and are set to profit off this as well.

One of the worlds richest men Warren Buffet is also a big investor in big pharma, as is Jeff Bezos. Bezos Washington post has posted some good stuff about covid but for the most part they’ve fear mongered heavily, and he’s profiting big in multiple ways from covid panic likely including the vaccine. Even the nation magazine and the Colombia journalism review have talked about Bill Gates big influence over media/public health and his cashing in on the pandemic (not just “conspiracy theorists”). Odds are, there won’t be many deaths from the vaccine, but the thing is with something that kills only .05% of people under 70 and hospitalizes less than one percent of those who get it worldwide.

Is mass vaccination even necessary? Is it worth the risk for kids even with an extremely small chance of injury? For kids, it’s probably more likely they develop a fever from the vaccine than from covid based on trial results. The old and the weak taking it is fine but everyone taking it seems like a money grab. This constant advertising, the demonization of people worried about the safety of this rushed new vaccine as “anti vax” is meant to protect a 40 billion dollar profit for big pharma. Worrying about their safety is perfectly normal, VP Kamala Harris has worried about it, so have many medical experts like Pfizer’s former head of respiratory research Dr. Yeadon, or Dr. Sucharit Bhkadi, or Professor Caumes. All of this global coordination is possible through organizations like the world economic forum, most of the worlds elite meets and discusses the future right in front of our faces in lavish places in davos. Also through big asset management firms who are connected to the rich all over the world.

The old saying goes “never let a good crisis go to waste” and it appears that’s what the world’s richest have done. They flipped a crisis to their advantage, and now they have a good amount of public approval for their new fourth industrial revolution or “great reset” of capitalism where the 0.1% will have an even greater strangle hold on the world. This is something they’ve had in the works and have talked about publicly, but with the financial crisis the process was sped up. They make talk a good game about climate change, but some of the biggest oil companies are a part of the club. They may talk a good game about inequality, pretend to care about it, make up feel good phrases like “stakeholder capitalism instead of shareholder capitalism”, but at the end of the day the mega multi national corporations (and the puppet governments that work for them) only care about maximizing profit.

Marx’s predictions about competition and capitalism inevitably leading to monopoly have turned out to be right, even before covid in 2017 Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was talking about the big monopoly problem in the us.

He said “There has been an increase in the market power and concentration of a few firms in industry after industry”. A Washington post article from may headlined “the end of small business” put it nicely, “Since the late 1970s, the income share of the top 1 percent of earners has risen from 11 percent to more than 20 percent of national income. Those gains have been almost exactly balanced by losses among the bottom 50 percent. There are many reasons for this trend, including corporate concentration, the private-equity boom and technology, which both displaces lower-skilled workers and enriches a highly skilled elite. But the coronavirus amplifies the importance of all of them. The pandemic could compress decades of economic change into a matter of years.”

International institutions like the IMF and World Bank will be giving out loans to both poorer and richer countries to help with the ”recovery” from the economic crash and of course there will be loans given out to help distribute the vaccine as well. This will seem friendly and benign but it will almost certainly require what’s called a structural adjustment. These international programs impose austerity on countries according to many economic experts. The EU and some other first world countries have already been known to be deficit hawks before the pandemic and this will most likely be a perfect excuse to switch to an even harsher version.

Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn recently said he expects all these first world countries to turn to “harsh austerity” after running these deficits up, and that the third world was headed for “brutal restructuring” and should expect another attack on their public sector. (10:45 here) The President of Belarus, a country that did not lockdown, said that the IMF told them they’d only give them assistance if they locked down. The head of the IMF didn’t really deny this, he said he told them that they had to follow WHO orders, but the WHO changed to a lockdown policy in the spring. So, this is basically blackmail, in today’s globalized economy even just China alone locking down would’ve caused a recession that would require a stimulus for most countries.

Surveillance is another thing many have become paranoid over, and rightfully so, but even then this is just an ongoing process being turbo charged. This is the next step in the evolution of surveillance which the empire has been using since the beginning, historian Alfred McCoy has written a lot about this process that has been going on over one hundred years. Of course, there’s also the Snowden leaks which exposed the gigantic modern surveillance state. Liberals and leftists who usually cry all day about the “far right” don’t at all find it strange that orban in Hungary, bibi in Israel, modi in India, the Saudi and gulf dictators, and duterte in the Philippines all went along and supported harsh lockdowns in the name of public health at one point or another? Gop governors in the us who didn’t support simple Medicaid expansion in Obamacare all of a sudden care about public health and lock their residents inside because of it? This is absurd, of course they don’t, they’re just helping chase more profit for their big corporate donors and billionaire friends.

In fact Bolsonaro in Brazil was probably the only far right leader to not be pro lockdown and even in Brazil local areas were still shutting down anyways. In many places people were forced to wear masks, even though it used to be considered a debatable issue. In some East Asian countries masks were recommended during flu season, in most other places they weren’t, the WHO wasn’t recommending them for everyone during flu season either. Oxford evidenced based medicine professors said there wasn’t enough evidence to say either way and the issue had been politicized. Well, why was debating the effectiveness of masks made a kin to saying the earth is flat? Some seem to think it’s some type of psychological tactic by people in power, and maybe that’s possible. I can’t help but I think of the money though, the disposable mask market went from under 1 billion dollars to start 2020 to over 166 billion by the end of 2020, there are definitely groups of wealthy people who have cashed in on the mask mania.

Dr. Fauci and Dr. Osterholm, whom I mentioned earlier, both separately said masks were useless in March, and switched up months later.

Fauci even admitted he lied in March allegedly to stop a mask shortage.

Many other doctors around the world did similar things. Even if this virus wasn’t engineered and let out of a lab on purpose or on accident, both of which are very possible as Sam Husseini has written about in Salon, this is the mother of all of conspiracies. Even in the most benign scenario where the virus jumped into humans through nature naturally, this global scam is still a crime against humanity that makes the weapons of mass destruction scam look light in comparison. We should start calling it “the virus of mass destruction”. I can’t remember exactly where I first heard the phrase, but it’s a fitting name for this. Now the difference is instead of pretending to fight terrorism we have leaders all over the world pretending to care about public health. This is class warfare kicked up a notch, it’s gone from conventional to nuclear.

Many people have figured out they’re being lied to, the problem is they can’t put their finger on exactly why so we end up with crazy conspiracism. Everything that has happened isn’t so the most powerful people can have more power just for the sake of it, and of course most people aren’t going to accept that theory, it’s ridiculous.

The lack of economic analysis in covid conspiracy circles probably comes from the fact that in the west most people against covid restrictions are libertarians, and obviously they aren’t going to blame capitalism or even understand that’s what caused all this. That’s why you have idiots calling the covid lockdowns “communism”, because for many libertarians anything they don’t like is communist, even if it’s being done by multi billion dollar corporations.

With that being said, I think the person who believes in 5g conspiracies or is obsessed with Bill Gates (he’s obviously extremely powerful, but he did not start this craziness on his own) is more reasonable than the perfectly healthy person who’s locked themselves inside their home and is scared to death of covid. At least they can see something isn’t right, and are willing to fight for their basic rights.

To me, the saddest thing I see is Leftists taking it as axiomatic that lockdowns work even though they don’t, and that they hurt the rich when in fact they do the opposite. Or how about race obsessed people saying things like covid kills black people more often than white people, as if a respiratory virus can be racist, and as if there are only blacks and whites in the US (black Africans have been dying less per capita than white Europeans). There is more of a correlation between obesity and covid deaths than race, and globally richer countries like the US have more obesity, but at the country level its the poor American who is more likely to be obese and black Americans are disproportionately poor.

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“We didn’t give a hoot about democracy… and I don’t think it means a thing today” (Philip Agee, former CIA agent(1))

“For Washington a consistent element is that democracy and the rule of law are acceptable if and only if they serve official strategic and economic objectives.” (Noam Chomsky(2))

Many years ago the colonial powers, such as Britain and France, made sure that ordinary people in the colonies did not have much say in running their own countries. Britain and France worked with local elites to run their countries in the interests of the colonial powers, and the elites themselves.

Colonial powers were worried that those colonies might want their independence, as the US did in 1776. In more recent times America has become the world’s dominant power. The US has spent the last 75 years trying to make sure that countries do not pursue their own independent development strategies. One way to achieve this is to work with leaders in other countries who appear to have been chosen by their people. US and British politicians therefore proclaim that they want to pursue democracy in other countries. However, this turns out to be an excellent example of propaganda. Just as with politics in Britain and the US, what they prefer is not genuine democracy, it is the illusion of democracy, as discussed in the previous two posts. Research has shown that the US has interfered in 81 foreign elections since 1950 to get their favoured candidates into power.(3) 

US and British leaders encourage this illusion of democracy so that poor people will not feel compelled to resort to violence to make their voices heard. The appearance of political progress is a cheap substitute for genuine economic progress. The voters believe that their lives will be better in the future. What these countries end up with is a leadership that has connections to US decision-makers, and that has little control of key parts of the economic system. Foreign businesses have control of trade and resources. This has been described by Matt Kennard, one of the leading experts on this system, as “tamper-proof democracy.”(4) 

Manipulating democracy in poor countries is even easier than manipulating it in rich countries. Voters will tend to vote for candidates that they have heard of. If the richest candidates can pay for large amounts of promotional advertising, they have a big advantage. If these same people control most of the media then they can make sure that their own coverage is positive, whilst their opponents will be repeatedly criticised. 

To convince voters to choose the ‘right’ leaders (pro-US and pro-corporate) the US interferes with politics in other countries in a number of ways. They fund groups who support their chosen candidate, and other groups who protest against other politicians and policies. They fund journalists who will write articles supportive of certain candidates, and supportive of the ‘right’ policies. They provide technical training, educational materials, conferences and overseas trips to non-government organizations (NGOs), student groups, publishers and unions.(5) The US also uses its own personnel based overseas to make economic threats, about withdrawing funds or aid, or blocking access to trade opportunities. If the electorate choose the ‘wrong’ candidate, the US will often attempt to change the result, either peacefully or violently. (Discussed in detail in earlier posts).

The National Endowment for (Undermining) Democracy 

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a US organisation that spends large sums of money supporting some candidates in foreign elections. It presents itself as an organisation for helping to promote democracy. In practice it focuses on helping US clients. Some readers will have heard about the Rose revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange revolution in the Ukraine (2005) and the Tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005).

These were presented by the mainstream media as countries discovering democracy and overthrowing their old leaders. What was not explained was that these countries already had democracy, and events were manipulated by the US government via the NED to try to get the pro-US candidate into power. It successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua (1990), Mongolia (1996) and Slovakia  (2002). Similarly, in Bulgaria (1991) and Albania (1992) US leaders were not happy with the winner of the elections, so the NED funded protests and eventually the elected politicians were forced to resign. It has a long history of corruption and failing to obey laws in many countries where it has operated, being involved in scandals in Venezuela, Iraq and Ukraine.

The NED was formed in 1983 after hearings exposed the crimes of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1991 the President of the NED admitted that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly [secretly] 25 years ago by the CIA.”(6) One critical US politician asked “How would people in America or Britain feel if the Chinese turned up with millions of dollars to support candidates deemed friendly to China?”.(7) This would obviously be considered inappropriate, yet when the NED manipulates politics overseas, the US and British media provide little criticism. Despite claiming to be more open than the CIA, many of the NEDs early activities were kept secret. It even tried to manipulate events in France.

If All Else Fails, Resort To Violence 

The following are examples of some of the democratically-elected leaders who tried to pursue their own policies. In each case, the US overthrew them and replaced them with a brutal ruler who committed widespread atrocities.(8)

In Iran (1953), Mossadegh was replaced by the Shah (1953-1979). He set up the notorious SAVAK secret police who tortured thousands of political prisoners.

In Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz (1954) was replaced by Castillo Armas (1954-57) who arrested and killed thousands of people.

In Indonesia Sukarno (1965) was replaced by Suharto (1967-1998), who committed genocide, twice! He slaughtered at least half a million people in the 60s, and hundreds of thousands in East Timor from 1975 onwards.

In the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba (1961) was replaced by Mobutu Sese Seku (1965-1997) who committed widespread torture and public executions.

In Chile, Salvador Allende (1973) was replaced by Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) who committed widespread murder and torture.

More recently, the US helped to overthrow the democratically-elected leader of Haiti in 2004.(9) In Venezuela the population repeatedly elected Hugo Chavez, who objected to US corporations and local elites exploiting Venezuela, so the local elites worked with US decision-makers and tried to overthrow him.(10) They are still trying to overthrow his successor, Nicolas Maduro.

Western Democracy is Overrated 

US and British politicians repeatedly complain about a lack of democracy in some other countries. The US particularly complains about Cuba. However, they rarely mention that in many other South American countries which are recognised as democracies, the standard of living for the poorest people is far worse.(11) Cuba provides excellent education and healthcare to all of its citizens, however poor they are(12). In some South American democracies, the poorest people get inadequate education and no healthcare.

During the last seventy-five years, the governments of many of these other countries have murdered and tortured large numbers of citizens. Compared to them, Cuba has a much better human rights record. If Cuba were to change to a system of US-style democracy, where politics can be bought by wealthy donors, it is highly likely that life for the poorest people would get worse. The US press is repeatedly telling its readers that Cuba is a terrible place, but Cuba’s real crime is demonstrating that poor countries can develop in ways that do not allow US corporations to control the economy and exploit the poor. Western observers who have visited Cuba explain that people in Cuba have much more say about how their country is run than poor people in the US and Britain, due to much more complex networks of grassroots discussions about policy.(13)

Elections in warzones under occupation by US soldiers are also meaningless. Whoever wins the election, the country is still under US control. We can re-phrase the earlier question and ask: “Imagine the Chinese army occupying Britain or America, then holding elections between two pro-Chinese candidates. Would that be democracy?” Obviously not. The elections just add a “democratic cloak to the US’s chosen leader”.(14)

Another issue that is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media is the fact that the countries that have developed most spectacularly since 1945 were not democracies. “South Korea and Taiwan were a mix of one-party states and military dictatorships until the late 1980s.”(15) If we compare China and India, China’s sustained progress has been faster than any other nation in history, yet it is not a democracy. India is a democracy, but it has failed to lift many of its poorest people out of poverty. It may actually be the case that a US-style democracy is not the best form of government for rapid development in poor countries. This is a point of view that is almost unmentionable in polite circles in Britain and the US.

Double Standards in the Mainstream Media 

The double standards of the mainstream US and British media in relation to foreign interference in elections has been particularly obvious since 2016. They repeatedly complained about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections (known as Russiagate). Even after a US judge ruled in 2019 that there was no evidence of interference,(16) the media still discuss the allegations as if they are true. US foreign policy, through the CIA and the NED, involves major interference in many countries, yet the media rarely mention it.

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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 nineteenth 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) Philip Agee, Interviewed by John Pilger, ‘War on Democracy’, 21 Aug 2007, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVAPfYaD_yA

2) Noam Chomsky, ‘The US says it is fighting for democracy but is deaf to the cries of the iraqis’, 11 Feb, 2007, at http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/noam-chomsky-the-us-says-it-is-fighting-for-democracy–but-is-deaf-to-the-cries-of-the-iraqis-435864.html 

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

Martin Williams, ‘America’s long history or meddling in other countries’ elections’, 23 Nov 2017, Channel4 Factcheck, at https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/americas-long-history-of-meddling-in-other-countries-elections 

Discussed by Julian Assange, ‘Full interview: Assange on Trump, DNC Emails, Russia, the CIA, Vault 7 & More’, 12 Apr 2017, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpXbgx4hnlc 

4) Matt Kennard, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The Masters of The Universe, 2015, p.316

5) Martin Pastor, ‘National Endowment for Destabilization? CIA funds for Latin America in 2018’, 4 April 2019, at  https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/National-Endowment-for-Destabilization-CIA-Funds-for-Latin-America-in-2018-20190403-0042.html

6) Allen Weinstein, cited in James Bovard, ‘The National Endowment for Democracy’s Forgotten Sordid History’, 15 Oct 2009, at http://jimbovard.com/blog/2009/10/15/the-national-endowment-for-democracys-forgotten-sordid-history/ 

William Blum, Rogue State, pp.238-243, available at https://www.investigaction.net/en/trojan-horses-and-color-revolutions-the-role-of-the-national-endowment-for-democracy-ned/

7) Ron Paul, US Senator, ‘National Endowment For Democracy: Paying To Make Enemies of America’, Oct 11, 2003, at www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=1526 

8) William Blum, Rogue State, 2000

9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Haitian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

10) John Pilger, ‘The War On Democracy’, 2007, at http://johnpilger.com/videos/the-war-on-democracy

11) Jonathan Glennie, ‘Cuba: A development model that proved the doubters wrong’, Guardian Poverty Matters Blog, 5 Aug 2011, at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/aug/05/cuban-development-model

12) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Cuba

13) Helen Yaffe, ‘We Are Cuba: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World’, 2020

14) Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse, p.52

15) Robert H. Wade, ‘Escaping the periphery: The East-Asian ‘mystery’ solved’, UNU-WIDER working paper 2018/101, Sep 2018, at https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/Working-paper/PDF/wp2018-101.pdf

16) Craig Murray, ‘In the world of truth and fact, Russiagate is dead. In the World of the political establishment, it is still the new 42’, 4 Aug 2019, at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/08/in-the-world-of-truth-and-fact-russiagate-is-dead-in-the-world-of-the-political-establishment-it-is-still-the-new-42/

Featured image: Since the cutting off of electricity, food and water inside the embassy has not been enough to force the collective to leave, late Tuesday afternoon, the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police handed out a trespassing notice that was printed without letterhead or signature from any U.S. government official. (Photo: CodePink)

According to Biden’s secretary of state-designee Anthony Blinken, the new regime in town will keep much of its predecessor’s geopolitical agenda in place.

Former usurper-in-waiting/self-designated interim Venezuelan president Guaido — no longer a National Assembly member — will still unlawfully be recognized as Venezuelan president.

No matter that he never ran for presidency, ever received a single vote for the office, or that according to polls, he’s perhaps the most reviled Bolivarian Republic citizen with low single-digit support.

When self-declaring himself Bolivarian Republic president two years ago, at least one poll showed that 81% of Venezuelans never heard of him.

No US reset with Russia is planned, no olive branch coming in the interest of furthering world peace and stability.

US opposition to completion of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany and Europe remains firm Biden/Harris policy.

The new regime will continue training Ukraine’s military and providing it with heavy weapons — on the phony pretext of enabling it to defend against a nonexistent Russian threat.

A continued tough approach to China is planned.

On all things Israel, Biden/Harris will keep the US embassy in Jerusalem — a UN recognized international city, the legal capital of no nation.

US policy toward Israel will at least largely remain unchanged going forward.

While Biden promised to rejoin the landmark JCPOA nuclear deal, Blinken and national intelligence director Avril Haines said following through on this policy isn’t imminent and may not happen ahead.

According to Win Without War director Stephen Miles:

“Joe Biden never promised to be a revolutionary or to enact radical change, so what we’ve seen so far both in terms of personnel and policy shouldn’t exactly be surprising,” adding:

“Given how broken our current foreign policy is, any transition is thus going to start far from where progressives want to be.”

To what extent Biden/Harris intend to maintain or diverge from Trump’s geopolitical agenda remains to unfold.

From what’s known — based on remarks by its nominees for high posts — little change ahead is likely in US relations with nations free from its control.

Hardline policies toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and other nations on the US target list for regime change are expected to remain in place.

According to Israel’s Channel 12 on Saturday, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen will meet with Biden and other US regime officials at the White House in February.

Reportedly he’ll present Israeli preconditions for Biden to rejoin the JCPOA that may kill the deal altogether if adopted.

They reportedly include a halt to Iran’s enrichment of uranium for its legitimate nuclear program that’s known not to include a military component.

It’s in stark contrast to nuclear armed and dangerous Israel — that also maintains stockpiles of chemical, biological and other banned weapons, as does the US.

Cohen apparently will urge Biden to demand that Iran halt production of advanced centrifuges, end support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and cease providing Syria with military support.

All of the above are lawful Iranian policies its ruling authorities are highly likely to continue.

Cohen will also reportedly demand that Tehran give the IAEA unrestricted access to sites related to its nuclear program — to include legitimately off-limits military facilities.

Unlike Israel and the US, Iran’s legitimate nuclear program complies with its NPT obligations.

Unconfirmed reports indicated that Biden/Harris team members met with Iranian officials weeks ago to discuss prospects for the US returning to the JCPOA.

The French publication Le Figaro reported that “(d)iscussions took place in New York between Majid Takht Ravanchi, Iran’s representative to the United Nations, and a US envoy from the Biden (regime),” according to an unnamed source, adding:

“We will know very soon whether these discussions were successful or not.”

Discussion reportedly focused on “fix(ing) the framing of announcements” of a possible US return to the deal, lifting of Trump-imposed sanctions, and related issues.

Citing a nonexistent Iranian threat numerous times, Netanyahu firmly opposes the JCPOA.

He’ll no doubt push hard against Biden/Harris yielding anything to Iran that he’s against.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said talks regarding Iran and the JCPOA will be held with relevant US allies on this issue and the Islamic Republic.

On January 20, inauguration day in Washington, Netanyahu tweeted the following:

“I look forward to working with you (meaning Biden) to further strengthen the US-Israel alliance, to continue expanding peace between Israel and the Arab world, and to confront common challenges, chief among them the threat posed by Iran (sic).”

On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif tweeted:

“The new US (regime) has a fundamental choice to make.”

“It can embrace the failed policies of its predecessor, and continue down the path of contempt for int’l cooperation & int’l law.”

“Or, it can reject failed assumptions & seek peace and comity.”

Last week, Blinken said the US will seek a broader agreement with Iran that includes its missile program, wanting unacceptable restraints imposed to weaken its self-defense capabilities.

It’s a notion Iran justifiably rejects, wanting the JCPOA, as unanimously approved by Security Council members in 2015, restored as adopted — as a starting point for further discussions about bilateral relations.

At this time, the US unlawfully abandoned the JCPOA.

E3 nations Britain, France and Germany are in breach of their obligations.

Restoration of the JCPOA requires that noncompliant nations reverse their breach by fulfilling their obligations entirely.

Unless done, the landmark agreement may unravel altogether ahead.

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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/

The next Pentagon Red Flag exercise runs January 25 to February 12 from the Nevada Test and Training Range and Nellis Air Force Base. Manilo Dinucci reported in June [1] that the Nellis 5G network would be fully operational and an active component of this year’s exercises.

At Red Flag 2021, 5G relocatable cell towers, that can be set up and taken down in less than an hour, will be probably already operating to be tested in a real environment. Nellis base is the fifth base selected by the Pentagon to test the military use of 5G: the others are located in Utah, Georgia, California and Washington State.

5G will allow the entire command and control system of the United States armed forces to be strengthened worldwide.

5G will play a decisive role particularly in the use of hypersonic weapons which travel at speeds exceeding 10 times that of sound also equipped with nuclear warheads.

5G will also be extremely important for secret services, making control and intelligence systems much more effective than those currently used.

These exercises significantly increase the radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMF) emissions in the U.S. due to radar, communications, GPS jamming, EMF weapons, satellites, and other equipment. The serious health problems experienced throughout the country have included cardiac disorders, severe sleep disruption, microwave hearing, and other neurological problems. RF-EMF also impacts the immune system – at a time when Americans need a strong immune system — and is a known carcinogen and causes genetic and DNA damage. In addition, it harms wildlife including bees and other insects, especially 5G millimeter waves.[2]

Due to the environmental and public health hazards, these military exercises must be halted immediately. I urge everyone to contact the U.S. Surgeon General and other state and federal officials now.

2021 exercises at the Nevada Test and Training Range:

• Red Flag 21-1: 1/25/21 to 2/12/21
• Red Flag 21-2: 3/8/21 – 3/19/21
• Red Flag 21-3: 7/19/21 – 8/6/21

WSINT – Weapons School Integration

• 21A 5/24 – 6/17/21
• 21B 11/22 – 12/16/21
• JFEX – Joint Forcible Entry Exercise –
• 21A – June 12, 2021
• 21B Dec. 11, 2021

(Information from dreamlandresort.com/info/flags.html)

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January 24, 2021

[email protected]

To the Surgeon General

Vivek Murthy MD

Dear Dr. Murthy:

Despite the COVID19 disaster, the Pentagon is conducting Red Flag and other military exercises in conjunction with the Nevada Testing and Training Range and Nellis AFB. Red Flag 21-1 is due to begin Jan. 25 and last into February 12.

These exercises negatively affect the public health and the environment by using high levels and far-reaching patterns of EMF emissions for jamming and EMF warfare practices that cover many parts of the United States and may extend into Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean nations. The military have added progressive capabilities to these exercises, to now include their new 5G network in conjunction with satellites.

I urgently request that you halt these exercises immediately in the interest of the public health and welfare, and the security of the nation.

Medical experts and EMF research scientists have warned about the hazards of radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation for years [3]. During past Red Flag exercises, members of the public reported the sudden onset of serious health problems, only to find out that symptoms started when these military exercises began.

These harmful emissions can affect public health in a myriad of ways including heart function, cognition, and cause increased incidence of migraine or headache, seizures, heart arrhythmia, sleep disturbances, skin problems, clicking or ringing in the ears, flu-like symptoms, difficulty breathing, pain, and other health problems. RF-EMF also impacts the Immune system – the last thing the public needs right now – and exposure causes cellular stress, rouleaux formation in the blood, and DNA damage. This will also affect pets and wildlife.

Additional hazards include interference with medical devices including pacemakers, Parkinson’s deep brain implants, and hospital equipment, as well as GPS equipment .

The most vulnerable people are people who are already disabled by electromagnetic sensitivity (EMS) — a functional impairment that occurs from exposure to EMF – or have other EMF-sensitive medical conditions including nerve damage, cancer, heart disorders, amputations or susceptibilty to stroke, or those with medical implants or devices. Many of people with EMS are already extremely ill from current levels of RF-EMF, suffering excruciating pain and crippling effects. The cities of Boston and Philadelphia [4] warned in 2013 about the suffering of the EMF-disabled. Based on a 1998 prevalence survey by the California Department of Health Services [5], millions of Americans could be at serious, even life-threatening risk from these drills.

The European Academy of Environmental Medicine released their report “EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF-related health problems and illnesses,”[6] expanding on the 2012 report by the Austrian Medical Association.[7] Have you read these reports?

However, in the 1990s, Congress defunded the EPA’s RF-EMF research and work on developing federal standards, and a recent FOIA request revealed that the last EPA review of literature was in 1984.[8] That is unconscionable and a violation of the public trust.

In 2015, the Canadian Parliament held three days of hearings on the public health hazards created by rising levels of EMF emissions and lax regulations, which the CMAJ reported.[9] And now there are the U.S. National Toxicology Program and Italian Ramazzini Institute results along with older cancer studies that show this radiation is a carcinogen.

The Naval Medical Research compiled a lengthy bibliography[10] in 1972 of studies showing biological effects. Extensive military research for decades has weaponized these effects, including the poppers used in Iraq and the Active Denial System using millimeter waves which causes intense burning sensations. These same millimeter waves are being deployed for 5G.

A COVID variant is causing additional concern for medical professionals. The DNA- and gene-damaging effects of RF-EMF radiation exposure are well known, including CTIA-Wireless Association sponsored research by Dr. Henry Lai, and a study by Belyaev in 1996 finding altered genetic structure in E. Coli bacteria at exposure levels of 0.0000000000001 microwatts per cm2, [11] far below U.S. exposure limits of 1000.0 microwatts per cm2. Increasing the public exposure to RF-EMF makes no sense to any rational person.

I request that you take leadership on this critical matter now and halt these military exercises immediately for this year and the indefinite future to protect the public, the environment, and the national security. The continuance of these exercises risks catastrophic harm and complicates an already difficult and unpredictable medical situation. These experiments are done without any public notification or advance warning, public hearings, environmental review, public input, or full informed consent from the public. The public is shut out of decision-making, despite paying the bill. This must end now.

A CE/CME-accredited virtual EMF Medical Conference (EMFMC) will be held January 28-31. It will cover RF-EMF/wireless radiation health effects. Please inform your staff and the national health officers of this critically important and timely conference. It offers 20.5 hours of CME. Please attend this conference.

Please respond at your earliest to my request.

Sincerely,

Nina Beety

For more information on Red Flag and the 2018 Red Flag drill, read this.

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Nina Beety is a researcher, writer, and educator on public policy, the environment, and wireless radiation hazards. Her reports for officials and the public on Smart/AMI utility meters are on her website www.smartmeterharm.org. She lives in California.

Notes

[1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/5g-arms-race/5715138

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56948-0.pdf

https://kompetenzinitiative.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ki_beesbirdsandmankind_screen.pdf

https://8a6b8cd0-359b-4b1b-b042-cdb0cdb8be26.filesusr.com/ugd/2cea04_00d3c4115e824aed85a3047fbb06949f.pdf

[3] For example, www.emfscientist.org, www.biolinitiative.org, www.mdsafetech.org, www.saferemr.com , www.ehtrust.org

[4] https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7520958706.pdf

[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20040721020821/http://www.dhs.ca.gov/ehib/emf/RiskEvaluation/Appendix3.pdf

[6] https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/reveh.2016.31.issue-3/reveh-2016-0011/reveh-2016-0011.xml

[7] https://electromagnetichealth.org/electromagnetic-health-blog/oak-emf-guidelines/

[8] https://ehtrust.org/research-studies-on-impacts-to-the-environment-from-wireless-trees-plants-pollinators-birds-and-wildlife/

[9] http://www.cmaj.ca/content/187/9/639.full?sid=b5163a9b-bfd0-4810-95a1-1e562107c8bf

[10] http://www.magdahavas.com/2010/07/05/pick-of-the-week-1-more-than-2000-documents-prior-to-1972-on-bioeffects-of-radio-frequency-radiation/

[11] https://www.buergerwelle.de/assets/files/high_level_microwave_concerns.doc?cultureKey= p.8

President Biden’s commitment to re-entering the Iran nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA—is already facing backlash from a motley crew of warhawks both domestic and foreign. Right now, opponents of re-entering the deal are centering their vitriol on one of the nation’s foremost experts on both the Middle East and diplomacy: Robert Malley, who Biden might tap to be the next Iran envoy.

On January 21, conservative journalist Elli Lake penned an opinion piece in Bloomberg News arguing that President Biden should not appoint Malley because Malley ignores Iran’s human rights abuses and “regional terror”. Republican Senator Tom Cotton retweeted Lake’s piece with the heading: “Malley has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime & animus towards Israel. The ayatollahs wouldn’t believe their luck if he is selected.” Pro regime-change Iranians such as Mariam Memarsadeghi, conservative American journalists like Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, and the far-right Zionist Organization of America are opposing Malley. Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed opposition to Malley getting the appointment and Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a close advisor to the prime minister, said that if the U.S. reenters the JCPOA, Israel may take military action against Iran. A petition opposing Malley has even started on Change.org.

What makes Malley such a threat to these opponents of talks with Iran?

Malley is the polar opposite of Trump’s Special Representative to Iran Elliot Abrams, whose only interest was squeezing the economy and whipping up conflict in the hopes of regime change. Malley, on the other hand, has called U.S. Middle East policy “a litany of failed enterprises” requiring “self-reflection” and is a true believer in diplomacy.

Under the Clinton and Obama administrations, Malley helped organize the 2000 Camp David Summit as Special Assistant to President Clinton; acted as Obama’s White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region; and was the lead negotiator on the White House staff for the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal. When Obama left office, Malley became president of the International Crisis Group, a group formed in 1995 to prevent wars.

During the Trump years, Malley was a fierce critic of Trump’s Iran policy. In an Atlantic piece he coauthored, he denounced Trump’s plan to withdraw and refuted critiques about the sunset clauses in the deal not extending for more years. “The time-bound nature of some of the constraints [in the JCPOA] is not a flaw of the deal, it was a prerequisite for it,” he wrote. “The real choice in 2015 was between achieving a deal that constrained the size of Iran’s nuclear program for many years and ensured intrusive inspections forever, or not getting one.”

He condemned Trump’s maximum pressure campaign as a maximum failure, explaining that throughout Trump’s presidency, “Iran’s nuclear program grew, increasingly unconstrained by the JCPOA. Tehran has more accurate ballistic missiles than ever before and more of them. The regional picture grew more, not less, fraught.”

While Malley’s detractors accuse him of ignoring the regime’s grim human rights record,  national security and human rights organizations supporting Malley said in a joint letter that since Trump left the nuclear deal, “Iran’s civil society is weaker and more isolated, making it harder for them to advocate for change.”

Malley and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in June 2015 (Public Domain)

Hawks have another reason for opposing Malley: his refusal to show blind support for Israel. In 2001 Malley co-wrote an article for the New York Review arguing that the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian Camp David negotiations had not been the sole fault of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat but included then-Israeli leader Ehud Barak. The U.S. pro-Israel establishment wasted no time accusing Malley of having an anti-Israel bias.

Malley has also been pilloried for meeting with members of the Palestinian political group Hamas, designated a terror organization by the U.S. In a letter to The New York Times, Malley explained that these encounters were part of his job when he was Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group, and that he was regularly asked by both American and Israeli officials to brief them on these meetings.

With the Biden administration already facing opposition from Israel about its intent to return to the JCPOA, Malley’s expertise on Israel and his willingness to talk to all sides will be an asset.

Malley understands that re-entering the JCPOA must be undertaken swiftly and will not be easy. Iranian presidential elections are scheduled for June and predictions are that a hardline candidate will win, making negotiations with the U.S. harder. He is also keenly aware that re-entering the JCPOA is not enough to calm the regional conflicts, which is why he supports a European initiative to encourage de-escalation dialogues between Iran and neighboring Gulf states. As U.S. Special Envoy to Iran, Malley could put the weight of the U.S. behind such efforts.

Malley’s Middle East foreign policy expertise and diplomatic skills make him the ideal candidate to reinvigorate the JCPOA and help calm regional tensions. Biden’s response to the far-right uproar against Malley will be a test of his fortitude in standing up to the hawks and charting a new course for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Peace-loving Americans should shore up Biden’s resolve by supporting Malley’s appointment.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Ariel Gold is the national co-director and Senior Middle East Policy Analyst with CODEPINK for Peace.

Featured image is CC BY 2.0

Below is a letter from Canadian doctors supporting Roman Baber MPP who penned an open letter to Premier Doug Ford asking to end the COVID-19 lockdown.

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Here is Baber’s open letter.

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We thank Mark Taliano for bringing this to our attention.

Featured image is from Mark Taliano

New York’s state lab has access to the Cycle Threshold (Ct) values from the PCR tests they process. Last July, the lab identified 872 positive tests based on a threshold of 40 cycles.

If the lab has used a cutoff of 35 cycles, 43 percent of those tests would have been considered negative.  What’s more, if the cycles had been limited to 30, 63 % of the PCR-positive patients would have been justifiably been regarded as negative.

In testing data that include cycle thresholds, officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada have found that up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus. If that data was extrapolated to nation-wide statistics, the 45,000 new “cases” reported last week perhaps only 4,500 would actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing

It is obvious that PCR tests need to be interpreted with caution as they do not reflect a true viral load, infectivity or even contagiousness. In fact, many times no viable viruses can be cultured in patients with a positive PCR test result. False positive PCR tests abound, resulting in CDC statistics that have been consistently over-estimating both the incidence rates and mortality rates related to the current epidemic, thus falsely stimulating the panic seen among the many people demanding their vaccinations NOW.

Studies in France, Canada and Singapore, as reported in the August 25, 2020 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, have tried to culture the Covid-19 virus in patients that had positive PCR test results when the number of “cycles” used in the test exceeded 30. The scientists doing the studies were unable to culture any virus in those patients. Since many PCR test kits in the United States use cycle thresholds that are actually greater than 35, there is a serious problem with the PCR test, which is considered the “gold standard” for diagnosing SARS CoV-2.

In view of the general consensus (including recent acknowledgements from both the WHO and CDC) that PCR cycle thresholds (Ct) above 30 results in increasingly large false positive test rates that approach 100%. (Note that 30 cycles represents a million replications of the RNA particles and 40 cycles represents a trillion replications.)

If it takes a trillion multiplications of a test before any viral RNA fragments (much less viable viruses) can be identified, you can be sure there are not enough viral particles to cause a disease.

Below is some information that should help people understand why mRNA vaccine hesitancy makes total sense.

PCR cycle threshold (11-37) and positive cell culture (black line, 100% to 0%). The colored bars indicate the number of positive cell cultures per Ct per week after infection (1 to 3 weeks). (Jafaar/Raoult)

The above chart is from a French research group that has recently shown that at a cycle threshold (Ct) of 25, about 70% of nasopharyngeal samples were viral culture positive (i.e. were infectious). At a Ct of 30, only 20% of the samples were culture positive. And at a Ct of 35, a miniscule 3% of samples remained culture positive. Above 35, all samples were negative.

This means that if a person gets a “positive” PCR test result at a cycle threshold of 35 or higher (as applied in most US labs and many European labs), the chance that the person is infectious is less than 3%. The chance that the person received a “false positive” result is 97% or higher.

The chart above correlates PCR test positivity (black line) with culture results for the tested-for virus (colored bars). If more than 30 cycles are required to get a PCR-positive test result, the cultures will be consistently negative/sterile, meaning that any positive PCR test that only becomes positive after 30 cycles can be called a false positive.

Many PCR test kits on the market use a PCR Ct that is actually above a useless 35! Those kits will naturally result in large numbers of false positives that have already corrupting the CDC’s and Department of Health’s Covid-19 statistics – and also the CDC’s drive to get people inoculated as rapidly as possible with the experimental – and untested for long-term safety and efficacy – the two mRNA vaccines. It is therefore imperative for patients who take a PCR test to know what test kit brands are being used (see partial list below) in your hospital or Public Health Dept laboratory.

Here is a helpful quote:

“…if a person gets a ‘positive’ PCR test result at a cycle threshold (Ct) of 35 or higher (as applied in most US labs and many European labs), the chance that the person is infectious is less than 3%. The chance that the person received a “false positive” result is 97% or higher.” – Swiss Policy Research

So, if someone has typical flu symptoms or an influenza-like-illness (ILI) and a positive PCR test that might be a false positive (ie, one that only turns positive at a cycle threshold over 30), perhaps your disease is something other than Covid-19 and shouldn’t be reported to the CDC as Covid-19. Something to think about.

And here are some examples of PCR cycle thresholds for five of the PCR test kit brands that are used in the United States: 

• Quest: 50 cycles
• Inbios: 45 cycles
• Luminex: 45 cycles
• Gnomegen: 39 cycles
• ThermoFisher: 37 cycles

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Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes a weekly column, entitled Duty to Warn, for the Duluth Reader, Duluth, Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American Friendly Fascism, corporatism, Oligarchy, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas as well as other movements that threaten the environment, democracy, civility, health and the sustainability and livability of the planet and the future of the children.

Dr. Kohls is a past member of Mind Freedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and is a signatory to and/or an advocate of the principles of the Great Barrington Declaration, the World Doctors Alliance and Americas Front Line Doctors. His practice of holistic medicine mainly involved helping the survivors of psychiatry that had often been mis-diagnosed, over-diagnosed and always over-medicated with un-approved and un-tested-for-safety cocktails of neurotoxic psychiatric drugs that not only had sickened them but to which they had also become addicted.

His Duty to Warn columns have been re-published around the world for the last decade. They deal frequently also deal with Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas

Many of Dr Kohls’ columns have been archived at a number of websites, including:

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2; http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national;

https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/?ptype=article; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/author/?a=Gary%20G.%20Kohls,%20MD

Washington hopes a free trade pact with Kenya will give it a beachhead in its hot war with Al-Shabab and cold war with China—and an African dumping ground for GMOs and plastic waste. What Kenya gets in exchange is not at all clear.

The United States and Kenya have been negotiating a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) since March 2020, sparking concerns about further neocolonization of the East African state by Washington, whose economy is 224 times the size of Kenya’s. Given its “America First” policy, it is not surprising the Trump administration would aim to subjugate Kenya economically through this FTA, as a template for the rest of Africa.

Somewhat more puzzling is why the Kenyan government of President Uhuru Kenyatta would go along with it, and what Trump’s successors in the Biden administration will do with the negotiations now. I spoke to Kenyan and U.S. trade experts about the domestic and geo-politics behind the FTA.

“The Trump administration wanted to move away from preferential trade programs towards more ‘reciprocal’ trade in which developing countries must make new concessions to keep the trade benefits they have now,” says Karen Hansen-Kuhn, program director at the Washington-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). “This agreement would be based on the model established under the new NAFTA [known as USMCA], which sets new limits on governments’ abilities to set rules on things like pesticides and GMOs or other public interest rules. In general, it would serve to cement these new limits on public policy in both the U.S. and Kenya against more progressive rules in the future.”

As a major participant in the U.S. Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) security operations on the continent, especially in Somalia, Kenya is already a leading U.S. client state, accepting $824 million in military and economic aid from Washington in 2018. Since 2010, Kenya has received $400 million in counterterrorism funding from the Pentagon and has become the U.S. military’s main foreign conduit for opposing Al-Shabab, the insurgent group that is fighting the U.S. in Somalia for control of the Horn of Africa. Al Shabab also carries out attacks in Kenya, including strikes last January on a U.S. military base and two schools near the Somali border.

As in Brazil, the United States sees strong military co-ordination with Kenya in combination with a preferential free trade pact—the U.S. government’s first with a sub-Saharan country—as a way to shore up Nairobi as a dependable military and economic conduit for U.S. interests on the continent.

Another major factor for Washington in seeking the FTA is countering Chinese influence in Africa, which has grown dramatically in economic terms. In fact, this may be “foremost among Washington’s concerns,” according to the U.S. establishment think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). China–Africa trade has “soared” since 2008 while trade between the continent and the U.S. has declined, notes CFR. China is also the top investor in Africa. Kenya’s imports from China were worth $3.79 billion in 2017, making Beijing its leading trade partner whereas imports from the U.S. in 2019 were $401 million and exports to the U.S. were $667 million.

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A main objective for the U.S. in the Kenyan FTA negotiations is gaining tariff-free access for its dominant agricultural sector, which could potentially destroy Kenya’s domestic food systems. This is one reason why Public Citizen, the U.S. consumer advocacy organization, calls the FTA “a terrible idea.” Melissa Omino, research manager at the Center for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (part of Swarthmore University in Nairobi, Kenya), agrees there would be “dire consequences” for Kenya stemming from the FTA, particularly concerning food security.

“The U.S. heavily subsidizes its own domestic producers thus allowing them to overproduce. When such goods are exported out of the U.S. at low prices together with removed tariffs, it results in the flooding of such U.S. agricultural exports leading to the destruction of the domestic market of Kenya,” says Omino. The U.S. also wants Kenya to import its GMO corn and maize, but GMO products are banned in Kenya currently.

According to Omino, the effect of the FTA would become devastating when world food prices go up, since Kenyans would neither be able to afford to buy food imports nor would they have local production to rely on.

“An example of this is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, now USMCA), which affected Mexico such that [two million] corn farmers lost their income due to flooding of corn from the U.S.,” she tells me. “So far Kenya has been protected by the tariffs of the East African Community [EAC—a regional trade agreement Kenya is part of along with five other countries] and has been able to manage food security well. Once these are removed the case changes drastically.”

Melanie Foley, international campaigns director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, pointed out to me that in the proposed FTA, the U.S. is also targeting Kenya’s “strong laws” banning certain GMO foods, protecting consumers’ privacy online, and the country’s progressive environmental policies such as its ban on plastic bags. Kenya is a leader in the area of plastic waste bans and management, according to Omino.

Foley quotes a New York Times exposé, according to which, she says,

“the [American] petrochemical lobby is pushing the U.S. government to use these talks to challenge Kenya’s strong plastics laws and expand the plastics industry’s footprint across Kenya and the continent. If the industry has its way, Kenya’s strong plastic bag ban and proposed limits on imports of plastic garbage could be under threat.”

James Gathii, professor of law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, tells me that the flooding of the Kenyan market with U.S. GMO corn and maize will not only devastate Kenyan agriculture but also its industry.

“Heavily subsidized farm products from the U.S. flooding the Kenyan market would enhance access to Kenya for U.S. companies in a way that would undermine Kenya’s industrialization plans, especially in agro-manufacturing.”

Gathii, a leading Kenyan academic and an expert in international trade law, says he is also concerned that Washington “is aiming for enhanced intellectual property protections” in the Kenya FTA, which could inhibit access to essential medicines and likely “undermine the fledgling health care systems in Kenya’s regional governments.” It is common United States Trade Representative practice to use trade negotiations to solidify and extend monopoly patent and other intellectual property protections for Big Pharma, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

“Counties have made a lot of progress in bringing health care closer to the people at the grassroot level for the first time since Kenya’s independence in 1963,” continues Gathii. “That progress will be upended by the U.S.–Kenya FTA that would make it difficult if not impossible to preserve and enhance the work these counties have been able to do with provision of essential drugs and health care systems that would face higher drug and medical costs as a result of the FTA.”

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Sharon Treat, senior attorney at IATP, emphasizes the degradation of standards Kenya faces under an FTA with the U.S. Currently Kenya has a trading relationship with the European Union and “must align its food standards to be consistent with EU standards in order to export there,” she explains.

“EU food standards in many respects are more protective of human health or the environment than U.S. standards, for example, allowable levels of pesticide residues on produce, approvals of genetically modified food for human consumption, and use of chemical additives and growth promoters such as ractopamine and hormones in livestock production.” Treat warns that a trade deal with the U.S. “could lead Kenya to adopt policies that reduce, rather than increase environmental and other protections.”

The Kenyan government argues that it needs the FTA to safeguard against possible U.S. cancellation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which currently provides considerable U.S. market access for Kenya and other African countries and has to be renewed by the U.S. Congress in 2025. But as Foley points out, the AGOA is unlikely to be terminated in 2025 as it “is extremely popular in Congress” with both Democrats and Republicans.

“AGOA has been renewed twice with overwhelming bipartisan support,” she says. “[T]here is simply no reason to believe that Congress would not renew this popular program again before it expires in 2025.”

Given all the disadvantages of finalizing an FTA with the U.S. as opposed to staying with the AGOA, which requires no concessions from Kenya, the Kenyatta government’s devotion to the FTA talks is difficult to understand, says Omino.

“What makes it even more difficult to understand is that such negotiations take place in secrecy and the text is only released to the public after the parties have agreed and signed the same,” she adds. “This means that citizens of the affected countries…are not really in the know of motivations for and actual machinations within these negotiations.”

Gathii says it seems Kenya’s elite are “pegging their hopes on a trade and investment deal that will propel Kenya’s economy.” He adds,

“There is simply no empirical evidence that merely entering into a trade and investment agreement along the lines that the U.S. and Kenya are entering into can result in the kinds of economic gains that the Kenyan government hopes to garner.”

Incoming U.S. President Joe Biden will announce his administration’s trade policy at the end of January. On the one hand, he is widely expected to put a hold on new trade initiatives while focusing attention on domestic affairs including the still worsening COVID-19 outbreak as well as economic renewal projects, some of them tied to a climate transition.

At the same time, Biden is on record calling for “a united front of friends and partners to challenge China’s abusive behavior.” Going along with Trump’s FTA negotiations with Kenya, as Biden is expected to do with a proposed U.S.–U.K. FTA, could provide him with an easy bi-partisan win while appeasing establishment hawks, business Democrats and big business lobbyists in D.C. What is the livelihood of a million Kenyan farmers and food vendors next to that?

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This article was originally published on Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Asad Ismi covers international affairs for the Monitor.

Featured image is a White House photo

“Citizen concerns over privacy ….. will require adjustments in thinking”. -Klaus Schwab, 2016

The World Economic Forum (WEF), the Switzerland-based NGO of “elites” noted for political power and extreme wealth, has taken it upon itself to dictate the future of the world. Each year, members have traditionally met in the small Swiss mountain town of Davos, hence the term “the Davos Crowd”, often used derisively because of the group’s unsolicited power. On any given day, the world should be prepared to wake up and find that the WEF’s society-changing “projects and initiatives” have been ongoing away from public scrutiny and are being realized.

One of the sessions taking place during the Forum’s 2017 gathering included the question of whether global society is moving toward an environment in which privacy becomes a “luxury item” with stark division between the “privacy rich” and the “privacy poor”. But then, someone queried, is it really germane any more? People being raised in the digital age appear not to care about privacy as did those of past eras. Based on behavior, humanity is demonstrating a willingness to trade away privacy for the greater convenience the digital world provides, and this is leading to the prospect (horrifying for some) that privacy may eventually cease to be available no matter how desperately it’s desired.

The key question of the session, proposed by the moderator, was never adequately explored, and indeed seemed to be carefully avoided: When privacy has disappeared completely and is no longer a consideration, what exactly will have been lost? The obvious answer to the question was avoided because those present knew the inescapable consequence of the death of privacy: In such a scenario, governmental power would necessarily become absolute, so that any protest by “digital citizens” against governmental overreach, no matter how outrageous, would be quickly discovered and neutralized. For discussants of the Davos session to acknowledge openly that fact would be to delegitimize their own existence.

Governments have interests, above all the protection and extension of their own power, and this inevitably comes up against the interests of citizens. In a digital world in which privacy has been snuffed, Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a society in which each generation has the ability to bring about the kind of revolution that is periodically necessary would be laughable. Complaint would be useless. With nothing to block government’s usurpation of power over its citizenry, “democracy” and “government of, by and for the people” would be nothing but hollow lies, perhaps kept on life support through constant repetition by a throughly corrupted media, as we already have been seeing for quite awhile.

The likes of Tom Paine and Ben Franklyn wouldn’t stand a chance in the Reset’s totally digital environment. A first hint of discord would be immediately detected by algorithm. To suppress dissent, the authorities might initially send agents to reeducate the heretics by “cognitive infiltration”, as proposed by Harvard legal monsters Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule [Side note: Sunstein was recently tapped by the World Health Organization to develop programs to overcome growing “vaccine hesitancy” among the public]. And if non-violent cognitive infiltration is not sufficient, how else might the authorities deal with nonconformists?

In 1968, two of the West’s greatest historians published a little tome, The Lessons of History, in which they concluded that 

“… the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.” 

But scratch that bit of wisdom, because the digital world, as the saying goes, “changes everything”, and that includes historical patterns. It was, once upon a time, possible for souls defiant against corrupt power to foment rebellion away from authoritarian notice. But the digital world has become one gigantic listening device that is always being refined and extended. Leaving one’s country in an attempt to find a safer society is pointless now, because the digital world of the “Reset” is global. There is no longer any safe “away”.

You might think it will always be possible to leave “mobile devices” at home, take a walk in the country, strategize in whispers with other malcontents. But invisible walls continue to close in, and if the electronic monetary system now planned becomes one’s sole means of obtaining life’s essentials via credit card-cum-chip (Government need only cease producing physical money altogether), it will be case closed. The simple act of electronically invalidating cards and freezing accounts would immediately render any potential dissident defenseless in the world. In such an environment — the one now being maneuvered into place by the WEF’s strategists — we, all of us, would find ourselves trapped in an invisible, digital Bastille that is absolutely storm-proof.

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One keeps hearing that former President Donald Trump will be judged well by the history books because he was the only American head of state in recent memory who did not start any new wars. Well, the claim is itself questionable as Jimmy Carter, for all his faults, managed to avoid entering into any new armed conflict, and Trump can hardly be described as a president who eschewed throwing his weight around, both literally and figuratively. He attacked Syria on two occasions based on fabricated intelligence, assassinated an Iranian general, withdrew from several arms and proliferation agreements, and has been waging economic warfare against Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Iraq. He has sanctioned individuals and organizations in both China and Russia and has declared Iranian government components and Yemeni Houthi rebels to be terrorists. He has occupied Syria’s oil producing region to “protect it from terrorists” and has generally exerted “maximum pressure” against his “enemies” in the Middle East.

So no, Donald Trump is no antiwar activist. But Trump’s most pervasive foreign policy initiatives have involved Israel, encouraging the Jewish state’s attacks on Palestinian, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian targets with impunity, killing thousands of civilians on his watch. Trump has given Israel everything it could possibly ask for, with no consideration for what the U.S. interests might actually be. The only thing he did not do for the Jewish state was to attack and destroy Iran, and even there, reports suggest that he sought to do just that in the waning days of his administration but was talked out of it by his cabinet.

Trump’s pander to Israel started out with withdrawing from the nuclear monitoring agreement with Iran, followed by his shutting down the Palestinian offices in the United States, halting U.S. contributions for Palestinian humanitarian relief, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, giving a green light for Israel to do whatever it wishes on the formerly Palestinian West Bank, and, finally permitting paroled former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard to go “home” to Israel where he received a hero’s welcome. Trump, to be sure, was aided in his disloyalty to his own country by former bankruptcy lawyer Ambassador David Friedman in place in Israel, an ardent Zionist and a cheerleader for whatever atrocities Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to commit. Couple that with a Congress that gives billions of dollars to Israel annually while bleating that the Jewish state has a “right to defend itself” and a media that self-censors all the human rights violations and war crimes that Netanyahu unleashes, and you have a perfect love fest for Israel expressed daily throughout the United States.

But even given all that, Trump the panderer clearly wanted to give one last gift to Israel, and he saved it for his last day in office, when he issued more than 140 pardons and commutations. Though other presidents have issued controversial pardons, no other head of state has so abused the clemency authority to benefit not only friends and acquaintances but also celebrity defendants including rappers, some advocated by the likes of the Kardashians, and also those promoted by monied interests. Most of the pardons went to cronies and to supplicants who were willing to pay in cash or in kind to be set free. It was suggested that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in the selection process and money was often a key element. Some might describe that as corruption.

Those of us in the actual antiwar plus anti-surveillance-state movement had been hoping that Trump would actually do something good at no cost to himself, pardoning whistleblowers Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, and Chelsea Manning as well as journalist Julian Assange. Kiriakou has reported that when he petitioned for a pardon through one of Trump lawyer Rudi Giuliani’s aides, he was told that such an arrangement would cost $2 million.

Bribes for pardons aside, it would have cost Trump nothing to pardon the whistleblowers and it would be a vindication of those who had put themselves at risk to attack the machinations of the Deep State, which Trump had blamed for the coordinated attacks against himself. This was his relatively cost-free chance to get revenge. Admittedly, there is speculation that Senator Mitch McConnell may have warned Trump against pardoning Julian Assange in particular, threatening to come up with enough GOP votes to convict him in his upcoming impeachment trial if he were to do so. Be that as it may, not a single whistleblower was pardoned though there was room on the ship for plenty of heinous white collar criminals. Former Dr. Salomon Melgen, for example, had his sentence commuted. Melgen, a close friend of the seriously corrupt Senator from New Jersey Robert Menendez got into trouble in 2009 when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) discovered that he had overbilled Medicare for $8.9 million for a drug called Lucentis. Two years later Melgen’s business was hit with a $11 million lien from the IRS and four years after that he was charged and convicted over more than 76 counts of health care fraud and making false statements.

Some of those pardoned had Jewish organizations going to bat for them. Elliott Broidy, former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, had no less than five Rabbis vouching for him. Last year Broidy had pleaded guilty to acting as an “unregistered foreign agent,” part of a larger investigation into the Malaysian “1MDB Scandal” in which Prime Minister Najib Razak stole more than $700 million dollars from his country’s state-run 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Broidy worked on behalf of Razak and was offered $75 million if he could get the U.S. Justice Department to drop its own investigation into the scandal.

Another clemency beneficiary who exploited his Jewish links was Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who executed one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Just days after being released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes celebrated his daughter’s wedding in a lavish party held at his multi-million dollar Florida home. He benefited from a lobbying campaign by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute, a group advised by the ubiquitous former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The movement reportedly has connections to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Another person pardoned by Trump was Sholam Weiss, a Hasidic businessman from New York who was sentenced to more than 800 years in prison in 2000 for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering connected to a huge fraud scheme that stole $125 million from the National Heritage Life Insurance Company, leading to its bankruptcy. He fled the country but was subsequently arrested in Austria and extradited to the United States. Weiss had reportedly received the endorsement of from Dershowitz, who also recently has been involved in the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell espionage case.

And, of course, there was also the Israel factor. For no plausible reason whatsoever and contrary to actual American interests, Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, a seventy-five year old former Israeli Air Force officer, who was indicted in the U.S. in 1987 for espionage in relation to the Jonathan Pollard spy case. Sella fled to Israel days before Pollard was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. and the Israeli government refused to extradite him. Sella, at the time doing a degree course at New York University, was Pollard’s initial contact. He had started working part-time for the Mossad intelligence agency in the early 1980s and received some of the classified top-secret documents provided by Pollard in exchange for money and jewelry.

Sella had passed on the Pollard contact to Mossad’s agent handler Rafi Eitan, who continued to “run” Pollard until he was arrested. Sella’s indictment was essentially meaningless theater, as is generally true of nearly all Israeli spy cases in the U.S., as Tel Aviv refused to extradite him to the United States and the Justice Department made no attempt to arrest him when he was traveling outside Israel. Trump’s pardon for Sella as a favor to Netanyahu sends yet another signal that Israel can spy against the U.S. with impunity. The request to Trump for clemency came from the Israeli government itself and was reportedly endorsed by Netanyahu, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, the United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Miriam Adelson. According to the White House statement on the pardon, “The state of Israel has issued what a full and unequivocal apology, and has requested the pardon in order to close this unfortunate chapter in U.S.-Israel relations.”

Was it a gift or merely a pander? Note particularly the inclusion of David Friedman, who as U.S. Ambassador to Israel is supposed to defend the interests of the United States but never does so. Once upon a time it was considered a potential conflict of interest to send a Jewish Ambassador to Israel. Now it seems to be a requirement and the Ambassador is apparently supposed to be an advocate for Israel as part of his or her mission. Friedman will no doubt be replaced by a Democratic version to deliver more of the same. And then there is Miriam Adelson. Good old Sheldon is hardly cold on the ground and his wife has taken up the mantle of manipulating players in Washington on behalf of the Jewish state.

Money talks and so the drama in Washington continues to play out. Trump manages to make himself look even worse with his last round of pardons and commutations on his ultimate day in office. No one who deserved clemency got it and a lot of well-connected rogues who were willing to fork over money in exchange for mercy benefited. Business as usual delivered by the so-called Leader of the Free World.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

Social scientists across their different disciplines have shared an enduring observation. They have found that the people who apply methods in real settings to understand social life find more elucidation of the inquiry process than those who seriously analyze the same but without adequate field application.

We learn best by engaging people in the locations that embody our questions – communities on the ground – to not only glean information from our subjects but also to address people’s needs. Learning by doing provides the context to achieve our educational potential as well as humanity’s growth.

Recognizing this also means that there are defeating practices, commonly rooted in stunted expectations for the outcomes of research, skewed designs resulting in vacuous experiences. This can lead to superficial or misleading explanations of social phenomena’s causes, and even worse, detached remedies.

Unfortunately, this limitation informs the mainstream structure of research and higher education and is also fixed in learning’s infrastructure. After all, interactive engagement with local communities to gain awareness through experience is a pedagogical orientation that is antithetical to classrooms with bolted down chairs facing one direction, positioning participants to not sufficiently interface and engage.

Way beyond a credible doubt, evidence also shows that our ability to integrate knowledge based on experience is basically always there with us and literally has no minimum age. Academic disciplines, considered in the aggregate, have incrementally reformed toward what was realized again during the West’s Enlightenment: students need to co-inquire with communities, with a seamlessness between data gathering and actions to enhance well-being. We see growing appreciation at universities and education centers for all ages – with their commensurate and increasingly dedicated administrations and resources – of providing students with a practical approach to meaningfully internalize the range of life’s insights by honing professional and citizenship abilities.

As we experientially learn about the roots of social challenges, poverty, social stratification, and persistently-generational unrealized potential, we uncover shared basic features. It involves members of local communities discussing these very patterns and identifying local projects for change, livelihood, and justice. It involves investigation, and rolling responses and reactions, which with persistence penetrate the intertwined forces that lead to socio-economic and environmental struggles and solutions. It involves someone assisting the communication among the many and diverse who express themselves, and whose information needs to be retained, organized, and acted upon as the primary basis for decision-making. And, it also involves the reconciliation of past pain, with apologies and regrets conveyed, and the determination to achieve consensus and create the personal and common benefits that are collectively sought by the people.

We know progress, large and small, never seems to be linear. Every context is its own. Global stratifications in unbearable forms find their way into school rooms. And all of this, this ride through the frailties and hope, ignites a lifelong pursuit among the learning youth to help implement community initiatives that seem so right, so fair, needed, and inexplicably long-delayed. This experience in young people can be so compelling that their life’s trajectory becomes new, unanticipated, and invigorated.

I consider myself lucky to have had this kind of essential education in my mid-twenties as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco, followed by action-study, and now leading the High Atlas Foundation in Marrakech 27 years later. I am struck when young student-interns have visited and are immersed in their analyses, observation, participation, and support of the practice of people’s movements for development. These gap-year, late-teen students are astute to the work’s difficult contradictions and transformative potential of what happens when community members work through what can be uneasy discussions toward finding consensus and advancing ahead.

As we celebrate 2021 International Education Day this week, I express a wish, which I suppose is customary for anniversaries: that classrooms are designed as community centers where middle and high schoolers, elementary students, and toddlers, draw their community maps for participatory planning, including in gender groups to reveal outlooks, depicting their visions, places they like and feel to enhance, and ideas for their future. It is a hope we extend for youth and pre-teens to weigh together their priorities they would like to see unfold in their surroundings, localities, and classrooms. It is that old dream when education becomes ever more about the awakening heart, of one’s feelings for others’ feelings, of the communities’ data filled with relativity that guides to sustainability, and the pursuit of not just understanding but to intently improve every day the days of living.

If, indeed, we can know and affect more by doing more in communities than we would by conceptualizing about it, as revered social scientists have so said, then it begins at the onset of education – or even before – when those bolts for the chairs are thrown away.

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Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is president of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco.

Featured image: Youth in northern Morocco participating in a community meeting (2020 by the High Atlas Foundation).

Search the scientific literature for examples of long-term vaccine randomized clinical trials that use inert placebos — you will not find them. Short-term studies are the preferred mode of vaccine manufacturers — even when there is no emergency — leaving long-term vaccine safety to be assessed after the vaccine goes to market.

The public is never afforded the opportunity to opt out of human subject trials in spite of federal regulations that provide protections against experimentation — with special protections for children and pregnant women.

Moderna’s mRNA vaccine is touted as having great promise for use against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus. As a new technology, it has features that make it competitive.

First, the design allows rapid updates of the vaccine to match new circulating types of virus. This is a stark contrast to, say, Merck’s MMR vaccine, which is showing signs of waning usefulness, not at all unexpected — in fact predicted to be obsolete in 2022 — unless updated to match the wild measles virus every two years or so.

Merck has not updated the MMR vaccine since it was created in 1960 — and the vaccine type and wild type measles lineages have evolved away from each other. Vaccine failure is now evident in that a majority of measles cases in the U.S. are in the vaccinated population (see Poland and Jacobson, 2012 and Hammond, 2020).

Given that Moderna’s mRNA vaccine utilizes only a single protein, it may be expected to induce less autoimmunity than vaccines that utilize more than one SARS-CoV-2 protein. Still, Moderna did not screen out unsafe epitopes to reduce autoimmunity due to homology between parts of the viral protein and the human proteome. Thus, concern over vaccine-induced pathogenic priming is not zero, but it may be less than COVID-19 vaccines that use more than one SARS-CoV-2 protein.

However, the hyper-focused IgG response to the fewer antigens could cause hyperimmunization, a condition considered ripe for off-target autoimmunity attacks. Neither Moderna’s nor Pfizer’s studies leading to filing for the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) have addressed long-term safety.

In contrast to what Moderna reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the early months of COVID-19, its mRNA vaccine is not an established technology. It is new. As a new, experimental vaccine, it deserves close and objective scrutiny.

Moderna reports 94.5% efficacy. The “efficacy” of vaccines is understood to be a measure of the effectiveness of the vaccine on an ideal population, and differs from “effectiveness,” which is how well a vaccine manages to induce evidence of immunity in the real population upon which it is being used.

Moderna reported to the FDA (Zhang, 2020) efficacy as the ratio of the rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the vaccinated (16 infected out of 28,068 vaccinated) to the rate of infection in the placebo group (275 infected out of 27,956 given placebo).

Close inspection of Moderna’s data made public ahead of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBAC) meeting that was scheduled for Dec. 17, 2020, however, reveals that among the vaccinated, an additional 81 participants and 118 among the placebo participants developed a COVID-19 diagnosis between the first and second shots. These participants were determined to be ineligible for the second dose and removed from the study.

By my calculations, these additional cases shift the vaccine efficacy from 94.5% to 75.4%.

If a chemotherapy agent is being tested against another cancer treatment, the deaths that occur between scheduled treatment rounds must be counted. It is misleading not to count these additional cases of COVID-19 in the Moderna vaccine trial — the 94.5% efficacy is not based in clinical reality even for an ideal population.

Death rates reflect non-representativeness

Another problem with Moderna’s FDA report is its data on safety. First, during data clean-up, Moderna changed one “death” in the vaccine group to a “serious adverse event” (SAE) — somehow resurrecting a patient? In mirror fashion, one “SAE” was changed to a “death” in the placebo group. Not to worry, though, because there were 13 deaths overall in the entire study — six in the vaccinated, and seven in the unvaccinated.

Note that some of the deaths occurred after the first dose — highlighting the need for consideration of SAEs after the first dose during consideration of efficacy. Given the full number of patients on the two reporting dates, the number of deaths per day per 100K population would be:

• 0.39 deaths per 100K per day (whole trial)
• 0.36 deaths per 100K per day (vaccine)
• 0.42 deaths per 100K per day (placebo)

Of the 13 deaths that occurred in the trial, the clinicians running the trial determined (to their own, and evidently to the FDA’s satisfaction) that the deaths could not have been due to the vaccine, or to the placebo, even though two of the deaths — one in the vaccinated group, and one in the placebo group — had “Death NOS” as the description “NOS” stands for “not otherwise specified.”

The other deaths listed as vaccinated included: cardio-respiratory arrest (1), myocardial infarction (1), multisystem organ failure (1), head injury (1) and suicide (1). In the unvaccinated group: cardio-respiratory arrest (1), myocardial infarction (2), systemic inflammatory response (1), COVID-19 (1), and abdominal injury (1).

How the physicians were able to determine that the two instances of “death NOS” were not due to the vaccine — i.e., how they derived absolute knowledge of causality in individual cases — is a mystery.

In the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, by contrast, such causality determinations in individual cases can take decades. Plausible mechanisms of pathophysiology are key in such determinations. For example, myocardial infarction can involve autoimmunity. The key indicator sometimes used is the type of infiltrating cells (although this is not a black-and-white characteristic), and certainly myocardial infarction has been seen in post-vaccination deaths before.

Multisystem organ failure is consistent with autoimmunity against ubiquitously expressed proteins as a result of vaccination. Given available data, the vaccine cannot easily be ruled out.

The suicide cannot be ruled out as not due the vaccine, either, as the possibility of psychological distress over pressure not to let down society, if the person developed COVID-19, or suspected she did, or might not want to disappoint the world by contributing to the failure of the study, could trigger depression. Or, less dramatically, autoimmunity against oxytocin or serotonin receptors could lead to devastating depression.

There are no past studies of this type of vaccine or any Beta-coronavirus vaccine, or any vaccine using this technology to which the physicians could refer to rule out causality in these cases.

In comparing death rates reported in the vaccine arms between Moderna and Pfizer, six people in the Moderna trial died in 56 days on the vaccine arm, whereas only two people died in the Pfizer study on the vaccine arm over 199 days. The Moderna vaccine arm death rate of 0.36 deaths/100K/day) is 5.14 times higher than Pfizer’s (0.07 deaths/100K/day). This large discrepancy deserves notice and requires explanation.

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

Moderna and Pfizer both made promises for complete transparency. It is essential that Moderna provide sufficient explanation on the determination of lack of causality for the deaths in the vaccination arm.

The process by which Moderna managed to achieve 0.5% SAEs also requires full disclosure and given such serious discrepancies, closer inspection.

Also, when comparing the study-wide number of deaths per day per 100K for the study to that of the entire U.S. population from 2019, I was shocked: the national number of deaths per day per 100K is 2.44. Moderna’s screening process and exclusion criteria in the trial led to evidence that the general population is dying at a rate 6.3 times greater than the death rate in the Moderna trial — which means the Moderna study, including its estimated efficacy rate and the vaccine’s alleged safety profile — cannot possibly be relevant to most of the U.S. population. The super-healthy cohorts studied by Moderna are in no way representative of the U.S. population. Most deaths from COVID-19 involve pre-existing health conditions of the types excluded from both Pfizer and Moderna trials.

Translational failure is the failure of the findings of earlier clinical research to generalize to later phases — or to hold up when a product comes to market (Prasad, 2016). This can occur due to use of a pharmaceutical or medical procedure on a group for which safety and efficacy has not been determined.

The public should know that the Moderna trial excluded patients that had evidence of atopy — specifically, urticaria or past incidence of anaphylaxis. To avoid translational failure, these people should be excluded from vaccination on roll-out. Those enrolling in the post-market surveillance studies deserve to know the abject absence of any relevant information on efficacy and risk for them. In their zeal to help humanity, or to help themselves, these people may very well be walking into a situation that will cause autoimmunity due to pathogenic priming (Lyons-Weiler, 2020), potentially leading to disease enhancement should they become infected following vaccination.

The outcome of these trials influence all of us. Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the BMJ, has identified additional discrepancies and has called for access to the raw data from all of the COVID19 clinical trials. The discrepancies I have identified underscore the urgency of fulfillment of promises of 100% transparency and independent assessment of the actual outcomes implied by the data of these trials.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Are we at War? This has become a legitimate question over the last 12 months in the western world.

And we are not talking of war by the west against Russia or China, or the east in general. It’s a war of the people against ever-more tyrannical governments around the world, that under the guise of health security against an invisible enemy, called Covid-19 – are repressing people of the entire planet.

When I mention the West, that includes every country that follows the neoliberal economic concept of the west, still led to this date by the United States of America and her subservient allied governments in Europe and Latin America and even in Asia and Oceania. Yes, that also includes Japan, Australia, New Zealand – and to some extent also South Korea.

It’s a people’s war against a nefarious and rapidly all destructive ideology – an ideology that has nothing to do with humanity, that in fact has so far – and way before covid – economically destroyed and debt-enslaved many countries of the Global South by internationally imposed trade policies (by the western created World Trade Organization – WTO) and fiscal policies that serve the western dollar-based fiat economy – imposed out by the IMF and the World Bank.

Now, this Covid-19 “pandemic”, in fact a Plandemic – because it has been planned for decades – has destroyed much more. It destroyed the livelihoods of billions of people, has killed more people from famine, misery, extreme poverty despair and suicide. Yes, there is a rapidly rising curve of suicides, worldwide. And this is only the beginning. – Because there is a different much more gigantic agenda behind covid: It is a crime of epic proportions that is being implemented in front of our eyes.

March 11, 2020

On March 11, 2020, WHO declared covid-19 a pandemic. And that when worldwide cases were only 5095 and deaths 293 (WHO statistics). That is hardly a case for a pandemic. Its rather a Plandemic – a purposefully planned pandemic that subsequently is to justify global lockdowns and the devastating destruction of the world economy, with disastrous human and social consequences – uncountable bankruptcies, hundreds of millions of unemployed – no income, famine, despair – and hopelessness, a  vision of no future.

In fact, on or around March 16, 2020, less than a week after WHO’s infamous declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic, the entire world, all 193 UN member countries plus 3 territories went into total lockdown. There is nowhere to escape.

A coincidence? – Hardly. It is absolutely impossible that a virus strikes the entire world at the same time.

This already indicates that the virus is man-made, most-likely in a US bio-war lab. Other possibilities of the virus’s origins mentioned are the UK and France. There are patents registered for this and other viruses preceding SARS-CoV-2, alias Covid-19.

This is a manufactured crisis that a world authority on health – like the World Health Organization (WHO) has been ordered to help implement, by declaring Covid-19, or SARS-CoV-2, as a pandemic, upon which all country governments have the right to take precautionary measures. The strange thing is that literally every government in the world, except for Sweden and Belarus, and perhaps one or two others have followed strictly the “official narrative”.

Why is that so? – Were they under pressure? – What kind of pressure?

Who are the masters behind WHO, behind the Plandemic?

Are they a few super-rich multi-billionaires – no names shall be mentioned – who have spun a network of collaborators throughout the world’s nations’ governments to make them obedient servants, and if they are not obedient, these governments, there are means to make them obedient?

China

China is also an exception, a different type of exception. China was struck first – not that the virus originated in China – no, in the most likelihood not – but the west may have been interested in observing with what efficiency China will master this maliciously manufactured crisis.

Well, the west had plenty of opportunities to learn from China on how to master this virus with a minimum of casualties and a minimum of economic losses.

But the west didn’t learn anything; or did not want to learn how to deal with this false epidemic efficiently and effectively? – Possibly, because there was and still is a different agenda behind this virus? – Instead of approaching the “crisis” with China-style efficiency, the west predominantly Europe and the US, create wanton confusion, chaos, issue non-sensical rules that change almost by the day – lockdowns, half-lockdowns, curfews – and all the time, or most of the times mask-wearing, always socials distancing, different rules for people’s assemblies – and lots of exceptions.

Then there are allegedly ever-so-often new strains discovered, like in the UK, some say they are highly infectious and deadlier than the original version of covid-19 – and the origin is South Africa – or maybe not. In any case, this new-type corona virus gives good reason for countries to continue locking down and closing borders, to keep their people ever more on a tight rope, ever less freedom – and ever more frustration.

And this, when scientist know and some have revealed, that since the beginning of the covid-19 Plandemic, there have been at least between 10 and 15 mutations. The corona virus mutates as does the flu virus. But these mutations are all more or less equally infectious, or dangerous, the same as with the flu virus.

The Big Picture

Let’s backtrack a bit to understand what was in the making for more than a decade – possibly several decades. But it may be sufficient to go back to 2010 to get a view of the Big Picture – on the basis of which we will understand the diabolical plan that has thrown the world into a chaos, never seen in the current civilization, vastly worse than the 1928 / 29 – 1933 world crisis.

It is important to understand the background and the plan behind this invisible enemy. It breaks every human right, every civil right – and nobody dares to object – because of FEAR, FEAR and FEAR. Fear has become weaponized. Fear is an instrument of war.

FEAR is also the instrument to subdue the world to the begging of a small elite – let’s call them, this commanding elite, the Globalist Cabal, those who aim at creating a One World Order (OWO) – and eventually to control every inch of Mother Earth and of humankind, by total digitization of everything – including the human brain…

That’s why the question: Are we at war? We should be, because we cannot let this happen. We have to resist this monster enslavement of the human population for the benefit of a few inhuman elitists.

Here is a brief summary of key precursors to Covid-19. In 2010 the Rockefeller Foundation issued a Report, simply called the “2010 Rockefeller Report” – May 2010 (until recently this report was available on internet). This report outlines in remarkable details what is happening today and has been happening since the beginning of 2020. It includes several scenarios that are supposed to follow each other.

The first one is called the “Lockstep Scenario”. Exactly. That’s what is happening now. A hapless and clueless world population is thrown from one day to another into a pandemic from which there is no escaping – as all 193 UN members have subscribed to it, or were coerced or bribed into it.

And this shocked world population is behaving in lockstep as they are told to do – by their government masters – isolate, wear masks, separate, live in quarantine – a series of well-thought out anti-social conditions, meant to break society, families and friends apart, and to condition the brain that this will be the new normal. Remember, a society in fear can be easier manipulated.

These measures have nothing to do with protecting peoples’ health. Their purpose is entirely different, as we will see. In fact, science – real science – not bought science – has proven in multiple ways that these measures are more destructive, more harmful than the virus Covid-19 itself – which has a mortality rate similar to that of the annual influenza. 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%)…

All of this is happening, I can only repeat – while the world economy is practically coming to a stand still. With uncountable losses – worst off are the people living in the Global South, where up to 70% of labor is informal – no contract, no social safety nets, no social health services – no shelter no food – no hope – and no education for children – no future.

This is the kind of misery this Globalist Cabal has planned and planted upon the world. And, mind you, we are only at the beginning. The Lockstep is just the first of four mind-dumbing scenarios to be implemented over the coming ten years. – If we, the People, humankind – do not stop it. NOW!

The 2010 Rockefeller Report is not all. There were numerous intermediary reports prepared by WHO’s Control Board.

But just a couple of months before the outbreak of the PLANDEMIC, on 18 October 2020, Event 201 took place in NYC. This event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What is the WEF? The WEF was created in 1971 by the German economics Professor Klaus Schwab, as a simple NGO in a suburb of Geneva, Switzerland, to develop rapidly into an international forum for the crème of the crop of Big Busines, Big Finance and Big Fame. Ever since then – with one exception – the WEF’s elite membership met usually in the last week of January in Davos Switzerland – to decide over the “fate of the globe – and over humanity”.

The 2021 WEF meeting, is however, planned for May 2021 in Singapore. – They claim Covid is the reason for the change of venue.

There is an intimidating arrogance with which the WEF make decisions behind closed doors. And the world population never knows what is planned for them – and as we – the people – have been programmed to obey authorities, we go along. Only few of us are questioning ever more grotesque events and occurrences. All of them infringing on our human and civil rights.

When the day comes that we discover that the salami is completely sliced off – I mean, sliced off of human and civil rights – that there is nothing left – it is too late. And that moment is now visible. In other words, it is High Noon to act.

Event 201

Back to Event 201. The key purpose of Event 201 was to computer simulate a pandemic patterned according to the 2002 / 2004 SARS outbreak. They called the new virus SARS-CoV-2. According to computer simulations this pandemic produced 65 million deaths in 18 months, created worldwide economic and social chaos, leaving behind uncountable bankruptcies, billions of people without work, and creating a deadly famine, a massive shortfall of goods and services, including food – and social misery beyond control.

On this website you may find several videos depicting Event 201, as well as some of the discussions that took place during the event.

The Event 201 Conference was attended by everybody who has a name in international public health – FDA, CDC, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID / NIH); in international finance, led by the IMF and the World Bank, key Wall Street bankers, as well as in Big Pharma, for example pharma-industry interest groups, and of course WHO, also UNICEF and other UN agencies – and more.

The original SARS (meaning – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) broke out also in China, in 2002, in the Guangzhou, Province, from where it spread to 26 other countries and according to WHO (2004) produced worldwide 8,096 cases and 774 deaths, more than 90% of which in China. It is speculated that the first SARS outbreak was a trial for what was to follow 20 years later. There were also other, what we may call, dry-runs for covid-19, not least the “failed” H1N1 Swine Flu which failed to break out as was expected by the organizers.

Isn’t it amazing that just a few weeks after Event 201 the first SARS-CoV-2 case was discovered and reported from Wuhan, China, in late 2019, and in early January 2020? China, prepared and alarmed, recalling the 2002 SARS outbreak, reacted fast, and with systematically organized severe lockdowns mastered the disease within a few months.

After WHO’s declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic – the entire world went into a lockdown, every country destroying its own socioeconomy, creating economic chaos, bankruptcies, unemployment, poverty and misery – deadly famine, especially in the Global South. How can that happen? What powers must be in play – what rewards or threats issued, so that every country of the planet basically self-destructs in lockstep?

The economic cost of this destruction – destruction of the real economy, can hardly be estimated. The devastation gets worse with every new lockdown, with every new measure of human segregation from society, from the workplace – with new and repeated closings of vital businesses – possible recovery of the economy is ever more difficult. Most small businesses will be gone forever. According to some estimates up to a third of the World’s GDP has already been wiped out.

And a good portion of these losses has been monetized and syphoned off and up into the pockets of a few billionaires, wo increased their riches in the 3 months from March to May 2020 by 20%. Imagine! Wile at the same time the International Labor Office estimates unemployment reaching close to 50% of the worlds ’entire labor force, most of it in the Global South.

When one sees the precursors to this covid-19 – which has in the meantime many strains, several mutations – one cannot but understand that there are “superior forces” behind it. There is an agenda way beyond Covid-19. This virus, invisible enemy, is just a convenient – and a truly clever – instrument to carry out worldwide restructuring of society, of our civilization of values that we have created over the years – good ones and bad ones.

Here is when the Great Reset sets in. That’s what the WEF calls it. The IMF, working in unison with the WEF, calls it the Great Restructuring.

“Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020), was written by Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the WEF, and his associate Thierry Malleret. Schwab calls the pandemic “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” – at the outset, it sounds like a good idea – bringing more equality, justice, a cleaner environment and finally peace to our world. Sounds like a dream.

But when you read the book, and read between the lines, it shows that the Reset means more power to the elite – a GLOBALIST and ever richer elite, that is steering the world’s nations – still to some extent sovereign nations – towards a global One World Order (OWO), to be managed through one gigantic global government.

Capitalism, now with a “black” economy – because of our primordial use of hydrocarbons (90+% of all energy), is to be turned into a Green capitalism. Meaning: The capitalist model will be maintained, even enhanced; hydrocarbons will be used to make so-called “green” energy – wind, solar, tidal power. These machineries and mechanisms are created with hydrocarbons.

As an example, we have today electric cars. Where do you think Tesla and consortia get their electric energy from? – It is at least 80% hydrocarbon or nuclear-generated electricity.

So, when you compare energy efficiency of an electric car and a conventional car, on average, the electric car is about 35% energy efficient, while the conventional car about 75%. This does not even account for the environmental and social damage that takes place to mine lithium, the base raw material for the batteries, as well as the rare earths metals used for the cars sophisticated electronics – and being mined largely in Central Africa under the most inhuman work conditions, including with massive child labor. This socio-environmental cost is simply shoved off as an economic “externality”.

That’s what Green Capitalism is all about. Pushing the so-called New Green Deal – basically painting capitalism green – is an important objective of the Great Reset – and, by the way, of the new Globalist Jo Biden US Administration.

An alternative would be for countries joining together, investing massively into research for new renewable energies, for example, more efficient solar energy – i.e., through photo synthesis.

Another objective of the Great Reset is outright digitization of everything. Algorithms and robots will control our lives. Money – cash – as we know it, will disappear – is already in the process of disappearing. By digitizing the money that we earn and hold in (bank) accounts, we are vulnerable. Depending on our “behavior” – whether we are obedient and submissive to the going dictatorial narrative – we may be allowed to use our earned monetary resources – or not.

It gets better. – In October 2020, the WEF issued a so-called White Paper entitled “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda – in a Post-Covid World”.

This 31-page document reads like a blueprint on how to “execute” – or implement – “The Great Reset”. The “White Paper” means it’s a draft, like a trial balloon to measure people’s reactions.

It reads indeed like an executioner’s tale. Many people may not read it – have no awareness of its existence. If they did, they would go up in arms and fight this latest totalitarian blueprint, offered to the world by the WEF.

It promises a horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population.

The Great Reset is to be executed according to the UN Agenda 21-30, meaning in ten years. The WEF outlines some 8 basic predictions, most of them linked to digitization and global control. But the last one is hilarious – “You own nothing and are happy.”

Now, contrary to what Klaus Schwab pretends – namely that the pandemic is a window of opportunity for the Great Reset – it is the other way around – the covid epidemic had to be invented, planned and implanted to allow The Great Reset to become a plan. We can only hope and act against it – hopefully not to come to fruition.

In addition to robotizing and electronically enslaving humanity, without most of humanity noticing, the Plandemic is also stealing our health, making it one of the most profitable commodities this civilization has ever known.

Just imagine – the idea is to vaccinate the world’s 7 billion-plus people within less than ten years. Only then can we move “freely” again. That’s the idea, already being floated around by many governments, especially in the west.

That’s the kind of policies the Global Cabal orders government leaders to implement, pretending that only when we are all vaccinated, freedom will return. Except that by then we are totally controlled and freedom is just a lame word from a defunct dictionary. In the meantime, Big Pharma makes trillions and trillions of dollars with Our Health – by stealing and commoditizing it.

Who would have thought, less than 12 months ago, that less than a year later we are literally living in a world tyranny? – And that we seem to be subdued and powerless against these also invisible Global Cabalists?

Will we let it happen?

Do we want to live in a New Technological World, a technocracy – to be terrorized, tyrannized and digitized?

Earlier I said – no names shall be mentioned. Yet, I would like to mention one name: Bill Gates.

Beware!

Why is BILL GATES Buying ALL the Farmland?

Our war is about:

Are we letting ourselves be pulled into this subversive World of Tyranny or do we opt for an open and transparent World of Freedom?

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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.

Multiple local, state and federal agencies are investigating the Jan. 21 death of a California man several hours after receiving the COVID vaccine.

Placer County Sheriff’s office said in a Jan. 23 Facebook post that agencies are “actively investigating this case.” They also mentioned that the man had tested positive for COVID in December. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that individuals who have already had COVID and fully recovered should still get vaccinated.

So far, in the U.S. only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have received emergency use authorization. According to news reports, it was unclear which COVID vaccine the man had received.

As of Jan. 15, 181 deaths have been reported to the U.S.government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System as possibly being related to COVID vaccines. A 2010 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services concluded that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries” are reported to VAERS and experts say the government’s reporting system is “broken.”

Earlier this month, The Defender reported on the death of a 56-year-old doctor 15 days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, and on numerous deaths among the elderly in Norway and Germany.

Meanwhile reports of injuries continue to surface in the media, including an article in the Jerusalem Post about a 17-year-old who was hospitalized in the intensive care unit after receiving the second dose of a COVID vaccine. Hospital officials told the Post they did not believe the boy’s illness was related to the vaccine.

Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters last week that he was “knocked out” after receiving the second dose of the vaccine, but says he feels fine now. Fauci received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine in December on live television to boost the public’s confidence in the vaccine.

The CDC reported 21 cases of anaphylaxis in people who received the COVID vaccine between Dec. 14 – 23, and another 10 between Dec. 23 – Jan. 10. Anaphylaxis is a life-threatening allergic reaction.

Last week, The Defender reported that allergic reactions had caused California health officials to hit pause on a large batch of Moderna vaccines. A few days later, Moderna said it was okay to resume using that batch.

Today, multiple news outlets reported that Merck has ended its COVID-19 vaccine program after early trial data showed the vaccine maker’s two experimental vaccines failed to generate immune responses comparable to a natural infection or existing vaccines. Bloomberg reported:

“The U.S. drug giant, which has a history of successfully developing vaccines, had adopted a different strategy from rivals Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, using a more traditional approach of focusing on shots based on weakened viruses.”

Children’s Health Defense asks that anyone who suffers any side effect, from any vaccine, report it, following these steps.

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Wearing ‘the mask’ is for those who suffer feelings of fear and/or guilt. Think about it.

One might reject such a notion “No, no, I’m just worried about being fined, that’s why I wear it”. Or “I don’t want to take any risks, the health authorities wouldn’t tell us to wear masks unless there was some protection benefit.” 

Are these valid responses? Both are based primarily on fear. Fear of what an authority might do if one was to disobey the rules, and fear of sickness should one not follow the authorities’ instructions.

But who are ‘the authorities?’ And are their demands backed by empirical evidence that the wearing  of a mask is a proven defence against infection by Covid? Will our mask wearer ask these questions? And if not – why not?

“Well, I do wonder what it’s all about – but there doesn’t seem to be much point in questioning it, does there.”

Right, in effect this is an admission of intellectual laziness coupled with an egregious obedience to the commands of ‘the authority’. This is the state of mind of those unwilling to think for themselves.

Allowing one’s self to be herded because one does not want to question the command, is a psychological sickness which presents an open book for the unchecked spread of fascistic authoritarianism.

I wonder how the same person would react if told to crawl to the shops on hands and knees, because ‘the authority’ said that these particularly pathogens only travel at head height?

Let us go back a few steps and imagine, for a moment, that this person has just enough suspicion concerning the motives of ‘the authority’ to check the medical records for evidence that the mask actually works.

Let’s see what the reaction is upon discovering that there is no evidence existing which confirms  health protection is achieved – and that includes for the vaccine –  but that there is evidence of health risks associated with extensive mask wearing.

What does our fellow human being do then?

“Yes, I saw that, but everyone else is wearing them – and, well, I don’t want to upset others by not wearing it..” 

So now we must add ‘deference to other herded humans’ to the growing list of reasons for not taking control of one’s destiny, but instead, lowering one’s head and running with the crowd.

Being led and not knowing where one is being led, but ‘trusting’ that it is somehow going to be OK. Better not rock the boat. Everyone else is masking-up, why be ‘different’?

Why not be different?

“I don’t want to draw attention to myself, you know, and then it’s being responsible to wear the mask, to show you wouldn’t want to infect anyone else.”

Yes, the contradictions implicit in this false logic are blatant. You know the masks don’t work; are likely to make you sick; cost money; are supposed to be frequently changed; washed, dried, disinfected – and so on – but nevertheless you feel you must wear one – because ‘that’s the only responsible thing to do’ and everyone else is doing it..

Is this the final curtain-call for a significant number of the supposedly sentient cognitive species known as homo sapiens?

I don’t know about you, but I feel a pit in my stomach seeing so many fellow humans behaving like lemmings.

I like to see the human face. Not all are pretty, but each is different and expresses character. So what to feel when confronted by herds of bank robbers marching towards one with more than half their faces masked-over?

I look at their eyes, because that’s the only animated bit left visible. What do I see in these eyes? Predominately I see fear and surrender.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s guilt, maybe shame. Maybe in some cases, a certain sick kind of pleasure – like with some young people “Why do I wear it? It’s cool, something different, you can get some funky designer masks – quite distinctive. Yea, nice.”

Do you believe it works?

“Sure, it works if you feel it works; kind of protection against others isn’t it..”

Sure it is, youthful narcissist. Protection against others – sure – sick people everywhere, got to protect yourself; survival of the fittest – let’s not take risks.

But mostly I see fear and guilt in the eyes of masked men and women. I see a coward, peering out into the world and trying to look and be ‘normal’. That infamous word ‘normal’. Yes, the ‘New Normal’ as announced by Klaus Shwab of the World Economic Forum. Mein Herr ‘Great Reset’, totalitarian pseudo-visionary of a fascist nightmare.

He must be pleased, so many people behaving ‘properly’, getting adapted to fitting into his New Normal. Silent cyborgs, lost and anxious, but still managing to keep up the appearance of ‘normality’.

So determined not to think, not stand-out from the crowd. Cannon fodder for the Zero Carbon Smart City, Green New Deal, New World Order prison camps of tomorrow.

A future specially constructed for the walking dead, minds gone to waste from lack of use, plugged into a state of the art computer so the act of thinking can be done for them by the master programmer.

A sub-human race sold out to the machines it made to relieve it of the need to think. Is that the future I see in the introverted eyes of the masochistic mask wearer? Do people subconsciously want to suffer? Is this a remnant of the Christian doctrine that one must suffer atonement for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?

Whatever the cause, it is for those who have meekly detoured from walking the path of life in favour of stepping onto the conveyor belt of a cyborgian slave cult.

In the midst of these most virulent and dark deceptions pulled on humanity, there is but one recourse that will bring back the light: having the courage to totally reject this state of mindless obedience – which has got a large segment of humanity into an unprecedented and abject state of spiritual poverty.

Finding a sufficiency of ‘fire within’ to burn-off the dead corpuscles of self afflicted conformity – that is the call. To bravely reject ‘the great lie’ currently running riot in all corners of the world.

Save yourselves. De-mask – return to humanity – and stand firm for truth, good people of Planet Earth!

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from howstuffworks

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov held his annual press conference last week reviewing his country’s foreign policy over the preceding year, the top two dozen highlights of which are touched upon in this analysis for those who don’t have the time to read the full transcript from this lengthy event.

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A nursing home run by Rock County is receiving significant pushback after mandating its employees receive the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine regimen or face layoff.

Officials at Rock Haven issued a memo on December 23 informing workers that reception of the vaccine was “a requirement for all staff” and those who did not comply would be laid off for failing to “perform the essential functions of the job.”

The memo went on to explain a laid-off employee “will not be allowed to return to work until they have completed the COVID-19 vaccine series.”

The initial session scheduled by the nursing home to conduct the first of a two-shot regimen was January 5. After declining to show up for the injection, registered nurse Terra Anderson was let go from her job.

In short order, she received a letter dated January 6 that informed her she had been laid off for her “inability to meet the essential functions of your job; failure to complete the Covid-19 vaccine as scheduled.”

A report from local Channel3000 indicated that “nearly a dozen” employees have been forced out of their jobs because of this policy.

Speaking to The Gazette under the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation, one employee said that though he or she is scheduled to receive the first dose of the Moderna regimen in February, they would like to refuse it. The employee also explained that 27 other workers at the nursing home this month had sent the county’s Health Services Committee letters explaining their objections to the vaccination mandate.

The concerns included how this biological agent, which was rushed through development and testing, may have dangerous, unknown long-term effects.

Others expressed worries about it effecting their pregnancy or fertility.

Michelle Lynch, a secretary at Rock Haven, reported that staff “are having side effects” from the first injection, “and they’re being told, ‘Too bad,’” she said.

Letters to Rock County supervisors revealed that two employees reported suffering “high fevers and other side effects from getting the vaccine on Jan. 5.” In one case, “the side effects were so bad” the employee “had to go to the doctor and was advised not to get the second shot of the vaccine.”

According to reports, officials from Walgreens and CVS, the two main pharmacy chains conducting vaccinations, long-term care employees have been “much more reluctant than residents to get the vaccine.”

Estimates from the American Health Care Association (AHCA) is that around 50 percent of long-term care staff are declining the injections.

“We’re having a real challenge with staff,” said Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of AHCA. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. There are rampant rumors spreading on social media that the vaccine can cause fertility problems, which has caused concerns among many of the young women that work in our facilities.”

Contrary to Parkinson’s characterization, the UK government issued a 10-page report late last year that warned these biological agents should not be used by pregnant or breast-feeding mothers. With regard to their impact on fertility, the report simply states it is “unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility.”

Therefore, according to the UK government, mandating young women receive these injections requires them to gamble with their fertility in order to keep their job.

Safety concerns with these biological agents also include “allergic” and “potentially fatal reactions,” that they may actually cause an increased vulnerability to the virus, and that, indeed, worries over long-term effects remain legitimate as these chemicals lack proper testing.

In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also drew up a document this fall listing the possible side-effects from a COVID-19 vaccine, including strokes, encephalitis, auto-immune disease, birth defects, Kawasaki disease, and death.

Current reports reveal that hundreds of individuals injected with these chemicals have been admitted to the hospital, and the shots have so far been linked to at least 55 deaths in the United States.

With regard to the elderly, a report on one nursing home in Auburn, New York, asserts that they had no coronavirus deaths at the facility at all until seven days after they began administering the vaccine. In a period of less than two weeks, beginning December 29, the “24 coronavirus-infected residents at the 300-bed nursing home” had died.

Earlier this month, the Norwegian Medicines Agency reported that 23 people died within days of receiving the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, 13 of whom were nursing home patients.

As a result, health experts from China called for Norway and other countries to suspend the use of mRNA vaccines, as currently produced by Moderna and Pfizer, especially among the elderly.

In response to the outcry from Rock Haven employees, several county board members indicated they plan to challenge the policy during their board meeting on January 28.

“I think we’re going to have to look at this real hard at the next county board meeting,” said Supervisor Brian Knudson, who also chairs Rock County’s Human Services Board. “I don’t think it’s fair to proceed laying off people. That’s not right.”

County Chairman Rich Bostwick said if the rule is challenged, a new rule could be passed in its place with a simple majority agreement from county supervisors.

In anticipation of this moral question, Dr. Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, affirmed in July that informed consent is not even possible for the new biological agents since long-term effects remain unknown due to the lack of extended testing. Thus, any use of coercion of persons to take such a vaccine, including making it a requirement for employment, remains “ethically unacceptable.”

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Tortilla con Sal: What is your perception of the seriousness of the problem of the intrusion of outsiders into indigenous lands, in your case of the Mayangna people?

Arisio Genaro Celso: We need to go back a bit to the past, to remember some negative actions generated by past governments. To explain this simple situation. Bearing in mind, for example, this problem of the invasion of mestizo settlers from the Pacific, towards our lands in the Caribbean, indigenous lands, above all land of the Mayangna and Miskito, but especially the Mayangna, because the Bosawas Reserve is located inside, the Bosawas Reserve is within Mayangna territories because these have been our ancestral lands.

TcS: Does that include Miskito or Afro-descendant land?

Arisio: More Miskito, we have… there are, for example, the limits of the Mayangna territory border with the Miskito territory, but the problem of invasion is not between indigenous people, it is not between Miskitos and Mayangnas. It is more to do with mestizos coming from the Pacific. Why do I want to mention this? in order to go back to the 90’s, to the government of Arnoldo Alemán. Arnoldo Alemán at the time was the one who promoted most, started and promoted the issue of what we call colonization by mestizos of the Caribbean, with the purpose of destabilizing the whole Autonomy project, which was being developed at that time. The Liberals then, led by Arnoldo Alemán, wanted a strategy, and the only way to disappear the Autonomy project in the Caribbean was to invade the Caribbean Coast with a mestizo population. And via that mestizo population take over indigenous lands so as to have control, most especially at election time, so that they would be favored with the votes of the mestizo settlers they were locating in those indigenous territories. I remember at the time the Nicaraguan army once detained about eight or ten trucks belonging to Liberal municipal authorities, full of mestizo people whom the Alemán government was sending to take over the lands on the Caribbean Coast.

Because the problem was also that back then, they made an interpretation and decided that the Caribbean Coast lands were national lands. There in itself was the question of recognition of the culture of the original peoples, we the Mayangna, for example, and the Miskitos too, traditionally ordered the territories into hunting areas, reproduction areas, artisanal mining areas, production areas, fishing areas, that is the way they have been ordered. So for example…

TcS: As part of the autonomy process?

Arisio: Before that. Before that. That has been the way the territories have been organized. With the Autonomy process, this was reinforced. The issue of ordering the territories well was reinforced. Prior to this, also talking about the years of 1979 after the Revolution, the indigenous peoples also knew their limits, where they could go hunting, where they could not go to cut down trees, because there were already large wooded areas or areas for the reproduction of bird species. So that area was taken care of. So for the mestizo culture of the Pacific, at that time, the people who arrived there said “There are 1200 manzanas of land but nobody lives there”. For them, it was understood that they were national lands, because nobody lived there, however those were areas, territories belonging to the indigenous peoples where they went to hunt, they went to….

TcS: And they were also protected areas…?

Arisio: Correct. Those are protected areas, reserves, historically they are preserved. If you notice, the great Natural Reserve in Nicaragua is in the indigenous territories. For example, the Bosawas Reserve is in our Mayangna territories, which our ancestors, our forebears, our grandparents have been taking care of for generations. Because conservation is also part of the culture. For example, in our culture before, if a boy came and cut down a tree and left it lying down and did not use it, the community was punished. This is a rule designed to protect. In this way, values of protection and conservation of the environment and natural resources were instilled in our communities. Then, from that time on, the issue of the invasion of indigenous lands towards the Caribbean Coast began, that process started in the ’90s, in the time of Arnoldo Alemán when he was in the government.

TcS: Not with Violeta?

Arisio: No, with Arnoldo Alemán. Although in Doña Violeta’s time, they also set up kind of land banks to locate some of the Nicaraguan Resistance.

Eloy Frank Gomez: Permit me to say, first, we, the Mayangna People, are organized at the communal level, at the territorial level and the structure of the Mayangna Nation of which the compañero is President, and myself as Secretary. We represent nine territories, of which four territories are located within the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, and five are outside the area of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve.

What I want to say is that before 1990, we lived in our communities. We did not need to have documents. But with time from ’90 around the time of the government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, we, the Mayangna vision is to live in nature, to live with the relationship between nature and living beings. Life was in the land, rivers and forests. But for them, their interest was power.

They made commitments with their people and at that time in the ’90s, they began to organize what they called development poles, without thinking about where, they had no lands there but they sent people on to our lands. On seeing that situation, we the Mayangna Nation organized to seek the title of communal property of the nine territories. Today, after 2007 with the arrival to power of our Commander Daniel, we have achieved the titling of our lands, an area of 8,101 square kilometers, titled and the title handed over by our Comandante Daniel to the communities.

So what happened earlier? As our president just explained, in that period of 15 years, the time of Violeta, the time of Arnoldo Alemán, the time of Enrique Bolaños, there they began promoting the invasion of our lands. But nowadays, we are able to enjoy this space, where we always historically lived with the land, today we have problems because as I was saying we have artisanal mining areas. But those areas, we, as our people use to survive for example at Christmas time, people work there but in an artisanal way, it was not on the scale of large exports but rather to solve basic needs.

Now, when they realize that, then other people, other peoples, in this case the mestizos, are now trying to take over. They go there because there are rivers, there is forest, there is gold, there is wood. We do not live off the export of wood, our life has been agriculture to feed our families, or hunting, fishing.

But now invasion is everywhere, the rivers are drying up, the rivers are drying up adn our anxiety if for our government to sustain its interest in maintaining the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, we all have to unite here at the level of the municipal and regional authorities.

On the other hand, we accuse the invaders, because these people are not poor people. They are individuals who have money and they send their people. They are not being sent by the government because there they not only clear land for pasture but rather they are like traffickers, land traffickers. They come in, they sell.

We don’t have resources ourselves because those resources are there, we live with nature. But these people set out boundaries, and then they sell….

TcS: How can they sell if they don’t have title? You have the title. So how can you sell it?

Eloy: That is why I said traffickers, mafia, because sometimes they go armed. For example, there some documents came to light claiming in such and such an area, but they are not in that area, rather they are inside Bosawas, with a rubric that might say Kukalaya, for example, with an area of such and such, but it is not in Kukalaya, instead it’s in Bosawas. So there are various documents. There are forged documents, with forged signatures of the authorities.

We don’t believe our government is doing that, because we have seen at various times how, rather, it has restored our right to property with title deeds. What happens is that people manipulate things and go out in the media to blame the government. We are convinced that it is not like that, rather it’s the other way around and they want to take advantage of this situation for their political aspirations.

Arisio: It’s worth highlighting some elements, elements of judgment on this issue, as the Secretary says…. It is necessary to see the situation of land trafficking from different perspectives as well. For example, the vision of our people and our communities, is one of respect, of coexistence, of harmonious relationship between the indigenous Mayangna and nature. Someone said to me, “Where do you Mayangnas have your pharmacy? Our pharmacies are the large natural reserves in the mountains, those are our pharmacies. However, in today’s situation, with the large clearings that settlers are causing in the indigenous territories, they are also exterminating that material, those resources that we have, that natural pharmacy our communities have, that we have, that we have lived historically from traditional medicine, from the knowledge, from the wisdom of our culture. So, the culture of conservation, as I was saying, has been with us over time, for many generations.

However, another perspective on the issue means looking at several elements. One is organized crime, because organized crime is fully involved in this issue of usurpation of indigenous property, trafficking of indigenous lands, even the sale of the wealth of indigenous lands. Apart from that, there are also armed groups, armed delinquents who come to harass, threaten the community members and dispossess the communities of their lands. We have this situation too.

Then again, there are political operators. For example, there have been episodes of incidents in some Mayangna and Miskito indigenous  territories and there were also deaths in our indigenous territories because of the land issue. The settlers invading the lands, killing indigenous people.

But when we did some work on that and we realized that those who were behind this were regional councilors of Yatama, Yatama mayors, and even some of them, we could even say weredeputies of Yatama, also involved in the sale of indigenous lands. The community members didn’tt know, the mestizos came in big numbers, families after families entering indigenous territories, for example in the area of the Rio Coco.

In certain areas of our communities in the Bosawas Reserve, which borders with Miskito land, many mestizo settlers came to enter our Mayangna lands. But how? Through these sales authorized by politicians from Yatama.

And another issue that is precisely well known, it’s no secret is that the Liberal mayors and municipalities with mayors opposed to the government also promoted land trafficking, even financed organized groups, armed groups to invade indigenous lands and to dispossess the indigenous people of their lands. There is evidence of that.

We have spent years following this situation. And we know for example that in El Cuá and in San José de Bocay, the mayor in San José de Bocay, where there is a Mayangna territory, which was invaded and financed by the mayor who was at that time a Liberal. He financed the groups, that mayor. And what did he do? He recruited peasants and told them: get organized, go there, take the land. We will support you. And he gave them weapons and that is not a secret.

The indigenous people, we have been used to it, the Mayangnas if you look at the history of Nicaragua, the Mayangnas are one of the most peaceful people. For example, during the time of the war of the ’80s, perhaps some communities got involved in the war in an involuntary and forced way as well. It was not their wish to go to Honduras there with the Nicaraguan Resistance. Many were kidnapped.

They have been a peaceful people, a peaceful culture. We do not go around inciting violence in these types of situations. So, from the political point of view, these political operators came to impose a war on us, that is, there was a personal interest, invading indigenous lands but the effect was unfortunate, because many families were displaced, both Miskito and Mayangna families.

TcS: Do you produce cattle on the lands of your people in Bosawas?

Arisio: In the lands that correspond to the area of the Reserve where our territories are located, there is very little cattle ranching, or only recently, one might say. But it is on a minimal scale. In the Caribbean Coast there is cattle ranching, but more in areas that are not indigenous territories, but there is ranching on the Caribbean Coast on private properties, where people from the Pacific have come to buy private property and what they have done is perhaps double the rate of cattle ranching… Look, the issue of the invasions is this, what we are seeing is that the invasion of indigenous lands by mestizos is for two reasons.

Many are dedicated to large-scale production. Indigenous farmers work the land only to sustain their families, for subsistence self-consumption. On the other hand, the mestizo farmer produces more, works the land more because he trades the product. They are dedicated to selling their produce. The indigenous are not. The indigenous Mayangna work, they keep their produce but for their own consumption, their self-consumption. So, yes, work and production have increased, but in the buffer zones which are protected, because as you know indigenous lands are inside the Reserve, but inside the Reserve too is the core zone, so not in the core zone, which has the main concentration of forestry reserves and biodiversity, so we also have the core area near the heart of the Reserve.

But these cases get a different treatment. For example, with the settlers in the buffer zone in the indigenous territories, an agreement has been made, for example, you can stay on those lands but with the agreement that at the same time you are going to remain and produce there, but you are going to protect them so that no more families enter, so that they do not continue causing damage, causing a lot of deforestation.

We should explain that we, for example, the government of the Mayangna Nation, we are an indigenous institution with a national character that covers six territories nationallyl with 75 communities and we also participate in government decision making. We are members of the National Commission for the Defense of Mother Earth where there is alsothe Army, the Police, the Attorney General’s Office, the Supreme Court, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Regional Government, the Secretariat of the Caribbean Coast, the entire government structure, also MARENA, we are part of it.

Now, what happens? This allows us to do advocacy work, to be able to dialogue, to make proposals to the government, and also to participate in decision making. Before, we did not have that possibility. Before, we were not mentioned. What was the political reality of the indigenous peoples in the Caribbean from the ’90s until 2006, for example? That was the period where we lived with racism and discrimination practiced on a large scale. So we can say, there was a situation of terrible discrimination against the indigenous people by the neoliberal governments. And that is not a lie. That is a reality with facts that people lived.

There was a period in the ’90s when that situation was very difficult. Why? Because all the functionaries came from Managua, they came to govern here in the Caribbean Coast. Here the indigenous peoples had no opportunities, they had no right to express their opinion, to participate in the decision making process over policies that were made at the whim of the government. So, look now, for example, as of 2006, or before even, from ’79 in the first stage of the Revolution, this issue was changed. It was already improving so as to recognize the rights of indigenous peoples.

For example, there are many important elements. The issue of education in the languages of the indigenous peoples, the issue of the restitution of their rights to indigenous territories. This issue was being worked on during the first stage of the Revolution. For example, talking about a health model that gathers the knowledge and experience and the wisdom of the indigenous peoples’ traditional medicine. Examples of this type.

Now, since 2006, the hold up of the Autonomy project has been reversed and it has become more concrete. How? In fact, take the example of the existence of regional government structures. This has allowed the region to manage all its political, social and cultural issues. Everything.

That is what is happening. For example, since 2006, the autonomous institutions have been strengthened. For example, here we have what you mentioned, there is a Regional Secretariat of Natural Resources, SERENA, so here everything is coordinated with Managua, Managua coordinates with these institutions, for example we have here a Regional Secretariat of Education that is working and administering the whole model of Intercultural Bilingual Education, to strengthen the issue of indigenous languages and to rescue the literary culture of our peoples. We have a regional health model, a regional and intercultural health model that also incorporates the knowledge and wisdom of the indigenous peoples in this health model. And in this way, Western knowledge and the knowledge of the native peoples work together. These are some of the experiences, right?

So we have been working on how all this has been restored, how this strengthening of Autonomy has been worked out, and another element that must be highlighted, for example. Before, we can say that indigenous peoples were relegated, there was no recognition by previous governments. Today, since the creation of the Territorial Governments, their territories have been restored. The government is making a broad recognition to all these peoples, to these territorial governments.

As regards what you were saying, about how are they financed, the government is funding the strengthening of these indigenous institutions, the indigenous territorial governments because they have an economic allocation from the government’s national budget from the Ministry of Finance. What for? To strengthen capacity and develop capacity in such a way that these structures of the indigenous governments, which are the indigenous institutions, do support some social things but also pay attention to all the organizational matters within their communities. So they also have an economic allocation like other institutions.

Eloy: For example, every 2 or 3 months the regional government convenes the territories, the territorial governments of the whole region. There, the communities participate and present their proposals to the government. This is a way, a new way for the Mayangna people to participate in this system of government.

Arisio: Something else that is important, we have talked about the issue of the Reserve. During those three neoliberal governments, there was a large project financed by GTZ, the Germans at the time. It was a large project in the Bosawás Reserve. We are often asked this question and I remember that at the time they called a consultation meeting with all the leaders of the territorial governments of the indigenous territories within the Reserve.

It was understood that it was also for the indigenous peoples to make proposals for development programs within their territories and that they were going to be financed by that project for the Bosawas of the GTZ, of the Germans. The question is that the project ended without taking note of various irregularities. And what happened with that project? Instead of stopping, for example, the issue of the invasion of the colonists, it got worse, expanded, increased the invasion.

So what are we trying to say? It’s that there are organizations, NGOs that use the name of the indigenous peoples and indigenous organizations to make accusations against the government, to denigrate the government, to try to destroy the government’s image and that of the work it does within the protected areas, for example, in the case of the Río San Juan, for example, or in the case of the Indio Maíz Reserve, and here in the case of the Bosawas Reserve.

However, at the time, when their side had power, there was no decision for indigenous people to participate in decisions so that the decisions would have some real effect. At no time was this the case. For example, right now there is an issue that is very topical now that is under discussion, which is the issue of the Bioclimate, the Green Fund, a project. This is an issue that at least…. What was done? A consultation process was carried out with the territories within the Reserve.

TcS: Someone told me that they held 400 assemblies

Arisio: That is why I am telling you, there were consultations, at least with the Mayangna territories, they were part of the consultation team as well. With a national team sent by the government, the Mayangna Nation provided a team of personnel to participate in the consultation, so that they could also participate in the design of the project, what they want to do, how it is going to be done, why it is going to be done, where it is going to be implemented and how it is going to be implemented. The point is that now anyway it is possible for indigenous peoples to participate in the decision making process.

For example, there is much mention of the issue of prior, free and informed consultation, where the indigenous peoples also have the right to participate, to be consulted when a program or project is to be implemented and executed in their territories, and this process has been complied with. The indigenous people are taken into account for consultation, for example this project was all about the deforested areas due to the self-same effect of the invasions of the settlers, how they were going to work on the natural regeneration of trees for example, or they are going to work on reforestation projects in all those areas to give life back to those affected areas and this has been coordinated with the territorial governments, with the indigenous institutions.

And it wasn’t before. Before, there was this great project for Bosawas, it was worse, there was no consultation, the decisions weren’t taken by the indigenous communities. However now things are different, so this is an opportunity for the indigenous peoples, this recognition, this respect of the government towards indigenous institutions, towards indigenous peoples and this also allows indigenous peoples to participate directly and broadly in the decisions that are being taken.

On the issue of artisanal mining in the Mayangna territories, for example, in the Mayangna territories and in the Reserve we don’t have problems with mining companies, with the large mining companies that are in the indigenous territories. No. We do not have that problem. The problem is with groups of settlers, because it is known that we have large mining reserves in our territories. So, people, as the compañero said, settlers enter for two reasons. One is to take advantage of the mining reserves that we have, and the other is to try and take over land for production.

TcS: But they do it illegally, right? Because in order to do it legally, they have to have a document that allows them to do that work.

Eloy: There is a management plan in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve where the use of this resource by the community members is outlined. That is why I mentioned earlier that our people do not work permanently in the reserve – for example, maybe in December, September, a few people go and work for a week like this ….. That is why nature is virgin in the Reserve and that is why we do not want other people to go there, because other people have other cultures, as I was saying, they make large land clearings and they want to bring in machinery and we do not agree with this….

Arisio: With the large extractive mining companies we do not have that problem but yes, for example, over the long term, many of the settlers that are invading come and establish themselves in a violent way, not with the consent of the communities. That is the problem we have had there but we are also working on it and that is another point….

As a result of this whole situation of invasion, an experience is being developed and in the case of the Mayangna territories our territorial governments and the national instance which is us, the government of the Mayangna Nation, we are making an articulated effort with the Army and the Police and also with some groups of indigenous forest rangers in which there is recognition for example from the police to these forest rangers. Even… How is this coordinated?

The rangers do their patrols, the Mayangna indigenous rangers do their patrols of the boundaries and if there are settlers and they are there without authorization or without permission or something like that, they detain them and bring them and hand them over to the police. But there are also joint patrols with the National Police and the Army, the Ecological Battalion. So what exactly are we doing?

So far we have consolidated this working relationship, this inter-institutional coordination on this matter between the Mayangna Nation, the territorial governments, the National Police, MARENA and the Nicaraguan Army. So that is how patrols are carried out, that is how surveillance and protection are carried out. But of course, this requires more effort, an effort between all the parties concerned because it implies resources in order to happen.

Because, for example, the police cannot be there, let’s say, for a month. When they go, to set boundaries, to clean up the boundaries or to make patrols. So these are quick interventions, maybe four or five days to see how the area is, if there is more invasion, or if there is more encroachment, if there is more settlement, if there is, for example…. MARENA accompanies these visits, these patrols, to identify the damage that has been caused, and if they identify the people that are going around with chainsaws, these invaders, then on the order from MARENA these people are captured and brought to court, where they are prosecuted and MARENA, for example, accuses them of environmental damage, the indigenous territorial governments accuse them of usurpation of indigenous property. What we feel is that we have made progress in consolidating this working relationship with these institutions.

We have good communication with the National Police in the Mining Triangle, for example here where we have four or five Mayangna territories, which are also within the reserve, and with the Army. So, we work on a plan, we present a joint plan, we have meetings with the police and the Army, with BECO, the Ecological Battalion, with MARENA. A plan is made, the plan is shared, the necessary resources are negotiated and the patrolling plan is made. Now we don’t have many problems with that.

We have overcome that, because before it was difficult, very difficult for the Army to get involved, or for the police to get involved in these issues of indigenous land ownership. But not now. Now they are participating and accompanying the indigenous peoples and the relationship between the police and the Army and the indigenous peoples in our case here, we have a good experience. We always get advised, for example if there is a change of authorities in the Army or the police, they share with us, they invite us, we are always working with them.

TcS: Is it fair to say that there has also been an improvement in terms of your relationship with the Attorney General’s Office?

Arisio: Of course. Look, in this particular, the good things must be highlighted, must be mentioned. That is why I was telling you, during this period of the second stage of the Revolution, as we call it, on the issue of the restitution of rights of the indigenous peoples, in our case the Mayangnas, we feel that there is greater recognition, greater respect, greater opportunity. On that score, for example, we have had some situations.

For example, if the forest rangers or the police brought and captured the settlers and brought them to the courts, it used to happen that after three, four days, they would release them immediately and let them go. Why? So there were some anomalous situations within the system and then we started to raise with the government institutions, with the same government authorities, in the National Commission that we needed more support from the Court, for example, from the Supreme Court of Justice, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, from the Public Defender’s Office, even from the PGR itself, and there has been progress on this issue.

Progress has been made. Why? Because the government authorized the creation of a body within the courts, namely the figure of Defenders of Indigenous Peoples was created,  wherever there is the presence of indigenous population. What is the function of these Defenders? It is the direct accompaniment these Defenders provide to the indigenous organizations for the judicial process of settlers, those who are destroying the environment, all these types of cases. So there is greater accompaniment.

And the other thing, the other important element is that we have also achieved is that, within the judiciary, our indigenous officials also hold positions in the courts. So now the recent appointments of the Defenders of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples are also indigenous people who speak the indigenous languages, because that is the other element, which for us is vital, this is important, that there is an indigenous official in the judiciary for example in the courts, because a Mayangna or Miskito indigenous person may arrive who does not speak Spanish so he has communication problems as well as all the problem of procedural delays, perhaps to do with the charges that have to be made or whatever other legal procedures that may need to be carried out?

So now this is an issue that the government has guaranteed, that in all the municipalities where indigenous peoples are present there will also be functionaries who speak indigenous languages. And this is something important because now these Defenders of Indigenous Peoples are accompanying the organizations to file the complaint because sometimes due to technical issues, perhaps the sisters and brothers of the indigenous organizations cannot lodge an accusation correctly, with the relevant technical criteria, so these Defenders of Indigenous Peoples accompany them to make or place the accusation and prepare all the corresponding process so that the case is formalized, that the accusation is duly filed and that those guilty of the damage being caused in the territories are punished.

TcS: How do you view the work of NGOs led by people like Lottie Cunningham?

Arisio: Look at CEJUDHCAN, CEJUDHCAN for Lottie Cunningham is like her piggy bank. Maybe you knows the term piggy bank, right? That’s CEJUDHCAN because CEJUDHCAN is not the institution she claims or as it projects itself at the international level, as an organization or institution defending indigenous rights. Why doesn’t she ever consult us? Why doesn’t she come to the communities to consult us? Why not our national leadership which is who we are, leading the national government of the Mayangna Nation, or else to the presidents in our territorial governments…? She is not present. She speaks from afar.

She uses the indigenous name. She uses it without having been there, when the events are taking place. For example, when the Alal case occurred, up there in the Reserve, she said that the government was not defending the indigenous people. But there are also other elements we should also mention, so there is the potential of all efforts that have made progress, in which we have advanced together with the government institutions for the defense of Mother Earth, but there are also some weaknesses that we have for example. And what does Lottie do? Lottie works with opposition activists practically. They are people who live as we Nicaraguans say, making accusations against the government, talking badly about the government. So she takes that and exploits it to say that the government does such and such, but really if it were the organization she says it is, she should be open to consultation. But she is not. She just turns up for a short while. And sometimes she exaggerates things. And she makes use of the indigenous peoples. And that is why, as we have always said, that is why Autonomy gave us the right for each native indigenous people to have its own voice.

No one can represent them ever. We were clear and categorical. Brooklyn Rivera said: I am the leader of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean Coast. We have to say that this is not true, this is a lie. Brooklyn Rivera does not represent the Mayangnas. The Mayangnas have our own indigenous institutions, they have their own government of their Nation that is of a national character and at the same time they have their territorial governments in the municipalities.

So each one has its own voice. They give their opinion. They contribute. They can say and decide on the model of government, the governance that is being developed there in the communities, but it isn’t that Brooklyn or Yatama can come and say: I represent the indigenous people of Nicaragua. Because that is not true. Because here each people is sovereign. Each people has its autonomy. We have a regime of self-determination so that each people can decide for itself.

TcS: In the case of Alal, what is your appreciation of that terrible incident? How do you perceive it?

Eloy: At root, there was a problem of settlers who attacked the community, but afterwards the government, its institutions immediately attended to the community, rebuilt the houses, provided care, ensured the presence of the police and the Army to guarantee the security of the families. So, the government has looked after and continues to look after the families of Alal.

TcS: Was it a criminal gang of the type of organized crime? What was it?

Eloy: Yes, they were practically organized settlers, criminal gangs. But the police and the army did their job, and that situation has calmed down.

Arisio: I think that, as I was saying at the beginning, cattle ranching in the Caribbean has grown, has increased, there’s a boom, but as I was saying, for example, the boom in cattle raising is on private properties. Because here, for example, where we are in the Mining Triangle, there have been many people who had private properties with large extensions of land, but they did not make much use of them. The landowner maybe had few animals but they had large amounts of land, then the farmers from the Pacific came and since they are private properties, then they buy and start to put in a lot of cattle.

Of course, after a year there is an valuable production of these cattle and there are many people who will remark how many cattle trucks are leaving the Caribbean Coast for the slaughterhouses because this cattle ranching has really grown. But as I was saying, for example, in our area in the Reserve, we have seen very little extensive cattle ranching. There we have seen more agricultural production, and the artisanal mining activities. Yes, but in fact these things have to be regulated.

TcS: In relation to deforestation, are you optimistic that there is slowly a process that will reverse this? Or is it going to be a problem that will become even more acute?

Arisio: We consider that this issue is going to improve. Improve because government institutions are paying attention to the issue. An effort is also being made to make large investments in these affected areas, and in fact there are also some local initiatives on the part of the territorial governments in conjunction with some environmental institutions, MARENA, INAFOR. For example, there is a youth group called Guardabarranco and in the municipalities they coordinate with INAFOR, which has large tree nurseries, and they deliver the plants so that they can work fr example in some watersheds where they are quite degraded and reforestation work is being done.

So this is important, for example, in all the boundaries, the boundaries marking Mayangna territories, they are planting fruit trees or other types of trees for timber, in order to recover from the deforestation  in our Reserve in some cases where there was damage and there are plans for the future to continue working on this.

TcS: There are people who criticize the indigenous peoples and say that they themselves or people within the indigenous populations break the rules. How true is this phenomenon in your experience?

Eloy: According to our assessment of the matter, yes there are some irresponsible people who commit these types of crimes. But maybe they don’t involve the large extensions that get mentioned, because the settlers also have the strategy of using that, those people, to traffic large extensions of land. But we have already proved that there are Mayangnas who are also involved in this illegal business.

TcS: Yes, because I imagine that they offer bribes…

Arisio: Yes, because there are good children and bad children anywhere, so unfortunately we have cases, for example, of some situations of violence that have occurred in some territories and so on, practically for that very reason. Although within the norms, within the statutes that we have of the constitution of the national organization, it mentions and is categorical in that sense, and it states that any Mayangna, be it an authority or someone from the community that incurs in the crime of buying and selling or trafficking of lands, has to be tried according to the laws of the State of Nicaragua.

And in that particular there are also brother mayangnas who are serving jail time for the sale of land, they are convicted and also there is this other issue that must be mentioned. Namely there are groups, there are mafia, criminal groups that are dedicated to land trafficking, recruiting peasants and putting them on indigenous lands, and then when that’s done, it is not the peasants who are the owners of the land but other people who have money.

We were surprised recently when a helicopter arrived in a community and landed near a farm that is near an indigenous community, so everybody was startled, what was going on? Everybody was abuzz, could it be narcos or who could it be? Even the police arrived. The police arrived and they found out that it was a cattle rancher who has many farms here in the Caribbean zone, and he flew over because he had a friend who is also a cattle rancher with land there and he came to visit him on his birthday.

The peasants do what they are told. Someone tells them to take 200,000 pesos, go, get in there, do this, buy, and when the tensions calm down and there is no longer a problem, there he comes with th fancy SUVs, or some fancy thing like that helicopter. So, as often as not there are different situations. They use the peasants, they swindle them too, and there are also cases of indigenous brothers who have dedicated themselves to this. And as I was saying, they have been prosecuted by the law. They are serving jail time.

TcS: In general, do you think that the situation is getting better or worse in terms of invasions?

Arisio: Well, the situation is quite moderate, there is nothing massive like it was at some point. Maybe there are four or five families, in some sectors, but there are other sectors where they continue to enter from other parts because we have to take into account, for example, the territory of Siquita, this Maynagna territory of ours here in Siuna, but there is a part of this territory that borders with the department of Jinotega with the area of San José de Bocay, so they are border territories one could say, because it borders with Siuna, it borders with Jinotega, it borders with Bonanza, so settlers enter there from all sides and sometimes it is uncontrollable. While in another territory, for example one that is in the center between Rosita and Bonanza, but it does not have much border with other departments with a mestizo population, so there is less of an invasion issue.

TcS: And how is your relationship with your fellow Miskitos?

Eloy: As Mayangnas, we each have our limits there and we have no problems with them, as people there is good communication. Besides that, I mentioned the Mayangna territories and the Miskito territories through the regional government meet every so often and there they share the situations of their territories. So I consider that there are no problems between Mayangnas and Miskitos.

Arisio: Maybe we have to reinforce what the compañero says in the case of the relationship between the Miskitos and the Mayangnas. I think it can be said that the experience of life has marked a direction, a guideline, a route to follow. I believe that the experience that both the Maynagnas and the Miskitos have lived through because of this issue of the invasion of property, has made them more aware of the unity between indigenous peoples in Nicaragua. Because now it’s being pointed out that we cannot be divided. It doesn’t matter if you are Krioll, Miskito or Mayangna, but here the problem is the same, and we all have to be united to face this situation. If we are more united we are stronger, better able to sit down, to make proposals to the government.

And the government itself sees that we are united. And I think that on that score many achievements have been reached, and it has been because that culture of internal conflicts that there may have been perhaps before…because during the ’80s the ethnic war in the Caribbean Coast was also not only against the government, but also between the Miskitos and the Mayangnas there were conflicts, and before of course there has been an history of antagonism. The Miskitos and Mayangnas never got along well because the Miskitos kidnapped Mayangna women and children, stole their property, burned their communities. So the elders as I told you at the beginning, remember we lived like this, we suffered like this because the Mayangna communities in Nicaragua, if you check the map of Nicaragua, the location of the Mayangna communities mostly, maybe ninety percent of the communities, are in the rural areas, in the big mountains.

So many elders say that we are here because they persecuted us, they wanted to exterminate us, and it was a way to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves in the mountains, to protect ourselves in the mountains from the Miskitos so that they would not exterminate us. So there were stories of that kind, but I think we are now living another reality, we are living another situation. Both we and the Miskito sisters and brothers have realized that this is a thing of the past and that the reality is different now and we have to be united as peoples, and that has strengthened us, and has brought us progress and has allowed us to do many things. So we have come a long way and we have overcome the past.

Eloy: It might be worth saying that I was talking in a personal sense, because the Miskitos have their organizations and we have to see that. As for the Yatama structure, not all Miskitos are from Yatama.

Arisio: And there are internal situations as well. Don’t think for a moment that internally they don’t have their conflicts and here there is another element that is important. Before there was a feeling… there was a mistrust perhaps on the part of the Mayangnas towards the Miskitos, one might say. The Miskitos were in power during the Liberal governments. Sixteen years they had control of the Regional Council governing body. And during that period the Mayangnas were forgotten, they kept everything for themselves. And it was not all their Miskito people that received those benefits, it was just a group of them. It was a Yatama elite that benefited from that.

But thanks to the second stage of the Revolution, there was recognition and institutionalization of the territorial governments, and the allocation of a budget to each one. This also allowed for greater autonomy and better governance for the territorial governments to administer their own territories.

TcS: When did this reorganization of the territorial governments take place, in what year?

Eloy: From two thousand nine onwards…

TcS: There is a topic that I had completely forgotten about… What do you understand by the phrase “remediation” and what does that mean?

Eloy: For example, according to Law 445 there are five stages. Law 445 has five stages for the property titling process. So, we complied with all of them. The last stage is remediation. And that is a legal term. For us at the moment we think that there is another way of dealing with it that can be a reordering of property. For example, in the zone mentioned by our colleague, perhaps people are currently entering there without knowing that this area is a conservation area. Well, neither we nor the indigenous peoples can live there.

So, one way of managing that could be to place them in another part of a buffer zone of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. We think that this is the term “reordering”, to bring order to our property. If someone came here, and we don’t want them to be there, we want them to be in another part. But that has to come about through the opinion of the majority of our population through a communal assembly, a territorial assembly of the people themselves. That is to say, there in the assembly they can approve if those people can be there or not.

Arisio: We have to understand that the concept of remediation does not directly imply eviction. In other words, it is not only eviction. The issue of remediation also has different concepts from the point of view that remediation also has to do with the way in which we establish the mechanisms for coexistence. We cannot enter a situation where there is already conflict, and go and stoke that conflict even more, but it has to be a strategy proposed by the indigenous peoples.

For example, let’s be clear, when the situation of Alal occurred, we Mayangnas did not go to shout to the four winds, nor make riots or demonstrations against the government, because we have a direct communication channel from the Mayangna Nation to central government. We who speaking to you now are the spokespersons for the problems, the situations in the territorial governments, and we make the national government aware of what is going on. What happened? We said we need to sit down to review this situation of Alal. What was the next step after this situation? Immediately, the government ordered that the police must be there, the army must be there, the PGR must be there, all the structures of the responsible institutions must be there to look for a way out of this problem. To make an analysis of why, what generated, what provoked, that conflict, those deaths. What response we give to that situation. And we directly drew up a balance, an analysis, and we realized that also in certain sectors of Mayangna territory, in the areas of Musawas, Alal, all that area there and also another part, for example, the Betlel River, Suliwas, people had entered in an uncontrolled way, they had taken lands, some even went as far as to fence off part of the properties of the indigenous people, so that cannot be…

In these cases of extreme situations, where indigenous people are no longer allowed freedom of movement, freedom to produce, and feel under siege, we cannot allow it. We have to evict. And so we coordinated with the government institutions and the evictions of the 140-odd families in the area of the Reserve were carried out in coordination with our government institutions. That is why I was telling you that we have no problems with the relationship between the police and the Army and the government and the indigenous communities. And this was an example, a demonstration that yes, we work, we coordinate, we articulate with government institutions. The eviction of these families that had invaded that territory, that area, those 140-odd families, was carried out.

And then, what did we do? Then, their representatives arrived to say yes, we recognize that these are your lands, we respect that, but we want to live there, we want to return, we want to go back. But what was the basic idea? Really to give indigenous peoples the opportunity to decide what they want, how they want to administer their territory. And on that score the government has never denied that. On the contrary, it has said, well, you are free, decide what you want, if you want to, are you going to lease your territory or do you want eviction? An example, right?

And what was done? Immediately the territorial assembly was summoned to know what the decision was. A consultation was made to know the consent of the communities, what they thought about this case. Immediately, 23 communities gathered from that territory. And the communities said well, we want our territory to be cleaned up, but more in the complex zones, where I mentioned, where they no longer allow free circulation because there are zones in the buffer zone, which are being treated differently and there is a different spirit and type of dialogue with the peasants as well. As I was saying… they remain, but under an agreement with the owners of the territories. Some can stay, some cannot, but always maintaining that balance of dialogue, peace and tranquility because what everyone wants is to avoid the type of violent situation that happened in Alal.

These are the strategies that are being used. So, remediation is not only ordering evictions, dialogue is also part of it. And it also has to do with the process of reviewing indigenous properties. For example, there are rural families who once went and bought indigenous lands and went to register them in the property registry of the region, but they cannot, the law says no, it is not allowed, it is illegal. So remediation is also part of that, reviewing all the documentation and if people went and register it when it was indigenous land, well, a revocation is made.

This is also part of the remediation, it is part of the reordering of the territories. So maybe the position of someone like Lottie who goes around saying that the remediation is not being done or that such and such is being done, is not correct. Each person manages their discourse as they please, according to their interests. And we and our people say what we are seeing, what we are living, what we are experiencing, what we are living in the communities. Our vision is different because we are living the experience ourselves. So one can go around with a legal document and it can be made out to mean anything… really…

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Almost immediately after his inauguration, President Joe Biden began creating new government dictates via executive orders. Many of these executive orders concern coronavirus, fulfilling Biden’s promise to make ramping up a coronavirus-inspired attack on liberty a focus of his first 100 days.

One of Biden’s executive orders imposes mask and social distancing mandates on anyone in a federal building or on federal land. The mandates also apply to federal employees when they are “on-duty” anywhere. Members of the military are included in the definition of federal employees. Will citizens of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where US troops are or will be “spreading democracy” be happy to learn the troops shooting up their towns are wearing masks and practicing social distancing?

Another one of Biden’s executive orders forces passengers on airplanes, trains, and other public transportation to wear masks.

Biden’s mask mandates contradict his pledge to follow the science. Studies have not established that masks are effective at preventing the spread of coronavirus. Regularly wearing a mask, though, can cause health problems.

Biden’s mask mandates are also an unconstitutional power grab. Some say these mandates are an exercise of the federal government’s constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. However, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to regulate interstate commerce. The president does not have the authority to issue executive orders regulating interstate commerce absent authorization by a valid law passed by Congress. The Founders gave Congress sole law-making authority, and they would be horrified by the modern practice of presidents creating law with a “stroke of a pen.”

Just as important, the Commerce Clause was not intended to give the federal government vast regulatory power. Far from giving the US government powers such as the power to require people to wear masks, the Commerce Clause was simply intended to ensure Congress could protect free trade among the states.

Biden also signed an executive order supporting using the Defense Production Act to increase the supply of vaccines, testing supplies, and other items deemed essential to respond to coronavirus. The Defense Production Act is a Cold War relic that gives the president what can fairly be called dictatorial authority to order private businesses to alter their production plans, and violate existing contracts with private customers, in order to produce goods for the government.

Mask and social distancing mandates, government control of private industry, and some of Biden’s other executive actions, such as one creating a new “Public Health Jobs Corps” with responsibilities including performing “contact tracing” on American citizens, are the type of actions one would expect from a fascist government, not a constitutional republic.

Joe Biden, who is heralded by many of his supporters as saving democracy from fascist Trump, could not even wait one day before beginning to implement fascistic measures that are completely unnecessary to protect public health. Biden will no doubt use other manufactured crises, including “climate change” and “domestic terrorism,” to expand government power and further restrict our liberty. Under Biden, fascism will not just carry an American flag. It will also wear a mask.

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Featured image is from The White House Facebook

“Pioneering” American entrepreneurs have waded into the “murky” oil business in Syria, according to a report by the Financial Times which investigated the US oil firm Delta Crescent Energy (DCE). The company was founded by a member of a former member of the US Delta Force who knew the Kurdish leadership — the Syrian Democratic Forces — through the security company he founded, TigerSwan.

In April last year, the US Treasury granted a rare license allowing DCE to sidestep American sanctions on Syria’s oil sector. Question marks have been raised over how this has happened. The founders of DCE are said to have donated to Republican candidates but they have denied using political influence to secure the license. Speaking about DCE’s work in the Kurdish controlled north-east region, Joel Rayburn, US special envoy to Syria said that US officials endorsed the project “because we support trying to get the economy of north-east Syria up and running.”

The FT article raised speculations over why former US president Donald Trump reversed his decision to keep US troops in the region having threatened twice to pull them out of the north-east Syria. Trump’s threat was met with criticism after which he admitted that that troops would remain “only for the oil”.

Pentagon spokesperson Jessica L McNulty was also forced to comment on speculations that US soldiers remained to guard the US oil firm, insisting that the Department of Defence had not been tasked with protecting “DCE or any other private company . . . seeking to develop oil resources in north-east Syria”.

DCE is said to be unlike other major oil firms that have long been involved in pumping crude from the Middle East, including neighbouring Iraq. This unknown outfit’s mission is to explore, refine and export oil from a corner of war-torn Syria controlled by a US-backed Kurdish-dominated militia. “It’s too pioneering; too adventuresome . . . some might say too risky,” the former US ambassador to Denmark told the FT, speaking about DCE’s operations.

Even with the US’ approval, DCE is said to be operating in a murky market. There are question marks over who controls the oil fields and who profits from them. The oil is prized by smugglers, who transport the crude within Syria and to northern Iraq and Damascus, which has awarded development contracts for this oil to Russian companies as a reward for its military ally Moscow. However, the Kurdish administration does not allow either the Russians or the regime direct access to the fields.

The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which controls the region, has “no other choices” but to sell to regime brokers or shadowy traders from northern Iraq, said Abdullah Al-Ghadawi, a journalist originally from north-east Syria. The US is said to have turned a blind eye to the $3 million a day oil that’s sold on the black market.

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Featured image: A view of an oil field in Syria, 19 July 2018 [Adnan Alhusen/Anadolu Agency]

Scientists warn of ongoing global insect abundance losses and say we lack a full understanding of invertebrate extinction causes and synergies. Action to curb extinction rates desperately needed: Studies.

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Chances are, the works of the world’s insects touch your lips every day. The coffee or tea you savor, both are insect pollinated. Apples, oranges, cabbages, cashews, cherries, carrots, broccoli, watermelon, garlic, cinnamon, basil, sunflower seeds, almonds, canola oil — all are insect pollinated. Honey, dyes, even some vaccines require insects to come to fruition.

Vital to the world’s food web, nested in nutrient cycling, and embedded in industries — the closer we look, the more we see insects as vital to maintaining life’s frameworks. Referring to this fact, famed biologist E.O. Wilson wrote in 1987, “[I]f invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt the human species could last more than a few months.”

Which is why the precipitous decline of insects is raising alarms.

Insect populations are being reduced at varying rates across space and time, but on average, the decline in their abundance is thought to be around 1-2% per year, or 10-20% per decade.

“Think of a landowner with a million-dollar house on a river that’s a little bit wild. And they’re losing 10% to 20% of their land every decade, and it’s horrifying. It means that after even a century, you really don’t have anything left,” David Wagner, an entomologist with the University of Connecticut told Mongabay in an interview. That, he says of this comparison, is the danger we now face.

Wagner has just edited a newly released in-depth feature in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Global Decline of Insects in the Anthropocene, in which 56 researchers present scientific studies, opinions and news on insect declines. The journal offers perspectives on the ecological, taxonomic, geographical and sociological dimensions of insect declines, along with suggestions on how we move forward to study and reverse this drain on global biodiversity.

Insect “death by a thousand cuts”

In a perspective piece that leads off the special issue, Wagner and his co-authors address the likely causes of insect decline. The main stressors to insects, they write, are changes in land use (particularly deforestation), agriculture, climate change, nitrification, pollution and introduced species. However, the importance of each stressor and how they interact still puzzles scientists.

“There’s so many good scientists that can’t figure out what the cause is,” Wagner said. He poses the well known honeybee as an example. “I mean, this thing is worth billions upon billions of dollars and we don’t know why it’s having such a hard time. And I think the reason is, it’s death by a thousand cuts… most of these things are hit by four or five pretty important stressors, and they’re acting synergistically.”

The articles that follow that opening essay zero in on the key causes for some of the biggest known losses:

A study by Wagner and Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden, concludes that declines in insect biodiversity and biomass are linked to the intensification of agriculture over the past 50 years.

Research by Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs — both biologists from the University of Pennsylvania who describe themselves as “intense observers of caterpillars, their parasites, and their associates” — focuses on climate change as a stressor. Since the late 1970’s, they write, they’ve watched as insect declines came to the dry forests, cloud forests, and rainforests of Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Conservation Area, as the region was plagued by rising temperatures, increasingly erratic seasons and inconsistent rainfall.

The top figure shows a normal 1980s assembly of moths at the Cliff Top light trap in dry forests of Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Conservation Area. The bottom figure is in the same location in 2019, during the same time in the moon cycle. “This dramatic change in moth density and species richness has now come to represent light trap catches in the  dry forest at the beginning of the rains,” the authors say. Images from Janzen and Hallwachs 2020.

Another study in the special feature, titled, Insects and recent climate change, argues that climate may be playing even more of a role in declines than land use change — which is massive around the planet mostly due to agribusiness expansion. The authors base their climate findings on a Northern California butterflies case study, where declines were severe even in areas suffering little habitat loss. Similar losses within well-protected areas have been detected in Germany and Puerto Rico.

Likewise, butterfly populations in Europe face challenges. In the UK, butterfly numbers have declined by around 50% over the past 50 years, with 8% of known resident species considered extinct. In the Netherlands, upwards of 20% of species have been lost and in Belgium 29%. Researchers suggest habitat loss, habitat degradation and chemical pollution as the primary causes. The authors offer conservation solutions and recommend policy changes to conserve butterflies and other insects — but so far political will has been lacking.

Moving from the winged creatures of the day to night fliers, Wagner and colleagues give an overview of the global state of moth declines. Moths are extremely diverse and cosmopolitan. “For every butterfly that Mongabay readers see during the daytime, there’s 19 species of moths flying around at night,” Wagner revealed.

Although moth numbers have declined in some areas, such as in parts of Europe and Central America, in other, mostly temperate areas, many moth taxa are increasing in abundance. Another study found that the overall abundance of arthropods in the Arctic has increased in recent years. Researchers attribute these increases in insect abundance to climate change, which scientists say has both its species winners and losers. As warmer temperatures march northward, new suitable habitats open up for insects. The consequences of this range expansion — and the conflicts which may occur with plant and insect species already occupying those ranges — have yet to be analyzed.

The oak jewel beetle (Eurythyrea quercus) is one of the most endangered beetle species in Europe and requires old, dry oaks to develop, which are seldom left in the landscape. Photo by Frank Vassen via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Insect declines are emblematic of a larger problem: the earth is in the midst of what some call the “sixth mass extinction.” Birds, amphibians, freshwater mussels, large mammals, all have seen dwindling numbers. The question for entomologists, Wagner said, is whether or not the decline of insects is actually occurring faster than for some other groups, especially because insects are often the direct target of destruction by human, due to pesticide and herbicide use.

Sarah Cornell, a scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), raises a insect-related question relevant to our time: “There might have been many more mass extinctions. It’s just that we only see extinctions with the things that leave a record… things with skeletons… When people [say], ‘we’re entering the sixth mass extinction.’ Okay, well, how do we know that? We might be entering the 17th?…We might make ourselves extinct before we even reach these hallowed glories of the sixth.”

Overshooting planetary boundaries

Clearly, the loss of insect abundance — depending on where and how fast it occurs — could have far more dire, unforeseen impacts than the loss of coffee or cashews. Wholesale transformation of global ecosystems, triggering mass insect declines, could be pushing the Earth past what scientists have dubbed as a “planetary boundary.”

The planetary boundaries framework, postulated by a group of international scientists in 2009, attempts to set the environmental limits within which life can safely function, and asks the question: how much human-caused disturbance can the planet take without shifting into a new and/or riskier state?

According to a 2016 analysis, humanity has passed the “safe” planetary boundary threshold for “biotic intactness” a measure of functional and genetic diversity (biodiversity). Biotic intactness has declined across at least 65% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, the authors say, especially in grasslands and biodiversity hotspots.

“The way that people (that’s us…) are using land is changing the capacity of ecosystems to continue doing their normal functions,” said Cornell, an SRC global change researcher who worked on a 2015 update to the planetary boundaries framework. “This pattern of lost biodiversity is undermining our own longer-term well-being.”

A conehead mantis (Empusa pennata) in Portugal. Because of its low-density distribution, this species is rarely found in the wild. Photo by Frank Vassen via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Insect declines will very likely get worse before they get better, Wagner warns, as climate change — a critical planetary boundary — worsens rapidly, and as both human population and human consumption skyrocket, resulting in greater land use change and increasing pollution — two other planetary boundaries.

Importantly, the Global Decline of Insects in the Anthropocene special feature identifies critical gaps in our knowledge. For starters, we have only scratched the surface of identifying and describing the planet’s existing insect biodiversity. Entomologists are working aggressively to advance our understanding via deep learning and computer vision — using a variety of cameras and sensors — and ambitious initiatives such as a plan to inventory and DNA barcode the entire biota of Costa Rica over the next ten years.

You can help save the world’s insects

The new feature doesn’t only sound the insect alarm, it also offers many suggestions about how to conserve and protect these tiny invertebrates. International, national and corporate policymaking needs to happen, and quickly.

In the final piece, researchers lay out, “eight simple actions that individuals can take to save insects from global declines.” One action urges people to convert lawns, or any green outside space, into more diverse natural habitats.

Monarch nectaring on swamp milkweed (A. incarnata) in Idaho. Monarch populations have declined dramatically and the species is now qualified for listing under the US. Federal Endangered Species Act. Photo courtesy of Stephanie McKnight / Xerces Society.

The paper recommends growing native plants; using less herbicides and pesticides; limiting the use of exterior lighting; lessening runoff created when washing vehicles and buildings; working to counter negative perceptions of insects; educating others about insects; and getting involved in local politics, supporting science, and voting.

“I think if we all did it together… it would make a very big difference,” Akito Kawahara, lead author of the eight simple actions paper told Mongabay. “Even just the lawn thing… taking a little tiny piece of your lawn and converting it to a natural habitat… the impact that a small piece of space can have on the grand scale is enormous.” Butterfly gardens and other such spaces also enrich our lives and offer educational opportunities for awakening natural wonder in children.

“These insect papers, the focus on the small things, is a really delightful return to thinking ecologically,” Cornell told Mongabay. “It’s not all about counting stuff. How many insects? How many extinctions? But rather we need to ask, how is this world changing?”

In a world with unchecked insects declines, the answer may be: more than we dare to imagine.

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Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay. Find her on Twitter @lizkimbrough

Source

Wagner, D. L., Grames, E. M., Forister, M. L., Berenbaum, M. R., & Stopak, D. (2021). Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(2).  doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023989118

Featured image: The rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) is endangered throughout its range in North America. Photo by Jill Utrup/USFWS (CC BY 2.0)

The US Congress has recently passed the so-called Tibetan Policy and Support Act (TPSA) – slipped into a COVID-19 relief package and a 1.4 trillion dollar government spending bill, US State Department-funded Voice of America reported in their article, “US Congress Passes Landmark Bill in Support of Tibet.”

The article would claim:

The US Congress on Monday passed a bill that is expected to upgrade US support for Tibetans in key areas, including sanctioning Chinese officials if they try to appoint the next Dalai Lama.

VOA would also report that:

It will pave the way for the US government to issue economic and visa sanctions against any Chinese officials who interfere with the succession of the Dalai Lama, and will require China to allow Washington to establish a consulate in Lhasa — the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region – before Beijing can open any more consulates in the US.

VOA quoted the exiled “Central Tibetan Administration” (CTA) – who commended the US move. Little was mentioned about how problematic this US support was for an exiled political movement that cannot and does not represent the actual people living inside China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.

The bill is a blatant act of US interference in China’s internal affairs – and the continuation of over half a century of such interference by the US in Tibet in particular.

Washington’s Long History of Meddling in Tibet  

This most recent move by Washington adds to a long and sordid history of meddling in Tibet, China.

The US State Department’s own Office of the Historian includes in its online collection a 1968 document titled, “Memorandum for the 303 Committee,” with the subject noted as, “Status Report on Tibetan Operations.”

It discusses “the CIA Tibetan program, parts of which were initiated in 1956,” which includes, “political action, propaganda, paramilitary and intelligence operations.” The document mentions the Dalai Lama and commitments made to him by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

It also discusses a “nucleus of new young leaders” as well as “widespread sympathy for the Tibetan cause,” all deliberately engineered results of the US government’s deep investment in Tibetan separatism.

The document also admits to – even then – a full spectrum propaganda campaign pushing for Tibetan independence.

It claims:

In the political action and propaganda field, Tibetan program objectives are aimed toward lessening the influence and capabilities of the Chinese regime through support, among Tibetans and among foreign nations, of the concept of an autonomous Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lama; toward the creation of a capability for resistance against possible political developments inside Tibet; and the containment of Chinese Communist expansion—in pursuance of US policy objectives stated initially in NSC 5913/1.2 [6 lines of source text not declassified].

And that is precisely what the US government has been doing ever since – for decades – manifesting itself most recently in the form of the “Tibetan Policy and Support Act.”

The US National Endowment for Democracy – created by the US government in the 1980s, funded annually by US Congress, and overseen jointly by the US Congress and the US State Department – lists at least 17 programs it is funding regarding Tibet.

They include groups like the “International Tibet Independence Movement” and  “Students for a Free Tibet” – two organizations openly promoting separatism regarding China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.

Other programs – like “Empowering a New Generation of Tibetan Leaders” and “Campaigning and Leadership Training” – are direct continuations of programs described in documents archived by the US State Department’s Office of the Historian, carried out by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s.

The fact that the US NED is now carrying out the work previously and admittedly carried out by the CIA regarding Tibet lends further credibility to claims by critics of the US government’s foreign policy like William Blum who noted that the whole purpose of the NED was to “do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.”

US interference in Tibet is just one part of a much wider strategy by Washington of containment, provocation, encirclement, and the undermining of China both within Chinese territory and surrounding it.

Washington’s  propaganda campaign against China regarding its western region of Xinjiang continues, as does attempts to place pressure on China regarding its successful attempts to restore order in Hong Kong.

Various US-sponsored color revolutions continue to brew within the borders of close allies of China – including across Southeast Asia – and in nations like Thailand in particular. “Pro-democracy” protesters in Bangkok’s streets had in recent weeks become increasingly anti-Chinese in nature – openly linking themselves to opposition groups in Hong Kong and regularly flying the separatist flags of both Tibet and Xinjiang’s Uyghur extremists.

The US Senate had passed a resolution openly siding with the anti-government protesters in Thailand who are also backed by US NED-funded organizations – some of which make up the anti-government movement’s core leadership.

Tying it all together is the US State Department’s meddling all along South East Asia’s Mekong River which actually originates in Tibet. VOA’s article even mentions this, stating:

…the TPSA addresses Tibetan human rights, environmental rights, religious freedoms and the democratic Tibetan government in exile. It also calls for a regional framework to water-security issues, following years of concerns from environmental activists and neighboring countries that ambitious Chinese hydropower projects are diverting water, threatening regional ecosystems.

The scale and interwoven nature of Washington’s anti-Chinese campaign – thus – is not confined to a sole point of pressure in Tibet. Tibet is just one of many interconnected pressure points the US is using against China. As China reacts – the US and its still large and capable media network portrays this reaction as “aggression” and even “expansion” – omitting any mention of Washington’s initial and continuous provocations.

The question remains whether Washington’s hard and soft political power can truly compete with China’s brand of international relations focused instead on economic trade, infrastructure projects, and the sale of military hardware minus the entangling political subordination required by Washington in order to do business.

And if the answer is that Washington’s foreign policies cannot compete – what steps will it take next as its power continues to fade globally, and China’s power continues to fill the voids it leaves behind?

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Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

Featured image is from NEO

The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, according to new research.

And the findings also reveal that the Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017 –  equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 metres thick covering the whole of the UK.

The research is the first of its kind to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data.

Scientists led by the University found that the rate of ice loss from the Earth has increased markedly within the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tonnes per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tonnes per year by 2017.

Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on.

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios.”

The findings of the research team, which includes the University of Edinburgh, University College London and data science specialists Earthwave, are published in European Geosciences Union’s journal The Cryosphere.

Funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the research shows that overall, there has been a 65% increase in the rate of ice loss over the 23-year survey. This has been mainly driven by steep rises in losses from the polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.

Lead author Dr Thomas Slater, a Research Fellow at Leeds’ Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said: “Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.”

Dr Slater said the study was the first of its kind to examine all the ice that is disappearing on Earth, using satellite observations .

He added: “Over the past three decades there’s been a huge international effort to understand what’s happening to individual components in Earth’s ice system, revolutionised by satellites which allow us to routinely monitor the vast and inhospitable regions where ice can be found.

“Our study is the first to combine these efforts and look at all the ice that is being lost from the entire planet.”

The survey covers 215,000 mountain glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans.

Rising atmospheric temperatures have been the main driver of the decline in Arctic sea ice and mountain glaciers across the globe, while rising ocean temperatures have increased the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. For the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice shelves, ice losses have been triggered by a combination of rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures.

During the survey period, every category lost ice, but the biggest losses were from Arctic Sea ice (7.6 trillion tonnes) and Antarctic ice shelves (6.5 trillion tonnes), both of which float on the polar oceans.

Dr Isobel Lawrence, a Research Fellow at Leeds’ Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said:

“Sea ice loss doesn’t contribute directly to sea level rise but it does have an indirect influence. One of the key roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space which helps keep the Arctic cool.

“As the sea ice shrinks, more solar energy is being absorbed by the oceans and atmosphere, causing the Arctic to warm faster than anywhere else on the planet.

“Not only is this speeding up sea ice melt, it’s also exacerbating the melting of glaciers and ice sheets which causes sea levels to rise.”

Half of all losses were from ice on land – including 6.1 trillion tonnes from mountain glaciers, 3.8 trillion tonnes from the Greenland ice sheet, and 2.5 trillion tonnes from the Antarctic ice sheet. These losses have raised global sea levels by 35 millimetres.

It is estimated that for every centimetre of sea level rise, approximately a million people are in danger of being displaced from low-lying homelands.

Despite storing only 1% of the Earth’s total ice volume, glaciers have contributed to almost a quarter of the global ice losses over the study period, with all glacier regions around the world losing ice.

Report co-author and PhD researcher Inès Otosaka, also from Leeds’ Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said:

“As well as contributing to global mean sea level rise, mountain glaciers are also critical as a freshwater resource for local communities.

“The retreat of glaciers around the world is therefore of crucial importance at both local and global scales.”

Just over half (58%) of the ice loss was from the northern hemisphere, and the remainder (42%) was from the southern hemisphere.

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Featured image: Ian Joughin – channel created by the flow of melted ice in Greenland; Greenland glacier.

Every year, we fight a battle on the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On one side is the U.S. state. Forced to offer a concession to the middle-class elements of the Black civil-rights movement in the form of a birthday observance for Dr. King, the state has suspended Dr. King from the movement that produced him and reduces his legacy to banal statements made by Black misleaders like Barack Obama, which only reinforce the fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism.

On the other side is the Black resistance movement. We counter with a Dr. King in transition, one who was being influenced by the analysis and politics of the radical Black Liberation Movement that was grounded in the realities of the urban and rural working classes and poor.

In this annual ideological battle, those of us attempting to define Dr. King’s legacy highlight one of his statements because of its poignance and continued relevance: He said the United States is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

After elements of the Black Liberation Movement (the real BLM) spent years opposing the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism in general, Dr. King finally broke with the pro-war Democrats, embraced an economic-justice program with the Poor People’s Campaign, and openly questioned the viability and ethical legitimacy of capitalism.

And in making that declaration during a Democratic Party administration, liberal Democrats, members of the civil-rights community, the press and almost every major institution in U.S. society—including most faith-based organizations—turned against Dr. King. This pivot in Dr. King’s politics likely cost him his life. When he was murdered, polls showed Dr. King was one of the most unpopular people in the country.

Liberals hated Dr. King then—as they likely would have hated him today if he was still alive—because he exposed their hypocrisy and collaboration with state violence. Today, they probably would condemn or most likely attempt to ignore Dr. King, who we can imagine would point out how in less than 48 hours after the Biden administration assumed power, 1) more U.S. troops were deployed to Syria, 2) NATO announced plans to expand its presence in Iraq, and 3) the violent U.S. campaign to undermine the right of the Venezuelan people to determine their political leadership, free from external interference, is being continued.

We speculate Dr. King would have to ask the question about how one can claim to be opposed to something one calls “fascism” in the United States, while supporting fascist political movements in Bolivia, Honduras, the right-wing opposition in Venezuela, the Saudi attack on Yemen, and the brutal occupation of Palestinians—just to name a few.

King likely would raise those questions today. But, in reality, he also supplied the answer close to 54 years ago:

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

That radical revolution of values did not happen. The spiritual rot at the center of U.S. culture only worsened with the politics and policies of the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. We are compelled to act because we are certain these policies will continue with the Biden administration.

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) is adamant we will not allow the U.S. peace and anti-imperialist movement to disarm and demobilize ever again. We are not confused. We know the legitimation crisis of neoliberal capitalism will deepen and the reliance on force and repression—including ideological repression—will increase.

We are preparing and urge you to do so, too. Peace and human rights are threats to the rulers. But they are our only means for survival, and so, we must be prepared to fight for them.

Please join us to discuss this contradiction during our next webinar, “The Challenge of Radical Black Movement Building In the Context of Crisis: An Intergenerational Discussion,” to be held January 26. Register here.

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Featured image is by Mr. Fish/truthdig

In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, They Rejected Lockdowns

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, January 25 2021

Shutting down an economy flatly contradicts a founding principle of the WHO: “Economic development and public health are inseparable and complementary… the social, cultural and economic development of a community, and its state of health, are interdependent.”

Eurostar Train Near Collapse, Asks for Bailout, Becomes Hot Potato

By Nick Corbishley, January 25 2021

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.

The Will to Believe: Americans and Their Divine Masters

By Edward Curtin, January 25 2021

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.

Human Civilization and the Recreation of Wilderness

By S. M. Smyth, January 25 2021

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?”

The ‘Humanitarian’ Left Still Ignores the Lessons of Iraq, Libya and Syria to Cheer on More War

By Jonathan Cook, January 25 2021

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.

Biden and the Democrats will Sow Chaos in Latin America

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, January 25 2021

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.

Joe Biden’s Policy on Israel Isn’t “Transformative” or “Decent”

By Rima Najjar, January 25 2021

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.

German Court Rules that COVID-19 Lockdowns Are Unconstitutional

By Great Game India, January 25 2021

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.

The UN Prohibits Nuclear Weapons and What Does Italy Do?

By Manlio Dinucci, January 25 2021

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.

The Biden Presidency: Business as Usual or a New Departure?

By Dr. Leon Tressell, January 24 2021

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. 

A Life Saving Hope or Death Defying Jab? Three Perspectives on the Experimental COVID Vaccine

By Michael Welch, Mary Holland, and Dr. Meryl Nass, January 24 2021

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.

A Totalitarian Regime Is Coming to America? Or Is It Just an Old Ball Game?

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal, January 25 2021

Dutch-Jewish historian Jacques Presser remarked as early as 1947: “Fascism, should it ever return, will undoubtedly present itself in the guise of anti-fascism.” Having watched the surreal inauguration, the Green Zone in Baghdad popped up.  The occupation in Washington was called Red Zone.

The Responsibility to Disarm and the Nuclear Ban Treaty

By Ramesh Thakur, January 25 2021

n 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.

Keep Swinging for Justice and Freedom: The Legacy of Hammerin’ Hank Aaron

By John W. Whitehead, January 24 2021

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Dutch-Jewish historian Jacques Presser remarked as early as 1947: “Fascism, should it ever return, will undoubtedly present itself in the guise of anti-fascism.” Having watched the surreal inauguration, the Green Zone in Baghdad popped up.  The occupation in Washington was called Red Zone.

Almost 30.000 troops occupied the city, protecting the ruling class from their own people. The “most popular President,” who can’t simulate mental acuity, was inaugurated behind a huge electric fence without any real people present, except some hundred handpicked members of the political class.

This flagged event has been reinterpreted by one of the propagandists from CNN, Don Lemon; he twisted the truth like CNN always does, saying,

“The reason President-elect Biden has to do this is that he’s just so incredibly popular. He has so many rabid fans that they might try to rush the stage as they’re overcome with enthusiasm and love for Biden, who is by far the most beloved candidate who has ever run for President.”

Kim Jong-un would love having such a guy in his propaganda crew.

Much lesser troops are still occupying Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria! The “crowd” was “represented” by 200.000 mini US flags along the Mall. Biden phraseology sounded like Obama’s only amateurishly and less eloquently. Obama finally got his third term.

Most of the so-called new people served under Obama. Susan Rice, who controls Biden’s domestic policy, will execute Obama’s divisive and identity policy, which contributed partly to the US’s dire situation.

Source: Ludwig Watzal

The Harris/Biden administration will wage a domestic war against 75 million “political-incorrect people” (Trump voters), together with the CIA, FBI, the big tech, the billionaire class, Wall Street, and the propaganda mainstream media as moral enforcers.

Biden used divisive language disguised in “unity” rhetoric such as “White Supremacists,” “Terrorists,” “Nationalists,” et cetera, who violated our “values.” Did he mean the “values” of the 1 percent and their political puppets?

The new regime uses the outburst of People Power on Capitol Hill, where many bozos broke some windows, as a pretext for a purge and a crackdown of 75 million Trump voters. Inciters from Black Lives Matter, such as John Early Sullivan and other agents provocateurs, whooped the protesters. It didn’t look like a “coup,” which the Obama administration organized in Ukraine or other places worldwide.

According to Democrats and their media instigators, Trump incited an “insurrection,” calling on people to make the protest “peacefully” and “patriotically” heard! Not a single word in his common rhetoric was inflammatory.

The Democratic Party political establishment in Washington even wants to “impeach” Trump, though he is now a private citizen. That quite a few Republicans rise to the bait demonstrates their needlessness.

Democrats and Republicans are afraid of Trump that they will bend the law to make “impeachment” happen. The new inquisition plans big. All Trump voters have to undergo reeducation training to be deprogrammed and brainwashed with their political-correct ideology.

The Obama 3.0 administration will topsy-turvy the US with their racist and discriminatory identity policy. Now women have to compete with male freaks who pretend they feel female! This insanity is a spit into the face of all women.

Besides this lunacy, Tribalism will return to America. In the future, everything will depend on who you look (black, brown, yellow, or colored, what sexual orientation one prefers, whether one feels discriminated, which bathroom one wants to use, and the rest of the ridiculous traits that are on display by the Harris/Biden people. The US looks like a nuthouse filled with ideological fanatics for an outsider.

The protest of people power on 6 January will serve as a pretext to establish a fascist system, which has been long in the pipeline. It started in summer 2020, when media oligarchs, a bunch of billionaires, and political operatives from the Democratic Party simulated war games against Trump’s “misbehavior.” Mainstream media was complicit and pushed these ideas.

The Harris/Biden administration, together with Pelosi’s and Schumer’s  control

Congress will ram a new “Patriot Act” down the lawmakers’ throat. This “law” will allow the US government to fight “domestic terrorism,” whatever that means. Harris/Biden can now switch between the so-called “Global War on Terror” and “domestic terrorism.” The left big tech and opinion oligopolies replaced class struggle and replaced “anti-fascist” technocratic terrorism. “Antifascism” justifies everything after all!

In fact, the people Biden/Harris hired are the old Obama administration with some new faces, such as the black Secretary of Defense.

They are obsessed with Russia, but not so much with China.

Isn’t the Biden family deeply involved in financial favors from Chinese intelligence? Instead of impeaching the private citizen Donald Trump, Congress should think about impeaching Joe Biden.

There won’t be any “normal,” neither for the American people nor for the peoples around the world. Plans for a “Great Reset” and total control by Big Tech, which plays the role of a “Global Pravda,” are in the pipeline.

Perhaps this American-style Fascism will be more palatable than older versions. But Fascism will remain Fascism, even when it appears as the shining city on the Hill.

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It did not take long for the Lie Machine, aka American media, to create the false news and fake narrative of the “storming of the US Capitol” on January 6 by a “white supremacist insurrection.” 

Here is an example from Bloomberg Weekend Reading on January 23, 2021: 

“The scenes from the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency unfolded against the backdrop of a devastated U.S. economy, continuing fallout from a white supremacist insurrection, and a coronavirus death toll surpassing 400,000.”[1]

The fake narrative is accepted everywhere.  It is endemic in the world press.  Even news sources such as RT and Sputnik which endeavor to give us real news instead of presstitute lies have repeated the insurrection story. 

President Trump was impeached by the House on the sole basis of this fake news story, and now stands to be tried in the Senate on the same fake news charges.  

On the basis of the same fake news story, two Florida banks in which Trump had multi-million dollar deposits closed Trump’s accounts. 

Signature Bank in New York also closed Trump’s account.

As did Germany’s Deutsche Bank.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who permitted Antifa and BLM to loot and burn Manhattan, has terminated the city’s contracts with Trump businesses that run ice skating rinks and a carousel in Central Park and a golf course in the Bronx.

The PGA of America voted  to take the PGA Championship away from Trump’s New Jersey Golf course.

See this.

Other sources report that conventions are avoiding his hotels and that creditors will not renew loans.

That fake news can have such real world consequences should scare every American to death. 

Notice also how the fake news story worsens with each repeat. On January 6, the alleged insurrection was by “Trump supporters.”  By January 23  Trump supporters had been morphed into “White supremacist insurrectionists.”  

The entire world now believes in something that does not exist.

This is an example of what it means to live in The Matrix.  Everyone lives in a false world created by lies repeated endlessly by pressitutes.

The ruling lies are lies that enable Establishment agendas by getting rid of non-establishment explanations and shutting down non-establishment leaders.  Trump had to go because he was in the way of Establishment agendas.  An example is being made of Trump as a lesson to others who value service to the people higher than service to the Establishment.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Trump won reelection.  The accumulated evidence of electoral fraud is overwhelming.  Yet the Lie Machine was able to prevent the evidence being presented and examined.  All the presstitutes ever said was that “there is no evidence of fraud,” followed by “all who support examining the evidence are enemies of democracy.”  

In other words, democracy is a stolen election.  If you protest the theft, you are an enemy of democracy. 

On December 29, 2020, almost two months after the November presidential election and after almost two months of demonization of Trump for saying the election was stolen, the Gallup Poll reported that its survey found that Donald Trump had displaced Obama as the man most admired by Americans.  See this. Yet the most admired man lost the election.

The fact that a presidential election could be stolen in plain view, attested to by numerous experts and a thousand signed affidavits, could go unexamined by the media, state and federal attorneys general, courts, and Congress, shows the power of the Establishment and the impotence of the media which, far from free, is in total service to the Establishment. The public never heard about the evidence from TV, newspapers, or NPR.

Clearly, in America there is no such thing as democracy.  An election was stolen and nothing was done about it.  The Establishment was able to eliminate a president who did not serve its purposes and nothing was done about it.  

The people learned that their vote means nothing and, therefore, there is no democracy. A government controlled by the Establishment is unaccountable to the people.

Perhaps there is a silver lining. It has been a long time since government policy served the public.  The public accepted the situation, because most people believed it was in some way a democratic outcome.  Now they know that “American democracy” was nothing but a mask for Establishment self-interests.  Perhaps the stolen election will serve as a wake-up call to bring the population out of its insouciance.  There are signs that the Establishment is concerned that it will, thus the new domestic terrorism bill which will be used to criminalize dissent as terrorism.

For those who are indoctrinated by media repetition that “there is no evidence of electoral fraud,” let’s assume this lie is correct.  The fact remains that the system has failed the people.  Whether the election was stolen or not, 74 million Americans according to the official vote count and 94 million Americans according to expert estimates of Trump’s true vote count believe that the election was stolen.  Yet, the concerns of these millions of Americans were dismissed out of hand as fraudulent claims.  The presstitutes claimed repeatedly that the only fraud was the claim of fraud.

The Democrats, the media, and the institutions put in place to ensure a free society failed totally in their responsibility to address the sincere concerns of half or more of the voting population.  This in itself is a failure of democracy, a failure of the Establishment. 

Those who expressed their concerns were not only dismissed but also demonized, threatened and punished as “enemies of democracy.”  

The lesson cannot be more clear:  An enemy of democracy is all who challenge the controlled explanation.  

The US enters the year 2021 as a country that has moved from the list of democracies to the list of authoritarian governments and is rapidly becoming a totalitarian country in which freedom of speech, freedom of association, and due process are dead letter Constitutional protections.  The Gestapo knock at the door, the NKVD knock at the door have come to America.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy.

Note

[1] Notice that this is a two for one sentence.  Bloomberg got in the fake news of 400,000 US Covid deaths.  This figure comes from counting everyone who dies regardless if from Covid, as a Covid death.  The Covid test produces a very high rate of false positives, thus greatly exaggerating the number of infections.  Many experts have pointed this out as did the inventor of the PCR test, but presstitutes have kept a lid on the news.  Now the World Health Organization has finally admitted that the Covid-19 PCR test has a problem. https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-finally-admits-covid-19-pcr-test-problem/5735107 

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The Asian flu of 1957-58 was a deadly pandemic with a broader reach for severe outcomes than Covid-19 of 2020. It killed between 1 and 4 million people worldwide, and 116,000 in the US in a time with half the population. It was a leading contributor to a year in which the US saw 62,000 excess deaths. 

Globally, it might have been five times as deadly as Covid-19, as measured by deaths per capita. It was unusually lethal for younger people: 40 percent of deaths had occurred among people younger than 65, whereas the average age of death Covid-19 is 80 with only 10-20% of deaths under the age of 65.

What’s striking is how public health officials handled the pandemic. It had a diametrically opposite response than policymakers pursued in 2020. One might assume that this was due to negligence and a lack of sophistication in understanding the need to lockdown. Surely they didn’t know 65 years ago what we know today!

Actually, this is completely false. Public health experts did in fact consider school closures, business closures, and a ban of public events but the entire ethos of the profession rejected them. There were two grounds for this rejection: lockdowns would be too disruptive, disabling the capacity of medical professionals to deal competently with the crisis, and also because such policies would be futile because the virus was already here and spreading.

Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity, the period in which the Asian flu had the most severe consequences was only three months. Newspapers barely covered it and most people did not notice it. Histories of the period hardly mention it whereas the early history of 2020 will talk primarily about the virus and the lockdowns. This is due not to the pandemic but to the brutal pandemic policy response.

The best single article on the 1957-58 Asian flu policy response is “Public Health and Medical Responses to the 1957-58 Influenza Pandemic” by the great epidemiologist Donald A. Henderson and others among his colleagues at Johns Hopkins. It appeared in 2009 in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science. It is embedded at the end of this article.

The article is crucially important because it proves that not locking down was a deliberate decision, not some kind of failure. The refusal to disrupt society and constrain freedom in the presence of a pathogen was an achievement of modern ideas of public health. From the ancient world through the 19th century, the typical response to disease was to attribute it to corrupt air and to run away while demonizing and excluding the sick. Modern medical advances – with the discovery of viruses and bacteria, antibiotics, antiviral therapeutics, and the workings of the human immune system – counseled community calm and doctor-patient relationships.

The most influential public health body at the time was the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers (ASTHO). They met on August 27, 1957. They concluded that they should recommend home care as much as possible to keep the hospitals from overcrowding. They would instruct people to seek medical attention if symptoms become severe.

Otherwise, ASTHO concluded as follows:

‘‘there is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease.’’

In particular, schools were not closed because public health experts observed that the children would just pick up the virus elsewhere. “The Nassau County Health Commissioner in New York,” observes Henderson, “stated that ‘public schools should stay open even in an epidemic’ and that ‘children would get sick just as easily out of school.’”

We’ve heard incessantly that Covid-19 necessitated lockdowns because it is a new strain for which there was not a vaccine. Well, the Asian flu was already new and there was no vaccine either. By the time one came along, it was only 60% effective and not widely used. Henderson comments: “it is apparent that vaccine had no appreciable effect on the trend of the pandemic.”

Perhaps we had to lock down due to asymptomatic cases? Not true. Henderson notes of the Asian flu: “Attack rates in the schools ranged from 40% to 60%. Serological surveys revealed that half of those reporting no influenza illness showed serological evidence of infection.”

To be sure there were disruptions. They happened not by force but by necessity due to absenteeism. They were short-lived. The millions of people exposed to the virus developed antibodies and moved on. This was true of schoolchildren in particular:

“School absenteeism reached its maximum with 280,000 absences on October 7. This amounted to 29% of all school attendees. The highest rate was registered for Manhattan schools, which had an overall 43% absentee rate. That day, 4,642 teachers (11%) did not report to work due to being sick. Business establishments, however, reported no significant increase in absenteeism. Within 2 weeks after the peak, school absentee rates were almost back to normal—around 7%.”

Newspaper reports at the time offer no record of widespread public event cancellations much less forced closures. Sometimes college and high school football games were postponed due to illness absences. Some conventions were cancelled by organizers. But that is all.

The New York Times’s single editorial on the Asian flu reflected public health wisdom: “Let us all keep a cool head about Asian influenza as the statistics on the spread and the virulence of the disease begin to accumulate.”

Henderson concludes as follows:

The 1957-58 pandemic was such a rapidly spreading disease that it became quickly apparent to U.S. health officials that efforts to stop or slow its spread were futile. Thus, no efforts were made to quarantine individuals or groups, and a deliberate decision was made not to cancel or postpone large meetings such as conferences, church gatherings, or athletic events for the purpose of reducing transmission.

No attempt was made to limit travel or to otherwise screen travelers. Emphasis was placed on providing medical care to those who were afflicted and on sustaining the continued functioning of community and health services. The febrile, respiratory illness brought large numbers of patients to clinics, doctors’ offices, and emergency rooms, but a relatively small percentage of those infected required hospitalization.

School absenteeism due to influenza was high, but schools were not closed unless the number of students or teachers fell to sufficiently low numbers to warrant closure. However, the course of the outbreak in schools was relatively brief, and many could readily return to activities within 3 to 5 days. A significant number of healthcare workers were said to have been afflicted with influenza, but reports indicate that hospitals were able to adjust appropriately to cope with the patient loads.

Available data on industrial absenteeism indicate that the rates were low and that there was no interruption of essential services or production. The overall impact on GDP was negligible and likely within the range of normal economic variation.

Health officers had hopes that significant supplies of vaccine might become available in due time, and special efforts were made to speed the production of vaccine, but the quantities that became available were too late to affect the impact of the epidemic. The national spread of the disease was so rapid that within 3 months it had swept throughout the country and had largely disappeared.

One reads this detailed account of how public health responded then compared to now and the response is to weep. How could this have happened to us? We knew for sure that lockdowns were terrible public health. We’ve known it for 100 years.

Shutting down an economy flatly contradicts a founding principle of the World Health Organization: “Economic development and public health are inseparable and complementary… the social, cultural and economic development of a community, and its state of health, are interdependent.”

In 1957-58, public health officials took that observation seriously. This very serious flu came and went with minimal social and economic disruption. Immune systems in the US and around the world adapted to the new strain of the flu.

Then ten years later, a new mutation of this flu arrived. Public health responded the same way, with wisdom, calm, and no interventions in people’s rights and liberties. Social and economic functioning were rightly seen as crucial to a comprehensive view of public health.

Lockdowns were ruled out in the past precisely so that the damage of a pandemic would be minimized and we could get through it more quickly. This was the science. This was the science all the way through the spring of 2020, when everything changed. Suddenly the “science” favored forgetting everything we’ve learned from the past and replacing it with brutal policies that wrecked the economy and people’s lives, while achieving nothing in terms of minimizing pandemic damage.

We had foisted on us an entirely new vocabulary designed to disguise what was being done to us. We weren’t under house arrest, our businesses smashed, the schools shuttered, live arts and sports abolished, our travel plans wrecked, and forcibly separated from loved ones. No, we were merely experiencing “disease mitigation” through “targeted layered containment,” “nonpharmaceutical interventions,” and “social distancing.”

This is all Owellian with traditional public health wisdom having been tossed down the memory hole. The actual science did not change. Traditional public health implores us to consider not just one pathogen but all variables that impact health, not just in the short run but in the long run too. So it was and so it is today.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.

Featured image is from AIER

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.