After condemning the pro-Trump invasion of the Capitol, the incoming Biden administration invited Carlos Vecchio – a coup leader charged in the 2014 torching of the Venezuelan Attorney General’s office – to its inaugural ceremony.
***
As Washington recovered from shock and outrage caused by pro-Trump hooligans storming the United States Congress – breaking windows, smashing doors, and intimidating police officers in order to push their way inside – a sense of pre-inaugural excitement began to sweep the nation’s capital. Who would be attending incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, scheduled to take place exactly two weeks following the Capitol riot?
While heavily armed National Guard troops descended onto Washington’s streets to set up check-points, construct fences around government buildings, and establish their military presence, news about the upcoming swearing-in ceremony began to trickle out in the media.
Lady Gaga was booked to belt out the National Anthem, while Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Bruce Springsteen, and a host of other Democratic Party-aligned pop artists were scheduled to perform throughout the day. Former Trump cabinet members, including Vice President Mike Pence, Supreme Court Justices, and lawmakers were all expected to attend, though the National Mall would be closed to the general public.
Beyond entertainers and high-level federal officials, foreign dignitaries were invited to join a smaller-than-usual group of individuals permitted to witness the day’s festivities. Among those dignitaries is Carlos Vecchio, a former Exxon lawyer who currently serves as US-recognized “Interim President” Juan Guaidó’s envoy in Washington. When the Trump Administration initiated a coup against Venezuela’s government in January of 2019, Vecchio became Guaidó’s ambassador, and has risen to prominence as the de facto leader of a US-based exile lobby dedicated to toppling Venezuela’s UN-recognized government.
The Biden team’s decision to invite Vecchio was a disappointing sign to those hoping the new administration would break from Trump’s failed and destructive policy of recognizing Guaidó as Venezuela’s leader. In the two years since Washington appointed the previously unknown opposition figure to lead its attempt at regime change, Guaidó has failed to rally public support in Venezuela or gain control of any government ministry. The country’s military remains loyal to President Nicolás Maduro and the United Nations still recognizes the Maduro government’s authority.
Beyond giving the appearance that Biden will continue the Trump Administration’s doomed Venezuela policy, Vecchio’s presence at the presidential swearing-in ceremony was filled with irony. In the days following the Capitol riot, Biden and his allies have denounced the violent takeover of Congress as an assault on democracy, with the incoming president himself declaring the rioters to be “domestic terrorists.”
Yet Carlos Vecchio, the Guaidó ally with a fresh ticket to Biden’s inauguration, is responsible for leading his own assault on his home country’s democracy – and is currently wanted in Venezuela for inciting a violent attack on the Attorney General’s office in Caracas.
After condemning Trump for inspiring the Capitol riot, Biden sent inaugural invite to @carlosvecchio – Venezuelan coup leader charged with inciting insurrectionist 2014 attack on gov't building.
Biden’s guest charged with inspiring a violent assault on Venezuela’s public institutions
On February 12, 2014, right-wing opposition leader Leopoldo López led a feverish rally of his supporters in the heart of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas. For over a month, López and his political allies had been holding demonstrations aimed at overthrowing newly-elected president Nicolás Maduro, who came into office following snap elections held in the aftermath of Hugo Chávez’s death.
Carlos Vecchio, the corporate lawyer who went on to represent Juan Guaidó in Washington, also spoke at the demonstration, and stood loyally by López’s side as he delivered his incendiary speech calling for an angry march to the Attorney General’s office, and whipping the crowd into chants of, “No fear! No fear!”
López’s supporters heeded his call and charged straight for the office of Venezuela’s Public Prosecutor, eventually setting the building on fire. Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression project concededthe mayhem “resulted in the death of two people and considerable damage to public property.”
López and his allies, including Vecchio, were charged for their role in inciting the destruction. López was eventually sentenced to 13 years in prison for his actions, while Vecchio fled to the United States to escape “incitement of violence” charges.
The attack on Venezuela’s public institutions in February of 2014 mirrored events that would take place in Washington DC roughly six years later, when President Donald Trump delivered a speech on the White House eclipse instructing his supporters to march to the Capitol as lawmakers voted to cerity his election loss. Within minutes of arriving at Congress, Trump’s followers overwhelmed the meager crowd of police deployed to protect the legislature and forced their way inside – unafraid to shatter doors and windows as they did so.
Following the violent breach of the Capitol, incoming president Joe Biden characterized the mob’s actions as “an unprecedented assault on our democracy, an assault literally on the citadel of liberty, in the United States Capitol itself” and “an assault on the rule of law.” Democrats in the House of Representatives quickly moved to impeach Trump, charging the president with “incitement of insurrection.”
In light of their outraged response to the Capitol raid, which they branded an act of illegal insurrection, Biden and his allies might be sympathetic to the Venezuelan government, which similarly moved to charge López and his co-conspirators, including Vecchio, for their role in encouraging a blitz on government buildings after the country’s Attorney General’s office was torched by a politically-charged mob.
Instead, the wanted coup leader Vecchio was welcomed by a bipartisan crew of top Washington politicians including President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Florida neocon Senator Marco Rubio, and former Democratic Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The violent actions of Vecchio and his allies were hardly limited to the events of February 12, 2014. The chaotic demonstrations they led lasted until May of that year, resulting in the deaths of 49 people and roughly 10 billion dollars in damage. Regime change rampages by Venezuela’s opposition have featured assaults on journalists, the construction of barricades manned by vandals, and the burning to death of political opponents.
On June 13, 2017, activists set Venezuela’s Supreme Court on fire following jailed opposition leader López’s call for a rebellion against the Maduro government. Days later a police officer named Óscar Pérez hijacked a government helicopter and attempted to launch four grenades at the Court while firing live bullets at the country’s Interior Ministry. (Trump honored Pérez during a political rally in South Florida on February 18, 2019).
For his part, Juan Guaidó has led two failed campaigns of violent insurrection against Venezuela’s government. In April of 2019, he called for an uprising against President Maduro while a group of a few dozen soldiers launched an attack on the La Carlota Air Base in Caracas. While the rebellion failed to generate popular support, López was broken out of house arrest during the day’s events, leading to his eventual exile in Spain.
Roughly a year later, Guaidó was exposed at the center of yet another coup plot when former U.S. Green Beret Jordan Goudreau accused the politician of contracting his services to carry out a botched capture or kill operation targeting President Maduro. Goudreau, who previously provided private security for Trump campaign rallies, produced a contract containing Guaidó’s signature along with a voice recording of Guaidó allegedly discussing the deal though Guaidó himself has denied involvement.
Biden and the Democrats reacted with indignation when the U.S. Capitol was breached for just one afternoon, immediately initiating Trump’s second impeachment by the House of Representatives. Within days, the Capitol was surrounded with unscalable fencing and 25,000 National Guard soldiers were summoned to occupy central Washington DC – more than three times the amount of troops deployed to Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined.
It would be instructive to imagine how Democrats would have responded if Trump or his supporters attempted anything like the years-long campaign of insurrection by Venezuela’s opposition – and did so with the full-throated support of a foreign power. What if Trump supporters had set up barricades around Washington DC, preventing residents from leaving or entering their own neighborhoods? What if they had lit the Supreme Court on fire and bombed it from the air in a stolen military helicopter? And how would Democrats have reacted if Trump had contracted foreign mercenaries to capture or kill Biden?
Anyone troubled by these hypothetical scenarios should be equally disturbed that Carlos Vecchio, a veteran coup leader allied with seditious forces in his home country, will be present at Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
Sen. Durbin lobbies for Venezuelan coup leaders hours after condemning Trumpist “insurrection”
In the lead up to the House vote on President Trump’s impeachment, on January 11, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin tweeted, “The President and his Republican enablers incited a violent mob into storming the Capitol… This was an assault on our democracy, our national security, and our Constitution. There must be accountability, including impeachment.”
Hours later Durbin took to Twitter again to boast of his meeting with incoming Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, saying the two discussed “his plan for the State Department in the Biden Administration.”
According to the senator’s office, Durbin explicitly advocated the Biden administration preserve support for Juan Guaidó, whom he described as Venezuela’s “Interim-President.”
We thank you @SenatorDurbin for addressing with the nominee for US Secretary of State @ABlinken the critical situation of Venezuela, the actions to restoring democracy hijacked by Nicolas Maduro's dictatorship, and the necessary support to the Venezuelan people. https://t.co/IUTNVPbTI7
“We thank you Senator Durbin for addressing with the nominee for U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken the critical situation of Venezuela, the actions to restoring democracy hijacked by Nicolas Maduro’s dictatorship, and the necessary support to the Venezuelan people,” Vecchio tweeted in response to news of the conversation.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.
He disrupted the academic world with his peer-reviewed paper exposing the exaggerated threat of an “invisible enemy” (the novel coronavirus).
In an interview, Dr. Brown said that “the public’s overreaction to the coronavirus pandemic was based on the worst miscalculation in the history of humanity.”
Now, in this music video, Dr. Ronald B. Brown, PhD, presents a melancholy tapestry of sounds and images exposing the understated harm of a real, yet “silent enemy” (the coronavirus control measures)…
SILENT ENEMY
This classical composition was performed and recorded by Brown in his home studio, using samples of orchestral instruments. In addition to pursuing a second PhD in epidemiology, Dr. Brown is a professional timpanist with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra in Ontario, Canada.
In an interview, Dr. Brown said that “the public’s overreaction to the coronavirus pandemic was based on the worst miscalculation in the history of humanity.”
Dr. Ronald B. Brown’s paper, Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation, has remained the most read article in the journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness for last six months. A follow up article is currently under peer review with the same journal.
“I can promise readers many more insights about the pandemic,” says Dr. Brown, “assuming the manuscript gets published.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors. Since March 2020, he has been writing articles that question and expose the contradictions in the COVID-19 narrative and control measures. He is also completing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.
We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” “treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.
Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security website, touting a trademarked phrase licensed to it in 2010 by the City of New York, urging citizens to report “suspicious activity” to the FBI and other security state agencies
The more honest proponents of this new domestic War on Terror are explicitly admitting that they want to model it on the first one. A New York Times reporter noted on Monday that a “former intelligence official on PBS NewsHour” said “that the US should think about a ‘9/11 Commission’ for domestic extremism and consider applying some of the lessons from the fight against Al Qaeda here at home.” More amazingly, Gen. Stanley McChrystal — for years head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of the war in Afghanistan — explicitly compared that war to this new one, speaking to Yahoo News:
I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America….I think we’re much further along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem as a country, than most Americans realize.”
Anyone who, despite all this, still harbors lingering doubts that the Capitol riot is and will be the neoliberal 9/11, and that a new War on Terror is being implemented in its name, need only watch the two short video clips below, which will clear their doubts for good. It is like being catapulted by an unholy time machine back to Paul Wolfowitz’s 2002 messaging lab.
The first video, flagged by Tom Elliott, is from Monday morning’s Morning Joe program on MSNBC (the show that arguably did more to help Donald Trump become the GOP nominee than any other). It features Jeremy Bash — one of the seemingly countless employees of TV news networks who previously worked in Obama’s CIA and Pentagon — demanding that, in response to the Capitol riot, “we reset our entire intelligence approach,” including “look[ing] at greater surveillance of them,” adding: “the FBI is going to have to run confidential sources.” See if you detect any differences between what CIA operatives and neocons were saying in 2002 when demanding the Patriot Act and greater FBI and NSA surveillance and what this CIA-official-turned-NBC-News-analyst is saying here:
The second video features the amazing declaration from former Facebook security official Alex Stamos, talking to the very concerned CNN host Brian Stelter, about the need for social media companies to use the same tactics against U.S. citizens that they used to remove ISIS from the internet — “in collaboration with law enforcement” — and that those tactics should be directly aimed at what he calls extremist “conservative influencers.”
“Press freedoms are being abused by these actors,” the former Facebook executive proclaimed. Stamos noted how generous he and his comrades have been up until now: “We have given a lot of leeway — both in the traditional media and in social media — to people with a very broad range of views.” But no more. Now is the time to “get us all back in the same consensual reality.”
In a moment of unintended candor, Stamos noted the real problem: “there are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than people on daytime CNN” — and it’s time for CNN and other mainstream outlets to seize the monopoly on information dissemination to which they are divinely entitled by taking away the platforms of those whom people actually want to watch and listen to:
(If still not convinced, and if you can endure it, you can also watch MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski literally screaming that one needed remedy to the Capitol riot is that the Biden administration must “shutdown” Facebook. Shutdown Facebook).
Calls for a War on Terror sequel — a domestic version complete with surveillance and censorship — are not confined to ratings-deprived cable hosts and ghouls from the security state. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
Meanwhile, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) — not just one of the most dishonest members of Congress but also one of the most militaristic and authoritarian — has had a bill proposed since 2019 to simply amend the existing foreign anti-terrorism bill to allow the U.S. Government to invoke exactly the same powers at home against “domestic terrorists.”
Why would such new terrorism laws be needed in a country that already imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world as the result of a very aggressive set of criminal laws? What acts should be criminalized by new “domestic terrorism” laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because — just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws — their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition.
The answer to this question — what needs to be criminalized that is not already a crime? — scarcely seems to matter. Media and political elites have placed as many Americans as they can — and it is a lot — into full-blown fear and panic mode, and when that happens, people are willing to acquiesce to anything claimed necessary to stop that threat, as the first War on Terror, still going strong twenty years later, decisively proved.
An entire book could — and probably should — be written on why all of this is so concerning. For the moment, two points are vital to emphasize.
First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to “incite violence.” The bastardizing of this phrase was the basis for President Trump’s rushed impeachment last week. It is also what is driving calls for dozens of members of Congress to be expelled and even prosecuted on “sedition” charges for having objected to the Electoral College certification, and is also at the heart of the spate of censorship actions already undertaken and further repressive measures being urged.
This phrase — “inciting violence” — was also what drove many of the worst War on Terror abuses. I spent years reporting on how numerous young American Muslims were prosecuted under new, draconian anti-terrorism laws for uploading anti-U.S.-foreign-policy YouTube videos or giving rousing anti-American speeches deemed to “incite violence” and thus provide “material support” to terrorist groups — the exact theory which Rep. Schiff is seeking to import into the new domestic War on Terror.
It is vital to ask what it means for speech to constitute “incitement to violence” to the point that it can be banned or criminalized. The expression of any political viewpoint, especially one passionately expressed, has the potential to “incite” someone else to get so riled up that they engage in violence.
If you rail against the threats to free speech posed by Silicon Valley monopolies, someone hearing you may get so filled with rage that they decide to bomb an Amazon warehouse or a Facebook office. If you write a blistering screed accusing pro-life activists of endangering the lives of women by forcing them back into unsafe back-alley abortions, or if you argue that abortion is murder, you may very well inspire someone to engage in violence against a pro-life group or an abortion clinic. If you start a protest movement to object to the injustice of Wall Street bailouts — whether you call it “Occupy Wall Street” or the Tea Party — you may cause someone to go hunt down Goldman Sachs or Citibank executives who they believe are destroying the economic future of millions of people.
If you claim that George W. Bush stole the 2000 and/or 2004 elections — as many Democrats, including members of Congress, did — you may inspire civic unrest or violence against Bush and his supporters. The same is true if you claim the 2016 or 2020 elections were fraudulent or illegitimate. If you rage against the racist brutality of the police, people may go burn down buildings in protest — or murder randomly selected police officers whom they have become convinced are agents of a racist genocidal state.
The Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer and hard-core Democratic partisan, James Hodgkinson, who went to a softball field in June, 2017 to murder Republican Congress members — and almost succeeded in fatally shooting Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) — had spent months listening to radical Sanders supporters and participating in Facebook groups with names like “Terminate the Republican Party” and “Trump is a Traitor.”
Hodgkinson had heard over and over that Republicans were not merely misguided but were “traitors” and grave threats to the Republic. As CNNreported, “his favorite television shows were listed as ‘Real Time with Bill Maher;’ ‘The Rachel Maddow Show;’ ‘Democracy Now!’ and other left-leaning programs.” All of the political rhetoric to which he was exposed — from the pro-Sanders Facebook groups, MSNBC and left-leaning shows — undoubtedly played a major role in triggering his violent assault and decision to murder pro-Trump Republican Congress members.
Despite the potential of all of those views to motivate others to commit violence in their name — potential that has sometimes been realized — none of the people expressing those views, no matter how passionately, can be validly characterized as “inciting violence” either legally or ethically. That is because all of that speech is protected, legitimate speech. None of it advocates violence. None of it urges others to commit violence in its name. The fact that it may “inspire” or “motivate” some mentally unwell person or a genuine fanatic to commit violence does not make the person espousing those views and engaging in that non-violent speech guilty of “inciting violence” in any meaningful sense.
To illustrate this point, I have often cited the crucial and brilliantly reasoned Supreme Court free speech ruling in Claiborne v. NAACP. In the 1960s and 1970s, the State of Mississippi tried to hold local NAACP leaders liable on the ground that their fiery speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores “incited” their followers to burn down stores and violently attack patrons who did not honor the protest. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew that they were metaphorically pouring gasoline on a fire with their inflammatory rhetoric to rile up and angry crowds.
But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated to commit crimes in the name of that cause (emphasis added):
Civil liability may not be imposed merely because an individual belonged to a group, some members of which committed acts of violence. . . .
[A]ny such theory fails for the simple reason that there is no evidence — apart from the speeches themselves — that [the NAACP leader sued by the State] authorized, ratified, or directly threatened acts of violence. . . . . To impose liability without a finding that the NAACP authorized — either actually or apparently — or ratified unlawful conduct would impermissibly burden the rights of political association that are protected by the First Amendment. . . .
While the State legitimately may impose damages for the consequences of violent conduct, it may not award compensation for the consequences of nonviolent, protected activity. Only those losses proximately caused by unlawful conduct may be recovered.
The First Amendment similarly restricts the ability of the State to impose liability on an individual solely because of his association with another.
The Claiborne court relied upon the iconic First Amendment ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a KKK leader who had publicly advocated the possibility of violence against politicians. Even explicitly advocating the need or justifiability of violence for political ends is protected speech, ruled the court. They carved out a very narrow exception: “where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” — meaning someone is explicitly urging an already assembled mob to specific violence with the expectation that they will do so more or less immediately (such as standing outside someone’s home and telling the gathered mob: it’s time to burn it down).
It goes without saying that First Amendment jurisprudence on “incitement” governs what a state can do when punishing or restricting speech, not what a Congress can do in impeaching a president or expelling its own members, and certainly not social media companies seeking to ban people from their platforms.
But that does not make these principles of how to understand “incitement to violence” irrelevant when applied to other contexts. Indeed, the central reasoning of these cases is vital to preserve everywhere: that if speech is classified as “incitement to violence” despite not explicitly advocating violence, it will sweep up any political speech which those wielding this term wish it to encompass. No political speech will be safe from this term when interpreted and applied so broadly and carelessly.
And that is directly relevant to the second point. Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of “Democrat v. Republican” or even “left v. right” is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.
The last several months of politician-and-journalist-demanded Silicon Valley censorship has targeted the right, but prior to that and simultaneously it has often targeted those perceived as on the left. The government has frequently declared right-wing domestic groups “terrorists,” while in the 1960s and 1970s it was left-wing groups devoted to anti-war activism which bore that designation. In 2011, British police designated the London version of Occupy Wall Street a “terrorist” group. In the 1980s, the African National Congress was so designated. “Terrorism” is an amorphous term that was created, and will always be used, to outlaw formidable dissent no matter its source or ideology.
If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about “right v. left” and most definitely do not care about “Republican v. Democrat” — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order.
Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status. The one who put this best was probably Barack Obama when he was president, when he observed — correctly — that the perceived warfare between establishment Democratic and Republican elites was mostly theater, and on the question of what they actually believe, they’re both “fighting inside the 40 yard line” together:
A standard Goldman Sachs banker or Silicon Valley executive has far more in common, and is far more comfortable, with Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan than they do with the ordinary American citizen. Except when it means a mildly disruptive presence — like Trump — they barely care whether Democrats or Republicans rule various organs of government, or whether people who call themselves “liberals” or “conservatives” ascend to power. Some left-wing members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) have said they oppose a new domestic terrorism law, but Democrats will have no trouble forming a majority by partnering with their neocon GOP allies like Liz Cheney to get it done, as they did earlier this year to stop the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Germany.
Neoliberalism and imperialism do not care about the pseudo-fights between the two parties or the cable TV bickering of the day. They do not like the far left or the far right. They do not like extremism of any kind. They do not support Communism and they do not support neo-Nazism or some fascist revolution. They care only about one thing: disempowering and crushing anyone who dissents from and threatens their hegemony. They care about stopping dissidents. All the weapons they build and institutions they assemble — the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, oligarchical power — exist for that sole and exclusive purpose, to fortify their power by rewarding those who accede to their pieties and crushing those who do not.
No matter your views on the threat posed by international Islamic radicalism, huge excesses were committed in the name of stopping it — or, more accurately, the fears it generated were exploited to empower and entrench existing financial and political elites. The Authorization to Use Military Force — responsible for twenty-years-and-counting of war — was approved by the House three days after the 9/11 attack with just one dissenting vote. The Patriot Act — which radically expanded government surveillance powers — was enacted a mere six weeks after that attack, based on the promise that it would be temporary and “sunset” in four years. Like the wars spawned by 9/11, it is still in full force, virtually never debated any longer and predictably expanded far beyond how it was originally depicted.
The first War on Terror ended up being wielded primarily on foreign soil but it has increasingly been imported onto domestic soil against Americans. This New War on Terror — one that is domestic in name from the start and carries the explicit purpose of fighting “extremists” and “domestic terrorists” among American citizens on U.S. soil — presents the whole slew of historically familiar dangers when governments, exploiting media-generated fear and dangers, arm themselves with the power to control information, debate, opinion, activism and protests.
That a new War on Terror is coming is not a question of speculation and it is not in doubt. Those who now wield power are saying it explicitly. The only thing that is in doubt is how much opposition they will encounter from those who value basic civic rights more than the fears of one another being deliberately cultivated within us.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This is the second of two posts about war propaganda, and the last of four posts about propaganda more generally.
“War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today” (John F.Kennedy(1))
War Propaganda Runs Through Our Culture
Hollywood movies about war or spying tend to portray the US military, or James Bond, as the ‘good guys’ involved in ‘goodies vs baddies’ conflicts, with little discussion of the crimes of the US and British militaries and their spy agencies. The US military cooperates closely with these productions provided that they have final script approval, and can change scripts or scenes that they do not like. Where movies have tried to say anything negative about the US military, cooperation has been refused. They expect to have a generally patriotic view of the US, with the military portrayed as heroes, always with good intentions. These films actually help to recruit people for the military. The US navy provided planes, pilots and warships for the 1986 movie ‘Top Gun’. This led to a big rise in applications for people to become US fighter pilots. A more recent development has been the use of internet adverts for Hollywood movies, which deceptively take people to disguised army recruitment websites.(2)
One of the best examples of CIA propaganda is their manipulation of the film version of George Orwell’s book ‘Animal Farm.’ The book highlights the fact that politicians in both capitalist and communist countries can be corrupted by power. The CIA bought the film rights, knowing that it could be used as a propaganda tool. The CIA’s film version omits the most important part of the ending (which criticises capitalism) creating the impression that it is only a criticism of communism.(3)
The developers of many computer video games work closely with the US military. There is increasing use of drones in the military, piloted by soldiers thousands of miles away. What they see on their control screens is indistinguishable from a video game. The content of some games involves overthrowing governments in countries such as Venezuela.(4) Evidence from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq indicates that US soldiers participate in war as if they are playing a video game, and therefore they can convince themselves that their actions have no consequences.
Never Question The Soldiers
One of the strongest parts of any pro-war propaganda system is convincing everyone that whatever criticisms they make, they must always support the troops. But the job of a British or American soldier has nothing to do with freedom or democracy. They are trained killers whose job is to invade and occupy other countries, and kill anyone who gets in the way. Britain’s military is much smaller than that of the US, but British propaganda plays an important role in generating support for war.(5) Military veterans are always praised on television when they appear at public events. When large numbers of people are being slaughtered in Iraq, there is a big difference between saying ‘The valiant British and American soldiers in Iraq were viciously attacked by terrorists, but successfully defended themselves’ and ‘The British and American occupation forces murdered large numbers of Iraqi people’. Variations of the first comment appear in US and British media regularly, but the second is a more honest way of describing what is going on.
Groups of former soldiers, such as ‘Veterans for Peace’, are now coming forward to explain that basic training is a form of brainwashing, and that the version of war that they experience, which is the mass slaughter of innocent people, is completely different from the propaganda.(6)
Brainwashing Begins In Childhood
Children’s comic books about World War 2, such as Commando and War Picture Library, were very popular for decades after the war. They had a strong focus on patriotism and heroism. They stereotyped people from enemy countries as cruel or cowardly, and used derogatory terms such as jerries, huns or krauts for German people, eyeties for Italian people, or nips for Japanese people.(7) A generation of children grew up with a very distorted view of the war and people in other countries.
Astute readers will have realised that the materials in these blogs are not taught in schools. Most young people reach adulthood with no understanding of how the world really works. This is because governments do not want citizens to understand the crimes they commit.
In 2007 the British government decided to increase its military propaganda in schools and society more generally. It is encouraging more schools to have cadet forces. Sports competitions for injured soldiers, such as the Invictus games in the UK, and the Warrior games in the US, are intended to present former soldiers as heroes.(8) The link between the military and the British Royal family also plays a propaganda role. More recently, Britain’s cybersecurity agency, GCHQ, started running courses in schools teaching hacking skills, and inviting young children to visit them.(9) One campaign group noted:
“Armed Forces Day, Remembrance Day, Uniform to Work Day, Camo Day [where people wear camouflage], in the streets, on television, on the web, at sports events, in schools, advertising and fashion – the military presence in UK civilian life is increasing daily”(10)
All of the activities described above are forms of militarism, where people are encouraged to see the military, and spying, in positive terms; to think of violent, military solutions as the best way to solve international disagreements; and to ignore peaceful alternatives. There is no discussion of British and US war crimes, or the illegal spying activities of GCHQ(11) and its US equivalent, the NSA. Encouraging children to play with military vehicles and weapons, and to watch military parachutists or airshows, is intended to indoctrinate them.School trips to war museums have a similar effect. Ideas learned at a young age come to seem like common sense, as opposed to propaganda intended to serve the interests of rich and powerful people. These activities play a direct role in recruiting soldiers, but just as importantly, they recruit a large number of people to support militarism unquestioningly.(12)
The Power of Patriotism
The military activities mentioned above also indoctrinate people into thinking about patriotism and nationalism, which are incredibly powerful propaganda tools.(13) Putting the head of a Monarch or an Emperor onto coins was one of the earliest forms of propaganda, and stamps with the Queen on them have a similar purpose. Royal pageants and processions are celebrated as major national events.We are encouraged to think of our country as a single entity, to be proud of it, and to forget, ignore, or be unaware of the crimes of our government, and the fact that most people have little in common with the billionaires and millionaires who dominate political decision-making. It makes it easy for decision-makers to generate support for foreign wars, and to describe others as ‘the enemy’.
Propaganda Works on Politicians Too
It is important to realise that some government propaganda is targeted at politicians. This is where the intelligence services come in. Most people think that intelligence services exist to provide accurate information. This is only partly true. Some parts of the intelligence services have a secondary role, which is to present information that supports policy. The US decided to invade Iraq a long time before the invasion actually happened. From that point onwards, they were trying to find intelligence that would give them a good excuse to invade. Intelligence officers in Britain were told that if they did not sign up to a dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction, that they knew was untrue, that would be the end of their careers. In the US, whole new departments were set up. The Office of Strategic Influence was set up in 2001 to support the war on terror through psychological operations (PSYOPs), which includes creating fake stories and propaganda. The Office of Special Plans was set up in 2002 specifically to ‘re-interpret’ data to create a case for war. If the data did not support war, officers would be told that this was not what their superiors wanted to hear, and they should try again until they came up with the ‘right’ result.(14)
Anti-war opinions are being censored – Manipulating Information on the Internet
The internet is becoming increasingly important as a source of information, particularly for young people. Wikipedia began as an online encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone. On some non-political topics, it is a useful source of information. Unfortunately, most edits are now made by a small number of people. There is strong evidence that some of these people are not honest, independent researchers. They work to protect the establishment against its critics.(15) Critical websites such as The Grayzone have been blacklisted by Wikipedia, even though it has an outstanding track record of investigative journalism.(16) Many anti-war activists, including the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, discovered that their Wikipedia entries had all been changed hundreds of times in very negative ways by a single individual (or, more likely, a group of people operating under a single username).
Critical writers have noted that Facebook and Twitter censor their output, and Google manipulates search results so that critical work does not appear on the first page of results. This means that it is becoming more and more difficult for people to find information that challenges the mainstream view.
Some Propaganda is More Subtle – Newspeak and Euphemisms
Most of the war propaganda discussed so far is reasonably obvious, once people have been made aware that it is propaganda. However, as with other forms of propaganda, war propaganda actually permeates our society.
We saw in an earlier post about the weapons industry that the word defence is actually a euphemism for invasions, occupations, mass murder and maiming. There are many other words that are intentionally used to give a misleading impression of what’s going on. The following is just a short selection of the more obvious ones:
National interest means the interests of the biggest corporations, and the rich and powerful more generally
International community means the US government and any country that can be bribed or threatened to support the US
Rogue state is a country that the US does not like. In reality, the biggest rogue state is the US, with Britain also having a global reputation for ignoring international law and committing war crimes.
Official secrets and national security are mechanisms to help the most powerful people cover up their crimes.
George Orwell, the author of ‘1984’, used the term ‘Newspeak’ to describe how the government and the media use language as a weapon to limit the range of ideas that people consider reasonable, and to distort our understanding of important issues. For example, politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, who object to invasions or drone assassinations, are labeled as ‘soft-on-defence’ or ‘soft-on-terror’,(17) when in fact they are objecting to serious crimes by our government. If you watch any mainstream news program, particularly on the BBC, you eventually realise that Newspeak is being used all the time.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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) John F. Kennedy, cited in David Swanson, War is a Lie, 2011, p.133
4) Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, ‘War games: Pentagon/CIA push regime change propaganda in video games’, The Grayzone, 15 April 2019, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72v7PWJUyxY
As the Trump era is coming to an end, his legacy in the Middle East will be described by the Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians and the rest of the Arab world as aggressive, dangerous and extremely reckless. Israelis will say that Trump was one of the most supportive and loyal American presidents to the State of Israel. The Israeli government even named a settlement after Trump in the Golan Heights called ‘Trump Heights.’
So how will history judge Trump’s Middle East policies?
For starters, Trump had increased tensions with all of Washington’s and Israel’s long-time enemies including the one country whose been on the hit list since 1979, Iran. In mid January 2021, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani criticized Trump’s policies towards Iran, “a president who lacked political understanding took the helm of a country, and was accompanied by a stupid foreign minister and an ignorant and radical national security advisor. He handled everything with his gambling and business-oriented mind, and we finally saw how his term ended” and that “no one could believe this law-breaker [Trump] would order riot against his own nation, his own security, and the country’s legislature, and provoke people against the very democracy they believe in” proclaimed Rouhani. On February 2017, Trump’s former National Security advisor Michael Flynn presented a short and threatening statement towards Iran:
Recent Iranian actions involving a provocative ballistic missile launch and an attack against a Saudi naval vessel conducted by Iran-supported Houthi militants underscore what should have been clear to the international community all along about Iran’s destabilizing behavior across the entire Middle East
Flynn spoke on the types of threats that come from Iran “including weapons transfers, support for terrorism and other violations of international norms.” Flynn’s final words of the statement did not at all sit well with Tehran “as of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” Not a good start to diplomatic relations. Fast forward to May of 2018, taking advice from Israel’s Prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump announced the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran, calling it “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made” and that “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.”
The next day, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called Trump’s decision “inane and superficial.” In the following months, the Trump regime prepared to impose economic sanctions on Iran targeting its banking, energy, shipbuilding, and financial sectors if they did not follow Washington’s demands. As tensions, increased, Washington designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces as a “foreign terrorist organization,” Iran retaliated by designating the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) as a “terrorist organization.”
In the following year, President Trump then imposed new sanctions on Iran by targeting numerous areas of production including aluminum, copper, iron and the steel sectors. A number of incidents including tanker explosions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a pipeline attack in Saudi Arabia prompted Trump to order US troops to the region and that created more tensions between Tehran and Washington. Then in early 2020, the Trump regime approved a drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the well-respected commander of Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Forces who led the fight against terrorists in the region and Mahdi al-Muhandis, the vice president of Hashd al-Shaabi group. Trump said “what the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago.” Tehran condemned the attack vowing to retaliate. History will remember when Trump threatened to hit 52 Iranian targets including cultural sites as a response to any attack on U.S. citizens on twitter:
Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!
A few days later, Iran made its threat a reality when the Revolutionary Guards Corps fired several missiles at the Ain al-Assad airbase in Iraq where US and Iraqi forces were based. The Revolutionary Guards released an official statement after the retaliation:
In Operation Martyr Soleimani in the early hours of Wednesday, tens of ground-to-ground missiles were fired at the U.S. base and successfully pounded Ain al-Asad Base
Luckily, a war between the US and Iran did not happen. On January 20th, Trump is set to depart from the White House, now Iran will have to wait and see what happens under the new President-Elect and self admitted Zionist and long-time supporter of Israel, Joe Biden.
From Planning the Assassination of Bashar al-Assad to Stealing Syrian Oil
In September 2020, The Hill published a report on Trump’s plan to assassinate Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad titled ‘Trump says he wanted to take out Syria’s Assad but Mattis opposed it’ claimed that Trump had admitted to a plan to have Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad assassinated while he criticized former Defense Secretary James Mattis. Trump’s “assassination operation” was discussed on Fox & Friends when he said that “I would’ve rather taken him out. I had him all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general.” According to The Hill “The president added that he did not regret the decision not to target Assad, saying he “could’ve lived either way.”
The report also noted another quote from Trump on the idea of assassinating the Syrian president in a book written in 2018 by mainstream-media journalist Bob Woodward titled ‘Fear; Trump in the White House’ which Trump denied when he was asked about the plot and said that it was “never even discussed” and “No, that was never even contemplated, nor would it be contemplated and it should not have been written about in the book.”
However, according to Woodward “Trump urged Mattis that the U.S. should f—— kill Assad” after a chemical attack that occurred on April 2017 on civilians in the town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib Syria. “Mattis reportedly went along with the president’s demands during the phone call, but immediately told aides after hanging up that they would take a “much more measured” approach.” Despite the fact that the mainstream media journalists have an extreme hatred towards Trump, it is quite possible that Israel did attempt to influence him to assassinate Assad and create a political crisis in Syria.
Trump also has been calling for the US to take Iraq and Syria’s oil for some time. An ABC news report has claimed that Trump said that the “U.S. will be keeping the oil” in Northeastern Syria after that his administration was “looking into the specifics” of the situation at hand. In 2020, Trump kept his promise. Last August, Newsweek published a report ‘Syria Says Donald Trump ‘Stealing’ Its Oil, After U.S. Company Makes Deal to Drill.’ The report said that Crescent Delta Energy and ‘Pentagon-backed militia’ or elements of ISIS and other terrorist groups who are allied with US and Israeli forces are operating in Syria’s oil fields:
Syria has accused President Donald Trump of stealing the country’s oil, after U.S. officials confirmed that a U.S. company has been allowed to operate there in fields under the control of a Pentagon-backed militia.
In remarks delivered Tuesday and sent to Newsweek by the Syrian permanent mission to the United Nations, representative Bashar al-Jaafari told the U.N. Security Council that “the U.S. occupation forces, in full view of the United Nations and the international community, took a new step to plunder Syria’s natural resources, including Syrian oil and gas” through the recent establishment of a company called “Crescent Delta Energy.”
This firm, “with the sponsorship and support of the US Administration, has entered into a contract with the so-called ‘Syrian Democratic Forces/SDF’ militia, an agent of the US occupation forces in northeastern Syria, with the aim of stealing Syrian oil and depriving the Syrian state and Syrian people of the basic revenues necessary to improve the humanitarian situation, provide for livelihood needs and reconstruction,” he added
Last December, another development took place against Syria with the Trump regime sanctioning President Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma and several members of her family. Sanctions were also imposed on the Central Bank of Syria, a member of parliament and several businesses that are associated with the Assad government according to The Hill. “Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the sanctions mark the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Security Council resolution aimed at laying out a political solution to end the conflict in Syria.”
Trump Announces Jerusalem As Israel’s Capital
In 2017, Trump announced the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the new location of the US embassy that was originally located in Tel Aviv, the Palestinians responded by the ‘Day of Rage’,setting off protests in several areas including where 2 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded after Israeli forces bombed the Gaza strip and many more were injured by either live fire or by rubber bullets in the West Bank. Fast forward to January 2020, the Associated Press reported on Trump’s Mideast peace plan that favored Israel which at this point in time, should not have surprised anyone:
Trump’s plan envisions a disjointed Palestinian state that turns over key parts of the West Bank to Israel. It sides with Israel on key contentious issues that have bedeviled past peace efforts, including borders and the status of Jerusalem and Jewish settlements, and attaches nearly impossible conditions for granting the Palestinians their hoped-for state
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called it “nonsense” and Netanyahu called it a “historic breakthrough” and that “it’s a great plan for Israel. It’s a great plan for peace.” Then Netanyahu promised to move forward to annex the Jordan Valley and the rest of the illegal Israeli settlements.
The US-Saudi Arms Deal and the Houthis Are Now a State Sponsor of Terror
Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace between Israel and UAE which was not about peace between the two, it’s was about creating a US-Israel-UAE alliance against Iran and creating long-term buyers of US and Israeli made weapons to the Emiratis. Israel and the UAE have been collaborating in the areas of security in terms of protecting the UAE’s oil fields for more than a decade or so. Israel’s Mossad has a long-time relationship with the UAE’s military that conduct covert spying operations against Iran adding to the fact that high-level Israeli officials had been visiting the UAE for many years. So Trump’s peace deal was another complete farce. The US and Israel basically have a good-long standing relationship with the Gulf State monarchies who both view Iran as their common enemy.
One of Trump’s first visit to the Middle East as US president was to Saudi Arabia to sell US weapons which he did successfully after sealing a $110 billion deal plus an additional $350 billion deal over a 10-year period. The US is preparing Saudi Arabia for a long-term war with its adversaries in the region which brings us to the Houthis of Yemen who the Trump regime will designate as a terrorist organization by January 19th. The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo released a statement on the matter and said that “the designations are also intended to advance efforts to achieve a peaceful, sovereign, and united Yemen that is both free from Iranian interference and at peace with its neighbors.”
Despite the fact that Trump fired his advisor at the time, Neocon John Bolton, a war hawk who wanted to launch more wars in the Middle East was a good move. However, Trump’s legacy based on his decisions during his time in the White House will be remembered as a disaster, a president that made Israel great for Israelis and America hated even more than ever.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on January 8 that Tehran was in no rush for the United States to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but, he also said, sanctions on Iran must be lifted immediately. “If the sanctions are lifted, the return of the Americans makes sense,” he insisted. President-elect Joe Biden has announced his plan to return to the deal soon after he is sworn into office. “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal,” he wrote in an op-ed for CNN, “the United States would rejoin.” His Iranian counterpart, President Hassan Rouhani, has also expressed willingness to return to the deal, stating that, “Iran could come into compliance with the agreement within an hour of the United States doing so.”
Five years ago, after years of intensive negotiations, six world powers managed to sign the world’s most comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran. While the agreement was a political one, it was also ratified by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. And, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the organization tasked with verifying the agreement’s technical aspects, Iran was fully complying with the deal for about three years, until President Trump withdrew from it in May 2018. In response to the US violations of the nuclear agreement, Iran too reduced some of its commitments. Most recently, on January 4, Iran announced that it had increased its uranium enrichment levels to 20 percent.
Although reviving the agreement is certainly still possible, it won’t be easy. The two sides will need to overcome nine hurdles to make it happen.
First, the sequencing of a mutual return could be an immediate problem. Iran expects the United States to lift sanctions first, because it was the Trump administration that withdrew first. While Tehran’s demand is legitimate, Washington may ask that Iran come into full compliance before lifting sanctions. Indeed, a straightforward reading of the quotation from Joe Biden’s op-ed suggests just that. In this scenario, after Joe Biden’s executive order rejoining the deal, Iran and the world powers can meet and agree on a realistic plan with a specified timeline of proportionate reciprocal actions.
Second is the issue of what compliance constitutes. During the Obama administration there was one major barrier to the full realization of the terms of the agreement: Many US primary sanctions, targeting US citizens and permanent residents, organizations, and individuals that engage in trade and business with their Iranian counterparts, remained intact. These sanctions limited the economic benefits of the deal for Iran. The 29th paragraph of the deal clearly states that all signatories will refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran. This cannot be achieved without abolishing the primary sanctions.
Third, the Trump administration imposed numerous sanctions against Iran under the guise of terrorism and human rights, aimed at preventing the Biden administration from returning to the deal. For a clean implementation of the agreement, Biden will need to remove all of these sanctions as well.
Fourth, Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement and violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 as well as other international commitments has damaged US credibility abroad. There is now a widespread belief among policy makers in Iran that the United States will simply not live up to its end of the bargain, no matter what that bargain is. This naturally raises the important question: What guarantees are there that the United States will remain committed to the deal in the post-Biden era?
Fifth, because of Trump’s maximum pressure policy, the Iranian economy has suffered hundreds of billions of dollars of losses while Iran was in full compliance with the terms and conditions of the deal. Some Iranian leaders, including Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, have demanded compensation for the economic damage the country suffered after the United States withdrew. The challenge will be to find a mechanism to compensate for the economic damages that the Trump administration inflicted on the Iranian economy.
Sixth, the “snapback” mechanism built into the agreement allows any country to force the UN Security Council to reimpose multilateral sanctions against Iran if Iran fails to fulfill its commitments. But this is one-sided: There is no such remedy for Iran if other parties fail to do their part. This became abundantly clear when the Trump administration first withdrew from the deal and then tried to unilaterally re-impose multilateral sanctions on Iran through the snapback mechanism. It was as if the injurer was demanding punishment for the injured. Although the UN Security Council rejected the US demand, the stunt revealed the structural flaw of the snapback.
Seventh, in the first week of December 2020, the Iranian parliament passed a bill mandating Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization to resume enriching uranium to 20 percent purity. The legislation also requires the Iranian government to cease voluntary implementation of the IAEA’s Additional Protocol within two months of the bill’s enactment if the other signatories fail to fully deliver on their commitments under the agreement. And after three months, the Atomic Energy Organization is obliged to begin using at least 1,000 second generation centrifuges. In short, president-elect Biden will need to move fast.
Eighth, there are some in the United States who are worried that Trump may start a reckless last-ditch war with Iran before leaving office. While this concern is overblown, there should be no doubt that US partners in the region will do whatever they can to prevent Biden’s return to the deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already said as much. To be sure, the hardliners in Iran are also fundamentally opposed to the deal.
Ninth, some pundits and politicians in Washington want Biden to leverage the Trump administration’s sanctions to pressure Iran to accept additional commitments beyond the original agreement as a condition for US return to compliance. These include limiting Iran’s missile capability, extending the so-called “sunset” clauses within the deal, or resolving regional disputes. But from Iran’s perspective, such demands are a non-starter. As the spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry said recently, “No negotiation has been, is being, or will be held about Iran’s defense power.”
Despite these hurdles, Biden should nevertheless seek a reentry into the deal. Only a clean and full implementation by all parties can save the world’s most comprehensive nuclear agreement, contain rising US-Iran tensions, and open the path toward more confidence building measures. That path should include, upon Biden’s issuing an executive order to rejoin the JCPOA, the creation of a working committee of parties to the agreement tasked with ensuring full compliance by all signatories, and a forum, organized by the UN secretary general, in which Iran and the Gulf countries can discuss a new structure for improving security and cooperation in the region.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian is a Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist at Princeton University and a former chief of Iran’s National Security Foreign Relations Committee. His book, A Middle East Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was published in May 2020 by Routledge. His latest book, A New Structure for Security, Peace, and Cooperation in the Persian Gulf, was published in December 2020 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Joe Biden presents himself as an empathetic guy who is willing to go the extra mile to help people overcome their personal tragedies.
However, Biden has throughout his career endorsed policies that caused countless personal tragedies for millions of people.
The best example is his support for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
It led to the deaths and wounding of thousands of U.S. soldiers, killing of an estimated one million Iraqis, and destabilization of a wide swath of the Middle East.
In 2002, Biden was riding high, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in his 30th year in the Senate.
Having supported Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 and bombing of Libya in 1986, Biden went on to embrace George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1991, and Bill Clinton’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999.[1]
When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) invaded Kuwait in 1991, Biden did vote against invading Iraq, believing that Bush had not made the case for war and that Hussein could be contained through an international embargo.
However, once Bush went to war, Biden declared that he was giving Bush his total support, and praised Bush for displaying real “leadership,” never mentioning the 110,000 civilians who died.[2]
Following the 9/11 attacks, Biden supported the invasion of Afghanistan and tried to raise funds for a Marshall Plan-type program to fund the country’s reconstruction.
Biden was so well connected to President George W. Bush in this period that he had a secure phone line to the White House set up in his home and met with Bush privately to plot out a public relations message for the Afghan War.[3]
Biden called for a strong U.S. commitment to the Middle East to defeat al-Qaeda and help empower “moderate Muslims,” while pushing for better efforts at public diplomacy.
When asked about Iraq, Biden said he was not in favor of immediate invasion, but rather for imposing a “smarter sanctions” policy and generating consensus for a multilateral coalition that would support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Biden’s support for regime change in Iraq went back to the late 1990s.
After the first Persian Gulf War, Saddam had agreed to destroy Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpile and to allow weapons inspectors into the country.
Senator Biden supported President Clinton’s decision to remove the weapons inspectors in 1998 in order to launch a four-day bombing campaign, despitebeing warnedthat it would likely end Saddam’s cooperation. Subsequently, Bideninsisted that “Saddam kicked the [inspectors] out.”
Biden presides over hearings where he advocated for regime change in Iraq in 1998. [Source: theintercept.com]
Scott Ritter, the chief UN weapons inspector, resigned in protest and accused the international community of not giving him and his colleagues the support they needed to carry out their job in Iraq.
Ritter was called to testify before the Senate in September 1998 where Biden, who was then the highest-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, grilled him.
“The primary policy is to keep sanctions in place to deny Saddam the billions of dollars that would allow him to really crank up his program, which neither you nor I believe he’s ever going to abandon as long as he’s in place,” Biden said, characterizing the then Clinton administration’s policy.
Biden continued:
You and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam is at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons of mass destruction. You and I both know, and all of us here really know, and it’s a thing we have to face, that the only way, the only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to end up having to start it alone—start it alone—and it’s going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking this son of a bitch down. You know it and I know it.[4]
Mobilizing Support for War
Biden followed up on these statements at the end of July 2002 by chairing hearings in the Senate that were designed to mobilize congressional support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, whose goal was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Biden stated that the purpose of the hearings was to initiate a “national dialogue” on Iraq.
However, the witnesses were skewed to represent alarmist views about Saddam and his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to support a preemptive strike. The three who testified on the subject of al-Qaeda, falsely claimed it received direct support from Iraq.
Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Hans Von Sponeck complained about the “deliberate distortions and misrepresentations” that “make it look to the average person in the U.S. as if Iraq is a threat to their security.”[5]
Biden set the tone in his opening remarks when he emphasized that
we cannot be complacent about those who espouse hatred for us. We must confront clear danger with a new sense of urgency and resolve. Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction, in my view, is one of those clear dangers … These weapons must be dislodged or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.
These comments echoed a New York Times op-ed Biden published the first day of the hearings with Richard Lugar (R-IN), which suggested that continued containment of Saddam raised the “risk that Mr. Hussein will play cat-and-mouse with inspectors while building more weapons” and that “if we wait for the danger to become clear and present, it may be too late.”
The first witness at the hearings was Richard Butler, a diplomat-in-residence at the Council on Foreign Relations and former executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), an inspection regime designed to ensure Iraqi compliance with international protocols on WMD after the first Persian Gulf War.
Butler testified that Saddam’s claims that he had no WMDs was false. Rather, Iraq had the components that were needed to manufacture nuclear weapons and a weaponized biological warfare program with capability of loading anthrax onto missile warheads, and had terminated UNSCOM’s work in order to hide the truth.
In Butler’s view, Saddam was a war criminal who should be on trial at The Hague alongside Serb leader Slobodan Milošević.
Claiming that Iraqis would welcome an American invasion “with open arms,” Hamza warned that Saddam Hussein had “turned Iraqi science and engineering enterprises into a “giant weapons making body.”
He said that Iraq possessed more than ten tons of uranium, and one ton of slightly enriched uranium, which he claimed was enough to allow them to build three nuclear weapons by 2005. Saddam was also well into chemical warfare production and developing biological warfare capabilities.
Image on the right: Khidir Hamza [Source: wikipedia.org]
According to Hamza, Saddam was a vicious tyrant who had hunted down defectors in exile like his brother-in law Hussein Kamel, who was killed in 1996.
Saddam was further linked to Islamic fundamentalism, training foreign jihadist fighters at an Iraqi intelligence camp twenty miles south of Baghdad, including in tactics of hijacking which was confirmed allegedly by satellite photos.
The Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, had traveled to Afghanistan and met with Osama bin Laden in 1998.
Most, if not all of Hamza’s information on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was untrue, and UNSCOM inspectors insist that Hamza was never actually part of Iraq’s nuclear program.
We seized the entire records of the Iraqi nuclear program, especially the administrative records. We got a name of everybody, where they worked, what they did, and the top of the list, Saddam’s ‘Bombmaker’ was a man named Jafar Dhia Jafar, not Khidir Hamza, and if you go down the list of the senior administrative personnel you will not find Hamza’s name in there. In fact, we didn’t find his name at all. Because in 1990, he didn’t work for the Iraqi Nuclear Program. He had no knowledge of it because he worked as a kickback specialist for Hussein Kamel in the Presidential Palace. He goes into northern Iraq and meets up with Ahmed Chalabi.
He walks in and says, “I’m Saddam’s ‘Bombmaker.’” So they call the CIA and they say, “we know who you are, you’re not Saddam’s ‘Bombmaker,’ go sell your story to someone else.” And he was released, he was rejected by all intelligence services at the time, he’s a fraud. And here we are, someone who the CIA knows is a fraud, the U.S. Government knows is a fraud, is allowed to sit in front of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and give testimony as an expert witness.
These comments provide a stinging rebuke of Biden and his deceit of the American people.
Witness after witness that followed Hamza advanced a similar underlying message to him.
Duelfer asked subsequently “whether we were prepared to give back the Saddam regime control over the oil revenues.” He stressed that “our highest priority should be convincing Iraqis in Iraq that they will be better off when Saddam was gone, and that he will be gone.”
Lieutenant General Thomas G. McInerney, the former Assistant Vice Chief of the Air Force, detailed before the committee how regime change could be accomplished through “blitz warfare”–a “24-hour, 7 day a week campaign,” using “precision weapons,” and “supported by fast mobbing ground forces and heavy, light, airborne amphibious, special covert operations working with [Iraqi] opposition forces.”
One of the hearings’ main academic experts, Fouad Ajami, director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, emphasized an alleged linkage between Iraq and 9/11 and said that Muslim hatred of America resulted from jealousy of American success and talent–among the untalented–and not historical factors or opposition to U.S. foreign policies.
Image below: Fouad Ajami, an Arab Uncle Tom. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Ajami went on to suggest that Americans would be greeted in Baghdad and Basra with “kites and boom boxes”—as they allegedly had been in Kabul.
Rend al-Rahim Francke, a cousin and close associate of Ahmed Chalabi—a con man who helped lobby for the Iraq War—echoed Ajami in claiming that American troops would be greeted as liberators and said that there would be no civil war after the U.S. invaded.
A member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was set up to lobby Congress to support an invasion of Iraq, she proposed a Bonn meeting for Iraq modeled on Afghanistan to help select the post-Saddam leadership.
The Bonn conference was highly unpopular among Afghans, however, because foreigners selected their leaders for them, and it went against the idea of democracy.
After Saddam was overthrown, Francke was appointed Iraqi ambassador to the U.S., and in 2004 was a guest of Laura Bush in the First Lady’s box at George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. Subsequently, she established the Iraqi-American Freedom Alliance, whose aim was to show the positive consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The few skeptics who testified at the hearing mainly raised questions about tactics, economic cost and military feasibility of regime change and how long it might take to stabilize the country, but not about the potential cost for Iraqis or hidden underlying motives behind U.S. policy.[6]
Dr. Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert and former professor at the National Defense University, was characteristic in considering the goal of regime change to be “ambitious.”
She stated:
If the United States is going to take the responsibility for removing the current leadership, it should assume that it cannot get the results it wants ‘on the cheap.’ It must be prepared to put some troops on the ground, provide advisors to help create new institutions, and, above all, spend time and effort in the future to see the project through to a satisfactory end. If the United States is not willing to do so, it had best rethink the project.
In short, the United States should try to be good colonials and initiate a sustained long-term military and political commitment or none at all—hardly an anti-war position.
In the afternoon session of the last day, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger(1981-1987), branded Saddam Hussein as a “purveyor of evil” and “implacable” and “permanent foe of the United States,” and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger(1993-1996), called Saddam a “menace to his own people and the stability of the region.”
Emphasizing Saddam’s link to terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hamas, and al-Qaeda’s growing presence in Iraq, Weinberger was most strident in his support for preemptive war.
The United States, he said, had successfully “changed several regimes after World War II” and “in each case, the result was a “vast and major improvement.”
Chafee told Biden that the panel he had set up “gave the perspective that the threat [from Saddam and his alleged WMDs] was very real, very immediate” but that it would have been “good to have a different perspective [offered].”
Wellstone was able to get inserted into the record three principled anti-war statements.
The first was written by Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). She provided a warning from Nelson Mandela that “attacking Iraq would be a disaster,” and predicted that it would “kill thousands of civilians,” risk the lives of U.S. military personnel, lead to a “long and bloody occupation” and “cost billions of dollars urgently needed at home.”]
Bennis noted that there were absolutely no verifiable reports regarding Iraq’s WMD program or evidence of Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks—Iraq was in fact antagonistic to bin Laden and vice versa—and she said that preemptive strikes were illegal under international law.
The second anti-war statement came from J. Daryl Byler of the Mennonite Central Committee’s Washington Office, who advocated for a regional approach to Iraq’s disarmament and establishment of an international tribunal as a right way to investigate allegations of crimes against humanity by Saddam Hussein.
Byler noted that, for more than 20 years, ordinary Iraqis had suffered from the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars and impact of UN sanctions intended to contain and control the Iraqi government, and that a U.S. invasion would make a bad situation worse and result in the deaths of thousands of children and civilians.
Byler predicted that the war would further destabilize the Middle East and provide “yet another example that the world’s superpower is unilaterally able to impose its will and wish on less powerful countries.” An Iraqi evangelical church leader told his delegation that “we hope that someday your country will stop doing everything with force.”
The third anti-war statement was written by Dr. Peter Pellet, emeritus professor of nutrition at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Dr. Colin Rowat, a professor of economics at the University of Manchester.
They emphasized the humanitarian crisis resulting from the U.S. bombing of the electrical grid during the first Persian Gulf War and imposition of economic sanctions and believed that the civilian costs of new military action would be greater than in 1990.
The three principled anti-war statements contrasted markedly with the rest of the hearings and were prescient in their analysis and warnings.
They did not command the same attention, however, as the regular panelists since they were not issued in-person.[7]
Their inclusion was a masterful trick designed to sustain the illusion that all sides were represented in the “national dialogue.” Really, however, it was a staged political event designed to lay the groundwork for war.
Afterwards, President Bush thanked Biden for holding the hearings, and Biden went on all the major television networks to argue for war, citing the lopsided testimony he had arranged. “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” he told Meet the Press.[8]
Twisting the Truth
Image on the right: Scott Ritter giving a lecture at the Harvard Kennedy school pointing to the lack of evidence for WMDs. He was a key figure excluded from the hearing. [Source: news.harvard.edu]
In his memoir, Promises to Keep—published in 2007 when he was running to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee—Biden claimed that the two days of expert testimony at the Senate hearings were “a good start to educating the country about the monumental difficulties of opening up another military front.”
Biden wrote that “not wanting the president to get locked into going to war,” his intention was to “make public the disincentives to going to war in Iraq.”[9]
Prior to the hearings, Biden wrote that President Bush personally assured him that “there was no plan to take down Iraq” and that he was confident at the time that “Secretary of State Colin Powell was trying to dissuade the president from an invasion.”
Ten days later, however, Biden read in the Washington Post that Bush had signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake a comprehensive covert program to topple Saddam Hussein, including lethal authority to capture the Iraqi president.” Biden wrote that he didn’t ask the administration to send any witnesses as such because “I didn’t want to force their hand.”[10]
Biden leaves the impression that he was opposed to the war and trying to stop it and did not want to give the Bush administration a voice, stating that the consensus of the experts was that Saddam “was five to ten years away from developing a nuclear weapon” and “not an imminent threat.”
However, in his introductory remarks and accompanying New York Times op-ed, Biden had stated that Saddam was a major threat who had to be confronted, and the experts at the hearings testified that Saddam was a grave threat, had WMD, was linked to al-Qaeda, and would have a nuclear weapon within three years; not five to ten.
In an attempt to show the hearings promoted a cautionary message, Biden referenced the testimony of military expert Anthony Cordesman, who said that war was not a game and quoted from the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder: “Small boys throw stones at frogs in jest. But, the frogs do not die in jest. The frogs die in earnest.”[11]
One month and a half after the hearings, Biden gained access to information that disproved the WMD claims, though he never acted upon it.
In a classified hearing on September 24, 2002, at the urging of a staff member, Biden asked then-CIA Director George Tenet what evidence of WMDs the U.S. had “technically collected.”
“None, Senator,” Tenet said, according to an account in the book Hubris, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Biden, wondering if there was some highly classified evidence, asked Tenet, “George, do you want me to clear the staff out of the room?” Tenet told him no. “There’s no reason to, Senator.”
Later in that same hearing, Biden heard from two government witnesses who rejected the “aluminum tubes” claim that had been circulating, and would later become a centerpiece of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations promoting preemptive war.
General Colin Powell has called his 2003 speech to the United Nations, laying out the Bush administration’s rationale for war in Iraq, a “blot” on his record. The speech set out to detail Iraq’s weapons program, but as the intelligence confirmed, that program was nonexistent. The former Secretary of State acknowledged that his report to the Security Council was only intended to give credit to the accusations from the administration and that the intelligence services had not “worked properly.” [Source: volatirenet.org]
Biden nevertheless would go on to vote in favor of the war on Iraq, even though he knew that the stated reasons—that Saddam had WMD—was unproven or false, and lied about this later.
Biden Votes for War
After hearing from Tenet, Biden, with Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel (R-NE), proposed an alternative to George W. Bush’s war resolution that would only allow Bush to attack Iraq for the purpose of destroying WMD and only after seeking UN approval.
If the UN turned Bush down, he would have to come back to Congress and prove Saddam posed a WMD threat so “grave” that only military action could eliminate it.
When Biden’s plan was derailed, however, through the work of Dick Gephardt (D-MI), the Democratic Party leader in the House, Biden backed Bush’s war resolution.
On October 10, 2002, on the eve of the vote, Biden repeated before the Senate his claims about Saddam’s threat and pursuit of nuclear weapons and framed military intervention as a “march to peace and security,” specifying that the “threat need not be imminent for us to take action.”
The next day, Biden was one of 77 Senators who voted to authorize military force in Iraq, joining fellow Democrats Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, John Kerry, and Dianne Feinstein.
In early November, Biden introduced the Iraqi Scientists Liberation Act before the Senate, which granted permanent residency status to 500 Iraqi scientists if they supplied information on weapons of mass destruction.
The clear intent was to lure defectors like Khidir Hamza who could validate the Bush administration’s stated reasons for going to war, while giving the impression that the U.S. was trying to destroy Iraq’s WMD.
Years later, when campaigning for higher office, Biden told NPR that he had voted for war only after he got a commitment from Bush that he needed the vote to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam was establishing a nuclear program. According to Biden, his mistake was to trust Bush.
When Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam on March 17, 2003—leave or be invaded—Biden predictably backed him.[13]
Four months later, Biden told a gathering at the Brookings Institution that he had cast “the right vote [on the war], and it would be a correct vote today.”
Biden called Bernard Kerik, the former NYPD Commissioner tasked with building a new police force, “a serious guy with a serious team.” However, Iraq’s police would soon become indistinguishable from sectarian death squads, and Kerik would later plead guilty to tax fraud and other federal corruption charges.
At the 2004 Democratic Party Convention at the Fleet Center in Boston, Biden tried to deflect responsibility away from himself and onto President Bush.
This was a stunning admission in light of the role Biden had played in “hyping” the Iraqi threat.
Biden said he felt that the worst legacy of the Iraq war was not its human costs, but rather a “further hardening of the Vietnam syndrome that afflicts some in the Democratic Party—a distrust of the use of American power.”
These comments reflected Biden’s longstanding neoconservative outlook and disdain for the Vietnam era anti-war movement, which was unaffected by his shifting position on Iraq.
As a law student at Syracuse University in the late 1960s, Biden had derided Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activists who occupied the Chancellor’s office to protest the Vietnam War, calling out “look at these assholes.”[14]
A Neocolonial Solution
In July 2005, as Iraq descended into nightmarish sectarian violence, Biden told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he remained “hopeful” about the situation, despite some of his earlier critical comments, and that U.S. forces had “turned a political corner of sorts.” Subsequently, Biden said that “calling it quits and withdrawing” would be a “gigantic mistake.”
Biden in this period routinely voted for billion-dollar war appropriations and used his status as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee to “advocate loudly for more troops and better police training,” which he considered key to successful counterinsurgency.[15]
This was to be achieved by establishing three largely autonomous regions, one for each of Iraq’s major ethnic and confessional groups, presided over by a nominally national Baghdad government, something he called “unity through autonomy.”
The model was the Dayton accords on Bosnia, which kept the country whole by dividing it into ethnic federations, and allowing Muslims, Croats and Serbs to retain separate armies. These accords were deeply flawed, however, in that they enshrined the violent division of Bosnia along ethnic lines.
In September 2007, Biden prevailed upon his fellow senators to endorse his flawed proposal in a lopsided 75-23 vote. Outside of Kurdistan, there was zero support among Iraqis, who saw the proposal as a neocolonial strategy designed to break up, divide and weaken their country.
The plan so tarnished Biden’s reputation that, in August 2008, when he was named Barack Obama’s running mate, Iraqis across the political spectrum reacted with dismay.
“This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq,” Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters that day.
“We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time.”
Obama’s Point Man
Despite Biden’s unpopularity and complicity in the destruction of Iraq, Obama appointed him as his point man there, allegedly telling him: “Joe, you do Iraq.”
According to Emma Sky, who was the political adviser to Raymond Odierno, the commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq that year, Biden seemed preoccupied with the idea of irreconcilable sectarian differences during a visit.
“I tried to explain the struggle between secularists and Islamists, and how many Iraqis wanted to move beyond sectarianism,” Sky wrote. “But Biden could not fathom this. For him, Iraq was simply about Sunnis, Shia and Kurds.”
As Sky pushed back on Biden’s belief that sectarian differences were the key to Iraq, she wrote: “He was clearly irritated by me. ‘Look, I know these people,’” he went on. “‘My grandfather was Irish and hated the British. It’s like in the Balkans. They all grow up hating each other.’”
The result, as Reidar Visser observed in 2011, was an al-Maliki government “made up of mostly pro-Iranian Shiite Islamists,” with the secular Iraqiya Party, which had won a plurality of votes in the March 2010 parliamentary elections, sidelined.
Though Biden was close to al-Maliki, when Arab-Spring style protests erupted, Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry quietly worked to help install Haidar al-Abadi, the former communications minister who was committed to privatizing Iraq’s economy in line with the original goals of the 2003 military invasion.
Al-Abadi tried to increase Sunni participation in government and root out corruption in the army and police, while securing a $1.5 billion pledge from the Obama administration to train the Iraqi security forces and sell F-16 fighter jets.
Al-Sadr had mobilized his Mahdi army to resist the U.S. occupation of Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and drew Iraq closer to Iran. His ascendancy reflected the failings of U.S. policy, which Biden had been integral to.
Supporting Another War on an Enemy He Helped Create
After overseeing troop withdrawals in 2011, Biden played an important role in the second Iraq War, which began when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS)—led by former Saddamist Generals, al-Qaeda terrorists and disaffected Sunnis—took over swaths of territory in Iraq in the summer of 2014 with Turkish backing.
In June 2014, the Obama administration ordered thousands of troops back into Iraq without authorization from Congress, claiming that the troops would serve in an advisory capacity, and that ISIS was equivalent to al-Qaeda, against which the U.S. had already declared war.[16]
According to Brett McGurk, a former U.S. official with extensive experience in Iraq, Biden supported the strategy known as “by, with, and through” to fight ISIS, in which America left most of the fighting to local soldiers and used its special forces, intelligence, and air power.
The heavy focus on air strikes deriving from Biden’s strategy resulted in untold civilian casualties. A study published in the New York Times Magazine determined that one in five of the 27,500 coalition air strikes over Iraq resulted in at least one civilian death, more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. The second war in Iraq, the authors noted, “may be the least transparent war in recent American history.”[17]
The U.S. forces in Iraq were commanded by General Lloyd Austin, whom President-elect Biden appointed as the first African American Secretary of Defense.
Austin helped oversee the razing of Mosul by U.S. and Iraqi forces which deployed rocket-assisted munitions and powerful explosive weapons that caused blast-related injuries.
The New York Times described “a panorama of destruction in the neighborhood of Judida so vast one resident compared the destruction to that of Hiroshima, Japan. There was a charred arm, wrapped in a piece of red fabric poking from the rubble, rescue workers in red jumpsuits who came wore face masks to avoid the stench, some with rifles slung over their shoulders, searching the wreckage for bodies.”[18]
Biden’s involvement in Iraq by this time had come full circle.
During his vice presidency he found himself championing another dirty war against an enemy he had been instrumental in creating—first by supporting preemptive war against Saddam Hussein, and then by supporting the ethnic division of the country and sectarian politicians like Nouri al-Maliki.
Biden himself has suffered from his poor decisions—his son Beau died from brain cancer suspected to have derived from toxic exposure at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad, where the U.S. military burned an estimated 140 tons of waste a day in open air burn pits.[19]
It is unclear as of this writing what President Biden might do to further torture Iraqis in the next four years.
Certainly, he will follow through with previously announced troop withdrawals, but will also continue to sustain military advisory and training programs, special forces operations, air strikes and private military contractors as part of a light footprint approach.
The ultimate aim is to gain access to military bases and Iraq’s oil fields, which is what the long Iraq War has always really been about.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine.
Notes
[1] Branko Marcetic, Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden (London: Verso, 2020), 159.
[6] Many of the skeptics endorsed a strengthening of economic sanctions—which were known to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children from disease and malnutrition—and expanded aid to Iraqi opposition groups, even though the U.S.-sponsored ones were led by charlatans like Ahmed Chalabi, who had been sentenced to twenty-two years in prison in Jordan for bank fraud.
[7] The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was willing to fly one witness in from Australia but would not allow authors of the anti-war statements appear in person—even though at least one, Phyllis Bennis, lived in Washington.
[8] Marcetic, Yesterday’s Man, 151.
[9] Joe Biden, Promises to Keep (New York: Random House, 2007), 332, 333.
[10] Biden, Promises To Keep, 332.
[11] Biden, Promises to Keep, 333.
[12] According to an article in National Business Review, Cordesman was said to have been “48 per cent” convinced on the need to invade Iraq in 2003, but contends that “concerns over Saddam’sweapons of mass destruction were valid.” Jeremy Hall, “The Clash Within Civilizations,” National Business Review, September 17, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20110611061421/http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/the-clash-within-civilizations
[13] Marcetic, Yesterday’s Man, 153.
[14] Biden, Promises to Keep, 159. It is uncertain if this story is true.
[15] Biden, Promises to Keep, 348.
[16] See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 180.
[17] Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, “The Uncounted: An on-the-Ground Investigation Reveals That the U.S. led Battle Against ISIS—Hailed as the Most Precise Air Campaign in History—is Killing Far more Iraqi Civilians than the Coalition Has Acknowledged,” The New York Times Magazine, November 19, 2017, 43-47.
[18] Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 181, 182.
[19] In a 2019 speech to the Service Employees International Union, Joe Biden said that, because of Beau’s “exposure to burn pits, in my view, I can’t prove it yet, he came back with stage four glioblastoma. Eighteen months he lived, knowing he was going to die.”
Featured image: Biden was sworn into office by Associate Justice John Paul Stevens on January 20, 2009. (Public Domain)
“You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country…why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.”—Seven Days in May (1964)
No doubt about it: the coup d’etat was successful.
That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.
It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.
This new order didn’t emerge into being this week, or this month, or even this year, however.
Indeed, the real coup happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”
We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.
Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s tune.
Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:
…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…
This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.
Incredibly enough, almost 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.
The premise is straightforward.
With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government. When Gen. Scott’s aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.
Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.
The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.
How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?
Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.
This is not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.
Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.
Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.
Meanwhile, the police have been transformed into extensions of the military while the nation itself has been transformed into a battlefield. This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed merely for not complying with a government agent’s order or not complying fast enough. This hasn’t just been happening in crime-ridden inner cities. It’s been happening all across the country.
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.
So you see, January 6 and its aftermath provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.
I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
Brace yourself.
There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
All of those dastardly seeds we have allowed the government to sow under the guise of national security are bearing demon fruit.
The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on EFF in June 2018.
So why do we know so little about it?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will include multiple forms of biometrics—from face recognition to DNA, data from questionable sources, and highly personal data on innocent people. It will be shared with federal agencies outside of DHS as well as state and local law enforcement and foreign governments. And yet, we still know very little about it.
The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.
In late May, EFF filed comments criticizing DHS’s plans to collect, store, and share biometric and biographic records it receives from external agencies and to exempt this information from the federal Privacy Act. These newly-designated “External Biometric Records” (EBRs) will be integral to DHS’s bigger plans to build out HART. As we told the agency in our comments, DHS must do more to minimize the threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by this vast new trove of highly sensitive personal data.
DHS Biometrics Systems—From IDENT to HART
DHS slide showing growth of its legacy IDENT biometric database
DHS currently collects a lot of data. Its legacy IDENT fingerprint database contains information on 220-million unique individuals and processes 350,000 fingerprint transactions every day. This is an exponential increase from 20 years ago when IDENT only contained information on 1.8-million people. Between IDENT and other DHS-managed databases, the agency manages over 10-billion biographic records and adds 10-15 million more each week.
DHS slide showing breadth of DHS biometric and biographic data
DHS’s new HART database will allow the agency to vastly expand the types of records it can collect and store. HART will support at least seven types of biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, DNA, scars and tattoos, and a blanket category for “other modalities.” It will also include biographic information, like name, date of birth, physical descriptors, country of origin, and government ID numbers. And it will include data we know to by highly subjective, including information collected from officer “encounters” with the public and information about people’s “relationship patterns.”
DHS slide showing expansion of its new HART biometric and biographic database
HART will Impinge on First Amendment Rights
DHS plans to include records in HART that will chill speech and deter people from associating with others.
DHS’s face recognition roll-out is especially concerning. The agency uses mobile biometric devices that can identify faces and capture face data in the field, allowing its ICE (immigration) and CBP (customs) officers to scan everyone with whom they come into contact, whether or not those people are suspected of any criminal activity or an immigration violation. DHS is also partnering with airlines and other third parties to collect face images from travelers entering and leaving the U.S. When combined with data from other government agencies, these troubling collection practices will allow DHS to build a database large enough to identify and track all people in public places, without their knowledge—not just in places the agency oversees, like airports, but anywhere there are cameras.
Police abuse of facial recognition technology is not a theoretical issue: it’s happening today. Law enforcement has already used face recognition on public streets and at political protests. During the protests surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, Baltimore Police ran social media photos against a face recognition database to identify protesters and arrest them. Recent Amazon promotional videos encourage police agencies to acquire that company’s face “Rekognition” capabilities and use them with body cameras and smart cameras to track people throughout cities. At least two U.S. cities are already using Rekognition.
DHS compounds face recognition’s threat to anonymity and free speech by planning to include “records related to the analysis of relationship patternsamong individuals.” We don’t know where DHS or its external partners will be getting these “relationship pattern” records, but they could come from social media profiles and posts, which the government plans to track by collecting social media user names from all foreign travelers entering the country.
Social media records, even if they are publicly available, can include highly personal and private information, and the fear that the government may be collecting and searching through this information may cause people to self-censor what they say online. The data collected also won’t be limited to information about foreign travelers—travelers’ social media records may include information on family members and friends who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, two groups protected explicitly by the Privacy Act. As the recent, repeated Facebook scandals are showing us, even when you think you have done everything you can to protect your own data, it could easily be disclosed without your control through the actions of your friends and contacts or Facebook itself.
DHS’s “relationship pattern” records will likely be misleading or inaccurate. DHS acknowledges that these records will include “non-obvious relationships.” However, if the relationships are “non-obvious,” one has to question whether they truly exist. Instead, DHS could be seeing connections among people that are based on nothing more than “liking” the same news article, using the same foreign words, or following the same organization on social media. This is highly problematic because records like these frequently inform officer decisions to stop, search, and arrest people.
DHS plans to include additional records in HART that could be based on or impact First Amendment protected speech and activity. Records will include “miscellaneous officer comment information” and “encounter data.” These types of information come from police interactions with civilians, and are often collected under extremely questionable legal circumstances. For example, ICE officers use mobile devices to collect biometric and biographic data from people they “encounter” in the field, including via unauthorized entry into people’s homes and Bible study groups, and in public places where people congregate with other members of their community, such as on soccer fields, in community centers, and on buses. “Encounters” like these, whether they are conducted by ICE or by state or local police, are frequently not based on individualized suspicion that a civilian has done anything wrong, but that doesn’t prevent the officer from stockpiling any information obtained from the civilian during the encounter.
Finally, DHS relies on data from gang databases (its own and those from states), which often contain unsubstantiated data concerning people’s status and associations and are notoriously inaccurate. DHS has even fabricated gang status as an excuse to deport people.
HART Will Include Inaccurate Data and Will Share that Data with Other Agencies
DHS is not taking necessary steps with its new HART database to determine whether its own data and the data collected from its external partners are sufficiently accurate to prevent innocent people from being identified as criminal suspects, immigration law violators, or terrorists.
DHS has stated that it intends to rely on face recognition to identify data subjects across a variety of its mission areas, and “face matching” is one of the first components of the HART database to be built out. However, face recognition frequently is an inaccurate and unreliable biometric identifier. DHS’s tests of its own systems found significantly high levels of inaccuracy—the systems falsely rejected as many as 1 in 25 travelers. As a Georgetown report recently noted, “DHS’ error-prone face scanning system could cause 1,632 passengers to be wrongfully delayed or denied boarding every day at New York’s John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport alone.”
DHS’s external partners are also employing face recognition systems with high rates of inaccuracy. For example, FBI has admitted that its Next Generation Identification database “may not be sufficiently reliable to accurately locate other photos of the same identity, resulting in an increased percentage of misidentifications.” Potential foreign partners such as police departments in the United Kingdom use face recognition systems with false positive rates as high as a 98%—meaning that for every 100 people identified as suspects, 98 in fact were not suspects.
DHS Slide Showing Partner Agencies
People of color and immigrants will shoulder much more of the burden of these misidentifications. For example, people of color are disproportionately represented in criminal and immigration databases, due to the unfair legacy of discrimination in our criminal justice and immigration systems. Moreover, FBI and MIT research has shown that current face recognition systems misidentify people of color and women at higher rates than whites and men, and the number of mistaken IDs increases for people with darker skin tones. False positives represent real people who may erroneously become suspects in a law enforcement or immigration investigation. This is true even if a face recognition system offers several results for a search instead of one; each of the people identified could be detained or brought in for questioning, even if there is nothing else linking them to a crime or violation.
In addition to accuracy problems inherent in face recognition, DHS’s own immigration data has also been shown to be unacceptably inaccurate. A 2005 Migration Policy Institute study analyzing records obtained through FOIA found “42% of NCIC immigration hits in response to police queries were ‘false positives’ where DHS was unable to confirm that the individual was an actual immigration violator.” A 2011 study of DHS’s Secure Communities program found approximately 3,600 United States citizens were improperly caught up in the program due to incorrect immigration records. As these inaccurate records are propagated throughout DHS’s partner agencies’ systems, it will become impossible to determine the source of the inaccuracy and correct the data.
HART Is Fatally Flawed and Must Be Stopped
DHS’s plans for future data collection and use should make us all very worried. For example, despite pushback from EFF, Georgetown, ACLU, and others, DHS believes it’s legally authorized to collect and retain face data from millions of U.S. citizens traveling internationally. However, as Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology notes, Congress has never authorized face scans of American citizens.
Despite this, DHS plans to roll out its face recognition program to every international flight in the country within the next four years. DHS has stated “the only way for an individual to ensure he or she is not subject to collection of biometric information when traveling internationally is to refrain from traveling.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg. CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan has stated CBP wants to be able to use biometrics to “confirm the identity of travelers at any point in their travel,” not just at entry to or exit from the United States. This includes creating a “biometric pathway” to track all travelers through airports, from check-in, through security, into airport lounges and shops, and onto flights. Given CBP’s recent partnerships with airlines and plans to collect social media credentials, this could also mean CBP plans to track travelers from the moment they begin their internet travel research. Several Congress members have introduced legislation to legitimize some of these plans.
Congress has expressed concerns with DHS’s biometric programs. Senators Edward Markey and Mike Lee, in a recent letter addressed to the agency, stated, “[w]e are concerned that the use of the program on U.S. citizens remains facially unauthorized[.] . . . We request that DHS stop the expansion of this program and provide Congress with its explicit statutory authority to use and expand a biometric exit program on U.S. citizens.” The senators have urged DHS to propose a rulemaking to clarify its plans for biometric exit. Congress also withheld funds last year from DHS’s Office of Biometric Identity Management.
DHS’s Inspector General criticized the agency last year for failure to properly train its personnel on how biometric systems worked and noted that the agency’s reliance on third parties to verify travelers leaving the country “occasionally provided false departure or arrival status on visitors.” The OIG is again investigating the biometric exit program this year and plans to “assess whether biometric data collected at pilot locations has improved DHS’s ability to verify departures.” The Government Accountability Office has also looked into the agency’s programs, criticizing the reliability of DHS’s data and the agency’s failure to evaluate whether a program that collects biometrics from all travelers leaving the country was even feasible.
However, these actions are not enough. DHS needs to end its plans to use its HART database to collect even more biometric and biographic information about U.S. citizens and foreigners. This system poses a very real threat to First Amendment-protected activities. Further, DHS has a well-documented history of poor data management, and face recognition has a high rate of misidentifications. Congress must step in with more oversight and act now to put the brakes on DHS’s broad expansion of data collection.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
President-elect Joe Biden’s new COVID relief plan does not adopt existing Democratic legislation to expand government sponsored medical coverage nor does it propose a promised public health insurance option. Instead, it adopts proposals from health insurance lobbying groups’ recent letter to lawmakers demanding lucrative new subsidies for insurance companies, at a moment when those corporations have recorded record profits as millions lose coverage and many face claims denials.
Biden’s plan would shovel billions of dollars to private health insurers by providing subsidies for Americans to buy coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces, which are far more expensive than government health care programs and have at times been plagued by high rates of claim denials. The plan would also subsidize COBRA continuation coverage through September, allowing workers to keep their employer health insurance plans when they’re laid off.
Those initiatives — which could further boost insurers’ skyrocketing profits — were recently recommended in a letter to lawmakers from America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, two insurance lobby groups in Washington that have opposed the expansion of government-sponsored health care programs.
A few days after the letter was sent, AHIP said that “health insurance providers are eager to assist the Biden health team.”
Biden’s inaugural committee has received donations from at least two major health insurers, Anthem and Centene, which bothoffer plans on state marketplace exchanges. Centene’s CEO bundled donations for Biden’s presidential campaign, and Biden’s first major campaign fundraiser was headlined by Independence Blue Cross’s CEO.
During the 2020 primary campaign, Biden repeatedly demonized Medicare for All legislation offered by Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Sen. Bernie Sanders, questioning how the country would pay for it and proposing a public health insurance option people can buy into instead. Democrats previously considered creating a public option during ACA negotiations a decade ago — AHIP secretlybankrolled a successful $100 million advocacy campaign to kill it.
While Medicare for All could actually save the country up to $650 billion annually, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Biden is now proposing some of the most costly and inefficient ways to expand health insurance coverage. The moves could still leave people exposed to substantial out-of-pocket costs — from deductibles, copays, and coinsurance — that act as barriers to care.
Nightmare Deductibles And Widespread Claim Denials
Pushing people onto ACA plans and subsidizing COBRA coverage would be expensive — but not necessarily popular.
Health care coverage purchased through the ACA marketplace costs 83 percent more than Medicaid coverage, and ACA plans leave patients with ten times the amount of out-of-pocket costs, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The researchers concluded that marketplace plans cost so much more than Medicaid because private insurers pay “higher prices for the same services.” Hospitals often bill people with employer health insurance plans, which are maintained under COBRA, more than twice as much as those with Medicare or Medicaid.
The Biden proposal does include a measure to slightly lower the percentage of Americans’ annual incomes that insurers can collect through premiums — from a maximum of 9.86 percent to 8.5 percent. Altogether, the Biden transition says its plan “would reduce premiums for more than ten million people and reduce the ranks of the uninsured by millions more.”
The ACA marketplace was a centerpiece of Democrats’ 2010 health care reform law, but only a small slice of Americans are actually buying insurance plans this way now — often people who are self-employed, independent contractors, or gig workers. The ACA exchanges are only currently “a miniscule part of the health insurance system,” the People’s Policy Project wrote last month.
While the marketplace was billed as allowing people to shop for health insurances, in reality the state exchanges offer few choices, and most are expensive. The average lowest-cost premium for bronze-level plans is $321 this year, though the numbers vary widely by state.
The premiums are pricy, but an even bigger issue is the nightmarish deductibles people with ACA plans are expected to pay before their insurance company actually starts footing their medical bills. The average bronze plan deductible on the individual market was nearly $5,900 in 2019.
Deductibles are lower on silver and gold-tier plans, but the average lowest-cost monthly premiums this year are $436 for silver plans and $482 for gold.
Poorer enrollees may qualify for subsidized premiums or cost-sharing reductions limiting their maximum out-of-pocket expenses — but those reduced out-of-pocket maximums are still substantial.
Making matters worse, health insurers deny nearly one in five claims for in-network care by patients with ACA plans, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation for 2017. For some insurers, about 40 percent of claims are rejected.
Moving the uninsured into these plans would be a massively expensive way to expand coverage — and if insurers are still allowed to impose huge out-of-pocket costs and deny claims with regularity, it may not help people much at all.
Backing Away From A Public Option
During the 2020 campaign, a health care industry front group called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), spent $4.5 million on advertisements attacking Medicare for All. The group launched a late wave of ads in South Carolina — where Biden’s strong performance helped propel him to victories around the country.
PAHCF’s tax return shows it is steered by executives from AHIP and lobbying groups for pharmaceutical companies and investor-owned hospitals. The industry group raised more than $55 million in 2019, and it has made clear that it would fight against a federal public option plan, just as AHIP did in 2009 and 2010. It also spent millions of dollars in 2020 to block a state level public option in Colorado.
Biden consistently campaigned in support of a public health insurance option, and after the primary, a joint task force made up of Biden and Sanders allies negotiated a fairly robust public option plan.
“The public option will provide at least one plan choice without deductibles, will be administered by the traditional Medicare program, not private companies, and will cover all primary care without any copayments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does on behalf of older people,” the task force wrote.
The Democratic National Committee’s 2020 platform included a similar pledge: “Democrats will also make available on the marketplace a public option administered through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which includes a platinum-level choice, with low fees and no deductibles. Low-income Americans will be automatically enrolled in the public option at zero cost to them, though they may choose to opt out at any time.”
Now, on the eve of his presidency, Biden is proposing a much more conservative health insurance expansion plan proposed by the health insurance industry. If enacted, the plan could head off any talk in Washington of a public option plan down the road.
There are many other options available. Democratic lawmakers could choose to rally around existing legislation to enact an emergency Medicare for All program, or they could press for a public option, as the party and its incoming president promised.
Biden could use his executive authority to expand Medicare during the pandemic, using emergency provisions in the Affordable Care Act. Democrats could also seek to expand Medicaid to cover more people.
Instead, Biden is pushing a health insurance expansion that would further enrich insurers and put people on insurance plans that will be too expensive for many of them to use. Democrats should reject this insurance industry cash grab.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Early in 2012, I started having debilitating cognitive lapses, pressure headaches, nausea and worse when around wireless and electronic devices.
That winter and spring, I’d put in long hours, drafting an eco-themed novel, writing for a hyperlocal news blog and starting to update a climate series I’d done for the site five years before.
But my worsening symptoms felt more extreme than simply too-much-screen-time fatigue. By late May, I could not sit down at any keyboard without losing my ability to work within minutes.
“What changed before this began?” one doctor asked me. As we explored the question, technology kept coming up.
Not only had I logged extra computer time in recent months, but a new community-wide wireless internet service had started nearby. My symptoms consistently worsened within what I later learned was the range of that service. The 12-mile trips from my country home into town, where this new provider and others had transmitters, often left me so impaired it took days to recover.
Was it possible higher levels of wireless radiation had crashed my health?
My search for answers led me deep into a topic that has expanding relevance for the environmental beat in the current COVID-19 era.
Recent lockdowns and more time online — plus the push for rapid expansion of 5G infrastructure, now touted for economic recovery (see sidebar) — are increasing our exposures to non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation (EMR, aka electromagnetic fields or EMF). This includes the radiofrequency radiation, or RFR, emitted by wireless devices.
Are these exposures safe? That’s hotly debated, so you’ll find plenty of story potential at the intersection of wireless tech, health and environment.
Plus, Project Censored — which since 1976 has publicized important news stories missed by mainstream media — says the health risks of wireless technologies are underreported. The topic has made the group’s annual list of Top 25 Censored Stories in 2012-13, 2017-18 and 2018-19.
The safety debate
Arguments over these health risks center on whether RFR, which includes microwave frequencies, does much or any harm when below intensities that heat tissue.
[DISCLOSURE: In October 2019, the author became one of four directors of a small family foundation whose donations include some to charities which research and/or educate the public about wireless radiation health risks, among them: Environmental Health Trust, the Golomb Research Group at University of California-San Diego and others not mentioned in this story.]
The International EMF Scientist Appeal says these effects can occur at intensities of RFR considered safe by “most international and national guidelines.” The appeal, now signed by more than 250 scientists from more than 40 countries, asks the United Nations, its sub-organizations including the World Health Organization, or WHO, and its member nations for greater public health protection from EMF exposure.
Echoing those concerns, a 2018 Lancet Planetary Health article reported that, of 2,266 studies evaluated, 1,546 “demonstrated significant biological or health effects associated with exposure” — both acute and chronic — to anthropogenic EMR, including RFR.
In contrast, the wireless industry says “the overall balance” of RFR science shows little risk, as Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie wrote in 2018 in The Nation. Their article also reported that when industry-funded research is excluded, larger proportions of studies show low-intensity RFR can cause harm.
Hertsgaard and Dowie described an analysis by Henry Lai, a bioengineering professor emeritus at the University of Washington who showed that while 67 percent of independently-funded studies found biological effects from cellphone radiation, just 28 percent of industry-funded studies did the same. A 2007 analysis in Environmental Health Perspectives replicated Lai’s findings.
This sort of published science has had limited influence on public policy, especially since passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This law bars states and localities from regulating wireless facilities based on RFR-related environmental concerns. Subsequent legal rulings determined that this includes concerns about RFR’s health risks.
Thus, no wireless infrastructure policies can be based on RFR research showing non-thermal health effects except at the federal level, mainly through the FCC.
Against this backdrop — and sometimes obscured by special-interest spin or tales of conspiracy — several issues are playing out, offering multiple angles for stories.
Cancer: Can wireless radiation increase the risk?
There’s “clear evidence” for rare cancers called schwannomas of the heart, concludes a 2018 paper by the U.S. National Toxicology Program, or NTP, and “some evidence” it’s a yes for malignant gliomas of the brain.
Although aspects of the NTP’s rodent study have been debated by scientists and regulators, Italy’s Ramazzini Institute has corroborated the NTP findings. Both long-term studies show “an increase in the incidence of tumors of the brain and heart in RFR-exposed Sprague-Dawley rats,” the Ramazzini study says.
Despite the NTP findings, the FDA — which initially called for the study — responded with a statement affirming the acceptability of current cell phone safety standards. Uncertainty remains about possible responses from other agencies now planning to review RFR’s carcinogenicity, including the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC.
As early as 2011, enough research had linked RFR to cancer so that IARC listed it as “possibly carcinogenicto humans.” Other agencies and scientific organizations have issued similar cautions. Now, some scientists want IARC to step up its RFR designation to “probable carcinogen” or definite “carcinogen.” IARC has prioritized this issue for consideration in the near future.
Meantime, wireless cancer risk studies continue to accumulate. One example is a meta-analysispublished November 2, 2020 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. This study found that “cell phone use with cumulative call time more than 1,000 hours significantly increased the risk of tumors.” It noted that 1,000 hours corresponds to roughly 17 minutes a day for 10 years.
Regulators — including the FCC — continue to argue that existing wireless safety guidelines are adequate. But the issue is going before federal judges. Pending in court are lawsuits claiming people’s tumors came from cell phone use, as well as lawsuits challenging FCC safety regulations.
On another regulatory front, should consumers have the “right to know” of possible wireless cancer risks — for instance, via point-of-sale notices as mandated until recently in Berkeley, California? The city’s test-case ordinance required retailers to post warnings recommending that customers heed safety instructions required in phone manuals by the FCC but rarely read. These include the typically half-inch distance users should keep cell phones away from the body to meet exposure guidelines (keeping live phones in bras or pockets, for instance, does not generally do so).
Though the wireless industry sued Berkeley shortly after the 2015 passage of its ordinance, early rulings sided with the city, and included industry losses (subscription required) in the U.S. Supreme Court. But as Bob Egelko reported (subscription required) in the San Francisco Chronicle, a June 2020 court filing by the FCC led a federal district judge to rule in September that Berkeley’s ordinance interfered with federal oversight of the cellphone industry.
The city will leave its law unenforced for now. According to Egelko, an attorney representing Berkeley said the ordinance “remains on the books awaiting a better FCC.” This story might resurface early this year.
A 2015 review article in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine explored one explanation for this variety of potential effects: the “significant activation” by low-intensity RFR of “key pathways generating reactive oxygen species” — in other words, generation of free radicals which can build up in biological tissues to create oxidative stress and related effects such as DNA damage.
Effects of this type were documented in 93 of the 100 human tissue, animal and plant studies that the article examined. The researchers write that this could explain “a range of biological/health effects of low-intensity RFR” and give this type of environmental exposure “a wide pathogenic potential.”
Children and pregnant women might be particularly vulnerable to such effects. Imaging in human head models like that done in a 2018 study published in Environmental Research has shown that children’s thinner skulls allow more RFR penetration of their brains. This has raised concerns about WiFi in schools, as well as the additional screen time required by pandemic-era digital schooling.
What happened to me in 2012 is called electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, which is also known as electrosensitivity. It is considered an “idiopathic environmental illness” by the WHO and is not included as a separate condition in that agency’s International Classification of Diseases.
A recent edition of Physician’s Weekly calls EHS a “clinical syndrome characterized by … a wide spectrum of non-specific multiple organ symptoms.” Headaches, fatigue, insomnia and cognitive impairments are most common but a variety of other symptoms from heart arrhythmias to nausea to tinnitus are also reported, and can range from mild to disabling.
Although some have suggested EHS is psychogenic, research is accumulating that concludes that it is not. Dr. Beatrice Golomb, who studies the condition, has stated that “[EHS] symptoms arise from physiological injury.” [Editor’s Note: See disclosure above.]
A 2020 paper by Dominique Belpomme and Philippe Irigaray lists EHS biomarkers — including oxidative stress by-products in blood samples and scan-detected blood-flow changes in the brain — and asks that EHS now be included as a separate condition in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases.
Surveys of countries from Finland to Taiwan have estimated that EHS affects from 0.7% to 13.3% of studied populations. Noting an upward trend, a 2006 letter to Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine by scientists Örjan Hallberg and Gerd Oberfeld asked, “Will we all become electrosensitive?” Already, write Belpomme and Irigaray, “millions of people may in fact be affected by EHS worldwide.”
How might wireless radiation affect nature?
Researchers have reported that birds and bees lose their navigational ability near cell towers, while treessport damaged leaves and foliage die-off. Studies also suggest that RFR might contribute to bird population declines, bee colony collapse disorder and recent dramatic drops in insect numbers.
A 2013 review of 113 plant and animal studies catalogs these and other findings on RFR’s impacts. So does Dr. Cindy Russell of Physicians for Safe Technology in her article, “Wireless Silent Spring,” which draws parallels between toxic chemicals and EMR.
Such impacts concerned the U.S. Department of the Interiorin 2014, when it wrote to the FCC that wireless safety guidelines did not adequately protect wildlife. But now, within Interior, the National Park Service is expanding wireless facilities, writes Christopher Ketcham — including in the Grand Tetons, as reported by Jimmy Tobias (who conducted his investigation with funding from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism).
These articles hint at openings for more media coverage of wireless tech’s effects on nature. Study findings, too, raise opportunities for more reporting. Just how serious are the effects of RFR on flora and fauna? How might they impact various species in combination with factors such as habitat loss, chemical pollution or climate change?
More reporting issues and angles
Wireless from space: Recent and proposed satellite launches will vastly expand wireless services from space. Astronomers complain these satellites obscure the night sky; others warn of potential health effects. What might be the cumulative impact of 50,000-plus wireless-from-space satellites and their transmitting/receiving equipment on Earth?
5G and forecasts: 5G has raised concerns beyond health — security, privacy and the integrity of weather forecasting among them. Columbia Journalism Review recently covered meteorologists’worries. As 5G develops, will it impair collection of accurate water vapor data, as they fear, and compromise weather and climate forecasts?
Misleading media: Journalists can do a better job drilling down to the facts on wireless radiation. Misleading media reports are all over the map. Recent stories with headlines like “5G networks have few health impacts, study finds,” covered research that examined one 5G wavelength but did not include mm waves. Conversely, conspiracy theory stories alleging 5G horrors are overshadowing “real 5G issues,” according to Investigate Europe, a nonprofit cross-border team of European journalists based in Germany.
Our technological footprint: The internet’s energy and ecological footprint is already large. How much bigger might the demand for mobile wireless connectivity make energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and other impacts on planetary health?
Wary insurers: The insurance industry was early among businesses to recognize climate change risks. Is its approach to wireless tech similar? Insurance policies class EMF as a “pollutant” and don’t offer product liability coverage for devices. A related paper by Michigan Technological University Professor Joshua Pearce recognizes potential wireless liability risks, advising that cell towers be sited away from schools and hospitals due to growing evidence of health effects.
Environmental justice: Some science suggests EMR and toxic chemicals, including metals, can have synergistic health impacts. Since higher toxic exposures often occur in low-income areas, tribal communities and communities of color, does placing wireless transmitters in those locations — especially if used in place of fiber to close the digital divide — constitute an environmental justice issue?
Smart meters: “Smart” utility meters, which often transmit data using RFR, continue to elicit health complaints. Are you covering any? A 2011 SEJ TipSheet written by the late environmental journalist Robert Weinhold provides relevant background.
Medical EMR assessments: The non-specific symptoms sometimes attributed to EMR exposures — such as headache or fatigue — led the American Academy of Environmental Medicineto suggest in 2012 that doctors routinely ask patients about their electromagnetic environments. How many doctors do so? How much might they overlook this or other environmental factors that could contribute to illness?
Safer tech R&D: Is there potential for safer tech? Is your nearest university engineering department doing any feature-worthy research along these lines? In the last section of his article, “Wireless Wake-Up Call: A New Paradigm in EMF Science,” engineer Jeromy Johnson covers areas of safer tech research and development — possible starting points for interview questions or background research.
Home improvements: If we don’t use wireless, what then? Stories about creating lower-RFR homes with cabled and corded alternatives might find a bigger audience among the pandemic period’s homebound populace.
By the way, journalist Louis Slesin of Microwave News is an ongoing source of story ideas and insights into EMR science and policy. Another useful source is Joel Moskowitz, director of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health, whose Electromagnetic Radiation Safety blog regularly posts summaries of and links to recent studies on EMR and health.
Some final words
I’m still electrosensitized, although not nearly as debilitated as in the first years after my health crashed. Avoiding RFR, I’ve found, has been the most effective way to avoid symptoms and maintain my health (see sidebar for how you can reduce your own potential risks). I don’t own a cell phone or anything wireless, and no longer use computers, at least not directly (helpful others typed up this story).
In the documentary Full Signal, Swedish EMR scientist Olle Johansson said that those of us with EHS might be “the lucky ones:” to avoid difficult symptoms, we often radically reduce our EMR exposure, thus cutting our potential risk of future — perhaps worse — health consequences.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Long-time SEJ member Katie Alvord is an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in a range of publications. She received the 2007 AAAS Science Journalism Award for Excellence in Online Reporting, for writing a series on Lake Superior Basin climate change. She has also worked with and written for libraries, government agencies and nonprofit groups, and is the author of “Divorce Your Car!” Marjorie Alvord, Katie’s sister, contributed research, computerization and editorial material for this story.
January 20th, 2021 by Center For Biological Diversity
National environmental groups filed a lawsuit today in the Southern District of New York challenging the Trump administration’s reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which eliminated longstanding, vital protections for more than 1,000 species of waterfowl, raptors and songbirds.
Under the Trump administration’s revised interpretation, the Act’s protections will apply only to activities that are specifically intended to kill birds. So-called “incidental” take, regardless of its impact on bird populations or how foreseeable that impact is — such as letting birds drown in uncovered oil pits — is rendered immune from enforcement under the law.
“Trump’s tenure has been a reign of terror for the environment, and his cruel insistence on destroying this century-old law is a testament to his total disregard for wildlife,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The revised rule is nothing but a gift to oil companies and other polluters, allowing them to kill birds without legal consequence. The courts rightfully stopped this farce once before, and we hope this latest suit again fully restores legal protection to birds that desperately need it.”
Had the Trump administration’s policy been in place at the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, British Petroleum would have avoided paying more than $100 million in fines to support wetland and migratory bird conservation to compensate for more than a million birds the accident was estimated to have killed.
“Trump’s rollback of migratory bird protections is an appalling and inexcusable give-away to corporate polluters who don’t want to face any consequences for killing birds,” said Bonnie Rice, Sierra Club’s endangered species representative. “Two-thirds of North America’s birds are imperiled by climate change. More than three billion birds have vanished since 1970. We need more protections, not less, in the face of this massive loss and the current human-caused extinction crisis.”
“We are back in the courts to fight the Trump administration’s callous decision to eliminate protections for migratory birds,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. “Even though a federal court already ruled that the administration’s reinterpretation of the MBTA was illegal, it pushed forward with its rulemaking to cement this destructive policy into law. We are here to overturn this terrible decision once and for all.”
Background
The Trump administration began its assault on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in December 2017 with a legal opinion authored by Daniel Jorjani, the solicitor of the Department of the Interior and a former Koch Industries employee. This opinion has already allowed birds deaths across the country that could have easily been avoided. In May 2018 the Center and allies filed suit in the Southern District of New York to challenge the proposed revision, resulting in a blistering court decision overturning the opinion.
Flouting the court ruling invalidating the basis for the reinterpretation, the Trump administration moved ahead with finalizing the rule on Jan. 4, along with a flurry of other last-minute actions aimed at eviscerating an array of essential environmental laws and regulations.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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 trialsofinfluenza 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 manyconcerns 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.
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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!
*
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.
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.
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.
***
Many folks are scratching their heads wondering why in the world Russian anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny would return to the same country that he claimed had unsuccessfully tried to kill him last year, yet that’s exactly what he inexplicably decided to do over the weekend.
He had previously been receiving treatment at a Berlin hospital after being poisoned by an unknown chemical substance that the Western Mainstream Media claims was Russian-produced Novichok, though Moscow vehemently denies the allegations. After all, conventional wisdom suggests that the Kremlin wouldn’t have let Navalny leave Russia for Germany in the first place had it truly wanted to assassinate him. In any case, the information warfare narrative recently being spun by hostile forces is that Russia is a so-called “rogue regime” which deserves to be aggressively isolated from the international community, including through the possible imposition of more sanctions against it.
Most observers expected Navalny to live out the rest of his days abroad acting as a symbolic but politically insignificant “opposition” figure as this blogger has been popularly but wrongly described by many. He therefore surprised everyone by recently announcing that he’ll return home despite the authorities promising to detain him for his probation violations, which they ultimately ended up doing true to their word, with a court ruling that it’ll last until 15 February.
This sequence of events in turn prompted incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to lambast the Kremlin for following its own laws, which was followed by Russian Foreign Minister spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reminding him to respect international law by not encroaching on the national legislation of sovereign states. Shortly thereafter, the British and German Foreign Ministers echoed Sullivan’s demand that Navalny be immediate released. As can obviously be seen, this incident is being exploited for clear information warfare purposes against Russia.
With that in mind, it convincingly appears as though Navalny timed his provocatively senseless return to Russia to coincide with the run-up to Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday. The purpose in doing so was to establish the “publicly plausible” pretext for for the incoming president to intensify his country’s anti-Russian crusade following Navalny’s detainment in response to his probation violations.
Nord Stream II has always been the real target all along, not so-called the promotion of so-called “democracy” and “human rights” in Russia, as was obvious the moment that foreign figures started calling for sanctions against that project shortly after news about Navalny’s poisoning last summer was first reported. Biden also plans to assemble an “Alliance of Democracies” as part of the US’ forthcoming soft power push aimed at connecting its geographically disparate network of allies so giving them a “unifying cause” to rally around by condemning Navalny’s detainment could serve to advance that grand strategic objective as well.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that President Putin accused Navalny (though not by name since he prefers to use the euphemism “Berlin patient”) of cooperating with US intelligence agencies during his year-end press conference last month which adds credence to the author’s interpretation of recent events as being part of a preplanned Hybrid War provocation for the previously explained ends.
Navalny never truly felt that his own government tried to kill him last summer otherwise he’d have never returned to the scene of the crime if that was the case. Nor, for that matter, would his intelligence handlers have allowed him to do so. They only want him to serve as an “opposition” icon, a role which they concluded that he’d more effectively play while in Russia (whether jailed or free) than living abroad in Germany for example. That’s why he mysteriously decided to return home over the weekend, which in and of itself debunks his own prior claims that the Kremlin unsuccessfully tried to kill him. The real purpose of his return is to rally the “opposition” and “justify” sanctions against Nord Stream II.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
“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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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
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
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!
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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 ofNATO, 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 8th 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 58th 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.
Appendix
1: Belgium’s crimes before Congo’s independence
Belgium’s crimes before Congo’s independence (1885-1960)
One may consider it a certainty that the King of the Belgians, and the Congo Free State, which he governed with the agreement of the Belgian government and parliament of the time, are responsible for deliberate ‘crimes against humanity’. These crimes are not blunders; they are the direct result of the type of exploitation to which the Congolese population was subjected. Some prominent authors have spoken of ‘genocide’. I propose not to create a debate focused on this issue because it is difficult to agree on figures. Some serious authors estimate the Congolese population in 1885 to have been around 20 million, and write that in 1908 when Leopold II transferred the Congo to Belgium, thus creating the Belgian Congo, there remained 10 million Congolese. These estimates by reputable authors are, however, difficult to verify in the absence of a population census.
The colonial period when Belgium owned the Congo (1908-1960)
Leopold II tried to get rid of the Congo since by making it over to Belgium he would also shake off the debts he had accumulated with various banks. Acceding to his request, Belgium inherited the debts contracted to exploit the Congolese people. The King had hoarded the extracted wealth as private loot while he had ordered enormous expenses from Belgium to strengthen its power and image. But big Belgian and foreign capitalist corporations had also had their share: Belgian arms manufacturers and traders, companies that supplied equipment, those that collected and processed natural rubber, and many others.
The Belgian State thus inherited the Congo and Leopold II’s debts, which led to further exploitation of the Congolese people.
While the Congo was a Belgian colony, big Belgian capitalist companies made maximum profitthanks to the exploitation of the huge natural resources of the country, notably in terms of minerals of all kinds. The Belgian State was paying off Leopold II’s debts and contracting new ones to better help big capital to accumulate maximum profit.
The Congolese people had no rights to speak of. The education system was pitifully inadequate because Belgium wanted to prevent the Congolese from entering higher or university education.
Not only were the Congolese people exploited in their native land, but they were also called upon to fight for Belgium during the various wars it was involved in, notably with an eye on the German colonies of Rwanda and Burundi to the East of the Congo. Thousands of Congolese died away from home fighting wars waged by European capitalist powers.
During the Second World War, the US made the atom bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 with uranium extracted for the Congolese province of Katanga. And indeed as Belgium was on the winning side in the First World War, it was able to extend its colonial territory with Rwanda and Burundi, wrenched from the German Empire through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
During the Second World War, the US made the atom bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 with uranium extracted for the Congolese province of Katanga. By way of thanks the US canceled the debt Belgium owed them.
On the other hand, when Belgium agreed to the Congo’s independence on 30 June 1960, it expected the Congolese government led by Patrice Lumumba to take over the debt Belgium had accumulated with the World Bank over the 1950s to exploit the ‘Belgian’ Congo.
Lumumba refused. This was one of the reasons that induced Belgium to plan and directly participate in Lumumba’s murder of in January 1961.
2: Belgium’s crimes after Congo’s independence
With the World Bank aiding and abetting, Belgium forced the Congolese people to pay a debt that had been used for their colonial exploitation
In the book The World Bank: a never-ending coup d’Etat originally published in 2006, [10] I pointed out the fact that the debt Belgium had contracted with the World Bank during the 1950s had been unjustly relegated to the Congolese people thanks to Mobutu’s complicity when he organized the arrest, then actively participated in the murder, of Lumumba.
How did it work? Violating the right to self-determination, the World Bank granted loans to Belgium, France and the UK to finance projects in their colonies. [11] As acknowledged by the Bank’s historians, “The loans, which served to alleviate the dollar shortages of the European colonial powers, were largely directed to colonial interests, especially mining, either through direct investments or indirect assistance, as in the development of the transport infrastructure related to mining”. [12] Those loans made it possible for colonial powers to reinforce the yoke under which they kept colonized people. They contributed to supplying colonial metropolises with minerals, farm products, fuel. In the case of the Belgian Congo, the millions of dollars that were granted for projects decided by the colonial power were almost entirely spent by the Congo’s colonial administration to buy products exported from Belgium. All in all the Belgian Congo ‘received’ loans for US $120 million (in three tranches), 105.4 million of which were spent in Belgium. [13] For Patrice Lumumba’s government it was just unthinkable to pay the World Bank a debt that had been contracted by Belgium in order to exploit the Belgian Congo.
The World Bank and Belgium violated international law when in the 1960s they forced onto the newly independent Congo the burden of debt contracted for its colonization.
Things changed in 1965: after Mobutu’s military coup, the Congo, now renamed Zaire, acknowledged that it had a debt towards the World Bank; of course the debt had actually been contracted by Belgium to exploit the Belgian Congo.
International law is very clear on this point. A similar case occurred in the past and was decided on by the Treaty of Versailles. When Poland retrieved its status as an independent state after the First World War, it was decided that debts contracted by Germany to colonize the part of Poland it had occupied would not be charged to the newly independent state. The Treaty of Versailles signed on 28 June 1919 stipulated: “There shall be excluded from the share of such financial liabilities assumed by Poland that portion of the debt which, according to the finding of the Reparation Commission… arises from measures adopted by the German and Prussian Governments with a view to German colonisation in Poland.” [14] The Treaty provides that creditors who have lent to Germany for projects on Polish territory can claim their due only from that colonial metropolitan power and not from Poland. Alexander Nahum Sack, the theoretician of odious debt, specifies in his 1927 law treaty: “When the government contracts debts in order to subject the population in part of its territory or to colonize it with nationals of the dominant nationality, etc., those debts are odious for the native population in that part of the territory of the debtor State.” [15]
The Treaty of Versailles decreed that the German Empire would lose its African colonies and that their debts would be cancelled. In this respect, Sack quotes part of the Allied Powers’ reply to Germany, that was not ready to accept such debt cancellation because it meant it would have to foot the bill. They said, “The colonies should not bear any portion of the German debt, nor remain under any obligation to refund to Germany the expenses incurred by the Imperial administration of the Protectorate. In fact, it would be unjust to burden the natives with expenditure which appears to have been incurred in Germany’ s own interest, and it would be no less unjust to make this responsibility rest upon the Mandatory Powers which, in so far as they may be appointed trustees by the League of Nations, will derive no benefit from such trusteeship.” [16]
This fully applies to the loans the Bank granted Belgium, France and the UK for the development of their colonies. Consequently, the World Bank and Belgium violated international law when in the 1960s they forced onto the newly independent Congo the burden of debt contracted for its colonization.
Belgium’s support of Mobutu’s dictatorship
Furthermore, Belgium sent high-ranking advisors to the Congo under Mobutu’s dictatorship, among them Jacques de Groote, who had taken part in the Belgian-Congolese round table to prepare the independence of the Belgian Congo in the first months of 1960. Mobutu also participated in the opening of the round-table conference in Brussels. Between April 1960 and May 1963, de Groote was an advisor to Belgium’s Executive Director at the IMF and World Bank in Washington. On November 24, 1965 Mobutu seized power for good by staging a coup against President Kasavubu. From March 1966 to May 1969, de Groote was an economic advisor to the de facto government of Mobutu, while also working as an advisor at the National Bank of the Congo. He played an active role in the design and implementation of the economic policy of the country as well as in the negotiations between Mobutu, the IMF, the World Bank, and the US government.
In the period 1973–1994, Jacques De Groote was one of the Executive Directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and one of the governors of the World Bank (IBRD). He was an active member of a hard core in the Belgian political class while representing its interests and those of big private corporations within international institutions. [17]
At the end of the 1970s, Erwin Blumenthal, a senior IMF official, German banker, and former Director of Foreign Affairs at the Bundesbank, made a damning report about Mobutu’s management of Zaire. [18] He warned foreign creditors that they should not expect repayment as long as Mobutu remained in power.
Between 1965 and 1981, the government of Zaire borrowed about $5 billion from foreign creditors, and between 1976 and 1981 there were four restructuring programmes authorised by the Paris club concerning part of its external debt amounting to $2.25 billion (see the figure below on the amount of debt in Congo-Kinshasa during Mobutu’s dictatorship). All of this debt falls into the category of odious debt, and can therefore be considered null and void.
The very poor economic management and systematic embezzlement by Mobutu of part of the loans did not lead the IMF and World Bank to stop their assistance to Mobutu’s dictatorial regime. Strikingly enough, after the Blumenthal report was submitted, the Bank’s disbursements increased (so did the IMF’s disbursements, but they do not show in the chart below). [19]Clearly, the choices made by the World Bank and the IMF are not mainly determined on the basis of sound economic management. Mobutu’s regime remained a strategic ally of the US and other influential powers in the Bretton Woods institutions (e.g., France and Belgium) as long as the Cold War lasted.
Congo-Kinshasa (Zaire under Mobutu): World Bank disbursements
From 1989-1991 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, later followed by the crumbling of the Soviet Union, Western powers began to loseinterest in Mobutu’s regime. All the more so since in many African countries (including Zaire) national conferences were taking place and making democratic claims. The World Bank reduced its lending before stopping its loans altogether in the mid-1990s.
Under Mobutu’s rule (1965-1997), the IMF and the World Bank were instruments serving US policy and geostrategy, which rewarded Mobutu for his support in the Cold War.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Eric Toussaintis 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.
[2] Félix Roland Moumié (1925-1960), a leader of the anticolonialist and anti-imperialist struggle in Cameroon, was assassinated on orders from France in Geneva on 3 November 1960.
[3] Saïd Bouamama, Figures de la révolution africaine, La Découverte, 2014, 300 p.
[10] Eric Toussaint, Banque mondiale : le Coup d’Etat permanent. L’Agenda caché du Consensus de Washington, co-published by CADTM / Syllepse / CETIM, Liège/Paris/Geneva, 2006, 310 pages. http://cadtm.org/Banque-mondiale-le-coup-d-Etat; translated into Spanish Banco mundial: el golpe de estado permanente Editorial Viejo Topo (Barcelona), 2007 ; Editorial Abya-Yala (Quito), 2007 ; Editorial del CIM, Caracas, 2007 ; Editorial Observatorio DESC, La Paz, 2007; into English The World Bank: a never-ending coup d’Etat: the hidden agenda of Washington Consensus Pub. VAK (Mumbai-India), 2007, also as The World Bank : A Critical Primer, Pluto Press, London; Michigan University Press, Michigan; Between The Lines, Toronto,; David Philip, Cape Town; and recently into Japanese.
[11] The colonies for which the World Bank granted loans are, to Belgium the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi; to the UK, East Africa (including Kenya, Uganda and future Tanzania), Rhodesia (that became Zimbabwe and Zambia) as well as Nigeria, to which we must add British Guyana in South America; to France, Algeria, Gabon, French West Africa (Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan that became Mali, Guinea-Conakry, Ivory Coast, Niger, Upper-Volta that became Burkina Faso, Dahomey that became Benin).
[12] KAPUR, Devesh, LEWIS, John P., WEBB, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 1, p. 685-686.
[13] The fact that Belgium was the beneficiary of loans to the Belgian Congo can be deduced from a table published in the WB’s 15th Annual Report for 1959-1960. IBRD (World Bank), Fifteenth Annual Report 1959-1960, Washington DC, p. 12.
[15] SACK, Alexander Nahum, Les Effets des Transformations des Etats sur leurs Dettes Publiques et Autres Obligations financières, Recueil Sirey, Paris, 1927. p. 158.
[16] Source : Treaty series, no. 4, 1919, p. 26. Cited by Sack, p. 162.
[17] In 2013, I devoted a book to this figure: The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man, https://cadtm.org/The-Life-and-Crimes-of-an-Exemplary-Man Though anecdotal, the list of decorations awarded to Jacques De Groote is quite telling: he is Grand Officier de l’Ordre de Léopold Ier in Belgium, i.e. the second highest Belgian distinction; Mobutu decorated him with the Palme d’or in Zaire; he is also Grand Officier de l‘Ordre d’Orange-Nassau (Luxembourg), he is bearer of the Orden für Verdienste in Austria and received the Red Star in Hungary.
[18] It is worth mentioning that at the height of his power, Mobutu had people call him “Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga” (which means Mobutu the unstoppable warrior who goes from one victory to another).
[19] The Bank’s historians wrote that in 1982 “Lured by Mobutu’s guile and promise of reform and by pressures from the United States, France, and Belgium, the bank embarked on an ambitious structural adjustment lending program to Zaire” in Devesh Kapur, John P. Lewis, Richard Webb, The World Bank, Its First Half Century, 1997 Volume 1: History, p. 702.
[20] In 1978, the IMF sent Erwin Blumenthal to the Central Bank of Zaire to improve its operations. In July 1979, he resigned after receiving death threats from those close to Mobutu.
[21] Erwin Blumenthal, “Zaire: Report on her Financial Credibility”, 7 April 1982, typescript, p.19.
[22] Mobutu even managed to intercept money before it actually reached the public coffers, as happened for instance with the $5 million granted by Saudi Arabia in 1977 (Emmanuel Dungia, Mobutu et l’argent du Zaïre (Mobutu and the money of Zaire), 1992, L’Harmattan, p.157).
[23] Steve Askin and Carole Collins, “External Collusion with Kleptocracy: Can Zaire Recapture its Stolen Wealth?” in African Political Economy, 1993, no. 57, p.77.
[24] L’ENTREPRENEUR. 1980. « Le lancinant problème de la dette extérieure du Zaïre » (The problem of Zaire’s persistent external debt), n°11, December 1980, p. 44-47.
[25] The $32 million corresponds to the debt that Belgium and the World Bank imposed on the Congo with the complicity of Mobutu’s regime. As stated above, during the 1950s Belgium borrowed $120 million from the World Bank to develop its colonial projects in the Belgian Congo. Belgium had only repaid part of this loan before the Congo gained its independence on 30 June 1960. The remaining amount ($32 million) was passed on to the Congo when Mobutu established his dictatorship in 1965.
[26] HAYNES, J., PARFITT, T. and RILEY, S. 1986. “Debt in Sub-Saharan Africa: The local politics of stabilisation,” in African Affairs, July 1986, p.346.
[27] Ibid, p. 347.
[28] NDIKUMANA, Leonce and BOYCE, James. 1997. Congo’s Odious Debt: External borrowing and Capital Flight, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts.
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”.
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
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.’
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.
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.’
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.’
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).
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.
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,
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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’.
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:
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
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
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
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.
With the pandemic, the “digital transformation” that so many analysts have been referring to for years, without being exactly sure what it meant, has found its catalyst. One major effect of confinement will be the expansion and progression of the digital world in a decisive and often permanent manner. – Klaus Schwab, COVID-19: The Great Reset (p. 153)
No matter the origin or true lethality of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus pandemic has been utilized to implement broader agendas that have been planned well in advance. One of the motivations for declaring a global pandemic was to make possible the widespread usage of new technology such as facial recognition, digital IDs and payment systems, mRNA vaccines and vaccine certificates. This is openly stated in books such as COVID-19:The Great Reset and The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The engineers of the “plandemic” recognized that new technology is often resisted by the masses, but could be adopted quickly due to a public health crisis. What better way to coerce people into using technology that has long been planned to enslave humanity than by holding them hostage to a “deadly” virus causing people to fear for their lives? From the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, humanity was told the world could not return to normal without global vaccination against the coronavirus. We were even told that some things would never return to normal.
In fact, the people and organizations behind exercises such as Crimson Contagion and Event 201 secretly planned to reshape the world in their technocratic image using the guise of the pandemic to implement their schemes.
For decades Hollywood, a major partner in advancing globalist agendas, has been conditioning people to accept all-pervasive surveillance through films such as Enemy of the State,Eagle Eye, and Minority Report. The societies depicted in those dystopian films is now a reality. Welcome to Dystopia Now!
Vaccine Certificates Will Change the Future of Work and Travel
On January 14 the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), a broad coalition of health and technology corporations, was announced. The VCI combines the efforts of companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Mayo Clinic for the purpose of standardizing digital access to vaccination records. The VCI also garners support from the World Economic Forum (i.e., Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset) through The Commons Project Foundation and its Common Pass project.
Common Pass is a “globally-interoperable platform for people to document their COVID-19 status (health declarations/PCR tests/vaccinations) to satisfy country entry requirements, while protecting their health data privacy.” In other words, it’s a digital tracking system designed to keep people from traveling unless current with vaccines and other future health requirements. Common Pass requires a smartphone and works on Apple (through the Apple Health app) and Android (through the CommonHealth app) devices. Authorities will be able to scan a QR code embedded in the app that will verify whether an individual is cleared for travel. It is expected to launch in the first half of 2022.
In the new world being erected right before our eyes, the Global Syndicate does not want the average citizen to have the right to travel freely without being closely monitored for compliance with new societal rules. They claim reducing travel will help the environment and solve the problem of climate change, but this is just a ruse to destroy individual freedom and rights. In reality, they want humanity locked into a surveillance grid that can track every movement and eventually, every thought!
As I warned in part four of the Beware the Vaccine series, employers will eventually make it difficult to work without proof of vaccination. Additionally, stores, concert and sports venues, restaurants, museums, and parks may also soon require a tool like Common Pass to shop for necessities and access entertainment and leisure. But it doesn’t stop here.
Facial Recognition, Thermal Cameras, and Biometric Wearables
Surveillance including the use of facial recognition technology was increasingly used by governments worldwide under the guise of fighting the spread of COVID-19. As early as last April, Amazon began using thermal cameras to scan workers for fever and other symptoms of coronavirus. Companies such as Thermal Guardian and Flir have been supplying thermal cameras to airports, healthcare centers, businesses, casinos and even grocery stores throughout the plandemic.
Contact tracing plans largely failed because people were uncooperative, and the technology was not well developed. Companies such as TraceSafe and Estimote have created the next wave of contact tracing tools in the form of biometric wearable devices. Wearables from Flywallet and Digital DNA will hold your vaccine certificates. For now, these new surveillance devices are meant to be worn outside the body, but the ultimate goal is for widespread adoption of bodily implants as documented in my Internet of Bodies article.
Though there have been some rumblings about the privacy violations these technologies could create, it hasn’t stopped their development or implementation by governments and companies worldwide. This does not bode well for the future as the digital transformation of society races on.
Digital IDs Will Place All Humans on the Surveillance Grid
Globalists have a funny way of posing as saviors while secretly planning humanity’s total subjugation. A global technocracy cannot be imposed without robust surveillance systems, widespread deployment of artificial intelligence, and the digitization of everything.
The push for digital identification is increasing at a pace faster than Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash. As I wrote in part 5 of the Beware the Vaccine series:
“…the plan is to roll out a full-fledged digital ID (ID2020) which would contain driver’s licenses, passports, work badges, building access cards, debit and credit cards, transit passes, and more.”
Under the guise of aiding the marginalized and protecting their civil liberties, despotic technocrats will be able to use digital IDs to control access to government, finance, health, travel, and any service where an ID would be required for access or benefits. The road to the ID2020 initiative leads to the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. You may recall that both were co-sponsors of Event 201, the pandemic planning exercise that became reality just a few months later. Is it a mere coincidence that these two foundations are the driving forces behind global pandemic planning, vaccination, and the creation and enforcement of digital IDs?
Digital Payment Systems, Global Digital Currencies, and the Cashless Society
The next domino to fall, coinciding with a planned and coordinated global economic reset, will be universal adoption of digital payments and the outlawing of cash.
The plandemic has served to rapidly change the way people think about money, especially cash. Last March, the World Health Organization vilified cash as a coronavirus spreader, and its use was restricted around the world. Coin shortages also soon followed, resulting in a dramatic shift toward digital payments. Talks and moves to implement digital currencies ramped up, all according to schedule.
Prior to the plandemic, cash usage was still prominent in the U.S., but was already on the decline in China and many Asian countries. The COVID-19 crisis provided the perfect cover to accelerate adoption of digital payments throughout Western nations.
Many are excited about digital money and the blockchain technology behind it, believing it will be the key to decentralization and less oversight by central banks. However, history has proven that elites tend to establish greater control of economies as societies move away from physical currency.
This push for digitalization is placing the world at a crossroads. I believe the transition to a global digital economy will happen similar to the way Napster revolutionized digital file sharing (mainly music) in the late 90s. As millions of songs were uploaded, downloaded, and shared across Napster’s networks, consumers relished the ability to obtain “free” music. However, the music industry and many of its artists were not happy and launched an all-out assault against Napster and the many services it spawned, such as Limewire and BitTorrent. After years of legal proceedings, the music industry was able to smash Napster and other file-sharing platforms to pieces. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) even sued individual citizens for illegal downloading and file-sharing. Through the creation of platforms like iTunes, Spotify and Apple Music, the music industry regained iron-clad control of its copyrighted material. Sadly, artist revenue never rebounded to pre digital piracy heights.
I see a similar situation with blockchain and digital currency. Though blockchain technology and cryptocurrency may initially provide financial freedom and anonymity through products like BitCoin, eventually the banking elites and their technocratic partners will find a way to regain control. The Federal Reserve has already proposed a new FedCoin that threatens to centralize digital currency with the ability to track and/or prohibit transactions. Attacks on cryptocurrency are on the rise as governments, credit card companies, and mega-corporations have banned their use. Big tech giants like Facebook and Google joined together to ban cryptocurrency ads. However, Facebook (which owns data from billions of people) has announced it will launch its new rebranded cryptocurrency called Diem later this year.
To top it off, several countries and banks have issued Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) which threaten to destroy the independent and anonymous financial system brokered through blockchain technology. Once these efforts by governments, central banks, and mega-corporations gain steam, it won’t be long before BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies will be targeted for extinction. Those who possess them may be sued, criminalized, and excluded from financial systems much like those who pirated music in the earlier part of the century.
The War on Terror Set the Stage for Global Surveillance
A significant outcome of the war on terror was the emergence of the surveillance state. Initially sold as a way to track terrorists, governments soon turned these tactics on their citizens, as revealed by whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and through legislation like the Patriot Act (which President-Elect Joe Biden bragged about writing) and National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It even spawned the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an entirely new government agency conceived to monitor known and “potential” terrorists and prevent future terror attacks. With time and the advancement of technology, the fledgling surveillance state of the early 2000s has grown exponentially into the monstrous biosecurity police state now emerging.
What began as eagle eye tools for militaries to track and monitor “terrorists” abroad have now been adapted for use in everyday consumer products like nanny cams, smartphones, smart watches, and vehicles. Use of traffic and surveillance cameras have exploded in the years since 9/11 to the point where the U.S. and China combined possess one surveillance camera for every four people. It is expected that 2021 will see the global deployment of over one billion cameras.
DHS expects to have biometric data including DNA and face, fingerprint, and iris scans of at least 259 million people by 2022. DHS is using cloud-based software called Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART), hosted by Amazon Web Services to “make it possible to confirm the identity of travelers at any point in their travel,” according to former secretary Kevin McAleenan. The possibilities of using this software to curb individual rights and freedom are staggering. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
“The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.”
Northrop Grumman, a preeminent U.S. defense contractor, received a $95 million contract to develop the first two phases of the HART system under DHS’s Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM). But this is just one of many ongoing government surveillance projects designed to spy on and incorporate all of humanity in biometric databases.
Technology Isn’t the Problem, It’s the People Behind It
For the record, I am not advocating against the use of new technology. Technology is simply a tool used to achieve a task or goal. It’s mostly neither good nor bad. How it’s used, who’s using it, and for what purpose typically determines benefit or harm. However, it has been proven time and again that digital systems are fragile, ripe for hacking, and contain back doors that can be used to spy on users. Though the technologies discussed in this article promise privacy and individual control, trusting those overseeing their development or deployment is foolish. Most involved in the creation, implementation, distribution, and use of these technologies have ties to governments, global entities, spy agencies, and billion-dollar tech companies.
All these new inventions are being used to create a global panopticon, making it easy for technocrats to control humanity through technological innovation. So pardon me if I don’t get all excited about artificial intelligence, augmented reality, body implants, and other rapidly developing technologies. In fact, these unprecedented modern times make me nostalgic for corded telephones and fax machines.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Jesse Smith is an independent journalist who operates the Truth Unmuted website. Truth Unmuted is dedicated to exposing the lies, motives, and methods of the global cabal trying to force humanity into a new world order. The website covers issues such as technocracy, globalism, transhumanism, politics, health, and other relevant topics that tie into global agendas.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
On 17 January 1961, just sixty years ago, the first legally elected prime minister of the DRC was assassinated after being overthrown with help from Washington. A sinister episode that Larry Devlin, the ‘Mr. Congo’ of the CIA from 1960 to 1967, would reveal half a century later in his fascinating book, ‘Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone.’
Leopoldville, on 30 June 1960. With the declaration of its independence, the DRC finally emerges from its long colonial history. A new bilateral system is established with a head of state as cunning as he is impenetrable, Joseph Kasavubu, and a Prime Minister as charismatic as he is unpredictable, Patrice Lumumba. In bars, people dance to the rhythm of the Independence Cha Cha, but the euphoria will be short-lived.
On 5 July, a mutiny broke out in the Thysville camp (Mbanza-Ngungu), then spread to the capital. Over a matter of pay, no doubt, but also a revolt against the continued Belgian presence in the DRC by virtue of bilateral agreements. “For the army and General Janssens, who commands it, has the impudence to say that independence means nothing.”
On 11 July, the rich province of Katanga, where the Belgian “Mining Union” reigns, secedes under the leadership of Moïse Tshombe. South Kasai threatens to do the same. This new state-continent is on the verge of imploding.
A tough guy
It is in this context that the new CIA station chief landed at Leopoldville Beach on 10 July 1960. A CIA agent since 1949, Lawrence (Larry) Devlin is an experienced man and a tough guy. His “cover” is that of an ordinary consul, and his local boss is US Ambassador Clare Timberlake.
Very quickly, the two men believed in the same thing, shared in Washington by their superiors: Prime Minister Lumumba, the Kasai nationalist and co-founder of the powerful Congolese National Movement, is a dangerous man. A communist? No. A USSR agent? Probably not. A man who could be easily manipulated by the Soviets and the KGB? Certainly. It is therefore necessary to do everything possible to isolate him.
With the utmost discretion, Devlin then begins to sound out, with a view to possible recruitment, some of the most prominent Congolese political leaders, reputed for their animosity towards Lumumba. They include Albert Kalonji, leader of the Balubas of South Kasai, Paul Bolya, a Mongo leader from Ecuador, Pierre Soumialot, Lumumba’s own private secretary, the trade unionist Cyrille Adoula and, above all, the man who would become one of his most loyal contacts, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Justin Bomboko.
During the month of July 1960, the situation deteriorated a little more each day. In Matadi, on the Atlantic coast, Belgian parachutists were deployed to protect their compatriots from the Congolese army who were fighting with heavy weapons.
On the 13th, Lumumba announces the rupture of diplomatic relations with Belgium and threatens to call for Soviet intervention if the Westerners do not move. On the 17th, a first contingent of UN peacekeepers landed at N’Djili airport, led by British General Alexander, who said: “Congolese politicians have not yet come down from their trees.”
A maelstrom of violence and looting
At the heart of this maelstrom of violence and looting, the Americans are more obsessed than ever with the Prime Minister. Not only do the socialist chancelleries – the USSR, Czechoslovakia, China, East Germany, Ghana, Guinea – support Lumumba, but his own entourage is, according to the CIA, full of “KGB agents.”
We are in the middle of the Cold War, and the Americans will stop at nothing to counter their target. Learning that the prestigious Time magazine is planning to publish a cover story about Lumumba, Ambassador Timberlake warns his counterpart in Belgium, who calls up his friend Henry Luce, the magazine’s owner. The result: Lumumba disappears from the cover in the name of America’s supreme interests.
In a wired message to CIA headquarters, Devlin wrote:
“Patrice Lumumba was born to be a revolutionary, but he doesn’t have the qualities to exercise power once he’s seized it. Sooner or later, Moscow will take the reins. He believes he can manipulate the Soviets, but they are the ones pulling the strings.”
On 26 August 1960, Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, replied:
“If Lumumba continues to be in power, the result will be at best chaos and at worst an eventual seizure of power by the communists, with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the UN and the interests of the free world. His dismissal must therefore be an urgent and priority objective for you.”
While Ambassador Timberlake is working to convince President Kasavubu to dismiss Lumumba (this requires a parliamentary vote), Devlin is working to undermine the Prime Minister’s authority. With the help of agitators hired for the occasion – he had a budget of $100,000, a considerable sum at the time – the CIA station chief organised anti-Lumumba demonstrations that often degenerated into violence.
On 5 September, Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba and replaced him with Joseph Ileo. However, the nationalist leader fights back, refuses to leave his post and wins parliamentary backing. The constitutional path seems blocked. The CIA believes the time has come to get down to business: the coup d’état.
It was then that a certain Joseph-Désiré Mobutu appeared. Admittedly, the man is not a stranger to the Americans, but they misunderstand his motivation. On the one hand, they consider him temperate, competent and pro-Western; on the other, they are unaware that he was one of Lumumba’s closest collaborators, who made him Secretary of State and then Chief of Staff of the army. In short, this colonel, barely 30 years old, is still an enigma – one that will soon become clearer.
One evening in early September 1960, Devlin had a meeting with Kasavubu at the president’s house. While he is waiting in the living room, Mobutu appears. “I wanted to talk to you very much,” he said. “I’m tired of these political games, this is not how we are going to build a strong, independent and democratic Congo. The Soviets have invaded the country. Do you know that they sent a delegation to Camp Kokolo to teach Marxism to the soldiers and distribute their propaganda? They claim that you Westerners are plundering the Congo whereas they are our real friends. I spoke to Lumumba about this. He told me to mind my own business. I gathered together my zone commanders: they all agreed with me. So let me be clear. The army is ready to overthrow Lumumba and set up a transitional government made up of my supporters. Will the US help us?”
At this point in the conversation, Foreign Minister Bomboko, whom Devlin considers practically one of his agents, enters through a back door. Before sitting down next to Colonel Mobutu, he slips Devlin a little note folded in half on which he has written : “Help him.”
Convinced, the CIA station chief replied: “I can assure you that the US is willing to recognise a transitional government made up of civilians.” Mobutu has a final request: “I need $5,000 for my officers: if the coup fails, their families will be left penniless.” The request is granted.
On 14 September 1960, Mobutu seized power for the first time. Lumumba was arrested, a civilian government in which Bomboko remained foreign minister was appointed, and diplomatic relations with the USSR, China and Czechoslovakia ended. But there is a snag. Mobutu, who has placed Kasavubu under house arrest, is the de facto head of state. Devlin immediately went to see him: “You have a big problem of legitimacy,” he told him, “especially since you dismissed the National Assembly. Restore Kasavubu to power.”
“Legitimacy? You should say hypocrisy!” says an angry Mobutu. However, he will do it as he doesn’t have much of a choice. On at least three occasions in the weeks following the coup d’état, the CIA, filled in by one of its informants who is a part of the very Lumumbist Pierre Mulele’s entourage, allowed Mobutu to thwart assassination attempts.
Devlin personally gets involved by accidentally neutralising a killer while he was visiting his friend at the Kokolo camp. This creates a bond. The CIA’s Chief of Station no longer hides his admiration for this young colonel who not only possesses astonishing physical courage, but who is also capable of mastering a horde of rampaging and threatening mutineers by the mere magic of his words and charisma.
Mobutu is, after all, well surrounded. He is a member of the “Binza group”, who also advises him. This group is composed of people who are either “friends” of the CIA, or recruited by them: Bomboko of course, Adoula and the new director of Security, Victor Nendaka, a former right-hand man of Lumumba, originally from the Oriental Province and considered particularly brilliant.
An operation authorised by Eisenhower
That leaves, of course, the issue of Lumumba. Although placed under arrest, the former Prime Minister has still not left his official residence. Worse, in the eyes of the CIA, he is now protected by UN peacekeepers. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld’s representative in Leopoldville, Rajeshwar Dayal, whom the US considers highly suspicious, has learned that the Congolese soldiers will be replaced by those of the UN. Lumumba’s multiple statements are as courageous as they are inflammatory. In short, he must be stopped.
On 19 September 1960, Devlin received a secret message from Langley: “A certain ‘Joe from Paris’ will arrive in Leopoldville on 27 September; he will contact you, and you will need to work together.” On the designated day, he and “Joe” will meet in a bar and then in a safe house. “Joe” is a chemist who works for the CIA, and he has brought a whole collection of poisons to liquidate Lumumba.
“Who authorised this operation?” asks Devlin. “President Eisenhower himself,” replied “Joe,” adding: “It will be up to you and you alone to carry it out.” He then handed him a package containing the poisons: various powders and liquids for food, drink and even a special toothpaste. “If our man brushes his teeth with it, he will catch a staggering polio. He will be here today, gone tomorrow.”
Devlin, who is not convinced of the need to suppress Lumumba – “he’s no Hitler,” he thinks – nevertheless contacts his only agent within Lumumba’s entourage. But the agent withdrew: he did not, he assured him, have access to the kitchens and private flats of an increasingly distrustful Lumumba. Over the next few weeks, Devlin continued to drag his feet as Langley became more and more impatient: “Where are you at, Larry?” Larry would be saved by the bell.
On 27 November 1960, on a stormy night, Lumumba secretly left the capital to travel to Stanleyville (now Kisangani), his stronghold. He was arrested a few days later in Kasai, severely beaten and flown back to Leopoldville, before being incarcerated in the Thysville military camp.
Dayal begged Hammarskjöld to allow the Ghanaian UN contingent to attempt a rescue mission. But the secretary-general, under direct pressure from the Americans, does not grant this request. At the very least, the poisoning operation is abandoned.
“Let the Congolese take care of the Congolese”
As Antoine Gizenga, Mulele, Anicet Kashamura and most of Lumumba’s companions from Province Orientale to North Katanga, via South Kivu, launch the uprising,another American plan emerges: let the Congolese take care of the Congolese. In other words: let the army do the dirty work itself.
On 13 January 1961, the Thysville camp, where Lumumba was being held, erupted into mutiny. Very soon, the CIA learns that disgruntled soldiers have freed the former prime minister and are considering placing themselves under his orders. In Leopoldville, the whole government is in panic, except Mobutu and Nendaka, who, after seizing Kasavubu and Bomboko, fly to Thysville.
Once more, the chief of staff confronts his troops, brings them under his control and orders that Lumumba be arrested again. This hero of Congolese independence is thrown into a plane heading for Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), the capital of the secessionist province of Katanga, where his sworn enemy Tshombe is waiting for him.
Lumumba, with his swollen face, was seen arriving on the airport tarmac on 17 January. He would be shot later that very same day. On 20 January, in Washington, President John Kennedy took office. In Langley, everyone welcomes the fact that the new administration will not have to deal with the Lumumba case.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
The words “Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit” were reportedly listed on a briefing note shared by the Biden transition team with U.S. stakeholders as part of a roundup of Biden’s planned day one executive actions. CTV News also reviewed the briefing documents, and a source familiar with Biden’s thinking told Reuters that the President-elect is planning to cancel the pipeline as one of his first acts.
“The Biden administration halting the Keystone XL pipeline is a momentous sign that he is listening, taking action and making good on his promises to people and the planet,” Kendall Mackey, 350.org Keep It In the Ground campaign manager, said in response to the news. “This decision to halt the Keystone XL pipeline on day one in office sets a precedent that all permitting decisions must pass a climate test and respect Indigenous rights.”
Mackey expressed hope that Biden would also end the equally controversial Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines.
The Keystone XL pipeline was first announced in 2005, CBC News reported. The pipeline is being built to carry 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day, stretching about 1,200 miles from Alberta, Canada to Nebraska. From there it would connect with the original Keystone pipeline that carries oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.
The pipeline has long been opposed by environmental and Indigenous groups, who are concerned about its climate impacts and the potential for leaks to harm wildlife and pollute drinking water, CTV News reported. Protests prompted the Obama administration to rescind the permit in 2015, but President Donald Trump reversed this decision with an executive order in early 2017.
Biden’s decision to once again rescind the permit is not surprising. His advisers have said in the past that he would move to block it again, according to HuffPost. Biden’s campaign has vocally opposed the pipeline since May, according to CTV News.
The news has sparked opposition in Canada.
“I am deeply concerned by reports that the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden may repeal the Presidential permit for the Keystone XL border crossing next week,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said in a Twitter statement. “Doing so would kill jobs on both sides of the border, weaken the critically important Canada-U.S. relationship and undermine U.S. national security by making the United States more dependent on OPEC oil imports in the future.”
Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., said the country still stood behind the pipeline and that it fit within Canada’s climate plans, CBC News reported.
“The Government of Canada continues to support the Keystone XL project and the benefits that it will bring to both Canada and the United States,” Hillman said.
Meanwhile, in a bid to make the project more appealing to Biden, owner TC Energy announced a plan on Sunday to reach zero emissions by 2030, hire union workers, sign Indigenous equity partners and install a $1.7 billion solar, wind and battery-powered operating system for the pipeline.
However, Canadian environmental groups and parties were pleased with the news.
“This is what true climate leadership looks like,” Annamie Paul, leader of the federal Green Party, told CTV News.
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, urged Canadians to follow suit and move away from the pipeline, which he likened to “beating [a] dead horse,” CBC News reported.
“The Biden administration offers us a fresh start on addressing the climate crisis with a willing partner, so let’s not blow it by pushing pipelines,” Stewart said.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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
This included the raiding of several Muslim homes and organisations, which French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said was launched against some individuals “not linked with the investigation around the beheading but to whom we want to send a message”.
The complaint made specific reference to several examples of state aggression against Muslim children specifically.
It cited the introduction of ID cards for children as a means to track Muslim parents who decide to home-school amid the coronavirus pandemic.
It also referred to a 3 October raid on a mosque in which children were learning Arabic, where authorities counted the youths, allegedly classifying them based on whether they were wearing a headscarf.
Additionally, the document mentioned the French state starting formal proceedings to dissolve Muslim charity Baraka City and human rights group CCIF (Collective against Islamophobia in France), which were publicly designated as the “enemy of the Republic”.
In terms of the publishing of offensive cartoons of the prophet in France, the coalition said that the French government supported and advocated such publications. Such a stance “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” and “could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace”, the coalition claimed, citing the UN Human Rights Committee’s own comments on depictions of the prophet.
“Muslims around the world united behind the cry to hold the French government accountable for continuing to support publications defaming the prophet (peace be upon him),” said Feroze Boda of the Muslims Lawyers Association, who submitted the complaint on behalf of the collective.
“We hope they will unite again around this global first, a truly collective effort, which expands the call for accountability and positive change to include the dismantling of pervasive hateful policies against Muslims in France.
“These policies are not only counter-productive, but they are open to abuse, and have been abused – while also being completely out of touch with reality.”
The document concluded by accusing France of acting “out of proportion” and “unreasonably” applying exceptions to restrictions on fundamental freedoms in order to protect national security.
It said that there was no effective remedy within the French legal system to stop structural Islamophobia, and therefore a formal infringement procedure against the government was necessary.
“France has seen shocking levels of state-sanctioned Islamophobia in recent months. This has precipitated the closure of mosques, Muslim schools, Muslim-led charities and civil society organisations,” said Muhammad Rabbani, managing director of Cage, which co-signed the complaint.
“As a signatory to the UN, France cannot be allowed to infringe upon its international rights obligations so openly, and yet present itself as the land of ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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 Medvedevauthoring 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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Featured image: Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was detained at the airport in Moscow upon arrival from Germany, January 17, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchline)
Siamo lieti di annunciare che abbiamo recentemente introdotto un plug-in di traduzione in Global Research.
Situato nel banner superiore del sito Web, il menu a discesa “Traduci sito Web” (Translate Website) consente di selezionare Italiano, in cui è possibile tradurre l’intero sito Web con un clic di un pulsante.
Ti invitiamo a provarlo e non esitare a inviare qualsiasi feedback tu possa avere a [email protected]
독자 여러분, 최근 Global Research에 번역 플러그인을 도입했음을 알려 드리게되어 기쁩니다. 웹 사이트의 상단 배너에있는 “웹 사이트 번역”드롭 다운 메뉴를 사용하면 버튼 클릭으로 전체 웹 사이트를 번역 할 수있는 27 개의 다른 언어 중에서 선택할 수 있습니다. 우리는 당신이 그것을 시험해 보도록 초대하고 당신이 필요로하는 어떤 피드백이라도 [email protected]으로 보내 주시기 바랍니다
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…”
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.
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.
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.
Thirty years ago, in the early hours of January 17, 1991, Operation “Desert Storm” began in the Persian Gulf, this war against Iraq opened the sequence of wars after the Cold War. The USA and its allies launched it at the moment when, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were about to dissolve.
The official handling last week of the deaths of two Danes and a Miami doctor following their COVID jabs highlights the gaping holes in the government’s surveillance system for detecting post-marketing vaccine reactions.
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.
I want to give testimony on what are called the “highways of death.” These are the two Kuwaiti roadways, littered with remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions.
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.
“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 10th 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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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
***
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.123 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.456
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. 18.789 The FDA granted an EUA for the BNT162b2 vaccine on Dec. 11. It followed with an EUA for the mRNA-1273 vaccine on Dec. 18.1011
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.121314
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.181920
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?1922
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.2122
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.1922
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.”2324
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.2325
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
“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 1st Amendment right to freedom of assembly, potential threats to 4th Amendment security of our homes and persons, 6th and 7th 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.
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.
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?
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.”
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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 inthe 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.
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.
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.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, by Joel Bakan, dissects the modern corporation in terms of psychopathology, ticking the boxes of Dr. Hare’s famed scale of psychopathy.
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.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
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.
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 1st 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!
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
***
“The 20th 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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
***
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.
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).
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.”
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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”.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
***
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.
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.”
Even as Fauci discussed vaccine passports and mandates in Newsweek, he admitted that proving that COVID-19 vaccines do more than prevent clinical disease but also block infection and transmission has been elusive. He emphasized that persons who get vaccinated still must wear masks:
“We do not know if the vaccines that prevent clinical disease also prevent infection. They very well might, but we have not proven that yet … That’s the reason I keep saying that even though you get vaccinated, we should not eliminate, at all, public health measures like wearing masks because we don’t know yet what the effect [of the vaccine] is on transmissibility.”
Fauci added, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
Immunity passports: suggested soon after the pandemic began
Government health officials in Israel are getting ready to issue a COVID-19 “green passport” to citizens who have received two COVID-19 shots, which will exempt them from travel restrictions and testing for infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or being required to quarantine after exposure to an infected person.
Technology companies have been working on creating a digital certificate, which contains personal medical information giving evidence that an individual has been vaccinated and can be used as a screening tool by employers, businesses and owners or operators of services and public venues, such as airlines, theme parks, concert halls, hotels and other places where people gather in groups with other people.
Immediately after the coronavirus pandemic was declared by the WHO last winter, Silicon Valley businessman Bill Gates began talking about the need for issuing digital certificates proving immunity to the virus and, once a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, proof of vaccination.
In a comment posted on Reddit in March 2020, Gates said, “Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”
That same month in a TED Talk, Gates explained how lockdowns and resulting “economic pain” will prevent people from getting naturally acquired immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and that immunity “certificates” will eventually be required. Gates said:
“Now we don’t want to have a lot of recovered people, you know. To be clear, we’re trying through the shutdown in the United States, to not get to one percent of the population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation you could get past that three million. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.
“Eventually, what we’ll have to have is certificates of who is a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person, because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.”
In an April 9, 2020, interview on National Public Radio, Gates returned to the message that some “social distancing” measures have to stay in place “until we get a vaccine that almost everybody’s had.” He said:
“What I’m saying, what Dr. Anthony Fauci is saying, what some other experts are saying, there’s a great deal of consistency. We’re not sure yet which activities should be resumed, because until we get a vaccine that almost everybody’s had, the risk of a rebound will be there.”
As of Jan. 3, 2021, the CDC had recorded over 20 million COVID-19 cases and nearly 350,000 related deaths.
Lasting immunity after mild, asymptomatic COVID-19 infection
A study was published Dec. 24, 2020, in Science Immunology by scientists from Queen Mary, University of London, in which they analyzed antibody and T cell responses in 136 London health care workers and reported that there was evidence of protective immunity up to four months after mild or asymptomatic COVID-19.
A press release issued by the university stated that mild or asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections represent the largest infected group and noted that researchers found T cell responses tended to be higher in those with the classic, defining symptoms of COVID-19, while asymptomatic infection resulted in a weaker T cell immunity than symptomatic infection, but equivalent neutralizing antibody responses. One of the researchers commented:
“Our study of SARS-CoV-2 infection in healthcare workers from London hospitals reveals that four months after infection, around 90 percent of individuals have antibodies to block the virus. Even more encouragingly, in 66 percent of healthcare workers we see levels of these protective antibodies are high and that this robust antibody response is complemented by T cells which we see reacting to various parts of the virus.
“This is good news. It means that if you have been infected there is a good chance that you will have developed antibodies and T cells that may provide some protection if you encounter the virus again.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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
***
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
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.
***
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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 6thoccupation 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 20th 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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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 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.
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.”
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
— 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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Thirty years Ago. The 1991 Gulf War: The Massacre of Withdrawing Soldiers on “The Highway of Death”
