“Until an accurate count of COVID-19 cases in the vaccinated and placebo groups has been determined for vaccine efficacy evaluation, we are asking the FDA to stay its decision regarding the emergency use authorization for this vaccine,” said Dr. Lee, director of Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory.
The major reason for petitioning the FDA for a stay of action is that the Phase 2/3 clinical trial of the Pfizer vaccine used a presumptive RT-qPCR diagnostic test. This test is acknowledged by the medical science community to generate high rates of false-positive results among qualified trial participants from the placebo group with minor symptoms such as a sore throat or a new cough. This is especially evident when a de facto unblinding among the trial participants has taken place, according to the petition.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial primarily uses an RT-qPCR test that employs cycle thresholds possibly up to 44.9 to identify COVID-19 “cases.” Samples deemed positive that require high levels of amplification (cycle thresholds greater than 30 to 35) are usually false positives, said Dr. Lee.
“To determine whether the amplified products are indeed SARS-CoV-2 genes, biomolecular validation of amplified PCR products is essential. For a diagnostic test, this validation is an absolute must. Validation of PCR products should be performed by either running the PCR product in a 1% agarose-EtBr gel together with a size indicator (DNA ruler or DNA ladder) so that the size of the product can be estimated. The size must correspond to the calculated size of the amplification product. But it is even better to sequence the amplification product. The latter will give 100% certainty about the identity of the amplification product. Without molecular validation one cannot be sure about the identity of the amplified PCR products…”
On Dec. 1, Switzerland’s medical regulator, Swissmedic, said it lacks the necessary information to approve three different coronavirus vaccines ordered by the government, including the Pfizer vaccine.
In a recent interview about the pending review of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn has promised, “we will make a determination regarding safety and efficacy based upon our very stringent criteria.”
As stated in the petition, if Pfizer is unable to perform the needed sequencing tests on the 180 RNA samples to confirm their stated vaccine efficacy rate of 95%, Dr. Lee has offered to re-test the residues of these samples in his laboratory.
Dr. Lee said his laboratory is located only one hour’s driving distance from Connecticut-based Pfizer Inc., and he will submit all the testing data to the FDA to support its vaccine evaluation based upon “very stringent criteria,” as promised by the FDA Commissioner.
Dr. Lee’s Sanger sequencing-based method for molecular diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 was published in International Journal of Geriatrics and Rehabilitation.
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The assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is the latest in a long-running pressure campaign against Iran by the US and its allies such as Israel. However, in the case of sanctions, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the biggest price.
An unprecedented total of 14,400 candidates from 107 political parties ran for office. Two Bolivarian blocs were heavy favorites to win a majority of seats — the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) and PPT Homeland for All Party/together with the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV).
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s comments in support of Sikh farmers protesting against new farm laws in India have been met with an unusually sharp rebuff from New Delhi.
It is currently popular among those who make money writing media articles about politics, to argue that Boris Johnson will implode next year and be replaced as Tory leader by someone more rational and conventional. I very much doubt this: the most important reason for that doubt being the power of the atavistic English nationalist forces that Johnson has unleashed in British politics.
OPCW executives privately criticized the manipulation of a Syria chemical weapons probe, and supported a dissenting veteran inspector. One official, however, feared helping the “Russian narrative.” These private admissions further expose the public whitewash of the Douma cover-up.
The idea that not enough Americans are wearing masks is detached from reality. And we have the data to prove it. The Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a very informative, consistently updated mask compliance tracker. It shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans across the nation are wearing masks.
The boom-and-bust cycle will not end because regulators stop investors from taking “excessive” risks. Almost every bubble and economic downturn America has experienced over the past 107 years was caused by the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the money supply.
This is the state of affairs in America today. All real power has been conceded to a globalist oligarchy that operates behind the curtain of corrupt government officials and public health experts. This begs the question of whether the hoopla surrounding the Coronavirus emerged as a spontaneous and appropriate reaction to a lethal and fast-spreading pandemic or whether the hysteria has been greatly exaggerated to implement a transformational political-social agenda.
To be sure, there are instances where criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic, when it attributes Israeli behaviours to negative stereotypes of Jews, as a collective. But to go from this to seeing all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic not only strains logic, it distorts the meaning of the word.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit today rejected the Trump administration’s approval of the first offshore oil-drilling development in federal Arctic waters.
La Fema – Agenzia federale per la gestione delle emergenze, dipendente dal governo Usa – ha aggiornato le istruzioni alla popolazione su come comportarsi in caso di attacco nucleare. Le nuove istruzioni tengono conto del Covid-19, dei conseguenti lockdown e delle norme da seguire per proteggersi dal virus.
Per essere pronti quando viene lanciato l’allarme per un imminente attacco nucleare – avverte la Fema – dovete sapere che «a causa del Covid-19 molti posti, da cui passate per andare al lavoro e ritornare, possono essere chiusi o non avere regolari orari di apertura». Dovete quindi individuare prima «i migliori luoghi in cui ripararsi, che sono gli scantinati e i piani centrali di grandi edifici».
In tali istruzioni la Fema ignora quali sono gli effetti reali (scientificamente accertati) di un’esplosione nucleare. Anche se le persone in fuga sono abbastanza fortunate da trovare un posto non soggetto a lockdown per il Covid, in cui ripararsi, non hanno comunque scampo. Lo spostamento d’aria dell’esplosione, con venti di 800 km/h, provoca il crollo o lo scoppio anche degli edifici più solidi. Il calore fonde l’acciaio, fa scoppiare il cemento armato. Anche le persone che hanno trovato «i migliori luoghi in cui ripararsi» sono vaporizzate, schiacciate, carbonizzate.
GLI EFFETTI DISTRUTTIVI di una bomba nucleare da 1 megaton (pari alla potenza esplosiva di 1 milione di tonnellate di tritolo) si estendono circolarmente fino a circa 14 km. Se a esplodere è una bomba da 20 megaton, gli effetti distruttivi si estendono in un raggio di oltre 60 km.
In tale situazione la Fema si preoccupa di proteggere le persone dal Covid-19. Quando viene lanciato l’allarme nucleare, avverte, «informatevi con le autorità locali su quali rifugi pubblici sono aperti, poiché possono essere stati delocalizzati a causa del Covid-19»; al momento dell’evacuazione, «per proteggere voi e la vostra famiglia dal Covid-19, portate con voi due mascherine a persona e un igienizzante per le mani che contenga almeno il 60% di alcol»; all’interno del rifugio, «continuate a praticare il distanziamento sociale, indossando la mascherina e mantenendo una distanza di almeno 6 piedi (quasi 2 metri) tra voi e le persone che non fanno parte della vostra famiglia».
Tale scenario presuppone che, in caso di allarme nucleare, i 330 milioni di cittadini statunitensi non siano presi dal panico ma, mantenendo la calma, si informino su quali rifugi sono aperti, quindi si preoccupino anzitutto di proteggersi dal Covid-19 portando con sé mascherine e igienizzanti e, una volta nel rifugio, mantengano il distanziamento sociale col risultato che, in un rifugio capace di ospitare mille persone, ne verrebbero ammesse 200 mentre le altre resterebbero fuori.
AMMESSO PER ASSURDO che le persone seguissero le istruzioni della Fema per proteggersi dal Covid-19, esse sarebbero comunque esposte alla ricaduta radioattiva in un’area molto più vasta di quella distrutta dalle esplosioni nucleari. Un numero crescente di persone, apparentemente illese, comincerebbe a presentare i sintomi della sindrome da radiazioni.
Non esistendo alcun trattamento possibile, l’esito è inevitabilmente fatale. Se le radiazioni colpiscono il sistema nervoso, esse provocano forte emicrania e letargia, subentra quindi lo stato di coma, accompagnato da convulsioni, e la morte sopravviene entro quarantotto ore. In caso di sindrome gastrointestinale da radiazioni, la vittima è colpita da vomito e diarrea emorragica, accompagnati da febbre alta e muore nel giro di una o due settimane.
In tale scenario la Fema si preoccupa anche dello stato mentale delle persone. Essa avverte che «la minaccia di una esplosione nucleare può provocare ulteriore stress a molte persone che già oggi sentono paura e ansia per il Covid-19». Raccomanda quindi di seguire le istruzioni su come «gestire lo stress durante un evento traumatico». Fa quindi capire che, in caso di attacco nucleare, i cittadini Usa sarebbero assistiti da psicologi che, mentre esplodono le bombe nucleari, insegnano loro a gestire lo stress convincendosi che, grazie alla Fema, si sono salvati dal Covid.
Manlio Dinucci
Manlio Dinucciè ricercatore associato del Center for Research on Globalization.
President-elect Biden’s choice for Secretary of Defense has turned out to be one of the most controversial and difficult of his Cabinet appointments. The early front-runner, Michèle Flournoy, was originally seen as a shoo-in and was touted as a great breakthrough for women, but her hawkish views have provoked serious concerns. Biden now appears to be also considering two Black Americans promoted by the Congressional Black Caucus: Jeh Johnson and retired General Lloyd Austin.
All three are flawed candidates to anyone who wants to see an end to the endless wars and to stop the revolving door between the Pentagon and military contractors. They all sit on boards of companies that profit from militarism—Johnson at Lockheed Martin, Austin at Raytheon and Flournoy at Booz, Allen, Hamilton. All have supported most or all post-9/11 U.S. military interventions. None would be our preference.
But Biden is not going to appoint someone truly committed to peace and disarmament, like Congresswoman Barbara Lee or retired Colonel Ann Wright, a senior diplomat who resigned from the State Department to protest the Iraq War.
So who is the “least worst” choice? While General Austin has some good qualities—his experience in overseeing major troop withdrawals from Iraq and his opposition to further U.S. involvement in Syria—appointing a recently retired military officer would violate long-standing traditions and laws that stipulate that the Secretary of Defense must be a civilian.
The Republican-controlled Senate set a dangerous precedent when it approved a waiver of the National Security Act and confirmed General Mattis as Trump’s Defense Secretary in 2017. As Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the Chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, said at that time, “Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and I will not vote for an exception to this rule.” We agree.
That leaves Flournoy and Johnson. We are afraid that Flournoy would be an especially dangerous choice for America and the world. Given the additional time that President-elect Biden is taking over this decision, he, too, seems to have reservations about her.
As Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during Obama’s first term, Flournoy clearly did not see eye-to-eye with Vice President Biden on many of the Obama administration’s most fateful decisions. Biden opposed military escalation in Afghanistan, while Flournoy supported it. Flournoy also backed military intervention and regime change in Libya, while Biden insists that he argued strongly against it.
Flournoy has held a head-spinning number of revolving door positions—her board seat at Booz, Allen Hamilton, co-founding WestExec Advisors, the Center for a New American Security, and advising the private equity firm Pine Island Capital that is heavily invested in military industries, and other compromising jobs.
Even more problematic, however, is that Flournoy has repeatedly demonstrated throughout her career, both in her official Pentagon positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations and in her published writings and statements, that she actually believes in the normalization of war.
She was the main author of the Clinton administration’s 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which politically justified the unilateral use of U.S. military force all over the world. For Flournoy, normalizing war was just a matter of making a persuasive political case for the widespread use of military force, by defining things like “preventing the emergence of a hostile regional coalition” and “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources” as “U.S. vital interests” that justified the use of force.
In every U.S. dispute with other countries since the 1997 Defense Review, she has supported exactly the kind of threats and uses of force that she set out to ideologically legitimize in the QDR, from invading Iraq to attacking Libya to militarily confronting China to fighting “hybrid” wars—a mix of conventional war, insurgencies and cyber threats. “In the future,” she blithely says, “warfare may come in a lot of different flavors.”
So what about Jeh Johnson? From 2009 to 2012, under Obama, he served as General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, where he was the senior legal official signing off on air strikes, drone strikes and other U.S. uses of force around the world. Johnson wrote the still secret legal memos that justified the targeted killing of people overseas by drones—a program that has killed many innocent civilians.
Legal experts were highly critical of both Obama’s policy and Johnson’s defense of it. We at CODEPINK repeatedly protested against Johnson, including projecting images of drone victims on his elegant home in Washington, D.C. We also opposed many of his policies as Secretary of Homeland Security in Obama’s second term.
But there are indications that Johnson would be more inclined toward restraint in the threat and use of force, reliance on peaceful diplomacy and compliance with U.S. and international law than Flournoy.
While Flournoy supported the 2011 US/NATO bombardment of Libya, Johnson did not. He advised Obama that the bombing constituted “hostilities” under the War Powers Act and must be ended by May 20, 2011. Tragically, Obama chose to ignore that advice from his top military lawyer and what Biden says were strong arguments against that war from his Vice President.
Johnson has also been quite unique among U.S. officials who have served the U.S. post-9/11 war machine in calling for the demilitarization of U.S. anti-terrorism policies and questioning the normalization of war that Flournoy worked to legitimize.
In 2012, while still at the Pentagon, Johnson made two ground-breaking speeches, one to the American Enterprise Institute and one to the Oxford Union debating society in the U.K., in which he discussed ending the U.S.’s militarized terrorism policy and once again treating terrorism as a crime to be dealt with by civilian law enforcement. He went on to say this:
“War must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. War permits one man – if he is a ‘privileged belligerent,’ consistent with the laws of war — to kill another. War violates the natural order of things, in which children bury their parents; in war parents bury their children. In its 12th year, we must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’ Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives.”
Johnson went on to explain that, like Martin Luther King, Jr., he graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta. “I am a student and disciple of Dr. King,” he said, “though I became an imperfect one the first time I gave legal approval for the use of military force.”
For Johnson, war cannot be the “new normal,” and no clever political arguments can make it so. His actions at the Pentagon appear to weigh on his conscience and conflict with his moral compass. Whatever the political or legal justification, war is still a “finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs.”
Johnson’s views echo what former President Jimmy Carter said when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
If, as reported, President Biden is trying to choose between Michèle Flournoy, General Austin and Jeh Johnson for Secretary of Defense, we urge him to choose the one out of the three who has upheld this basic principle that most Americans believe in, that war is “extraordinary and unnatural,” and peace is “the norm toward which the human race continually strives.”
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Exclusive: Documents obtained by The Grayzone show that OPCW executives privately criticized the manipulation of a Syria chemical weapons probe, and supported a dissenting veteran inspector. One official, however, feared helping the “Russian narrative.” These private admissions further expose the public whitewash of the Douma cover-up, and undermine the ongoing attacks on the whistleblowers who challenged it.
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Since the explosive revelation that an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in Syria was manipulated, a smear campaign has been waged against a pair of veteran OPCW scientists who challenged the cover-up.
OPCW documents and correspondence obtained by The Grayzone offer a stark contrast to these public attacks. Among several revelations, they show that before the attempts to discredit the whistleblowers, OPCW directors privately criticized the chemical watchdog’s suppression of the investigation, and supported the inspector who vocally protested it.
One of these executives, however, feared that raising alarm about the scientific fraud would help the “Russian narrative”— a tacit admission that the organization’s independence and impartiality have become subordinate to geopolitics.
The dissenting inspector, 16-year OPCW veteran Dr. Brendan Whelan, was a member of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) that investigated an alleged chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma on April 7, 2018. The team’s findings raised major doubts about allegations of Syrian government culpability, the pretext for a US-led bombing of Syria one week later.
Rather than having their complaints addressed, Whelan and the other known dissenting inspector, 12-year OPCW veteran Ian Henderson, have been subjected to a second deceit: false claims about them and their investigation.
Whoever is behind these public attacks, the private OPCW emails and documents obtained by The Grayzone further undermine them. In addition to revealing initial praise by OPCW brass for Whelan’s attempt to protect the investigation, these leaks provide a new window into how other officials compromised it:
One top official acknowledged the doctoring of the Douma evidence. But rather than order an investigation into how it occurred, this official sought to have an email protesting the censorship erased from the OPCW’s servers.
Another executive, who appears to have been deeply involved in the scientific fraud, sidelined the inspectors who collected the evidence in Syria. This same OPCW official also engineered a delay that ensured that the most vocal dissenter, Whelan, would no longer be in the picture.
By contrast, two senior directors praised Whelan’s opposition to the Douma probe subterfuge. (These directors are distinct from the Director General, whom they work under.) The first director criticized the censorship of evidence, and also signaled that it was politically motivated. Yet this same director was also hesitant to press the issue, out of fear that doing so would “feed… the Russian narrative.”
The second director lauded Whelan’s contributions to the OPCW, as well as his effort to defend the Douma investigation from fraudulent behavior.
These documents show that internal concerns about the Douma cover-up went beyond members of the FFM team to even the highest levels of the organization.
Aaron Maté is a journalist and producer. He hosts Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone. He is also is contributor to The Nation magazine and former host/producer for The Real News and Democracy Now!. Aaron has also presented and produced for Vice, AJ+, and Al Jazeera.
All images in this article are from The Grayzone unless otherwise stated
The Great Reset is basically aimed to “transform organization design and work design” as spelled out in section 1.1 of the White Paper Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World issued in October 2020 by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with Mercer.
As a precondition to realize the Great Reset, a terror plan had to be set in motion and the people behind it came up with the notion that a pandemic was the most effective alternative. They capitalized on the idea of HYPING a common and seasonal infirmity – the flu – to control people by way of scaremongering or launching a worldwide fear campaign using the mainstream media all over the world. To heighten the terror to the level of paranoia, massive deaths numbering hundreds of thousands had to occur. To realize this, patients (or perhaps, victims is the better term) – most were elderly – had to be hospitalized where they would be administered with heavy doses of killer drugs (anti-malaria, anti-Ebola, anti-HIV) and be subjected to a killer procedure called intubation. Afterward, they invented a new jargon to describe the present circumstances: the new normal.
Now that we are already standing before the portal of the New Normal the Great Reset button is about to be pushed to inaugurate the New World Order. And it is no surprise that the people behind the Great Reset are the very ones in control of the post-industrial Information Technology systems because the New World Order will be organized, administered, managed, run, supervised, and controlled by these InfoTech helmsmen.
What we have been experiencing as we continue to be enslaved by the conditions that define the deceptive structure of this false pandemic called Covid-19 — which in reality is nothing but pure and simple hyped flu, i.e., HF-20 — is in reality, a necessary stage to inaugurate the realization of the New World Order in the mold of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World though not exactly according to the latter’s fictive algorithms.
The Great Reset is one heck of a deception. The “great resetters” are global economic programmers motivated by greed as they have determined once and for all that, their total economic and financial domination over the globe will only be achieved through the consolidation of their enormous wealth. To be more specific, these programmers are operating within the confines of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The radical change they have been dealing with and propagating around is against the interest of humanity. This Great Reset is therefore a large-scale project aimed to dehumanize humanity.
What we witness at this point in time is the omnipotence of the enormous power players behind this so-called pandemic: the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the global industrial titans that constitute it who have already issued even some four years back the blueprint of the New World Order called The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016) which was later followed up in 2018 by Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and capped this year with the issuance of another document called Covid-19:The Great Reset.
At the moment, they are on top of the game they have created and no strategy has yet been conceived on how to convince the victimized people of the world whom their minions have already brainwashed that we are in the present predicament because of the criminal acts of these controllers. For those who know the truth about the dynamics and mechanics of all these tragic circumstances that have engulfed the world, the mental trajectory leads only towards one direction and that is to make these criminals liable for their heinous deeds.
Now, the possibility of actually putting them on trial is another thing because such a matter is yet inconceivable considering the magnitude of power they hold. It doesn’t however change the reality that they are the culprits in starting and sustaining the catastrophe the world has been suffering from and they have to be prosecuted. When? We don’t know the answer as yet.
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Prof. Ruel F. Pepais a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.
It is currently popular among those who make money writing media articles about politics, to argue that Boris Johnson will implode next year and be replaced as Tory leader by someone more rational and conventional. I very much doubt this: the most important reason for that doubt being the power of the atavistic English nationalist forces that Johnson has unleashed in British politics. Astonishingly, despite the UK government’s hideously inept performance in the Covid crisis, and the corruption and looting of the public purse on a massive scale for which the pandemic has been used, the Conservatives still lead Labour in the UK opinion polls.
Partly that is due to Sir Keir Starmer having no apparent policy other than to ensure that no party member ever criticises Israel. But it is mostly due to the fact that Johnson’s supporters do not care what happens to the country, as long as they can see news footage of black people being deported on charter planes and immigrant children washed up dead rather than rescued. The racist brand is very, very strong in England. Cummings and Johnson’s plan to appropriate it and target the areas of England with lowest levels of educational achievement as their new political base still holds up as a political strategy. Look at the polls.
Tory MP’s care about themselves. They will ditch Johnson extremely quickly if he becomes a perceived electoral liability and therefore a threat to their own jobs. But as long as the Tories are ahead in the opinion polls, then Johnson is secure. The idea that there is a norm to which politics revert is a false one. Many of the same pundits who are assuring us now that Johnson will depart, also assured us that his kicking out moderate and pro-EU Conservatives from his party, and removing Remainers from his Cabinet, was a temporary move to be reversed post-election. There is in fact no going back to the norm.
Even the dimmest Labour Party members must now realise that Starmer lied when he promised he would carry on with Corbyn’s radical economic policies if elected to the leadership of the Labour Party. The Corbyn phenomenon was interesting. It arose as a reaction to the massively burgeoning wealth inequality in UK society and the great loss of secure employment opportunity with rights and benefits available to the large bulk of the population. That situation continues to worsen. Brexit was in large part a cry of pain resulting from the same causes. But Brexit in itself is going to do nothing to improve the social position or economic prospects of the working class.
Whether the novelty of Brexit will in the long term continue to be enough to channel the desire for radical change away from actual programmes of redistribution of wealth and ownership, I doubt. I suspect the Starmer project will falter on public reluctance to yet again embrace a choice of two Tory parties, and Starmer will be ejected as Labour leader before he can become the third Blue Labour PM. In the meantime, I can only urge those in England to vote Green. I can certainly see no reason to vote Labour and validate the Starmer purge.
As a former professional diplomat, I am going to be astonished if there is not a Brexit deal announced very shortly. It is plainly highly achievable given the current state of negotiations. The EU have moved very far in agreeing that an independent UK body, as opposed to the European Court of Justice, can be responsible for policing UK compliance with standards regulation to ensure against undercutting. The “ratchet clause” sticking point, where a mechanism is needed to ensure the UK does not undercut future improved EU regulatory regimes, can be resolved with some fudged wording on the mutual obligation to comply with the highest standards, but which does not quite force the EU to simply copy UK regulation in the improbable event it becomes more demanding than the EU regime. By making the obligation theoretically mutual the “sovereignty” argument about UK subservience to EU regulations and standards is met, which is the ultra Tory Brexiteers biggest fetish. Fisheries is even simpler to solve, with obvious compromises on lengths of agreement periods and quotas within easy grasp.
It should not be forgotten that David Frost is not the plain loutish Brexiteer he has so spectacularly enhanced his career by impersonating domestically, but is the smooth and effective professional diplomat he shows when actually interacting with Barnier. It could only be an act of utter lunacy that would lead Johnson to eschew a deal that the Express and Mail will be able to trumpet as a massive victory over Johnny Foreigner. I expect we shall be seeing a union jacked apotheosis of saviour Johnson all over the media by a week from now at the very latest – another reason he will not be leaving office.
It is of course, all smoke and mirrors. By expectation management, a deal which is a far harder Brexit than anybody imagined when Theresa May set down her infamous red lines, will be greeted by a relieved business community as better than actually blowing your own brains out. As I have stated ever since the repression of the Catalan referendum, I can live with leaving the EU and live with abandoning its political and security pillars. I continue to view leaving the single market and losing the great advantage of free movement as disastrous.
One thing that has been very little publicised is that, deal or no deal, the UK is going to fudge the worst consequences by simply not on 1 January applying the new rules at the borders. There will not be immigration checks on the 86% of truck drivers entering the UK who are EU citizens, for the first six months. Otherwise the queues by mid January would scarcely be contained by Kent itself. Similarly, the UK side will not be applying the new customs paperwork on 1 January except on a “random sampling” basis. Those who are eagerly anticipating chaos on 1 January will thus probably be disappointed. In fact the deleterious economic effects of Brexit are quite probably going to take some time to show through in a definite way. I do not believe we will see either empty shelves or major price hikes in the first few weeks.
My prediction is this: Boris will agree his thin deal and at the end of January the Brexiteers will be gloating that the predicted disaster did not happen. Effects on economic growth and employment will take some time to be plainly identified, and it will be mortifying how readily the Tories will twist the narrative to blame the EU, and also to obtain English nationalist support for the notion that this gradual pain is worth it in pursuit of a purer country, with less immigration. That may sound crazy to you. But is it not crazy to you that the Tories are still ahead in UK polls after the last year? Mark my words; hope that Boris Johnson will simply vanish is very misplaced.
There is of course the possibility that Johnson is indeed completely bonkers and will not agree any deal at all, in which case 1 January chaos is unavoidable and all bets are off. I should be very surprised indeed. But then I did not think Trump would be mad enough not to concede the US Presidential election. Trying to predict the irrational mind is a pointless undertaking. I don’t think Johnson is that irrational; but I have been wrong before.
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Featured image: Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a press conference on 16 March, with Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Witty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Picture by Andrew Parsons
Some Federal Reserve officials are calling for tougher banking regulations in order to prevent the Fed’s low interest rate policy from leading investors to take “excessive” risks that will create asset bubbles. The Fed is understandably worried that these bubbles will burst leading to another market meltdown. However, the boom-and-bust cycle will not end because regulators stop investors from taking “excessive” risks. Almost every bubble and economic downturn America has experienced over the past 107 years was caused by the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the money supply.
The Federal Reserve’s actions artificially lower interest rates, thus distorting the signals sent by the rates, which are the price of money. Artificially low interest rates cause investments to be made in projects that are not supported by the real underlying market conditions. This results in a boom, inevitably followed by a crash, then by a new round of money creation and government bailouts restarting the cycle.
Increased regulations will not just fail to head off the next crash, they will make the next recession worse. Federal regulators are not capable of determining what is “excessive” risk. Instead, that determination is best left to market participants. Regulators are subject to having the same Fed-induced distorted view of the marketplace as nearly everyone else. Thus, regulators may mistake a growing asset bubble as a thriving sector of the economy that will serve as a long-term source of growth. This is especially the case if, as with the housing bubble, government policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act encourage the malinvestments. Also, regulators may impede the growth of businesses that are actually responding to real economic conditions instead of Fed-created illusions.
Support among the people, if not among the financial and political elites, for auditing and even ending the Fed, as well as for cryptocurrencies and precious metals, suggests we may soon reach what Ludwig von Mises referred to as the “crack-up.” The crack-up occurs when enough people realize that continuous expanding of the money supply, and the accompanying decline in a currency’s purchasing power, is a feature of central banking. Therefore, they spend their money as soon as they get it, accelerating the rise of hyperinflation.
Concerns over the effects of the US government’s debt, the precarious American economic condition, and growing resentment of US foreign policy have led to a decline in the dollar’s international value. Eventually, these factors will lead to a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status.
Rejection of the dollar’s reserve currency status abroad and the crack-up at home will cause an economic meltdown worse than the Great Depression. Among the problems this will lead to is increased violence as some Americans who believe they are entitled to live off the stolen property of others cut out the government middleman and start stealing from their fellow citizens.
The only way to avoid this fate is to spread the ideas of liberty among the people. A strong liberty movement that can pressure politicians to cut spending, audit and end the Fed, legalize competing currencies, and stop promoting divisive identity politics is the key to peacefully transitioning away from the Keynesian welfare-warfare state to a free society.
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One of the most common pro-mask arguments I’ve heard over the course of the past year, both from “public health experts” and your average citizen, sounds similar to the following statement:
“If only everyone would just wear a mask, we would be able to crush the virus and end the pandemic.”
This line of reasoning is frequently espoused by lockdown governors and “public health experts.” You see, the problem isn’t them, it’s you, the citizen, we’re told. Wear a mask, peasant. You’re the problem! You’re the reason why the pandemic is still a problem in this country.
Deaths up? Why aren’t you wearing a mask. Cases up? Wear a mask. Hospitals crowded? The problem is that not enough people are wearing masks, they claim.
The idea that not enough Americans are wearing masks is detached from reality. And we have the data to prove it.
The Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a very informative, consistently updated mask compliance tracker. It shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans across the nation are wearing masks. And in virtually every major population center in the United States, especially in areas where COVID-19 cases are rising, mask compliance levels are off the charts high, with most major metro areas registering well over 90 percent compliance.
Early on in the pandemic, when the “new science” told us that masks could stop the virus in its tracks (after the science of early 2020, espoused by the likes of Fauci and many others, rightly pointed to the reality that masks are useless outside of a controlled setting), the CDC and other “public health agencies” claimed that we could essentially eliminate transmission if a large percentage of the population adopted universal masking.
When lockdowns failed to “stop the spread,” masking up at over 80% was hyped as a way to “do more to reduce COVID-19 spread than a strict lockdown.”
“Universal masking at 80 [percent] adoption flattens the curve significantly more than maintaining a strict lockdown,” a much-hyped, highly publicized study, which was treated by many in the scientific community as the gospel, proclaimed.
“We will not only be able to flatten the curve, we will be able to significantly reduce the spread of the virus and return to life as normal sooner rather than later,” De Kai, a research scholar at Berkeley who helped develop the COVID-19 universal masking model, proclaimed.
With the help of the CMU mask compliance tracker, let’s take a look at the current COVID-19 hotspots in the United States and the level of mask compliance within these areas.
San Francisco metro area: 97% mask compliance
New York City metro area: 97% mask compliance
DC metro: 97%
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington: 94%
Philly area: 96%
Chicago: 95%
Miami-Ft Lauderdale: 96%
Seattle: 96%
The data demonstrates very clearly that Americans have overwhelmingly exceeded the masking compliance percentages needed to supposedly “flatten the curve” and reduce transmission of the virus. The problem, of course, is that the models have not matched reality. Americans are wearing masks, but the hypothesis behind universal masking has not worked to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Americans have adopted the recommendations of the “public health experts,” but the “public health experts” have failed to follow the science, which now shows that masks are useless when it comes to stopping the spread of COVID-19. Now we’re left with an overwhelming majority of Americans wearing masks for no science-based reason whatsoever.
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In the very month in which I read articles condemning the “cancel culture,” which some apply exclusively to the “left’s efforts to silence or shame views with which they disagree,” several disturbing incidents caught my attention.
A Palestinian American Congresswoman was called an anti-Semite because she greeted the announcement of President-elect Biden’s pick for Secretary of State with the hope that her right to support the movement to Boycott, Divest or Sanction Israel (BDS) would be recognised. An accomplished Arab American woman, of Palestinian descent, appointed to a position in Biden’s White House was condemned for an observation she made as a student, two decades ago, in which she pointed out how it must have been despair that drove young Palestinians to become suicide bombers. The California Board of Education removed Arab American studies from a model ethnic studies curriculum and eliminated any mention of Palestine. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the State Department will adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. As a result, he will designate the BDS movement as an anti-Semitic “cancer” and may also sanction respected human rights organisations because of their criticism of Israeli policies.
Though these incidents are different, they are examples of the pervasive “cancel culture” working to silence voices that are critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinian rights. Collectively, they raise several important concerns.
In the first place, silencing Palestinians and their supporters is born of bigotry. Denying Palestinians their fundamental right to express pain and to protest is to deny their very humanity.
Compounding this is the unprecedented use of state authority silence Arab Americans and those who advocate for Palestine. While it is shameful for the US State Department to consistently ignore Israel’s systematic violations of Palestinian human rights, it is beyond shameful to now seek to call Palestinians and their supporters anti-Semites for speaking out against these violations or calling for a non-violent boycott.
This is a violation of Palestinian human rights, the right to freely speak out and to act against injustice. But then, if the US officials in question can only see Israeli humanity and do not see Palestinians or Arabs as full human beings, then it follows that Palestinian rights should be subordinated to the concern that Israel be protected from criticism.
There is a clear double standard being applied here.
When Baruch Goldstein, an extremist Israeli settler, massacred 29 Palestinian worshipers in a mosque in Hebron, The Washington Post carried a feature article asking the question, “What happened to drive this Jewish doctor to do what he did?” There was no mention of the Palestinian victims. Nor were there interviews with the victims’ families or those who survived the mass murder. Goldstein, a troubled man, was the subject of the story. His victims were mere objects, an abstract body count, a number to be noted and then dismissed.
But when a 20-year-old Palestinian American attempted to understand why a young Palestinian would be in such despair that he would commit suicide in an act of terror, she is condemned today. She was no more justifying the Palestinian’s act than The Washington Post was justifying Goldstein’s. Her’s was an effort to understand what could have led any young person to commit such an atrocity. That this involved speaking about a Palestinian as a person, albeit one who was deeply disturbed, was deemed unpardonable.
It is also important to note that many groups who are quickest to denounce Arabs as anti-Semitic for legitimately condemning Israeli policies are the very ones who will accept the view of Palestinians and Arabs as prone to violence because of their culture or religion. This, without question, is also bigotry.
What is equally disturbing about the effort to silence criticism of Israel by conflating it with anti-Semitism is the damage it does to the battle waged against real anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is bigotry. It is hatred of or prejudice against Jews based on stereotypes that portray Jewish people, not as individuals, but part of a collective, sharing the same attributes, physical or cultural, or participating in nefarious activity because of their “Jewishness”.
Since the 1970s, however, some pro-Israel groups have been campaigning to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. They argue that since, as they see it, Israel is the “Jewish State”, then excessive criticism of Israel is by extension an attack on all Jews, as a group.
To be sure, there are instances where criticism of Israel can be anti-Semiti, when it attributes Israeli behaviours to negative stereotypes of Jews, as a collective.
But to go from this to seeing all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic not only strains logic, it distorts the meaning of the word. It is also a crude effort to shield Israel from criticism, while at the same time rendering people powerless to oppose the crimes Israel commits daily against the Palestinian people.
To rebut this charge, advocates of this expansion of the definition of anti-Semitism say that they will allow for “legitimate criticism.” What concerns them, they say, are critics who focus exclusively on Israel or those whose criticism is “excessive”.
That same degree of discernment is necessary when one considers critics of Israel and its policies. Otherwise, the blanket determination that criticism of Israel or its policies as anti-Semitism should be seen as nothing more than a crude effort to silence such criticism.
The expanded definition of anti-Semitism includes those who condemn the injustice to the Palestinians resulting from the foundation of the State of Israel. But when we rightly welcome a discussion of the injustices done to the indigenous peoples of America or the crimes of slavery and Jim Crow, how can we deny Palestinians the right to protest their expulsion and dispossession? And if we entertain a discussion about compensation to Native Americans or African Americans, why would we deem it anti-Semitic for Palestinians to demand repatriation and compensation? Unless, of course, we view Palestinians as less worthy of rights or inherently dangerous.
Even before this current campaign to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, some major Jewish organisations made a determined effort to silence Arab Americans. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee published reports warning of the danger posed by “pro-Palestinian” or “Arab propagandists”. As a result of this campaign, Arab Americans, myself included, were denied jobs, harassed, had speaking engagements cancelled and received threats of violence. Much the same is being done today by the likes Canary Mission and Campus Watch.
In other words, “cancel culture” is nothing new. It has been around for decades, with Arab Americans and Palestinian human rights supporters as the main victims. And now with over 30 states passing legislation criminalising support for BDS, the Departments of State and Education adopting the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, the effort to silence pro-Palestinian voices is escalating.
Caution and discernment are required when we speak about Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs. Thoughtful proponents of reasoned discourse, in particular among progressive Arab Americans and American Jews, must make a determined effort to convene a respectful conversation to challenge this dangerous slide toward repression and incivility.
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James J. Zogby is president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute.
“Look! You fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see? They’re after you! They’re after all of us! Our wives…our children…they’re here already! You’re next!”—Dr. Miles Bennell, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
The nation is being overtaken by an alien threat that invades bodies, alters minds, and transforms freedom-loving people into a mindless, compliant, conforming mob intolerant of anyone who dares to be different, let alone think for themselves.
However, while Body Snatchers—the chilling 1956 film directed by Don Siegel—blames its woes on seed pods from outerspace, the seismic societal shift taking place in America owes less to biological warfare reliant on the COVID-19 virus than it does to psychological warfare disguised as a pandemic threat.
As science writer David Robson explains:
Fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic, and less accepting of eccentricity. Our moral judgements become harsher and our social attitudes more conservative when considering issues such as immigration or sexual freedom and equality. Daily reminders of disease may even sway our political affiliations… Various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease… the evocative images of a pandemic led [participants in an experiment] to value conformity and obedience over eccentricity or rebellion.
This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm.
This is not a new experiment in mind control.
The powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.
That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.
The 9/11 attacks followed a similar script: a foreign invasion mounts an attack on an unsuspecting nation, the people unite in solidarity against a common foe, and the government gains greater war-time powers (read: surveillance powers) that, conveniently enough, become permanent once the threat has passed.
The government’s scripted response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been predictably consistent: once again, in order to fight this so-called “foreign” foe, the government insists it needs even greater surveillance powers.
As we’ve seen since 9/11 and more recently with the COVID lockdowns, those in power have always had a penchant for enacting extreme measures to combat perceived threats. However, unlike the modern America police state, the American government circa the 1950s did not have at its disposal the arsenal of invasive technologies that are such an intrinsic part of our modern surveillance state.
Today, we are watched and tracked 24/7; data is collected on us at an alarming rate by governmental and corporate entities; and with the help of powerful computer programs, American domestic intelligence agencies sweep our websites, listen in on our telephone calls and read our text messages at will.
Now with the COVID pandemic and its offshoots such as contact tracing and immunity passports, the governmental landscape is even more invasive.
Yet no matter the threat, the underlying principle remains the same: can we hold onto our basic freedoms and avoid succumbing to the soul-sucking dredge of conformity that threatens our very humanity?
This conundrum is at the heart of the 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was based on a 1954 science fiction novel by Jack Finney (and later remade into an equally chilling 1978 film by Philip Kaufman).
Body Snatchers not only captured the ideology and politics of its post-war era but remains timely and relevant as it relates to the worries that plague us today. Filmed with only seven days of rehearsal and 23 days of actual shooting, Body Snatchers is considered one of the great science fiction classics.
Body Snatchers is set in a small California town which has been infiltrated by mysterious pods from outer space that replicate and take the place of humans who then become conforming non-individuals. Miles Bennell, the main character, is a local doctor who resists the invaders and their attempts to erase humanity from the face of the earth.
At the very least, the film conveys a double meaning, serving as both a mirror of a particular moment in history and a compass pointing to a growing societal illness. Following World War II with the emerging military empire, the atomic bomb and the Korean War, Americans were confused and neurotically preoccupied with domestic threats, the polio pandemic and international political events, not much different from today’s populace preoccupied with domestic and international political drama, terrorism and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet Siegel’s film delves beneath the surface to confront an even more sinister threat: the dehumanization of individuals and the horrifying possibility that humanity could become infused as part of the societal machine.
Central to the film is one key speech delivered by Bennell while hiding from the aliens:
In my practice, I see how people have allowed their humanity to drain away…only it happens slowly instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind…. All of us, a little bit. We harden our hearts…grow callous…only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is.
As Siegel makes clear, it is not Communists or terrorists or even viral pandemics that threaten our well-being. The real enemy is invasive governmental measures—something we now see happening across the country—and, thus, totalitarian conformity. And resistance must be against all government measures that threaten our civil liberties and against all kinds of conformity, no matter the shape, size or color of the package it comes in.
When all is said and done, however, the real threat to freedom (in the fictional world of Body Snatchers and in our present-day America) is posed by an establishment—be it governmental, corporate or societal—that is hostile to individuality and those who dare to challenge the status quo.
The mob hysteria, sense of paranoia, fascist police and the witch hunt atmosphere of the film mirror the ills of a 1950s America that is frighteningly applicable to present American society.
Acknowledging that Body Snatchers portrayed the conflict between individuals and varied forms of mindless authority, Siegel stated, “I think the world is populated by pods and I wanted to show them.” He explained:
People are pods. Many of my associates are certainly pods. They have no feelings. They exist, breathe, sleep. To be a pod means that you have no passion, no anger, the spark has left you…of course, there’s a very strong case for being a pod. These pods, who get rid of pain, ill-health and mental disturbances are, in a sense, doing good. It happens to leave you in a very dull world but that, by the way, is the world that most of us live in. It’s the same as people who welcome going into the army or prison. There’s regimentation, a lack of having to make up your mind, face decisions…. People are becoming vegetables. I don’t know what the answer is except an awareness of it.
All of the threats to freedom documented in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American Peoplecame about because “we the people” stopped thinking for ourselves and relinquished control over our lives and our country to government operatives who care only for money and power.
While the specific game plan for turning things around is complicated by a police state that wants to keep us at a disadvantage, the solution is relatively simple: Don’t be a pod person. Pay attention. Question everything. Dare to be different. Don’t follow the mob. Don’t let yourself become numb to the world around you. Be compassionate. Be humane. Most of all, think for yourself.
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Featured image is from Global Look Press / Jaap Arriens
They earn stars and medals by waging preemptive wars to advance the nation’s imperial aims.
Throughout the post-WW II period — from North Korea in the early 1950s to the present day — US wars have always been against invented enemies.
The common thread behind attacking them is for being unwilling to subordinate their sovereign rights to US interests.
According to Defense News and establishment media reports, Biden/Harris chose retired four-star Army general Lloyd Austin as regime war secretary.
He requires a congressional waiver to serve in the post because of his recent military service, likely to be gotten.
If confirmed as expected, he’ll be the third former US military official to serve as war secretary — George Marshall and James (“mad dog”) Mattis the other two.
Austin will be the first African American to serve in the post.
A West Point graduate, he headed three Army airborne commands, US forces —Iraq, was Army vice chief of staff and CENTCOM head.
He’s a global war OF terror veteran, in charge of US aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq — nonbelligerent countries threatening no one, invented enemies, not the real thing.
The American Academy of Diplomacy described him as follows:
He “culminated his military career serving as the 12th Commander of US Central Command from 22 March 2013 to 30 March 2016.”
“In this capacity, he was responsible for military strategy and joint operations throughout the Middle East and Central and South Asia.”
“He also served as the Combined Forces Commander, overseeing the military campaign to defeat the terrorist organization, ISIL in Iraq and Syria (sic).”
ISIL (aka ISIS, the Islamic State) was made-in-the USA to serve as Pentagon proxy fighters in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
The same goes for al-Qaeda, its al-Nusra spinoff, and likeminded terrorist groups.
Like other Pentagon commanders, Austin deployed ISIS fighters to areas in US war theaters to combat their defense forces and civilians.
He didn’t defeat them. He used them to advance US imperial interests.
He currently heads the Austin Strategy Group, along with serving as a board member of United Technologies, NUCOR Steel, and Tenet Health Care.
When Obama withdrew US forces from Iraq in December 2011 (a temporary move as things turned out), Austin defied reality with the following remarks:
“What our troops achieved in Iraq over the course of nearly nine years is truly remarkable (sic).”
“Together with our coalition partners and corps of dedicated civilians, they removed a brutal dictator and gave the Iraqi people their freedom (sic).”
From GHW Bush’s preemptive 1991 Gulf War — to over a dozen years of genocidal US/Western sanctions — to Bush/Cheney’s 2003 aggression — to Trump’s rape and destruction of Mosul…millions of Iraqis were liberated from their lives.
Millions more lost access to near-universal healthcare and one of the region’s best educational systems to the highest levels — provided free to Iraqis by Saddam Hussein.
He ruled despotically but wasn’t all bad.
Iraqis today endure rampant corruption, high unemployment, impoverishment affecting millions, and the absence of essential to life social services.
What Austin, Trump’s first war secretary Mattis, and other US commanders did to Iraq over the past 30 years was and continues to be one of history’s great crimes.
Similar ones were — and are still — committed against numerous other countries, by hot war and other means.
US generals like Austin are charged with transforming sovereign nations into US vassal states by brute force and other hostile tactics.
When likely confirmed as Biden/Harris war secretary, Austin will be charged with directing all US hot wars and foreign occupations.
His mission will be to smash targeted countries into compliance with Washington’s interests and control them.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
Featured image: Vice President Joe Biden, Austin, and Command Sergeant Major Earl Rice, at an event marking the award of the Iraq Commitment Medal in December 2011 (Source: Public Domain)
“My young cousin passed away last week,” an Iranian Twitter user recently lamented. “She needed medication for her cancer that doctors said can’t be found.”
The tweet tragically went on: “Maybe she’d be alongside her little daughter now if she had this medicine and not under a pile of cold dirt.”
These heartbreaking words are from journalist Katayoon Lamezadeh, one of thousands of Iranians who have taken to social media to speak of how sanctions have upended their lives. Their stories reflect the devastating human costs of US economic sanctions that are often ignored by Washington’s foreign policy elite and largely unknown to the American public.
The assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is the latest in a long-running pressure campaign against Iran by the US and its allies such as Israel. However, in the case of sanctions, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the biggest price.
The onslaught of sanctions and covert actions on Iran during the Trump era has not elicited concessions from the Iranian government, but it has caused immense pain inside Iran. Today, Iran’s population is being crushed by the twofold blows of US sanctions and the Covid-19 crisis, all while under the yoke of an increasingly repressive government.
The Trump administration imposed new sanctions after it pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, crippling an economy that supports over 83 million lives. And despite the harrowing toll of the pandemic in Iran, the epicentre of the virus in the Middle East, Trump is bent on increasing sanctions all the way up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January. The administration has ignored a wide range of calls from world leaders and the United Nations to provide sanctions relief amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Recently, 75 Democrats in Congress also sent a letter to the Trump administration to demand measures to ensure that all countries can get essential medical equipment during the pandemic despite ramped-up US sanctions.
A humanitarian crisis
In recent weeks, many Iranians have begun documenting the humanitarian crisis unleashed by sanctions using the hashtag, Ravayat-e Tahrim (روایت_تحریم#) meaning “the story of sanctions”. The personal accounts corroborate the dismal economic data coming out of Iran, which show striking declines in the consumption of even staple goods such as red meat and rice.
The suffering and helplessness of the Iranian people today underscores the callous nature of President Trump’s approach to Iran, and the moral and strategic need for relieving pressure on the Iranian people and rethinking America’s sanctions policy under the incoming Biden administration.
Many of the stories Iranians have shared online relate to a loss of access to life-saving medicines. While humanitarian goods such as food and medicine are technically exempt from the US sanctions regime, groups such as Human Rights Watch have documented how the blanket economic and financial sanctions have deterred foreign firms and banks from facilitating humanitarian trade with Iran, including for “vital medicines and medical equipment”.
The outcome of this policy has harmed Iran’s most vulnerable, especially patients suffering from chronic and rare diseases such as multiple sclerosis, haemophilia, HIV/AIDS, epilepsy, and cancers. For many Iranians, their lives now depend on scrounging for increasingly scarce medicine.
One Iranian Twitter user wrote how he searched for his father’s diabetes medication at “seven or eight” pharmacies to no avail. Then, at a pharmacy in Tehran’s Ferdowsi square, he saw a woman who was searching for but could not find the blood thinner medication Plavix. “I forgot my own troubles and stared at her as she left the pharmacy hopeless,” he wrote. “I felt ashamed that we had Plavix at home for my father who suffered a stroke.”
Rapid decline
The firsthand reports of the desperation wreaked by US sanctions are made even bleaker by the overall economic picture in the country.According to the Statistical Centre of Iran, from March 2016 to March this year, GDP per capita decreased by roughly 10 percent. The price of basic foodstuffs such as butter and beans has more than doubled over this period, while housing and automobile prices have skyrocketed to an extent that they are unaffordable for all but the wealthiest citizens.
As the incomes of Iranian households have decreased, so too have domestic consumption patterns, even for vital foodstuffs. The statistics in this regard show how shockingly impoverished Iranians have become: from 2011 to 2020, red meat consumption has declined by 51.6 percent, rice by 34.7 percent, and dairy products by 35.3 percent. Notably, the previous round of sanctions imposed by the Obama administration was only beginning to lift in 2016 before being reimposed with greater severity by President Trump in 2018.
While perennial corruption and domestic mismanagement have long played a role in Iran’s economic malaise, Iran experienced 13 percent growth in 2016, the year the nuclear deal went into effect, and was on the path to further growth.
The rapid economic decline of recent years is directly attributable to the Trump administration’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign, which has slashed Iran’s oil exports, cut the value of its currency by two-thirds, and resulted in rampant inflation. The Iranian people have been subject to great misery with no discernable dividends for US national security interests or regional stability.
US sanctions have also helped crush Iran’s civil society, which has already been under immense pressure from the state. Over the last several years, Iranian civil society activists, like other Iranians, have grown poorer, sicker, and more hopeless.
“Being poorer means that many engaged in this sector as volunteers are no longer able to continue their activism, as they have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. As such, Iranian civil society is losing its most valuable asset: its volunteer activists,” said Sussan Tahmasebi, a prominent women’s rights activist and civil society leader.
However, the sad reality is that Iran’s civil society that once advocated rights is now shifting gears to meet basic demands such as for food and medical care. “It will take years for Iranian civil society to recover from these setbacks, just as it will take years for Iranians to recover from the economic setbacks of the last few years,” Tahmasebi added.
Restoring Iranians’ trust
The Trump administration’s sanctions on Iran become an end unto themselves. They have triggered a humanitarian disaster while failing to meet any reasonably defined US objectives towards Iran.
After years of maximum pressure, the Iranian government’s foreign policy is unchanged, its nuclear programme is more advanced, and its most hardline factions are greatly empowered. The current US policy has only managed to brutally immiserate a population already under the yoke of a repressive government.
Hossein Nooraninejad, the spokesperson of Iran’s largest reformist party, the United People’s Party, told us that sanctions have not resulted in their stated goals because the Iranian people have endured them, some as an act of “resistance” to the US and others due to coercion. Nooraninejad adds that Iranians are also increasingly demanding a diplomatic resolution to tensions with the US, because of the impact of sanctions on their lives.
The Biden administration must rethink the use of broad sanctions as a foreign policy tool. As the Iran case currently shows, the net outcome of such sanctions is only widespread suffering and geopolitical instability.
To restore US trust with the Iranian people and its credibility as a defender of human rights globally, President Biden must provide relief from collectively punishing sanctions as a first step to finding diplomatic solutions to disputes with Iran.
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Negar Mortazavi is a journalist and political analyst based in Washington DC. She is a columnist for The Independent and host of the Iran Podcast. @NegarMortazavi
Sina Toossi is a Senior Research Analyst at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). He tweets @SinaToossi
December 8th, 2020 by Center For Biological Diversity
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit today rejected the Trump administration’s approval of the first offshore oil-drilling development in federal Arctic waters.
Hilcorp Alaska received approval in 2018 to build and operate the controversial Liberty project, an artificial drilling island and underwater pipeline that would risk oil spills in the sensitive Beaufort Sea and threaten polar bears and Arctic communities.
The lawsuit was brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife and Pacific Environment, all represented by Earthjustice.
“This is a huge victory for polar bears and our climate,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This project was a disaster waiting to happen that should never have been approved. I’m thrilled the court saw through the Trump administration’s attempt to push this project through without carefully studying its risks.”
The court ruled that the Trump administration had failed to properly consider the climate impacts of the project, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Specifically, the court rejected the administration’s improper use of economic modeling to reach the conclusion that this project would benefit the climate.
“I’m pleased that the court today rejected the administration’s inaccurate and misleading analysis of this project’s impact to the climate,” said Earthjustice attorney Jeremy Lieb. “In the face of a worsening climate crisis, the federal government should not be in the business of approving irresponsible offshore oil development in the Arctic. The world cannot afford to develop new oil prospects anywhere, but especially in the Arctic where warming is already taking such a significant toll.”
The court also held that the Fish and Wildlife Service had violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to adequately analyze the effects of the project on polar bears —specifically, that the agency arbitrarily relied on uncertain mitigation measures in concluding the project would not adversely modify polar bear critical habitat and failed to properly consider the harm to them from noise disturbance.
“Today’s news is a victory for Alaska’s imperiled polar bears that are threatened by oil and gas development throughout virtually all of their terrestrial denning critical habitat ─ in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and in the nearshore marine environment as well,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska program director at Defenders of Wildlife. “Defenders will continue our fight against destructive oil and gas drilling and for the survival of polar bears in the Arctic.”
The Liberty project would involve construction and operation of a nine-acre artificial island, with a 24-acre footprint, in about 20 feet of water and a 5.6-mile pipeline under Arctic waters to send the oil into onshore pipelines.
“Today’s decision is a victory for the planet and its people. The ruling affirms that the U.S. must take steps to transition off of oil and gas if we are to have any hope of halting the climate crisis,” said Tim Donaghy, senior research specialist at Greenpeace. “If we are going to create a just, green, and peaceful future, it must start with rejecting destructive projects like Liberty. Climate action must happen now and the Biden administration needs to keep its promise to halt any new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.”
The court vacated approval of the project and remanded the matter to the agency.
“We applaud the court’s decision to reject the Trump administration’s rush to drill for oil in Alaska’s pristine Arctic coastlines,” said Marcie Keever, legal director with Friends of the Earth. “Thankfully, the court put the health of our children and our planet over oil company profits. We will continue to fight against future oil and gas projects in the Arctic.”
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China is about to accomplish a historic act in Colombia. In 1942, when Bogotá had 380,000 inhabitants, a project was launched to build the urban metro. After more than 75 years and with 8 million people, the work finally seems real, thanks to Chinese efforts, already valued at more than 3.5 billion dollars. The Bogota metro is one of the most important infrastructure works in Latin America today. A promising business that begins to materialize after seven decades of broken promises and unfinished projects. The work was attributed to two Chinese companies and the first line is expected to start operating in the second half of 2028. This line will be 24 kilometers long and will directly benefit almost 3 million inhabitants. The first line will be elevated and will go from the city of Bosa, a popular area of more than 600,000 inhabitants, to the southwest, crossing the city diagonally to Avenida Caracas with Calle 78 to the north.
Bogotá is one of the five megacities in Latin America along with Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, and Mexico City. And it is precisely the only city on the list without a metro system or any other form of public transport. As expected, public service is not enough, congestion in the Colombian capital is kilometers long and environmental pollution due to the emission of gases has reached intolerable levels. Currently there are 1,315,000 cars in the country’s capital, as well as 410,778 vans and 514,947 motorcycles. The public transport system consists of articulated buses known as Transmilenio or TPR. Such buses, when inaugurated – in 2000 – were considered a great innovation and received several awards, but with the exponential increase in the number of passengers, congestion and obstruction of city traffic, the system has become obsolete and scrapped, receiving today several criticisms.
The consortium chosen for the metro construction was the APCA Transmimetro, formed by two Chinese companies, China Harbor Engineering Company Limited (Chec) and Xi’An Metro Company Limited, which have already participated in the construction of this type of transport in several cities around in the world, such as Caracas, Dubai, and Malaga. The selection process lasted 15 months, with the Chinese consortium being chosen due to the fact that it presented the most favorable economic conditions. Although the project is old and these Chinese companies have already participated in similar operations in different regions of the planet, it is undeniable that such work represents something far beyond mere business for Beijing. Colombia is Washington’s largest South American ally, being a NATO partner country and a true American military base in the South, serving as a center of operations for the Pentagon’s strategic programs for the entire South American region. Therefore, in a context of increasingly intense trade war, the approach of a major American partner to Beijing must be carefully analyzed. Every form of business between China and an American ally currently represents much more than mere trade or agreement of interests, being a real geopolitical maneuver. This becomes even more evident when we consider the US domestic political and social context.
With an uncertain political future, turbulent elections, accusations of fraud and judicialization, American democracy is truly in crisis. More than that, Washington’s entire strategy to secure American global power is also in crisis. While the US is sinking into an internal crisis, China, with its political and economic stability and its well-defined international strategy, seeks to expand its ties with nations historically allied with Washington, gradually reducing the area of American influence. By guaranteeing the completion of a Colombian project of seventy years, Beijing is taking space in South America and, consequently, taking a great geopolitical leap towards overcoming American hegemony.
With Trump, Washington adopted a strategy of global retraction and greater regional focus. Trump’s foreign policy can be defined as a “new Monroe doctrine”, or, in other words, greater attention to the consolidation of American power on its own continent. This was evident, for example, with Trump’s attitudes towards Venezuela, while he sought to significantly decrease the number of American soldiers in the Middle East. With Biden, this situation can change. The new president-elect openly has a focus of attention in the East, promising to increase American troops in Iraq and Syria again, while the American continent does not appear so frequently in his speeches.
China will certainly take advantage of this moment. Beijing already has a strong influence in Central America, where it makes heavy investments in infrastructure and guarantees its space in the center of the American continent. Now, the way is open for the Chinese occupation of the South. Attracting Colombia, Beijing removes the main American ally from Washington’s sphere of influence and opens the way to a new horizon of possibilities for Bogota and the entire South America.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Comments Off on China Overtakes the US to Become EU’s Biggest Trade Partner as Beijing’s Economy Continues to Boom Post-COVID while the Rest of the World Slides into the Red
December 8th, 2020 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) and the Coalition of Canadian Palestinian Organizations (CCPO) are urging the Canadian government to vote in support of an upcoming resolution on the status of Jerusalem at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The resolution rejects Israel’s unilateral annexation of Jerusalem, and calls for the concerns of both Palestinians and Israelis to be considered when negotiating the final status of Jerusalem. The resolution is expected to be considered by the plenary later this week, alongside the final votes on a series of related annual resolutions.
From 2000 to 2010, Canada voted “Yes” on the Jerusalem resolution, before radically reversing its position in 2011. During preliminary voting at the committee stage, Canada has already maintained its anti-Palestinian habit by voting “No” or abstaining on 11 related motions which affirmed Palestinian human rights, with the exception of Canada’s lone vote in favour of Palestinian self-determination.
The upcoming resolution on Jerusalem is expected to reflect Canada’s existing foreign policy positions: condemning Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem as illegal, calling for a just and lasting solution that takes into account the legitimate concerns of both Israelis and Palestinians, and calling on all parties to respect the historic status quo in regard to holy places. “This vote is an opportunity for Canada to demonstrate that it stands by its own position on a shared Jerusalem,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. “It would be highly cynical for Canada to continue to vote against what it believes to be true, for the sole purpose of defending Israel from legitimate criticism,” said Bueckert.
“The status of Jerusalem is a significant issue for Palestinian Canadians, who want to see their government speak out against dangerous moves on the ground, such as Israeli annexation and Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy,” said Mousa Zaidan, National Coordinator for the CCPO. “We hope to see Canadian politicians start listening to their constituencies on important issues like these, and to stop taking them for granted.”
To help make sense of Canada’s voting record at the UN, CJPME recently launched the UN Dashboard, a new resource which allows Canadians to explore how Canada has voted on 16 resolutions about Palestinian human rights from 2000-2020. An EKOS poll from June 2020 found that 82% of Canadians support a shared Jerusalem, and that they reject proposals to recognize Jerusalem as the exclusive capital of Israel.
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On Sunday, Venezuelans voted to elect 277 National Assembly members for five-year terms from January 5, 2021 to January 5, 2026.
An unprecedented total of 14,400 candidates from 107 political parties ran for office.
Two Bolivarian blocs were heavy favorites to win a majority of seats — the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) and PPT Homeland for All Party/together with the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV).
For the first time, the Popular Revolutionary Alternative (APR) competed for seats.
The PPT Homeland for All Party called APR “a historic necessity which has come out of the coming together of all of us who struggle to defend the victories of the revolution.”
The above parties support Bolivarian social democracy, wanting it preserved.
US-designated puppet/usurper in waiting Guaido and many opposition parties boycotted Sunday’s process because of no chance to win a controlling majority.
On January 5, his time in office ends when polls show his support is a rock-bottom 3%.
Bolivarian social democracy is the world’s gold standard of how governments should operate — serving all Venezuelans, not just the privileged few as in the US, West and most other countries.
US war by other means on Venezuela since Hugo Chavez’s December 1998 election continues without letup.
Harsh Trump regime policies imposed on the country exceeded the worst of its predecessors since the Clinton co-presidency.
Much of the same will surely continue under Biden/Harris — how the US punishes all nations unwilling to subordinate their sovereign rights to a higher power in Washington.
Unlike elections in the US and West, Venezuela’s process is open, free, and fair, international monitors observing things.
Representatives from the UN, CARICOM, African Union, Council of Latin American Electoral Experts (CEELA), Russia, Iran, and other countries were in Venezuela on Sunday.
Former regional presidents Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Manuel Zelaya were involved as observers.
In deference to US imperial interests, the EU rejected an invitation to send monitors.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Electoral Council (CNE) handles things smoothly and efficiently whenever Venezuelan elections are held.
The Trump regime, Biden/Harris, and Brussels only recognize governments that are subservient to Western interests — at the expense of their own people, targeting independent ones for regime change.
Early Monday, AP News reported the following:
“Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s political alliance claimed a sweeping victory” in Sunday’s National Assembly elections, adding that:
The US and other Western countries called the results fraudulent (sic) — because Bolivarianism triumphed overwhelmingly over fascist dark forces.
In a nationally televised address at 1:45 AM local time, Maduro said “(w)e have recovered the National Assembly with the majority vote of the Venezuelan people.”
“It’s a great victory without a doubt for democracy.”
“Starting today, a new era is born in Venezuela, and we are giving ourselves the opportunity to start a truly democratic process for the recovery of our beloved homeland.”
“I call on all the opposition to abandon the extremist route.”
“We ask in one voice for the new United States government to lift all sanctions.”
“We restore all national dialogue mechanisms and are preparing an electoral agenda.”
“Today’s vote is a vote of rebellion, of independence, to tell the world that Venezuela is nobody’s colony, that Venezuela is a free, sovereign and independent country.”
Telesur called Sunday’s process “orderly and calm.”
Maduro’s PSUV coalition won 67% of National Assembly seats, Telesur reported — voter turnout light at around 31%.
In response to Sunday’s process, Pompeo reacted as expected.
Turning truth on its head, he tweeted the following:
“Venezuela’s electoral fraud has already been committed (sic).”
“The results announced by the illegitimate Maduro regime will not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people (sic).”
“What’s happening today is a fraud and a sham, not an election (sic).”
The above remarks reflect reality about US fantasy democracy.
Venezuelans have the real thing.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
The general strike occurred in the context of the devastation brought about by the coronavirus pandemic in India. Added to this are the millions of people who have lost income and who now face increased poverty and hunger, in a country where even before the pandemic 50 percent of all children suffered malnourishment.
Some are newly aware that the misguided over-reach mandating face masks, social distancing and a limit on gatherings have done nothing to reduce the spread of Covid and that compliance with mandatory face masks is only a beginning stage for what the future holds.
Washington’s China bashing started with Obama through his Asia Pivot policy, reinforced by Trump and Biden might go even further than Trump. So far, China bashing does not seem to be beneficial to Washington. Even in the long run, there is no guarantee that it will bring any positive results. In fact, it will hurt not only the economies of the two rivals but also the global economy.
On December 1, 2020, the ex-Pfizer head of respiratory research Dr. Michael Yeadon and the lung specialist and former head of the public health department Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg filed an application with the EMA, the European Medicine Agency responsible for EU-wide drug approval, for the immediate suspension of all SARS CoV 2 vaccine studies.
The United States of America has been a world power for almost a century. This century saw the highest level of technological progress but it was also the most brutal century in terms of wars, human deaths and suffering.
French protesters clashed with police in Paris and other cities including Marseille, Lyon, Rennes and Nantes yesterday as tens of thousands took to the streets in further mass demonstrations against an authoritarian new security law.
The US under both right wings of the one-party state is waging a long war on Russia by other means — and all other nations unwilling to bow and scape to its imperial demands.US aggression includes endless smashing of Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and at times Iraq.
Paranoia, disregard for evidence and over-the-top rhetoric to encourage hate. And I’m not talking about Donald Trump’s Republicans. Progressive Canadian should counter a wave of McCarthyite Sinophobia sweeping this country’s politics.
The way the federal government can kill death row prisoners will soon be expanded to ghoulish methods that include hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber and the firing squad. Set to take effect on Christmas Eve, the new regulations authorizing an alternative to lethal injections
In 1997, Don DeLillo, the author of seventeen novels, published what many consider his masterpiece, Underworld. It was a prophetic book in many ways, especially with its focus on the World Trade Towers and the way the book’s cover, front and back, pictured the towers shrouded in smoke or clouds with what seemed like a large bird approaching it at its upper floors.
With freedom of speech continually being curtailed, running an independent counter-current news media in 2020 is no easy feat.
We have always operated on a shoestring budget, but the last year has been a financial struggle for us. However, we still have a solid core readership for which we are extremely grateful! We turn to you, our core readers, to ask for your support in keeping Global Research alive and well for now and for future generations.
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Joe Biden announced last week that he will nominate Avril Haines to the position of Director of National Intelligence. Haines provided legal cover for CIA agents and worked closely with Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan on Obama’s tenfold expansion of drone killings.
If confirmed by Congress, Haines will be the first woman to head up the coalition of 17 intelligence agencies ranging from the National Security Agency to the FBI and the State Department, all under the umbrella of the DNI.
“If she gets word of a threat coming to our shores, like another pandemic or foreign interference in our elections, she will not stop raising alarms until the right people take action. People will be able to take her word because she always calls it as she sees it,” said Joe Biden when announcing Haines’ nomination.
Haines is billed as someone who speaks “truth to power.” It’s an ironic about-face for the person who decided not to punish those who hacked into the computers of Senate staffers investigating the CIA’s torture program. Haines’ “accountability board” spared CIA personnel from having to answer for their use of torture, and her team redacted the board findings.
Yet Haines is being touted by former Obama administration officials for allegedly making the drone program “more responsible.”
“This is a pretty ominous signal about what is to come” in a Biden administration, a Senate staffer who works on national security issues toldThe Daily Beast. “To have [Haines] touted for her record in advancing human rights and respect for the rule of law I don’t think can be adequately squared with not only her record but her deliberate choices of advocacy.”
Whatever policy changes Haines implemented, far too often U.S. drone strikes killed civilians and turned weddings into funerals. The standards fell “far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Haines also supported the controversial nomination of waterboarding proponent Gina Haspel, who had direct supervision over the CIA’s torture program, as first female director of the CIA under President Trump.
“If Haines couldn’t even oppose the appointment of a torturer as CIA director, how can she be expected to rein in American intelligence agencies’ abuses of power?” asksThe Guardian.
After a detail to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put Haines on Biden’s radar in late 2010, she moved to the White House, where she eventually chaired the interagency lawyers’ group that created the legal framework for “targeted killings”—i.e. drone strikes.
She quickly partnered with White House counterterrorism adviser and former CIA officer John Brennan.
“We wanted to make sure that the counterterrorism program and any type of lethal strikes that we might take would be very sharply caverned within a framework that made certain stipulations [and] criteria before any strike was taken,” said Brennan.
Despite the tenfold increase in drone strikes under the Obama administration, Brennan framed their roles as one of “limiting strikes.”
“Avril and I bore the scars of a lot of the pushback that we received from counterterrorism proponents that wanted to have more latitude in carrying out strikes,” he said.
“Former Obama aides have retroactively sought to cast [Haines] as a voice of restraint and protecting civilians, but this revisionism…is undeserved,” tweeted Sarah Lazare, editor of In These Times. “Whatever supposed safeguards Haines included to limit harm to civilians, they didn’t work. The effect of the presidential policy guidance she co-authored was to turn the world into a US battlefield & normalize drone war that was, and continues to be, extremely lethal for civilians.”
Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations, disagrees.
“When someone doesn’t get everything they seek inside the U.S. government, critics can say ‘that person is legitimating policy by improving it,’” said Power, “but the fact of the matter is that more innocent civilians would have died and a far wider set of targets would have been pursued without the changes that she secured.”
In op-eds strewn throughout the media, Haines has been recast as a scientist, spy chief, and supergirl, with a life like “a movie script.”
“Avril Haines’ appointment will make America — and the world — safer,” gushes CNN national security analyst Samantha Vinograd. “Her incredible background — including her love of science, flying planes and brown belt in judo — may read like a movie script, but it’s real. Among her other accomplishments, she’s a skilled lawyer, a physicist and has been described by a colleague as someone who ‘may quite literally be the nicest person any of us have ever met.’”
CNN’s write-up is notably similar to this one in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Avril Haines’ journey to the top of the national security world reads more like a movie script than the path of a woman about to make history as America’s first female spy chief. Long before President-elect Joe Biden nominated her this week to be his Director of National Intelligence, Haines mastered judo at an elite academy in Tokyo, learnt to fly planes while studying physics in Chicago and opened a bookstore in Baltimore that occasionally hosted readings of erotic literature.
“While much news coverage has dwelled on her quirky life history – she rebuilt a plane! She’s a brown belt! She owned a bookstore! – she also played a key role in overseeing the drone strike program under Obama,” points outThe Guardian’s Nathan Robinson. “This should be completely disqualifying, because Obama’s use of drones was a national disgrace. There has been very little accountability or acknowledgment of how bad it was. Anyone involved with the program should have been prosecuted. Instead they’re being rewarded.”
Vinograd says that she worked with Haines during the Obama administration and that Haines won’t get political like Richard Grenell and current DNI John Ratcliffe have, in her telling.
“In the time that I worked with her, I never once heard her mention politics or party or anything of that sort,” she writes. “In the wake of Trump’s undermining of the intelligence community, Haines’ track record of apolitical public service will help her restore the soul of the intelligence community which, at its core, is supposed to speak truth to power.”
In her glowing op-ed, Vinograd omits Haines’ role in sparing CIA personnel accountability for torture and hacking Senate computers. Others are not so quick to forget. The New York Times reports that Haines “is likely to win confirmation in a sharply divided Senate but encounter hard criticisms from the left.”
The selection of Haines to lead DNI is “very” concerning, national security investigative journalist Gareth Porter told The American Conservative, and particularly if the Biden administration “continues the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and Africa, as [I] expect it will.”
“Not only did [Haines] show an absence of ethical values in her role in the Obama White House, but she will have a powerful bureaucratic self-interest in maximizing the drone strikes, which have occupied a major share of the CIA’s staffing in the past,” he said.
Haines’ drone limits weren’t “sufficient,” and on “the torture report, she was part of an administration that was much more hostile to the Senate’s [investigation] efforts than was warranted,” said Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst for Project on Government Oversight, in an interview with The American Conservative. Haines “signed off on the CIA’s decision to exonerate itself for spying on and making a false criminal referral about the Senate staff….”
Biden undoubtedly chose Haines because she is a “familiar face,” points out Hawkins. The open question is whether Biden and Haines recognize that the U.S. is in a “very different moment” now, as a war-weary public faces the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Barbara Boland is TAC’s foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered, a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work has appeared on Fox News, The Hill, UK Spectator, and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.
A new chapter in the scandals of the Netherlands’s involvement in supporting terrorist organizations in Syria is unfolding in front of the world public opinion after Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has recently admitted that he personally intervened to obstruct parliamentary investigations into his government’s provision of millions of dollars to terrorists, which shows the blatant hypocrisy in the policies of the Netherlands and the West regarding the allegations of fighting terrorism and protecting human rights.
The new development in the Dutch scandals file came after Rutte had been forced a few days ago to admit that he had obstructed the investigations by a fact-finding committee formed at the Dutch Parliament two years ago after Dutch media published files revealing the Dutch government’s involvement in supporting terrorists in Syria over several years and supplying them with technical equipment, especially for communication, military and logistical equipment, and hundreds of trucks and various vehicles.
At the time, the Dutch investigators did not reach any conclusion due to Rutte obstruction of the work of this committee and his deliberate concealment of secrets that prove his direct involvement with terrorists and his flagrant violation of the international and Dutch laws as the organizations that he supports financially and logistically in Syria are classified as terrorist organizations by the Dutch Public Prosecution itself.
The Parliamentary Investigation Committee was formed in the Netherlands after two media outlets revealed in a special documentary in 2017 the Dutch government’s support for about 22 terrorist groups, including the so-called “Levantine Front” organization, which is classified as terrorist even by Dutch institutions.
Rutte’s obstruction of the investigations has been met with great indignation by the Dutch people, as the media there has focused on his government’s involvement in providing millions of dollars, foodstuffs, medicines and telecommunication equipment to terrorists, while Dutch and European parties started to raise this issue at the public opinion platforms, calling for transparency and the truth while wondering about the benefit of democracy if it is not reflected on the ethical dimensions of the international policies.
The Dutch support for armed terrorist groups has continued throughout the years of the war on Syria, despite the pledges of the Amsterdam government to its parliament that only the organizations it described as “moderate” would receive support in harmony with the hypocrisy adopted by the United States of America, which has always claimed that it provides support and training to those whom it describes as “moderate opposition”, but later many reports have refuted these claims and confirmed that “Washington’s moderates” are nothing but terrorists who joined the ranks of terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda and Daesh “ISIS”.
The Dutch government has claimed that the reason behind its illegal interference to obstruct the investigations into the scandal is that the investigation would lead to the disclosure of secret information, in addition to exposing the alleged international coalition which had been formed under the pretext of fighting Daesh “ISIS” and the crimes committed by the Western states which are members of this coalition against Syrian civilians and the Syrian infrastructure under the pretense of fighting terrorism, while the facts on the ground confirm the involvement of this coalition in protecting Daesh.
The Netherlands, which is on the top of the European countries that export terrorists to Syria and Iraq, and the Dutch government’s support for terrorist organizations in the context of its submission to the American decision, makes it the last to have the right to talk about democracy and human rights in Syria or elsewhere and its government should be held accountable at the International Court of Justice.
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What Happened: A new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has, according to the authors, discovered that vaccinated children require far more healthcare than unvaccinated children. At least that’s what they found from the group of children used to collect the data.
This type of study is interesting to see given the fact that studies comparing unvaccinated children to vaccinated children are lacking, there aren’t many of them. These studies are, as the authors state, “rarely conducted.”
None of the post licensure-vaccine safety studies have included comparisons to groups completely unexposed to vaccines.
The study concludes that “the unvaccinated children in this practice are not, overall, less healthy than the vaccinated and that indeed the vaccinated children appear to be significantly less healthy than the unvaccinated.
The data source for this study was all billing and medical records of Integrative Pediatrics, a private pediatric practice located in Portland, Oregon.
The study emphasizes the need for more research given the fact that, again, there is hardly any in this area. They concur with Mawson et al., 2017 , who reported: “Further research involving larger, independent samples is needed to verify and understand these unexpected findings in order to optimize the impact of vaccines on children’s health” and with Hooker and Miller 2020, who wrote: “Further study is necessary to understand the full spectrum of health effects associated with childhood vaccination”.
These studies mentioned above also had similar findings.
According to the authors,
Vaccines are widely regarded as safe and effective within the medical community and are an integral part of the current American medical system. While the benefits of vaccination have been estimated in numerous studies, negative and nonspecific impact of vaccines on human health have not been well studied. Most recently, it has been determined that variation exists in individual responses to vaccines, that differences exist in the safety profile of live and inactivated vaccines, and that simultaneous administration of live and inactivated vaccines may be associated with poor outcomes. Studies have not been published that report on the total outcomes from vaccinations, or the increase or decrease in total infections in vaccinated individuals.
This is important because, although vaccinations in some cases may protect against the target disease, what else might they be doing not only on the short term, but in the long term? It’s also important to point out that in other cases, like the HPV vaccine, there is no evidence that they do protect against the target disease.
Another great example comes from a study published in 2017 that examined the introduction of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine (DTP) in an urban community in Guinea-Bissau in the early 1908s. They found that the DTP vaccine was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. The authors state the following:
All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Though (this) vaccine protects children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.
This new study points out,
Pre-licensure clinical trials for vaccines cannot detect long-term outcomes since safety review periods following administration are typically 42 days or less. Long-term vaccine safety science relies on post-market surveillance studies using databases such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC’s) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safety Datalink. VAERS is a passive reporting system in which, according to Ross 2011 , “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.” The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) can, in principle, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM, 2013), be used to compare outcomes of vaccines and unvaccinated children. Based on the IOM’s recommendation, in 2016, the CDC published a white paper (CDC, 2016; Glanz et al., 2016) on studying the safety of their recommended pediatric vaccine schedule. Unfortunately, to date, no studies have been published comparing a diversity of outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
Below is one of many interesting graphs from the study. The orange line represents the vaccinated children, and the blue one represents the unvaccinated.
The parents that I work with in New York, that I see around the country are very concerned that their rights are being taken away, that their knowledge about the science is being pushed away by an agenda that only says, unvaccinated children are a problem.
No study has every been done in this country, appropriately, to address the health outcomes of children who are vaccinated versus the children who are unvaccinated. I have been seeing families in my practice for over 20 years, that have opted out of vaccination, they are the healthiest children I’ve ever seen. – Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a NY licensed paediatrician
Why This Is Important: Given the fact that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) has paid out approximately $4 billion dollars to families of vaccine injured children, there are clearly, in my opinion, some valid points here, especially against compulsory vaccinations. Again, as mentioned above, VAERS only accounts for an estimated 1 percent of vaccine injuries, this one percent is what is recorded.
A 2010 HHS pilot study by the Federal Agency for Health Care Research (AHCR) found that 1 in every 39 vaccines causes injury, a shocking comparison to the claims from the CDC of 1 in every million.
Take the MMR vaccine for example, if you search on VAERS, as of 2/5/19, the cumulative raw count of adverse events from measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines alone was: 93,929 adverse events, 1,810 disabilities, 6,902 hospitalizations, and 463 deaths. Again, don’t forget about that 1% figure cited in the study.
There are a number of legitimate concerns about vaccine safety that would require quite a long and very in-depth article, but I just wanted to let the reader know here briefly. Aluminum for example, is another concern I’ve written quite a lot about.
These are a few reasons as to why vaccine hesitancy is at an all time high, even among many physicians and scientists. This has actually been observed for a while. For example, one study published in the journal EbioMedicinein 2013 outlines this point, stating in the introduction:
Over the past two decades several vaccine controversies have emerged in various countries, including France, inducing worries about severe adverse effects and eroding confidence in health authorities, experts and science. These two dimensions are at the core of vaccine hesitancy (VH) observed in the general population. VH is defined as delay in acceptance of vaccination, or refusal, or even acceptance with doubts about its safety and benefits, with all these behaviours and attitudes varying according to context , vaccine and personal profile, despite the availability of vaccine services VH presents a challenge to physicians who must address their patients’ concerns about vaccines and ensure satisfactory vaccination coverage.
At a 2019 conference on vaccines put on by the World Health Organization this fact was emphasized by Professor Heidi Larson, a Professor of Anthropology and the Risk and Decision Scientist Director at the Vaccine Confidence Project. She is referenced, as you can see, by the authors in the study above. At the conference, she emphasized that safety concerns among people and health professionals seem to be the biggest issue regarding vaccine hesitancy.
The other thing that’s a trend, and an issue, is not just confidence in providers but confidence of health care providers, we have a very wobbly health professional frontline that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. That’s a huge problem, because to this day any study I’ve seen… still, the most trusted person on any study I’ve seen globally is the health care provider…
Is there not enough information here alone to warrant informed consent? I have a hard time understanding how someone who would take the new COVID-19 vaccine, for example, would be worried about me contracting the virus if they are protected?
Why have we given governments the ability to mandate such actions? Why have we given them so much power to dictate what we do and how we want to live? Is this really how we want to live, is this really the kind of world we want to create?
A Deeper Discussion. What Do We Do About The Increasing Vaccine Pressure?
So many are concerned about mandatory vaccination. Further, many are starting to see that mandated vaccines may not be the future, but that services and options will be denied unless you can prove you have been vaccinated. Is it still the time to point the blame? Or is there a radical new approach we must take? A shift in our worldview, re-examining who we think we are, why we are here and what world we want to create is where we will begin to find the answers we are looking for. Has the dualistic fight the enemy method worked in the past? Are we not still here regardless of having used this method in the past? Maybe it’s time for a new conversation, one that looks at ourselves in a whole new light. This perhaps is how we will solve our ongoing challenges at their core.
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……….the vaccines induce immediate or latent adverse reactions that sideline these first responders and frontline workers? It could be a catastrophe. And if for some reason the vaccines spread COVID-19 rather than quell it (there is such a thing as vaccine-induced infection), what a way to create an out-of-control pandemic. Some of the vaccines are just weakened (attenuated) COVID-19. Just what is in the vaccine if COVID-19 hasn’t been shown to exist and the test for it is so unreliable it has created pseudoepidemics? No one can fathom just how fraudulent this pandemic is. Everything related to COVID-19 is a false prop.
Every doctor, nurse and laboratory technician becomes a Trojan horse as they go back home and spread the virus, or whatever else is in the vaccine. These are experimental vaccines, rushed to market. The immunized are guinea pigs.
The US Code, the Helsinki Agreement and the Nuremburg Code protect citizens from forced vaccination by codifying the right to consent to or refuse vaccination when experimental vaccines like COVID-19 are being employed. The public won’t be informed of these legal protections.
What we have today is coerced consent (no travel, no job, no money). Are healthcare workers going to keep their jobs if they object to vaccination?
Are frail, mentally impaired residents at nursing homes who can no longer take care of their own affairs, able to understand a vaccination consent form?
Because vaccine effectiveness depends on the quality of the immune response, persons with weak immune systems, such as very young infants and elderly persons, are likely to be insufficiently protected even with the best vaccines. For example, protection against influenza virus strains is only 29%–46% in persons aged older than 75 years, compared with 41%–58% in persons 60–74 years of age.
What if…….. vaccination creates a problem called immune enhancement whereby a person is vaccinated against one disease and later is exposed to that same pathogen (virus or bacterium) again and develops more severe disease than they would have if not vaccinated.
What if…….. a post-vaccination inflammatory syndrome occurs in large numbers? Certain vaccines may produce brain inflammation that result in symptoms of fever, restlessness, anorexia and out-of-control emotions (acute crying).
What if……. There are so many severe side effects emanating from vaccination that these cases fill up hospital wards and are mistakenly reported to represent cases of COVID-19, which is largely diagnosed by symptoms, not a lab test.
What if just 1% of 325,000,000 vaccinated Americans experience a severe or lasting side effect, or God forbid, get added to the mortality numbers. We are talking about 32,500 deaths. Americans won’t learn of any of this till months later because mortality data takes months to tabulate and verify. These deaths will be blamed on the virus, not the vaccine or the vaccination process.
Just admit frail elderly Americans to the hospital and the ordeal (isolation, antibiotic resistance, medication errors, malnutrition, what is called iatrogenic damage or hospital-induced trauma) may lead to the premature demise of many.
Why the elderly won’t develop antibodies after vaccination
The strong line of internal defense against infectious disease in the elderly is comprised of T-cells produced in the thymus gland. The thymus gland of elderly Americans has shriveled up and no longer efficiently produces T-cells, especially memory T-cells that produce long-lasting immunity.
The trace mineral zinc is required for maintenance of the thymus gland. Zinc supplementation is generally not practiced by American medicine. Instead of a mandate to fortify the diet of nursing home residents with zinc, we have a mandate to vaccinate feeble patients who can’t possibly benefit from vaccination.
Instead, we get more ineffective anti-viral drugs
Blockbuster (get-rich) medicines like remdesivir (Velkury) and Tamiflu (oseltamivir) are promoted in pandemics.
One report says: “It is inexplicable that despite the lack of scientifically robust data on efficacy and safety of Tamiflu (oseltamivir), reputed organizations like World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US FDA not only recommended the drug in question for treatment and prophylaxis of influenza but its stockpiling as well.”
These are the same organizations responsible for protecting you and your family from COVID-19.
But here we are once again with a re-run of another “ivir” drug – – remdesivir.
The end game: mass vaccination
The grim part of this is that the U.S. may be preparing to administer the COVID-19 vaccine house-to-house.
Without a proof of vaccination card, you won’t be able to travel, eat at a restaurant, get a job, etc. I would call that “coerced consent,” not “informed consent.”
US law says Americans have the right to refuse vaccination because these are experimental vaccines. Mass vaccination of the entire population, for which government agencies are already practicing for, is upon us. Vaccine ID cards are in the making. Just how long does immunity against COVID-19 last? Maybe yearly vaccination will be required. And what if the virus mutates? Then what?
Expect the cure to be worse than the disease.
The so-called life saving vaccines will be used to quell a viral pandemic that official counts show 281,000 Americans have died from as of the first week of December 2020, which amounts to 0.00084% or 8.4 deaths in 10,000, of which 94% are deaths from other diseases counted as COVID-19, which leaves 16,860 deaths that are probably cases of tuberculosis which is a similar lung disease being re-categorized as COVID-19, which represents 0.00005% or 5 in 100,000 deaths. Out of 66.7 million cases that have been confirmed by the notoriously inaccurate PCR test, among which 42.9 million have recovered on their own without need of a vaccine, or 65% recover without vaccines. So, vaccination will not be beneficial to these people. Many millions more Americans were never tested, experienced symptoms and recovered. The natural recovery rate exceeds the effectiveness of the vaccine, which will only be about 7%. It would be better to treat the severely ill rather than over-vaccinate the entire population.
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To track COVID vaccine recipients, Operation Warp Speed has resurrected a program devised after the September 11 attacks that was quickly defunded following public backlash over privacy concerns.
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Operation Warp Speed, a joint operation between U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense (DOD), continues to be shrouded in secrecy, but little by little information is emerging that long-term monitoring of the U.S. public is part of the plan.
At face value, OWS is a public-private partnership tasked with producing therapeutics and a fast-tracked COVID-19 vaccine — 300 million doses’ worth that are intended to be made available starting in January 2021.
But it appears the involvement doesn’t end there. Rather than just ensuring a vaccine is produced and made available for those who want it, Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, dubbed the coronavirus vaccine czar, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the rollout will include “incredibly precise … tracking systems.”
Their purpose? “To ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects.” In an interview with The New York Times, Slaoui described it as a “very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system.”
What will the vaccine monitoring system entail?
This is the number one question, and one that hasn’t been answered, at least not officially. “While Slaoui himself was short on specifics regarding this ‘pharmacovigilance surveillance system,’” news outlet Humans Are Free reported, “the few official documents from OWS that have been publicly released offer some details about what this system may look like and how long it is expected to ‘track’ the vital signs and whereabouts of Americans who receive a Warp Speed vaccine.”
One of the documents, “From the Factory to the Frontlines: The Operation Warp Speed Strategy for Distributing a COVID-19 Vaccine,” was released by HHS. It also mentions the use of pharmacovigilance surveillance along with Phase 4 (post-licensure) clinical trials in order to assess the vaccines’ long-term safety, since “some technologies have limited previous data on safety in humans.”
The report, which lays out a strategy for distributing a COVID-19 vaccine, from allocation and distribution to administration and more, continues:
“The key objective of pharmacovigilance is to determine each vaccine’s performance in real-life scenarios, to study efficacy, and to discover any infrequent and rare side effects not identified in clinical trials. OWS will also use pharmacovigilance analytics, which serves as one of the instruments for the continuous monitoring of pharmacovigilance data.
“Robust analytical tools will be used to leverage large amounts of data and the benefits of using such data across the value chain, including regulatory obligations. Pharmacovigilance provides timely information about the safety of each vaccine to patients, healthcare professionals, and the public, contributing to the protection of patients and the promotion of public health.”
Similar language was reiterated in an October 2020 perspective article published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), written by Slaoui and Dr. Matthew Hepburn.
Hepburn is a former program manager for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he oversaw the development of Profusa an implantable biosensor that allows a person’s physiology to be examined at a distance via smartphone connectivity. Profusa is also backed by Google, the largest data mining company in the world.
In NEJM, the duo writes, “Because some technologies have limited previous data on safety in humans, the long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance strategies.”
‘Traceability’ a key tenet of operation warp speed
Humans Are Free also references an OWS infographic, which details the COVID-19 vaccine distribution and administration process. One of the four key tenets is “traceability,” which includes confirming which of the approved vaccines were administered regardless of location (public or private), reminding recipients to return for a second dose and ensuring that the correct second dose is administered.
That word — pharmacovigilance — is used again, this time as a heading inferring that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be involved in “24-month post trial monitoring for adverse effects/additional safety feature.” Pharmacovigilance, also known as drug safety, generally refers to the collection, analysis, monitoring and prevention of adverse effects from medications and other therapies.
Passive reporting systems for adverse events, like the Vaccines Adverse Event Reporting System, already exist and are managed by the FDA and CDC.
However, a report released by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Health Security suggests that passive systems that rely on people to send in their experiences should be made into an “active safety surveillance system directed by the CDC that monitors all vaccine recipients — perhaps by short message service or other electronic mechanisms — with criteria based on the World Health Organization Global Vaccine Safety Initiative.”
What’s more, according to Humans Are Free, “Despite the claims in these documents that the ‘pharmacovigilance surveillance system’ would intimately involve the FDA, top FDA officials stated in September that they were barred from attending OWS meetings and told reporters they could not explain the operation’s organization or when or with what frequency its leadership meets.” STAT News further reported:
“The Food and Drug Administration, which is playing a critical role in the response to the pandemic, has virtually no visibility into OWS — but that’s by design … The FDA has set up a firewall between the vast majority of staff and the initiative to separate any regulatory decisions from policy or budgetary decisions.
“FDA officials are still allowed to interact with companies developing products for OWS, but they’re barred from sitting in on discussions regarding other focuses of OWS, like procurement, investment or distribution.”
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Health Security, by the way, has ties to Event 201, a pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus” that took place in October 2019, along with Dark Winter, another simulation that took place in June 2001, which predicted major aspects of the subsequent 2001 anthrax attacks.
Hepburn also reportedly “ruffled feathers” during a June 2020 presentation to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices because he offered no data-rich slides, which are typically part of such presentations, and, STAT News reported, “Several members asked Hepburn pointed questions he pointedly did not answer.”
Google and Oracle contracted to collect vaccine data
Google and Oracle, multinational computer technology corporations headquartered in California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, have been contracted to “collect and track vaccine data” as part of OWS’ surveillance systems, a partnership Slaoui reportedly revealed in his Wall Street Journal interview. According to Humans Are Free:
“If the Warp Speed contracts that have been awarded to Google and Oracle are anything like the Warp Speed contracts awarded to most of its participating vaccine companies, then those contracts grant those companies diminished federal oversight and exemptions from federal laws and regulations designed to protect taxpayer interests in the pursuit of the work stipulated in the contract.
“It also makes them essentially immune to Freedom of Information Act requests. Yet, in contrast to the unacknowledged Google and Oracle contracts, vaccine companies have publicly disclosed that they received OWS contracts, just not the terms or details of those contracts. This suggests that the Google and Oracle contracts are even more secretive.”
In an interview with investigative journalist Whitney Webb, it’s also revealed that Slaoui, a long-time head of GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division, is a leading proponent of bioelectronic medicine, which is the use of injectable or implantable technology for the purpose of treating nerve conditions.
The MIT Technology review has referred to it as hacking the nervous system. But it also allows monitoring of the physiology of the human body from the inside.
Slaoui is also invested in a company called Galvani Bioelectronics, which was cofounded by a Google subsidiary. “So, you have Google being contracted to monitor this pharmacovigilance surveillance system that aims to monitor the physiology and the human body for two years,” Webb says.
“And then you have the ties to the Profusa project,” she adds, “which oddly enough is supposed to work inside the human body for 24 months — the exact window they’ve said will be used to monitor people after the first [vaccine] dose.”
The conflict of interest is massive, in part because Google owns YouTube, which has been banning our videos, a majority of which are interviews with health experts sharing their medical or scientific expertise and viewpoints on COVID-19, since June 2020. As noted by Humans Are Free:
“With Google now formally part of OWS, it seems likely that any concerns about OWS’s extreme secrecy and the conflicts of interest of many of its members (particularly Moncef Slaoui and Matt Hepburn) as well as any concerns about Warp Speed vaccine safety, allocation and/or distribution may be labeled ‘COVID-19 vaccine misinformation’ and removed from YouTube.”
Is total surveillance set to become the new normal?
OWS, rather than being directed by public health officials, is heavily dominated by military, technology companies and U.S. intelligence agencies, likening it to a successor for TIA, a program managed by DARPA that sprang up after the September 11 attacks.
At the time, TIA was seeking to collect Americans’ medical records, fingerprints and other biometric data, along with DNA and records relating to personal finances, travel and media consumption. According to Webb:
“We now know, for example, that the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security are directly involved in Operation Warp Speed, But there are some indications as to what they could be involved with.
“And the fact that Silicon Valley companies that have been known to collaborate with intelligence [agencies] for the purpose of spying on innocent Americans — Google and Oracle, for example — are going to be involved in this surveillance system … for everyone that gets the vaccine.
“It’s certainly alarming, and it seems to point to the fulfillment of an agenda that was attempted to be pushed through or foisted on the American public after September 11, called Total Information Awareness, which was managed, originally, by DARPA.
“It was about using medical data and non-medical data — essentially all data about you — to prevent terror attacks before they could happen, and also to prevent bioterror attacks and even prevent naturally occurring disease outbreaks.
“A lot of the same initiatives proposed under that original program after September 11 have essentially been resurrected, with updated technology, under the guise of combating COVID-19.”
A key difference is that TIA was quickly defunded by Congress after significant public backlash, including concerns that TIA would undermine personal privacy. In the case of OWS, there’s little negative press and media outlets are overwhelmingly supportive of the operation as a way to resolve the COVID-19 crisis.
But what if it’s not actually about COVID-19 at all, but represents something bigger, something that’s been in the works for decades? As Humans Are Free puts it:
“The total-surveillance agenda that began with TIA and that has been resurrected through Warp Speed predated COVID-19 by decades.
“Its architects and proponents have worked to justify these extreme and invasive surveillance programs by marketing this agenda as the ‘solution’ to whatever Americans are most afraid of at any given time. It has very little to do with ‘public health’ and everything to do with total control.”
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The US under both right wings of the one-party state is waging a long war on Russia by other means — and all other nations unwilling to bow and scape to its imperial demands.
US aggression includes endless smashing of Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and at times Iraq.
US war by other means rages endlessly against China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Somalia, and all the above-named countries.
Thats how the scourge of imperial lawlessness operates.
That’s what the US is all about no matter who runs things.
That’s why the country is unsafe and unfit to live in, its ruling regimes waging war on humanity at home and abroad.
Why don’t Russia and China because of their prominence on the world stage refuse to deal with a nation seeking their demise?
Why do they maintain diplomatic relations with US regimes going all out to undermine them politically, economically, technologically and militarily?
Trump is a geopolitical know-nothing — surrounded by hardliners Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and the guy with the mustache would have been proud to call allies.
Diplomatic outreach to their modern-day US counterparts achieves betrayal every time — why trying to foster cooperative relations consistently fails.
The US considers the above-named countries mortal enemies, wanting their sovereignty replaced by servitude to a higher power in Washington.
One of many examples of US war on Russia by other means is its all-out efforts to undermine completion of its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany — a diabolical scheme doomed to fail but it continues anyway.
Amendments to House and Senate versions of the US FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) include more sanctions that aim to sabotage the pipeline’s completion.
They aim to deter European banks from financial involvement in its construction.
They threaten other entities with sanctions for providing services or facilities for vessels that engage in pipe-laying for both Nord Stream 2 beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany and TurkStream’s extension across the Black Sea to Turkey.
Both pipelines will supply low-cost Russian natural gas to these and other European countries.
When completed, Nord Stream 2 — the world’s longest underway pipeline — will be able to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year, 110 cubic meters of gas annually together with the initial Nord Stream pipeline.
Turkstream will annually be able to deliver 31.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas — 15.75 billion cubic meters “per each of the two strings,” Gazprom explained.
Completion is expected in January. Yet the Trump regime and Congress aim to halt the progress of both pipelines by the threat of sanctions on entities and individuals involved in its construction.
The same scheme applies to successor projects if undertaken.
NDAA legislation calls for sanctions on enterprises, organizations, and individuals the secretary of state declares have knowingly:
Provided underwriting services or insurance or reinsurance for vessels engaged in the construction of the pipeline projects.
Provided services or facilities for technology upgrades or installation of welding equipment for, or retrofitting or tethering of such vessels.
Provided services for the testing, inspection, or certification necessary for, or associated with the operation of, Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream’s extension.
Section 232 of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) authorizes sanctions on entities and individuals involved in supporting Russian energy pipelines.
In October 2017, the State Department applied Section 232 to Russian energy pipeline projects agreed to on or after August 2, 2017.
Since July 2020, the Trump regime applied Section 232 to Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream.
Under the provision, US sanctions will not be imposed on entities and individuals involved in their construction prior to July 2020 if steps are taken to end their operations as soon as possible.
On Friday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that Russia will do “everything possible to protect its interests and the interests of its commercial projects,” adding:
This applies “to all the other sanction aspirations of the US side.”
“In the context of Nord Stream 2, we see this as nothing but a manifestation of the unfair competition.”
“Of course, we firmly believe that these steps contradict the principles of international trade and even international law.”
A Final Comment
The European Commission criticized Trump regime sanctions on Nord Stream 2 and intention to expand them.
A bloc plan to strengthen the “economic and financial sovereignty of Europe” is being prepared.
Whether this step will be significant is unclear. Most often, Brussels bends to Washington’s will. Whether this time is different is for the bloc to prove.
According to head of Germany’s Bundestag Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, Klaus Ernst:
“(T)he US now wants to exempt European governments and their bodies from (Nord Stream 2) sanctions.”
In further talks with Washington on this issue, Berlin must “unambiguously indicate…that the sovereignty of Germany and the EU are not up for discussion.”
Actions by Brussels and bloc countries need to follow the above rhetoric.
Otherwise what’s said is meaningless.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
It comes as no surprise that simultaneous with President Donald Trump’s declaration that the voter fraud election of 2020 was a coordinated Democratic jihad, the next ‘dark winter’ of Covid 19 “outbreaks” arrived just in time to distract the American public from the details of an obviously counterfeit election.
Just as former Vice President Sleepy Joe, impersonating a President-elect, promised one hundred days of mandatory 24-7 face masks, most Democratic States tightened their restrictions for renewed Lockdowns with increasingly severe legal consequences. At the same time as an ‘emergency’ distribution of an experimental vaccine was expected, many disenfranchised voters throughout the country, especially in States where election results were little more than hypothetical aspirations, took to the streets in massive car/pedestrian “parades” of support for Trump. Thus inspired, a multitude of Sheriffs, in citing the Constitution, announced their opposition to enforcing Lockdown arrest penalties as small business owners, especially restaurants, announced they would maintain an open door policy to serve their patrons.
With a seething unrest below the surface, an increasing number of Americans have caught on that humanity is experiencing a political crisis under the guise of a health crisis. Some are newly aware that the misguided over-reach mandating face masks, social distancing and a limit on gatherings have done nothing to reduce the spread of Covid and that compliance with mandatory face masks is only a beginning stage for what the future holds. Is it reasonable to expect that a cotton mask offers protection from an engineered viral pathogen that escaped from a high risk Level IV Bio-Safety lab? In addition, there is no coincidence that Covid 19 has occurred just as the obsolete material world fights for existence as a Quantum shift of reality is occurring.
Here is the current experience of small town Durango, Colorado when forced to confront a Covid ‘outbreak’ just prior to Thanksgiving. Initially designated a Level Orange of reduced capacity from 50% to 25% for non essential businesses and reduced social interaction, the ‘outbreak’ then moved on to a Level Red which is essentially a stay-at-home designation, restriction on indoor restaurant dining and limiting social interaction within one household.
In a nutshell, the ‘outbreak’ increase provided the rationale for the City Council to adopt a more stringent ordinance as the tyrannical Director of San Juan Basin Health took the lead enforcing the ill-considered consequences by issuing a ‘cease and desist’ warning to CJ’s Diner, a long time popular haunt. CJ’s has a thirty day period in which to request an administrative hearing. As a result of the cease and desist, the Durango City Manager suggested a meeting of all the parties (including the restaurant association) in an attempt to reach a compromise. The suggestion was immediately rejected by the SJBH’s Cruella de Vil citing that ‘the law is the law’. The community responded with standing room only diners from early breakfast until its 1:30 pm closing for the next several days.
Violating a public health order and thwarting the Lockdown’s mask and social distancing requirement is considered a Misdemeanor charge.
As CJ’s resisted the intimidation, the SJBH, which has the authority to enforce State public health laws, filed an ‘emergency’ motion with Colorado’s Sixth Judicial District Court for non-compliance with the ‘cease and desist.’ SJBH told the Durango Herald that indoor dining is among the most dangerous activities contributing to the spread of Covid 19 because customers remove their masks to eat and drink. One wonders if the Durango High School football team, which just won a state championship, wore face masks and observed social distancing during their game. The SJBH has provided no science or forensic evidence to support its contention.
SJBH’s emergency motion was granted by Sixth Judicial District Judge William Herringer who promised that either law enforcement would be instructed by Friday night to make sure that CJ’s stops offering indoor dining by ‘whatever means necessary.” The next morning, the community responded to the threat when the diner filled to capacity with another crowd of about fifty who stood guard outside from the crack of dawn for several hours protecting the front door from law enforcement access. (see photo)
Source is the author
Instead of allowing the cease and desist order to play out within the thirty day appeal timeline, the SJBH Director who is charged with protecting the public health and safety, has created a potentially dangerous crisis and further created a wedge to split the community.
As CJ’s continues to serve in-person meals despite a Red Alert public health order, the Court Order remains in effect for two weeks with a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, December 9th.
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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at [email protected].
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Washington’s China bashing started with Obama through his Asia Pivot policy, reinforced by Trump and Biden might go even further than Trump.
So far, China bashing does not seem to be beneficial to Washington. Even in the long run, there is no guarantee that it will bring any positive results. In fact, it will hurt not only the economies of the two rivals but also the global economy.
The humanity is threatened by pandemics, climate change and other global enemies. It is not the time to engage in counterproductive China bashing. It is not too early that the two super powers show leadership for the difficult fight against these enemies.
In this paper, I am asking why Washington is so eager to continue its China bashing policy. Then, I will discuss the means deployed in order to carry out the policy. Finally, I will examine the probability of its success.
The Objective of China Bashing
For last thirty years, China has been the global factory where the American firms made large profit owing to the low cost hardworking and well disciplined Chinese workers. The imports of low priced Chinese goods allowed Americans to avoid inflation and save money and finance the education of their children and pay a part of medical bills.
Then, we ask why the China bashing? Politicians, think tank people, the media have been warning about China’s threats. But, what threat? We know that China is no military match with the U.S. military might. We know that China cannot be a political threat to America, for Washington controls the U.N. the E.U. and countless alliances. China cannot be an economic threat to the, U.S., because China’s economic success is beneficial to the American economy, as it has been so for last thirty years.
Is China threatening the U.S. to leave Asia? Well, President de la Chine, Xi Jinping does not want it. Xi Jinping says that there is no such threat.
“The vast Pacific Ocean must have enough space to accommodate both China and the Unites States. (Feng Zhang and Richard Ned Lebow. Taming the Sino-American Rivalry, Oxford University Press 2020. p.111)
What seems to be China’s threat to Washington is the ideological threat. We can see this in the statements of major national and international decision makers in the U.S. and the West.
President Obama made the following statements about the Trans Pacific Economic Partnership (TPP). I will come to TPP later.
“The TPP puts American workers first and make sure we write the rule of road in the country…Other countries should play by the rule that America and our partners set and not the other way around.”
“With the TPP, we can rewrite the rules of trade and benefit American middle class… If we don’t, the competitor who does not care our value, like China, will step in fill the void.”
Stephen K. Bannon, former chief strategist for Trump’s government said this.
“If we blink, we’re heading on a path of the war (with China) to a kinetic war, if we don’t stop it right now…this is not a cold war. This is a hot war information and economic war, sliding rapidly. We are inexorably going to be drawn into an armed conflict, if we don’t stop it now”
“I think ultimately, success is regime change“, adds Bannon.
On the other hand, Mike Pompeo the U.S. Secretary of State said:
“Beijing poses a new kind of challenge: an authoritarian regime that’s integrated in to the West in ways that the Soviet never was…”
On his part, Vice-President Mike Pence said:
“So far, it appears the Chinese Communist Party resists a true opening and converge on globalization”
The China Research Group in UK made this statement:
“The cost of doing business with autocratic regimes is that you don’t just import technology. You also import their values and make yourself dependent on their policies.”
Jens Stoltenberg, former NATO General Secretary had this to say:
“The focus is no longer on technology and economics…It is now China’s threat to the Western way of life.”
What these statements of some of the key decision makers in the West are saying is that the Chinese socialism with Chinese characteristics are threatening the Western values and the Western free-market democracy.
This is really incredible, because this indicates that the West is not convinced of the superiority of its own political and economic system over Chinese hybrid regime of the socialist governance cum the free-market economy.
If the Chinese values are threatening the western values, the best way to counter them would be the improvement and the strengthening of the western values instead of allocating time and resources to China bashing. Another possible approach would be the creation of better global values through cooperative integration of the western values and the Chinese values.
Strategic measures of China Bashing
China bashing of Washington is based on the assumption that the undermining of the Chinese economy is the best way of forcing China to abandon its hybrid regime and to integrate more into the rules and laws determined by Washington. The anti-China economic measures of Washington include those which are designed to damage the production system of Chinese goods and services on the one hand and, on the other, those measures which are intended to curtail the exports of Chinese gods and services.
The measures designed to restrict China’s capacity to produce goods and services include the prevention of China’s access to advanced technology of the West, the promotion of re-shoring of American firms in China and the possible sanctions on Chinese imports of raw materials and intermediate goods.
For the time being, the U.S. has taken some measures to prevent the technology transfer. The Department of Commerce prohibits American companies to provide services to selected Chinese telecommunication companies including Huawei, ZTE Corporation. The Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has a black list of Chinese firms, research centers and universities which are involved in the development and trade of telecommunication technology. The black list has 140 entries.
The Justice Department punishes those who steal strategic information related to technologies. Washington limits the number of Chinese Americans who work for government-run establishments. Washington limits the number of Chinese students who come to study. In addition, the number of Chinese news reporters working in the U.S.is limited. These measures may not have created major problems for China for the time being. But the government of Biden may go further and China is likely to react more strongly.
Trump has launched the process of bringing back American firms from China to the U.S. But the possibility of success does not look promising. The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai has conducted, recently, a survey with 200 American firms in China. Only 3% of them have shown their plan to come back to the U.S. This is understandable, for the re-shoring is costly and it would not be easy to handle high labour cost in the U.S.
For the time being, the most visible anti-China policy is the trade war designed to curtail exports of Chinese goods and services. In 2018, the value of U.S. exports to China was USD 120.3 billion, whereas that of Chinese exports to the U.S. was USD 539.5 billion resulting in U.S. trade deficit of USD 419.2 billion.
In 2018, Trump declared a trade war against China. Trump imposed a tariff rates varying from 10% to 25% on Chinese goods worth of about USD 400 billion. This policy was successful in cutting the inflow of Chinese goods by 16%. And, the U.S. trade deficit with China fell to USD 160 billion. Thus, as far as the deficit is concerned, Trump got what he wanted.
But, did this harm China? The answer is no. It is true that Chinese exports to the U.S. fell by 16%. What is surprising is this. Chinese exports to other trade partners in Asia rose by 26%. Thus, the loss of the American market was offset by the increased access to alternative markets.
Besides, the increased tariffs on imported Chinese goods lead to increased price of these goods thus increasing the burden of family budget. Moreover, the decrease of imports of Chinese goods means the loss of great number of jobs related the distribution of these goods.
Moreover, Washington should know that American deficit with China has special implication. A great part of Chinese exports to the U.S. is products of American firms in China. Hence, the cut in Chinese exports to the U.S. means a cut in the exports of goods produced by American firms in China. A decrease in exports from China to the U.S. means a profit reduction for American firms in China.
Washington has indirect ways of undermining Chinese economy. It is the policy of putting pressure on the Chinese economy through its alliances. There are bilateral alliances with Asian countries which include Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam.. There are multilateral alliances including U.S.-Japan alliance, the Korea-U.S. alliance and the trans-pacific partnership (TPP) composed of 12 countries. There is the four- country alliance (Quad) composed of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.
The function of these alliances is to serve the interests of Washington in return for Washington’s assistance for trade and security. Most of these alliances have assisted Washington’s China containment policy.
However, as the Sino-American conflict intensifies, these alliances will be asked to play more active role of undermining the Chinese economy reducing the trade with China and even participating in economic sanctions against China. When this happens, some of these allies, especially South Korea, will find themselves in a very difficult situation where it has to find a balance between the American security guarantee and trade interests for which they rely on China. This could undermine the effectiveness of the alliances as China bashing tool.
The alliance on which Obama relied heavily is the TPP. It is supposed to be free trade organization (FTA). As it was shown above, it is composed of 12 nations (before the Trump withdrew). It appears that Joe Biden, President-elect of the U.S. might come back to it. If the U.S. rejoins it, it will have, as member countries, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S. and Vietnam.
The effectiveness of TPP as instrument of China bashing is limited because its four members (Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam) are member of ASEAN (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) which depends much on China for trade and investments.
There is the regional multilateral trade organization which just started to operate. It is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). RCEP composed of the 15 member countries including of ASEAN members plus Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. We must know that all of the 10 members of ASEAN and the five additional member countries all depend much on trade with China. Moreover, RCEP will be led by China.
Therefore, RCEP will further weaken TPP as a China bashing weapon. Besides, the regional economy of Asia will depend much more on RCEP than on TPP. RCEP has much better prospect for economic growth than on TPP. The TPP with the U.S.as member accounts for only 10% of global population although it represents 40% of global GDP. By contrast, the RCEP represents 30% of global GDP and 30 % of the world population. Although RECP has a lower GDP compared to TPP, it has the population of countries which have much more dynamic economies.
Will it succeed?
The foregoing discussion seems to indicate that, in the short run, economic war does not seem to be a great weapon of China bashing. Even in the long run, there is no guarantee that Washington’s China bashing will bring regime change in China.
The long-run prospect of the Sino-American economic war depends on the global economic and political environment which is expected to change because of the corona-virus crisis. The post-pandemic world is likely to have these characteristics.
First, the scope and the space of globalism will be limited. There will be more regional or sub-regional globalism and multilateral trade organization. This will not help China bashing.
Second, in order that the China bashing works, Washington must satisfy two conditions. On the one hand, the American economic must grow sufficiently so that it can provide moral, economic and security assistance to allies which participate. On the other hand, the growth of the American economy must contribute to the welfare of all Americans, not just the elite groups. To justify China bashing, Washington must prove the superiority of the American values and this requires a fair distribution of the fruits of economic growth to all Americans.
The prospect of the American economy does not look optimist
Up to now, the American economy has grown so much that its per capita GDP is USD 63,000. There is a limit in the growth of GDP because of declining working force, depletion of material resources, declining productivity of technologies and other factors. It is estimated that the rate of the potential growth of the American economy is about 1.5% as against 6% for the Chinese economy.
The American economy being the most neo-liberal economy has produced extremely unequal income distribution, loss of full-time jobs, decreasing consumer spending and the un-development or under-development of small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The growth of the American economy has not been able to distinguish itself as the provider of welfare to the American people.
The pandemic has rendered more difficult the growth of the American economy and the provision of the public welfare. The first wave of the pandemic is not over yet; the second wave is there; the third wave may soon come. Soon, 400 thousand lives may be lost; more than 15 million people may be infected.
The disastrous impact of the pandemic on the American economy could be so great that we can’t have a realistic estimate of the damage it would cause. But, what is worrisome is the future of SMEs which are the major job creating sector in the American economy. They create 66% of jobs in the U.S. It is possible that more than half of them may have closed the business for good. The recovery of the American economy depends, before anything else, on the recovery of SMEs. The American government has injected more than USD 2 trillion, but only 25% of these funds is allocated to SMEs, the rest being given to big firms. Surely, this is not the best way to recover the economy.
All these long-run factors are likely to prevent Washington’s China bashing from succeed.
In short, even in the long run, the American economy is unlikely be strong enough to make China to change its regime.
It is more than likely that the Biden government will continue China bashing to change the Chinese regime.
But, why is China’s regime change so important to Washington?
There seem to be two reasons. The first reason is a sort of quasi religious fanatic belief in the predestined mission of the U.S. to enlighten the world with “American values”. It seems to be inspired by the Project for New American Century (PNAC) initiated in 1997 by 25 individuals. It embraces two central ideas. To begin with, it believes that American leadership is good both for America and the World. Moreover, it argues that America should have strong military might to impose American values on the world.
The second reason is the willingness of the military to actively participate in China bashing. China bashing justifies the additional injection of financial resources into national defence, which means more benefits for the oligarchy composed of the defence industry, the intelligence circle and the military group (simply the oligarchy). So, the oligarchy wants China bashing.
The strategy of regime change proceeds by steps. If the diplomacy does not work, Washington provokes internal division to weaken the regime; if this fails, then send the military force to conquer. What is alarming is that such perception is shared by the intellectuals, media, politicians and even the general public.
The Washington’s policy of regime change has started with President George W. Bush. But, the Bush government focused regime change wars in the Middle East and Africa. It was the Obama government which applied the regime change policy in Asia. The principal weapon was the Asia Pivot which consisted in transferring 60% of naval and air forces to the Asia-Pacific region in addition to 50,000 troops and other measures. As for TPP, Obama wanted to use it not only for trade promotion but also, especially, for the change of Chinese economic regime into the American model of neo-liberalism.
The headache of Washington is this. If China bashing is to succeed in changing the Chinese regime, China must accept such change. But in all probabilities, China is unlikely to do so. Even if it does, there will be a limit in its regime change.
There are reasons for China’s refusal to change its political and economic regime.
First, for Chinese, the American regime is not necessarily more valuable than the Chinese regime. The ultimate raison d’être of a regime is to provide reasonable welfare to all citizens. It is possible that China thinks that Washington has failed. The credibility and the attractiveness of the U.S. democracy has been lost for two reasons To begin with, their economic growth has failed to provide fair income distribution, offer public goods such as housing,, education, public health, public safety service, The American society is one of the most racist countries. The American society is the most violent society, mass killing happens more than once every day.
Furthermore, since the imposition of neo-liberalism on democratic countries, democracy in general has lost much of its authenticity and legitimacy. To be sure, neo-liberalism has brought unprecedented GDP growth but it has fallen into the trap of boundless competition and technology development. Competition is governed by the rule of the fittest; competition ends up by the survival of the most powerful. It is far from being the democracy of the people, by the people and for the people. I presume that it is still of the people, but surely it is neither by the people nor for the people.
Democracy has lost much of its attractiveness. According to Democracy Index, in the period, 2005-2019, the number of countries where democracy improved declined from 83 to 57. On the other hand, in the same period, the number of countries where democracy deteriorated rose from 52 to 64 countries. The global demographic distribution of political regimes in 2019 was as follows: true democracy (4.5%), false democracy (43.2%), hybrid regimes (16.7%) and authoritarianism (35.6%).
Thus, 52.3 % of humanity live in hybrid or authoritarian regimes, while 47.7 % in democratic regimes. But, only 4.5% live in true democracy. One can debate about the reliability of these data. But, one thing sure is that democracy has been declining, because it has not been able to meet the people’s needs.
Second, even if the government of China wished to change its present regime into something similar to American regime, there is a limit to what can be done. It is so because of the fact that the Chinese regime is a result of Chinese system of thoughts cherished for thousands of years.
Values which inspire China’s political and economic regime are Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism.
In Daoism, there is no absolute truth; truths are relative. Chinese are not dogmatic; it is neutral to rigid ideology. The communist structure of governance is chosen because it is effective in the Chinese cultural context. Here, we have the source of Chinese pragmatism.
Buddhism teaches peace, respect for living things and sympathy for others. China developed gun powder not for canon but for the joy of festivity.
Confucianism defines the relations between the governor and the governed. According to Confucianism, the interests of collective entity are superior to those of individuals. Here, we see the origin of collectivism. The head of state should behave as the father of the citizens by providing citizens’ welfare; the citizens must behave like children respecting and obeying the head of the state.
To be sure, the impact of traditional systems of thoughts has been much diluted. But, the core of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism is still in the mind and soul of Chinese people. If we understand these three systems of thoughts, we have an idea why Den Xiaoping and Xi Jinping have adopted the socialism with Chinese characteristics (Chinese way of thinking) in which authoritarian central government led by the Chinese Communist Party coexists in coordinated way with open free capitalist private market.
We have seen why the China’s regime change which Washington tries to impose by means of China bashing is just not realistic policy. Remember that since China joined to WTO in 2001, it has been trying to adopt rules and norms developed and imposed by the U.S. But, China can never accept the whole of American political and economic regime.
To sum up, there is little need to change Chinese regime, because China is not interested in imposing its values on other countries. China was for centuries the largest economy n the world, but it did not have the ambition to change the regime of the world. Besides, China is now too big and too powerful to be manipulated by external forces.
The world is now facing unprecedented challenges. The survival of the mankind is threatened by climate change, pandemics, wars, terrorism, worsening natural disasters and poverty of billions of people.
These challenges can be met only through concerted leadership efforts of the two superpowers. It is not too early to stop counterproductive China bashing.
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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the Observatoire de l’Asie de l’Est (OAE) of the Centre d’Études sur l’Intégration et la Mondialisation(CEIM), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Center of Research on Globalization (CRG).
French protesters clashed with police in Paris and other cities including Marseille, Lyon, Rennes and Nantes yesterday as tens of thousands took to the streets in further mass demonstrations against an authoritarian new security law.
The weekly rallies each Saturday are developing into the third huge wave of street unrest against President Emmanuel Macron since he took office, following the Yellow Vests movement of 2018-19 and the giant trade union demos against railway privatisation in 2019. Many at the demos wore yellow high-vis jackets to indicate their continuity with the Yellow Vests.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin praised police for tackling “very violent individuals” who pillaged a bank, set fire to cars and threw projectiles — including a Molotov cocktail in Nantes — at officers.
But the mass rallies denounced police violence, with the demos calling for the government to drop its Global Security Law imposing prison sentences of up to a year and fines of up to €45,000 (£40,000) on individuals who publish photographs showing police officers’ faces with “harmful intent.”
Demonstrators carried banners saying “Police mutilate, police kill” and chanted: “Everyone hates the police.”
The French Communist Party called its supporters out on demonstrations against police violence and poverty.
Leader Fabien Roussel joined marchers in both Lille and Valenciennes against “both poverty and for the revocation of the Global Security Law. France, the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, must not become a country of poverty and authoritarianism,” he tweeted.
France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon also linked the issues, saying the government should recognise “there is hunger in France” and tying Mr Macron’s increasing authoritarianism to the need to quash social unrest.
“This is not just about Article 24,” he said, referring to the police photography clause of the Global Security Law. “It’s the whole ‘liberty-cide’ project that must be binned!”
The French government offered to rewrite Article 24 of the law last week because of the scale of opposition, which ranges from the political left to the editors of Establishment newspapers such as Le Monde, who say it will have a chilling impact on freedom of the press.
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Paranoia, disregard for evidence and over-the-top rhetoric to encourage hate. And I’m not talking about Donald Trump’s Republicans.
Progressive Canadian should counter a wave of McCarthyite Sinophobia sweeping this country’s politics.
The over-the-top reaction to a recent “Zoom to Free Meng Wanzhou” highlights the issue. The event was labelled “Chinese Communist Party propaganda” in the House of Commons and criticized by numerous media. When interviewing Paul Manly about his participation in the event journalist Evan Solomon repeatedly accused the Green MP of being “used by Chinese authorities” and for “Chinese propaganda”.
What’s going on? As China became more prosperous, the US military began a “pivot” towards Asia a decade ago. More recently, some important US capitalists have become increasingly unhappy with the terms imposed by the Chinese government on their operations there. Simultaneously, labour costs in China have risen sharply in recent years, taking some of the shine off the country as a low-wage assembly hub.
Alongside these broader economic and geopolitical trends, Donald Trump has been railing against the “China disease” for months. This xenophobia is shaping Canadian politics as well. Most of the front-page of a February Vancouver Province read: “Second China Virus Case in BC” while in April Conservative leadership candidate, Derek Sloan, said Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam was working for China and advancing “Chinese Communist propaganda”. Polls show a sharp rise in insults, threats and assaults targeting Canadians of Chinese descent since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
China bashing is central to new Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s political messaging. He harps on about standing up for “Canadian values” against the Communist Party of China. In April O’Toole called for a “new Cold War” with China and recently said there’s “no greater threat to Canada’s interests than the rise of China”. (Greater than the climate crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, species collapse, opioid crisis, nuclear holocaust, economic inequality?)
To counter the Chinese “threat” the Conservatives openly appeal to British empire settler solidarity. In criticizing the “Free Meng Wanzhou” event in the House of Commons Conservative Shadow Minister for Diversity, Inclusion and Youth Raquel Dancho said, “all Canadian MPs need to stand with our Five Eyes partners and other like-minded allies to push back on Beijing’s intimidation tactics.” For his part, O’Toole recently declared, “Canada should work very closely with our Five Eyes allies” on countering the world’s most populous nation.
Settler colonialism and empire unite the Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and US Five Eyes alliance that excludes wealthier non-white nations (Japan and South Korea) or those with more English speakers (India and Nigeria). It’s not a coincidence that the only four countries that originally voted against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007 are part of the Five Eyes.
There is a long history of stirring up Sinophobia in Canada as part of US/British conflict with that country. During the US-led Korean War in the early 1950s Canadian troops denigrated the “yellow horde” of North Korean and Chinese “chinks” they fought. At a time when a small number of Canadians helped the British suppress the boxer rebellion in 1900 newspapers labeled China the “sick man of Asia,” which threatened European social mores. In opposing voting rights for “Chinamen” in 1885, Prime Minister John A. MacDonald said he feared their enfranchisement would lead to officials who “represent Chinese eccentricities, Chinese immorality, Asiatic principles altogether opposite to our wishes.” He concluded, “the Chinese has no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations.”
Progressives should resist the current ‘Yellow peril’ rooted in geopolitical competition and racism. To do so we should be clear eyed about Chinese power, which is significant and often authoritarian though somewhat exaggerated. That country’s global influence has yet to reflect its share of the world’s population. In 2019 the country’s GDP per personwas $10, 000 – equal to Mexico – while US GDP was $60, 000. The US has over 800 military bases in 80 countries around the world while the UK has 145 military facilities in 42 countries. China has one international base in Djibouti. The US and UK have bases in numerous countries bordering China. (In June 2012 the Canadian Press reported, “Canada is seeking a deal with Singapore to establish a military staging post there as part of its effort to support the United States’ ‘pivot’ toward Asia to counter a rising China.”) How many bases does China have in Canada or Mexico?
Additionally, China rarely deploys troops internationally. The US, Canada and UK, on the other hand, have been involved in recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.
As the oldest and most populous nation, a prosperous and united China unquestionably threatens the US Empire’s dominance. Decision-makers in Washington have been concerned about that since at least 1949, which is part of the reason they invaded Korea after Mao’s nationalist/communist victory.
The military and large sections of the ruling classes in those countries integrated into the US Empire want to prevent China from taking its rightful place in world affairs. They are pushing economic, political and military means to “contain” China.
But those of us who believe in equality for all people, who fight racism and xenophobia, must say no. Progressives need to resist the logic of empire and oppose the wave of Sinophobia sweeping Canadian politics.
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According to a report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), decommissioning the UK’s civil nuclear sites will cost £132bn of public money, and will not be completed for a further 120 years.
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The report blamed a “sorry saga” of failed contracts, poor government oversight, and “perpetual” lack of knowledge of the state of civil nuclear sites. It said that decommissioning of retired nuclear power stations had been an “afterthought” when the UK’s nuclear industry was established.
This has led to decades of poor record-keeping about the conditions and locations of hazardous materials, the report said, leaving the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) with a legacy of knowledge gaps about the condition of sites it is responsible for ensuring are safe. The NDA acknowledged that it still does not have a complete understanding of the 17 sites across its estate, including the 10 former Magnox power stations.
“The UK went from leading the world in establishing nuclear power to this sorry saga of a perpetual lack of knowledge about the current state of the UK’s nuclear sites,” said Meg Hiller, chair of the PAC. “With a project of this length and cost we need to see clearer discipline in project management.”
In 2018, the PAC condemned the NDA for having “dramatically underestimated” costs with regards to the Magnox procurement and original contract, with lack of knowledge a major factor in this failure. It estimates that the cost of getting Magnox sites to the “care and maintenance” stage of decommissioning has increased by £1.3-3.1bn since 2017 to £6.9-8.7bn today; the PAC warned that costs may increase further. The timetable for completing this work is uncertain, with a current estimate of 12-15 years.
According to the NDA’s most recent estimates, the cost of decommissioning the UK’s civil nuclear sites will cost current and future generations of taxpayers £132bn and take another 120 years to complete.
The PAC said that the NDA had not done enough to harness technical skills and new technologies in the nuclear industry.
Deputy chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown added:
“Although progress has been made since our last report, incredibly, the NDA still doesn’t know even where we’re currently at, in terms of state and safety of the UK’s disused nuclear sites. The NDA, with stronger, better oversight from government, must make a clear break with the incompetence and failures of the past and step up to maximise these assets and the astronomical sums of taxpayers’ money it has absorbed.”
An NDA spokesperson said:
“We welcome the [PAC]’s report and the scrutiny it brings on our work to provide value for money for the taxpayer. We are pleased that the committee recognises the inherent uncertainties and challenges involved in our mission to clean up 17 of the UK’s oldest nuclear sites and the progress being made. This includes increased learning on our sites, their facilities, and the nature of the waste within them.
“Safety is our priority and we do not accept the committee’s suggestions that we may not understand the safety of our sites. Our work is tightly and independently regulated to ensure we uphold the highest standards of safety.
“Our focus remains on ensuring that we deliver this work of national strategic importance safely, effectively, and efficiently. We will be looking carefully at the PAC’s recommendations.”
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An idea that’s simple as an abstraction–vaccine ID cards–turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with.
Authorities around the world have made it clear that they will do “whatever it takes” to vaccinate their citizenry with one of the first available vaccines. Authoritarian states may mandate universal vaccinations while less authoritarian states will favor a “carrot and stick” approach of offering benefits to the vaccinated and exclusions from employment, education, travel and most of everyday life for those who refuse to be vaccinated.
To identify the vaccinated and unvaccinated, many nations are planning to issue ID cards or “vaccine passports.” As an abstraction, this seems straightforward, but if we start digging into the actual operational requirements of this mass ID card issuance and distribution, a number of common-sense issues arise.
First and foremost, it’s unknown how long the immunity offered by the vaccines will last. It’s still early days, so there is conflicting evidence: some claim the vaccines will be longer-lasting than the natural immunity of those who caught the virus and recovered, while other evidence suggests the immunity might decay after six months. Despite claims that natural immunity is long-lasting, a non-trivial number of people who had Covid have been re-infected.
Nobody knows how long either natural or vaccine immunity will last because not enough time has elapsed to collect sufficient data.
Given these intrinsic unknowns, how long will the ID card be valid? It’s easy to imagine variations in individual responses such that the vaccines’ effectiveness decays more rapidly in 20% of the vaccinated. This variability would introduce tremendous unknowns that no ID card could reflect: is the holder of the card at Month 10 still immune or not?
If the duration of the vaccine’s effectiveness is variable, then an ID card could be misleading. In other words, being vaccinated with a variable-duration vaccine tells us nothing about the individual’s actual immunity down the road.
Given these unknowns, the vaccinated may need booster shots in the future, and the ID cards would have to be re-issued. The task of keeping track of hundreds of millions of vaccination records, identities and then issuing ID cards is a non-trivial task.
To thwart black-market fake-ID cards, the security measures will have to be equivalent to a driver’s license or passport. Have you applied recently for either of these forms of ID? The process is painfully slow. The systems in place to process state drivers’ licenses and U.S. passports are already strained, and which agency is prepared to verify the identity of 280 million adult citizens, confirm the validity of their vaccine and then issue ID cards–and then repeat this process in a year?
If the procedures for issuing vaccine ID cards are slapdash due to time constraints–for example, downloading a digital record from the vaccine distributor or a printed card–these will likely be vulnerable to being duplicated or spoofed. Fake vaccine distributors will pop up issuing bogus digital records, hackers might download and sell digital records from trusted sources, and so on.
Then there’s the extra burdens being placed on the staff of airlines, cruise lines, etc. to scan these documents and deal with rejected cards. Who will have the legal authority to deal with claims that a rejected card is actually valid? How many smaller establishments simply won’t have to staff to do more than glance at the card?
Do authorities have the means to issue hundreds of millions of absolutely secure vaccine ID cards and then monitor all the attempts to find loopholes and weaknesses in the process? If authorities think that strict penalties will limit this activity, they underestimate the difficulty in getting such penalties enforced by overloaded court systems.
In nations with strong traditions of civil liberties, there will be pushback against mandatory vaccinations with essentially untested vaccines and against national databases tying identity to vaccination cards–a situation ripe with potential for abuse.
Authorities don’t seem to grasp that many of those hesitating to get vaccinated are not anti-vaxxers; they simply see the vaccine approval process as deeply flawed for common-sense reasons: for example, there is simply not enough data on safety, duration and real-world efficacy.
Authorities are counting on the “carrot” of air travel, cruises and concerts to persuade skeptics to get vaccinated despite their concerns. What authorities don’t seem to realize is that a great many people value their health, privacy and agency far more than they crave air travel, cruises or concerts. They will gladly forego all these activities until more reliable data is collected, peer-reviewed and distributed for analysis.
The more draconian the measures designed to pressure people into getting the vaccines, the greater the reluctance of skeptics who see the draconian measures as additional evidence the vaccines are half-measures being forced on the populace as a means of imposing a false assurance that all is well and “normal” will return as soon as the skeptics cave in and get vaccinated.
There’s also the possibility that the virus could mutate in ways that moot the vaccines’ effectiveness. While this is widely considered unlikely, it’s not impossible, either. If a mutated virus arises that evades the vaccine, then what value will the vaccine ID card have?
An idea that’s simple as an abstraction–vaccine ID cards–turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with. The fact is the first vaccines have been rushed to approval with virtually none of the testing demanded of previous vaccines raises common-sense concerns which cannot be dissolved with force or carrots and sticks.
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The way the federal government can kill death row prisoners will soon be expanded to ghoulish methods that include hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber and the firing squad.
Set to take effect on Christmas Eve, the new regulations authorizing an alternative to lethal injections – the method currently used in federal executions – were announced by the Justice Department on Nov. 27.
It is not clear whether the administration actually intends to employ the newly announced methods. It may only want to have them in reserve if any of the individuals scheduled for execution before January’s inauguration – five, according to the Department of Justice – should succeed in challenging the current execution protocol.
What is clear is that these new regulations send a message about the lengths the administration will go to kill as many death row inmates as possible before Joe Biden takes office and, as expected, halts the federal death penalty.
If the president and Department of Justice succeed in their plan, the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump’s federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliestin the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century.
As someone who has studied execution methods in the U.S., I see in the new regulations echoes of a troubled history of less-than-perfect execution methods.
To grasp their full significance, it is necessary to look at the record of hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber and firing squads. Each of them has been touted as humane only to be sidelined because its use was found to be gruesome and offensive. Given that history, there are questions over whether the administration’s plans serve any purpose other than continuing a death penalty system deemed to be a cruel outlier among modern societies.
The noose and the chair
Let’s start with hanging.
Image on the right: Rainey Bethea (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Hanging was the execution method of choice throughout most of American history, and it was used in America’s last public execution in 1936, when Rainey Bethea was put to death in Owensboro, Kentucky. When done correctly, the noose killed by severing the spinal column, causing near instantaneous death.
But, all too often, hanging resulted in a slow death by strangulation and sometimes even a beheading. Given this gruesome record and hanging’s association with the lynching of mainly Black men, by the end of the 19th century the search for other execution methods began in earnest.
The first of those alternatives was the electric chair. At the time it was adopted, it was regarded as a truly modern instrument of death, a technological marvel in the business of state killing. Hailed by penal reformers as a humane alternative to hanging, the electric chair was first authorized in 1888 by New York state following the report of a commission that concluded, “The most potent agent known for the destruction of human life is electricity…The velocity of the electric current is so great that the brain is paralyzed; it is indeed dead before the nerves can communicate a sense of shock.”
Yet, right from the start, electrocution’s potency was a problem. Its first use in the 1890 execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler was horribly botched. Reports of the execution say that “After 2 minutes the execution chamber filled with the smell of burning flesh.” Newspapers called the execution a “historic bungle” and “disgusting, sickening and inhuman.”
In spite of the Kemmler debacle, the electric chair quickly became popular, being seen as more efficient and less brutal than hanging. From the start of the 20th century until the 1980s, the number of death sentences carried out by this method far outstripped those of any other method.
But electrocutions continued to go wrong, and eventually several dramatic botched executions in Florida helped turn the tide. Included were two executions, one in 1990, the other in 1997, in which the condemned inmates caught fire.
The gas chamber
By the start of the 21st century, states all over the country were abandoning the electric chair. As Justice Carol W. Hunstein of the Supreme Court of Georgia explained, “Death by electrocution, with its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies,” was no longer compatible with contemporary standards of decency.
One alternative to electrocution was the gas chamber, but it too has its own history of problems. First adopted in Nevada in 1922, executions using lethal gas were to take place while the condemned slept. Death row inmates were supposed to be housed in airtight, leak-proof prison cells, separate from other prisoners. On the day of the execution, valves would be opened that would fill the chamber with gas, killing the prisoner painlessly.
This plan was soon abandoned because officials decided it would be impractical to implement it, and states constructed special gas chambers fitted with pipes, exhaust fans and glass windows on the front and back walls for witness viewing. But deaths by lethal gas were never pretty or easy to watch.
Inmates regularly fought against breathing the gas as it entered the chamber. They convulsed, jerked, coughed, twisted and turned blue for several minutes before they died.
Far from solving the problems associated with hangings or electrocutions, lethal gas introduced its own set of horrors to the institution of capital punishment. In fact, by the end of the 20th century, 5% of executions by lethal gas had been botched.
As a result, states used gas as the sole method of execution only from 1924 to 1977, and it was last used in 1999. By then, the gas chamber had become a relic of the past because of its inability to deliver on its promise to be “swift and painless” and its association with the Nazi use of gas to kill millions during the Holocaust.
The firing sqaud
Finally, the firing squad. Of all of America’s methods of execution, it has been least often used. From 1900 to 2010, only 35 of America’s 8,776 executions were carried out using this method, and since 1976 just three people have faced a firing squad, with the last one carried out in Utah in 2010.
Critics point out that because death by guns evokes images of raw, frontier justice in a society awash in gun violence, this method mimicked something that the law wished to discourage. Nonetheless, Utah revived the firing squad in 2015 due to challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol.
While it has some contemporary proponents who claim it is the least cruel of all execution methods, the history of the firing squad is marked by gruesome mistakes when marksmen missed their target. In the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for example, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.
A cruel history, revived
While Trump’s Department of Justice is now holding out the prospect of using these previously discredited methods of execution, it cannot erase the cruelty that marks their history. That history stands as a reminder of America’s failed quest to find a method of execution that is safe, reliable and humane.
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Austin Sarat is Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College.
In Steven Spielberg’s 2017 historical thriller The Post, the Washington Post’s publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) wrestles with a harrowing choice: should she authorize further publication of the “Pentagon Papers“—and risk financial ruin and possible prison time? Spoiler alert: Graham takes the courageous path and informs the public of systematic government lies regarding one of America’s bloodiest and most polarizing conflicts. Near the end of the film, as the Supreme Court rules in favor of “a free and unrestrained press,” Graham confides to the paper’s editor (a hardboiled Ben Bradlee played by Tom Hanks), “I don’t think I could ever live through something like this again.” Spielberg concludes The Post with a wink, reminding us that Watergate lurks right around the corner.
Although if we consider Mark Twain’s adage about “history not repeating itself but often rhyming,” the situation that most closely rhymes with the “Pentagon Papers” would not be the ensuing Watergate scandal, but the alarming plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently in London’s notorious Belmarsh prison. Like Graham and The Washington Post, and The New York Times which broke the story of the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971, Assange’s WikiLeaks has also released leaked, classified materials that in 2010 exposed a vast range of staggering U.S. government misdeeds.
For these revelations, President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) convened a grand jury in 2011 to explore the possibility of indicting Assange and prosecuting him for espionage. But despite years of rigorous investigation, and the interrogation and imprisonment of Assange’s source, Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, the Obama administration opted not to prosecute Assange for fear it would overturn the press freedom precedent established with the “Pentagon Papers.”
The Trump administration, by contrast—and with no new evidence since the time of Obama—has dashed across that red line with its charges against Assange.
In an unprecedented attempt to exercise universal jurisdiction to extradite a foreign national for publishing newsworthy information in the public interest, the Trump DOJ has created the false perception that Assange conspired with Manning to hack into government systems to obtain classified documents.
But through her position with the U.S. Army, Manning already had access to all the documents she would give to Assange. In fact, underpinning the Trump DOJ’s initial allegations is the charge that Assange told Manning he might be able to help her crack a password that would have given her administrative privileges, allowing her to evade detection. But even if Assange had attempted this—there is no evidence he did—helping one’s source not get caught, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald reminds, “is not only the right of journalists, it’s the duty of journalists.”
Piling on to their flimsy password gambit, which carries a maximum sentence of five years, the Trump DOJ issued a chilling superseding indictment in May of 2019. Assange now faces 175 years imprisonment.
Barton Gellman, who has won three Pulitzer Prizes with The Washington Post, sums up the current charges against Assange this way: “Assange is charged with asking for information, with receiving information, and with publishing information… exactly the things that I do… If that’s allowed to stand, there’s absolutely no reason why it couldn’t be used against The Washington Post or The New York Times or CNN.” Gellman’s assessment is undoubtedly shared by over 1,500 journalists and writers—including “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg—and more than 40 press freedom, human rights, and privacy rights organizations who are all calling for the U.S. and U.K. governments to release Assange without delay.
Earlier this year, when Brazilian prosecutors charged Glenn Greenwald in a case that mirrors the U.S. case against Assange, the world got its first unwelcome taste of how Assange’s continued prosecution poses an extreme danger to journalists everywhere. And there has never been any evidence that WikiLeaks’ 2010 publications have harmed a single person; yet, despite garnering a trove of prestigious journalism awards, they are the sole reason for which Assange is behind bars.
President Trump has a golden opportunity to pardon Assange, which would go a long way toward transforming the outgoing president into a defender of American values. President-elect Biden, for his part, will have to decide whether he follows the footsteps of Obama, or, to this point, Trump. Leaders across political divides should be pressured by the public to free Assange and defend press freedom. Recognizing the crucial role of journalists, Hanks’ Bradlee in The Post perhaps said it best: “We have to be the check on their power. If we don’t hold them accountable, I mean my God, who will?”
From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
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December 7th, 2020 by Center For Biological Diversity
Congress today moved to deny the Defense Department’s request to seize more than 1.7 million acres of public land in Nevada for bombing ranges, following a five-year grassroots campaign by public lands advocates to stop the land grab.
The Air Force’s proposal to seize 1.1 million acres of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, the largest refuge in the lower 48 states, drew widespread condemnation from across Nevada and the nation. A similar Navy proposal to seize 600,000 acres of land in central Nevada was criticized by Nevada conservationists and indigenous tribes.
Both proposals were blocked in today’s final conference committee report for the annual defense policy bill, the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.
“This is a monumental victory for public lands, wildlife and the people of Nevada,” said Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which helped lead the coalition opposing the proposed land grabs. “We were told we had to cut a deal or risk losing everything. But this coalition showed steely resolve and it paid off. Our public lands have been saved from military seizure.”
More than 32,000 people submitted comments to the Air Force opposing the Desert refuge takeover. In 2019 the Nevada state legislature passed near-unanimous resolutions opposing both land grabs, led by Assemblywoman Lesley Cohen, Sen. Melanie Scheible, Assemblyman Howard Watts III and Assemblywoman Sarah Peters.
“We want to recognize the leadership of Nevada Assembly members Cohen, Watts and Peters, state Sen. Scheible and U.S. Rep. Horsford,” said Donnelly. “These elected officials went above and beyond the call of duty, responded to their constituents’ demands and took a bold stand for our public lands. We owe them a debt of gratitude.”
Tribal leadership was central to the campaign to save Nevada’s public lands, which are the ancestral heritage of Nevada’s tribal nations. The Moapa Band of Paiutes, Las Vegas Band of Paiutes, Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, the Intertribal Council of Nevada and the National Congress of American Indians passed resolutions opposing the land seizures and made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress.
“Nevada’s Native American nations played a crucial role in securing this victory,” said Donnelly. “Their determined advocacy for their ancestral lands was decisive in achieving this outcome.”
This summer Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) successfully amended the Act to give the military almost 1 million acres of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge. Nevada’s Democratic House delegation, led by Rep. Steven Horsford, shot down the Bishop amendment and the wildlife refuge gained a temporary reprieve.
In today’s final report, the conference committee encouraged the Defense Department to “continue to work with the committees of jurisdiction, the Nevada congressional delegation, state and tribal stakeholders to secure a mutually-agreed upon expansion.”
“We know the military will be back and the coalition will be ready to protect our public lands,” said Donnelly. “When this campaign began we said ‘not one acre.’ We meant it.”
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Featured image: Desert National Wildlife Refuge. Photo by Patrick Donnelly, Center for Biological Diversity Image is available for media use.
US Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reintroduced the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, on Wednesday. The bill urges the US State Department to designate the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a foreign terrorist organization.
Republican Senators Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Pat Roberts of Kansas cosponsored the bill.
“I am proud to reintroduce this bill and to advance America’s fight against radical Islamic terrorism. I commend the current administration’s work calling terrorism by its name and combatting the spread of this potent threat, and I look forward to receiving the additional information this new bill requests from the Department of State. Many of our closest allies in the Arab world have long ago concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group that seeks to sow chaos across the Middle East, and I will continue working with my colleagues to take action against groups that finance terrorism,” said Cruz.
Inhofe added,
“Since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Brotherhood-affiliated groups have consistently preached and incited hatred against Christians, Jews, and other Muslims while supporting designated radical terrorists. I am proud that under the Trump administration we continue to call out and combat radical terrorism and I am glad to join my colleagues today in reintroducing this legislation. We must continue to condemn Foreign Terrorist Organizations and hold them accountable for the evil they perpetrate.”
Cruz first introduced the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act in 2015 and reintroduced the bill in 2017.
“I will continue working with my colleagues to take action against groups that finance terrorism,” adding, “I am proud to reintroduce this bill and to advance America’s fight against radical Islamic terrorism,” said Cruz.
The MB was named a terrorist organization by Egypt in 2013, and by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2020, and both Russia and Syria have banned the group after suffering thousands of deaths caused by the group and its supporters who follow Radical Islam, which is a political ideology, and is not a religion, nor a sect.
“This bill recognizes the simple fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamic terrorist group,” Sen. Ted Cruz said in 2015.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives has made passage difficult. With a democratic President-elect coming to office in January 2021, the Cruz bill faces urgency.
Trump tried to designate the MB as a terrorist organization
In April 2019, the Trump Administration announced it planned to officially name the MB a foreign terrorist organization and directed national security and diplomatic officials to find a way to place sanctions on the group, which would impose wide-ranging economic and travel sanctions on companies and individuals who interact with the group. The act faced criticism from Democrats, who have established ties to the MB.
American support for the Muslim Brotherhood
The MB was founded in 1928 in Egypt as a religious, social, and political organization. It renounces secularism and advocates a return to Islamic law. Because the US is a secular democracy, the political ideology of the MB stands in sharp opposition to American values.
However, there are many groups in the Muslim American community, who defend the MB by accusing any act to designate it as a terrorist group, as an attempt to vilify Muslims, cripple Muslim American civil society, and promote Islamophobia.
CIA support for the Muslim Brotherhood
A leaked internal CIA memo read, “MB groups enjoy widespread support across the Near East-North Africa region, and many Arabs and Muslims worldwide would view an MB designation as an affront to their core religious and societal values.”
What the memo does not say, is the fact that hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians have been killed in Libya, Egypt, and Syria by the followers of the MB since 2011. The Arab Spring utilized the MB followers as the ‘boots on the ground’, thus allowing the US-NATO attacks for regime change, with limited American military personnel.
What is the Muslim Brotherhood?
The MB has two pillars: “The introduction of the Islamic Shari’ah as the basis controlling the affairs of state and society” and “Work to achieve unification among the Islamic countries and states, mainly among the Arab states, and liberating them from foreign imperialism.”
The Muslim individual, the Muslim family, the Muslim community, and finally the Muslim government, or Islamic State is the ultimate goal, and the younger generation has voiced its support for a revolutionary approach using violent means. The MB official English website is Ikhwanweb.
The MB has committed war crimes and atrocities in Syria and Egypt, while also working as an American ally.
The UK funded the MB’s establishment in 1928. Key figures and operatives of this movement migrated to the United States 70 years ago and assumed important positions in American academic and intellectual institutions. They generally appear to be highly educated, productive members of business and society in the US.
Mohamad Soltan, an Egyptian-American member of the Brotherhood, jailed in Egypt before being deported to the US, explained: “the one thing that everybody in the prison had in common —the ISIS guys, the Muslim Brotherhood guys, the liberals, the guards, the officers — is that they all hate America.”
Obama administration support of the MB
In October leaked emails proved the Obama administration’s support of the MB, with some emails related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The emails reveal a relationship between the US, during Obama, and Qatari Al Jazeera as well as the MB.
The MB targeted all high-level state positions, including ministries, and attempted to fully control the Egyptian media, so it launched pro-MB channels, broadcast from inside and outside the country until the 2013 revolution which ousted the MB from the control of Egypt.
Wadah Khanfar, former director of the Al Jazeera network, appeared in emails with Clinton notifying her of all details taking place regarding the network known for its support to terrorist and extremist groups.
In Frank Gaffney’s book, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration‘, he examined Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, with three close family members who were intimately connected to the MB, and influencing US foreign policy. Abedin was deeply connected to the MB in the US, and Gaffney identified many individuals with Islamist ties working in sensitive government roles.
Obama allied with the MB and enabled them to participate in the US’s foreign policy in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria during the Arab Spring.
The Pentagon’s view of the Muslim Brotherhood
General James Mattis, former Chief of Central Command, responsible for all operations in the Middle East, Central and South-East Asia, and Secretary of Defense under Trump believed that the MB and Al Qaeda belonged to the same movement.
Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, called Radical Islam a “cancer”, later Flynn was fired by Obama in August 2014.
The Pentagon began referring to the Obama presidential advisers as the “White House jihadi” or “the Muslim Brotherhood caucus.” It took the massacre of nearly a thousand civilians by the MB at Rabaa in August 2013, for the United States to change course.
Turkey’s Erdogan is a Muslim Brotherhood supporter
President Erdogan has transformed a modern, secular country that had hopes of joining the EU, into a backward-looking Islamic society ruled by the AKP party, which follows the MB political doctrine.
Istanbul is now the MB hub, as Turkey becomes the MB’s base to take over the world. Civil society cannot fight back, as Turkey has the highest proportion of imprisoned journalists in the world. Turkey is financing and supporting ISIS, the Syrian Free Army, and other terrorists.
The Turkish Regime expanded its influence in the Middle East while working with Qatar in funding, supporting, and expanding the MB in the region.
Turkey and Qatar invested billions of dollars in expanding AKP and MB-linked institutions in the US, with AKP and Qatari government officials at events of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been linked to the MB, and Turkish influence is growing in the US.
Will Biden support the Muslim Brotherhood?
A Biden presidency may be a return to the Obama-era MB alliance, after all, Joe Biden served as Obama’s vice president for eight years.
The US’s alliance with Qatar and the MB during the so-called Arab Spring only led to deaths, refugees, and failure. The US intervened in the Middle East by relying on the Qatari Al-Jazeera channel with its Arabic and English teams as a media arm for this purpose, thus instigating political and economic devastation most notably in Syria.
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In 1997, Don DeLillo, the author of seventeen novels, published what many consider his masterpiece, Underworld. It was a prophetic book in many ways, especially with its focus on the World Trade Towers and the way the book’s cover, front and back, pictured the towers shrouded in smoke or clouds with what seemed like a large bird approaching it at its upper floors.
That the front cover had a positive image and the rear a negative one with the light and dark inverted gave it a ghostly look that was haunting. I remember when I first saw the book, I wondered if the photograph was showing a plane or a bird approaching the north tower near what looked like twenty or so floors from the top. I concluded it was probably a bird, but four years later reality entered the picture with a plane exploding into the side of the building twenty or so floors from the top.
The photo is ambiguous but eerily suggestive, especially in retrospect. Below the towers we see a cross atop the local church seemingly holding the towers together, as if to announce the future of the new Crusade against Islam, or perhaps the connection between God and Mammon, or maybe a reminder that “you cannot serve God and mammon.” Who knows?
No one seeing it now could avoid thinking of the attacks of September 11, 2001. And reading the words of the character Brian, who is in the waste management business, one realizes why the cover photos were an appropriate choice and how they captured DeLillo’s story and the terrible future. Fresh kills and burials. Waste. The underworld. Brian thinks as he stands atop the mountains of waste at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and looks at the Twin Towers across the harbor: “The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one.” Does Brian know that soon nearly three thousand people will be wasted there? And that his twinning of the towers with waste would soon take on the creepiest of meanings. “The wind carried the stink across the kill.”
Ezra Pound once said that artists are the antennae of the race. He seemed to be speaking of DeLillo, among others. Can artists intuit the future? Did DeLillo realize the fate of the Twin Towers? How?
When I read Underworld, I was struck by its uncanny brilliance. This was in 1998. I recommended it to everyone I knew. No one would read it. It was too long – 827 pages – and maybe something closer to the bone dissuaded them, as if its title was announcing dread and death and they preferred smiley faces. Then, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I again recommended it. No one took my suggestion to read it. Perhaps then it wasn’t the length but its eerie insights. Its prescience. Its weirdness. Its references to the Twin Towers, terrorists, the view of the Towers from the Fresh Kills landfill where the debris from the attack was in fact later taken and laid to waste as fast as possible to avoid inspection, buried, the reference to germs and the fear of them, the need to wash your hands over and over, the traumatic looping of images on television, so much repetition, such frantic sex, loss of faith, nuclear dread, etc. The book was capacious and captivating and unnerving.
“What’s your argument?” one character asks another.
“You asked, so I’ll tell you. That the biggest secrets are staring us straight in the face and we don’t see a thing.”
Or don’t want to.
What are those open secrets now?
DeLillo’s latest book is The Silence, which is called a novel but is really a long short story or a novella. But the categories don’t matter. It’s a meditation in words on silence, death, technology, and loss, always the heart of the matter and DeLillo’s core themes. It is very short – 117 pages of big print. All the characters talk gibberish, inanities that cut to the bone. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry when hearing them talk. Yet much of their talk is frightening because it is the way people do talk to each other. The sounds of silence. What did you say? What? What did you say? I don’t remember, I was texting.
And like Underworld, whose first 150 pages are devoted to the first nationally televised baseball game played on October 3, 1951 at New York’s Polo Grounds that ended with a ninth inning home run by the Giants’ Bobby Thompson that came to be called “the shot heard round the world,” The Silence centers around a group of five people gathering in 2022 to watch the Superbowl on a superscreen TV in a Manhattan apartment.
Sport: from old French, desporter, to divert; literally, to carry away. From what? To where?
“Filling time. Being boring. Living life,” says Tessa to Jim who are on a plane returning from France. Jim is fixated on the screen in front of him that is flashing the plane’s altitude, the temperature, time to destination. Tessa is writing in a small notebook her memories of what they saw on their trip so that in the years to come she may realize what she had missed, “something I don’t see right now.” Both killing time. Jim jabbers on about nothing, but he “wasn’t listening to what he was saying because he knew it was stale air.”
Back in the NYC apartment a threesome is awaiting their arrival for the big viewing of the Superbowl. Drinks and snacks are ready. There sit Diane, Max, and Diane’s former student, Martin, who is in his early thirties. Routine, boredom, and ennui await the kickoff and the arrival of the other couple and expected excitement. The national diversion on a small scale. A question hovers in the air: “What are we doing here, that is the question,” says Vladimir in Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot. “And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer.”
Do we?
Back on the plane, something happens, “a massive knocking somewhere below them. The screen went blank.” Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Death. “Are we afraid?” she said. The plane crash-lands because all the electronics have failed.
Back in the high-rise aerie, the threesome talk in clipped voices like the robotic Alexa. While her husband Max sits and drinks bourbon and stares at the big screen, Diane, in search of something to excite her, prods the gangling Martin with absurd questions to which he quickly responds with gibberish that gives her a sexual frisson. Boredom is a powerful force.
The kickoff is minutes away. “Something happened then.” The images on the screen shake, get distorted, and then the screen goes blank. Their phones go dead. At first they think it is a local outage, but it soon becomes apparent that what happened on the plane was happening everywhere and that the entire electronic grid was down, all electricity, the internet out. Max keeps staring at the blank screen, cursing. He starts announcing out loud the invisible game:
Play resumes, quarter two, hands, feet, knees, head, chest, crotch, hitting and getting hit. Super Bowl Fifty-Six. Our National Death Wish.
Martin tells Diane he is taking a medication, and a side effect can be that others can hear your thoughts or control your behavior. “Yes, we all do this,” he says. “A little white pill.”
It seems madness has walked in. Blank screens. Disoriented minds.
Soon Tess and Jim, after visiting the darkened hospital with others from the plane crash to have Jim’s head wound attended to, walk to the apartment through darkening empty streets for the absent game. Martin says, “Are we living in a makeshift reality? Have I already said this? A future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet?”
The five sit and eat by candlelight as cold joins the darkness of the encroaching night. “Was each a mystery to the others, however close their involvement, each individual so naturally encased that he or she escapes a final determination, a fixed appraisal by the others in the room?”
No one knows what has happened, who or what is behind the digital takedown. Or who they really are. Martin says, “Nobody want to call it World War III but this is what it is.” His madness pours from his mouth, a ranting filled with the kinds of questions and thoughts many would think if the digital takedown really happened, the kinds of questions more and more people are now asking. Will DeLillo be prescient again: Is a digital “attack” coming soon?
Martin’s words:
Certain countries. Once rabid proponents of nuclear arms, now speaking the language of living weaponry. Germs , genes, spores, powders.
DeLillo:
Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions. Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and the disabled. Starvation, plague, and what else. Power grids collapsing. Our personal perception sinking into quantum dominance…And isn’t it strange that certain individuals have seemed to have accepted the shutdown, the burnout?”
The five of them sit and talk on and on in the silence. Each delivers a closing monologue, as if it’s closing time and the last drinks have been served. Say what you want. What has happened? Speak. Was this foreseeable? Have we been zombified? Lost our ability to think, to communicate, to grasp what’s happening around and within us? Have our digital addictions destroyed our humanity? Have we reached our expiration dates? Who is doing this to us?
Your phone is wasted; don’t seek its advice.
Just as he seemed to perceive the attacks of September 11, 2001 four years before they occurred, does DeLillo know something that most would prefer to avoid? Are we like Tessa, who wishes to just go home and return to normality but who feels she is “in a tumbling void”?
When her husband Jim hears her say something about home, “he realizes it is simply fake, a dead language.”
“Home,” he says finally. “Where is that?”
DeLillo has been asking that for decades.
Are we and he like Max, who ends the book understanding nothing and staring into a blank screen?
Or can we see the biggest secret staring us straight in the face?
I can’t help thinking that DeLillo tipped his hand at the end of Underworld when he has the book’s protagonist, Nick Shay, born and bred like his creator in the Italian Arthur Ave. section of the Bronx, say what he longs for:
I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.
Can we get back into our skins or are we doomed to tumble into a void? The signs are not too encouraging.
My wife and I were recently hiking on a narrow mountain trail along which we encountered not a soul. We came to an isolated spot overlooking a valley to the east. We stopped, looked, and listened. Not a sound. Not even birds. Just beautiful silence. There was so much to hear there. When we continued on, we saw a couple with a dog up ahead. The man and woman each wore a mask. When they saw us, mask-less criminals, they quickly stepped off the trail. The woman pulled the dog close to her and the man took out and checked his phone. As we passed, they said not a word, but their eyes spoke fear. I was wondering if the man was texting the police.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Spanning some 60 years of employment, this writer has some conclusions. Of course, these are from my own personal experiences. Yet, having spoken with a myriad of working stiffs over the years, perhaps this analysis is valid.
During those 60 years of work, I think only twice, for a mere two weeks and then 5 months, did I work for a large corporation. Factoring that out, all the hundreds of bosses I have had were small businesspeople.
I can say almost categorically, with maybe an exception or two, the overwhelming majority of my bosses had but one agenda when it came to their employees: Make as much as you can and pay them the least you can (including any benefits). In all the instances, including the two corporate jobs, I worked for NON UNION businesses, with one of them having only union delivery drivers. Let’s go there first.
In the winter of ’74, engaged to be married and ready for college graduation, I saw an ad in the Sunday Times for ‘Management Trainee’. Please, always avoid any job that advertises any such sort of position. What it means is getting a job to do whatever dirty work the company wants done to inhibit their employees from having a more secure experience. In my case during that bitter cold January was being hired to work in a linen company’s Brooklyn plant.
My manager actually came out and said to me on my first day on the job: “Ok kid, the way it works here is the more yousave money for the company, the more you can earn.”
He then went on to tell me how everyone working there (except of course the managers) was A) Lazy B) shiftless and C) a born liar. My epiphany came when he scheduled me to go out with one delivery driver per day for one week. I was to ‘Observe and learn’ how the company operated. On day One of my routine I got into the truck with driver 1 and rode ‘shotgun’. He had the Bronx territory.
The delivery truck was so old it must have had arthritis! The heater didn’t work well, and driver 1 sucked on cigarette after cigarette, with his window always open…. in 20 degree weather. Most of his stops were bakeries, eateries and grocery stores. I went inside with him…mostly to get out of the smoky, freezing truck! None of the businesses had the dirty towels and linens ready for him. We had to search ‘here and there’ to collect them.
In one food store we had to go down the dark stairway to the basement, and I could sense the rats hanging out to our right. The driver caught my drift and laughed. “All part of the job kid.” On the way back to the plant I was told how shitty the job was, and how the union the drivers belonged to was a ‘Sweetheart Union’. “They own our union officials, and God knows how much they pay off those bastards. All I know is that at each new contract we get sold down the river.”
Day Two with driver 2 was a repeat performance. These guys were getting screwed by everyone! On top of that they had to show up, in the coldest winter, at 5 AM to the garage/ warehouse, which was as damp and frigid as being outside They had to stay there for an hour getting loaded up and then handed the paperwork for the day. I made the mistake of getting there at 5 AM myself. Well, I got through the week, and by the following Monday I wanted OUT! Early Tuesday morning I called in sick (maybe from that garage/warehouse?).
That Friday I called up to ask to have my paycheck mailed to me. No way I ever wanted to go near that shithole again! Well, a few days went by and no check. That Friday, my buddy Torch (recently back from Vietnam) gave me a ride to the place. I walked in and went to the main window. The bookkeeper said she did not have it. Why? I asked. She said the manager told her not to write one. She said he told her that I never gave notice, so…. My friend Torch seemed as pissed as I was. We rushed to the manager’s office and entered. “Hey”, the manager shouted, “Nobody asked you to come in here. Get out!” Torch, all five feet seven of him, reached over and grabbed the manager, who had him by five inches and 100 pounds. “Listen, you fat **** , you don’t give my buddy his check I’m gonna kick your fat ass, and then do it again when I follow you home!” They had my check in five minutes.
I have had experiences with sales jobs working for small businesses. It seems that if you were good enough to earn high commissions, the solution became obvious. They just adjusted your commission rate… downward of course. Since this was non union,
AND always NON Contractual employment, they could do as they pleased. One place had me work there, very successfully, for 18 months, building up an account base (we all serviced our accounts for reorders, earning the same commissions). Then, just like that, they told me that ‘Stephanie’ will call your accounts for reorders, and you will get 1/4 of the commission rate. Take it or leave it was the credo. How about the added torture: With no contract or union protection, a business owner would somehow NOT pay you all your commissions. They would tell you that things were bad, so in essence they were using some of the money owed to you to keep the place going. These things all happened to me. Truth can be stranger than fiction.
About 15 years ago we had our office cleaning lady with a husband who was a craftsman at a local cabinet company. He told how the owner kept complaining to the four craftsmen that he could not afford any raises or bonuses that year. Yet, the guy purchased or leased three new BMWs for each of his children… who were on the payroll. This is why we need to establish a system of commerce where there are ONLY union shops. As a socialist, I would like there to be profit sharing at small businesses , and not some wacky noblesse oblige of pennies on the dollar.
No, small businesses should make their employees feel like partners a bit, and reward them as such. The Japanese, during the 1980s, actually had a better plan. Then, it was called the 15% rule. The highest paid employee of a business (usually the owner or CEO) could only earn 15 times the pay of the lowest full time employee, in salary and bonuses combined. Do the math and see how much fairer that could be. Of course, over the years they may have modified this to be a 30 Times rule. Example:
At a company like CVS Health Corp (owners of pharmacy stores) in 2018 CEO Larry Merlo earned over $7.5 million in salary and bonuses. Under the 30 times rule, let us say that CVS’s lowest paid full timer earns $ 15 and hour. 30 X $15 = $ 450 an hour. The eight hour day brings his pay to $ 3600 a day, or $ 18k a week. Times that by 50 weeks and it translates into $900k a year. A big stretch from his current compensation, yes?
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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected]
The general strike occurred in the context of the devastation brought about by the coronavirus pandemic in India. Added to this are the millions of people who have lost income and who now face increased poverty and hunger, in a country where even before the pandemic 50 percent of all children suffered malnourishment.
On Thursday over 200 million workers held a one day general strike in India. They were joined by farmers in mass actions across the country against the right-wing government of Narendra Modi.
On Thursday, some 200 million workers held a one day general strike in India. This massive day of action was called by 10 trade unions and over 250 farmers organizations and was accompanied by massive protests and a near total shutdown of some Indian states. According to the call put out by unions, the general strike was organized against “the anti-people, anti-worker, anti-national and destructive policies of the BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The withdrawal of all “anti-farmer laws and anti-worker labour codes”
The payment of 7,500 rupees in the accounts of each non-tax paying family
Monthly supply of 10 kg of food to needy families
The expansion of the MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005) to include 200 workdays each year, higher wages, and the Act’s extension to urban industries
Stop the “privatisation of the public sector, including the financial sector, and stop corporatisation of government-run manufacturing and service entities like railways, ordnance factories, ports, etc.”
The withdrawal of the “draconian forced premature retirement of government and PSU (public sector) employees”
Pensions for all, the scrapping of the National Pension System and the reimposition of the earlier pension plan with amendments
Workers in nearly all of India’s major industries — including steel, coal, telecommunications, engineering, transportation, ports, and banking — joined the strike. Students, domestic workers, taxi drivers, and other sectors also participated in the nationwide day of action.
In addition to the demands of the nationwide strike, certain sectors made industry-specific demands to fight back against the government’s attacks to their industries that affect the entire working class in India. For example, bank employees are fighting against bank privatization, outsourcing, and for a reduction in service charges and action against big corporate defaults.
Other industries framed their demands in the context of the government’s appalling response to the pandemic and economic crisis hitting India. As the Bombay University and College Teachers’ Union’s statement stated:
This strike is against the devastating health and economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 and the lockdown on the working people of the country. This has been further aggravated by a series of anti-people legislations on agriculture and the labour code enacted by the central government. Along with these measures, the National Education Policy (NEP) imposed on the nation during the pandemic will further cause irreparable harm to the equity of and access to education.
The general strike occurred in the context of the devastation brought about by the coronavirus pandemic in India. India has more than 9.2 million people infected with Covid-19, the second highest count in the world. Since the pandemic began, nearly 135,000 have died, according to official data. It is likely the numbers are much higher. Added to this are the millions of people who have lost income and who now face increased poverty and hunger, in a country where even before the pandemic 50 percent of all children suffered malnourishment.
The pandemic has spread from major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and other urban centers to rural areas where public health care is scarce or non-existent. The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritizing the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.
To stand up against these attacks — many of which began even before the pandemic — farmers and rural workers have been protesting for several months. They joined the national strike this week, staging actions across the country. Small farmers from three major agriculture-based states in India marched all the way to Delhi to protest laws passed by Modi’s government that would allow for larger corporate freedom and industrial farming. They were met with tear gas and brutal repression by the police upon entering Delhi.
The nationalist and right-wing government has used the pandemic to intensify its persecution of Muslims and migrant workers. In New Delhi in April, migrant workers returning home after being stranded by the nation-wide lockdown were brutally hosed down with bleach used to disinfect buses.
Modi has also escalated his nationalist rhetoric, especially against China, in an effort to capitalize on the trade war between the U.S. and China and deepen its strategic and military cooperation with the United States.
In the midst of the misery created by decades of neoliberalism and exacerbated by the pandemic, union leaders called the strike to allow workers to express discontent against the government. This one day strike demonstrated the anger of the working class and unity of farmers, workers and students. However, a one day general strike is not enough to impose all of the ambitious demands put forward by workers and farmers. The working class of India must fight to expand the strike, against the Stalinist-led union leaders of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), who try to reign in the anger of the working class with merely symbolic demonstrations.
Without a doubt, this massive coordinated action shows the great potential for unity in action of the Indian working class and farmers. It serves as an inspiration for workers all over the world to use one of our greatest tools against the capitalists: the strike.
Comments Off on India: Largest Strike in World History : Over 200 Million Workers and Farmers Protest against Poverty and Unemployment Triggered by Covid Lockdown
China finalised its campaign against protests in its Hong Kong territory when it expelled opposition politicians from Hong Kong’s government for endangering national security.
Following this move, opposition politicians still in office resigned in protest, leaving the territory’s government firmly pro-Beijing.
This came after a sweeping security law was passed which focused heavily on cutting foreign backing to opposition groups rioting in Hong Kong’s streets and outlawing aspirations of “independence” as a form of sedition.
With the cutting off of foreign support and the effective removal of opposition political parties supporting and driving the protests from Hong Kong’s political landscape, the prospects for another round of disruptive and violent protests is highly unlikely.
And almost as if to vindicate Beijing’s policy decisions regarding Hong Kong, the US and UK insisted on one last round of interference regarding these most recent developments.
UK’s Sky News in an article titled, “UK summons Chinese ambassador after expulsion of Hong Kong MPs,” would claim:
The government has summoned China’s ambassador to register “deep concern” after Beijing ordered the expulsion of four opposition MPs from Hong Kong’s parliament.
Kwok Ka-ki, Alvin Yeung, Dennis Kwok and Kenneth Leung were banished from the territory’s assembly for allegedly endangering national security.
They were expelled under a new Chinese law banning supporters of Hong Kong independence from holding office.
The article also claimed:
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Thursday declared China’s action a fresh breach of the Sino-British Declaration, the deal that saw Hong Kong pass back to China from Britain in 1997.
The agreement commits China to ensuring Hong Kong enjoys a “high degree of autonomy” and preserves the right to freedom of speech.
The London Guardian would also report in its article, “Hong Kong and China could face fresh US sanctions over ousting of lawmakers,” that:
Hong Kong and Chinese officials could face further sanctions from the United States over a new law that disqualified four pro-democracy legislators as “unpatriotic” and prompted a mass resignation by the pro-democracy caucus.
The UK had violently seized the territory in 1841 and occupied it until its handover back to China in 1997. Before the handover, the British government demanded Beijing recognize a series of conditions including “democratic” procedures that ironically never existed under British rule.
More recently, the UK’s attempts to maintain influence over the territory has been aided by US interference in the form of financial, political and material support provided to opposition parties and street movements culminating in open support of protests in recent years and even featuring high-profile trips by opposition leaders to Washington D.C. to directly receive US aid.
Hong Kong was never the UK’s to legitimately determine the affairs of from the beginning and only through its own military and imperial aggression did it hold any power over the territory. It parting “demands,” while agreed to by Beijing who at the time was left little choice, have no relevance in an international order the US and UK both have regularly predicated on “might makes right.”
Currently, China has the “might” to determine what is right in Hong Kong, and Beijing has correctly decided that what is right is uprooting the remnants of Western influence and interference from its territory.
While the UK government and its much larger transatlantic partners in the US are far from giving up their collective ambitions to subordinate China and greater Asia to the West, it appears that Beijing has laid the groundwork to fully shut Hong Kong off as a vector for such efforts.
The irony is that had the US and UK not pushed as aggressively as they did in Hong Kong over the past several years it is likely their proxies would have been able to maintain some form of influence in the territory for many more years to come. But by rushing in a bid to pressure Beijing, they provided the perfect justification for Beijing swiftly and completely uproot these proxies once and for all.
What’s more is that while the US and UK’s interference in Hong Kong has led what’s being called the “Hong Kong model” by other Western-backed opposition movements across Asia targeting governments friendly to China, Beijing’s success could now provide a “Beijing model” for regional governments to likewise fully and permanently uproot Western interference from within their borders as well.
What the US in particularly had regularly referred to as “America’s Pacific Century” may yet turn out to be the eventual dusk of Washington’s hegemonic ambitions in the region.
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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
While you were busy eating your Thanksgiving dinner, you probably were not paying much attention to the Danish government’s attempt to enact the ‘Epidemic Law’ which is a law in Denmark that would have given authorities the power to enforce rigid quarantines and, more importantly, mandate police enforced vaccination against coronavirus as well as ‘detainment’ if people refused.
The result of this mandate was exactly what should happen in a society when the government oversteps its bounds. The Danes took to the streets and nine days of public protests ensued. Much to my satisfaction, the Danish government relented but governments around the world are already planning on what to do for the ‘refusniks’ who do not obediently queue and roll up their sleeves.
The [fake] “left” [Dems. Joe Biden, et al] presents itself as the advocate for the common person, the voice of the oppressed and the architects of social justice. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to this subject. Suddenly all their bluster about representing individual rights is replaced with a diametrically opposed philosophy which is only one example of how their stated claims represent hypocrisy or even outright lies.
For years, the “left” [Dems] spouted the slogan ‘my body, my choice’ but rest assured that this does not apply to either masks or vaccines. Suddenly, their mentality at the expense of liberty becomes irrefutable. The next time this issue is discussed in the media, listen for the code words which lift the veil as to what is really being prepared. You will be told you need to acquiesce for the ‘common good’ or ‘for the comfort and safety of others’. This is the real face of the modern “left” which for thirty years has been using Mrs Clinton’s ‘It takes a village’ rationale to gut our civil liberties. If it indeed takes a village, then realize quickly that it is the village that will make your choices for you and you will have no say if the left’s [Dems] goals are realized.
No doubt, someone reading this in the United States is thinking ‘certainly this cannot happen here’. Think again… you are being naive. It is already happening and if there were to be a Biden or Harris Administration, this will escalate at a speed which will horrify you while your civil liberties evaporate before your eyes.
In the US, Ticketmaster controls music and drama seating and while it is currently facing a lawsuit over its near monopoly status, they are already planning on barring entry to venues for those who refuse to be forcibly vaccinated. Far more obtrusive to our lifestyle are the airlines plans to install a digital certification of vaccination they call a ‘health pass’ which will ban people from flying if they will not take the needle.
Meanwhile on the ground, Uber and other ride share companies are beginning to refuse service to those who will not accept their ‘new safety protocols’. So, protests may have the potential to officially resist mandatory vaccines but consider the ramifications. These vaccines have been rushed into production, they have been insufficiently tested and they utilize new delivery methods with unknown efficacy or side effects. The ability of those who do not wish to be test subjects may find their social lives impacted, their ability to travel outside their nation – or even state – severely limited and perhaps even potential bans from employment. So, to put it bluntly, you can refuse the vaccine so long as you are content to be a leper who remains at home and is unemployed. Even more sinister in terms of Biblical implications is that some financial institutions are considering denying banking services to those who will not obey their demands.
American Sovereignty Network is aware that we have followers in at least fourteen nations and we are honored you choose to monitor what we are doing. This truly is a subject which knows no borders and vaccination is not an ‘American issue’ because already world plans are being instituted for draconian travel passes which basically will create a global police state. In the coming weeks, American Sovereignty Network will be releasing a statement on the Great Reset that is planned by the World Economic Forum (WEF) which is working with the globalist Rockefeller Foundation to create what they term the ‘Common Pass’ which will be the addition of vaccination records to passports and visas. Simply put, vaccination will be a prerequisite for travel.
The following list was taken verbatim from The Commons Project which convened a meeting this past July in association with the World Economic Forum and The Rockefeller Foundation. Fifty Two nations were represented and over three hundred fifty political and business leaders attended. Their sinister work contains the following objectives:
Every nation must publish their health screening criteria for entry into the country using a standard format on a common framework
Each country must register trusted facilities that conduct COVID-19 lab testing for foreign travel and administer vaccines listed in the CommonPass registry
Each country will accept health screening status from foreign visitors through apps and services built on the CommonPass framework
Patient identification is to be collected at the time of sample collection and/or vaccination using an international standard
The CommonPass framework will be integrated into flight and hotel reservation and check-in processes
Your medical tests or vaccinations will be uploaded to your mobile device and will be scanned at airports, hotels, destinations or wherever they deem it necessary to control the populace. While the length of this commentary prevents a thorough summary of all the stated goals, there are enough telling excerpts to know that what is being assembled is not a temporary health safety policy until coronavirus disappears but rather a permanent surveillance and control system. This is not just a policy planned for the future, it is slowly being implemented now. CommonPass is already in use on United Airlines flights from London to Newark as well as Cathay Pacific transit from Hong Kong to Singapore. Its use is expected to be expanded with Australia being one of the next anticipated locations.
So, what can be done about this? Any examination of how to stop the infringement of civil liberties should quickly arrive at the conclusion that retaining our rights while we still have them is far easier than attempting to reclaim that which has already been lost. The first logical step is to inform as many people as you can. Remember that most people who are saturated in the mainstream media will find expressions such as ‘technocracy’, ‘mark of the beast’, ‘globalist serf state’ and other similarly themed expressions to be easy to dismiss via the now knee jerk charge of conspiracy theory. Start with something which impacts their lives. Ask them questions such as:
Do you wish life would go back to normal?
How would you feel if you were required to take a vaccine with no long term testing?
Should healthy people who do not fall into ‘high risk’ categories be required to accept an inoculation they do not want for an illness that is 0.08% fatal?
Do you want to live a life where masks and injections are mandatory from here onward?
If we can be forced to take a coronavirus vaccine, how many others will you accept?
What will you do if you are told you cannot travel, go to a hotel or large event without first being willing to receive an injection?
Do you trust the government and pharmaceutical companies with personal health choices, especially since drug companies have a strong profit motive?
These questions are nothing more than conversation starters but that is exactly the goal. Most rational people will have a difficult time hearing themselves say something to the effect of ‘People should have no right to determine what is put in their bodies; that is up to the government’.
So, finding a way to start the conversation is the first step for those willing to ponder what question(s) you have posed. Then, offer some specific sources as to validate what you are saying. Keep in mind that most people immersed in mainstream media will not be likely to gravitate towards alternative sources because they have yet to understand that 92% of media on three continents is controlled by six corporate conglomerates. So, I suggest you find a few citations that you can remember before starting such a discourse.
There are now plenty of options which acknowledge that mandatory vaccination is not just being planned and current efforts at implementation are likely to increase, not decrease. Deciding what sources to suggest should be determined by the individual’s receptiveness but as recently as Monday of this past week, Newsweek (decidedly mainstream) published an article entitled ‘With COVID-19 Vaccine On the Way, Can Employers Make Vaccination Mandatory?
The simple act of showing someone that their ability to earn a living can be impacted by this issue should hopefully help that person question the narrative blaring out of Dr Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control. Remember, the goal is to get the person to be open enough to seek information and question their previously held assertions, not to ‘win an argument’ because that will not gain converts.
Should you have the good fortune of finding someone who is either genuinely interested or dismissive enough to want to prove you wrong, then recommend them checking out the previously mentioned World Economic Forum, The Rockefeller Foundation or the Commons Project because each one of these global organizations along with the United Nations make no attempt to hide what their goals are. Hopefully, the people you speak to will be able to cast off their hive mentality when they see that this is no ‘secret plan’ but in fact is discussed openly by its advocates own web sources.
The ultimate measure of success will be to get people involved. The simplest way is to get people to be willing to contact members of elected office to encourage them to oppose mandatory vaccinations, medical travel passports or employment vaccine mandates. Like minded grass roots organizations along with other established civil liberties groups will be glad to have more people who have seen through the fog of the media fiction. As stated earlier, stopping this before it is fully implemented should be the logical immediate goal and people need to know time is not on our side. Act accordingly while we still have the opportunity.
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The current year marks the 15th anniversary of the U.S. shale boom, a period in which fracking technology across such states as Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Wyoming helped establish the nation as a top oil and gas producer.
Unfortunately, high costs of production compared with conventional drilling has led to the sector consistently printing red ink and resulted in considerable destruction of shareholder value. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent oil price crash has led to investors souring on the industry further, credit becoming harder to come by, and a cross-section of Wall Street calling the end to the sector.
But the death of the U.S. shale sector might have been greatly exaggerated.
Whereas U.S. shale has recorded a steep production decline due to sharp fall in oil and gas prices, the industry could be primed to recover much faster than what we have been led to believe.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Since its inception, the U.S. shale industry has been a big money loser.
A June report from Deloitte revealed that during its 15 years of existence, the U.S. shale industry managed to write off a staggering $450 billion in invested capital while generating $300 billion in net negative cash flow. Further, the sector has recorded more than 190 bankruptcies since 2010, the highest by any sector in the United States.
The Covid-19 pandemic only served to make a bad situation much worse. According to Deloitte:
“The oil industry is currently experiencing a ‘great compression’ in which companies’ room to maneuver is restricted by low commodity prices, reduced demand, capital constraints, debt loads, and health impacts of COVID-19. Unlike in previous downturns, these effects are now simultaneous–creating a higher level risk of technical insolvencies and building intense pressure on the industry.”
Still, the shale sector is hardly on its deathbed as has been portrayed in some circles.
The U.S. shale patch has an estimated breakeven oil price in the $60-$65 range, well above the current WTI price in the mid-40s. The historically low oil prices have definitely taken a hit on production, with the Texas’s Permian Basin pumping 4.49 million barrels a day in September down from 4.9 million barrels in March. Yet, the September figure is actually higher than in any month prior to September 2019. In fact, the decline in Permian production has been less severe compared to the cuts undertaken by the likes of Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Source: Bloomberg
Indeed, the worst might be over for the U.S. shale patch thanks to a deluge of Covid-19 vaccines arriving just when the second, third, and even fourth waves of infections have been ravaging the world and causing widespread despair.
The UK has become the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 vaccine, which has been shown to offer up to 95% protection against Covid-19. The first 800,000 doses will be available in the country starting next week, with another 40M doses on order.
Even better news: The U.S. could soon follow suit with an FDA approval and distribute enough of the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine to immunize 100M people–or a third of its population–by the end of February…
There are at least five other promising vaccine candidates from Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, CureVac, and Sanofi–GlaxoSmithKline already in the pipeline.
Further, a recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report says that shale production costs have been falling, with E&P companies operating in the lowest-cost U.S. basin, Permian and Delaware, posting breakeven levels of ~$33 a barrel, down from a $40 per barrel just a year ago.
In an earlier report, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs projected that oil prices might hit $60 a barrel by the end of 2021. Given the high efficacy that the Covid-19 vaccines have so far demonstrated, do not be surprised if Bank of America’s prediction that oil prices will hit $60 during the first half of 2021 proves to be accurate. In other words, the majority of U.S. shale companies could turn cash flow positive in a matter of months.
The U.S. shale sector might be down but is by no means about to go out. Shale companies know it, and have been busy consolidating their operations so as to be better primed for the oil price recovery.
It’s not time for shale to surprise us–yet. An oil price rally on vaccines doesn’t exactly connect with the massive impact on demand the coronavirus has had. There’s an important time lapse here.
But if American shale has finally learned its lesson on resilience, we can expect some real value-focused growth once the dust settles on multiple crises.
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Our thanks to Oil Price for having brought this article to our attention
An ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION has been filed with the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the new Pfizer COVID vaccine that has been submitted for “emergency use authorization” (EUA).
It is widely expected that the FDA is going to grant EUA fast-track approval to Pfizer’s experimental COVID vaccine within days.
The STAY OF ACTION is based upon the faulty PCR tests that were used in the vaccine trials:
Before an EUA or unrestricted license is issued for the Pfizer vaccine, or for other vaccines for which PCR results are the primary evidence of infection, all “endpoints” or COVID-19 cases used to determine vaccine efficacy in the Phase 3 or 2/3 trials should have their infection status confirmed by Sanger sequencing, given the high cycle thresholds used in some trials. High cycle thresholds, or Ct values, in RT-qPCR test results have been widely acknowledged to lead to false positives.
Dr. Lee is a world-renowned expert on DNA sequencing-based diagnostics. He has trained and taught in some of the world’s most prestigious institutions and has published scores of scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals.
He recognized very early on that the PCR tests and other tests fast-tracked by the FDA were not accurate in identifying SARSCoV-2 RNA, and even sent a letter, back in March, to Dr. Margaret Harris and Dr. Eduardo Guerrero of the World Health Organization, and Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), explaining why the tests to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA were generating false positives and negatives.
You can read his March 22, 2020 letter here. He explained that a two-phased test would “guarantee no-false positive results” based on his research and published work from Japan.
So here we are now at the end of November, 2020, and the FDA appears to be ready to grant EUA fast-track approval to COVID vaccines that have gone through Phase I, II, and III vaccine trials, all using these faulty COVID tests.
In Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION, he recognizes the great risk for harm on the American public if the vaccine trials are approved based on these faulty tests.
Petitioner and the public will suffer irreparable harm if the actions requested herein are not granted, because once the FDA licenses this COVID-19 vaccine, both governments and employers may make this product mandatory (in general, or for airline or international travel) or may recommend it for widespread use.
If the assignment of cases and non-cases during the course of the trial is not accurate, the vaccine will not have been properly tested. If the vaccine is not properly tested, important public policy decisions regarding its use will be based on misleading evidence. The medical and economic consequences to the nation could hardly be higher.
The New York State Bar Association has already issued a report on COVID-19 recommending that, “a vaccine subject to scientific evidence of safety and efficacy be made widely available, and widely encouraged, and if the public health authorities conclude necessary, required…”
Thus, it is reasonable to suspect that COVID-19 vaccines, including the Pfizer vaccine, could become mandatory. Without the FDA assuring proper efficacy trials of the vaccine now, the Petitioner and the public may not have the opportunity to object to receiving the vaccine, which was approved based on currently deficient and unreliable clinical trial data.
How likely is it that HHS and the FDA will grant this stay and deal with the PCR testing deficiencies before issuing emergency use fast-track approval to the Pfizer vaccine?
Dr. Peter Marks is the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and will be the main person to make the decision of whether or not to issue an EUA for the Pfizer COVID vaccine. He recently told the press that “Americans can expect a very open process” in their evaluation of the experimental vaccine. (Source.)
We need thousands if not tens of thousands of Americans to contact Dr. Peter Marks and let him know the public is watching, and that we want the FDA to consider Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION and respond to it.
Here is FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn’s contact info:
Dr. Stephen Hahn – email: [email protected] – Phone (Main FDA #): 1-888-463-6332 – Twitter account: @SteveFDA
A Strong Warning to the U.S. Military about Operation Warp Speed
If you are a member of the military who will soon be called upon to participate in Operation Warp Speed and help distribute the new experimental COVID vaccine, be careful that you do not end up on the wrong side of history!
Just claiming to be “following orders” if massive deaths and injuries result from this experimental vaccine may not save you!
That is what many of the Nazi doctors in Germany who served under Hitler tried to claim, but during the Nuremberg trials, and specifically the “Doctors Trial” in 1946-1947, twenty of the twenty-three defendants were medical doctors, and were accused of having been involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder.
Of the 23 defendants, seven were acquitted and seven received death sentences; the remainder received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.
What they did under German law, or maybe “emergency orders” during war time, was probably perfectly “legal” at the time, but after the Hitler regime was overthrown those who committed these “legal” actions that resulted in murder and crimes against humanity, were brought to justice after the war.
Dr. Peter Marks and Dr. Stephen Hahn would also do well to just not blindly excuse Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION, because Dr. Lee appears to have close ties to Attorney Mary Holland, currently the Counsel for Children’s Health Defense and former Professor of Law at NYU, and one of the nation’s top attorneys when it comes to vaccines.
Mary Holland works now for Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who himself has become one the top attorneys in the world taking on Big Pharma.
He currently has 4 lawsuits filed against pharmaceutical giant Merck, for their approval of the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, which has destroyed the lives of so many young people due to being fast-tracked into the market.
Here is a warning from a former Military Commander regarding current Commanders taking part of Operation Warp Speed, and the legal risks of doing so, published at Children’s Health Defense.
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The UK military supplied 2,323 spare parts for Tornado fighter jets to an arms company in Saudi Arabia last year, despite a court order against exporting weapons for use in the Yemen war, Declassified UK has found.
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Saudi planes bombing Yemen received 2,323 spare parts from the UK military last year, according to the government’s annual report into strategic export controls, which was published four months later than usual due to the coronavirus.
The long-awaited report shows that supplies to Saudi Arabia’s air force and navy continued despite a court order in June 2019 banning new export licences for use in Yemen.
Tornado spare parts were exempt from the arms embargo because they were covered by licences issued prior to the court ruling. The equipment was diverted from the Royal Air Force (RAF), which stopped flying its own Tornado fleet in March 2019.
Saudi Arabia continues to use Tornados on combat operations in Yemen, having purchased the planes from BAE Systems in the 1980s and 1990s under the notoriously corrupt Al-Yamamah series of arms deals.
The intense fighting requires a constant stream of spare parts. Some experts say the war would stop within weeks without British supplies to the Saudi air force.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels recently shot down a Saudi Tornado, leading British military officials to “verbally discuss the possibility of offering technical assistance” to help Saudi Arabia investigate the crash, although none was ultimately requested.
When asked in Parliament whether the British military had helped to maintain the jet that crashed, Defence Minister James Heappey said, “RAF personnel do not service Royal Saudi Air Force Tornado aircraft.”
In another attempt to downplay the extent of British support for the Saudi air force, the government has told Parliament that none of the Saudi Tornados has returned to the UK for maintenance since the Yemen war began in 2015.
However, Declassified has found from a freedom of information request that the RAF gave Saudi air force technicians a bespoke training course on Tornado maintenance at RAF Cosford in England last year, in addition to the export of thousands of spare parts.
There are also RAF instructors on secondment to BAE Systems who provide training support to Saudi Tornado aircrew.
Three Saudi air force officers graduating from an aerosystems engineering course at RAF Cosford in June 2015. (Photo: RAF / Facebook)
Sending spare parts to Saudi forces appears to be routine. Official documents show that 575 Tornado spares were sent to Saudi Arabia in 2018, along with 156 missiles and missile launchers. These are thought to include Paveway, Brimstone, Storm Shadow and ALARM missiles.
The conflict in Yemen has caused the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. The UN said on Tuesday that 233,000 Yemenis have died so far in the war, while more than 24 million need humanitarian assistance.
Although the UK government refuses to say how many times British-made equipment has caused civilian casualties, it has tracked more than 500 incidents of possible violations of international humanitarian law.
The UK also donates large quantities of aid to Yemen. In December 2019, the Department for International Development gifted three civilian armoured vehicles to the United Nations Verification and Inspection Mission for Yemen, for use in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah.
Export controls?
The UK’s Department for International Trade repeatedly claims that Britain has “one of the most rigorous defence export regimes in the world” which “assesses all export licences in accordance with strict licensing criteria”.
The department’s annual report into export controls shows that in 2019 customs officials made 194 seizures of exports that were in breach of the licensing regime, sanctions or embargoes – a four-year high. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) then sent 110 warning letters, but made no prosecutions.
Instead, HMRC opted to issue 12 companies with penalties “ranging from £4,000 to £90,000 for unlicensed exports of military goods, dual-use goods and related activity controlled by The Export Control Order 2008”. The penalties totalled around £408,000.
HMRC has told Declassified that it had a minimum of two officers present during the DSEI arms fair in London last year, which is one of the biggest such trade shows in the world. One company, Condor, had its stand shut down after it was found to be displaying banned electro-shock equipment.
However, HMRC refused to tell Declassified whether it had conducted a criminal investigation into Condor or issued the firm with any penalty, citing privacy exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.
Tear gas equipment on display at the Condor stand at DSEI 2019. (Photo: Phil Miller)
The Government’s Joint Export Control Unit, which also enforces the licensing regime in addition to HMRC, has just eight inspectors to conduct “compliance visits” at arms factories.
They made 554 site checks in 2019, and found that 43% of exporters were not fully complying with the licensing regime during routine checks. This resulted in 97 warning letters being sent to company directors last year, “where breaches of licence conditions were identified”, up 2% from 2018.
Five exporters surrendered licences which did not cover their goods and two exporters “had a licence suspended due to repeat infractions”.
However, as Declassified has previously revealed, four of the arms factories at the heart of the Yemen war have not been inspected within the last three years, in breach of the government’s own rules.
These include the warplane factories run by BAE Systems at Warton and Samlesbury in Lancashire, northwest England, which manufacture the Tornado.
BAE sends a weekly cargo flight from Warton to a Saudi air force facility which refuels at an RAF base in Cyprus. The flights are believed to carry spare parts, but the Ministry of Defence refuses to reveal the cargo.
Somalia and Israel
Another recipient of military equipment from the UK in 2019 was the Somali police’s Goodir Unit, which was donated £81,000 worth of ammunition and ballistic shields. The elite police unit has been supported by the British Embassy in Mogadishu since at least 2017 under a £1.14-million training contract.
The Goodir Unit comprises a “hard arrest unit”, Rapid Reaction Team and a Counter Terrorism Unit. UK training has aimed to make the Goodir Unit able to conduct “day/night detention operations”.
Somalia is designated as a “human rights priority country” by the Foreign Office and its security forces have been accused of atrocities, such as the massacre of eight health workers in May.
It is not known what role the Goodir Unit played in that incident. Witnesses claim the five masked gunmen wore a mixture of military, police and civilian clothes.
Other recipients of sensitive British equipment last year included the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has been accused of human rights abuses in the West Bank. The UK donated £900,000 worth of commercial IT and communications equipment.
In 2018, Human Rights Watch said the “Fatah-controlled PA has methodically arrested activists and supporters of Hamas or Hamas-aligned groups solely because of their political affiliation or expression”.
British trade officials have also been keen to develop ever closer ties with Israel, taking part in “an outreach event in Israel to update industry and Israeli officials involved in export control licensing of changes to the control lists.”
Israel is also designated a “human rights priority” by the Foreign Office, which has noted: “The first 6 months of 2019 saw continued violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the context of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Settlement advancements and increasing rates of demolition were particularly worrying.”
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Phil Miller is a staff reporter for Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world.
In breaking news today, the U.K. became the first country to issue emergency authorization for Pfizer’s new COVID vaccine, with the first doses being delivered “immediately” and injections expected to begin in the U.K. next week.
Pfizer and BioNTech have made history.
The two companies’ BNT162b2 has become the first COVID-19 vaccine allowed in the Western world as drug regulators in the U.K. doled out an emergency use authorization on Wednesday, ahead of decisions by the U.S. and Europe, which are expected soon.
For the broader vaccine world, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s decision means the world now has the first mRNA shot authorized for widespread use, opening up a brand-new chapter for vaccine development. (Source.)
This announcement today comes one day AFTER an emergency STAY OF ACTION was filed with the European Medicines Agency by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg and Dr. Michael Yeadon, the former head of Pfizer research.
In their STAY OF ACTION filed yesterday, one day BEFORE the U.K. issued emergency use authorization, Dr. Yeadon stated that this vaccine can make females infertile.
He writes that the Pfizer COVID vaccine as well as other COVID vaccines currently in Phase III trials are:
expected to induce the formation of humoral antibodies against spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2. Syncytin-1 (see Gallaher, B., “Response to nCoV2019 Against Backdrop of Endogenous Retroviruses” – http://virological.org/t/response-to-ncov2019-against-backdrop-of-endogenous-retroviruses/396), which is derived from human endogenous retroviruses (HERV) and is responsible for the development of a placenta in mammals and humans and is therefore an essential prerequisite for a successful pregnancy, is also found in homologous form in the spike proteins of SARS viruses.
There is no indication whether antibodies against spike proteins of SARS viruses would also act like anti-Syncytin-1 antibodies. However, if this were to be the case this would then also prevent the formation of a placenta which would result in vaccinated women essentially becoming infertile.
To my knowledge, Pfizer/BioNTech has yet to release any samples of written materials provided to patients, so it is unclear what, if any, information regarding (potential) fertility-specific risks caused by antibodies is included.
According to section 10.4.2 of the Pfizer/BioNTech trial protocol, a woman of childbearing potential (WOCBP) is eligible to participate if she is not pregnant or breastfeeding, and is using an acceptable contraceptive method as described in the trial protocol during the intervention period (for a minimum of 28 days after the last dose of study intervention).
This means that it could take a relatively long time before a noticeable number of cases of postvaccination infertility could be observed. (Source.)
As we have previously reported, Pfizer is one of the largest criminal organizations in the world, having repeatedly paid out BILLIONS of dollars in settlements for fraud. See:
These Globalist Eugenicists have one goal they intend to implement: significantly reduce the world’s population and setup a single world government, now referred to as “The Great Reset.”
The U.S. elections were always the side show to set this in place and begin the distribution of the new COVID vaccines.
So while all of you on the Religious Right and in the Alternative Media are clamoring every day that Trump needs to send the military into the cities to “Save the Nation” and overturn the election which was stolen from him, you seem to be forgetting that President Trump is behind the roll out of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, and he is going to do it through the military!
The biggest threat to the United States right now is NOT who is going to be crowned President, but whether or not the nation is going to resist the COVID vaccine which knowledgeable scientists and doctors are saying will be a “Crime Against Humanity.”
Download these articles and videos to your local computers NOW! And store them in a safe place on devices that are NOT connected to the Internet, because chances are that your Operating System, such as Windows, Android, or iOS, will soon find ways of deleting this information from your devices.
But President Trump will NOT save us from this Eugenicist program to vaccinate everyone in the U.S.!
In fact, just the opposite!! He wants the vaccine! And he is very upset with the FDA right now for not already approving it!!
Throughout the pandemic, White House officials have twisted arms at the FDA—and sometimes succeeded. Now, in the final months of the Trump administration, agency chief Stephen Hahn has been summoned to explain the timing of its review of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, Axios reports.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows called Hahn in for a 9:30 a.m. meeting Tuesday to explain why the agency hasn’t moved faster on the review, sources told the publication. Ahead of the meeting, Hahn told the news outlet that “career scientists have to make the decision, and they will take the time that’s needed to make the right call on this important decision.”
Some people in the Trump administration are “complaining the FDA is not working around the clock to get things approved,” one source told Axios, prompting Meadows to call the meeting. (Source.)
The White House has politicized the COVID vaccine like everything else, further dividing the American public at a time we need to be UNITED against the real threat here, which is the Globalist Eugenic plan to vaccinate EVERYONE and reduce the world’s population.
WAKE UP America and every other freedom loving soul around the world!! This is no longer a Conspiracy “Theory,” but a full-blown Plandemic that the Globalists have conspired and planned to do for decades now, and it is happening right in front of your eyes, if you just open them and see the truth!
All Eyes on the U.K. – Again
Since the U.K. is the center of the House of Rothchild, one of the most powerful families in the world and part of the Illuminati, it makes sense that most of the Globalist moves right now are starting in the U.K., where these “trial balloons” are being put out to see just how far they can push their agenda before the masses start revolting.
It was heartening to see the masses take to the streets this past Saturday and engage the police, but there were far too many people just standing around with their cell phones recording their fellow citizens being beat up by the police.
The masses always outnumber the tyrants, and resistance does NOT have to necessarily be violent, although it may come to that. You MUST use your bodies as human shields, and get between the police and the one being attacked.
There is strength in numbers, but you have to be wise. When you barricade an individual, or a doorway to a building, for example, LAY DOWN on the ground when an officer approaches you!
A person standing up can easily be pushed away, but bodies lying on the ground between the perpetrators and the way to be guarded will be MUCH harder to remove. It can take 2-3 officers to pick up and carry away a limp body lying on the ground.
I was personally involved with the Operation Rescue movement back in the early 1990s that shut down late-term abortion clinics, and this tactic was very effective in keeping these killing centers closed for hours if not the entire day, as it took the police literally hours to carry each one of us away to be arrested.
The horror that these young mothers observed in seeing so many people step up to try and save their baby often convinced them to change their minds and choose life instead.
But it won’t be as easy this time, because the U.K. will be deploying the military, just as President Trump is planning to do in the U.S.
The British Army’s Information Warfare Unit is being deployed to deal with “anti-vaccine propaganda” heading into the rollout of the vaccine, The Daily Mail reports. The unit was launched in 2010 and is part of the Army’s 77th Brigade, which “often works with psychological operations”.
In fact, “solders are already monitoring cyberspace for Covid-19 content”, the report reveals. The move comes as a response to a growing number of both anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests. Late last week, for example, more than 155 anti-lockdown protesters organized in Central London, marching through Westminster and chanting “shame on you” and “freedom”.
Others waved signs reading “All I want for Christmas is my freedom back”, “Ditch the face masks” and “Stop controlling us”. The country is implementing similar fines and restrictions for businesses as the U.S. government. And, similarly, businesses are starting to take matters into their own hands and defy lockdown orders. (Source.)
Time is short now, especially for those of you in the U.K., as the vaccine is in route and will be deployed very soon.
Like sheep being led to the slaughter, those who believe the Corporate Media narrative and fear for their lives from COVID, will line up to get this vaccine.
The only thing stopping them from literally taking the “mark of the beast” with this new vaccine, is YOU!
You British made the news last week with merely a handful of arrests, but those arrests need to be in the THOUSANDS with massive resistance, if you have any hope of waking up the masses who are sleepwalking to their own deaths right now.
Those of you in the U.K. need to find out NOW just where they are storing these vaccines and make every effort to get there, as well as the health centers or drug stores where the vaccines will be injected into people, so that you can use your bodies as shields to try and stop this mass genocide that the Globalist Eugenicists are planning.
If you are successful in disrupting their plans, which will spark fear and awareness among those uniformed who are showing up to get the vaccine and make them hesitant, then expect the Globalists’ next move, which will be an Internet black out. So prepare in advance for sustained opposition, and find ways to share information outside of the Internet as well.
What, then, shall we say in response to this?
If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns?
Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us!
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-39)
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Donald Trump has, once again, demonstrated that the waning weeks of his tour in the White House could be the most dangerous during his residency at the executive mansion in the US capital. Free of all constraints and wise council, Trump can now do his utmost to disrupt the international scene and create obstacles to efforts of the incoming administration to reverse some of his most egregious actions on the world scene.
It is no coincidence that Friday’s murder of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was timed to take place during the US interregnum. He was the fifth nuclear expert to be killed over the past decade, presumably by Israeli agents and since 2017 with Trump’s active or tacit blessing. He would assuredly give this to Israel after being advised by his hawkish inner circle not to bomb Iran’s main nuclear plant at Nantaz before leaving office. Therefore, the murder of Fakhrizadeh amounted to Israeli compensation for Trump for being balked in his desire to demonstrate his military might: a last hurrah for a chief executive who has disrupted the international order.
Both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to boost tension with Iran and even ignite a limited military clash ahead of the January 20th inauguration of Democrat President-elect Joe Biden. He has committed to reversing Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 agreement for lifting punitive sanctions on Iran in exchange for dismantling 80 per cent of its nuclear programme. Both Trump and Netanyahu seek to scupper Biden’s plan. During the previous Obama administration, Biden and his candidate for Secretary of State Antony Blinken played key roles in the lengthy negotiations which ended in the deal.
Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in May 2018 and has since imposed increasingly damaging sanctions on Iran with the aim of forcing Tehran to capitulate to a dozen demands it cannot accept. Ahead of the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, Israel conducted a series of strikes on targets in Syria, killing a number of Iran-deployed militiamen fighting on behalf of the Syrian government. Fakhrizadeh was, of course, the second major Iranian figure assassinated this year.
The first, Al Quds Corps commander Qassem Soleimani was murdered by a US drone in Baghdad in January. This was followed up in August by the sabotage of Iran’s Nantaz nuclear plant which destroyed late model centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
Despite of the provocative US/Israeli interventions, Iran has refrained from retaliating while the other five signatories of the nuclear deal — Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany, have held their breath and urged restraint. This region is, after all, the backyard of Europe and Russia and the main land bridge between China and Europe. Therefore, events in Iran have a major international dimension as well as a regional dimension.
Trump may gain a certain amount of satisfaction from the murder of Fakhrizadeh as the US campaign of “maximum pressure” designed to wreck that country’s economy and force Iran to capitulate to the US has failed. Consequently. the five other signatories argue that returning to the deal is the best bet as it limits Iran’s nuclear programme and subjects its nuclear sites to intrusive inspections. They also insist that allowing Iran to re-join the international community and opening Iran to foreign business and investment will ultimately compel Iran to moderate policies the West and its Arab allies oppose. Once there is progress in the effort to re-enter the nuclear deal, Biden seeks to negotiate other agreements with Iran in order to curb its development of ballistic missiles and counter some of its activities in this region. He rejects the stick and stick policy adopted by Trump and Netanyahu and favours the Obama administration’s carrot and carrot approach which kept Iran’s nuclear programme in check, provided Tehran with opportunities to grow its economy and regain respectability on the international scene.
Despite calls for revenge strikes for the killing of Fakhrizadeh from hardline Iranian politicians and members of the public, Tehran has so far kept its cool and pledged to retaliate in its own good time. Iran has acted on this policy by dispatching Quds force commander Esmail Ghaani to Beirut to urge Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hizbollah, and to Baghdad to press pro-Iranian militia commanders not to take any action that would escalate tension and provide Israel with a pretext to launch a major military operation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been preparing for the day could do just this since taking office in 2009. While Israel has not claimed the Fakhrizadeh assassination, Netanyahu openly declared him an enemy of Israel during a 2018 presentation. Since Iran has urged restraint disappointing both Trump and
Netanyahu, either the US or Israel followed up the assassination with drone attack that killed an Iranian military commander as he crossed from Iraq into Syria.
Nothing deters them. The murder of Fakhrizadeh drew sharp condemnation from the UN, European Union (EU), Britain, and Germany; and in the region, Jordan, the Emirates, Lebanon, Qatar, Oman, Syria and Turkey. The EU has called on both the Biden administration and the Iranian government to promptly address US re-entry into the nuclear accord and sanctions relief. Re-engagement would dramatically reduce tensions and end the threat of another devastating war hanging over this region.
Some US experts fear Biden’s efforts to revert to the nuclear deal could be undermined by the killing of Fakhrizadeh and non-stop Israeli/US provocation. Others argue that this could put pressure on both sides to expedite US re-entry. This could involve a simple decree from Biden, just as the US exit was effected by a Trump decree. At this stage, the US would not demand amendments to the deal as this would be likely to necessitate lengthy negotiations. Once the US was back in the deal, Biden would have to begin lifting US sanctions which have prevented Iran from benefitting from the deal. While this could involve a battle with both houses of an-anti-Iran legislature, Biden would be able to rely on a cooperative Treasury Secretary as it is the treasury department which implements sanctions.
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Featured image: President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence participate in an expanded bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, Jan. 27, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
And the first thing the American power structure doesn’t want any Negroes to start is thinking internationally. Malcolm X – Autobiography
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The United States, with the complicity of local oligarchies, used lawfare to overthrow the governments of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009; Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012 and Dima Rousseff in Brazil in 2016. Lawfare was also used for the political persecution of Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and former President Lula in Brazil.
Lawfare has thus become the Empire’s main instrument to impede the advance of progressive forces in Latin America. Before its international application, however, lawfare was widely used by the United States in the oppression and political persecution of its own Black population in the struggle for racial equality and civil rights. Thus, the origin of lawfare is intrinsically linked to racism and the maintenance of the hierarchies imposed by capitalism.
The African-American writer Charles Chesnutt, in the article ‘The Courts and the Negro’, published in 1908, already recognized it:
The function of courts in the organization of modern society is to protect rights; to pass upon disputes between man and man or between the individual and the State; and then, by their mandate, to set in motion the arm of the executive to prevent or punish a wrong or to enforce a right. Obviously if this great power be not rightly exercised, if it be swayed by prejudice or class interest, justice will not be done. Nowhere in the history of our jurisprudence has this power of courts been more strongly exerted than in the matter of Negro rights, and nowhere has it been more swayed by prejudice and class interest.
With the liberation of slaves at the end of the Civil War in the United States, the defeated oligarchy of the southern states – the Confederacy – quickly organized itself to prevent African-Americans from using the vote to challenge the hierarchies of power. On the one hand, they used the various tribunals and the Supreme Court – as Chesnutt denounced in the above citation – in a lawfare that would prevent any advance in the conquest of rights and equality by African-Americans. On the other hand, the oligarchies have also widely used terror to keep African Americans permanently oppressed and away from voting. The parallel with United States’ action in Latin America could not be closer:to the lynchings and the terroriizing of the Ku Klux Klan correspond the various death squads of the regimes supported by the Empire: Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay and the murderous military dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil, among others. In the south of the U.S. or in Latin America, the objective is the same: to prevent social advances and any change in the hierarchy of power that challenges the capitalist system. The close connection between racism and capitalist exploitation was a fact recognized in the U.S. as early as the nineteenth century.
Frederick Douglass, born a slave around 1818, a self-taught author who fled slavery and became perhaps the best-known American public figures of his time, was a profound analyst of the society in which he lived and, without having known Karl Marx, wrote:
The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slaveholder, and the former belongs to ALL the slaveholders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages.
Carrying forth Douglass’ analysis into the twentieth century, the African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction:
Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America. … Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy.
Capitalism would not have developed without slavery, and so the struggle against racism is fundamentally also the struggle against capitalism. It is not surprising, therefore, that lawfare is intrinsically linked to racism.
It was in the 1960s in the U.S. that the struggles of the progressive forces incarnated in the African-American movements for racial equality and civil rights reached their climax. It was only during this period that the main barriers imposed by lawfare to the advancement of civil rights of African-Americans finally fell, not without much struggle and much bloodshed.
Perhaps no other group has been more attacked by the capitalist order’s double strand of hierarchical power – lawfare and violent terror – than the Black Panther Party. And through the history of the Black Panther Party one can understand much better the recent history of Latin America and its relationship to the Empire.
Possibly the most complete history of the Black Panther Party is the book Black Against Empire – The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by authors Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. In this study the authors wrote:
The Panthers saw black communities in the United States as a colony and the police as an occupying army. In a foundational 1967 essay, Newton [Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther] wrote, ‘There is a great similarity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupation of our communities by the racist police’. … In 1970, the Party had opened offices in sixty-eight cities from Salem, Wisconsin, to Omaha and Seattle. The Black Panther Party had become the center of a revolutionary movement in the United States.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously declared, ‘The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security in the country’. … The federal government and the local police forces across the nation responded to the Panthers with an unparalleled campaign of repression and vilification. They fed defamatory stories to the press. They wiretapped Panther offices around the country. They hired dozens of informants to infiltrate Panther chapters. … In attacking the Black Panthers as enemies of the state, federal agents sought to repress not just the Party as an organization but the political possibility it represented.
Much more is known today about the role of the FBI in the campaign against the Black Panthers and the civil rights movement in general. Nelson Blackstock’s book COINTELPRO – The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom [COINTELPRO: for COunter INTELligence PROgram] is an excellent source of information on this subject. In this work the author states:
‘One of the things that come through clearest in the Cointelpro papers is that the FBI reserved a special hatred for the Black civil rights movement.’
Noam Chomsky, who wrote the introduction to the book, explains that the role of the FBI was ‘to block legal political activity that departs from orthodoxy, to disrupt opposition to state policy, to undermine the civil rights movement.’
Still in Chomsky’s words:
Predictably, the most serious of the FBI disruption programs were also those directed against the Black Nationalists. … Perhaps the most shocking story concerns the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police directed by the state’s attorney’s office in December 1969, in a predawn raid on a Chicago apartment. Hampton, one of the most promising leaders of the Black Panther party – particularly dangerous because of his opposition to violent acts or rhetoric and his success in community organizing – was killed in bed … there is now substantial evidence of direct FBI involvement in this gestapo-style political assassination.
It is no coincidence that the people most responsible for the putsch against elected President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil – Judge Sergio Moro and State Prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol – have allied themselves with the FBI in their efforts to criminalize former President Lula and the Worker’s Party (PT in Portuguese). The smear and criminalization campaigns against the Black Panther Party and the Worker’s Party in Brazil have much in common.
One of the Black Panther’s main programs was the distribution of food to poor African-American communities, especially children. The party also distributed clothing and organized medical care. Some of the centers where the Party distributed breakfast to children suffered bomb attacks, so violent was the reaction of the white and capitalist power hierarchy to the challenge posed by the Panthers. Some party leaders were murdered, others put in prison. As mentioned, the repression of the Black Panther through the combination of lawfare and violent terror was unprecedented but not without parallels: the Empire’s repression of social movements and leftist political parties in Latin America is similar in both action and motivation. The fundamental phrase in the above quote from Bloom and Martin’ book lays bare in all clarity the main objective of the Empire and its accomplices in Latin America:
‘In attacking the Black Panthers [or Lula, or the Worker’s Party, or Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Christina Kirchner, Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro] as enemies of the state, federal agents sought to repress not just the Party as an organization but the political possibility it represented.’
In 1981, Ronald Reagan took over the capitalist power hierarchy’s war against progressive social forces. In another important study on structural racism in the U.S. and its relation to security and repression policies – Incarcerating the Crisis – author Jordan T. Camp wrote:
The triumph of Reaganism marked the consolidation of a racial and security regime, a neoliberal regime that took shape during the Cold War counterinsurgency against the long civil rights movement. Reagan sent a message to whites that their economic problems were caused by people of color winning access to the social wage during the civil rights movement. … These neoliberal narratives defined the behaviour of the unemployed and social wager programs as the primary sources of economic insecurities. … [Reagan’s strategy was to] redirect resources away from investments in the public sector and toward an expanded budget for the neoliberal carceral-security state. … With Reagan’s election, Cold Warriors and neoliberals were able to capture state power and legitimate their class rule through appeals to security. In his first two years in the White House, Reagan doubled the FBI budget and increased the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget by 30 percent. The discourse of security was deployed as the major justification for the restructuring of the state form, much like the U.S. state’s legitimation of increased expenditures for aggressive counterinsurgency measures in Central America and apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. … By the early 1980s the U.S. imprisoned 420,000 people in federal and state prisons. Over the next decade the number of prisoners would increase more than 64 percent across the country. (…) The carceral population grew from two hundred thousand people in the late 1960s to more than 2.4 million people in the 2000s. Currently, one in thirty-five, or 6.9 million adults in the United States, are in jail or prison, or on parole or probation. Increased spending on incarceration has occurred alongside the reduction of expenditures for public education, transportation, health care, and public-sector employment. Prison expansion has coincided with a shift in the racial composition of prisoners from majority white to almost 70 percent people of color. The unemployed, underemployed, and never-employed Black and Latino poor have been incarcerated at disproportionate rates. With the highest rate of incarceration on the planet, the United States currently incarcerates Black people at rates higher than South Africa did before the end of Apartheid. All of these numbers bespeak a collision of race, class, and carceral state power without historical precedent, but certainly not without historical explanation.
This reformulation of the state by the Reagan regime still inspires the main political objectives of the Latin American oligarchies, with strong resistance from social movements and left-wing parties. The elections of Hugo Chavez, Lula, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Christina Kirchner were responses to the Empire’s attempt to promote ‘incarceration’ in Latin America.
Neoliberalism, which was born as a political reaction to capitalism’s ‘concessions’ to the ‘welfare state’, also became a reaction against the civilizing conquests of the 1960s. Hence the return of the most virulent forms of racism, of the attacks on the rights obtained by women and homosexuals. The maintenance of the capitalist hierarchy in its neoliberal stage depends fundamentally on the most reactionary part of the population. And neoliberalism, on the other hand, tries to reproduce and maintain these social forces.
The quotation from Malcolm X at the beginning of this text defines the fundamental political program of our time: the internationalization of the struggle against racism is an integral part of the construction of the international struggle against capitalism and its hierarchies of power.
[Continuação da conversa com o ativista político, doutorando e engenheiro de petróleo da Petrobrás, Paulo Henrique Tavares, atualmente morador da Bielorrússia]
YMF: A economia da Bielorrússia se manteve em grande medida planificada depois da queda soviética. Você poderia nos detalhar algo sobre esta planificação? Em que áreas ela é mais impactante (educação, saúde, energia, água)?
PHT: O fato de a tentativa de golpe aqui ter sido mal sucedida se deu exatamente porque a maior parte da economia, especialmente dos setores estratégicos, está nas mãos do estado. Para se ter uma ideia, todos os bancos são necessariamente estatais. As principais pautas de exportação aqui são tratores, metalurgia, indústria química, refinarias, energia, indústria nuclear – e tudo está sob controle estatal. E esse é o principal conflito com os liberais, ou melhor, neoliberais.
Um aluguel de um apartamento mediano – custo que no Brasil atola até mesmo a classe média – sai por uns 800 reais em Gomel, enquanto em Minsque sai uns 1200 reais. Mas, a maior economia da população está mesmo nos subsídios do estado a todas as demais despesas essenciais: luz, água fria e quente, aquecimento (vital nestas terras geladas) e condomínio não passam de 120 reais (enquanto no Brasil, com este dinheiro você paga apenas água e um botijão de gás).
A educação fundamental e média é totalmente gratuita e de qualidade. As universidades são gratuitas dependendo das notas dos exames; mas mesmo quando pagas, são bastante baratas. A saúde também é gratuita e muito mais abrangente que o nosso Sistema Único de Saúde, ainda que tenha seus problemas – como por exemplo você ter que pagar pela injeção tomada!
Andar pelas cidades bielorrussas, especialmente Minsque, para brasileiros, como nós, é como passear no paraíso: tudo limpo, bem cuidado. Aqui o estado cuida até das fachadas dos prédios. O transporte público funciona extremamente bem, pontual, rápido e barato; uma passagem de metrô em Minsque custa R$ 1,50 e o ônibus R$ 1,20. Já o ônibus ou trem de longa distância custa uns 30 reais, para percorrer 300 km.
O salário-médio aqui deve estar por volta de uns 2400 reais (1200 rublos bielorrussos, ou 400 euros). Já o salário-mínimo é cerca de 850 reais.
Quanto à alimentação básica – fator do qual alguém de esquerda, progressista e que clame pela “democracia” não deve se esquecer de considerar –, por aqui a cesta básica é bem barata: ela não passa por arroz e feijão, mas como é costume na Europa, se come a batata (ingrediente de diversos pratos), além de legumes, laticínios, sopas. Naturalmente, que num país temperado, os preços dos alimentos oscilam. Em outubro começa o frio, que vai firme até abril: o preço do quilo da batata vai de 1 a 2 reais. Mas a alimentação do dia a dia [1], de modo geral é mais barata até mesmo de que no Brasil, quanto mais se comparada à caríssima Europa Ocidental.
O tomate e o pepino, por exemplo, saem uns 2 reais o quilo: com eles, se faz uma conserva em vasilhas de vidro com água salgada, que se come durante o inverno. Um quilo de carne de porco custa o mesmo que no Brasil, uns 20 reais; o mesmo se dá com o frango, 10 reais. As frutas daqui, como a maçã e a pera, saem uns 5 reais o quilo, como no Brasil. Mas o pão é muito mais barato: cerca de 2 reais. Há também a smetana, comida típica daqui, que é uma espécie de laticínio denso e gorduroso, que o povo mistura na sopa; e se come bastante iogurte com a comida salgada, também bastante barato.
YMF: Quem são os manifestantes? De que classes sociais são a maioria deles? E em linhas gerais, o que estão reivindicando?
PHT: O que percebi do perfil dos manifestantes é que são pessoas em geral de classe média e jovens. Por isso, é que esses protestos quase que se limitam somente a Minsque. Mas na Bielorrússia, diferentemente do Brasil, não se consegue distinguir a classe social das pessoas pelo rosto ou pele, ou como no caso dos países ricos ocidentais, pelo contraste étnico com os estrangeiros serviçais. Aliás, em parte, aqui, a baixa desigualdade é expressa exatamente pelo fato de você não conseguir distinguir isso. Veja esta história: um parente de minha companheira foi preso por usar drogas sintéticas; um garoto de 20 anos, e que deve pegar muitos anos por essa bobagem. Fui visitá-lo na cadeia, e notei que simplesmente todos os presos se parecem àqueles atores dos filmes comerciais de Hollywood ou das novelas da Globo: todos loirinhos de olhos azuis – e em cana. Aliás, muitos deles presos pela mesma bobagem.
Quanto às demandas da oposição, se parecem com os discursos lava-jatistas: oficialmente, só batem na tecla do “fim da corrupção” e de “eleições sem fraude”. Veja a página da Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya [2]: só há aquelas propostas abstratas, demagógicas, sem projeto nem planejamento, com frases de efeito como “melhorar a educação”, “lutar pelas crianças”, “pela justiça”, transformar a Bielorrússia em “uma nação amiga de todos”, “acabar com a corrupção” e outras superficialidades. Claro que nas questões que interessa, ela não entra, se esquiva, se esconde. Enfim, o projeto dela, até agora, é ser esposa de um blogueiro reacionário financiado pelo Ocidente.
Já seus seguidores quem são… Na prática, a classe média insatisfeita, sobretudo em tempos de crise mundial do capitalismo, iludida com o suposto “padrão europeu”. Conversei com alguns, e o argumento deles é que “o salario médio na Europa” (qual “Europa”, para começo de conversa?) é de 1200 euros, enquanto aqui é entre 300 e 400 euros. Mas eu sempre pergunto a estas pessoas: quanto custa uma passagem de metrô, uma conta de luz, os impostos, aluguel, etc, em euros? Em resumo: eles querem ter salários em euros, mas que as contas milagrosamente continuem em rublos (1 rublo local vale 2 reais).
Ocorre que muitos destes jovens, aliciados por gente irresponsável e gananciosa, não sabem que há duas décadas o governo Lukashenko salvou a Bielorrússia de ser um país em guerra, rachado, dominado por mafiosos, cheio de prostitutas, sofrendo de fome, perdendo população com a imigração em massa.
YMF: E os trabalhadores, os partidos socialistas, trabalhistas, como têm se posicionado?
PHT: Não existem muitos apoiadores entusiastas de Lukashenko, pois a situação econômica não está fácil (como no mundo inteiro). As pessoas veem o Lukashenko como um mal menor. Só que ele comete um erro mortal, que é tentar agradar a gregos e troianos (UE e Rússia). Ele sempre tentou tirar o máximo de proveito tanto do Ocidente, quanto da relação com os russos.
Além disso, ele tem um aspecto nacionalista, e costuma boicotar os movimentos e partidos que desejam uma maior integração com a Rússia. No conflito russo-ucraniano pela Crimeia, Lukashenko não reconheceu a península como russa, e sempre criticou os separatistas ucranianos que não aceitaram o golpe, de orientação neoliberal e mesmo fascista; e ainda reconheceu o governo golpista de Poroshenko, em troca de alguns trocados nas transações comerciais com a Ucrânia (o que aumentou bastante após golpe, dado o afastamento deste país com a Rússia).
A única salvação que vejo para a Bielorrússia é aumentar a integração com a Rússia. Porém, Lukashenko não respeita uma série de acordos com Moscou, e volta e meia a Rússia interrompe as fronteiras. Ele a meu ver exagera um pouco neste seu ideário de independência; exige uma série de contrapartidas da Rússia, que Putin não está mais a fim de conceder; especialmente porque percebeu que tais facilidades dadas aos aliados bielorrussos estavam se convertendo em benefícios à traidora Ucrânia, hoje nas mãos da OTAN.
Mas depois deste “susto”, quem sabe o Lukashenko entenda que não existem caminhos intermediários neste contexto político: ou busca uma maior integração com a Rússia, ou tende à ucranização neoliberal (senão fascista, que afinal, não é muito diferente hoje em dia). Isto porque a dependência energética da Rússia é total: apenas a Bielorrússia paga a Moscou um preço subsidiado pelo gás e petróleo (como se fosse parte do próprio território russo), algo bem abaixo do preço de mercado. Aí, o que fazia era pedir muito mais gás e petróleo do que efetivamente o país consumia, para depois revender para os vizinhos (como a Ucrânia), a preço de mercado. A Rússia fazia vistas grossas, mas agora se levantou contra isso; e não porque a Bielorrússia se beneficie, mas porque estava beneficiando a Ucrânia.
Quanto aos trabalhadores, eles não saem as ruas em defesa do Lukashenko porque na política, o jogo é bruto, e a crise mundial segue fazendo suas vítimas. Como eu dizia, tudo que Lukashenko fez nestas duas décadas pelo país, perdeu muito de seu valor, principalmente para as novas gerações. As pessoas sempre querem mais, especialmente quando elas não são suficientemente politizadas, não discutem política, não praticam política, não estudam história.
Agora, essa politica de tentar agradar ao Ocidente e à Rússia entrou em colapso, porque o Ocidente quer alguém que afaste definitivamente Minsque de Moscou. E a qualquer custo.
O povão não se anima às ruas, mas faz o cálculo: “eu não quero mais o Lukashenko, mas menos ainda essa direita que quer colocar o país em guerra, como na Ucrânia”.
Mas acredito que domingo passado, dia 25 de outubro, foi o último suspiro dos liberais pró-Ocidente. Com as ameaças ingênuas de Svetlana de parar o país caso ele não “entregasse o poder”, parece-me que Lukashenko ficou politicamente maior do que já era; saiu fortalecido. Só acho curioso que ele não tenha convocado protestos a seu favor: se ele fizesse isso, muita gente iria agora para as ruas. Nos meios populares, há muitas críticas aos protestos, que podem dividir o país e mergulhá-lo numa guerra de todos contra todos. Por isso, a situação da oposição, na prática, ficou muito pior: sua rejeição aumentou, e diminuiu a de Lukashenko.
Red Zones, the facemask, social distancing, the closing down of schools, colleges and universities, no more family gatherings, no birthday celebrations, music, the arts: no more cultural events, sport events are suspended, no more weddings, “love and life” is banned outright.
And in several countries, Christmas is on hold …
It’s the destruction of people’s lives. It is the destabilization of civil society. And for What?
The Lies are sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and repetitive “Covid alerts” for the last ten months. … It is a process of social engineering.
Manipulation of the Estimates. The RT-PCR Tests are Misleading.
What they want is to hike up the numbers so as to justify the Lockdown.
This misuse of RT-PCR technique is used as a relentless and intentional strategy by some governments, supported by scientific safety councils and by the dominant media, to justify excessive measures such as the violation of a large number of constitutional rights, the destruction of the economy with the bankruptcy of entire active sectors of society, the degradation of living conditions for a large number of ordinary citizens, under the pretext of a pandemic based on a number of positive RT-PCR tests, and not on a real number of patients.
Covid-19 is portrayed as the “killer Virus”.
Falsifying Death Certificates
In the US, the deaths certificates are falsified on the instructions of the CDC.
COVID-19: The “underlying cause of death”. This concept is fundamental. It is defined by the WHO as “the disease or injury that initiated the train of events leading directly to death”.
In France “Churches are threatened with Kalashnikovs over Covid-19 outbreak” (April 2020)
The entire urban services economy is in crisis. Shops, bars and restaurants are driven into bankruptcy. International travel and holidays are suspended. Streets are empty. In several countries, bars and restaurants are required to take names and contact information “to support effective contact tracing if necessary“.
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Free Speech is Suppressed
The lockdown narrative is supported by media disinformation, online censorship, social engineering and the fear campaign.
Peer reviewed psychological “studies” are currently being carried in several countries using sample surveys.
Accept the “big Lie” and you are tagged as a “good person” with “empathy” who understands the feelings of others.
…[E]xpress reservations regarding … social distancing and the wearing of the face mask, and you will be tagged (according to “scientific opinion”) as a “callous and deceitful psychopath”.
In colleges and universities, the teaching staff is pressured to conform and endorse the official covid narrative. Questioning the legitimacy of the lockdown in online “classrooms” could lead to dismissal.
Google is marketing the Big Lie. The opinions of prominent scientists who question the lockdown, the face-mask or social distancing are “taken down”:
“YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) orlocal health authorities‘ medical information about COVID-19, including on methods to prevent, treat or diagnose COVID-19, and means of transmission of COVID-19.” (emphasis added)
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They call it “fact checking”, without acknowledging that both the WHO and local health authorities contradict their own data and concepts.
March 11, 2020: Engineered Economic Depression. Global Coup d’Etat?
The Pandemic was launched by the WHO on March 11, 2020 leading to the Lockdown and closure of the national economies of 190 (out of 193) countries, member states of the United Nations. The instructions came from above, from Wall Street, the World Economic Forum, the billionaire foundations. This diabolical project is casually described by the corporate media as a “humanitarian” endeavor. The “international community” has a “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). An unelected “private-public partnership” under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has come to the rescue of Planet Earth’s 7.8 billion people. The closure of the global economy is presented as a means to “killing the virus”.
Sounds absurd. Close down the real economy of Planet Earth is not the “solution” but rather the “cause” of a process of Worldwide destabilization and impoverishment.
The national economy combined with political, social and cultural institutions is the basis for the “reproduction of real life”: income, employment, production, trade, infrastructure, social services. Destabilizing the economy of Planet Earth cannot constitute a “solution” to combating the virus. But that is the imposed “solution” which they want us to believe in. And that is what they are doing.
“Economic Warfare”
Destabilizing in one fell swoop the national economies of more 190 countries is an act of “economic warfare”. This diabolical agenda undermines the sovereignty of nation states. It impoverishes people Worldwide. It leads to a spiralling dollar denominated global debt.
The powerful structures of global capitalism, Big Money coupled with its intelligence and military apparatus are the driving force. Using advanced digital and communications technologies, the Lockdown and Economic Closure of the global economy is unprecedented in World history.
This simultaneous intervention in 190 countries derogates democracy. It undermines the sovereignty of nation states Worldwide, without the need for military intervention. It is an advanced system of economic warfare which overshadows other forms of warfare including conventional (Iraq-style) theater wars.
Global Governance Scenarios. World Government in the Post-Covid Era?
The March 11 2020 Lockdown project uses lies and deception to ultimately impose a Worldwide totalitarian regime, entitled “Global Governance” (by unelected officials). In the words of David Rockefeller:
“…The world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” (quoted by Aspen Times, August 15, 2011, emphasis added)
The Global Governance scenario imposes an agenda of social engineering and economic compliance.
“It constitutes an extension of the neoliberal policy framework imposed on both developing and developed countries. It consists in scrapping “national auto-determination” and constructing a Worldwide nexus of pro-US proxy regimes controlled by a “supranational sovereignty” (World Government) composed of leading financial institutions, billionaires and their philanthropic foundations.”(See Michel Chossudovsky, Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis, May 1, 2020).
Simulating Pandemics
The Rockefeller Foundation proposes the use of scenario planning as a means to carry out “global governance”. (For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, May 1, 2020). In the Rockefeller’s 2010 Report entitled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development Area” scenarios of Global Governance and the actions to be taken in the case of a Worldwide pandemic are contemplated. More specifically, the report envisaged (p 18) the simulation of a Lock Step scenario including a global virulent influenza strain. The 2010 Rockefeller report was published in the immediate wake of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic.
Another important simulation was carried out on October 18, 2019, less than 3 months before SARS-2 was identified in early January 2020.
Event 201 was held under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. (For details see Michel Chossudovsky, March 1, 2020)
Intelligence and “The Art of Deception”
The Covid crisis is a sophisticated instrument of the power elites. It has all the features of a carefully planned intelligence op. using “deception and counter-deception”. Leo Strauss: “viewed intelligence as a means for policymakers to attain and justify policy goals, not to describe the realities of the world.” And that is precisely what they are doing in relation to Covid-19.
Video: The Event 201 Pandemic Exercise. October 18, 2019. Focusses on the extent of the pandemic. Also addresses within the simulation how do deal with online social media and so-called “misinformation”. (Listen carefully)
Macro-Economic Intervention. Evolution of the Global Economy
History of Economic “Shock Treatment”. From The Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) to “Global Adjustment (GA)”
The March 11, 2020 (simultaneous) closing down of the national economies of 190 member states of the UN is diabolical and unprecedented. Millions of people have lost their jobs, and their lifelong savings. In developing countries, poverty, famine and despair prevail.
While this model of “global intervention” is unprecedented, it has certain features reminiscent of the country-level macro-economic reforms including the imposition of strong “economic medicine” by the IMF. To address this issue let us examine the history of so-called “economic shock treatment”.
Flash back to Chile, September 11 1973.
As a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Chile, I lived through the military coup directed against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. It was a CIA op led by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger coupled with devastating macro-economic reforms.
Image on the left: Kissinger together with General Augusto Pinochet (1970s)
In the month following the Coup d’Etat, the price of bread increased from 11 to 40 escudos overnight. This engineered collapse of both real wages and employment under the Pinochet dictatorship was conducive to a nationwide process of impoverishment. While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty: in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six times and eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.” That was Chile’s 1973 “Reset”
Two and a half years later in 1976, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with another military coup d’état in March 1976. Behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” macro-economic reforms had also been prescribed – this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors, including David Rockefeller who was a friend of The Junta’s Minister of Economy José AlfredoMartinez de Hoz.
Image on the right: General President Jorge Videla, David Rockefeller and Argentina’s Economy Minister Martinez de Hoz, Buenos Aires (1970s)
Chile and Argentina were “dress rehearsals” for things to come: The imposition of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was imposed on more than 100 countries starting in the early 1980s. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, 2003)
A notorious example of the “free market”: Peru in August 1990 was punished for not conforming to IMF diktats: the price of fuel was hiked up 31 times and the price of bread increased more than twelve times in a single day. These reforms – carried out in the name of “democracy” – were far more devastating than those applied in Chile and Argentina under the fist of military rule.
And now on March 11, 2020, we enter a new phase of macro-economic destabilization, which is more devastating and destructive than 40 years of “shock treatment” and austerity measures imposed by the IMF on behalf of dominant financial interests.
There is rupture, a historical break as well as continuity. It’s “Neoliberalism to the n-th Degree”
Image on the left: Kissinger with Argentina’s Dictator General Jorge Videla (1970s)
Closure of the Global Economy: Economic and Social Impacts at the Level of the Entire Planet
Compare what is happening to the Global Economy today with the country by country “negotiated” macro-economic measures imposed by creditors under the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The March 11, 2020 “Global Adjustment” was not negotiated with national governments. It was imposed by a “private/ public partnership”, supported by media propaganda, and accepted, invariably by co-opted and corrupt politicians.
“Engineered” Social Inequality and Impoverishment. The Globalization of Poverty
Compare the March 11, 2020 “Global Adjustment” “guidelines” affecting the entire Planet to Chile September 11, 1973.
In a bitter irony, the same Big Money interests behind the 2020 “Global Adjustment” were actively involved in Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976). Remember “Operation Condor” and the “Dirty War” (Guerra Sucia).
There is continuity: The same powerful financial interests: The IMF and the World Bank bureaucracies are currently involved in preparing and managing the” post-pandemic “New Normal” debt operations (on behalf of the creditors) under the Great Reset.
Henry Kissinger was involved in coordinating Chile’s 9/11, 1973 “Reset”.
The Thrust of “Depopulation” under the Great Reset?
Today, Henry Kissinger is a firm supporter alongside the Gates Foundation (which is also firmly committed to depopulation) of the Great Reset under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
No need to negotiate with national governments or carry out “regime change”. The March 11, 2020 project constitutes a “Global Adjustment” which triggers bankruptcies, unemployment and privatization on a much larger scale affecting in one fell swoop the national economies of more than 150 countries.
And this whole process is presented to public opinion as a means to combating the “killer virus” which, according to the CDC and the WHO is similar to seasonal influenza. (Viruses A, B).
The Hegemonic Power Structure of Global Capitalism
Big Money including the billionaire foundations are the driving force. It’s a complex alliance of Wall Street and the Banking establishment, Big Oil and Energy, the so-called “Defense Contractors”, Big Pharma, the Biotech Conglomerates, the Corporate Media, the Telecom, Communications and Digital Technology Giants, together with a network of think tanks, lobby groups, research labs, etc. The ownership of intellectual property also plays a central role.
This complex decision-making network involves major creditor and banking institutions: The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF, the World Bank, the regional development banks, and the Basel based Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which plays a key strategic role.
In turn, the upper echelons of the US State apparatus (and Washington’s Western Allies) are directly or indirectly involved, including the Pentagon, US Intelligence (and its research labs), the Health authorities, Homeland Security and the US State Department (including US embassies in over 150 countries).
Ongoing Wealth Appropriation by The Super Rich
“V the Virus” is said to be responsible for the wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. That’s a lie. There is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables. It’s the powerful financiers and billionaires, who are behind this (decision-making) project which has contributed to the destabilization (Worldwide) of the real economy.
In the course of the last nine months, they have cashed in on billions of dollars. Between April and July the total wealth held by billionaires around the world has grown from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion,
The Forbes report does not explain the real cause of this massive redistribution of wealth:
“collective billionaire wealth has grown at its fastest rate over any period over the past decade.”
In fact it is the largest redistribution of global wealth in World history. It is predicated on a systematic process of Worldwide impoverishment. It is an act of economic warfare.
The billionaires were not only the recipients of generous “government stimulus packages” (i.e. Handouts), the bulk of their financial gains from the outset of the Covid fear campaign in early February was the result of insider trading, foreknowledge, derivative trade and manipulation of both financial and commodity markets. Warren Buffett rightfully identifies these speculative instruments as “Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction”.
The combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by $850 billion from March 18th, 2020 to October 8, 2020, an increase of over 28 percent. This estimate does not account for the increase in wealth during the period preceding March 18, which was marked by a series of stock market crashes. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Economic Chaos and Societal Destruction, November 7, 2020)
On March 18, 2020, U.S. billionaires had combined wealth of $2.947 trillion. By October 8th, their wealth had surged to $3.8 trillion.
This upper billionaire class manipulates financial markets starting in February and then orders the closing down of the global economy on March 11, the stated objective of which was to combat Covid-19, i.e. similar to seasonal influenza.
The “Real Economy” and “Big Money”
Why are these Covid lockdown policies spearheading bankruptcy, poverty and unemployment?
Global capitalism is not monolithic. There is indeed “A Class Conflict” “between the super-rich and the vast majority of the World population.
But there is also intense rivalry within the capitalist system. Namely a conflict between “Big Money Capital” and what might be described as “Real Capitalism” which consists of corporations in different areas of productive activity at the national and regional levels. It also includes small and medium sized enterprises.
What is ongoing is a process of concentration of wealth (and control of advanced technologies) unprecedented in World history, whereby the financial establishment, (i.e. the multibillion dollar creditors) are slated to appropriate the real assets of both bankrupt companies as well as State assets.
The “Real Economy” constitutes “the economic landscape” of real economic activity: productive assets, agriculture, industry, services, economic and social infrastructure, investment, employment, etc. The real economy at the global and national levels is being targeted by the lockdown and closure of economic activity. The Global Money financial institutions are the “creditors” of the real economy.
“The Second Wave”. Another Lockdown
Second Wave is a Lie. It is presented to public opinion as a means to combating the virus and saving lives.
That is what the governments are telling us. The fear campaign has gone into high gear, applied simultaneously in different regions of the world.
Test, Test, Test, In the UK, the Armed Forces are involved in mass testing operations using the PCR, the objective of which is to push up the numbers of so-called positive cases.
If you live alone in the UK, you can set up a “Support Bubble (see left)
Needless to say: at the outset of this Second Wave, the global economy is already in a state of chaos. While the reports fail to reveal the depth and seriousness of this global crisis, the evidence (which is still tentative and incomplete) speaks for itself.
The rationale of the Second Wave is to prevent and postpone the reopening of the national economy, coupled with the enforcement of social distancing, the wearing of the face mask, etc.
The target are the service economy, the airlines, the tourist industry, etc. Maintaining strict restrictions on air travel is tantamount to spearheading major airlines into bankruptcy. The bankruptcy program is engineered and imposed. Solely in the US tourism and travel industry, 9.2 million jobs could be lost and “between 10.8 million and 13.8 million jobs … are at serious risk”.
And the Second Wave is intent upon enabling the billionaires to pick up the pieces, acquiring ownership of entire sectors of economic activity at rockbottom prices.
The money they appropriated in the course of the financial crisis (through outright manipulation) will be used to buy out bankrupt corporations as well as bankrupt governments.
Image: Hong Kong Airport. Empty.
Global Governance: Towards a Totalitarian State
The individuals and organizations involved in the October 18, 2019 201 Simulation are now involved in the actual management of the crisis once it went live on January 30th, 2020 under the WHO’s Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), which in turn set the stage for the February financial crisis.
The lockdown and closure of national economies triggers a second spree of mass unemployment coupled with the engineered bankruptcy (applied Worldwide)of small and medium sized enterprises.
All of which is spearheaded by the installation of a global totalitarian State which is intent upon breaking all forms of protest and resistance.
The Vaccine
The Covid vaccination program (including the embedded digital passport) is an integral part of a global totalitarian regime.
What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity. The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity.(Peter Koenig, March 12, 2020)
“The Great Reset”
The same powerful creditors which triggered the Covid Global Debt Crisis are now establishing a “New Normal” which essentially consists in imposing what the World Economic Forum describes as the “Great Reset”:
Using COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions to push through this transformation, the Great Reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which older enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or absorbed into monopolies, effectively shutting down huge sections of the pre-COVID economy. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs will be carried out by AI-driven machines.
The jobless (and there will be many) would be placed on some kind of universal basic income and have their debts (indebtedness and bankruptcy on a massive scale is the deliberate result of lockdowns and restrictions) written off in return for handing their assets to the state or more precisely to the financial institutions helping to drive this Great Reset. The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘saving the planet’. Of course, the tiny elite who rolled out this great reset will own everything. (Colin Todhunter,Dystopian Great Reset, November 9, 2020)
By 2030, the global creditors will have appropriated the World’s wealth under the “Global Adjustment” scenario, while impoverishing large sectors of the World Population.
In 2030 “You’ll own nothing, And you’ll be happy.” (see video below)
The United Nations: An Instrument of Global Governance on Behalf of an Unelected Private/Public Partnership
The UN system is also complicit. It has endorsed “global governance” and The Great Reset.
While UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres rightfully acknowledges that the pandemic is “more than a health crisis”, no meaningful analysis or debate under UN auspices as to the real causes of this crisis has been undertaken.
According to a September 2020 UN Report:
“Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost.The lives of billions of people have been disrupted. In addition to the health impacts, COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated deep inequalities … It has affected us as individuals, as families, communities and societies. It has had an impact on every generation, including on those not yet born. The crisis has highlighted fragilities within and among nations, as well as in our systems for mounting a coordinated global response to shared threats. (UN Report)
The decisions which triggered social and economic destruction Worldwide are not mentioned. No debate in the UN Security Council. Consensus among all Five Permanent Members of the UNSC.
V the Virus is held responsible.
The WEF “Reimagine and Reset our World” in a private-public partnership has been endorsed by the UN.
Flash back to George Kennan and the Truman Doctrine in the late 1940s. Kennan believed that the UN provided a useful way to “connect power with morality,” using morality, as a means to rubber-stamp America’s “humanitarian wars”.
The Covid crisis is the culmination of a historical process.
The lockdown and closure of the global economy are “weapons of mass destruction”. What we are dealing with are extensive “crimes against humanity”.
Joe Biden and the “Great Reset”
“Elected President” Joe Biden is a groomed politician, a trusted proxy, serving the interests of the financial establishment.
Let’s not forget that Joe Biden was a firm supporter of the Invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein “had weapons of mass destruction”. “The American People were deceived into this war”, said Senator Dick Durbin. Do not let yourself be deceived again by Joe Biden.
Evolving acronyms. 9/11, GWOT, WMD and now COVID: Biden was rewarded for having supported the invasion of Iraq.
Fox News describes him as a “socialist” who threatens capitalism: “Joe Biden’s disturbing connection to the socialist ‘Great Reset’ movement”. While this is absolute nonsense, many “progressives” and anti-war activists have endorsed Joe Biden without analyzing the broader consequences of a Biden presidency.
The Great Reset is socially divisive, it’s racist. It is a diabolical project of Global Capitalism. It constitutes a threat to the large majority of Americans workers as well as to small and medium sized enterprises. A Biden-Harris administration actively involved in carrying out the “Great Reset” is a threat to humanity.
With regard to Covid, Biden is firmly committed to the “Second Wave”, i.e. maintaining the partial closing down of both the US economy and the global economy as a means to “combating the killer virus”.
Joe Biden will push for the adoption of the WEF’s “Great Reset” both nationally and internationally, with devastating economic and social consequences. The 2021 World Economic Forum (WEF) scheduled for Summer 2021 will focus on the implementation of the “Great Reset”.
A Joe Biden administration would actively pursue Big Money’s totalitarian blueprint: The Great Reset.
Unless there is significant protest and organized resistance, nationally and internationally, the Great Reset will be embedded in both domestic and US foreign policy agendas of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration.
It’s what you call Imperialism with a “Human Face”.
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In this expanded and updated edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.
This book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.
In this new enlarged edition – which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction — the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.
Barely a few weeks after the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This economic shock treatment had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys”.
At the time of the military coup, I was teaching at the Institute of Economics of the Catholic University of Chile, which was a nest of Chicago trained economists, disciples of Milton Friedman. On that September 11, in the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew. When the university reopened several days later, the “Chicago Boys” were rejoicing. Barely a week later, several of my colleagues at the Institute of Economics were appointed to key positions in the military government.
While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country was precipitated into abysmal poverty: in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six times and eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.
These events affected me profoundly in my work as an economist. Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. I started to understand that macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” – as claimed by the academic mainstream – nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation. In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” as a wellorganized instrument of “economic repression”.
France has seen a spate of attacks carried out by radicalized Muslims. The attacks and killings must be denounced.
But more so must one denounce the terrorism and killings carried out by the French state against Muslims in its wars abroad. In a move that gives a strong inkling of French values, the French state has targeted 76 mosques for “unprecedented action” and potential closure.
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France is a party to the western chorus that condemns the alleged internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China. China has rebutted the western disinformation; for example, China provided real-site photos in Xinjiang to debunk satellite images as purported evidence of so-called internment camps.
Eljan Anayt, spokesperson of the Xinjiang regional government, said,
I want to emphasize that Xinjiang is an open region, and there is no need to learn about it through satellite images. We welcome all foreign friends with objective, unbiased stance to come to Xinjiang and to know a real Xinjiang.
The Qiao Collective, an all-volunteer group comprised of ethnic Chinese people living abroad, complied a must-read report on Xinjiang that warned of “politically motivated” western disinformation:
The effectiveness of Western propaganda lies in its ability to render unthinkable any critique or alternative—to monopolize the production of knowledge and truth itself. In this context, it is important to note that the U.S. and its allies are in the minority when it comes to its critiques of Chinese policy in Xinjiang. At two separate convenings of the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 and 2020, letters condemning Chinese conduct in Xinjiang were outvoted, 22-50 and 27-46. Many of those standing in support of Chinese policy in Xinjiang are Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil, including Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, and Nigeria. On the issue of Xinjiang, the clear break in consensus between the Global South and the U.S. bloc suggests that Western critiques of Xinjiang are primarily politically motivated.
France states that its crackdown on radicalized mosques is spurred by terrorist actions. The Qiao Collective notes that France had earlier begun its own “de-radicalization programs.”
2015 October – France begins operating “de-radicalization programs.” It would seem these programs have since garnered mostly criticism from the public, but mainstream Western discourse has not accused France of cultural genocide.
Earlier in 2020, French media alleged the destruction of mosques in Xinjiang by Chinese authorities. The New York Times ran a similar story claiming that “China Is Erasing Mosques and Precious Shrines in Xinjiang …” This is coming from the US that erased several Indigenous nations from it landmass at its establishment. This is coming from a country that is engaged in genocide against Muslims worldwide — calculated to be 34 million avoidable deaths in 20 countries post-9-11. [1]
The below video depicts how US forces respect the sanctity of a mosque during its illegal war waged in Iraq, a war based on the fixing of intelligence and facts indicating that Iraq possessed weapons-of-mass-destruction (weapons that the US arrogates the right to possess to itself and some of its allies) around the policy. That war has been condemned as a genocide. [2]
Regarding the situation surrounding mosques in China, CGTN corrected the western disinformation:
Western accusations of “forceful demolition of mosques,” “persecution of religious leaders,” and “restrictions of religious freedom” in Xinjiang are “ridiculous” and “groundless,” and the lies and slandering have deeply offended the feelings of Xinjiang people and tarnished the true picture of Xinjiang, Xinjiang Islamic Association said in a statement…
Xinhua, the largest media organization in China presented an affirmative and uplifting video on the respect for Islam by the Chinese government.
Another video report cites the greater number of mosques in China than in either the US or France, even when compared per capita; the modernization of mosques having been carried out; the effectiveness of a respectful de-radicalization program in Xinjiang; and the reluctance of western governments and western media to acknowledge terrorism having been carried out in China.
The Qiao Collective provides relevant background information that China has been a victim of several attacks by Muslim terrorists:
Although there were many attacks between 1990 and 2016 and not all of the information is yet available, some high-profile attacks are as follows:
2013 October 28 – Tiananmen Attack, 5 killed, 40 wounded…
2014 March 1 – Kunming Train Station Attack, 31 killed, 141 wounded…
2014 May 22 – Urumqi Attack, 39 killed and 94 injured …
2014 July 30 – Assassination of Imam Jume Tahir at the Id Kah Mosque after morning prayers…
2016 September 6 – Kyrgyzstan’s state security service attributed the suicide bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek to the ETIM/TIP.
While terrorist actions have been carried out by Muslims, this points to a minority among Muslims. In no way does it diminish Islam as a religion compared to other religions because there is plenty of terrorism to be attributed to other confessions such as Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Unless otherwise demonstrated by solid evidence, then the terroristic actions must be acknowledged as that of a minority in the religion. Any actions taken to remediate the violent factions must be undertaken in a respectful manner that does not tarnish the entirety of a group.
Finally, to stake out the moral high ground, the state must abstain from carrying out its own terrorism.
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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
1. See Gideon Polya, US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide (Korsgaard Publishing, 2020). Review.
2. See Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States, (Clarity Press, 2013). Review.
“Yet this depraved new global architecture, dangerous to life, human, sentient and biological, is pushed forward despite advanced knowledge of foretold tragedy – solely for the pursuit of money, profits and power. It is this very fact that shows us unequivocally and irrevocably that promises for a just transition, green deals, new deals, build back better schemes, are nothing but empty, hollow assurances, void of intent. These are the lies they tell. Promises and assertions that are nothing more than alibis.” – Cory Morningstar, from The Great Reset [1]
On December 12th, on the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the world is set to host the virtual Climate Ambition Summit.
This Agreement aimed for the first time to hold global temperature rise “to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” It also called for the less developed economies to develop their economies using high efficiency technology and less high emissions technology which would require financing from developed technologies.[2]
The Agreement spotlighted the countries’ commitment to transparency, flexibility, cooperation and regular reports on their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC). And while there was no mechanism to enforce compliance with the provisions of the Accord, there was a proposal to promote compliance developed by a committee.[3]
Paris does have its critics however, not all of whom are climate change deniers. One 2016 paper stresses that the Agreement commits to “sustained industrial growth, risk management over disaster prevention, and future inventions and technology as saviour.” He argues the incompatibility of attracting economic growth and lowering greenhouse gas emission.[4]
Meanwhile, there is another agreement set to introduce a range of changes in all areas of life. The Great Reset is essentially a “reboot” of the economic system of capitalism which is starting to show signs of fatigue and failure. It claims to address the major dilemmas facing our world, including economic insecurity, gender disparity, climate change and, of course, the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic.[5]
But, given what we know about Klaus Schwab, UK Prince Charles, and all these other members of the capitalist cavalry, what can we realistically expect of this giant scheme?
This week, on the Global Research News Hour, we will address both of these changes, and what to expect of the major entities, including some of the environmental non-profit organizations, leading the charge toward restoration of the people and the planet.
Our second guest is Clive Spash, the man who wrote the 2016 article I mentioned earlier, entitled This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality. During our talk, Spash not only goes into detail about the flaws in the agreement, he also underscores the problems with any kind of “green new deal,” the mix of energy infrastructure currently with military security, and the failure of non-profit organizers generally to confront the global economic masters of industry.
Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.
Clive Spash is an economist, a teacher and an environmental activist. He works as Professor, and Chair of Public Policy and Governance in the Department of Socio-Economics, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. His books include The Political Economy of Nature (2006) and Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics (2002). He is also the author of over 100 articles.
The ruling backed the University of Sydney’s February 2019 dismissal of Dr. Tim Anderson, an economics department senior lecturer, primarily on the basis of allegations that his criticisms of US militarism and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people were “offensive.”
Most people around the globe would agree that 2020 has been a year to forget. This is certainly, if not especially, true for Venezuela’s opposition, and the upcoming parliamentary vote will only add to their misfortunes.
Forty-five years ago, under a cloak of secrecy, Operation Condor was officially launched: a global campaign of violent repression against the Latin American left by the region’s quasi-fascist military dictatorships. The US government not only knew about the program — it helped to engineer it.
England’s GPs, who are expected to play a pivotal role in the roll out of coronavirus vaccines, say they are in the dark about how exactly they will fit into the government’s plans, according to the British Medical Association.
The Fed’s policy tools – interest rate manipulation, quantitative easing, and “Special Purpose Vehicles” – have all failed to revive local economies suffering from government-mandated shutdowns. The Fed must rely on private banks to inject credit into Main Street, and private banks are currently unable or unwilling to do it.
Judicial Watch announced today that a September 2020 study revealed that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters.
Trust of citizens and their political representatives is already at drought stricken levels. Now, politicians are hoping to convince citizens that being publicly vaccinated in an effort to return to “COVID normalcy” will somehow restore confidence long shattered.
Although the Israeli government has not claimed credit for the illegal killing, there is little doubt of its culpability. Trump implicitly praised the assassination, retweeting a comment by Israeli journalist and intelligence expert Yossi Melman that the killing was a “major psychological and professional blow” to Iran.
The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.
But the issue at hand in the present undertaking is to resolve the problem of “conscious machines”. The present fundamental issue is therefore hinged on the question, Can machines be conscious? Without delving too deeply into the technical nitty-gritty and getting too strict on the understanding of what consciousness is, it is hereby supposed that it will not totally sound ridiculous or outrageous to venture to theorize that yes, machines can be conscious.
This first video interview may be one of the most important ones you listen to before the onslaught of the Covid-19 vaccine – distinction: Western style Covid-19 vaccine.
The Russian Sputnik V is not part of the same design.
The western ones are not the “normal” kind; they are RNA-type vaccines that modify the human genome, plus much more – but listen to Dr. Christiane Northrup, who has an excellent way of describing complex issues for everybody to understand. .
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An important article in RT Op Ed entitled “UK wants to use literal army to fight ‘anti-vaccine propaganda’ online” begs the question “Are we in a budding totalitarian state” involving censorship and a crackdown on free speech?
With the impending rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine, a UK military cyber unit has been tasked to crack down on “online propaganda against vaccines.” Questioning something that will be injected into your body is now deemed radical.
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With the anti-lockdown narrative beginning to become more prominent throughout the UK following the arrest of 150 people over the past weekend, a clampdown on independent thought is looming. The arrests were made because of anti-lockdown protests in London, and the heavy-handed nature of dealing with these protests is extraordinarily alarming. Now the crackdown is moving online, where the gradual destruction of free speech is becoming ever more blatant and cynical. The Sunday Times reported that there is even a brazen operation to suppress people’s fundamental right to express their opinion.
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The UK authorities intend on literally using military intelligence brigades to manage the elimination of free speech. The primary target of this military operation is what the Times calls “anti-vax militants” and supposed propaganda content across the internet and social media. (emphasis added)
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The above article by Lewis Olden is related to the video, in as much as it shows what to expect, if we let this vaccine or any of the western vaccines be put into our bodies.
This refers right now to the UK which is implementing harsh controls through a specially trained “cyber” Military Unit – mind control, basically taking away your freedom of expression and eventually of thought.
This is hard to believe. But you better be prepared for it. And Dr. Christiane Northrup explains how.
The article entitled – Breaking – by “Vaccine Impact” (2 December 2020) quotes the former Head of Pfizer Research, Dr. Michael Yeadon, as saying that the new untested mRNA (human DNA-altering) Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, BNT162b2, may make females infertile.
The two companies’ BNT162b2 has become the first COVID-19 vaccine allowed in the Western world as drug regulators in the U.K. doled out an emergency use authorization on Wednesday, ahead of decisions by the U.S. and Europe, which are expected soon.
For the broader vaccine world, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s decision means the world now has the first mRNA shot authorized for widespread use, opening up a brand-new chapter for vaccine development. (Source.)
THIS STAY OF ACTION is very similar to the one filed last week with the FDA in the U.S. by Dr. Sin Hang Lee, and “demands that clinical trials be STOPPED until there is an accurate testing mechanism in place to correctly identify SARS-CoV-2, since the PCR test is very inaccurate”. “In Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION, he recognizes the great risk for harm on the American public if the vaccine trials are approved based on these faulty tests”. “Dr. Yeadon, the former head of Pfizer research, also went public recently in a viral video recording where he states that the COVID Pandemic is over, and that it is being kept alive by false narratives using the faulty PCR tests.” (health impact news, op cit)
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Just think – eleven months ago, at the beginning of January 2020 – nobody would have thought – not in their wildest nightmares – what would be coming to humanity within the next few months – maybe years if we don’t stop it. Repression no end – all possible because of an atrocious fear campaign.
Clever – fear from an invisible enemy.
People with fear will end up with a vastly reduced immune system, vulnerable to all kinds of infectious diseases, not just covid. Fear also reduces the will to resist – people under fear can be manipulated. We see it every day.
This invisible enemy [V the virus[, they say has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Truth is, however, quite different. CDC figures show that there have been no excess deaths in the US in 2020 – in fact the total deaths at the end of 2020 may be even lower than in 2019. – So, what are we talking about? A phantom virus-killer? – See for yourself.
Frankly, who could have imagined that we would be loosing almost all human and civil rights only 11 months later, by December 2020?
And yes, this draconian crackdown starts in the UK (though, we have seen “examples” of it in Melbourne and Victoria State of Australia) – while people actually stand in line waiting for the vaccines, in the hope life will return to normal – IT WILL NOT.
It will get worse, and especially, you have no idea what is in the vaccine and how it will affect you – side effects and real effects. How it may affect future generations. You will never be able to detox your body from RNA vaccines, as they change your DNA, like genetically engineered organisms – think of corn, soja, rice, cotton and many more. With one of these vaccines you will become “transhuman”.
You will know much more after having listened to the interview with the renown Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Massive-massive civil disobedience may be the answer.
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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.
Peter is also co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
On November 27, Israel assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist. International law expert Richard Falk called it “an outrageous act of state terrorism.”Although the Israeli government has not claimed credit for the illegal killing, there is little doubt of its culpability. Trump implicitly praised the assassination, retweeting a commentby Israeli journalist and intelligence expert Yossi Melman that the killing was a “major psychological and professional blow” to Iran. This was an “implicit approval if there ever was one,”according to SinaToossi, a senior research analyst at the National Iranian American Council.
The Israel Defense Forces have been ordered to prepare for a possible U.S. military attack on Iran before Trump’s term ends,senior Israeli officials told Axios. They expect “a very sensitive period” leading up to Biden’s inauguration.
In mid-November, Trump requested plans to attack Iran’s Natanz nuclear power facility but was reportedly talked out of it. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and strategized about Iran. Pompeo visited Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and several countries in the Gulf to discuss Iran.
During Pompeo’s visit to the Gulf, the U.S. Central Command announcedthat B-52 strategic bombers carried out a “short-notice, long-range mission into the Middle East to deter aggression and reassure U.S. partners and allies.”
“All options are on the table,” State Department officials who were traveling with Pompeo told reporters.
Trump Appears to Have Outsourced His Iran Policy to Israel
Israeli leaders think Iran poses an existential threat to Israel’s existence, in spite of the fact that Iran has never attacked Israel or any other country in the last 200 years. In fact, Israel is the only Middle East country that has nuclear weapons and it refuses to join the new UN International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The Iran nuclear agreement is embodied in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated during the Obama administration between Iran, the U.S., France,U.K., Russia, China, Germany and the European Union. Iran, which has consistently maintained that its nuclear program is only intended for peaceful purposes, agreed to restrict its uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities.In return, it received relief from the punishing U.S. sanctions.The UN International Atomic Energy Agency certified several times that Iran was complying with its obligations under the agreement. Nevertheless, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and reimposed the sanctions against Iran.
One year after the U.S. withdrawal, Iran began to pull back from its commitmentsunder the JCPOA, whichallows a party to abandon its obligationsif another party is in noncompliance. Trump intensified the sanctionsthat have devastated Iran’s economy, impoverished 82 million Iranians and hindered its ability to respond to the pandemic.With his campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran, Trump has waged economic warfare against the Iranian people.
Trump spent his entire presidency enabling Israel’s illegal oppression of the Palestinians, withself-identified evangelicals Pompeo and Mike Pence driving Trump’s Israel policy. Christian Zionists believe there will be no second coming of Jesus until the Temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt, and that is more likely to happen if the Temple Mount remains under Jewish rather than Palestinian control.
It is becoming clear that Trump aims to cater to Israel’s agenda until he leaves office.
U.S. and Israel Try to Bait Iran to Retaliate and Lead to Middle East War
Hopefully, Iran will resist the apparent U.S.-Israeli attempt to provoke it into retaliating for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination and thereby provideTrump witha pretext to launch a retaliatory strike,which would ignite a war in the Middle East. The U.S. military already has more than 40,000troops in the region on high alert.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhanipledged to respond to the assassination of Fakhrizadeh at the “proper time.” Rouhani said, “The Iranian nation is smarter than falling into the trap of the Zionists. They are thinking to create chaos.”The day after the assassination,Iran’s parliament unanimously voted to end future UN inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites.The inspections had confirmed that Iran was in compliance with the JCPOA. Terminating them could spell an end to the nuclear deal.
Nevertheless, Zarif hopes Biden will improve relationsbetween Iran and the United States. But hard-liners, who won recent elections and are slated to pick up additional seats in Iran’s parliament in February, could doom any rapprochement with the United States. CODEPINK’sMedea Benjamin and Ariel Gold notethat this leaves only a four-month windowfor negotiations after Biden is inaugurated.
“US & Israel efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program have now morphed into Trump & Netanyahu sabotaging the next US President,” tweeted Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council. “They are trying to goad Iran into provocations & accelerating nuclear work-exactly what they claim to oppose. Their real fear is US & Iran talking”
Much to Netanyahu’s chagrin, Biden has said he wants to return the United States to the Iran nuclear deal, albeit with preconditions. Tony Blinken, Biden’snominee for secretary of state, indicated the incoming administration will pursue a policy of uncritical support for Israel.In spite ofthe mandates in the Leahy Law and the Arms Export Control Act, Blinken stated that Biden “would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes.Period.Full stop.” The U.S. government supports Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory with $3.8 billion in annual military aid, in spite of Israel’s war crimes.
Blinkenmade that statement in a briefing to the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMI), a U.S.-based advocacy group that pushes the Democratic Party to adopt pro-Israel policies. “DMI was manufactured to ensure that Democrats would not stray too far from the pro-Israel party line,” Richard Silverstein wrote at Tikun Olam.“The group has regularly acted as an enforcer within the Party when candidates espouse positions considered anti-Israel.”
It is up to Congress, as well as civil society, to preventthe Biden administration from continuing the U.S. policy of caving to Israel’s demands — a practice that not only deepens the oppression of the Palestinians but could also activelyimperil the national security of the United States.
Meanwhile, we must pressure Congress to prevent Trump from attacking Iran. The consequences to the Middle East and the entire world would be catastrophic.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” — Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence
“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.” — Ray Kurzweil
“I had a fascination with art, science fiction, and philosophy, dreaming of what robots could be. I imagined that if artificial intelligence ever did match human intelligence that it would re-design itself to be ever smarter, ever faster, you would have something like a Moore’s Law of super-intelligent machines.” — David Hanson, Founder and CEO, Hanson Robotics
A Layman’s Understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The present discussion on artificial intelligence (AI) is not a technical one and hence starts off with an uncomplicated definition based on a non-technical understanding of artificial intelligence as software intelligence found in non-human systems that “think and act rationally” like humans. We find the simplest types of such systems in the most modern appliances and equipment that make chores in households and offices easy and even enjoyable. Their most sophisticated types though are harnessed and utilized in the complex field of robotic science and technology which has been experiencing unprecedented velocity in the creation of remarkably new and more complex systems that unceasingly transcend their very recent predecessors. The path of the field’s advancement seems to be boundless and the issue of having the best is deemed irrelevant in a situation where something better perennially emerges.
People have witnessed a lot of amazing technological inventions and innovations in the multifaceted performances of artificial intelligence systems ever since the earliest stages of their development. Activities previously done with a lot of manual and muscular efforts are now accomplished with no sweat and just at the tip of one’s finger. I would venture to say that artificial intelligence is among the highest scientific and technological achievements of humanity in the post-modern civilization. As useful systems fundamentally designed to facilitate human productive activities, AI-based tools/implements/instruments should be viewed positively and with an air of appreciation and praise to the geniuses behind their creation. From this point of view, there is nothing to worry about AI as it is fully under human control generally for the purpose of work facilitation. Like when fire-making was first discovered and later enhanced with the invention of the match and the lighter, AI systems are basically facilitative. Humanity has benefitted a lot from the use of fire for so many practical purposes in the contexts of the household and the industry as well.
The positive aspect of AI is best depicted in the 1999 Robin-Williams-starrer movie The Bicentennial Man which is based on the 1993 novel The Positronic Manco-authored by the celebrated science fictionist Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. The highly sophisticated robot – an android, to be specific, having been designed to look and act like humans – which is later called Andrew Martin first arrives at the posh mansion of the wealthy Martinfamily for functional and facilitative purposes. As the story develops, Andrew Martin undergoes several upgrades – both external and internal – until the point where he develops self-consciousness and already acts spontaneously like a human and with not an iota of non-human traces anymore. The story unilaterally dwells on the good side of humanity as Andrew in his most fully developed “humanness” is the personification of a cultured, non-violent, sober, rational, and sympathetic person.
Consciousness and AI in the Science of Robotics
At this point, we need to be clear about our understanding of what being conscious is. Basically, it is taken as being able to understand and know what is happening in one’s particular spatio-temporal location and having the sensitivity and sensibility to respond to such a state of affairs as well. These are cognitive and affective properties that define the mental and emotional states of living organisms particularly the higher forms of animals including the human species but without dismissing the lower forms about which we do not have a thorough and substantial knowledge as yet.
As specific cases in point and without being exhaustive, it is a given that animals in the Class Mammalia (where the human species is included), Class Aves, and Class Reptilia are conscious entities. They do not have to express themselves using a spoken language – as in the case of the human species – to prove that they understand, know and respond to what is happening in their surroundings. The truth is, we have observed them time and again and it is not inaccurate to say that they are endowed with consciousness the fact that they are perfectly able to cope with their existence in their respective habitats.
But the issue at hand in the present undertaking is to resolve the problem of “conscious machines”. The present fundamental issue is therefore hinged on the question, Can machines be conscious? Without delving too deeply into the technical nitty-gritty and getting too strict on the understanding of what consciousness is, it is hereby supposed that it will not totally sound ridiculous or outrageous to venture to theorize that yes, machines can be conscious.
Furthermore, without spreading too thinly the concentration of our present concern, we can cite certain dramatic developments in the field of robotics. In this connection, we may mention one actual modeling project of modern humanoid robots which was inaugurated in Japan’s Waseda University in 1967 called WABOT Project and finally resulted in the creation of “the world’s first full-scale humanoid intelligent robot” in 1973. [1] Prior to and after this, a robotics history timeline will introduce us to a series of significant events and likewise familiarize us with the basic details of how humanoid robotics projects have progressed through the years up to the present. [2]
Considering the issue of consciousness on the basis of the parameters established in terms of how we basically understand it, machines can therefore be conscious. Through a scientifically controlled observation, a fully developed humanoid robot with all the complex components that constitute its system has the sophisticated capability to understand and know what is going on in the spatio-temporal surroundings where it is located.
A further observation yielded more amazing findings that it even has the sensitivity and sensibility to respond accordingly, i.e., with a human-like reaction, to what is going on around it. This is consciousness seen through the glasses of a new paradigm where consciousness is technically designed through the latest developments in electronic technology. In this sense, we cannot evaluate and make a judgment on this matter using the homo sapiens sapiens paradigm where consciousness has developed via the natural evolutionary process without any technological intervention.
Image on the right: Sophia, First Robot Citizen at the AI for Good Global Summit 2018. (CC BY 2.0)
The latest and most sophisticated human-like robot is a creation of a Hong Kong-based company called Hanson Robotics whose banner line says, “an AI and robotics company dedicated to creating socially intelligent machines that enrich the quality of our lives.” [3] The humanoid robot with a face modeled after the late American actress Audrey Hepburn has been given the name, Sophia.
“Hanson Robotics’ most advanced human-like robot, Sophia, personifies our dreams for the future of AI. As a unique combination of science, engineering, and artistry, Sophia is simultaneously a human-crafted science fiction character depicting the future of AI and robotics, and a platform for advanced robotics and AI research.” [4]
Consciousness Deconstructed within the AI Paradigm
The most fundamental controversy that arises at this point centers on the issue of how the term consciousness has been wrongly thought of and manipulated to suit the claim that even machines – and in the present discussion, humanoid robots – can have consciousness. Handling the matter philosophically, it is important to point out certain areas of concern aimed to settle the issue.
In the first place, the spur-of-the-moment reaction that there is a pernicious manipulation of semantic signification is not very accurate. In the present context, the meaning of consciousness is not adversely manipulated but rather practically redefined and hence, conveniently reinterpreted. There is actually nothing wrong with redefinition, much less with reinterpretation as long as the paradigm wherein a concept is introduced is clear and its parameters well established. In other words, consciousness is used in the present context outside of the traditional human-based paradigm with all the components and processes involved to understand the concept of consciousness as a uniquely distinct human event.
In the second place, we have to reasonably realize that isolating the human-based aspects of the concept of consciousness and concentrating more on the linguistic formulation that has no necessary connection (but only constant conjunction on the basis of habit) with such aspects to define consciousness in a new way is the essence of the technology-based paradigm aimed by no means at all to contradict, disparage and dismiss the human-based paradigm.
The evolving socio-cultural landscape, particularly in the context of the post-modern western society, has re-defined and re-interpreted myriad traditional concepts well-established in the old paradigm to understand the most recent developments obtaining in the third-wave or post-industrial civilization. Simply put, these traditional concepts appropriated in the new paradigm gain a wider scope of meanings which include the descriptions of cyberworld tools, devices, and applications among others that are better understood and utilized in the context of virtual reality. The word “notebook” is no longer an exclusive term we use for a stitched or spiraled blank book for recording notes. It is also a compact portable computer more or less with the same usefulness as the former. Even the terms “personal presence” and “face-to-face encounter” have gained third-wave significations as they are appropriated in online audio-visual communication in real-time. Though the element of actual “warm-body presence” is in absentia, so to speak, the circumstance in this kind of contact is perfectly face-to-face and never construed as less personal.
In this light, the term “consciousness” which has gained a brand new meaning as it is appropriated in the context of the post-modern robotic technology should not really shock us. The creative purpose in all of these undertakings is reflective of human ingenuity that calls for celebration and not condemnation. Echoing the words of David Hanson, the founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics, he says:
“Our robots will serve as AI platforms for research, education, medical and healthcare, sales and service, and entertainment applications, and will evolve to become benevolent, super-intelligent living machines who advance civilization and achieve ever-greater good for all.” [5]
Peeping into the Seemingly Dark Side of Where We are Heading To
We might opine that despite the leaps and bounds seen in the achievements of robotic science and technology, humanity could yet be thousands and thousands of miles away from the realization of an Andrew Martin, i.e. if such a point is ever truly realizable. But taking the matter hypothetically and imagining such a possibility, is it more rational to think of the immoral side of an android which is in diametrical opposition to the amiable “personality” of Andrew Martin in the movie? If the process basically starts off in programming, is it more rational to consider the possibility of a sinister conspiracy to create and programme diabolical androids designed to destroy significant segments of humanity for the evil programmers to take full control of planet Earth? This is the dark side of AI whose fiendish potentiality is not far-fetched. It is like fire which on the one hand is absolutely advantageous but also harmful on the other if tapped for criminal purposes. In this sense, it is reasonable to think that AI is both an opportunity and a threat.
But is there really something new in this circumstance when since time immemorial human beings, in general, are personifications of opportunities and threats toward each other? Why do we get troubled by the emerging power of AI which could on the one hand be constructive yet destructive on the other, while we fully know that the basic stuff of life is largelycharacterized by both construction and destruction? Are we worried that humanity will soon be threatened by the dark side of AI systems when the truth of the matter is long before the advent of AI, humanity has always been threatened by the evil forces of totalitarian powers well-entrenched in governments and big capitalist empires in control ofnations’ economies? Future AI systems employed and mobilized in the service of these political and economic powers will certainly heighten the degree of their oppressive domination and intensify the common people’s oppression. In this penultimate condition, large-scale chaos will multiply in geometric proportion until the final annihilation of the human species on planet Earth. Without sounding like a biblical prophet, we seem to be heading toward that direction.
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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.
Notes
[1] Robotics and Mechatronics: Proceedings of the 4th IFToMM International, edited by Saïd Zeghloul, Med Amine Laribi, Jean-Pierre Gazeau, Published by Springer International Publishing (Switzerland, 2016).
This article was originally published on Asia Times.
The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.
Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of the historical evolution of capitalism to show how the Washington consensus ended up metastasized into the Silicon Valley consensus. In a delightful twist, he brands the new grove as the “Californian ideology”.
We’re far away from Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys; it’s more like Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on steroids, complete with IMF-style “structural reforms” emphasizing “flexibilization” of work and outright marketization/financialization of everyday life.
The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.
Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.
Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.
Those Randian heroes
Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.
When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.
That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.
Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.
On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.
The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.
So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.
Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable, online real estate empire is built.
The key point is that whatever the original business – Google, Amazon, Uber – strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of “spaces of observation and capture” of data.
About the Chinese credit system…
Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system – a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3rd plenum of the 18th Congress of the CCP, under the motto “to value sincerity and punish insincerity”.
For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It’s all about trust. Beijing defines it as “a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance”.
The Chinese term – shehui xinyong – is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than “social credit”, it’s more about “trustworthiness”, in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.
Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of “mass lines”, as in “start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas”.
Durand’s analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff’s
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become “fiefdoms”: they live out of, and profit from, their vast “digital territory” peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.
And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.
It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, “Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers.”
So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:
a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the “techno-feudal” option, as defined by Durand.
Blake meets Burroughs
Durand’s book is extremely relevant to show how the theoretical and political critique of the Digital Age is still rarified. There is no precise cartography of all those dodgy circuits of revenue extraction. No analysis of how do they profit from the financial casino – especially mega investment funds that facilitate hyper-concentration. Or how do they profit from the hardcore exploitation of workers in the gig economy.
The total concentration of the digital glebe is leading to a scenario, as Durand recalls, already dreamed up by Stuart Mill, where every land in a country belonged to a single master. Our generalized dependency on the digital masters seems to be “the cannibal future of liberalism in the age of algorithms”.
Is there a possible way out? The temptation is to go radical – a Blake/Burroughs crossover. We have to expand our scope of comprehension – and stop confusing the map (as shown in the Magna Carta) with the territory (our perception).
William Blake, in his proto-psychedelic visions, was all about liberation and subordination – depicting an authoritarian deity imposing conformity via a sort of source code of mass influence. Looks like a proto-analysis of the Digital Age.
William Burroughs conceptualized Control – an array of manipulations including mass media (he would be horrified by social media). To break down Control, we must be able to hack into and disrupt its core programs. Burroughs showed how all forms of Control must be rejected – and defeated: “Authority figures are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers”.
Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.
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Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Will they ever learn? When former US Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced that they would publicly take a vaccine against COVID-19, National Public Radio seemed impressed. “Who better to promote a product than a former president? How about three?”
On SiriusXM’s The Joe Madison Show, Obama held up his hand. “I promise you that when it’s been made for people who are less at risk, I will be taking it. I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people show that I trust this science.” Clinton did the same, albeit through the medium of spokesman Angel Ureña, who stated on December 3 that he would do so “based on the priorities determined by public health officials. He would also “do it in a public setting if it will help urge all Americans to do the same.”
Bush’s chief of staff, Freddy Ford, informed CNN that his boss had been in touch with the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, letting them “know that, when the time is right, he wants to do what he can to help encourage his fellow citizens to get vaccinated.” The vaccines would first “need to be deemed safe and administered to the priority populations”. Once done, Bush would “get in line for his, and will gladly do so on camera.”
Enlisting politicians and leaders into the role of product promotion, especially in the field of vaccines, is goggling in its daftness. In the United States, the brand label of the presidential endorsement is hardly glorious. Those with longer collective memory would remember the efforts of the Ford administration in 1976 to promote a mass vaccination programme against swine flu. It was nothing short of a calamity: the flu pandemic never eventuated and the vaccine led to cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome. In December 1976, President Gerald Ford’s vaccination programme was suspended, having reached only 20% of the population. “The danger now,” concluded the New York Times, “is that the whole idea of preventive medicine may be discredited.”
Trust of citizens and their political representatives is already at drought stricken levels. Now, politicians are hoping to convince citizens that being publicly vaccinated in an effort to return to “COVID normalcy” will somehow restore confidence long shattered. The business of capitalism and trade can return. Travel can resume. Lockdowns, if they are applied, will be rarer than ever.
In due course, the vaccines in question might well work. Credibility, however, is hardly going to return before the spectacle of former presidents keen to turn vaccine taking into a celluloid spectacle. While margins of error in public health responses can, on some level, be understood, notably against an evolving contagion, the global mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis amongst political leaders has left a profound and disturbing impression.
The speed with which such vaccines as Pfizer and Moderna have been developed, not least their astonishingly high levels of effectiveness (95%), have done little to provide reassurance. Governments, notably those from countries facing another vicious surge of infections, are keeling over in desperation to get the vaccines into circulation.
The rapid approval by Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for the emergency use of the Pfizer vaccine brought the sceptics to the fore. It was enough for Fauci to suggest that the MHRA had been too hasty, though he qualified his statements in a BBC interview so as not to imply any “sloppiness” on the part of his British colleagues. “I meant that in the US, where there is a lot of scepticism over vaccines, it would not have been good to rush to approve the vaccine.” Despite his collegial qualification, Fauci had made a telling point to CBS: the MHRA had simply taken the data provided by Pfizer at face value “and instead of scrutinising it really, really carefully, they said OK, let’s approve it”.
To this can be added the pull of vaccine opponents, who have become adept at colonising social media and muddying the waters of debate. In a study analysing Facebook page content on vaccination discussions published in Nature this year, the authors were alarmed. Lead author on the study and data scientist Neil Johnson, went so far as to express his shock. 124 pro-vaccine pages were found, all sporting a total of 6.9 million followers. The anti-vaccine pages came to 317 and 4.2 million followers. The undecided field was the largest: 885 pages with 74.1 million followers. “Although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral.” The pro-vaccination discussants, for the most part, soothed themselves in an echo chamber of reassurance.
Anthropologist Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is adamant about the trends. The anti-vaccination movement “was winning” and “covering a lot more ground with fewer of them.”
A suggestion – sensible enough – is that politicians ought to retreat from the show. When they drop their oar in, notably on the issue of vaccination matters, support for taking vaccines can decline. This is especially so in the American context. The results of a survey published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open was revealing in how poorly political endorsements of vaccines can fare. As the authors note of a sample of 2,000 participants, “The probability of choosing a vaccine was lowest when the vaccine was recommended by President Trump (the baseline category), although the probability was not significantly higher when the vaccine was recommended by former Vice President Biden”.
Sarah Kreps and Douglas L. Kriner suggest a simple formula for political representatives: “Keep mum, and let the scientists and public-health experts share the facts with the American people.” Hard to disagree but for the fact that sharing accurate data in a transparent fashion can be compromised by public health agencies that are politicised.
While the full US presidential jab show risk doing a disservice to vaccine promotion, a sadistic streak can also be found in some populations. In Britain, a Daily Mailpoll (make of that what you will) in November found that 74% would take the COVID-19 vaccine. Of those surveyed, four in ten were very selective about who should take it first to prove its safety: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet colleagues. Even taking vaccines can constitute a form of pornography.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies
rights movement in general. Nelson Blackstock’s book COINTELPRO – The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom [COINTELPRO: for COunter INTELligence PROgram] is an excellent source of information on this subject. In this work the author states:
Flash back to Chile, September 11 1973.
Two and a half years later in 1976, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with another military coup d’état in March 1976. Behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” macro-economic reforms had also been prescribed – this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors, including David Rockefeller who was a friend of The Junta’s Minister of Economy José Alfredo Martinez de Hoz.
