Global Research

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the last three presidents, for example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Propagandists are smart people.

They hate freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shahbazz Afzal is an independent writer and political activist.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Intercept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

Featured image is from Palestine Solidarity Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qureshi added,

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

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

Austin said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the original:

And here is the edited version:

From ICAN’s website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: GreatGameIndia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviving the JCPOA

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Longer and stronger agreement’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured image is by Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More via AP:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) January 22, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too Much Power Concentrated In The Hands Of A Few Sociopaths 

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

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

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

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

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

The Political System Rewards the Most Insane People 

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

Lack of Accountability 

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

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

The Deep State

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

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

Secrets and Lies 

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

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

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

Official Secrets and National Security are (mostly) propaganda 

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

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

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

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

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

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

Notes 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Mullin, A Very British Coup, 1982

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domestic problems will take precedence

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

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

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

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

In its recent analysis Foreign Policy noted that:

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

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

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

The Domestic Situation

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

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

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

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

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

Wealth Transfer

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

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

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

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

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

Debt Mountain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$15 Minimum Wage

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

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

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

Eat the rich: wealth inequality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden’s Backers

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

Biden reassured his rich donors in comforting tones:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action to address unemployment and hunger

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healthcare under Biden

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

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

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

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

“Instead, it adopts proposals from health insurance lobbying groups’ recent letter to lawmakers demanding lucrative new subsidies for insurance companies, at a moment when those corporations have recorded record profits as millions lose coverage and many face claims denials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prospects for the future

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

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

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

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

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

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Featured image is by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islamic State

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

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

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

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

The US occupation forces

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

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

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

Popular Mobilization Units

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

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

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

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

The Iraqi government and parliament

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

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

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

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

Regional countries statements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He began playing baseball as a shortstop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You wanted to add an ‘amen.’ ”

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

“Thank God it’s over.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mourn his loss like many others.

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Reset Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You choose.

This article was first published by The Saker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secretive Plan to Shut Down the Internet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Eric Sommer is an international journalist living in China.

Featured image is from InfoRos

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

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

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

adding:

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

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

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

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

On January 13, Trump was impeached again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public assembly and free expression are constitutionally guaranteed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The latter standard defines how US governance operates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

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

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

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

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

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured image is from The White House Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither success story happened overnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred stated,

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

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the public domain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spot the difference.

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

Transparency International ratings for Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Looting of Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The great diversion

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

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

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

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

Disappearing defence funds and weaponry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction

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

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

The stolen and squandered “reconstruction” funds

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

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

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

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

The Development Fund for Iraq

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

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

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

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

Blocking and weakening the UN Supervisory Board

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

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

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

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

Airfreight of dollar bills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failed reconstruction by the major construction firms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cost of “Security”

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

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

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

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

Ousted Minister of Electricity Defends Himself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corruption of the Iraqi government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(…) Maliki’s cabinet is part of the problem, the report said:” The Prime Minister has shown openly hostility to independent corruption investigations. His government has withheld operational resources from the CPI, the report said, and “there are a number of clear cases where governmental and political pressure have been used to change the results of investigations and prosecutions in favour of members of the Shia alliance” – which includes Maliki’s Dawa party.

(…) Maliki has also protected corrupt officials by reintroducing a law that prevents the prosecution of an official without the consent of the minister of the relevant agency.

(…) In another note obtained by The Nation – marked “Confidential and Secret” – in early 2007[55], Maliki’s cabinet ordered the Commission on Public Integrity not to send any case to a judge regarding the president of Iraq, the Prime Minister of Iraq, or any current or past minister without Maliki’s prior consent. According to the US embassy’s report on anti-corruption efforts, the government’s hostility to the CPI went so far as to lead visitors to a pornographic site for a time through the CPI link on the official Iraqi government website.

(…) CPI staffers were “accosted by armed militias within ministerial headquarters and denied access to officials and the administration.” They and their families are systematically threatened. Some sleep in their office in the Green Zone. In December 2006, a sniper fired three shots from the roof of an Iraqi government building in the Green Zone at CPI headquarters. Twelve CPI personnel were killed on the job.

Iraqi Militias Embrace Corruption

The first demand in the largest mass protests experienced by Iraq in October 2019 was to fight official corruption. But, anxious to protect the interests of the system of corrupt religious and sectarian parties, the government of former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, unleashed Iraqi militias, affiliated with Iran, on the peaceful protesters and killed +700 protesters and wounded + 20,000 more.

The militia leaders have joined the ranks of Iraq’s richest men, becoming famous for buying upscale restaurants, nightclubs and opulent farms on the Tigris.

Robert F. Worth reported in the New York Times on July 29, 2020: “The militias have been aided and abetted by a new Iraqi political class whose sole ethic is self-enrichment. Over the years, this cross-sectarian cabal has mastered scams at every level: routine checkpoint shakedowns, bank fraud, embezzling from the government payroll. Adel Abdul Mahdi, who was hailed as a potential reformer when he became Iraq’s prime minister in 2018, hoped to subordinate the militias to the state. Instead, they outmanoeuvred and overpowered him. His cabinet included people with ties to some of the worst graft schemes afflicting the country.

The United States is deeply implicated in all this, and not just because its serial invasions wrecked the country and helped ravage the economy. America provides the money that sustains it, even as U.S. officials wink at the self-dealing of Iraqi allies. The Federal Reserve of New York still supplies Iraq with at least $10 billion a year in hard currency from the country’s oil sales. Much of that is passed on to commercial banks, ostensibly for imports, in a process that was hijacked long ago by Iraq’s money-laundering cartels. At the same time, the United States inflicts punishing sanctions on two countries — Iran and Syria — with which Iraq shares notoriously permeable borders. It is the ideal breeding ground for corruption.”[56]

On September 3, 2009, the New York Times reported that a gang of robbers tied up eight guards in the Zuwiya branch of the Rafidain bank in Baghdad and shot them on the spot with muffled guns. They ran off with at least two full wagons of cash worth $ 4.3 million dollars. They didn’t have to worry about the police, because in that area they were the police themselves. Among them were several bodyguards of Adel Abdul Mahdi, who was the Prime Minister of Iraq from October 2018 until May 2020, he was Vice President of Iraq from 2005 to 2011 and served as Finance Minister in the Interim Government and Oil Minister from 2014 to 2016 .

World Bank Assessment of Iraq

In 1996, the World Bank established its Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), which have become the standard by which to measure government management in developing countries. The WGI consists of six indicators of governance dimensions used in more than 200 countries since 1996: voting rights and accountability, political stability and absence of violence / terrorism, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and corruption control.

• Voting Rights and Accountability: The extent to which the citizens of a country can participate in the selection of their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association and free media. This is Iraq’s best-performing governance indicator and reflects the formal freedoms and rights constitutionally guaranteed, as well as the electoral process. Nevertheless, Iraq was in the lowest category worldwide in 2018.
• Political Stability and Absence of Violence: The perception of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including domestic violence and terrorism. Here, Iraq’s performance is among the lowest in the world, ranked in the lowest percentile category in 2018.
• Government effectiveness: the quality of public services, the quality of public service and the degree of independence from political pressure, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies. Iraq was in the lowest category in 2018.
• Regulatory Quality: The government’s ability to provide sound policies and regulations that enable and promote private sector development. Iraq also scored here in the lowest category in 2018.
• Rule of law: adhere to the rules of society, including the quality of contract enforcement and property rights, the police and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence. Iraq’s performance is even worse in this case, in the lowest category of 3 percentiles in 2018.
• Corruption control: the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both minor and large-scale forms of corruption, as well as the ‘capturing’ the state by elites and private interests. Iraq scored in the lowest category in 2018.

When a Finance Minister Speaks About Corruption of His Own Government

The presentation by Professor Ali A. Allawi on 2-4 March 2020 in Berlin[57] is enlightening. Ali Abdul Ameer Allawi is an Iraqi politician who served as Minister of Commerce and Defence in the cabinet appointed by Iraq’s Interim Board of Governors from September 2003 to 2004, and then Minister of Finance in Iraq between 2005 and 2006 transitional government. Allawi was appointed as Finance Minister in Mustafa Al-Kadhimy’s cabinet in May 2020, so he can be called an unsuspected source, even if he was an integral part of previous corrupt governments and thus part of the problem. Will he be able to stop the watershed of corrupt practices? Iraqi protesters don’t think so. When you board a golden carriage and alien drivers determine the direction, you have two choices: either stay in the carriage and follow the drivers’ course or disembark. That’s why the protest movement wants to abolish the whole US-imposed political system and an end to foreign interference.

Here are some excerpts from his presentation:

“The chaos, arbitrariness and shallowness of the CPA’s “reforms” created the perfect platform to thrust Iraq into the lowest ranks of corrupt countries. These conditions were further exacerbated by the Iraqi governments that took over the mismanagement of the country since 2004.

The removal of the upper tiers of the bureaucracy for their Baathist affiliations created a leadership vacuum in the bureaucracy. This was filled by lower grade civil servants who were either incompetent, under-equipped for the task, or who had been sidelined by the previous regime for malfeasance or negligence.

Careless and chaotic packing of the government agencies by cronies and hangers-on of the new political class created a new layer of bureaucrats who had little or no training in modern administrative practices, duties, and constraints.

Job-hungry exiles returned in the tens of thousands with expectations of government posts and sinecures. A psychology of entitlement to government perks was a concomitant to their periods of exile.

Chaos, arbitrariness, incompetence, self-dealing, and plain ignorance characterized economic policy-making, further exacerbating the confused drift of the government and creating ample opportunities for unscrupulous and corrupt people to take advantage of the prevailing disorder. Rent-seeking by businessmen, government officials, ministers, and foreign adventurers became the assured path to enrichment. The main driver behind decision-making for the economy, at least in the public sector, was the frenzy for economic rents. Needless to say the distortions and costs to the economy grew in leaps and bounds. The new political class, many of whom had spent years in impecunious exile and in degrading circumstances were determined to have their period of suffering requited by feeding at the public trough- Leaders of this new order were equally determined to amass personal fortunes through their control over key ministries and government agencies. Whatever controls on corrupt practices had existed prior were severely weakened by a frightened and confused bureaucracy, a broken judicial system and the general degradation of the ethics of dealings and transactions- The old sanctions-busting criminal and business networks reasserted themselves often in partnership with the new political class, thereby creating a strong incentive to maintain the “crisis” economy of Iraq. A “perfect storm” that favoured the stratospheric rise in corruption evolved in the 2004-2019 period. In spite of the astounding levels of plunder, not a single senior official has been indicted, tried and then jailed for corrupt practices. The only one who had come near to it, a former Minister of Electricity, was incarcerated for a few days and then sprung from jail by a US-sanctioned jail break organized by the Black Water Co! The former Minister of Trade was placed under house arrest after being indicted on a minor administrative infringement.

Examples of corruption practices by the Iraqi government from 2003 to the present.

The Integrity Commission, the agency charged with monitoring and sanctioning corrupt practices, is itself prone to corruption in the form of extortion and blackmail of targeted culprits. Nevertheless, the heads of the Commission constantly complain of their inability to go after miscreants because of political protection. The Integrity Commission has literally thousands of cases of proven corrupt practices which have lingered in its files with no legal action.

• 2004-2009: Corruption in the imports of oil products Loss of about $1-$1.5 billion through overpricing and undersupplying
• 2014-Present: Corruption in the supply and trade of heavy fuel oil. Loss of about $ 400 million per annum
• 2006-2010: Corruption in the Ministry of Defense purchases of military equipment from the former Warsaw Pact countries: Loss of about $300 million
• 2009: Corruption in the Ministry of Interior in the supply of bomb-detection equipment: Loss of about $200 million through serious overcharging (useless equipment costing about $60 per piece sold for $16,000 each; Source: New York Times)
• 2008-2014: Corruption in the Ministry of Transport: Purchase of Bombardier aircraft, opaque port terminal licenses, truck transport contracts: Loss of about $500 million
• 2004-2019: Municipality of Baghdad: Major water works and sewerage contracts; land transfers and sales: Loss about $2,500 million
• 2004-Present: Ghost workers in government ministries, mainly the Ministry of Defense and Interior: Loss of about $250 million per annum
• 2004- 2010: Ministry of Sports; Alleged corruption in the building of stadiums
• 2004- 2016: The Haj and Umra Bureau; Alleged corruption in the procurement of travel and lodging services to pilgrims
• 2004 Present: Corruption in the supply of fertilisers and seeds by the Ministry of Agriculture
• 2004 Present: Corruption in the medicines procurement agency of the Ministry of Health, Kimadia.: Losses reach about $200 million per annum
• 2010 Present: Corruption in the award of hospital construction projects
• 2006 Present: Sustaining a large gap between official exchange rates for current account transfers and parallel market rates of between 3% 8%. Approximately 10% of currency purchases “round trip” between the official and parallel rates totalling about $750 million per annum in corruptly inspired leakages.

There is alleged corruption in the procurement of loans, advances and guarantees from all the state-owned financial institutions such as Rafidain Bank, Rashid Bank, and the TBI

There is alleged corruption in the land dealings of the religious endowments (Awqaf) and the transfer and sale of state land controlled by the Ministry of Finance

The opaqueness of the production-sharing contracts awarded by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to foreign oil companies masks a very probable carried interest to the major political figures of the KRG. The figures, if substantiated, will run in the billions.

In one of the most egregious acts of self-dealing, legally covered by their inclusion in the annual budgets, are the salaries and perks that the political class (parliamentarians, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Office of the President) has awarded itself

The costs of maintaining an Iraqi PM is one of the highest in the world (about $ 500 million per annum). The budgets of the Office of the Prime Minister reaches $900 million, most of which is excluded from line accounting; for the Presidency, the figure is about $400 million. In total, the 400 odd members of Iraq’s political class have awarded themselves about $2 billion per annum. The reform measures undertaken recently in 2014 and 2015 could have reduced this figure.

There is little doubt about the costs of institutional decay and corruption to the growth and development of the Iraqi economy.

The qualitative effects of loss of self-esteem, cynicism, mistrust, and a sense of pervasive injustice are equally great if not greater

Perhaps the greatest loss is the near-terminal decline of the informal rules and codes of conduct, mostly derived from the country’s ethno- religious traditions. These had made it possible to deal and transact in those very long periods in Iraq’s history when there were inadequate safeguards from the judicial system and the political authority”

Dual citizenship fosters unlimited fraud

Each of the 275 Iraqi MPs receives a monthly salary of approximately US $ 17,000 and has 30 bodyguards. Each minister earns more than US $ 30,000 monthly, the Prime Minister $ 60,000 and the President $ 75,000, excluding other “expenses,” according to the Iraq National Audit Office (2018 figures).

Many ministers from the various Iraqi cabinets since 2004 have the British nationality, such as (ex) Prime Minister Haider al Abadi and the (ex) Iraqi president Fuad Masoum, or are of Iranian nationality, such as al-Maliki, Ali al-Adeeb, ex-Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Hadi al-Amari, former Iraqi Minister of Transport and head of the Badr organization, military wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), also commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces.

Other senior Iraqi officials hold dual citizenship, including Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi (France), former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and former Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari (UK) and Speaker of Parliament Saleem al-Jibouri (Qatar). Of the 66 Iraqi ambassadors, 32 have dual citizenship, as well as an estimated 70 to 100 MPs.

Then there are the ministers in the current Iraqi government with a Western background: Mohamed Ali Alhakim – Minister of Foreign Affairs (UK and US), Fuad Hussein – Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister (Netherlands and France), Thamir Ghadhban – Minister of Oil and Deputy Prime Minister (UK)

Many officials accused of corruption by Iraqi authorities have fled the country to escape persecution thanks to their foreign passports, including former ministers Abdul Falah al-Sudani (trade), Hazim Shaalan (defence) and Ayham al-Samarrai (electricity).

Najah al-Shammari serves as the current Defense Minister in Adel Abdul Mahdi’s government from 2019. He is a Swedish citizen who is part of Mahdi’s cabinet. The minister is under investigation for benefit fraud for claiming housing and child benefits from Sweden, according to online news site Nyheter Idag and Swedish newspaper Expressen. He is being charged in Sweden with ‘crimes against humanity’.

President Barham Salih is a British citizen. A complaint was lodged against him by ‘Defending Christian Arabs’, who asked the Solicitor General in Scotland to open an investigation against him for’ authorizing crimes against humanity or being complicit in the widespread attack on civilian demonstrations in Scotland. Iraq that resulted in mass murders, injuries, illegal arrests and kidnapping ”.

Where Does the Money Go?

There are no robust statistics on the accumulated proceeds of corrupt practices since 2003 in Iraq.

Estimates of assets held abroad by Iraqis range from a minimum of $ 100 billion to $ 300 billion. The vast majority of these assets were acquired illegally. These figures are corroborated by discussions with Integrity Committee officials, along with estimates derived from inferences. Senior Lebanese bankers and Banque du Liban officials indicate that there was approximately $ 20 billion in deposits from Iraqis in Lebanese commercial banks at the start of the October 2019 banking crisis. These have now been effectively frozen within the Lebanese banking system. It’s a reasonable estimate to infer that there is a similar figure for Iraqi assets in Jordan. The other main Middle East destination of corrupt Iraqi funds is Dubai. It is very likely that a significant portion of Iraqi corrupt funds have been invested in real estate in Dubai, both residential and commercial. An often mentioned figure of the total amount of such funds is close to $ 25 billion.

A smaller percentage of Iraq’s corrupt funds are placed with Turkish banks and invested in Turkish real estate. It is very likely that this amount has increased significantly in recent years, partly due to the number of Iraqis now living in Turkey and of Turkish nationality. Other Middle East destinations for corrupt Iraqi funds are Kuwait and Egypt, but less than the four major countries mentioned before.

Outside the Middle East, London is the most important location. Iraqi corrupt funds finding refuge in the UK have been transferred from other locations in the Middle East. Money laundering and UK rules are very robust for banks and agents alike, but until recently, the identity of overseas funds earmarked for real estate investments in London escaped this scrutiny.

The total amount of funds invested by Iraqis in real estate in London is difficult to estimate. Real estate agents have reported that Iraqi funds have been deployed in large quantities in the residential property market in London. Entire floors of new-build apartments in London’s Nine Elms neighbourhood and other residential areas have been acquired by Iraqis directly, through nominees or through offshore companies. A good estimate of Iraqi corrupt funds invested in London real estate could be around $ 10 billion.

Switzerland is also a haven for Iraqi corrupt funds, but it is somewhat limited due to the high cost of holding a Swiss bank account and the lack of awareness of the new class of Iraqi ‘businessmen’ with the benefits of Switzerland. A very senior Swiss banker stated off the record that his bank alone holds about $ 1 billion in Iraqi funds.

Another destination for corrupt Iraqi funds is the USA. A large number of dual nationality Iraqis worked in various business ventures in Iraq and benefited from corrupt practices. In general, US citizens are not subject to the strict money laundering rules that apply to other nationalities when opening or managing bank accounts in the US. It has proven relatively easy for dual Iraqi / US citizens, who have been charged with corruption charges in Iraq, to ​​avoid freezing or seizing their assets in the US.[58]

The year 2019 saw the formation of a Supreme Anti-Corruption Council to take preventive measures to curb corruption. However, Moussa Faraj, the former chief of Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, revealed to an Iraqi publication that corruption starts at Iraq’s executive branch, and that this Anti-Corruption commission is extrajudicial and will not put an end to corruption. He said that MPs and government officials often intervened in and inhibited the work of independent bodies that stood in the way of their personal gain. This is seen through bribes, blackmail, blocking litigation, the incorrect placement of independent bodies under ministerial authority instead of parliamentary, etc. This is a flagrant violation of the rule of law – a clear demonstration that MPs, lawmakers, and decision-makers at every level engage in practices that seemingly place them above the law.[59]

Give Iraq Back to the Iraqi People

Iraqi MP Haider al-Mulla stated in an interview for As-Sumariya TV on January 16, 2013: “Allow me to tell you the following…. The entire political class and I repeat, the entire political class in Iraq, of which I am also a part, has their finances and those of their families very well organized so that they do not have to suffer when blood runs through the streets. The unfortunate population, on the other hand… ”

Mishan al-Jabouri, one of Iraq’s anti-corruption leaders said in a February 2016 interview: “There is no solution. Everybody is corrupt, from the top of society to the bottom. Everyone. Including me. At least I am honest about it. I was offered $5m by someone to stop investigating him. I took it, and continued prosecuting him anyway.”[60]

Corruption, the waste of government resources and the purchase of military equipment have increased Iraq’s budget deficit from $ 16.7 billion in 2013, $ 20 billion in 2016 to $ 23 billion for fiscal year 2019. And of course the IMF comes to the rescue and stands multi-billion dollar loans that make the country even more dependent on the US and other foreign creditors.

Should it come as a surprise that Iraq is witnessing a deficit of $ 43.9 billion in the 2021 budget? Should it come as a surprise that Iraq, as a middle-income country, isn’t capable of providing its people with the most basic necessities, like education, healthcare, housing, water, electricity….?

In March and April 2019, an extensive opinion poll carried out across Iraq found that the population were only united by very high levels of pessimism about the future of their country. At the centre of their concerns, and the key factor in driving mistrust, is the issue of corruption. In the poll, 82 per cent of Iraqis were concerned or very concerned about corruption at the highest levels of government; 83 per cent perceived corruption to be getting worse. It appears clear: politically sanctioned corruption among senior politicians and civil servants is systematically undermining popular faith in the Iraqi government and destroying the legitimacy of its leaders in the eyes of the population.[61]

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that the whole political and economic system, imported by the USA after the 2003 invasion, has to be reversed, because it was illegally imposed upon the Iraqi people and it serves only the Western interests and enriches the US installed Iraqi stooges. Perhaps it’s time to support the Iraqi uprisings against the unbridled corruption and foreign interference. Perhaps it’s time to give Iraq back to the Iraqis.

Dirk Andriensens is a renowned author, peace activist and criminologist, coordinator of SOS Iraq, member of the Executive Committee of the BRussell’s Tribunal, Belgium.  He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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Notes

[1] https://tribune.com.pk/story/2279259/iraqs-century-of-humiliation-in-the-globalised-age

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4353491.stm

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20050524205830/http://www.worldtribunal.org/main/?b=1

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-10-years-how-baghdad-became-city-corruption-8520038.html

[5] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/former-iraqi-pm-nouri-al-maliki-allegedly-siphoned-off-500bn-8-years-1526096

[6] http://dinarvets.com/forums/index.php?/topic/74763-a-quarter-trillion-dollars-the-size-of-corruption-in-iraq/

[7] https://www.yenisafak.com/en/world/iraqi-panel-says-2397-bln-smuggled-outside-iraq-3557960

[8] https://thearabweekly.com/kadhimi-going-after-big-fish-anti-corruption-crackdown

[9] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/iraqi-panel-says-2397-bln-smuggled-outside-iraq/2097655

[10] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/unicef-iraq-humanitarian-situation-report-idp-crisis-end-year-2020

[11] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/humanitarian-action-children-2021-iraq

[12] https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-iraq-is-rapidly-becoming-the-region-s-next-failed-state-1.9425548

[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/18/world/a-nation-challenged-the-president-bush-sets-role-for-us-in-afghan-rebuilding.html

[14] https://www.gicj.org/iraq_conference_speeches/Dr_Alkazaz_Presentation.pdf

[15] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/07/iraq.features11 

[16] Iraq Revenue Watch, Report No. 7, Disorder, Negligence and Mismanagement: How the CPA Handled Iraq Reconstruction Funds (September, 2004) p. 2. The contracts at issue were those over $5 million in value.

[17] James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton et al. “The Iraq Study Group Report” Vintage Books, New York (December 2006) p. 22

[18] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meters-cost-iraq-billions-in-stolen-oil/  

[19] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/fuelling-suspicion-coalition-and-iraqs-oil-billions

[20] http://www.twf.org/News/Y2005/0714-Money.html

[21] https://corpwatch.org/article/mystery-missing-meters-accounting-iraqs-oil-revenue

[22] https://www.iraq-businessnews.com/2011/05/13/iraq-lags-on-oil-metering/

[23] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/world/struggle-for-iraq-new-looting-jordan-s-scrapyards-signs-looted-iraq.html

[24] https://archive.commondreams.org/scriptfiles/headlines05/0204-23.htm

[25] https://corpwatch.org/article/iraq-fraud-weapons-deals-drained-1-billion

[26] http://blackkrishna.blogspot.com/2005/08/811-theres-no-rebuilding-no-weapons.html

[27] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/crucial-iraq-police-academy-a-disaster/

[28] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6076834.stm

[29] https://www.news.com.au/world/billion-missing-from-iraq/news-story/e6201af80c120a6f72afc195d1bc5041 

[30] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/the-failed-reconstruction-of-iraq/274041/

[31] https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/47/2/177/519163

[32] https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/977ABA699FB1D8E1852572F400648580-globalpolicyforum-waroccupationiraq-june2007.pdf

[33] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

[34] https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/977ABA699FB1D8E1852572F400648580-globalpolicyforum-waroccupationiraq-june2007.pdf

[35] https://www.dpc.senate.gov/dpcdoc.cfm?doc_name=sr-111-1-116

[36] https://www.dpc.senate.gov/dpcdoc.cfm?doc_name=sr-111-1-116

[37] https://web.archive.org/web/20150929035703/http://www.brusselstribunal.org/SaiebKhalil240811.htm

[38] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/19/post-war-iraq-corruption-oil-prices-revenues

[39] https://hhi.harvard.edu/publications/english-version-never-forget-views-peace-and-justice-within-conflict-affected

[40] https://www.gicj.org/NOG_REPORTS_HRC_22/educationsystem.pdf

[41] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iraq-paralyzed-by-corruption/

[42] https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/241120191

[43] https://www.france24.com/en/20191124-in-protest-hit-iraq-parties-cling-to-lucrative-posts

[44] https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/iraq/

[45] https://www.transparency.org/files/content/corruptionqas/Country_profile_Iraq_2015.pdf

[46] https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/100820191

[47] https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/iraq/

[48] https://thearabweekly.com/kadhimi-going-after-big-fish-anti-corruption-crackdown

[49] https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarianresponse.info/files/2019/07/IOM-Iraq-Perceptions-on-Women%27s-Economic-Opportunities-in-Urban-Areas-of-Iraq–Motivations-and-Mechanisms-to-Overcome-Barriers.pdf

[50] https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CESCR/Shared%20Documents/IRQ/INT_CESCR_CSS_IRQ_21658_E.pdf 

[51] https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/transparency-accountability-integrity-new-agreement-help-combat-corruption-iraq-enar

[52] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/10/corruption-continues-destabilize-iraq

[53] https://www.giswatch.org/en/country-report/internet-and-corruption/iraq

[54] https://borgenproject.org/10-facts-about-corruption-in-iraq/

[55] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-report-corruption-norm-within-iraqi-government/

[56] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/magazine/iraq-corruption.html

[57] http://iraqieconomists.net/en/2020/05/19/the-political-economy-of-institutional-decay-and-official-corruption-the-case-of-iraq/

[58] http://iraqieconomists.net/en/2020/05/19/the-political-economy-of-institutional-decay-and-official-corruption-the-case-of-iraq/

[59] https://eaford.org/site/assets/files/1132/the_rule_of_law_in_iraq.pdf

[60] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/19/post-war-iraq-corruption-oil-prices-revenues

[61] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/10/corruption-continues-destabilize-iraq

“I believe that people should be aware that side effects can happened, that it is not good for everyone and in this case destroyed a beautiful life, a perfect family, and has affected so many people in the community. Do not let his death be in vain please save more lives by making this information news.” – Heidi Neckelmann, wife of Dr Gregory Michael, whose death was attributed to the Pfizer COVID vaccine.

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The vaccine for COVID is here.

While being told or left with the opinion it is the only relief to the burdens imposed over the last year, these new doses coming from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna arrived as a warm Christmas present for the locked down and masked masses.

As of 9:00am on January 22, fully 19,107,959 Americans had gotten at least one shot. More are planning to line up and take their dose in time. However, there are some reported difficulties with the MRNA Mimosas that could pose concern down the line.

In addition to a perfectly healthy 56 year old physician based in Florida who died after receiving Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, there was a story of a 41 year old woman in Portugal who died two days after getting the vaccine. And there was a 75-year-old Israeli man who had a heart attack only two days after receiving his dose.

In California, the State’s top epidemiologist, Dr Erica S Pan requested a halt on the huge batch of the Moderna vaccine on the grounds that it left people with “higher-than-usual number of possible allergic reactions.”

And in Norway, doctors have been advise to re-assess frail and terminally ill patients in the COVID inoculation crew after 33 elderly patients died shortly after the Pfizer-BioNTech injection.

Dr. William Wodarg and Dr. Michael Yeadon put out a petition in early December to call off all SARS-CoV-2 vaccine studies until a study design was put in place to address concerns about the vaccine and the inadequate study design behind it. The lack of testing the drug on animals, the lack of time to study the long-term effects, the accentuated process of an exaggerated immune reaction to a real or wide virus in a process known as antibody-dependent amplification (ADE), and the polyethylene glycol in the vaccine, a substance to which 70% of people have allergic and possibly fatal reactions, are just some of the concerns under consideration.

But COVID is a matter of life and death! According to some, heroic moves to rescue them with a cure cannot be held back on account of uncertain episodes.

The Global Research News Hour this week endeavours to explore the issue with three individuals all with somewhat different views and vantage points about the harm caused by these Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna potions.

First up, Dr. Meryl Nass returns to the show outlining what authorities did to endanger patients with the Emergency Use Authorization legislation and the virtually helpless situation they endure if they do get vaccine injured. Second, Dr. Allison McGeer shares her views spotlighting the necessity of supplying the drug in a timely manner and the dangerous consequences of giving in to vaccine hesitancy in the ‘Age of COVID.’ Finally, Mary Holland, a representative of the Children’s Health Defense, spelled out her reasons for disagreeing with the use of the vaccines, given what we know about them so far, and states her objections to what she sees as censorship plaguing her group.

Meryl Nass M.D. is a General Internal Medicine Physician with 40 years of experience. She is an epidemic and anthrax expert and composes a series of blogs for the site Anthrax Vaccine as well as Global Research. She’s based in Ellsworth, Maine.

Allison McGeer M.D. is a specialist in internal medicine and is a Canadian infectious disease specialist in the Sinai Health System, She has led investigations into the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Toronto and worked alongside Donald Low. During the COVID-19 pandemic, McGeer has studied how SARS-CoV-2 survives in the air.

Mary Holland is the vice chair and general counsel for Children’s Health Defense.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 303)

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Transcript – Interview with Dr. Allison McGeer, Jan. 19, 2021

Global Research: Should the COVID vaccine be banned in the face of numerous instances of allergic reaction and death?

Dr. Allison McGeer: The answer to that is absolutely not. You know, the…when we introduce new vaccines or start using new vaccines we are very, very careful about safety surveillance. And so that means that whenever we see something, okay, question of increased allergic reactions in California, appears to be associated with blood batch, batch gets pulled, until we sort it. It’s probably not anything important, it’ll probably go back in. But we just don’t know that.

In Norway, there have been a number of deaths in long-term care after vaccine introduction. My understanding from accounts is it’s actually less than the expected number of deaths in long-term care for that period of time. So it is entirely appropriate that people report them, that they investigate them that they ask whether there’s any potential association with the vaccine because we need to be very careful.

But it’s almost certainly true that in Norway those are expected deaths that occur when you vaccinate frail, elderly residents in long-term care, unfortunately, their case fatality rate from all sorts of diseases is relatively high. And so it’s unlikely that any of those will turn out to be associated with vaccine.

Norway has not stopped its vaccination program. It’s just recommended that a little bit of caution in elderly residents on long-term care specifically in the same way that the UK advocates caution with people who’d had anaphylactic reactions to previous vaccines initially, but now with more experience with knowing that the risk of anaphylaxis, well it’s not zero – never is with vaccine or for that matter with any medication you take – but it’s low enough that people don’t need to be worried about it any longer.

So we can expect with a new, very large vaccine program rolling out, that because of the extreme caution that we apply to new vaccines there’s going to be temporary holds on things there’s going to be lots of investigations. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the vaccine at all. And it certainly in this circumstance doesn’t mean that taking the vaccine is not the safer of two choices.

We tend to think that, “okay I’m choosing whether or not to get the vaccine.” But that’s not actually the choice. The choice is “I am choosing to get vaccinated or I am choosing to live exposed to COVID-19.” And living exposed to COVID-19 is not a risk free thing to do. COVID-19 is a dangerous virus. Three thousand people a day are dying from it in the United States. And so it’s a balance. You know, which is a riskier thing to do, get the vaccine or get COVID. And no question from the data we have at the moment. For a great many adults, particularly older adults, getting the vaccine is the safer option.

GR: Are they adequately being warned of this risk? I mean if they could get anaphylaxis or possibly even a remote chance of dying before they take this (vaccine) and they can decide would you rather have the vaccine or would you rather have COVID.

AM: Yes, I think the answer is yes. Whenever we give somebody a vaccine it should come with adequate information. I think there’s been lots of discussion which has been very useful about allergic reactions to vaccine. A lot of information about how (inaudible) they are. I think…anytime

that a health care provider offers you medication for people…a health care provider of any sort offers you any intervention whether it be medication or vaccine or manipulation or injections there should always be a discussion about risk benefits and people should be making an informed choice. And I would hope that that’s what people are doing with respect to COVID vaccines.

GR: The first vaccines are involving messenger RNAs. They’ve never been used before. First time that they’re going out. They weren’t using lab animals. The FDA, the Health Canada, they approved it. Is it possible that in some way they’ve operated in haste? They’re so active, so much of a hurry to get this vaccine, that, you know, better a bad vaccine than no vaccine at all. What do you say to that?

AM: Well, we do actually use mRNA vaccines the better name practice, a number of mRNA vaccines that people are using, we’ve been investigating them in humans for a long time. Most commonly in humans they’re used in testing in cancer vaccines so the attempt to vaccinate you against your own cancer cells so that your body will attack and kill cancer. But there are also some mRNA vaccines for influenza, for instance, that are in development, have not been widely in humans, in part because we didn’t expect them to work very well.

So, we can expect to see a lot more mRNA vaccines out there now that we’ve found they’ve worked so well against COVID-19. But they have been subject to exactly the same and very stringent safety assessments that any vaccine comes from our (inaudible) has.

This is not that we have not applied the same safety standards to these vaccines. It’s just that because COVID is out there and because we know how dangerous it is we’ve been careful to do that really quickly so it’s involved a great many people, and a lot of their time, but we haven’t cut corners on any of the safety assessments. These vaccines got tested in animals, they got tested in humans in small numbers initially, they’ve been through the entire usual process for vaccines. It’s just been more quickly than we usually do it.

GR: Two prominent doctors, there was William Wodarg, the former chair of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Health Committee and Michael Yeadon a former chief science adviser they submitted a petition in early December to stop the roll out of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines on the grounds that there were four perceived dangers. They include the formation of non neutralizing anti bodies which could result in exaggerated immune reaction if confronted by the real virus, the antibody-dependent amplification. Also they contain polyethylene glycol to which 70% of people are allergic and could develop a fatal reaction to the immunization. Also the vaccines contain antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins, however, they could trigger an immune reaction to syncyntin-1 which is essential for the formation of placenta in humans and could leave them infertile.

And the short duration of the study does not allow for a realistic assessment of the late effects, as happened a decade ago with vaccinations to H1N1.

European Medical Agency didn’t agree with them. Should they have been? What do you say to those concerns? WAS IT charged TOO SOON OUT OF THE GATES?

AM: So, the answer to that is unequivocally no.

You know, it is true that there are some allergic reactions to that vaccine, but we will know what that number is now, it’s about ten per million doses of vaccine administered. That’s a little bit higher than with some other vaccines, but it’s still very low. It’s still…again in the balancing act though – risk of COVID, risk of vaccine – it does not change that balance at all. So yes, allergic reactions do happen but they are distinctly uncommon and well within the range of making us decide that we should take the COVID vaccine.

The fact that we don’t know how long the COVID vaccine lasts is absolutely true. That is always true when we introduce new vaccines. And in this particular setting, even if the COVID vaccine only lasted for a year, that would be a very significant benefit, you know? That would get us back to normal and then we’d have to get re-vaccinated. Well okay, we get vaccinated against flu every year. You know? We can manage that.

And so if the price of getting our lives back to normal, getting our economy going is getting a shot every year to protect us from COVID, I think most people would be willing to accept that as reasonable. I actually think the evidence suggests now that the vaccine will last considerably longer than that but we will have to see. Nonetheless, every time we introduce a new vaccine, we don’t know how long it’s going to last, okay?

We introduced Hepatitus B vaccine in the 1980s, right? We had no idea how long it was going to last. If we waited to know we’d still be waiting, because the vaccine’s good for a lifetime, okay? So, you have to introduce vaccines and then you have to do the assessment.

It is also true that we don’t know whether this vaccine protects you from asymptomatic infection and transmission, and that is really important if you want to prevent transmission of this disease. But again, if all the vaccine does is prevent serious illness, and doesn’t prevent transmission, that’s not great, but it’s a lot better than nothing and that’ll mean that we’ll switch away from these vaccines ultimately to some other vaccine that does protect you. But if in the meantime all those vaccines do is prevent people from dying from COVID-19 for the six or eight months until we get other vaccines, that’s still well worth having.

GR: That was Canadian infectious disease specialist Allison McGeer.

Transcript – Interview with Mary Holland, January 21, 2021.

Global Research: Since the vaccines have been released there have been a number of severe allergies and even some deaths and your associate The Defender printed them up. Are you…are they related to any of the fears that you had in your list of concerns. I mean, what is a scenario that you foresaw?

Mary Holland: Sadly Michael, it was a scenario we foresaw.

So, the only two COVID vaccines available in the United States, and in Canada and in many countries right now are what are called messenger RNA vaccines. Many people say they should not be called vaccines. They are not traditional, typical vaccines in any way.

Some people say that it should be called simply genetic engineering. This is literally injecting into the human body for the first time in history ever, on very, very radically short clinical trials. Genetic information to tell individual cells to create a protein against which the body will develop antibodies. This is not the traditional technology. The observational period in the clinical trials is about three months. There are many problems with the clinical trials I’d be happy to talk with you about. And so we’re very concerned.

There have been reports of widespread death in the elderly community. So there’s been an attempt to target nursing homes. We have information that there were just thirty three deaths in a Norweigan nursing home. Norway has now called for patients to be assessed on their frailty to see if they’re actually fit for vaccination because this is a very severe immune system event.

China has called for suspension of using the Pfizer vaccine in the elderly population. In New York State, where I’m located, there is a story about a nursing home in Upstate New York that just had over twenty deaths immediately after giving the vaccine. And in there are cases of younger, healthy people. A 56-year-old obstetrician in Florida who died within weeks of getting the vaccine. He developed thrombocytopenia, something that is known as a severe adverse event from vaccination.

A younger woman, 42, in Portugal, died two days after getting the vaccine.

One of the things that we warned about, our founder Robert F Kennedy Jr and our chair, he wrote a letter to the FDA and to the NIH back in March saying we knew that they were going to be using something called polyethylene glycol in the lipid nanoparticle envelopes around the messenger RNA in the Moderna vaccine. And so he wrote to FDA and to NIH saying we know that 80 percent of the population has severe allergic reactions to PEG.

Many, many medications are what they call PEGillated. They contain PEG which is thought to be inert but the research now is suggesting it’s not inert at all. It can cause severe allergic reactions. We know that that’s going to cause anaphylaxis in 80 percent of people and they’re going to die if they don’t get epinephrine. And in fact, we said you have to screen people for PEG sensitivity and that wasn’t done. And immediately after the roll-out of these COVID vaccines in the United Kingdom, what it received: two people with severe anaphylactic shock. And those aren’t the only problems.

The real bottom-line is Michael, they skipped over animal trials, they had about three months of observations in predominantly extra-ordinarily healthy people, they exclude people with co-morbid conditions for political trials, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. But in the short period of time that we’ve already observed these products to be on the market, these mRNA vaccines, the CDC has reported about one in forty two serious adverse events, health outcome events they call it. One in forty two, that’s more than 2 percent. That’s a lot! And we’ve already got sixty-six reported deaths in our adverse event reporting system.

GR: A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital, I mean, she was going over that and she said that a lot of these sorts of instances can be expected because they’re very frail, and if you give one of them a shot, well, you don’t even know that… that the shot was responsible for killing them, according to her, because we got to get these people vaccinated right away. That the risk due to the vaccine is not like the risk due to COVID. So, what do you say to that?

AM: So, what we say to that is this is by its very definition, Michael, this is an experimental use authorization product. It is by its very definition experimental and we subscribe to the Nuremburg Code, the foundation of ethical medicine which says consent of the individual is absolutely essential.

So now in Norway they’re recommending that people who have a short life span ahead of them, they shouldn’t get this vaccine. Why should somebody’s life be cut short just because they’re frail. There’s no reason for that! So I think it’s an individual choice. I think the reality is is that we don’t know all of the adverse effects that are likely from this vaccine, and people are taking a calculated risk.

COVID is treatable! Ivermectin has now been recognized as an appropriate treatment by the FDA. Certainly there’s good science in other countries, not the US but about the hydroxychloroquine being used. Vitamin D deficiency is very closely associated with COVID morbidity and mortality. There are interventions for people who get COVID! The survival rate is in the high 90 percent.

So it’s an individual choice. Do people want to take the risk of taking the vaccine, or do they want to preserve the risk that they might get sick but that there are therapeutics available. That’s an individual choice, given that this is at this point still an experimental prize. .

GR: Do you think that the people are hearing the risk? I mean, anytime somebody, even doctors read…anytime somebody gets a shot, they should be warned of all the risk. Do you think that’s actually happening?

MH: No, I don’t think that people are being adequately given…I don’t think people are given sufficient information. I don’t think people are always being told that this is an experimental use authorization vaccine. It has not been licensed by the FDA. And that it is by its very nature experimental. And there may be known and unknown side effects, including death. I don’t think people are getting that information sufficiently. And that’s what they need to be told. In order to be able to give true, informed consent.

Consent implies that you have enough information on which to base a judgement, and if people are being told, “oh, there’s just going to be a little pinch in your arm but there’s nothing else that can go wrong,” that’s just false information.

GR: I was wondering, could you mention any of the other conflicts that causes your group to have doubts about accepting the vaccine?

MH: Well obviously, for instance the Moderna vaccine, which is the second one on the market in the U.S., it’s a co-production with the National Institute for Health. So this is a public-private partnership. Sadly, there’s an obvious conflict of interest that the government is not eager, likely, to decide that it’s own product is inadequate or is excessively dangerous. That’s an inherent conflict. It’s a very serious one.

Also, like I said, they skipped over animal trials. You know, the observation period’s very short. They didn’t do clinical trials in the target population. One of the target populations is the elderly. People of colour. They didn’t actually have large percentages of people in the clinical trials from those two target groups. So, we have to expect that there are going to be adverse events that we didn’t see in the clinical trial.

And furthermore, very problematic information that’s come to light in the British Medical Journal in the last couple of weeks by the Associate Editor Peter Doshi who did a deeper dive in information that’s just been published about the size of clinical trial by the FDA in four thousand pages, he uncovered that many people had suspected COVID but they didn’t have a matching polymerase chain reaction test that confirmed that COVID…well if you add any of the suspected COVID cases, which are people who have clinical symptoms, you know, fever, achiness, you know, sick, if you add in all of those people, you ended up with an efficacy rate of nineteen percent, or maybe twenty nine percent if you excluded some right after the Vaccination. That’s a world of difference from the ninety five percent efficacy that has been touted around the world.

So, there are just so many questions about this product that has been pushed out in this aggressive manner, as if we know that it’s going to solve the pandemic, when in point of fact we have no clue if it’s going to solve the pandemic.

Also, it was not tested for whether or not it stopped transmission. It was tested for whether it averted mild symptoms. What it’s going to do in terms of stopping transmission we have no idea.

GR: You know, one of the points that were raised in the conversation with Dr. McGeer was the fact that just because somebody gets the vaccine, well we don’t know for sure that they died from the vaccine. I mean there could have been other potential possibilities and that’s possibIe. But, it seems to me that when it comes to COVID, it doesn’t matter how you died. If you had COVID, it was COVID. So that it seems as if there’s a bit of a double-standard there. I mean, I don’t know. What do you think?

MH: I agree with that completely! I mean Dr. Birks from the COVID task force said that, you know, we are going to count anyone who dies with COVID as a COVID death. So literally, if somebody dies in a motorcycle accident because a car ran into them, but they test positive at death or on after death with COVID, that’s characterized as a COVID death.

That’s ridiculous! And yet that is what we have in the United States at least.

GR: Now, one of the other things she said, she talked about how long the COVID vaccine will actually be effective, and she herself said that if it only works against the virus for six or eight months, we may have to go out and get another vaccine. So, we are looking at every year, potentially, unless we’re really lucky, but every year potentially, we could have to go for our vaccine. Do you have any concerns that, not only about the vaccine but having to take it again an again and again?

MH: We have grave concerns about that! So, you know, we do a lot of study and put out a lot of information about the annual flu vaccine. So, this is not comparable, the ones that have come out on the market right now. These are novel technologies, these mRNA. But the flu vaccines we know cause the majority of the injuries in the national vaccine injury compensation program. It’s the majority of injuries that are compensated by the U.S. government.

Flu vaccines, people die from the flu vaccines. If we now have annual COVID vaccines or joint annual flu/COVID vaccines, you can be sure that they will cause injuries. I mean that’s just, you know, it is acknowledged that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. No one knows exactly how the given individual will react to this medication.

You know, we never give prescription medications without examining the individual patient. And yet,

somehow, we imagine that we can give “vaccines,” a particular type of medication, on a one size fits all basis. It doesn’t work that way! It just doesn’t work that way! You actually have to examine the patient to figure out whether this medication is really appropriate for this individual.

And fortunately, the Norwegian health authorities have now said that about COVID vaccine. You need to examine whether this particular patient is fit for vaccination. If they are very frail, they are not fit for vaccination.

GR: A little while ago you mentioned there were alternatives to vaccines. You mentioned things like ivermectin and Vitamin D and so on. But, I mean, surely you have to have…these things have to go through peer review at the very least before you can authorize it. Is that the case? Can we legally go along with this or is there a potentially a down side that has not been explored?

MH: I’m only talking about things that have been robustly peer reviewed Michael. So, the literature on Vitamin D and COVID and other respiratory conditions is robust. This is peer reviewed science. And I’m telling you that the FDA…. I’m sorry…the NIH, the National Institute of Health in the U.S., just issued a statement saying that ivermectin is now considered appropriate for use against COVID. The United States has not embraced hydroxychloroquine, however many physicians and scientists around the world have. And again there is robust peer reviewed science showing that hydroxychloroquine and other chloroquine drugs are effective against COVID.

There’s no such thing as a perfect drug that doesn’t cause side effects in some people. But there are now therapeutics. I mean, the peak of this pandemic was almost a year ago – was March, April of 2020. We’re now not in the peak, and we have discovered effective, you know, combinations of things that seem to work effectively to prevent death and severe cases.

GR: There’s been a tendency on the part of the media to avoid talking about harm, it seems to me. Plenty of pro-vaccination points, but the anti-vaccination point is generally ignored. Could you talk about your experiences dealing with media.

MH: Yes! So, we know that the media has really embraced the narrative of the pandemic and, you know, COVID 24/7, and the deaths and the horror. And we know that they have not published about anything about the therapeutics and have taken a very taken a very jaundiced view towards anyone whose critical in any way about the vaccines or disputing the numbers and so on.

I think it’s a disservice to talk about the anti-vaccine movement. We don’t consider ourselves at Children’s Health Defense to be anti-vaccine. We’re pro-science! We want to see robust science! We want to see robust discourse! We believe you can only arrive at the right conclusion if you have free and open discourse about these issues and you publish all of the science. The media has really fallen down on its job in covering this story about the pandemic from our perspective.

The media has really fallen down on its job in covering this story about the pandemic from our perspective. And because the media has so fallen down, we created at the end of 2020 an online newspaper that comes out five times a week called The Defender. And we are covering the adverse events. And people can put in their comments “we can want to have conversation” so it’s www.childrenshealthdefense.org/defender. And we think that it’s crucial we talk about the adverse event, and we talk about if the vaccine is working great. But we have reservations based on the critical trials and about the suppression of information that’s critical.

GR: Are there any other ways that you’ve been having difficulty in the pandemic era?

MH: Well, we are actively, Michael, we are actively censored! I mean we were thrown off of mailchip. We have been closed down on vimeo. On our facebook page for Children’s Health Defense. We are routinely blocked from putting up certain stories and videos and they are labelled as ‘false.’ So we are battling censorship on a daily basis. Robert F Kennedy Jr our chair has been demeaned and criticized in an Op-Ed in the New York Times and was unable to publish any kind of response. So we are facing very real censorship that is critical.

I grew up believing that in a democracy, the loyal opposition is essential. You cannot get to the right public policy conclusions without robust debate, or the ‘cauldron of debate’ as Robert Kennedy called it. That’s been dismissed! You know now we in sort of the cancel culture world and the idea that censorship is somehow good for the public, you know these ideas are very disturbing.

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Notes:

1. www.facebook.com/heidi.neckelmann/posts/10157817790183977

First published by Global Research on January 9, 2021

We are at war. Yes. And I don’t mean the West against the East, against Russia and China, nor the entire world against an invisible corona virus.

No. We, the common people, are at war against an ever more authoritarian and tyrannical elitist Globalist system, reigned by a small group of multi-billionaires, that planned already decades ago to take power over the people, to control them, reduce them to what a minute elite believes is an “adequate number” to inhabit Mother Earth – and to digitize and robotize the rest of the survivors, as a sort of serfs. It’s a combination of George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”.

Welcome to the age of the transhumans. If we allow it.

Vaccination

That’s why vaccination is needed in warp speed, to inject us with transgenic substances that may change our DNA, lest we may wake up, or at least a critical mass may become conscious – and change the dynamics. Because dynamics are not predictable, especially not in the long-term.

The war is real and the sooner we all realize it, the sooner those in masks and those in social distancing take cognizance of the worldwide “anti-human” dystopian situations we have allowed our governments to bestow on us, the better our chance to retake our sovereign selves.

Today we are confronted with totally illegal and oppressive rules, all imposed under the pretext of “health protection”.

Non-obedience is punishable by huge fines; military and police enforced rules: Mask wearing, social distancing, keeping within the allowed radius of our “homes”, quarantining, staying away from our friends and families.

Actually, the sooner, We, the People, will take up an old forgotten characteristic of human kind – “solidarity” – and fight this war with our solidarity, with our love for each other, for mankind, with our love for LIFE and our Love for Mother Earth, the sooner we become again independent, self-assured beings, an attribute we have lost gradually over the last decades, at the latest since the beginning of the neoliberal onslaught of the 1980s.

Slice by tiny slice of human rights and civil rights have been cut off under false pretexts and propaganda – “security” – to the point where we, drowned in propagated dangers of all kinds, begged for more security and gladly gave away more of our freedoms and rights. How sad.

Now, the salami has been sliced away.

We suddenly realize, there is nothing left. Its irrecoverable.

We have allowed it to happen before our eyes, for promised comfort and propaganda lies by these small groups of elitists – by the Globalists, in their thirst for endless power and endless greed – and endless enlargements of their riches, of their billions. – Are billions of any monetary union “riches”? – Doubtfully. They have no love. No soul, no heart just a mechanical blood-pump that keeps them alive, if you can call that a “life”.

These people, the Globalists, they have sunk so deep in their moral dysfunction, totally devoid of ethics, that their time has come – either to be judged against international human rights standards, war crimes and crimes against humanity – similar as was done by the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, or to disappear, blinded away by a new epoch of Light.

As the number of awakening people is increasing, the western Powers that Be (PTB) are becoming increasingly nervous and spare no efforts coercing all kinds of people, para-government, administrative staff, medical personnel, even independent medical doctors into defending and promoting the official narrative.

It is so obvious, when you have known these people in “normal” times, their progressive opinions suddenly turning, by 180 degrees, to the official narrative, defending the government lies, the lies of the bought “scientific Task Forces” that “advise” the governments, and thereby provide governments with alibis to “tighten the screws” a bit more (Ms. Merkel’s remarks) around the people, the very people the governments should defend and work for; the lies and deceptive messages coming from “scientists” who may have been promised “eternal, endless ladders of careers”, or of lives in a hidden paradise?

What more may they get in turn for trying to subvert their friends’, peers’, patients’ opinions about the horror disease “covid-19”? – Possibly something that is as good as life itself – and is basically cost free for the avaricious rich. For example, a vax-certificate without having been vaxxed by the toxic injections, maybe by a placebo – opening the world of travel and pleasurable activities to them as “before”.

By the way, has anybody noticed that in this 2020 / 2021 winter flu-season, the flu has all but disappeared? – Why? – It has conveniently been folded into covid, to fatten and exaggerate the covid statistics. It’s a must, dictated by the Globalists, the “invisible” top echelon, whose names may not be pronounced. Governments have to comply with “covid quotas”, in order to survive the hammer of the Globalists.

Other special benefits for those selected and complacent defender of the official narrative, the placebo-vaxxed, may include dispensation from social distancing, mask wearing, quarantining – and who knows, a hefty monetary award. Nothing would be surprising, when you see how this tiny evil cell is growing like a cancer to take over full power of the world – including and especially Russia and China, where the bulk of the world’s natural resources are buried, and where technological and economic advances far outrank the greed-economy of the west. They will not succeed.

What if the peons don’t behave? – Job loss, withdrawal of medical licenses, physical threats to families and loved ones, and more.

Screen Shot: NTD, December 16, 2020

The Globalists evil actions and influence-peddling is hitting a wall in the East, where they are confronted with educated and awakened people.

We are at war. Indeed. The 99.999% against the 0.001%.

Their tactics are dividing to conquer, accompanied by this latest brilliant idea – launching an invisible enemy, a virus, a plandemic, and a fear campaign to oppress and tyrannize the entire world, all 193 UN member countries.

The infamous words, spoken already more than half a century ago by Rockefeller protégé, Henry Kissinger, comes to mind:

“Who controls food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

Quoted below are some lines and thoughts of a 1 January 2021, RT Op-Ed article by Helen Buyniski entitled “Civil war, medical discrimination, spy satellites and cyborgs! How 2021 could make us yearn for 2020”. The article may point us in a direction of what may happen in 2021, that we certainly do not yearn for:

“People everywhere are eager to bid farewell to 2020, a year in which our lives were turned upside down by power-mad elites who seized the Covid-19 pandemic as a chance to go full police state.

But be careful what you wish for…. merely putting up a new calendar does nothing to address [the mounting repression and tyranny], which seem certain to reach a breaking point.

Humanity has been pushed to the limit with arbitrary rules, enforced poverty, and mandated isolation — it will only take a spark or two for things to explode.”

And it continues –

”As vaccines are rolled out to the general public, the divide between those obeying the rules and the dissidents will only grow. Those who decline to get the jab will be treated as pariahs, banned from some public spaces and told it’s their fault life hasn’t gone back to normal, just as so-called “anti-maskers” have been.”

And more glorious prospects

“Anyone who isn’t thrilled by the idea of ingesting an experimental compound whose makers have been indemnified from any lawsuits, will be deemed an enemy of the state, even separated from their children or removed from their home as a health risk. Neighbors will gleefully rat each other out for the equivalent of an extra chocolate ration, meaning even the most slavishly obedient individuals could end up in “quarncentration camps” for upsetting the wrong person.”

Yes, we are in the midst of war.

A war that has already ravaged our society, divided it all the way down to families and friends.

If we are not careful, we may not look our children and grandchildren in the eyes, because we knew, we ought to have known what was and is going on, what is being done, by a small dark power elite – the Globalists. We must step out of our comfort zone, and confront the enemy with an awakened mind of consciousness and a heart filled with love – but also with fierce resistance.

If we fail to step up and stand up for our rights, this war goes on to prepare future generations – to abstain from congregating with other people.

They are already indoctrinating our kids into keeping away from friends, school colleagues, peers, and from playing in groups with each other – as the New Normal.

The self-declared cupula – the crème of the crop of civilization – the Globalist evil masters, already compromised and continue to do so, the education systems throughout the globe to instill into kids and young adults that wearing masks is essential for survival, and “social distancing” is the only way forward.

Must see Video

Children of the Great Reset

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ncE5yYQvJY (6 min. video).

Breaking the Social Fabric. Towards Totalitarian Rule

They, the Globalists, know damned well that once a civilization has lost its natural cohesion – the social fabric is broken, the very fabric that keeps a civilization together and dynamically advancing, they have won the battle. Maybe not the war, since the war will last as long as there is resistance. The “dynamic advancing” – or simply dynamics itself – is their nightmare, because dynamics is what makes life tick – life, people, societies, entire nations and continents. Without dynamics life on the planet would stand still.

And that’s what they want – a Globalist dictator, controlling a small population of serfs, or robotized slaves, that move only when told, own nothing and are given a digital blockchain controlled universal income, that, depending on their behavior and obedience, they may use to buy food, pleasure and comfort. Once the slaves are dispensable or incorrigible, their electronically controlled brains are simply turned off – RIP.

This may turn out to be the most devastating war mankind has ever fought.

May We, the People, see through this horrendous sham which is already now playing out, in Year One of the UN Agenda 21 /30;

And may We, the People, the commons, win this war against a power-thirsty elite and its bought administrators and “scientists” throughout the world – and restore a sovereign, unmasked, socially coherent society – in solidarity.

See the following Global Research articles by Peter Koenig on the “The Great Reset” 

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Knows Best – The Post-Covid “Great Global Reset”,

The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” – After “The Great Reset”. A Horrifying Future

Die Post-Covid-Welt, das teuflische Projekt des WEF: „Resetting the Future of Work Agenda“ – Nach dem „Großen Reset“. Eine erschreckende Zukunft

COVID and Its Man-Made Gigantic Collateral Damage: The Great Reset – A Call for Civil Disobedience

Covid-19: The Great Reset – Revisited. Scary Threats, Rewards for Obedience….

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

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

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have spoken. Issuing a remarkable memorandum to all members of the Armed Forces, the JCS have declared that Joe Biden will be the new president of the United States. The memo may have been not only one to military personnel but also to President Trump: No matter how convinced you are that the election was stolen from you, don’t even think about remaining in power because we will ensure your forcible exit from the White House.

Unfortunately, relatively few people, including libertarians, comprehend that the Pentagon, along with the CIA and the NSA and, to a certain extent, the FBI, are the part of the federal government in which ultimate power is being wielded. They are the ones who are ruling the roost in America. That’s why that memo is so important. It’s declaring how things will be.

This overwhelming power is usually exercised behind the scenes in order to make Americans feel comfortable that their government is different from other national-security governments. While the national-security branch of the government is driving the overall direction America will take, especially with respect to foreign affairs, it permits the other three branches to maintain the appearance of power. The idea is to convince Americans that the federal government operates the same as a national-security state as it did when it was a limited-government republic.

But it’s a lie, a very dangerous lie, one that unfortunately is lived by all too many Americans, especially those within the mainstream press.

If you haven’t read the book National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, you owe it to yourself to do so so. This is Glennon’s thesis — that the national-security establishment is the part of the federal government that is wielding and exercising the ultimate power within the governmental structure. At the same time, however, it permits the legislative, judicial, and executive parts of the government to continue appearing to be in charge.

Glennon is not some crackpot writer. He is professor of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He has served as a consultant to various congressional committees, the U.S. State Department, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. You can read a more complete biography here.

If Glennon is right — I am firmly believe that he is — then it requires people, including libertarians, to reevaluate everything they understand about the country, especially foreign affairs.

Consider, for example, the many laments against America’s “forever wars.” It’s a popular mantra, including among libertarians. But what good does it do to complain about “forever wars” if the root cause of such wars is left in place, where it is in charge?

In other words, the national-security establishment needs those forever wars, just as it needed the Cold War. Any national-security state necessarily depends of fear, crises, chaos, and emergencies — or “threats” of such things to sustain its existence, its power, and its money. They will always find something for people to be afraid of, even if they have to instigate it. Communism, terrorism, drug dealers, illegal immigrants, Muslims, Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran, Syria, insurrectionists, revolutionaries, invaders, or whatever. Without such fearful things, people are apt to ask why they need a national-security state instead of a limited-government republic, which was the type of governmental structure on which America was founded.

What is the distinguishing characteristic of a national-security state, as compared to a limited-government republic? Power — raw, unadulterated power. With its vast military and arsenal of weaponry, along with extreme powers of assassination and surveillance, a national-security establishment has the means of imposing its will on government and on society. No one wields the countervailing power to resist.

This why precisely why our American ancestors opposed the creation of a national-security state or what they called “standing armies.” They understood that once such a governmental apparatus comes into existence, there is no practical way for the citizenry, even a well-armed citizenry, to oppose it. In fact, if the Constitutional Convention had proposed a Constitution that called into existence a federal government that was a national-security state, rather than a limited-government republic, there is no way that Americans would have approved the Constitution.

Practically from the beginning of the conversion to a national-security state, the other three branches have deferred to the overwhelming power of the Pentagon and its vast military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA. All three of those branches have understood the nature of power.

For example, in the 1950s the Pentagon insisted that the Supreme Court grant it a state-secrets doctrine. Ordinarily, that is a legislative function; that’s the way things are ordinarily done in a democracy. The Supreme Court went along with what the Pentagon wanted, thereby circumventing the legislative process.

Consider assassination. The Constitution did not delegate such a power to the federal government. The Bill of Rights expressly prohibits the federal government from killing anyone without due process of law. Nonetheless, when the national-security establishment insisted on having the power to assassinate people, including Americans, the Supreme Court acceded to its demand.

Look at GItmo, where people have been held for for more than a decade without trial. Never mind that the Bill of Rights requires the federal government to grant people speedy trials. That doesn’t matter when it comes to the military and the CIA. The federal judiciary is not going to interfere.

Congress has proven to be just as deferential. For one thing, Congress is filled with people who   could be considered to be self-designated assets of the national-security establishment. This especially includes the military and CIA veterans. They are almost certain to go along with whatever the national-security establishment wants. For those who strenuously object, they encounter the threat of having military bases or projects in their districts canceled, in which case the mainstream media in their districts will go after them with a vengeance. And there is always the possibility of being “Hoovered” with the threat of having friendly assets in the mainstream press reveal compromising secrets about one’s personal life.

And woe to any president who takes on the national-security establishment. They all know this. That’s why there hasn’t been a president since John F. Kennedy willing to challenge them. For a while it looked like Trump was going to do so but it wasn’t long before Americans saw that he too quickly fell into line.

It’s time for Americans to do some serious soul-searching and to ask themselves some penetrating questions: Is a root cause of America’s many woes the fact that it is a national-security state, just like China, Russia, and North Korea? Is it time to restore America’s founding system of a limited-government republic? Which governmental structure is more likely to lead to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony?

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

I sat behind a trading terminal at two Wall Street firms from 1986 to 2006. I can assure you that if the President of the United States was refusing to accept the outcome of a presidential election and urging a coup d’é·tat by his civilian militia, the stock market would have sold off by double digits. This era’s stock market has yawned at the spectacle.

I can further assure you that if an actual, violent coup d’état did occur inside the halls of Congress and played out in real time on every television network and cable news program in the country and around the world, there would have been a crash in the stock market. (I was sitting behind my trading terminal on October 19, 1987 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 22 percent by the end of the trading day and the country was peaceful.)

The stock market of that prior era would not have greeted 20,000 National Guard troops descending on the nation’s Capitol and television pictures of hundreds of those troops guarding the halls of Congress with a meaningless loss of 8 points — a tiny fraction of one percent.

Clearly, today’s stock market is broken. And that’s a big problem for this country and the world because the U.S. stock market is supposed to be an early indicator of when things are going well and when things are going badly. When the U.S. stock market is sending a signal to the world that bloody coups of government are nothing to fret over, we’ve entered a dangerous dimension where fascist rule is deemed a good thing.

The stock market of my day reflected the composite wisdom of all of its participants. Today’s stock market appears to reflect the composite wisdom of only its fascist-inclined participants.

So how do we fix our broken stock market so that it is once again a barometer to lead the country in the right direction? We listen to our whistleblowers who love their country so much that they will put their careers on the line to blow the whistle on all that is wrong on Wall Street.

To read complete article click here

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Ms. Martens is a former Wall Street veteran with a background in journalism.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

The New Tang Dynasty (NTD) broadcast a Press Conference of 9 January 2021 of independent French medical doctors for the truth about Covid-19. It is called “Coordination Santé Libre” or “Free Health Coordination”.

The Group, based in France, represents more than 30,000 medical doctors, an equal amount of medical care personnel, and more than 100,000 citizens.

Conférence de presse: Santé Libre | Des collectifs de médecins indépendants pour la Covid19 – Une Initiative de médecins libresfrançais (12 Janvier 2021)

NTD Television is the largest independent Chinese international TV channel. It was created in 2001 in New York, from where it broadcasts its programs to more than 100 million people around the world.

In 2010, a French branch was created, to serve mainly European viewers. NTD has become an effective alternative news network.

Since the independent French “Free Health Coordinators” have no access to French and European mainstream media, they have decided to work with NTD – benefitting from the broadcast network’s large coverage. Their goal is to inform as many people as possible about the truth behind Covid-19, clearing up myth, mysteries, scientific controversies and outright lies.

The Medical Coordination Group has created 4 cells of research and public information, covering covid prevention, treatment, dialogue and information, notably

(i) the (French) government’s prohibition of using traditional and effective anti-inflammatory and infection medication, like Ivermectin and others;

(ii) analyzing and making public the “figures” – the often false or misleading statistics about new “infections” or new “cases” – the mortality rate (what does it mean) – and bringing these corrected concepts to the public;

(iii) the different aspects and risks of the currently available – largely untested – vaccines in the west, specially the dangers of mRNA-type vaccines; and

(iv) public information – which is currently a topic of misinformation, a chaos of scientific and medical contradictions, manipulation of facts, half-facts and untruths, and outright lies, as well as intense fear campaigns. People in fear become weak, morally, physically and more vulnerable for diseases – all kinds of diseases – as well as obedient and depressed which may lead to suicide.

It is truly amazing what this French Medical Coordination has already done and is planning to continue doing to counter the current almost worldwide false and incomplete covid narrative – and bring truth to the people. – With this fantastic French initiative, there is a flicker of hope on the horizon that more and more people will see through this criminal covid endeavor.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

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

While the saccharine continues to ooze from the mainstream media for the incoming Biden Administration, the real iron fist of what will be the Biden foreign policy is starting to materialize. As if on cue, major bombings in Baghdad – by ISIS…remember them? – have opened the door for the Biden Administration to not only cancel President Trump’s troop drawdown from Iraq but to actually begin sending troops back into Iraq.

Is this to be Iraq War 4.0? 3.7? 5.0? Anybody’s guess.

If Biden uses this sudden – and convenient – unrest in Iraq as a trigger to return US troops (and bombs), it should not surprise anyone. As Professor Barbara Ransby points out in this video, Biden did much more to make the disastrous 2003 attack on Iraq happen than just vote “yes” on the authorization to use force. As Professor Ransby reminds us, Biden used the full power of his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to ensure the Senate approved George W. Bush’s lie-based war on Iraq. Biden prevented any experts who challenged the “Saddam has WMDs and he’s about to use them” narrative from being heard by Members of Congress, guaranteeing that only the pro-war narrative was heard.

As much as Bush or Cheney, Biden owns the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which killed a million Iraqi civilians. And he may well be taking us back.

One figure in the Biden Administration who will play a pivotal role in returning the US to its hyper-interventionism in the Middle East is Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken. As a Biden Senate staffer in 2003, he helped the then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman put together a pro-war coalition in the Democratic Party to support President Bush’s Republican push for invasion.

Later on Blinken was Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, where he successfully made the case that destroying both Libya and Syria were fantastic ideas. Both countries drowned in the Obama Administration’s “liberation” bloodbath and neither country has recovered from the “democracy” brought by Washington, but being a neocon foreign policy ideologue means never having to say you’re sorry.

And Blinken isn’t.

Not surprisingly, Blinken is a favorite of the AIPAC-bankrolled Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, as Phil Giraldi reported, Tweeted that Blinken would be part of a “…superb national security team. The country will be very fortunate to have them in public service.”

We have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to thank for at least bringing up the fact that Blinken has blundered from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster – which only gets you promoted in Washington DC. In Blinken’s confirmation hearing, Paul reminded Blinken of his addiction to intervention in the Middle East and how that has worked out for everyone.

Paul reminded the Secretary of State nominee that his only criticism of the Syria “regime change” plan was that the US did not successfully overthrow Assad. But…the US was using jihadist proxies to overthrow the secular Assad, so what does this say about Blinken’s judgement?

“The lesson of these wars,” said Paul, is that ‘regime change’ doesn’t work!”

Paul added:

Even after Libya you guys went on to Syria wanting to do the same thing again… it’s a disaster.

You got rid of one ‘bad guy’ and another ‘bad guy’ got stronger.

Yes, Senator Paul is right. “Regime change” doesn’t work. It kills or destroys the lives of the most vulnerable. The poor and the innocent. The US enemies may occasionally find themselves on the wrong end of a noose or a knife rape, but it is the civilians who always suffer when they are “liberated” by Washington.

Buckle up, as incoming Senate Majority Leader Schumer advised, there’s a whole lot of interventionism in the queue. There’s a whole lot of death and destruction to be unleashed by Biden, Blinken, and their gang of “humanitarians.”

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If President Joe Biden intends to restore America’s credibility in the world, he needs to take these steps regarding Syria. Much of this applies to other countries as well:

1) End all sanctions and blockades. US sanctions are not benign means to put pressure on governments, they work in this way – to starve and isolate the economy and the people in order to make them so desperate they will rise up against their governments and do our malignant regime changes for us. They are in fact economic terrorism against entire populations.

2) End the illegal occupation by the US and allies of conventional troops, contractor/mercenaries, and proxies. The US is controlling almost 1/3rd of Syria’s lands – lands which not coincidentally contain Syria’s richest oil fields. America is selling off Syria’s oil to fund their arming, training and equipping of mercenary proxies to try to split Syria apart … Balkanization. It also serves to deprive Syrians of fuel they need for rebuilding; for their army to defeat the al Qaeda and other terrorists that hold Idlib province, ISIS cells in the west and south, and various terrorists still attacking in other areas of the country; for manufacturing, production and distribution; for heating and power for hospitals, schools, homes, businesses, etc. People are waiting for sometimes days in lines for gasoline.

3) Apply pressure on Israel and Turkey to end their illegal occupations of Syrian lands; to end their illegal, constant attacks against the sovereign nation of Syria; and to end their continued assistance to several terrorist groups.

In many ways, Syrians are suffering more now than ever. Since the collapse of Lebanon’s government and economy last year, their economy has spiraled down, out of control. Prices on even the most basic essentials for life are beyond the means of most people – to buy even a little chicken for example is a great extravagance. Corruption, war time inflation, smuggling, the black market and rise of mafias have exacerbated the misery of the people exponentially and many are without any hope for the future at all.

All of these problems are a direct result of the reckless and unjustifiable regime change efforts of the United States of America and its allies. The regime change aggression began under GW Bush; it escalated into violence under Obama; and has continued under Trump.

Joe Biden has signaled that instead of acting in good faith and ending US efforts to overthrow the government of Syria, he will escalate them and try to finish the job that Bush, Obama and Hillary (with Biden as VP) were all so determined to accomplish. High from getting Qaddafi tortured and killed and murdering Libya in the process, the Obama administration proceeded to try to rip Syria apart. They failed for the most part but Syria is bleeding. They’ve buried hundreds of thousands of their loved ones. Their army has been hemorrhaging blood – of their young men and old alike fighting ISIS, al Qaeda and other terrorist proxy armies all sponsored by the US and/or its allies, and the civilians as the victims of the violence by legions of terrorists.About ten million (out of a total population of 23 million) have been displaced, either having to relocate within the country or outside becoming refugees.

Huge swaths of their cities and infrastructure have been destroyed or heavily damaged both by the terrorists who were missioned with bringing death and destruction; and the efforts by the Syrian government and Army with their allies to defeat the mercenary thugs.

All the US has to do is end the aggression against that country which has never threatened America, in fact they’ve wanted only mutually beneficial and respectful relations with the West.

So President Biden – I call on YOU to end this murderous madness. End the terrorist proxy regime change attempt war against Syria. And do it NOW.

These people are not our enemies – we must stop treating them as such.

These photos are all from 2020/2021 with special thanks to Rida Ali and Roula Elias Naddour.

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Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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