Global Research

The following are excerpts of an important article published by the British Medical Journal. The author Dr Peter Doshi is associate editor of The BMJ.

To read the complete BMJ article click here

In the United States, all eyes are on Pfizer and Moderna. The topline efficacy results from their experimental covid-19 vaccine trials are astounding at first glance. Pfizer says it recorded 170 covid-19 cases (in 44,000 volunteers), with a remarkable split: 162 in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group. Meanwhile Moderna says 95 of 30,000 volunteers in its ongoing trial got covid-19: 90 on placebo versus 5 receiving the vaccine, leading both companies to claim around 95% efficacy.

Let’s put this in perspective.

First, a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%.

Second, these results refer to the trials’ primary endpoint of covid-19 of essentially any severity, and importantly not the vaccine’s ability to save lives, nor the ability to prevent infection, nor the efficacy in important subgroups (e.g. frail elderly). Those still remain unknown.

Third, these results reflect a time point relatively soon after vaccination, and we know nothing about vaccine performance at 3, 6, or 12 months, so cannot compare these efficacy numbers against other vaccines like influenza vaccines (which are judged over a season).

Fourth, children, adolescents, and immunocompromised individuals were largely excluded from the trials, so we still lack any data on these important populations.

I previously argued that the trials are studying the wrong endpoint, and for an urgent need to correct course and study more important endpoints like prevention of severe disease and transmission in high risk people. Yet, despite the existence of regulatory mechanisms for ensuring vaccine access while keeping the authorization bar high (which would allow placebo-controlled trials to continue long enough to answer the important question), it’s hard to avoid the impression that sponsors are claiming victory and wrapping up their trials (Pfizer has already sent trial participants a letter discussing “crossing over” from placebo to vaccine), and the FDA will now be under enormous pressure to rapidly authorize the vaccines.

But as conversation shifts to vaccine distribution, let’s not lose sight of the evidence. Independent scrutiny of the underlying trial data will increase trust and credibility of the results. There also might be important limitations to the trial findings we need to be aware of.

Most crucially, we need data-driven assurances that the studies were not inadvertently unblinded, by which I mean investigators or volunteers could make reasonable guesses as to which group they were in.

Blinding is most important when measuring subjective endpoints like symptomatic covid-19, and differences in post-injection side-effects between vaccine and placebo might have allowed for educated guessing. Past placebo-controlled trials of influenza vaccine were not able to fully maintain blinding of vaccine status, and the recent “half dose” mishap in the Oxford covid-19 vaccine trial was apparently only noticed because of milder-than-expected side-effects. (And that is just one of many concerns with the Oxford trial.)

…

Neither Moderna nor Pfizer have released any samples of written materials provided to patients, so it is unclear what, if any, instructions patients were given regarding the use of medicines to treat side effects following vaccination, but the informed consent form for Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine trial provides such a recommendation:

“Following administration of Ad26.COV2.S, fever, muscle aches and headache appear to be more common in younger adults and can be severe. For this reason, we recommend you take a fever reducer or pain reliever if symptoms appear after receiving the vaccination, or upon your study doctor’s recommendation.”

There may be much more complexity to the “95% effective” announcement than meets the eye—or perhaps not. Only full transparency and rigorous scrutiny of the data will allow for informed decision making. The data must be made public.

To read the complete BMJ article click here

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Peter Doshi is associate editor of The BMJ.

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Was liegt näher, als sich an den Weisheiten großer europäischer Dichter und Denker wie Goethe, Schiller, Rolland oder Camus zu erfreuen und Kraft daraus zu schöpfen. Sind wir nicht alle – jeder einzelne! – dringend gefordert, uns nicht weiter zu blinden Dienern korrupter Regierungen im Sold einer verbrecherischen Milliardärs-Clique zu erniedrigen, sondern unserem persönlichen Gewissen zu folgen, unser Recht auf individuellen und kollektiven Widerstand wahrzunehmen und gegen sie aufzustehen? Dieser Akt der Empörung schließt – oft abgesondert von der trägen Herde – zivilen Ungehorsam und weitere gewaltfreie individuelle und gemeinschaftliche Handlungen mit ein. Der Mensch kommt dabei zu sich selbst. Romain Rolland warnte in einer ähnlich finsteren Zeit wie der heutigen in seinem Antikriegs-Roman „Clerambeault“ vor der Gefahr des Versinkens der Einzelseele im Abgrund der Massenseele. (1) Freie Seelen und starke Charaktere müssten verblendeten Regierungen und deren Strippenziehern im Hintergrund Schach bieten – aus Liebe zur Menschheit.

Der Worte sind genug gewechselt, …

In dem Goethes „Faust“ entliehenen Zitat-Fragment „Der Worte sind genug gewechselt,…“ wird dazu aufgerufen, den Worten auch Taten folgen zu lassen. Viele unerschrockene Aufklärer in den alternativen sozialen Medien haben uns ja unermüdlich darüber informiert,

• dass wir den Mut haben sollten, uns unseres eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen,
• dass man keinem Politiker die Macht übergeben dürfte,
• dass die geplante und in Teilen bereits umgesetzte „Neue Weltordnung“ der sogenannten Elite ein „Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit“ darstellt, das sie eines Tages vor einem neuen „Nürnberger Prozess“ zu verantworten hat,
• dass die Aufforderung zur sozialen Distanzierung und der Maulkorb-Zwang ebenfalls verborgene Ziele verfolgt,
• dass das Schüren irrationaler Ängste (wie zum Beispiel vor dem Tod durch einen Virus) ein bewährtes Disziplinierungs- und Herrschaftsmittel Regierender ist,
• dass die gleichgeschalteten und konzernabhängigen Lügen-Medien („Journaille“) dabei eine erbärmliche und unheilvolle Rolle spielen,
• dass man den unwillkürlichen Reflex des absoluten geistigen Gehorsams aufgeben kann und
• dass man sich durch das Auflehnen gegen die illegal verordneten Einschränkungen der persönlichen Freiheiten wieder als Mensch fühlt.

… lasst mich auch endlich Taten sehn!

Warum sollte es nicht auch den Bürgern unserer Generation gelingen, was jungen und älteren Männern und Frauen des deutschen Widerstands drei Generationen früher gelang: Aufstehen gegen schreiendes Unrecht und Gesetzlosigkeit. Nein, eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht! (Schiller) Und die Kraft dafür kommt nicht aus körperlichen Fähigkeiten; sie entspringt einem unbeugsamen Willen. (Gandhi). Nicht an der Menschheit verzweifeln! Der Mensch ist gut. Das Böse wird nicht siegen!

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Erziehungswissenschaftler und Diplom-Psychologe.

Noten

[1] Reinbeck bei Hamburg (1988). Aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Stefan Zweig. Ersterscheinung 1920 im Pariser Verlag Ollendorff. Ursprünglicher Titel „Einer gegen alle“ (1917)

La portaerei Cavour, dopo essere stata ristrutturata nell’Arsenale militare di Taranto per imbarcare i caccia F-35B a decollo corto e atterraggio verticale, sta per salpare verso gli Stati uniti.

Lo ha annunciato l’attaché navale presso l’Ambasciata italiana a Washington, precisando che dalla metà di febbraio la portaerei sarà dispiegata nella base a Norfolk, in Virginia, per ottenere la qualifica che le permetterà di partecipare a «operazioni congiunte» con la Marina e il Corpo dei marines degli Stati uniti.

Si prepara così la partecipazione della nave ammiraglia della Marina italiana a missioni Nato sotto comando Usa in distanti teatri bellici.

Tutto ciò costa, sia in termini politici legando sempre più l’Italia alla strategia di guerra Usa/Nato, sia in termini economici.

La portaerei Cavour è costata 1,3 miliardi di euro; i 15 F-35B per la Marina costano 1,7 miliardi. Si aggiungono le spese operative: un giorno di navigazione della Cavour costa oltre 200 mila euro e un’ora di volo di un F-35 oltre 40 mila euro. Gli altri 15 F-35B acquistati dall’Italia vanno all’Aeronautica, insieme a 60 F-35A a capacità nucleare.

La portaerei Cavour © Marina Militare

C’è però un problema: nel 2019 è stata varata un’altra portaerei, la Trieste, che dovrà imbarcare un numero di caccia F-35B maggiore di quello della Cavour: essi dovranno essere acquistati con un costo complessivo ancora più alto.

Per dotarsi di questi e altri armamenti, l’Italia deve accrescere la spesa militare: i 26 miliardi di euro annui non bastano più, occorre passare ad almeno 36 miliardi annui come stabilito dalla Nato e ribadito dal neopresidente democratico Joe Biden.

Ma dove trovare i soldi in una situazione di crisi come quella attuale?

Ed ecco l’idea geniale, partorita dal Center for American Progress, uno dei più influenti think tank di Washington legato al Partito democratico: la Nato crei una propria banca per risolvere il «gap finanziario». In altre parole, una volta istituita la banca, i paesi dell’Alleanza che non hanno i fondi per accrescere la spesa militare al livello richiesto, li possono ricevere in prestito dalla stessa Nato attraverso la nuova istituzione finanziaria.

Nessun problema, quindi, per l’Italia: se non ha i 10 miliardi di euro da aggiungere ogni anno alla propria spesa militare, glieli presta la Banca Nato a un non precisato tasso di interesse.

L’Italia, però, accumulerebbe in tal modo un nuovo, crescente debito estero con un organismo controllato dagli Stati uniti, che detengono il comando della Nato.

Nel presentare il progetto, il think tank sottolinea che immediatamente «l’amministrazione Biden dovrà ripristinare l’impegno dell’America nei confronti della Nato e spingere l’Alleanza a rafforzarsi», in primo luogo per «difendere l’Europa dalla aggressione russa».

Da qui la necessità che «la Nato istituisca una propria banca per investire in capacità militari fondamentali».

Tra queste sicuramente gli F-35 della statunitense Lockheed Martin che, con gli altri colossi dell’industria bellica, sarebbe la principale beneficiaria della Banca Nato: ad esempio sarebbe la banca a finanziare l’acquisto di altri F-35B per la Marina italiana, pagando alla Lockheed Martin miliardi di dollari, che noi italiani dovremmo rimborsare con gli interessi sempre con denaro pubblico.

Oltre a questa, vi sono altre funzioni che la Banca Nato dovrebbe svolgere. «Investire in infrastrutture a duplice uso»: ponti che permettano in Europa il transito anche di pesanti mezzi corazzati da Ovest ad Est e reti 5G per uso anche militare. Fornire a paesi e regioni «una alternativa rispetto a quella di rivolgersi a banche di rivali della Nato, come Cina e Russia».

La Banca Nato avrebbe, in generale, la funzione di «accrescere la capacità dell’Alleanza di affrontare le sfide finanziarie del conflitto», poiché «qualsiasi significativo sforzo militare dipende dalla capacità economica e finanziaria».

Chiaro è il messaggio agli alleati europei: «Il finanziamento dell’Alleanza non può essere solo responsabilità americana, deve essere una responsabilità condivisa».

Questo, nelle linee essenziali, è il progetto della Banca Nato che, prima di essere presentato dal think tank di Washington, è stato vagliato da politici che andranno a ricoprire importanti incarichi nell’amministrazione Biden.

Manlio Dinucci

Russian anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny inexplicably decided to return to the same country that he claimed had unsuccessfully tried to kill him, curiously timing his trip to coincide with the immediate run-up to Biden’s inauguration in what some suspect is nothing more than a Hybrid War provocation to establish the “publicly plausible” pretext for the incoming president to intensify his country’s anti-Russian crusade following Navalny’s detainment in response to his probation violations.

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“In war, truth is the first casualty” (Aeschylus(1))

A Very Brief History of War Propaganda

Propaganda as a science really got under way during World War 1 (WW1). The British and the German governments both brainwashed their populations into believing that the other country was a demonic enemy that had to be defeated. The famous writer, Aldous Huxley, once wrote that: 

“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human”(2)

The war itself, and the propaganda that helped to create the war, has been described as an:

“extraordinary state accomplishment – mass enthusiasm at the prospect of a global brawl that otherwise would mystify those very masses, and that shattered most of those who actually took part in it.”(3)

Students of propaganda are usually aware that Germany’s propaganda minister in the 1930s and 40s, Goebbels, had a large propaganda library. He was very interested in the scientific approach to propaganda and he followed the research of early propaganda pioneers.

He used this to minimise criticism of German policy, whilst at the same time he carried out a campaign against the Jews which led to millions of them being killed.(4) However, propaganda by Britain and the US relating to these wars is discussed much less. We are encouraged to think that during WW1 and WW2, the British and US were ‘the good guys’, but this is an example of propaganda through re-writing history. In 1914 (beginning of WW1) and also in 1939 (beginning of WW2) Britain was the dominant imperial power in the world, and the US and France had their own colonial territories. This involved many invasions and occupations, and a great deal of mass murder, torture and rape. Germany wanted its own Empire, so both wars (sometimes described as a single war divided into 2 parts) were fights for imperial supremacy. None of these nations deserve the label ‘the good guys’ in either world war. They were all run by insane leaders who were prepared to slaughter millions of people for their own ends.(5)

There is further evidence of US and British criminality in those periods. In 1917, the Russian people overthrew their rulers (known as the Tsars) and withdrew from World War 1. Britain and the US then invaded Russia, in 1918, to (unsuccessfully) try to overthrow the new government. Similarly, after WW2, many Greek people wanted to govern themselves, but Britain and the US invaded Greece to (successfully) get the pre-war dictators back into power.(6) The Russians in WW1 and the Greeks in WW2 had initially fought on the same side as the US and Britain. The idea that Britain and the US were not the ‘good guys’ during that period is almost unmentionable in polite US and British society, and is almost never mentioned in the mainstream press.

Don’t Show The Reality of War – Censorship by Omission 

The most effective propaganda technique of all is to block discussion so thoroughly that almost no-one realises that there is an important topic not being talked-about. When the US invaded Panama in 1989, they finished the fighting before any reporters were even aware that there was an invasion taking place. When Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006, the US army fought, in secret, alongside the Ethiopians, so there was no discussion of it in the US or British press. Proxy warfare, where the US and Britain supply weapons to someone else, such as Saudi Arabia, to do the fighting allows the US and Britain to minimise scrutiny, and avoid challenges to the legality of their actions.

There are two other issues where the most effective propaganda is not talking about something. The first of these is not showing what war is really like for the people on the receiving end of British and US bombs. Bodies of men, women and children everywhere; people maimed or disabled for life; the ruined lives of people who have lost mothers, fathers, children or other relatives; the destruction of whole cities and, ultimately, whole nations.

The second is not engaging with the act of going to war as a monstrous crime. Where war crimes are discussed, the focus is on individual actions within war. There will occasionally be a discussion in the mainstream press about whether a war is illegal. But these discussions are often quite technical and use legal terminology, giving the impression that it’s a finely balanced debate, with strong arguments to say the war is legal. This is propaganda. Destroying a nation, or invading a country to overthrow the government, is never legal. It is the crime of aggressive war – one of the worst crimes that any group of people can commit.(7)

Similarly, there are other aspects of war that are rarely discussed by the press. There is an ongoing attempt to block proper investigation into the effects of depleted uranium (DU) used in modern ammunition. Thousands of tons have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of babies born with birth defects in these regions has increased significantly. The Italian government has announced that some of its soldiers have died from DU poisoning. Belgium has now banned DU weapons but so far the US and British governments have successfully avoided a proper investigation, despite the fact that some US Gulf war veterans are now disabled due to DU.(8) There is virtually no mention of this issue in the US and British media, and therefore no widespread public pressure to do anything about it.

Lie About Our Weapons and Death Tolls 

The videos we see during wartime of smart bombs precisely hitting their targets are another form of propaganda. They give us the impression that weapons are accurate and that civilians will be relatively unscathed. The government would like us to believe that more accurate weapons lead to fewer civilian casualties, but this is a myth. In order to minimise US casualties, their strategy is to use enormously destructive air power from long range, with an approach that has been described as “shoot first, ask questions later.”(9) They deliberately attack weddings and funerals. In practice, civilians are being slaughtered in huge numbers. The expression ‘collateral damage’ is also an example of propaganda. It is intended to give the impression that civilian deaths are accidental, when in fact US strategy guarantees that most deaths will be civilian. To confuse people over the scale of civilian deaths, the US now label every military-age man in a warzone as a combatant or a terrorist.(10)

Leaders repeatedly lie about the scale of casualties, although for changing reasons. Historically, they would exaggerate the number of enemy deaths to improve morale among their own soldiers and their civilian population. These days they understate the number of dead civilians in order to minimise objections to war. During discussions relating to casualty figures in Vietnam, a foreign office representative explained that it was important for every spokesperson to keep “stonewalling” so no one knew the true figures, which were in the millions.(11)

There has been a great deal of propaganda about the number of people killed in Iraq. A 2006 report in the medical journal, The Lancet, using the best research methods available, suggested that the number of deaths in Iraq was over 600,000. The best estimate of deaths by 2007 was over a million.(12) US and British politicians regularly appeared in the media trying to persuade the public that the true figure was much lower, but leaked reports show that their own experts believed the figures to be correct.(13) In 2007, Americans were asked their estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq. The average answer was under 10,000, a tiny fraction of the true figure.(14) Clearly, government and media propaganda is highly effective at making sure that ordinary people have little understanding of the true consequences of war. It was noted that the official figures were clearly absurd. If they had been correct then the death rate in the middle of a war zone would have been only half the death rate in US cities such as Detroit or Baltimore. In 2014 the US air force increased the scale of their bombing in Iraq and Syria, reducing some cities, such as Mosul, to ruins. The current death toll in Iraq is likely to be over 2 million,(15) but this figure is rarely mentioned in the mainstream.

The US Lies About Every War 

In many of the earlier posts we have seen examples of recent war propaganda. The use of exaggerated threats such as communism, terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating atrocities to justify war. A detailed study of 25 US wars, from 1945 onwards, was carried out in 1992. The conclusion was that the US government lied about all of them.(16) The US military provides an endless stream of retired officers and specialists to fill airtime on TV channels whenever the US government wants to promote its wars. They are vetted beforehand to ensure that they will say the right things.

If the US decides to overthrow the leadership of another country, then almost everything that we hear in the mainstream news about that country contains elements of propaganda. A good example is the phrase ‘axis of evil’ that President Bush used in 2002 to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea. There is nothing particularly ‘evil’ about these countries or their leaders. Their human rights records were no worse than many of the US’s allies, and they posed no military threat to the US or Britain. Presenting the enemy as evil is an extremely powerful form of propaganda.

Smearing Whistleblowers 

Propaganda is also used when whistleblowers and journalists expose war crimes. A standard technique is to deflect attention elsewhere by smearing the journalist or the whistleblower. They will say that the journalist has caused harm to others. No evidence will be presented. The immense harm caused by the war crimes is ignored. This was one of the techniques used to discredit Julian Assange and Wikileaks. The US government eventually admitted in court that they had no evidence of anyone ever being killed due to Wikileaks’ releases about US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where it is impossible to deny wrongdoing, the attention will be focused on lower-ranking individuals, so that the senior people who determine policy again escape scrutiny. This was the case with the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a small number of low-ranking soldiers were prosecuted, even though evidence emerged that the torture was US government policy.(17) Journalists have exposed serious crimes by US, British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. No senior people have been prosecuted, but whistleblowers have been prosecuted and imprisoned, and some journalists have been arrested.(18)

The Basic Principles of War Propaganda 

Having already written many of these posts on propaganda, I came across the writing of Anne Morelli, who wrote a book called “The basic Principles of War Propaganda” in 2001.(19) It has not been fully translated into English, but the ideas have been discussed. Morelli studied propaganda throughout the last century by all sides and came up with a summary that is described as the 10 principles of war propaganda:

1) We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves

2) Our adversary is solely responsible for this war

3) Our adversary’s leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil

4) We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests

5) The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention

6) The enemy makes use of illegal weapons

7) We suffer few losses, the enemies losses are considerable

8) Recognised intellectuals and artists support our cause

9) Our cause is sacred

10) Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor

It is remarkable how consistently these principles have been used to justify recent US and British wars. The leaders of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, (Hussein, Gadaffi, and Assad) were all portrayed as evil. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were portrayed as evil. We were repeatedly told that they were committing atrocities or using illegal weapons, even whilst our governments and militaries were slaughtering millions of people and destroying whole nations. Critics of these wars have been demonized, particularly in relation to Syria. Whilst not every one of these principles applies to every US and British invasion, it provides a good framework for understanding how war propaganda works.

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

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

Notes

1) Quote is usually attributed to Aeschylus, a Greek dramatist (525 – 456BC), but the dictionary of modern proverbs indicates that this attribution was not used before the 1980s, so the source is contested.

2) Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree, 1937

3) Mark Crispin Miller, Introduction to Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 2004, p.11 (originally published in 1928)

4) Stauber and Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, 1995, p.24 

5) Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The beginnings of World War II, the end of civilization, 2008

6) Ian Sinclair, ‘Retrieved from the memory hole: British intervention in Greece in the 1940s’, openDemocracy, 19 June 2017, at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/retrieved-from-memory-hole-british-intervention-in-greece-in-1940s/

7) The closest we might have come to a situation where an invasion was justified would be when the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia to overthrow the Genocidal dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in January 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide

8) Christian Fraser, ‘Uranium ‘killing Italian Troops’’, BBC News, 10 Jan 2007, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6247401.stm

Willem Van den Panhuysen, ‘Belgium Bans Uranium Weapons and Armour’, Global Research, 23 March 2007, at https://www.globalresearch.ca/belgium-bans-uranium-weapons-and-armour/5167

Project Censored, ‘US/British Forces Continue Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Despite Massive evidence of Negative Health Effects’, 2004 (updated 29 April 2010), at https://www.projectcensored.org/8-us-british-forces-continue-use-of-depleted-uranium-weapons-despite-negati/?doing_wp_cron=1591940256.1105339527130126953125

For more on depleted uranium, see International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW), at https://www.icbuw.eu/en/

9) https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf

10) Conor Friedersdorf, ‘Under Obama, men killed by drones are presumed to be terrorists’, The Atlantic, 29 May 2012, at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-obama-men-killed-by-drones-are-presumed-to-be-terrorists/257749/

11) Mark Curtis, Unpeople, 2004, p.237 

12) Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S.Davies, ‘The staggering death toll in Iraq’, Salon, 19 Mar 2018, at https://www.salon.com/2018/03/19/the-staggering-death-toll-in-iraq_partner/

13) Owen Bennett-Jones, ‘Iraq death survey was robust’, BBC World Service, 26 March 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm

14) Nancy Benac, cited in PSR, ‘Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 years of the “War on Terror”’, Physicians for Social Responsibility, March 2015, at https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf

15) Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S.Davies, ‘The staggering death toll in Iraq’, Salon, 19 March 2018, at https://www.salon.com/2018/03/19/the-staggering-death-toll-in-iraq_partner/ 

16) John Quigley, The Ruses for War, 1992 

17) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

18) Nicky Hager, Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror, 2011 

19) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Principles_of_War_Propaganda

US President Donald Trump can be considered guilty of many things, but he can’t be considered guilty of not attempting to preserve the fruits of his labor.

This can be seen in the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, his endless antagonism directed against China, the unstoppable crusade against the Nord Stream 2, and most recently, and one would say most notably – the premier product of his presidency: the US Space Force.

It is no secret that under the guidance of Trump and Co., the United States has advanced rapidly in terms of space exploration (move aside Elon Musk), and especially militarily.

The largest leap so far, is an Executive Presidential Order on promoting small modular nuclear reactors for Space Exploration (and National Defense). After all, the US was the first country to develop nuclear energy and use it, back in 1951 in Arco, Idaho.

Because the US Space Force plans to not only go to Space, but also reach the far reaches of the cosmos (possibly together with the “Galactic Federation”). It needs better energy, since solar power can’t always be used (you could go too far from the Sun, and who knows if other stars work in the same way, surely Trump doesn’t).

Nuclear reactors of up to 100 kilowatts may be needed to support human habitats, ISRU, other facilities, and rovers on both on the Moon and on Mars.

After all, just over a year ago the US Space Force got its first recruits, now called Guardians, and they’ve not even faced a lawsuit from ViacomCBS for ripping off the Star Trek logo, and from Disney for simply copying the name of the “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

These are only some of the successes – they also got their first deployment; it should be mentioned that it was off US soil – to Qatar, which is in the Middle East, not in Space. But why should that be a deterrent to Trump and his Space Force’s enthusiasm?

There’s really nothing new in space, and the race to get the upper hand in it. It’s been going on for years, and neither Neil Armstrong nor Yuri Gagarin put a pin in it.

In terms of militarization there have been concerns for a while, and all the leading powers have expressed their worries and have accused each other, more than once. The end of those empty accusations has come, however, and if nothing else, the US Space Force has lifted the arms race above the atmosphere.

It is unknown if Joe Biden and his administration will continue developing the Space Force and continue Trump’s legacy. Even if it does, it’s a significant question how it will do so.

Until then, however, other Middle Eastern countries (and potentially outer space at some point) should get ready, because Trump’s Space Force is coming to shake things up!

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Norway upped the number of deaths under investigation, from 23 last week to 33, while in Germany, health officials said they are investigating 10 deaths that occurred among elderly patients who received the COVID vaccine.

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China health experts say Norway and other countries should suspend the use of mRNA vaccines like those produced by Pfizer and Moderna, especially among the elderly, according to Global Times.

Norway health officials said last week they were investigating the deaths of 23 elderly people who died shortly after receiving the vaccine, and had confirmed 13 of those were directly related to the vaccine.

Today, Bloomberg reported that the number of deaths under investigation in Norway had risen to 33 and that all had occurred in people ranging from age 75 to 80. According to Bloomberg, Camilla Stoltenberg, head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, said at a press conference today:

“It is important to remember that about 45 people die every day in nursing homes in Norway, so it is not a given that this represents any excess mortality or that there is a causal connection.”

The Norwegian Medicines Agency previously told Bloomberg that all of the deaths occurred in people who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which until Friday was the only COVID vaccine approved for use in Norway.

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health, which had originally prioritized the elderly for the vaccine, has since revised its advice to urge more caution when vaccinating the elderly, especially those with underlying conditions.

The institute told Bloomberg that “for those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences. For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.”

The Institute also admitted to Global Times that the clinical trials that resulted in emergency approval of the vaccine included “very few people over the age of 85,” but added “we assume that the side effects will largely be the same in the elderly as in those over 65 years of age.”

According to the Global Times, a Beijing-based immunologist who requested anonymity said the mRNA vaccines had not proven safe for large-scale use or for preventing infectious diseases. Noting that people over 80 have weaker immune systems, he said they should not receive the vaccine, but instead should take medicines to improve their immune systems.

Meanwhile, The BMJ and other news outlets reported last week that in Germany, the Paul Ehrlich Institute is investigating 10 deaths in people ranging in age from 79 to 93 who died shortly after receiving the COVID vaccine.

U.S. health officials continue to push COVID vaccinations in nursing homes, despite growing resistance among nursing home employees to take the vaccine.

So far, there’s no word of any investigation into the deaths of 29 elderly people at a nursing home in New York. According to a Jan. 9 news report from Syracuse.com, a single nursing home in upstate New York vaccinated 193 residents beginning on Dec. 22 and subsequently reported 24 deaths within the span of a couple of weeks.

The facility attributed the deaths to a COVID-19 “outbreak,” even though there had been no COVID-19 deaths in any nursing homes in the entire county “until the first three deaths … were reported Dec. 29.”

Florida health officials and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating the death of a 56-year-old doctor who died of a rare autoimmune disease 15 days after getting the Pfizer vaccine. A Johns Hopkins scientist told the New York Times it was a “medical certainty” that the death was related to Pfizer’s vaccine.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating numerous severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, in healthcare workers who received the vaccine.

Sunday night, California health officials called for a pause on the use of a huge batch of Moderna’s COVID vaccine due to its ”higher-than-usual number of possible allergic reactions.” As The Defender reported this morning, California’s top epidemiologist Dr. Erica S. Pan is recommending providers pause the administration of lot ‘041L20A’ of the Moderna COVID vaccine.

According to the latest figures, updated Jan. 7, from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 66 deaths have been reported in the U.S. as being possibly related to a COVID vaccine. It’s estimated that only 1% of vaccine injuries are reported to VAERS.

Anyone who suspects an injury or death related to the COVID vaccine, or any vaccine, can go to the VAERS website and file a report.

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New allegations have surfaced, accusing Syrian President Assad of some connection to the Beirut Port blast.  Allegations don’t need proof, and they are a tool used repeatedly by the US against nations and leaders who they deem as an enemy.

Lebanese officials had for years known the dangerous chemicals were improperly stored at the port.  No one took any action to ensure the safety and security of the residents of the area.  It was hinted that Hezbollah must be to blame, but it was later proven that Hezbollah had no control over the Port and its contents.

Faysal Itani, a political analyst and deputy director of the Center for Global Policy at Georgetown University wrote that the Port, like other aspects of Lebanese society, suffered from a “pervasive culture of negligence, petty corruption and blame-shifting.”

Now, they must find a scapegoat. Almost three months ago, Walid Jumblatt began unsubstantiated accusations against President Assad, accusing him of having a hand in the Beirut Port blast. Recently, a Lebanese filmmaker aired a segment on a Beirut TV channel, Al Jadeed, in which he makes some connections to Syrian-Russian businessmen. These men vigorously deny any connection to the blast.

Lebanon may become a failed state in terms of the government, banking, economy, electricity, medical care, and security.  President Macron of France has tried to help, but the Lebanese officials refuse to comply with common-sense measures.

The Beirut Port blast highlighted in deadly terms the depths of the failure of the administration. Now, a filmmaker and a corrupt politician are trying to blame President Assad. This would not be the first time the Assad government has been blamed without proof.

Rafik Hariri’s assassination

Rumors and unsubstantiated accusations were hurled at President Assad and his government after the death of Rafik Hariri’s death.

Rafik Hariri, a dual Lebanese-Saudi citizen, was a billionaire businessman who served as prime minister of Lebanon five times, with his last term in office in 2004, after which he aligned himself with the opposition in parliament and was a symbol of Saudi influence after the end of the Lebanese civil war.

On February 14, 2005, Hariri got into his car and after his motorcade passed along the seafront corniche, a truck bomb tore through his vehicle, leaving a massive crater and ripping the facades of the surrounding buildings.

In August 2005, four Lebanese generals were arrested at the request of the UN investigator but were released nearly four years later without charge.

Hariri’s son, Saad, led a coalition of anti-Syrian parties known as March 14, which was backed by the US and Saudi Arabia.

Saad Hariri, who had blamed Syria for his father’s death, retracted his accusation against Damascus in 2010.

On August 18, 2020, an UN-backed court found a member of the militant group Hezbollah guilty of involvement in the assassination of Hariri. Judges at the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon said Salim Ayyash had a central role in the bomb attack in Beirut in 2005 that killed Hariri.

They acquitted three other defendants, who like Ayyash were tried in absentia. The prosecution’s case relied on the analysis of calls between mobile phones that it said were used to plan, prepare, and execute the attack. One of the judges, David Re, said the court had found motive but not evidence.

Hezbollah denied any involvement, and the judges said no evidence implicated the Shia militant group’s leaders.

Saad Hariri told reporters outside the court: “I think today everybody’s expectation was much higher than what came out, but I believe the tribunal came out with a verdict that is satisfying and we accept it.”

Chemical use

President Obama, the architect of the US-NATO attack on Syria for ‘regime change’ made a famous speech in which he said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a ‘red line’.  In mid-March 2013 the ‘rebels’ in Syria attacked Khan al-Assal, a small town near Aleppo, and killed about 30 people, and injured others. The Syrian government began requesting the UN to send investigators, but the UN did not quickly respond. The UN was standing politically with the US, UK, France, and trying to pin the blame on Syria.

Carla Del-Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general, and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal said in May 2013, “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” suggesting the ‘rebels’ have used the nerve agent, sarin.

On August 18, 2013, a UN team of investigators arrived in Damascus, with Chemical weapons expert Ake Sellstrom in the lead. Before they could visit Khan al-Assal, the ‘rebels’ attacked East Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus on August 21, and uploaded videos that went viral on news media.  Claims of thousands dead from a sarin attack were made but without proof.

Ake Sellstrom said on August 24, 2013, “The weapons looked quite professional. But who has been using them, none of that we could conclude.”

Investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, published “The Red Line and the Rat Line” which exposed the reason Obama decided not to attack Syria in September 2013 was the sample of the sarin used in East Ghouta was proven to not have come from a Syrian government source.

President Assad accused rebel groups supported by the US, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia of using chemical weapons to blame Syria because they were losing. The Syrian Arab Army has troops, weapons, and aircraft.  It has no motive to use chemical weapons when in a winning position.  It especially defies logic to ask for the UN inspectors to arrive to investigate chemical use by ‘rebels’, only to then use them just as the inspectors are unpacking their bags.

The repeated use of unsubstantiated accusations against President Assad and his government is not new, but an ongoing western led media war against Syria. This new accusation about the Beirut Port blast is a new chapter in a very old story.

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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.

After a resounding victory in the first real elections in which the Congolese participated, Patrice Lumumba became Prime Minister of Congo from 24 June 1960 until his overthrow and imprisonment on 14 September of the same year by Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu and his supporters. Mobutu then ruled the country, first in the shadow, then directly from 1965 until his overthrow in 1997.

On 17 January 1961, Lumumba, this great fighter for Congo’s independence, for social justice and for internationalism, was tortured and then executed, along with several of his comrades, by Congolese leaders complicit with Western powers, as well as by Belgian police and soldiers. Lumumba was only 35 years old and could have continued to play a very important role in his country, in Africa and at a global level.

As journalist Colette Braeckman wrote,

“Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese Prime Minister who was illegally removed from office in September, placed under house arrest and then detained in Thysville, had been sent to Katanga on 17 January 1961. Five hours after his arrival on Katangan soil, he was put to death with his two companions Maurice M’Polo and Robert Okito.” [1]

Among the Congolese leaders who directly participated in the killing of Lumumba, we find Moïse Tshombé, self-proclaimed president of the Congolese province of Katanga, which seceded on 11 July 1960, less than two weeks after the independence of Congo on 30 June 1960. The Katangan secession proclaimed by Moïse Tshombe was supported by Belgium and the large Belgian mining corporations that controlled that part of Congo (see below) with a view to destabilizing the government led by Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

At least five Belgian policemen and soldiers were present at the assassination. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, one of the major Congolese leaders responsible for the assassination of Lumumba, did not attend the murder as he was in in the capital city in the West of the country.

Belgium’s responsibility in the assassination of Lumumba in January 1961 was established by several historians, among whom Ludo De Witte in The assassination of Lumumba and was was the subject of a commission of inquiry within the Belgian Parliament in 2001-2002. See also Ludo De Witte’s interview in 2018,(in French).

In it De Witte sums up in simple words the causes that led to the assassination of Lumumba:

“Lumumba was a victim of imperialism. Actually the powers that wanted to continue imperial rule in Congo, replace a colonial system with a neocolonial system, a system in which Africans would wield political power but controlled by Western powers and their corporations. This is the neocolonialism Lumumba wanted to fight and this is why he was assassinated.”

We should remember the speech delivered by the the Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in reply to what Baudouin, King of the Belgians had said, namely,

“Congo’s independence is the culmination of the Belgian ‘civilising mission’ devised by the genius of Leopold II, which he launched with tenacious courage and which was continued with perseverance by Belgium.”

During the proclamation of Congo’s independence on June 30, 1960, the Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Emery Lumumba, gave a memorable speech

In his speech Lumumba insisted that justice be done for the Congolese people. Here is an English translation of it.

Speech delivered in Parliament after those by King Baudouin and President Joseph Kasavubu, on the day of the proclamation of the independence of the Republic of Congo.

“Men and women of the Congo,

Victorious independence fighters,

I salute you in the name of the Congolese Government.

I ask all of you, my friends, who tirelessly fought in our ranks, to mark this June 30, 1960, as an illustrious date that will be ever engraved in your hearts, a date whose meaning you will proudly explain to your children, so that they in turn might relate to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren the glorious history of our struggle for freedom.

Although this independence of the Congo is being proclaimed today by agreement with Belgium, an amicable country, with which we are on equal terms, no Congolese will ever forget that independence was won in struggle, a persevering and inspired struggle carried on from day to day, a struggle, in which we were undaunted by privation or suffering and stinted neither strength nor blood.

It was filled with tears, fire and blood. We are deeply proud of our struggle, because it was just and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us.

That was our lot for the eighty years of colonial rule and our wounds are too fresh and much too painful to be forgotten.

We have experienced forced labour in exchange for pay that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, to clothe ourselves, to have decent lodgings or to bring up our children as dearly loved ones.

Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were ‘Negroes’. Who will ever forget that the black was addressed as ‘tu’ not because he was a friend, but because the polite ‘vous’ was reserved for the white man?

We have seen our lands seized in the name of ostensibly just laws, which gave recognition only to the right of might.

We have not forgotten that the law was never the same for the white and the black, that it was lenient to the ones, and cruel and inhuman to the others.

We have experienced atrocious sufferings, being persecuted for political convictions and religious beliefs, and exiled from our native land: our lot was worse than death itself.

We have not forgotten that in the cities the mansions were for the whites and the tumbledown huts for the blacks; that a black was not admitted to the cinemas, restaurants and shops set aside for ‘Europeans’ that blacks travelled in the barge’s holds, under the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

Who will ever forget the shootings which killed so many of our brothers, or the cells into which were mercilessly thrown those who no longer wished to submit to the regime of injustice, oppression and exploitation used by the colonialists as a tool of their domination?

All that, my brothers, brought us untold suffering.

But we, who were elected by the votes of your representatives, representatives of the people, to guide our native land, we, who have suffered in body and soul from colonial oppression, we tell you that henceforth all that is finished with.

The Republic of Congo has been proclaimed and our beloved country’s future is now in the hands of its own people.

Brothers, let us commence together a new struggle, a sublime struggle that will lead our country to peace, prosperity and greatness.

Together we shall establish social justice and ensure for everyone a fair remuneration for their labour.

We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.

We shall see to it that the lands of our native country truly benefit its children.

We shall revise all the old laws and make them into new ones that will be just and noble.

We shall stop the persecution of free thought. We shall see to it that all citizens enjoy to the fullest extent the basic freedoms provided for by the Declaration of Human Rights.

We shall eradicate all discrimination, whatever its origin, and we shall ensure for everyone a station in life befitting their human dignity and worthy of their labour and their loyalty to the country.

We shall institute in the country a peace resting not on guns and bayonets but on concord and goodwill.

And in all this, my dear compatriots, we can rely not only on our own enormous forces and immense wealth, but also on the assistance of the numerous foreign states, whose co-operation we shall accept when it is not aimed at imposing upon us an alien policy, but is given in a spirit of friendship.

Even Belgium, which has finally learned the lesson of history and need no longer try to oppose our independence, is prepared to give us its aid and friendship; to that end an agreement has just been signed between our two equal and independent countries. I am sure that this co-operation will benefit both countries. For our part, we shall, while remaining vigilant, try to observe the engagements we have freely made.

Thus, both in the internal and the external spheres, the new Congo, our beloved Republic to be created by my government, will be rich, free and prosperous. But to attain our goal without delay, I ask all of you, legislators and citizens of the Congo, to give us all the help you can.

I ask you all to forget your tribal quarrels: they weaken us and may cause us to be despised abroad.

I ask you all not to shrink from any sacrifice that might ensure the success of our grand undertaking.

Finally, I ask you unconditionally to respect the life and property of fellow-citizens and foreigners who have settled in our country. If the conduct of these foreigners leaves much to be desired, our Justice will promptly expel them from the territory of the Republic; if, on the contrary, their conduct is good, they must be left in peace, for they, too, are working for our country’s prosperity.

The Congo’s independence is a decisive step towards the liberation of the whole African continent.

Our government, a government of national and popular unity, will serve its country.

I call on all Congolese citizens, men, women and children, to set themselves resolutely to the task of creating a national economy and ensuring our economic independence.

Eternal glory to the fighters for national liberation!

Long live independence and African unity!
Long live the independent and sovereign Congo!”

Lumumba, a fighter for internationalism

Before becoming Prime Minister, Lumumba had woven steadfast connections with a number of anti-imperialist, panafricanist and internationalist movements and people. In December 1958, he attended the All African Peoples’ Conference in Accra where he met among others the Caribbean-Algerian psychiatrist and freedom fighter Frantz Fanon, the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah and the Cameroonian anti-colonialist leader Félix-Roland Moumié. [2] He made a speech in which he said, “The fundamental aim of our movement is to free the Congolese people from the colonialist regime and earn them their independence. We base our action on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man — rights guaranteed to each and every citizen of humanity by the United Nations Charter — and we are of the opinion that the Congo, as a human society, has the right to join the ranks of free peoples.” He concluded with the following words, “This is why we passionately cry out with all the delegates: Down with colonialism and imperialism! Down with racism and tribalism! And long live the Congolese nation, long live independent Africa!”

At the end of the All African Peoples’ Conference, Lumumba was appointed a permanent member of the co-ordinating committee, as Saïd Bouamama recalls in his Figures de la révolution africaine. [3] Lumumba was also in close contact with Belgian anticolonialist and anticapitalist militants such as Jean Van Lierde, who worked in support of the revolution in Algeria and who maintained close ties [4] with the weekly La Gaucheand its main driving force, Ernest Mandel.

A few weeks after the conference in Accra, Lumumba and his movement held a meeting to report on the proceedings of the anticolonialist summit in Léopoldville, then capital of the Belgian Congo. He called for the independence of Congo before an audience of 10,000. He described the goal of the Mouvement National Congolais as “to liquidate the colonialist regime and the exploitation of men by men.” [5]

According to Le Monde Diplomatique of February 1959, a riot broke out in Léopoldville following the conference, beginning 4 January1959. This is what the French monthly had to say: “The origin of the riot is directly related to the All-Africa Peoples’ Conference in Accra. It was as the leaders of the Mouvement National Congolais — headed by the president of the movement, Mr. Lumumba — were preparing to hold a public meeting on the subject that the unrest first broke out. With the authorisation of the Governor General of the Belgian Congo, Mr. Cornelis, a delegation of Congolese nationalists, led by Mr. Lumumba, had travelled to Ghana in December. It was as the delegation was preparing to report on its visit and its work, on 4 January, that the police gave the conference attendees and those who had come to hear them the order to disperse.” [6]

It is important to point out that during the year 1959, the repression organised by colonialist Belgium resulted in the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of people. One example of the extent of the repression: in October 1959, during the national congress of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) in Stanleyville, police fired into the crowd, killing 30 and wounding hundreds. Lumumba was arrested a few days later, tried in January 1960 and sentenced to six months in prison on 21 January 1960.

But protest was so intense that out of fear, the regime in Brussels decided to defuse the situation by calling local elections in which the Congolese were allowed to participate. Lumumba was freed on 26 January, only a few days after his sentencing. Finally, following the local elections, a general election was held in May 1960, the first in the history of the Belgian Congo. The Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) won the election and as a result Lumumba was appointed prime minister.

The sequence of events that led to the coup against Lumumba and to his assassination

Following Lumumba’s speech of 30 June, the Belgian government, the monarchy and the heads of the major Belgian companies present in Congo decided to destabilize Lumumba and provoke the secession of Katanga, the province where most of the raw materials (copper, cobalt, radium) were extracted. Congolese accomplices immediately stepped up in the form of Moïse Tshombé, proclaimed president of Katanga on 11 July 1960, President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, who revoked Lumumba in September 1960 despite having no constitutional authority to do so, and Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who led a coup d’état a few days later and had Lumumba arrested, despite the fact that his ministers had expressed their confidence in him and that his party was the leading party in the parliament. Mobutu, who had had a military career during the colonial period and was a former journalist for the pro-colonial press in Congo, had managed to be appointed to the rank of colonel in the new army and quickly turned against Congo’s elected government.

Belgium, as a member of NATO, had a heavily-equipped military zone in Western Germany extending from the Belgian border to that of the Soviet-aligned countries. The Belgian general staff had at its disposal a considerable military arsenal, at least partly originating in the USA, and NATO allowed them to deploy aircraft, troop transports and even warships which bombarded Congolese positions in the Congo estuary. The US government and CIA were also at the controls “alongside” the Belgians, with whom they had decided to assassinate Lumumba. [7]. France was also on board. In a telegram dated 26 August 1960, the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, told his agents in Léopoldville, concerning Lumumba: “Consequently, we concluded that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.” [8]

We should mention that on 12 August 1960, Belgium had signed an accord with Tshombé, recognising de facto the independence of Katanga. The attempts made by Lumumba’s government to deal with the secession were fully legitimate, but were fought against by the major Western powers.

Despite his arrest by Mobutu, Lumumba did not capitulate and maintained contact with the ministers who remained faithful to their commitments, and with his comrades. A clandestine government led by Antoine Gizenga was established in Stanleyville. Lumumba managed to escape from his jailers on 27 November 1960 and attempted to join up with the government in Stanleyville, but was arrested a few days later in transit. In January 1961, with Lumumba still highly popular, Mobutu and the Western powers feared that a popular revolt would lead to the leader’s liberation and decided to have him executed. The operation leading to Lumumba’s execution was directly accompanied and directed by Belgians on orders from Brussels. On 17 January 1961, Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito were taken in an airplane piloted by a Belgian crew to Élisabethville, the capital of Katanga, and handed over to the local authorities. They were then tortured by Katangese leaders, including Moïse Tshombé, and by Belgians. They were shot that evening by soldiers under the command of a Belgian officer.

According to the testimony of Belgian Gerard Soete, then police commissioner in charge of setting up a “Katangese national police force”, the three bodies were transported 220 kilometres from the place of execution, and were buried in the earth behind a termite mound, in the middle of a wooded savannah.

Image on the right: Mobutu and Ronald Reagan

The AFP, which had collected this testimony, reports that three days later the bodies were moved again to delete any possibility of tracking them. Soete said he was accompanied by “another white man” and a few Congolese when they cut up the corpses with saws and dissolved them in acid. [9]

Belgium’s support for the Mobutu dictatorship

The Belgian army intervened twice in the Congo to help Mobutu and his dictatorial regime to crush the resistance of Lumumbist organizations, first in November 1964 with the operation Red Dragon and Black Dragon, respectively at Stanleyville and at Paulis. On this occasion, the operation was jointly led by the Belgian army, Mobutu’s army, the General Staff of the US army and mercenaries, among whom some anti-Castro Cubans.

In a speech delivered at the UN General Assembly in November 1964, Ernesto Che Guevara condemned this intervention, as he also did in a speech delivered in Santiago de Cuba, “today, the most poignant and pervasive memory that stays with us is that of the Congo and of Lumumba. Today, in that country that is both so distant and so near to our hearts, historical events have occurred which we have to know about, as we have to learn from what has been experienced. The other day, Belgian parachutists assaulted the city of Stanleyville.” (excerpt from Che Guevara’s speech in Santiago de Cuba on 30 November 1964, on the occasion of the 8^th anniversary of the town’s uprising led by Frank País (translation CADTM, from the French version).

The second intervention of the Belgian army occurred in Kolwezi in the heart of the mining area of Shaba (Katanga) in May 1978 in collaboration with the French army and Mobutu’s army.

Litigation still in progress in Belgium concerning the assassination of Lumumba

The Belgian courts have not yet handed down a judgment concerning the murder of Lumumba. If the case has remained open, it is only due to the ongoing actions of all those who are determined to see justice done. The Lumumba family continues its actions toward revealing the truth. A Belgian examining magistrate is still in charge of the case since it has been classified as a war crime to which no statute of limitations applies. And as the family’s attorney, Christophe Marchand, pointed out to Belgian television on 23 June 2011 “the main instigators are all dead today (…) but former advisors and attachés of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are still alive.”

Image below: Lumumba in Brussels (1960) (CC – Wikimedia)

Lumumba has become an emblematic figure

The figure of Patrice Lumumba has traversed history and still serves today as an example for all who champion the emancipation of peoples. Lumumba never surrendered.

Such was his popularity under the regime of the dictator Mobutu that the latter decreed Patrice Lumumba a national hero in 1966. Not satisfied with having overthrown him in September 1960 and with being one of the main organizers of his murder, Mobutu attempted to steal a part of his aura. The day of his execution, 17 January, is a bank holiday in Congo-Kinshasa.

In Brussels, after years of actions by anticolonialist militants, the municipal council voted on 23 April 2018 to create a square, the Place Patrice-Lumumba, which was officially inaugurated on 30 June of the same year, the date of the 58^th anniversary of the independence of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But all of that amounts to very little.

Beyond the need to disseminate the truth about Lumumba’s struggle and to demand that justice be done him, his struggle and that of all the women and men of Congo who fought against all forms of spoliation, oppression and exploitation must be continued.

That is why the CADTM feels that the Belgian authorities must:

• Recognise publicly and name all of the abuses and crimes committed against the people of Congo by Léopold II and the Belgian monarchy, and make official excuses;
• Deepen and extend the task of remembrance by involving the appropriate personnel both in public education and popular educational activities and including in institutional areas;
• Restore all Congolese cultural property to the Congolese;
• Actively support the review of all colonialist symbols in public spaces in Belgium;
• Conduct a historical audit of debt in order to make unconditional financial reparation and retrocession for the amounts extracted during the colonisation of Congo;
• Take action within the multilateral institutions (World Bank, IMF, Paris Club, etc.) so that their members totally and unconditionally cancel repayment of all odious debt on the Democratic Republic of Congo;
• Publicly support all moratoria on repayment of debt enacted by the government of Congo in order to improve the public health system and face the epidemic of CoViD-19 and other diseases which cause deaths that would be entirely preventable if expenditures on public health are increased.

The CADTM supports the various collectives calling for actions in Belgium in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and all those who are taking action in the area of awareness of colonialism.

The CADTM supports the Congolese people in facing the health, economic and social consequences of the CoViD-19 crisis. In spite of the diktats of creditors and the serious failures of successive Congo governments, which have resulted in severe repression and flagrant denial of fundamental human rights, social movements in Congo have resisted. The CADTM supports these and other struggles for social justice.

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Source : World Bank, CD-Rom, GDF, 2001

“In many cases, the loans were used to corrupt governments during the Cold War. The issue was not whether the money was improving a country’s welfare, but whether it was leading to a stable situation, given the geopolitical realities in the world.” \

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 1999, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 2001, on a French television show L’Autre mondialisation (The Other Globalization), on Arte, March 7, 2000

Therefore, the IMF and the WB, where de Groote was a senior official, became complicit in the abuses committed by the Mobutu regime against human, economic, social and cultural rights inasmuch as they maintained their support for the dictatorial system, which did not at all honour its financial obligations.

“The issue of the moral responsibility of the creditors was particularly apparent in the case of Cold War loans. When the IMF and the World Bank lent money to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s notorious ruler Mobutu, they knew (or should have known) that most of the money would not go to help that country’s poor people, but rather would be used to enrich Mobutu. It was money paid to ensure that this corrupt leader would keep his country aligned with the West. To many, it doesn’t seem fair for ordinary taxpayers in countries with corrupt governments to have to repay loans that were made to leaders who did not represent them.” – Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 2002

Mobutu and his clan used the State coffers as a steady and plentiful source of personal enrichment with three different kinds of misappropriation: legal, illegal, and mysterious expenditures. The legal ones, such as the presidential endowment, was allocated without any control. The illegal expenditures are described in the Blumenthal report (this secret report was made public in 1982), [20] which indicates that it was impossible to control the State’s financial transactions since the presidential office hardly made a distinction between personal expenses and public spending. Erwin Blumenthal identified at least seven bank accounts held abroad that were used to channel money directly to Mobutu’s personal bank accounts or to corrupt political figures. Erwin Blumenthal’s message was clear: “The corruptive system in Zaire with all its wicked and ugly manifestations, its mismanagement and fraud will destroy all endeavours of international institutions, of friendly governments and of commercial banks towards the recovery and rehabilitation of Zaire’s economy. Sure, there will be new promises by Mobutu, […] but no (repeat: no) prospect for Zaire’s creditors to get their money back in any foreseeable future.” [21]

Since 1979, the main lenders to Mobutu’s regime, closely connected to the IMF, had known and been aware of these fraudulent practices, and of the risk they were taking by continuing to lend to Mobutu.

As indicated in this report, the third category of embezzlement consisted of “mysterious expenditures.” One of the State’s largest budget items (accounting for 18% according to a 1989 World Bank study) was “other goods and services,” a hotchpotch with little information on how the expenditures were allocated. According to World Bank experts, most of the money was used for extravagant expenditures as well as to purchase military equipment. This shows that the World Bank was also well aware of the illegal use made of the loans it was granting.

By the mid-1970s, it was clear that the money injected into Zaire in the form of loans or grants was systematically misappropriated. They were either directly transferred to personal bank accounts held abroad  [22] or invested in prestigious, inadequate, and/or useless projects that helped many people to get richer, but certainly did not help the sustainable industrialisation of the economy. For instance, according to the Office of ill-gotten gains (Office des biens mal acquis, OBMA), which was created at the National Conference, Mobutu supposedly pocketed a 7% commission on the value of the Inga hydroelectric plant. The investigation could not be pursued to its conclusion because of resistance from official circles.  [23]

J. de Groote actively supported Mobutu’s regime and intervened several times to improve the relationships between the IMF, the World Bank and Mobutu, although he was very well placed to know in detail what Blumenthal denounced in his report. He also knew about the serious violations of human rights committed by the Mobutu regime.

Yet in 1994, at the end of his term, de Groote said he was satisfied with his action vis-à-vis Congo-Kinshasa. While all along, the vast majority of the Congolese people lived in great misery, the persecutions and assassinations of opponents were rife, and the economy was devastated.

Belgian private corporations systematically derived profits from the relationships between Belgium and the Congo

The excerpt below speaks for itself. It was pronounced by Jacques de Groote in a speech given in 1986 to a group of Belgian company directors, and then published in the Bulletin de la Fédération des Entreprises de Belgique (Newsletter of the Federation of Belgian Companies). “The advantages Belgium derives from its participation in the activities of the Group’s institutions– as do all World Bank member countries – can be measured in terms of flow-back, that is to say the relationship between, on the one hand, the total amount of disbursements made by the IDA (International Development Association, which is part of the World Bank Group) or the World Bank in favour of a country’s companies, when these companies sign contracts, and, on the other hand, the contributions of this country to the Bank’s capital, as well as to the IDA’s resources. Flow-back is thus the relationship between what the companies obtain via the sales of equipment or consulting services and what Belgium provides as a contribution to the IDA’s resources and to the Bank’s capital. The flow-back from the World Bank toward industrialised countries is significant, and has continually increased: for all industrialised countries, it has increased from 7 to 10 from the end of 1980 to the end of 1984. In other words, for one dollar put into the system, the industrialised countries got back $7 in 1980 and receive $10.5 today.”  [31]

Jacques de Groote after the end of his term at the IMF and World Bank

In his interview with Béatrice Delvaux from Le Soir in March 1994, at the end of his term at the IMF, de Groote congratulated himself on the role he had played in the decision made by Belgium to adopt the neoliberal agenda in the 1980s.

Béatrice Delvaux : “You did, however, from Washington play a major role in the orientation of Belgian economic policy. You provided a guarantee from the IMF for the economic shift at the beginning of the 1980s, in close relationship with the Poupehan group?”  [32] J. de Groote’s response: “Absolutely, and I’m extremely proud of this. I am even extremely satisfied. At that time, we completed studies that enabled the major economic policy options to be defined for Belgium, which were then discussed with Alfons Verplaetse, [33] and other figures including Wilfried Martens.”  [34]

These statements provide a good illustration of the close relationships between figures like De Groote and the key political leaders in a particular country. De Groote acknowledged, moreover, that the independence of the Belgian National Bank was only for the form, because Belgian (monetary) policy was defined in a very small, secretive circle bringing together key stakeholders, ranging from the Prime Minister to the Governor of the National Bank, and including the head of the Christian Unions and representatives of corporate management, all in cahoots with the IMF.

Belgium’s attitude after Mobutu’s fall

Belgium was complicit in whitewashing the odious debt accumulated by Mobutu. Instead of acknowledging that it had to be cancelled because it was illegitimate, Belgium got involved in the setting up of a complex mechanism whereby the Congolese people were bound to lose and the creditors that had helped the former regime were to win

After Mobutu’s fall, in spite of pleas from the CADTM and other organizations, the Belgian government did not do anything to help the Congolese people retrieve the money that Mobutu and his clan had embezzled and invested in cash or real estate in Belgium. Yet a country like Switzerland had moved a long way in that direction, for once. But the ties between the Belgian ruling class and Mobutu’s clan were so tight that nothing conclusive was done even though some magistrates tried to take positive measures.

Later, Belgium was complicit in whitewashing the odious debt accumulated by Mobutu. Instead of acknowledging that it had to be cancelled because it was illegitimate, Belgium got involved in the setting up of a complex mechanism whereby the Congolese people were bound to lose and the creditors that had helped the former regime were to win.

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This article was originally published on CADTM.

Translated by Snake Arbusto and Christine Pagnoulle

Source of the two appendices: Éric Toussaint, “Reply to the letter by Philippe, King of the Belgians, about Belgium’s responsibility in the exploitation of the Congolese people”

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc.

Notes

Today – Friday 15th January – over 50,000 restaurants are planning to open, an act of mass civil disobedience against “anti-Covid” lockdown measures which have massively hurt the restaurant business, especially small family-owned businesses.

Spreading through social media under the hashtag #IoOpro (“I am opening”), the movement is largest country-wide act of civil disobedience since lockdowns began.

Italain opposition MP Vittorio Sgarbi has backed the movement, saying in an interview:

Open up, & don’t worry, in the end we will make them eat their fines”.

Italy’s government is already facing internal conflict and crisis, an early election is a possibility.

A similar movement already started in Mexico on January 12th, when hundreds of restaurant owners gathered to protest the lockdowns:

Mexico 🇲🇽 Epic scenes, Over 500 restaurants have joined forces, agreeing to open up together, defying LOCKDOWN. Forced closed since Dec 18, they've stated it's either 'WE OPEN UP OR WE DIE'. Long Live the People 💥👊 pic.twitter.com/PeSQpaGtqb

— ✖️TIME ✖️2✖️RISE✖️ (@itstime2rise) January 12, 2021

The “I am Open” protest is spreading across Europe as well, with variants already taking hold in German-speaking Switzerland (#Wirmachenauf) and Poland (#OtwieraMY).

It’s good to be reminded that, no matter how much it looks like the new normal is spreading unopposed, it’s not. People all over the world are resisting where they can. That’s what “Covid Positive” is all about.

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Featured image is from OffGuardian

In August 2010, the secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, warned that ‘We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate.’ According to the UN Environment Program, ‘the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life’ with scientists estimating that ‘150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours’ which is nearly 1,000 times the ‘natural’ or ‘background’ rate. Moreover, it ‘is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago.’

See ‘Protect nature for world economic security, warns UN biodiversity chief’.

Two months later, at the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held from 18 to 29 October 2010, in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture in Japan, a revised and updated Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, including the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, for the 2011-2020 period was adopted.

See ‘Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, including Aichi Biodiversity Targets’.

You can read the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets on the Convention’s website. They were ambitious but represented a realistic assessment of what needed to be achieved by 2020 if national governments were to achieve the longer term goal of ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ by 2050. The 2050 Vision for Biodiversity required ‘a significant shift away from “business as usual” across a broad range of human activities.’

See ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 5’.

So how have we done in the past ten years?

In 2015, distinguished conservationists Professor Gerardo Ceballos, Anne H. Ehrlich and Professor Paul R. Ehrlich published their book titled The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals which tells the story of humanity’s ‘massive and escalating assault on all living things on this planet’ precipitating what is now Earth’s sixth great mass extinction: ‘a time of darkness for our planet’s birds and mammals’.

Noting that the roots of this destruction ‘run deep through time’ with human hunting and other activities responsible for pushing populations of animals to extinction long before the agricultural revolution (which began about 10,000 years ago), they observe that the current collective assault on animals, plants and microbes has reached a level so horrendous that ‘any alarm call we might sound will be too faint to match the tragedy that is unfolding’. But while the decimation of life that is currently underway is being caused by Homo sapiens, the consequences of this decimation will also have impact on humanity itself because the life-forms being annihilated are ‘working parts of life-support systems on which civilization depends’.

Despite the impressive statistics that record the demise of life on Earth and the fundamental threat this extinction crisis poses, Cebellos and the Ehrlichs are well aware that the public and politicians generally are not reacting emotionally to this crisis as do those who are ‘deeply familiar with the impoverishment of nature’. They hope we can relate to the fate of the last Spix’s macaw, a male that searched fruitlessly for a mate until it disappeared from the savannah of northeastern Brazil in 2000.

And did you know that even the iconic African lion may be facing extinction in the wild? In 2015, as a result of decades of hunting, disease and habitat loss, only 23,000 lions remained in Africa’s vast savannahs: less than 10% of what roamed there in 1950. There are fewer lions today.

But separately from species extinctions, Earth continues to experience ‘a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization’. In a 2017 report, Professor Ceballos and his coauthors describe what they label ‘a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’

See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’.

Beyond even this, however, many additional species are now trapped in a feedback loop that will inevitably precipitate their extinction as well because of the way in which ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ work once initiated and as has already occurred in almost all ecosystem contexts. See the (so far) six-part series ‘Our Vanishing World’.

Have you seen a flock of birds of any size recently? A butterfly?

What is Driving the Sixth Mass Extinction?

Homo sapiens. And the key tool is always destruction of habitat, whether on land or in the ocean.

Of course, particular human behaviours have a huge impact. Fighting wars (or even just wasting resources to manufacture weapons and other military infrastructure) is one (particularly given that the perpetual war in which the US is engaged is to secure resources and markets), destroying the climate is another and deploying 5G is yet another. But there are many other destructive human behaviours too.

Consider the forests. Just last year, 6.5 million hectares of pristine forest were cut or burnt down for purposes such as clearing land to establish cattle farms so that many people can eat cheap hamburgers, mining (much of it illegal) for a variety of minerals (such as gold, silver, copper, coltan, cassiterite and diamonds) and logging to produce woodchips so that some people can buy cheap paper (including cheap toilet paper).

See ‘Our Vanishing World: Rainforests’.

One outcome of this destruction is that 40,000 tropical tree species are now threatened with extinction. In addition, rainforest destruction is also the primary cause of species extinctions globally given the number of species that live in rainforests.

See ‘Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’.

Another outcome is that ‘the precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we’.

See ‘Amazon Tipping Point: Last Chance for Action’.

And in relation to another major habitat that is being destroyed, consider the world’s oceans. In summary, the oceans are warming, acidifying and deoxygenating; being contaminated with nuclear radiation, by offshore oil and gas drilling as well as oil spills; being damaged by deep sea mining; being polluted by industrial (including chemical) and farming wastes while being damaged in a myriad other ways and being overfished.

In short: the oceans are under siege on a vast range of fronts and are effectively ‘dying’. For a comprehensive 18-point summary,

see ‘Our Vanishing World: Oceans’.

If you like, you can read comprehensive summaries of the fate of Earth’s birds and insects too.

See ‘Our Vanishing World: Birds’ and ‘Our Vanishing World: Insects’.

What is the State of Play in early 2021?

In a report published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in May 2020, the authors observe that ‘Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely.’ With a total estimated number of animal and plant species on Earth of 8 million (of which 5.5 million are insect species), an accelerating daily extinction rate combined with an ongoing decline in ecosystem health, the report concludes that 1,000,000 species of life on Earth are threatened with extinction.

See ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline “Unprecedented”; Species Extinction Rates “Accelerating”’ and ‘A million threatened species? Thirteen questions and answers’.

And the latest edition of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s flagship publication ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 5’was published on 18 August 2020. It reports that ‘Humanity stands at a crossroads with regard to the legacy it leaves to future generations. Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, and the pressures driving this decline are intensifying. None of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets will be fully met.’

But this is an understatement, to put it politely.

In their commentary on this predicament in November 2020, scholars Ruchi Shroff and Carla Ramos Cortés note that ‘Despite wide-spread international calls to curb the sixth mass extinction, no single goal of the Convention of Biological Diversity’s Aichi Biodiversity Targets, for the second consecutive decade, have been met. In some cases, biodiversity loss has been made worse as no action has been taken to curb pesticide use, pollution, fossil fuels and plastics.’

See ‘The Biodiversity Paradigm: Building Resilience for Human and Environmental Health’.

But the destruction is far worse than suggested by this. Given, as already noted above, the ongoing destruction of rainforests and oceans, not to mention other habitats ranging from wetlands to deserts, the annihilation of life on Earth continues to accelerate with no indicators signaling that this destruction is being slowed in any way.

Therefore, destruction of biodiversity remains one of the four primary paths to human extinction (along with nuclear war, the deployment of 5G and the climate catastrophe).

Is it too late to do anything?

It might be. As mentioned above: Because many species are now trapped in a feedback loop that will inevitably precipitate their extinction because of the way in which ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ work once initiated, many further extinctions are now inevitable.

However, we can take action to save those individuals and species not yet trapped in a feedback loop and that might yet be saved. But if you wait for governments or corporations to act responsibly, you will wait in vain as the last 20 years has demonstrated.

So you have some powerful options to consider. The first, and most important, is to consider the ways in which you can reduce your own consumption. The planetary environment is only being destroyed so that governments and corporations can respond to consumer demand. Everything from military spending and war to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels are fundamentally driven by what you buy. And each and every item that you buy has a negative environmental impact. There are no exceptions.

If you reduce your own consumption and increase your self-reliance, you will reduce the burden that extraction, transport, manufacture and distribution of resources imposes on the natural environment resulting in the destruction of habitat and the annihilation of biodiversity.

One option to consider is ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which outlines a graduated series of steps for reducing consumption and increasing self-reliance.

If you want to better understand why so many human beings are addicted to endless consumption, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. There is more detail on the origins of this behaviour in ‘Why Violence?’and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you are inclined to campaign to defend biodiversity in one context or another, whether by campaigning to end war, halt the climate catastrophe, stop the deployment of 5G or end wildlife trafficking for example, consider doing so strategically.

See ‘Nonviolent Campaign Strategy’.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Conclusion

One species – Homo sapiens – is annihilating life on Earth, driving at least 200 species to extinction each day. In the time it took you to read this article, another species of life on Earth vanished into the fossil record.

This annihilation of life is driven by our over-consumption. As Mahatma Gandhi, already wearing his own homespun cloth, noted more than 100 years ago: ‘Earth provides enough for every person’s need but not for every person’s greed.’

Of course, many people around the world are not responsible for over-consuming; they live life on its margins, with barely enough to eat let alone thrive. And this reflects inequities built into a global economic system that prioritizes profit for the few, not resources for living for all.

So that means that the burden for reducing consumption must fall on those in industrialized societies who benefit from the maldistribution of planetary resources.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted that ‘The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.’

If we are to prove him wrong, we do not have much time left.

This is because Homo sapiens is a part of the web of life. And we are ruthlessly destroying that web.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to ‘Global Research’.

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The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
8. I will not buy rainforest timber
9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

 

 

Founded in 1971, the Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) meets annually in Davos, Switzerland.

It brings together top business and political leaders, along with likeminded pro-New World Order economists and pseudo-journalists.

Calling itself “an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas” is cover for its diabolical agenda.

The WEF’s Great Reset about to be formally rolled out aims to establish ruler-serf societies worldwide.

It wants ordinary people exploited serve the privileged few worldwide that goes beyond what Orwell and Huxley imagined.

It’s a diabolical scheme promoted by the WEF’s executive chairman Klaus Schwab — a dystopian nightmare wrapped in deceptive equitable socioeconomic rhetoric.

Made-in-the-USA covid (renamed seasonal flu/influenza) that unleashed lockdowns, quarantines, social distancing, and harmful to human health mask-wearing caused unprecedented economic collapse in the US, West, and elswhere.

Events of last year — continuing in 2021 with no end of them in prospect — were planned by dark forces before unleashed on unsuspecting billions of people worldwide.

For Schwab and likeminded extremists, what’s going on is a “unique window of opportunity” for global leaders to reshape “global relations…national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of a global commons…”

Instead of serving “the dignity” and interests “of every human being,” it intends exploiting them.

The Great Reset is an updated new world order, a diabolical socioeconomic “revamp” worldwide.

If achieved, life as once existed will be replaced by Dante’s Hell.

According to upcoming late January Davos Agenda propaganda:

“The (covid) pandemic has demonstrated that no institution or individual alone can address the economic, environmental, social and technological challenges of our complex, interdependent world (sic).”

“The pandemic has accelerated systemic changes that were apparent before its inception (sic).”

“The fault lines that emerged in 2020 now appear as critical crossroads in 2021 (sic).”

“The time to rebuild trust (sic)) and to make crucial choices is fast approaching as the need to reset priorities and the urgency to reform systems (sic) grow stronger around the world (sic).”

“The Davos Agenda is a pioneering (sic) mobilization of global leaders to shape the principles, policies and partnerships needed in this challenging new context (sic).”

“It is essential for leaders from all walks of life to work together virtually for a more inclusive, cohesive and sustainable future as soon as possible in 2021 (sic).”

Seven diabolical themes that pretend to be beneficial for societies and their people are worlds apart from what’s claimed.

They include the following:

“How to save the planet” by plundering it for maximum profit-making.

Exploitive economies masquerading as “fairer” ones.

“Tech” for pure evil called “good.”

“Socit(ies) & future of work” to be  under ruler-serf rules worldwide.

“Better business” by maximum exploitive harshness.

Unhealthy “futures” pretending to be the other way around.

“Beyond geopolitics” pretending that “we’re all in this together.”

Calling for “nations…to change” is code language for promoting abolition of sovereign rights according to the rule of law.

Late January Davos Agenda will formally launch exploitive Great Reset policies to be exposed, condemned and opposed.

A Final Comment

Great Reset New World Order policies include digital mass-surveillance worldwide.

It calls for monitoring virtually everything about our daily lives to control them.

Pretending to support “sustainable development” and “stakeholder capitalism” is polar opposite what’s planned.

Great Reset policies aim to more greatly empower wealth, power and privileged interests at the expense of ordinary people worldwide.

It promotes global control by and exploitation of most people by their privileged few masters.

Great Reset pusher Schwab called for “not letting (made-in-the-USA covid and economic collapse) go to waste.”

Selling it involves mass deception because understanding what’s planned would assure mass-rejection.

Nothing intended will improve public health, welfare, safety and societies fit to live in — just the opposite.

The WEF’s slogan “build back better” is mass deception to disguise what’s diabolically planned.

Reject and resist are the only options.

The alternative is Great Reset New World Order enslavement by a higher power that’s hostile to a safe and and fit to live in world.

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is from OffGuardian

Below is an important letter from former Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Richard Schabas, addressed to Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

“The national lockdown was never part of our planned pandemic response nor is it supported by strong science”.

“Two recent studies on the effectiveness of lockdown show that it has, at most, a small COVID mortality benefit compared to more moderate measures. Both studies warned about the excessive cost of lockdowns.”

 

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We’d like to thank Mark Taliano for bringing this to our attention.

With the mainstream media still obsessing about the January 6th “violent coup attempt” at the US Capitol Building, the incoming Biden Administration looks to be chock full of actual purveyors of violent coups. Don’t look to the mainstream media to report on this, however. Some of the same politicians and bureaucrats denouncing the ridiculous farce at the Capitol as if it were the equivalent of 9/11 have been involved for decades in planning and executing real coups overseas. In their real coups, many thousands of civilians have died.

Take returning Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, for example. More than anyone else she is the face of the US-led violent coup against a democratically-elected government in Ukraine in 2014. Nuland not only passed out snacks to the coup leaders, she was caught on a phone call actually plotting the coup right down to who would take power once the smoke cleared.

Unlike the fake Capitol “coup,” this was a real overthrow. Unlike the buffalo horn-wearing joke who desecrated the “sacred” Senate chamber, the Ukraine coup had real armed insurrectionists with a real plan to overthrow the government. Eventually, with the help of incoming Assistant Secretary of State Nuland, they succeeded – after thousands of civilians were killed.

As we were unfortunately reminded during the last four years of the Trump Administration, the personnel is the policy. So while President Trump railed against the “stupid wars” and promised to bring the troops home, he hired people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to get the job done. They spent their time “clarifying” Trump’s call for ending wars to mean he wanted to actually continue the wars. It was a colossal failure.

So it’s hard to be optimistic about a Biden Administration with so many hyper-interventionist Obama retreads.

While the US Agency for International Development (USAID) likes to sell itself as the compassionate arm of the US foreign policy, in fact USAID is one of the main US “regime change” agencies. Biden has announced that a top “humanitarian interventionist” – Samantha Power – would head that Agency in his Administration.

Power, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council staff and as US Ambassador to the UN, argued passionately and successfully that a US attack on the Gaddafi government in Libya would result in a liberation of the people and the outbreak of democracy in the country. In reality, her justification was all based on lies and the US assault has left nothing but murder and mayhem. Gaddafi’s relatively peaceful, if authoritarian, government has been replaced by radical terrorists and even slave markets.

At the end of the day, the Bush Republicans – like Rep. Liz Cheney – will join hands with the Biden Democrats to reinstate “American leadership.” This of course means more US overt and covert wars overseas. The unholy alliance between Big Tech and the US government will happily assist the US State Department under Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Assistant Secretary of State Nuland with the technology to foment more “regime change” operations wherever the Biden Administration sees fit. Finish destroying Syria and the secular Assad? Sure! Go back into Iraq? Why not? Afghanistan? That’s the good war! And Russia and China must be punished as well.

These are grave moments for we non-interventionists. But also we have a unique opportunity, informed by history, to denounce the warmongers and push for a peaceful and non-interventionist foreign policy.

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Featured image is from SCF

This 92nd anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes at a time of great historical conjunctures inside the United States and around the globe.

For the last ten months the country has been imperiled by the worst public health crisis in more than a century where nearly 400,000 have perished due to the COVID-19 pandemic amid the infections of more than 24 million people.

The public health disaster is a direct result of the failure of the outgoing administration of President Donald J. Trump to adequately address the advent and rapid spread of the virus, seeking instead to downplay the pandemic while the widespread sickness and death throughout the land has prompted an unprecedented economic downturn. Millions are jobless and facing imminent foreclosure and eviction absent of much needed drastic federal, state and municipal interventions aimed at guaranteeing housing, food, water and education for the majority of working and oppressed people.

COVID-19 and its concomitant social ills has not for one minute eased the level of institutional racism, economic exploitation and state repression which has been the hallmark of U.S. capitalism and imperialism for several centuries. The brutal police and vigilante executions of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Hakim Littleton, among others, exemplifies the character of the ruling class during this period.

Fortunately, in line with our tradition of resistance to injustice, millions are rising up to mobilize against the wanton arrest, prosecution, injuring and killing of African Americans and other communities of color. These demonstrations and rebellions since late May in particular, has alerted the world that the U.S. can in no way claim to be the paragon of democracy and human rights in which it describes itself.

In response to this renewed mass uprising among the people, thousands have been arrested and dozens killed. The administration has deployed state and federal forces into municipalities with the expressed intent to suppress the unrest. Both locally and nationally, the ruling interests have sought to denigrate and demoralize anti-racist activists.

These efforts have failed miserably in the last few months. People continued to come into the streets to protest while at the same time they have registered and voted in record numbers sending a clear message that racism and state repression must end immediately.

The Trump administration launched a well-funded propaganda and psychological warfare campaign to convince its supporters that the inevitable electoral defeat on November 3 could have only occurred as the result of massive fraud. Despite the rejection by the majority along with the court systems at all levels, in regard to these endless misrepresentations of the actual situation in the U.S., the right-wing has persisted in promoting these lies to the point of advocating the declaration of Marshall Law which could only be consolidated through a neo-fascist coup.

The Significance of the January 6 Coup Attempt in Washington, D.C.

Despite the shocking events of earlier this month when thousands of Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill, these developments should not have taken any politically conscious person by surprise. The administration had signaled the need for extra-judicial and violent actions against not only working class and oppressed peoples but also others who would dare stand in the way of such a program of reaction.

The ultimate realization of a neo-fascist and racist coup of this character would in fact disenfranchise tens of millions of principally African Americans and other voters from oppressed communities. It requires the throwing out of all the advances won through more than a century-and-a-half of protracted struggle related to civil rights and universal suffrage.

Even some among the spokespersons for the ruling class through its media outlets and other public platforms contemplated the apparent complicity of not only the White House and members of Congress in the attempted coup. Obviously, which has been the case historically, the overlap between military, intelligence and law-enforcement personnel easily became operational. It has been the policy of successive Democratic and Republican administrations to further militarize the police and to continue to replenish the prison-industrial-complex where more than 2.5 million remain incarcerated as millions of others are subjected to grossly overreaching judicial and law-enforcement supervision.

How can these ultra-rightist and militarist forces be defeated? We know from the history of the U.S. that the racist and reactionary forces are deeply embedded in the security apparatus of the capitalist state. If sections of the ruling class which are in disagreement with the Trump program attempts to purge these reactionary elements from the bureaucracy it could trigger even more violent unrest. One key aspect of the failure of the January 6 putsch was the lack of support among the highest levels of the military and intelligence structures. Although the Trump administration prodded the generals, intelligence heads, state politicians and the leaders of the Senate, including Vice President Mike Pence, to engage in the attempt to overthrow the electoral will of the people, these forces did not feel compelled to engage in a dictatorial solution to the contemporary crisis of racial capitalism and imperialism.

This is not to say that under a different set of circumstances such a coup would not gain the allegiance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leading political officials, government bureaucrats and directors of intelligence agencies. Only the masses of people properly organized and militant could be in a social position to reverse a right-wing coup through the use of general strikes, school boycotts and direct action. Consequently, our objective is to enhance the capacity of the working class, the nationally oppressed and other popular sectors of the population to guard against the advent of fascism and for the acquisition of genuine democracy and social emancipation.

Imperialist Militarism as an Outgrowth of Domestic Racism and Neo-fascism

During the last year of Dr. King’s life, he took a firm position in opposition to the U.S. genocidal war in Vietnam. King linked the struggle against imperialist war abroad with the need to eradicate poverty and institutional racism inside the country. Such a view in 1967-68 as well as in 2021 places one at loggerheads with the ruling class.

Nonetheless, we know that the actual enemies of the masses of people in the U.S. are in Washington, D.C., on Wall Street and other areas where the exploitation and repression of the majority remains in force. The peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean are not the inherent adversaries of the working class and nationally oppressed. In fact, the working and struggling masses of the world are the natural allies of the people within the U.S.

Therefore, we must be forthright in our solidarity with the peoples of Palestine, the Western Sahara, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela, and all other oppressed and struggling nations throughout the globe. The total liberation of these geo-political regions will assist in the efforts of people inside the U.S. in their struggles to win genuine freedom and self-determination.

Let us continue our fight to prevail over the forces of racism and reaction in the U.S. and internationally. The securing of a federal holiday in honor of Dr. King some 35 years ago was not an end within itself. These concessions from the ruling class must be utilized to push the movement towards newer heights of achievement.

We salute all organizers in the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, nationally and internationally. We will continue to march towards the objectives of eliminating all forms of injustice and oppression in our lifetimes and for future generations to come.

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Author’s note: These remarks were delivered at the Virtual 18th Annual Detroit MLK Day Rally and Cultural Program held on Monday January 18, 2021. This event brought together over 30 speakers and cultural workers to honor the social justice and antiwar legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Azikiwe, a co-founder of MLK Day in Detroit in 2004, has served as both a speaker and emcee at all of the previous rallies, demonstrations and cultural programs. Others presentations at this event were delivered by Jesus Rodriguez Espinoza, editor and publisher at the Orinoco Tribune based in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; Darnell Summers, former GI war resister, musician and target of the United States government’s counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO); Aurora Harris, Detroit poet, author and lecturer at the University of Michigan-Dearborn; Blair Anderson, former Black Panther Party member and political prisoner; Sammie Lewis, organizer for Detroit Will Breathe (DWB); Nakia Wallace, co-founder of DWB; Tristan Taylor, co-founder and organizer with DWB; Anthony Ali, artist and organizer with DWB; Sarah Torres, event co-chair, musician, technician and member of Moratorium NOW! Coalition; Saydi Sarr, co-founder of the African Bureau for Immigration and Social Affairs (ABISA); Clarence Thomas, retired member of the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Workers Union Local 10 (ILWU); Efren Peredes, juvenile lifer and prison organizer; Jae Bass, Detroit spoken word artist and organizer for DWB; a Peoples’ Spirit of Detroit award was given to DWB for their pioneering role in the anti-racist movement; Yvonne Jones, Moratorium NOW! Coalition organizer and spokesperson for the Racial Profiling Across 8 Mile billboard campaign; among many others. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on Detroit, the entire event was held online. Here is the link to the entire program streamed over You Tube.

Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

President-elect Joe Biden is planning to cancel the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on the first day of his administration, a document reported by CBC on Sunday suggests.

A coalition of civil society organisations has written to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to request that it opens formal infringement procedures against France’s government for entrenching Islamophobia and structural discrimination against Muslims.

In a 28-page document seen by Middle East Eye, 36 organisations from 13 countries have submitted a complaint to the UNHRC in which they outline “clear violation of a number of basic rights that are protected in legislation that is ratified by Paris”.

The document alleged that France’s actions and policies in relation to Muslim communities violated international and European laws, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The signatories include the Strasbourg-based European Muslim Initiative for Social Cohesion, the Muslim Association of Britain and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Macron singles out Muslims

The complaint begins by setting out a chronology of addresses by French President Emmanuel Macron that specifically singles out Muslim communities.

This included a 2019 speech shortly after an attack in which four police officers were killed, in which Macron promoted a “society of vigilance” against the “Islamist hydra”. He called on people to report those at risk of “radicalisation” to authorities, citing at-risk factors such as growing a beard or regularly practising ritual prayer.

It also mentioned remarks from February 2020 when the French president announced plans “against separatism”, targeting Muslim communities and organisations. This included approval of imams by the state and an indirect tax on every Muslim who performs the Islamic pilgrimage of Hajj to finance counter-radicalisation programmes.

Most recently, the document mentioned a high-profile speech from October in which Macron described Islam as a “religion that is in crisis all over the world”, in remarks that led to protests around the world and an international boycott of French goods from individuals in several Muslim countries.

Two weeks after Macron’s speech, Samuel Paty, a teacher in the suburbs of Paris, was beheaded outside his school after he showed cartoon pictures of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on free speech. The assailant, an 18-year-old Russia-born Chechen refugee, was killed by French police near the scene of the attack.

The coalition of groups accused the French government of exploiting Paty’s death “for racist and Islamophobic purposes”.

Targeted attacks

A regime change project in Russia was launched on Sunday with the return of political activist Alexei Navalny to Moscow. It was a highly symbolic event — except that Navalny was travelling by an aeroplane from Germany and not in a sealed train.

Navalny’s rebranding from an obscure rabble rouser to an international celebrity through the past 5-month period is apparently complete. And the timing of his arrival in Moscow is perfect. Moscow had forewarned that he’d be detained for interrogation, being on the wanted list. And this while the Biden Administration is hitting the ground on coming Wednesday, raring to go.

The presidential elections are scheduled to be held in Russia in March 2024 and the next couple of years will be crucial for the Kremlin politics. The big question is whether President Vladimir Putin would seek another six-year term or not.

Putin keeps everyone guessing. Another term as president is his for the asking, as his popularity continues to soar, built on a solid record of achievements in consolidating Russia’s comprehensive national power, steering the country’s resurgence on the world stage and enhancing its international prestige and ensuring the global strategic balance.

Putin is the anchor sheet of the Russian boat. Unsurprisingly, he makes a formidable adversary for the US. The Russian analysts expect Biden to turn the US-Russia-China triangle to Washington’s advantage by engaging China and isolating Russia. Basically, in Biden’s world view, China is a competitor but is pragmatic and open to deal-making, and will remain neutral in the US’ confrontation with Russia.

Generally speaking, Biden and the Obama-era officials who comprise his national security team are rooted in their belief that the Russian power calculus is inherently fragile. From such a perspective, Navalny’s return to Russia becomes a moment of truth. The coming weeks would show the extent of popular support he actually enjoys.

The outgoing US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has lost no time to issue a strongly worded statement on Sunday regarding Navalny, demanding his “immediate and unconditional release” while also taunting Putin indirectly as an insecure leader. How far Pompeo contrived to create a precipitate situation for the incoming Biden administration we do not know. Such a possibility cannot be ruled out.

At any rate, in diplomatic terms, Navalny’s detention in Moscow is being turned into a cause célèbre of the transatlantic alliance at a juncture when Europe has been harping on its strategic autonomy from the US and Germany has pushed back at US pressure to scuttle the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. A German-Russian rapprochement will not be to the linking of Washington and London and some European capitals. The EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting on January 25 is expected to discuss the case of Navalny.

Possibly, the stage is being set for a US-Russia collision right at the outset of the Biden presidency. In anticipation of the gathering storms, perhaps, the Kremlin made an extraordinary move on Saturday with the former president Dmitry Medvedev authoring an op-ed in the state news agency Tass on Russia’s relations with the US. In a lengthy analysis, Medvedev laid bare the archaic political system in America with election rules drawn from the 18th century body polity that virtually negate the essence of truly democratic mandates for the elected presidents, which ultimately renders the US an “unpredictable partner” for its allies and partners alike.

Medvedev acknowledged,

“We expect it is highly likely that the United States will consistently pursue an anti-Russian policy… Biden has not yet said anything positive about Russia. On the contrary, his rhetoric has always been openly unfriendly, harsh, even aggressive… Our relations are likely to remain extremely cold in the coming years. And right now we do not expect anything but the continuation of a tough anti-Russian policy.”

But, interestingly, Medvedev concluded by making an impassioned plea for moderation in the US policies and conveying Russia’s readiness to work with Biden. No doubt, the essay has been written to draw Biden’s attention.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has traditionally spearheaded the cutting edge of the American policy toward Russia. And for the first time, a former diplomat William Burns who is also an experienced “Russia hand”,will be heading the agency in the Biden Administration. Burns’ memoirs The Back Channel is openly critical of Putin, where he candidly writes that “Basically, we’re facing a Russia that’s too big a player on too many important issues to ignore… It’s a Russia whose assertiveness in its neighbourhood and interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role beyond it will sometimes cause significant problems.”

Burns examines the Russian motivations in domestic and international politics and surveys the US decision on NATO’s expansion towards Russia’s western borders in the mid-1990s, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, the US’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the US deployment of missile defence in Europe soon afterward as defining moments in the relationship. To be fair, he takes a rational view and takes note of the genesis of Russia’s progressive alienation from the West. Nonetheless, the bottom line is that he advocates a hard line toward Russia.

In Burns’ words,

“Managing relations with Russia will be a long game, conducted within a relatively narrow band of possibilities. Navigating such a great-power rivalry requires tactful diplomacy—maneuvering in the gray area between peace and war; demonstrating a grasp of the limits of the possible; building leverage; exploring common ground where we can find it; and pushing back firmly and persistently where we can’t… We ought to traverse it without illusions, mindful of Russia’s interests and sensibilities, unapologetic about our values and confident in our own enduring strengths. We should not give in to Putin—or give up on the Russia beyond him.”

Succinctly put, Burns sees the troubled relationship with Russia as something to be managed rather than fostered or nurtured and he is deeply pessimistic about the prospects of any improvement so long as Putin continues to be in power. Conceivably, Biden shares such a perspective too, and one main consideration amongst others in his decision to put Burns as the head of the CIA would be that the US diplomacy in the period ahead will be navigating a turbulent phase in the relationship, where the American interests lie in promoting a change of regime in the Kremlin, which will of course essentially devolve upon the measure of success of the spy agency’s covert operations to destabilise Russia.

Top Kremlin officials had alleged in September that Moscow had definite information that CIA operatives were working with Navalny in Germany. If so, Navalny is a strategic asset that the CIA will not give up easily. But all indications are that Moscow is also digging in for the long haul. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has rebuked the Russia’s Western partners and urged them “to show politeness, exclude methods of diplomatic boorishness and honour their international obligations in the situation” involving  Navalny.

That being the case, to be sure, the CIA is all set to make a hyper-aggressive opening move on the Russian chessboard — the Danish Gambit! In the game of chess, the Danish opening usually lasts less than 20 moves as white will either breakthrough and checkmate the king early on or white will fail miserably and be left in shambles. This is not for the faint of heart.

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Featured image: Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was detained at the airport in Moscow upon arrival from Germany, January 17, 2021  (Source: Indian Punchline)

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Dear Readers, we are happy to announce that we recently introduced a translation plug-in to Global Research. Located in the top banner of the website, the “Translate Website” drop-down menu allows you to select from 27 different languages into which the entire website can be translated at the click of a button. We invite you to test it out and please feel free to send any feedback you may have to [email protected]

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Fighting a Corona Phantom

By Julian Rose, January 18 2021

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Martin Luther King

There was a man speaking on the radio this morning and it was a speech not often heard on public radio stations. The voice was both noble and articulate. It was soon apparent it was none other than Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in his calm, distinctive style telling a story about how he was stabbed by a woman and narrowly escaped death; a foreshadowing of what was soon to come. This was his last speech; the next day he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Robert F. Kennedy, upon hearing of the assassination gave an impromptu speech later that day in Indianapolis before a predominately black crowd. His remarks are often considered one of the greatest speeches ever given by an American politician. Kennedy said,

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

These comments seem timely today, not only due to the ongoing racial tension but also while we watch two political parties squaring off in an alarming confrontation, threatening to tear the country to shreds.

In 1999 the King family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against restaurant owner Loyd Jowers and other “unknown conspirators” for the murder of Martin Luther King. Loyd Jowers claimed in an interview in 1993 that he had conspired with the mafia and the federal government to kill King. The family lawyer William F. Pepper, who was also the last attorney of alleged shooter James Earl Ray argued that Ray was not the shooter but was framed by the FBI, the CIA, the military, the Memphis police, and organized crime figures. “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Coretta King said at a press conference in that same year.

History has revealed that the FBI under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover launched a relentless propaganda campaign against MLK that contributed to the results of a Gallup poll conducted in 1966, that revealed only 33% of Americans had positive feelings toward Dr. King. Hoover despised Martin Luther King, that much seems obvious, but the “why” is harder to ascertain: on the surface Hoover claimed King was a “threat to national security” due to his relationship with known-Communist and one of his closest advisers, Stanley David Levison.

MLK’s son Dexter King gave a more lucid and perhaps philosophical understanding of his father’s death: “It is not about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same things are still happening. Until we address that, we’re all in trouble. Because if it could happen to him…if it can happen to this family, it can happen to anybody.”

It is apparent that the establishment was threatened by Martin Luther King—J. Edgar Hoover made him an object of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program from 1963 until his death. FBI agents recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion mailed King a threatening anonymous letter that urged him to commit suicide. These recordings were also sent to pastors and even to his wife Coretta but all recipients refused to make the recordings public.

The unpleasant truth is that there is a thick scar of racism running across the underbelly of America that rises to the surface on occasion like a great beast rolling over. The Black Lives Matter movement that gained strength over the summer months of the past year is ample proof that the beast is still breathing but maybe, just maybe it is a dying beast, cornered and trapped in its final death throes. More than one commentator has suggested we are currently witnessing the downfall of the Republican party and its dubious choice of a president has only accelerated the accompanying fall of white supremacism.

The ancient Israelites were infamous for stoning their prophets and America seems to have gone down a similar path with a growing list of extra-judicial assassinations and incarcerations of their most outspoken critics; it is fair to say that Martin Luther King was a modern prophet. Though he is known as the leader of a movement in the United States to free African-Americans from racial segregation and discrimination, his captivating rhetoric elevated all human beings to a higher level. He spoke from a universal platform about what it means to be a human being in the face of tyranny. Martin Luther King Jr., at the age of 35 became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and on accepting this award on December 10^th of 1964 he said, “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

Someday, somebody will need to explain why so many human beings are threatened by those advocating freedom, equality, peace and brotherhood. The awful truth is that some human beings don’t really want freedom and equality; some seem to relish tyranny and find solace in the worship of tyrants. For the rest of us, the goal is the same every day: Fight the good fight and speak the healing words that will bring brotherhood and lasting peace to our troubled world. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

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Richard Revelstoke is an activist, musician and author of several books, hailing from Vancouver, Canada.

First posted in May 2020, James Corbett documents the devastating impacts of the Covid-19 vaccine

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Who is Bill Gates? A software developer? A businessman? A philanthropist? A global health expert?

This question, once merely academic, is becoming a very real question for those who are beginning to realize that Gates’ unimaginable wealth has been used to gain control over every corner of the fields of public health, medical research and vaccine development.

And now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people.

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The media could not move faster to support the impeachment of Donald Trump and to place the responsibility for inciting a “violent insurrection” at his feet.  

Whether it was the progressive magazine The Nation, the conservative newspaper the Wall Street Journal, or the revolutionary socialist website WSWS, the conclusion about Trump was the same: he had organized and led an armed group of dangerous extremists to seize control of the Congress with the intention of subverting the Constitution, overturning the election and attacking liberal politicians.

The view being promoted in the media is that Trump and his ignorant followers, claiming a stolen election without any evidence, spouting conspiracy theories about COVID19, are universally assumed to pose an immediate threat to the security of the United States.

CNN announced that Trump was “ isolated and wallowing in self-pity in the White House” as he awaited trial, and even possible imprisonment. The possibility that some part of the claims of fraud in the election might have grounds in fact, that some conspiracies about COVID19 are real, did not cross anyone’s mind.

It is true that hostile forces have taken control of Washington D.C.

But they were not wearing MAGA red hats or waving Confederate flags. No, the takeover was at a much higher level.

The Federal government, the production of money by the Federal Reserve, the educational system and the corporate media from which citizens get all information has been taken over definitively by the multinational corporations Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and SpaceX (and others), and those companies, and the banks that fund them, have taken home some ten trillion dollars from the Federal Reserve through a series of COVID19 bailouts that remain opaque, if not explicitly classified.

But that real takeover of the Capitol has not been mentioned in the press. All attention is on a selfish, ignorant, racist and dangerous Donald Trump who stands in contrast to a rational, scientific and compassionate Biden administration.

Yet any careful consideration of this “armed attack” on the Capitol suggests that rather than a failed insurrection by dangerous right-wing forces trying to destroy democracy, it was closer to Grand Guignol, to sensationalist theater.

That attack, documented for us in carefully posed scenes, was but the first act of “Operation Lipstick on a Pig,” a move to decorate the radical crackdown on freedom of expression and of assembly to oppose corporate tyranny with the trappings of a multicultural, progressive, feminist, scientific and rational administration.

Over the last few days, Posse Comitatus has been buried in a shallow grave. The military takeover was passed over for talk about whether or not Kamala Harris would wear a sari to the inauguration.

Source: Emanuel Pastreich

9/11 at a fire sale price

When EU Commissioner Thierry Breton referred to the “attacks” as “Capitol Hill — the 9/11 moment of social media,” he was not kidding. He spelled out precisely what is going to unfold over the next few months as “Operation Lipstick on a Pig” swings into overdrive.

In effect, the Biden administration, loaded up with minorities and women at the highest levels, will use this ethnic PR as a sweet syrup to help Americans swallow down the launch of the most repressive regime in American history. As Naomi Klein famously stated, bringing about such a shift requires the “shock doctrine” a deep trauma for the entire nation that will force acceptance of a “new normal.”

Breton explicitly refers to this attack as a “paradigm shift for global security” like 9/11.

“We are all still shocked by the images of protesters storming the U.S. Congress to halt the certification of the next U.S. president. The attack on the U.S. Capitol — a symbol of democracy — feels like a direct assault on all of us.”

Just as 9/11 marked a paradigm shift for global security, 20 years later we are witnessing a before-and-after in the role of digital platforms in our democracy.

The paradigm shift he is suggesting is one in which social media companies are made responsible for whatever people post (even though the hyped up COVID19 pandemic is the reason people have been forced to be dependent on social media corporations) and therefore those corporations have a responsibility to ban anything that they deem dangerous.

He claims we need a Digital Markets Act that will allow us to shut down misinformation immediately and ban those who engage in such threats. There is of course some legitimacy to this argument. But the article assumes that the “truth” can be determined by for-profit and morally bankrupt companies like Twitter and Facebook, or by billionaires, or by the government agencies that now function as own subsidiaries of investment banks.

In any case, the analogies between the Capitol attack and 9/11 are not random; they are intentional.

Just like after the 9/11 incident, everyone who has institutional authority has been called in to testify as to the horrific nature of the attack—before anyone has had a chance to think deeply about what actually happened. Moreover, the enemy is decided for us early on by a series of journalism scoops, Islamic terrorists in the first case, conservative white nationalists in this case, to make sure that we don’t think too much.

In the case of the insurrection at the Capitol, Wikipedia (which did not exist back in 2001) has decided that it was “a riot and violent attack” “carried out by a mob of supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump.” Case closed.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, without exception, signed a letter without precedent stating that was “a violent riot” and “direct assault on the U.S. Congress” that was led by the president of the United States.

The executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists Kathleen Rest condemned the attack as “a violent intimidation of our elected representatives and by extension all of us. It is not a peaceful protest. It is insurrection.”

In other words, if you have any doubts as to what happened on January 6, you should increase your dosage of antipsychotic medication because people will just think you are crazy. Even worse, thinking in a scientific manner could lead to you being associated with right-wing domestic terrorists.

But what happened on Capitol Hill on January 6, and why is it not being subject to a rigorous analysis?

Already, there have been extensive discussions on the Internet about how the photographs and videos fail to document any form of “violent insurrection” and how most photographs appear staged.

The protestors held no weapons in the photographs and videos released at the time. The terrible violence was only fed to us later through media reports of dubious reliability.

The videos of the protestors pushing against the Capitol Police are pure keystone cops. No one could possibly engage in that sort of roughhousing with the police and not end up on the ground handcuffed in a few seconds unless both sides were in on the game.

The strangest footage was that of the protestor Ashli Babbitt being shot in the neck by a Capitol Police officer (she reportedly died soon after). In the video, Babbitt is shot by a revolver that we are told was held by the police officer and falls to the ground. Some nearby attend to her while others mill around, checking their smart phones and calling out, “shots fired.”

Such a scene is improbable. If a police officer shot into a crowd of protesters and someone fell to the ground, the rest would run for cover as fast as they could, or hit the ground immediately. Unless they were battle hardened soldiers, the only thing in their mind would be avoiding being the next one shot.

But everyone seemed to know that only one person would be shot. That scene, most the scenes, just smell phony, like a low-budget 9.11 aimed at stirring up fear in preparation for a massive clampdown.

Stage set for a granola-flavored version of the “Patriot Act?”

Whereas the 9/11 incident served as an opportunity to induce national trauma and prepare for the reduction of civil rights and for the march towards foreign wars, the attack on the Capitol is being used to pave the way towards a massive crackdown on domestic political opposition and possibly the use of the military to suppress any resistance.

Whereas Al Qaeda and the threat of Islamic nationalism and terrorism were presented as the threat after 9/11, and then used as an excuse to secure massive budgets for military and intelligence contractors while restricting the activity of citizens, this time “domestic terrorism” is the new threat on the block.

Whereas terror after 9/11 was presented by CNN and the New York Times as Arabs wearing turbans, this time it is white men wearing MAGA hats are the target.

The isolationist white militias that have nominally supported Donald Trump are dangerous and a real threat. They have carried out real attacks on multiple occasions.

So also the Islamic military groups that worked out of Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 were serious threats. But the relationship between those extremists and the 9/11 incident was never made clear and there was nothing to justify those foreign wars, or the end of civil liberties, that resulted. So also, today, the relationship between the MAGA “white nationalists” and the Capitol incident is far from clear. What we do know is given to us by the corporate media, not trustworthy sources of scientific analysis.

We can already detect in editorials and news briefings the outlines of a new version of the Patriot Act taking form, this time focused on “domestic terrorism.”

The original Patriot Act cleared away all the limits on the spying on foreigners, starting with those accused of the 9/11 attacks, and opened the doors for general spying on the entire world, and spying, not by an accountable government, but by private intelligence contractors who sold their trawl catch to the highest bidder.

This new “Patriot Act,” dressed up as a progressive effort to reign in intolerant, violent and ignorant Trump followers, aims to strip American citizens of all legal defenses against the authority of Federal Government and to allow for the deployment of the military within the United States to defend against domestic terrorism, real or trumped up.

The hyping of the Capitol incident goes beyond a drive to cement into place the Biden administration before its legitimacy can be questioned. The argument driven home to all Americans by the media coverage is that those who have doubts about the lockdown on personal freedom taking place, or about the COVID19 vaccine regime that Biden has made his highest economic, security and social priority, are in the same camp as these domestic terrorists.

The COVID19 task force has expressed its intention to work with the military domestically to disperse vaccinations to the public (perhaps by force). At the same time, DARPA has suddenly entered the medical field with a broad range of new medical tools, including vaccines, related to COVID19. That militarization of medicine has ominous implications.

The spread of dangerous misinformation and “conspiracy theories” is treated, post-Capitol attacks, as the equivalent of war. By extension, anyone who suggests that COVID19 is not a pandemic at all, but a scheme by the rich and powerful to destroy civil society and to push for needless vaccines using modified RNA and microchips can be considered now a domestic terrorist.

Tech giants will be justified, in the interests of national security, in shutting down, or punishing, without any legal due process, those who spread information that they have determined to be “false.” Already Facebook and Twitter are banning medically supported reports by qualified doctors questioning COVID13 policies.

As large parts of the intelligence community have been sold off to Facebook, Google and Amazon over the last year, the nature of the true threat should be clear.

Remember that it was quarantine and distance learning that has made it difficult to meet with friends and family in person. We are forced to communicate via social media, or platforms like WhatsApp, Zoom or Skype that are run for profit, and over the policies of, we have no say. We can be placed in cyberjail, or banned, at the whim of these corporations at precisely the moment they we are allowed no other means to communicate with others except through them.

It was no surprise that the politician groomed as the face of the youthful left, Alexanderia Ocasio-Cortez, was chosen to lay the groundwork for military rule and the end of free expression in social media.

She rushed to The Guardian to express her terror about the Capitol attacks,

“I myself did not even feel safe going to that extraction point because there were QAnons and white supremacist sympathizers and, frankly, white supremacist members of Congress in that extraction point who I know and who I had felt would disclose my location.”

The comments seem far removed from the actions of the rowdy crowd who entered the Capitol on January 6. But then again, the fact that the occupation was for show does not mean that it was harmless.

Ocasio-Cortez pinned the responsibility for this “violent insurrection” on big tech, stating, ” Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook bear partial responsibility for Wednesday’s events, period.”

Interestingly, she argues that Facebook the corporation helped these dangerous domestic terrorists organize their attack and therefore it is responsible. But she does NOT suggest that Facebook be broken up, or run as a public monopoly, or that the decision as to what is true and what is false should be subject to rigorous external review. She is pressuring Facebook to be more aggressive in shutting down any communication, that it deems to be dangerous.

In other words, she is giving a progressive stamp of approval for the control of public communication by multinational corporations.

It is fine with her if Twitter blocks Donald Trump without any legal process, or Facebook blocks Press News for giving Americans too much truth.

Politico used the favorite “9/11” term “intelligence failure” to refer to the investigations of the Capitol incident scheduled for no less than four house committees. The formal letter announcing investigations, states,

“This still-emerging story is one of astounding bravery by some U.S. Capitol Police and other officers; of staggering treachery by violent criminals; and of apparent and high-level failures — in particular, with respect to intelligence and security preparedness.”

We are being set up for another series of dishonest committee meetings like those of 2001 and 2002 in which politicians will drone on and on about intelligence failures while the criminals stand unmolested in plain view.

What we need now is not show trials, or the takeover of Washington D.C. by the military, but rather an objective, international, scientific investigation of what happened in the Capitol on January 6 that does not involve any media players linked to the global financial forces that stand to benefit from the militarization of American governance.

It was too easy to reduce Donald Trump to a dangerous caricature, a new Osama bin Laden who can be used to justify a crackdown on domestic dissent at precisely the moment that a dangerous vaccine regime is being rolled out with the cooperation of the military.

And by the way, an international investigation of the 9/11 incident might be helpful too.

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More than a hundred candidates who ran in municipal elections last November in cities across Brazil’s Amazonian states are on the environmental regulator’s “dirty list” for violations committed over the past decade.

That’s the finding from an analysis by Agência Pública, a nonprofit investigative journalism agency in Brazil. It found 118 of the candidates for mayor and deputy mayor in the Nov. 15 polls had previously been fined for deforestation, illegal burning, exploitation of native forest located in reserves, or providing false information to environmental agencies to cover up illegal activities. The politicians include 51 who were in office at the time of the election, and 28 who ran for reelection.

Among those fined by IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency, were four mayors and two deputy mayors of the six municipalities in the state of Pará notorious for the Aug. 10, 2019, “day of fire” — a series of blazes set by the agribusiness sector to clear land. The politicians are Valmir Climaco, the mayor of Itaituba, who was reelected; Raimundo Batista Santiago of Jacareacanga; Valdinei José Ferreira and his deputy, Maurício de Lima Santos, from Trairão, both of them reelected; and Ubiraci Soares Silva and his deputy, Gelson Luiz Dill, of Novo Progresso. (Dill ran against Silva in the election and won.) Together, the six men have racked up fines of 7.8 million reais ($1.5 million) for environmental violations, though none were accused of having participated in the burning during the “day of fire.”

These four cities, plus Altamira and São Félix do Xingu, were responsible for 79% of the fire outbreaks detected in the state of Pará on Aug. 10 and 11 last year, according to a survey by Greenpeace.

Itaituba’s Valmir Climaco, a former gold miner and cattle rancher, was last year sentenced to four years and nine months in jail for destroying 746 hectares (1,843 acres) of native forest in neighboring Altamira between 2002 and 2004. He was found to have laundered the timber through Madeireira Climaco, a company that appears on the declaration of assets he submitted to electoral authorities.

He also has three charges against him for damage to vegetation and for carrying out works without the requisite license. Two of these charges, dating from 2012 and 2015, are still pending trial.

In 2019, the Federal Prosecution Service (MPF) sought the removal of Climaco as Itaituba’s mayor after he apparently threatened officials from Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs. The officials were slated to inspect Climaco’s ranch, which sits on land claimed by the Munduruku Indigenous people, but in June 2019 the mayor said he would only receive the inspectors “at bullet point.” The following month, the Federal Police (PF) found 583 kilograms (1,285 pounds) of cocaine on the ranch.

In total, Climaco is the subject of 45 federal criminal citations, according to his declaration to electoral authorities.

Cattle graze next to burning vegetation in Lábrea, Amazonas state. Politicians with business interests in cattle ranching have been fined by IBAMA for deforestation, illegal logging and infractions within conservation areas. Image by Christian Braga/Greenpeace.

From miner to mayor

A two-hour drive south of Itaituba lies the municipality of Trairão, whose mayor is also accused of deforestation. Valdinei José Ferreira, known as “Django,” was convicted in April 2020 for destroying 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres) of Amazon forest. He has denied the charge, despite IBAMA detecting the deforestation on his farm in 2012.

Ferreira has been embroiled in other environmental crimes. He was recently ordered to pay more than 43,000 reais ($8,300) in fines imposed by IBAMA in 2011 and 2012, after he was caught operating an illegal sawmill. He has also been accused by prosecutors of illegal logging inside a conservation area in Itaituba in December 2007. A verdict is pending in that case.

Ferreira’s deputy at Itaituba City Hall, Maurício de Lima Santos, has also been accused of deforestation by the Pará state Attorney General’s Office. The alleged violation occurred in Itaituba II National Forest, in neighboring Novo Progresso municipality.

Santos has also been accused by prosecutors of illegally entering another national forest, in Trairão, in 2014 with machinery intended for logging, without the required authorization.

In Novo Progresso itself, where the mass burning of the “day of fire” was likely coordinated, the mayor and deputy mayor have also been fined by IBAMA for environmental violations.

Ubiraci Soares Silva, the outgoing mayor, is a defendant in a lawsuit filed by IBAMA since 2015; as of 2017, he has been liable for fines exceeding 1.7 million reais ($328,000), according to the newspaper O Globo, for the illegal occupation of land inside Jamanxim National Forest.

His deputy, Gelson Luiz Dill, recently elected the new mayor, was fined a total of 4.3 million reais ($825,000) on two charges of destroying a combined 198.4 hectares (490 acres) in the same park in 2017 and 2018, according to the NGO Repórter Brasil.

Dill claims the fines are a form of retaliation for his actions in defense of farmers and ranchers in the region. “It’s because I denounce the irregularities of these environmental agencies that are burning producers’ machinery and producers’ properties,” he said.

Dill is himself a rancher, with 2,473 head of cattle valued at 1.9 million reais ($366,000), according to his declaration to electoral authorities.

Agribusiness and slave labor

Twelve of the 28 mayors and deputy mayors of municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon who ran for reelection are farmers, ranchers or loggers.

Fernando Gorgen, who was reelected as mayor of Querência in Mato Grosso state, declared 17.2 million reais ($3.3 million) in assets to electoral authorities. This figure includes his shareholdings in two cattle-breeding companies in the state of Tocantins and a farm in Querência. His wealth grew 260% in the four years he was in charge of the municipality.

Gorgen and his brothers were fined in 2018 by the Mato Grosso state environmental office for defrauding deforestation permits. IBAMA accused them of responsibility for the clearing of more than 5,000 hectares (12,400 acres) of the Amazon forest. Gorgen claimed he wasn’t the owner of the farm where the illegal deforestation had occurred, saying he was “mistakenly pointed out as one of the [land clearing] protagonists by Operation Siriema,” a law-enforcement operation carried out by IBAMA and the Mato Grosso state prosecutor’s office.

In Nova Canaã do Norte, another municipality in Mato Grosso, the reelected mayor, Rubens Roberto Rosa, was also fined for an environmental violation while in office in 2017. Like Gorgen, he is a cattle rancher and a millionaire: for last year’s election, he declared an inheritance of 25.9 million reais ($5 million), which includes 7,334 head of cattle and five farms.

In 2013, he was named on the “dirty list” of employers using slave labor, following raids by prosecutors on two of his properties. In a lawsuit, the MPF alleged that Rosa kept the workers “in conditions analogous to slavery, since they were subject to sleeping in shacks under the protection of plastic tarpaulins, had precarious food and no drinking water, sharing the environment with venomous animals, living without any conditions of hygiene, and staying several kilometers away from their places of origin.” A verdict is pending in the case.

Contacted by Agência Pública, Rosa claimed there were no criminal charges pending against him, and that the slave labor lawsuit was the result of a “setup” by a former worker. On the fines and allegations levied against him by IBAMA, he said he had paid all the compensation required for the deforestation he had caused, and that there were no recent charges pending. Rosa also said he carried out forest clearing before the Forest Code came into force and tightened the permissible area of land allowed to be deforested.

IBAMA personnel with seized timber from an illegal logging site within an Indigenous reserve in Brazil’s Roraima state. Candidates with links to logging were among those who ran in municipal elections across Brazil last November. Image courtesy of IBAMA.

The most fined mayor, and the most mayors fined

Among all the politicians fined for environmental violations in the Amazon, the record holder is the current deputy mayor of Alto Araguaia in Mato Grosso state: Freud Fraga dos Santos. A cattle rancher, he has been fined 13 times between 2012 and 2019, yet was still reelected alongside the city’s mayor, Gustavo Melo.

Freud was denounced in 2014 by the MPF in the state of Pará as a member of a gang of deforesters and land grabbers in Novo Progresso. According to the MPF complaint, the group invaded public lands, deforested and burned the areas to establish cattle pastures, and then sold the lands as ranches. According to the investigation, at least 15,500 hectares (38,300 acres) were deforested, resulting in environmental damage equivalent to at least 500 million reais ($96 million).

At the time, the Federal Police, IBAMA, the Brazilian tax authorities and the Attorney General’s Office considered the gang one of the most destructive in the Amazon.

“We don’t recognize his involvement in anything,” said Marlon Arthur Paniago de Oliveira, the deputy mayor’s lawyer in the case. “It is important to clarify that the judicial process is still in the court, and it is certain that he has never had any conviction in criminal proceedings of any kind, in any degree or jurisdiction,” he added.

Mato Grosso, besides having the politician with the most fines, is also the state with most candidates fined. In Colniza, on the border with Amazonas state, five of the 10 mayor-deputy mayor tickets in the November election had candidates with environmental fines. Most of these were for violations against vegetation and environmental control.

The problem isn’t just confined to municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon. The Agência Pública report found six candidates for mayor and deputy mayor in municipalities in other parts of the country were fined by IBAMA for violations committed in the Amazonian states. In total, 11 mayors and deputy mayors currently in office outside the Amazon have been hit with a fine in the region at some point.

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This article was first published in Portugue by Agência Pública.

Authors: Aline Maciel, Bianca Muniz, Bruno Fonseca, Ciro Barros from Agência Pública

Featured image: IBAMA personnel carrying out a raid in 2018 on an illegal mining operation in Tenharim Indigenous Territory in the state of Amazonas. The region is home to extensive forest massifs that are under pressure from criminal groups. Five politicians fined for environmental crimes were elected in the state in 2020. Image courtesy of Vinícius Mendonça/IBAMA.

On Nov. 9, 2020, Pfizer, Inc. announced that the experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) BNT162b2 vaccine for COVID-19 it developed in partnership with Germany’s BioNTech SE had an efficacy rate of 90 percent, based on the results of human clinical trials on the vaccine.^{1 2 3} This news was followed up a week later with an announcement by Moderna, Inc. on Nov. 16 that its experimental mRNA mRNA-1273 for COVID-19 showed an efficacy of 94.5 percent.^{4 5 6}

Seemingly not to be outdone by Moderna and perhaps in anticipation of an impending emergency use authorization (EUA)—not “approval”—by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the first COVID-19 vaccine to be distributed to the U.S. public and used, Pfizer revised upward the efficacy of its BNT162b2 vaccine to 95 percent on Nov. 18.^{7 8 9} The FDA granted an EUA for the BNT162b2 vaccine on Dec. 11. It followed with an EUA for the mRNA-1273 vaccine on Dec. 18.^{10 11}

During the past two months, other pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have revealed efficacy rates for COVID-19 vaccines they have developed. On Nov. 23, the United Kingdom’s AstraZeneca plc announced that its experimental AZD1222 COVID-19 vaccine, developed in partnership with Oxford University, had attained an efficacy of 70 percent during clinical trials. On Dec. 14, Russia’s Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology announced its Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine was 91.4 percent efficacious. On Dec. 30, China’s Sinopharm Group Co. Ltd. announced its COVID-19 was 79.34 percent efficacious.^{12 13 14}

Many other pharmaceutical companies, universities and government agencies are continuing to work on their own COVID-19 vaccines that they hope to submit for governmental approval or at least EUAs over the next year. They are proceeding with clinical trials to determine the safety and efficacy of their products. The market for COVID-19 vaccines has begun to take shape and some of the early leading manufacturers have become apparent. Additionally, a bar has been set for the range of effectiveness expected of a COVID-19 vaccine. An efficacy rate of 95 percent is currently considered to be the gold standard for COVID-19 vaccines.

What is Meant by “Efficacy” of COVID-19 Vaccines?

But what exactly does “efficacy” mean when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines? Does it mean that the vaccines will prevent people from becoming infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Does it mean that they will prevent people who have the virus from spreading it to others? Based on clinical trials, there is no evidence the vaccines will prevent either. In an interview last month with NBC’s Lester Holt, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla acknowledged he didn’t know if the BNT162b2 vaccine would prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “I think this is something that needs to be examined. We are not certain about that right now with what we know,” Bourla said.¹⁵

Bourla’s comments were echoed by Moderna’s chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, MD. In an interview with Axios on Nov. 23, Dr. Zaks noted, “When we start the deployment of [the mRNA-1273] vaccine, we will not have sufficient concrete data to prove that this vaccine reduces transmission.”¹⁶¹⁷

“These COVID vaccines are preventing clinical disease, we don’t know if they prevent transmission [of the SARS-CoV-2 virus],” says infectious disease expert Chris Beyrer, MD of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. According to vaccines expert David Diemert, MD of George Washington University, it is not known if the COVID-19 vaccines will prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from entering the body or leaving a vaccinated body.^{18 19 20}

Preventing Infection is Not “Primary Endpoint” of COVID-19 Vaccines

Similar views were expressed last year by Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) which partnered with Moderna on the development of the mRNA-1273 vaccine. At Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit on Oct. 26, Dr. Fauci was asked the following question by reporter Anjalee Khemlani:

I wonder about the effectiveness. That’s something that has been a topic of conversation, and I’ve heard a broad range of commentary, from… it will block the virus entirely to it will simply diminish the most severe cases. And if anyone experiences the virus, it will actually be a milder version. So based on what you know right now and what you’re seeing, do you anticipate that the first sets of vaccines out the door will be more of a less effective blocker of the virus?^{19 22}

Dr. Fauci responded:

That’s the primary endpoint of most of the [vaccines] is to prevent clinical disease, to prevent symptomatic disease. Not necessarily to prevent infection… that’s a secondary endpoint. But the primary thing you want to do is that if people get infected—prevent them from getting sick. And if you prevent them from getting sick, you will ultimately prevent them from getting seriously ill. So that’s what we want to do. The first, which we call the primary endpoint, is that.^{21 22}

He added:

If the vaccine also allows you to prevent initial infection, that would be great. But what I would settle for, and all of my colleagues would settle for, is the primary endpoint—to prevent clinically recognizable disease. And that’s what we hope happens.^{19 22}

More recently, Dr. Fauci was asked specifically by Newsweek if people who get a COVID-19 vaccines could still pass on the SARS-CoV-2  to others. He answered: “That’s a good question. We don’t know that yet. We do not know if the vaccines that prevent clinical disease also prevent infection.”^{23 24}

Finally, the World Health Organization (WHO) is also not particularly bullish on the ability of COVID-19 vaccines to control the SARS-CoV-2 contagion. “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,” said the WHO’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, MD.^{23 25}

In short then, what has been measured in the trials on the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines, as well as other experimental COVID-19 vaccines, is not whether they prevent infection with and transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus but how well they can prevent or minimize symptoms of COVID-19 disease that can be caused by the virus. There is no evidence to suggest the vaccines will have any effect in terms of protecting people from getting the virus and spreading it.

It doesn’t look like these COVID-19 vaccines are going to come anywhere close to being the proverbial ‘silver bullet.’

Marco Cáceres is managing editor of the weekly journal newspaper The Vaccine Reaction established and published by the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), which launched the TVR website in 2015.

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Notes

¹ Ellis R. Pfizer Says COVID Vaccine 90% Effective. WebMD Nov. 9, 2020.

² Kounang N. Pfizer says early analysis shows its Covid-19 vaccine is more than 90% effective. CNN Nov. 9, 2020.

³ Neergaard L, Johnson LA. Pfizer says COVID-19 vaccine is looking 90% effective. The Associated Press Nov. 9, 2020.

⁴ Cohen E. Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine is 94.5% effective, according to company data. CNNNov. 16, 2020.

⁵ McNamara D. Moderna: Data Shows COVID Vaccine 94.5% Effective. WebMD Nov. 16, 2020.

⁶ Park A. Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective. Here’s What That Really Means. TIME Nov. 17, 2020.

⁷ Hopkins JS. Pfizer Says Covid-19 Vaccine Is 95% Effective in Final Data, Will Seek Authorization. The Wall Street Journal Nov. 18, 2020.

⁸ Morello L. Pfizer says vaccine is 95 percent effective in updated data. Politico Nov. 18, 2020.

⁹ Reals T, Gandel S. Pfizer says vaccine is 95 percent effective in updated data. CBS News Nov. 18, 2020.

¹⁰ Press Release. FDA Takes Key Action in Fight Against COVID-19 By Issuing Emergency Use Authorization for First COVID-19 Vaccine. U.S. Food and Drug Administration Dec. 11, 2020.

¹¹ Press Release. FDA Takes Additional Action in Fight Against COVID-19 By Issuing Emergency Use Authorization for Second COVID-19 Vaccine. FDA Dec. 18, 2020.

¹² Crist C. AstraZeneca Says COVID-19 Vaccine 70% Effective. WebMD Nov. 23, 2020.

¹³ Russia’s Sputnik V Vaccine Is 91.4% Effective, Developers Confirm. The Moscow Times Dec. 14, 2020.

¹⁴ Gan N.  China approves Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine, promises free shots for all citizens. CNNDec. 31, 2020.

¹⁵ Choi J. Pfizer chairman: We’re not sure if someone can transmit virus after vaccination. The Hill Dec. 3, 2020.

¹⁶ Axios. Moderna CMO: A vaccine doesn’t mean we change behavior. Twitter Nov. 23, 2020.

¹⁷ Manskar N. Moderna boss says COVID-19 vaccine not proven to stop spread of virus. New York Post Nov. 24, 2020.

¹⁸ Cáceres M. Wanna Fly? Proof of Vaccination, Please. The Vaccine Reaction Dec. 6, 2020.

¹⁹ Gregory M. VERIFY: Moderna, Pfizer vaccines may prevent disease, but not infection. WUSA9 Nov. 19, 2020.

²⁰ Gregory M. VERIFY: Will the COVID-19 vaccine stop you from spreading it to others? Experts don’t know yet. WUSA9 Nov. 20, 2020.

²¹ Sheets M. Dr Fauci warns that early COVID-19 vaccines will only prevent symptoms from arising – not block infection. Daily Mail Oct. 27, 2020.

²² Yahoo Finance. Dr. Anthony Fauci on coronavirus, vaccines, and stopping the spread. YouTube Oct. 26, 2020.

²³ Fisher BL. WHO, Fauci Warn COVID-19 Vaccines May Not Prevent Infection and Disease Transmission. The Vaccine Reaction Jan. 3, 2021.

²⁴ Kim S. Dr. Fauci on Mandatory COVID Vaccines: ‘Everything Will Be on the Table’. NewsweekJan. 1, 2021.

²⁵ Colson T. Top WHO scientist says vaccinated travelers should still quarantine, citing lack of evidence that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission. Business Insider Dec. 29, 2020.

Featured image is from Health Impact News

The Great Covid Hoax

Covid 19 is a phantom. Slaying a phantom is what the mythic Spanish hero Don Quijote attempted to do by ‘tilting at windmills’ he imagined to be monsters. But now almost everybody has got into the act, because they have been ordered to follow Quijote’s example by the perpetrators of the grand hoax called Covid -19. 

The more one slashes at the phantom with one’s trusty sword, the more tired one gets, because a phantom is a phantom – and a sword does no more harm to it than shooting bullets at a hurricane does to annihilate the eye of a storm. Nevertheless, a large percentage of mankind – under instruction – is doing just that, and after a while it gets tiring.

Yes, phantoms are phantoms. One can try to concrete them in or wall them out. One can try to ‘isolate’ one’s self against them; wear masks to scare them away; avoid others who may be harbouring phantoms under their clothes, all this and more – but do they care? No, not one iota!

People get scary feelings when talking about ghosts. Especially on cold winter evenings when the lamps burn low and the last embers of the fire are dying-away with the clock creeping up to the witching midnight hour. And this ghostly virus called Covid-19 is inciting the same kind of feelings in susceptible people all over this planet – even when the sun is up and the sky is blue. A particularly menacing apparition, wouldn’t you agree?

However, those who invented this chimera are not phantoms. Nor are they stupid. They saw a big chance to scare the pants off people and took it. They needed to scare the pants off people to get them to ‘obey’. A scared person will do almost anything he/she is told to do if they think their life  is threatened.  And what the perpetrators did was to take an existing viral infection called ‘flu’, give it a new fancy name and get governments and global media bosses to agree to run with the deception.

It wasn’t that difficult to do, because most of those involved in these professions already live in a phantom world themselves. This was just one more scam to sell to the great listening/watching passive public.

The ‘master perpetrators’ thought this ruse up decades ago. They only needed to give a small tweak to the old flu causal agent to make it seem like a new ‘deadly strain’ and get most of the medical profession hopping around like kangaroos in the arctic circle, searching desperately for the source of something that had become instantly labelled ‘a global pandemic’, but whose real title was ‘global hoax’. A ‘plandemic/scamdemic’ as others have astutely observed.

My God, how the spooks got running once this ‘pandemic’ thing took-off. It seemed like all the lascivious news editors of the world’s media (6 corporations own 90% of it) fell on ‘the pandemic’  as a free gift from hell. One could almost see their eyes turning red with glee at this unprecedented chance to scare their followers witless. 

But the stats tell the real story.  The flu ‘with a twist’ – unpleasant and occasionally dangerous as all flu’s are – comes up with the same morbidity numbers as the standard winter flu. Statistically they are as near as damn’ it identical. And there lies the nature of the phantom. Even when there is a small variation, it’s because the number of (deeply flawed) PCR tests have increased, thereby upping the false positives.

With Ministers of Health, Economics, Digitalisation and who knows what more – all equally devoted to adhering to the divide and conquer advice of the deep state placement at the head of the World Health Organisation, ‘we the people’ had almost nowhere to turn to get a handle on this madness. All ‘traditional’ sources of information – already steeped in the role of printing and broadcasting lies rather than truths – remain to this day wedded to government edicts, regardless of how utterly fatuous and devoid of reason they are.

Fortunately, a smallish percentage of the populace can still smell a rat once it’s out on the loose.  Fortunately this includes real doctors, real scientists, the occasional mainstream news columnist, broadcaster/publisher and really quite a lot of individual entrepreneurs committed to genuine investigative journalism.

However, since the deep state control system has its minions placed in all social and economic key positions of authority, those ready and able to convey truth are forced to find other ways of getting their messages out.

This brings me to a prescient point: since ‘mainstream’ is locked into making phantoms seem real, and since most of the human race  are addicted to their mainstream lie machines, the emergent ‘movement for truth’ is going to have to self organise in order to form the foundations of a de-politicised and de-corporatised society/community which completely parts company with the poisoned status quo.

We pursuers of truth are presently on our life-rafts, dazed by the rapidity of the phantom’s progress in barring our very real freedoms of speech, movement and thought, while simultaneously performing a further turn of the fascist screw on our capacity to remain sane and healthy in body, mind and spirit.

While Klaus Schwab and fellow trolls at the World Economic Forum announce the dystopian details of the Six Great Falsifications known as ‘The Great Reset’ : Zero Carbon, Green New Deal, Fourth Industrial Revolution, Agenda 2030, Transhumanist Smart Cities and New World Order – we are rowing our life rafts through the rip-currents towards solid land.

A land destined to serve as the fresh foundation from which to kick start (once again) the evolution of truth, trust and global human emancipation. The real evolutionary dynamic of humanity, presently cut off from its true path by the predators of chaos, destruction and fear.

The nearer we get to that promised land the clearer our sense of direction becomes; the more settled our emotions, the more calm our thoughts and the more lucid our vision.

It becomes possible to recognise, quite clearly, the darkly malevolent nature of the power structure we have been, wittingly or unwittingly, contributing to for much of our lives. We can begin to understand how it is actually the direct expression of a demonic state of mind, reinforced by Satanic and Masonic initiates whose rituals are played-out in all the main capitals of the world, many centres of government, the church as well as at corporate banker elite secret society gatherings.

It is this explicitly anti-human cabal which has ‘been in charge’  for as long as one cares remember and long before that.

What the Covid phantom did was to bring it all out in the open. Unable to resist the tantalising ‘control prize’, the forces of darkness have – maybe for the first time – come out ‘en masse’ into the open. Now they are throwing their weight around mercilessly, resorting to genetically modified vaccines and enforced home imprisonment in an attempt to wrap-up their mission to capture the planetary soul and to achieve a permanent lockdown of the insuppressible power of love and light.

There are many tiers to the darkside pyramid of course. Many on the lower tiers know not what goes on above them. Our political figureheads are not at the top end. They are simply ever open to being manipulated by those that are.

For example 33% Masons have the ability to manipulate dark power, but many masons think they are part of an organisation dishing-out benevolent gifts to those in need. It is this type of ‘unknowing’ that keeps mankind in slavery to the masters of deception. The largely hidden puppet-masters who tweak the strings of the unknowing and the uncaring.

‘The darkest hour is just before dawn’ and that dawn is closer than most think. We can already see the outlines of the shore beckoning beyond the stormy sea. We must be bold in our determination to reach that shore – and to blow aside all the phantoms that try to obscure our innate capacity to be united – as creative masters of our own destinies.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info. 

Featured image is from dreamstime

The visit of Moldovan President Maia Sandu to Ukraine last week is the first interaction between the two neighboring countries at the highest level in recent years. For Sandu, this trip became her foreign policy premiere since she became president on December 24, 2020. We could observe in her meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that there is a good level of personal interaction between the two leaders.

The Three Seas Initiative project was discussed in relation to the implementation of a partnership with the EU. The Three Seas Initiative is a forum comprising of twelve European Union members located between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas and has the aim of fostering closer cooperation. Both Moldova and Ukraine want to be involved in the Three Seas Initiative despite not being European Union member states.

Both Sandu and Zelensky are radically opposed to Russia in the belief that it will help their countries prospects into becoming European Union and NATO members. The Moldovan and Ukrainian leaders discussed “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity” and their willingness to face “geopolitical challenges” together with the traditional allusion of a common “aggressor.” They never directly named Russia, but given their known position against Moscow, it is obvious who their statement was directed towards.

Sandu and Zelensky are oriented towards the same circles in the West. Both aim to integrate their countries into Euro-Atlantic structures, despite the unlikeliness that Moldova or Ukraine will become member states of the European Union or NATO in the foreseeable future. As a result of their willingness to appease Western interests in Eastern Europe, Russian influence in the post-Soviet space is being challenged. But now that the political situation in the United States is showing signs of instability, it is not convenient for them to make openly direct statements against Russia.

The issue of Crimea and the Crimean Platform was deliberately avoided by both presidents in the part of the meeting that was revealed to the public. This is likely because such maneuvers require consultation with the incoming Joe Biden administration. Sandu and Zelensky most likely considered it premature to make such statements regarding Crimea. This decision is despite Ukraine launching the Crimean Platform just a mere few months earlier as part of their strategy to “de-occupy” the peninsula after it reunited with Russia in 2014 in a referendum that adhered to all international norms and standards.

When the new administration in Washington stabilizes, it will become clearer whether Moldova’s and Ukraine’s Western partners are ready to use them against Russia. Although they will likely find support from Biden if they continue their opposition to Russia, there will be elections for a new German Chancellor on September 26 and Angela Merkel will not be running. The victor could determine whether Berlin, the de facto leader of the European Union, will continue to loyally follow Washington’s foreign policy or pursue an independent one.

Away from the public eye and ear, it is likely that Sandu and Zelensky privately discussed possibilities of joint pressure against Russia in Transnistria and Donbass. Although Donbass is well known to Westerners, Transnistria is almost unheard of. The small territory is wedged between Ukraine and Moldova. It has a de facto independence but is internationally recognized as a part of Moldova despite the majority of the population being either Russian or Ukrainian.

It should be remembered that during last year’s election campaign, Sandu announced that she will focus on “eliminating the Russian military presence” without mentioning a political settlement in the Transnistrian dispute, thus threatening to warm up a frozen conflict. Given the geography, Ukraine and Moldova are able to blockade Transnistria. This would sever transport links and economic flows.

During the meeting between Sandu and Zelensky, only two public initiatives came to be known – the creation of a certain transportation corridor between the capitals of Ukraine and Moldova, and the organization of a presidential council of the two countries. However, regarding the first initiative, it must have a strong economic justification to be attractive to potential investors. Given the current state of low economic interaction between Ukraine and Moldova, as well as their economic crises, such a justification will be very difficult to find.

The Presidential Council is a more realistic initiative, although the idea itself is not new. The statement about it is a sign that Moldova and Ukraine have agreed to pursue certain policies together. Even if those policies are not clear yet, it will undoubtedly include how they can collectively counter Russian influence in Transnistria and Donbass.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from The Dubrovnik Times 

“We just want the facts, please.” –Detective Joe Friday, Dragnet

“You notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?”  The question boomed by Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof may have never been more urgent than today.

We should all be asking this question and demanding straight answers. The sense of smell provided us by nature in our self-protection toolbox is indispensable when dangers are invisible and inaudible – denied view and voice by those empowered and trusted by the public.  This leaves us to follow our noses, and when investigations are met with obvious stonewalling and gaslighting we are probably on the right track.

CIA Document 1035-960 referred to nose-following investigations of the dubious Warren Commission report on JFK’s assassination as “conspiracy theories,” a dismissive term repeatedly invoked ever since to discredit challenges and evade honest examination of evidence of unspeakable crimes by the powerful. The same tactic was employed after 9/11.  Searches for truth and justice by determined private citizens meet with long delays, multiple roadblocks, and buried hope. I see this script again in the covid-19 pandemic declarations and radically destructive responses by power wielders in the US and worldwide. We cannot allow similar delays and obfuscation this time around.

Is theory an impermissible word?  Of course not. A theory is a conceptual model developed to account for evidence, connecting identified data points.  This is the fundamental method of science.  In behavioral theory construction, complex social and political events obviously involve multiple participants.  When the events are criminal or otherwise need to be hidden, participants must necessarily plan and prepare secretly.  When official explanations from government and its compliant media stenographers are highly suspicious, empirically unlikely or obvious nonsense, we have the duty as citizens to inquire independently and build our own theoretical models.  In crime as well as science, multiple theories typically arise before the final breakthrough in empirical demonstration or courtroom proof.

The “theories” immediately proclaimed by government sources following each of the four seminal assassinations of the 1960s, and of 9/11, involved no scientific method.  Each warped the course of history without valid empirical foundations. By the time citizen investigators have uncovered and assembled enough evidence to construct realistic storylines, it has been much too late.  Massive damage to our rights and freedoms grounded in official stories have already been institutionalized. We have inflicted mass-murderous wars on other peoples. Wrongs remain unresolved, often exacerbated and simply better disguised.  Evidence is cold, and perpetrators have died or disappeared voluntarily or involuntarily.

The official lies become enshrined as history. Our government, “news” media, educational curricula and cultural legends have relentlessly lied and betrayed us about everything – the congenial Thanksgiving feast between Pilgrims and their targeted genocide victims, about anti-colonial independence movements as “international communism,” about Iraqi WMDs, about Israeli innocence in the face of Palestinian “terrorism.” Why should we believe them now about anything that doesn’t match the obvious or easily discoverable facts?  There is a conspiracy, a very big one, obvious by now to everyone seeking the pieces missing  from the covid-19 jigsaw puzzle. I encountered an example when submitting this seditious composition through my gmail account to which I was directed by the submission portal provided.  Almost all the hyperlinks were “unable” to access their sites, so I switched to a private account and they all reappeared.  By reading further, you too may experience the now-designated-guilty pleasure of sedition.

Many Americans, over 50,000 health and bioscience research professionals, and common-sensible people worldwide are questioning whether the government declaration of a covid-19 pandemic and “public health emergency” permitting state suspension of civil rights were justified. These indefinite suspensions include violation of our 1^st Amendment right to freedom of assembly, potential threats to 4^th Amendment security of our homes and persons, 6^th and 7^th Amendments due process rights, as well as rights to liberty, privacy, freedom of movement, work, and education specified by Universal Declaration of Human Rights Articles 3, 9, 12, 13, 20 and 26.

Considering the severe impacts of government actions upon employment, small businesses, public mental health, opportunities for vulture capitalism transferring massive assets from everyday citizens to multinational banks, massive corporations and the wealthiest citizens through the deceptive CARES Act, We the People are owed a thorough and fully independent investigation of this economically catastrophic management of a perceived public health threat amplified by alarmist reporting before necessary facts were available.

Specifically, we must demand investigation of the following documented events and questionable policies brought to public attention during this crisis.  These questions are central but by no means comprehensive.  More emerge every day.

Origins

Two exercises precisely anticipating this pandemic were held in 2019. Event 201 sponsored by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was held in NYC in October.  Crimson Contagion, a series of DHHS simulations envisioning a pandemic outbreak beginning in China, had previously been held in Washington between January and August.  These are not only de facto suspicious, but why was our public health system so unprepared?

The federal government failed to obtain prevalence data to provide a valid denominator in morbidity and mortality rate assessments, data provided by Stanford University and USC studies in late April, some six weeks after a “pandemic” was declared without these necessary parameters.

These California studies based on indices of ongoing or recent infection in subject samples from Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties estimated prevalence rates of 3-4%, with case morbidity risk of about 1.5% and case fatality risk of .15%. Since business closures are the prevention modality causing the most economic hardship and exacerbation of other health problems, I did a further analysis in late May comparing covid-19 fatalities (from NYT reports over 90 days between January 21 and April 21) of the 13 states that did not close “non-essential” businesses with 13 neighboring states that did (identified by USA Today), which show an indistinguishable difference slightly favoring the open states, with both reporting about three deaths per 100,000 population.  As of mid-January, 2021, the worldwide population fatality rate is currently .00026 – with deaths of some two million in a population approaching eight billion. Do epidemiologists define these fatality risks as a “pandemic” or “public health emergency”?

NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci had information from China in January that reflected these modest predicted rates, but failed to notify the public, publishing this only in a Feb. 28 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.  In this paper he anticipated an infection death rate of less than 1%, comparable to a “severe seasonal influenza,” including China’s report of “higher morbidity and mortality among the elderly and among those with coexisting conditions.” This would have suggested simply protecting the vulnerable elderly.

Nevertheless, a society-wide lockdown has continued into January 2021, inflicting severe economic, social, psychological and collateral medical hardships on millions that have caused far more deaths than covid-19.  But following nine months of this lockdown the worldwide CFR is even below Dr. Fauci’s early expectations, yet Fauci et al. still decline to blow the “game over” whistle.

Can Drs. Fauci, Redfield and Birx be trusted?

U.S. military documents show that Redfield and Birx—both military HIV research science officers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1992—knowingly falsified scientific data published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses journal, engaging in “a systematic pattern of data manipulation, inappropriate statistical analyses and misleading data presentation in an apparent attempt to promote the usefulness of the GP160 AIDS vaccine.”

An Air Force tribunal on Scientific Fraud and Misconduct agreed that Redfield’s “misleading or, possibly, deceptive” information “seriously threatens his credibility as a researcher.”  Dr. Redfield admitted that his analyses were faulty and deceptive, agreed to publicly correct them, but continued making false claims at three subsequent international HIV conferences and perjured himself in testimony before Congress, claiming that his vaccine cured HIV to secure $20 million support for his research program.  Public Citizen stated in a 1994 letter to Henry Waxman’s Congressional Committee that this money induced the Army to kill the investigation and “whitewash” Redfield’s offenses.

Also hunting the HIV golden goose, Dr. Fauci blocked publication (see minutes 12-18 of this video) of Dr. Frank Ruscetti’s study confirming French Dr. Luc Montagnier’s identification of the HIV virus to buy time for Dr. Robert Gallo’s American team to catch up and force the Pasteur Institute to share lucrative patent rights.  Fauci then succeeded in transferring the research program from Gallo’s National Cancer Institute to his own NIAID, gaining massive revenue allocations by Congress including long-ongoing collaboration with DARPA on gain-of-function bioweapons research disguised as “biodefense” thereby evading bioweapons treaty prohibitions.

There is credible evidence that this virus has been lab-modified from SARS 1. If so, this likely originated from collaborations including US and Chinese bioweapons laboratories at the University of North Carolina BSL3 lab, the Wuhan BSL4 lab, and Harvard.  Dr. Charles Lieber, a nanotechnology expert and ex-chair of the Harvard Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, was arrested and indicted in 2020 for lying to federal investigators about unreported $50,000 monthly income from China.

These collaborations are documented in joint authorship of scientific articles by University of North Carolina, Harvard and Wuhan scientists, and by two $3.7 million grants to Wuhan from the NIAID in 2014 and 2019 through EcoHealth Alliance, an NIAID pass-through organization. Their collaboration apparently moved from UNC to Wuhan in 2014 following Congressional disapproval of our thinly veiled bioweapons research and a 2013 SCOTUS judgment confirming a previous decision that genetic material cannot be patented.

Irrespective of the origin of covid-19, all our BSL3 and BSL4 labs in the U.S. and overseas should be closed as morally indefensible existential threats to humanity.

Exploitation

Reuters and Politico reported White House meetings in January including Pentagon and CIA officials that excluded public health officials.  The pandemic media preoccupation has been used as cover to further impose illegal sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, transfer Venezuelan state funds into a NY Federal Reserve account of Juan Guaido, quickly sponsor an aborted invasion of Venezuela by private mercenaries under a $150 million contract with Guaido, and distract from the November 2019 “lithium coup” (now overturned) against the elected president of Bolivia.

The presumed pandemic has been used in the US and worldwide to justify state infringements on freedom and privacy and in some places police abuse, and there is now a movement within government health agencies to condition certain civil rights on mandatory vaccinations.

With tens of thousands of small, independent businesses squeezed or ruined as “non-essential,” big box, chain and online businesses have taken over much of the economy. Wealth of the world’s billionaires has increased obscenely while the entrepreneurial middle classes, working classes, and poor struggle and sink.

Corruption, Fraud and Deception

Doctors report being incentivized to hospitalize ($13,000) and to ventilate ($39,000) covid-19 patients although ventilation may often be the wrong treatment, even causing iatrogenic death. Inappropriate use of ventilators despite early warnings by conscientious physicians competent in emergency and infectious disease medicine appear to have killed [yet to be fully confirmed and investigated] hundreds or thousands of patients.

Doctors have been instructed by the CDC to list covid-19 as primary cause-of-death whenever present or presumed irrespective of chronic co-morbidities that have heretofore been reported as primary with acute infectious diseases listed as secondary contributors.

A long-established, safe, inexpensive drug – hydroxychloroquine – when combined with zinc and prescribed at the early outpatient stage has been demonstrated highly effective in multiple studiesworldwide including prominent advocacy and publication by NY Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, but has been prohibited for use by American physicians and fraudulently demonized by studies that administered it at inappropriate, hospitalized, late stages of treatment in potentially lethal dosages, a criminal effort to discredit an effective, inexpensive outpatient treatment that obviates the need for $3000 remdesivir and desperately rushed development of new and dangerous vaccines. The shocking, coordinated campaign to deceptively discredit this low-cost, very effective prevention and early intervention medication is described by Dr. Simone Gold in her short, very readable book, I Do Not Consent.

Many leading molecular biologists, virologists, epidemiologists, and infectious disease specialists have explained that masking, social distancing, business restrictions and closures, and touch avoidance prolongs rather than prevents spread of a viral infection since these measures delay “herd immunity” among the large low-risk majority whose immunity will subsequently protect the high-risk minority.  Sweden followed this model with no lockdown or draconian social interaction modifications to permit development of herd immunity, had a somewhat higher CFR than neighboring Norway due largely to failure to protect nursing home residents, but had a lower rate than any major European country other than Germany and has now returned to normalcy with none of the  collateral damage widespread elsewhere.  Our government and media have only cited comparison with Norway, which has much lower population density than Sweden spread along its long, fjord-divided coastline communities.

Denmark also followed a permissive model, with masking optional and infrequent.  This facilitated a nationwide randomized controlled study of masking effectiveness with experimental and control subjects instructed to wear or not wear masks in public, with social reactions neutralized as a contributing factor.  With its large sample size (c. 6,000), stratified random sampling design controlling for regional variations, 30-day exposure window during the height of the pandemic, use of 3-layer surgical masks, satisfactory (80%) subject completion rate, and multiple outcome criteria, the study findings are conclusive to the naked eye irrespective of the statistical analysis necessary for scientific publication. The best comparison sample with unmasked controls were about half the treatment subjects who masked consistently as directed, where the infection rates were 2.0% (masked) and 2.1% (controls), with inconsistent maskers leading the others at 1.7%.  These findings have been wholly ignored by our government and press.

Vitamins C and D are effective for both prevention and treatment, and well-established anti-inflammatory drugs such as budesonide and ivermectin have proven highly effective in preventing and reducing the immune system overreactions that account for respiratory distress and collateral organ damage. Simple antibiotics such as azithromycin prevent opportunistic bacterial pneumonia. These effective, inexpensive, well-established preventive and treatment protocols have been ignored by our public health establishment and its captive press. Instead,  newly minted vaccines promising massive Big Pharma development subsidies and projected profits have been relentlessly promoted as the only solution from the beginning.  The low death rate – almost exclusively confined to the elderly with significant co-morbidities and virtually zero among the school-aged – has been concealed along with the absurdity of health-compromising masks, social distancing and touch avoidance in the very low-risk populations.

The Vaccine Rescue Plan

The declared “pandemic” has been prolonged to await rescue by vaccine through a frantic interweaving of contact tracing and PCR testing – a method its inventor, Nobel Prize laureate Kary Mullis, has explained only identifies viral molecules that are often inconsequential and does not identify disease.  A positive finding may simply indicate virus encountered and subdued with immunity acquired, leaving some battlefield detritus. Compounding  this, there are many false positives. The public has been terrorized into readiness to seek safety exclusively in a vaccine – a highly suspicious agenda of the NIAID, CDC and WHO.

There is widespread concern that covid-19 vaccinations could be mandated or made a condition of certain civil rights (e.g., assembly, access to public spaces) despite use of experimental technologies, very inadequate safety testing, and a long record of vaccine injuries documented by decades of court records.

The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act  should be repealed, which immunized vaccine manufacturers from liability due to many business-ruinous lawsuits for lifelong disabilities, thereby removing the necessity of thorough safety testing in their business model and leading to a proliferation of highly profitable vaccines without sufficient risk/benefit evaluation. Following this legislation, vaccine injury claims have been defended by the U.S. Department of Justice in a Vaccine Court with some $4.2 billion in judgments paid through 2019 plus court costs at taxpayer expense despite denying most claims by parents.  The 2020 PREP Act should also be repealed, which extended immunity from vaccine liability to the US government as well, leaving vaccine-injured citizens with no legal protection or recourse. Restoration of both these rightful consumer-protection liabilities has become increasingly important as bizarre and alarming reactions producing irreversible autoimmune conditions are already reported in response to novel-technology mRNA vaccines that may better meet the definition of genetic engineering than vaccination – what Dr. Simone Gold calls insertion of “experimental biological agents” into our cells perhaps including penetration of the blood-brain barrier (see minutes 55-1:05 in this video).

There are worrisome institutional conflicts-of-interest as well. Bill Gates has stated his ambition to establish a global system and production capacity to vaccinate the entire world for this and future pathogens.  His dystopian vision of a technocratic health safety regime fits seamlessly into the very disturbing Agenda 20-30 and World Economic Forum visions of centralized world control, which would increase rather than broadly redistribute the power and wealth of the .001%, and would disempower situational, local, regional and national approaches to this and all other challenges to human welfare and survival while smothering individual, organizational and cultural identities. This is an agenda of which the covid-19 measures imposed upon us across the globe are an obvious harbinger.

In addition, Gates has undisclosed conflicts-of-interest with the massive looming vaccine profit center. The Gates Foundation, Gates-established/controlled GAVI Alliance, and Gates-funded CHAMPS program through Emory University provide indispensable funding to the CDC and WHO.  Following US withdrawal of WHO support by President Trump, the Gates Foundation and GAVI now provide more funding to the WHO than any of the 192 nations it serves.  To mesmerize public acceptance through news propaganda, the pharmaceutical industry provides enormous TV advertising revenues, about equivalent to the fast food industry and exceeded only by the automotive industry.

Requiring covid-19 vaccination as a condition of school attendance would be not only unjustified but arguably criminal.  Oregon pediatrician Paul Thomas, who has scrupulously provided parents with informed choice whether or not to vaccinate their children, performed a review of his clinical records over 10 years comparing health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Collaborating with research analyst Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, Dr. Thomas found striking differences in overall health with the unvaccinated children far healthier across all illness outcome measures.

Resistance

These facts are now being introduced into evidence in lawsuits across the world where most jurisdictions do not provide liability immunity to pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Attempts to investigate these essential questions, scrupulously fact-based, have been ignored or casually dismissed as “conspiracy theories” by the mainstream press. Alternative web-based and social media reports and assertions by hundreds of physicians, medical research scientists, independent and citizen journalists, civil rights attorneys and everyday fed-up citizens challenging the official narrative have met smothering censorship by the dominant internet platforms. Due in no small measure to this blatant censorship, public opposition is growing, rejecting mainstream propaganda and responding to emerging counter-narrative revelations with dismay, anger and aroused will to resist.

The urgent need to mount vigorous resistance goes far beyond the current health-panic-induction agenda – possibly an intended checkmate – by obviously coordinated world power managers. The methods, motives and orchestration of this dark global theatric that we are not allowed to dig into, identify and examine lead us back toward the sponsors of Crimson Contagion – the vaccine-obsessed Gates Foundation, the Great Reset vision of World Economic Forum Davos denizens, and Big Pharma as their instrument and beneficiary.  Or would that just be another ridiculous conspiracy theory?

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Jack Dresser, Ph.D. is a retired psychologist and NIH-funded research scientist associated with Oregon Research Institute, where he served as Principal Investigator on projects developing and evaluating high-risk behavior prevention and early intervention programs.  Before these studies he directed several projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education developing drug and alcohol abuse prevention and early intervention programs for school districts in northern and southern California and Oregon.  He began his professional career as a U.S. Army psychologist during the Vietnam War, and is national vice-chair of the Veterans for Peace working group on Palestine and the Middle East.  For several years he has co-hosted a weekly radio show titled “Racism, Empire and Survival” on www.kepw.org in Eugene, Oregon that focuses on the propaganda fueling and maintaining violent U.S./NATO/Israeli imperialism and the false histories packaged as education that provide the framing into which government and media propaganda is seamlessly fitted.

Liberals may be able to argue with Fox News or even Republican politicians. But what happens when a peer reviewed study comes out of one of their coveted and prestigious universities in California potentially showing that their collective reaction to Covid may have been completely worthless and, as a result, may have done exceptionally more harm than good?

Along those lines, it seems like a good idea to point out that a new peer reviewed study out of Stanford is questioning the effectiveness of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders (which it calls NPIs, or non-pharmaceutical interventions) to combat Covid-19. The study’s lead author is an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford.

“The study did not find evidence to support that NPIs were effective in preventing the spread,” according to Outkick, who published the report.

The study, co-authored by Dr. Eran Bendavid, Professor John P.A. Ioannidis, Christopher Oh, and Jay Bhattacharya, studied the effects of NPIs in 10 different countries, including England, France, Germany and Italy.

And, when all was said and done, it concluded that: “In summary, we fail to find strong evidence supporting a role for more restrictive NPIs in the control of COVID in early 2020.”

In fact, the study found  “no clear, significant beneficial effect of more restrictive NPIs on case growth in any country.”

From the study:

“In the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (“lockdowns”) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020. By comparing the effectiveness of NPIs on case growth rates in countries that implemented more restrictive measures with those that implemented less restrictive measures, the evidence points away from indicating that more restrictive NPIs provided additional meaningful benefit above and beyond less restrictive NPIs. While modest decreases in daily growth (under 30%) cannot be excluded in a few countries, the possibility of large decreases in daily growth due to more restrictive NPIs is incompatible with the accumulated data.”

The study even looked into the potential of stay-at-home orders facilitating spread of the virus:

“The direction of the effect size in most scenarios point towards an increase in the case growth rate, though these estimates are only distinguishable from zero in Spain (consistent with non-beneficial effect of lockdowns). Only in Iran do the estimates consistently point in the direction of additional reduction in the growth rate, yet those effects are statistically indistinguishable from zero. While it is hard to draw firm conclusions from these estimates, they are consistent with a recent analysis that identified increase transmission and cases in Hunan, China during the period of stay-at-home orders from increased intra-household density and transmission. In other words, it is possible that stay-at-home orders may facilitate transmission if they increase person-to-person contact where transmission is efficient such as closed spaces.”

It continues:

“We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures.”

You can read the full study here.

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The Higher Planning Council (HPC) of the Civil Administration approved today plans to build 780 housing units in settlements, most of them deep in the West Bank (714 units (92%) in settlements that Israel will have to evacuate under a peace agreement, according to the Geneva Initiative model). Among other things, the HPC approved for deposit the legalization of two illegal outposts: Havat Yair with 96 units of which 82 units are already (illegally) built, as a “neighborhood” of the Yakir settlement, and the outpost of Nofei Nehemiah with 118 units, as a “neighborhood” of the Rehelim settlement which itself was an illegal outpost that was legalized in recent years.

The plans advanced include:

Earlier in the day, the HPC discussed several housing plans for Palestinians in Area C, although according to reports, the Prime Minister’s Office today asked to cancel the hearing due to settlers’ pressure. This is in addition to the pressure put by settlers last week which led to the removal of three plans for Palestinian villages from the committee’s agenda.

No decisions were made during the discussion and the committee is expected to publish its decisions in the coming days, but the spirit of the discussion shows that:

1. There is an intention to approve the plan to legalize 70 existing housing units in the Palestinian village of Hizma + an addition of 70 new housing units.

2. The HPC is intending to condition the approval of the plan for the Palestinian village of Walajeh, with the approval of a new bypass road for settlers (which will “be compensated” by the construction of the plan for about 1,000 housing units for settlers in the new planned settlement of “Givat HaGamal” in Har Gilo). It is important to note that the discussion of the plan of Walajeh was forced on the HPC following the High Court’s decision that the plan should be discussed.

3. Apparently the HPC did not approve the plan to legalize a school in the Bedouin community of Wadi A-Sik in the western slopes of the Jordan Valley.

4. Apparently the HPC approved two hotels and an amusement park on the outskirts of Area B, and a 200 square-meter cooling building for a Palestinian farmer in the Jordan Valley.

These approvals are almost insignificant in terms of the true needs of the Palestinians in Area C. It should be mentioned that in 2020 alone, 12,159 housing units were approved for Israeli settlements, while only 245 housing units, many of which already exist, were approved for Palestinians (note that 245 units for Palestinians is a lot compared to previous years).

Peace Now: “By promoting hundreds of settlement units, Prime Minister Netanyahu is once again putting his personal political interests over those of the country. Not only will this settlement activity erode the possibility for a conflict-ending resolution with the Palestinians in the long-term, but in the short-term it needlessly sets Israel on a collision course with the incoming Biden administration.”

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Two frogs no more than four centimetres in length: they seem so insignificant. But much is riding on them, namely a constitutional court case that could stop mining development in most of Ecuador.

The Long Nose Harlequin Frog, last seen in 1989, was thought extinct until it was rediscovered in the LLurimagua mining concession in 2016. The much rarer Confusing Rocket Frog, last spotted in 1985, was also written off until its rediscovery in the same mining concession in 2019. Both have been enlisted to stop a large-scale copper mining project that has been promoted by eight different Ecuadorian governments.

In years past, community opposition forced a Japanese and a Canadian mining company to abandon the project. Since 2014, Chilean-owned Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, has funded advanced exploratory activities. The company has the full support of the Ecuadorian government through Enami, Ecuador’s state-owned mining company.

Tactics 

This government support enabled the two companies to access the mining site in May of 2014. They did it with the help of nearly 400 members of three different elite police units backed up by the military, and by occupying not only the mining site, but most of the Intag area.

Other tactics of intimidation included incarceration of a local opposition leader, plus an outrageous smear campaign, spearheaded by then president Rafael Correa.

This is a only small sampling of the tactics used to try to neutralize the opposition to mining. And, if it sounds like fodder for a cinematic drama, it’s because it is. Several documentaries have been made on the 25-year long struggle.

The issue, of course, is not only about frogs, although saving species from extinction shouldn’t need further justification. The frogs live in some of the last remaining cloud forest on the western slopes of Ecuador’s Western Andean range. Over 80 percent of these forests have been transformed into pastures, banana, cacao and oil palm plantations, sugar cane fields, and dismembered by illegal logging. Mining now severely threatens what is left.

Most people haven’t heard of cloud forests, yet they are much more biodiverse and more threatened than the better-known Amazonian lowland forests. Worldwide they make up less than 2.5 percent of rainforests, but these forests also protect watersheds that give life to hundreds of rivers and thousands of streams, and provide safe drinking water and livelihoods to hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians.

Rights

As important as species extinction and watershed protection are, Intag’s struggle is also about defending collective and human rights.

A preliminary environmental impact study by Japanese experts in the mid-1990s predicted 100 families from four communities would have to be relocated to make room for what was then thought to be a small copper mine. Other impacts included heavy metal contamination of rivers, plus “massive deforestation” which would lead to a “process of desertification”.

Today, Codelco suggests the ore deposit could be 53 times larger. If Codelco’s estimate is confirmed, besides impacting more communities, the large-scale mine would generate anywhere from 3,829 million tons, to twice that amount of subsoil contaminated with heavy metals. All for just 17 million tons of pure copper.

The Confusing Rocket Frog and the Long Nose Harlequin are only the tip of the biodiversity iceberg. Hundreds of species on the IUCN and Ecuador’s Red Lists depend on Intag’s forests for continued existence. These include the Brown-headed Spider Monkey, the Spectacled Bear, the critically endangered Coastal Jaguar, several glass frogs, an extremely rare fish, and a tree so rare it has only been reported in another patch of forest hundreds of kilometers away. The full list is depressingly long.

And the area hasn’t even been properly studied. For example, just last month a new species of mammal was discovered close to the mining site.

Action

Lying beneath all this stunningly beautiful landscape lies a massive copper deposit. Intag’s communities, supported by local, national and international organisations have done everything possible to prevent this environmental and social catastrophe from happening over the past 26 years.

We sued the Toronto Stock Exchange for human rights violations, created dozens of community- and local government-owned forest and watershed reserves, and got local environmental ordinances approved, all the while supporting sustainable economic activities.

The latest tactic, taken in August of this year, involved presenting a Constitutional precautionary measure to prevent mining activities from impacting the two endemic species’ habitat.

We based the legal action on the inevitable violation of Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature. To date, Ecuador’s Constitution is the only one that recognises nature as a holder of rights independent from environmental rights that may benefit humans.

It’s such a novel concept that I and others involved in the legal action had doubts the lower court judge would comprehend it. The judge not only grasped the concept but did so with a clarity that should be heartening to people all over the world fighting for the adoption of the rights of nature.

Pressures

The win at the lower court set an important precedent for Ecuador. Other communities will be able to use this case to liven their opposition to mining because the country has over 2000 endangered species in a territory the size of the US state of Nevada.

The defendants – in this case the Ministry of the Environment and the State Attorney General – immediately appealed. The case now proceeds to the Provincial Superior Court of Imbabura. But for the appeal several other heavyweights will join in, including lawyers from the Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Resources, CODELCO and ENAMI.

The appeal will likely take place at the start of the new year. However, the pressure to annul the decision before it gets to the higher courts has been mounting.

It shouldn’t be difficult to imagine the kinds of pressure that judges hearing mining cases are being subjected to in countries like Ecuador, especially in times of pandemic. The government and companies paint apocalyptic scenarios: negative rulings will scare away foreign investments; they will break the economy more than it already is and rob the government of rents.

The companies will invoke international agreements that protect their investments and sue the country in International tribunals. And so on. My hat off to judges that can withstand these pressures and choose to uphold Constitutional Rights over thug intimidation, especially rights so novel as the rights of nature.

Energy

Here we come to an uncomfortable but key aspect of the issue. Copper is one of the basic metals for the “clean” energy transformation, so what are we to do if we don’t mine enough of it?

Shouldn’t the question be, how can we contain runaway climate crisis without being complicit in human rights violations, the devastation communities, and the decimation of forests harbouring threatened species?

Why aren’t we carrying out an independent cost-benefit analysis of mining projects that may impact endangered species, water sources, indigenous and non-indigenous peoples as well as the rights of nature?

What will happen to ecosystems and the climate itself, if we keep placing a higher value to what is below ground than the richness above it? That wealth includes a region’s clean water, productive lands, biodiversity, and cultural and social wealth. It is the type of wealth that can also help drive  sustainable economic activities.

The biodiversity crisis is just as critical as the climate crisis. It is upon us to act accordingly.

Winning

Exclusion zones can be set aside to keep mining out of places like Intag’s forests and key watersheds around the world. For exclusion zones to work, companies and government must include in their calculations all external costs to objectively determine a project’s true benefits versus its social, environmental and cultural costs. These costs are normally undervalued or left out of equations all together.

Some of the guidelines should include zero extraction of minerals where endangered species are found, nor ore bodies exploited which can release heavy metals into the environment. Above all, mining companies and governments must respect a community’s right to Free Prior and Informed Consent concerning activities that may impact their environment or their culture.

Given the expected increased demand for copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel, there will be a dangerous rush to find and exploit new mining sites. But, if on the way to solving one crisis we create a much more dangerous one, we will be guilty of unforgivable environmental crimes against nature and, thus, future generations.

If the frogs should win the appeals, a crucial precedent will be set. Preservation of wildlife and environments should always trump corporate interests. This precedent would mean that hundreds of families will not be forced off their lands or lose their livelihood. It will assure that the habitat of critically endangered species will not be decimated, and that pristine rivers and streams will not be poisoned.

Winning the upcoming appeals will go a long way to supporting a change of paradigm that just might help humanity save itself.

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Carlos Zorrilla is a full-time resident of Intag, co-founder of DECOIN, the environmental organization on the front lines of the resistance to the Llurimagua mining project since day one. In 2017, DECOIN was a recipient of the prestigious Equator Prize for its conservation work. The award is only given out every two years by the United Nations.

Featured image is from Medium, Luis Coloma, Jambatu Center

Over the last few months have seen a number of significant developments in relation to the increasing proliferation of armed drones. The most significant of these have been the use of Turkish Bayraktar TB-2’s in the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh which turned the military engagements in Azerbaijan’s favour and, secondly,  the Trump administration’s decision to unilateral reinterpret the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) agreement in order to allow it to export more armed drones.

This latest update details new operators and other significant developments around the proliferation of armed drones.  For our complete list of states operating, or close to operating, armed drones see Who Has Armed Drones?

Turkey

Azerbaijan and Turkey’s partnership

In the long running conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey provided military support for Azerbaijan. The most noteworthy arms transfer was the Bayraktar TB-2, the use of which was said to have provided Azerbaijan with an advantage that Armenia could not match.When violence has flared up in the past, Armenia usually had the upper hand, but this time Azerbaijan was able to cause more devastation.  Questions remain over whether the Turkish drones were actually operated by Turkey or Azerbaijan given the short turnaround between the sale and operational use.

The use of Bayraktar TB-2’s led campaigners to step up pressure to have sales of various imported parts in TB-2 suspended. Armenian activists have photographed these parts and built up a media campaign. US manufacturers have supplied transceivers, antenna, fuel filters and reservoirs, GPS units among other things, whilst the UK is said to have supplied fuel pumps and bomb racks, and Canada, sensors and antenna radio transmitter.

Turkey Export deals

TB-2s have also been delivered to Ukraine, who are said to be working towards joint production so they can beef up their fleet to 48 air frames. At present they have 6 from the 2019 deal and are said to be ordering a further 5 in 2021.

In December Turkish Aerospace were reported to have signed a deal to export 3 Anka-S drones to Tunisia in an $80m deal, the first export of Anka drones.

Other Turkey drone news

Turkey have also announced the successful flight test of a second Akinci drone prototype. The Akinici – an armed High Altitude, Long Endurance (HALE) drone with an endurance of 24hrs –  will be able to fire various indigenously built rockets and laser guided bombs on 6 underwing hardpoints. As imposing as this sounds, commentators judge it is merely papering over the cracks of the ageing Turkish aircraft fleet. Turkey has been frozen out of a US F-35 programme and has little option but to develop indigenous alternatives. The Akinci seems to be the flagship of this new generation.

Roketsan, the state controlled missile manufacturer has also been busy developing new missiles specifically for drones.

Selcuk Bayraktar, the chief technology officer of Baykar, recently indicated that Turkey are ready to mass produce their own drone engines which will be used in the Akinci and Bayraktar TB-3. However, it was previously understood that Akinci engines were part of a deal with Ukraine. It’s possible that the Ukrainian engines will be of a higher horsepower, as this commentator suggests.

Turkey is said to have around 75 TB-2 drones already in operation with their armed forces, engaged in operations in Syria, Libya, Iraq and, within Turkey itself, operating against Kurdish fighters. In the last few months, several articles have exposed the toll this drone war is taking on local Kurdish populations.

US exports

As Turkey and China’s armed drones exports expand, the Trump administration (prodded by lobbyists from some of the world’s biggest arms companies) unilaterally announced its reinterpretation of the MTCR rules on exports, in order to be able to sell  Category 1 systems (that is drones capable of carrying a 500-kilogram payload at least 300 kilometres) to more countries. After unsuccessfully trying to persuade other signatories of the Missile Technology Control Regime to loosen restrictions on what constitutes a ‘Category 1’ system, the Trump administration announced that it will treat systems that fall in to Category 1, but travel less than 800km/hr as Category 2, allowing these systems to be sold beyond close allies.

In response to Trump’s loosening of the MTCR restrictions, a cross-party group of senators  introduced a bill that would mean only NATO members, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan fell under the new rules drawn up by the administration. All other countries would continue remain under the existing MTCR rules.

In the short space of time since this announcement in July, the State Department has approved sales of armed Reapers to the UAE and Taiwan, as part of larger packages of weapons transfers to both countries, and is in discussions about potential sale to Morocco.

The sale to Taiwan is less controversial within the US as many members of Congress and the Senate support arm sales to Taiwan as part of geo-political moves to deter China.  China, who regard Taiwan as a wayward province rather than an independent responded immediately saying it “strongly urged” the US to withdraw its plans and “cease US-Taiwan military contacts.”

The sale to UAE, on the other hand, has proved considerably more controversial amongst US legislators. A deal for the transfer of military equipment was first announced in July after Jared Kushner negotiated the normalisation of relations between UAE and Israel. In return for its recognition of Israel, UAE is to be rewarded with sophisticated weapons. The State Department gavenotification to Congress on 6 November and since then several  senators have lodged objections and tried to introduce joint resolutions to block the sale. Drone Wars has joined a coalition of NGOs worldwide denouncing this sale as UAE continue be involved in the bloody war in Yemen, where many say there is evidence of war crimes.

Morocco is reportedly to receive four MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones (a Reaper variant made by General Atomics), giving it the capability to survey huge swathes of sea and desert. It is not known if the armed or unarmed variant will be sold to Morocco, but it is part of a larger defence and security dealbetween the two countries.

Finally, in less good news for US arms companies, Japan is said to be rethinking its purchase of Global Hawk, for two reasons. Firstly, the US is retiring its Block 30 fleet, the model the Japanese intend to purchase. This would make maintenance costs rise significantly for Japan. Secondly, that Iran were able to down a Global Hawk in July has raised questions about the drone’s efficacy.

Europe News

The debate in Germany on whether or not to arm its drones took a surprising turn in mid-December.  As part of their coalition agreement, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) had agreed that the Bundestag would only decide on whether or not to arm its drones after a comprehensive debate on the issue.  The German Ministry of Defence set up a series of carefully controlled panel discussions and events during 2020 which aimed to fulfil this requirement and the MoD published a policy document on the use of armed drones. A vote was scheduled for mid-December in the budget committee to provide funds to arm the Heron drones that Germany lease from Israel, and it seemed to many commentators that this would be approved.  However, a few days before the vote, the SPD said that they would in fact vote against the resolution as there had not be sufficient public debate.  In the end, the resolution was withdrawn and discussion on the issue is likely to continue in the run up to German elections in September 2021.

Meanwhile, Spain received two more Reapers from General Atomics, taking the total ordered to 6 aircraft. Spain have also committed to purchasing “at least” 12 of the Euromale drones. These will be received in 2029. Presumably the Reapers will be in service until then. The Euromale is currently moving in to Phase 2 of development with contracts now signed for work on production.

Belgium has signed a deal with GA for four MQ-9B SkyGuardian drones, a variant of Predator, due to be delivered in 2023 and worth nearly $189mn. The UK, whose Protector is the same model of Predator, and Belgian air forces have signed a ‘Statement of Intent’ to explore collaboration on their MQ-9B drones.

The Euromale and the UK and Belgium’s MQ-9B drones are intended to gain certification from civil regulators to fly in European airspace, opening up a whole new set of regarding safety and privacy. Drone Wars has previously commented on this and has recently launched UK Drone Watch a project that will to monitor developments.

Other News

Russia

Similarly to Turkey’s Roketsan, Russia’s JSC Kronshtadt has displayed missiles made specifically for the Orion MALE drone  (built by Kronshtadt) which was delivered to the army last spring for operational assessment, and, it is said, will be ready for reconnaissance and combat missions in 2021. This time around, this might actually be the case.

 United Aircraft Company (UAC) who are manufacturing Russia’s other armed drone, the (reportedly) stealthy Okhotnik, have been ordered to accelerate production and have the drone delivered to the army by 2024. It is said the Okhotnik has a range of 6,000km, a 59,000ft ceiling and can deploy air-to-air missiles.

Nigeria

Nigeria’s fleet of CH-3 armed drones are to be joined by more Chinese armed drones. Reports are that this new deal includes four CH-4B, two Wing Loong II and two CH-3B. The CH-4B have arrived in Nigeria and two are deployed to a new Combat Reconnaissance Group in Gombe state. This makes Nigeria only the third country, after China and UAE, to operate the Wing Loong II, China’s most deadly drone. It is likely that the drones will be used immediately they are ready in Nigeria’s ongoing battles against counter-insurgents and “armed banditry” in the north west of the country.

India

India’s quest to acquire armed drones continues amid growing tensions in the disputed border area with China. The army submitted a proposal to the Defence Acquisition Council seeking to arm the 90 Heron drones in service across the three services. Project Cheetah, has been in existence for a decade but a decision on whether or not to go ahead was sped up in August of 2020 although there is no confirmation of the outcome at the time of writing.

In the meantime, the Indian Navy has leased two unarmed MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones, presumably for training purposes ahead of a larger acquisition of armed drones which has been subject of long, on-going discussions.

Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan has had two Wing Loong I since 2017, although it is unclear whether they are fully operational. Nonetheless, since Azerbaijan’s use of the Turkish armed drone against Armenian forces in the recent conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazak military figures have begun to consider acquiring TB-2 drones. Reports have surfaced that a delegation from Kazakhstan visited the UAS base in Batman, Turkey, in November. One news agency suggested that Kazakhstan is looking to acquire “several dozen” TB-2.

The need for controls

In light of the developments in 2020, not least the Trump administrations undermining of the MTCR and Azerbaijan’s widely reported use of Bayraktar TB-2 in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, there has been renewed discussion about the need to develop effective international controls on the proliferation and use of armed drones.

In October, NGOs and rights groups, including DWUK, delivered a statement to the First Committee of the UN General Assembly in which they stressed the need for accountability on the use of armed drones that, in many cases, have ignored standards of humanitarian and human rights law.

The Stimson Centre and Pax held an online discussion that can be viewed here. It pulled together different voices on the topic of drone proliferation and made for an interesting discussion that included representatives from producer country, a non-producing country, the NGO sector and Agnès Callamard, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. An event summary is available from EFAD.

Lastly, a new report was published by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy that outlines the existing mechanisms for control and suggests ways of strengthening each of them, noting that all avenues need to be pursued as militarisation in general and the use of armed drones in particular, increases across the globe.

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Featured image: CODEPINK protests killer drones at DC home of Jeh Johnson (Credit: CODEPINK)

Seven months after Bayer AG announced plans for a sweeping settlement of U.S. Roundup cancer litigation, the German owner of Monsanto Co. continues to work to settle tens of thousands of claims brought by people suffering from cancer they say was caused by Monsanto’s weed killing products. On Wednesday, one more case appeared to find closure, though the plaintiff did not live to see it.

Lawyers for Jaime Alvarez Calderon, agreed earlier this week to a settlement offered by Bayer after U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday denied summary judgment in favor of Monsanto, allowing the case to move closer to a trial.

The settlement will go to Alvarez’s four sons because their 65-year-old father, a longtime winery worker in Napa County, California, died just over a year ago from non-Hodgkin lymphoma he blamed on his work spraying Roundup around winery property for years.

In a hearing held in federal court Wednesday, Alvarez family lawyer David Diamond told Judge Chhabria that the settlement would close out the case.

After the hearing, Diamond said Alvarez had worked in the wineries for 33 years, using a backpack sprayer to apply Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides to sprawling acreage for the Sutter Home group of wineries. He would often go home in the evenings with clothing wet with herbicide due to leaks in the equipment and weed killer that drifted in the wind.  He was diagnosed in 2014 with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, undergoing multiple rounds of chemotherapy and other treatments before dying in December 2019.

Diamond said he was happy to settle the case but has “400 plus” more Roundup cases still unresolved.

He is not alone. At least half a dozen other U.S. law firms have Roundup plaintiffs they are seeking trial settings for in 2021 and beyond.

Since buying Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has been struggling to figure out how to put an end to the litigationthat includes more than 100,000 plaintiffs in the United States. The company lost all three trials held to date and has lost the early rounds of appeals seeking to overturn the trial losses. Juries in each of the trials found that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides do cause cancer and that Monsanto spent decades hiding the risks.

In addition to efforts to resolve claims currently pending, Bayer also hopes to create a mechanism for resolving potential claims that it could face from Roundup users who develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the future. Its initial plan for handling future litigation was rejected by Judge Chhabria and the company has yet to announce a new plan.

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Featured image is from Global Justice Now /Flickr/CC BY

[T]his view rests on … mistaking or confusing what is real with what is imitation;  literal meaning with metaphorical meaning; medicine with morals… – Thomas Szaz 

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to  become absurd and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. – R.D. Laing  

Lately, in the furious fever of viral hysteria–what one might call a “panic-demic”–the word “psychopath” has become ubiquitous. Certainly, seen from the everyday point of view of decent people, “normal” people, it makes sense to label as crazy the senseless cyclone turning our lives upside-down. We want to get back to the old normal as possible: not to the “new normal” being thrust down our throats and up our noses.

But since the iron fist is showing ever more clearly through the threadbare shreds of the formerly plumply furry velvet glove, perhaps it would be more useful to approach an analysis in terms of the politics of power. Or in terms of sin, evil, and moral corruption. Or simply in terms of an old-fashioned warrior ethic of the dog-eat-dog, might makes right encounter of the conquering hero kind. 

The American Psychiatric Association’s “bible,” the DSM, is neutral in relation to the etiology of mental disorders, making the point that these are defined in terms of social norms.(1) In other words, while one may be considered mentally ill in some social contexts, one would be considered normal in others.

In the same way, the world-view of the warrior honours the virile virtues of a code that may be maladapted to a more “civilized” norm. Hobbes’ “cardinal virtues” of war, “force and fraud”(2) would seem to have no place in a polite drawing-room. “All’s fair in love and war” implies that “nothing is off the table,” even that there is no such thing as evil in a world where there is no moral compass. Indeed, the very word “moral” seems, more and more, a quaint anachronism. 

This is the world where a public figure can claim with apparent pride to an appreciative audience chuckling in approval: “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” Only missing is “we murdered.” 

Perhaps this is a world of moral, not mental, illness. A sickness of the soul. And it is easy to sell one’s soul to the Devil if one has no moral sense, if it is a shrivelled appendage like a spiritual appendix. No longer needed, surplus to requirements, a useless eater of our body energy. Better to cut it out in one clean, surgical strike.

Can a whole culture fall prey to a collective soul-sickness, poisoned with the Kool-Aid of a warrior death cult? Can “this is war!” lose its power to thrill in the boardrooms, sports stadia, and fields of battle? Can Veblen’s “predatory culture”  evolve past the need for “full spectrum dominance?”  

Surely we are at the point where, in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, writing about a “psychopathic god” he says: “We must love one another or die.”

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S. M. Smyth was a founding member of the 2006 World Peace Forum in Vancouver and organized a debate about TILMA at the Maple Ridge City Council chambers between Ellen Gould and a representative of the Fraser Institute. 

Notes

(1) DSM-IV: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 

(2) Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) pt. 1, ch. 13

This past Thursday, January 14, 2021 Biden announced his ‘American Rescue Plan’ (ARP), a list of programs and proposals purported to generate a robust economic recovery in 2021, just as the US economy continues to deteriorate as a growing list of recent economic data now indicate.

US Economy Faltering Fast 

New filings for unemployment benefits have been rising rapidly. From a ‘low’ of about 1 million/week in December last week’s initial claims for benefits topped 1.4 million—when  both benefit programs, State administered and the Federal PUA, are counted .

Another red flag indicator is consumer spending (70% of the US economy) and retail sales, its largest component. The latter fell -1.4%% in November and another -0.7% in December, according to just released US Commerce data. These are typical months during which they rise the fastest.  Another indicator of consumer spending in growing trouble, credit card spending fell an even larger -2.7% in December, according to Chase Bank’s database of 30 million credit and debit card holders. Still another red flag is trade. The US trade deficit based on recent months is now running $85 billion a month and close to $1 trillion a year. Deficits mean US exports, and thus US production for exports, is trailing imports to the US badly—and thus contributing to US GDP contraction in 2021 still further.

The severe weakening in the private sector of the US economy now underway can only be offset by increased government spending and stimulus.  The much vaunted recovery of manufacturing activity represents only 11% of the US economy and, furthermore, has already increased most of its potential growth. It cannot continue at past rates or carry the general recovery from here.  Only massive government spending at this point can do that.

The $900 Billion December 2020 Non-Stimulus

As the economy has weakened in the latter months of 2020, the US government injected a paltry stimulus in last December’s $900B (actually $866B per the Congressional Budget Office). But that will have minimal stimulus effect the current sagging real US economy. Here’s why:

Last December’s $900 billion emergency stimulus passed just after Christmas continued levels of $300/week in unemployment benefits for 12 million jobless.

First, it just continues the level of unemployment benefits of $300 per week. That’s not a net new stimulus.  The economy was already slowing fast in November-December despite that $300 level of benefits. Discontinuing the $300 in 2021 would have made the economy worse but continuing it is not make it a further net stimulus. Moreover, that $300 extension in benefits is good for only 11 weeks. It will run out by mid-March 2021.

Then there’s the $600 checks part of the December $866B/$900B. That’s a net stimulus but a minimal one at best. It injects only $166 billion into the real economy which is miniscule relative to the more than $20 trillion size US economy. Not even 0.01% of the $20 trillion US GDP. And even that assumes the entire $166 billion will actually be spent and not hoarded for future emergencies or used to pay down debt.

The $284 billion for direct small business grants is the largest part of the $900/$866 billion. It will have some net stimulus effect but won’t start hitting the economy for weeks and maybe months—first it must be applied for, then distributed, and then actually spent. And we all saw how that process dragged on with the Cares Act small business PPP program last March 2020—and how larger businesses scammed off a good deal of it and then sat on the scammed dollars.

In short, as an economic stimulus funding of the sagging US economy, the $900/$866 billion is a DOA effort to stimulate the economy this first quarter 2021 in particular. It might keep the slowdown now underway from being even worse than otherwise a little. In that sense it’s a ‘mitigation’ package, not a stimulus.

Biden’s $1.9 Trillion ‘American Rescue Plan’ Stimulus

Overlaid on the futile December mitigation package now is Biden’s government $1.9 Trillion stimulus proposals announced this past week.  But that’s still just a proposal—not an actual stimulus spending Act passed by Congress. Moreover, for it have any appreciable effect stimulating the economy, there are three reasons why the $1.9 trillion will almost certainly end up much less.

First, the problem remains how much of the $1.9T will get cut as Republicans, and corporate Democrats, in Congress attack it. Already political forces are organizing to slash billions from the $1.9 trillion, including Democrats.  A second reason why the stimulus will not amount to $1.9T net new actual stimulus to the economy is that a large part of it just continues prior spending levels. And that spending level that hasn’t been able to prevent the current US economy’s slowdown.  Third, there’s the question of how soon some of the actual stimulus spending will actually be spent and thus actually get into the US economy. Certain programs and their spending will be delayed until well after the current January-March critical period.

So let’s describe in detail what’s in Biden’s ‘American Rescue Plan’ (ARP) and consider those programs that are likely candidates for cutting by Republican and corporate Democrats in Congress; that constitute just continuation of prior spending; and that will likely experience significant delay before the spending actually hits the economy.

Larry Summers: Corporate Shill Takes the Lead

Forces in and out of government and within both parties are coalescing to roll back the $1.9T Biden ARP proposals. Once again in the lead for corporate Democrats, is former adviser to Barack Obama in 2009, Larry Summers—now also advisor to Biden. Summers is appearing everywhere on corporate and mainstream media outlets declaring that the $1.9T is too much. He’s especially attacking the $2000 checks for families earning less than $75K per year in income, saying it’s too much.  Summer’s message is even the $1400 in checks will expand government deficits and will overheat the economy causing inflation.

But there’s been no inflation for the past two decades despite adding $15 trillion to deficits and the national debt. The claim that deficits cause inflation in real goods and services is empirical nonsense, not because of some worn out neoliberal economic theory but because the facts don’t support it. But that old fake economic bogeyman of ‘excess spending leads to deficits that cause inflation’ is being peddled once again by Summers in the lead, on behalf of his corporate Democrat buddies, and of course most of the Republicans. They’ll seek to cut at least $500 billion from the $1.9 trillion.

For Summers this isn’t the first time he’s given fake and dangerous advice to presidents in time of economic crisis. It was Larry Summers who, back in early 2009, as key advisor to Barack Obama on how much to spend on Obama’s January 2009 economic recovery plan at the time, convinced Obama to reduce his 2009 stimulus by $120 billion that the US House of Representatives was prepared to spend.  As a result the US recovery lagged badly in 2009-10. Congress had to make up the loss in spending by passing emergency measures like ‘First Time Homebuyers’ and ‘Cash for Clunkers (autos)’ subsidies for households. But by then it was too late. During Obama’s recovery package—amounting to way too little too late now acknowledged by most economists—it took more than six years to recover jobs lost in 2008-09. And then those recovered were at pay levels much less than those that were lost.  Meanwhile as well, 14 million of the 48 million mortgages were foreclosed. And tens of millions more were added to the list of those workers without health insurance between 2009-15.

The Biden proposals are numerous and detailed. The ARP is a very detailed set of proposals. But if readers think they understand it by reading the Washington Post, New York Times, or other mainstream media summaries of it they are wrong. What that media has provided thus far is just bits and pieces of information, packaged up with very little analysis as to how much of the spending will actually get into the economy, how soon might it get there, and whether the $1.9 trillion will yet be gutted and reduced—as the ARP ‘wish list’ hits the Republican buzz saw in Congress.

What follows is a breakdown of the spending elements in Biden’s $1.9T ARP proposals, as well as where and how it will likely be attacked and rolled back by Senate Republicans, Corporate Democrats, and Business Interest lobbying friends of Larry Summers.

Part 1: $400 Billion Covid Relief, School Reopening, & Emergency Paid Leave 

To begin with, there’s 4 Categories of spending in Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion ARP. The first is $400 billion for Covid measures, Vaccine distribution, and for reopening the schools. In this group corporate forces and their political allies will likely attack measures for spending $170 billion to reopen the schools as well as the roughly $70 billion more to provide for 14 weeks paid emergency leave for workers who have to leave their jobs due to schools or child care center closings, to care for family members sick or to quarantine themselves. The measure also extends such paid leave for the first time to the 2 million federal employees and to reimburse state and local governments for the cost of the leave.  The paid leave maxes out at $1,400/week and for workers earning $73K per year in annual income. In other words, it covers roughly 75% of all US workers.

Opponents like Summers and Senate Republicans will argue the $170 billion is too much and should be reduced. It’s really money not needed for schools costs of reopening. It’s really money Democrats want to push to local government—a source for which Republicans and Mitch McConnell have vowed not to allow funds since last June 2020. Anything appearing to help fund state and local governments will be opposed in their push back, and there’s a lot of that money in the $1.9T in various forms of funding.

The other big target in this $400 billion is the above $70B for emergency leave pay for anyone earning less than $73K per year. Even though the money will be paid to employers to offset the costs of the paid leave, it will be attacked by conservatives and corporate Democrats, like Senator Mnuchin, in West Virginia and other corporate interests in Congress. Again, a main reason is its extension to federal and state-local government workers. They also don’t like the fact Biden’s ARP expands paid leave well beyond the minimal provision in the March 2020 Cares Act. That Act exempted big corporations with more than 500 workers from providing paid leave, as well as very small businesses with fewer than 50 workers. Now the measure covers all workers impacted by Covid who have to care for sick family members, or fill in for child care closings, or leave their jobs to provide schooling at home for their K-6 children, or have to quarantine themselves. Equally important, business interests fear the long term effect of providing such leave. They fear it will legitimize more permanent paid leave in future legislation. Better not to allow the precedent now, rather than fight it later.

Other proposals in the $400 Billion will be more difficult for corporate interests to roll back. The remainder of the roughly $160 billion (after $170B for school reopening and $70B for emergency paid leave) goes to a national vaccination program ($20B), testing ($50B), the Disaster Relief fund to replenish stocks of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), pandemic supplies like developing more therapies.  A further amount, not specified, is allocated to International Health Groups (presumably WHO) which conservatives will fight to remove. There’s also calls for OSHA to issue Covid protection standards and grants to organizations that implement them that Congressional Republicans will likely also oppose.

A second major category of ARP spending  is called Direct Family Relief. It allocates $1 trillion more in spending in addition to the $400 billion for Covid, Schools, and Paid Leave. Here the opposition will be intense, centered around the $1400 checks per person to help working households cover back rents, mortgages, keep the utilities on, and, most important for tens of millions now to provide food for their families.  Biden’s ARP also extends the checks to adult dependents of households who were left out of the Cares Act 2020 $1200 check disbursement.  The checks are a large cost item, amounting to $464 billion (for $2,000 which includes the $600 recently authorized this past December).  Here the Republicans will argue it’s ‘deficit busting’.

Yet these are the same Republicans and corporate Democrats who quickly approved $650 billion in deficit busting tax cuts for businesses and investors in the March 2020 Cares Act. Then approved another $100 billion more in the December 2020 Defense Bill. Not to mention their approval of $429 bill in tax loopholes in 2019 for investors and corporations, which followed Trump’s notorious $4 trillion January 2018 business-investor tax cuts. In other words, they had no problem passing more than $5 trillion in tax cuts the past two years but now they’re crying wolf over spending for working families, students, renters, and local governments approaching bankruptcy.

Part 2: $1 Trillion Direct Family Relief Proposals

Another major element of the $1 trillion proposed for Direct Family Relief is the restoration of unemployment benefits. This is the $300/week supplemental unemployment benefits just passed in December in the $900B emergency ‘mitigation’ Act. Biden’s ARP raises it a modest $100, to $400.  The December 2020 bill, however, provided the extra benefits only until March, a mere 11 weeks after its authorization in December. Biden’s ARP extends that to December 31, 2021. It’s important to remember, however, this is not a net new stimulus but a continuation of prior spending. It may help prevent a further slowing of consumer spending and its effect on the economy, but it will not constitute a ‘stimulus’, or net new spending.  Nevertheless, Corporate interests in Congress will argue it should not be extended through next December. They may agree to a few more months this spring, past March, instead. They’ll argue that will save hundreds of billions of $ as deficits to the US budget this year.

Other proposals within the $1 trillion for Direct Family Relief are subject to reduction in amount of spending most likely. That includes the additional $35 billion for rent and mortgage relief; the $13 billion more for SNAP and food assistance; and the $40B for assistance to child care providers and for assistance to families of essential workers, caregivers, unemployed, and women who had to leave the labor force to care for children schooling.  Like creating a precedent for paid leave, Republicans and others will fight to reduce the ARP Child Care funding out of concern it will legitimize more permanent spending in these areas later.

One area that opponents won’t likely try to reduce is the further $20 billion allocated in this category to Veterans Health needs. Nor probably the provisions that subsidize COBRA health insurance payments for 3 million workers forced to leave their jobs due to Covid. These payments will ultimately get into the hands of the employers and their health insurance companies, so that’ll be ok with the Republicans and friends no doubt.

The remainder of the $1 trillion takes the form of small funding increases for cash assistance for women on welfare ($1B for TANF program), for substance abuse ($4B), and for programs to address domestic violence due to Covid family stress. While the amounts are small, the idea of providing more funds for such programs will be viewed as adding non-Covid crisis related ‘wish list’ Democrat spending to the total ARP.

The $1 trillion also includes four tax cutting measures that impact working family households in particular: funds to help essential workers, caregivers, and jobless to pay for child care expenses; funds to expand for one year the child care tax credit for households that would allow a tax credit up to half the cost of child care expenses for each child under 13 years old, up to $4k per child (max $8K); an increase in the general child tax credit up to $3.6k per child including now children up to 17 yrs old; and increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for child-less adults, from $530 to $1,500 for those with incomes up to $21k per year. While the total cost of these 4 consumer focused tax cuts is not exactly known, the idea of raising tax credits for families will be viewed by conservatives as threatening their business and investor tax credits. They will oppose these four measures or, in exchange, demand a further increase in their business-investor existing tax credits.

Finally, there is another element in the call to spend $1 trillion that opponents will fight against tooth and nail. It’s the proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. And the call to pay essential workers retroactive hazard pay. Neither of these proposals contribute to the cost of the $1.9 trillion, their actual costs unknown at this point. Nor are they probably serious proposals for passage by Biden and the Democrats. They will almost certainly be withdrawn. At best they may constitute ‘markers’ for where future legislation may go. It will be important for opposing politicians to get Biden and the Democrats to drop these ideas from negotiations quickly, which most likely they will.

Part 3: $440 Billion Struggling Communities Support Proposals 

The third major category of Biden’s $1.9T ARP is for ‘Struggling Communities Support’. It calls for another $440 billion in spending—in addition to the $1 trillion and $400 billion noted.

Just as in the case of the $1,400 Checks, Unemployment Benefits extension, Schools Reopening and Emergency Paid Leave costs, the $440B in part 3 of Biden’s ARP targeting communities will be among the main targets attacked by conservative, Republican, and corporate lobbying interests. The big target for rollback will be the $350 billion of the $440 billion allocated for an emergency fund to state and local governments to pay for more 1^st responders and essential workers needed immediately to attack the spread of Covid and accelerate the vaccination of millions before much feared new and more infectious strains of the virus accelerate among the population.  These funds are targeted to ensure faster vaccine distribution, more serious testing, help school reopenings, and to provide EDA grants to local governments, higher education institutions, churches and non-profits.  In addition to the $350 billion, additional $20B each is earmarked for local public transport needed to keep essential workers in big cities are able to get to work and for pandemic response costs by tribal governments.

Opponents will see this as just another way to get money to state and local governments. They’ll argue there’s already funds in the $400 billion for Covid response and the $350B is duplicative. The same argument will be levied for the $20B for local transportation support.

Ever since Mitch McConnell made funds for state and local government the ‘bete noir’ of stimulus spending proposals, Republicans in particular have been adamantly against any aid whatsoever to such local governments. They’ve preferred that States and big cities go to the municipal bond market and borrow more if they need it instead. In other words, let the blue states and big cities get more in debt than they already are. Let them lay off public workers more. The McConnell strategy was to let those states and cities suffer and make them turn on their Democrat politicians. This political bias and prejudice is not gone in the US Senate.  It is led by McConnell, with the Senator Paul Rand ‘deficit hawks’ faction of around 20.  That critical mass is likely to succeed in rolling back most, if not all, the provisions in the $1.9T ARP proposals associated with providing aid to states, cities, local agencies, and tribal governments.

The amounts related to state-local government assistance in the $1.9T are probably around $500 billion of the $1.9T.  So the fight over them in Congress once Biden’s proposals hit the floor will be intense. And likely drawn out. And that is bad for getting government spending and stimulus into the economy promptly in order to offset the likely decline continuing in consumer spending, especially in the first quarter of 2021 when it is desperately needed.

The fight in Congress over the $1.9T stimulus could actually be a long, drawn out affair—unless the Democrats and Biden want to retreat quickly on key provisions to get some kind of an agreement. That is quite possible, especially if the economy continues to deteriorate noticeably in the first quarter. If Biden and friends do not reduce their $1.9T, the actual economic stimulus effect will be delayed and with it the economic stimulus effect. And if the $1.9T is significantly reduced, that too will reduce the economic stimulus effect.

Some commentary is already arguing that the Democrats in the Senate can bypass the Republican opposition and quickly pass the $1.9T by reverting to what’s called the ‘Budget Reconciliation’ rule. This allows the passage of legislation by a simple majority instead of the Senate’s otherwise archaic 60 votes rule for passage. But Democrats have a 50-50, with the Vice President voting for a 51-50 outcome.  That assumes, however, that all 50 Democrat Senators will vote in support. There are a number of them, however, who are closer to Republicans in their corporate affinities than to their Democrat colleagues. It is no guarantee that a budget reconciliation strategy will succeed.

Part 4: Modernize US Government Technology & CyberSecurity 

A final part 4 of Biden’s $1.9T ‘American Rescue Plan’ addresses spending to upgrade and improve federal government use of technology, especially where cybersecurity is involved. Amounting to a couple tens of billions of dollars and the remainder of the $1.9T it is clearly an ‘add on’ unrelated to the Covid, Family, and Community Relief proposals. It is more a matter of infrastructure spending which Biden promises will come in a subsequent set of proposals for government spending and investment later this spring. Republicans and opponents of the ARP will no doubt argue such and move to have it considered in that later legislation.

Based on the preceding possibilities it’s reasonable to assume as much as $500 billion could be cut by Congress once conservatives, Republicans, and Corporate Democrats in the Senate get their claws into the $1.9 trillion package. What remains moreover will almost certainly be delayed well beyond February. In short, very little of the ARP will come in time to slow the US economy’s current first quarter trajectory.

Addendum: What’s Actually Net Stimulus in the $1.9T

Apart from the Congressional cuts likely coming, there are still other reasons why the $1.9T impact will not be the full $1.9T.

A good part of the $1.9T is not really net new or additional economic stimulus in the first place. A significant part of the $1.9T represents just a continuation of prior spending levels. At best it can serve to help mitigate an even more serious economic slowdown.

For example, the unemployment benefits in the ARP don’t kick in until after March and just represent a continuation of the benefit spending levels. The extension continues until the end of 2021. That’s probably around $300 billion of the $1.9 trillion. Then there’s the four consumer tax credits. That effect won’t be felt until households filing their 2020 taxes start to get tax refunds. Those refunds will be late this year. Households will wait until the passage of the ARP before they file tax returns in order to see if in fact they can claim the tax credits and get the refunds reflecting them. Refunds will not flow into households until later this year as a result, especially if the passage of the ARP Act is delayed in Congress. That could amount to another $100B or more.

So the actual stimulus effect of the ARP might be as little as half the $1.9T. $500 billion cut by Congress. Another $300B that’s just continuation of benefits. $166B that will have already entered the economy as the initial $600 checks. And $100-$150B in consumer tax credits.

In short, the actual stimulus to the economy could amount to barely $1 Trillion, not to Biden’s announced $1.9T.

Will that be sufficient to generate a sustained economic recovery in 2021. Not even close!

Biden and the Democrats are thus confronted with making the same error that the Obama administration did in early 2009—not providing a sufficient fiscal stimulus to generate a sustained recovery.  Having failed in that objective in 2009-10, Obama turned to even more tax cuts for business. That did little to reverse the recession for tens of millions of working families and small businesses in the US. The direct consequence of that was the Democrats severe loss of members in the US House of Representatives in the mid-term election in November 2010. And then the loss of the US Senate. And that led to policies that fueled the discontent and rise of opposition throughout the US to Democrat government—paving the way for Donald Trump.

Biden and the Democrats don’t even have the same time in which to prevent the repeat of the last decade. They must turn the economy around quickly. They must put the Covid threat to bed by this summer 2021. They must somehow neutralize Trump, Trumpism and the proto-fascist radical right that is not going away the next four years. They must address the growing discontent with institutional racism. And they better hope that all this doesn’t eventually lead to a recurrence of a financial crisis—as debt loads accelerate in the private sector in 2021 due to a slow recovery and in turn lead to defaults and bankruptcies that precipitate a new financial instability event!

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Dr. Jack Rasmus writes on his blog site, Jack Rasmus, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

This is the second in a series of 4 posts about propaganda. The title of the previous post is ‘You are Surrounded by Propaganda’. The title of this post is taken from the book of the same name by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.

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“The 20^th Century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy” (Alex Carey(1)).

Public Relations (PR) – The Scale of Corporate Propaganda  

Whilst government ‘spin’ is sometimes mentioned in the media, there is much less discussion of corporate spin. In practice, a huge amount of propaganda comes from corporations.(2) One of the leading critics of our economic and political system, Jonathan Cook, wrote that when corporate activities are particularly harmful:

“it becomes necessary for a company to obscure the connection between cause and effect, between its accumulation of profit and the resulting accumulation of damage caused to a community, a distant country or the natural world – or all three. That is why corporations – those that inflict the most damage – invest a great deal of time and money in aggressively managing public perceptions…Much of the business of business is deception, either making the… harm invisible or gaining the public’s resigned acceptance that the harm is inevitable.”(3)

Much of what we see on TV, hear on the radio, read in newspapers and magazines, and see on mainstream internet sites has a bias in favor of big corporations, and economic ideas that help those corporations make immense profits. One of the leading experts on propaganda, Alex Carey, once said that:

“One of the great achievements of business propaganda has been to make us believe that we are free from propaganda”.(4)

Most people are simply unaware of the scale of the manipulation, and the extent to which businesses influence governments and their citizens. The key to success is that propaganda is ideally delivered through multiple channels targeted at multiple audiences. This includes lobbying aimed at political leaders and decision-makers; influencing (or ‘capturing’) regulators; controlling or influencing the media; manipulating academics, grass roots activists and members of the public; and advertising.(5)

A long-term example is the US National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). This was formed by a group of the biggest US businesses in 1895. They have bombarded the public with propaganda for over a century. In one year alone NAM broadcast on the radio for 1,350 hours.(6) That is 4 hours per day. They placed stories in newspapers and magazines throughout the country. They distributed millions of leaflets in schools. They provided briefings to editors, journalists and radio commentators. All of this is intended to increase public acceptance of corporate power. This was described some time ago as “a 75-year-long multi-billion dollar project in social engineering on a national scale”.(7) A similar UK organisation, Aims of Industry, has bombarded British media with corporate propaganda for many years.(8)

In the US, the number of people employed in the PR industry now outnumbers the people employed in the media, and estimates in the UK suggest that there are 3 times as many PR people as journalists.(9) It is impossible to know how much is spent on PR because there is an overlap between PR and advertising. One estimate in the US is $14 billion each year,(10) but as the annual advertising budget is almost $250 billion,(11) the true figure is likely to be much more. The biggest PR firms operate globally:

“In 2015, three publicly traded mega PR firms—Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic Group—together employed 214,000 people across 170 countries, collecting $35 billion in combined revenue”.(12)

Much of this activity is secret. In the same way that intelligence agencies have connections with the mainstream media, former insiders from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have admitted that offices of PR companies have provided useful cover for CIA agents to operate overseas.(13)  

Crisis Management and Whitewashing Reputations 

One of the specific roles of PR companies is called crisis management. This is where a corporation or a government has made a big mistake and wants to cover it up, or has a bad reputation in general and wants to polish its image. The PR company’s job is to convince you that Union Carbide (now part of The Dow Chemical Company) is a caring corporation after an explosion at one of their plants in Bhopal, India has killed thousands of people; to convince you that the military dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s were reasonable people, while they were murdering their citizens; or to convince you that torture in Turkey, Guatemala, Nigeria, Kuwait, Indonesia, Egypt, Peru, Columbia or Pakistan is not so bad.(14) Whitewashing the reputations of foreign governments is a major source of revenue for some PR companies.(15) They were even employed by the Saudi Arabian government after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 because many of the attackers were Saudis.

Whitewashing reputations is not just something carried out by governments and global corporations. It happens on a more local level too. For example, following an incident where campus security personnel pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors, the University of California Davis spent $175,000 trying to eradicate mentions of the incident on the internet in 2011.(16)

No ethical standards in PR 

PR companies have sent spies into campaign organisations and political groups to find out what they are planning. If these groups are thought to be a threat to a client then PR companies will try to undermine them, using smears, legal intimidation and other forms of manipulation. For example they have tried to set up animal rights protestors by becoming members and then persuading other members to commit acts of violence, which ends up generating bad publicity for the genuine protestors.(17)

PR companies also employ people who appear to be independent experts, when their true role is just to support the PR company. There is a huge amount of junk science being put out by people paid by corporations. In the 1960s there were claims that chemicals like DDT, and materials like asbestos, were safe. We now know this was not true. The corporations knew at the time that they were unsafe, but they paid experts to lie.

Astroturf Lobbying – Fake Organisations

One of the main techniques used by PR companies is to create, train and finance fake grassroots movements and other campaign organisations to influence policymakers, journalists and the public.(18) These are known as front groups or ‘astroturf’ lobbying.(19) They post fake information on the internet, send fake letters to politicians, and make advertisements that look like news programs, or articles in newspapers. These fake groups are usually given misleading names, like the ‘American Council on Science and Health’, which was a front for many companies, and has defended poisonous chemicals such as asbestos.(20) The ‘Campaign for Creativity’ was a front for Microsoft and other companies trying to get stronger patent laws in Europe.(21) The ‘Save Our Species Alliance’ was a fake group representing the cattle and timber industries trying to weaken the Endangered Species Act.(22)

Kuwait’s leaders are one of the most repressive regimes in the world, yet before the first Gulf War began, a huge propaganda campaign was undertaken to present them as a reasonable government. A fake organisation called ‘Citizens for a free Kuwait’ was set up. They made-up a story about Iraqi soldiers taking babies from incubators and murdering them, in order to convince US politicians to invade Iraq.

Bell Pottinger – Fake everything 

One of the UK’s biggest PR firms, Bell Pottinger, collapsed in 2017, after revelations that it was involved in serious corruption, and deliberately exacerbated racism, in South Africa.(23) Among other activities the firm were paid $540 million by the Pentagon to make fake terror videos and other propaganda. They used a wide range of internet manipulation techniques. They used networks of fake bloggers and Twitter accounts to spread misleading information. They changed content on Wikipedia to make their clients look good by adding favourable comments and removing negative ones. At the same time they maliciously altered other people’s Wikipedia pages. They manipulated search engines so that positive articles about their clients would come first, and negative comments would appear much further down the rankings. The firm had close connections with senior British politicians, and they polished the reputations of countries accused of human rights violations.

Tobacco – The Best Weapon Is Doubt 

The tobacco industry set up one of the most notorious fake organisations – the ‘Council for Tobacco Research’.(24) This was a front for the tobacco companies making sure that they could cast doubt on anyone who criticised them. They had no interest in genuine tobacco research. Where there is evidence of something that corporations do not want you to accept, such as ‘smoking is bad for you,’ the standard ploy used by PR companies is to cast doubt and create confusion. If there is any doubt in the mind of the public, they will believe whatever they choose. If they want to believe that smoking is not bad for their health, they will. This is much easier for PR companies than actually denying or disproving anything. The tobacco industry has a long history of using PR. In the 1920s, women did not smoke very much. The tobacco companies were keen to encourage them, so they set up one of the earliest examples of corporate PR – a smoking stunt during the 1929 Easter parade in New York. Lots of debutantes who marched in the parade were given cigarettes to smoke while they marched. This was hyped as an example of female emancipation.(25) The taboo against female smoking had been broken.

Deny, Doubt, Delay, Discourse 

Sugar, alcohol and gambling companies (sometimes called addiction industries), together with industries that contribute to climate change, now use the same tactics as the tobacco companies to resist legislation. First they deny that there is a problem. At the same time, these companies will ‘attack’ their critics, accusing them of being anti-business, or nanny state. They make false claims about how regulations will cause job losses, or affect the economy.(26) When they can no longer deny the problem, they create doubt using misleading data. Then they present themselves as a responsible industry that is trying to deal with the problem, so they are invited to help draft legislation. They set up industry-funded research organisations so that they control our understanding of the problem. They focus on ineffective solutions such as ‘education’ and ‘awareness’ programs. This long-term strategy is sometimes described as ‘deny, doubt, delay, discourse’(27) and is deliberately intended to block effective legislation for as long as possible.

Nuclear Industry 

A good example of an industry that has used PR for many years is the nuclear industry. When nuclear energy first became a possibility, its supporters realised that the total cost would be much greater than the cost of coal. Despite that, they came up with slogans like “energy too cheap to meter”(28) and persuaded governments to build reactors. Third world governments spent large sums on these ‘white elephants’(29) (this means something that appears valuable but whose costs exceed its usefulness). Studies showing how unsafe nuclear reactors are have been kept secret. Many nuclear accidents, some very serious, have never been reported in the mainstream press.

It’s Getting Worse 

Corporate propaganda is very complex. It includes issues such as misrepresenting their activities, corporate social responsibility, covering up unethical and criminal activity, and fraudulent accounts. Some of this will be examined in more detail in future posts. The extent of manipulation by PR companies is growing. For example, if you’ve ever attended a public consultation, perhaps about a planned supermarket in your area, it is quite likely that the consultation was a sham, organised by a PR company.(30) The consultation gives the impression of the company engaging with the local population, but in practice the company is intending to go ahead with its plans whatever local people say.

The truth is out there 

The availability of information on the internet has enabled ordinary people to begin to see through propaganda more easily. Wikileaks provides many documents that expose government and corporate crimes, and show what decision-makers in government and business are actually saying to each other when they are lying to the public. Some genuine campaign organisations (listed below) are now trying to expose the deceptions of the PR industry by explaining misleading activity, by creating databases showing which groups are funded by which companies, and other databases showing how networks of individuals are connected to each other.

Propaganda aimed at ordinary people to manage public opinion is sometimes called grassroots propaganda, but the really important work is treetops propaganda, which is used to manage politicians and other policymakers; journalists, editors and broadcasters; economists, academics and anyone else who might influence your opinion. In particular, a considerable amount of PR effort goes into systematically targeting and manipulating politicians and journalists behind closed doors. If they can persuade these two groups to repeat corporate propaganda, they are more likely to be successful. Manipulating politicians is usually called lobbying and is discussed in a later post.

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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 fourteenth 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) Alex Carey, Taking The Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty, 1996, p.18

2) John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, 1995

3) Jonathan Cook, ‘Capitalism is double-billing us: We pay from our wallets only for our future to be stolen from us’, 25 Oct 2020, at https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-10-25/capitalism-double-billing/

I have made slight changes to the quote to make it easier to read.

4) Alex Carey, Taking the risk out of democracy, 1996. The exact quote is “The success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century”

5) Jeff Connaughton, The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, 2012, p.125

6) Alex Carey, Taking The Risk Out Of Democracy, 1996, p.28

7) Alex Carey, Taking the risk out of democracy, 1996, p.20

8) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014, p.28

9) Joan Pedro-Caranana, Daniel Broudy and Jeffery Klaehn, (eds.) ‘The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception an Awareness’, 2018, London: Westminster University, at https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/39c0f5fe-db05-4670-94a2-0091c9c920f1/UWP-027-REVISED.pdf

10) A. Guttman, ‘Estimated aggregate revenue of U.S. public relations agencies from 2000 to 2018’, 3 Dec 2019, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/183972/estimated-revenue-of-us-public-relations-agencies-since-2000/ 

Harry Cooper et al, ‘Big East-West skew in record EU lobbying bonanza’, Politico, 21 Dec 2017, at https://www.politico.eu/article/transparency-register-analysis-lobbying-east-west-skew-european-union/ 

11) A. Guttman, ‘Advertising spending in the United States from 2010 to 2012’, Statista, 25 Feb 2020, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/236958/advertising-spending-in-the-us/ 

12) Peter Phillips, ‘The Diabolical Business of Global Public relations Firms’, Project Censored, 15 March 2017, at https://www.projectcensored.org/propaganda-fake-news-media-lies/ 

13) Robert T. Crowley, cited in Johan Carlisle, ‘Public Relationshipe: Hill and Knowlton, Robert Gray and the CIA’, Covert Action Quarterly, No.44, Spring 1993,

14) Carmelo Ruiz, ‘Europa Bio’s PR Friends Burson-Marstellar: PR For The New World Order’, (now known as Burson Cohn & Wolfe) at https://www.bhopal.net/old_bhopal_web/oldsite/burson.html

15) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014

16) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident

17) John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, 1995, pp.62-64

18) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014, p.116

19) ‘Astroturf’, at www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astroturf

20) ‘American Council on Science and Health’, Sourcewatch, at https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Science_and_Health

21) Corporate Europe Observatory, ‘How the Campaign for Creativity morphed into the Innovation and Creativity Group: habits of deception die hard’, Nov 2006, at http://archive.corporateeurope.org/c4c-icg.html

22) ‘Astroturfing’, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

23) ‘Bell Pottinger’, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Pottinger

24) ‘Council for Tobacco Research’, at www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Council_for_Tobacco_Research

25) Richard Curtis, ‘Century of the Self Part 1: Happiness Machines’, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04

26) Simon Capewell and Ffion Lloyd-Williams, ‘The role of the food industry in health: lessons from tobacco?’, British Medical Bulletin, Vol.125, Issue 1, March 2018, at https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/125/1/131/4847358

27) Juliet Roper, Shiv Ganesh and Theodore E. Zorn, ‘Doubt, delay and discourse: Skeptics strategies to politicize climate change’, Science Communication, 23 Nov 2016, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1075547016677043

28) John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, 1995, p.36

29) Zia Mian and A.H.Nayyar, 25 July 2004, ‘Another Nuclear White Elephant’, South Asians Against Nukes, Dawn magazine, available at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00024.html

30) Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, A quiet word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, 2014

Featured image is from SHTFplan.com

Miami medical examiner is investigating the death of 56-year-old Dr. Gregory Michael who reportedly died from a rare autoimmune disease 15 days after being vaccinated. Michael’s wife wants her husband’s death to serve as a warning to others.

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The wife of a Florida doctor who died 15 days after receiving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine told reporters at USA Today and the Daily Mail that her husband was “perfectly healthy” before he got the vaccine.

Heidi Neckelmann said her husband, 56-year-old Dr. Gregory Michael, “sought emergency care three days after the shot because he had dots on his skin that indicated internal bleeding.”

Michael received the vaccine on Dec. 18 at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, where he’d worked for 12 years as an OB-GYN. He died on Jan. 3 after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke related to a lack of platelets, a condition called thrombocytopenia, or as the Daily Mail reported, acute idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP).

Neckelmann told the Daily Mail:

“He was in very good health. He didn’t smoke, he drank alcohol once in a while but only socially. He worked out, we had kayaks, he was a deep sea fisherman.

“They tested him for everything you can imagine afterwards, even cancer, and there was absolutely nothing else wrong with him.”

Pfizer, in a statement to USA today, said the vaccine maker was aware of and “actively investigating” the death, but also added “we don’t believe at this time that there is any direct connection to the vaccine.”

Pfizer also told USA Today:

“There is no indication — either from large clinical trials or among people who have received the vaccine since the government authorized its use last month – that it could be connected to thrombocytopenia.”

But Neckelmann told the Daily Mail that in her mind, her husband’s death was “100% linked” to the vaccine.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) President Lyn Redwood, RN, MSN, said ITP is a well-known adverse event associated with vaccinations.

The vaccine most often implicated is the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, where the disease occurs in approximately 1 in every 25,000 to 40,000 doses of the vaccine, Redwood said. ITP has also been associated with hepatitis A and B virus (HBV), human papilloma virus (HPV), varicella-zoster, diphteria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTap), polio and pneumococcus vaccines.

According to Redwood, a study comparing adverse effects following influenza vaccination found that ITP was the third most common autoimmune condition (after Guillain Barre and rheumatoid arthritis).

Redwood also pointed out that ITP has been reported to occur following exposure to drugs containing polyethylene glycol (PEG), a compound used in both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

“Considering that according to the United States Court of Federal Claims, cases of ITP have been compensated in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), it is completely disingenuous for vaccine manufacturers to deny this risk,” Redwood said.

As Neckelmann told the Daily Mail, Michael suffered no immediate reaction to the vaccine, but three days later he noticed petechiae — spots of red indicative of bleeding beneath the skin — on his hands and feet.

After checking himself into the hospital, doctors confirmed Michael was suffering from an acute lack of platelets. According to Neckelmann:

“All the blood results came back normal except for the platelets which came back as zero.

“At first they thought it must be a mistake. So they did the test again and this time did a manual count which is supposed to be more accurate. This time it showed just one platelet.”

Doctors told Michael his condition was “incredibly dangerous” and could lead to a brain bleed and/or death, Neckelmann said.

Neckelmann told USA Today that a team of doctors tried unsuccessfully for two weeks to raise his platelet count. She told the Daily Mail that her husband had no prior history of acute idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, the illness her husband was diagnosed with. The disorder causes the immune system to mistake platelets for foreign objects and instructs the spleen to destroy them.

In a Facebook post, Neckelmann wrote that her husband was a pro-vaccine advocate. But, she said:

“I believe that people should be aware that side effects can happen, that it is not good for everyone and in this case destroyed a beautiful life, a perfect family, and has affected so many people in the community

“Do not let his death be in vain please save more lives by making this information news.”

According to the Daily Mail, children can get acute ITP after a viral infection such as the flu or mumps, while in adults, triggers can include HIV, hepatitis or H. pylori, a type of bacteria that causes stomach ulcers.

On hearing of Michael’s death, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., CHD chairman and chief legal counsel said:

“We need to stop regarding these tragedies as acceptable collateral damage. We need to step back from this giddy exuberance and make a cold hard risk assessment about these experimental medical interventions. And we need to recognize that these zero-liability vaccines are risky and that where there is risk, there has to be choice.”

The Pfizer — and also the Moderna — COVID vaccines use messenger RNA technology never before used in vaccines. Both vaccines are approved for emergency use in the U.S., UK and other countries, but neither is yet fully licensed.

So far there is no confirmation of any deaths directly related to either vaccine, though a 41-year-old woman in Portugal died two days after getting the Pfizer vaccine, and a 75-year-old Israeli man reportedly died of a heart attack two hours after receiving the vaccine.

There are, however, a growing number of reports of severe allergic reactions to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. According to the Wall Street Journal, at least 29 people have had severe allergic reactions in the U.S. to date.

In a news conference Wednesday, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told the media:

“The known and potential benefits of the current COVID-19 vaccines outweigh the known and potential risks of getting Covid-19. That doesn’t mean, however, that we couldn’t see potential serious health events in the future.”

To date, the only explanation offered for the allergic reactions to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is that they were caused by PEG.

In September, Children’s Health Defense warned the FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci about the potential for PEG to cause anaphylactic shock, but as previously reported, neither took action.

Immediately after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were rolled out in the U.S. and UK, reports of severe allergic reactions began to surface in the media. In some cases, the reactions were severe enough to require vaccine recipients be hospitalized.

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On Tuesday, the U.S. Army General Staff issued a memorandum strongly condemning the violent riots in Washington on January 6 and announcing that the U.S. military will “obey lawful orders of civilian leadership” and “defend the U.S. Constitution against all external and internal enemies.”

In addition, the document states,

“On January 20, 2021, in accordance with the Constitution, confirmed by the states and the courts, and certified by Congress, President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt: “In politics, nothing happens by accident.”

The memorandum marks the preliminary culmination of a development which might well end with the assumption of power by the military in Washington. In order to understand this development, one has to recall the words of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once said, “In politics, nothing happens by chance. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”

The politics of both Democrats and Republicans have for months been dominated by their dispute over the outcome of the U.S. election in November. Neither side misses an opportunity to systematically stir up emotions. Thus, both parties are deliberately inflaming the mood amongst a population whose living conditions have recently deteriorated drastically.

US unemployment is currently the highest since the Great Depression. The state as well as companies and private households are suffering from the heaviest debt burden of all time, infrastructure is crumbling, the middle class is being driven to ruin by ever harsher pandemic measures, poverty and hunger are on the rise, while at the same time the increase in wealth of the ultra-rich is breathtaking.

This historically unprecedented explosion of social inequality has created social tensions that will almost certainly erupt in violence. The events of January 6 are most probably only a foretaste of what can be expected in the weeks and months ahead.

Instead of de-escalating tensions, both parties have done exactly the opposite for weeks now, with Republicans ranting about election fraud (from which they themselves benefited in 2000), inciting protesters to commit acts of violence, and then condemning them. The Democrats have initiated impeachment proceedings, which will not shorten the president’s term of office by a single day, but which do serve to systematically fuel the anger of his supporters. The tech corporations, in turn, are adding fuel to the fire by imposing ever harsher censorship on their social platforms.

Taken as a whole, these measures are nothing more than deliberately lit fuses that are helping to explode the U.S. social barrel. If Roosevelt is right and this development is not accidental, then the goal is clearly to ignite a civil war, or at least massive civil unrest.

The true center of power is Cupertino & Wall Street

To understand why such violence is to be unleashed, one must look to the true center of power in the U.S, the digital-financial complex headed by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, as well as the major asset management firms BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and Fidelity.

This digital-financial complex has usurped more power in recent years than any force in the entire history of the United States. But even this power has its limits, and one such limit is currently being reached by the foundation on which this power rests: the global monetary system, which is built around the dollar.

After having been revived several times over a period of 12 years by the central banks, this system is showing increasing signs of decay and cannot be kept alive very much longer.

The collapse of the stock markets at the turn of 2018/2019, the problems in the U.S. repo market in September 2019 and the renewed near collapse of the global financial system in February/March 2020 have clearly shown that the central banks’ options for future bailouts have largely been exhausted.

For this reason, a radical solution has apparently been opted for: According to reports from Washington, President-elect Biden will announce a total lockdown lasting several months immediately after taking office and, together with his designated Treasury Secretary, former FED head Janet Yellen, will fuel the largest monetary injection to date, amounting to almost two trillion dollars. Following the lockdown, the banking system in its traditional form will be ended and money creation will be placed solely in the hands of the central bank. U.S. citizens are to have only one account directly with the FED in the future.

Why is social unrest needed?

Why is social unrest needed for this restructuring of the monetary system? For one simple reason: Because the new monetary system is nothing short of the complete subjugation of the entire population to the interests of the digital-financial complex. The latter will not only be informed about every single transaction of every single citizen, but will also be able to withhold payments, bind them to deadlines or even restrict them geographically. It will be able to arbitrarily charge negative interest rates, favor selected occupational groups, disadvantage others, make payments dependent on behavioral codes, and completely cut off individual citizens from access to their money.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) no longer has anything in common with the money the world has so far known. Regardless of how democratic a constitution may be, the introduction of CBDC marks the end of all democracy, because it hands citizens over to the unlimited arbitrariness and total control of the central bank and the tech corporations that cooperate with it.

Under normal circumstances, no population would accept the introduction of such a monetary system without considerable resistance. Therefore, the digital-financial complex has obviously chosen a strategy of deliberately triggering the worst recession in a century, creating mass unemployment, promising aid payments but failing to meet the deadlines, and, in addition, creating political upheavals, setting different population groups against each other and triggering social turmoil.

By allowing the military to intervene and afterwards allowing the central bank to distribute the new money as a ‘universal basic income’ via emergency decrees, the unholy trinity of central bank, tech corporations and financial institutions will even manage to make its actions appear not as an act of coercion but as an act of humanity. The past nine months of the ‘war against the pandemic’ have proven how well this strategy works: The measures, which have lowered the standard of living of nearly two billion people, driven 130 million into hunger and destroyed millions of livelihoods forever, are still presented to the world as a “protection against a disease”.

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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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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)