Global Research

At a virtual press conference held by the World Health Organization officials warned there is no clear evidence COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing asymptomatic infection and transmission.

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At a virtual press conference held by the WHO Dec. 28, 2020, officials warned there is no guarantee that COVID-19 vaccines will prevent people from being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and transmitting it to other people.

In a New Year’s Day interview with Newsweek, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, reinforced the WHO’s admission that health officials do not know if COVID-19 vaccines prevent infection or if people can spread the virus to others after getting vaccinated.

According to U.S. and WHO health officials, vaccinated persons still need to mask and social distance because they could be able to spread the new coronavirus to others without knowing it.

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Emergency Use Authorization in December 2020 for Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna to release their experimental mRNA vaccinesfor use in the U.S., the companies only provided evidence from clinical trials to demonstrate that, compared to unvaccinated trial participants, their vaccines prevented more mild to severe COVID-19 disease symptoms in vaccinated participants.

The companies did not investigate whether the vaccines prevent people from becoming asymptomatically infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and/or transmitting it to other people.

COVID-19 vaccines designed to prevent severe disease

According to WHO officials, while it appears the vaccines can prevent clinically symptomatic COVID-19 clinical disease, there is no clear evidence COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing asymptomatic infection and transmission. During the press conference, WHO chief scientist and pediatrician Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said:

“We continue to wait for more results from the vaccine trials to really understand whether the vaccines, apart from preventing symptomatic disease and severe disease and deaths, whether they’re also going to reduce infection or prevent people from getting infected with the virus, then from passing it on or transmitting it to other people.

I don’t believe we have the evidence on any of the vaccines to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on.”

Swaminathan said the COVID-19 vaccine was designed to first prevent symptomatic disease, severe disease and deaths. Dr. Mark Ryan, MPH, who is executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, agreed with Swaminathan and added:

“So the first primary objective is to decrease the impact the disease is having on people’s lives and, therefore, that will be a major step forward in bringing the world back to some kind of normal.

The second phase is then looking at how will this vaccine affect transmission. We just don’t know enough yet about length of protection and other things to be absolutely able to predict that, but we should be able to get good control of the virus.”

SARS-CoV-2 eradication via mass vaccination is a ‘moonshot’

Ryan also pointed out that the decision by WHO to try to eradicate the SARS-CoV-2 virus “requires a much higher degree of efficiency and effectiveness in the vaccination program and the other control measures” and that it is likely the new coronavirus will “become another endemic virus, a virus that will remain somewhat of a threat but a very low level threat in the context of an effective vaccination program.”

Ryan cautioned that, like with measles and polio, there is no guarantee of eliminating the SARS-CoV-2 virus through mass vaccination programs. He said:

“The existence of a vaccine even at high efficacy is no guarantee of eliminating or eradicating an infectious disease. That’s a very high bar for us to be able to get over. First, we have to focus on saving lives, getting good control of this epidemic, and then we will deal with the moonshot of potentially being able to eliminate or eradicate this virus.”

Azar says get vaccinated but still mask up

In a Dec.  22, 2020 interview, HHS Secretary Alex Azar told Fox News that the current “consensus” among health officials is that people who get two doses of COVID-19 vaccine should still mask up and practice social distancing. He said:

“We’re still studying some fundamental scientific questions though, such as, once you’ve been vaccinated, do you still need to wear a mask to protect others, could you still be carrying the virus even though you’re protected from it …

“If you’re getting vaccinated right now, still social distance, still wear a mask, but all these [recommendations] have to be data and science-driven, so we’re working to generate the data there so that as we go forward, we’ll be able to advise people on a foundation of data.”

COVID-19 vaccine passports and mandates may be coming

In an interview on CNN in early April 2020 when most states were in some form of a coronavirus lockdown, Fauci told Alyson Camerota, “It’s very likely that there are a large number of people out there that have been infected, have been asymptomatic, and did not know they were infected.”

Eight months later, on New Year’s Day 2021, Fauci told Newsweek that in his role as the new administration’s chief medical adviser, there is a possibility the federal government will eventually introduce “COVID-19 vaccine passports” and that some city, county or state governments and businesses will make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory, including in schools.

“Everything will be on the table,” Fauci declared. A week earlier, Fauci told The New York Timesthat between 70% and 90% of the U.S. population would need to get COVID-19 vaccinations in order for the country to reach vaccine-acquired herd immunity. He explained why he has continued to shift the “herd immunity” goal post over the past year:

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85 … We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

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Featured image is from CHD

As Trump’s term comes to a dramatic close, the administration’s last minute effort to rush through multiple mining projects that pose a grave environmental risk is lost in the headlines

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Buried deep in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2015, section 3003 calls for the expeditious facilitation of a land exchange agreement between Resolution Copper Mining, LLC and the United States government to create one of the largest and deepest copper mines in the country, spanning nearly 11,000 square miles of national forest terrain and penetrating 7,000 miles into beneath the surface of the earth.

The land swap specifically targets approximately 2,500 acres that are not already owned by the mining concern and which rest inside Apache hallowed ground known as Oak Flat in the Tonto National Forest in central Arizona. Considered sacred by the Apache and other First Nation peoples who still use the land they call Chich’il Bildagoteel for important ceremonies, food, and a vital link to their heritage, Oak Flat has been at the center of a decades-long battle between the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Resolution Copper, comprised of extraction industry behemoths Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

Closed to mining activities by President Eisenhower in 1955, Oak Flat has since flourished as a significant habitat for wildlife, including several endangered species of fish, snakes, and birds, as well as a popular campground and world-renowned rock climbing destination. Reaffirmed in the early ‘70s the protective regulations have nevertheless been incessantly targeted by UK-based Rio Tinto, whose lobbying efforts to obtain burrowing rights to the land have been rebuffed 13 times since.

In 2014, John McCain – the largest recipient of Rio Tinto political contributions in Congress that year ­– inserted the aforementioned rider in the 2015 NDAA, effectively reversing 66 years of environmental protection law and betraying his own history of advocating for indigenous rights as a ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs in 1989, when he led a Republican minority in the fight for the religious freedom of First Nations and the protection of sacred lands.

More than 30 years later, as President Trump leaves office, his administration looks to finish this act of duplicity initiated by his biggest political enemy in yet another demonstration of the hypocrisy that runs through the American political system and pervasive history of broken treaties and disenfranchisement of Native peoples.

Rushing into destruction 

The U.S. Forest Service will release the final version of the environmental analysis for the Resolution Copper Project and Land Exchange in three days’ time and a full year ahead of schedule as a result of pressure from the Trump administration, according to local officials.

Members of the San Carlos Apache Nation have been camping out at Oak Flat since January 2020 as part of their continued effort to halt the mining project. Tribal member Wendsler Nosie Sr, interviewed by The Guardian in November described the urgency of their plight as the “fourth quarter with two minutes left in the game,” adding that Trump’s move to push the approval process forward by a year meant they now only “have one minute left.”

Oak Flat is just one of several large-scale mining and energy projects the outgoing administration is looking to approve before the proper assessments and consultations with affected populations are made. Other projects include a lithium mine in Nevada; a helium extraction project in Utah and an oil and gas drilling venture in Alaska, among others.

Virtually every one of these projects is facing opposition from Native tribes, whose very survival is threatened by the relentless advance of the extraction industry. That industry not only represents a catastrophic menace to their sources of clean water and food but also poses a direct risk to their safety as the proliferation of so-called “man-camps” or the temporary labor sites, plays a central role in the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered indigenous women.

In the case of Oak Flat, Native communities have found an unlikely ally in their fight against Rio Tinto and BHP. A British government pension fund group with a stake in both companies has requested more information from their subsidiary, Resolution Copper, as to the potential impacts the proposed mine would have on Native American cultural and religious sites.

Ally or cover? 

Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (LAPFF) Chairman, Doug McMurdo, has voiced his opposition to the mining method Resolution Copper is expected to use in Oak Flat, should the project move forward. The head of the £300 Billion pension investment fund echoes the concerns of the indigenous communities who oppose the “block caving” method planned, which consists of blasting beneath the surface to extract the copper ore through tunnels and inevitably cause the collapse of the rock above, taking ancient burial grounds, petroglyphs, and medicinal plants with it.

LAPFF has advocated for communities affected by Rio Tinto’s irresponsible mining practices in other parts of the world as well. Last year, Rio Tinto faced an official inquiry from the Australian government after the company blew up 46,000-year old caves in Western Australia that were part of the country’s Aboriginal heritage. McMurdo participated in the parliamentary inquiry that found Rio Tinto culpable of knowingly destroying the Aboriginal cultural heritage site. The LAPFF Chair pointed to the conclusions as the reason why the fund “has increased its call for companies to engage meaningfully with affected communities. The fact that Rio Tinto’s senior management had not reviewed a critical report about the site itself calls into question the company’s governance and oversight processes.”

But, at the end of the day, the question arises whether such remonstrations are enough to curtail the irreparable damage the extraction industries have done and continue to do to the environment and to the indigenous communities who are not only fighting for their own survival but the survival of the entire planet.

The legend of Oak Flat 

One of the most significant areas of Oak Flat threatened by Resolution Copper’s project is a place called Apache Leap. The 400 foot-high cliff is the site of a historic incident of Native American resistance, from which 75 Apache warriors leaped to their death rather than be captured by the U.S. troops that surrounded them after a sneak attack that took the lives of 50 Apache warriors within minutes.

The Legend of Apache Tears is an enduring account of defiance against an enemy that keeps coming. When the wives and children discovered the bodies of their brave men at the bottom of the precipice, the legend states that their tears turned the white earth at their feet into black stones (obsidian) and, henceforth, anyone who acquired any such stones would never have to cry again since so many tears had already been shed by the Apache women on that tragic occasion.

If we stand with our Native American brothers and sisters against the destruction of their sacred sites, we might realize that they are sacred to us as well and then we might be able to arm ourselves with obsidian to begin the hard road back to living in harmony with nature and avert the creation of the Legend of Oak Flat.

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Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.

Featured image is from MPN

Seeking prestige and power within the military, CENTCOM chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie has deployed a series of bureaucratic and PR moves to drive the latest episode in US-Iran tensions.

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During the final two months of the Trump administration, a series of provocative U.S. military moves in the Middle East stirred fears that a war against Iran was being hatched. The atmosphere of crisis was not the result of any threat posed by Tehran, but rather the product of a campaign manufactured by the head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., to advance his interests.

In a bid for prestige and power within the military, and the influence over policymaking that it guarantees, McKenzie has worked to accumulate military assets. The general’s thirst for influence has been a driving factor in the latest episode of US-Iran tensions. To advance his self-serving agenda, McKenzie has deployed a calculated series of political-bureaucratic moves, combined with a PR push in the media.

A four-star general who previously served as director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, McKenzie is regarded as the most politically astute commander ever to lead Middle East Command, according to journalist Mark Perry. He has also shown himself to be exceptionally brazen in scheming to defend his interests.

Almost immediately after taking command at CENTCOM in March 2019, McKenzie launched his campaign of political manipulation. By requesting additional forces to contain a supposedly urgent Iranian threat, McKenzie triggered the dispatch of an aircraft carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East. A month later, he told reporters he believed the deployments were “having a very good stabilizing effect,” and that he was in the process of negotiating on a larger, long-term U.S. military presence.

As a result of his maneuvering, McKenzie succeeded in acquiring 10,000 to 15,000 more military personnel, bringing the total in his CENTCOM realm to more than 90,000. The rapid increase in assets under his command was revealed in a Senate hearing in March 2020.

During the remainder of 2020 some of those troops were shifted to East Asia or Europe, in line with the new Pentagon priority on “major power competition.” McKenzie’s determination to resist the loss of military assets was a crucial factor in artificially manufacturing the recent Iran crisis.

McKenzie has fought to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, ostensibly to fight ISIS, but more fundamentally to maintain a long-term military presence in the country. But the U.S. military presence has been extremely unpopular in Iraq. In January 2020, following the U.S. assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iraq’s legislature passed a resolution demanding the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the country.

In the meantime, Iraqi militias aligned with Iran have escalated attacks on U.S. forces, beginning with a major rocket attack on coalition forces at Camp Taji in March 2020 that killed two U.S. servicemen. McKenzie exploited the Camp Taji attack to reclaim some of the assets he had lost, successfully requesting that a second aircraft carrier strike group remain in the region. McKenzie asked for the additional forces, according to the Wall Street Journal, to “signal to Tehran that it would be held responsible” if the Iraqi militias continued to attack U.S. forces.

But that ploy was quickly shown to be a failure: Iraqi militia attacks on bases occupied by U.S. forces soared to 28 between March and August 2020. McKenzie was thus forced to begin withdrawing from bases in Iraq and turning them over to Iraqi forces. In September, McKenzie even acknowledged, while announcing the planned reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,000, that militia attacks were a major reason for the withdrawal.

After Trump’s mid-November decision to reduce troop numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500, McKenzie and his allies in Washington constructed the illusion of a crisis with Iran by promoting the idea that Iran might be planning attacks on U.S. forces.

The New York Times reported on November 16 that officials were “especially nervous about the January 3 anniversary of the U.S. strike that killed Soleimani….” And a Washington Post story the following day cited “people familiar with the matter” stating that U.S. intelligence had recently been “monitoring potential threats by Iran to U.S. forces in the region”.

Then came an even more serious move: on November 21, two Air Force “Stratofortress” B-52 bombers flew directly from the United States to the Persian Gulf.

The flight was announced in a statement by the spokesman for McKenzie’s Central Command, which offered no specific justification. It declared that the Soleimani assassination in January 2020 precipitated the last deployment of long-range B-52 flights to the Gulf, creating the sense that the new flights were linked to a potential military crisis. In fact, the bombers made a round-trip from their U.S. base to the Gulf and back without stopping.

On December 7, McKenzie was back on the PR offensive, speaking to a small group of reporters who were allowed to identify him only as a “senior U.S. military official with knowledge of the region.” As theAssociated Press and NBC News reported, he said the risk of miscalculation by Iran “is higher…right now,” because of the U.S. pulling troops out of the region, the U.S. presidential transition, the COVID pandemic, and the anniversary of Soleimani killing. He emphasized that military leaders had determined that the Nimitz must remain in the region “for some time to come,” and that an additional fighter jet squadron might also be needed.

Three days later, another squadron of B-52s flew from the U.S. to the Persian Gulf, flying provocatively close to Iranian airspace before returning to their home base. Then, on December 21, the U.S. Navy publicly announced that the guided-missile submarine USS Georgia, along with two guided-missile cruisers, had just transited the Strait of Hormuz and entered the Arabian Gulf. The announcement was highly unusual: the Navy, normally tight-lipped about the movements of its ships, stated publicly that the Georgia could carry up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles.

In an interview with ABC News on December 22, McKenzie was asked about the risk of an Iranian attack on US and allies in the region. “I do believe we remain in a period of heightened risk,” he said, even though he also suggested that Iran did not want war with the United States.

A third flight of B-52s was dispatched to the Persian Gulf on December 30. This time, CENTCOM quoted McKenzie directly: his intention was to “make clear that we are ready and able to respond to any aggression directed at Americans or our interests.”

A “senior military officer” subsequently told the Associated Press that U.S. intelligence had supposedly detected “indications that advanced weaponry has been flowing from Iran into Iraq recently and that Shiite militia leaders in Iraq may have met with officers of Iran’s Quds force.” This was said to suggest plans for possible rocket attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq, in connection with the one-year anniversary of the Soleimani killing. CNN echoed the Pentagon claims, alleging that Iran had moved short-range ballistic missiles into Iraq, and that Iraqi militias were planning “complex attacks.”

But a “senior defense official” who had been directly involved in the discussions of those issues insisted to CNN that officials circulating such reports were deliberately exaggerating the threat of an attack. The CNN story strongly implied that acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s December 30 decision to bring the Nimitz back home was based on his belief that McKenzie and his allies were hyping a potential Iranian-sponsored attack to advance their command’s interests.

Neither the Associated Press nor CNN explained to readers that the additional Iranian short-range missiles would have been been necessary precautions to strengthen deterrence in light of the series of the provocative U.S. shows of force involving B-52s and missile-carrying ships. Nor did they mention explicit statements by Iran that revenge for the Soleimani killing would be aimed not at U.S. troops but at the officials responsible for his assassination.

In the end, Miller was forced to reverse his decision and keep the Nimitz in the Middle East — a significant win for McKenzie. And although the anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Soleimani came and went without incident, yet another flight of B-52s was carried out on January 7 — a bold demonstration of McKenzie’s bureaucratic victory over Miller.

The political-bureaucratic power struggle that played out in the final weeks of the Trump administration suggests that McKenzie’s power and interests are likely to be a major influence on the Biden administration’s Iran policy.

Still resisting the shift of military assets away from the Middle East, McKenzie will have a strong motive to oppose and obstruct any effort at easing tensions with Tehran. To achieve his aims, his ties with the military services and media will be among the most useful weapons in his arsenal.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

Featured image: US General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of CENTCOM (Source: The Grayzone)

Ever since at least the Iraq War of 2003, the fundamental alternatives facing North American and European elites have been constant. One alternative might have been to accept a certain loss of global power so as to share global influence peacefully in a multi-polar world with China, Russia and other regional powers. Instead, the Western elites chose the other alternative: an ultimately futile, globally destructive effort to defend their accustomed power and privilege.

Accompanying that abject, absurd strategic failure, the self-evident decline of their power overseas bears an inverse relationship to the clear and increasing repression and exploitation of their own peoples at home. The traditional motto of Western foreign policy and diplomacy has always been “do what we want, or else…”. Now, domestically, the underlying, unspoken but still extremely clear variation on that message Western elites now offer their own peoples is “don’t worry, our sadism is good for you…”

Large numbers of people in North America and Europe are being denied adequate health care, in some countries like the US, even completely. In other countries, years of austerity cutbacks have meant hospitals struggle to attend to numbers of patients very similar to those they would have treated in earlier years with little difficulty. Financially, North American and European corporate elites have benefited from yet another unprecedented upward transfer of wealth, the most egregious example being the CARES Act in the United States.

By contrast, the current, mostly self-inflicted, global crisis has seen payments of various kinds being made to large numbers of people very similar to a pauperizing universal basic income. The official pandemic narrative has served to suppress debate on the far more equitable and democratic policy choice of a jobs guarantee. Despite official affirmations of a uniquely deadly global pandemic, North American and European governments are generally failing to commit to radical reform and investment to improve their public health systems.

Similarly, those same governments refuse to cooperate internationally with other major regional powers to ensure equitable treatment for vulnerable populations elsewhere. The US and its allies continue imposing illegal coercive measures against the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen and Iran, for example. Even tiny Nicaragua is subject to similar illegal unilateral measures despite being recognized by international bodies for its model social and economic policies. Those illegal coercive measures seem to represent the unmistakable shadow of imperial decline.

In 2008-2009, the European and North American ruling classes patched up a phony resolution of their economic crisis, transferring, until then, unprecedented wealth from their populations in order to rescue their corporate elites. Shortly afterwards, they undertook a desperate global offensive aimed at firming up their control and influence in resource rich regions around the world. In 2011, the Western powers allied with terrorist proxies to overthrow vulnerable governments in Libya and Ivory Coast regarded as threats to their control in Africa.

They also allied with similar diverse terrorist proxies in Syria, in Thailand and in Ukraine, for example, seeking to stymie perceived threats to their control in those countries’ respective regions. That desperate offensive failed in various ways, especially perhaps from the point of view of the European Union. In any case, essentially, those years confirmed the decline of US and allied power and influence. Internationally, the murder of Qasim Soleimani set a cruel, sinister, criminal seal on that decline. Domestically, this year’s brief, contrived, tragicomic January 6^thoccupation of Washington’s Capitol has served as a pretext for the US ruling classes to drop their masks and openly acknowledge their well established fascist union of corporate and State power, applying selective censorship with the general approval of most progressive opinion.

For over 200 years, US elites learned from their European forebears how to exploit crude racism to co-opt revolutionary class resistance. A central feature of European and North American politics throughout the 20^th Century was how Western ruling elites traded modest socio-economic concessions in exchange for their peoples’ complicity in genocidal conquest, domination and exploitation of the majority world. Now ruling class driven identity politics manipulates both race and gender to cloak the savage class realities of contemporary Western societies and culture, signaling that imperialism’s long standing material class trade off with their own peoples is over.

Its replacement is a post modern ideal-virtual identity trade-off denying an increasingly pauperized majority basic material rights but assuring them that this economic sadism will transform their lives with virtue. It will be an anti-racist, gender equitable, alert-to-climate-change virtue, rendering material needs crass and deplorable. By apparent coincidence, environmental destruction of the planet is revealing with ever more urgency the limits of economic growth driven by corporate consumer capitalism which is what until now has ensured the North American and European elites their dominance and wealth.

Currently, Nicaragua is commemorating Nicaragua’s national poet Ruben Darío, who practically single-handed dragged Spanish literature into the modern age. Last week, President Daniel Ortega noted Darío’s analysis of how the US initially presented the Monroe Doctrine as intended to defend the integrity of Latin America’s newly independent republics from European intervention. President Ortega also noted how Darío pointed out very quickly the way the US ruling elites’ manipulated the Monroe Doctrine into a continent wide mechanism of systematic extortion.

Similarly, in his remarks on Rubén Darío, Daniel Ortega also recalled that, after all, it was highly cultured European elites who invented and implemented the genocidal horrors of imperialism. Subsequently, the world’s imperialists and fascists extended those horrors both to their own peoples in Europe and to even more nations around the world. Now that world domination by the US elites and their allies is practically over,  increasingly they are imposing on their own peoples the shock of domestic post-imperial conquest. All the time they tell people in the West not to worry, they mean well and their sadism is good for you.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

A new radicalism is rocking the foundations of modern politics, rapidly destroying venerated but defunct notions about our political systems and replacing them with new activism and political configurations of astonishing sophistication and power. Though there remain unresolved problems and tensions arising from this new political subject, the excitement amongst radicals worldwide is considerable and leading critics of empire are claiming that we are witness to a new age of dissent.

This activism is called “leaking” and though the activity and its marriage with “scientific journalism” is hardly new, a number of astonishing breakthroughs in the technological apparatus of whistleblowing at the turn of the new millennium have culminated in its evolution, suggesting that maybe we are finally perfecting investigative journalism: a comprehensive, secure framework that would unite whistleblowers and citizen journalist worldwide to expose corruption and reform, transvaluate obsolete politics.

Advocates of digital leaks even claim that the invention, with all credit to Aaron Schwartz, could even represent a renaissance or revolution in publishing.

Although publishers are generally conservative in their approach to new ideas, the backlash against the new media and its spokespeople has proven a point they will continue to dominate the publishing agenda for the foreseeable future. “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth”, said Julian Assange, progenitor of Wikileaks. At several conferences, he astonished traditional journalists by declaring a new means of organising the media, a new means of informational production, one with a distribution of labour between whilstblowers and citizen journalist that undercuts the need for fake news dictated by unelectable boardrooms. He added that as a great internet library, Wikileaks would lead to a new understanding of what history and society and politics really are, which is arguably the most dramatic change in civilisation since the printing press.

Even John Pilger, ever cautious not to hype the claims of journalists, compared Wikileaks’ work to Orwell’s. This genesis, he declared, may be no less profound than the transition of working class reality from the illusion of equality to 1984.

Two of the project’s researchers, Sarah Harrison, an investigative journalist, and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a radical anti-corruption parliamentarian in Iceland and bard represent – beneath the surface of media cartoons of a dictatorship – a project that spoke through many people and spoke to many.

At the heart of this endeavour is the knowledge that the internet, cryptography and computer science may provide a comprehensive framework to support the quick verification, dissemination of information and protection of a source. The project even embraced startlingly modern techniques of decentralisation and assymetric warfare when in combat with enemy lies, beginning to change the playing field.

Historically, whistleblowing has developed rather fragmented.

The great work of Tom Paine and George Orwell, for example, who computed the facts of the motion of Machiavellian politics with their critical reason and sharp, acid pens, differ significantly from the actions of Reality Winner, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou and countless other selfless individuals who revealed the workings of deep state corruption with their publication of repressed information. Moreover, the virtues and principles required for contemporary whistleblowing seem unalike to Solzhenitsyn’s literary portrait of totalitarianism, which described the grim Gulag system, dissidents’ repression, and the absolute power of Stalin.

With developments in the technological apparatus of whistleblowing, however, it now becomes possible to apprehend these separate pieces of the puzzle and see them whole, as something bigger than the sum of their individual efforts. Although the quest for repatriation of truth is a recent one, with most of the pioneering work done in the past ten years, in retrospect it is easy to remediate the great works of whistleblowing in society in terms of the coherent concept of scientific journalism.

Due to the momentum created by Wikileaks, the history of journalism is fast being reshaped – beginning with the man who globalised cryptographic journalism, Julian Assange, and his discovery of the applications of computer science to source verification and protection, arguably the most impressive journalistic development in several hundred years of human history.

In the Age of Revolution, the journalism and publishing world was thrown in to seismic turmoil by a series of incendiary writings that challenged centuries of colonial rule. Earth was bearing witness to the genesis of a new consensus forming the ruins of the old Empire’s order. Out of this maelstrom, however, emerged not one, but two legends.

Tom Paine fired the first canon and focused his work on understanding how the nature of elitist power such as royalties and dynasties corrupted the natural impulse of reason and democracy. The foundation for the criticism of how power works and manipulates the human species on a psychological level, however, was fired by the second legend, George Orwell, who virtually governs the world of modern radicalism. He was an Eton dropout and sought to collaborate with comrades in the international.

Interestingly, the fates of Paine and Orwell were analogous, though they stood aeons apart. Both of noble origin, they were renegades and iconoclasts who battled the orthodox wisdom and dogmas their contemporaries took for granted as operative truth. They continue to dominate and determine the course of dissidence for centuries beyond their own times.

Socrates was and remains an accomplished hero who went beyond the perimeters of the known world on a brave voyage for knowledge and returned with a new story to preach to the world. He was also a critic of power’s corruption. According to the story of Socrates, both the hero and whistleblower are skilled at destroying seemingly stable illusions about reality and piecing together the facts of a given matter to piece together answers to seemingly invisible problems.

Since Chelsea Manning, politicians have been consumed by the futile task of cracking the whistleblower’s staying resolve and finding the means to roll back the successful establishment of a technological infrastructure to support data age dissidence. Only in the past few years, however, have establishment actors realised the possibility of power over official, incriminating secrets can be found in manipulating the data about these renegade’s work by systematically excluding their stories from representation in the media, except for where the facts can be manipulated for propaganda.

Commentators and politicians of different persuasions have expressed an authentic range of divided views on how the information released by Wikileaks can support democracy and maintain global peace. But at the same time, ostensibly partisan lawmakers and establishment staff are coordinating a unilateral response to reports in the libertarian press in which they, the elite, are implicated in or identified as conspirators in crimes that may push the US and world at large to withdraw support for the contemporary world order in exchange for genuine freedom.

Wikileaks’ work is likely to make people demand an alternative to the dominant political and economic system after it failed in its promise to spread freedom, justice and prosperity through the world in exchange for individual and collective surrender to the liberal ideology. Significantly the publisher has quoted secret conversations between states, intelligence, transnational lobbies and diplomats, as saying they acknowledge and work to ensure success for the US empire’s strategies and objectives worldwide because such deals are an obligation under the code of honour reified in the norms of power and world order—the dynamics that regulates the global balance of power, in the suppression and near absence of meaningful democratic internationalism.

According to the establishment, Wikileaks real target is to support terrorism against and collapse within America, a strategically important asset of modern empire in the North-Western hemisphere, at the centre of the core of the capitalist economy and the territory of neo-conservatism. Because America occupies a unique opening in history, the neoconservative establishment says, it can serve an evangelist and missionary role in the world and could help enforce a world order based on its political system. Given its special strategic role, America has been built into a fortress to safeguard itself against communism, and as much is evident from the flurries of communist repression.

The UN noted that policies America enforces have generally tried to cut support for human rights even as it reduces states and outlying satellites to rubble to bring it under psuedo-democratic control and conform to human rights obligations. The UN said it has never recognised legitimacy of any recent US, NATO led force in the East which has led to wholesale atrocities. Thomas Carothers, director of the Carnegie Endowment Program on Law and Democracy, in his recent book Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion says:

“Where democracy appears to fit in well with US security and economic interests, the United States promotes democracy… Where democracy clashes with other significant interests, it is downplayed or even ignored.”

America has significantly reduced the number of individual and united opposition groups stationed in outposts the world around to less than a critical mass, it is possible to conclude, and it is time for resistance to reciprocate the offensive by rejecting empire’s propaganda targeted at captive minds and the hollow ceremony of establishment democracy.

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Featured image is from Columbia Journalism Review

A coalition of big tech companies, including Microsoft is developing a COVID passport, with the expectation that a digital document linked to vaccination status will be required to travel and get access to basic services.

The group is calling itself the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), and includes Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle.

The US health provider Mayo Clinic is also involved in the project, which is being described as “the most significant vaccination effort in the history of the United States.”

The idea is now a familiar one. Anyone who has been vaccinated will receive a QR code that can be stored on their mobile phone in the wallet app. Those without phones will have access to a printed version.

We have previously reported on the development of this so called ‘CommonPass’, which also has backing from the World Economic Forum, and now more details have emerged.

Screenshot: ‘CommonPass’ outline

“The goal of the Vaccination Credential Initiative is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records,” said Paul Meyer, CEO of non-profit The Commons Project, also involved in the project.

Tech giants want to help you prove you’ve been vaccinated for COVID-19, via @FastCompanyhttps://t.co/tNNDzC3cux#vaccinecredential#covidvaccinepic.twitter.com/q0GIsjuc06

— The Commons Project (@commons_prjct) January 14, 2021

Meyer said that the document will allow people “to safely return to travel, work, school, and life, while protecting their data privacy.”

Meyer said the coalition is working with several governments, and expects standards to be adopted that will see mandatory negative tests or proof of vaccination, in order to re-engage in society.

“Individuals are going to need to have to produce vaccination records for a lot of aspects of getting back to life as normal,” he added. “We live in a globally connected world. We used to anyway — and we hope to again.”

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with @MITREcorp and a broad coalition of industry leaders across healthcare and technology to accelerate digital access to COVID-19 vaccination records. Read more: https://t.co/9tJR8Cbymc #vaccinecredential pic.twitter.com/e9leRz2Bza

— The Commons Project Foundation (@commons_prjct) January 14, 2021

The Financial Times reports that The Commons Project has received funding for the project from the Rockefeller Foundation, and that it is being implemented by all three major airline alliances.

The Rockefeller Foundation has previously touted its plans for a ‘Covid-19 data and commons digital platform’ as well as a desire to “launch a Covid Community Healthcare Corps for testing and contact tracing.”

“Coordination of such a massive program should be treated as a wartime effort,” the foundation states on its website, adding that there should be “a public/private bipartisan Pandemic Testing Board established to assist and serve as a bridge between local, state, and federal officials with the logistical, investment and political challenges this operation will inevitably face.”

Screenshot: Rockefeller Foundation ‘Covid action plan’ website

Screenshot: Rockefeller Foundation ‘Covid action plan’ website

Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce join a push for digital vaccination credentials. Read more via @nytimes on #vaccinecredential https://t.co/AOXrVtRJEW

— The Commons Project Foundation (@commons_prjct) January 14, 2021

The group also wants to see a global standardisation of the so called vaccine passports, noting that “The current vaccination record system does not readily support convenient access, control and sharing of verifiable vaccination records.”

The coalition of big tech firms is looking to “customize all aspects of the vaccination management lifecycle and integrate closely with other coalition members’ offerings, which will help us all get back to public life,” said Bill Patterson, an executive vice president at Salesforce.

“With a single platform to help deliver safe and continuous operations and deepen trust with customers and employees, this coalition will be crucial to support public health and wellbeing,” Patterson claimed.

Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle’s Global Business Units added that “This process needs to be as easy online banking. We are committed to working collectively with the technology and medical communities, as well as global governments.”

Ken Mayer, founder and CEO of Safe Health also stated that the VCI “will enable application developers to create privacy-preserving health status verification solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into existing ticketing workflows.”

Put more simply, it will “help get concerts and sporting events going again,” Mayer said.

The context seems clear. Those without the COVID passport will not be allowed to travel or engage in social events.

Hundreds of Tech companies are scrambling over themselves to develop COVID passport systems.

As we reported last month, the IATA, the world’s largest air transport lobby group, expects its COVID travel pass app to be fully rolled out in the first months of 2021.

A further ‘COVID passport’ app called the AOKpass from travel security firm International SOS is currently undergoing trials  between Abu Dhabi and Pakistan.

We have exhaustively documented the privacy and rights concerns associated with the move toward adoption, and more importantly the global standardisation of so called COVID passports.

UK based human rights group Privacy International has warned that if “immunity” passports are issued by some governments, it could signal a creep toward “digital identity schemes” and other mandatory ID schemes.

“Once you have multiple uses (e.g. access to services) in multiple domains (i.e. public sector, private sector), in multiple countries (i.e. travel), then we are approaching a global identity document needed to live your life,” the group warned.

Sweden based human rights group The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) warned recently that 61 per cent of countries have used COVID restrictions “that were concerning from a democracy and human rights perspective.”

Anna Beduschi, an academic from Exeter University, commented on the potential move toward vaccine passports by EU, noting that it “poses essential questions for the protection of data privacy and human rights.”

Beduschi added that the vaccine passports may “create a new distinction between individuals based on their health status, which can then be used to determine the degree of freedoms and rights they may enjoy.”

The EU’s own data protection chief Wojciech Wiewiórowski recently labeled the idea of an immunity passport “extreme” and has repeatedly said it is alarming, and ‘disgusting’.

A report compiled last year by AI research body the Ada Lovelace Institute said so called ‘immunity’ passports “pose extremely high risks in terms of social cohesion, discrimination, exclusion and vulnerability.”

Sam Grant, campaign manager at the civili liberties advocacy group Liberty has warned that “any form of immunity passport risks creating a two-tier system in which some of us have access to freedoms and support while others are shut out.”

“These systems could result in people who don’t have immunity potentially being blocked from essential public services, work or housing – with the most marginalised among us hardest hit,” Grant further warned.

“This has wider implications too because any form of immunity passport could pave the way for a full ID system – an idea which has repeatedly been rejected as incompatible with building a rights-respecting society,” Grant further urged.

Gloria Guevara, CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), has also slammed the passports as “discriminatory”, saying “We should never require the vaccination to get a job or to travel.”

Speaking at a Reuters event, the head of the WTTC also condemned airline Qantas for their previous assertion that unvaccinated people would not be allowed on their aircraft.

“It will take a significant amount of time to vaccinate the global population, particularly those in less advanced countries, or in different age groups, therefore we should not discriminate against those who wish to travel but have not been vaccinated,” Guevara noted.

Nevertheless, the spectre of so called ‘immunity passports’ is looming globally.

As noted above, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has penned a letter to EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, demanding that the Commission should ‘standardise’ a vaccine passport across all member countries, and that it should be required for people to travel throughout the area, further outlining that “Persons who have been vaccinated should be free to travel.”

The request is set to be debated in the coming days.

Vaccine passports have previously been touted by the EU, with officials suggesting back in April that visa applicants would also be required to be vaccinated.

EU countries including Spain, Estonia, Iceland, and Belgium have all indicated that they are open to some form of vaccine passports, as well as sharing the data across borders.

Denmark recently announced that it is rolling out a ‘Covid passport’, to allow those who have taken the vaccine to engage in society without any restrictions.

Poland has also announced plans to introduce vaccine passports, which will allow those who have taken the COVID shot greater freedoms than those who have not.

Having left the EU, Britain would not be part of any standardised European scheme, however it has now confirmed that it is rolling out vaccine passports, despite previous denials that it would do so.

Recently, the government in Ontario, Canada admitted that it is exploring ‘immunity passports’ in conjunction with restrictions on travel and access to social venues for the unvaccinated.

Last month, Israel announced that citizens who get the COVID-19 vaccine will be given ‘green passports’ that will enable them to attend venues and eat at restaurants.

A litany of other government and travel industry figures in both the US, Britain and beyond have suggested that ‘COVID passports’ are coming in order for ‘life to get back to normal’.

In addition, hotels have also indicated they will do the same.

Insurers have also indicated that they will fall in line with any standardisation of vaccination passports, and may demand to see proof of vaccination before covering those wishing to go on holiday.

The international Travel and Health Insurance Journal reported that “If the EU obliges travellers to vaccinate, travel insurance providers may refuse to cover those who decline to have the vaccination.”

EU news website Schengenvisainfo also reported on the likely move by insurers, pointing out that anti-vaxxers will likely be specifically targeted by the mandates.

“Even if anti-vax travellers find a loophole in the requirement and manage to enter any of the Member States, travel insurance providers may refuse to cover them,” the report states.

It continues, “With the high volume of fake news and conspiracy theories that have been going on for months now on the pandemic and vaccination, the real challenge for the EU will not be to purchase the necessary vaccine doses, but rather to convince people to be vaccinated.”

The report adds that “Conspiracy theorists, in Europe and further in the world, have targeted Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is known as a supporter of vaccination, claiming he is responsible for the Coronavirus pandemic.”

While surveys have indicated that around half the people in the world are not willing to take the vaccine at this stage. However, a recent poll has indicated that 74% of Americans say they are willing to get a COVID vaccination passport, should they be introduced in the U.S.

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Michael Hudson: Well, I’m honored to be here on the same show with Pepe and discuss our mutual concern. And I think you have to frame the whole issue that China is thriving, and the West has reached the end of the whole 75-year expansion it had since 1945.

So, there was an illusion that America is de-industrializing because of competition from China. And the reality is there is no way that America can re-industrialize and regain its export markets with the way that it’s organized today, financialized and privatized and if China didn’t exist. You’d still have the Rust Belt rusting out. You’d still have American industry not being able to compete abroad simply because the cost structure is so high in the United States.

The wealth is no longer made here by industrializing. It’s made financially, mainly by making capital gains. Rising prices for real estate or for stocks and for bonds.  In the last nine months, since the coronavirus came here, the top 1 percent of the U.S. economy grew by $1 trillion. It’s been a windfall for the 1 percent. The stock market is way up, the bond market is up, the real estate market is up while the rest of the economy is going down. Despite the tariffs that Trump put on, Chinese imports, trade with China is going up because we’re just not producing materials.

America doesn’t make its own shoes. It doesn’t make some nuts and bolts or fasteners, it doesn’t make industrial things anymore because if money is to be made off an industrial company it’s to buy and sell the company, not to make loans to increase the company’s production. New York City, where I live, used to be an industrial city and, the industrial buildings, the mercantile buildings have all been gentrified into high-priced real estate and the result is that Americans have to pay so much money on education, rent, medical care that if they got all of their physical needs, their food, their clothing, all the goods and services for nothing, they still couldn’t compete with foreign labor because of all of the costs that they have to pay that are essentially called rent-seeking.

Housing in the United States now absorbs about 40 percent of the average worker’s paycheck. There’s 15 percent taken off the top of paychecks for pensions, Social Security and for Medicare. Further medical insurance adds more to the paycheck, income taxes and sales taxes add about another 10 percent. Then you have student loans and bank debt. So basically, the American worker can only spend about one third of his or her income on buying the goods and services they produce. All the rest goes into the FIRE sector — the finance, insurance and real estate sector — and other monopolies.

And essentially, we became what’s called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy. So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?

America used to have industrial capitalism in the 19th century. That’s how it got richer originally but now it’s moved away from industrial capitalism towards finance capitalism. And what that means is that essentially the mixed economy that made America rich — where the government would invest in education and infrastructure and transportation and provide these at low costs so that the employers didn’t have to pay labor to afford high costs — all of this has been transformed over the last hundred years.

And we’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism. Before, the idea of capitalism in the 19th century from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to John Stuart Mill to Marx was very clear and Marx stated it quite clearly; capitalism was revolutionary. It was to get rid of the landlord class. It was to get rid of the rentier class. It was to get rid of the banking class essentially, and just bear all the costs that were unnecessary for production, because how did England and America and Germany gain their markets?

“We’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism.”

They gained their markets basically by the government picking up a lot of the costs of the economy. The government in America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided transportation at subsidized prices. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. And so, government infrastructure was considered a fourth factor of production.

And if you read what the business schools in the late 19th century taught like Simon Patten at the Wharton School, it’s very much like socialism. In fact, it’s very much like what China is doing. And in fact, China is following in the last 30 or 40 years pretty much the same way of getting rich that America followed.

It had its government fund basic infrastructure. It provides low-cost education. It invests in high-speed railroads and airports, in the building of cities. So, the government bears most of the costs and, that means that employers don’t have to pay workers enough to pay a student loan debt. They don’t have to pay workers enough to pay enormous rent such as you have in the United States.  They don’t have to pay workers to save for a pension fund, to pay the pension later on.  And most of all the Chinese economy doesn’t really have to pay a banking class because banking is the most important public utility of all.  Banking is what China has kept in the hands of government and Chinese banks don’t lend for the same reasons that American banks lend.

(When I said that China can pay lower wages than the U.S., what I meant was that China provides as public services many things that American workers have to pay out of their own pockets – such as health care, free education, subsidized education, and above all, much lower debt service.

When workers have to go into debt in order to live, they need much higher wages to keep solvent. When they have to pay for their own health insurance, they have to earn more. The same is true of education and student debt. So much of what Americans seem to be earning — more than workers in other countries — goes right through their hands to the FIRE sector. So, what seems to be “low wages” in China go a lot further than higher wages in the United States.)

Eighty percent of American bank loans are mortgage loans to real estate and the effect of loosening loan standards and increasing the market for real estate is to push up the cost of living, push up the cost of housing. So, Americans have to pay more and more money for their housing whether they’re renters or they’re buyers, in which case the rent is for paying mortgage interest.

So, all of this cost structure has been built into the economy. China’s been able pretty much, to avoid all of this, because its objective in banking is not to make a profit and interest, not to make capital gains and speculation. It creates money to fund actual means of production to build factories, to build research and development, to build transportation facilities, to build infrastructure. Banks in America don’t lend for that kind of thing.

“So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.”

They only lend against collateral that’s already in place because they won’t make a loan if it’s not backed by collateral. Well, China creates money through its public banks to create capital, to create the means of production. So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.

The United States has decided not to gain wealth by actually investing in means of production and producing goods and services, but in financial ways. China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it. And whether you call this, industrial capitalism or a state capitalism or a state socialism or Marxism, it basically follows the same logic of real economics, the real economy, not the financial overhead.  So, you have China operating as a real economy, increasing its production, becoming the workshop of the world as England used to be called and America trying to draw in foreign resources, live off of foreign resources, live by trying to make money by investing in the Chinese stock market or now, moving investment banks into China and making loans to China not actual industrial capitalism ways.

“China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it.”

So, you could say that America has gone beyond industrial capitalism, and they call it the post-industrial society, but you could call it the neo-feudal society. You could call it the neo-rentier society, or you could call it debt peonage but it’s not industrial capitalism.

And in that sense, there’s no rivalry between China and America. These are different systems going their own way and I better let Pepe pick it up from there.

Pepe Escobar: Okay. Thank you, Michael, this is brilliant. And you did it in less than 15 minutes. You told the whole story in 15 minutes. Well, my journalistic instinct is immediately to start questions to Michael. So, this is exactly what I’m gonna do now. I think it is much better to basically illustrate some points of what Michael just said, comparing the American system, which is finance capitalism essentially, with industrial capitalism that is in effect in China. Let me try to start with a very concrete and straight to the point question, Michael.

Okay. let’s says that more or less, if we want to summarize it, basically they try to tax the nonproductive rentier class. So, this would be the Chinese way to distribute wealth, right? Sifting through the Chinese economic literature, there is a very interesting concept, which is relatively new (correct me if I am wrong, Michael) in China, which they call stable investment. So stable investment, according to the Chinese would be to issue special bonds as extra capital in fact, to be invested in infrastructure building all across China, and they choose these projects in what they call weak areas and weak links. So probably in some of the inner provinces, or probably in some parts of Tibet or Xinjiang for instance. So, this is a way to invest in the real economy and in real government investment projects.

Right? So, my question in fact, is does this system create extra local debt, coming directly from this financing from Beijing? Is this a good recipe for sustainable development, the Chinese way and the recipe that they could expand to other parts of the Global South?

Michael: Well, this is a big problem that they’re discussing right now. The localities, especially rural China, (and China is still largely rural) only cover about half of their working budget from taxation. So, they have a problem. How are they going to get the balance of the money? Well, there is no official revenue sharing between the federal government and its state banks and the localities.

So, the localities can’t simply go to central government and say, give us more money. The government lets the localities be very independent. And it is sort of the “let a hundred flowers bloom” concept. And so, they’ve let each locality just go the long way, but the localities have run a big deficit.

What do they do?  Well in the United States they would issue bonds on which New York is about to default. But in China, the easiest way for the localities to make money, is unfortunately they will do something like Chicago did. They will sell their tax rights for the next 75 years for current money now.

So, a real estate developer will come in and say; look we will give you the next 75 years of tax on this land, because we want to build projects on this (a set of buildings). So, what this means is that now the cities have given away all their source of rent.

Let me show you the problem by what Indiana and Chicago did. Chicago also was very much like China’s countryside cities. So, it sold parking meters and its sidewalks to a whole series of Wall Street investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund for seventy-five years. And that meant that for 75 years, this Wall Street consortium got to control the parking meters.

So, they put up the parking meters all over Chicago, raised the price of parking, raised the cost of driving to Chicago. And if Chicago would have a parade and interrupt parking, then Chicago has to pay the Abu Dhabi fund and Wall Street company what it would have made anyway. And this became such an awful disaster that finally Wall Street had to reverse the deal and undo it because it was giving privatization a bad name here.  The same thing happened in Indiana.

High School marching band in Chicago’s 2008 Bud Billiken Parade. (Curtis Morrow, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Indiana was running a deficit and it decided to sell its roads to a Wall Street investment firm to make a toll road. The toll on the Indiana turnpike was so high that drivers began to take over the side roads. That’s the problem if you sell future tax revenues in advance.

Now what China and the localities there are discussing is that we’ve already given the real estate tax at very low estimates to the commercial developers, so what do we do? Well, I’ve given them my advice. I’m a professor of economics at the Peking University, School of Marxist studies and I’ve had discussions with the Central Committee. I also have an official position at Wuhan University. There, we’re discussing how China can put an added tax for all of the valuable land, that’s gone up. How can it be done to let the cities collect this tax? Our claim is that the cities, in selling these tax rights for 75 years, have sold what in Britain would be called ground rent (i.e. what’s paid to the landed aristocracy).

Over and above that there’s the market rent. So, China should pass a market-rent tax over and above the ground rent tax to reflect the current value. And there they’re thinking of, well, do we say that this is a capital gain on the land? Well, it’s not really a capital gain until you sell the land, but it’s value. It’s the valuation of the capital. And they’re looking at whether they should just say this is the market rent tax over and above the flat tax that has been paid in advance, or it’s a land tax on the capital gain for land.

Now, all of this requires that there be a land map of the whole country. And they are just beginning to create such a land map as a basis for how you calculate how much the rent there is.

What I found in China is something very strange. A few years ago, in Beijing, they had the first, International Marxist conference where I was the main speaker and I was talking about Marx’s discussion of the history of rent theory in Volume II and Volume III of Capital where Marx discusses all of the classical economics that led up to his view; Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Marx’s theory of surplus value was really the first history of economic thought that was written, although it wasn’t published until after he died. Well, you could see that there was a little bit of discomfort with some of the Marxists at the conference. And so, they invited for the next time my colleague David Harvey to come and talk about Marxism in the West.

Well, David gave both the leading and the closing speech of the conference and said, you’ve got to go beyond volume I of Capital. Volume I was what Marx wrote as his addition to classical economics, saying that there was exploitation in industrial employment of labor as well as rent seeking and then he said, now that I’ve done my introduction here, let me talk about how capitalism works in Volumes II and III. Volumes II and III are all about rent and finance and David Harvey has published a book on Volume III of Capital and his message to Peking University and the second Marxist conference was – you’ve got to read Volume II, and III.

Well, you can see that, there’s a discussion now over what is Marxism and a friend and colleague at PKU said Marxism is a Chinese word; It’s the Chinese word for politics. That made everything clear to me. Now I get it!  I’ve been asked by the Academy of Social Sciences in China to create a syllabus of the history of rent theory and value theory. And essentially in order to have an idea of how you calculate rent, how do you make a national income analysis where you show rent, you have to have a theory of value and price and rent is the excess of price over the actual cost value. Well, for that you need a concept of cost of production and that’s what classical economics is all about. Post-classical economics denied all of this. The whole idea of classical economics is that not all income is earned.

Landlords don’t earn their income for making rent in their sleep as John Stuart Mill said. Banks don’t earn their income by just sitting there and letting debts accrue and interest compounding and doubling. The classical economists separated actual unearned income from the production and consumption economy.

Well, around the late 19th century in America, you had economists fighting against not only Marx, but also even against Henry George, who at that time, was urging a land tax in New York. And so, at Columbia University, John Bates Clark developed a whole theory that everybody earns whatever they can get. That there was no such thing as unearned income and that has become the basis for American national income statistics and thought ever since. So, if you look at today’s GDP figures for the United States, they have a figure for 8 percent of the GDP for the homeowners’ rent. But homeowners wouldn’t pay themselves if they had to rent the apartment to themselves, then you’ll have interest at about 12 percent of GDP.

And I thought, well how can interest be so steady? What happens to all of the late fees; that 29 percent that credit card companies charge? I called up the national income people in Washington, when I was there. And they said well, late fees and penalties are considered financial services.

And so, this is what you call a service economy. Well, there’s no service in charging a late fee, but they add all of the late fees. When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP. When housing becomes more expensive and prices American labor out of the market, that’s called an increase in GDP.

This is not how a country that wants to develop is going to create a national income account. So, there’s a long discussion in China about, just to answer your question, how do you create an account to distinguish between what’s the necessary cost to production and what’s an unnecessary production cost and how do we avoid doing what the United States did. So again, no rivalry. The United States is an object lesson for China on what to avoid, not only in industrializing the economy, but in creating a picture of the economy as if everybody earns everything and there’s no exploitation, no earned income, nobody makes money in their sleep and there’s no 1 percent. Well, that’s what’s really at issue and why the whole world is splitting apart as you and I are discussing in what we’re writing.

“When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP.”

Pepe: Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. So just to sum it all up, can we say that Beijing’s strategy is to save especially provincial areas from leasing their land, their infrastructure for 60 years or 75 years?  As you just mentioned, can we say that the fulcrum of their national strategy is what you define as the market rent tax? Is this the No. 1 mechanism that they are developing?

Michael: Ideally, they want to keep rents as low as possible because rent is a cost of living and a cost of doing business. They don’t have banks that are lending to inflate the real estate market.

However, in almost every Western country — the U.S., Germany England — the value of stocks and bonds and the value of real estate is just about exactly the same. But for China, the value of real estate is way, way larger than the value of stocks.

And the reason is not because the Chinese Central bank, the Bank of China lends for real estate; it’s because they lend to intermediaries and the intermediaries have financed a lot of housing purchases in China. And, this is really the problem for if they levy a land tax, then you’re going to make a lot of these financial intermediaries go bust.

That’s what I’m advocating, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. These financial intermediaries shouldn’t exist, and this same issue came up in 2009 in the United States. You had the leading American bank being the most crooked and internally corrupt bank in the country, Citibank making junk mortgage, and it was broke.

Its entire net worth was wiped out as a result of its fraudulent junk mortgages. Well, Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) wanted to close it down and take it over. Essentially that would have made it into a public bank and that would be a wonderful thing. She said, look Citibank shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing. And she wrote all this up in an autobiography. And, she was overruled by President Obama and Tim Geithner saying, but wait a minute, those are our campaign contributors. So, they were loyal to the campaign contributors, but not the voters; and they didn’t close Citibank down.

And the result is that the Federal Reserve ended up creating about $7 trillion of quantitative easing to bail out the banks. The homeowners weren’t bailed out.  Ten million American families lost their homes as a result of junk mortgages in excess of what the property was actually worth.

All of this was left on the books, foreclosed and sold to a private capital companies like Blackstone. And the result is that home ownership in America declined from 68 percent of the population down to about 61 percent. Well, right where the Obama administration left off, you’re about to have the Biden administration begin in January with an estimated 5 million Americans losing their homes. They’re going to be evicted because they’ve been unemployed during the pandemic. They’ve been working in restaurants or gyms or other industries that have been shut down because of the pandemic. They’re going to be evicted and many homeowners and, low-income homeowners have been unable to pay their mortgages.

There’s going to be a wave of foreclosures. The question is, who’s going to bear the cost? Should it be 15 million American families who lose their homes just so the banks won’t lose money? Or should we let the banks that have made all of the growth since 2008? Ninety five percent of American GDP of the population has seen its wealth go down. All the wealth has been accumulating for the 5 percent in statistics. Now the question is should this 5 percent that’s got all the wealth lose or should the 95 percent lose?

Worker installs security panels over windows after police evict woman from her foreclosed home in South Minneapolis, 2009. (Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The Biden administration says the 95 percent should lose basically. And you’re going to see a wave of closures so that the question in China should be that, these intermediate banks (they’re not really banks they are sort of like payday loan lenders), should they come in and, bear the loss or should Chinese localities and the people bear the loss?  Somebody has to lose when you’re charging, you’re collecting the land’s rent that was paid to the creditors, and either the creditors have to lose or, the tax collector loses and that’s the conflict that exists in every society of the world today.   And, in the West, the idea is the tax collectors should lose and whatever the tax collector relinquishes should be free for the banks to collect. In China obviously, they don’t want that to happen and they don’t want to see a financial class developing along US lines.

Pepe: Michael, there’s a quick question in all this, which is the official position by Beijing in terms of helping the localities. Their official position is that there won’t be any bailouts of local debt. How do they plan to do that?

Michael: What they’re discussing, how are you not going to do it? They think they sort of let localities go their own way. And they think, well you know which ones are going to succeed, and which ones aren’t, they didn’t want to have a one-size-fits all central planning. They wanted to have flexibility. Well, now they have flexibility. And when you have many different “let a hundred flowers bloom,” not all the flowers are going to bloom at the same rate.

And the question is, if they don’t bail out the cities, how are the cities going to operate? Certainly, China has never let markets steer the economy, the government steers the markets. That’s what socialism is as opposed to finance capitalism. So, the question is, you can let localities go broke and yet you’re not going to destroy any of the physical assets of the localities, and all of this is going to be in place. The question is how are you going to arrange the flow of income to all of these roads and buildings and land that’s in place? How do you create a system?  Essentially, they’re saying well, if we’re industrial engineers, how do we just plan things? Forget credit, forget property claims, forget the rentier claims. How are we just going to design an economy that operates most efficiently? And that’s what they’re working on now to resolve this situation because it’s gotten fairly critical.

Pepe: Yes, especially in the countryside. Well, I think, a very good metaphor in terms of comparing both systems are investment in infrastructure. You travel to China a lot so, you’ve seen. You’ll travel through high-speed rail. You’ll see those fantastic airports, in Pudong or the new airport in Beijing. And then you’ll take the Acela to go from Washington to New York City, which is something that I used to do years ago. And the comparison is striking. Isn’t it?

Or if you go to France, for instance, when France started development of the TGV, which in terms of a national infrastructure network, is one of the best networks on the planet. And the French started doing this 30 years ago, even more. Is there……, it’s not in terms of way out, but if we analyze the minutia, it’s obvious that following the American finance utilization system, we could never have something remotely similar happening in United States in terms of building infrastructure.

So, do you see any realistic bypass mechanism in terms of improving American infrastructure, especially in the big cities?

TGV 2N2 Lyria train at Paris’ Gare de Lyon station. (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Michael: No, and there are two reasons for that. No. 1, let’s take a look at the long-term railroads. The railroads go through the center of town or even in the countryside, all along the railroads, the railroads brought business and all the businesses had been located as close to the railroad tracks as they could. Factories with sightings off the railroad, hotels and especially right through the middle of town where you have the railway gates going up and down. In order to make a high-speed rail as in China, you need a dedicated roadway without trucks and cars, imagine a car going through a railway gate at 350 miles an hour.

So, when I would go from Beijing to Tianjin, here’s the high-speed rail, there’s one highway on one side, one highway on the other side. There’ll be underpasses. But there it goes straight now. How can you suppose you would have a straight Acela line from Washington up to Boston when all along the line, there’s all this real estate right along the line that has been built up? There’s no way you can get a dedicated roadway without having to tear down all of this real estate that’s on either side and the cost of making the current owners whole would be prohibitive. And anywhere you would go, that’s not in the center of the city, you would also have to have the problem that there’s already private property there.

And there’s no legal, constitutional way for such a physical investment to be made. China was able to make this investment because it was still largely rural. It wasn’t as built up along the railways. It didn’t have any particular area that was built up right where the railroad already was.

President Donald Trump visiting China in 2017. (PAS China via Wikimedia Commons)

So certainly, any high-speed rail could not go where the current railways would be, and they’d have to go on somebody’s land. And, there’s also, what do you do if you want to get to New York and Long Island from New Jersey?

Sixty years ago, when I went into Wall Street, the cost of getting and transporting goods from California to Newark, New Jersey, was as large as from Newark right across the Hudson River to New York, not only because of the mafia and control of the local labor unions, but because of the tunnels. Right now, the tunnels from New Jersey to New York are broke, they are leaking, the subways in New York City, which continually break down because there was a hurricane a few years ago and the switches were made in the 1940s. The switches are 80 years old. They had water damage and the trains have to go at a crawl. But the city and state, because it is not collecting the real estate tax and other taxes and because ridership fell on the subways to about 20 percent, the city’s broke. They’re talking about 70 percent of city services being cut back. They’re talking about cutting back the subways to 40 percent capacity, meaning everybody will have to get in — when there’s still a virus and not many people are wearing masks, and there was no means of enforcing masks here.

So, there’s no way that you can rebuild the infrastructure because, for one thing the banking system here has subsidized for a hundred years junk economics saying you have to balance the budget. If the government creates credit it’s inflationary as if when banks create credit, it’s not inflationary. Well, the monetary effect is the same, no matter who creates the money. And so, Biden has already said that President Trump ran a big deficit, we’re going to run a bunch of surpluses or a budget balance. And he was advocating that all along. Essentially Biden is saying we have to increase unemployment by 20 percent, lower wages by 20 percent, shrink the economy by about 10 percent in order to, in order for the banks not to lose money.

“You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism.”

And, we’re going to privatize but we are going to do it by selling the hospitals, the schools, the parks, the transportation to finance, to Wall Street finance capital groups. And so, you can imagine what’s going to happen if the Wall Street groups buy the infrastructure. They’ll do what happened to Chicago when it sold all the parking meters, they’ll say, OK, instead of 25 cents an hour, it’s now charged $3 an hour. Instead of a $2 for the subway, let’s make it $8.

You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism. Well, it’s not socialism. It’s industrial capitalism. It’s industrialization, that’s basic economics. The idea of what, and how an economy works is so twisted academically that it’s the antithesis of what Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill and Marx all talked about. For them a free- market economy was an economy free of rentiers. Free of rent, it didn’t have any rent seeking. But now for the Americans, a free-market economy is free for the rentiers, free for the landlord, free for the banks to make a killing. And that is basically the class war back in business with a vengeance. That blocks and is preventing any kind infrastructure recovery. I don’t see how it can possibly take place.

Pepe: Well, based on what you just described, there is a process of turning the United States into a giant Brazil. In fact, this is what the Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a Pinochetista, as you know Michael, has been doing with the Brazilian economy for the past two years, privatizing everything and selling everything to big Brazilian interests and with lots of Wall Street interests involved as well. So, this is a recipe that goes all across the Global South as well. And it’s fully copied all across the Global South with no way out now.

 Michael: Yes, and this is promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And when I was brought down to Brazil to meet with the council of economic advisers under Lula, [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil], they said, well the whole problem is that Lula’s been obliged to let the banks do the planning.

So, basically free markets and libertarianism is adopting central planning, but with central planning by the banks. America is a much more centrally planned economy than China. China is letting a hundred flowers bloom; America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be. Now the irony is that China’s sending its students to America to study economics. And, most of the Chinese I had talked to say, well we went to America to take economics courses because that gives us a prestige here in China.

I’m working now, with Chinese groups trying to develop a “reality economics” to be taught in China as different from American economics.

“America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be.”

Pepe: Exactly, because of what they study at Beijing University, Renmin or Tsinghua

is not exactly what they would study in big American universities. Probably what they study in the U.S. is what not to do in China. When they go back to China, what they won’t be doing. It’s an object lesson for what to avoid.

Michael, I’d like to go back to what the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] had been discussing in the 2000s when Lula was still president of Brazil and many of his ideas deeply impressed, especially Hu Jintao at the time, which is bypassing the U.S. dollar. Well, at the moment obviously we’re still at 87 percent of international transactions still in U.S. dollars. So, we are very far away from it, but if you have a truly sovereign economy, which is the case of China, which we can say is the case of Russia to a certain extent and obviously in a completely different framework, Iran. Iran is a completely sovereign, independent economy from the West. The only way to try to develop different mechanisms to not fall into the rentier mind space would be to bypass the U.S. dollar.

Occupy Wall Street picket of HSBC, midtown Manhattan; Feb. 14, 2013. (Michael Fleshman Via Flickr)

Michael: Yes, for many reasons. For one thing the United States can simply print the dollars and lend to other countries and then say, now you have to pay us interest. Well, Russia doesn’t need American dollars. It can print its own rubles to provide labor. There’s no need for a foreign currency at all for domestic spending, the only reason you would have to borrow a foreign currency is to balance your exchange rate, or to finance a trade deficit. But China doesn’t have a trade deficit. And in fact, if China were to work to accept more dollars, Americans would love to buy into the Chinese market and make a profit there, but that would push up China’s exchange rate and that would make it more difficult for her to make its exports because the exchange rate would come up not because it’s exporting more but because it’s letting American dollars come in and push it up.

Well, fortunately, President Trump as if he works for the Chinese National Committee, said, look, we don’t want to really hurt China by pushing up its currency and we want to keep it competitive. So, I’m going to prevent American companies from lending money to China, I’m going to isolate it and so he’s helping them protect their economy. And in Russia he said, look Russia really needs to feed itself. And, there’s a real danger that when the Democrats come in, there are a lot of anti-Russians in the Biden administration. They may go to war. They may do to Russia what they tried to do to China in the ‘50s. Stop exporting food and grain. And only Canada was able to break the embargo. So, we’re going to impose sanctions on Russia. So immediately, what happened is Russia very quickly became the largest grain exporter in the world. And instead of importing cheese from the Baltics, it created its own cheese industry. So, Trump said look, I know that Russians followed the American idea of not having protective tariffs, they need protective tariffs. They’re not doing it. We’re going to help them out by just not importing from them and really helping them.

Pepe: Yeah. Michael, what do you think Black Rock wants from the Chinese? You know that they are making a few inroads at the highest levels? Of course, I’m sure you’re aware of that. And also, JP Morgan, Citybank, etc. What do they really want?

Michael: They’d like to be able to create dollars to begin to buy and make loans to real estate; let companies grow, let the real estate market grow and make capital gains.

The way people get wealthy today isn’t by making an income, it’s been by making a capital gain. Total returns are current income plus the capital gains. As for capital gains each year; the land value gains alone are larger than the whole GDP growth from year to year. So that’s where the money is, that’s where the wealth is. So, they are after speculative capital gains, they would like to push money into the Chinese stock market and real estate market. See the prices go up and then inflate the prices by buying in and then sell out at the high price. Pull the money out, get a capital gain and let the economy crash, I mean that’s the business plan.

Pepe: Exactly. But Beijing will never allow that.

Michael: Well, here’s the problem right now, they know that Biden is pushing militarily aggressive people in his cabinet. There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy. They’re very worried about the military and they say, how do we deter the Biden administration from actually trying a military adventure in the South China Sea or elsewhere? They said well, fortunately America is multi-layered. They don’t think of America as a group. They realize there’s a layer and they say, who’s going to represent our interests?

“There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy.”

Well, Blackstone and Wall Street are going to represent their interests. Then I think one of the, Chinese officials last week gave a big speech on this very thing, saying look, our best hope in stopping America’s military adventurism in China is to have Wall Street acting as our support because after all, Wall Street is the main campaign contributor and the president works for the campaign contributors.

The politician works for the campaign contributors. They’re in it for the money! So fortunately, we have Wall Street on our side, we’ve got control of the political system and they’re not there to go to war so that helps explain why a month ago they let wholly-owned U.S. banks and bankers in. On the one hand, they don’t like the idea of somebody outside the government creating credit for reasons that the economy doesn’t need. If they needed it, the Bank of China would do it. They have no need for foreign currency to come in to make loans in domestic currency, out of China.

The only reason that they could do it is No. 1, it helps meet the World Trade Organization’s principles and, No. 2, especially during this formative few months of the Biden administration, it helps to have Wall Street saying; we can make a fortune in China, go easy on them and that essentially counters the military hawks in Washington.

Pepe: So, do you foresee a scenario when Black Rock starts wreaking havoc in the Shanghai stock exchange for instance?

Wall Street, Nov. 21, 2009. (Dave Center, Flickr)

Michael: It would love to do that. It would love to move things up and down. The money’s made by companies with the stock market going up and down; the zigzag. So of course, it wants to do a predatory zigzag. The question is whether China will impose a tax to stop this, all sorts of financial transactions. That’s what’s under discussion now. They know exactly what Black Rock wants to do because they have some very savvy billionaire Chinese advisers that are quite good. I can tell you stories, but I better not.

Pepe: Okay. If it’s not okay to tell it all, tell us part of the story then.

Michael: The American banks have been cultivating leading Chinese people by providing them enough money to make money here, that they think that, okay they will now try to make money in the same way in China and we can join in. It’s a conflict of systems again, between the finance capital system and industrial socialism. You don’t get any of this discussion in the U.S. press, which is why I read what you write because in the U.S. press, the neocons talk about the fake idea of Greek history and fake idea of the Thucydides’ problem of a country jealous of another country’s development.

There’s no jealousy between America and China. They’re different, they have their own way. We are going to destroy them. And if you look at the analogy that the Americans draw —and this is how the Pentagon thinks — with the war between Athens and Sparta. It’s hard to tell, which is which. Here you have Athens, a democracy backing other democracies and having the military support of the democracies and the military in these democracies all had to pay Athens protection money for the military support and that’s the money that Athens got to ostensibly support its navy and protection that built up all of the Athenian public buildings and everything else. So, that’s a democracy exploiting its allies, to enrich itself via the military. Then you have Sparta, which was funding all of the oligarchies, and it was helping the oligarchies overthrow democracies. Well, that was America too. So, America is both sides of the Thucydides war if the democracy is exploiting the fellow democracies and is the supporter of oligarchies in Brazil, Latin America, Africa and everyone else.

So, you could say the Thucydides problem was between two sides, two aspects of America and has nothing to do with China at all except, for the fact that the whole war was a war between economic systems. They’re acting as if somehow if only China did not export to us, we could be re-industrialized and somehow export to Europe and the Third World.

And as you and I have described, it’s over. We painted ourselves into such a debt corner that without writing down the debts, we’re in the same position that the Eurozone is in. There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth. And, since 1980 as you know, real wages in America have been stable. All the growth has been in property owners and predators and the FIRE sector, the rest of the economy is in stagnation. And now the coronavirus has simply acted as a catalyst to make it very clear that the game is over; it’s time to move away from the homeowner economy to rentier economy, time for Blackstone to be the landlord. America wants to recreate the British landlord class and essentially what we’re seeing now is like the Norman invasion of England taking over the land and the infrastructure. That’s what Blackstone would love to do in China.

“There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth.”

Pepe: Wow. I’m afraid that they may have a lot of leeway by some members of the Beijing leadership now, because as you know very well, it’s not a consensus in the political arena.

Michael: We’re talking about Volume II and III of Capital.

Pepe: Exactly. But you know, you were talking about debt. Coming back to that, in fact I just checked this morning, apparently global debt as it stands today is $277 trillion, which is something like 365 percent of global GDP. What does that mean in practice?

Michael: Yeah, well fortunately this is discussed in the 19th century and there was a word for that — fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this. You could say the question now, and The Financial Times just had an article a few days ago that China’s claims on Third World countries on the Belt and Road Initiative is fictitious capital, because how can it collect?

Well, China’s already thought of that. It doesn’t want money. It wants the raw materials. It wants to be paid in real things. But a debt that can’t be paid, can only be paid either by foreclosing on the debtors or by writing down the debts and obviously a debt that can’t be paid won’t be paid.

“Fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this.”

And so, you have not only Marx using the word fictitious capital. At the other end of the spectrum, you had Henry George talking about fictive capital. In other words, these are property claims that have no real capital behind them. There’s no capital that makes profit. That’s just a property claim for payment or a rentier claim for payment.

So, the question is, can you make money somehow without having any production at all, without having wages, without having profits, without any capital? Can you just have asset grabbing and buying-and-selling assets? And as long as you have the Federal Reserve in America, come in, Trump’s $10 trillion Covid program gave $2 trillion to the population at large with these $1,200 checks, that my wife and I got, and $8 trillion all just to buy stocks and bonds. None of this was to build infrastructure. None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory. None of this 8 trillion was to employee a single worker. It was all just to support the prices of stocks and bonds, and to keep the illusion that the economy had not stopped growing. Well, it’s growing for the 5 percent. So, it’s all become fictitious. And if you look at the GDP as I said, it’s fictitious.

Pepe: And the most extraordinary thing is none of that is discussed in American media. There’s not a single word about what you would have been describing.

Michael: It’s not even discussed in academia. Our graduates at the university of Missouri at Kansas City, we’re all trained in Modern Monetary Theory. And as hired professors they have to be able to publish in the refereed journals and the refereed journals are all essentially controlled by the Chicago School. So, you have a censorship of the kind of ideas that we’re talking about. You can’t get it into the economic journals, so you can’t get it into the economics curriculum. So, where on earth are you going to get it? If you didn’t have the internet you wouldn’t be discussing at all. Most of my books sell mainly in China, more than in all the other countries put together so I can discuss these things there. I stopped publishing in orthodox journals so many years ago because it’s talking to the deaf.

“None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory, employee, a single worker.” 

Pepe: Absolutely. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about Russia, Michael? There is a raging, debate in Russia for many years now between let’s say the Eurasianists and the Atlanticists. It involves of course, economic policy under Putin, industrial capitalism Russian style. The Eurasianists basically say that the central problem with Russia is how the Russian central bank is basically affiliated with all the mechanisms that you know so well, that it is an Atlanticist Trojan Horse inside the Russian economy. How do you see it?

Michael: Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. First of all, the IMF announced in advance that there was a big meeting in Houston with the IMF and the World Bank. And the IMF published all of its report saying, first you don’t want inflation in Russia so let’s wipe out all of the Russian savings with hyperinflation, which they did. They then said, well now to cure the hyperinflation the Russian central bank needs a stable currency and you need a backup for the currency. You will need to back it with U.S. dollars.

“Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.”

So, from the early 1990s, as you know, labor was going unpaid. The Russian central bank could have created the rubles to pay the domestic labor and to keep the factories in place. But, the IMF advisers from Harvard said, no you’ll have to borrow U.S. dollars. I met with people from the Hermitage Fund and the Renaissance Fund and others. We had meetings and I met with the investors. Russia was paying 100 percent interest for years to leading American financial institutions for money that it didn’t need and could have created itself. Russia was so dispirited with Stalinism that, essentially, it thought the opposite of Stalinism must be what they have in America.

They thought that America was going to tell it how America got rich, but America didn’t want to tell Russia how it got rich, but instead wanted to make money off Russia. They didn’t get it. They trusted the Americans. They really didn’t understand that, industrial capitalism that Marx described had metamorphosized into finance capitalism and was completely different.

And that’s because Russia didn’t charge rent, it didn’t charge interest. I gave three speeches before the Duma, urging it to impose a land tax. Some of the people I noticed, Ed Dodson was there with us and we were all trying to convince Russia, don’t let this land be privatized. If you let it be privatized, then you’re going to have such high rents and housing costs in Russia that you’re not going to be able to essentially compete for an industrial growth. Well, the politician who brought us there, Viatcheslav Zolensky was sort of maneuvered out of the election by the American advisers.

Russian Duma Building, Moscow, 2017. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Americans put billions of dollars in to essentially finance American propagandists to destroy Russia, mainly from the Harvard Institute of International Development. And essentially, they were a bunch of gangsters and the prosecutors in Boston were about to prosecute them.

The attorney general of Boston was going to bring a big case for Harvard against the looting of Russia and the corruption of Russia. And I was asked to organize and to bring a number of Russian politicians and industrialists over to say how this destroyed everything. Well, Harvard settled out of court and essentially that made the perpetrators the leading university people up there. (I’m associated with Harvard Anthropology Department, not the Economics Department.)

So, we never had a chance to bring my witnesses, and have our report on what happened, but I published for the Russian Academy of Sciences a long study of how all of this destruction of Russia was laid out in advance at the Houston meetings by the IMF. America went to the leading bureaucrats and said; look, we can make you rich why don’t you register the factories in your own name, and if you’re registered in your own name, you know, then you’ll own it. And then you can cash out. You can essentially sell, but obviously you can’t sell to the Russians because the IMF has just wiped out all of their savings.

You can only cash out by selling to the West. And so, the Russian stock market became the leading stock market in the world from 1994 with the Norilsk Nickel and the seven bankers in the bank loans for shares deal through 1997. And, I had worked for a firm Scutter Stevens and, the head adviser, a former student of mine didn’t want to invest in Russia because she said, this is just a rip off, it’s going to crash. She was fired for not investing. They said look, we know that’s going to crash. That’s the whole idea it’s going to crash. We can make a mint off it before the crash. And then when it crashes, we can make another mint by selling short and then all over again. Well, the problem is that the system that was put in with the privatization that’s occurred, how do you have Russia’s wealth used to develop its own industry and its own economy like China was doing. Well, China has rules for all of this, but Russia doesn’t have rules, it’s really all centralized, it’s President Putin that keeps it this way.

Well, this was the great fear of the West. When you had Mikhail Gorbachev beginning to plan to do pretty much what is done today, to restrain private capital, the IMF said hold off. We’re not going to make any loans to stabilize the Russian currency until you remove Mr. Primakov.

The U.S. said we won’t deal with Russia until you remove him. So, he was pushed out and he was probably the smartest guy at the time there. So, they thought [President Vladimir] Putin was going to be sort of the patsy. And he almost single-handedly, holding the oligarchs in and saying, look, you can keep your money as long as you do exactly what the government would do. You can keep the gains as long as you’re serving the public interest.

But none of this resulted into a legal system, a tax system, and a system where the government actually does get most of the benefits. Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people instead of giving Norilsk Nickel and the oil companies to Yukos. It could have given everybody their own house and their own apartment, the same thing in the Baltics. And instead it didn’t give the land out to the people. And Russians were paying 3 percent of their income for housing in 1990. And rent is the largest element in every household’s budget.

“Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people.”

So, Russia could have had low-price labor. It could have financed all of its capital investment for the government by taxing, collecting the rising rental value. Instead, Russian real estate was privatized on credit and it was even worse in the Baltics.

In Latvia, where I was research director for the Riga Graduate School of Law, Latvia borrowed primarily from Swedish banks. And so, in order to buy a house, you had to borrow from Swedish banks. And they said, well, we’re not going to lend in the Latvian currency because it can go down. So, you have a choice; Swiss Francs or German Marks or U.S. Dollars. And so, all of this rent was paid in foreign currency. There came an outflow that essentially drained all the Baltic economies. Latvia lost 20 percent of its population. Estonia and Lithuania followed suit.

And of course, the worst hit by neo-liberalism was Russia. As you know, President Putin said that neo-liberalism cost Russia more of its population than World War II. And you know that to destroy a country, you don’t need an army anymore. All you have to do is teach it American economics.

Pepe: Yes, I remember well, I arrived in Russia in the winter of 91 coming from China. So, I transited from the Chinese miracle. In fact, a few days after Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern tour when he went to Guangzhou and Shenzhen.  And that was the kick for the 1990s boom, in fact a few years before the handover, and then I took the Trans-Siberian and I arrived in Moscow a few days after the end, in fact, a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union.

But yeah, I remember the Americans arrived almost at the exact minute, wasn’t it, Michael? I think they already were there in the spring of 1992. If I’m not mistaken.

Image on the right: Russian 1992 privatization voucher. (Wikimedia Commons)

Michael:  The Houston meeting was in 1990.  But all before that already in, 1988 and 1989, there was a huge outflow of embezzlement money via Latvia. The assistant dean of the university who ended up creating Nordex, essentially the money was all flying out because Ventspils in Latvia, was where Russian oil was exported and it was all fake invoicing. So, the Russian kleptocrats basically made their money off false export invoicing, ostensibly selling it for one price and having the rest paid abroad and, this was all organized through Latvia and the man who did it later moved to Israel and finally gave a billion dollars back to Russia so that he went on to live safely for the rest of his life in Israel.

Pepe: Well, the crash of the ruble in 1998 was what, roughly one year after the crash of the baht and the whole Asian financial crisis, no? It was interlinked of course, but let me see if I have a question for you, in fact, I’m just thinking out loud now. If the economies of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, the case of South Korea and Russia, were more integrated at the time as they are trying to integrate now, do you think that the Asian financial crisis would have been preventable in 1997?

Michael: Well, look at what happened in Malaysia with Mohammad Mahathir. Malaysia avoided it. So of course, it was preventable, and they had the capital controls. All you would have needed was to do what Malaysia did. But you needed an economic theory for that.

And essentially the current mode of warfare is to conquer the brains of a country to shape how people think and how they perceive the economy. And if you can twist their view into an unreality economics, where they think that you’re there to help them not to take money out of them, then you’ve got them hooked. That was what happened in Asia. Asia thought it was getting rich off the dollars inflows and then the IMF and all the creditors pulled the plug, crash the industry. And now that all of a sudden you had a crash, they bought up Korean industry and other South Asian industries at giveaway prices.

That’s what you do. You lend the money; you pull the plug. You then let them go under and you pick up the pieces. That’s what Blackstone did after the Obama depression began, when Obama saved the banks, not the constituency, the mortgage borrowers. Essentially that’s Blackstone’s modus operandito pick up distressed prices at a bankruptcy sale, but you need to lend money and then crash it in order to make that work.

Pepe: Michael, I think we have only five minutes left. So, I would expect you to go on a relatively long answer and I’m really dying for it. It’s about debt, it about the debt trap. And it’s about the New Silk Roads, the Belt and Road Initiative, because I think rounding up our discussion and coming back to the theme of debt and global debt.

The No. 1 criticism apart from the demonization of China that you hear from American media and a few American academics as well against the Belt and Road is that it’s creating a debt trap for Southeast Asian nations, Central Asian nations and nations in Africa, etc…. Obviously, I expect you to debunk that, but the framework is there is no other global development project as extensive and as complex as Belt and Road, which as you know very well was initially dreamed up by the Ministry of Commerce. Then they sold it more or less to Xi Jinping who got the geopolitical stamp on it, announcing it, simultaneously, (which was a stroke of genius) in Central Asia in Astana and then in Southeast Asia in Jakarta. So, he was announcing the overland corridors through the heartland and the Maritime Silk Road at the same time.

At the time people didn’t see the reach and depth of all that. And now of course, finally the Trump administration woke up and saw what was in play, not only across Eurasia but reaching Africa and even selected parts of Latin America as well. And obviously the only sort of criticism, and it’s not even a fact-based criticism, that I’ve seen about the Belt and Road is it’s creating a debt trap because as you know Laos is indebted, Sri Lanka is indebted, Kyrgyzstan is indebted etc. So, how do you view Belt and Road within the large framework of the West and China, East Asia and Eurasia relations? And how would you debunk misconceptions created, especially in the U S that this is a debt trap.

Six proposed corridors of Belt and Road Initiative, showing Italy inside circle, on maritime blue route. (Lommes, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Michael: There are two points to answer there.  The first is how the Belt and Road began. And as you pointed out, the Belt and Road began, when China said, what is it we need to grow and how do we grow within our neighboring countries so we don’t have to depend upon the West, and we don’t have to depend on sea trade that can be shut down? How do we get to roads instead of seas in a way that we can integrate our economy with the neighboring economies so that there can be mutual growth?

So, this was done pretty much on industrial engineering grounds. Here’s where you need the roads and the railroads. And then how do we finance it? Well, The Financial Times article, last week, said didn’t the Chinese know that [with past] railroad development, they’ve all gone broke? The Panama Canal went broke, you know, the first few times there were European railway investment in Latin America in the 19th century, that all went broke.

Well, what they don’t get is China’s aim was not to make a profit off the railroads. The railroads were built to be part of the economy. They don’t want to make profit. It was to make the real economy grow, not to make profits for the owners of the railroad stocks. The Western press can’t imagine that you’re building a railroad without trying to make money out of it.

Then you get to the debt issue. Countries only have a debt crisis if their debt is in a foreign currency. The first way that the United States gained power was to fight against its allies. The great enemy of America was England and it made the British block their currency in the 1940s. And so, India and other countries, that had all these currencies holdings in sterling, were able to convert it all into dollars.

The whole move of the U.S. was to denominate world debt in dollars. So that No. 1, U.S. banks would end up with the interest in financing the debt. And No. 2, the United States could, by using the debt leverage, control domestic politics.

Well, as you’re seeing right now in Argentina, for instance, Argentina is broke because it owes foreign-dollar debt. When I started the first Third World bond fund in 1990 at Scutter Stevens, Brazil and China and Argentina were paying 45 percent interest per year, 45 percent per year in dollars debt. Yet we tried to sell them in America. No American would buy. We went to Europe, no European buy this debt. And so, we worked with Merrill Lynch and Merrill Lynch was able to make an offshore fund in the Dutch West Indies and all of the debt was sold to the Brazilian ruling class in the central bank and the Argentinian bankers in the ruling class, we thought oh, that’s wonderful.

We know that they’re going to pay the foreign Yankee Dollars debt because the Yankee Dollars debt is owed to themselves. They’re the Yankees! They’re the client oligarchy. And you know, from Brazil client oligarchy is, you know, they’re cosmopolitan, that’s the word. So, the problem is that on the Belt and Road, how did these other countries pay the debt to China?

Well, the key there again is the de-dollarization, and one way to solve it is since we’re trying to get finance out of the picture, we’re doing something very much like, Japan did with Canada in the 1960s. It made loans to develop Canadian copper mines taking its payment, not in Canadian dollars, that would have pushed up the yen’s exchange rate, but in copper.

So, China says, you know you don’t have to pay currency for this debt. We didn’t build a railroad to make a profit and you want, we can print all the currency we want. We don’t need to make a profit. We made the Belt and Road because it’s part of our geopolitical attempt to create what we need to be prosperous and have a prosperous region. So, these are self-reinforcing mutual gain. Well, so that’s what the West doesn’t get — mutual gain?  Are we talking anthropology? What do you mean mutual? This is capitalism! So, the West doesn’t understand what the original aim of the Belt and Road was, and it wasn’t to make a profitable railroad to enable people to buy and sell railway stocks. And it wasn’t to make toll roads to sell off to Goldman Sachs, you know. We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.

“We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.”

Pepe:  Belt and Road loans are long-term and at very low interest and they are renegotiable. They are renegotiating with the Pakistanis all the time for instance.

Michael: China’s intention is not to repeat an Asia crisis of 1997. It doesn’t gain anything by forcing a crisis because it’s not trying to come in and buying property at a discount at a distressed sale. It has no desire to create a distressed sale. So obviously, the idea is the capacity to pay. Now, this whole argument occurred in the 1920s, between [John Maynard] Keynes and his opponents that wanted to collect German reparations and, Keynes made it very clear. What is the capacity to pay? It’s the ability to export and the ability to obtain foreign currency. Well, China’s not looking for foreign currency. It is looking for economic returns but the return is to the whole society, the return isn’t from a railroad. The return is for the entire economy because it’s looking at the economy as a system.

The way that neoliberalism works, it divides the economy in parts, and it makes every part trying to make a gain, and if you do that, then you don’t have any infrastructure that’s lowering the cost for the other parts. You have every part fighting for itself. You don’t look at in terms of a system the way China’s looking at it. That’s the great advantage of Marxism, you’ll look at the system, not just the parts.

Pepe:  Exactly and this is at the heart of the Chinese concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, which is the approximate translation from Mandarin. So, we compare community with a shared future for mankind, which is, let’s say the driving force between the idea of Belt and Road, expanded across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America as well with our good old friends’, “greed is good” concept from the eighties, which is still ruling America apparently.

Michael: And the corollary is that non-greed is bad.

Pepe: Exactly and non-greed is evil.

Michael: I see. I think we ran out of time. I do. I don’t know if Alanna wants to step in to wrap it up.

Michael: There may be somebody who has a question.

Pepe: Somebody has a question? That’ll be fantastic.

Alanna: There is a question from Ed Dodson. He wanted to know why there are these ghost cities in China? And who’s financing all this real estate that’s developed, but nobody’s living there? We’ve all been hearing about that. So, what is happening with that?

Michael: Okay. China had most of its population living in the countryside and it made many deals with Chinese landholders who have land rights, and they said, if you will give up your land right to the community, we will give you free apartment in the city that you could rent out.

So, China has been building apartments in cities and trading these basically in exchange to support what used to be called a rural exodus. China doesn’t need as many farmers on the land as it now has, and the question is how are you going to get them into cities? So, China began building these cities and many of these apartments are owned by people who’ve got them in exchange for trading their land rights. The deals are part of the rural reconstruction program.

Alanna: Do you think it was a good deal? Vacant apartments everywhere.

Pepe: You don’t have ghost cities in Xinjiang for instance, Xinjiang is under-populated, it’s mostly desert. And it’s extremely sensitive to relocate people to Xinjiang. So basically, they concentrated on expanding Urumqi. When you arrive in Urumqi it is like almost like arriving in, Guangzhou. It’s enormous. It’s a huge generic city in the middle of the desert. And it’s also a high-tech Mecca, which is something that very few people in the West know. And is the direct link between the eastern seaboard via Belt and Road to Central Asia.

Pepe Escobar at the Khunjerab pass, China-Pak border, on New Silk Road overdrive.

Last year I was on an amazing trip. I went to the three borders, the Tajik-Xinjiang border, Kyrgiz-Xinjiang border and the Kazakh-Xinjiang border, which is three borders in one. It’s a fascinating area to explore and specially to talk to the local populations, the Kyrgiz, the Kazakhs and the Tajiks. How do they see the Belt and Road directly affecting their lives from now on? So, you don’t see something spectacular for instance, in the Xinjiang – Kazakh boarder, there is one border for the trucks, lots of them like in Europe, crossing from all points, from Central Asia to China and bringing Chinese merchandise to Central Asia.

There’s the train border, which is a very simple two tracks and the pedestrian border, which is very funny because you have people arriving in buses from all parts of Central Asia. They stop on the Kazakh border. They take a shuttle, they clear customs for one day, they go to a series of shopping malls on the Chinese side of the border. They buy like crazy, shop till it drops, I don’t know for 12 hours? And then they cross back the same day because the visa is for one day. They step on their buses and they go back.

So, for the moment it’s sort of a pedestrian form of Belt and Road, but in the future, we’re going to have high-speed rail. We’re going to have, well the pipelines are already there as Michael knows, but it’s fascinating to see on the spot. You see the closer integration; you see for instance Uyghurs traveling back and forth. You know, Uyghurs that have families in Kyrgizstan for instance, I met some Uyghurs in Kyrgyzstan who do the back-and-forth all the time. And they said, there’s no problem. They are seen as businessmen so there’s no interference. There are no concentration camps involved, you know, but you have to go to these places to see how it works on the ground and with Covid, that’s the problem for us journalists who travel, because for one year we cannot go anywhere and Xinjiang was on my travel list this year, Afghanistan as well, Mongolia.

These are all parts of Belt and Road or future parts of Belt and Road, like Afghanistan. The Chinese and the Russians as well; they want to bring Afghanistan in a peace process organized by Asians themselves without the United States, within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, because they want Afghanistan to be part of the intersection of Belt and Road and Eurasian Economic Union. This is something Michael knows very well. You don’t see this kind of discussions in the American media for instance, integration of Eurasia on the ground, how it’s actually happening.

Michael: That’s called cognitive dissonance.

Alanna: To try to understand it gets you cognitive dissonance.

Pepe: Oh yeah, of course. And obviously you are a Chinese agent, a Russian agent. And so, I hear that all the time. Well, in our jobs we hear that all the time. Especially, unfortunately from our American friends.

Alanna: Okay. I know you have other things to do. This has been fabulous. I want to thank you so much, both of you, uh, with so easy to get attendance for this webinar. There were 20 people in five minutes enrolled and in two days we were at capacity. So, I know there are many more people who would love to hear you talk another time, whenever you two are so willing. And I think you both got much out of your first conversation in person. Everybody listening knows these two wonderful gentlemen, they have written more than 10 books, and they have traveled all over the world. They are on the top of geopolitical and geoeconomic analysis, and they are caring, loving people. So, you can see that these are the people we need to be listening to and understanding all around the world.

So, thank you so much. Ibrahima Drame from the Henry George School is now going to say goodbye to you and will wrap this up.  Thank you again.

Pepe: Michael it was a huge pleasure. Really, it was fantastic. Really nice, we’re on the same website. So, let’s have a second version of this.

Ibrahima:  So, let’s have a second version of this two months from now. Thank you very much for participating and I really hope you liked this event. And, we also want to ask for your support by making a tax-deductible donation to the Henry George School. I believe I shared the link on the chat. Thank you. And see you soon.

Pepe: Thank you very much. Thanks Michael. Bye!

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Michael Hudson is an American economist professor of economics at the university of Missouri Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He’s a former Wall Street analyst political consultant commentator and journalist. He identifies himself as a classical economist. Michael is the author of J is for Junk Economics, Killing the Host, The Bubble and Beyond, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Trade Development and Foreign Debtand The Myth of Aid, among others. His books have been published translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish and Russian.

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

Featured image: High-ended retailer Saks Fifth Avenue added private security, fencing and barbed wire ahead of a Black Lives Matter protest in New York, June 7. 2020. (Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

There were delays and some people were turned away at San Diego’s new “Vaccination Super Station” near PetCo Park on Wednesday after, in a short time period, six people had allergic reactions after receiving their experimental coronavirus vaccine shots.

In addition, the unused portion of the lot of the vaccine from which the shots came was pulled from distribution. That suggests thinking that there may be something particularly dangerous about that lot.

This gives a whole new meaning to “drawing lots.”

Watch and read here an NBC 7 report on the vaccination trouble.

In the video report from NBC 7, a woman who had an allergic reaction and a four-hour hospital stay after receiving the first shot of the two-shot vaccination regimen on Wednesday at the Vaccination Super Station is interviewed. She says she feels fatigued and sore. She also says she does not want to have a second shot even though she has taken other vaccines throughout her life, including a flu vaccine recently. “I can’t go through that again,” she states.

Who could blame her? Initial studies from drug companies that created the experimental coronavirus vaccines indicate side effects tend to be worse after the second shot.

Information from the vaccine injury reporting system of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates the first dose alone of the experimental coronavirus vaccines is causing many times more adverse events than flu shots cause.

Interestingly, there seemed to have been some evasion when NBC 7 sought information about the delay at the Vaccination Super Station. Here is how that is described in the TV station’s written report:

Just after 11 a.m., NBC 7 confirmed that some people waiting for their vaccines at the site at Tailgate Park were experiencing delays. Others said they had been turned away.

NBC 7 reached out to those running the station; a representative said the delay was about an hour long due to logistical issues having to do with more doses of the vaccine arriving at the location.

During the county’s weekly COVID-19 briefing, Dr. Eric McDonald, Director of Epidemiology for the county, said vaccinations were slowed down after allergic reactions were detected in six vaccine recipients.

Fortunately, more of the story of the vaccination problem did come out. It makes one wonder how often similar problems are successfully hidden from media and the public.

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Featured image is from Renzo Velez / POGO

What’s going on in the nation’s capital is unprecedented.

Around 25,000 troops, unknown numbers of secret service agents, other federal security forces, and local police turned the city into a blockaded armed camp ahead of illegitimate transition of power on January 20.

The nation’s capital resembles occupied Baghdad’s Green Zone that’s half-way around the world from Washington DC.

Seven-foot-high non-scalable barricades topped with razor wire surround the Capitol and various federal buildings.

Thousands of heavily armed National Guard troops and other security forces — with orders to use lethal force against alleged threats — guard the city’s perimeter and virtually everything important inside.

Bridges into the city and National Mall will be closed ahead of Wednesday’s transition of power.

At checkpoints, IDs of occupants in cars, no other modes of transport,  or on foot entering or leaving the city are checked.

The Military Times reported that “National Guard troops from (virtually all US (states) continue to pour into DC for…security.”

Army General Daniel Hokanson, head of the National Guard Bureau, is commanding what’s going on.

Deployment of troops was authorized for up to 30 days for transition of power preparations, what’s planned for January 20 and its aftermath.

The Washington Post, located in the city on K Street NW, said it’s “closed off like never before,” adding:

“(T)he Secret Service has launched a massive security operation.”

“Vehicle traffic in much of the city will be prohibited or limited to residents and businesses only.”

“Metro is shuttering stations in the city’s core and near the Mall.”

“Street closures will continue through Thursday, and are subject to change at the discretion of the Secret Service.”

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser noted the unprecedented interruption of daily life for city residents and businesses while all of the above continues.

Saying “we are in unchartered waters” greatly over-dramatizes preparations for alleged threats that are highly unlikely to happen unless one or more state-sponsored false flags are planned to further vilify Trump and his supporters.

No reported intelligence or other information suggests a serious enough or any threat to warrant over-the-top preparations — notably 25,000 National Guard troops from all states.

No explanation was given for what’s going on at enormous taxpayer expense — other than non-specific remarks.

The best FBI director Christopher Wray would offer was saying the following:

“We are seeing an extensive amount of concerning online chatter — that’s the best way I would describe it — about a number of events surrounding the inauguration” with no further elaboration.

His remark suggested no organized or other planned threat(s) to inauguration day events — likely because there are none expected.

According to one observer who walked around the perimeter of barricades twice this week, it’s nearly impossible for any unauthorized vehicle or person to get anywhere near close to where inaugural ceremonies will be conducted.

At Secret Service discretion, closures, barriers, and other preparations are subject to change.

A Final Comment

On Friday, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s remark was an Orwellian shot across the bow for what may be coming ahead nationwide, saying:

“(O)ur entire country is going to have to deal with how our intelligence apparatus, security apparatus at every level deal with a very real and present threat to our nation (sic).”

Her remark indicates a new abnormal for the city that perhaps is coming to the US nationwide.

The only “threat to our nation” is state-sponsored.

A free and open society appears on the chopping block for elimination — totalitarian rule enforced by police state harshness appears coming to replace it.

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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/

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

Brave new world dystopia is unfolding in plain sight, freedoms as once known fast eroding.

Are they heading for elimination altogether in the West and elsewhere?

Is totalitarian rule enforced by police state harshness becoming the new abnormal?

Is the US land of opportunity/land of the free and home of the brave a distant memory?

Eroding for years, life as once known in the US and West are on a fast track for elimination if not challenged to halt what’s underway.

Seasonal flu/influenza that occurs annually with no mass hysteria fear-mongering, house arrest by lockdowns and quarantines, face masks that harm health instead of protecting it, social distancing and all the rest have done infinitely more harm to most people than any number of illnesses combined.

Renamed (made-in-the-USA) covid, it’s a vehicle for transforming free societies into totalitarian ones — complementing what’s gone on up to now following the US state-sponsored 9/11 mother of all false flags.

What’s happening and hardening is what no one yearning to breathe free should accept.

But it’s going on and advancing, supported by Big Media.

It includes a diabolical scheme to silence dissent by eliminating truth-telling divergence from the falsified official narrative.

America’s Bill of Rights are fast disappearing.

October 2001 Patriot Act legislation trampled on them by greatly eroding the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, 8th and 14th Bill of Rights amendments to the US Constitution.

Calling for Patriot Act 2.0, Biden/Harris want the draconian 2001 law hardened for greater police state control to further weaken/then eliminate a free and open society.

Their stimulus plan calls for nationwide mass-vaxxing with high-risk, experimental, DNA-altering, hazardous to health mRNA vaccines that provide no protection and likely harm to countless numbers of people if taken as directed.

What’s planned includes issuance of digital vaccine passports — an unacceptable Big Brother intrusion into and for control over our lives.

Will they be required ahead for air travel and free movement, along with access to employment, education, and other public places?

Will daily lives and routines no longer be possible without proof of covid immunity — not gotten from vaxxing?

Will what was inconceivable not long ago become reality ahead by what Biden/Harris and likeminded US hardliners have in mind?

Is the scheme a diabolical depopulation plot to eliminate maximum numbers of what Henry Kissinger once called “useless eaters” — in the US and worldwide?

A so-called US Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) was established.

Its sponsors include Microsoft, Oracle, the Mayo Clinic, the Commons Project, Change Healthcare, the Rockefeller Foundation, other corporate interests, likely mass-vaxxing advocate Bill Gates and US dark forces.

VCI calls itself “a coalition of public and private partners committed to empowering individuals with digital access to their vaccination records (sic).”

It’s part of a diabolical, deep state, Great Reset plot for draconian control over our lives — for ill, not good, to further erode and eliminate fundamental freedoms.

It’s unrelated to “protect(ing) and improv(ing) (our) health…safety, and privacy.”

Its aims are polar opposite the above mass deception.

It calls for digital access to health, vaxxing, and related information — for greater government intrusion into and control over our lives.

“Participating technology and other collaborating partners agree to support Vaccination Data Sources in issuing SMART Health Cards” — to aid diabolical aims sought by US dark forces at home and worldwide.

In response to what’s planned, UK-based Big Brother Watch (BBW) director Silkie Carlo said the following:

“Vaccine passports would create the backbone of an oppressive digital ID system and could easily lead to a health apartheid that’s incompatible with a free and democratic country,” adding:

“Digital IDs would lead to sensitive records spanning medical, work, travel, and biometric data about each and every one of us being held at the fingertips of authorities and state bureaucrats.”

“This dangerous plan would normalize identity checks, increase state control over law-abiding citizens, and create a honeypot for cybercriminals.”

BBW’s website warned about “(a) wave of emergency powers and extreme measures in response to (seasonal flu renamed covid that) brought about the greatest loss of liberty in (UK) history,” the US and other Western societies.

Vaccine passports are part of a diabolical plot to transform free societies into dystopian ones on the phony pretext of protecting our health and well-being that’s greatly harmed by what’s going on and planned.

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/

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

What could be more natural than to enjoy and draw strength from the wisdom of great European poets and thinkers such as Goethe, Schiller, Rolland or Camus? Are we not all – every single one! – urgently called upon to stop degrading ourselves into blind servants of corrupt governments in the pay of a criminal billionaire clique, but to follow our personal conscience, to exercise our right to individual and collective resistance and to stand up against them? This act of outrage – often set apart from the inert herd – includes civil disobedience and other non-violent individual and collective actions. In the process, man comes to himself. Romain Rolland warned of the danger of the individual soul sinking into the abyss of the mass soul in his anti-war novel “Clerambeault” in a similarly dark time as today. (1) Free souls and strong characters would have to offer blinded governments and their string-pullers in the background a check – for the love of humanity.

Enough words have been exchanged, …

In the quote fragment borrowed from Goethe’s “Faust”, “Enough words have been exchanged, …”, there is a call for action to follow words. Many intrepid enlighteners in the alternative social media have indeed tirelessly informed us,

– that we should have the courage to use our own minds,

– that power should not be handed over to any politician,

– that the planned and in parts already implemented “New World Order” of the so-called elite is a “crime against humanity” which they will one day have to answer for before a new “Nuremberg Trial”,

– that the call for social distancing and muzzling also has hidden aims,

– that stoking irrational fears (such as death by virus) is a tried and tested means of discipline and domination by those in power,

– that the corporate-owned and controlled media of lies (“journaille”) play a pathetic and sinister role in this,

– that one can give up the involuntary reflex of absolute mental obedience and

– that by rebelling against the illegally imposed restrictions on personal freedoms, one feels human again.

… let me also finally see action!

Why should the citizens of our generation not also succeed in doing what young and older men and women of the German resistance succeeded in doing three generations earlier: Standing up against screaming injustice and lawlessness. No, a border has tyrannical power! (Schiller) And the power to do so does not come from physical ability; it springs from an indomitable will. (Gandhi). Do not despair of humanity! Man is good. Evil will not triumph!

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is an educationalist and qualified psychologist.

Note

(1) Reinbeck bei Hamburg (1988). Translated from the French by Stefan Zweig. First published in 1920 by the Ollendorff publishing house in Paris. Original title “One against all” (1917).

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Today and during the last few days new “measures” – restrictions of freedom imposed by governments for reasons of “public health security”, i. e. preventing the spread of covid infections – have been tightened throughout Europe. Literally, these treacherous governments say, “we have to tighten the screws”. Seriously. WTF – who do they think they are? Servants of the people who elected them and who pay them. This is high treason. But people take it without asking too many questions, some complaints but not strong enough… we are living in the midst of the Sheep Syndrome.

They – these supposedly people friendly governments – call them “measures”, a euphemism for lockdown – sounds better in the ears of a public tired of continuous and more and more repressions. This second, in some countries even third lockdown, includes further business closing, more sever control on home-office work, police-enhanced social distancing, mask wearing, no indoor group activities, only 5 people may meet in an apartment… and, and, and.

For example, there are about 75 studies – give or take a couple – about the uselessness and even dangers of mask wearing. They address especially the danger for children and young adults…i.e students, but nobody, nobody in the bought-compromised and coerced, bribed – western governments pays any attention to them, nor does, of course, the presstitute mainstream media.

They also impose homeoffice, knowing damn well that any serious psychologist and sociologist tells you how devastating this is for the individual – loneliness, lack of physical contact, encounter and interaction with colleagues – as well as for society as a whole. Without physical contact it breaks apart. This is of course all wanton – thus, all restaurant closings, all events where people gather and interchange, is forbidden.

People are unhappy. Yes, but not enough to stop this tyranny! – Well, I better behave otherwise I’m going to be punished. – FEAR! – Fear leads to the sheep syndrome – that deep-deep social disease which besets us today – and has done so for a while. It does a lot of harm not only to you, but also to the societal cohesion. People, we got to get out of it.

But, it seems, people are not yet tired enough to stand up in unison, screaming “enough is enough”, we do not continue this is government tyranny, we stop obeying.

And yes, to give the tyranny more weight, more credibility, it is enhanced by a so-called Task Force (TF), a group of coopted “scientists”, especially established by the Powers that Be, to inform them what to do. It is an old method of a decision-making duality, when governments have to, or want to, take decisions that are not popular, they ask a specially designated Task Force for advice. However, the TF has been told and knows exactly what they have to advise. That’s a premeditated lie, at best manipulation of public opinion.

In the UK and France new lockdown measures were imposed already for days, Austria and Switzerland announced them a couple of days ago – the EU as an entity – says nothing, does not coordinate, does not want to see that these lockdowns are not only destroying the individual nations’ economy, but they bring the entire EU to economic suicide. The EU is hamstrung by Washington and by NATO.

The new lockdowns – and possibly more are planned as more waves of covid are in the making – until everybody is vaxxed – and has his / her electromagnetic gel injected in their bodies with a DNA-altering substance. So now, they are totally controllable over time. And the time horizon set for total digitization of everything is 2030. AI and robot control of humans – making them into transhumans that’s the goal for the UN Agenda 21-30. And the instrument to achieve it is the Bill Gates created Agenda ID2020 (see this)

Traditional and very effective medication against corona – proven for over 60 years for other infections and which were used successfully in China to beat the outbreak, and now in Argentina, Bolivia, southern Peru – and elsewhere in the world, are now forbidden under fines for medical doctors who prescribe them and treat their patients with these medicines. – Can you imagine! – So, no healing, only when you are vaxxed. There are clearly not only billions of dollars of profits for the pharmas behind this stint, this constantly propagated, to the point of being forced upon the people, vaccines, especially the western brands that are untested but are scientifically known to interfere with the human DNA.

More lockdowns are killing more small businesses, shops, and restaurants. Creating more hardship of small business owner, more bankruptcies, more misery for the people and their families, losing their jobs.

Just imagine – home-teaching, a family of 4, both parents work, the kids have to have each one a reasonably powerful computer / laptop to be able to connect to the school teacher – the kids have to have reasonable computer skills to manage home-learning, and the parents, even if they have time, do they all have the reasonable computer skills to help their kids? – Does every family in the already much covid-hardship affected society have the resources to spare the money for buying the needed electronic gear for the kids?

It is a disaster. Again, a wanton disaster. Because it will result in less or non-educated children in the west – non-educated kids will become easier manipulatable adults – well, they are expected to fall – in lockstep – into their parents Sheep Syndrome. – Or will they? – That’s where dynamics may not meet linear elite thinking and expectations.

Now, this is happening in the Global North. Imagine how it is in the Global South, where increasing poverty, misery and famine is ravaging entire societies. Often times, more than two thirds of a country’s population is poor and many of them at or below the poverty line. How will these kids be distance-taught? – They simply won’t. So, we have a situation where the Global South produces uneducated kids, because they simply don’t go to school. Most of them will remain poor, they will be the perfect laborers for the elite – or cannon fodder for the wars the rich nations have to (or want to) fight to satisfy their greed. Never forget, wars are profitable. But foremost because of the Globalists sociopathic thirst for more and more power and money.

Listening and talking to people in the street and to small business owners – they are all upset, and many of them say they may not survive, may never reopen, despite the subsidy they receive form governments. In Switzerland, the head of “Gastronomie Suisse” said with another lockdown, up to 50% of restaurants may not survive. Similar figures have been mentioned in Germany, Austria and France – and surely the situation is likewise devastating elsewhere too.

We are talking predominantly for the west. The situation in the East, Russia and China and their allies in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is different, in as much as they have a much more people-friendly approach to covid-eradication.

In the west, in some cases, people’s entire lifesaving, their life achievements, their family businesses, are killed for the sake of a useless and purely oppressive rule. The purpose of this rule is not to stamp out a disease, but covid is a means to instill fear and make us compliant, for worse times to come. Because, let me tell you, whatever you may think that in the summer of 2021, or next year, 2022, we will get back to normal – we will not. Never. If we let them do what they are doing now.

This small Globalist Cabal, via its ultra-rich handlers – billionaires with two and three digits, from the Silicon Valley – does not only have the power to censoring whoever is against the Matrix, but they are all censuring in unison the President of the United States. What does that say about a country, or about a society we live in, a society that calls itself “democratic”?

No matter how much you like or dislike your President, doesn’t it occur to you that this is the embodiment of freedom of speech that is taken away from you? – But again, we do nothing. We watch and complain, but we do nothing. We let it happen. Wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity to block and boycott all social media platforms? Period. – Live without them, for Christ’s sake, some 20, 30 years ago we didn’t even know that they existed, and even less so to what extent we will be hooked on them.

If we can still think independently, it’s now the time to cut yourself loose from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and what all their names are — don’t use them. Get back to regular human-to-human communications, dialogues, meeting each other, calling on the phone, landline if possible. Yes, I’m serious.

Think about the consequences of following this trend of no free speech, but a steady increase in AI-ization by algorithms that are precisely using the data you give them on the social platform to further enslave you; by ever more robotization and digitization – to the point when we don’t even realize that our brains have been wired and “hacked” by DARPA-developed super-computers. We will believe and follow orders we are directly implanted by such super-computers, managed, guess by whom – by the Globalist Cabal – at which point we have irreversibly become the personification of the Sheep Syndrome. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is an advanced research and technology branch of the Pentagon.

Does anyone want that?

I doubt it.

We have to find a way to act now. I don’t have the solution. But maybe collectively connecting with each other spiritually, perhaps meditation – we will find a solution – or we will make a solution emerge.

That would be the noble way – changing an utterly abusive environment with our conscientiousness and with spiritual thinking; emitting high-vibrating vibes that influence our collective destiny. But we have to believe in it and in ourselves as a solid and solidary collectivity.

If we fail as humans to claim back our human and civil rights and preserve them, eventually Mother Earth will clean herself. She will clean out the inhuman swamp. Maybe it needs one or two huge and lasting cataclysms; a massive earthquake with a disastrous tsunami, a gigantic eruption of one or several volcanos, darkening the sky for weeks, or a monster hurricane or ice storm that destroys and paralyzes parts of civilization, or a huge solar explosion, knocking out the world’s electric and electronic grid – ending digitization of everything on the spot.  – All this might be much worse than what covid, or its inventors, ever did.

After such a cataclysm, much of humanity might have to start from scratch – from near-to-zero, and certainly without digitization – but with the now lost freedom, to start afresh and develop freely and sovereignly according to our needs.

For decades the Global Cabal has showered us with self-aggrandizing lies, with promises of comfort, of well-being, but with the notion that competition rather than cooperation will be the salvation. These well-thought-out lies led to a society of egocentric psychopaths – not only, but enough to influence the trend of society, of our dystopian lives. We have gradually acquiesced in LOCKSTEP to a move of societal, even civilizational destruction, from where there is no return.

Let’s work ourselves out of the Sheep Syndrome – NOW.

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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: File photo from the Times of India

Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-reported results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was extraordinarily close.

All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidate with a comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years earlier, the actual votes tabulated revealed an entirely contrary outcome. According to the official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket ended up millions of votes ahead, having racked up huge leads in overwhelmingly Democratic states such as my own California, and also won by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin in Electoral Votes. But control of the White House depends upon the state-by-state tallies, and these told a very different story.

Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.

Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960 had been a byword for close races, but Biden’s margin of victory was much smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a narrow reelection over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would have required a voter swing nearly five times greater than Trump’s in order to claim victory. Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.

If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these simple facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat more understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their Republican counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their election victory. Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of the historically slender margin of their candidate’s defeat.

The emotions on both sides of the Trump reelection campaign were among the strongest in modern American history, and the outcome was determined by the tiniest sliver of voters in a few states. So under these circumstances, last week’s controversial events in DC were perhaps not so entirely unexpected. Indeed, during the weeks before the election, I’d half-predicted such a scenario, speculating about possible claims of a stolen election and the resulting civil unrest. For example, the following was my response to a question from a longtime commenter:

Many Trump supporters are alleging that there could be massive voting fraud in the 2020 election. Some believe that if Trump is ahead on election night, Democratic machines will manufacture ballots to give a victory to Biden. Do you think this is possible or do you see this as improbable?

Well, I suppose it’s possible…

Frankly, both sides are so totally agitated and extreme, the Trumpists would be saying and believing it, even if it were entirely false and impossible. It’s hard to figure out what’s happening when everyone involved is so dishonest and corrupt. Trump has always seemed like an ignorant buffoon to me, but I think the Democrats and liberals have almost gone insane in their opposition to him.

As I’ve been telling people for weeks, the whole political situation certainly seems very bizarre and I’ve seen some pretty plausible arguments that we might end up with a “disputed” election if the numbers are fairly close in key states. Apparently, the Republicans are overwhelmingly going to be voting in person, while the Democrats will be voting by mail, meaning their ballots will be much slower to come in and be counted.

So Trump could be ahead by wide margins on Election Night and declare victory to the cheers of his partisans. And then as the mail ballots come in, the numbers turn against him, but he and his die-hard supporters cry “Fraud!” and refuse to recognize the result. Hard to say what would happen, but I’m glad I live in California which is generally quiet and peaceful these days.

Obviously, Bush/Gore was “disputed” in 2000, but only party loyalists much cared at the time, while today the country is filled with Trumpists and Trump-haters, both very suspicious and angry.

Although I think my speculative scenario turned out to be reasonably correct, the actual post-election developments were far greater in magnitude than I had expected, and may have dire consequences for maintaining American civil liberties.

I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the candidate’s defeat.

Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.

Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once they story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.

Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the $100 million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.

The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.

Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially true when all of America’s most powerful corporations and ruling elites unite to essentially steal a reelection from a populist incumbent, hero-worshiped by many tens of millions of Americans. And when despite all that blatant unfairness and theft, the final margin of defeat is just one vote in 7,000, an explosion of popular outrage should only be expected.

Solid estimates appear unavailable, but it seems that hundreds of thousands of grass-roots Trump supporters traveled to our nation’s capital to protest against what they regarded as a stolen election, and then peacefully assembled to listen to their hero’s speech.

Afterwards, a tiny sliver of this vast multitude of angry individuals—perhaps less than one in a thousand—barged their way into the strangely-undefended Capitol building of Congress, took souvenir selfies, livesteamed their antics, and generally played the role of tourist-protesters while the lawmakers they so despised as corrupt mostly fled or hid. These Trumpists and some of their colorful costumes brought to mind the radical Yippies of the late 1960s.

The previous year had seen an unprecedented wave of violent riots, arson, and looting across some 200 American cities, which our entirely corrupt and dishonest media had generally characterized as “mostly peaceful protests.” In previous years, angry mobs of organized Democratic activists had repeatedly invaded and occupied the Wisconsin Legislature, sometimes winning praise from the media. But when unarmed Trump supporters now did something similar for a few hours in Washington, they were quickly branded “domestic terrorists” seeking to overthrow our democracy.

A video shows Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed female protester, being shot dead by a security guard as she tried to climb through a window, an incident not dissimilar to the famous Kent State shootings of a 1960s campus protest, but hardly treated by the media in a similar manner.

GRAPHIC FOOTAGE: Police fatally shoot a Trump supporter inside the Capitol building. This is a sickening crime that should be prosecuted as such. pic.twitter.com/X8JK7HplJ7

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) January 7, 2021

A couple of other Trump protesters, probably elderly, overweight, or in poor health, died of strokes or heart-attacks during all the excitement, and one Capitol police officer later died as well, allegedly struck in the head with a fire-extinguisher although there has been no solid account of the incident. Yet this confused tableau of chaos and popular anger, which recalls scenes from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests, has been portrayed as a “coup attempt” incited by President Trump, and therefore justifying his second impeachment.

Even more importantly, the incoming Biden/Harris Administration may be considering the most sweeping domestic crackdown upon traditional American civil liberties since the Patriot Act was passed in the hurried aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks twenty years ago. This has been justified by the need to suppress “domestic extremism.”

Even without any new governmental legislation, a remarkable Internet crackdown has already begun. In an absolutely unprecedented development, the sitting president of the United States—who had just lost his reelection by 0.01% of the vote—has been summarily banned by Twitter, Facebook, and all other major social media outlets, preventing him from communicating with his followers, and with many of his leading supporters suffering the same fate. Famed libertarian Ron Paul criticized Twitter for banning Trump, and he was immediately locked out of his own Facebook page. Parler, a young but rapidly growing Twitter competitor, refused to ban Trump, and was immediately driven off the Internet by a combined attack from Apple, Google, and Amazon, possibly never to return. Our Information Age has entered a truly Orwellian period.

These Tech giants have often justified their extreme censorship by expressing the need to combat the spread of the dangerous “conspiracy theories” so widespread among Trump partisans. Particularly demonized by the media is the wildly popular “QAnon” theory, which numbered the unfortunate Ms. Babbitt among its committed followers. Although I’m only very slightly familiar with QAnon, it appears to be a bizarre mishmash of many strange ideas, notably including the belief that our ruling elites heavily consist of exceptionally corrupt and criminal individuals, sometimes even being Satanic pedophiles.

Although much of that doctrine seems like total nonsense to me, we should note the massive suppression this movement has experienced and bear in mind that “the wicked flee when no man pursueth.” And indeed, my own articles over the years have solidly established that many of the seemingly ridiculous elements of QAnon probably contain a very large nugget of truth:

• American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate
• John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
• Our American Pravda
• American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories”

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

As a violent mob of Trump’s citizen militia scaled walls, broke windows and seized control of the Capitol building yesterday around 2 p.m., the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a new intraday high of 31,022.65. It gave up very little by the 4 p.m. close, gaining 437.8 points on the day.

The Trump operatives were attempting to stop Congress from confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win. Dressed in paramilitary clothing or jeans and red MAGA hats, the mob overpowered the Capitol Police inside and outside the building, gaining access to both Senate and House chambers and lawmaker offices, including the office of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

Jamie Stiehm, a US political columnist, was inside the Capitol building and reported the following for the BBC:

“I went inside to the House of Representatives and up into the press gallery, where we were assigned seats, looking down at the rather somber gathering. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was holding the gavel, and keeping people to their five-minute statements.

“As we went into the second hour, all of a sudden we heard breaking glass. The air began getting fogged. An announcement from the Capitol Police said, ‘An individual has breached the building.’ So everyone looked around and then it was business as usual. But after that, the announcements kept coming. And they were getting more and more urgent…The police didn’t seem to know what was happening. They weren’t coordinated. They locked the chamber doors but at the same time, they told us we would have to evacuate. So there was a sense of panic…There was a sense of ‘nobody’s in charge here, the Capitol Police have lost control of the building, anything can happen.’ ”

An excellent report by Emilie Munson for Hearst Newspapers on how House Reps, Senators and press were eventually evacuated by Capitol Police through tunnels is provided here. The Capitol building was not declared secured by the Capitol Police until approximately 5:50 p.m. At around 8:00 p.m. Congress resumed its deliberations and confirmed the Biden win after hours of debate.

Grisly images of the mayhem at the Capitol are available at Bloomberg News here. According to CNBC, four people were left dead as a result of the riots. A young, unidentified woman was shot inside the Capitol building according to Capitol Police and died of her injuries. Another woman and two men died from “medical emergencies,” according to the CNBC report, which was based on information provided at a press conference by Washington, D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee.

CNBC also reported that “At least fourteen police officers sustained injuries with multiple [officers] still in the hospital.” One officer, whose photo of being assaulted by the mob is included in the link to Bloomberg photos above, sustained serious injuries.

According to multiple news reports, this was the worst invasion of the Capitol building since 1814, during the War of 1812 with the British.

While all of this mayhem and insurrection played out on television screens around the world, and world leaders were forced to confront the possibility that there would not be a peaceful transition to a new President in the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average yawned at the chaos. This is certainly not a normal reaction for the U.S. stock market, especially since it’s already in bubble territory.

There was the distinct impression among market watchers that an invisible hand was once again intervening to prevent a crash in the market as the violent events unfolded. Thoughts turned immediately to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s Exchange Stabilization Fund which, under the law (31 U.S.C. §5302) “may deal in gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and securities the Secretary considers necessary.” Conveniently, the Exchange Stabilization Fund has grown from $94.3 billion in assets prior to Trump taking office to $682 billion as of September 30, 2020.

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Update (1630ET): In what can only be described as a somewhat concerning turn of events, health experts from Wuhan, China, called on Norway and other countries to suspend the use of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines produced by companies such as Pfizer, especially among elderly people (following the surge in deaths in Norway described below)

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China’s Global Times reports Chinese experts said the death incident should be assessed cautiously to understand whether the death was caused by vaccines or other preexisting conditions of these individuals.

Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist from Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Friday that the death incident, if proven to be caused by the vaccines, showed that the effect of the Pfizer vaccine and other mRNA vaccines is not as good as expected, as the main purpose of mRNA vaccines is to heal patients.

…

A Beijing-based immunologist, who requested anonymity, told the Global Times on Friday that the world should suspend the use of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine represented by Pfizer, as this new technology has not proven safety in large-scale use or in preventing any infectious diseases.

Older people, especially those over 80, should not be recommended to receive any COVID-19 vaccine, he said.

All of which is a problem since it is the elderly who are at most risk (quite frankly at any real risk at all) and thus who need the protection the most. The Chinese health experts instead say that the most elderly and frail should be recommended to take medicines to improve their immune system.

Of course, one cannot help but note the irony of scientists from the source of the plague that has killed millions around the world and destroyed lives/economies almost everywhere, is now calling for the cessation of the process to protect against the plague.

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As we detailed earlier, Norway health authorities are reporting COVID-19 vaccine news of monumental importance at a moment the US is rushing to get an initial some 30 million doses into the arms of the elderly and those with chronic health conditions: sick patients over 80 are particularly at risk for devastating side effects.

Thus for this vulnerable demographic which is currently first in line in North America, the “cure” could be worse than the disease. Bloomberg notes that it’s “the most cautious statement yet from a European health authority” regarding potential adverse vaccine health risks.

“For those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences,” the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said.

The health authority said further in its most blunt statement cautioning against a policy of a blanket promotion of the vaccine for all:

“For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.”

This comes after a handful of global cases, including an elderly patient in France, where a recipient died within hours of receiving their first-round of the vaccine.

Thus far Norway says it has administered doses to up to 33,000 people, including the elderly, but are already finding it “too risky” for the terminally ill and people over 80 that are in frail condition. Given only 33,000 injected so far, the reported death count is already staggering and is causing officials to sound the alarm:

Norwegian officials said 23 people had died in the country a short time after receiving their first dose of the vaccine. Of those deaths, 13 have so far been autopsied, with the results suggesting that common side effects may have contributed to severe reactions in frail, elderly people, according to the Norwegian Medicines Agency.

But despite the warnings being featured prominently at the end of this week in Bloomberg and multiple other mainstream publications, again we doubt this will do anything in terms of putting the brakes on the rushed vaccine rollout in the US where it’s precisely the elderly, frail, and those prone to persistent health conditions that are being urged on by state and federal policies to be first in line.

How many of these deaths came after the Pfizer vaccine? It would be good to know after the news from Norway. https://t.co/TtazlDpG0s

— Neil Clark (@NeilClark66) January 15, 2021

Meanwhile, Bloomberg had this to say of the most common vaccine brands in Norway and the West:

Representatives for Pfizer and BioNTech didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine approved late last year has been used most broadly, with a similar shot from Moderna Inc. approved earlier this month also now being administered.

Norway initiated its COVID-19 vaccinations last month on the heels of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine receiving approval by the European Medicines Agency. Norway’s infections are approaching 60,000 out of total population of 5.3 million, including over 500 deaths.

Many skeptics in Europe and the US still have severe reservations about the vaccines, even as big pharma and governments continually insist they are completely safe.

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Featured image is from Zero Hedge

Saint Simeon, on the outskirts of Aleppo, was the largest church in the world in the fifth century. After Islam arrived in Syria, the country has remained a dense mixture of cultures and faiths, living in tolerance and cooperation until 2011, when a US-NATO war for ‘regime change’ began which destroyed the country, and scattered its citizens to the far corners of the world. 

According to UNESCO, Aleppo is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and it has survived the war but faces many challenges to recover, rebuild, and bring its citizens back home.

“What’s special about this city is its living cultural heritage,” says Dima Dayoub, an Aleppan architect now working in Berlin for the Syrian Heritage Initiative. “The priority is not the churches or the mosques, it’s for people to return. We need to help people reconstruct their homes and their livelihoods.”

An American in Syria

Drew Binsky is an American traveler who visited Aleppo in 2019 and produced a video showing life in Aleppo. Seeing the city and its people in a video brings the story of the city to life, and makes it real.

Airline connections

Syrian Air is expanding with a new Aleppo-Beirut service. The route will operate once a week on Fridays in both directions.

The airline flies to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Doha, Moscow, and Cairo. Syrian Air only flies to one European destination, Yerevan due to ongoing EU and US sanctions.

Transportation routes

In February 2020, the Syrian Arab Army (SAR) established full control over the Aleppo-Damascus highway, which is a strategically important transportation route. Aleppo is the industrial capital of Syria.

The SAR, advancing from the Western outskirts of Aleppo, liberated Sheikh-Ali, Arada, Arnaz, Khan el-Asal, and the Rashideen-4 district from terrorists.

Major General Yuri Borenkov, the chief of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of Opposing Parties in Syria, said that the security zone called for in the September 2018 Russian-Turkish memorandum had been partially achieved by liberating the highway from the terrorists, and he believed this would provide security for the Syrian residents.

How the war came to Aleppo

According to Wedad Mohammed, they went to sleep in East Aleppo in 2012 and woke up the next morning under the occupation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which was supported by the Obama administration.  At first, they thought they might be able to stay in their home and continue working under occupation, but the strict enforcement of Sharia (Islamic Law) made life unbearable for Wedad and her family, who moved to Latakia as displaced persons.

Aleppo war years and liberation

In the last days of December 2016, CNN and BBC were featuring the battle for east Aleppo daily. Usually, they referred to the city as Aleppo, but the battles were in the eastern district. The international viewer came away with the impression that the largest city in Syria was engulfed in raging battles. Aleppo was not all besieged, and not all bombed into rubble. The eastern section of Aleppo had been occupied by armed terrorists. Some were the FSA, which was a local militia following the Muslim Brotherhood directives out of Istanbul. But, others were Al Qaeda affiliates and foreign fighters who had been imported from as far away as Afghanistan, Pakistan, the UK, and France. All these groups, whether being paid by Qatar at the behest of the US, or by Saudi Arabia, were following Radical Islam, which is a political ideology and is not a religion, nor a sect.

The ‘last doctors’ in Aleppo

In August 2016, CNN featured an appeal by the last 15 doctors in Aleppo, asking President Obama to take military action.

“We do not need tears or sympathy or even prayers. We need action,” their letter to Obama read. The doctors added: “We choose to be here. We took a pledge to help those in need. ”

What CNN failed to explain was there were free public hospitals in the western side of Aleppo that could have served the needs of those patients, and they had never closed even in the darkest days of the war 2012-2016. However, some of those doctors remained because they were followers of Radical Islam and identified with the terrorists. Those doctors could have served their patients well by arranging for the Syrian Red Crescent to rescue their patients through the humanitarian corridors for civilians to leave the eastern district. The FSA snipers killed dozens of people, some whole families, as they attempted to flee to safety.

In stark contrast are the Catholic hospitals of Aleppo. Suffering has held together the bricks of Syria’s reconstruction, according to the “Open Hospitals” project launched in 2017, and sponsored by the apostolic nuncio, Cardinal Mario Zenari.

The Catholic hospital of Saint Louis of Aleppo, built-in 1905, is a 60-bed facility run by the nuns of Saint Joseph of the Apparition, to offer free treatment to the most vulnerable and destitute patients, despite the severe US and EU sanctions that affect medical facilities.

“Only 44 out of 141 health infrastructures are still functioning in Aleppo as a result of the war,” said George Theodory, head doctor at Saint Louis of Aleppo, who added that there are long waiting times for diagnosis and treatment as a result of the US and EU sanctions.

”The situation is very different today. There is no more fighting except in the area of Idlib, but we are facing another war that bears the name of poverty,” said Sister Fekria, while pointing an accusing finger at the US and EU sanctions that have been direly affecting the population. Electricity, gas, and fuel are rationed. The sanctions on banking prevent many foreign pharmaceutical companies from trading with Syria, causing a lack of medicines and difficulties in finding medical supplies and equipment.

The Syrian government has rehabilitated 52 health centers and hospitals, in addition to 1,620 schools, with over one thousand projects being announced by the local administration.

What was destroyed?

The first full satellite survey of devastated ancient Aleppo is called “Five Years of Conflict: The State of Cultural Heritage in the Ancient City of Aleppo,” and was made by the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), and cultural heritage experts from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), working closely with historians, architects, and archaeologists.

The study shows that, between 2014 and 2015, most of the historic buildings south of the ancient Citadel were destroyed or severely damaged,

Audrey Azouley, Director-General of UNESCO, said that the technology provides a “remarkable tool with unmatched precision for documenting and understanding heritage” adding that it could also pave the way “for the eventual recovery of the city.”

What has been restored?

Construction and restoration activities in Aleppo were the main source of income for a large proportion of the city’s population; however, the increase in the price of cement has stopped some housing projects.

Thousands of structures in Aleppo’s neighborhoods, including houses, schools, and hospitals, particularly in the eastern parts of the city, were destroyed in the bombing when the city was under the control of the terrorists.

The Aleppo governorate witnessed the highest destruction level in Syria, with more than 35.7 thousand buildings destroyed.

Residents who have returned to some eastern Aleppo neighborhoods have repaired their houses, such as in the Masaken Hanano area, al-Shaar, the al-Bab road, and the al-Maysar.

The Syrian government has limited its restoration and rehabilitation activity to government facilities, and some schools in the neighborhoods of al-Jazmaty, al-Ferdous, and al-Saliheen.

Restoration of architectural heritage

Aleppo was the symbol of the material and cultural wealth that once made Syria one of the most civilized places in the world.  Blessed by climate, fertile land, physical beauty, and its position between the Mediterranean and the east.

The citadel sits atop a mound, with a moat, and the castle is the icing on the cake. The souks are a web of covered alleys and streets, which make up the first ‘shopping malls’ on earth, and are gems of architecture.

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture is supporting the rebuilding of some of the Aleppo souks, and some churches have been restored with the help of congregations abroad.

What’s next for Aleppo?

The Syrian people have suffered. Syrians who remained in the country have high hopes for 2021 being the year of peace and renewal. Syrians abroad may be homesick and waiting for the chance to return, but need security, an improved economy, and more electricity and gasoline supplies to make the long journey back home.

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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.

In his first media interview, the incoming US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has given a preview of Joe Biden administration’s foreign policy directions in regard of Russia, Iran and China. Major shifts can be expected in the policies toward both China and Iran while selective engagement of Russia is on cards.  

First, Russia. Sullivan noted that it was “most likely” that Russia is responsible for the massive cyber attacks on the US government system, critical infrastructure and private sector entities that have come to light recently. He didn’t want to “telegraph our punches” but forewarned that Biden will impose “substantial costs” on Russia. 

Biden will “choose his time and place” pending a thorough assessment regarding the intent of the attack, how far and wide it had spread and precisely what might result from it. Prima facie, this appears to go beyond“random opportunities for espionage” and downstream destructive action cannot be ruled out. Biden has told aides that from day 1, cyber security will be “a top national security priority of his administration.” 

However, Sullivan drew the analogy of the Cold War to point out that even when the US and the former Soviet Union arrayed thousands of nuclear warheads against each other on “a hair trigger”, and spoke in existential terms about their competition with each other, there were areas of cooperation — “more specifically, on arms control and nuclear non-proliferation.” 

Therefore, the US and Russia “can act in their national interests” to advance an arms control and strategic stability agenda amidst today’s tense relations. Sullivan disclosed that Biden has “tasked us to pursue from right outside the gate” (after the inaugural ceremony on Jan. 20) the renewal of the new START agreement. He admitted that US will have to look at “extending that treaty in the interests of the United States.” 

Sullivan didn’t expand on this selective engagement with Russia to include other issues (eg., Syria, Ukraine, etc.) or on the need of cooperation to meet common challenges. But Sullivan did not use any harsh language against “Russian aggression,” leave alone call Russia a “revisionist power”, etc. Nor did he make any critical references to Russian policies. 

Sullivan’s remarks in a measured tone followed come only days after an unusual gesture by Russian President Vladimir Putin last week to convey his Christmas and New Year greetings to Biden where he touched on the “the importance of broad international cooperation” in the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and “other challenges which the world faced”. 

Putin went on to express the hope that “by building a relationship in the spirit of equality and consideration for each other’s interests, Russia and the United States could contribute much to enhancing stability and security at the regional and global levels.” 

China

As regards China, Sullivan’s extended remarks signalled that Biden’s approach will be radically different from that of the Trump administration. He criticised that Trump took on China on its own, while also “picking fights” with its allies and partners. Whereas, Biden intends to “consult with our allies and partners” on how together the US can bring leverage to come to bear on China’s most problematic trade abuses, including dumping, illegal subsidies for state-owned enterprises, forced labour and environmental practices that hurt American workers and farmers and businesses. 

Sullivan exuded confidence that said Biden’s extensive contacts with lawmakers in the Congress will help push through his China policies. “He (Biden) knows his mind on China and he is going to carry forward a strategy that is not based on politics, not based on being pushed around by domestic constituencies, but based on the American national interests.” 

Sullivan described it as a “clear-eyed strategy, a strategy that recognises that China is a serious strategic competitor to the US that acts in ways that are at odds with our interests in many ways including trade.” At the same time, “it is also a strategy that recognises that we will work with China when it is in our interests to do so”, such as on climate change. 

To quote Sullivan, Biden’s strategy will be to work on “our sources of strength here at home so that we can more effectively compete with China on technology, economy and innovation, more effectively invest in our alliances, so as to build up to develop leverages.”  

Alongside, the US will be active in international institutions so that it is the US and its partners and not China “who is calling the shots at the key tables on issues ranging from nuclear non-proliferation to international economics.” Sullivan said that Biden’s strategy will be rooted in a clear assessment of the challenges the US faces, of America’s national interests and what are “the points of strength we can bring to bear in this competition.” 

What Sullivan didn’t say merits careful attention too. Never once did he mention Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy or the Quad. He completely avoided any critical remarks about China or references to contentious issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang or Tibet. 

Sullivan’s characterisation of China as a “serious strategic competitor” differs sharply from the Trump administration’s projection of China as a rival and irreconcilable enemy and aggressor. Indeed, he spoke about the imperatives of engagement with China despite differences. 

Iran

When it comes to Iran, Sullivan did not mince words to underscore that Trump’s maximum pressure policy has been a spectacular failure insofar as Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon today than before and its policies are posing “continuing, ongoing concerns”. Clearly, the promises made by the Trump administration — that US would extract a better nuclear deal, stop Iran’s malign behaviour and so on — did not bear out. The assassination of Qassem Soleimani showed that a strategy that is “so focused on one element of American power and completely sets aside diplomacy” cannot ultimately help attain the US’ strategic objectives. 

Sullivan reaffirmed Biden’s stance that if Iran comes back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal — that is, reduces its stockpiles, takes down some of its centrifuges — so that it is “back in the box”, then the US will also return to the JCPOA. Significantly, he added, “And that will become the basis of follow-on negotiation.” Sullivan flagged the following:

• Iran’s ballistic missile “has to be on the table” as part of follow-on negotiation.
• There could be conversations that go beyond the P5 + 1 and “involve the regional players” as well. 
• In that “broader negotiation”, we can “ultimately secure limits on Iran’s ballistic missile technology” and that is what Biden administration will try to pursue through diplomacy to address both the nuclear file and a broader range of regional issues.”

Sullivan who was instrumental in preparing the ground for the negotiations leading to the JCPOA, noted that the very logic of the 2015 deal was that it’d be narrowly focused on Iran’s nuclear programme, while the US would retain all its capacities — sanctions, intelligence capability, deterrent capacity — to push back at Iran on all other issues. 

He said the US had made no assumptions that by going into the nuclear deal, it would change Iran’s behaviour on other issues. But what the US estimated was that if it had the Iranian nuclear programme “in a box, it could then begin to chip away” at some of the other issues. Sullivan regretted that the US did not pursue “clear-eyed diplomacy backed by deterrence”, which was the hallmark of what produced the JCPOA. 

Having said that, “it was never fundamentally a part of the nuclear deal that we had expectations.” Therefore, “As we move forward, we will look at each of these issues in its own distinctive way, without presuming that progress on one aspect will necessarily mean progress on other aspects too.” 

To be sure, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE will feel disappointed that the “maximum pressure” strategy is going to be unceremoniously dumped, and renewed US-Iranian engagement is on cards. Biden apparently sees no problem in associating Saudi Arabia and the UAE with the forthcoming process of engagement with Iran, but it also has flip side insofar as Iran’s missile capability is its deterrence against the massive arms build-up by these two countries as well as Israeli belligerence. 

Therefore, Iran will not agree to unilaterally abandon its deterrent capability. And it is unlikely that Israel would disarm or that the Saudis and Emiratis would agree to curtail their excessive arms purchases. Arguably, the western powers themselves may not be enthusiastic about the highly lucrative West Asian arms bazaar drying up. 

Iran has reacted sharply to Sullivan’s remarks saying, “As for Iran’s defence capability, there has never been, there is no and there won’t be any negotiation.” Suffice to say, the US will have to incentivise Iran. A rollback of US sanctions, as provided under the JCPOA, will be a step in that direction. 

The bottom line is that Sullivan refrained from demanding any re-negotiation of the JCPOA. Sullivan has phrased it as “follow-on negotiation.” Now, there is going to be a great sense of urgency in kickstarting negotiations. Today, Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles vastly exceed the limit set by the JCPOA. 

Iran also announced today that it has begun the pre-processing stage of gas injection earlier in the underground Fordow nuclear site and the first UF6 enriched uranium will be produced “in a few hours”.

The transcript of Jake Sullivan’s interview with CNN is here.

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Featured image: Jake Sullivan (Public Domain)

“The purpose of impeachment is to get somebody out of office. If they’re already out of office what’s the purpose? It’s all a political act, and the Establishment getting rid of a non-establishment figure who was seen as a treat to their agendas and who had massive popular support.”

– Paul Craig Roberts (from today’s interview)

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The remarkable events unfolding on Capitol Hill in the afternoon of January 6, 2021 have been compared to Pearl Harbor. [2]

Thousands of aggrieved Americans descending on the home of leading democratic structures and then breaking through into the U.S. Capitol! [3]

Capitol police were described by the media as being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people. The protesters stormed in and raised havoc.

They collected in the Senate Chamber while the democratic representatives huddled in a secure location. A few of the culprits made it into House Representative Nancy Pelosi. And there were five individuals who died in the clash, including the death of a protester – U.S. Air Force Veteran and Qanon supporter Ashli Babbit. [4][5][6]

Senators, media personalities, and talking heads everywhere noted the tragedy, the terror, and the insult to the principles the elected individuals swore an oath to uphold when they set up an office in this nearly two and a half century old institution. The shattered politicians in the wake of the calamity named a singular villain as the author of this misfortune…Donald Trump. [7]

Now, the outgoing president, with less than a week to go before his regularly appointed succession has been impeached a second time. He has lost access to twitter and other platforms. And he may have lost any chance of returning again in four years for a rematch. [8][9]

Now, in just a few days, shortly after securing the presidency, Joe Biden will surely announce measures leading the charge against fascists, “White Supremacists” and “conspiracy theorists” to insure they will never again challenge the nation as a bastion of democracy.

Looking at this situation as the dust settles behind us, certain questions have started to challenge the 1/6 official story.

After weeks of preparing for a major insurgency of angry individuals, why was the Capitol police acting so incompetently?

Why would an unarmed U.S. Capitol Hill police officer hold off a mob by himself and then provoke them into following him right to the Senate Chamber?

Why does the scene in which Ashli Babbitt was killed appear ‘staged?’

A further concern pertain to the measures to be introduced to defeat the angry mobs of the future. Will they stop at Trump supporters? What about BLM? Or anti-war demonstrators? Peddlers of ‘conspiracy theories?’

These are the questions we will focus on in this brand new episode of the Global Research News Hour.

In our first hour, we get an opinion from the renowned commentator and analyst Paul Craig Roberts. He describes the January 6 riots as essentially a false flag. He also explains why Trump is targeted, why the election actually was fraudulent, and what the future holds for a split America.

Next up is former journalist and media critic Barrie Zwicker. He too agrees it was a false flag and puts the Washington incident in the context of countless others throughout history.

Finally, we hear from Jason Bermas. He presented himself as a reporter in the crowd. He relies a little more about what happened there and why the mainstream media is distorting the Trump supporters and thus the overall picture of the action.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan administration, a member of the US Congressional staff, associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He is chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and author or co-author of ten books and numerous articles in scholarly journals. His site is PaulCraigRoberts.org. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Barrie Zwicker is a former journalist and media critic. He wrote for the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Vancouver Province, Sudbury Star, Detroit News, and Lansing State Journal. He is the author of the 2006 book, Towers of deception: The Media Coverup of 9/11.

Jason Bermas is an accomplished broadcaster and Documentary film producer. He worked on the 9/11 film Loose Change and has been involved with WeAreChange. His current work is InfoWarrior, available through the webpage www.rofkin.com/jasonbermas.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 302)

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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. William L Shirer (1960), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, published by Simon and Shuster
2. Pail Kengor (January 12, 2021), ‘January 6, 2021: The New Kristallnacht, Pearl Harbor, 9/11?’, The American Spectator; http://spectator.org/january-6-2021-kristallnacht-pearl-harbor-9-11/
3. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/9/timeline-capitol-hill-riots
4. http://time.com/5927215/capitol-hill-police-riots-unprepared/
5. Http://www.salon.com/2021/01/08/pro-trump-rioters-stole-nancy-pelosis-and-other-top-lawmakers-laptops-and-ipads-democrats-say/
6. Kenya Evelyn (January 8), ‘Capitol attack: the five people who died’, The Guardian; Http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/capitol-attack-police-officer-five-deaths
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbpS651EF8M
8. Http://www.fox61.com/article/news/nation-world/what-happens-if-trump-is-impeached/77-5e6300cb-5109-41f9-921f-9231da687053
9. http://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/06/twitter-pledges-action-on-any-calls-for-violence-in-capitol-riot.html

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Born this Day: Prophet Who Saw the “Far Deeper Malady”

By David W. Mathisen, January 15 2021

January 15 is the day on which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. He would go on to become one of the most powerful voices of all time against racism, oppression, violence, imperialism, and impoverishment.

Martin Luther King’s Warning of America’s Spiritual Death

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, January 15 2021

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Riverside Church speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was delivered exactly one year before his April 4, 1968 assassination in Memphis. In the speech, King declared, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Martin Luther King Day 2021: Memphis, Tenn. Court Decision, U.S. “Government Agencies” Found Guilty in Martin Luther King’s Assassination

By Carl Herman, January 15 2021

After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.

MLK Day: Who Killed Martin Luther King? The Cover-Up of the Century

By Asad Ismi, January 15 2021

King was on the motel’s second floor balcony at 6:01 pm on April 4, 1968, when a bullet struck his chin, knocking him to the ground. He died in hospital an hour later. The authorities never matched the bullet that killed King to the rifle they claim Ray used.

“Beyond Vietnam”, Silence is Betrayal: Martin Luther King’s Historic 1967 Speech

By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,  April 4 1967

Martin Luther King Jr. 4 April 1967 Speech at Riverside Church, Upper Manhattan, New York. The speech was delivered on the same day (April 4, 1967) one year before MLK was killed on April 4, 1968.

The Plot to Kill Martin Luther King: Survived Shooting, Was Murdered in Hospital 

By Craig McKee, September 3 2016

Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King: The U.S. is “The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today”

By John Marciano, January 15 2019

King denounced the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and saw the war was “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Later that spring, he asserted that “the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together“: we could not “get rid of o­ne without getting rid of the others [and] the whole structure of American life must be changed.”

For Martin Luther King Day: Let Us End His “Second Assassination”

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, January 11 2021

While many people take the opportunity to treat Martin’s life as a pre-packaged hallmark card of cliché speeches, far too few take the time to fully appreciate not only the depth of his understanding of the multifaceted evils plaguing society but also his brilliant plans, methods and vision for creative problem solving.

Martin Luther King: The Struggle for a Living Wage and the End to War

By Abayomi Azikiwe, April 07 2017

What is routinely overlooked by the corporate and government-sponsored media in the U.S. is the political shift of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) following the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

Martin Luther King: The Saint Honored by the Government that Shot Him in the Face … A “Forgotten” Extrajudicial Political Assassination [?]

By Prof. Graeme MacQueen, January 18 2016

The great variety of evidence presented by attorney William Pepper pointed to the impossibility of the lone assassin hypothesis (James Earl Ray) and to the conspiring of several bodies, including the local police (Memphis Police Department), the mafia (local representative Frank Liberto), and federal police, intelligence and military units.

“Orders to Kill” Dr. Martin Luther King: The Government that Honors MLK with a National Holiday Killed Him

By Edward Curtin, January 16 2017

Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For almost fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government deception to hide the truth.

Martin Luther King: “I Have Been To The Mountain Top”

By Danny Schechter, January 23 2014

Mountaintops offer dynamic vistas and symbolize not only physical heights but inspiring points of prominence. On the night before he was murdered, Martin Luther King told a packed church in Memphis where he was crusading on behalf of the city’s garbage workers, that he had been to the mountain top.

Trump Hardliners Poisoning US-China Relations. Pompeo “Spreads Political Viruses”

By Stephen Lendman, January 15 2021

In its waning days in power, Trump regime hardliners are going all-out to more greatly deteriorate US relations with China than already — Pompeo leading the assault.

Encircling China and Praising India: The US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, January 15 2021

Rather than seeing it as a blueprint for imminent conflict with China, a more benign reading is given: how to handle “strategic rivalry with China.”  Looming in the text of the National Security Council’s US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific (SFIP) is a generous doffing of the cap to Australia’s reckless, self-harming approach towards China.

COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink

By Dr. Ari Joffe, January 15 2021

The public health goal of lockdowns was to save the population from COVID-19 cases and deaths, and to prevent overwhelming health care systems with COVID-19 patients. In this narrative review I explain why I changed my mind about supporting lockdowns.

Biden’s Pick: Will the Senate Confirm Coup Plotter Victoria Nuland?

By Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies, and Marcy Winograd, January 15 2021

Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden’s pick for Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.

The New America of Terror and Discontent

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null, January 15 2021

There is something on the horizon that does not bode well for most Americans.  It is a simple principle to understand; yet so subtle it will likely go unnoticed until everyone is individually and collectively affected. It is the utter lack of balance within the nation’s body politick, and across the media that spoon feeds us virtual images of a faux theatrical play.

Video: Israel and US Efforts in Large-scale Strikes on Iranian Infrastructure in Syria

By South Front, January 15 2021

The first two weeks of 2021 have, so far, been marked by an incredible increase in Israeli activity in the skies over Syria. The most intense strike took place on January 13 morning hitting multiple Syrian and Iranian-affiliated targets in the province of Deir Ezzor.

History of Economic Thought: John Maynard Keynes and the Battle for Bretton Woods

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, January 14 2021

Under the Keynesian takeover of Bretton Woods Trans-Atlantic nations became increasingly dominated by bloated bureaucratic systems while plans for genuine development were undermined, Matthew Ehret writes.

You Are Surrounded by Propaganda. “The Invisible Government”

By Rod Driver, January 15 2021

Art as Liberation: The Mexican Muralists at the New York Whitney Museum

By Prof. Sam Ben-Meir, January 15 2021

Alle 2:20 del 17 gennaio 1991 (ora del Golfo), elicotteri Usa penetrano in territorio iracheno, distruggendo con missili Hellfire due stazioni radar. Subito dopo missili da crociera Tomahawk e caccia Stealth F-117A colpiscono altri centri nevralgici, accecando le difese aeree della capitale.

La Cnn trasmette in tutto il mondo le immagini del cielo di Baghdad illuminato dai traccianti della contraerea che spara alla cieca, uno «spettacolo» che il reporter paragona ai festosi fuochi d’artificio del 4 Luglio. C’è sotto le bombe anche il nostro inviato Stefano Chiarini. Inizia così quella che il Pentagono descrive come l’azione militare più distruttiva mai effettuata in così breve tempo con armi non-nucleari, modello delle guerre future.

Paradossalmente la guerra scoppia nel momento in cui «scoppia la pace» (secondo lo slogan dell’epoca). Dopo il crollo del Muro di Berlino nel 1989, stanno per dissolversi il Patto di Varsavia e la stessa Unione Sovietica. «La guerra fredda è terminata, siamo entrati in una nuova era che offre grande speranza», annuncia il presidente Bush, ma «la crisi del Golfo ci ricorda che vi sono ancora nel mondo fonti autonome di turbolenza».

In realtà la «turbolenza» viene innescata da Washington per trarre il massimo vantaggio dal fatto che, con la disgregazione del blocco sovietico, gli Stati uniti, come ufficialmente dichiarano, rimangono «il solo Stato con una forza, una portata e un’influenza in ogni dimensione – politica, economica e militare – realmente globali: non esiste alcun sostituto alla leadership americana».

Dopo aver sostenuto negli anni Ottanta l’Iraq di Saddam Hussein nella guerra contro l’Iran di Khomeini, gli Usa spingono il Kuwait, che ha aiutato l’Iraq a combattere l’Iran, a esigere da Baghdad l’immediato rimborso di un prestito di decine di miliardi di dollari e a sfruttare oltremisura, danneggiando l’Iraq, il giacimento petrolifero che si estende sotto ambedue i territori.

Mentre cresce la tensione tra i due paesi, il 25 luglio 1990 l’ambasciatrice Usa a Baghdad April Glaspie assicura Saddam Hussein di «avere dirette istruzioni dal Presidente di ricercare migliori relazioni con l’Iraq» e che «noi non abbiamo alcuna opinione sulla vostra disputa di confine con il Kuwait». Una settimana dopo, con un colossale errore di calcolo politico, l’Iraq invade il Kuwait, proponendo successivamente di ritirarsi in cambio di determinate concessioni, tra cui l’accesso al Golfo negatogli quando la Gran Bretagna aveva ridisegnato negli anni Venti la carta del Medio Oriente.

La trappola è scattata. Gli Stati uniti – che hanno da tempo preparato la guerra, osservando con i satelliti militari il dispiegamento delle forze irachene e individuando gli obiettivi da colpire – formano una coalizione internazionale che invia nel Golfo una grande armata di 750 mila uomini agli ordini del generale Usa Schwarzkopf. Nel novembre 1990 il Consiglio di sicurezza dell’Onu approva – con 12 voti favorevoli (compreso quello dell’Urss), 2 contrari (Cuba e Yemen) e l’astensione della Cina – la Risoluzione 678 che autorizza l’uso di «tutti i mezzi necessari» contro l’Iraq.

La guerra del Golfo è la prima guerra a cui partecipa sotto comando Usa la Repubblica italiana, violando l’articolo 11 della Costituzione. La Nato, pur non partecipandovi ufficialmente in quanto tale, mette a disposizione sue forze e basi.

Subito dopo la guerra la Nato vara, sulla falsariga della nuova strategia Usa, il «nuovo concetto strategico dell’Alleanza», che l’Italia ricopia col «nuovo modello di difesa». Si passa così di guerra in guerra, presentandole quali «operazioni umanitarie per l’esportazione della democrazia»: Jugoslavia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libia 2011, Siria 2011, e altre.

Questa è la guerra che, secondo quanto dichiarato dal presidente Bush nel 1991, avrebbe aperto «un futuro migliore – una nuova comunità mondiale riunita dal crescente consenso che la forza non può essere usata» e che per questo «la crisi del Golfo passerà alla storia come il crogiolo del nuovo ordine mondiale».

Lo testimoniano i milioni di morti, invalidi, orfani, rifugiati provocati dalla guerra del Golfo, cui si aggiungono un milione e mezzo di morti, tra cui mezzo milione di bambini, provocati dai successivi 12 anni di embargo all’Iraq e dagli effetti a lungo termine dei proiettili a uranio impoverito, più i molti altri provocati dalla nuova guerra del 2003. La scia di morte, scaturita trent’anni fa dalla prima guerra del dopo guerra fredda, continua a dilagare.

Manlio Dinucci

On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. is born in Atlanta, Georgia

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Riverside Church speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was delivered exactly one year before his April 4, 1968 assassination in Memphis. In the speech, King declared, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

The people who heard that speech recognized it as one of the most powerful speeches ever given articulating the immorality of the Vietnam War and its destructive impact on social progress in the United States. In explaining his decision to follow his conscience and speak out against U.S. militarism, King said:

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

But King went farther, diagnosing the broader disease of militarism and violence that was endangering the soul of the United States. King said,

A mug shot photo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

Poisoning America’s Soul

King knew very well that the disease of violence was killing off more than social progress in America. Violence was sickening the nation’s soul as well. He added,

“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’.”

King urged his fellow citizens to take up the causes of the world’s oppressed, rather than taking the side of the oppressors. He said:

“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, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world a world that borders on our doors.

“If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

King pointed to an alternate path into the future:

“Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter but beautiful struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard?”

Signing His Own Death Warrant

By denouncing so forcefully the war crimes that the U.S. military was committing daily in the killing fields of Vietnam, some of King’s followers understood that he had just signed his own death warrant. But King, being a person of conscience, was compelled to express his deep sense of moral outrage over the horrific maiming, suffering and dying of millions of innocent Vietnamese civilians in that unjust war that afflicted mostly unarmed women and children and that was going to leave behind lethal poisons in the soil, water and unborn babies that would last for generations.

He knew that non-combatants are always the major victims of modern warfare, especially wars that indiscriminately used highly lethal weapons that rained down from the air, especially the U.S. Air Force’s favorite weapon, napalm — the flaming, jellied gasoline that burned the flesh off of whatever part of the burning adult or child it splashed onto.

King also connected the racist acts (of American soldiers joyfully killing dispensable non-white “gooks” and “slants” — often shooting at “anything that moves”) on the battlefields of Southeast Asia to the oppression, impoverishment, imprisoning and lynching of dispensable, deprived non-white “niggers” in America.

King saw the connections between the violence of racism and the violence of poverty. He saw that the withholding of economic and educational opportunities came from the fear of “the other” and the perceived need to protect the white culture’s wealth and privilege with violence if necessary.

King knew, too, that fortunes are made in every war, and the war in Vietnam was no exception. In his speeches, he talked about that unwelcome reality that the ruling class preferred not be discussed. That meant his well-attended Riverside Church speech threatened not only the powerful interests already arrayed against his civil rights struggle but also the interests of the war profiteers and the national security establishment.

War is Good Business

The longer the Vietnam War lasted, the more the weapons manufacturers thrived. With their huge profits, there was a strong incentive for these financial elites to continue the carnage. And therefore the Wall Street war profiteers financed, out of their ill-gotten gains, battalions of industry lobbyists and pro-military propagandists who descended upon Washington, DC, and the Pentagon to claim even more tax dollars for weapons research, development and manufacture.

Nick Ut’s famous photo of terrified South Vietnamese children fleeing from a napalm attack on the village of Trang Bang in 1972. The girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, has ripped off her burning clothes.

With that funding secured, armies of desperate jobs-seekers were hired to work in thousands of weapons factories that were strategically placed in congressional districts almost everywhere, with weapons research grants likewise being awarded to virtually every university in the nation. Thus, weapons-manufacturing and R&D soon became vitally important for almost every legislator’s home district economy as well as for the household budgets of millions of American voters who indirectly benefited from the U.S. military’s killing, maiming, displacement, starvation and suffering of non-white people in war zones.

King’s anti-war stance was based on his Christianity and on the ethics and life of Jesus, but it was also based on his standing as a revered international peace and justice icon. Those factors made him a dangerous threat to the military/industrial/congressional/security complex.

The powerful forces that were working hard to discredit King had already infiltrated the civil rights movement. Their efforts, cunningly led by the proto-fascist and racist J. Edgar Hoover and his obedient FBI, accelerated after the Riverside speech. The FBI ramped up the smear campaigns against King. Eventually he was “neutralized” with a bullet to the head. [The case for believing that King’s murder was not simply the act of lone gunman James Earl Ray is laid out in many studies, including attorney William F. Pepper’s An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King.]

King’s Prophetic Vision

Now, five decades after his anti-war speech (which was widely kept from the public), it is clear how prophetic King’s observations were. America is indeed losing its soul. Violence, racism, militarism and economic oppression are still American epidemics.

Both upper- and middle-class investors of get-rich-quick schemes in America have succumbed to predatory lenders, cannibalistic corporate mergers and acquisitions, psychopathic multinational corporate schemers, corrupt crony capitalists, and the rapist/exploiters of the land and water by extractive industries all schemes that will eventually burst as part of predictable economic bubbles.

Those busted bubbles regularly wipe out investors (except for the large, deep-pocketed “insiders” who, usually being forewarned, will have sold their holdings just in time, before the publicly revealed “bust”), leaving the taxpayers to bail out the financial messes that were created by the so-called “invisible hand of the market” but are really caused by the cunning work of corporate gamblers.

Photos of victims of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam galvanized public awareness about the barbarity of the war. (Photo taken by U. S. Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle)

King was trying to warn us not just about the oncoming epidemic of violence toward victims at home but also about the tens of millions of people around the world who were and are still being victimized by U.S. military misadventures. King was also warning us about the multinational corporate war profiteers whose interests are facilitated and protected by the U.S. military whether they are operating in Asia, Latin America, Africa or the Middle East.

The Pentagon budget averages well over $700 billion per year, including wars that are often illegal and unconstitutional. That amounts to $2 billion per day with no visible return on investment, except for the military contractors, the oil industries and Wall Street financiers.

Vast sums also are needed to address the physical and mental health costs needed for the palliative care for the permanently maimed and psychologically-traumatized veterans. Hundreds of millions of dollars more are spent paying down the interest payments on past military debts.

All those potentially bankrupting costs represent money that will never be available for programs of social uplift like combating racism, poverty and hunger, or paying for affordable housing/healthcare, universal education or meaningful job creation. Can anyone else hear a demonic laugh reverberating down Wall Street?

King was warning America about its oncoming spiritual death if it didn’t convert itself away from military violence. But most observers of the U.S. see America still worshipping at the altars of the Gods of War and Greed. Our children may be doomed.

The vast majority of American Christian churches (whether fundamentalist, conservative, moderate or liberal, with very few exceptions) have failed King’s vision, despite the lip service they sometimes give to King on MLK Day. Churches whose members were brought up on the Myth of American Exceptionalism (and the myth of being “God’s chosen people”) consistently refuse to take a stand against the satanic nature of war.

Past the Point of No Return?

If America is to avert future financial and military catastrophes, King’s central warnings about the “triple evils” of militarism, racism and economic oppression must be heeded. That means a retreat from worldwide network of budget-busting military bases. And, if America wants to shed the justified label of “Rogue Nation,” the covert killing operations of its secret black ops mercenary military units all around the world must be stopped, as should the infamous extrajudicial assassinations by America’s unmanned drones.

If King’s 50-year-old warning continues to be ignored, America’s future is bleak. The future holds the dark seeds of economic chaos, hyperinflation, unendurable poverty, increasing racial/minority hostility, worsening malnutrition, armed rebellion, street fighting, and perhaps, ultimately, institution of a reactionary totalitarian/surveillance police state in order to control citizen protests and quell rebellions.

At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.”

In 1967, many Americans considered King hopeful vision for a better future as irrational idealism. He was told that the task was too great, the obstacles were too imposing, and there was no will for even the churches to reverse their age-old, conservative pseudo-patriotism and society’s institutional racism. I suspect that many of the churches that called King a communist and therefore ignored him back then wish that they could turn back the clock and give King’s (and Jesus’s) path a try.

King finished his speech with these challenges:

“War is not the answer. We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

And he had these sobering words for the churches that are immersed in a polytheistic culture (the worship of multiple gods, including the gods of war and mammon) and thus are tempted to quietly ally themselves with those gods rather than the God of Love that King was devoted to:

“I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. I have looked at her beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlay of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over again I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?’”

Today, the task is even tougher, the obstacles much more imposing, but the path that King outlined remains.

Dr. Gary G. Kohls is a retired physician who writes about peace, justice, militarism, mental health and religious issues. 

David W. Mathisen is the author of eight books about the connections of the world’s ancient myths to the stars. He is a graduate of West Point and has a masters degree in literature from Texas A&M University. His website can be found at www.starmythworld.com.

Featured image is from ABC7 Chicago

In its waning days in power, Trump regime hardliners are going all-out to more greatly deteriorate US relations with China than already — Pompeo leading the assault.

Mindful of what’s going on with more coming, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the following last Tuesday:

“Pompeo certainly went to great lengths to spread political viruses.”

“He’s truly in a league of his own when it comes to weaving lies and distorting facts.”

The US “is the biggest destabilizing factor threatening global peace and security and undermining multilateral cooperation.”

“In rampant pursuit of unilateralism, it blatantly withdraws from treaties and organizations and arbitrarily resorts to the threat of sanctions.”

“To date, it has exited a dozen international conventions and organizations.”

It “unilaterally announced the restoration of UN Security Council sanctions against Iran, and abused the venue of the UN to flagrantly smear other countries, drawing wide opposition from the international community.”

These actions…“gravely undermine international cooperation…world peace, stability and security.”

“Pompeo’s lying diplomacy has once again exposed the infamous ‘American double standard.’ ”

It undermines cooperation among world community nations, leaving America’s “international image and reputation” in tatters.

On Thursday, the Trump regime added nine more Chinese firms to its so-called “entity list.”

They include the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and mobile phone producer Xiaomi — on the phony pretext of ties to the country’s military.

The move blocks US exports to and imports from targeted firms without Commerce Department approval.

A statement by Secretary Wilbur Ross said the following:

“China’s reckless and belligerent actions in the South China Sea and its aggressive push to acquire sensitive intellectual property and technology for its militarization efforts are a threat to US national security and the security of the international community (sic).”

The above claim applies to the US and its imperial partners, not China.

Its leadership prioritizes cooperative relations with other nations, confrontation with none.

Separately, an anti-China propaganda report by a so-called Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) falsely accused its government of “crimes against humanity  – and possibly genocide” against its Uyghur population.

Similar US charges were made before that falsely claim mass-internment of up to a million Uyghurs and other Muslims.

When accusations like these surface against sovereign independent countries free from US control, no credible evidence supports them because none exists.

In response to the above US charge, China’s Washington embassy slammed the CECC for being “obsessed with making up all sorts of lies to vilify China,” adding:

“The so-called ‘genocide’ is a rumor deliberately started by some anti-China forces and a farce to discredit China.”

House passed Uygur legislation called for sanctions against Beijing for human rights abuses.

The world’s leading human rights abuser domestically and worldwide USA time and again blames other nations for its own high crimes.

Reportedly, the Trump regime is set to release so-called “bombshell” information about made-in-the-USA covid it claims was released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology before reported outbreaks last year.

As point man for Trump’s war on China by other means, Pompeo will release so-called evidence.

According to London’s Daily Mail, “America is set to present dramatic new evidence that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab – in the final act of the Trump” regime, adding:

“Senior officials in Washington say that…Pompeo is set to make a ‘bombshell intervention.’ ”

“They say he will reveal evidence that SARS-CoV-2 did not leap naturally from bats, pangolins or other species to humans.”

“Instead he will claim it was cultured by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…”

“British Foreign Office and security sources confirmed they were expecting the claims from Washington but dismissed them in advance, saying ‘all the credible scientific evidence does not point to a leak from the laboratory.’ ”

“The established view of the US intelligence community suggests the pandemic was natural in origin.”

Pompeo is also expected to accuse the WHO of aiding an alleged Beijing cover-up with no credible evidence supporting the charge.

He’ll claim ties between the lab and China’s military to conduct experiments.

On Monday, a White House statement said the following:

“The world cannot continue to pay heavy prices for its naivete and complicity in Beijing’s irresponsible and harmful practices (sic) – whether it is ending the rule of law in Hong Kong (sic) or not cooperating with health officials on the pandemic (sic).”

The Trump regime “is examining further options to respond.”

As earlier explained, covid is renamed seasonal flu/influenza that occurs annually — with none of what’s going on now, no mass-hysteria fear-mongering propaganda.

What began since early last year is a diabolical brave new world US-led social control plot.

Its aim is transforming world community nations into ruler/serf societies.

It created the Greatest Main Street Depression in US history.

It’s facilitating the greatest ever wealth transfer from most people to the privileged few.

Lockdowns and quarantines (aka house arrest), social distancing, mask-wearing, and all the rest caused infinitely more harm to countless millions of households than any number of serious diseases combined.

What’s happening perhaps established a permanent new abnormal, the worst likely to come.

A diabolical social engineering plot with no end of it in prospect may eliminate freedoms as once existed — dystopian harshness replacing them.

Ongoing actions have nothing to do with protecting and preserving health and well-being, everything to do with harming them by police state social control.

Covid is the vehicle, a hoax perpetuated by Big Government/ Big Media mass deception — a state-sponsored coup d’etat against virtually everything just societies hold dear.

If successful, it’ll create what Orwell called “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Everyone vaxxed with hazardous covid vaccines is playing fast and loose with their health, safety and well-being.

We can either resist to preserve and protect what’s too precious to lose or risk near-or-longer-term contraction of serious illnesses under draconian conditions.

The choice is self-evident.

*

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

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

What Biden proposed Thursday may or may not be what Congress passes and gets enacted into law.

Whatever becomes law, special interests may largely benefit when funds are dispensed.

Much of what was in last year’s $2.2 trillion CARES Act went to business and other special interests over Main Street needs.

According to Wall Street on Parade (WSOP), around 75% of $454 billion allegedly earmarked for emergency lending to save businesses and jobs was unaccounted for by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin.

At a time when nearly 100,000 largely small businesses permanently closed for lack of enough customers and revenue, $340 billion of CARES Act relief “went missing.”

WSOP later learned that the missing funds were in a Mnuchin “slush fund” to be used at his discretion for what he favored, not for their intended purpose, adding:

He “ha(d) no problem (using) emergency lending programs (to aid) Wall Street” while largely indifferent toward Main Street.

Will something similar play out after Biden/Harris replace Trump next week?

His proposed plan heavily pushes mass-vaxxing with hazardous to health/experiment Pfizer and Modern covid vaccines — essential to avoid or risk serious illness or death.

Direct relief is as follows if the so-called American Rescue Plan (ARP) becomes law.

It includes $1,400 to eligible households —  not $2,000 Biden pledged earlier.

The amount at most might cover essentials to life for around a month.

The plan also includes $400 in weekly unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through September, along with rental assistance; emergency paid leave, and funding for schools.

It calls for a $15 per hour federal minimum wage.

Evictions and foreclosure moratoriums are extended until end of September.

Around $350 billion in aid to states and communities pushes harmful mass-vaxxing, meaningless PCR tests that don’t work, and funding for public health workers that’s all-about wanting all Americans vaxxed.

Another $170 billion is earmarked for K-12 schools and higher education institutions that includes mass-vaxxing students.

Nearly always when PCR tests for covid are positive, the diagnosis is false.

Former Pfizer chief science advisor Dr. Mike Yeadon called their use “junk science.”

According to 22 eminent scientists, around 97% of PCR tests for covid produce false positive results.

Yet the ARP includes $50 billion for testing, another $20 billion for promoting mass-vaxxing nationwide in cahoots with state and local governments.

The plan makes the Child Tax Credit fully refundable for 2021, increasing the credit to $3,000 per child, $3,600 for children under age-6.

What’s needed are weekly stimulus checks of at least $600 as approved last year that ended on July 31.

The proposed plan also extends a 15% increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and $3 billion for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program through September.

Proposed $225 billion in aid for small businesses includes $15 billion in grants, $175 billion in loans, and another $35 may likely go at least largely to corporate favorites.

Dem leadership supports the plan. Most Republicans likely to want less than proposed.

If conservative Dems support them, one alone in the equally divided Senate perhaps enough, the plan could be pared back.

Nothing is included for debt bondage from America’s student loan racket as Biden earlier pledged.

He could do it by executive order post-inauguration.

Reportedly, a follow-up stimulus package will be introduced in February that allegedly will call for jobs creation, infrastructure related programs and others.

Whatever helps Main Street is positive.

Yet time and again, Republicans and Dems are generous to corporate America and other special interests.

Notably since the neoliberal 90s they’ve been stingy to Main Street.

*

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

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from CODEPINK

 First published on January 19, 2016

“The United States government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”- Martin Luther King

On December 8, 1999, a jury in Memphis, Tennessee, reached the verdict that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed as a result of a conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA, U.S. Army, Memphis police and the Mafia.

After a five week trial which presented 70 witnesses, the jury (made up of six blacks and six whites) rejected the official position that the civil rights titan was shot by a lone assassin, James Earl Ray, who was jailed for 99 years for the crime and died in 1998. The verdict concluded a wrongful death civil lawsuit brought by the King family against Loyd Jowers, owner of Jim‚s Grill, a Memphis cafe located next to the scene of the shooting when it took place on April 4, 1968.

The jury found Jowers guilty as one part of a large conspiracy created by government agencies. Jowers admitted his role but insisted that he did not know the identity of the target.

Coretta Scott King, Martin’s widow, hailed the verdict as “a great victory for justice and truth.” She added: “there is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband and the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief.” Dexter King, one of Martin’s four children, said that his father was killed “because he challenged the establishment.” He called the official investigation into Martin’s murder, “the most incredible cover-up of the century.”

The case for conspiracy and the inadequacy of the lone assassin theory seem obvious. The state had no significant evidence implicating Ray. According to the official version, Ray shot King from the bathroom window of a rooming house located next to the Lorraine Motel where the civil rights leader was staying. King was on the motel’s second floor balcony at 6:01 pm on April 4, 1968, when a bullet struck his chin, knocking him to the ground. He died in hospital an hour later.

The authorities never matched the bullet that killed King to the rifle they claim Ray used. Charles Stephens, the state’s only eye witness who claimed to have seen Ray leave the rooming house soon after the shot, was too drunk to even stand up at the time. There was a tree branch between the bathroom window and the balcony that made a clear shot impossible. Ray was not a trained marksman and the scope on the rifle was not sighted which means that it could not have hit any target. Six witnesses claimed that the shot came from bushes behind the rooming house. Jim’s Grill was located under the rooming house and its back door opened on to the bushes. Ray was jailed not due to evidence but because he pleaded guilty. He recanted 3 days later and spent the rest of his life trying to get a trial. Under Tennessee law Ray had the right to a trial but this was consistently denied. Ray claimed that his guilty plea was coerced by Percy Foreman, his lawyer at the time, who threatened him with the death penalty.

Ray was a petty criminal who had bungled almost every robbery he committed. In the King murder, he claimed to have been set up by a man named Raul (of Portuguese origin) who, he said, directed his movements after Ray escaped from prison in April 1967. Ray first met Raul in Montreal in August and agreed to work for him after he was promised travel papers. Raul was a gunrunner with links to Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss of New Orleans. Raul had Ray smuggling contraband across the U.S.-Canadian border and going to different U.S. cities to make deliveries. On April 3, 1968, Raul met Ray in Memphis. Raul had already asked Ray to buy a Remington 30.06 rifle with a telescopic sight. Ray was then told to get accomodation at the rooming house next to the Lorraine Motel and leave the rifle there. On the afternoon of April 4, Raul asked Ray to “go to the movies” for three hours. After 6:01 pm, Ray heard on his car radio that King had been shot and the police were looking for a white man in a white Mustang (the make of his car). Ray escaped to Toronto and then flew to London (England) where he was caught. Sidney Carthew, a seaman, testified that he met Ray and Raul together in Montreal’s Neptune Bar in the summer of 1967.

Jowers also identified Raul. According to him, King’s assassination was planned by three Memphis Police Department (MPD) officers in Jim’s Grill over 2 days. The officers were Earl Clark, Johnny Barger and Marrell McCollough. Jowers was asked to help in the plot by Frank Liberto, a produce dealer with Mafia connections to whom he owed money. Liberto told Jowers to hold $100,000 for him. Minutes after the bullet hit King on April 4, Jowers was handed a smoking rifle at the back door of Jim’s Grill by Earl Clark, the MPD’s best marksman. Jowers believes Clark killed King. Raul picked up the rifle and the money the next day, according to Jowers.

William Pepper, the King family’s lawyer, actually found Raul living in Yonkers, New York. He was asked to appear in court but refused. Barbara Reis, journalist for “Publico”, the main newspaper in Portugal, testified that a source connected to Raul’s family told her that agents of the U.S. government had visited them three times. The source added that the government was “protecting” the family and monitoring their phone.

One of the main indicators of conspiracy was the removal of all security for King in Memphis during April 3- 4. A detail made up of black police officers assigned to King on previous visits to Memphis was not deployed this time. Similarly, two black firemen were removed from the fire station overlooking the Lorraine Motel on April 3, as was black detective Ed Redditt who was surveilling King from there. Police emergency tactical units were also pulled back from around the motel giving the assassin lots of room to escape. All police personnel disappeared from the motel an hour before the murder. After the shooting, no All Points Bulletin describing the suspect was issued nor was a “Signal Y” which would block off exits from the city. Both of these are standard police procedures. A door-to-door investigation in the Lorraine Motel area was never carried out by authorities and many witnesses were not questioned. By order of the police the bush area from where, according to six witnesses, the shot came, was cut down the next day. This destroyed the crime scene.

The state also claimed that Ray was driven by racism to kill King but there is no record of Ray displaying racist or violent behaviour. He had no motive to kill King. There is lots of evidence, however, to indicate that U.S. federal government agencies were out to get King. He was extensively surveilled by the FBI, CIA and Army Intelligence, as a dangerous radical who threatened national security. All three agencies believed that King had communist ties. J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, hated King intensely and wanted him “neutralized” by almost any means. When King won the Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover publicly called him, “the most notorious liar in the country.” A Senate report stated in 1976 that the FBI tried “to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King.”

William Sullivan, FBI assistant director, considered King “the most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country.” King’s phones were tapped, his movements watched, his rooms bugged and his entourage infiltrated. The FBI threatened him, blackmailed him, launched a media disinformation campaign to discredit him, and sent him a letter suggesting that he commit suicide. A main goal of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) which was aimed at eliminating black nationalist groups, was to prevent the rise of a black “messiah.” FBI memoes also discussed finding a black leader to replace King. The final obscenity of U.S. “justice” was that the FBI which clearly wanted King dead was given the task of investigating his murder. Hence the official devotion to the baseless lone assassin theory for the last thirty two years. Judge Joe Brown who presided over one of Ray’s appeals, called the FBI’s investigation into King’s killing, “inept and incapable if not downright incompetent.”

In its surveillance of King, the FBI collaborated with Army Intelligence which had been spying on the King family for three generations, since 1917. There were seven U.S. Army Military Intelligence Groups (MIGs) spread out over the U.S., and six of them surveilled King as he toured the country. The Army maintained a massive domestic spy system which included 304 intelligence offices in the U.S. and national security dossiers on 7 million Americans. In a series of articles in the “Memphis Commercial Appeal” in March 1993, reporter Steve Tompkins detailed the “increasing hysteria”of Army intelligence chiefs over the national security threat they thought King posed. Tompkins stated that army intelligence was “…desperately searching for a way to stop him…” Particularly alarming was King’s opposition to the Vietnam War which he denounced as On April 4, 1967, as an “imperialist assault on Third World peasants.”

He equated the use of new weapons against the Vietnamese to the testing of “new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe” by the Nazis. King’s condemnation of the Vietnam War made him the leader who could merge the anti-war and civil rights movements. He announced his intention to lead a Poor Peoples’ March (of all races) to Washington D.C. in the spring of 1968 and shut down the government if it did not stop the war in Vietnam and take steps to end poverty in the U.S. The Army received reports stating that “King will create massive civil disobedience in [Washington] and in ten to fifteen major cities in the U.S. in the spring of 1968.” The Army was not prepared for such upheaval. According to Major General William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for army intelligence, there were “too few reliable troops to fight in Vietnam and hold the line at home.”

Army surveillance of King continued until his assassination. Carthel Weeden, a former captain with the Memphis Fire Department, testified at the Jowers trial that on the afternoon of April 4, 1968, two men approached him at the fire station across from the Lorraine Motel, and showed the identification of U.S. Army officers. The men carried photographic equipment and positioned themselves on the rooftop of the fire station which gave them a clear view of King and the assassin. Any photographs could be in Pentagon archives. According to former National Security Council operative, Jack Terrell, the army went beyond surveillance. Terrell testified that his close friend J.D. Hill who was part of the 20th Special Forces Group confessed to him that he had been a member of an Army sniper team in Memphis ordered to shoot an “unknown” target on April 4. The snipers were being transported to Memphis when their mission was suddenly cancelled. Hill stated that upon learning of King’s murder the next day, he realized that the team must have been part of a backup operation to kill King if another sniper failed.

The U.S. government’s murder of arguably “the greatest American who ever lived” signified that in violently propping up vicious right-wing dictatorships all over the Third World (as in Vietnam), the U.S. itself had become one of the biggest banana republics with no possibility for peaceful social change. Martin Luther King was a leader of international stature who spoke for the poor of the world and militantly confronted a system based on their slaughter. This pitted him against the most genocidal establishment on Earth. The state murder of such a great man only increased the power of his example.

Asad Ismi is a writer on international politics who specializes in detailing the destructive impact of U.S. and Canadian imperialism on the Global South and the resistance of the Southern people to this. He is a regular contributor to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor, Canada’s biggest left-wing magazine by circulation.  Asad is winner of a Project Censored Award for his article The Ravaging of Africa which was released in 2007 as a radio documentary. He holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the University of London (England) and taught for two years in Vietnam. He is a regular guest on community radio stations across Canada and the U.S. He is a frequent  contributor to Global Research. 

The first two weeks of 2021 have, so far, been marked by an incredible increase in Israeli activity in the skies over Syria.

The most intense strike took place on January 13 morning hitting multiple Syrian and Iranian-affiliated targets in the province of Deir Ezzor, including the underground base of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Corps near al-Bukamal.

The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Israeli strikes have killed 57 and wounded another 37. Pro-government sources confirmed only 5 casualties.

The airstrikes were so numerous that even Abu Yatem al-Katrani – the commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) 4th Brigade was killed in an airstrike.

The Israeli operations were carried out with the assistance of the United States – it provided intelligence and Israeli struck on them. Former CIA Director, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was reportedly discussing the airstrikes with Yossi Cohen, chief of Israel’s spy agency Mossad.

The US support of Tel Aviv’s aerial raids is a clear message to Iran, and is a very open support to Israel’s undeclared war against Iran, which it has been waging in Syria since hostilities began.

All of the airstrikes in the first two weeks of 2021 are the most significant by Israel, and over all, since the beginning of the war in Syria. They were so significant, that Damascus even accused Tel Aviv of carrying out the strikes in very open support of ISIS militants which the Syrian Arab Army is hunting.

Meanwhile, there appears to be a sense of urgency, or a sense of danger in the air, as the United States reinforced its troop positions in the Omar oil fields with artillery pieces and other equipment.

The US troops, together with their local proxies also hold frequent drills in the area, to keep ready, for some future unknown escalation.

Prior to New Year’s Eve, Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated, in what Tehran claimed to be an elaborate Israeli operation.

Additionally, since around the same time, a farewell strike on Iran has been expected from US President Donald Trump, and the general chaos in the US ahead of Joe Biden stepping into office has been used by Israel as a chance to inflict as much damage as possible on Tehran and its allies.

Russia, at the same time, appears to also be preparing for an escalation of some sort, by building up its forces and is lying in wait.

Israel appears dead set on continuing its crusade against Iran and its allies in Syria. An urgency is felt, since Biden is unlikely to support Tel Aviv as much as Trump did, and every possible chance should be used. This is all in spite of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu removed the photo of Donald Trump from his Twitter, but all is fair in love and war.

Finally, both the American and Russian forces appear to be biding their time, waiting for an escalation that, with tensions at the breaking point appears closer than ever.

The year began with terrorist attacks in Syria, increased Israeli strikes, Iran threatening against any aggression against it, and the two most significant players in the face of Moscow and Washington are expecting an escalation, and no amount of preparation would be enough for the incoming storm.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

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For the vast majority of Americans, the past year has been the most challenging in their lives – certainly for young adults.  However, not everyone has been suffering equally. The nation’s health or illness is not uniform. Much of our suffering is dependent upon the institutionalization and negligence of previous injustices, the loss of social equanimity, economic heedlessness, and our leaders’ unmitigated greed and pursuit of power.  Nor is everyone adversely affected by the shifts underway in the imaginations of the political and ideological universes. The transnational class of corporate and banking elites, for example, has little motivation to respect or contribute to national boundaries and interests. They perceive themselves as global actors.  For the generals and captains of neoliberal globalization, the puppet masters of financial markets, the Covid-19 pandemic only caused annoying disruptions in the quality of their lives. For the remainder, it has been cataclysmic.

There is something on the horizon that does not bode well for most Americans.  It is a simple principle to understand; yet so subtle it will likely go unnoticed until everyone is individually and collectively affected. It is the utter lack of balance within the nation’s body politick, and across the media that spoon feeds us virtual images of a faux theatrical play, the illusory icons on our minds’ monitor screens, that shape our perspectives of reality.  This is how control is exerted over our thoughts, speech and actions. In fact, it is only after people exercise their thoughts independently, with the certain belief that they have actual self-control over their lives, that they arrive at the realization that their perceptions may be largely distorted.

Throughout America’s history there has been a system of three federal branches to assure there is a platform for checks and balances as well as a structure to contain the tensions between them.  That system now is being rapidly challenged and even eroded away. Next week the middle of the road Democrats will officially control the White House and both legislative bodies. We will see what awaits us.

There is also what is commonly referred to as the “fourth estate,” the powers of the press and news media that control the framing of the political narrative and partisan issues. In the past, the media was expected to hold the government accountable by exposing its conflicts of interest that endanger the public, its misdemeanors, and systemic corruption.  This too is in decay as the media has been fully captured by corporate interests and now aligns itself politically and ideologically with the new political elite determined to reshape democracy and launch a new reset that will dramatically infringe on individual rights and liberties.

Finally, there is the growing influence of a fourth branch of government, the corporate state and its private interests.  We might also include the US intelligence community that now increasingly operates independently from executive and legislative oversight.

Together we can witness this cabal of seemingly independent entities, working simultaneously in consortium and in opposition to each other, propelling us towards a future tsunami of greater polarization and immense social disruption.

Earlier generations were not threatened by the telecommunication and technological giants of industry, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Clinton’s Communications Decency Act of 1996, despite its realistic intentions to protect free speech, was otherwise destructively naïve. At that time it was sensible; however, that was before that advent of the social media that now dominates our lives and shapes our political narratives. Now we are witnessing Silicon Valley as a force far more powerful than the lobbyists on K Street to ensure that corporate Democrats are raised to a position of absolute power.  Yet the problem would be equally threatening if it were the corporate and radicalized GOP in power.

The centrist Democratic left, lulled in a passivity that “it can’t happen here,” is every bit as dangerous and delusional as the Republican far-right’s paranoia over conspiracies squatting behind every nook and cranny.  A moderate centrist right no longer exists as it has now exited reality like a herd of lemmings to follow Trump over a phantasmagoric cliff.

The more important question to contemplate is how this will impact yourself and average citizens.  What happens elsewhere around the world must no longer be viewed in isolation.  Globalization is perhaps the most holistic phenomena within the matrix of financial capital movements and post-modern social restructuring. China now has the means to socially control most of its population, especially in urban areas.

On the other hand, China would be unable to succeed in this endeavor without the direct assistance, trade and technological development of Silicon Valley and the private innovators of intelligence and surveillance applied science.  China has already launched social scoring, a nefarious means to reward and penalize public activity. If a person protests the lack of personal freedom, democratic values or free speech, his or her social score decreases. And through digital networks, authorities can monitor and identify every Chinese citizen’s movements. All of this technology is ready for launch in the US and other developed nations. However rather than social scoring, it is called bit chain, which has already been employed for almost a decade.

After the recent attack on the capitol by hundreds of Trump’s most radical supporters, a Patriot Act 2.0 was ready to be launched. This follows a similar playbook to the weeks following 911, and Biden was one of its principal legislators. Does this mean that the capitol was a false flag as many conspiratorial sites, right and left, are now suggesting?  Not necessarily.  We believe this apparent convergence of events may have more in common with what the quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli and his colleague Carl Jung, and later Arthur Koestler, theorized as synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidences” that unfold despite there being no apparent causal relationship.  Perhaps this is a wrong interpretation, but it is nevertheless something worth considering as we try to better understand how a dystopian future is evolving before our eyes through what might appear as a convergence of disparate events, laws and policies.

At this moment the federal government and individual states are over-reacting to Covid’s health threats, the climate and environment, and the collapse of social cohesion.  These threats are eliciting government mandates, such as vaccination. Anthony Fauci has suggested that Covid-19 vaccine mandates are on the table at the federal level, which would overrule state laws.  The fact that this is being publicly stated should quell any conspiratorial theories. It is already part of the long-term agenda for expanding the government’s social control under the pretense and propaganda of keeping Americans safe under the banner of national security.

New laws are under construction that would redefine hate speech, such as conflating criticism towards Israeli policies against Palestinians with anti-Semiticism. Censorship of free speech for criticizing official narratives and policies to tackle the pandemic are being enforced. Any criticism towards the complete failure of the PCR tests as a reliable diagnostic tool is being redefined as threats to public health.  People raising such critiques may eventually find their names on domestic terrorist lists.  And this scenario is not beyond the imagination.  Wikileaks revealed that environmental, animal protection, and human rights groups have been labeled as terrorist organizations.  Guilt by association laws, for example buried in Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act, are in place. Expanding a law’s scope is far easier than erasing it from the books. Consequently, it is not unlikely that these laws may eventually widen to include charges of subversion based solely on the emails you read, the videos you watch or the broadcasts you listen to.  This would inevitably lead to the death toll for any residue of integrity in journalism.  This is underway as we witness Silicon Valley’s collusion with the government to cancel the voices of some of our best investigative journalists such as Chris Hedges, Sharyl Attkinsson, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal and Julian Assange in particular.  These are only a few of many examples. The new unstated law is that original investigation must support the official narrative, otherwise it will be prohibited from accessible public view.

We may recall that under the second Bush administration, the Justice Department created “free speech zones,” fenced off or confined areas where demonstrators were only permitted to exercise their Constitutional rights of free speech.  Today we are only several small amendments away before the right to assemble beingbanned altogether.

Now faced with growing condemnation by many nations, the US’ hegemony on the world geopolitical arena has waned considerably. Biden’s administration and its return to neocon foreign and neoliberal market policies will likely make every effort to regain the dominance it lost during the past four years.  How successful a Biden White House will be to recover lost ground and international respect remains to be seen. On the other hand, what has vanished in the US’ former full spectrum dominance over the geopolitical landscape is now being inverted to strengthen federal hegemonic reign over the American population.

Finally, we need to awaken to modern technologies’ remarkable sophistication and its certain threats to the health of our societies, and even to our definition of being human. Sadly, this is an industry each one of us has been complicit in advancing. Coining a term by one of the planet’s most important and forgotten 20^th century prophetic voices, the Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Merton, we are facing a great Unspeakable, a spiritual crisis contributing to the existential vacuity of modern American culture.  Few are aware that in his 1964 collection of meditations, Seeds of Destruction, Merton predicted that the civil rights movement would confront a catastrophic impasse and may find itself without leadership.  Four years later, Martin Luther King, who Merton had a deep correspondence with, was assassinated.  Merton would die suddenly later that year under very mysterious circumstances on his return to the US from Thailand.

Another way to describe the Unspeakable is criminal Sovereignty, with a capital S, to convey its numinous qualities. If alive today, Merton would look upon the Proud Boys on the right, and Antifa on the left, as mere expressions of the meaninglessness of American life manifesting as a turbulent ocean of afflictive emotions and thoughts. Instead of technology serving the needs of humanity, Americans are being increasingly conditioned to willingly bow as slaves to technology.  The Unspeakable’s unspoken mantra is:  technology must progress regardless of how many people fall destitute, jobless, debt ridden and physically ill with only suicide as a recourse to escape.  “American democracy today,” Merton observed over 55 years ago, “is just cheap pressed wood fiber, cardboard and spray paint.” Consequently, the elite sitting in the global control tower view the emerging technological regime as preferable to democracy’s kabuki theater.  Advanced surveillance, artificial intelligence, intelligent robotics, transhumanism, a 5G internet of everything, genetic engineering, and weather modification should be our guiding avatars. The solutions, he would argue, can no longer be found in civil discourse or the rights of human beings gathering in assembly. For the ruling elite, the masses are dumb sheep in need of a shepherd. This is what author Ronald Wright called the “progress trap” – progress’ unending efforts to feed technology’s hunger to devour natural and human capital, interest free. And the mainstream press and news media, in its’ malady of cognitive dissonance, serve as its unreflective cheerleader for our march towards civilizational collapse.

Merton was keenly aware of technology’s dangers to social stability. In a 1967 letter he took aim at the “universal myth that technology infallibly makes everything in every way better for everybody. It does not.” However, he was by no means a Luddite. “Technology could indeed make a better world for millions of human beings,” he wrote. Yet there remained the nightmare of technology transforming the world into a “more collectivist, cybernated mass culture.” Decades before the first desktop, Merton foresaw a complete fragmentation of the nation’s moral and spiritual fabric when people will begin basing all of their political and ethical decisions on computers.  Prophetically he wrote to a friend, “just wait until they start philosophizing with computers!” That was 1967.  He even foresaw technology becoming a means to elevate the slaves of technology’s false self, to satisfy narcissistic appetites for admiration and status. In other words, the social media of wokeness.

“The greatest need of our time,” Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media.”

For this reason we urgently need to penetrate the illusions of propaganda and popular falsehoods, across the entire political spectrum as well the self-appointed pontificating Pharisees, that we have entered a new social era. Despite its newness, it has also been clearly predictable.  No doubt, if Orwell were penning his great book today, the emergence of this new era we are witnessing would not be fiction.

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“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”(1)

Propaganda is the distortion of information to manipulate people’s thoughts and actions. Many philosophers over the years have noted “The easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”(2) The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, realised that persuasive speakers can lead their audience into making unwise choices, and therefore believed that the ‘art of influencing opinion’ should be widely taught. Unfortunately in Britain and the US, there is no formal teaching of how powerful people manipulate our opinions.

Propaganda-managed democracy 

A democracy works best if decision-making is out in the open and policies can be thoroughly scrutinised, but present-day politicians and corporate leaders operate in secret, and spend a lot of money manipulating our opinions. Most people associate propaganda with dictators, or with historical events such as World War 1 and World War 2. However, propaganda is actually one of the most powerful forces within 21^st Century Britain and the US, despite being rarely mentioned by the mainstream press. The overall aim is to control people whilst they think they have freedom of action – this is sometimes called ‘engineering’ or ‘manufacturing’ consent.(3) The more specific goals are to limit the terms of any debate, and to direct our attention away from thinking critically about our military, corporate, economic and political systems.

Propaganda specialists now play an almost continuous behind-the-scenes role. Much of the time, people are not even aware that their views are being manipulated. There is repeated, subliminal reinforcement. What we have ended up with has been labelled a propaganda-managed democracy.(4) People who do this work have stopped using the word propaganda, because of its negative association with war. It is now known as Public Relations (PR). When governments distort information this is colloquially known as spin.

The most powerful source of propaganda is mainstream media – newspapers and TV news and current affairs programs. This was discussed in detail in the two previous posts. However, there are other sources of propaganda. Some of these are discussed below. Others, such as advertising, will be discussed in later posts.

Layer Upon Layer of Propaganda  

Where discussions of propaganda do take place, commentators usually talk about individual pictures, newspaper articles, or political speeches, but propaganda is much broader and more complex than that.(5) Many parts of our society contain elements of propaganda, and they can influence our thoughts and our ideas for many years. What starts out as a deliberate attempt to mislead people, gradually becomes the received wisdom if it remains unchallenged. It surrounds us and works in a subconscious way to influence our thoughts about almost every aspect of our societies – how they are structured, which aspects of society get talked about critically, and who benefits. The framework for every important discussion contains unstated assumptions that go unquestioned. This sets the limits for which opinions are considered reasonable, and which are not.

When magazine editors decide who to interview, or a TV producer decides who to have as a guest, they are making decisions, sometimes subconsciously, about which opinions to take seriously, and whom they perceive as knowledgeable. When editors decide whose obituaries will appear in their newspaper, they tend to celebrate establishment figures, reinforcing a message that we should treat them and their views as important. When this happens repeatedly, day after day, year after year, readers and viewers will tend to be influenced by these ideas, and come to share similar views.

For example, if we talk about wealth, there is an unstated assumption that it is ok for some people or organisations to have unlimited wealth. In fact we are bombarded with propaganda, in magazines like Forbes, which is intended to encourage us to celebrate extreme wealth,(6) and even to define success by how wealthy we are. The evidence showing that concentrations of wealth, and extreme inequality, create huge problems for societies is mostly ignored.(7) We are indoctrinated to believe that the rich have ‘earned’ their wealth, or that success is based on merit. Some people who have accumulated great wealth by committing serious crimes, such as Andrew Carnegie or John Rockefeller, set up foundations and give money to good causes as a way of whitewashing their reputations.(8) They make donations to universities or have buildings named after them. As one commentator noted:

“Corporate fraudsters almost all use philanthropy as a cover. Because of all their goodness, people never look any further”(9)

This is all intended to make us less critical of those with great wealth, and therefore less critical of how our society works.

History, as taught in the US and Britain, is Propaganda 

Censorship-by-omission, where important issues are not discussed (explained in the previous post) is important with historical propaganda. Our history books have a western perspective, distorting events, exaggerating positives and minimising or ignoring negatives.(10) A great deal of our history is propaganda to whitewash reputations and to celebrate the role of the wealthy and the powerful, and to erase their crimes and exploitation. People such as Winston Churchill are portrayed positively, with no discussion of his extreme, racist approach to killing people in Britain’s colonies. Commentators talk unquestioningly about British and US ‘values’, like ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’, without mentioning that the values that influence policymaking the most include power, money, war and exploitation.

I cannot stress this point enough. The positive portrayal of rich and powerful people, both historical and in the present day, and the censorship-by-omission of all their crimes and unethical activities, and the huge amount of damage that their actions have caused to people at home and abroad, is incredibly powerful propaganda.

During recent protests about racism, statues were pulled down in Britain and the US.(11) These statues have played a propaganda role. They are intended to show how important the individuals were, and make us less questioning of our history and of earlier decision-makers. Similarly, many British country houses were built with money that came either directly from the slave trade, or from industries that used slaves, or from compensation given to slave owners when slavery was abolished.(12) The houses were status symbols when they were built, and they now stand as historical monuments to the people who built them. Some churches contain monuments to wealthy donors who helped to pay for the building of the church, with no indication that their wealth came from slavery, or the drug trade, or colonial exploitation. Streets are named after famous people, some of whom committed serious crimes, but their true history is rarely mentioned. This propaganda is remarkably effective and creates what is known as ‘collective amnesia’. Whole societies deny their history, and British and American citizens have become remarkably uncritical of their military, corporate, economic and political systems.

Museums do Propaganda 

Museums and other exhibitions are an important part of this historical propaganda. The displays at the Imperial War Museum are notoriously distorted, celebrating Britain’s history of violence, and misrepresenting what actually happened and why.(13) Medals are celebrated, even if they were awarded for participation in colonial plunder and associated massacres, and the soldiers are presented as heroes. Powerful people involved in aggression and violence clean up their stories. There is an unstated assumption that US and British politicians had good intentions in their foreign policies. But this needs to be stated clearly, questioned and challenged, because the evidence shows that US and British leaders have not had good intentions in their foreign policies. Even a display about propaganda by the British Library in 2013 did not have any discussion about censorship-by-omission.(14)

Think Tanks and Universities do Propaganda 

Think tanks claim to be independent research establishments, but they are usually funded by wealthy donors such as billionaires or big corporations, so their output reflects the interests of those donors.(15) Mainstream publishers rarely publish genuinely critical books. Before the financial crisis in 2008, they declined many books that explained the problems with the financial system.(16) Most critical writing is in books published by small publishers, and those books are rarely reviewed in the mainstream press. Universities teach Economics, Finance, Politics, International Relations and War Studies in heavily distorted ways. The majority of academics in these subjects present only a narrow range of mainstream opinions and ignore the most critical views. Critical academics have complained that most academic journals reinforce mainstream thinking by not accepting work that is too critical. This has been particularly notable in economics, where students at many universities have been protesting, since the 2008 financial crisis, that what they are taught is irrelevant to the real world.(17)

People are rewarded for not challenging the system 

The honours system in Britain, where awards such as peerages and knighthoods are given out, is notorious for rewarding party fundraisers and political allies,(18) and more generally for rewarding people who have been successful within the establishment system.

The Nobel Peace Prize is given to sociopathic war criminals such as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. The prize for economics is awarded to people who have promoted some of the most extreme economic ideas such as Milton Friedman. The economics prize was set up by the Swedish central bank to promote neoliberal (an extreme form of capitalism) ideas,(19) and to make economics seem more scientific than it really is. These awards are mostly given to people who are not strongly critical of how our societies work.

Not everyone is conscious that they spread propaganda

The successful spread of propaganda involves people repeating and passing on distorted information that they were exposed to in the past. Most people are unaware they are doing it. When economics lecturers teach economic theories that end up benefitting the rich, some of them are unaware they are doing so. Some journalists believe the propaganda that they have been exposed to by governments and corporations, so they repeat it. Any time someone repeats something that they have read in a mainstream newspaper, or seen on television news or current affairs programs, there is a high probability that they are repeating propaganda.

The Overton Window – Alternative Views Are Not Discussed 

The repetition of some points-of-view is so widespread that these perspectives become the accepted norm, so individuals engage in self-censorship, where they become reluctant to express dissenting views, afraid that they will be considered ridiculous by their friends and colleagues. This becomes reinforcing, so that the acceptable range of views becomes very narrow. This is known as the ‘Overton window’.(20) Alternative views are essentially shut down. This desire to conform with others around us is a very powerful psychological trait that will be discussed in a later post.

Resisting propaganda is possible – Seek out alternative views 

People with strongly critical opinions rarely appear on discussion programs or in magazines. In 2014, the singer P.J.Harvey was a guest editor on BBC Radio 4’s Today program. All of her guests were critical thinkers. This was unique in 21^st century BBC broadcasting. Voices and opinions that are rarely heard finally had an opportunity to explain what is really going on.(21)

Most people do not like to admit that they are susceptible to propaganda, therefore they claim it is not there. We are all regularly manipulated. There is no shame in admitting it. We can never change things if we do not admit that people are trying to manipulate us. Understanding the extent of propaganda in Britain and the US is the key to understanding how political and corporate criminals have been able to get away with their activities for so long.

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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 thirteenth 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)  Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

2) David Hume, 1711-1776, cited in Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, 2006

3) A similar expression, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, is the title of a book by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky about the media. This book is discussed more in the posts about the failings of the media.

4) Alex Carey, Taking The Risk Out Of Democracy, 1996, p.19

5) Robert Jackall (ed.) Propaganda (Main trends of the Modern World), 1994

6) Forbes, ‘World’s Billionaires List: The Richest in 2020’, at https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

7) Karen Rowlingson, ‘Does income inequality cause health and social problems’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Sep 2011, at https://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/default/files/jrf/migrated/files/inequality-income-social-problems-full.pdf 

8) Michelle Celarier, ‘The 10 most toxic Philanthropists’, 24 Sep 2019, at https://www.worth.com/the-10-most-toxic-philanthropists/

9) Marianne Jennings, The seven signs of ethical collapse: How to spot moral meltdowns in companies…before it’s too late, 2006

10) James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, 1996

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 2015

The Crimes of Winston Churchill, at https://medium.com/@write_12958/the-crimes-of-winston-churchill-c5e3ecb229b3

11) BBC, ‘George Floyd protests: The statues being defaced’, 10 June 2020, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-52963352

12) Sanchez Manning, ‘The stately homes built on the back of slaves’, Independent, 3 March 2013, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-stately-homes-built-on-the-back-of-slaves-8518002.html 

13) Louis Allday, The Imperial War Museum in London: A Lesson in State Propaganda?’, Monthly Review online, 7 Sep 2016, at https://mronline.org/2016/09/07/allday070916-html/#lightbox/11/ 

14) Personal Observation by the author on visiting the British Library exhibition entitled ‘Propaganda, Power and Persuasion’, 2013

15) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowelll, A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014

16) Michael Hudson, J is for Junk Economics, 2017

17) Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins, The Econocracy: The perils of leaving economics to the experts, 2016

18) Andrew Grice, ‘David Cameron Honours list would embarrass a medieval; court’, Independent, 4 Aug 2016, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/honours-list-read-full-david-cameron-peers-knighthoods-mbes-nominations-a7172406.html 

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal

19) Avner Offer and Gabriel Soderberg, The Nobel Factor: The prize in economics, social democracy and the market turn, 2016

20) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

21) ‘Joyce Macmillan: Why politics deserves a new voice’, The Scotsman, 3 Jan 2014, at https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/joyce-mcmillan-why-politics-deserves-new-voice-1548993

Abstract

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) worldwide pandemic in 2020. In response, most countries in the world implemented lockdowns, restricting their population’s movements, work, education, gatherings, and general activities in attempt to ‘flatten the curve’ of COVID-19 cases. The public health goal of lockdowns was to save the population from COVID-19 cases and deaths, and to prevent overwhelming health care systems with COVID-19 patients. In this narrative review I explain why I changed my mind about supporting lockdowns. First, I explain how the initial modeling predictions induced fear and crowd-effects [i.e., groupthink]. Second, I summarize important information that has emerged relevant to the modeling, including about infection fatality rate, high-risk groups, herd immunity thresholds, and exit strategies. Third, I describe how reality started sinking in, with information on significant collateral damage due to the response to the pandemic, and information placing the number of deaths in context and perspective. Fourth, I present a cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 that finds lockdowns are far more harmful to public health than COVID-19 can be. Controversies and objections about the main points made are considered and addressed. I close with some suggestions for moving forward.

Read full article here.

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Featured image is by Spiro Skouras

Despite Trump agreeing to leave the White House next Wednesday after losing the election under contentious circumstances, the Democrats and their “Republican In Name Only” (RINO) allies pushed Trump’s historic second impeachment through the House on allegations that he “incited insurrection” in order to delegitimize his legacy, intimidate his supporters, and establish the “legal” precedent for de facto criminalizing the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement that he inspired as a “domestic terrorist” organization in order to pave the way for one-party rule.

Below in an excerpt of an important interview published by the Toronto Sun

To Read the complete Toronto Sun Interview clicl here 

Dr. Ari Joffe is a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at University of Alberta. He has written a paper titled COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink that finds the harms of lockdowns are 10 times greater than their benefits.

The below Q&A is an exchange between Joffe and Anthony Furey.

***

Anthony Furey: You were a strong proponent of lockdowns initially but have since changed your mind. Why is that?

Dr. Ari Joffe: 

Emerging data has shown a staggering amount of so-called ‘collateral damage’ due to the lockdowns. This can be predicted to adversely affect many millions of people globally with food insecurity [82-132 million more people], severe poverty [70 million more people], maternal and under age-5 mortality from interrupted healthcare [1.7 million more people], infectious diseases deaths from interrupted services [millions of people with Tuberculosis, Malaria, and HIV], school closures for children [affecting children’s future earning potential and lifespan], interrupted vaccination campaigns for millions of children, and intimate partner violence for millions of women. In high-income countries adverse effects also occur from delayed and interrupted healthcare, unemployment, loneliness, deteriorating mental health, increased opioid crisis deaths, and more.

….

I believe that we need to take an “effortful pause” and reconsider the information available to us. We need to calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.

We need to better educate ourselves on the risks and trade-offs involved, and alleviate unreasonable fear with accurate information. We need to focus on cost-benefit analysis – repeated or prolonged lockdowns cannot be based on COVID-19 numbers alone.

To Read the complete Toronto Sun Interview click here

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Vida Americana is an exhilarating, expansive and immensely satisfying exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum. Like a great and varied feast, this is a show that one must take one’s time to fully appreciate and digest; an exhibition that includes photography, film, sculpture, charcoal sketches, colored pencil and graphite, watercolors, lithographs and oil paintings, from the easel to the epic in scale. Not only are the greatest Mexican artists of the twentieth century represented here – including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros (‘Los Tres Grandes’) – but also many of the notable American artists who they had a profound influence on, such as Jackson Pollock, Jacob Lawrence, Marion Greenwood and Charles White, among others.

The show occupies the entire fifth floor of the Whitney, and upon entering we are immediately greeted by a large, and colorfully exuberant canvas by Rivera featuring men and women commencing to “Dance in Tehuantepec” (1928). It is a fitting beginning to an exhibit which is at once a celebration of indigenous Mexico – its colors, and textures, its sorrows and its joys – as well as a close look at the new visual language that emerged during the cultural renaissance that began following the decade-long Mexican Revolution.

The horror and brutality of war looms large in this exhibition, especially in the work of Orozco. In his depiction of “Pancho Villa” (1931), we find the revolutionary leader, pistol in hand, standing barrel-chested over emaciated men and women who crouch at his feet in abject terror. In the top left corner a building is engulfed in flames, while in the bottom right a pregnant women kneels, completely naked and exposed, her arm covering her face, in a gesture that heightens our sense of her grief and shame. Orozco’s images are among the most provocative, violent and daring in the entirety of the exhibition, which notably includes a reproduction of his mural Prometheus (1930), “the greatest painting done in modern times,” Pollock would declare. The central figure stands with his anguished face and hands upturned to the heavens, as if he is both in the act of stealing fire from the gods to give to the throngs of suffering, desperate humanity flanking him; and at the very same time being condemned to eternal suffering for doing so. The penalty is implicit within the deed itself.

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Our Present Image, 1947 (Source: whitney.org)

One of the most arresting paintings to confront the devastation and despair wrought by modern warfare is Siqueiros’ “Echo of a Scream” (1937). The scene is one of utter desolation, drained of almost all color, save for the striking red garment that barely covers the solitary infant whose cries echo across the ruined landscape. The destruction we see is the result of fascist forces in Europe – forces that Siqueiros was so determined to see defeated that, not longer after this painting was completed, he joined the Republicans fighting against General Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War.

When Siqueiros’ Experimental Workshop opened near New York’s Union Square in 1936, Jackson Pollock was among the initial group of artists to join. Siqueiros would emphasize the importance of discovering novel techniques and materials, and Pollock would wholly embrace the use of unorthodox paint applications, including spraying paint through stencils, as well as pouring, dripping, bespattering, and flinging paint at the canvas; in a word, “the exploitation of accidental effects.” Vida Americana includes a generous selection of Pollock’s work from the 1930’s, including “Landscape with Steer” (1936-37), a haunting work which he created by airbrushing lacquer onto the surface of the paper. The Guggenheim is presently exhibiting Pollock’s Mural (1943), his first great masterpiece, and a reminder of just how important the great Mexican muralists were for his development.

Another welcome highlight of the show are ten panels from Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel Migration Series (1940-41) about the largest exodus in American history, where beginning in the 1920s some 6 million African-Americans would eventually leave the south in search of a better life in the great metropolises of the northern states.  Lawrence clearly drew inspiration from the Mexican muralist’s commitment to produce art that confronted the history of the marginalized and oppressed, the subjugated races and classes, including the experience of women and people of color. Panel 3 depicts a sizeable group of black men, women and children walking north, carrying large bags and boxes, presumably all that they own. As they move, they form a triangle, a “V” shape, which is of course how birds – like those hovering above the dense crowd – fly in formation. Lawrence would in fact observe that, “we are very much like other kinds of animals in that we move for different reasons.” The Mexican muralists sought to create socio-politically transformative public art; and Lawrence was effective in realizing that objective in works with the thematic breadth and scope, the poetry and potency of the muralists, but on a much smaller scale.

Gray Terrain by Edward Millman, 1954 (Source: whitney.org)

The painters of Mexico’s renaissance saw the potential of art to serve as a political force against social injustice, nor was this lost on their counterparts to the north. A subject to which these artists frequently turned was police brutality against unionized workers. Philip Evergood’s “American Tragedy” (1937) depicted the Memorial Day Massacre which occurred when hundreds of steelworkers, demanding the right to unionize, marched toward the Republic Steel plant on the South Side of Chicago. When police officers failed to disperse the crowd with tear gas, they charged in firing their guns. This is the awful the scene that Evergood depicts, where police officers use their batons to beat protesters bloody, and their guns to shoot men and women in the back as they flee. Evergood manages to capture the mayhem, the blood-soaked ground, the cracked heads and broken bodies with frightful clarity – but also the bold defiance of the workers. In the central foreground, a worker stands tall and resilient, his right arm supporting a young woman who firmly holds a long stick, while his left hand grasps the lapel of the officer who, standing before them, seems ready to fire his gun on the courageous couple.

The exhibition includes a large-scale reproduction of Rivera’s most famous and controversial commission, Man, Controller of the Universe (1934), a fresco in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. It is a truly extraordinary achievement, not only for its immense thematic scale and scope, but because it grasps the world in all its irreducible complexity and at the same time insists on organizing it, making some kind of sense of the world, and taking a stand on what it all means. The world it depicts is filled with conflict and strife – from the soldiers in gas masks marching across the top left, while just below them mounted policeman brutalize workers. Opposite an image of capitalism’s jaded and decadent elite, drinking and playing cards, is an image of Lenin, in whose hands are the hands of men and women of all different races. At the heart of the fresco is man, in all his mastery of nature, at the very center of a chiasm formed by two elongated ellipses – one containing the cosmic world of stars galaxies, and the other the world as seen through the microscope. Modernity may be defined by struggle, conflict and contradiction, but at the same time we have the power to create an egalitarian society where workers are treated fairly and decently, or a society where the people are literally trampled over for the sake of a callous and cynical few.

Vida Americana is an astounding exhibition which almost manages to do justice to the breathtakingly immense contribution of the artists that it revisits. It is the kind of exhibition that places great demands on the viewer and rewards the viewer with great riches in return. For the Mexican muralists, and many of their notable students to the north, art is ultimately about human liberation, it is about ushering in the new, delivering humanity from the forces that subjugate us, and creating the conditions in which personal and collective renewal are possible. Genuine art is inherently transgressive, subverting the structures that perpetuate an unfree world.  By creating an art which is at once “for and about the people,” the Mexican muralists also created an art with the inherent potential for social and spiritual transformation.

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

“What Happened at the Capitol Could Not Happen Unless Police Allowed It to Happen”

By Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Janine Jackson, January 14 2021

Janine Jackson interviewed the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Mara Verheyden-Hilliard on police responsibility for the January 6 insurrection for the January 8, 2021.

The Pentagon, Corporations and Slave Labor in U.S. Prisons

By Sara Flounders, January 14 2021

It is not only federal prisons that contract out prison labor to top corporations. State prisons that used forced prison labor in plantations, laundries and highway chain gangs increasingly seek to sell prison labor to corporations trolling the globe in search of the cheapest possible labor.

No One Is Listening: A Country Divided Against Itself

By Philip Giraldi, January 14 2021

The U.S. may morph into two nations with the increasingly impoverished helot “deplorables” under the heel of the empowered social justice warriors.

The History of US and British Support to Mussolini’s Fascism

By Shane Quinn, January 14 2021

Mussolini’s coup was described by the onlooking US ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, as “a fine young revolution here. No danger, plenty of enthusiasm and colour. We all enjoy it”.

Trump Impeached Again, Nearly Half the Country Opposed

By Stephen Lendman, January 14 2021

There’s no ambiguity about Trump’s legion of supporters. On average, polls show that nearly half of voting-age Americans oppose impeaching Trump and removing him from office.

Can China Lead a World Economic Recovery?

By F. William Engdahl, January 14 2021

Predictions that China would once again, as it did in 2008, lead the rest of the world, especially the EU and North America, out of deep recession are common. Yet behind the official Beijing statements there are indications that China’s decades of economic boom are coming into deep problems.

9/11 Was the Prelude. 1/6 Is the Holy Grail

By Pepe Escobar, January 14 2021

9/11 opened the gates to the Patriot Act, whose core had already been written way back in 1994 by one Joe Biden. 1/6 opens the gate to the War on Domestic Terror and the Patriot Act from Hell, 2.0, on steroids (here is the 2019 draft ), the full 20,000 pages casually springing up from the sea like Venus, the day after, immediately ready to roll.

On Being Sane in Insane Places

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, January 14 2021

In 1973, Dr. D. L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University, published a ground-breaking psychiatric study in the January 19 issue of Science magazine. The article exposed a serious short-coming in the psychiatric hospital system at the time.

International Support Continues for Protesting Farmers in India

By Colin Todhunter, January 14 2021

On 5 January, British MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi wrote a letter to Boris Johnson urging him to convey to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the “heartfelt anxieties” of MPs’ constituents (many emanating from Punjab) regarding the treatment of protesting farmers in India.

Campaigners Call for Closure of EU’s Wildlife Trafficking Loopholes and Criminalisation of Wildlife Smuggling, to End “Stolen Wildlife” Crisis

By Humane Society International, January 14 2021

Animal protection campaigners have called for the urgent closure of gaping loopholes in EU wildlife trade regulations that fail to prevent the trafficking of protected wild species.

Under the Keynesian takeover of Bretton Woods Trans-Atlantic nations became increasingly dominated by bloated bureaucratic systems while plans for genuine development were undermined, Matthew Ehret writes.

***

It is as if the battle lines of civil war have been drawn up between masses of Americans who have been led to believe in either a false “bottom up” approach to economics, as defined by the Austrian School represented by Friedrich von Hayek, or in the “top-down” approach of John Maynard Keynes. The former sacrifices the general welfare of the whole nation for the sake of the parts (i.e. individual liberties), while the latter sacrifices the individual liberties of each citizen for the sake of the general welfare (or at least some oligarch’s definition of what that should be).

In my last article, I introduced, in broad strokes, a history of the American System of political economy as advanced by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Henry Clay, Henry Carey, Lincoln, and McKinley. We reviewed how it was derailed by McKinley’s 1901 murder and was only revived 30 years later with Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential victory which put a stop to the 1933 Bankers Dictatorship.

Finally, we briefly explored how and why both John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek whose ideas so deeply influence the polarization of the USA today, not only despised FDR but hated everything the republic stood for.

In this second installment of a three-part series, we will shed light on the anti-human ideas and the political operations that shaped the mind, the life and the politics of Lord John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).

Keynes the Fabian Eugenicist

Although Keynes is heralded as the guiding light of the New Deal (and, as such defended by modern “Green New Dealers” and Great Reset technocrats wishing to impose a top-down system of governance onto the world), the fact is that Keynes not only detested Franklin Roosevelt, but also humanity more in general.

This will be seen clearly in 1) his devotion to the theories of Thomas Malthus, 2) his promotion of eugenics as a science of racial purification and population control, and 3) his general devotion to World Government as a leading member of the Fabian Society.

From his earliest days at Cambridge where he rose quickly to become one of the select Cambridge Apostles and shared, among other things, a lifelong friendship with Lord Bertrand Russell, Keynes devoted himself to the service of empire, becoming Knight of the Order of Bath and Order of Leopold by 1919.

His early 1911 book on Indian Currency and Finance (conducted during his five-year foray in the Empire’s Indian Office) ignored all actual political reasons for the famines plaguing India and argued coldly for a greater integration of the Indian banking system into the City of London controls which would somehow solve India’s problems. The provable reality was that Indian famines were coordinated tools of population control by the Malthusian elite of the British establishment who considered “war, famine and disease” as the gifts nature gave the strong to manage the weak.

While his later 1919 Consequences of the Peace appeared to be a reasonably sympathetic warning that the draconian Versailles reparations would do incredible damage and lead to a new world war, in reality, Keynes was displaying a cold sleight of hand. Serving as British Treasury representative to the Versailles Conference, Keynes never opposed fascism: he merely argued that a more liberal pathway to global fascism could be established under the direction of the Bank of England. His opposition, though, to the more violent approach preferred by conservative imperialists among the British Intelligentsia, was one of form more than substance.

Keynes and his fellow Fabians H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and G.B Shaw preferred the “slow and steady” “long game”, reminiscent of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus who famously fought his enemies by slow attrition rather than in full-scale confrontation. Due to the public’s general ignorance of this strategy, we celebrate these Fabian Society luminaries for their pacifism, though in reality they were just as racist, fascist and eugenics-loving as their more short-sighted, hard-stomached counterparts sir Oswald Mosley, Lord Alfred Milner and even Winston Churchill.

Where the real solution to the hyperinflationary money printing and economic industrial shutdown of Germany during the post WWI years was to be found in the German-Russian Rapallo Agreement (destroyed with the assassination of American System Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau), Keynes and his ilk merely called for economic integration of the German banking and military system under Bank of England/League of Nations control.

Malthus, Eugenics and Keynes

Two theories advanced by the British Empire in response to the growth of the American System, first in the USA, and later internationally, were those of Thomas Malthus, and of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. These sister concepts served as nothing less than religious precepts for the ruling elite as it desperately reorganized itself in the late 19^th century.

It must be kept firmly in mind that at this period the British Empire was weak, and incapable of stopping the electric spread of win-win cooperation as the American System was sped around the world bringing progress and full-spectrum economics in its wake. One of the leading voices of the American System in 1890 was Colorado’s first Governor William Gilpin whose The Cosmopolitan Railway laid out a practical vision for a world united by rail, development, and national banking [see map].

Nevertheless, the Empire was determined to put an end to the spread of the American System.

A new breed of think tanks was created to shape the Empire’s grand strategy in the face of this growth of independent sovereign nations: these were T.H. Huxley’s X Club (c.1865), the Fabian Society (c.1884), and the Roundtable Group (c.1902). Where Huxley’s X Club coordinated with Cambridge, and the Roundtable Group/Rhodes Trust interfaced with Oxford, the Fabian Society created a new school called the London School of Economics. All three worked together as one unit.

Defining his misanthropic belief in overpopulation, Thomas Malthus (a British East India Company economist) stated in his famous 1799 Essay on Population:

“The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

How could this crisis be avoided? Malthus answers it like only a devout imperialist could:

“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.”

Darwin himself admitted in his autobiography that his theory of evolution arose only after his 1838 reading of Malthus’ Essay on Population in which he “at last got a theory by which to work”.

So, Darwinism is really an extension of Malthus’s Hobbesian social theories onto all of living nature: a mere struggle for survival in a universe of entropy and diminishing returns. After a Malthusian version of biology was created, Darwin’s theories were in turn re-applied to human society as imperial tools for population control under the form of Galton’s Eugenics thus giving the same old evil practices of empire, war and slavery a “scientific validation”.

Although some apologists considered Keynes an anti-Malthusian- due to his theory that overpopulation might be overcome by encouraging spending rather than savings, which would, in turn, somehow create markets and thence new factories and more growth, the reality was the opposite. Keynes not only spoke gushingly of Malthus throughout his life as one of the greatest minds of all time, but even plagiarized many of Malthus’ own theories, for instance that of “demand deficiency causing unemployment and recession” outlined in his 1930 Treatise on Money. In his 1933 Essay on Malthus, Keynes wrote:

“Let us think of Malthus today as the first of the Cambridge economists—as, above all, a great pioneer of the application of a frame of formal thinking to the complex confusion of the world of daily events. Malthus approached the central problems of economic theory by the best of all routes.”

In his May 2, 1914 lecture Population, Keynes argued that government should “mould law and custom deliberately to bring about that density of population which there ought to be” and that“there would be more happiness in the world if the population of it were to be diminished.”

Saying that “India, Egypt and China are gravely overpopulated”, Keynes advocated using violence to defend the “superior white races” in this struggle of survival with the pacifist saying: “Almost any measures seem to me to be justified in order to protect our standard of life from injury at the hands of more prolific races. Some definite parceling out of the world may well become necessary; and I suppose that this may not improbably provoke racial wars. At any rate such wars will be about a substantial issue.”

As Acting chair of the Neo-Malthusian League, Keynes stated in 1927: “We of this society are neo-Malthusians… I believe that for the future the problem of population will emerge in the much greater problem of Hereditary and Eugenics. Quality must become the preoccupation.”

By 1946, Keynes, still a member of the British Eugenics Society (after serving as Vice President from 1936-1944) wrote in The Eugenics Review: “Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.”

This was not ivory tower theorizing, but concepts with very real-world significance.

By 1937, Keynes’ General Theory of Employment was published in Nazi Germany. If anyone wishes to defend the idea that the economist was somehow an anti-fascist defender of “liberal values”, let them read his own words in the preface and then either redefine “liberal values” or their naïve idea of Keynes:

“I may perhaps expect to find less resistance among German readers than among English ones, when I put before them a theory of employment and production as a whole… The theory of production as a whole which is the object of this book, can be much better adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than the theory of production and distribution of wealth under circumstances of free competition.”

Hitler himself was not only a devout eugenicist (whose racial purification policies emerged through the funding of the Rockefeller, Carnegie Foundations as well as British establishment), but was also a devout Malthusian saying:

“The day will certainly come when the whole of mankind will be forced to check the augmentation of the human species, because there will be no further possibility of adjusting the productivity of the soil to the perpetual increase in the population.”

Keynes was by this time extremely frustrated that the intention-driven system of political economy defining the New Deal under the helm of FDR’s leadership was not absorbing his trojan horse theories on employment, demand, and inflation. However, by the end of the war, many Council on Foreign Relation (CFR)-affiliated operatives pushing Keynesianism were making successful inroads into all branches of U.S. bureaucracy and penetrated the highest levels of the state department and treasury. At one point in 1943, Franklin Roosevelt commented on his understanding of this British Deep State operation when he told his son Elliot:

“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”

The Battle for Bretton Woods

During the Bretton Woods conference (July 1-20, 1944), the two opposing paradigms, on the one hand the American System of anti-colonialism, and on the other hand the. British System of zero sum Malthusianism, went to war.

This war took the form of the battles waged by FDR’s trusted collaborator Henry Dexter White against John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, where 730 delegates representing 44 nations gathered to settle the terms of the post-war order.

Although this conference is famously associated with the creation of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), it is falsely assumed to be a Keynesian creation. Keynes’ role as representative of the British Empire, much like his earlier role at Versailles in 1919, was defined by the intention at all costs to shape the conditions of a post-nation state world order on behalf of the City of London. Like Bertrand Russell and other Cambridge Apostles before and since, Keynes was trained in the sophistical deployment of statistics and mathematical logic to cover for the imperial rape of target nations.

Where Dexter White and Franklin Roosevelt demanded a U.S. dollar-backed post-war system of fixed exchange rates (to block speculation on commodities as a tool of economic war), theirs was not an idea premised on imperialism which FDR’s recorded battles with Churchill attest. Unlike the hard vs soft imperialism of Churchill and Keynes, FDR and his allies rather looked to a post-war system defined by U.S.-China-Russia friendship, and the internationalization of the New Deal applying a win-win approach to foreign policy.

At Bretton Woods, Dexter White and Henry Morganthau reached agreements to provide vast technology transfers to help South America industrialize. At the same time, large-scale programs modelled on the New Deal were presented by delegations from India, Eastern Europe, and China. It is noteworthy that the Chinese delegation introduced infrastructure plans first laid out by Sun Yat-sen in his 1920 International Development of China which both Mao, and Zhou Enlai endorsed alongside the Kuomintang’s Chiang Kai-Shek! Had these plans not been sabotaged, it is amazing to consider what sort of progress might have opened up for the Chinese 70 years before anyone heard of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.

At this early stage, Russia was still happy to be a founding member of the IMF and World Bank which were designed to act as cheap lending mechanisms for long-term, low-interest, high-tech global development.

Commenting on support for FDR’s post-war system of mutual interest, Stalin stated: “Can we count on the activities of this international organization being sufficiently effective? They will be effective if the Great Powers who have borne the brunt of the burden of the war against Hitler’s Germany continue to act in a spirit of unanimity and harmony. They will not be effective if this essential condition is violated”.

In opposition to this anti-imperial win-win system defended by Dexter White, and FDR, Keynes demanded a bankers’ dictatorship with a new supranational currency controlled by the Bank of England called the Bancor, as well as an international clearing house. The Bancor was later revived in a modified form when Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) were established, bringing the world closer to the sort of green synthetic hegemonic currency now promoted by the likes of Mark Carney, Klaus Schwab and George Soros under the veil of a Great Reset and Central Bankers Climate Compact.

Similarly to the League of Nations’ earlier design for World Government, Keynes’ arguments entailed the virtual castration of nation states, preventing their involvement in their own economic planning. These arguments also demanded that the USA fully recognize the legitimacy of the British Empire in the post war age (something which Dexter White and Morgenthau refused to do). In Keynes’ view, nation states should relinquish their sovereign financial controls to Malthusian technocrats managing the levers of production and consumption through a system of globally interconnected central banks.

Keynes’ model of governance would ensure that the sorts of INTENTION-driven large-scale projects that could finally end colonialism would not see the light of day.

The Keynesian World That Emerged in the Wake of FDR

Under the Keynesian takeover of Bretton Woods that emerged during the Anglo-American special relationship created by Truman and Churchill, Trans Atlantic nations became increasingly dominated by bloated bureaucratic systems while plans for genuine development were undermined. With Roosevelt dead by 1945, Harry Hopkins dead by 1946, Dexter White dead by 1948, and Henry Wallace’s presidential efforts sabotaged by 1948, the last serious resistance to Britain’s reconquest of the USA had been put down.

After the war, eugenics-promoting organizations and think tanks changed their names while continuing their work, morphing into new forms by the 1960s such as the environmental movement, transhumanist movement, while not even the pharmaceutical/healthcare sector was left untouched.

In the next chapter we will close up this short series by reviewing the figure of Friedrich von Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics which emerged with the collapse of the Keynesian Bretton Woods in 1971 and the rise of the “Conservative Revolution”.

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Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from SCF

Selected excerpts from the Live Science Article published in May 2019.

To read the complete article on Science Magazine, click here

DARPA, the Department of Defense’s research arm, is paying scientists to invent ways to instantly read soldiers’ minds using tools like genetic engineering of the human brain, nanotechnology and infrared beams. The end goal? Thought-controlled weapons, like swarms of drones that someone sends to the skies with a single thought or the ability to beam images from one brain to another.

This week, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced that six teams will receive funding under the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. Participants are tasked with developing technology that will provide a two-way channel for rapid and seamless communication between the human brain and machines without requiring surgery. “Imagine someone who’s operating a drone or someone who might be analyzing a lot of data,” said Jacob Robinson, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University, who is leading one of the teams. [DARPA’s 10 Coolest Projects: From Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars]

…

Genetically tweaking human brains

…Robinson’s team plans to use viruses modified to deliver genetic material into cells — called viral vectors — to insert DNA into specific neurons that will make them produce two kinds of proteins. [Flying Saucers to Mind Control: 22 Declassified Military & CIA Secrets]

To read the complete article on Science Magazine, click here

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With its large population and fragile health systems, Africa has recorded more than three million Covid-19 cases, still less deadly as compared to other regions in the world, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). According to Africa CDC, Africa’s coronavirus tally was 3,021,769 as of January 10. The death toll was 72,121 and the number of recoveries was 2,450,492. The biggest number of coronavirus cases were reported from South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Ethiopia.

South Africa, with more than 1.2 million reported cases, including 32,824 deaths, accounts for more than 30% of the total for the continent of 54 countries and 1.3 billion people. The high proportion of cases identified in South Africa, were attributed to more tests carried out than many other African countries.

African countries are expecting to get medical equipment, most especially vaccine, to help them out of the pandemic. These they expect from external sources. During January 4-9, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi paid official visits to Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Tanzania, Botswana and Seychelles. Wang Yi emphasized that China is willing to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation in diverse spheres with Africa. For example, China’s efforts to create a new image in Africa through China-European Union Cooperation in vaccine.

Both China and the EU vow to work as a global collaboration under the World Health Organization in terms of accelerating the development and manufacture of Covid-19 vaccines, and assuring fair and equitable access for every country in the world. It’s about making the vaccine a global public good.

It is also important to remind here in this article that the Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity Against Covid-19 was held in June 2020, making China the only major country that convened a summit with countries across Africa in 2020. China has provided rounds of high-demand supplies to all African countries and the African Union to help them combat Covid-19, and African countries have also been firm in their support to China’s efforts on fighting against the pandemic.

Last December, during his annual media conference, President Vladimir Putin made it known that Russia’s readiness to help foreign countries including Africa. With regard to cooperation with other countries, it would boost the technological capabilities, enterprises to produce the vaccine, foreign countries would invest their own money into expanding their production capacities and purchasing the corresponding equipment, he explained.

Foreign countries would be investing in these projects: the enlargement of production facilities and the purchase of equipment.

“As for cooperation with foreign countries: nothing is stopping us from manufacturing vaccine components at facilities in other countries precisely because we need time to enhance technological capacities of our vaccine manufacturing enterprises. This does not hinder vaccination in the Russian Federation in any way,” Putin said.

According to January report from the Tass News Agency, the Russian Direct Investment Fund has only registered the first Russian vaccine Sputnik V in Africa.

“Russian Direct Investment Fund announces the first registration of Sputnik V in Africa. Ministry of Pharmaceutical Industry of Algeria registered Sputnik V on January 10th,” as follows from a post on their official Twitter account.

According to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the registration was done under the accelerated Emergency Use Authorization procedure. This procedure was also used to register this vaccine in Argentina, Bolivia, and Serbia. The Fund said that supplies to Algeria would be possible thanks to its international partners in India, China, South Korea and other countries.

Writing under the headline “Africa’s Road to Recovery in 2021 Is a Fresh Start” published by Chatham House, Dr Alex Vines, the Director for the Africa Programme at Chatham House, said many African countries would be much more seriously affected by the socioeconomic consequences of the global economic slowdown triggered by the pandemic. Even before Covid-19 hit, an increasing number of African countries were indebted and financially stressed.

He wrote that African debt would become a greater global concern in 2021 as many African states remain the world’s poorest and most fragile and have been hard hit by the economic and financial costs imposed by the pandemic.

In his analysis, Dr Vines further pointed out that 2021 will also see increased geopolitical rivalry for influence in Africa.

This will include competition over generosity, ranging from positioning over debt cancellation to providing Covid-19 vaccines. China has its Sinopharm vaccine and has already signed up to Covax, the international initiative aimed at ensuring equitable global access. The Russians have their Sputnik V vaccine, the UK has its AstraZeneca and University of Oxford vaccine, and the US the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech (with Germany) vaccines.

Reports from Quartz also said Africa appears not part of the supply priorities of the Pharmaceutical companies producing the foremost Covid-19 vaccines. While Pfizer-BioNTech has offered to supply just 50 million Covid-19 vaccines to Africa starting from March to the end of this year, Moderna and AstraZeneca have not yet allocated supplies for Africa. AstraZeneca directed the African Union (AU) to negotiate with the Serum Institute of India for its vaccine to see if they can get a deal. Serum Institute of India has earlier obtained the license to produce the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The Quartz report said most African countries mainly relied on the COVAX co-financing public-private facility backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to enable rapid and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines for lower income countries. The facility promised access to vaccines for up to 20% of participating countries’ population with an initial supply beginning in the first quarter of the year to immunize 3% of their population. However, COVAX is underfunded, and these countries must look for other avenues to access more doses to vaccinate the 50% of their population in order to reach immunity.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, several countries around the world have been making efforts to facilitate local vaccine development, clinical trials, and some had made upfront payments for vaccines to encourage early production. Outside of South Africa, most African economies have played too little or no role at all in the development of Covid-19 vaccines and had likewise made little or effort to secure vaccines while other economies around the world were doing so.

For instance, a globally respected genomic and infectious disease laboratory in Nigeria announced the development of a Covid-19 vaccine in September that is 90% effective against the virus in the preclinical trial but it has not been able to carry out clinical trials due to lack of support and funding.

While Kenya recently announced that through the COVAX facility, it ordered 24 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, with supply expected to start arriving in the second week of next month, several African countries are opting for vaccines from India, Russia, and China. This is despite skepticism about the vaccines from Russia and China in particular. Both countries rolled out their vaccines without phase 3 clinical trial results that confirm the vaccine effectiveness.

South Africa said it made a deal with Serum Institute India and will be getting 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine for its health workers starting this month. The country, which is going is also in talks with Russia and China to procure vaccines. Currently, Guinea is testing the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V and has ordered 2 million doses.

Morocco has ordered 65 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine from China, and AstraZeneca vaccine from Serum Institute India. Egypt plans to buy 40 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, has already received 50,000 doses of the vaccine in December, and expecting another 50,000 in the second or third week of this month when vaccination will commence. Nigeria says vaccine access was in its discussions this week with the Chinese foreign minister during his visit to the county, according to the report from Quartz.

Besides the fact that Africa has registered its three million cases, Africa still behind the United States and European countries, and Asian countries such as China and India when it comes to the Covid-19 outbreak. For many African countries, it is still the time to reflect on African countries’ responses to Covid-19. Although it has abundant resources, Africa remains the world’s poorest and least developed continent, and worse with poor development policies. It is time to prioritize and focus on sustainable development.

Significantly, the global pandemic has exposed the weaknesses in Africa’s health system, adversely affected its economic sectors, it is therefore necessary for African leaders, the African Union (AU), regional organizations and African partners be reminded of issues relating to sustainable development and integration. It sets as a reminder to highlight and prioritize the significant tasks set out by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, a former regional bureau correspondent for Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his entourage have evidently lost the “war at home”. The internal struggle is all but entirely concluded, and the victors are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.

However, Trump and Co., in their last days in office are still dead set on proving they are in charge of the Middle East, and on guaranteeing that their “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran continues. And both sides are flexing muscles showing that they are ready for military confrontation at any moment.

Tehran revealed its new helicopter carrier – the Makran, as well as a brand-new missile launching warship – the Zereh. Iran continues amassing forces along its sea border in the Persian Gulf and is tightening its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.

US Satellite imagery has revealed an increase in activity by IRGC vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

In just the first days of the year, Iran carried out a large-scale drone drill, showcasing loitering munitions and more, closely followed by a naval exercise.

The elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps revealed their own underground missile base near the Persian Gulf, promising to realize their threat of turning the US aircraft carriers into “sinking submarines.”

On its part, the United States sent their nuclear submarine, the USS Georgia, loaded to the brink with Tomahawk missiles, accompanied by two guided missile destroyers, to the Persian Gulf.

They joined the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, which was initially set to depart, but which has instead remained.

To top it all off, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the new “home base” of Al-Qaeda is Iran and went pretty close to claiming that Iran was even behind the organization of 9/11.

That took place just days after Pompeo vowed to designate Yemen’s Houthis, longstanding Iranian allies, as a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is also on high alert. Its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah vowed to support Iran and thanked it again for its support.

Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei warned the US against “extraterritorial adventurism” and its actions do appear to be evidence of that.

At the same time, Donald Trump is desperate for a “win” or at least to show himself as a decision-maker, after being banned from all social media. It could also be his aim to damage the relations between Tehran and Washington beyond repair.

Incoming President Joe Biden is expected to attempt to rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal in one way or another, which could lead to improving relations between the two sides and bring a semblance of calm to the Middle East.

There is no certainty that this would happen and, depending on which actions would be undertaken by both Iran and the USA, this could also contribute to a deepening rift between the two.

In regard to the conflict between Iran and Israel, the parliament in Tehran voted on a resolution to end the state of Israel by 2041. While Biden is expected to be less supportive of Tel Aviv than Trump, the United States will remain Israel’s key ally. Therefore, an end to the conflict between the sides is as unlikely as ever, but Israel may, for the first time in a while, be on retreat.

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A figure like Benito Mussolini could only have taken power in a nation plagued by severe illness. Italy, a resource poor state, had been virtually bankrupted by expenditure in World War One, with the Liberal-led Italian governments dispensing with more money on the conflict than during the previous half a century combined.

Italy suffered more than 1.5 million casualties in the war. Those Italian soldiers who returned home found a country where divisions ran deep, unemployment was high, opportunities were few, and inflation was soaring. It was a breeding ground for extremists to emerge, as would occur further north in Germany, one of the most harmful side effects of the war.

Despite being on the “winning side”, much of the Italian public felt their nation was then robbed at Versailles, in June 1919, by America, Britain and France – who shared almost all of the spoils of war among themselves with the Treaty of Versailles ratified.

As the war was concluding, Mussolini had looked coldly at the fractured society that lay before his eyes in Italy. He surmised that a determined, ruthless man like himself could forge a pathway to power. Mussolini was a cynical opportunist and shrewd operator who possessed notable journalistic skills. The future Duce (“leader”) also had a psychopathic streak, as revealed by his bulging, coal black eyes and sometimes timid disposition. A good psychiatric nurse would have recognised the warning signals by observing him.

Unlike with Hitler, Mussolini had no real loyalty to a particular ideology. It was inevitable that he would abandon his pre-1914 Marxist tendencies, and shift far off to the right. Mussolini was concerned more than anything with himself, and wanted power for its own sake. He intended to do so by the illegal route, a coup d’etat. By the late summer of 1922, his Blackshirts had eradicated all active resistance on the streets through militant means.

With the left in Italy beaten by force, Mussolini’s three other adversaries could not be dealt with in such a manner: the Roman Catholic Church, the Monarchy and the liberals. Mussolini won over the Church and the Monarchy by renouncing his anti-Catholicism and anti-Monarchism, while offering them concessions, allowing those power-hungry and vain institutions to retain some influence in Italy.

The historian and anthropologist David Kertzer, who has analysed relations between Italian fascism and Roman Catholicism, said that “The key ingredient to Mussolini really becoming a dictator was the Church” and without its collaboration his autocracy “wouldn’t have happened. Or it could have been stopped”. To hide the truth, various myths have since been pushed by Roman Catholic apologists, claiming that religious leaders were against fascism from the outset. In actual fact the opposite was the case as, “The Church was incorporated into the state under Mussolini”, Kertzer continued, while the Duce and Pope Pius XI “came to depend on one another, in a sense”. (1)

With the Church and Monarchy on board, Mussolini had the appearance of respectability with those who counted, leaving the liberals checkmated. He provided the final blow through his March on Rome during 28 October 1922. Once Mussolini entered office, he would enjoying increasing support from the leading Western powers.

Mussolini’s coup was described by the onlooking US ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, as “a fine young revolution here. No danger, plenty of enthusiasm and colour. We all enjoy it” (2). The New York Times, reflecting standard US media coverage, commented that the Blackshirts had achieved a “revolution of the peculiar and relatively harmless Italian type”, which, over the past three and a half years, had resulted in widespread violence and several thousand deaths.

The fascists’ arrival ended Washington’s fears of another Bolshevik-style takeover, such as had occurred in Russia five years before in October 1917. A top level inquiry, conducted by US president Woodrow Wilson‘s administration in December 1917, warned of Italy that it poses “the obvious danger of social revolution and disorganisation”, as labour power intensified. A US State Department official observed privately, “If we are not careful we will have a second Russia on our hands”, adding that “The Italians are like children” and should be “assisted more than almost any other nation”.

Mussolini’s street brawlers quickly solved the problem. The US Embassy in Rome reported that the fascists are “perhaps the most potent factor in the suppression of Bolshevism in Italy”, expressing mild concern regarding the “enthusiastic and violent young men” comprising the Blackshirts. The US Embassy elaborated further on the appeal of fascism to “all patriotic Italians”, simple people who “hunger for strong leadership”. (3)

US corporations flocked to invest in Mussolini’s Italy. The American historian and analyst Noam Chomsky wrote,

“As fascist darkness settled over Italy, financial support from the US government and business climbed rapidly. Italy was offered by far the best postwar debt settlement of any country, and US investment there grew far faster than in any other country, as the fascist regime established itself, eliminating labor unrest and other democratic disorders”. (4)

The irresistible attraction of big business towards fascist rule, like moths to a flame, tells its own story. With Mussolini one year in power, the US Embassy eulogised in late 1923, “The results have been excellent, and during the last 12 months there has not been a single strike in the whole of Italy” (5). The Embassy believed that Mussolini was becoming a success because of his destruction of labour power, and therefore the erosion of a key democratic process.

The new US Ambassador to Italy from 1924, Henry Fletcher, outlined a central factor of American foreign policy which resurfaced for decades to come. Ambassador Fletcher informed the US Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, that the choice in Italy is “between Mussolini and fascism and Giolitti and socialism”; Giovanni Giolitti being Italy’s former left-leaning prime minister. Ambassador Fletcher, and Secretary of State Kellogg, preferred the dictatorial Mussolini over the liberal-minded Giolitti.

Fletcher thought that the Italian population desired “peace and prosperity” under Mussolini in comparison to “free speech, loose administration” and “the danger and disorganisation of Bolshevism”. Kellogg, who served as US Secretary of State from 1925 to 1929, agreed with Fletcher, designating all opposition groups to Mussolini as consisting of “communists, socialists and anarchists” who must be prevented from attaining power (6). The real fear of elites, such as Fletcher and Kellogg, was the threat “to the very survival of the capitalist order” that Bolshevism supposedly presented.

With the Great Depression biting deep across Europe from early 1930, Mussolini’s regime received even greater praise from establishment circles. American diplomat Alexander Kirk wrote in 1932, “On all sides it is agreed that the future welfare of Italy is safe as it could humanly possibly be in the hands of Mussolini, but if anything should happen to him, what then? (7)”. Perish the thought.

In 1933 the New York Times Magazine noted approvingly, “there is no limiting condition imposed on any fascist project” in Italy and “whatever Mussolini commands is executed without being hampered by problems, practical or financial”. The New York-based Fortune Magazine, a major US business journal, devoted a full special issue to fascist Italy in 1934. It declared that, “The Wops are unwopping themselves”. A “wop” is a derogatory term for an Italian, and the headline suggested that under Mussolini the Italian people are no longer backward and dismal.

Between 1925 and 1938, Mussolini’s economic strategy had actually lowered the real wages of Italian workers by 11%. Before the Great Depression had even struck, the numbers of Italian unemployed under Mussolini were rising fast – more than doubling in the space of two years, from 181,000 out of work in 1926, to 439,000 in 1928. By 1932, over 1.1 million Italians would be unemployed (8), so much then for the immunity of fascist Italy to the Depression.

Mussolini’s policies had also driven up the cost of production, while his stabilisation of the currency at 90 lire to the pound “placed tremendous strain on the Italian economy”, as recognised by academic and scholar David F. Schmitz, who has closely studied US foreign policy with Mussolini. The Duce was able to keep the currency stable only because he took drastic actions, like incurring severe inflations followed by deflations.

All of this had somehow escaped the attention of the Western business press; in spite of telling public comments from exiled Italian historians, like Gaetano Salvemini. In 1932 Salvemini informed the US think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, that “business in Italy has been hit by the depression as elsewhere” and “is just as bad as here in the United States”.

National debt in Mussolini’s Italy was growing year-on-year, while he placed the Italian economy increasingly on a war footing; “this military dilettante”, as Hitler’s close adviser Wilhelm Keitel contemptuously described Mussolini, was seeking to create a 20th century Roman Empire by force of arms. Schmitz discerned that, “American officials, impressed by the political stability of Italy, ignored such warnings of trouble”. (9)

As early as 1923 Mussolini “made a very favourable impression” on US delegates, according to Morgan Bank representative Nelson Dean Jay, after the Duce delivered the opening address at the International Chamber of Commerce in Rome. Why had Mussolini so impressed? During his speech, he said it was time for European governments to privatise enterprises that had been nationalised during World War One. The German military leader, Erich Ludendorff, whose reign expanded across most of Europe in the war, had nationalised an array of industries in central and eastern Europe (10), including newspaper and cigarette companies. This process, of placing industry under state control, was later reversed after Ludendorff was forced to resign at war’s end. For Western elites, privatisation ruled.

From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano, as they prepare to sign the Munich Agreement (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

The prominent US judge, Elbert Henry Gary, a co-founder of the US Steel Corporation, said of Mussolini while on a trip to Rome in 1923, “A master hand has, indeed, strongly grasped the helm of the Italian state”. Judge Gary felt “like turning to my American friends and asking them whether they don’t think we, too, need a man like Mussolini” (11). The judge was obviously impressed by Mussolini’s ability to crush labour strikes.

Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of State and future Secretary of War, outlined in 1933, “American relations with Italy were of the most cordial character”. After World War Two, Stimson recalled that he and US president Herbert Hoover believed Mussolini to be “a sound and useful leader”. When US General Smedley Butler made unflattering remarks about Mussolini in 1931, Stimson went so far as to bring court-martial proceedings against him.

Hoover’s successor Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democratic president, labelled Mussolini an “admirable Italian gentleman” in 1933, as Washington’s support for the dictator continued. Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, was enthusiastic about the “new experiment in government” that fascism presented which “works most successfully in Italy”.

The US State Department considered Mussolini’s murderous 1935 invasion of Ethiopia a “magnificent” achievement, and that the Blackshirts “brought order out of chaos, discipline out of licence, and solvency out of bankruptcy”. In 1937, the State Department regarded both Italian and German fascism as political movements which “must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left”. (12)

In 1939 as a second war loomed, president Roosevelt said that Italian fascism was “of great importance to the world” but was “still in the experimental stage” (13). Powerful multi-millionaire American bankers, like Thomas Lamont for example, was a fervent Mussolini admirer. Lamont, a partner of US banking institution J.P. Morgan, called Mussolini “a very upstanding chap” who had “done a great job for Italy” with his “sound ideas”. Otto Kahn, another influential US banker, praised Italy under “the clear sighted and masterful guidance of that remarkable man, Benito Mussolini”.

Backing for Mussolini likewise extended across the British establishment. Mussolini’s ties to London in fact date to 1917, when he was hired in the autumn of that year as a British agent by MI5, the intelligence service (14). The then 34-year-old Mussolini, as editor of the Il Popolo d’Italia newspaper in Milan, was paid £100 a week by MI5 for at least a year, equivalent to £7,000 weekly today. These payments were dispensed to ensure that Mussolini would continue publishing warmongering articles, urging Italy to remain on the Allied side against Germany.

British funds to Mussolini were authorised by the Conservative politician Samuel Hoare, MI5’s man in Rome. Mussolini told Hoare, an MP, that he would send Italian Army veterans to beat up peace protesters, news that apparently did not discourage his British paymasters.

Italy’s dictator received glowing plaudits from high-ranking British statesmen, such as Conservative Party MP Winston Churchill. In 1927 the 52-year-old Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, embarked on a visit to Rome where he met the Duce. Churchill subsequently informed the press,

“I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm and detached pose, in spite of so many dangers and burdens… If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish, in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism”. (15)

Churchill’s obsequious comments are perhaps not surprising, considering that he hated trade unionists, socialists and communists as much as Mussolini did. The English educator John Simkin wrote, “The historical record shows that Churchill was a great admirer of fascism”, as revealed in addition by “his speeches and articles he produced in the 1920s and 1930s”, including letters to his wife (16). Much of this has been disappeared from history, however.

“Signor Mussolini” would only become a problem for Churchill and colleagues in the latter stages of his fascist rule, when British interests were threatened by the despot’s colonial ambitions.

Chomsky reflected that,

“Mussolini was portrayed as a ‘moderate’ with enormous popular appeal, who had brought efficient administration and prosperity, slaying the beast and opening the doors to profitable investment and trade”. (17)

Conservative Party MP Austen Chamberlain, the British Foreign Secretary from 1924 to 1929, was a personal friend of Mussolini’s. Chamberlain, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, had twice served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was the half-brother of future prime minister Neville Chamberlain.

As Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain said of Mussolini, “I am confident that he is a patriot and a sincere man; I trust his word when given, and I think that we might easily go far before finding an Italian with whom it would be as easy for the British government to work” (18). Ronald Graham, the British Ambassador to Italy from 1921 to 1933, also viewed the fascist dictatorship with approval. The Eton-educated Graham dispatched to London a number of supportive accounts of Mussolini’s rule, which were read eagerly by British Foreign Office and Cabinet officials.

With Mussolini having consolidated his power, the London-based newspaper the Times, one of England’s leading dailies, outlined its view in June 1928 that Mussolini was “indefatigable and successful” in securing Italy’s place as a major state. The London Times, bought in 1922 by wealthy US-born Conservative politician John Jacob Astor, was clearly pro-Mussolini. The Times applauded the dictator’s “wonderful judgment”, observing that he even had “a sense of humour”; while the newspaper was worried that Mussolini’s regime could fall some day, calling it “too horrible to contemplate”; the Times praised him again in February 1929 for his “great daring and great statesmanship”. (19)

In December 1928 the Daily Telegraph professed Mussolini to be an “uncompromising realist” who had an “honourable record” of peaceful intent. Conveniently forgotten was Mussolini’s invasion and bombardment of the Greek island of Corfu, in autumn 1923, which resulted in over a dozen civilian deaths.

The Telegraph, moreover, approved of Mussolini’s labour laws, which it considered a “daring innovation” rooted in “pure patriotism”. The anti-fascist historian Salvemini remarked in 1936 that the Telegraph “always backed Mussolini”. Italian fascism was firmly supported by other British newspapers, like the extreme anti-Bolshevik Daily Mail and Morning Post, the latter taken over in 1937 by the Telegraph. Australian author Richard Bosworth, who focuses on fascist Italy, revealed that the only mainstream British journal which condemned Mussolini outright was, “The Spectator, whose early enthusiasm for Mussolini had waned”. (20)

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Notes

1 Alex Floyd, “A Communion of Dictators Binds Fascism and the Catholic Church”, Vineyard Gazette, 30 July 2015

2 David F. Schmitz, “A Fine Young Revolution”: The United States and the Fascist Revolution in Italy, 1919-1925, Radical History Review, 1 May 1985

3 Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Vintage, New edition, 3 Jan. 2006) p. 38

4 Ibid.

5 Edwin P. Hoyt, Mussolini’s Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Fascist Vision (Wiley; 1st edition, 2 Mar. 1994) p. 87

6 Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, p. 39

7 David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 30 Jan. 1988) Chapter 5, Italy and the Great Depression

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Donald J. Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Soldier: Dictator: Revolutionary (Hart-Davis; 1st edition, 1 Jan. 1966) p. 138

11 Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, Chapter 3, the United States

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

13 Ibid.

14 Tom Kington, “Recruited by MI5: The name’s Mussolini. Benito Mussolini”, The Guardian, 13 October 2009

15 Tom Behan, The Camorra: Political Criminality in Italy (Routledge; 1st edition, 18 Aug. 2005) p. 34

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

17 Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, p. 39

18 Lawrence R. Pratt, East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis, 1936-1939 (Cambridge University Press; 1st edition, 13 Oct. 2008) p. 16

19 R. J. B. Bosworth, The British press, the Conservatives and Mussolini, 1920-1934, Jstor, pp. 172 & 174

20 Ibid., p. 173

Janine Jackson interviewed the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Mara Verheyden-Hilliard on police responsibility for the January 6 insurrection for the January 8, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: We spoke with our next guest in January of 2017, in the wake of the mass arrest of protesters and journalists at Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the decision to bring felony riot charges against them. What accounts for how differently DC law enforcement behaved yesterday?

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard is an activist and attorney. She’s co-founder and executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: Glad to be with you.

JJ: So I just have one big question, really, which is, “What the hell?” And why is the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, along with the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, calling for public investigations here?

MVH: I think what we witnessed yesterday, in addition to being an extraordinary event in US history and our lifetimes, is fully defining of what has been told to us over and over again is the neutral application of law enforcement, and law and order. Any of us who have ever demonstrated in Washington, DC, or been in Washington, DC, know full well the capacity of the police agencies here to shut down and repress completely peaceful protest. Our clients and we have been subject to kettling, to mass arrest, to projectile weapons, to being soaked in chemical weapons, to tear gas, and there’s been no hesitation to use this. The police have all the materiel, the riot gear, the personnel, the weapons, the tactics at their disposal.

So that can lead us only to the most obvious conclusion, which is, what happened yesterday at the nation’s capital could not happen unless the police allowed it to happen. And they did in fact allow it to happen.

So we are demanding an investigation, because there has to be exposure and accountability for every single officer, for every single command official, for everyone who was involved in allowing, facilitating, this white supremacist mob violence.

Our point here is not calling for police repression; our goal is not to increase police repression. What we need to do and must do here is expose the nature of police repression, and that is so evident here today. We know perfectly well that if there had been a peaceful demonstration that had come en masse to the Capitol and had tried to enter through the front doors, we would have seen a massacre, I mean, a massacre.

And here is a white supremacist group that had been publicly bragging that they were coming to Washington, DC, that they were trying to smuggle illegal weapons in here. And the idea that the Capitol Police were caught off guard, or were somehow outmaneuvered, is completely false. Over 20 years of litigation in the District of Columbia, in constitutional rights cases, we have seen, over and over again, the very sophisticated operation that exists here in planning for major events in the District, and for demonstrations and for rallies and for everything. And they have very effective and significant coordinated interagency communications, operation manuals, tabletop exercises, planning, mutual aid agreements.

It’s simply not possible, particularly in the post–9/11 world at the Capitol, that they lacked preparedness, or that they lacked knowledge for what was going to happen.

Janine Jackson: We’ve been speaking with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. You can follow their work online at JusticeOnline.org. We will be following this investigation. Thank you so much, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, for joining us today on CounterSpin.

MVH: I’m glad to be with you.

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Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin.  Her articles have appeared in various publications, including In These Times and the UAW’s Solidarity, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library). Jackson is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.A. in sociology from the New School for Social Research.

Featured image is from WTTG

One of the most significant chapters in China’s newly released white paper concerns its support of developing countries’ endogenous growth, which crucially contradicts the US’ information warfare narrative that Beijing is laying so-called “debt traps” for its partners.

The U.S. may morph into two nations with the increasingly impoverished helot “deplorables” under the heel of the empowered social justice warriors.

In a recent article Catholic University professor Claes G. Ryn wrote

“Few people are really open to persuasion in any case—not just on political subjects but on any subject about which they care and on which they have adopted certain views. Diehard partisans for a certain outlook will refuse to have their beliefs questioned, and so will many others. They will be no less dismissive of a document challenging their opinions if it is full of footnotes and appendixes. Such a document will, indeed, make them resist it even more. As for the relatively few people who are truly open-minded, they will not find another person’s observations dispositive. They will, as they should, want to consider the evidence on a contested matter for themselves.”

The observation immediately calls to mind the red-blue political division that has hardened in the United States over the past several years, with the two sides persistently talking past each other. Part of the problem is that once someone has staked out an essentially ideological position, he or she will regard new developments in such a way as to fit with that preconception. Once one is locked into a viewpoint in that fashion it becomes practically speaking impossible to “consider the evidence on a contested manner” for oneself.

That tendency to want to believe that something is indisputably true means that most people find it difficult to entertain two somewhat contradictory ideas at the same time. In the current context it should be possible to believe that Donald Trump has been a very bad president based on some aspects of his performance while also conceding that many of his failings have been spawned by the unrelenting criticism he has received from the media as well as the clandestine efforts within the government establishment to undermine and destroy him. Most who emphasize the conspiracy against the president also feel compelled to defend his record. Those who don’t believe there was a conspiracy against him, including Russiagate, support his being impeached and also condemn his achievements.

Or there is the election itself, with one side believing it was stolen and the other maintaining that there was no fraud. In reality, an objective review of the actual evidence and examination of the registration and voting systems that are in place suggests that there certainly was fraud, though the issue of whether it amounted to a change in the outcome is likely a question that will never be answered as the Democrats are now in charge. Voting by mail, much promoted by the Democrats, either was a way of expanding the voters’ rolls or a mechanism that would permit widespread fraud. It is not unreasonable to regard it as doing both.

COVID-19 is another good example of linear thinking. Critics of the pandemic tend to go all the way, minimizing the impact of the disease while also contending that it is a hoax contrived by the government to take away the rights of citizens. Against that, one should be able to recognize that the disease is both highly contagious and deadly for certain demographics while also accepting that the government has mishandled the response to it and is seeking to aggrandize its power over ordinary citizens. So both viewpoints can more-or-less be true.

So, we come to the incident at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on January 6^th. Various unofficial estimates put the number of “Stop the Steal” protesters objecting to what was seen as a fraudulent election at between 20,000 and 200,000. The language being used to describe what occurred that afternoon is suggestive and would likely delight George Orwell. The liberal media (nearly all of it) as well as some Democratic congressmen have officially declared it “incitement of insurrection.” Other expressions that are popping up include “domestic terrorism,” “sedition,” “right wing mobs,” a “coup” or a “storming” of the building, all reportedly driven by incendiary language used by President Trump. Others preferred describing a “breaching” of security or even a “riot” or possibly “treason.”

A local newspaper in Virginia wrote a headline saying that the Capitol building was “ransacked” while Politico sounded the alarm about the “mob who breached the Capitol.” The New York Times thundered that the “mob” included “infamous white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.” What is not in dispute is that five died during the incursion into the building, including a woman Air Force veteran who was unnecessarily shot and a Capitol Police Force officer who was murdered by being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. That the death toll was not higher is inevitably being attributed by some to restraint by the police due to “white privilege” as most of the demonstrators were Caucasian.

Trump allies reject the language and all it implies, insisting that the president did not ever unambiguously encourage actual violence on the part of participants in the “March to Save America” and that most of the demonstration was peaceful, consisting of ordinary Americans who are shocked by the dying spasms of the country that they grew up in. A Newsweek poll determined that nearly half of Republican voters supported the demonstrations at the Capitol, while no less than 68% opined that they were no threat to the American political system, demonstrating just how divided the country is. There have also been claims that infiltrators from Antifa and BLM might have exploited the opportunity to initiate the successful assault by the demonstrators that broke the police line and forced the entry into the Capitol building. Some Democrats are also suggesting that the entry was itself aided by some of the police, a not completely unreasonable suggestion given the inexplicably poor performance by the Capitol Police Force and some photographic evidence showing demonstrators being assisted by security personnel.

One might have noted that the only thing missing from the event had been the allegations that it included “interference” by the Russians or possibly even the Chinese, but it now appears that some Democrats are actually pointing their fingers at Vladimir Putin. And surely the Iranians and even the North Koreans must have had something to do with it. We will have to wait until the Biden Administration is installed, if it is, to find out which foreigners exactly will have to be implicated and punished. One eagerly awaits the inevitable Washington Post cartoon showing Putin in his office laughing while watching on TV events in Washington.

One thing that is for sure and that is being ignored by many of those who have taken up contrary positions is that there will be consequences from what took place last week. Given the polarization in the discussion itself, “truth” will be the first entity sacrificed as the Republicans will make haste to walk away from Trump while the Democrats will not be eager to permit anyone to dig any deeper into the mechanics of the election. No matter what the GOP chooses to do, it will be the long-term loser even if Trump himself is successfully made the designated fall guy and it will have to learn how to retain the support of the Trumpsters without Donald Trump.

In spite of all the media and talking head fulminations, it nevertheless remains unlikely that Trump will actually be impeached and convicted by both houses of Congress or removed under Article 25 as that would permit his lawyers to mount a defense, which would embarrass everyone. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has nevertheless raised tension by contacting the Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and inquiring whether the president can be denied the nuclear weapons’ codes as he appears to be “unhinged.” There is also speculation that an attack on Iran in coordination with Israel might be under consideration to change the narrative.

Perhaps more interestingly, some Democrats are calling for investigation and punishment for some fellow politicians, government employees and ordinary citizens who might be found guilty of supporting the Trump “coup.” Several identified demonstrators have already lost their jobswhile the Washington Post has demanded that “seditious Republicans must be held accountable.” There is even some discussion of setting up a “truth commission” to investigate and punish those individuals who aided in Trump’s other alleged crimes. Such people might have their liberty to travel on commercial flights, to associate in groups and/or to hold certain jobs restricted, expanding on existing anti-terror legislation that would now include a focus on “rightwing terrorism” while also increasing the number of “hate crimes.” Surveillance of individuals who have committed no crimes would likely increase dramatically. Any or all of those moves by Biden would, however, set a very bad precedent, sure to beget more violence.

And also there are calls for greater restrictions on what appears on social media. One ex-Obama adviser has even claimed that social media caused the Capitol building riot by “enabling the spread of the lies, hate speech, and conspiracy theories [by rightwing extremists] that led to” the attack. Since the Democrats now command a majority in both houses of Congress as well as the White House that will mean that those labeled “white supremacists” and their message will be expunged while politically correct social justice content will be promoted. Several social media platforms have begun banning what they call right wing material and Biden as well as several senators have, in fact, already promised to bring in stronger “domestic terrorism prevention” legislation based on the Patriot Act. And even those who believe themselves “safe” as holding reliably progressive views will eventually discover that any deviance from Establishment acceptable positions will be forbidden. Free speech in America will become as dead at the Dodo and the United States would become effectively two nations with the increasingly impoverished helot “deplorables” under the heel of the empowered social justice warriors. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be stable.

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

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

There’s no ambiguity about Trump’s legion of supporters.

On average, polls show that nearly half of voting-age Americans oppose impeaching Trump and removing him from office.

Yet Wednesday on the House floor, lynch mob “justice” triumphed over the rule of law.

Trump became the first US president impeached twice.

Both times were for politicized reasons with no legitimacy — Wednesday’s process largely along party lines.

Ten Republicans joined with 222 Dems.

One article of impeachment falsely accused Trump of “willfully inciting violence against the government of the United States.”

His public remarks and tweets did nothing of the sort. He urged nonviolence on January 6, not the other way around.

Once again on Wednesday from the White House, Trump denounced week ago Capitol Hill violence, urging calm.

The die was cast. Dems out for blood and their establishment media, press agents have been going all-out to deny Trump a second term — along with wanting him defrocked, humiliated, and prevented from holding public office ahead for the wrong reasons, not legitimate ones.

Image below: Hoyer with President Donald Trump in 2019 (CC BY 2.0)

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that the article of impeachment will be sent to the Senate straightaway.

Separately, he turned reality on its head by the following Big Lie on national television, saying:

“The timing was thrust upon us by the actions of the president of the United States (sic).”

“The fact that he is leaving should not divert us from holding accountable behavior which many of us believe is treasonous behavior and criminal behavior (sic).”

At earliest, Senate trial won’t begin until January 19 as things now stand — two days before Trump’s tenure ends.

A two-thirds super-majority is needed for conviction, a high bar to cross, what never happened before in US history.

Will Trump be the US president to be removed from office following impeachment?

If not, will he be convicted by a Senate super-majority post-tenure?

What’s unthinkable based on the fabricated charge of inciting insurrection is unlikely but possible.

That’s the depth to which the state of the nation sank, greater depths likely ahead.

The rule of law died long ago in Washington.

9/11 added an exclamation point.

Made-in-the-USA covid (that’s renamed seasonal flu) and orchestrated Main Street economic collapse last year, continuing with no end of it in prospect, added two more.

Orchestrated by anti-Trump dark forces, last week’s Capitol Hill coup attempt added another.

In response to Trump’s politicized impeachment 2.0, Law Professor Jonathan Turley said the following:

Wednesday’s “snap” impeachment of Trump “dispense(d) with the traditional hearing or inquiry of impeachment.”

“There was no opportunity to debate the language or the implications of the language Trump.”

“(T)he rush to judgment could become a parade of constitutional horribles.”

It’s “ripe for challenge on the Senate floor and even later in the federal courts.”

Impeachment “language…is sweeping and raises serious concerns of this standard for future presidents.”

Trump’s remarks did not rise to the level of “criminal incitement…”

“(T)he Senate should reject the impeachment if on the basis that an impeachment of a former president is unwarranted and likely unconstitutional.”

It’s based on invented reasons, not legitimate ones.

Turley is a sharp Trump critic as am I — for justifiable reasons, not phony ones to satisfy vengeful Dems.

Impeaching Trump twice for politicized reasons — along with seeking lynch mob “justice” against him throughout his tenure — proves conclusively that Dems are self-serving and unfit to lead the nation.

Their involvement in staging a Capitol Hill coup attempt against a sitting president left the state of the nation and rule of law in tatters.

Post-inauguration of unelected Biden/Harris next week, will they declare martial law?

Will tyranny follow on their watch?

A pox on both right wings of the one-party state.

On her website, Sharyl Attkisson posted results of what she called “a recent unscientific poll of more than 640 people,” adding:

“When asked if they generally trust (US) election integrity, 70% said ‘Absolutely no’ and 19% said ‘More no than yes’ for a total of 89% expressing skepticism.”

“Another 6% said they tend to trust election integrity: 2% said ‘Absolutely yes’ and 4% said ‘More yes than no.’ ”

Along with earlier stolen US federal elections since the early 19th century, media-supported Election 2020 theft may have been most brazen of all.

Events post-election, leading up to last week’s orchestrated Capitol Hill coup attempt, Wednesday’s impeachment, and what may follow are proof positive of a nation dismissive of the rule of law.

It’s on a fast track to full-blown tyranny if not challenged by nonviolent mass action in the streets before it’s too late.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Whether civil war is coming will depend on the degree of stoicism prevalent among the Deplorable multitudes.

I hear the sons of the city and dispossessed
Get down, get undressed
Get pretty but you and me
We got the kingdom, we got the key
We got the empire, now as then
We don’t doubt, we don’t take direction
Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me

Sisters of Mercy, Lucretia my Reflection

9/11 was the prelude. 1/6 is the Holy Grail.

9/11 opened the gates to the Global War on Terror (GWOT), later softened by Team Obama to the status of Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) even as it was suavely expanded to the bombing, overt or covert, of seven nations.

9/11 opened the gates to the Patriot Act, whose core had already been written way back in 1994 by one Joe Biden.

1/6 opens the gate to the War on Domestic Terror and the Patriot Act from Hell, 2.0, on steroids (here is the 2019 draft ), the full 20,000 pages casually springing up from the sea like Venus, the day after, immediately ready to roll.

And as the inevitable companion to Patriot Act 2.0, there will be war overseas, with the return in full force, unencumbered, of what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern memorably christened the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank) complex.

And when MICIMATT starts the next war, every single protest will be branded as domestic terrorism.

Whatever really happened on 1/6 in the militarized Valhalla of a superpower that spent untold trillions of dollars on security since the start of the millennium, the elaborate psy op/photo-op circus – complete with a strategically photogenic MAGA Viking actor – could never had happened if it was not allowed to happen.

Debate will rage till Kingdom Come on whether the break in was organic – an initiative by a few hundred among at least 10,000 peaceful protestors surrounding the Capitol – or rather a playbook color revolution false flag instigated by an infiltrated, professional Fifth Column of agent provocateurs.

What matters is the end result: the manufactured product – “Trump insurrection” – for all practical purposes buried the presentation, already in progress, of evidence of electoral fraud to the Capitol, and reduced the massive preceding rally of half a million people to “domestic terrorism”.

That was certainly not a “coup”. Top military strategist Edward Luttwak, now advising the Pentagon on cyber-war, tweeted, “nobody pulls a coup during the day”. That was just “a show, people expressing emotions”, an actually faux coup that did not involve arson or widespread looting, and relatively little violence (compare it to Maidan 2014): talk about “insurrectionists” walking inside the Capitol respecting the velvet ropes.

A week before 1/6, a dissident but still very connected Deep State intel op offered this cold, dispassionate view of the Big Picture:

“Tel Aviv betrayed Trump with a new deal with Biden and so they threw him to the dogs. Sheldon Adelson and the Mafia have no trouble switching sides for the winner by hook or crook. Pence and McConnell also betrayed Trump. It was as though Trump walked as Julius Caesar into the Roman Senate to be stabbed to death. Any deal Trump makes with the system or Deep State will not be kept and they are secretly talking about ending him forever. Trump has the trump card. Martial law. Military tribunals. The Insurrection Act. The question is whether he will play it. Civil war is coming irrespective of what happens to him, sooner or later.”

Whether civil war is coming will depend on the degree of stoicism prevalent among the Deplorable multitudes.

Alastair Crooke has brilliantly outlined the Top Three main issues that shape Red America’s “Epiphany”: stolen elections; lockdown as a premeditated strategy for the destruction of small and mid-size businesses; and the dire prospect of ‘cancellation’ by an incoming woke ‘soft totalitarianism’ orchestrated by Big Tech.

Cue to a Corpse Reading a Teleprompter, also known as The President-Elect, and his own ominous words after 1/6: “Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists.” Some things never change. George W. Bush, immediately after 9/11: “Either you’re with us, or with the terrorists”.

That’s the hegemonic, set in stone, narrative now being implemented with an iron fist by Big Tech. First they come for POTUS. Then they come for you. Anyone, anywhere, not following Big Tech’s Techno-Feudalist diktat WILL be cancelled.

Bye bye Miss American Pie

And that’s why the drama is way, way, bigger than a mere discombobulated POTUS.

Every single institution controlled by the ruling class – from schools to mass media to the way workplaces are regulated – will go after the Deplorables with no mercy.

Professional CIA killer and liar John Breenan, key conceptualizer of totally debunked Russiagate, tweeted about the necessity of, in practice, setting up re-education camps. Media honchos called for “cleansing the movement”.

Politically, the Deplorables only have Trumpism. And that’s why Trumpism, with a possible avenue to become an established third party, must be smashed. As much as the 0.0001% is more terrified by the possibility of secession or armed revolt, they need urgent pre-emptive action against what is, for now, a nationalist mass movement, however inchoate its political proposals.

The “unknown unknown”, to evoke notorious neo-con Donald Rumsfeld, is whether the exasperated plebs will eventually reach for the pitchforks – and make the 0.0001% feudal hacienda ungovernable. And then there’s a literally smokin’ element – those half a billion guns out there.

The 0.0001% knows for sure that Trump, after all, was never a radical revolutionary change agent. Inchoately, he channeled Red America’s hopes and fears. But instead of the promised glitzy palace adorned with gold, what he delivered was a shack in the desert.

Meanwhile, Red America, intuitively, understood that Trump at least was a useful conduit. He lay bare how the corrupt swamp actually moves. How these “institutions” are mere corporate puppets – and completely ignore the common man. How the Judiciary is utterly corrupt – when even POTUS cannot get a hearing. How Pharma and Tech actually expanded the MICIMATT (MICIMAPTT?) And most of all, how the two party paradigm is a monstrous lie.

So where will 75 million disenfranchised voters – or 88 million Twitter followers – go?

As it stands, we’re deep into Hardcore Class War. The Top of the Scam Gang are in full control. The remains of “Democracy” have gelled into Mediacracy. Ahead, there’s nothing but ruthless purge, protracted crackdown, censorship, blanket surveillance, smashing of civil liberties, a single narrative, overarching cancel (in)culture. It gets worse: next week, this paranoid apparatus merges with the awesome machinery of the United States Government (USG).

So welcome to Full Spectrum Domestic Dominance. Germany 1933 on steroids. 1984 redux: no wonder the hashtag #1984 was banned by Twitter.

Cui bono? Techno-Feudalism, of course – and the interlocking tentacles of the trans-humanist Great Reset. Defy it, and you will be cancelled.

Bye bye Miss American Pie. That’s the legacy of 1/6.

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Featured image: KSLA-12

Animal protection campaigners have called for the urgent closure of gaping loopholes in EU wildlife trade regulations that fail to prevent the trafficking of protected wild species.

At Stolen Wildlife, an online conference, Humane Society International/Europe and Pro Wildlife launched a report underlining the urgent need to criminalise the import and sale of illegally sourced wildlife. Additionally, John E. Scalon, former CITES[1] Secretary General and chair of the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, advocated for a new protocol on the illicit trafficking of wildlife under the UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC). This would make the illicit trafficking in protected species a serious crime and create obligations for UN Members, including the EU, to take action.

In its recently adopted EU Biodiversity Strategy, the European Commission committed to revising the EU Action Plan against Wildlife Trafficking in 2021. However, loopholes mean that legal EU trade in wild species effectively rubberstamps wildlife trafficking.

Dr Sandra Altherr, founder of Pro Wildlife, noted:

“Our Stolen Wildlife report reveals that there is a substantial and systematic wildlife trafficking in species that are protected by national law, though not yet internationally protected by CITES. EU citizens are heavily involved in such smuggling activities. Once those animals have been successfully smuggled out of their country of origin, traffickers and their clients do not face any legal consequences, while their profits are often very high. The exotic pet trade in Europe is driving biodiversity loss and threatening the survival of species in other parts of the globe. The EU must act to close the legal loophole that permits this.”

Dr Joanna Swabe, senior director of public affairs for Humane Society International/Europe, added:

“Make no mistake, we are in the midst of a wildlife smuggling crisis. From fascinating glass frogs from Costa Rica or highly threatened lizards from Sri Lanka, a myriad of species are being illegally shipped to Europe to supply the exotic pet trade. The presently legal EU trade in species taken in violation of the laws of other nations is tantamount to rubberstamping wildlife trafficking. Indeed, it speaks volumes that the former Secretary General of CITES believes that the current legal framework for combating wildlife crime and regulating the international wildlife trade is inadequate. In its programme, the current Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the EU cited combating the trafficking of protected species as one of its priorities. We therefore urge both the Council and the European Parliament to exert pressure on the Commission to take decisive legislative action to end all wildlife trafficking.”

Martin Hojsík MEP, Slovakian Member of the European Parliament for the Renew Group, member of organisation MEPs for Wildlife, and host of the event, noted:

“The EU Biodiversity Strategy—and the revision of the EU Action Plan against Wildlife Trafficking—should be seized as a golden opportunity to close the loopholes in the existing EU wildlife trade regulations. Reptiles and amphibians, which are the main victims of the exotic pet trade, are not necessarily the most charismatic of animals, like elephants, tigers and rhinos. However, they play a vital role in local ecosystems and deserve our protection. This is a chance to halt biodiversity decline in other parts of the globe, even when species are not protected from trade by CITES. It is also our chance to show that we have learnt our lesson from Coronavirus outbreak by eliminating the possibility of emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases and preventing new pandemics. If the Commission is truly serious about taking action on biodiversity and illegal wildlife trade, it should put its money where its mouth is and deliver a proposal to close this insidious legal loophole.”

Facts:

• In May 2020, the European Commission adopted its EU Biodiversity Strategy as part of the broader European Green Deal. This Strategy included a commitment to revise the EU Action Plan against Wildlife Trafficking in 2021.
• The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) does not cover all illegal wildlife trade. Many threatened species are protected from exploitation in their home countries but are not protected from being traded, either through domestic legislation or by CITES, and such domestic protections are often poorly enforced. In addition, many demand-focused countries have no protections for non-native species. As a result, wildlife traffickers are able to easily smuggle these animals into legal (or illegal) international trade flows, and once out of their countries of origin, little can be done to stop the trade in these species.
• HSI/Europe and Pro Wildlife call for the EU to adopt supplementary legislation prohibiting the importation, transhipment, purchase and sale of wildlife taken illegally in the country of origin. In the United States, the law providing law enforcement with the authority to prosecute cases of illegally taken wildlife, which sets a precedent for these kind of legislative measures is known as the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. §§ 3371-3378.

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Note

[1] CITES = Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora

This article was originally published by Workers World on June 11, 2011.

It is not only federal prisons that contract out prison labor to top corporations. State prisons that used forced prison labor in plantations, laundries and highway chain gangs increasingly seek to sell prison labor to corporations trolling the globe in search of the cheapest possible labor.

One agency asks: “Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the costs of employee benefits? Unhappy with out-of-state or offshore suppliers? Getting hit by overseas competition? Having trouble motivating your workforce? Thinking about expansion space? Then Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you.” (educate-yourself.org, July 25, 2005)

Major corporations profiting from the slave labor of prisoners include Motorola, Compaq, Honeywell, Microsoft, Boeing, Revlon, Chevron, TWA, Victoria’s Secret and Eddie Bauer.

IBM, Texas Instruments and Dell get circuit boards made by Texas prisoners. Tennessee inmates sew jeans for Kmart and JCPenney. Tens of thousands of youth flipping hamburgers for minimum wages at McDonald’s wear uniforms sewn by prison workers, who are forced to work for much less.

In California, as in many states, prisoners who refuse to work are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges, as well as “good time” credit, which slices hard time off their sentences.

Systematic abuse, beatings, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation and lack of medical care make U.S. prison conditions among the worst in the world. Ironically, working under grueling conditions for pennies an hour is treated as a “perk” for good behavior.

In December [2010], Georgia inmates went on strike and refused to leave their cells at six prisons for more than a week. In one of the largest prison protests in U.S. history, prisoners spoke of being forced to work seven days a week for no pay. Prisoners were beaten if they refused to work.

Private prisons for profit

In the ruthless search to maximize profits and grab hold of every possible source of income, almost every public agency and social service is being outsourced to private for-profit contractors.

In the U.S. military, this means there are now more private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan than there are U.S. or NATO soldiers.

In cities and states across the U.S., hospitals, medical care facilities, schools, cafeterias, road maintenance, water supply services, sewage departments, sanitation, airports and tens of thousands of social programs that receive public funding are being contracted out to for-profit corporations. Anything publicly owned and paid for by generations of past workers’ taxes — from libraries to concert halls and parks — is being sold or leased at fire sale prices.

All this is motivated and lobbied for by right-wing think tanks like that set up by Koch Industries and their owners, Charles and David Koch, as a way to cut costs, lower wages and pensions, and undercut public service unions.

The most gruesome privatizations are the hundreds of for-profit prisons being established.

The inmate population in private for-profit prisons tripled between 1987 and 2007. By 2007, there were 264 such prison facilities, housing almost 99,000 adult prisoners. (house.leg.state.mn.us, Feb. 24, 2009) Companies operating such facilities include the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group Inc. and Community Education Centers.

Prison bonds provide a lucrative return for capitalist investors such as Merrill Lynch, Shearson Lehman, American Express and Allstate. Prisoners are traded from one state to another — based on the most profitable arrangements.

Militarism and prisons

Hand-in-hand with the military-industrial complex, U.S. imperialism has created a massive prison-industrial complex that generates billions of dollars annually for businesses and industries profiting from mass incarceration.

For decades, workers in the U.S. have been assured that they benefit from imperialist looting by the giant multinational corporations. But today more than half the federal budget is absorbed by the costs of maintaining the military machine and the corporations, which are guaranteed profits for equipping the Pentagon. That is the only budget category in federal spending that is guaranteed to increase by at least 5% per year — at a time when every social program is being cut to the bone.

The sheer economic weight of militarism seeps into the fabric of society at every level. It fuels racism and reaction. The political influence of the Pentagon and the giant military and oil corporations — with their thousands of high-paid lobbyists, media pundits and network of links into every police force in the country — fuels growing repression and an expanding prison population.

The military, oil and banking conglomerates, interlinked with the police and prisons, have a stranglehold on the U.S. capitalist economy and reins of political power, regardless of who is president or what political party is in office. The very survival of these global corporations is based on immediate maximization of profits. They are driven to seize every resource and source of potential profits.

Thoroughly rational solutions are proposed, whenever the human and economic cost of militarism and repression is discussed. The billions spent for war and fantastically destructive weapons systems could provide five to seven times more jobs if spent on desperately needed social services, education and rebuilding essential infrastructure. Or it could provide free university education, considering the fact that it costs far more to imprison people than to educate them.

Why aren’t such reasonable solutions ever chosen? Military contracts generate far larger guaranteed profits to the military and the oil industries, which have a decisive influence on the U.S. economy.

The prison-industrial complex — including the prison system, prison labor, private prisons, police and repressive apparatus and their continuing expansion — are a greater source of profit and are reinforced by the climate of racism and reaction. Most rational and socially useful solutions are not considered viable options.

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Featured image is from Workers World

At the beginning of December China’s Xi Jinping officially declared that China had eliminated poverty entirely, part of his priority program. Western financial pundits have praised the remarkable economic recovery of China following the severe lockdowns a year go to combat the coronavirus. Predictions that China would once again, as it did in 2008, lead the rest of the world, especially the EU and North America, out of deep recession are common. Yet behind the official Beijing statements there are indications that China’s decades of economic boom are coming into deep problems, far deeper than officially acknowledged. If true, the consequences for the rest of the world as well as for China could be severe.

Eliminating by Definition?

On December 1, 2020 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping announced that China had achieved the goal of “eradicating absolute poverty” and becoming a “moderately prosperous society” before the end of 2020. At the November G20 summit in Riyadh, Xi boasted that this was ten years ahead of the deadline set by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet as even Chinese analysts point out, there are major questions to this achievement.

A binding target to eliminate absolute poverty by the end of 2020 was incorporated into China’s 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020) in November 23, 2016. Now impressively, the goal is declared won, and just on time.

However on closer scrutiny, it is not as impressive. Most of China’s poverty population are rural migrant populations living in subsistence farming or by other means in the central and western parts of China far from the prosperous coastal provinces. A China National Bureau of Statistics 2016 report stated that in 2015 the poverty rate was 1.8 percent in China’s highly developed and largely urbanized eastern provinces; 6.2 percent in central China, and 10 percent in Western China.

Yet China does not use the standard of the World Bank defining poverty in an upper-middle-income country, namely for daily income of $5.50 per capita. It uses approximately $1.90 a day, the value for the world’s poorest countries. Second it talks about only rural poverty, ignoring a significant urban poor quotient. Were China to use the World Bank poverty definition, instead of 1.7% poverty, China would have 17% poverty, a significant number. With the economic impact in 2020 from coronavirus lockdowns globally, today the poverty number is presumably higher, but unstated.

Indeed in May, the Chinese Premier, Li Keqiang, gave a sobering statistic at a press conference. He announced that roughly 600 million Chinese, or almost half the population, were eking out a living with a monthly income of 1,000 yuan (US$150) or less in 2019. Yet in the past two years inflation of everything from basic food to household appliances has often exceeded double digits. This all makes the next CCP economic priority a mirage.

Stimulating Domestic Consumption

The true state of poverty and real household income is crucial now, as the CCP has declared it will focus on domestic consumption to overcome loss of export revenues in the COVID era, a shift called “dual circulation” economy— expand exports and expand domestic consumption as well. How will China stimulate citizens with less than $150 monthly to lift the China economy? At the same press conference last May, broadcast on State TV, Li Keqiang stated, “One cannot even pay his rent with the money if he lives in a big city, let alone spend to improve his life or buy these export products to help manufacturers.”

The further problem is that the large, young new middle class in the recently built mega-cities such as Kunming, Xi’an, Chengdu, Shanghai or countless others with modern skyscraper apartments, are already loaded down with debt from buying new cars for the first time, and then buying an apartment amid rising real estate prices. Now the first signs of consumer debt default are appearing. Not only Americans are maxed out in debt.

Debt Crisis Growing

When the global financial crisis erupted in September, 2008, triggered by the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy, China’s Wen Jaibao implemented a staggering $4 trillion stimulus to keep its economy somewhat stable as world trade briefly collapsed. Around half of the $4 trillion was left to local governments to raise the capital, usually via special purpose infrastructure bonds or loans with local State Enterprises. That was the beginning of the debt buildup that today is leading to local government crises and collapse of numerous smaller banks in the past two years, well before the corona crisis and the US trade sanctions.

To keep their local economic targets after 2008, provincial party officials engaged in what is called shadow banking, undeclared, unguaranteed and unregulated by Beijing. It was a short term way to keep the economy going, done at the cost of a huge accumulation of municipal or provincial debt, much of it reportedly undeclared to Beijing. This hidden local debt has been growing in unknown dimensions. These so-called Local Government Finance Vehicles (LGFVs) debts began falling due in significant amounts by 2020 but many local governments lacked the funds to repay or rollover the bonds. There is $25.8 trillion officially estimated in central government guaranteed debt. Of that, debt of State Owned Enterprises such as ChemChina or Sinopec is $15 trillion or 95 trillion Renminbi. Then there is debt of the local divisions of the Communist party of China, another $6.3 trillion of declared debt. All this staggering amount of debt is known and de facto state guaranteed.

The problem comes with the local “undeclared” debts. Here no one knows the truth, as local officials chose to hide them to keep their regions growing and possibly to advance their career within the CCP by showing economic success. According to Liu Shijin, deputy director of the Economic Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, “From the places investigated, it is at least no less than ‘declared debt’, and some of them are three times higher.” That would mean an added hidden local debt burden between $6.3 trillion to $18.9 trillion.

That is a huge debt time-bomb. It explains why the Chinese central bank and Beijing State Council have been trying to deleverage the local debt bomb since 2014. In an effort to bring the local hidden debt issuance under control, the Beijing Finance Ministry on December 9, 2020 published “Measures for the Administration of the Issuance of Local Government Bonds.” It tries to solve the issuance of local debt by handing liability and debt issuance to the local government as of 1 January. The issuance and redemption of local government bonds shall be handled by the public finance departments of local governments. According to the official Xinhua.net, “The local public finance department shall effectively perform the debt repayment liability, timely pay the principal and interest of bonds, and maintain the government reputation.” That is, it’s now your local problem.

This is a huge change. Previously, local government bonds were issued by the Beijing Ministry of Finance for the local government, and the money was lent back to the local government. If a local government was at risk of default the central government would step in. This new rule is a clear attempt after six years of recognizing the seriousness of the local hidden debt problem, for the central authorities around Xi Jinping to bring the hidden debt issuance to a halt. The problem is that, as no one knows the extent and how much of construction has been sustained so far using the hidden debt, the move could easily trigger large-scale municipal defaults that could in turn trigger a systemic debt crisis.

In this context, how will Beijing fill its central goal of stimulating consumption by especially the poorer regions and provinces?

Unemployment Large

The true number of unemployed is an added problem. Unemployed cannot take loans to buy apartments or new cars. The central government reports an official unemployment rate of single digits, between 6% to 7%, enviable in comparison with many OECD countries. However, in a curious anomaly, China statistics office defines “unemployed” as strictly urban unemployed. Beijing’s data does not include people in rural communities or a large number of the 290 million migrant workers who work in construction, manufacturing and other low paying jobs. According to a 2020 study by Zhang Bin, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank, if those migrants are included, as many as 80 million people could have been out of work at the end of March, 2020, some 10% to 13% of the workforce, with some private economists estimating it could be as high as 20%.

With already seriously high unemployment and a credit system imposing de facto deflation, it is difficult to see how China in 2021 can implement Xi’s Dual Circulation of stimulating domestic consumption and export growth via the Silk Road. This is against a backdrop of the world’s most rapidly ageing population, which in 2018 saw a decline in total population for the first time since Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in the 1960’s.

The global consequences of a Chinese economy entering into a prolonged downturn and a simultaneous debt default crisis will have severe consequences for the global economy. As well, the pandemic lockdowns across the EU and USA will hit China’s huge export economy. Already there are indications that China’s ability to open new export markets via its Belt and Road Initiative, the New Economic Silk Road, is being seriously impaired. The December 8 Financial Times of London reported a study by Boston University researchers which concluded that the Communist Party of China has significantly reduced overseas loans of the two largest state banks well before the corona crisis. They note that in 2019, the total overseas loans of the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China were $4 billion, far lower than the record $75 billion in 2016. The two banks lent $462-billion between 2008 and 2019, much for Silk Road projects abroad.

With tens of billions of past loans to financially weak states such as Pakistan, Ethiopia, Venezuela now in near default, or in renegotiation, it’s a serious question whether the new markets Beijing hoped to win by the Silk Road will instead become a debt albatross for the state at a time it faces a serious internal debt crisis. A Chinese economic collapse or even serious recession is what the world does not need at this juncture.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

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

Featured image is from NEO

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

History of the Russian Revolution: Separating Truth from Myth

By Max Parry, January 13 2021

There is a deceitful and ahistorical myth that frequently resurfaces in right-wing circles seeking to discredit socialism with lies about the Russian Revolution. No matter how many times it has been invalidated as fabrication, the reactionary mythos endures.

Why Does the US Department of Justice Want to Worsen the Split in the US Population?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, January 13 2021

The initial charges against those few who entered the Capitol during the Trump rally were “entering a restricted building without permission and engaging in disorderly conduct while inside.”  This charge does not carry sufficient punishment for the kind of example the Establishment intends to make of Trump supporters. 

Britain to Issue Vaccine Passports

By Stephen Lendman, January 13 2021

According to the London Telegraph, UK vaccine passports “could be rolled out across the UK” if Boris Johnson’s “trial” run goes as planned.

A Nation Imploding: Digital Tyranny, Insurrection and Martial Law

By John W. Whitehead, January 13 2021

This is what we have been reduced to: A violent mob. A nation on the brink of martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. And a Constitution in tatters. We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.

Agroecology and Post-COVID Plunder

By Colin Todhunter, January 13 2021

Contingent on World Bank aid to be given to poorer countries in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, agrifood conglomerates will aim to further expand their influence. These firms have been integral to the consolidation of a global food regime that has emerged in recent decades.

Ten Things You Need to Know about the Experimental COVID Vaccines

By Makia Freeman, January 13 2021

Experimental COVID Vaccines are coming to town, being rolled out worldwide as the transhumanistic New World Order (NWO) agenda dictates. This next phase of the COVID scamdemic is an incredibly dangerous one.

Biden’s Patriot Act 2.0: Exploiting the Chaos to Impose More Surveillance and Censorship

By Rainer Shea, January 13 2021

Welcome to the latest stage in the process of reaction that’s occurring within the U.S. ruling class amid Washington’s imperial decline. This is the stage where after Trump’s personality cult has escalated a petty political dispute into violence, the liberal technocrats who will soon have control over the White House are escalating their war against dissent.

Biden Exploits His Capitol Gains

By Diana Johnstone, January 13 2021

For months prior to the election, the elite Transition Integrity Project was spreading the alarm, loudly echoed by liberal media, that Trump would lose and refuse to acknowledge his loss. There was a simple, obvious way to avoid such a drama.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and Australia’s Complicity

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, January 13 2021

Rather than defend an Australian national against the positively homicidal and kidnapping disposition of US politicians and agencies, Canberra has been generally reticent, hiding behind the fiction of due process.

The Top 10 Weather and Climate Events of a Record-setting Year

By Dr. Jeff Masters and Dana Nuccitelli, January 13 2021

Calendar year 2020 was an extreme and abnormal year, in so many ways. The global coronavirus pandemic altered people’s lives around the world, as did extreme weather and climate events. Let’s review the year’s top 10 such events.

On January 11, in his final days before leaving office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added one parting blow to the series of bludgeons his administration has inflicted on Cuba for four years: putting the island on the list of “state sponsors of terror” that includes only Iran, North Korea and Syria. The designation drew swift condemnation from policymakers and humanitarian groups as a decision widely characterized as “politically motivated.” It comes six years after the Obama administration had removed Cuba from the same list as part of his policy of rapprochement.

In the six years since, Trump’s State Department could not point to a single act of terror sponsored by Cuba. Instead, Secretary Pompeo based his decision on Cuba’s alleged support for the ELN (National Liberation Army – Colombia’s second-largest guerilla group) and the harboring of a handful of U.S. fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the 1970s, including renowned Black revolutionary Assata Shakur. Lacking more specific accusations, the State Department criticized Cuba for its supposed “malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”

These claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. Regarding the ELN, the gist of the story is that the Trump administration is punishing Cuba for its role in attempting to bring peace to the long-simmering conflict in Colombia. ELN negotiators arrived in Cuba in 2018 for peace talks with the Colombian government. As part of the protocols for these meetings, ELN negotiators were allowed entry into Cuba and promised safe passage back into Colombia after their conclusion. Guarantor countries, including Cuba and Norway, assumed responsibility for their safe return. The talks collapsed in January 2019 following an ELN car bombing in Bogotá that killed 22 people. Colombia requested the extradition of the negotiators, but Cuba refused because the Colombia government will not honor the previous government’s commitment to guaranteeing the negotiators’ freedom upon returning home.

Regarding Secretary Pompeo’s other arguments, Cuba’s main influence in the Western Hemisphere has been the opposite of “malign”: it has deployed its doctors throughout the region and the world, saving thousands of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. And when it comes to harboring terrorists, it’s worth noting that for decades the United States harbored Luis Posada Carriles, mastermind of a 1973 bombing that killed 73 people on a Cuban commercial airliner.

Cuba’s placement on the state sponsors of terror list is meant to be a thorn in any plan by the Biden administration for rapprochement. Taking Cuba off the list will require a review process that could take months, delaying any new initiatives to roll back Trump-era policies. It will also cause further pain to Cuba’s economy, already battered by tightened sanctions and the pandemic that has devastated the island’s tourism industry. The new terrorism label will likely scare off many businesses that import to Cuba, banks that finance transactions with Cuba and foreign investors.

A week before the designation, nine U.S. Senators wrote to Secretary Pompeo and warned that such a step “will politicize our national security.” It has drawn strong condemnation from Senator Patrick Leahy, who said it made a “mockery of what had been a credible, objective measure,” and House Foreign Affairs Chairman, Representative Gregory Meeks who said the hypocrisy from President Trump less than a week after he incited a domestic terror attack was “stunning but not surprising.”

Faith group Pastors For Peace was one of many organizations to condemn the designation: “We know that this latest act, in the waning days of the Trump administration, is not only an aggressive act against Cuba, but aggression against the incoming administration who have pledged to return to a policy leading to peace and civilized relations with our island neighbor.”

Policy group ACERE (which CODEPINK is a part of) drew a connection between the designation and recent events at home: “Perpetuating the myth that Cuba is a threat to the American people – while minimizing the threat posed by far-right extremists at home – is an embarrassment to our country on the world stage.”

The real motive behind this move is to offer a parting gift to the Cuban exile community and its allies that have been loyal supporters of the Trump administration and helped oust several Democratic members of Congress in the last election. This is par for the course for an administration that has repeatedly used sanctions for political gain with no regard for the Cuban people who, for four years, have borne the brunt of sanctions affecting everything from energy, tourism, medicines, remittances and flights. Just like millions of U.S. citizens, Cubans are counting the days until the Trump administration becomes history and hoping the next administration will offer some relief.

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Medea Benjamin is an author, activist and cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK.

Leonardo Flores is a Latin American policy expert and a campaign coordinator with CODEPINK.

The first month of 2021 was marked by a new round of violence in Syria. The situation was especially complicated in Greater Idlib, northern Aleppo and in the central desert.

On January 8, ISIS terrorists launched a large attack on government forces in the eastern countryside of Hama. After a series of clashes with the Syrian Army and pro-government militias, terrorists captured a number of positions near the towns of Rahjan and al-Shakusiyah. As of January 12, ISIS cells retreated from these positions under pressure from the army. Nonetheless, at least 19 government troops and 12 ISIS members were killed in the clashes.

Meanwhile in the eastern countryside of Homs, ISIS cells destroyed a pickup of the al-Quds Brigade, a Palestinian pro-government group, with an improvised explosive device. According to pro-opposition sources, at least 44 pro-government fighters have been killed in the clashes in the desert area since the start of the year. The number of the eliminated terrorists is reportedly over 35.

Sources affiliated with Russia-linked private military contractors claim that the deterioration of the security situation in western Deir Ezzor is a result of the withdrawal of a majority of Russian specialists from the area.

At the same time, Iranian-backed forces continue their work to expand the Imam Ali Base near al-Bukamal. The base, operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is allegedly designed store precision-guided missiles in a network of underground tunnels in the area. The base was repeatedly targeted by Israeli and even US strikes in 2019 and 2020. Despite this, the strikes did not cause any major impact as the base’s military infrastructure has been steadily expanding.

January 9 also became the first day of 2021 when the Russian Aerospace Forces carried out strikes on terrorist targets in Greater Idlib. Strikes hit several hills in outskirts of the town of Kabani, which is known for being stronghold of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkistan Islamic Party. A day earlier, forces of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham shelled Syrian Army positions in northern Lattakia injuring several soldiers.

These developments coincided with some strikes by some ‘mysterious aircraft’ that once again bombed Turkish-linked oil smugglers in northern Aleppo. This time the infrastructure of the smugglers was destroyed near the village of Tarhin.

The situation in neighboring Iraq is also not stable. Just on January 9, 3 supply convoys of the US-led coalition became targets of IED attacks in the central and southern regions of the country. These attacks are a logical continuation of the ongoing standoff between the US-Israeli bloc and the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. Iranian-backed forces in Iraq conduct these attacks as a part of their campaign to force the US to withdraw its forces from the country.

While some expect that a Biden administration would be less interested in an increase of confrontation with Iran, there are no indications that the sides can fully settle their contradictions in any way in the nearest future. Therefore, the entire region will remain a battleground for the warring blocs.

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Biden’s Foreign Policy

GR Editor’s Note

With regard to the coverage of the Wednesday Capitol Event, Global Research will be publishing opposing and contradictory points of view by several of our authors.

We are dealing with a complex and far-reaching political process. We are at the crossroads of a major political, economic and social crisis which has bearing on the future of the United States. This crisis must be the object of debate and analysis rather than confrontation of opposing political narratives.

***

Welcome to the latest stage in the process of reaction that’s occurring within the U.S. ruling class amid Washington’s imperial decline. This is the stage where after Trump’s personality cult has escalated a petty political dispute into violence, the liberal technocrats who will soon have control over the White House are escalating their war against dissent.

As Biden’s team plans their waves of online censorship, surveillance under the “Great Reset” brand, and cold war escalations against Russia and China, they’re justifying this to the masses by pointing to the alarming events which Trump has stirred up.

They’re portraying a fortification of the liberal order as the only cure for the rise of white supremacist terrorism, deteriorations of “liberal” democratic integrity, public health crises, and economic shockwaves that the country has been experiencing. It’s an extension of the propaganda strategy that these liberal technocrats used during the era of “Russiagate” hysteria, which Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report described in 2018 as follows:

The ruling circles of the imperial superpower set out to destabilize and call into disrepute the sitting government of the home country. They have inflicted great trauma and anxiety among the public in the process, but thanks to the corporate media component of the cabal, most of the blame has accrued to the targets of the campaign: Trump, “the Russians” and those defamed as “dupes” and “co-conspirators” with the fictitious Putin-Trump axis. It is quite evident that this campaign of self-inflicted chaos is a project of the global corporate class, manifesting elsewhere in the “West” in remarkably similar fashion, but with local characteristics. Russia is, thus, charged with attempting to subvert governments around the world through minions like the St. Petersburg outfit.

Russiagate was the ideological predecessor to the Great Reset. Both propaganda campaigns are designed to take advantage of the symptoms of late-stage capitalism to prop up militaristic, McCarthyist, and American chauvinist mentalities. They’ve both pointed to the horrors that the country has been undergoing during the Trump era, and presented an embrace of the U.S. intelligence agencies, corporate and state-run media outlets, and war machine as the solution. They’ve both played on the widespread desire for our society to go “back to normal,” with an emphasis being put on the instruments for state violence that “normal” in the United States has always represented.

Russiagate provided the ideological base for the dystopian measures that Trump’s Democratic successor would impose. As Glenn Greenwald wrote two years ago in response to a poll which showed that more Democrats than Republicans supported continuing the wars in Syria:

“A new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, [are] being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience.” Now the intelligence actors, opportunistic politicians, and dishonest pundits who helped create this ideological base will enact their steps to “fix America.”

Biden will carry out a Patriot Act 2.0. Biden, who’s boasted about being the author of the 2001 Patriot Act, plans to enact new anti-terrorism measures, with his goal reportedly being to create a new White House post overseeing the prevention of ideological “extremists” from carrying out insurrectionary activity. Any honest assessment of the nature of the U.S. national security state, which jails black liberation fighters under the label of “black identity extremists,” tells us that this post will be used primarily for persecuting those fighting against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

Biden plans to use the precedent that the recent Assange ruling has set to further erode press freedom. The U.K. blocked Assange’s extradition because of concerns over prison safety instead of because of any concerns over press freedom, legitimizing all the fraudulent charges the U.S. empire has made against Assange.

Throughout all of the core imperialist countries, there’s now an opening to prosecute journalists under the Espionage Act, as the U.S. has been trying to do to Assange (and will remain determined to do). Biden’s team will see great use in this precedent, because it was established through the persecution of a man for his journalistic work to reveal U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

And Biden, along with his war-hungry future secretary of state Antony Blinken, aim to keep the war crimes that they plan to commit on the lowdown.

They hope they’ll manage to create the narrative that they’re “ending the endless wars,” even though they’ll simply be leaning more onto proxies, mercenaries, and secret troops while continuing the drone strikes. To do this, they’ll have to prevent leaks about the horrifying realities of what Washington will be carrying out abroad in these next several years. This entails getting Big Tech to crack down far more on anti-imperialist journalists. This entails expanding the Obama/Trump war on whistleblowers to a new dimension, one based in the unprecedented disregard for the rights of journalists that’s been established during Assange’s persecution.

It will also entail a paradigm of propaganda which makes all of this war and repression legitimate in the eyes of the public. The key to this will be to paint any source which reports on the Biden administration’s atrocities as a foreign agent, a “useful idiot” for Putin, or an “extremist” who wants to bring back the chaos which just unfolded at the national capitol. It’s the McCarthyist approach which was established during the Russiagate era. During the Great Reset era, it will be used to stoke suspicion about anyone who dares challenge the government’s noble efforts towards bringing our society back from the brink.

These are the kinds of narratives that will be put out by the governing clique of Richard Stengel, who’s branded himself as the Biden administration’s “chief propagandist” while directing the transition team for the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Stengel has advocated for the U.S. government to use propaganda on its “own population,” for the country to “rethink” the First Amendment, and warned that “The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us. And the Russians in particular are smart about this.”

Stengel’s self-described obsession in these last few years with fighting “Russian disinformation” shows the mindset that the ruling class has right now. Their fixation is on policing the minds of the masses so that during this moment of rising economic disruption, imperial decline, and class conflict, people won’t gain the anti-imperialist political consciousness to be able to coherently defy the system.

We’re still a ways away from the ultimate phase of censorship which U.S. military experts anticipate, wherein domestic warfare will break out and the government will shut down the internet in the zones the military occupies. But it’s alarming how much the language from today’s oligarchic censors and liberal technocrats mirrors the language from the military reports which predict these dystopian future scenarios; a U.S. Army War College report from 2016 concluded that during a situation of military intervention within the U.S. itself, the military will need to “identify online opinion-makers who could have a major impact in any controversy over US military intervention.”

At that point, the country’s descent into wartime censorship will have transitioned from Russiagate to the Great Reset to something even more extreme. Right now, the ruling class is trying to placate the suffering masses with war propaganda, and with promises of a post-pandemic techno-utopia. When the endless wars further destabilize society, and the utopia fails to materialize, capital will resort to waging open war against the population while using dictatorial censorship to try to cover up Washington’s future war crimes. Russiagate was a preparation for this endgame, as Ford indicated in another part of his article:

Capital is using Russiagate to inflict extreme shocks to the very political system they claim to be defending. The trauma is necessary, they believe, because capital has nothing to offer to the masses of people, and must therefore dramatically weaken or destroy the political mechanisms through which the people make demands on the rulers. They are preparing the landscape for a regime of permanent austerity and war, and plan to suppress all opposition on the Left.

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Featured image is from rainershea.com

GR Editor’s Note

With regard to the coverage of the Wednesday Capitol Event, Global Research will be publishing opposing and contradictory points of view by several of our authors.

We are dealing with a complex and far-reaching political process. We are at the crossroads of a major political, economic and social crisis which has bearing on the future of the United States. This crisis must be the object of debate and analysis rather than confrontation of opposing political narratives.

***

The opening salvo against red state America is the article of impeachment against President Trump introduced on January 11 by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrat Representatives David Cicilline, Ted Lieu, and Jamie Raskin.  So much for Biden’s promise to “unify the country.”  

What is the intent of this article of impeachment?  It cannot possibly be to remove Trump from office.  Trump will have left office before the Senate could vote on impeachment. There is no such thing as impeaching a person who is not in office. Clearly impeachment has nothing to do with getting Trump out of office.

How does it unify the country to follow up an election believed by half of the US voting population to have been stolen with impeaching the president who is regarded as the victim of a stolen election?

Adding insult to injury will only further enrage 75 million or more Trump voters,  and many honest Democrats, who regard the election as stolen. 

If the Establishment and its Democrat, Republican, and media allies truly believe the election not to have been stolen, why wasn’t the evidence permitted to be examined so that the controversy could be settled instead of ignored?  Ignoring the evidence deepens the suspicion as does labeling those who challenged the election “enemies of democracy.”  Democrats are now trying to censure Republican members of the House and Senate who supported having the evidence presented to Congress.  Why censure someone who wants evidence to be examined?

What many Americans and people abroad do not comprehend is that in the 2020 election Trump  officially got 74,222,958 votes.  This is the official number, which is understated by the 10 million vote suppression used against him.  In “losing,”  Trump’s 74,222,958 official votes are more votes than any elected president has ever received with the exception of Biden whose vote count was raised by 10 million fraudulent ballots. How is the country unified by demonizing half of it?  Are the Democrats’ threats and reprisals against Trump and his supporters unifying?  

I watched the presentations by independent experts to three state legislatures of the detailed evidence showing evidence that the election was stolen in the swing states. Some of the experts explaining the election’s theft were people of color as were many of those who signed affidavits under penalty of perjury of the electoral fraud that they witnessed.  This information has never been presened by the media to the public, nor has any media, election officials, Department of Justice, or Congress examined the evidence.  It is overwhelming evidence ignored.

Whether of not you believe that Biden—the most uninspiring presidential candidate in American history—got 81 million votes (the largest in American history), why do Pelosi and the Democrats want to make themselves even more hated and distrusted by half of the country by impeaching the president whose reelection they stole?  

This is rubbing salt in the wound.  Half of the country already regards Biden as an illegitimate president and regards the Democrats as power-mad totalitarians hostile to democracy.  What does Pelosi achieve by furthering this image of Democrats? She is damning her party and herself. Why?

The answer is to generate fear in Republicans and Trump supporters.  

The Democrats are using open unabashed retribution to scare Republicans and Trump supporters into compliance. Everywhere you look Republican members of Congress both House and Senate, Trump’s present and former cabinet members, and present and former members of the White House staff are denouncing Trump and putting distance between Trump and themselves. The latest is Fiona Hill, formerly of Trump’s National Security Council. She denounces Trump for having “put us on the brink of civil war.” Note that for Republican Fiona Hill, it is not a stolen election that puts “us on the brink of civil war,” but the protest against the election theft. This is the position of the Republican Party.  In other words, the Republicans have surrendered.  They are useless to the people.

As a large number of videos made available online by people who attended the rally show, the Capitol police allowed protestors into the Capitol.  The Trump supporters were not smart enough not to take the bait. Once inside, the Democrats had their “insurrection” and “storming of the Capitol.”  

It achieved its purpose. It stopped presentation of the evidence showing Congress a stolen election. Scared by the presstitutes one voice proclamation of an attempted coup, the Republicans wilted and ran for their political lives knowing that they would be blamed for “aiding and abetting Trump’s insurrection.” 

The Democrats intend to keep them running, and that is what the impeachment is about.

Trump supporters are in for it as well.  The FBI, which has been hand-in-hand with Democrats throughout the Russiagate and impeachment hoaxes, is now hunting down those who attended the Trump rally.  Those for whom the FBI cannot invent grounds for arrest have their names turned over to the presstitutes who agitate for their firing from their jobs. Already policemen, corporate employees and executives, including a chief financial officer, have been fired for attending the Trump rally, and recording artists dropped because they attended the rally. Dumbshit indoctrinated school children have impoverished their own families by ratting out their parents for attending the rally and causing them to be fired.

Children squealing on their parents to the media is the worst part of the Democrats’ assault on America, because it shows that the liberal propaganda that passes for education in the schools has destroyed solidarity and loyalty in the family.  Without the family, there is no society.  Essentially, without family there is no country.

In so many ways Americans are now people without a country. 

As the blatantly public theft of a presidential election shows, democracy is a dead value among elites and institutions in the United States.  The word will continue to be used as cover for oligarchic rule in the interest of the few. All who find the courage to challenge rule by the few will be demonized as “enemies of democracy.”  We are already seeing it.  President Trump and his “deplorables” are already declared “enemies of democracy.”

Whether or not Americans believe Trump and his supporters are enemies of democracy, many will be caused by fear to go along with it.  Otherwise, they will be the next to be outed, fired, and prosecuted.

I am not optimistic.  One reason for my lack of optimism is the age of disinformation in which we live. Disinformation is used by the Establishment to conform the public to its agendas. Disinformation is used to reconstruct white society. Disinformation is even used by Trump supporters in efforts to keep alive hope that the stolen election will be overturned or that Trump will win reelection in four years.

Another reason I am not optimistic is that I read comment sections of websites that host courageous and insightful commentators in hope of encountering intelligence and a rising awareness that could result in effective resistance.  But what do I find?  Inability to comprehend what they have read. Narcissists  hiding behind fake names. Nit-picking in place of weighing a well-stated presentation. And the ever-present trolls demeaning the authors with ad hominum accusations that are spread into social media.  

I am also not optimistic when I see that Trump, who has experienced the evil power of the Establishment, has not come to the realization that the last blow he can strike against the Establishment is the pardon of Assange and Snowden, two who are persecuted for telling the truth. Perhaps the reason is that many of Trump’s patriotic supporters have fallen for the Establishment’s line that Assange and Snowden are Russian agents who acted against America.

In the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and all of Western Europe, telling the truth is being criminalized.  The result will be the destruction of the truth-teller. This is true as well within the universities.  Identity politics and Establishment agendas rule.  If you cross them, you are out.

Objective truth has been redefined as a “white construct” that serves “systemic racism” and misogynists. White people, especially heterosexual white males, have been assigned the role that Karl Marx gave capitalists. They are hateful, exploitative creatures that must be destroyed by demonization and indoctrination. The process has been going on for some time in the schools and in work place “sensitivity training” sessions.

This is the ideology of the Democrat Party. Imposed ideologies wear down facts. 

As the Native American tells the elderly woman in the Clint Eastwood film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, “Hell is coming to breakfast.” White people can expect hell.  To see this, all you have to do is to look at Biden’s Department of Justice appointments.

Americans are only now beginning to realize that the expensive educations they have paid for their children have resulted in their children being stolen from them. A friend told me recently that his son and son’s girlfriend had left their brutally lockdowned Democrat state to come to him in a Republican state where life still went on not too far from normal.  Having heard their conversations with him and among themselves, he has concluded that they regret that they were born white.  

To his dismay, he understands that their regret at having white skin is not because of employment and promotion quotas that limit their success as white people, or the demeaning racial training sessions they have to endue as “systemic white racists.” Their regret is due to their successful indoctrination that, as white racists, they are responsible for the lack of success of black Americans.  Perplexed, he asked me, “how can we resist the tyranny that is being imposed on us when the younger generation believes we are quilty and cannot be trusted with our freedoms.

Yes, good question.  How?

Note that the outpouring of support for Trump in the Washington Rally, which Democrats easily turned into a liability for Trump, consists largely of older adults.  Where were the young people?  They stayed home and ratted out their parents.

America’s young were not born into a free society. They have never experienced a free society. They are not socialized into a free society. They have no idea what one is beyond access to the Internet. 

It was two decades ago that the Bush regime orchestrated  the PATRIOT Act.  It was two decades ago that the Republican President of the United States threw habeas corpus out the window and claimed executive authority to detain American citizens indefinitely without presenting evidence before a court.  No bar association, no university law faculty, no court, no Congress, and certainly no presstitute media demanded Bush’s impeachment for unilaterally exercising unconstitutional executive authority.

During the subsequent Obama regime, America’s First Black President, who got less votes than Trump did in 2020, executed American citizens without due process of law.  No one demanded Obama’s impeachment for his unconstitutional and illegal murder of American citizens.

If cancelling the Bill of Rights isn’t insurrection, what is?

In contrast, President Trump who challenged the media monopoly for its censorship, who challenged the military/security complex for its orchestration of Russia as an enemy, who challenged various “trade agreements” for sending Americans’ middle class jobs abroad—in other words, a rare president who represented the American people—this President was destroyed by the Establishment and its media and intellectual whores.

The  corrupt and evil Establishment, acting through the Democrat Party with the backing of the monopoly over all communications and the monetary and power interests of the military/security complex and Wall Street, and strengthened by the Identity Politics hatreds, which extend into the universities, public schools, bar associations, corporations, and judiciary, and the indoctrination seminars that white males are forced to undergo, has achieved more power than Stalin and Hitler could imagine.  

Today the United States is not only a threat to its citizens but also a threat to the world.  The American Establishment’s belief in its hegemony makes the United States  the greatest threat that the world has ever experienced.  

The forces in control of the United States deny the existence of objective truth. As the Establishment defines truth, truth is what serves the agendas of the ruling elite.  

There is no other truth.  

Among other terrors, this means that an accused person can mount no defense.  As the trial of the surviving brother of the alleged Boston Marathon Bombing demonstrated, the proof of his innocence according to the FBI’s own evidence was not allowed to be introduced into the trial, only the fabricated “evidence” of his guilt.  When this happened, it was clear that the United States government regarded the rule of law as dispensable whenever it interferred with its agenda.

As journalist Ekaterina Blinova instantly recognized, the effect of the stolen election is to create one-party rule in the United States. Of course, the Democrats won’t rule. Rule will be by the interest groups for whom the Democrats will front. As the Republcans abandoned the American people and joined in the denunciation of the “insurrectionist Trump,” there are few voters left who will vote Republican. By its cowardice, the Republican Party has destroyed itself.

What can be done.  I am open to answers.  If you think about it, you wonder if Americans have the intelligence and awareness to survive.  Consider Parler, a social media alternative that does not censor.  Why did Parler think it could be independent when it was dependent on Apple, Amazon, and Google?  It must be a new high water mark of American insouciance that Parler executives thought the ruling Establishment would allow them free speech. See this.

America is in collapse on all fronts—morally, economically, socially, politically, and militarily.  Every American institution is corrupted. America’s collapse will be a large collapse, and it will affect the entire world.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.