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There is an old saying that you should not put the fox in charge of the hen house. It makes perfect sense, and yet that’s exactly what Western governments are increasingly starting to do when it comes to their freedom of speech policies. All bluster about “cancel culture” aside, the leading threat in the world today to freedom of speech is the ever-increasing crackdown on the right to speak out in support of the Palestinians.

Israel’s military dictatorship against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; its apartheid regime against its own Palestinian citizens; and its adamant denial of the Palestinian refugees’ legitimate right to return to their land are all such transparent injustices that the Palestinian cause has always been popular across the world. That means that Israel cannot win the argument on the popular level. Instead, it wants to suppress free speech of the kind that I have just employed here, and outlaw public exposure and discussion of its breaches of international law and human rights violations. This, of course, starts in the occupied West Bank.

Under Israel’s regime there, Palestinians have no right to speak out against the military dictatorship that controls every facet of their lives. They can be thrown into prison on the say-so of an army officer, with no charges or any semblance of due process. Protests are routinely banned; journalism, poetry and literature speaking out against the occupation are slapped with the label “incitement” and stamped out; and unarmed Palestinian activists and campaigners are routinely thrown into prison.

Khalida Jarrar is just one example; she’s a leading women’s rights activist and socialist Palestinian lawmaker. On 1 November last year, she was abducted by Israeli army thugs and thrown in jail. More than a year later, she continues to be detained without charge or trial.

By way of contrast, Jewish citizens of Israel – including the settlers who dominate the West Bank in their illegal colonies — are granted the right to freedom of speech under Israeli law. This is clear evidence that not only is Israel a military dictatorship, but it is also an apartheid military dictatorship and a Jewish-supremacist state. In fact, that is the reality of Zionism.

Nevertheless, full control of the lives and speech of Palestinians is not enough to satisfy Israel’s thirst for domination. The Zionist state relies on support from European governments and — especially — from the US. The latter subsidises Israel’s armed forces to the tune of $3.8 billion every year, with this figure looking set to rise in a new deal that the pro-Israel lobby is aiming for during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Israel’s position as a small, European settler-colony surrounded by millions of indigenous people who it denigrates as hostile natives (a “villa in the jungle,” as Israel’s racist Prime Minister Ehud Barak once put it) makes such military and political subsidies essential if it wants its unjust regime to survive. This means that any threat to this political and military support for Israel in Western countries must be counteracted swiftly.

It is for this precise reason that Israel has for years been waging what it calls a “war” against the BDS movement, the popular campaign to put pressure on Israel through boycotts, divestment and sanctions until it complies with the requirements of international law on Palestinian human rights. A major part of this “war” against Palestinians and their rights has been for Israel to pressure, convince and lobby Western governments into suppressing and outlawing Palestine solidarity campaigns such as BDS. That’s why Israel represents such a major threat to freedom of speech in Britain and the United States.

Last year, Israel’s then “Strategic Affairs” Minister Gilad Erdan took credit on behalf of the Israeli government for a wave of anti-BDS laws and measures in the US. “Our efforts are producing results,” he said. “Twenty-seven US states now have counter-BDS legislation. Let’s give a hand to all the governors and state legislators who supported this law. They deserve it.”

Since then, that number has risen to 30 US states, with 202 anti-BDS bills having been introduced to date.

Moreover, just this week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau anointed leading pro-Israel lobbyist Irwin Cotler as Canada’s “special envoy” against anti-Semitism. Cotler’s true role, though, will not be to protect Jews against bigotry or hatred. Instead, it will be to implement and enforce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s bogus definition of anti-Semitism, which conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with hatred of Jews.

As Canadian organisation Independent Jewish Voices explained on Wednesday, Cotler “has long been one of the world’s leading proponents of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ discourse, which paints supporters of Palestinian human rights as anti-Semitic. His appointment today to this position is troubling.”

Trudeau’s appointment of Cotler is quite similar to Trump’s appointment in 2018 of Kenneth Marcus as the US Department of Education’s top civil rights enforcer. In both of these cases, Western governments were putting the fox in charge of the hen house. For years, Marcus pioneered the “lawfare” strategy of abusing US civil rights law by attempting to mobilise it in defence of Israeli crimes and arguing that criticism of Israel was “anti-Semitic”. Trump appointed Marcus at the behest of the pro-Israel lobby to run the very same government department that he had been lobbying for years as a “lawfare” operative on behalf of the state of Israel.

We face a similar threat in Britain, with the government’s appointment of John Mann — a former Labour MP who was so anti-socialist that he quit the party under Jeremy Corbyn and was given a life peerage in return — as it’s so-called “Anti-Semitism Tsar”. The irony is obvious, given that the real Tsars were brutally and violently anti-Semitic in Russia before they were overthrown by the communist revolution in 1917.

Mann has essentially based his whole career on smearing Palestine solidarity activism as “anti-Semitism”. Yet again in a major Western country, the fox has been put in charge of the hen house. Israel’s strategic threat to our freedom of speech is indeed growing.

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Featured image: Graffiti on the Israeli separation wall dividing the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis (Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler via shutterstock.com)

On Saturday 21 November 2020 Russia celebrated the 75^th Anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials which started on 20 November 1945 and lasted almost a year, until 1 October 1946. The Tribunal was given the task of trying and judging 24 of the most atrocious political and military leaders of the Third Reich.

For this unique celebration – so we shall never forget – Russian leaders and people of the Arts and History organized a Special Performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem” at Moscow’s Helikon Opera Theatre.

Daniel Hawkins, from RT, introduced this extraordinary event, as a journey through history, a journey through life and death, when some of – at that time – most genocidal people in history had to answer for their crimes.

This opera event was prepared for more than a year and was first performed in January 2020 for the Holocaust victims and the victims of the Nazi concentration camps in Leningrad.

Nuremberg Trial 

The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an International Military Tribunal. They resulted in 12 death sentences.

The idea of the “Requiem” performance is “not just to appeal to emotions, but to reason. Because if we fail to learn from history, the tragedy could be repeated.”

This is precisely what Sergei Novikov, head of the (Russian) presidential directorate for social projects, intimidated. He says,

“Despite of what we have seen happening 75 years ago – we do not seem to have learned a lesson. Today we seem to go down the same road, which is frightening.”

The musical performance interplays with theatrical realism – so memories are awake and moving – better than a museum. The educational impact of this celebration of remembrance is extremely important – especially for the young people, who do not remember these events, but with this first-class performance, they may learn a crucial lesson – a lesson, hardly talked about in history books – and even less so in the west.

If we compare what has happened then – 75 years ago – actually the anti-Jewish demonstration in Berlin, known as Kristallnacht, on 9 and 10 November 1938, effectively the beginning of WWII, and look at today’s extremism in Europe, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium – we should know that we are not far from a tyranny we knew as “Nationalsozialismus” – a political Nazi-concept of the late 1930s and up to mid-1940s, that today can best be compared with extreme neoliberalism – and merciless oppression of peoples’ rights by police and military.

Let us reflect on Todays World.

Are we not steps away from “a totalitarian government”. But again, today, like then, we are blind to it.  

There may be a time when we can no longer move – when we are in constant lockdown, masked – with dismembered faces, so to speak, kept away from each other under the pretext of social distancing – so that we cannot communicate with one another – all for reasons of public health, for the “good intentions” of our governments to protect us from an evil virus – the corona virus.

Today, this oppression is the result of a long-term plan by a small elite to implement The Great Reset (Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020) – see this and this. 

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There is, of course, a good reason, why Moscow wants the world to remember what WWII meant and how eventually Nazi-Germany was defeated – yes, largely if not solely by enormous sacrifices of the Soviet Union. Some 25 to 30 million USSR soldiers and Soviet citizens had left their lives for salvaging Europe – and possibly the world – from an all invading fascism.

The United States, nominally an ally of the Soviet Union, had clandestinely funded the Third Reich’s war against the Soviet Union. (See the analysis of Dr. Jacques Pauwels)

One of the key purposes for the US of getting “involved” in WWII, other than defeating the British Empire, was to defeat their arch-enemy, communist Soviet Union. The Rockefellers funded Hitler’s war machine by providing them with hydrocarbons, with petrol, the energy that drove the war.

On the other hand, the Federal Reserve (FED), via the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) – the pyramid tower still omni-present in Basle, Switzerland, near the German border – transferred gigantic monetary resources to the Reichsbank (at that time Hitler’s equivalent of a German Central Bank)

Verdi’s Requiem Performance in Moscow on 21 November is important to go back in history and open the “memory books” in front if our eyes.

It is even more important, as we see the trend towards fascism taking over the entire European continent – and possibly also in the United States.

Europe basically ignores the importance of the 75^th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials which still, as of this date, provides precedents for international war crimes – except, these precedents are miserably ignored, if not, we would have multiple repeats of Nuremberg in our days and age – with European and US leaders (sic) in “retirement’ but still with power.

Our dystopian western world is beset by war criminals even to the point where they blackmail judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, not to touch their – the European and US – war crimes, or else…

That’s where we have arrived.

Since we are going back to the times when WWII and Nuremberg happened, we should take the opportunity to also look at the Big Picture – one that may be at the root of this new wave of fascism invading Europe. It is in essence a “health dictatorship”; it has become a Health Martial Law. Many countries have ratified, quietly, or rammed it through Parliament without the public at large noticing – a law allowing them switching from everyday life to an emergency situation, i.e. (health) Martial Law.

The Big Picture though is a diabolical plan of eugenics. Yes, it’s a term nobody wants to use, but it must be said, because it’s one of the fundamental principles that lies in all that is planned,  the 2010 Rockefeller Report entitled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development Area” and the extremely important WHO Report “A World at Risk” – Annual Report on Global Preparedness for Health Emergencies, by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board – GPMB (September 2019).

Key members of this Monitoring Board include the World Bank, IMF, CDC and many more influential players, who have been concocting the “Preparedness” for a new epidemic since at least 2016, when the World Bank set up a special “Health Emergency Fund” to face the “next pandemic”. See this also.

Also, part of the SARS-Cov-2 preparedness – and planned outbreak, was Event 201 (18 October 2019), NYC, sponsored by Gates, the WEF, and the Johns Hopkins School for Medicine (Rockefeller created and funded), which simulated the outbreak of a SARS-Cov-2 virus – which curiously happened a couple of months later.  The “outbreak” was actually officially announced on the dot of the beginning of the 2020 Decade.

The Big Picture scheme also includes as an aftermath to covid, The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020), a plan to implement the 4^th Industrial Revolution and the enslavement of the remaining population. The Rockefellers and Bill Gates, Kissinger and many more – have nurtured the idea of massively reducing the world population for at least the last 70 years.

Ever since the Rockefellers espoused the concept of the “Bilderberger Society” (a parallel organization to the WEF (World Economic Forum), with overlapping and an ever-moving memberships) – their one and only continuous “project” was a selective population reduction. And they actually never made it a secret. See Bill Gates TedTalk in February 2010 – just about the time when the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report was issued – the one that has us now in “lockstep” following all the rules and regulations, issued by the WHO and supported by the entire UN system (see this).

Why then was the eugenics agenda never seriously picked up by the mainstream, by the public at large? – Possibly, because nobody can even imagine people so evil to actually wanting to make this reality. How they infiltrated themselves into human society is a mystery.

To implement such a massive plan on a worldwide scale, one needs a uniform approach to world health. In 1948, just a couple of years after the Nuremberg trials started, where war criminals like the Rockefellers should also have been indicted for supplying the enemy (German Nazis) with energy to drive their (anti-Soviet) war machine – back then, in 1948, Rockefeller created the WHO, the World Health Organization.

The philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation (RF) has marked the field of health like no other organization. The oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Hence, the RF created and provided the original funding to set up WHO in 1948. On 7 April 1948, WHO inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health Organization, which had been an agency of the League of Nations. Twenty-six (out of then 58) UN members ratified WHO as a UN agency under the UN Constitution.

Once you have “Global Health” under one roof, the WHO, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the pharmaceutical industries (predominantly GAVI – Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization – also created by Bill Gates in 2000) and you also have the predominant donor, Bill Gates, an obsessed vaxxer (and eugenist) without any medical training, choose WHO’s Director General – Dr.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a buddy of Gates and former Board Member of GAVI – it is relatively easy to make the foundation of WHO’s health policies based on vaccination.

That’s what we see today. As we have heard from Gates’ TedTalk (2010 see above), vaccination seems to lend itself perfectly to reduce the world population. It has the further advantage, that if anything goes “wrong” – no vaccine company can be held responsible, let alone being sued. For example, if people get seriously ill or die from the vaccinations – which would not be a surprise, after the Covid-19 are planned to be administered in warp speed – the vaccine pharmaceuticals cannot be sued.

In fact, vaccine companies do not bear any liability risk. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34), was signed into law by US President Ronald Reagan on November 14, 1986. NCVIA’s purpose was to eliminate the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers due to vaccine injury, since lawsuits led many manufacturers to stop producing the vaccines, a lame argument, but that shows once more the lobbying power the pharma industry commands.

That’s where we stand today. Any sinister vaccination agenda, no matter how hurtful to the public, is home free. Today we are at this crucial point of massive forced vaccination. Many governments, i.e. UK’s Boris Johnson and Australia’s Scott Morrison, have already advanced the idea of a vaccination-pass. Without it you are banned from flying and from just about every public event. That’s promising.

And one might ask – what does that have to do with public health?

What is the real agenda behind it?

Again, returning to the Nuremberg Trials – aren’t we in the midst of a world tyranny – to which 190 (out of 193) UN member countries subscribed (including Russia and China, excluding Nicaragua, Sweden and Belarus), or were coerced into – a tyranny that has already been genocidal, in as much as it has destroyed the world economy, creating countless bankruptcies, unemployment – untold poverty and misery and death – and now a massive vaccination campaign.

A world tyranny inflicted by all 193 UN member countries – whatever their motivation – all these governments and the heads of WHO and the entire UN system belongs before a new Nuremburg-type Tribunal – where the same legal principal would be applied as 75 years ago – in 1945.

Who says this will not happen? We can make it happen. We, the People, are the 99.99% – they are only 0.01 %. We have the power to resist – and we will prevail.

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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.

Israel used all four years of Trump’s presidency to entrench its systems of occupation and apartheid. Now that Joe Biden has won the U.S. election, the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, likely by Israel with the go-ahead from the US administration, is a desperate attempt to use Trump’s last days in office to sabotage Biden’s chances of successful diplomacy with Iran. Biden, Congress and the world community can’t let that happen.

On Friday November 27, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in the Iranian city of Absard outside of Tehran. First, a truck with explosives blew up near the car carrying Fakhrizadeh. Then, gunmen started firing on Fakhrizadeh’s car. The immediate speculation was that Israel had carried out the attack, perhaps with the support of the Iranian terrorist group the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted that there were “serious indications of [an] Israeli role” in the assassination.

All indications indeed point to Israel. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified this scientist, Fakhrizadeh, as a target of his administration during a presentation in which he claimed that Israel had obtained secret Iranian files that alleged the country was not actually abiding by the Iran Nuclear Deal. “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh. So here’s his directive, right here,” Netanyahu said.

Fakhrizadeh was far from the first assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist. Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated—Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. Though Israel never took official credit for the extrajudicial executions, reports were fairly conclusive that Israel, working with the MEK, were behind the killings. The Israeli government never denied the allegations.

The assassination of Fakhrizadeh also follows reports that the Israeli government recently instructed its senior military officials to prepare for a possible U.S. strike on Iran, likely referring to a narrowly averted plan by President Trump to bomb Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. Furthermore, there was a clandestine meeting between Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman. Among the topics of conversation were normalization between the two countries and their shared antagonism towards Iran.

Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear activities are particularly galling given that Israel, not Iran, is the only country in the Middle East in possession of nuclear weapons, and Israel refuses to sign the International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Iran, on the other hand, doesn’t have nuclear weapons and it has opened itself up to the most intrusive international inspections ever implemented. Adding to this absurd double standard is the intense pressure on Iran from the United States—a nation that has more nuclear weapons than any country on earth.

Given the close relationship between Netanyahu and Trump, and the seriousness of this attack, it is very likely that this assassination was carried out with the green light from Trump himself. Trump has spent his time in the White House destroying the progress the Obama administration made in easing the conflict with Iran. He withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed an unending stream of crippling sanctions that have affected everything from the price of food and housing, to Iran’s ability to obtain life-saving medicines during the pandemic. He has blocked Iran from getting an IMF $5 billion emergency loan to deal with the pandemic. In January, Trump brought the US to the brink of war by assassinating Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, and in an early November meeting with his top security advisors, and right before the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, Trump himself reportedly raised the possibility of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

After the news broke of the assassination, Trump expressed implicit approval of the attack by retweeting Israeli journalist and expert on the Israeli Mossad intelligence service, Yossi Melman, who described the killing of Fahkrizadeh as a “major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”

Iran has responded to these intense provocations with extreme patience and reserve. The government was hoping for a change in the White House and Biden’s victory signaled the possibility of both the U.S. and Iran going back into compliance with the nuclear deal. This recent assassination, however, further strengthens the hands of Iranian hardliners who say it was a mistake to negotiate with the United States, and that Iran should just leave the nuclear deal and build a nuclear weapon for its own defense.

Iranian-American analyst Negar Mortazavi bemoaned the chilling effect the assassination will have on Iran’s political space. “The atmosphere will be even more securitized, civil society and political opposition will be pressured even more, and the anti-West discourse will be strengthened in Iran’s upcoming presidential election,” she tweeted.

This assassination will have a chilling effect on Iran’s political space; the atmosphere will be even more securitized, civil society and political opposition will be pressured even more, and the anti-West discourse will be strengthened in Iran’s upcoming presidential election.

— Negar Mortazavi (@NegarMortazavi) November 27, 2020

The hardliners already won the majority of seats in the February parliamentary elections and are predicted to win the presidential elections scheduled for June. So the window for negotiations is a narrow one of four months immediately after Biden’s inauguration. W. What happens between now and January 20 could derail negotiations before they even start.

Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said that US and Israeli efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program “have now morphed into Trump & Netanyahu sabotaging the next US President. They are trying to goad Iran into provocations & accelerating nuclear work—exactly what they claim to oppose. Their real fear is US & Iran talking.”

US & Israel efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program have now morphed into Trump & Netanyahu sabotaging the next US President. They are trying to goad Iran into provocations & accelerating nuclear work-exactly what they claim to oppose. Their real fear is US & Iran talking

— Jamal Abdi (@jabdi) November 27, 2020

That’s why U.S. members of Congress, and President-elect Joe Biden himself, must vigorously condemn this act and affirm their commitment to the US rejoining the nuclear deal. When Israel assassinated other nuclear scientists during the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the murders, understanding that such illegal actions made negotiations infinitely more difficult.

The European Union, as well as some important US figures have already condemned the attack. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy pointed out the risks involved in normalizing assassinations, how the killing will make it harder to restart the Iran Nuclear agreement, and how the assassination of General Soleimani backfired from a security standpoint. Former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes tweeted that it was an “outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy,” and former CIA head John Brennan called the assassination “criminal” and “highly reckless,” risking “lethal retaliation and a new round of regional conflict,” but rather than putting the responsibility on the U.S. and Israel to stop the provocations, he called on Iran to “be wise” and “resist the urge to respond.”

I have not yet been briefed on this incident, but: Every time America or an ally assassinates a foreign leader outside a declaration of war, we normalize the tactic as a tool of statecraft. The risk is that the security benefit can be very short lived. https://t.co/vn3mbEWmhB

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 27, 2020

This is an outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy between an incoming US administration and Iran. It’s time for this ceaseless escalation to stop. https://t.co/ix6LpeVpcQ

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) November 27, 2020

This was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict.
Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits. https://t.co/0uZhyBTM3S

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) November 27, 2020

Many on Twitter have raised the question of what the world response would be if the roles were reversed and Iran assassinated an Israeli nuclear scientist. Without a doubt, the U.S. administration, whether Democrat or Republican, would be outraged and supportive of a swift military response. But if we want to avoid escalation, then we must hope that Iran will not retaliate, at least not during Trump’s last days in office.

The only way to stop this crisis from spiraling out of control is for the world community to condemn the act, and demand a UN investigation and accountability for the perpetrators. The countries that joined Iran and the United States in signing  the 2015 nuclear agreement —Russia, China, Germany, the UK and France—must not only oppose the assassination but publicly recommit to upholding the nuclear deal. President-elect Joe Biden must send a clear message to Israel that under his administration, these illegal acts will have consequences. He must also send a clear message to Iran that he intends to quickly re-enter the nuclear deal, stop blocking Iran’s $5 billion IMF loan request, and begin a new era of diplomacy to dial back the intense conflict he inherited from Trump’s recklessness.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She is a member of the writers’ group Collective20.

Ariel Gold is the national co-director of CODEPINK and runs their Peace with Iran campaign.

“They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts.  It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt,” wrote the marvelous New York journalist, Pete Hamill in “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class” in New York magazine.  He added:

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians….Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar types.’ But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He wrote that on April 14, 1969. Yesterday. Little changes.

Transferred from NYC to the middle of the country half a century later, these people are referred to as Trump’s “deplorables.” They comes in baskets, as Hillary Clinton said.  And even though they represent nearly half the voting public in the last two presidential elections – 70+ million Americans – their complaints are dismissed as the rantings of ignorant, conservative racists.

Name calling substitutes for understanding. This is not an accident.

Like Hamill, I am a NYC born and bred Irish-American – my working-class Bronx to Pete’s Brooklyn. We both attended the same Jesuit high school in different years. Unlike Hamill, known for his gritty street reporting, because I have been a college sociology professor, I could falsely be categorized as a northeastern liberal intellectual oozing with disdain for those who voted for Trump.  This is false, because, like Hamill, I see it as my intellectual duty to understand what motivates these voters, just as I do with those who voted for Biden.

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, nor did I vote for Joseph Biden, or Hillary Clinton in 2016.  I am not one of those sociologists Hamill refers to; I use the term Working Class and am acutely aware of the social class nature of life in the U.S.A., where the economic system of neo-liberal capitalism is constructed to try to convince working Americans that the system cares for them, and if they grow disgusted with its lies and inequities and rage against the machine by voting for anyone who seems to be with them (even a super-rich reality TV real estate magnate named Trump who is not with them), they are dumb-ass bigots whose concerns should be brushed off.

The truth is that both the Trump voters and the Biden voters have been taken for a ride.  It is a game, a show, a movie, a spectacle.  It hasn’t changed much since 1969; the rich have gotten richer and the poor, working, and middle classes have gotten poorer and more desperate.  Those who have profited have embraced the fraud.

The Institute for Policy Studies has just released a new analysis showing that since the start of the Covid-19 “pandemic” in mid-March and the subsequent transfer upwards of $5 trillion to the wealthy and largest corporations through the Cares Act, approved 96-0 in the U.S. Senate, 650 U.S. billionaires have gained over a trillion dollars in eight months as the America people have suffered an economic catastrophe.  This shift upward of massive wealth under Trump is similar to Obama’s massive 2009 bailout of the banks on the backs of American workers. Both were justified through feats of legerdemain by both political parties, accomplices in the fleecing of regular people, many of whom continue to support the politicians that screw them while telling them they care.

If the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger part of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the end.

I am well aware that most people disagree with my analysis.  It does seem as if I am wrong and that because the Democrats and their accomplices have spent years attempting to oust Trump through Russia-gate, impeachment, etc. that what seems true is true and Trump is simply a crazy aberration who somehow slipped through the net of establishment control to rule for four years.  To those 146 + million people who voted for Biden and Trump this seems self-evident.  But if that is so, why, despite their superficial differences – and Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s for that matter – have the super-rich gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else?  These are a few facts that can’t be disputed. There are many more. So what’s changed under Trump?  We are talking about nuances, small changes.  A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, “dignified” con men.

If you were writing this script as part of long-term planning and average people were getting disgusted from decades of being screwed and were sick of politicians and their lying ways, wouldn’t you stop the reruns and create a new show?  Come on, this is Hollywood where creative showmen can dazzle our minds with plots so twisted that when you leave the theater you keep wondering what it was all about and arguing with your friends about the ending. So create a throwback film where the good guy versus the bad guy was seemingly very clear, and while the system ground on, people would be at each other’s throats over the obvious differences, even while they were fabricated.

Variety is necessary.  You wouldn’t want to repeat the film from 2008 when a well-spoken black man came into town out of nowhere to clean up the mess created by the poorly spoken white sheriff who loved war and then the black hero went on to wage war in seven countries while his fans sat contented in the audience loving the show and making believe they didn’t see what was happening on the screen even though their hero jailed whistle blowers and greatly expanded the surveillance state right in front of their eyes.

No, as the years passed, those two guys turned out to be buddies, and their wives hit it off, and a famous photograph appeared of the good guy’s wife hugging the bad guy, which was not a good thing for the script that has the Republicans warring against the Democrats.

A new story line was needed. How about an opéra bouffe, someone suggested, and the rest is history. Or pseudo-history. This is the real matrix. The most sophisticated mind control operation up to this point, with the coronavirus lockdown added to propel it to what the producers hope is a conclusion.

What more can I say?

Billy Joel said it:  “JFK blown away.”

The Towers pulverized. David Ray Griffin told us the truth repetitively.

Minds of this generation destroyed, as Allen Ginsberg said in Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

It’s been many generations now.  There has been a form of social madness growing over the decades and it is everywhere now.  Look at people’s faces, if you can see them behind the masks; everywhere the strained and stressed looks, the scared rabbit eyes that you see on the wards of mental hospitals. The look that says: what the fuck has happened as they stare into a blank screen in a tumbling void, to paraphrase Don DeLillo from his new book Silence, where people speak gibberish once their digital world is mysteriously taken down and they wander in the dark.  We are in the dark now, even though the lights and screens are still shining for the time being.

Let those who think I am wrong about Trump and Biden being players in the same show, consider this. If Trump is truly the opponent of the Deep State, the Swamp, the corrupt establishment, he will pardon Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden who have been persecuted by these forces.  He has nothing left to lose as he exits stage right.

The journalist Julian Assange has done more than anyone to expose the sick underbelly of the gangster state, its intelligence and military secrets, its illegal and immoral killings. That is why he has been hounded and locked away for so long. It’s a bipartisan persecution of an innocent man whose only “crime” has been to tell the truth that is allegedly the essence of a democratic society.

Chelsey Manning has also suffered tremendously for exposing the savagery of U.S. military operations.

And Edward Snowden has been forced into Russian exile for telling us about the vast global surveillance systems run by the NSA and CIA to spy on the American people.

Three innocent truth-tellers at war with the Deep-State forces that Donald Trump says he opposes.

If he is what his supporters claim, he will pardon these courageous three.  It’s all in his power. A simple, clear message as he goes out the door. If by the smallest chance he does pardon them, I will be very happy and publicly apologize.  If he doesn’t, as I expect, please don’t say a word in his defense.  My ears will be stuffed with wax.  For he won’t, because, like Biden, he is controlled by the very forces that these truth-tellers have exposed.

But back to the working class “deplorables” that voted for Trump. They aren’t going anywhere.  Their grievances remain. For decades, under Democratic and Republican administrations, their lives have been hollowed out, their livelihoods taken as corporate thieves have ravaged their towns and cities by closing down the factories where they worked and sending them overseas for greater profits. Small farmers have been “liquidated” for agribusiness.

As always, the coastal urbanites have considered rural people stupid, uncouth, and clownish, as the words clown, boor, and villain have all originally meant farmer or countryman or lower-class peasant.  Such hidden etymological social class prejudices have a way of persisting over the years.

Towns and small businesses disappear, traditional values are ridiculed, drug addiction and suicide increase, the fabric of traditions crumble, etc.  This list is long.  The people who voted for Trump feel betrayed; feel like victims. Of course, as Pete Hamill wrote of the NYC white working class in 1969, there are racists among them, and with all racists, they have their reasons, but these reasons are poison and despicable. But overall, these Trump voters are, in Hamill’s words, “actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”  Any politician, he added, who leaves these people out of the political equation, does so at a very large risk.  That risk has been growing over the decades.

Yet desperate people do desperate things, and for many Americans these are desperate times.  Everywhere you look, there are long lines at food pantries and soup kitchens.  The unemployment numbers are staggering. Homelessness. Suicides.  Drug and alcohol addictions rising.  Clear signs of social disintegration.  This is true not just in the United States but is happening around the world as neo-liberal economic policies are exacerbated by the widespread lockdowns that have given rise to massive protests worldwide, protests that the corporate press has failed to publicize since doing so would give the lie to their promotions of the lockdowns.

In England, the Mirror newspaper just printed the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger’s article about his 1975 interviews with impoverished English families with this lead:

John Pilger interviewed Irene Brunsden in Hackney, east London about only being able to feed her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes in 1975. Now he sees nervous women queueing at foodbanks with their children as it’s revealed 600,000 more kids are in poverty now than in 2012.

Vast numbers of people are suffering.

Many Trump voters no doubt know that Trump was never going to save them. But he said the right things, and desperation and disgust will grasp onto the slightest will-o’-the-wisp when disbelief in the whole rotten system is widespread.

Let’s not bullshit: everyone knows the game is rigged.

Trump is a liar.

Biden is a liar.

Great Britain’s Boris Johnson is a liar.

Fill in the names of the political charlatans.

The system is built on lies to keep the illusions brightening the screen of the great picture show, what Neil Gabler has rightly called “life the movie.”

Biden voters no doubt desperately hope that we can go back to some semblance of “normal,” even while knowing this is a losing game. Many of them try hard to conceal their true feelings, that their hatred for Trump and their love of living in times when imperialism is concealed as democracy is what they want. They don’t want to know. Concealment of the atrocious underbelly of normal is their hope and desire, even while they too are being fleeced and secretly know that the “new normal” will be far from their restorative dreams.  There are exceptions, of course, true believers who think Biden will significantly change things, but I would say they are a very small minority.  Many Biden voters say they have voted for the “lesser of two evils,” an old, worn-out excuse that in a rigged system will perdure.

Little changes. The past lives on.

Next year’s Academy Awards will be interesting.  A wit I know suggested that perhaps Trump and Biden will be nominees for the Best Actor in a Leading Role and they will tie for the Oscar.  That will be the second time that has ever happened.  The first was in 1932 when Fredric March and Wallace Beery shared the award.  March starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Beery in the boxing film, The Champ.

Both winners will be announced as starring in the same film, confusing the audience until it’s named: The American Nightmare.  Then raucous cheering will erupt from the jaded audience.  Dr. Jekyll will embrace Mr. Hyde and the melded Champ will take a bow as he winks for the cameras.

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

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

Featured image is from Sky News

Reports on the death of senior Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh signals another dangerous turn in Washington’s systematic attempts to undermine and overthrow the current government of Iran.  

The Western media is framing the assassination as a unilateral operation carried out by Israel with the New York Times in an article titled, “Assassination in Iran Could Limit Biden’s Options. Was That the Goal?,” claiming:

Intelligence officials say there is little doubt that Israel was behind the killing — it had all the hallmarks of a precisely timed operation by Mossad, the country’s spy agency. And the Israelis have done nothing to dispel that view. 

The article also claimed:

But Mr. Netanyahu also has a second agenda.

“There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,” he declared shortly after it became clear that Mr. Biden — who has proposed exactly that — would be the next president.

The New York Times assumes that Biden genuinely wanted to return to the 2015 nuclear agreement – officially known as the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – and insists that it is up to Iran whether or not that possibility still remains.

The article claims:

If Iran holds off on significant retaliation, then the bold move to take out the chief of the nuclear program will have paid off, even if the assassination drives the program further underground.

And if the Iranians retaliate, giving Mr. Trump a pretext to launch a return strike before he leaves office in January, Mr. Biden will be inheriting bigger problems than just the wreckage of a five-year-old diplomatic document.

But there is a third option – if the US or Israel – or both – stage an event meant to look like an Iranian retaliation to help ensure the nuclear deal is permanently buried and only a path toward escalation lies ahead for Washington.

And this third option is the most likely. More than mere speculation – this conclusion is drawn from US policy papers produced by corporate-funded policy think tank – the Brookings Institution.

Their 2009 paper (PDF) titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran,” had not only called for the US to disingenuously offer Iran an opportunity to escape from under US sanctions, but admitted that the offer would be deliberately sabotaged by the US and used as a pretext toward further escalation.

Thus the JCPOA was doomed before it was even signed in 2015 – with US policymakers fully determined to scrap it at the most opportune time and then incrementally ratchet up pressure on Iran.

And while the US posed as “peacemaker” with Iran in 2015 – at the same time it waged proxy war on Iran’s closest ally in the region – Syria – aiming to overthrow the Syrian government and thus further isolating and encircling Iran itself.

Two quotes in particular from the 2009 Brookings document are revealing in regards to the ill-fated JCPOA and what is most likely to follow this most recent assassination as well as the prospects for Biden’s “desire” to restart the deal after taking office next year.

First the document claims (emphasis added):

…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.) 

Next, the document claims:

In a similar vein, any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.

Creating the deal, sabotaging it, and using it as a pretext to pursue military aggression against Iran was always the plan – long before the JCPOA was ever signed.

With prospects of the plan being revived already unlikely – and more so with this recent escalation – the only path left and just as Brookings in their 2009 paper planned years ago, is toward wider conflict between the US and Iran.

Whether this conflict unfolds as American policymakers envisioned over a decade ago or US power in the Middle East evaporates before this plan is fully realized – only time will tell – and depends widely on not only Iran’s patience and skill – but also on that of its allies in Moscow and even Beijing.

For the US who still clings to the illusion of leading a “rules based international order” – assassinating scientists half-way across the planet either directly or through its Israeli proxies – is only further evidence of just how desperately the world needs to move on with such an order left far behind.

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This article was originally published on Land Destroyer Report.

Brian Berletic is an independent geopolitical analyst based in Bangkok, Thailand and a regular contributor to New Eastern Outlook. You can support him and his work at Land Destroyer via Patreon here. 

On Tuesday, December 1, 2020, Canadians will take action right across the country to FREE MENG WANZHOU, who will have been under house arrest in Vancouver for two full years on that date.

In brief, the sponsors seek the release of Ms. Meng – through a simple order by Justice Minister Lametti – because they see her arrest and extradition at the request of the Trump Administration as a means by which it tried to drag Canada into a new cold war with China.

Disturbing elements of this new cold war with China are a rising tide of hostility towards Asian-Canadians and the illegal attempt, orchestrated through the Fives Eyes Intelligence Network, to prohibit Ms. Meng’s company, Huawei Technologies, from participating in the Canadian deployment of a 5g internet network. 1300 lucrative, high-tech, Canadian jobs are at stake. The sponsoring organizations are also united in the belief that Canada must develop an independent foreign policy, which is sadly lacking in the Trudeau government of today.

There will be three different avenues of protest on Dec. 1st. The first course of protest will be a cross-country day of informational pickets at courthouses, MP’s constituency offices, and other governmental sites. These socially-distant and masked events have been deliberately kept small to comply with public health restrictions in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The second course of action will be a selfie day in support of Ms. Meng. A selfie poster has been distributed, which Canadians are asked to pose with, and to send the selfies to their MP’s, post on social media, and forward to our campaign for compilation. The selfie poster is attached.

The third course of action will be an Action Alert message, distributed through the offices of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, to all members of Parliament.

The Cross-Canada Day of Action follows closely upon the heels of the Zoom to Free Meng Wanzhou,  a successful panel discussion involving two MP’s, namely, the NDP’s Niki Ashton and Green’s Paul Manly. 261 people attended that online event on Zoom and more than 1000 watched it livestreamed on Facebook. In addition, it was widely reported in the Canadian media.

The sponsors of the Cross-Canada Day of Action are World Beyond War, the Canadian Peace Congress, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, and Just Peace Advocates.

People seeking additional information are urged to contact the author.

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Ken Stone is a longtime antiwar, environmental, anti-racism, and social justice activist. He is treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a writer for Global Research. He may be reached at 905-383-7693 or [email protected].

Featured image is from the author

Ryan Costello, Policy Director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), issued the following statement on reports of the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who led Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program until it was shelved in the early 2000s. Israel and the U.S. have long been linked to assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted Fakhrizadeh as pivotal to any Iranian weaponization possibilities in 2018.

“If confirmed, the assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is yet another reckless step that appears intended to poison the well for negotiations under a Biden administration and set the stage for war. Coming shortly after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani earlier this year, the killing of a scientist who formerly directed Iran’s shelved military nuclear program risks war between Iran, the U.S. and Israel.

“President Elect Biden has made clear his desire to return to the negotiating table and the international agreement that restrained Iran’s nuclear program, signaling an end to the failed pressure-only approach directed by Trump and cheered on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi kingdom. This dramatic escalation in the waning days of the Trump presidency appears to be part of a scorched earth approach to sabotaging diplomacy and locking the U.S. and Iran onto the war path. While Iran reacted with relative restraint after one of its nuclear facilities was destroyed in an act of sabotage over the summer, each new step weakens those advocating restraint and empowers those advocating confrontation.

“Assassinations, sabotage, sanctions and military confrontation have all accelerated the U.S. and Iran on the path to war as well as resulted in an expanding Iranian nuclear program. The killing of military men and scientists will only result in their replacement and Iran accelerating their pursuit of credible deterrents. By contrast, sincere diplomacy managed to overcome decades of mistrust and take the dual threats of war and an Iranian nuclear weapon off the table. It has taken President Trump the better part of four years to return those threats to the fore.

“There is still space for urgent diplomacy to stop a rush to war. Conflict is not inevitable. But it will require restraining those in Washington and around the region who are determined to plunge forward into war.”

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Featured image is from NIAC

“Petitioners appear to have a viable claim that the mail-in ballot procedures set forth in Act 77 contravene Pa. Const. Article VII Section 14 as the plain language of that constitutional provision is at odds with the mail-in provisions of Act 77.”- PA Judge Patricia McCullough

In one ruling, a bombshell.

Issued in the late evening this past Friday by Pennsylvania Commonwealth judge, Patricia McCollough, her bold– and absolutely correct– ruling is about to make Nov 27, 2020 the day that the highly questionable 2020 election blew to pieces.

To make matters worse for the Dems, the same day, just down the street from Judge McCollough’s chambers, civil war broken out on the floor of the PA State House.  Outraged Republicans announced they would proceed, post haste, to pass a resolution that,

“Declares that the selection of presidential electors and other statewide electoral contest results in this commonwealth is in dispute” and “urges the secretary of the commonwealth and the governor to withdraw or vacate the certification of presidential electors and to delay certification of results in other statewide electoral contests voted on at the 2020 general election.”

Thinking ahead to the Electoral College:

“urges the United States Congress to declare the selection of presidential electors in this Commonwealth to be in dispute.”

That’s as polite as civil war gets.

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When both McCullough’s decision and the PA’s awakening are considered in detail The Keystone State has, after more than two centuries, once again become the epicenter of the war for American democracy.

Over the past three weeks, this ongoing report has documented the intricacies of: the US Electoral College, Media’s complicity as partisan censorship, the initial allegations of mail-in ballot fraud, and the inner workings of American voting machines. All are players in this high stakes drama unfolding before the eyes of all Americans.

If they look.

Outrage is increasing; slowly becoming bi-partisan contempt. Except in the media that has buried this news.

As the author, next in the series, began to examine the illegal, if not unconstitutional, self-serving mandates imposed on the voters by many States’ Legislatures, their Governors and their Secretaries of State, this past Wednesday a story leaked out that lite the fuse of Friday’s bombshell.

In power politics there are few checkmates, but political irony is coming in the form of two previous court decisions, and judge McCollough’s, and are about to force feed these decisions to the DNC’s masters of the universe… for a second time in thirteen days.

This, is the stuff of history!

Three Weeks in November.    

As has been suggested previously that all the salacious allegations across the battleground states are legally, for the moment, nothing more than circumstantial evidence. Yes, thee allegations are important and together may have much weight eventually in court. This was evidenced by Trump’s handlers losing their case repeatedly in a multitude of jurisdictions.

What has been missing has been a constitutional challenge born of its own merits. Strangely, as the reader will see, those merits became obvious- in writing- first on Nov 3 and again on Nov 6.

When a new law suit was filed on Monday, Nov 23 in PA using purely constitutional reasoning bolstered by the allegation directly germane to the argument, this author snapped to attention. It’s been a very busy week.

On Wed Nov. 25, 2020, PA Commonwealth Judge Patricia McCullough ordered the state, “to not take any further steps to complete the certification of the presidential race”, which the state already announced on Tuesday. In calling for a Friday hearing, McCullough added, “Respondents are preliminarily enjoined from certifying the remaining results of the election, pending the evidentiary hearing.” [Emph. added]

McCullough was presiding over a lawsuit brought by Republican affiliates against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf (D), Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly. All four were instrumental, it is alleged, in the unconstitutional passage of Pennsylvania’s absentee ballot and vote-by-mail statute: Act 77. A copy of that action is provided here.

In short, the PA legislature too hastily crafted Act 77 which allowed, in part, for virtually all unregulated mail-in ballots to be tabulated. However, Act 77 was created in violation of PA state statutes and constitutional law. Boockvar knew it, as did the PA Supreme Court. So did SCOTUS, before it put a temporary stop to some of these rather limited but highly effective vote counting irregularities on Nov 5.

At the very moment that this ruling permeated the last remnants of quality American journalism, a storm of a different kind was blowing an ill wind for state democrats in a conference room in Harrisburg, PA.

Upon the request of Pennsylvania Senator Doug Mastriano (R), the state’s Senate Majority Policy Committee was holding a public hearing, on Thursday, to discuss these election issues and irregularities. Outside thousands rallied with their demands that their currently elected officials do their duty.

This, for most, of course, translated into “toss the election to Trump,” but, interestingly, the additional presence of many banners and signs suggested a growing non-partisan call to, “Investigate!”

Echoing the days old of SCOTUS Associate Justice, Samuel Alito, Mastriano said,

“Elections are a fundamental principle of our democracy – unfortunately, Pennsylvanians have lost faith in the electoral system…Over the past few weeks, I have heard from thousands of Pennsylvanians regarding issues experienced at the polls …We need to correct these issues to restore faith in our republic.”

At the public hearing, Trump consiglieri Rudy Giuliani appeared as point man with his usual layout of many allegations and presentation of witnesses. Certainly, this hearing was a very partisan showing of self-serving facts by a legion of GOP sponsored camera moths, but their testimony was indeed pause for further investigation; not a cover-up.

The more important charges were:

• 47 memory cards containing over 50,000 votes are missing.
• PA’s registry shows 1.8 million absentee ballots were mailed out, yet 2.5 million mail-in ballots were counted.

Of course, not one MSM source covered the hearing and, as punishment for his efforts, Twitter disabled the Mastriano’s account as it did to the author last week. It should be noted now by all that being banned by Twitter, Facebook- and even Parler- is quickly becoming, in the minds of Americans, not censorship, but certification of the allegations themselves.

As goes PA, the voters in both GA and MI will soon watch special sessions of their state congresspersons begin to factually examine very similar claims as those in PA. Other states are sure to follow, if not, their own politicians with stand guilty by the same association to a silent and corrupt media.

Little of this, however, had a purely constitutional foundation.

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To understand the constitutional strength of the civil suit before McCollough in PA a good example is already on the books of Election 2020 and it comes by way of, strangely, California..

On election eve Monday, Nov 3 a California judge ruled that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) overstepped his authority when he issued an executive order amending state election law and thus required mail-in ballots to be sent to every registered voter amid the COVID-19 pan-panic.

In her ruling, Sutter County Superior Court Judge, Sarah Heckman, said that Newsom’s order was “an unconstitutional exercise of legislative power.”

In March, Newsom, like many officials in other states, declared a state of emergency in CA due to the alleged spreading of COVID-19. Three months later, in June, Newsom issued a blanket executive order to send mail-in ballots to all registered California voters. Overall, Newsom issued more than fifty orders that changed a number of state laws under the auspices of the California Emergency Services Act (CESA). That law gives the governor the authority to issue orders and rules while suspending certain laws during a declared state of emergency.

But California GOP Assemblymen James Gallagher and Kevin Kiley filed suit against Newsom, claiming his mail-in vote order was a gross abuse of power and an overreach. In May, former GOP Rep. Darrell Issa also filed suit against Newsom, along with Judicial Watch, in which they, too, claimed the order was “unconstitutional.”

Heckman did not overturn Newsom’s state of emergency but ruled the CESA,

“does not authorize or empower the governor of the state of California to amend statutory law or make new statutory law, which is exclusively a legislative function not delegated to the governor under the CESA.”

In an interstate summation of Newsom’s violations, and those in PA and other states,  Heckman wrote in finality:

 “…the Constitution gives the legislative branch the exclusive authority to make law and the executive branch the power to see that the law is faithfully executed.”

Heckman’s words may very soon be re-written even more powerfully by SCOTUS, a court, that on Nov 6 already agreed with Heckman. Both have embodied in their words a singular constitutional prerogative:

Article II Sect 1, Clause Two of the Constitution of the United States of America.

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Returning to PA and Judge McCullough, unilateral violations of PA constitutional provisions and procedures by the legislature are at the foundation of the matter.

As referenced in part two of this series, previously three weeks ago U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, on Friday, Nov 6, ordered very publically overruled the PA Supreme Court and Pennsylvania state election officials to segregate and separately count mail-in ballots that arrived after 8 PM on Election Day. Many PA counties did not honor Alito’s injunction.

Alito’s injunction was a direct result of the PA Supreme court playing fast and loose with US Article II Sect 1, Clause two and the PA constitution as well.

To  understand the PA Supreme Courts outrageous decision is to understand a court that cared not for either.

In 2019, the PA legislature passed a law called Act 77 that, among other provisions, permitted all voters to cast their ballots by mail but, in Justice Alito’s words,

“unambiguously required that all mailed ballots be received by 8 p.m. on election day.”

This was, by using plain English and the PA constitution, absolutely true.

Indeed, the exact text from the 2019 Pa. Leg. Serv. Act 2019-77, reads,

“No absentee ballot under this subsection shall be counted which is received in the office of the county board of elections later than eight o’clock P.M. on the day of the primary or election.”

Even more prohibitively, Act 77 also provided that if any portion of Act 77 was ever invalidated, the entirety of Act 77, including its liberalization of absentee balloting voting, would also be immediately void.

Pretty clear so far, except if you’re on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Like the edicts imposed by Calif’s Gov. Brylcrèem, just as outrageously the PA Supreme Court attempted to use Emergency Powers created for the mythic Coronavirus to justify a strange emergency ruling. The court ruled that mailed ballots did not need to be received by election day at 8 PM. Further, that ballots can be accepted if they are postmarked on election day or received within three days thereafter. Next, the court allowed that a mailed ballot with no postmark, or an illegible postmark, must be regarded as timely if it is received by that same date.

The SCOTUS injunction of Nov 6 put a temporary stop to all that. However, when Trump attorneys tried to effect certiorari with the court on their allegation of fraud, SCOTUS was reticent. A 4-4 vote sent Trump’s forces back to the lower courts to seek further relief.

Of course, MSM called this a defeat for Trump. It was really just a moot attempt applied to the incorrect jurisdiction and court venue and no more than a “nice try” that SCOTUS had seen before.

Make no mistake. SCOTUS can afford to be patient and has a long historical track record of watching dramatic cases unfold before their eyes while within the pleadings of their lower courts.

So, here were the voters of PA as of this past Monday morning, in a lower court. A court and a judge that already had in mind the previous words of wisdom of Calif. Judge Heckman, and the days-old admonishment of Alito, who similarly assessed regarding the “nice try,” of the PA Supreme Court:

 “The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.” [Emph. Added]

With these words, Alito is directly referring to the established law of the land in America: Article II Sect 1, Clause two of the US Constitution

So, at the evidentiary hearing, this Friday Judge Mc McCullough likely had a firm grasp of all these words of wisdom. Perhaps, also, the shouts of an ever maddening public just outside her courtroom walls.

What Judge McCullough had most in mind, however, is the PA Constitution and its own legally required provisions under Article VII, Sect 14.

In a hangman’s twist of political and judicial irony that will soon extract a dark irony all of its own, the Dems have filed an emergency petition in court to immediately block Judge McCullough’s ruling. That court:

The Supreme Court of the State of Pennsylvania.

For any political aficionado, it doesn’t get any better than that.

MATERIAL FACTS.

Article VII of the PA Constitution allows for only two kinds of votes to be cast in the Keystone State. One: In Person. Two: Absentee.

However, and here was the consideration for Judge McCullough: Only under the expressed provisions and restrictions of Art VII Sect. 14 can Article VII be changed. No exceptions. Further, these provisions can only be amended by using a mandated process under Article VI Sect.1.

Article VII provides,

“provision[s] underlining the limited circumstances under which an elector is permitted to vote without being present at a polling location- Absentee Voting.”

In the rush to put in place Act 77, PA failed to follow this prescribed methodology that could, at least, only have been finalized as completed legislation during the following state election scheduled for May 18, 2021.

It would appear that the Biden forces realized this mistake

Unconstitutionally, Gov. Tom Wolf (D) signed Article 77 into law on Oct 31, 2019. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, these same PA legislators were scrambling to have the PA Supreme Court come to their rescue by using COVID-19 and emergency powers as the reason to approve the arbitrary mail-in ballot provisions added to Act 77, which Alito rebuked.

The current suit cites that, as to all current changes to absentee ballot regulations, PA has had no legal changes since being amended in1967. Further, the suit states that at that time the PA legislature did correctly follow both law and precedent in creating and subsequently passing these amended statutes so long ago.

The suit also alleged that the current PA legislature and its spawn ART 77, did not.

Art VI Sect 1 provides the only permissible methodology for changing absentee voting rules- or any other part of the PA constitution- in any way at any time. To do so, this statute first requires a majority vote of a joint session of the State House and Senate, not once, but twice and in succession.

Those two vote results and intended legislation, if successful, must then be advertised as pending in two newspapers in each and every PA county for a full three months before the next scheduled State General Election. At the time of that election, the Bill must be presented to the voter as a ballot question about amending the statute, or not. A simple majority must agree.

The PA legislature is deficient on all but one count. They did vote collectively for Act 77 and to change absentee voting rules, but only once on April 29, 2020.

In violating these provisions, the legal actions now before judge McCullough claim Act 77 and all its related mail-in ballots to be constitutionally invalid.

That’s a bunch of votes. Potentially, 2.5 million.

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Act 77 started its life first as Bill 411 and was then rolled into Bill 413 on March 9, 2019. The Bill passed the Senate on Oct 22, 2019, and made its way out of the House committee on April 6, 2020. Interestingly, by then the words, “Mail-in Balloting” had been removed from the title of the Bill after it was sent to the House.

Then S.B. 413 was passed, one time only, by both House and Senate on April 29.

Act 77 functionally crossed out almost all of Art. VII sect. 14 which required any eligible voter to, when first requesting an absentee ballot, “provide a permissible reason to do so” before being sent a ballot.

It did not provide for the mass mailing of unsolicited ballots to the entire PA voting constituency.

The PA mandate that an absentee voter first personally and individually request a ballot is a significant requirement and protection. This allows for the initial substantiation and likely legitimacy of that mail-in vote when received by the state. It also significantly eliminates the temptation towards massive endemic election fraud by mail-in ballots.

Article VII sect. 5 does allow for the advent of the possibility of other methods of absentee voting, but only “as may be prescribed by law.”

As to this possibility of an amendment, Art VII sect 14 allows for changes only if “The legislature, by general law, provide [such] a manner.” General law means, Article VII, Sect 5 and Article VI, Sect 1.

Translated into plain English: Hillary, …you have a problem!

A Multi-State Pandemic.

As of Friday night’s, ruling and keeping in mind Alito’s words and the previous decision of CA judge Heckman, the magnitude of McCollough’s ruling has equally dramatic national implications.

Across America, many other state governors and Secretaries of State also ignored their state’s constitutional procedural mandates thinking that a medical virus would allow the cover to affect a political one.

The voters of at least the states of AZ, GA, MI, MT, NV, IA, ND, VT and WI had their Sec.of State also required unsolicited absentee ballots to be sent out statewide while citing a virus as the reason. Considering the PA example, it is very likely that their unilateral decisions are also in violation of state constitutional law. In NV a state court also helped matters along when refusing to accept a similar challenge from private citizens.

Certainly, these violations with respect to the outcome of the US election matter little in many of these states. However, the voters in every state should be just as outraged as in PA. since the ruse that was a virus-induced rationale for canvassing any state with absentee ballots, and/ or eliminating almost all restriction on other types of mail-in ballots, should now be obvious to anyone following the litany of allegations mounting daily in their own state.

It does indeed seem evident that all of this was by design.

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In GA, WI, MI, however, the states that do matter in their effect on the Electoral College totals for president, all three are at this moment in court and under legal action to petition these state courts to stop and then rectify similar unilateral political moves.

MSM would have their voters believe that, since these states have managed to certify their election results under very dubious circumstances, the matter is settled. AS is the case now in PA, nothing is settled until the Electoral College on each state certifies its slate of electors on Dec 14.

That’s two more weeks.

As a previous article highlighted, Trump and his minions had no choice but to be patient and allow for certification before beginning serious legal challenges that may move through state and district courts and then all the way to SCOTUS.

As of Thanksgiving Day, if Trump’s lawyers as smart as those in PA, three new judges will soon be facing a similar constitutional determination as McCullough, Heckman, and Alito. Like the PA lower courts, in the other three battleground states, politicians have already attempted to ignore their own state’s constitutions, not examined evidence, nor considered the merits of the plaintiff’s- the voter’s- claim.

Today, Former Assist. US attorney, Sidney Powell finally delivered her, much advertised “Kraken” to the courts in both MI and GA.  Previously in GA, noted attorney Lin Wood served his own legal action regarding mail-in voting not being constitutionally approved. Wood had his suit quashed by U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg, who refused to grant standing to Wood’s claims and thus avoided any court examination of evidence or constitutional claims.

Powell has waited until the GA vote was certified. If her salacious accusations of the past week are accurate she will be providing evidence of voter fraud along with allegations of constitutional violations of absentee voting statutes in a manner very similar to PA.

Previously, U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross, an Obama appointee wrote that voters must be protected during the coronavirus pandemic, when record numbers of Georgians were expected to cast absentee ballots and then extended the deadline for absentee ballots to be returned in Georgia, ruling that they must be counted if postmarked by Election Day and delivered up to three days afterwards.

This, like the PA Supreme Court’s abuse of power, is certainly unconstitutional per US Art II, Sect 1, Clause two as referenced above.

That GA judge’s decision likely resulted in tens of thousands of ballots being counted after Nov. 3 that would have otherwise been rejected, and enough to swing this close election, since Ross, all by herself, invalidated Georgia’s requirement that ballots had to be received at county election offices by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

In MI, similar violations have allowed Powell to virtually cut and paste the GA legal filing when introducing it to the MI courts.

Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) unilaterally voided the legal requirement that voters provide a signature when requesting an absentee ballot, establishing instead an online request form. She then took things a step further by announcing that she would “allow civic groups and other organizations running voter registration drives to register voters on their behalf through the state’s online registration website,” granting activist and partisan groups such as Rock The Vote direct access to Michigan’s voter rolls.

Since the MI legislature had not created this new law, Ross did so with a stroke of her pen. In doing so she became a co-conspirator in this growing indictment of MI election fraud.

Up in WI, the election is not yet certified. For Trump, the case in point may be the reports that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) told poll workers to ‘add a missing witness address’ to any deficient ballot and that some poll workers allegedly took it one step further by signing for non-existent witnesses.

If proven true in court, these workers, who have testified to these illegal instructions, may have invalidated thousands of more ballots, committed a felony offence and necessitated further SCOTUS intervention.

Wisconsin Statute 6.86 provides that: 

“an absentee ballot must be signed by a witness, who is also required to list his or her address. If a witness address is not listed, then the ballot is considered invalid and must be returned to the voter to have the witness correct.”

“The statute is very, very clear,” said retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, a Milwaukee poll watcher on Election Day. “If an absentee ballot does not have a witness address on it, it’s not valid.”

It is a safe bet that the Trump minions will proceed similarly to court within hours of certification.

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The Only Effective Vaccine.

At this point in the story, and with voter interest growing, refusal by any court to provide some degree of investigation will encourage a popular voter revolt on their streets and likely on their doorsteps. Should these judges perform their duty to the voter-not the DNC- when they commence these proceedings they will be faced with a difficult and simple constitutional polar choice of decision.

Beyond technicality, wholesale denial of the allegations, or a court refusing standing to the many voter plaintiffs and their allegations, these politicians, judges, and legislators now under popular attack will have only one remaining affirmative defense to offer,

“The virus made me do it.”

This argument did not work previously in CA with judge Heckman nor with SCOTUS judge Alito. So, the choice becomes a simple one for these judges:

One: Allow a virus- a political one- to prevail within their courts and next infect all others.

Or…

Two: Vaccinate publicly, in court, the voters of their states against a national pandemic of viral democratic corruption.

With each day and new civil suit, it appears more probable that it will ultimately be up to SCOTUS to make this all-important polar choice. A landmark choice that will likely decide America’s true future beginning the very next day.

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The still-developing story of the election conspiracy of 2020 has, yesterday, taken on the greatest of importance. Election 2020 has revealed many important facts, yet all are almost exclusively covered over by American media which must be considered also a co-conspirator. Why have you not heard this week’s historic news? Well, that’s a rhetorical question now, isn’t it?

As this series has progressed, evidence of demonstrative state-by-state election fraud, the complicity of the Dominion voting machines, and the dire need for these states to invoke the Electoral College to stop this political virus from destroying the body politic of a nation, have been offered in these pages as a furthering of this collective indictment.

In PA, this Friday’s call to take back the power of the Electoral College from one Secretary of State of questionable motives, and place it in the hands of a full body of elected officials, is an advent that will almost assuredly be repeated in other states. The public will demand it. Probably before Dec 14.

The most powerful and necessary vaccine, factual investigation, must now be jabbed, not into the arms, but directly into the foreheads of all Americans of any party affiliation before their country and their democracy dies the violent death of American color revolutions past.

As has been suggested, a purely political virus has utilized the virus known as Covid-19 to great effect: That of anointing, not electing, Joe Biden president.

If the state and federal courts fail in their proper duty, there is but one court remaining.

This court has failed the American public in the past, most famously with the Citizens United decision. Will it fail once again at this Rubicon of American history?

Of which of the two polar choices that “the highest court in the land” ultimately allows to prevail, Americans are increasingly bearing witness and closer scrutiny each day.

It seems an increasing probability that this political football of Election 2020 will require a landmark decision and will soon be punted as high and as long as it possibly can.

However, when that ball finally lands in the dramatic days to come, it will do so upon the grounds of the most important location in Washington, DC:

#1 First Street.

Perhaps, too long ago, there was a damn good reason for providing SCOTUS with that address.

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has authored and published over 180 in-depth articles over the past twelve years. Many have been translated and republished worldwide. He can be reached at: live-on-scene ((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

On November 4, the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) came under attack by the provincial government in the northern Tigray region.

Reports indicate that numerous ENDF personnel were killed while the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) local leadership declared that the administration of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali in Addis Ababa as being illegitimate.

Between 1991 and 2018, the TPLF was the dominant political party within the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) which had fought the former government of Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the ruler of the country from 1974 to the early 1990s. Mengistu was aligned with the former Soviet Union, the Eastern European socialist countries and Cuba. He was a part of the armed forces grouping known as the Derg, the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC), which seized power from the Monarchy under the control of H.I.M. Haile Selassie in 1974 amid a national uprising inside the country.

With the advent of unrest in Ethiopia during early 2018, the former EPRDP leadership of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned from office. Hailemariam said he wanted to pave the way for much-needed reforms creating the conditions for the rise of the incumbent administration of Abiy.

Abiy has described the conflict as an internal matter which does not require the diplomatic and military intervention of the African Union (AU), whose Secretariat is based in Addis Ababa, along with the United Nations and other international bodies. The deliberate and rapid military actions taken by the ENDF was characterized by the Ethiopian government as a law-enforcement operation.

A delegation from the AU visited Ethiopia for discussions with Abiy on November 27. The talks appeared to have been cordial resulting in the issuing of communiques by both the delegation empowered by the current AU Chairperson South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and the federal government in Addis Ababa.

A report published by AllAfrica.com says of the meeting between the AU delegation and Abiy that:

“African Union envoys meeting Friday with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali ended with no apparent progress towards averting an attack on Mekelle, capital of the northern Tigray region. Abiy has demanded that regional forces surrender and urged international actors not to intervene, saying Ethiopia is capable of resolving the situation internally. The envoys, three former presidents – Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Mozambique’s Joaquim Chissano and Kgalema Motlanthe from South Africa – have been seeking a negotiated solution for the conflict, which has already displaced 43,000 Ethiopians, according to UNHCR. In a statement after the meeting, Abiy expressed ‘utmost gratitude to President Cyril Ramaphosa & his Special Envoys for their concerted effort to understand our rule of law operations,’ he said in a Tweet. ‘Receiving the wisdom & counsel of respected African elders is a precious continental culture that we value greatly in Ethiopia.’ The African Union in a communique described the positions outlined by the prime minister but gave no indication of any further actions by the envoys.” (See this)

Military Clashes Resulting in Humanitarian Crisis

Even though the Ethiopian government has declared victory in the current conflict, TPLF leaders at present are refusing to concede and vowing to continue the fight against the ENDF. The clashes between the ENDF and TPLF loyalists has prompted the departure from the country of tens of thousands of Ethiopians from various nationalities and regions.

Many of the refugees are temporarily settling in eastern Sudan where humanitarian agencies are reporting on their status in a country which is itself undergoing a political transition. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a November 26 article that those displaced number around 40,000.

The report emphasizes:

“UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and its partners are delivering and distributing life-saving aid, including hot meals, water and latrines for the arrivals. Staff at the Hamdayet border crossing in Kassala State and the Lugdi crossing in Gedaref State, are registering thousands of new arrivals each day. The most vulnerable refugees including older people, pregnant and lactating women and children are receiving special care, including supplementary feeding. But the humanitarian response continues to face logistical challenges. The relocation of refugees away from the border is hampered by logistics and distances, limiting the number of people being transferred to Um Rakuba camp in Gedaref, some 80 kilometres inside Sudan.” (See this)

International Dimensions of the Internal Conflict

Although it has been nearly three decades, the role of the United States government in the current political crisis in Ethiopia cannot be overlooked. Under the administration of former President George H.W. Bush, Sr. in May 1991, the U.S. State Department encouraged and facilitated the seizure of power by the EPRDF.

This was the period of decline and dissolution of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies which had played an enormous role in the efforts by the Mengistu government to create a socialist society under the leadership of the Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE).  Herman Cohen, the-then U.S. Undersecretary for African Affairs, had been involved in negotiations to bring about peaceful settlement to the wars in Ethiopia between the Mengistu administration and the EPRDF. Cohen emerged from the talks held in London issuing a statement recognizing the TPLF-EPRDF as the legitimate government in Ethiopia.

In the early phase of the EPRDF government in Addis Ababa, there was extensive military cooperation with the U.S. Ethiopia at the aegis of Washington under successive Republican and Democratic administrations engaged in military operations in neighboring Somalia, which is still not stable even decades after direct and indirect interventions by Washington. Relations with the U.S. and Britain had been very close from the time of the Italian occupation during 1935-1941 to the post World War II period of the Cold War.

When Ethiopia experienced a Revolution stemming from demonstrations and strikes in the early months of 1974, the mass sentiment among many inside the country was in opposition to U.S. foreign policy. Ethiopia turned towards the socialist camp, declaring itself marxist-leninist and eventually attempting to form a vanguard party. Yet the internal problems of the sectional conflicts with the Tigray and Oromo groups prevented the WPE from consolidating its national development policies. In addition, a war of independence waged by Eritrea against the central government lasted from 1961-1991, when the former Italian colony declared itself a sovereign state and two years later, after a referendum on independence was recognized by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor of the AU, and the United Nations.

Former Assistant Secretary of State Cohen is still denying rumors related to his political bias towards the EPRDF. A twitter post by Cohen said of the resurfaced allegations that: “I was surprised to see frivolous rumors alleging I have taken money from the TPLF. There is no truth to this.” (See this)

An Ethiopian news agency, Borkena.com, reported during mid-November that many people consider Cohen as some sort of “political godfather” of the TPLF. The existing federal system of governance in Ethiopia which Prime Minister Abiy is trying to transcend, has been favored by Cohen. Borkena quoted a Cohen twitter post which asserts that the:

“’Best solution for #Ethiopia is a truly decentralized federal system, in which Ethiopia remains unified but each ethnic nation has the self-determination they desire. If Abiy wins militarily, [the] international community should still press for this outcome through political dialogue,’ he said.” (See this)

The formation of the Prosperity Party (PP) in December 2019 by Abiy is designed to usher in a new era of governance for the country of 110 million, the second-most populous state in Africa. It appears to many that the TPLF is attempting to rekindle its political dominance exercised during its 27-years of undisputed rule. The refusal of the TPLF to join the PP and to hold its own provincial elections after the central government postponed voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, fueled tensions with the Abiy government in Addis Ababa.

In the last several months, the administration of President Donald J. Trump has interfered in the ongoing talks to resolve the dispute between Addis Ababa and Egypt over the operations of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project which is viewed as essential for the further modernization and industrialization of the Horn of Africa state and its neighbors. After the Ethiopian government refused to accept a U.S. proposal advanced by the Trump White House, Abiy was condemned by administration.

A recent conference call over the question of “normalization” of relations between the Republic of Sudan and the State of Israel, gave an indication of the hostility directed towards Ethiopia by Washington. Trump said during the conversation that the Egyptian government would have no other choice than to “blow up” the Dam. Such reckless comments could very well have been interpreted by the TPLF as a signal from the U.S. welcoming its hostile action against the central administration of Abiy.

Attempts by the TPLF to bring Eritrea into the conflict has so far failed. Reports on November 29 from Asmara say that there have been six explosions in the capital city of Eritrea without mentioning the exact cause. (See this)

Abiy had negotiated a peace agreement with Eritrea after taking power in 2018, putting an end to the border conflict around Badme which erupted in 1998 and 2000. Abiy was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations with the Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki resulting in the signing of accords and a deepening of bilateral relations.

Since Ethiopia is an important nation within the AU and the international community, with thousands of years of history and cultural contributions, the outcomes of the present crisis will be followed closely by many people throughout the world.

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

The assassination of Tehran’s top nuclear scientist is a ploy by Israel to compel the likely US president-elect to reject diplomacy and choose military action to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambition. Which option will he choose?

Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. 

In a recent post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.

My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism's perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020

Our own societies must deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs dropped by our “defence” industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.

Divine right to rule 

In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the media’s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too, as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies, their billionaire owners and their advertisers.

Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through the doctrine of divine right, their subjects to passively submit to exploitation. Today, “mainstream” media are there to persuade us that capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the natural order of things, that this is the best economic model imaginable.

Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.

Lifeblood of empire 

There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the lifeblood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.

My latest: The new documentary on Greta Thunberg – I Am Greta – isn’t about climate change. It’s about something even more important: the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world https://t.co/uU2G6i821I

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 17, 2020

US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed. Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s appeal is not diminished.

As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.

Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive products of the “defence” industries, from fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into private hands.

The lobbies associated with these “defence” industries have every incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities, and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.

Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended, resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.

War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.

Fog of war 

For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of jail” card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.

The “fog of war” does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed, shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations and their political cronies at home.

The “fog of war” engineers the disruption of established systems of control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the licence provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that quickly become normalised. It is the disinformation that passes for national responsibility and patriotism.

Permanent austerity 

All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged an extra £16.5 billion in “defence” spending at a time when the UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing “systemic crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released last week show the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.

If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.

To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real, which means massive spending on “defence”. Such expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via their media arms.

New salesman needed 

The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as “Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded us last week. The CIA memo addressed the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed 9/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.

The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9/11 had chiefly relied on “public apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There was an urgent need to futher manipulate public opinion more decisively in favour of war.

The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which they believed would play better with European publics.

Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for peace, and would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this same effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were reminded that Obama backed these wars.

As Greenwald observes:

“Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.”

Obama-style facelift 

Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power – and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence”, or peace – are still the core western mission.

That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them, might have been shocked to learn last week that the UK still operates 145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second largest network of such bases after the US.

Such information is not made available in the UK “mainstream” media, of course. It has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site, Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of the British public are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told further belt-tightening is essential.

REVEALED — The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.

The results of a months-long investigation by @pmillerinfo https://t.co/oaffNnJlZc

— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) November 24, 2020

The UK’s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world’s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK – whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no” to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.

Ideological alchemy 

Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias and Eastasias– becomes clearer.

Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today’s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.

Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.

Quite how opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria. 

During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.

Israel’s likely reward is contained in a new bill in Congress for even more military aid than the record $3.8 billion Israel currently receives annually from the US – at a time when the US economy, like the UK one, is in dire straits.

My latest: Pompeo’s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are ‘antisemitic’ marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe https://t.co/0fLC8TKnzm

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 24, 2020

The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, “terrorism” against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.

But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of itself as a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson’s £16.5 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.

Crushed or tamed 

Anyone of significance who questions these narratives that rationalise and perpetuate war is the enemy too. Current political and legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into subservience.

Trump was initially just such a figure that needed breaking in. The CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition to Trump – helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate “scandal” – not because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies, but for two more specific reasons.

First, Trump’s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US empire depends on. Despite open disdain for him from most of the media, he was criticised more often for failing to prosecute wars enthusiastically enough rather than for being too hawkish. And second, even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued after the 2016 election by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials, Trump proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than packaging it as “intervention” intended to help women and people of colour.

But Trump’s amateurish isolationism paled in comparison to two far bigger threats to the war machine that emerged over the past decade. One was the danger – in our newly interconnected, digital world – of information leaks that risked stripping away the mask of US democracy, of the “shining city on the hill”, to reveal the tawdry reality underneath. 

Julian Assange and his Wikileaks project proved just such a danger. The most memorable leak – at least as far as the general public was concerned – occurred in 2010, with publication of a classified video, titled Collateral Murder, showing a US air crew joking and celebrating as they murdered civilians far below in the streets of Baghdad. It gave a small taste of why western “humanitarianism” might prove so unpopular with those to whom we were busy supposedly bringing “democracy”.

The threat posed by Assange’s new transparency project was recognised instantly by US officials. 

Exhibiting a carefully honed naivety, the political and media establishments have sought to uncouple the fact that Assange has spent most of the last decade in various forms of detention, and is currently locked up in a London high-security prison awaiting extradition to the US, from his success in exposing the war machine. Nonetheless, to ensure his incarceration till death in one of its super-max jails, the US empire has had to conflate the accepted definitions of “journalism” and “espionage”, and radically overhaul traditional understandings of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment.

My latest: Julian Assange was on the front line of a war to remake journalism as a true check on the runaway power of government. Journalists had a chance to ally with him. Instead they served him up as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters https://t.co/oF2nPOix49

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 2, 2020

Dress rehearsal for a coup

An equally grave threat to the war machine was posed by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Britain’s Labour party. Corbyn presented as exceptional a problem as Assange.

Before Corbyn, Labour had never seriously challenged the UK’s dominant military-industrial complex, even if its support for war back in the 1960s and 1970s was often tempered by its then-social democratic politics. It was in this period, at the height of the Cold War, that Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was suspected by British elites of failing to share their anti-Communist and anti-Soviet paranoia, and was therefore viewed as a potential threat to their entrenched privileges.

As a BBC dramatised documentary from 2006 notes, Wilson faced the very real prospect of enforced “regime change”, coordinated by the military, the intelligence services and members of the royal family. It culminated in a show of force by the military as they briefly took over Heathrow airport without warning or coordination with Wilson’s government. Marcia Williams, his secretary, called it a “dress rehearsal” for a coup. Wilson resigned unexpectedly soon afterwards, apparently as the pressure started to take its toll.

‘Mutiny’ by the army 

Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learnt the Wilson lesson: never, ever take on the “defence” establishment. The chief role of the UK is to serve as the US war machine’s attack dog. Defying that allotted role would be political suicide.

By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British establishment only in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a real danger to the militaristic status quo.

He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged specifically to challenge the premises of the “war on terror”. He explicitly demanded an end to Israel’s role as a forward base of the imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own party – and claims he was undermining “national security” – Corbyn urged a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the “defence” establishment for the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine programme, effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn’s socialist agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many billions spent in maintaining the UK’s 145 military bases around the globe back into domestic social programmes.

In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely unquestioned, Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour leader, Corbyn’s own MPs – still loyal to Blairism – sought to oust him with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper soon offered a platform to an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.

Weeks after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the general warned that the army would take “direct action” using “whatever means possible, fair or foul” to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would be “mutiny”, he said. “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.”

My latest: Corbyn's election to lead the Labour party didn't overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https://t.co/2u0Vyo0qLU

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 3, 2019

Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with American-Jewish organisations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to “run the gauntlet” as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime minister. The military metaphor was telling. 

In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added: “You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”

Smears and Brexit

After a 2017 election that Labour only narrowly lost, the Corbyn threat was decisively neutralised in the follow-up election two years later, after the Labour leader was floored by a mix of antisemitism slurs and a largely jingoistic Brexit campaign to leave Europe. 

Claims that this prominent anti-racism campaigner had overseen a surge of antisemitism in Labour were unsupported by evidence, but the smears – amplified in the media – quickly gained a life of their own. The allegations often bled into broader – and more transparently weaponised – suggestions that Corbyn’s socialist platform and criticisms of capitalism were also antisemitic. (See here, here and here.) But the smears were nevertheless dramatically effective in removing the sheen of idealism that had propelled Corbyn on to the national stage.

By happy coincidence for the power establishment, Brexit also posed a deep political challenge to Corbyn. He was naturally antagonistic to keeping the UK trapped inside a neoliberal European project that, as a semi-detached ally of the US empire, would always eschew socialism. But Corbyn never had control over how the Brexit debate was framed. Helped by the corporate media, Dominic Cummings and Johnson centred that debate on simplistic claims that severing ties with Europe would liberate the UK socially, economically and culturally. But their concealed agenda was very different. An exit from Europe was not intended to liberate Britain but to incorporate it more fully into the US imperial war machine.

Which is one reason that Johnson’s cash-strapped Britain is now promising an extra £16.5bn on “defence”. The Tory government’s priorities are to prove both its special usefulness to the imperial project and its ability to continue using war – as well as the unique circumstances of the pandemic – to channel billions from public coffers into the pockets of the establishment.

A Biden makeover 

After four years of Trump, the war machine once again desperately needs a makeover. Wikileaks, its youthful confidence eroded by relentless attacks, is less able to peek behind the curtain and listen in to the power establishment’s plans for a new administration under Joe Biden.

We can be sure nonetheless that its priorities are no different from those set out in the CIA memo of 2010. Biden’s cabinet, the media has been excitedly trumpeting, is the most “diverse” ever, with women especially prominent in the incoming foreign policy establishment. 

There has been a huge investment by Pentagon officials and Congressional war hawks in pushingfor Michèle Flournoy to be appointed as the first female defence secretary. Flournoy, like Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has played a central role in prosecuting every US war dating back to the Bill Clinton administration.

The other main contender for the spot is Jeh Johnson, who would become the first black defence secretary. As Biden dithers, his advisers’ assessment will focus on who will be best positioned to sell yet more war to a war-weary public.

The role of the imperial project is to use violence as a tool to capture and funnel ever greater wealth – whether it be resources seized in foreign lands or the communal wealth of domestic western populations – into the pockets of the power establishment, and to exercise that power covertly enough, or at a great enough distance, that no meaningful resistance is provoked.

A strong dose of identity politics may buy a little more time. But the war economy is as unsustainable as everything else our societies are currently founded on. Sooner or later the war machine is going to run out of fuel.

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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

To be a nuclear scientist in Iran is to be in danger. During the past decade, up to this week, at least four had been killed in vehicle bombings and shootouts, and several others have been targeted but survived. 

On Friday, the alleged architect of Iran’s military nuclear programme joined the ranks of the slain. Armed assassins gunned down Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in his car in an ambush in Absard city, outside the capital Tehran.

Fakhrizadeh, an officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), has been known as one of Iran’s most celebrated physicists because of his work on the country’s nuclear programme, Project 111.

When his colleague, Majid Shahriari, was assassinated in 2010, the UN described Fakhrizadeh as a leader in Tehran’s effort to acquire a nuclear warhead.

Details of Friday’s attack remain unclear, but Hossein Salami, head of the country’s Republican Guards, has accused those who targeted Fakhrizadeh of working to block Iran “from gaining access to modern science”.

There is a long history of world powers killing scientists as a form of warfare; from World War II to the Cold War, physicists and engineers have been known to turn the tide of military capabilities, making them prime targets.

Iran has blamed Israel and the United States for past assassinations of its scientists, though both countries have denied involvement.

Masoud Alimohammadi

Masoud Alimohammadi, a professor of particle physics at the University of Tehran, was killed in January 2010 by an apparent remote-controlled bomb that had been attached to his motorcycle.

At the time, Iranian government authorities, as well as his university colleagues, swore that Alimohammadi, described as “apolitical,”  had nothing to do with the country’s nuclear programme.

“He was a well-known professor but was not politically active,” Ali Moghari, director of the science department of Tehran University was quoted as saying at the time.

The year before his assassination, however, Alimohammadi had signed a letter – along with hundreds of others – expressing support for the main opposition candidate, former prime minister Mir Hussein Mousavi, in that year’s presidential elections.

Still, following his death, Iranian authorities branded Alimohammadi a government loyalist and arrested several suspects in his killing, accusing them of working for the Israeli intelligence service.

Majid Shahriari

Eleven months later, Majid Shahriari, a scientist who managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEO), was also killed.

A motorcycle driver reportedly pulled up to Shahriari’s car and attached a bomb, killing him in the explosion. His wife and driver were wounded but survived.

Then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the attack was “undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime” and western governments. Both the US and Israel denied involvement.

His colleague, Fereydoon Abbasi, was wounded in a similar attack on the same day but survived after being rushed to hospital. Abbasi was the head of the AEO at the time and was sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

The UN had described Abbasi as a senior scientist in the Ministry of Defence who had been “working closely” with Fakhrizadeh.

Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear programme also came under cyber-attack. At the time, Ahmadinejad admitted those intrusions had been successful in “creating problems for a limited number of… centrifuges with the software”.

Darioush Rezaeinejad 

Darioush Rezaeinejad became the next Iranian scientist to meet a bloody fate in July 2011. Two gunmen riding motorcycles fatally shot Rezaeinejad one Saturday afternoon, wounding his wife in the attack.

A doctoral student at Khajeh Nasroldeen Toosi University, Rezaeinejad was thought to have been working on a nuclear detonator, and had, according to Israeli reports, been seen frequently entering a nuclear lab in northern Tehran.

Iranian authorities rejected such intelligence, painting Rezaeinejad as nothing more than an academic.

“The assassinated student was not involved in nuclear projects and had no connection to the nuclear issue,” Iranian intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi was quoted as saying at the time.

Iran has long denied any desire to build a nuclear bomb, but western powers have insisted on its intentions to do so. Tensions in 2011 had been building, as the US, Israel and the European Union feared the country was getting close to succeeding in its alleged attempts to access fissionable material.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan

Less than a year later, in January 2012, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan became the next assassination target.

Another motorcyclist was used in the killing of Roshan, riding up to his car and attaching a magnetic bomb that killed the scientist and his driver.

Roshan was a professor at a technical university in Tehran and a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.

His death came a week after Iran’s top nuclear official announced that production was about to start at the country’s second major uranium enrichment site.

Two months earlier, the UN’s nuclear watchdog had published a report alleging that Iranian scientists were engaging in secret and continuous efforts to construct a nuclear weapon.

The AEO released a statement warning that “America and Israel’s heinous act will not change the course of the Iranian nation”.

The United States condemned the killing and denied any responsibility, while Israel’s military spokesman released a sort of non-denial denial in a statement on Facebook.

“I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist,” Brigadier-General Yoav Mordechai wrote. “But I am definitely not shedding a tear.”

Quiet until Trump

That year, serious nuclear talks began between Iran and six world powers known as the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States).

The assassinations stopped, and negotiations – which had been sporadic in years past – picked up steam. In June 2013, Hasan Rouhani, a former nuclear negotiator, became president of Iran.

By September, the newly inaugurated leader took part in a phone call with then-US president Barack Obama, marking the highest level talks between Iran and the US since 1979.

Within four months, parts of the nuclear deal had been implemented, and, by July 2015, Iran and the P5+1 announced a comprehensive deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

On 8 May 2018, US President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the multilateral nuclear accord, reinstating a series of crippling sanctions against the country.

When Iran failed to garner enough European support to pressure the United States against its escalating “maximum pressure” sanctioning campaign, it began breaking terms of the deal, restarting some parts of its shuttered nuclear enrichment programme.

Tensions between the US and Iran have been heated ever since, several times coming to what many called “the brink of war,” particularly when the Trump administration ordered the assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January this year.

President-elect Joe Biden, who worked on the Obama-era negotiations, has expressed willingness to restart talks with Iran, but concern has been growing over the outgoing president’s plans for Iran and its uranium enrichment facilities during his final weeks.

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Featured image: Killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (CC BY 4.0)

Britain’s leading supermarkets and fast food outlets are selling chicken fed on soya that has been linked to vast deforestation and thousands of fires across a vital region of tropical woodland in Brazil, an investigation has revealed.

Tesco, Asda, Lidl, Nando’s and McDonald’s source chicken produced in the UK by the agribusiness giant Cargill – America’s second biggest private company. It is estimated that Cargill ships more than 100,000 tonnes of soya beans to the UK every year from Brazil’s threatened Cerrado savannah.

Though less well known than the Amazon rainforest to its north, the Cerrado is an enormous natural biome, covering 2 million sq km of land. It is a major habitat for wildlife – home to 5% of the world’s plant and animal species – and a critical region for tackling climate change. It is also under increasing threat from industrial food production.

An investigation by the Bureau and a coalition of reporting partners has revealed the complex supply chains that bring this soya to the UK – much of it from the deforestation hotspot of the Cerrado, where allegations of land-grabbing, violence and deforestation have been rife.

Exclusive figures obtained from Aidenvironment, a research consultancy, reveal 800 sq km of deforestation and more than 12,000 recorded fires since 2015 on land used or owned by a handful of Cargill’s soya suppliers in the Cerrado. Fires are often set to clear woodland and aid agricultural expansion. Footage obtained in the investigation shows huge fires burning on a farm belonging to one of Cargill’s suppliers in October.

Cargill said it broke no rules, nor its own policies, by sourcing from the farm in question and made clear it does not source from illegally deforested land.

The broadcaster and campaigner Chris Packham said the revelations showed that consumers needed to be given more information about their food. “Most people would be incredulous when they think they’re buying a piece of chicken in Tesco which has been fed on a crop responsible for one of the largest wholesale tropical forest destructions in recent times,” he said.

“We’ve got to wake up to the fact that what we buy in UK supermarkets, the implications of that purchase can be far and wide and enormously damaging, and this is a prime example of that.”

The findings come as the British government is proposing new legislation, aimed at stamping out deforestation in British supply chains, that would make it illegal for companies to import foodstuffs linked with any illegal environmental destruction in the source country.

Campaigners and politicians say the legislation needs strengthening because it would potentially omit areas – including the Cerrado – where local laws permit significant deforestation.

“Voluntary commitments … from the private sector just don’t work, which is why we need robust UK legislation,” Kate Norgrove, director of campaigns at WWF-UK, said. “Although an important first step, the proposed approach to due diligence, relying on local laws, will not be enough. We need a legally binding UK target to end all deforestation and habitat destruction in precious landscapes like the Cerrado through our imports.”

Neil Parish, the Conservative chair of the environment select committee, said he welcomed the government’s proposals, “but this investigation shows legal deforestation is widespread, ingrained and endemic in our supply chains”.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the proposed legislation was one piece of a “much larger package of measures” to tackle deforestation. “Businesses must take greater responsibility for ensuring the resilience, traceability and sustainability of their supply chains.”

An intensive poultry farm in the UK. (By Rob Stothard)

McDonald’s, Asda, Lidl and Nando’s do not publicly say where the soya in their supply chains originates from, though Nando’s told the investigation team that its soya is from Brazil and Paraguay. Tesco states that some of the Cargill soya in its supply chains comes from the Cerrado but in 2019 it told Greenpeace it does not know the origin of much of the product it uses.

The supermarkets and fast food outlets all said they are committed to tackling deforestation in their supply chains but acknowledged there was more work to do. All these corporations recently wrote to the government in support of the proposed legislation and urged that it be expanded to cover locally legal deforestation too.

Some argue the only way to get companies to act is by applying public pressure. “It’s vital that pressure is applied to Cargill, but also to the household names like Tesco, Asda, McDonald’s and Nando’s if they are using soya from deforestation hotspots for their chicken,” said Parish. “Naming and shaming these companies is an important tool in our armoury, and our consumers deserve to know.”

Ten years ago Cargill set itself a deadline of 2020 to eliminate deforestation in its supply chains of key commodities such as soya, but admitted last year it would not be met. It has pushed back its deadline to 2030 instead. McDonald’s has given itself until 2030. Experts have repeatedly warned this is far too late.

A final refuge for wildlife

While the Amazon rainforest has become the focus of global environmental concern in recent decades, its neighbouring Cerrado region remains largely unknown to the outside world. Yet despite being much smaller than the Amazon, it has lost more of its vegetation over the 10 years to 2018, and today only half of its original cover remains.

Image on the right: A jaguar in the Cerrado. (Source: Victor Moriyama/Greenpeace)

The Cerrado’s trees, shrubs and plains are estimated to store the equivalent of 13.7bn tonnes of carbon dioxide – significantly more than China’s annual emissions. The savannah is considered a crucial part of South America’s water system and is home to many indigenous communities as well as endangered animals, including jaguars, giant armadillos and giant anteaters. It provides a habitat for more than 4,800 species of plants and animals found nowhere else on the planet.

But although traders and international NGOs agreed a ban on felling trees in the Amazon for soya production in 2006, no such agreement has ever been reached for the Cerrado. While beef production continues to drive Amazon deforestation, soya is doing the same in the Cerrado, with the region estimated to account for 90% of soya-driven deforestation in Brazil.

Global exports of Brazilian soya were linked to 500 sq km of deforestation in 2018, according to the supply chain expert Trase. Cargill is one of the world’s biggest exporters of Brazilian soya, alongside another American trader, Bunge.

Last year, Cargill publicly opposed proposals for a Cerrado soya moratorium similar to that in the Amazon. Instead it announced $30m of funding for efforts to address deforestation, but did not specify what this would be spent on. According to Reuters, in 2018 the Brazilian government’s environmental agency, Ibama, fined Cargill for trading soya originating from illegally deforested areas in the Cerrado.

Cargill said it is “committed to nourishing the world in a safe, responsible and sustainable way” and that it is aiming to build a deforestation-free soya supply chain. It added: “Cargill estimates that 96% of our soya volumes in Brazil for the 2018-19 crop year were deforestation-free … Cargill does not and will not supply soya from farmers who clear land in protected areas.”

Brazil’s farming frontier

This August, the investigation team tracked the journey of a bulk tanker, the BBG Dream, as it left Cotegipe port near the Cerrado carrying 66,000 tonnes of soya beans on a journey that included a stop into Liverpool docks. The team was able to confirm that Cargill had leased the ship and that the beans on board were from the Cerrado’s hard-hit Matopiba region – including from the heavily deforested municipality of Formosa do Rio Preto.

Some of the ship’s beans were originally supplied by Bunge and another trader, ADM, but trade data shows all the beans were unloaded into Cargill’s soya plant in Liverpool.

Matopiba is Brazil’s newest soya frontier, an expanding agricultural powerhouse that has driven the country’s record soya harvests. An exclusive new analysis by the Dutch NGO Aidenvironment has found vast deforestation and fires on land used or owned by nine Cargill suppliers in the Cerrado, mainly in Matopiba.

Some of these farms are in Formosa do Rio Preto, a municipality notorious for alleged land-grabs and violence, and for its rapid transformation from a lush biodiverse savannah into the site of many sprawling monoculture soya fields.

A soya bean silo near Formosa do Rio Preto (Source: Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace)

On just one farm in the area, Fazenda Parceiro, more than 50 sq km of vegetation was razed in the first three months of 2020 alone, according to the sustainability risk analyst Chain Reaction Research. Cargill has confirmed that it sources soya from this farm, which is owned by SLC Agrícola, one of Brazil’s biggest soya bean producers. SLC runs 17 large farms in Brazil, 10 of which are in Matopiba. More than 210 sq km of deforestation has been recorded on SLC Agrícola farms since 2015 – a total area roughly twice the size of Bristol.

Huge fires were spotted burning on Fazenda Parceiro as recently as early October and were estimated to have affected at least 65 sq km of land. There is no evidence to suggest the farm started these.

A former Fazenda Parceiro employee interviewed for this investigation said the company was under intense pressure to address deforestation in its production. In September, SLC Agrícola said the company would stop engaging in deforestation from 2021 onwards but admitted it still planned to clear around 50 sq km before the end of this year. SLC Agrícola declined a request for comment.

On another soya-growing estate, which is one of the largest in the area and not part of the new data analysis, last year Greenpeace Brazil filmed guards seemingly threatening villagers with guns.

In the UK

Once Cargill’s soya beans from Matopiba arrive on UK shores, they are processed at its soya crushing plant in Liverpool for use in animal feed. The plant sends the processed soya to Cargill’s poultry feed mills in Hereford and Banbury. Cargill runs its UK chicken operations under the banner Avara, a joint enterprise with the British producer Faccenda.

The soya is mixed with wheat and other ingredients at the feed mills, then taken to Avara’s contracted chicken farms. Identifying a typical case, the investigation established that the Hereford mill supplies a nearby farm that sends birds on to McDonald’s. Avara also supplies chicken to Asda, Lidl and Nando’s, and is the largest fresh chicken supplier to Tesco.

Avara said it has committed to eliminate deforestation in its soya supply chain by 2025. It said it is exploring ways to reduce its dependency on imported soya and that the issues raised by the investigation would only be combated by “continuing to work across the full supply chain to improve transparency”.

The findings highlight how even homegrown livestock has a global environmental impact. The UK slaughters a billion birds – the equivalent of 15 per person – every year and according to one estimate, chickens account for around 60% of the UK’s imported soya consumption.

McDonald’s serves meals to 3.5m customers a day in the UK, including McNuggets, Chicken Legends and McChicken sandwiches. It has admitted that 14% – a seventh – of the soya used in its chicken feed was not covered by any sustainability certification; the rest is covered by buying credits – similar to carbon offsetting – or other schemes. The credits support farmers producing sustainably but the actual soya in the retailers’ supply chains can still come from deforesting farms.

A McDonald’s spokesperson said: “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, yet recognise there is more to do. […] An effective approach will require strong collaboration between governments, civil society and the private sector.”

Nando’s, which also uses a credits system, said: “We recognise that there is more work to do, which is why we are also investing in research looking at more sustainable feed alternatives.”

Several British supermarkets including Asda and Lidl say they are working towards buying 100% “certified” soya by 2025. Asda said: “We understand the importance of sustainable soya to our customers and are committed to reducing food production linked to deforestation.”

Lidl GB said it is committed to sourcing sustainable and deforestation-free soya and that it was the first supermarket to cover its entire soya footprint with sustainability credits. Tesco said it has set an “industry-leading target” for its soya to come from verified “deforestation-free areas” by 2025.

“Setting fires to clear land for crops must stop,” a Tesco spokesperson said. “We are working with partners including WWF to build the industry-wide support needed to deliver this.”

Last year, Tesco committed £10m in funding to help find a solution to soya deforestation in the Cerrado. McDonald’s, Nando’s and the three supermarkets named have publicly expressed their support for a new moratorium, like that in the Amazon, to restrict deforestation for soya in the Cerrado, but opposition in Brazil has so far been successful. Cargill has publicly said it opposes a further moratorium.

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The current hearings on the extradition of Meng Wanzhou are a tangled web of legal arguments that obscure a simple truth: the Canadian government is enabling a witch hunt on the part of a right-wing Trump administration against a Chinese capitalist rival—the telecommunications giant, Huawei.

This is putting Canada in the crosshairs of the US and China, aligning us closer than ever to wayward American foreign policy, and jeopardizing the safety and security of all.

We are adding our voices to the growing campaign to demand an end to the extradition process and release Meng.

Why?

For those who have not followed the case, Meng Wanzhou is the Huawei executive who was arrested at the Vancouver airport on December 1, 2018 in response to an extradition request from the US charging her with fraud for violating sanctions against Iran.

From the outset the case seemed far-fetched and part of the Trump administration’s anti-China campaign, and we hesitated to speak out. Meng is a rich and powerful figure, vice-chair of one of the largest corporations in the world, engaged in a tit-for-tat battle with US corporations. Why get involved?

Meng also owns luxury properties in Vancouver, an emblematic target for those who indiscriminately blame “the Chinese” for the city’s housing crisis, setting the stage for the Sinophobic racism associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then the Chinese government arrested Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig on charges of allegedly “endangering state security.” Suddenly, we entered into an ‘us vs. them’ scenario, and a destructive discourse on hostage taking.

As anti-war and social justice activists who have built long-term friendships with people in China, we refuse to be caught in the crosshairs of those who would recklessly demonize an emerging economic superpower.

The growing chorus of voices demanding the release of Meng has prompted us to take a closer look at what’s been going on, particularly in the extradition hearings currently taking place in the BC Supreme Court.

And we don’t like what we see.

The US charges seem hardly supportable given that Canada does not have sanctions against Iran and the alleged crimes took place in Hong Kong, not in Canada or the US.

So how did we get here?

Canada’s Justice Holmes and the Iran sanctions

In 2015, the Obama administration waived any sanctions aimed at Iran as part of an international agreement that saw Iran limit its nuclear development program in exchange for the withdrawal of sanctions. However, when Trump assumed power, he unilaterally withdrew from the deal and re-imposed sanctions against Iran to the astonishment of most countries and the United Nations.

The Canadian government did not follow Trump’s lead and has not imposed sanctions against Iran. The decision to arrest Meng and subject her to the extradition hearings now taking place should have been a non-starter since the allegation, breaking US sanctions, is not a crime in Canada.

Meng’s lawyers have argued exactly that. In response, the judge in the extradition hearings, Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes, has shifted the focus of the deliberations away from Iran. In a ruling on the importance of Canada not having sanctions (United States v. Meng, BCSC 2020, 785), Justice Holmes came to the curious conclusion that, though she recognized that US sanction laws are not part of Canadian law, “they are also not fundamentally contrary to Canadian values as in the way that slavery laws would be, for example.”

Justice Holmes’ historical reference to slavery laws as the bottom line in Canadian values is breathtaking. It sets a bar so low that it belittles the long history of struggle for justice in this country, not to mention the fight for an independent Canadian foreign policy.

In a letter beseeching the Canadian government to release Meng, 17 prominent Canadians including former justice minister Alan Rock, former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, and former NDP leader Ed Broadbent stated that releasing Meng would not be the first time that Canada has parted ways with the US, “including on much more momentous issues, such as refusing to join in their invasion of Iraq.”

Having participated in 2003 with hundreds of thousands of other people across Canada and in Quebec in demonstrations against the proposed invasion of Iraq, we agree that it was a momentous occasion, one that reflects how Canadians value their independence despite the country being allied with the US. The failure of Justice Holmes to recognize that Canadian non-participation in sanctions against Iran is—like our refusal to join in the invasion of Iraq—an integral part of Canadian values is distressing.

An illegal interrogation and arrest?

Upon accepting the US extradition request, Canada’s Department of Justice and the RCMP obtained a warrant for the “immediate arrest” of Meng for December 1, 2018 when she was scheduled to pass through Vancouver on her way to Mexico.

But instead of arresting Meng, Canadian Border Service Agency (CBSA) officers detained and interrogated her for over two hours, telling her the scrutiny was necessary to enter Canada–even though Meng was en route to Mexico.

Knowing that Meng would soon be arrested but failing to disclose this to her, CBSA agents seized her goods including her phones. When asked to surrender the pass codes for the devices she did so, but only after being assured it was part of immigration procedure.

A CBSA officer then wrote the pass codes in his notebook and on a separate piece of paper that was then inserted with the telephones in a designated bag. An RCMP officer’s notes from that day indicate that the seizure and placement in mylar bags was “as per FBI request.”

After detaining and grilling Meng for two hours, the CBSA suspended their interrogation, led Meng to another room, and RCMP officers arrested her. They read Meng her rights and took her to jail. The CBSA then handed the phones and passcodes over to the RCMP.

According to the notes of an RCMP officer introduced as evidence, another officer, Brett Chang subsequently emailed the serial numbers of the devices, SIM cards and international mobile identity numbers to the FBI. Chang initially denied that he had done this but now, after seeking legal advice, he is refusing to testify in court.

There is more. CBSA officers admitted that they, together with RCMP officers, schemed to delay the arrest and oblige her to go through immigration screening, supposedly because the CBSA had its own suspicions that Meng represented a “national security” risk.

Meng had entered the country 52 times without a problem yet somehow, on this particular trip with the RCMP waiting with an arrest warrant in their pocket, the CBSA suddenly discovered Meng was a national security risk?

The CBSA admitted in court that not “one iota” of evidence of her being a national security risk was found during their screening. And now Scott Kirkland, the CBSA agent has admitted that handing over Meng’s personal security codes to the RCMP was improper, that it was “heart-wrenching to realize I made that mistake.”

The hearings reveal a judiciary obliged to denigrate Canadian law, and law enforcement agencies bending the rules, if not breaking them, to find evidence for a Trump administration that, even now on its way out, is seriously considering bombing Iran according to the New York Times. This has shades of Iraq in 2003 when the US, without sanction from the UN, invaded that country because the Bush administration believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, there were no such weapons, and US intelligence had made it up.

50 years ago, Justin Trudeau’s father was prime minister and he had the foresight to open diplomatic relations with China. He believed in keeping US foreign policy at arm’s length. As China’s power in the world grows, Pierre Trudeau’s approach is all the more relevant as the US government strives to do what George Bush did prior to the invasion of Iraq—bypass the UN and divide the world into “coalition of the willing” against an “axis of evil.”

Canadians rejected that approach then and we should do the same today. Justin Trudeau, however, does not seem to get that. That is why Canadian protests surrounding the Meng affair are growing.

Protests growing

Nearly a year ago, former prime minister Jean Chrétien called for an end to the Meng extradition to facilitate the release of Kovrig and Spavor. Now, many others are doing the same.

Vina Nadjibulla, the spouse of Michael Kovrig, took matters into her own hands this summer and called for the release of Meng. She, with former minister of justice Rock and former supreme court justice Louise Arbour, commissioned a legal opinion by Edward Greenspan that details how Canada’s minister of justice would be fully within his legal rights to intervene at any time to release Meng.

“The Minister of Justice, acting in that capacity, should immediately accept the responsibility under the Extradition Act and exercise the authority he has under that statute to end the Meng extradition proceeding,” states the letter signed by Rock, Arbour as well as a 17 others including Broadbent and Axworthy.

In July, the Green Party of Canada echoed the sentiments of that letter. Their parliamentary leader, Elizabeth May, argued that the US has abused Canada’s friendship, trust and the extradition treaty. “It’s time for the Canadian government to stand up to the US administration and demand that it drop the criminal charges and extradition request against Meng so that we can release her,” she stated in a press release.

A month later, the Globe and Mail reported that over 100 former Canadian diplomats had also called on Trudeau to stop extradition proceedings against Meng, allow her to return to China, and arrange a swap for Kovrig and Spavor.

Professor Charles Burton, considered a hawk on China, complained that he was not contacted to sign the letter even though he did a stint at Canada’s embassy in Beijing. He argues that to end the extradition would embolden China.

This view is contested by others such as professor emerita Wendy Dobson, one of the 19 signatories to the letter to Justin Trudeau and author of Living with China: A Middle Power Finds Its Way.

Now, MP Niki Ashton has sponsored a parliamentary petition calling for Meng’s release. A national day of action to back up the demand is planned for December 1.

With Trump on his way out, there is no time like the present to break the impasse by ending the extradition hearings and releasing Meng. This does not in any way imply aligning ourselves with the Chinese government. It is a message that we will not be bullied—full stop.

To do otherwise is to allow the world to be cleaved into hostile camps and to court disaster in the face of the two global crises of our time: the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency.

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John Price is professor emeritus of Transpacific history (University of Victoria) and author of Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific and A Woman in Between: Searching for Dr. Victoria Chung.

Margaret McGregor is a family physician in Vancouver. She lived in Beijing for two years as part of the first Canada-China student exchange (1973-1975).

Featured image is by Canadian Dimension

There’s at least one good reason to support Donald Trump’s ongoing lawsuits challenging the election results in several states: the US foreign policy establishment doesn’t want you to.

As Newsweek reported last week, “A group of more than 100 national security experts” from Republican administrations have condemned the president’s challenges to some states’ vote-counting process. These “experts” are claiming these legal efforts “undermine democracy” and “risk long-term damage” to the nation’s institutions. The signatories include people like Michael Hayden, John Negroponte, and Tom Ridge. These are the usual sort of “deep state” technocrats—for example, James Comey and John Brennan—who chime in to defend the status quo in the United States and insist it is an outrage that anyone (i.e., Donald Trump) departs from the usual way of doing things.

This alleged devotion to “democracy” and “the nation’s institutions” rings a bit odd coming from people like Negroponte and Hayden. Hayden, after all, has supported a litany of spying programs, torture, and the wholesale destruction of the human rights of both Americans and countless foreigners. Negroponte was the first director of national intelligence and has long supported spying on American citizens without a warrant. He oversaw the US-funded terror campaigns against Hondurans during the Reagan administration. Negroponte also enthusiastically supported the US’s 2003 war in Iraq which failed to achieve any of the objectives sold to the Americans as the reasons the war was a necessity.

Through scandals like the Abu-Graib debacle, unconstitutional wiretapping, torture, and ceaseless paranoid calls for an ever larger national-security state, the American foreign policy establishment has done more to undermine American democracy and institutions than Trump could ever hope for.

Yet,  these people are now speaking as if they are moral authorities on preserving the rights of Americans.

Given their clear disregard for basic human rights in recent decades, however, one suspects it is more likely that what really motivates the signatories’ denunciation of Trump’s election lawsuits is a desire to return to “business as usual.” This, after all, would make it easier for the regime to get back to dismantling the Bill of Rights, initiating new wars, and generally doing what it wants.

This becomes harder to do if millions of Americans begin to suspect that the regime isn’t as legitimate as has been long claimed, and that maybe the game is rigged against those who fail to be sufficiently friendly toward the permanent government in Washington and the so-called deep state.

But lest anyone think that investigating the integrity of American elections is a worthwhile endeavor, these national security bureaucrats resort to the usual, tired claim:

“By encouraging President Trump’s delaying tactics or remaining silent, Republican leaders put … national security at risk.”

The message is this: Dear Trump supporters, if you demand thorough legal proceedings and a careful look at this election’s outcome, then you support “America’s enemies.” We’ve heard a similar sentiment from these people before, when the Bush Administration declared “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” The message now is: “either you’re with us, or you’re with the Chinese totalitarians.”

It’s the usual sort of ruse that’s been used by the US foreign policy establishment for decades, and this is only the latest illustration. This same impulse is why the Conservative movement’s longtime leader William F. Buckley called for “a totalitarian bureaucracy” in the United States so long as it served the interests of the American national security state.

What’s the Harm in Contesting the Election?

More reasonable people however, should see the value and necessity of a slow, thorough, and public legal examination of the election.

Regardless of how one feels about Donald Trump, anyone who values fair play, honesty, and the votes of legal voters should want thorough audits and investigations. The question: “how much was this election affected by fraud?” warrants serious consideration and serious investigation into how the election was conducted. After all, whenever political power is at stake, there is no reason whatsoever to assume honesty and integrity are guiding the actions of all involved.

Fraud occurs with every election, of course. Anyone who claims any election contains no fraud lives in a fantasy land, or is lying. Voter fraud exists anywhere that votes are cast. Anecdotes of fraud in this election are plentiful, from backdated ballots in Pennsylvania, to  “coaching” voters in Detroit. The question is whether or not this sort of thing is widespread enough to change the outcome. In a number of lawsuits, the Trump campaign has suggested that it has been widespread.

And there’s no harm in allowing the legal process to proceed. After all, in legal and constitutional terms, the US election process is still very much on schedule.

Contrary to what various reporters seem to think, it is not the case that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “were declared the election’s winners more than two weeks ago, after Fox News, the Associated Press and other television networks called” it. The outcomes of presidential elections aren’t declared by infotainment performers working at Fox News.

Rather, federal statutes and constitutional provisions stipulate that the Electoral College will meet in December, and the Congress will declare a winner shortly thereafter. This process is in no danger of being derailed.

It’s too bad that people like Michael Hayden don’t respect this constitutional process, but that’s just par for the course coming from someone who has been director of the CIA.

For those who actually care about some measure of accountability and transparency from government institutions in charge of running elections, there should be no problem with any presidential candidate demanding a wide variety of legal challenges. This in itself won’t solve the problem of election fraud, and it won’t make the regime respect anyone’s human rights. This wouldn’t make government by majority-rule any less problematic. But it would be helpful to gather more information on how much of a gulf lies between the perception of “free and fair elections” and the reality. And it is the very least that should be done in the wake of an election where the outcome is close, messy, and conducted by politicians who are very unlikely to have the average Americans’ interests at heart.

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Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Featured image is by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Speaking just over a week after the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, US President George W. Bush made his now infamous declaration “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”. “In this conflict, there is no neutral ground”, he repeated seventeen days later, as military strikes on Afghanistan began.

It certainly felt like this at the time—that there was very little anti-war ground, and insofar as there was any, very few people were standing on it. The Australian government immediately pledged support for the invasion, as did the Labor Party and most union leaders (with a couple of honourable exceptions). The mainstream media dutifully rallied behind it, along with an array of liberals, influenced by the appeal to liberate women from the repressive Taliban. A number of prominent women’s rights groups even held a pro-war press conference at the White House.

The Murdoch press was predictably belligerent, Piers Ackerman writing in the Sunday Telegraph soon after the invasion began, “Some people are running around the country saying they don’t know why Australians are going to war, so let me make a few things clear. Australian military forces are joining a long-overdue fight against evil. Is that too difficult to understand?” Unsurprisingly in the face of all this, almost two-thirds of Australians supported the invasion when it was launched.

In the nearly twenty years that Afghanistan has been occupied by Western soldiers, the reality of this “liberation” has become clear. Since 2009, more than 100,000 civilians have been killed, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and nearly 500,000 were displaced last year alone. According to the US Central Command Combined Air Operations Centre figures, a record 7,423 bombs were dropped on Afghanistan in 2019, up from 7,362 in 2018. More than half the population currently lives in poverty. “Entire cities have been left in ruins, with the United States offering no coherent strategy for a return to stability, or even normalcy, in the places it has been at war”, writes Murtaza Hussein in the Intercept.

For the many Australian champions of this war, this matters not a bit. The purpose of the mission—a show of continuing loyalty to the US empire—has been fulfilled. As Clive Williams, adjunct professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald last year: “The real reason [for the war] is of course to show we are a willing ANZUS and Western alliance partner in order to be well regarded by the US and receive the defence and intelligence benefits that go with active membership of the Five-Eyes relationship. Afghanistan per se is of little strategic importance to Australia”.

The Brereton report reveals the tragic human consequences of this cold calculation.

The Australian military has long been highly secretive about its overseas operations, especially those of the SAS. A working paper published by the army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre, that looked at the experience of embedding reporters with the Australian forces in Afghanistan, found the Australian Defence Force had an “institutional aversion to media” and a “lingering bias” against media organisations. Partly because of this, “the war in Afghanistan has not only been the nation’s longest military commitment, it has also been the worst-reported and least-understood conflict in Australian history”, argues Kevin Foster, author of Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the Media and the Afghan Conflict.

Journalists who dared to challenge the official narrative have faced extreme repression, from the persecution of Julian Assange for his WikiLeaks revelations to the raids of ABC offices and the referral of ABC journalist Dan Oakes to the Director of Public Prosecutions for his 2017 “Afghan Files” stories.

The Brereton report exposes this for what it is: a monumental cover-up. The reality of Australian troops on the ground is not just that of a pointless war that has further devastated a long-suffering country, but one of barbaric cruelty borne of hardened, racist contempt for those being occupied. Official bleating about how sorry military heads and politicians are for the “misconduct” and “wrongdoing” identified—when they have created a pathologically secretive and sadistic military culture for decades—reveal only that they have been backed into a corner. Certainly, they can never make it up to the countless Afghans whose lives have been devastated by Australian atrocities.

This harrowing report is yet more vindication, if more were needed, of the anti-war position. It vindicates all those who stood against the march to war, who saw through the lies and platitudes and who recognised that, whatever the window dressing, major powers go to war for power and economic dominance, nothing more. Governments and their backers in the media said we were “with the terrorists”. But the Brereton report shows that the Australian government was sponsoring terrorism and the armed forces were carrying it out. Those who launched and continued the invasion and occupation should be in jail for war crimes.

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Featured image: U.S. Army Sgt. Christian Cisineros takes a moment to speak with his interpreter March 17, 2009, while on a dismount patrol mission near Forward Operating Base Baylough in the Zabul Province of Afghanistan. Cisineros is assigned to  Company B, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army Europe. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini/Released)

Drawing alarm at the D.C. Circuit, a lawyer for the United States argued Monday that the government has the power to kill its citizens without judicial oversight when state secrets are involved.

“Do you appreciate how extraordinary that proposition is?” U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett asked Justice Department attorney Bradley Hinshelwood, paraphrasing his claim as giving the government the ability to “unilaterally decide to kill U.S. citizens.”

The hearing before the federal appeals court came as the government fights to hold off allegations by two journalists who say it wrongly targeted them as terrorists in Syria.

One of the journalists, U.S. citizen Bilal Abdul Kareem, says his interviews with al-Qaida-linked militants landed him on the U.S. kill list. Just in June and August 2016, Kareem says, the U.S. government targeted him five times, including one drone strike involving a U.S.-made Hellfire missile.

Though the United States has not confirmed whether Kareem or his co-plaintiff, Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, pose any such threat, it has withheld information related to their case on the basis of national security.

Arguing only on the claims brought by Kareem, the Justice Department’s Hinshelwood conceded Monday that a strike against a U.S. citizen is a serious undertaking. Where the judiciary can step in, he said, is in ensuring that the state-secrets privilege was appropriately applied.

Read full article here.

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Featured image via Reprieve

To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America’s democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what.

First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008.

Trump’s vote increased so much because, according to exit polls, he performed far better with many key demographic groups. Ninety-five percent of Republicans voted for him. He did extraordinarily well with rural male working-class whites.

He earned the highest share of all minority votes for a Republican since 1960. Trump grew his support among black voters by 50 percent over 2016. Nationally, Joe Biden’s black support fell well below 90 percent, the level below which Democratic presidential candidates usually lose.

Trump increased his share of the national Hispanic vote to 35 percent. With 60 percent or less of the national Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Bellwether states swung further in Trump’s direction than in 2016. Florida, Ohio and Iowa each defied America’s media polls with huge wins for Trump. Since 1852, only Richard Nixon has lost the electoral college after winning this trio, and that 1960 defeat to John F. Kennedy is still the subject of great suspicion.

Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.

Read full article here.

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Featured image is by viarami / Pixabay

In Argentina, beatification and canonisation can happen to living figures.  Unlike the officialdom of the Catholic Church, the processes take place in accordance with an insurgent popular will.  The death of various public figures – Carlos Gardel for tango; Evita Perón for politics; Diego Maradona for football – merely reassures them the status of popular saintliness.  Essential in the make-up of such a figure: a flawed, distressed character; usually of humble origins; a stroke of charisma, even genius; a rascal’s talent to seduce.

Diego Maradona, footballer with the No 10 shirt, had oodles of all of those traits.  It was on the field where he expressed himself best, so much so that he was lauded, if not as a god of sorts, then certainly the emissary of one.  As with so many figures who become premature monuments and plinth displays, the process off the field of performance is cruel, a disfiguring form of sinning saintliness. But on the field, the figure of Maradona beguiled.  As he described it, “When you’re on the pitch, life goes away.  Problems go away.  Everything goes away.”  His technique entailed hypnosis with feet and legs, a dynamo of deceiving genius.  When he played, he moved laws and assumptions.  During the 1986 World Cup tournament in Mexico, one he made his own, his performances were never just pitch-confined.  In them, Argentina saw catharsis.  Rivals such as England saw a bedevilling cheat. 

It came in that most written and talked about of encounters.  June 22, 1986.  The quarter-final.  England and Argentina, locked at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City.  Maradona breaks the drought with his first goal.  Some confusion over the scrappy method of execution: offside?  “Or was it a use of a hand that England were complaining about?” wondered Barry Davies in his BBC commentary. The Uruguayan, Victor Hugo Morales, was less equivocal and more spiritually honest in his famous narrative: “handball!  Goal!  Goal!  Goal!  Goal for Argentina!”  He conceded that the English had grounds to protest but knew where his allegiance lay.  “The goal was scored using a hand, I celebrate it with all my soul, but I must say what I think. I hope you tell me, from Buenos Aires, if you’re watching the game, if the goal was fair, though the referee has given it.”  He sought God’s forgiveness for his remarks.

Within a few minutes, the Sky God again prevailed upon, this time to be thanked.  From poacher, Maradona had turned artist, using the dribbling, bewildering seduction of the gambeta.  Morales was ecstatic.  “Genius!  Genius!  Genius!  Genius!  He’s still going… Goooal!  Sorry, I want to cry!  Good God!  Long live football! … The greatest solo goal of all time.  Cosmic Kite, which planet did you come from leaving so many English players behind, and in this process turning the country into a clenched fist shouting for Argentina!”  God was thanked profusely, “for football, for Maradona, for these tears and for this score line: Argentina 2 England 0.” 

A football chant was given birth to, one recalled by the Argentine anthropologist Eduardo Archetti.  It was richly crude and unforgiving, featuring Britain’s prime minister and victor over Argentina in the Falklands War of 1982.  “Thatcher, Thatcher donde estas?  Maradona, Maradona te anda buscando, para metértela por detras!” (Thatcher, Thatcher where are you?  Maradona is looking for you to screw you from behind!)

In his autobiography Yo Soy El Diego (I am The Diego), Maradona recalled being a surrogate, avenging warrior for his country.  “Somehow we blamed the English players for everything that had happened, for everything that the Argentinian people had suffered.  I know that sounds crazy but that’s the way we felt.  The feeling was stronger than us: we were defending our flag, the dead kids, the survivors.”  An analysis published in one of Spain’s leading newspapers, El País, went so far as to see Maradona as a hero no less significant than “the legendary liberator from colonial rule, General San Martín.”

The football authorities have never stopped weighing in on the significance of the moment.  The contrasting ways the goals were scored, suggested Mark Biram, were dichotomous of Argentina itself.   He quotes Maradona’s 1986 teammate, Jorge Valdano, who assessed the first goal as the result of characteristic deceit, creole cunning and sharpness.  “Argentina is a place where deceit has more prestige than honesty.”  But the second goal was a product of another, flair-filled side, “one of virtue and ability.”

In 1984, Maradona made the journey from silverware heavy Barcelona to silverware bereft Napoli.  The fee then would not seem so eye-popping now: £5 million.  He was also unduly optimistic, a point he made in Asif Kapadia’s 2019 documentary.  “I expected peace.  The peace I didn’t have in Barcelona.”  But things started oddly; expectations not met.  “I asked for a house, I got a flat.  I asked for a Ferrari, I got a Fiat.”  What he gave to Napoli was worth its weight in gold and, it should be said, sanity.  The club won its first ever Serie A title in 1987 because of the exploits of the Scugnizzo Napoletano, that naughtiest of naughty rascals. 

Maradona’s miracles began to compete with the city’s established patron saint, San Gennaro.  But yet to become a fully-fledged figure of sinning saintliness, there was more room to err.  At the club, things turned tempestuous.  By the late 1980s, Maradona wished to leave.  Napoli shut the door on such suggestions.  The player took to drugs under the stifling shadow of organised crime.  In 1991, he was suspended for 15 months following a test showing traces of cocaine.  The Cosmic Kite suffered a gradual, health plagued decline as he fell to earth.  In an interview with Argentina’s Tyc Sports in 2014, he rued his fall towards addiction: “I gave my opponents a big advantage due to my illness.  Do you know the player I could have been if I hadn’t taken drugs?”

At his passing, the mayor of Naples, a politician sensing a moment, was keen to draw upon and imbibe the Maradona legend.  “I ask,” requested Luigi de Magistris, “that our stadium, which has witnessed so many of his successes, bear his name.  It will be called the Diego Armando Maradona.  The people want it.  They spoke unanimously.”

Roberto Saviano, who made his name with Gomorrah, a work on the Camorra crime network, was less opportunistic though no less indulgent in the memory of the Argentinean.  Themes of sin pickle it: Maradona was the means of the city’s redemption.  “Redemption, because a southern team had never won a Scudetto, a team from the south had never won the UEFA Cup, or even been the centre of the world’s attention.”  The greater footballer might have gone for Juventus, the star club of the Serie A galaxy; he, instead, picked Napoli.

Broadcasters, commentators and players across the globe will recount memories of the Cosmic Kite like sips of holy water and pieces of blessed bread.  Sporting stars of codes beyond football will pay their respect to him as, indeed, they already have.  The words of Charles Baudelaire, noted in the opening of Emir Kusturica’s tribute from 2008, are appropriate.  “God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.”  Cosmically, the kite never fell.

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

Featured image: Maradona. Source: Twitter.

We’re living through unprecedented times.

Covid is another form of seasonal flu/influenza that occurs annually like clockwork.

Millions of people are affected worldwide with no fear-mongering mass hysteria, no lockdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing — until 2020.

What’s likely to continue ad infinitum is a made-in-the-USA dystopian nightmare.

It diabolically aims to transform Western nations (and all others) into ruler/serf societies.

It’s to benefit privileged interests by exploiting ordinary people everywhere.

It’s about plundering planet earth, not preserving and improving it for the betterment of humanity.

All the while, we’re being systematically lied to by US-led Western ruling authorities and public health officials serving their interests.

Elections when held are farcical, not legitimate.

The rights and welfare of ordinary people are eroding in plain sight, heading toward eliminating them altogether — totalitarian harshness replacing them.

A year ago, who could have ever imagined that most Americans and others elsewhere would voluntarily accept house arrest for weeks or months — unaware of mass deception mandating it.

Events of 2020 causing Main Street economic collapse are highly likely to continue in the new year and beyond.

The hardest of hard times affect most people with no end of it in prospect.

Perhaps what’s going on won’t end in our lifetimes — the worst of times ahead, dystopia replacing societies safe and fit to live in.

Mass vaxxing and mask-wearing are among defining features of what’s going on.

All vaccines are hazardous to human health — rushed development, production, and distribution of covid ones potentially most harmful of all.

It’s why no one should accept the Big Lie about their safety and effectiveness, an issue discussed in previous articles.

What about mask-wearing? Do they protect against covid illness and its transmission?

According to a GlobalResearch.ca article titled: “The Plain Truth About Face Masks,” Michael Talmo explained the following:

Based on peer-reviewed studies, “all masks…have a network of microscopic pores/holes in them. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to breath.”

You’d be hermetically sealed and suffocate.

“Numerous systematic reviews have been done on masks. All of them came to the same conclusion.”

None “established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”

According to “peer-review journal Canadian Family Physician (CFP) in July 2020:

“(U)se of masks in the community did not reduce the risk of influenza, confirmed viral respiratory infection, influenza-like illness, or any clinical respiratory infection.”

Professor of Physics Denis Rancourt, an expert in his field, explained that no study exists to show mask-wearing effectiveness.

Based on what’s known about viral respiratory diseases, they’re mainly transmitted by “too fine to be blocked…aerosol particles” able to penetrate all face masks.

“No RCT study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator.”

“There is no such study. There are no exceptions…Masks and respirators do not work.”

Public health authorities in the US, West, and elsewhere know this.

Yet in cahoots with dark forces, they claim otherwise.

Based on scientific evidence, masks don’t work and may be hazardous to human health from longterm use — “from concentration and distribution of pathogens on and from used masks.”

Yet governments in the US, West and elsewhere ignored science, risking harm, instead of protecting human health.

Recommended mask-wearing — perhaps to be mandated ahead (see below) — shows governments, establishment media, and public health authorities are “operat(ing) in a science vacuum, or select only incomplete science that serves their interests,” Rancort explained.

Critical care physician/public health expert Pascal Sacre explained that “(c)ontinuous wearing of masks aggravates the risk of infection.”

“(S)cientific and medical analysis” proved it.

“(A)ir, once exhaled, is heated, humidified and charged with CO2.”

“It becomes a perfect culture medium for infectious agents (bacteria, fungi, viruses).”

Their longterm use “is a scientific and medical aberration!”

Scientific research shows that “about a third of the workers developed headaches with the use of the mask, most had pre-existing headaches that were aggravated by wearing the mask, and 60% needed pain medication to relieve it.”

“With respect to the cause of the headaches, while the straps and pressure of the mask may be causative, most of the evidence points to hypoxia and/or hypercapnia as the cause.”

“That is, a reduction in blood oxygenation (hypoxia) or an increase in blood C02 (hypercapnia).”

What’s recommended in the US may be required ahead.

On November 25, Dem Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal introduced legislation that mandates mask-wearing in public.

Joe Biden supports the ineffective/potentially harmful to human health practice.

Defying scientific evidence, he said “(t)his is about saving American lives (sic), so let’s institute a mask mandate nationwide, starting immediately.”

In legislation Markey and Blumenthal introduced, their intention is “masked” by the following remarks:

If enacted into law — what’s likely if a Biden/Harris regime replaces Trump — the law they introduced “would encourage states to require the use of face masks in all public spaces and outside when one cannot maintain social distance.”

Markey separately added: “(W)e need to use every technique available to us to encourage mask use…even… mandating (its) use nationwide.”

Mandatory mask-wearing — in defiance of scientific evidence against the practice — will be an element of social control if enacted into law that’s unrelated to and potentially harmful to human health.

It’s part of a planned dystopian future in the US and West, perhaps many other countries to follow.

Instead of governance of, by, and for everyone equitably according to the rule of law, Western societies are heading toward becoming more unsafe and unfit to live in than already for ordinary people.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from howstuffworks

In the debate over coronavirus policy, there has been far too little focus on the costs of lockdowns. It’s very common for the proponents of these interventions to write articles and large studies without even mentioning the downsides. 

Here is a brief look at the cost of stringencies in the United States, and around the world, including stay-at-home orders, closings of business and schools, restrictions on gatherings, shutting of arts and sports, restrictions on medical services, and interventions in the freedom of movement.

Click Here to Access the original AIER document (including links to sources)

Mental Health

The Economy

Unemployment 

Education

Healthcare

Crime

Food and Hospitality

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Credits to the owner of the featured image

The national economies of 193 countries, member states of the United Nations were ordered to close down on March 11, 2020. The order came from above, from Wall Street, the World Economic Forum, the billionaire foundations. And corrupt politicians throughout the world have enforced these so-called guidelines with a view to resolving a public health crisis. 

Millions of people have lost their jobs, and their lifelong savings. In developing countries, poverty and despair prevail. We are told the it is V the Virus which is responsible for the wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. 

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of  mass unemployment, bankruptcy and extreme poverty. 

Shortly before midday on 9 November 1923, around 3,000 far-right insurgents began marching on Munich, Germany’s second largest city in the south of the country. Before these brownshirts had set out it was clear to the Nazi Party leader, the 34-year-old Corporal Adolf Hitler, that their coup d’état had already failed. A few hours prior to marching out Hitler learnt that the inter-war German Army, the Reichswehr, would firmly oppose his so-called Beer Hall Putsch. This was ordered by the Reichswehr chief, General Hans von Seeckt, who remained loyal to the Weimar Republic for now.

With impending defeat obvious Hitler had not wanted this march on Munich to go ahead, but proposed that the rebels retire to nearby Rosenheim. Hitler suggested this retreat of their forces to his famous ally, the 57-year-old Erich Ludendorff, dictator of Germany during World War One. In reaction General Ludendorff looked coldly at Corporal Hitler and exclaimed, “We march!” When Hitler said rather nervously that they “would be fired on” by Reichswehr troops or police, Ludendorff barked again, “We march!”

They marched. Ludendorff, Hitler and a few other Nazi Party officials marched at the head of the units, as they quickly reached the Marienplatz square in central Munich. A few hundred yards away at the top of Residenzstrasse, a cordon of armed police loyal to the government were awaiting the brownshirts. As they approached one Nazi Party member, Ulrich Graf, stepped forward and shouted to the police, “Don’t shoot, Ludendorff and Hitler are coming!” (1). The police commander Freiherr von Godin, a conscientious officer later persecuted by the Nazis, ordered his men to fire at the rebels.

On hearing von Godin’s command to shoot, the police hesitated for they could clearly see General Ludendorff at the forefront, goose-stepping in their direction. Just a few years previously, Ludendorff had issued orders to most of these police officers during the war, when they were then soldiers. Von Godin loudly repeated the order to fire, but as it was met once more with silence, the police commander grabbed a rifle from one of his men and fired it himself at the brownshirts. The other policemen followed suit. A prominent Nazi, Scheubner-Richter, marching with linked arms between Ludendorff and Hitler immediately fell dead.

If the rifle had only been fired some inches to the other side, Hitler might well have met his end – and Europe would have been spared the brutal dictatorship to come. A few Nazis shot at the police in response, but the latter showed more resolve, inflicting 16 fatalities on the brownshirts compared to four police deaths. Panic set in as the fascists dropped to the ground and fled in every direction, like earwigs disturbed from the nest.

Out of the few thousand insurgents who marched on Munich, only two of them had held their nerve. The American historian and war correspondent William L. Shirer noted that,

“Ludendorff did not fling himself to the ground. Standing erect and proud in the best soldierly tradition, with his adjutant Major Streck, at his side, he marched calmly on between the muzzles of the police rifles until he reached the Odeonsplatz. He must have seemed a lonely and bizarre figure. Not one Nazi followed him. Not even the supreme leader, Adolf Hitler”. (2)

Having suffered a dislocated shoulder Hitler was instead “bundled into a little yellow Fiat on the Odeonsplatz and driven away to hiding” (3), according to the biographer of Ludendorff, Lieutenant-Colonel Donald J. Goodspeed, professor emeritus of history at Brock University, Ontario.

Lt. Col. Goodspeed acknowledged that as the unarmed Ludendorff steadfastly approached the line of policemen and “brushed them contemptuously aside”, that also “he was, in fact, marching out of history. All the rest of his life was excruciating anti-climax. Perhaps after all, it would have been better if von Godin’s men had dared to shoot their wartime leader down”. (4)

How quickly fortunes change. Less than six years before, as Germany’s military autocrat, Ludendorff ruled over much of Europe and came tantalisingly close to winning the First World War. During the Germans’ major spring offensive, which was Ludendorff’s creation, by late March 1918 the German 18th Army had captured the town of Montdidier, less than 65 miles from Paris.

The 18th Army was meeting little opposition, and it looked likely that the French capital would soon fall. In addition, German railway guns produced by the Krupp steel company, such as the 43 ton “Big Bertha”, were ominously lining up near Montdidier. German soldiers quickly loaded these siege howitzers with their 16.5 inch shells, which were then pointed southwards at Paris and fired (5). Horrified Parisiens could see the shells of Big Bertha soaring through the air, and smashing into the buildings of the landmark city.

The experienced French commander Philippe Pétain, seldom the most high-spirited of men, gloomily informed his British counterpart, Douglas Haig, that he would have to relocate French Army reserves south-west, in a desperate attempt to save Paris. This was the equivalent of saying that France would have to abandon their British ally further north.

On 24 March 1918, the Germans had already driven a deep wedge between the French and British forces south of the Somme – but, in the end, the Allied commanders need not have worried too much, for the German advance gradually petered out. The German Army of 1918, though still formidable, was not quite as good as its 1914 or 1916 predecessors, failing to capitalise on the progress made while Allied resistance hardened. From April 1918, a quarter of a million American troops were landing on French soil each month, another factor in the turning of the tide.

Yet credit must be given where credit is due. The fact that Germany, against daunting odds, had fallen just shy of victory in a conflict where they had faced the world’s strongest nations (Russia, Britain, France and finally America), was largely down to Ludendorff’s “outstanding military talent”, as outlined by Lt. Col. Goodspeed. He continued that,

“The defensive and offensive doctrines developed under his direction displayed a tactical brilliance not shown elsewhere in the war, and seldom equalled in any war… Ludendorff’s administrative ability was even more pronounced, and he must be ranked as one of the very greatest military organisers of all time”. (6)

Hindenburg and Ludendorff (pointing), 1917 (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Today Ludendorff’s name is often classed in equal terms with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a tall, well-built man who possessed strong nerves and simple optimism. Yet Goodspeed discerned correctly that in comparison, “Ludendorff was a much stronger personality and much more intelligent”. For most of the war Hindenburg played a somewhat passive role, leaving the key and complex details for Ludendorff to iron out, including political matters, which Hindenburg had little time for. By the autumn of 1916, with Ludendorff having amassed virtually all real power in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II was merely a ceremonial figurehead. The Kaiser never did relish his meetings with the overbearing “Sergeant-Major”, as he dubbed Ludendorff.

Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Ludendorff, January 1917 (Public Domain)

The Ludendorff dictatorship can most plausibly be described as a milder version to that of Hitler’s. The younger fanatics who emerge are usually worse than their elders, and Hitler was undoubtedly more extreme than Ludendorff by a considerable margin. While the general pursued imperialist policies as Germany’s warlord, he refrained from initiating wanton acts of annihilation against the Russian-led armies, nor against Slavic civilians. Though Ludendorff could be heard making anti-Semitic comments during the war, there is no evidence to suggest that he considered executing criminal acts against Europe’s Jewish populations, let alone genocide.

In fact at a conference at General Headquarters, on 14 August 1918, Ludendorff requested a “more vigorous conscription of the young Jews, hitherto left pretty much alone” (7). He held out hope, unrealistically, that Poland would dispense with armed divisions to bolster Germany’s forces. These attitudes would have been unthinkable in Hitler’s Germany.

Four weeks into the conflict, on 23 August 1914 Ludendorff and Hindenburg – having achieved a significant success at the fortress city of Liège in Belgium – were transferred to the Eastern front, in order to rescue a potentially dire situation against the Russian Empire’s huge armies. They were threatening not only the whole of East Prussia, but had a conceivable chance to march on to Berlin itself, thereby bringing the war to an early end. In the coming months with Ludendorff’s arrival, assisted by his able deputy Lt. Col. Max Hoffmann, German forces would instead force the Tsar to retreat. The Germans secured decisive early victories against the Russians, such as in the Battle of Tannenberg and around the Masurian Lakes of Central Europe.

Come the spring of 1915, the Germans had conquered a large swathe of territory in the East, and were inflicting horrendous casualties on the Russian divisions. After just over a year of war, by September 1915 the Russians had lost 1,750,000 men. (8)

Before the age of Blitzkrieg, the rapidity of German advances in the East were “made possible only because Ludendorff paid the closest attention to prosaic administrative details” (9). He set the road-mending companies feverishly to work, while he ordered that the broad Russian railway line gauge be changed to the narrower German gauge. This enabled the swift transfer of German soldiers and materiel to the Eastern front. World War One was in many ways a railway war. It had created a constant necessity for lumber, railway sleepers and cellulose. Ludendorff therefore established forestry inspectorates and saw-mills to help cope with the demand.

After less than 18 months of fighting, the German Army had captured land areas such as all of Lithuania, Courland (western Latvia), Suwalki and Bialystok (both in northern Poland), and Grodno (western Belarus). Ludendorff poured over his map at headquarters with satisfaction, and he divided these conquered areas into separate districts under German rule. He formed a police corps and law courts with provincial appeals, along with a high court of appeal founded in Kovno (central Lithuania), where Ludendorff and Hindenburg settled down in new headquarters from October 1915.

Ludendorff issued local coinages and levied taxes and customs duties (10). In the opposite manner to present day neoliberalism, he controlled big business at home and in the captured territories. Ludendorff nationalised industries en masse and brought them under his domain, roughly brushing aside the arguments of corporate managers who came to see him. Hindenburg, a massive and intimidating presence, nodded approvingly and grunted in his deep voice to support his colleague’s views.

Goodspeed wrote that, “Ludendorff was at least as brilliant an administrator as a soldier, and he thoroughly enjoyed using his powers. More ambitiously than Napoleon, he dreamed of the future colonisation of the East, especially of Courland… Ludendorff, determined that Germany would get everything possible out of the occupied territories, administered them with a ruthless hand”.

Further power was drawn to Ludendorff as he created monopolies on cigarettes, alcohol, especially spirits, salt, matches and confectionery. He founded a chain of newspapers and placed them under strict censorship, which forced upon the local populations the news that he wanted them to read (11). Ludendorff established factories for the manufacture of barbed wire, and erected workshops for the repair of military equipment.

Large caches of captured Russian machine-guns were altered to take German ammunition. Billets were constructed for the German troops, better quality hospital facilities were built, winter clothing was provided; and other measures were adopted to maintain the health of the German Army’s soldiers and its horses. Leave was arranged and the mail delivery system put in order to reach standards of German efficiency.

To sustain morale Ludendorff created soldiers’ clubs, libraries, bookshops and concerts. He intensified military training and tweaked it to incorporate lessons learnt during the war. Supply services were improved, and the roads were made fit for all-weather transport, including mechanised machinery and horses. Ludendorff saw to it that Germany was furnished with ample quantities of Polish scrap-iron, brass, copper, skins and hides. The German Army was heavily reliant on the horse, and there was an ongoing shortage of these once sought after animals. He implacably ordered that horses be conscripted from farmers and peasants, despite the hardship this brought on the people in occupied regions.

In particular, Ludendorff commandeered the Lithuanian horse which he wrote “possesses great powers of endurance” and is “a very useful animal for military purposes”; though the general admitted of Lithuania itself, “The country was bound to suffer severely as the result of the continuous heavy demands made upon it, especially the constant levies of horses and cattle. The local administrative authorities often drew my attention to this fact, but there was nothing for it but to insist on these deliveries”. (12)

Ludendorff ruthlessly enacted tight controls over agriculture in the conquered regions, and he dispatched motor-ploughs, agricultural machinery and seed from Germany to augment food crops. German companies were established to farm the colonised areas, while a census was taken of peasants’ cattle.

From the war’s outset, Ludendorff spoke bluntly about his desire “of a greater Fatherland and of territorial acquisitions that would compensate the German people for their sacrifices”. His view was that “if Germany makes peace without profit, Germany has lost the war” (13). For these reasons Ludendorff began to enjoy “a tremendous reputation with the masses of the German people”, along with Hindenburg. (14)

On 11 September 1917 at a Crown Council meeting in Pless Castle, Silesia, Ludendorff demanded that “the conquered territories in the East be divided into a Duchy of Courland and a Grand Duchy of Lithuania”. These annexed lands would ostensibly be placed under the personal sovereignty of the Kaiser.

Ludendorff’s hegemonic aspirations for the West were likewise exacting. Once victory was obtained, far from his considering the returning of Alsace-Lorraine to France or offering concessions on it, he intended that these provinces be fully incorporated into Prussia, rather than administered as a separate entity. Ludendorff had plans for the seizure of all French property in Alsace-Lorraine, which he wanted to hand over to German war veterans as compensation for their sacrifices to Germany. He wanted economic union with Belgium, and a prolonged military occupation of that country.

In late 1917, as Germany’s eastern forces were preparing to give the coup de grâce to the Tsar’s regime, Ludendorff increased his demands against the Kremlin. His final peace terms to Russia were harsh and audacious in scope, and he was becoming impatient with how long the negotiations were taking. To show how serious he was, Ludendorff ordered German soldiers to march deep into eastern Europe during the early spring of 1918 – which they did, almost unmolested. Ludendorff was firmly set on carving out a great slice of Russia’s Empire, to be absorbed into the German Reich: A land mass stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, hundreds of miles of fertile, resource rich land.

These expansionist goals were supported strongly by Field Marshal Hindenburg. He and Ludendorff rarely disagreed on anything, hence their seamless collaboration. On 19 December 1917 Hindenburg informed the German foreign secretary, Richard von Kühlmann, that Germany needed the Baltic territories “for the manoeuvring of my left wing in the next war”. (15)

As further humiliation for Russia, and to demonstrate his contempt for the Bolsheviks, Ludendorff granted Finland, Poland and the Ukraine their independence – all formerly part of the Russian Empire – while Estonia and Latvia were to be occupied by the German Army. Also stripped from the Kremlin were the Black Sea port of Batumi and Kars Oblast. Ludendorff turned his ire towards Romania too. He insisted that Romania be turned into a German satellite under a puppet regime, partly as retribution for the Romanians having unexpectedly chosen to join the Allied side in August 1916.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 David King, The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany (Pan; Main Market edition, 14 June 2019) Chapter 20, Blood Land

2 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Fawcett Crest Book, 1 Jan. 1968) p. 74

3 Donald J. Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Soldier: Dictator: Revolutionary (Hart-Davis; 1st edition, 1 Jan. 1966) p. 242

4 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 243

5 Washington Post, “A Blast from ‘Big Bertha’”, 24 March 1999

6 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 248

7 Ibid., p. 209

8 Ibid., p. 136

9 Ibid., p. 103

10 Ibid., p. 138

11 Ibid.

12 Erich Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, August 1914-November 1918, The Great War (Pickle Partners Publishing, 12 Apr. 2012) Chapter 6, The Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief on the Eastern front in Kovno

13 Will Brownell, Denise Drace-Brownell, Alex Rovt, The First Nazi: Erich Ludendorff (Counterpoint, 31 Mar. 2016) Chapter 7, Ludendorff fights Lenin

14 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 236

15 James Joll, Gordon Martel, The Origins of the First World War (Routledge; 3rd edition, 5 Oct. 2006) p. 212

Featured image: Cropped photograph of German general, Erich Ludendorff (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The tragic, cynically calculated decline of Corbynism, and the subsequent ascendancy of the neo-Blairite Starmer project, have made the Labour party a lot less free. When Starmer’s great power games started – after being elected on a manifesto of party unity – censorship and propaganda was introduced to manage the threat of socialism and democracy. The alliance between Zionist diplomacy and Starmer’s administration created the necessity for Labour’s new bureaucrats to embark upon a McCarthyist pursuit of its political enemies, and in the process to control and narrow the spectrum of acceptable opinion within the party.

In this era of escalated warfare against the left, the leadership’s list of enemies has grown to embrace, beyond Jeremy Corbyn, a large amount of the party membership he’s allied with. Israel is the preeminent enemy of Corbynism, since its empire has a strong motivation to exterminate the influence of his pro-Palestinian, anti-imperial policies. Starmer is even making enemies of grassroots activists keen for a civic-minded debate on his controversial decision to suspend and remove the whip from Jeremy Corbyn, punishing their free discussion of policy within the confines of the law. Starmer is an adversary to Labour socialism because of his agenda to capitulate policy to the needs of big business donors. Most of his positions are the same as the Tory government’s, making it possible to see Starmer’s Labour and the Tories as one entity, the same power.

An example of the intersection between the hard right Tory government and Starmer is the PLP’s support for a surge in war spending, favouring bombs over investment in public services. During moments like this year’s coronavirus crisis, Starmer has been hesitant to present an alternative opposition to government policy, erring on the side of praise. His biggest commitment to the right comes from his rehearsal of pro-Zionist propaganda, with “anti-semitism” being cynically used as a political tool behind apologist arguments for Israeli war crimes.

This repellent, opportunistic abuse of antisemitism was repeated throughout the media’s attempts to discredit Jeremy Corbyn, so much so that they were able to destroy his reputation as a principled, veteran anti-racist. At one point, Pompeo, an ally of far right Zionism, claimed that he would use his power to prevent Corbyn’s election when in fact that decision lies squarely with the sovereign UK electorate.

Such blatant Zionist interference in the internal democracy of the Labour party was not acknowledged by the political mainstream, because these truthful, accurate narratives are portrayed as the antisemitic enemy to Israeli self-determination. The tale the establishment tells is one of widespread, aggressive chauvinism against Jews, against which their allies must be eternally vigilant. This story is disinformation, and the Labour left has collapsed under pressure from its agents.

The happenings of the last fortnight have proven that this information war is focused not just on Jeremy Corbyn, but on the entire alliance he galvanised. In response to internal party debate about the suspension and removal of the whip, party bureaucrats have suspended dozens of innocent members. The reporting on this development by the progressive, independent left media, which has rightly criticised Starmer’s nascent dictatorship, might be right, but it is not the view of the political mainstream, which is largely sympathetic to the persecution of Corbynism. So far the media has ignored that Starmer crosses a line far more dangerous than what’s represented by Corbyn.

The examples never end of the political policing of supporters of the Labour left, representing the agenda of a totalitarian regime that’s emerged during the new Mccarthyism. To enforce this regime, the establishment has needed to reconcile the public to their own suppression. To rationalise its persecution of Corbynism, elites have treated it as a form of ideological extremism, with the implicit assumption that Blairite centrism is the only agenda deserving of time, attention and respect.

Policies crafted in the public interest generate outrage, while the cronyism and corruption of the centre is viewed as a standard. The leader of the opposition isn’t allowed to advocate policies that will resonate with the electorate, while the government is able to spin its self-serving policies in the media. And the narrow agenda of corporatocracy is protected by the media-politico complex, whilst the accurate criticisms levelled against it by independent media analysts is censored on social media.

This commitment to capitalist totalitarianism among elites – and therefore to the type of fascist reaction the West has so long thought itself immune from – is rationalised through the logic that it is a radical, progressive resistance to left fundamentalism. The monolithic ideology of capitalist realism has conquered heterogeneous, pluralist social democracy, making the superiority of the neoliberal regime the default assumption of the dominant political centre.

Buoyant radical hope for a Corbynite restoration of the UK’s neoliberal political economy to its former glory as a world-leading social democracy has been betrayed by a violent crackdown. Reactionary in nature, the censorship and propaganda that’s occurring is imposed by authoritarianism, because it’s built upon hierarchical, elitist power. And authoritarian hierarchical, elitist power is a system that’s evolved to efficiently exploit the weaknesses of the people.

The thought police of the ascendant Labour right yield authority from the aggressive Zionist psyops the elite class is happy to rehearse, and from the logic that Corbyn represents a fundamentalist threat to political virtues. Until we can next reelect a socialist to the leadership of the Labour party, the best we can do to resist these cynical, opportunistic attacks on democracy is to insist on fearlessly having the debate that Starmer so fears.

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Featured image is from MEMO

There, it happened.

For my words, my words, my writings, I was dismissed like a waste, a thief, without the right to answer.

An experienced, competent emergency physician, appreciated by his colleagues for my actions in stressful situations, fired in the middle of COVID!

For words, for an image.

All you had to do was reassure people, defend your doctor, attenuate and wait for the storm to calm down…  and then talk.

I write, it’s true, things that disturb, dissident points of view, those who follow me on this site since 2009 know it.

When I resumed my writing starting in 2020, about the political management of the COVID crisis, but also generally, about the endemic corruption of medicine, science and official bodies in Belgium, I felt that it would be risky, really.

But I did not give up because I will never let my life be controlled by fear.

Some people say that I am unconscious. Do you think that after 17 years of treating people, in emergency, stress, often for 24 hours at a time, I could have done all this while being unconscious?

Some people say that I am irresponsible. I have always taken my responsibilities, preferred writing to speaking because it allows reflection, rereading, and I have always turned my tongue 7 times in my mouth, before finishing an article and sending it with all its sources and references. I have always respected the rules of the hospital, of society, even when, as they stand, they seemed crazy to me and likely to cause more harm than good. I have always put the safety of my patients above my convictions, preferring to explain, to convince through words and writings.

Some say I am a disgrace to the profession.

Those who say that are ignorant of my profession. Many people talk about critical care, especially today with Covid, when critical care has been around for 70 years, but do they even know, these accusing people, what they are talking about?

We can’t pretend, this is live, live, surrounded by death and suffering,

We don’t know how to lie and if we do, we get out. I’ve held on to it for 17 years and I only had to stop suddenly because of people who don’t like what I say, don’t like my opinions!

Some say, the most beautiful things, that I am anti-everything. Those who say that are certainly much more so than I am. I will tell you all the things I am for:

1. The truth, in any case its permanent search and accept for that, to deceive me.
2. Tolerance of other people’s ideas, opinions and writings.
3. The will, in turn, to be able to express my ideas, opinions and writings.
4. Respect for nature and animals
5. Relief of pain and suffering
6. Life in all its facets, music, sounds, songs, dances, colors, and therefore accept death, because one cannot live like this without accepting the idea of dying at any time.

I only wanted to ask questions, to give my points of view without ever imposing them, to question, to nuance, to contextualize, to reassure when others only want to terrorize.

I was condemned, thrown away for that.

I was forced to abandon my colleagues in difficulty, summoned to leave burning places by people who should not so easily spit on the help of one of their own, a resuscitator, for words, a picture!

That’s how it is.

They have that power.

And yet,

• Professor Didier Raoult (France)
• Professor Christian Perronne (France)
• Professor Toubiana (France)
• Professor Toussaint (France)
• Professor Gala (Belgium)
• And all those other doctors, caregivers, health care professionals,

Belgium :  https://docs4opendebate.be/fr/open-brief/ 

Netherlands: https://opendebat.info/  et https://brandbriefggz.nl/ 

US Frontline Doctors : https://www.xandernieuws.net/algemeen/groep-artsen-vs-komt-in-verzet-facebook-bant-hun-17-miljoen-keer-bekeken-video/ 

Spain: https://niburu.co/gezondheid/15385-artsen-komen-massaal-met-coronawaarheid-naar-buiten 

Germany: https://acu2020.org/international/ 

Belgium : https://omgekeerdelockdown.simplesite.com/?fbclid=IwAR2bJAAShAlIidjnRQPyVSoZbk1Uj-FTHAthL77hKX_Oo8aMLN3V6DdwAac 

https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/enseignement/septante-medecins-flamands-demandent-l-abolition-du-masque-dans-les-ecoles-une-menace-serieuse-pour-leur-developpement-5f58a5189978e2322fa9d32c 

https://belgiumbeyondcovid.be/ 

France : https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/provence-alpes-cote-d-azur/bouches-du-rhone/marseille/covid-tribune-pres-300-scientifiques-denoncent-mesures-gouvernementales-disproportionnees-1878840.html 

We are all of them.

There are thousands of us.

Thanks to all of you who want a world where the word is respected, truth is defended, freedom is a reality.

I will never let fear rule my life. Don’t negotiate with fear.

Dr. Pascal Sacré

Featured Photo: Citizen Initiative Video

“While Donald Trump continues to stoke the flames of division and uncertainty surrounding election 2020, the Establishment is also preparing for the possibility of martial law in response to this chaos. Meanwhile, the public is being prepped for a second wave of COVID-19 infections which could lead to the foreshadowed Darkest Winter. While we don’t care to instill fear we do encourage everyone to heed these warnings and be prepared for potential unrest in the days and weeks following the election.”

– Derrick Broze, excerpt of The Darkest Winter [1]

“Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in human history.”

– Richard Bright, Former Dir, DHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Auth (excerpted from Dark Winter)

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The ballots to the US Presidential election have been counted. That tally indicates that the Joe Biden won and that Donald Trump lost. [2]

The battle isn’t quite over yet. Trump insisted since the night of the election that he won. Biden’s victory after the fact was, according to Trump, a product of election-rigging and fraud.

None of the courts to which he has challenged the election results have so far seen any substantial evidence of election fraud. But not only is the 45th President sticking to his guns, but a huge swath of the population – fully 70 percent of the Republican Party – is backing the President’s position!

The interesting development though is how this circumstance was predicted as an outcome! In October, the site TheLastAmericanVagabond.com featured extensive conversations about election simulations guided by the Transition Integrity Project (TIP). The drill anticipated scenarios where Trump lost the election but refused to accept defeat under any circumstances, resulting in chaos confusion and possibly a potential civil war.

On October 29, a video, The Darkest Winter, debuted about 5 days in advance of the election. It was intended as a message and a warning to members of the general public. Not only was it about the election result, it highlighted the potential for a second wave of COVID-19, which was predicted by several officials, and even the prospect of martial law being invoked to contain the ebullient spirits waking up opposing any establishment narratives.

The author of The Darkest Winter is a young man by the name of Derrick Broze. He will be our feature guest this week.

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For about 40 minutes, he not only expands on his video prediction, he focuses on The Great Reset being planned as a strategy for resolving COVID-19 and other issues related to the economy, technology, the environment and other issues. He will also share his views on Operation Warp Speed and the alliance of vaccines with bio-electronics placed inside the body. And he will discuss the issues associated with the immense 5G project.

Following the interview, we will pay a clip from Dr. Roger Hodkinson, a prominent physician and CEO speaking the Edmonton City Hall earlier in November in opposition to the ‘anti-COVID’ strategies being implemented.

Derrick Broze is a freelance investigative journalist, documentary film maker, author, public speaker and, in 2019, a candidate for Mayor of his town Houston. Derrick is the author of 5 books and writer of 5 documentaries. He is currently a staff writer for The Last American Vagabond, co-host of Free Thinker Radio on 90.1 Houston, and the founder of The Conscious Resistance Network & The Houston Free Thinkers.

Roger Hodkinson received his medical degree at Cambridge University and is the CEO of Western Medical Assessments providing Independent Medical Examinations (IMEs) to insurance companies, employers, and lawyers. He is the CEO of a biotech company that manufactures COVID tests. He is also a general practitioner in the UK and Canada, a Pathologist with the Medical Examiner’s Office in Edmonton, and the President of the Alberta Society of Laboratory Physicians.

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Notes:

1. https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/darkest-winter/
2. Sarah Elbeshbishi (Nov. 25, 2020) ‘Biden won, but technically the election’s not over: What to expect in the next 60 days’, USA Today; https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/elections/2020/11/13/electoral-process-and-what-expect/6234952002/

No Thanks on Thanksgiving During US-Engineered Economic Collapse

By Stephen Lendman, November 27 2020

Venezuela Presents Proposal for an International Association Against US Sanctions to Stop Crimes Against Humanity (UN Security Council)

By Orinoco Tribune, November 27 2020

Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, intervened this Wednesday in the session of the Security Council to denounce the economic aggression of the United States against twenty-nine countries of the world, through their misnamed “sanctions,” and proposed the formation of an International Alliance to stop the crimes against humanity perpetuated by the US.

EPA Finds Glyphosate Is Likely to Injure or Kill 93% of Endangered Species

By Center For Biological Diversity, November 27 2020

The Environmental Protection Agency released a draft biological evaluation today finding that glyphosate is likely to injure or kill 93% of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Vindicating Jeremy Corbyn

By Megan Sherman, November 27 2020

He will doom Labour at the ballot box; he’s a threat to your nan; if you say his name three times the ghost of Trotsky will appear, collectivize your cat and steal your taxes. This circus of fear isn’t just misleading: when Corbyn is trying to shine a light on the troublesome logic of government policy, on the nightmare that austerity and privatization creates, it shuts down dialogue before it can even get started.

Britain’s Class War on Children

By John Pilger, November 27 2020

In this abridged article published by the London Daily Mirror & based on his 1975 film, Smashing Kids, John Pilger describes class as Britain’s most virulent disease, causing record levels of child poverty.

European Sanctions Against Turkey Are More Likely than Ever

By Armen Tigranakert, November 27 2020

Another scandal erupted in relations between Turkey and the EU – on November 22, the Turkish merchant vessel, Roseline A, was detained and fully inspected by personnel of German frigate Hamburg in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 160 nautical miles north of the Libyan city of Benghazi.

The War Crimes of Bush and Blair – Afghanistan and Iraq

By Rod Driver, November 27 2020

For all practical purposes, Iraq has now been destroyed. It no longer exists as a single country and has disintegrated into regional power bases, with widespread ethnic cleansing in each region. It is estimated that approximately two million people have died in Iraq since the invasion, and millions more have been displaced.

The New Norm: Government Lawbreaking

By True Publica, November 27 2020

Government lawbreaking in Boris Johnson’s adminstration has now reached an unprecedented scale for a British government – and we should all be concerned.

Biden Proclaims ‘America Is Back’ as the US Makes Provocations on Russia’s Borders

By Johanna Ross, November 27 2020

 ‘America is back’ hailed Joe Biden on Twitter this week. The world tried to work out exactly what that meant. For different parts of the world, of course, it means different things. As many liberal Americans breathe a sigh of relief, the people of Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq may shudder.

Maradona: The Fragile God of the Global South

By Pepe Escobar, November 27 2020

His life was a running planetary pop opera for the ages. From Somalia to Bangladesh, everyone is familiar with the basic contours of his story – the pibe from Villa Fiorito, a poor suburb of Buenos Aires (“I am a slum dweller”), who elevated football to the status of pure art.

“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law…We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.” (Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize for Literature Speech, 2005) 

Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre Twin Towers in New York, on September 11, 2001, (known as 9/11) the US declared a global war on terror. Since then it has destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It has supported the destruction of Yemen, and the attempted destruction of Syria. (Libya, Syria and Yemen will be discussed in a subsequent post).

Afghanistan 

For many years, Afghanistan has been seen as a key area in what is known as ‘The Grand Chessboard’ – It is important for control of immense energy resources (oil and gas) in central Asia. Up until 1989, the US government had been unable to take control of the region because of the proximity of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 changed this. Immense deposits of oil and gas in the region are now accessible to Western corporations. Not only does Afghanistan have its own deposits of natural gas, it is the obvious choice for numerous pipeline routes.(1)

The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. The explanations given for the invasion included dealing with the al-Qaida terrorist network, led by Osama Bin Laden, and to replace the extremely repressive Taliban government with a better one for humanitarian reasons. As with the justifications for other wars, these reasons were repeated by the media with little questioning. However, most of the 9/11 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. It was widely recognised that most of the al-Qaida network would have dispersed before the attacks, and the attempted removal of the Taliban left equally violent warlords in power in many parts of the country. The US had been negotiating with the Taliban about building oil pipelines late into the 1990s, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US had therefore decided to “bury you [the Taliban] under a carpet of bombs” shortly before the 9/11 attacks.(2) The US went ahead and dropped plenty of bombs, but this has not decreased terrorism in the region. Predictably, the first US representative in Afghanistan was connected to the oil industry, and had been involved in earlier negotiations to build pipelines.(3)

The war in Afghanistan does not receive nearly as much media coverage as the Iraq war, but thousands of Afghan citizens are still being killed every year.(4) Wikileaks released files showing that the US military is aware that they have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan.(5) The country has been in chaos for almost 20 years.

Iraq 

Britain and the US helped to overthrow the leadership of Iraq in 1963. Saddam Hussein became President of that Iraqi government in 1979. The US and Britain supplied him with weapons for many years, despite knowing that he was a murderous dictator. They encouraged him to fight a war throughout the 1980s against Iran(6), creating devastation in the region. In 1991, Saddam invaded the neighbouring country of Kuwait. In response, US  forces invaded Iraq. This was known as Gulf War 1. President H.W.Bush stated that the issue in Kuwait was not democracy, but to “prevent a dictator…from seizing control of more than a quarter of the world’s oil reserves”.(7) There were opportunities to negotiate a peaceful resolution with Iraq in 1991, but the US leadership did not want this to happen so they deliberately suppressed information about possible non-violent solutions, and the media also failed to discuss these alternatives(8). Throughout the 1990’s Britain and the US continued to wage war against Iraq, bombing it approximately once every three days.(9) In 2003, the US and Britain carried out a full-scale invasion, known as Gulf War 2. Immediately following the invasion, US forces secured the oilfields and the ministry of oil, but not much else.(10)

Image below: George W. Bush declares victory in Iraq War, USS Abraham Lincoln, San Diego, May 1, 2003)

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was an excellent example of the way in which the US and British governments try to scare us into supporting war by exaggerating threats. First we were told that we should be afraid because Iraq was making Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), but the only WMD that Iraq might have had were old, degraded chemical shells.(11) Then we were told lies about Saddam’s links to terrorism. The ‘links to terrorists’ explanation was always doubtful as Saddam Hussein’s government was secular (non-religious) and he was therefore an unlikely ally of religious terrorists. Finally we were told that we had to invade for humanitarian reasons – essentially ‘Saddam is a bad man’ – but Britain and the US had actively helped him when he had committed earlier atrocities. The US and British governments lied repeatedly to justify the invasion.(12) There were forgeries supposedly showing that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material from Africa(13), and a ‘dodgy’ dossier(14) trying to convince journalists that Saddam was a serious threat. None of these had much evidence to back them up, yet, as with earlier interventions, they were repeated by the media without adequate scrutiny. The government decided on its plan, then tried to pick and choose selective pieces of information to fit that plan. Iraq was slightly unusual in that lots of people did not believe any of these scare stories. Millions of people protested against the war in many countries,(15) including huge protests in Britain and the US, but the invasion went ahead anyway.

The extent of the lies has been admitted by former government insiders. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, has now admitted briefing George Bush that Saddam did not have any weapons of mass destruction, and other sources have admitted that the intelligence information was “being fixed around the plan.”(16) In other words, the invasion was going ahead and the politicians needed an excuse. There is an unofficial record of notes by the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, from the afternoon of September 11^th 2001 (just a few hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks) which says: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only U.B.L. [Usama Bin Laden]. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”(17) Rumsfeld wanted to see if the terrorist attacks could be used to justify invading Iraq. He repeatedly asked for evidence to connect Iraq to the terrorist attacks but the CIA was unable to find any.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair supported these policies and actively participated in the lies. He has written that “[Vice-President] Cheney wanted forcible ‘regime change’ in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to US interests”.(18) This strategy has been confirmed by former US general, Wesley Clark, who admitted that in 2001 he was told that US President Bush and US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wanted to ‘take out’ seven countries in five years. These were Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan and Iran.(19) President Bush’s Energy Secretary, Paul O’Neill, has disclosed that President Bush came into office planning to overthrow Saddam.(20) Although the war began two years later, the decision to invade Iraq was made less than two weeks after 9/11. One US commentator pointed out “This is a war of an elite. I could give you the names of 25 people [in Washington] who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened”.(21)

For all practical purposes, Iraq has now been destroyed. It no longer exists as a single country and has disintegrated into regional power bases, with widespread ethnic cleansing in each region.(22) It is estimated that approximately two million people have died in Iraq since the invasion,(23) and millions more have been displaced. This has been described as genocide.(24) Many people have fled the country and others are homeless within the country. Over half of Iraqis have had a close friend or relative killed or injured, and a whole generation of people growing up from 1991 to the present day have been traumatised. The invasion and destruction of Iraq is almost certainly the worst crime of the 21^st Century.

Key Points

The invasion of Afghanistan was not about terrorism or humanitarianism.

The invasion of Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction, or humanitarianism, or links to terrorism.

Both wars were part of a wider policy of US imperialism and control of energy resources.

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

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

Notes 

1) Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit, pp47-74

2) Michael Meacher, ‘This war on terrorism is bogus’, 6 Sep 2003, at www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq

3) Patrick Martin, ‘Oil Company Advisor named US representative to Afghanistan’, WSWS, 3 Jan 2002, at

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/01/oil-j03.html

4) BBC News, ‘Afghanistan’s Ghani says 45,000 security personnel killed since 2014’, 25 Jan 2019, at

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-47005558

5) Wikileaks, ‘Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010’, 25 July 2010, at

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

7) Thomas Friedman, ‘Haiti’s Coup: Test Case for Bush’s New World Order’, Oct 4 1991, N.Y.Times, at

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/04/world/haiti-s-coup-test-case-for-bush-s-new-world-order.html

8) David Edwards, ‘Where Egos Dare’, 12 Jun 2002, at

https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2002/06/33629.html

9) Jeffrey St. Clair, ‘Iraq as Prison State’, Oct 15, 2002, in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair, Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia,

10) Derek Gregory, Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, p.220

11) Jon Schwarz, ‘Twelve Years Later, US Media Still Can’t Get Iraqi WMD Story Right’, 10 April 2015, at

https://theintercept.com/2015/04/10/twelve-years-later-u-s-media-still-cant-get-iraqi-wmd-story-right/

12) Jon Schwarz, ‘Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew About Iraq 15 Years Ago and What He Told The U.N.’, 6 Jan 2018, at

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin-powell-knew-about-iraq-fifteen-years-ago-and-what-he-told-the-un/

13) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

14) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier

15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests

16) Sidney Blumenthal, ‘Turning Truth Into Lies’, Guardian, 7 Sep 2007, at

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/07/turningtruthintolies

17) Paul Krugman, ‘Osama, Saddam and The Ports’, 24^th Feb, 2006, at

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/02/paul_krugman_os.html

Thad Anderson, blogger who found the memo from a FOIA request, posted at

https://www.flickr.com/photos/66726692@N00/100545349/

Note that the spelling is usually Osama, but Usama is used in the memo.

18) Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life, discussed in Robert Parry, ‘Blair reveals Cheney’s war agenda’, 6 Sep 2010, at

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/090610.html

19) Wesley K. Clark, A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country, 2007

Joe Conason, ‘”Seven countries in five years”’, 12 Oct 2007, (mentions memo from 2001) at

http://www.salon.com/2007/10/12/wesley_clark/

20) BBC News, ‘Bush ‘plotted Iraq War from start’’, 12 Jan 2004, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3387941.stm

21) Thomas Friedman, cited in James S. Henry, The Blood bankers, p.304

22) Gareth Stansfield, ‘Accepting Realities In Iraq’, May 2007, at https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/accepting-realities-iraq

23) Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S.Davies, ‘The Iraq Death Toll 15 Years After the U.S. Invasion’, 15 March 2018, at

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/15/iraq-death-toll-15-years-after-us-invasion

24) Abdul-Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, Genocide in Iraq Volume II: The Obliteration of a Modern State, 2015

During the era of Yellow Journalism in the U.S. which defined the type of journalism that existed before the start of Spanish-American War in 1898. The term, ‘Yellow Journalism’ was associated with various major newspapers that held no journalistic principals or truth, “sensationalism” or “eye-catching headlines” was the only truth that mattered for newspaper owners that exaggerated stories to sell newspapers and fill their pockets with profits. Today they sell you lies to support the agendas of major corporations and the Military-Industrial Complex because corporate interests pays the MSM handsomely to sell their wars, drugs and propaganda.

The accelerated downfall of the mainstream media (MSM) occurred since the election of Donald Trump. It’s apparent that the MSM has caught TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don’t know what you feel or sense when you are watching the MSM, whether it’s CNN, MSNBC who are obviously liberal networks or FOX News who is aligned with the Republicans party, it’s almost like watching the twilight zone.

Journalistic integrity has been absolutely flushed down the toilet. For the record, the MSM has been losing its reputation as a reliable news source way before Trump became US president, he just added TDS to the so-called “television journalists” on CNN and MSNBC. However, that did not stop CNN’s president Jeff Zucker to propose a weekly show with the US President on a call with Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen according to The Hill, “I have all these proposals for him,” Zucker reportedly told Cohen “I want to do a weekly show with him and all this stuff.” Despite the fact that anti-Trumpism is alive and well in the MSM, it’s hypocritical. CNN and MSNBC will surely miss Trump if Joe Biden officially steals the election because low-ratings will collapse both networks and even FOX news will suffer to a point without Trump being showcased regularly on television networks and that’s probably why Jeff Zucker, had reportedly called Trump “the boss” if he would have signed a contract with CNN.

The print media is also guilty for publishing numerous false claims, accusations and lies that has led to wars and regime change in various countries for decades. One recent example is the case with The New York Times who published an article with the worst possible title ‘The baseless ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory rises again’ yet, on November 1st, Time magazine published a cover story that read ‘The Great Reset’ on its front page.

The media must think the people are that stupid, it clearly shows how they view its target audience.  There are many reasons why liberal networks with the possibility of FOX news following in the same direction will collapse due to low-viewership ratings.  CNN, MSNBC and FOX employs a long list of liars and state propagandists who were in previous administrations that offer their one-sided analysis and reports in domestic and foreign issues presented to the viewer.  In an important note, all of the MSM networks are on board and all agree that no matter who is president, they know who their foreign enemies are when it comes to war because they all obviously work for the same US war machine.  Remember when liberal media host on MSNBC, Brian Williams and his comment on U.S. missiles hitting Syrian airfields with Trump’s approval in 2017 as “beautiful”?  I guess he thought Trump wasn’t so bad after all.  The MSM is a propaganda organ of the Democratic party and to the Republican party if we include FOX news.  All of US viewers are beholden to the US war machine that includes all special interest groups and major corporate powers that dictate to the MSM what to report and say to the public. Since 2016, the MSM has stooped to its lowest level of lies and deceit.  Its journalistic principles have evolved into a joke, a laughing stock in the world of news.  Here is a short list out of many lies by the MSM:

The Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax: 3 Years Worth of Conspiracy Theories

The Trump-Russia Collusion scandal was proof in itself that CNN and MSNBC are conspiracy theorists with no actual facts. Conspiracy theorists is defined as those who create “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators” Well there is a group of “powerful conspirators” that does explain a set of fake circumstances surrounding Trump’s collusion with Russia which in under the definition of a conspiracy theorist.  It took 3 years of this non-stop nonsense about Trump and Russia colluding 24 hours a day which was way over the top for anyone, even for some democrats who turned into republicans because of the MSM lies. The nearly $32 million spent on the Trump-Russia Collusion report turned out to be a devastating blow to the Democratic party.

A letter that was addressed to Senator Lindsey Graham that was signed by John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence (NIA) for the Trump administration requested information on the FBI’s behalf concerning their Investigation. Ratcliffe declassified the information which exposed the scandal and as many of us knew from the start, it was a hoax.  It all turned out to be a major humiliation for the MSM after the dossier was exposed as a Hillary Clinton smear campaign against President Trump. Hillary Clinton was on board with a plan to link candidate Trump in 2016 to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In late July 2o16, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by typing him to Putin and the Russians’ in hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”  It also stated the following:

According to handwritten noted, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services 

The letter also included that “On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding ‘U.S. President candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The MSM including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (who cried on air) after the hoax was exposed was humiliated. The MSM has lost time, money and whatever they had left of their credentials based on Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia lie, at this point they should be all crying themselves to sleep at night.

CNN Claimed Ecuador’s Embassy in London is a ‘Russian Hacking Hub’

Another case of pure MSM propaganda was against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who at the time was in exile in Ecuador’s embassy in London. The former President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa criticized the MSM’s side of the story on Ecuador’s Embassy in London as a ‘Russian Hacking Hub.’ Correa was interviewed by RT.com and this is what he said about CNN and other US media sources:

We never approved interference in the internal affairs of other countries, we respect every nation, that is why when we saw that Julian Assange was publishing the data of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign, we warned him two or three times, and on the third or fourth time we acted, we cut the internet. The story that CNN wants to build, that in the embassy there was a center for espionage operations with Russian support, that we knew about it and approved it. That’s how they want it to appear. what they want to sell to the world. What CNN and other media are saying is rubbish, but were use to it. They are prepping for the show. The reason is, when they extradite Assange to the US and sentence him to life, they want the honest backing of the public, they are setting the stage

What CNN reported on December 9, 2017, was that Donald Trump, Jr. was offered “advanced access” to the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks before those emails were made public. MSNBC also jumped on the band wagon and “independently confirmed” CNN’s evidence about the collaboration between the Trump team and WikiLeaks over the hacked DNC emails. It all turned out to be false information. The email which Donald Trump, Jr. received was a link that was published online and open to the public. If that is not reckless and irresponsible journalism on a grand scale or just plain spiteful propaganda to paint Trump’s team as Russian assets, I don’t know what is.

The Pentagon with Help from the MSM is Pushing Regime Change in Venezuela

The MSM’s Commitment to the Pentagon’s agenda of regime change in Venezuela has been steady as well with CNN has been following Trump’s Line on Venezuela who falsely claimed in the SOTU address last February when Trump declared Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s true and legitimate president. CNN claimed that the voters wanted Maduro to step down since the elections in January 2019, but there’s one problem with that statement, Venezuela’s presidential election was actually held on May 20, 2018. CNN’s story ‘Military helicopter crashes in Venezuela, killing 7, amid protests’ first reported on a helicopter crash that killed seven military officers then redirects the story to the political scene mentioning Juan Guaido, the unpopular political figure who was unpopular among the opposition he’s part of. Washington chose Guaido as the best puppet they can manage as it’s “acting President.” After all, Uncle Sam still makes important decisions for the Venezuelan elite and the rest of its Latin American puppet states. CNN said that “pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido over him for president.” Current president Nicolas Maduro won that election by more than 67% of the vote as Juan Guaido and his followers decided not to participate in the elections as a way of protest against the Maduro government.

Eventually Big Tech Will Collapse, And the Independent Media Will Rise

I feel sorry for the MSM’s faithful viewers, frying their brains with absolute propaganda from their preferred sources of information. They could have done more productive things with their lives. Just imagine, decades of endless lies by the MSM.  It’s hard to wrap my head around what and how the MSM reports to its target audience who accept what is reported as the truth. The media has used propaganda and flat out lies to manipulate the public into believing whatever they said to further Washington’s agenda at all costs, even if it means losing viewership and they still get paid no matter what.  Real journalism has died a long time ago in the US and that’s why the alternative media has grown significantly to challenge MSM’s narrative.

Big Tech companies such as Face book, Twitter and YouTube are trying to suppress the alternative media and the truth it reveals to the public by way of censorship, but guess what?  There will be alternative platforms that will compete and outperform Big Tech in the future. We already have numerous platforms where alternative voices are heard such as www.bitchute.com, www.minds.com, ise.media, Global Research.ca, Information Clearinghouse, The Corbett Report, The Gray Zone, rt.com, sometimes even Al Jazeera can be truthful when it wants to be and many others that will rise to the occasion of telling or spreading the truth on various platforms.  The MSM has embarrassed themselves to the point of no return. They are dead in its tracks and the world is waking up to that fact.

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

Recent attempted infringements of Russia’s airspace and maritime borders by NATO are very dangerous instances of de-facto brinksmanship intended to provoke the Eurasian Great Power into reacting in a way that could then be manipulated as the “plausible pretext” for imposing further pressure upon it.

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It seems like almost every week that Russian media reports on NATO’s attempted infringement of Russian airspace and maritime borders, but two ultra-dangerous developments occurred over the past week which signify that this trend will intensify. The Russian Navy threatened to ram the USS John McCain after it aggressively passed into the country’s territorial waters near Peter the Great Bay off Vladivostok, after which it thankfully reversed its course. The second incident involved the US launching rockets into the Black Sea from Romania that are capable of reaching Crimea in a wartime scenario. These two events deserve to be discussed more in detail because of their significance to NATO’s grand strategy.

The transatlantic alliance intends to provoke the Eurasian Great Power into reacting in a way that could then be manipulated as the “plausible pretext” for imposing further pressure upon it. It amounts to de-facto brinksmanship and is therefore incredibly dangerous since both parties are nuclear powers. Furthermore, it’s the definition of unprovoked aggression since Russia doesn’t partake in symmetrical provocations against NATO. If anything, every time that it’s been dishonestly accused of such was just the country carrying out military exercises within its own borders which just so happen to abut several NATO states after the bloc extended its frontiers eastward following the end of the Old Cold War.

It’s the eastern expansion of NATO and the alliance’s recent activities in the Arctic Ocean that represent the greatest threat to peace between the two. On the eastern front, the US is once again provoking Russia in order to craft the false impression among the Japanese that Moscow is a military threat to their interests. Washington is greatly perturbed by their past couple years of technically fruitless but nevertheless highly symbolic talks over signing a peace treaty to end the Second World War and resolve what Tokyo subjectively regards as the “Northern Territories Dispute”. Moscow’s reclamation of control over the Kuril Islands following that conflict was agreed to by the Allies, but then America went back on its word in order to divide and rule the two.

Their mutual intent to enter into a rapprochement with one another could in theory occur in parallel with a similar rapprochement between Japan and China, which might altogether reduce Tokyo’s need to retain as robust of an American military presence on its islands. That in turn would weaken the US’ military posturing and therefore reduce the viability of its grand strategic designs to “contain” both multipolar countries in that theater. As regards the Arctic and Eastern European fronts, these are also part of the same “containment” policy, albeit aimed most directly against Russia and only tangentially against China’s “Polar Silk Road”.

It’s understandable that the US will continue to compete with these two rival Great Powers, but such competition must be responsibly regulated in order to avoid the unintended scenario of a war by miscalculation. It’s for that reason why the world should be alarmed by American brinksmanship against them, especially the latest developments with respect to Russia that were earlier described. All that it takes is one wrong move for everything to spiral out of control and beyond the point of no return. Regrettably, while Biden might ease some pressure on China, he’ll likely compensate by doubling down against Russia.

Trump should also take responsibility for this as well since it’s occurring during his presidency after all, even if it might possibly be in its final months if he isn’t able to thwart the Democrats’ illegal seizure of power following their large-scale defrauding of this month’s elections. He capitulated to hostile “deep state” pressure early on into this term perhaps out of the mistaken belief that “compromising” with his enemies in the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies would result in them easing their pressure upon him on other fronts, but this gamble obviously failed since it only emboldened them to pressure him even more.

It’s unfortunate that Trump was never able to actualize his intended rapprochement with Russia for the aforementioned reasons, but he could have rebelliously defied the “deep state” after this month’s fraudulent elections by reversing his currently aggressive policy against Moscow if he truly had the political will to do so. He doesn’t, though, and this might nowadays be due more to his support of the military-industrial complex than any “deep state” pressure like it initially was. After all, war is a very profitable business, and artificially amplifying the so-called “Russia threat” by provoking Moscow into various responses could pay off handsomely.

It’s therefore extremely unlikely that this dangerous trend will change anytime in the coming future. To the contrary, it’ll likely only intensify and get much worse under a possible Biden Administration. Nevertheless, Russia doesn’t lack the resolve to defend its legitimate interests and will always do what’s needed in this respect, albeit responsibly (so long as it’s realistic to react in such a way) in order to avoid falling into the Americans’ trap. The ones who should be the most worried, then, are the US’ NATO and other “allied” vassals who stand to lose the most by getting caught in any potential crossfire for facilitating American aggression.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

Another scandal erupted in relations between Turkey and the EU – on November 22, the Turkish merchant vessel, Roseline A, was detained and fully inspected by personnel of German frigate Hamburg in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 160 nautical miles north of the Libyan city of Benghazi.

Since no weapons were found on board, Ankara received moral satisfaction which would later turn into notes of protest demanding an apology and compensation, as well as statements about European “Turkophobia”. Turkey for sure will use this cause in all possible ways – necessary protests will be made; lawsuits will be filed. This very issue will be included in the agenda of Turkey’s activities in NATO and the UN. The Turkish side has already declared its official protest, and the EU ambassadors have been invited to the Turkish Foreign Ministry for “talks”.

It is worth noting that this incident occurred shortly before the next EU summit scheduled on December 10, devoted to possible imposing of sanctions against Turkey for its actions in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. EU top officials are once again trying to make it clear to Turkey that its activities in the region are unacceptable and “sanctions are more likely than ever.”

Moreover, on November 26, MEPs voted by an absolute majority in favor of a draft resolution calling on the EU member states to impose tough sanctions on Ankara. The document emphasizes that relations between Turkey and the EU have reached a “historical minimum” due to Ankara’s actions in the Mediterranean, Libya, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Europe sends constant signals to Turkey that its position is contrary to European values, interests, and understanding of regional and global security.

What will happen at the summit on December 10, when the EU will, once again, discuss sanctions against Turkey? How far the EU will be ready to go and what steps Ankara will take in the near future to prevent it? Now Turkey provides a more restrained policy trying not to give a leverage to Europe, Paris, or Berlin.

France still may be the most anti-Turkish country in the EU, but now Berlin is starting to act more openly against Ankara. The incident in the Eastern Mediterranean was approved by the German leadership in advance for sure. This means that the situation for Turkey is changing for the worse on the eve of the EU summit, so important for Erdogan.

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Armen Tigranakert is a freelance journalist from Armenian diaspora in Syrian Aleppo.

 ‘America is back’ hailed Joe Biden on Twitter this week. The world tried to work out exactly what that meant. For different parts of the world, of course, it means different things. As many liberal Americans breathe a sigh of relief, the people of Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq may shudder. For democratic, progressive values at home were often balanced with interventionism and destruction abroad during previous ‘normal’ administrations. There is no doubt that Russians are viewing Biden’s presidency with trepidation: the return of familiar hawks does not bode well for Russian-US relations.

Biden’s announcement curiously coincided with another incident on the very same day – the appearance of US naval destroyer John S McCain within Russian waters off the coast of Vladivostok. The incident should not be overlooked. The move seems to be a display of sheer bravado on the part of the Americans, who released a statement later on asserting that they had the right to challenge ‘Russia’s excessive maritime claims’. Moscow responded by saying the ship had been ‘warned of the unacceptability of its actions’ and (in short) it was lucky it had not been rammed by the Udaloy-class destroyer which had been tailing it.  This provocative move was followed on the next day by US missiles being launched into the Black Sea from Romania.  The rocket-launch tests reportedly involved more than 130 troops and 30 pieces of military hardware.  It doesn’t take much imagination to work out what they could be used for: the range of these missiles is 300km, they could reach Crimea.

But don’t take my word for it. For greater insight into the US’ ambitions when it comes to Russia, one need only look to this RAND report from last year. This think-tank has close ties to the US military and therefore offers a pretty good reflection of what current US policy is. And it makes disturbing reading. Entitled ‘Extending Russia’ the document discusses all the different ways the US can undermine Russia, ideologically, geopolitically and militarily. It identifies that the US is locked in a ‘great-power’ competition with Russia (welcome back to the 19th century) and it assesses which tactics would bring about the best results at what risk. From promoting regime change in Belarus to increasing NATO exercises in Europe, every possibility is explored. With regard to the recent military exercises in Romania, and the incident with the USS John S McCain, we can see where the ground has been laid for such provocations:

‘There are several measures the US and its allies could take to encourage Russia to divert defense resources into the maritime domain, an area where the US already possesses key comparative advantages…deploying land-based or air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles on NATO’s Black Sea coast could compel Russia to strengthen defenses of its Crimean bases, limit its navy’s ability to operate in the Black Sea, and thus diminish the utility of its Crimean conquest.’

It speaks of developing a land-based military presence on the coast, citing Romania as a country likely to comply with such plans, having concerns over the Russian ‘build-up’ in the Black Sea region. It suggests that installing land-based weapons systems could be preferable to increasing maritime activity, as the increased presence of NATO vessels in the Black Sea could lead to Russia bolstering its presence in the region. Which, naturally, given this increased US threat, it already has. Only this week, it was reported that the Russian army had installed advanced artillery on Crimea to defend the peninsula from any “surprise missile attack.” The Deputy Head of the Public Chamber of Crimea, Alexander Formanchuk, expressedconcern that these NATO exercises fit within a wider pattern of escalation, saying that “provocations against Crimea have become more frequent. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a further exacerbation of international relations and the international situation. And the topic of Crimea is a convenient reason for escalating such provocations.”

The question is, does the US appreciate the danger of the path it is treading? Do these policy makers understand that if it continues on the current trajectory the chances of conflict with Russia, even being triggered accidentally, are increasing? With such demonstrations of force taking place on Russia’s borders, there is a high risk of one side misinterpreting the other’s actions, leading to retaliation. One has to ask if this is in fact the goal of some in the US military and security establishment. Look where this ‘great power’  competition led us to in the 20th century- two catastrophic world wars. And yet the rhetoric coming from US politicians and media couldn’t try to incite war more if it tried. “The U.S. Army Has A Rocket Surprise For Russian Troops In Crimea’ a Forbes article read this week.  The US is sending ‘a message’ to Moscow it reads, ‘The U.S. Army in Europe has restored its long-range firepower. And it wants the Russians to know’. Sounds friendly, doesn’t it?

The US has never recognised Crimea’s reunification with Russia; nor has it ever understood or appreciated the history of the peninsula or why Russia felt obliged to involve itself in the Ukraine conflict to protect ethnic Russians. Only this year Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that the US ‘will not ever recognize’ Crimea as Russian territory and that it will maintain sanctions against Russia until the peninsula returns to Ukraine. This unequivocal position, together with the somewhat fanciful hope that Crimea could return to Ukraine demonstrates just how far apart the two nations are. It has been widely acknowledged that relations between the US and Russia are worse now than during the Cold War. With Joe Biden, having already acknowledged during his recent election campaign that Russia is the ‘biggest threat’ the US faces, we are entering a very uncertain and potentially volatile period ahead.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.  You can follow the author on Twitter @shottlandka

Credits to the owner of the featured image

Government lawbreaking in Boris Johnson’s adminstration has now reached an unprecedented scale for a British government – and we should all be concerned.

In September last year, the supreme court ruled that Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen that parliament should be prorogued for five weeks at the height of the Brexit crisis was unlawful. It was a unanimous judgment from the 11 justices on the UK’s highest court. Johnson’s response was to attack the supreme court and threatened to dissolve it.

More recently, we’ve heard how Members of Parliament have been pushing the UK government to back down over its controversial plan to breach international law with its Internal Markets Bill. The House of Lords reacted badly to it and inflicted a crushing defeat on Boris Johnson. In the first vote, the government was defeated by 433 to 165 by the Lords, in the second, by 407 to 148. This is still not resolved. For ‘global Britain’ this alone has been a disaster as it has attracted worldwide derision.

You could argue that both these events are seen by the government as the only way to get through their Brexit agenda – others would say that these are acts of desperation because Brexit simply can’t be done by working inside political, economic and diplomatic norms.

But as each day passes we are learning that at the very highest levels of government – new lawbreaking is being reported.

For the purposes of this article, we can leave aside the scale of illegal contracts provided by what is becoming known as the ‘chumocracy’ to Tory donors and friends of Tory MP’s who are taking advantage of the Covid crisis to feather their nests. Court cases against the government are already filed.

Controlling Information, blacklisting, targeting journalists

A report from OpenDemocracy this week that exposes the government of creating a ‘clearing house’ to control Freedom of Information requests is breathtaking. This is the stuff of tinpot dictators. Here, the governemt has been accused of running an ‘Orwellian’ unit in Michael Gove’s office that instructs Whitehall departments on how to respond to Freedom of Information requests. Worse still, it collects the personal information about journalists who submit them for nefarious reasons.

oD reports – “Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are supposed to be ‘applicant-blind’: meaning who makes the request should not matter. But it now emerges that government departments and non-departmental public bodies have been referring ‘sensitive’ FOI requests from journalists and researchers to the Clearing House in Gove’s department in a move described by a shadow cabinet minister as “blacklisting”.

Not only is the government centralising control over what information can be released for the public – but journalists are being targeted. oD again:

“The secrecy of this list and the fact that our names have been circulated around Whitehall is seriously chilling”

Labour shadow Cabinet Office minister Helen Hayes said: “This is extremely troubling. If the cabinet office is interfering in FOI requests and seeking to work around the requirements of the Act by blacklisting journalists, it is a grave threat to our values and transparency in our democracy.”

As the government continues to act in a way that raises the suspicion of its lawbreaking, immorality or malfeasance in office – the government has since been found in this investigation to have granted fewer and rejected more FOI requests than ever in the history of the Freedom of Information Act. That report, entitled ‘Art of Darkness’ paints a disturbing picture of the state of Freedom of Information in Britain. The government are now being legally pursued in this case.

Silke Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch said,

“We’re appalled that such important information rights have been so disrespected by the government. The centralisation of difficult FOIs, the secrecy of this list and the fact that our names have been circulated around Whitehall is seriously chilling. This is a shameful reflection on the government’s attitude towards transparency.”

Detained, deported and denied legal rights

Next up is the Windrush scandal that broke in 2018 when it was discovered that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights.

“It is unacceptable that equality legislation, designed to prevent an unfair or disproportionate impact on people from ethnic minorities and other groups, was effectively ignored”

The Equality and Human Rights Commission agreed with an earlier report that the experiences of the Windrush generation were “foreseeable and avoidable”, and its chair described their treatment as a “shameful stain on British history”. In its investigation, which it has subsequently just published it found the government had willfully broken the law and went on to say –

“It is unacceptable that equality legislation, designed to prevent an unfair or disproportionate impact on people from ethnic minorities and other groups, was effectively ignored in the creation and delivery of policies that had such profound implications for so many people’s lives.”

Children

Last Tuesday, we find that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson acted unlawfully by failing to consult children’s rights bodies before deliberately watering down safeguards for children in care, a court has just ruled.

Judges found against Williamson over his actions in relaxing some of the important obligations on local councils over the 78,000 children in care in England during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The government’s actions were shameful, both in the scale of the protections they took away from very vulnerable children in England and the way they went about it”

A case was brought against Williamson because it was thought he acted illegally. The Court has now ruled that there was “no good reason” why Williamson excluded England’s children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, and other bodies representing children in care from his decision-making.

Carolyne Willow, the director of the charity that brought the case said:

“I am hugely relieved and overjoyed that the Court has confirmed that children and young people, and the organisations who represent their rights and interests, must be consulted when the government is considering changes to their legal rights and protections. The government’s actions were shameful, both in the scale of the protections they took away from very vulnerable children in England and the way they went about it. This should draw to a close backroom, secret government consultations which exclude the rights, views and experiences of children and young people.”

Intimidation

The Priti Patel case is a high profile case but it only scratches the surface. Boris Johnson was left facing questions about why he sat on this report for so long and why he tried to tone down an independent report which said Home Secretary Priti Patel broke the ministerial code by bullying staff.

Sir David Normington, a former Home Office chief, said Patel’s behaviour was “completely unacceptable” and “You shouldn’t have bullies in government”. One person at the end of Patel’s obviously vicious and insidious character attempted to take her own life. She lost her job – as did the person who reported it. After a Cabinet Office inquiry, Sir Alex Allan said the home secretary’s conduct “amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying” – finding she had breached the ministerial code. For the first time ever, Johnson rejected the advice and supported the bully – Sir Alex felt he had no choice but to resign as his role has been fully undermined.

We shouldn’t forget, it was only two weeks ago that Sonia Khan – a special adviser to the then chancellor, Sajid Javid who was escorted out of Downing Street by armed police on the orders of Dominic Cummings has been given a five-figure payoff by the government to stop a lawsuit over intimidation and unfair dismissal that it would have emphatically lost. Before that, another civil servant received a five-figure payout from a bullying case against a senior member of Michael Gove’s team. IN addition, there is an ongoing case of a senior civil servant taking the government to court for the same reasons.

In the eBook – Brexit – A Corporate Coup D’Etat, we see evidence of senior Tory MP’s at the heart of Brexit threatening and bullying the CEO’s of some large British companies for speaking out about the dangers of leaving the EU. Others were made to sign non-disclosure agreements to effectively silence CEO’s who have a legal obligation to publicly report trading threats to their shareholders and the stock market.

The governments own website says of bullying – “Bullying and harassment is behaviour that makes someone feel intimidated or offended. Harassment is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010.” No matter how the government dresses this up – they are breaking the law that applies to everyone in Britain.

Autocrats

These examples, distorting and withholding information of public interest, creating secretive units within government, blacklisting media operations and targeting journalists is bad enough. But to be found in a British court of wrongly detaining people, illegally deporting them and denying them their legal rights is truly shameful.  Then we come to the utterly disgraceful behaviour of this government who have willfully attempted to deny poverty-stricken children a meal whilst a pandemic rages around them. It took a football player to defeat the government and force them into an embarrassing U-Turn. Since them, we have learned that the government effectively jettisoned legal obligations to protect nearly 80,000 extremely vulnerable children.

People like Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson and Michael Gove have decided that the rule of law is simply too inconvenient. It’s not for them.

Scholars say countries across the globe are experiencing a rise in autocratic rule, with declines in democratic ideals and practice. Autocratic rule – also known as authoritarianism – is when one leader or political party attempts to extend and then exercise more and more power to govern a country and its people.

The Tories are now dispensing with long-held checks and balances designed to highlight government lawbreaking and accountability in what was once a functioning democracy. This government is: extending its own executive powers, repressing citizen efforts to hold it accountable, appealing to an ethno-nationalistic force to support it, are capturing elite support, controlling information, singling out journalists and abusing emergency laws. These are signs of rising authoritarianism according to Shelley Inglis – who for 15 years with the United Nations, advised governments and democracy advocates on how to strengthen the rule of law, human rights and democratic governance.

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In this abridged article published by the London Daily Mirror & based on his 1975 film, Smashing Kids, John Pilger describes class as Britain’s most virulent disease, causing record levels of child poverty.

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Taiwan has found itself increasingly in the middle of the growing power struggle between a waning US and a rising China.

Taiwan is recognized by both the UN and the vast majority of the world’s nations including (officially) the United States under the One China policy – but Taiwan’s pro-independence circles have nonetheless enjoyed large amounts of financial and political support from Washington and has been a point of contention in the region and between Beijing and Washington for decades.

The most recent example of this – reported by the Taipei Times in their article, “Two Washington-based pro-democracy NGOs to establish offices in Taipei,” – was the increased footprint of Washington’s notorious regime change front – the National Endowment for Democracy.

The article would claim:

Two Washington-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), are to establish offices in Taiwan after they were sanctioned by Beijing last year.

The two institutes, along with the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House and Human Rights Watch were sanctioned last year after speaking in support of Hong Kong democracy activists and as well as being part of China’s tit-for-tat reaction against US President Donald Trump signing the US’ Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. 

Of course the US NED was not simply “speaking in support” of Hong Kong opposition groups – but was a primary conduit through which US government funding passed to these opposition groups.

Making the purpose behind the US NED’s expansion in Taiwan much clearer was IRI president Daniel Twining’s comments claiming (emphasis added):

From our Taipei base, we will work with our partners to highlight Taiwan’s hard-won democratic lessons, strengthen networks of Asia’s democratic actors and build resilience against malign authoritarian influence in the region… As the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] becomes more aggressive in violating the global rules-based order, now is the time for all democracies … to invest in strengthening ties with Taiwan.

In other words, the US NED’s move in Taiwan is meant to contribute to Washington’s wider campaign of encircling and containing not only China but to fuel US-funded unrest targeting China’s closest regional allies.

Independence movements in Taiwan have identified themselves as part of the so-called “Milk Tea Alliance” – a united front of US-funded opposition groups from across the region attempting to coerce their respective governments into a confrontational posture toward Beijing. Most recently this has included the opposition in Hong Kong and anti-government protests in Thailand.

And while the US is clearly banking on its heavy investments in “soft power” – essentially region-wide political interference – China’s strategy focuses instead on economic ties underpinned by principles of non-interference.

It is no surprise that the Asian region has responded positively to the latter instead of the former.

Taiwan’s Future is Inevitable 

The US and the wider Western media have promoted narratives of an impending Chinese invasion of Taiwan. This narrative has been used to justify the sale of US weapons to Taiwan’s military including a recent arms deal worth several billion US dollars.

The Business Insider in an article titled, “A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not be easy, and the 400 anti-ship missiles the US plans to sell to Taiwan would make it even harder,” would note:

Less than a week after it authorized a $1.8 billion arms sale to Taiwan, the US Department of State notified Congress on Monday of another possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan for $2.4 billion that includes hundreds of Harpoon anti-ship missiles and launchers.

The big sale, if approved by Congress, would give Taiwan 100 Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems (HCDS) and 400 RGM-84L-4 Harpoon Block II Surface-Launched Missiles, very capable all-weather weapons that can search for and take out ships as far as half-way across the Taiwan Strait.

The sale of the additional missiles would later be approved.

The weapons are for a “Chinese invasion” that will likely never come and in addition to the US “soft power” networks Taiwan now serves as a base for – the US still lacks any means to confront or contain China’s influence – both in regards to Taiwan and in regards to the wider region.

The need for a “Chinese invasion” of territory already recognized as part of China by the UN makes so little sense on so many levels. But the clearest level is economically where mainland China now stands as Taiwan’s largest trade partner and investor.

Mainland China has been the key to Taiwan’s economic growth throughout recent years and had helped drive the easing of cross Strait tensions.

Because of Taiwan’s economic ties with the mainland, the most recent drive by the US to re-introduce a wedge between the two has come at high cost to Taiwan’s economy. The government fulfilling Washington’s desire to restrict mainland investment and  oppose Beijing’s decisions regarding Chinese territory has cut Taiwan off from economic inflows the US – and even the wider West – are unable to compensate for.

A look at Taiwan’s foreign investment and trade over the last two decades reveals an obvious and unavoidable trend regarding Taiwan’s near to intermediate future.  It is a trend of a shrinking Western role in Taiwan’s economy replaced by a rising mainland China – and a trend that inevitably impacts Taiwan geopolitically.

Twenty years ago only 4% of Taiwan’s exports headed to mainland China while 18% headed to the United States. Today, 34% of Taiwan’s exports head to China versus 10% to the United States. Taiwan’s imports reflect a similar shift in economic power. Both China’s economic rise and its proximity to Taiwan means that this trend will only continue.

US efforts to build up Taiwan’s independence movement is meant to deliberately disrupt this trend – and it is doing so not by providing Taiwan with economic alternatives but instead baiting the island into a growing political and even military standoff with the mainland and its regional allies. This is being done specifically at the expense of Taiwan’s economic ties to both.

Just like Australia and others being drawn into Washington’s anti-Chinese foreign policy – such a stance is not sustainable. As long as China can avoid provocations and conflict and continue offering the benefits of economic prosperity and peace as an alternative to Washington’s strategy of tension – patience and time will run out for Washington’s style of Indo-Pacific hegemony and the interests in the region abetting it will be displaced by those interested in a more constructive regional architecture.

Perhaps on a more global scale a similar process can play out within the United States itself – where current circles of power pursuing this counterproductive foreign policy are displaced by those with a more constructive vision of America’s role not only in Asia but around the globe.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from US-China Perception Monitor

There was no rea­son to think that a Biden admin­is­tra­tion would be to the left of the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion when it comes to for­eign pol­i­cy. Biden comes with a long polit­i­cal career of sup­port­ing the wars of the Unit­ed States and its allies, from the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq to Israel’s aggres­sion against Pales­tini­ans to the pro­tract­ed occu­pa­tion of Afghanistan. And what­ev­er lim­it­ed over­tures he made to the Left dur­ing his cam­paign for the gen­er­al elec­tion in 2020 (while he simul­ta­ne­ous­ly ran on dis­tanc­ing him­self from the Left), for­eign pol­i­cy was almost entire­ly omit­ted, as evi­denced by the issue’s exclu­sion from the uni­ty task force with Bernie Sanders.

Per­haps the most dis­tin­guish­ing for­eign pol­i­cy posi­tion Biden took on the cam­paign trail was his saber rat­tling toward Chi­na, which was not quite as racist at Trump’s, but nonethe­less got so bad a Biden ad was rebuked by pro­gres­sive Asian-Amer­i­can groups for its racist con­tent (Biden even­tu­al­ly walked back some of the ad’s rhetoric). Biden did say dur­ing his cam­paign that he wants to end ​“for­ev­er wars” (many of which he helped start) and that he’s against the war in Yemen (a posi­tion he only took after he served in the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion that sup­port­ed the war), but he nei­ther cen­tered these plat­forms nor accom­pa­nied them with con­crete pol­i­cy pro­pos­als that would actu­al­ly bring an end to end­less war.

In keep­ing with this tra­jec­to­ry, Biden is already draw­ing from a host of pro-war indi­vid­u­als from the Oba­ma era to fill his cab­i­net. Because many of these peo­ple have been around for a while and have rela­tion­ships across Wash­ing­ton, there is no short­age of well-known polit­i­cal fig­ures who are tes­ti­fy­ing to their decen­cy and smarts—that’s how the rel­a­tive­ly insu­lar world of Wash­ing­ton ​“nation­al secu­ri­ty pro­fes­sion­als” works, after all. But for those on the out­side of the Wash­ing­ton Blob look­ing in, the oper­a­tive ques­tions are, ​“What are these appointees’ records, and what does this say about what exact­ly we are up against in a Biden administration?”

Antony Blinken — who will be nom­i­nat­ed for Sec­re­tary of State, as the Biden-Har­ris tran­si­tion team announced Mon­day — has right­ful­ly attract­ed con­sid­er­able crit­i­cism for a record of sup­port­ing wars and so-called human­i­tar­i­an inter­ven­tions. Blinken was a top aide to Biden when the then-Sen­a­tor vot­ed to autho­rize the U.S. inva­sion of Iraq, and Blinken helped Biden devel­op a pro­pos­al to par­ti­tion Iraq into three sep­a­rate regions based on eth­nic and sec­tar­i­an iden­ti­ty. As deputy nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, Blinken sup­port­ed the dis­as­trous mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Libya in 2011, and in 2018he helped launch Wes­t­Ex­ec Advi­sors, a ​“strate­gic advi­so­ry firm” that is secre­tive about its clients, along with oth­er Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion alum­ni like Michèle Flournoy. Jonathan Guy­er writes in The Amer­i­can Prospect, ​“I learned that Blinken and Flournoy used their net­works to build a large client base at the inter­sec­tion of tech and defense. An Israeli sur­veil­lance start­up turned to them. So did a major U.S. defense com­pa­ny. Google bil­lion­aire Eric Schmidt and For­tune 100 com­pa­nies went to them, too.”

But oth­er, less­er-known Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion alum­ni deserve greater scruti­ny. Among them is Avril Haines, who has been tapped as Biden’s Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence. Haines was one of the co-authors of Obama’s ​“pres­i­den­tial pol­i­cy guid­ance,” the infa­mous drone play­book that nor­mal­ized tar­get­ed assas­si­na­tions around the world. Here’s how Newsweek described Haines in 2013:

Since becom­ing the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil’s legal advis­er in 2011, she had been work­ing on a wide array of high­ly com­pli­cat­ed and legal­ly sen­si­tive issues — gen­er­al­ly until 1 or 2 in the morn­ing, some­times lat­er — that go to the core of U.S. secu­ri­ty inter­ests. Among them were the legal require­ments gov­ern­ing U.S. inter­ven­tion in Syr­ia and the range of high­ly clas­si­fied options for thwart­ing Iran’s nuclear pro­gram. All the while, Haines was some­times sum­moned in the mid­dle of the night to weigh in on whether a sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ist could be law­ful­ly incin­er­at­ed by a drone strike.

Dur­ing the Biden pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, there was a con­cert­ed effort by for­mer Oba­ma aides to cast Haines retroac­tive­ly as a voice of restraint and pro­tect­ing civil­ians, as cap­tured in an arti­cle by Spencer Ack­er­man. This revi­sion­ism should not be believed: What­ev­er civil­ian pro­tec­tions Haines may have writ­ten into drone law, they clear­ly did not work, as evi­denced by the dev­as­tat­ing toll of U.S. drone wars on civil­ians. While the Trump admin­is­tra­tion esca­lat­ed the drone war and loos­ened restric­tions on killing civil­ians, it was the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion — aid­ed by Haines — that nor­mal­ized the wide­spread use of tar­get­ed assas­si­na­tions that turned the whole world into a poten­tial U.S. battlefield.

There are oth­er aspects of Haines’ record that are wor­ry­ing. She has ​“in the past described her­self as a for­mer con­sul­tant for the con­tro­ver­sial data-min­ing firm Palan­tir,” as Mur­taza Hus­sain report­ed for The Inter­cept. Palan­tir was co-found­ed by a Trump-back­ing bil­lion­aire, and is impli­cat­ed in some of the worst wrong­do­ings of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing mass sur­veil­lance and immi­grant deten­tion. As Hus­sain reports, lit­tle is known about Haines’ role at the firm, and she scrubbed any men­tion from her bio when she came on as a Biden advi­sor. (Haines also worked for Wes­t­Ex­ec, as Guy­er reports.)

In 2018, Haines angered pro­gres­sives when she spoke in sup­port of Gina Haspel’s nom­i­na­tion for CIA Direc­tor. Haspel was wide­ly opposed for her role in run­ning CIA pris­ons where tor­ture took place.

And then there is Lin­da Thomas-Green­field, tapped to serve as Unit­ed Nations Ambas­sador. Thomas-Green­field lists her most recent employ­ment Albright Stone­bridge Group, a secre­tive ​“glob­al strat­e­gy firm” some­what sim­i­lar to McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny, and chaired by Madeleine Albright (Thomas-Green­field is cur­rent­ly list­ed as ​“on leave” from the firm). Albright Stone­bridge Group is a black box: It’s near impos­si­ble to get any info about who its clients are. The firm claims that it does not lob­by the U.S. gov­ern­ment or do work that is cov­ered by the For­eign Agents Reg­is­tra­tion Act, but many of its staffers dou­ble in roles that cer­tain­ly do exert influ­ence, or have in the past. The firm’s UAE office is head­ed by Jad Mneym­neh, who pre­vi­ous­ly was in the Crown Prince Court of Abu Dhabi’s Office of Strate­gic Affairs.

There is noth­ing remark­able about Biden appoint­ing some­one who hails from a shad­owy glob­al strat­e­gy firm for a pow­er­ful role, but that is pre­cise­ly the prob­lem. As Guy­er points out, Jake Sul­li­van, set to be Biden’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor, went to work for Macro Advi­so­ry Part­ners in 2017. ​“Run by for­mer British spy chiefs, Macro Advi­so­ry Part­ners has about 30 full-time staff and report­ed $37 mil­lion in rev­enue last year,” notes Guy­er. ​“Macro Advi­so­ry Part­ners has used Sullivan’s involve­ment as a sell­ing point in offer­ing ​‘trust­ed coun­sel in a tur­bu­lent world,’ with his face atop the ros­ter on their website’s land­ing page. But when Sul­li­van pub­lish­es a mag­a­zine arti­cle about U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy or deliv­ers uni­ver­si­ty lec­tures, he almost always omits this job from his biography.”

Then there is Michèle Flournoy, con­sid­ered the favorite to lead the Pen­ta­gon (though this hasn’t been offi­cial­ly announced yet). Not only is she on the board of mil­i­tary con­trac­tor Booz Allen Hamil­ton, but she co-found­ed the the hawk­ish cen­ter-left think tank Cen­ter for a New Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty (CNAS) — which receives sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing from the weapons indus­try, includ­ing Gen­er­al Dynam­ics Cor­po­ra­tion, Raytheon, Northrop Grum­man Cor­po­ra­tion and Lock­heed Mar­tin Cor­po­ra­tion. She served in the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion as Under Sec­re­tary of Defense for Pol­i­cy from 2009 to 2012and then played a pow­er­ful role at CNAS. She was a major backer of the 2011mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Libya, a sup­port­er of the occu­pa­tion of Afghanistan, and firm­ly opposed the com­plete removal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

More Biden nom­i­na­tions will be trick­ling in over the com­ing days and weeks, and we have every rea­son to expect more of the same: His tran­si­tion team is a clear tell. As I report­ed on Novem­ber 11, one third of Biden’s Pen­ta­gon tran­si­tion team alone lists as their ​“most recent employ­ment” think tanks, orga­ni­za­tions or com­pa­nies that are either fund­ed by the weapons indus­try or are direct­ly part of this indus­try. Many of these enti­ties are well-known and even respect­ed, includ­ing influ­en­tial think tanks like CNAS and the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies. Staffers of these think tanks do not get the same bad flak that lob­by­ists receive, but they deserve it: Via pol­i­cy papers, media out­reach and rela­tion­ships with politi­cians, these staffers effec­tive­ly do the same thing lob­by­ists do, but dressed in a more aca­d­e­m­ic veneer, and the think tanks Biden is draw­ing from have proven track records of push­ing weapons sys­tems on the U.S. gov­ern­ment. Indeed, in 2016 even the New York Times accused CSIS of lob­by­ing for Gen­er­al Atom­ics, a Cal­i­for­nia-based man­u­fac­tur­er of Preda­tor drones, based on a cache of emails show­ing it doing just that. And then there are the many that do not dis­close their fun­ders, includ­ing four tran­si­tion team mem­bers (Lin­da Thomas-Green­field among them) who hail from Albright Stone­bridge Group.

There is a temp­ta­tion to take a moment to breathe, to cel­e­brate that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has been vot­ed out (although Trump appears deter­mined to main­tain pow­er), and to hold on to hope that Biden will mark a turn away from some of Trump’s worst impuls­es, includ­ing his war mon­ger­ing. But we learned from the ear­li­est days of the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion that it is sober assess­ment — rather than pro­jec­tion — that is called for in moments like this. Oba­ma, with Biden at his side, over­saw inter­ven­tion in Libya, dis­as­trous involve­ment in the Yemen war, ongo­ing occu­pa­tion in Afghanistan, sup­port for the coup in Hon­duras, and much more. And Biden is now pulling from the same team of advi­sors and influ­ence ped­dlers and con­sul­tants who helped make it all happen.

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Sarah Lazare is web edi­tor at In These Times. She comes from a back­ground in inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism for pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing The Inter­cept, The Nation, and Tom Dis­patch. She tweets at @sarahlazare.

Featured image: Then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE

Thailand’s ongoing US-funded anti-government protests aren’t “pro-democracy,” they are anti-Chinese. 

Just like in Hong Kong, the US is attempting to create crisis for China and its allies and impede both China’s and Asia’s rise upon the global stage.

I go over the close and ever-growing ties between Thailand and China and why the US is so determined to undo them. 

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This article was originally published on Land Destroyer Report.

Sources

By now the apocalyptic metaphor for Jeremy Corbyn has crept through the doors of our consciousness. The tendency in the press to describe the unlikely leader in foreboding words which contain a warning: toxic; dangerous; destroy; risk, has gone in to overload. There’s always a warning attached to Corbyn. He will doom Labour at the ballot box; he’s a threat to your nan; if you say his name three times the ghost of Trotsky will appear, collectivize your cat and steal your taxes. This circus of fear isn’t just misleading: when Corbyn is trying to shine a light on the troublesome logic of government policy, on the nightmare that austerity and privatization creates, it shuts down dialogue before it can even get started.

Mainstream media renderings of Jeremy Corbyn tell us he has travelled through a wormhole that leads back to 1970, to drag us all back kicking and screaming in to an age of unbridled left-wing lunacy. In truth, like most ‘golden ages’ alluded to in politics, the reality is often more complex than the mythologizing which hides it. A lot seems odd about the reasoning of the debunkers. Firstly the issue that the chief problem is Corbyn’s obsolescence, rather than the reverse: precisely because of the way global debates on security, warfare, climate change and inequality are escalating, throwing 21st century challenges in to sharp relief, Corbyn’s ideas on rail and energy nationalisation, trident renewal and redistributive justice are ever salient. What should the era of an idea matter anyway? It made sense to left-wing activists in the sixties and seventies to protest the fact that the war economy hoovers up resources that might instead be devoted to helping people. Why can’t it make sense now? If anything those beliefs have been vindicated by time. You’d hope the idea that libraries, schools, hospitals and nurses do more good than bombs didn’t just die on January 1st 1980.

As for introducing Hamas as “friends”, one senses the alternative phrasing, “our enemies in Hamas”, may have escalated tensions somewhat. Corbyn’s choice was simply politic. There is a better reason why his bedfellows stir controversy, and that is when they are at odds with humanitarian principles. For example Corbyn’s refusal to speak out on regimes like Russia and Iran, which violate principles of justice by persecuting LGBTQI citizens, is horrendously out of touch.

Nevertheless he has done good to challenge the UK government for its collusion with Saudi Arabia, an extremist regime notorious for its abuse of human rights and to whom we nevertheless have a policy of selling guns and bombs. Arguably the UN has bastardized the whole legacy of humanitarianism by inviting Saudi Arabia to sit on its human rights council. It is horrifying to think that the (dubiously named) Ministry of Justice in the UK is being contracted to make Saudi Arabia’s disgusting penal system more efficient, at a time when human rights activists are campaigning for the release of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, a teenager sentenced to death for his involvement with anti-government protests. Jeremy Corbyn can be a force for good if he can keep applying diplomatic pressure and expose the pernicious influence of the Sauds on government policy.

Despite his high ideals he will doom us at the ballot box, say many. Of course Labour has to fight elections, but is that its central political task? If seizing the centre and capturing the average voter means capitulating to the portfolio and rhetoric of the Conservatives, it is mind-boggling why anyone would want to try. Obviously Blair did it, and sold Labour’s soul for peanuts. But there is no reason Labour should ever again ditch people power for parliamentary privilege, and ditch progress for politics.

Elections matter, but there is another battle, to build a mass movement for social justice sustainable on the local level, to win back the population for whom Labour was once an authentic opposition to the status quo but morphed in to a spooky robot replica of the Conservatives. Labour shouldn’t just rely on elections, but should equally support the struggle of trade unions, campaign groups and students aspiring in earnest to eliminate poverty and injustice from the world. There’s a whole generation of young people who want to change the state of democracy and struggle for peace and freedom who have found cause for hope in Corbyn, and his success in galvanizing this generation is a great illustration of how progressive principles of the past can still have meaning for people today.

People may accuse Labour of being stuck in the past but the truth is that we are still fighting Thatcher. We have a choice between the neoliberal society, organized by markets and private ownership and run for the benefit of a few self-serving plutocrats, or a socialist democracy, putting power in people’s hands to end the blight of war and division. Thatcher’s triumph was to convince the political class that “there is no alternative” to her Rayndian social engineering. New Labour embraced the essentials of the consensus. She herself said Blair was her greatest success. And every now and then a Blairite will rise up in a bubble of hot air to spew invective over the people’s protest, to try and kill off the Corbyn conga. But socialism is back. The struggle of progressives to reveal the truth, that “another world is possible”, has won, and the establishment hates it. And that is why they crank out phoney propaganda, and ask us if Jeremy Corbyn wins, would the last person who leaves Britain turn the lights out. Because it sits very, very uneasily with them that even if the all the lights did go out, more and more people are following Jeremy Corbyn, who may be a blind man leading the blind, but leading with the light of socialism in his heart.

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Featured image is from Global Justice

First things first, and rather than speculate about what may happen five or ten years from now, we need to look at the present. What is being tested now is to what extent the powerful are able to shape our perception of reality at will, and were we to believe mainstream media, it seems they are getting it. 

We can only trust our instinct, and what my instinct tells me is we have to throw away the masks and go on general strike. Act in unison, not in that social distancing that they want to enforce to its last consequences. Everything else is calculated ambiguity, mediocrity and delirium, a worthless attempt to escape from what is happening right now. 

This would be truly cathartic, and the crossing of supposedly contradictory gestures would short-circuit power and the ideological divisions that are at its service.

The future will depend on what we do in the present and not the other way around. Today what we observe is general subjection; each mask is the most effective vote for the party of the technocracy, fear and the multiple levers of repression. We will return to this at the end. But it is also necessary to pay attention to the medium and long term and not give a few the additional advantage of being the only ones capable of playing a long game, since they already have too many.  

It has almost become commonplace to put populism and technocracy at opposite poles, and so it is on a superficial reading. What is less appreciated is how they participate in the same lie, and this is always the essential thing if one wants to see beyond banana politics. 

Everything encompassed under the umbrella term “populism” has the common denominator of claiming to represent “the people” as opposed to an elite; the unitary character of such a people may be a myth, but the overwhelming reality of a tiny kleptocracy is not, which ends up endowing populist claims with undeniable strength and truth.

On the other hand, it is crystal clear that technocracy is at the service of these minute elites and their facilitators, which exposes a myth much more unfounded and false than that of populism: its legitimization in the name of efficiency. Since the aim is to optimize benefits and structural advantages for a minimum percentage of the population, it is absolutely impossible for technicians at the service of power to work for the benefit of general efficiency, but for a very particular efficiency that is not only different but so often in stark contrast to the former. 

No technocracy is more consolidated today than that of the central banks whose archetype and keystone is the Federal Reserve System, a mere consortium of private banks with the official blessing of the Government. And it is clear that the Fed does not work for the general efficiency of the economy —not even that of its own nation- but for the financial interests of global banking with the hegemony of the dollar as instrument. 

It is also clear that the economic theory that technocrats force on us is garbage economics at the service of the debt trap, so their alleged technical superiority is simply ridiculous: it is just counter-demagogy at the service of the economic elite. 

It is in the interest of this pseudo-elite that everything is, or at least seems, way more complicated than it really is, so that no one but them can be in charge. The best example is the convoluted fractional reserve system, which is ten times more complex than a hundred percent legal money system and incomparably less fair, since it is at the service of and intimately related to the inverted pyramid of inequality.

So-called “right-wing populism” claims to be sovereignist, but today it is impossible to seriously consider sovereignty without a way to guarantee an economic autonomy which begins with monetary independence. In this way any claim to sovereignty is a dead letter from the outset, and national-populism is a neutered cat that is only allowed the mewing, or rather the screaming, of cheap demagogy.

Trump is the textbook example: the base that support Trump is that of the impoverished white worker, but all he offers is more tax breaks for the rich and inconsequential measures against China. His feeble invectives against the Fed are a very small matter because we all know that the consortium has much more weight than the chief executive —he is there to assume quick decisions, distract the attention, and take the hits and the slaps. 

Populism could only be something more than demagoguery if it had a place to grasp the question of monetary sovereignty, but this cannot even be posed in the current correlation of forces.

Populism as a “fourth political theory”, whether right or left, is an option neutralized beforehand by the prevailing system as long as it is incapable of proposing monetary sovereignty: it continues to be on the same plane and turns within the same wheel as the rest of the parties and ideologies, each with its own ambiguity and indetermination, each with its own demagoguery. 

But is it not also demagogy to raise economic sovereignty when it has been totally hijacked and is impossible to access? Demagogy, it is not; it is a vital and elemental question, but totally beyond the reach of modern democracies. After all, democracy itself has been emptied of real content because the usurpation by private banks of such a fundamental public prerogative has also emptied it of effective power. 

Geoeconomics and Geopolitics

Except for China, no country today has monetary sovereignty: certainly not the United States, despite what appearances might suggest. And it is this situation that really determines the hostility of the globalists towards the eastern giant, a hostility that they try to transfer to the masses that support them. 

The media does a great job, and so we see the corner shopkeeper complaining about the Chinese next door and his fellows, “who are taking everything,” instead of looking at the bank to whom he pays the mortgage and who happens to be the engine of globalization. 

The Empire’s hostility towards China will not be tempered, but rather the contrary, since it is an existential threat. And it is here that the wires of geoeconomics and geopolitics will cross.

The Chinese government never had global hegemonic aspirations and would be content with having a voice in international affairs commensurate with its weight. Understandably, the real hegemon is not willing to yield a single portion of its present power. By increasingly harassing China, it is forcing her to defend herself in all spheres —and today attack is an integral part of defense. 

The more hostile the West is to the Sinosphere, the deeper her reaction will be. Previously, Western decision-makers believed that these attacks would leave no wounds and would be reversible since the ultimate goal was to assimilate the Chinese economy into global capitalism. Thus, anything that would weaken the dragon would be good for gaining bargaining power and obtaining concessions more easily. 

But, reached a certain point, the hostility begins to take on an irreversible character and the rival moves further and further away from the negotiating horizon, even if it never loses sight of it. It is forced to move deeper. And that is the point we are getting to, because, unable to solve their own problems, Democrats and Republicans alike need to blame China to get returns from both the electorate and the deep state. 

In the United States, the fallacy of Chinese guilt becomes the only “floating signifier,” the only remaining space left for powerless politicians to the point of pathetic. 

But what is a floating signifier in the jumble of lies of the West could end up being a meaningful token for China, and for this very thing that liars cannot meddle with. 

There is a much more pressing technological race right now than that of coronavirus vaccines. It is the race for control of the cryptocurrency space, in which China seems to be in the lead. 

Digital currency is the ultimate phase of capitalism in the final stage of the liquefaction of money: both a technical culmination and a critical step in the enslavement of the masses and the closure of the system. This step poses a great danger both for those who run it and for those who suffer from it. 

It is only natural that in this phase neoliberalism takes a sharp turn towards technocracy and global governance until it is no longer recognizable. But technocracy itself is only a screen to disguise as neutral the unusual power of a plutarchy that also uses the oligarchy to hide. 

In previous works we have detected a “double contradiction” at the crossroads of the main monetary decisions. We have seen that there are two basic attitudes of the states with respect to the digital currency, as well as two types of private crypto-currencies, the speculative and corporate cryptos, and the alternative cryptos for all sorts of communities. The latter seem to be a residual option but may tip the balance in the very plausible case of a generalized currency war. 

China has no pretensions to monetary hegemony —its currency is still pegged to the dollar- and would be content with some sort of equilibrium; but it is the aggressiveness of those who want to impose the rules that will force her to undertake incursions in the global market even reluctantly, and precisely to preserve the equilibrium. 

The coming crypto-currency war can be a great test to find out the truth of monetary theories. The globalist elite wants to impose a “global governance” of the digital currencies so that the subjects have no escape from their system, even if it means the end of the dollar’s hegemony, now replaced by a new design and a new consensus. This is something that Mark Carney, ex of Goldman Sachs and former governor of the Bank of England, put frankly at the Jackson Hole meeting in 2019. 

But efforts to reach international agreements may come late and badly, at least with respect to a player as important as China; and if agreements were finally reached, today it could only be at the expense of the US dollar, or more precisely of the people of the United States, which would have to submit to a new international discipline for which their internal market is not even remotely accustomed.

Today the different currencies do not have real autonomy because if they turn their backs to the dollar system, the response, whether financial or military, is almost immediate, as we have seen with relatively modest countries like Iraq or Libya. If the monetary hegemony is transferred to a global crypto-currency, blessed by the Bank for International Settlements, they must be certain that the US army will continue to be at its service, or else the always decisive resource of force will be lost. 

On the other hand, if the dollar is abandoned, the Americans will see with painful clarity something they should have seen long before: that the United States has always been an instrument and nobody gave a damn about the people. To speak in such circumstances of betrayal of the American people would be ludicrous; but a new kind of humiliation, of plundering and derision, can still await them if they don’t wake up. Not everyone will accept it. 

The question of the transfer of monetary hegemony, which until now had nothing to do with Chinese initiatives, is a very delicate one and reminds us of a blanket too short for the bed —one has to choose between the feet and the head.

American populism is not going to die with Trump, that could represent only the beginning of a somewhat comical but more than understandable struggle for self-determination. The division in American society is deep and has a dual but unique origin: in the external opposition between globalists and isolationists, and in the internal division of the elites themselves. 

It may well be the case that global banking will reach an agreement with China to the detriment of the American people, but this would only further fuel populism and neo-isolationism: one can even imagine soon the vindication of the dollar as a symbol of the lost sovereignty… even if it was through the dollar that sovereignty fled to the Empire. 

But on the other hand, a monetary hegemony dissociated from military hegemony and force will never get very far. Add to this the fact that the American stock market bubble is the greatest in history and is yet to pop, and we can begin to imagine the chaos into which the old models and behaviors will be plunged. 

Smaller economies and currencies always look for another reference currency to be backed for. After the Last Great Bubble pops, it will be really difficult for the dollar to be the main reserve currency —because the Fed is the Last Great Bubble itself. What is broken, is broken. Hence the urgency to “reinvent” the hegemony by the Great Financial Siphon.

This will make the impending digital yuan, better supported by both a more robust economy and a more solid and balanced state, even more attractive. If the American bullying disappears, the flight to the eastern currency will be much easier —but here we are not only talking about national currencies, but also private crypto-currencies, whether speculative or alternative.

From Chinese dual circulation to the Tao of Judah

Just this fall of 2020 the Communist Party of China has revealed its new five-year strategy of “dual circulation” to reduce dependence on foreign markets and technologies from 2021 to 2025. 

It does not take much insight to realize that the dual attitude is a deeply rooted feature of Chinese idiosyncrasy: from yin and yang to the “one China, two systems”, to this brand-new dual circulation that admits more levels of interpretation than what commentators have so far discovered. 

One of these levels, and a vital one indeed, would be the imminent new digital currency. Let us remember in passing that our own fractional reserve monetary system is also a dual circulation system, with legal money issued by the central banks, barely a five per cent of it, and endogenous money created out of thin air by bank credit, which is the bulk of the total: the debt-money for which we all work, even if we have never asked for credit in our whole lives.

But the “dual circulation” of the Chinese digital currency would have very different implications. The Chinese government could be extremely restrictive about the use of its crypto-currency in its huge domestic market, while adopting a much more “liberal” approach in foreign markets in order to attract long-awaited capital while harvesting new support and a new kind of soft power. 

It sounds very attractive, both to the Chinese government and to a growing sector of the foreign population that feels increasingly destitute, not to mention the flow of capitals that ignores ideologies and is always willing to sell out its mother. 

This explains why guys like Carney are stressing once and again that “governance is the core pillar of any form of digital currency” —global governance, of course; because it is not easy to empty the sea with a sieve. 

China would in no way want to play hard the card of a dual monetary system unless it is strongly provoked, that is, as a defensive countermeasure; but this game, which would disrupt the global financial corral, would be easily interpreted as an incursion into someone else’s yard or “aggression” in other words. Put another way, if China is winning the economic war, the Western countries will intensify their offensive in the other sectors of the hybrid war, from opinion to military pressure and attempts of destabilization.

It can be assumed then that China will evolve in this arena with great caution and according to the behavior of its rivals, because after all, the official approach to double circulation is to decrease the dependence on foreign markets and to come closer to the Chinese ideal of self-sufficiency, which will never cease to be the ultimate goal of its movements. 

The Chinese government would also have an additional reason for concern: the difference in treatment for users of its currency in the domestic and foreign markets could lead to growing discontent at home. It is not easy to harmonize the state-directed economy with navigating the markets, but the Chinese technocracy already know something about it. And they are not alone, because the Fed and the other central banks are familiar with this issue too. 

However, this contrasts sharply with the attitude of the Western powers, which still believe they have a special right to rule the world and impose their wills on others. But we should not blame the “West” for what is basically a matter of the plutocracy and its lackeys.

Elite comes from elected, the chosen ones, and it is known that some are more Chosen than others. We have spoken repeatedly of the 80/20 law in the distribution of wealth and its successive powers, and we have also spoken of the x-ray of that x-ray, that informal “law” of 50/50 that affects the share of the booty and the most intimate physiology of accumulation, that special relationship within AngloZionism between leaders in the exercise of violence and deceit.

This share seems insufficient to one of the parties given the notorious advantage they enjoy; the financial elite wants the United States to serve the Empire and not the other way around. The disappearance of the dollar would not at all imply the retreat of the interests of those who manage the Federal Reserve, but its protection against the growing instabilities of the nation and loss of consensus —of which they are the main cause. 

This transfer or succession would imply an internecine war that can only be read between the lines, and this conflict is the invisible cause of a social division that is but the ultimate consequence of the projection of power with its control of means and minds. 

The transfer of the coercive mechanisms of financial control can leave a vacuum of power and authority that will be favorable to the monetary sovereignty of countries, collectives and peoples, and right now it is impossible to say what will tip the balance, since many of the consequences will be unintended. 

China may favor that spring, but so may the United States if it throws off the yoke of empire and creates the first one hundred percent legal tender, as already proposed in the 1933 Chicago Plan. And only in this way they could set a positive example and have the only moral leadership, involuntary, that may be worthwhile. 

Social Democrat Roosevelt did a great job for the Fed at the time, which should not be surprising. But it is in the destiny of the United States and of all of us that this unprecedented option —which will not fail to come up at the critical moment of “change of phase” in the state and reality of money. And this will completely disrupt the props of the political spectrum, which, as we see, can no longer stand.

Today there would no longer be globalism or a will to continue with this project were it not for the weight and power projection of “Jewish” money, which is the only will that continues to give a direction to the multiple divergent interests of the oligarchies. The West itself would be dismembered into a heap of disperse interests without this element of cohesion; there is nothing easier to demonstrate, if the question is the fate and concentration of capital. It is good to understand this, and he who ignores it miss the thread of the plot. 

Not even the Jews themselves have exhausted the meaning of this reality, since censorship of public opinion must also have a profound effect on involuntary mechanisms of self-censorship. Only at the very end can instinct attain self-understanding. 

Too many confuse loyalty to the West with loyalty to Netflix, and there is a point to it, since the West is above all the imaginary of the descent in search of its unfathomable bottom.  

As the couplet goes, ’cause the Tao of Judah, neither is tao nor is not nah, the anonymous poet complaining that the sharp-edged rigor of the Law has little to do with the harmonious roundness of reciprocity. But surely our coplero, whether Benjamin of Tudela or not, had an understandable bias that prevented him from seeing the issue more objectively. 

Because yes, there is a Tao of Judah; and it is true that it does not have to do directly with the Law, but with its reversal: we are talking about the dialectic between the Jews and the Goyim —the nations and their peoples. The “tao of Judah” is literally the winding road and tortuous way of the Law among the nations.

Jewish scriptures continuously emphasize the outstanding status of Israel over all peoples and nations; China, on the contrary, was the popular civilization par excellence long before the People’s Republic, since there the ideal is not to stand out. The Tao of Judah seeks the extremes with full intention, turning everything into gold included, while the Chinese people, in their instinctive search for the invariable medium, aspire to the golden mean or aurea mediocritas by carefully avoiding the extremes. 

So the archetype of the Jew and the Chinese are like the scorpion and the frog of the fable: one is always looking for soft parts to nail the sting to the heart, while the other, all defensive instinct, is always ready to avoid it. 

Of course, we are talking of a big frog. And if we are dealing with how the digital liquefaction of money is going to affect the balance and legitimacy of nations —water and earth, after all- it is not hard to spot a curious fight between Behemoth and Leviathan. And in our upside-down world, the earth has to use the liquid element of money to defend itself, while the plutarchs who accumulate the bulk of the wealth seek to poison all the levers of politics to prevent it. 

Those who like enigmas may wonder where the Ziz is today —that mysterious creature of the air capable of covering the Sun with its wings. 

To avoid being fried in the pan, China would have to combine the three mythical creatures into a single entity: a full-fledged Dragon with brand new claws. 

Israel’s extremely close ties with the national-populist movements are telling: from Trump to Bolsonaro, Johnson, or the European populist parties. It is as much about controlling their movements as it is about ensuring that their leaders are unpresentable enough to discredit their most legitimate claims. And so far they are having great success, because even if they win, and especially if they win, the expectations about a real sovereignty wear down more and more —especially when they have control of the media and can round out the caricature of these already cartoonish characters. 

The current national-populist leader appeals on the one hand to healthy instincts against globalization, while on the other appeals to the most dull and stupid selfishness. Lacking real power, he is a movie loser doomed to ridicule. 

The only game changer here would be the new (digital) monetary balance. If sovereignty is able to regain control of money for nations and do so successfully, the myth of the efficient technocracy would be forever discredited.   

But this requires not only a window of opportunity, but also another sense of goodness and justice. There should be much more coherence and integrity in speaking about the common good and the ways to achieve it.

There is the erotics of power and there is the necrotics: but now they are barely distinguishable for both politicians and technocrats. The true erotics of power is being able to awaken in the people the desire for good, and the present national-populist has no idea what that might be. If he gets so many votes today, it is only because many people know what they hate. Adherence by negative reaction is already guaranteed by the system; the question is if there is a real offer beyond demagoguery. 

Given the nature of the forces at play, the time to rise this question will come.

Saying no

In the coming monetary war we can distinguish three axes: the horizontal axis, linked to the most purely commercial, civil and liquidity factors, the vertical axis, to the political-legal environment of the states and the agreements between states, and a temporal axis in depth encoding the scope of the reversibility and irreversibility of the debt, and of the uses and changes in monetary technology.

As we have already said elsewhere, this third axis is as important or more than the other two, and it is present in all orders and not only in the economy. In fact, it defines the extremes of our sense of temporality, and maybe one day analysts will understand its relevance. Today it is beyond their estimations, and even their ideas, which makes it even more interesting.

The things now being discussed are at a very different level; issues such as basic income, which, by the way, will be one of the star products to gain the assent of the debt-serf without costing the elites a penny. The same people responsible for all this situation have to present themselves as saviors; what less not to end up hanged. 

And this brings us back to the beginning of our article, and how to respond to those who care so much about saving us. And for this we do not need to ponder or analyze; we only need to have guts. 

They say fear is free but nothing is further from truth. Surely those who seek to frighten us 24/7 are trying to free us. 

Many people who often talk about the Revolution and taking over the Winter Palace not only put on their masks but also launch diatribes against the “deniers”. It is well known that “fascism” must be fought —but operetta fascism, not the real thing we know so well. Perhaps, by attacking this paper fascism they believe they have fulfilled their political consciousness, a truly revolutionary one. They are the necessary counterpart of all those who say that the Democratic Party is communist.

I am not going to tell anyone what to do, but there is no need to wait for the revolution, or the taking of the Winter Palace, or anything like that. If you wanted a chance to do something against this system, to make a real gesture for once, the time has long since come. It never will be easier for you, because you don’t even have to start by doing something, but simply decide not to do it.

Not to wear a mask. Not to close your business. Not to submit to disgusting and unnecessary tests. Not to be vaccinated with completely experimental and unnatural vaccines. Not letting them muzzle you or inserting icky sticks and needles in your body, you insert them something bigger by the best place possible, without no need to stain yourself with their shit. 

It is way better to die alone than suffer their special treatments, because anything is better than owing them your life. Show yourself you don’t depend on them. If there is a time to prove it, this is it. 

You don’t need to be their guinea pig, let them graciously experiment in their own flesh —this are the only experiments worthwhile. You don’t need to back up with actions what you don’t believe in. If you stop doing and consuming certain things, you will soon find room to do and assimilate others; if you stop giving in to the all-pervasive pressure to isolate yourself, you will soon find unexpected companions, because you will also be busy looking for them. 

Whatever happens, in spite of everything and with all our actions included, I am convinced that this is always the least bad of the infinite possible worlds; but no one can imagine how the others might be. We have enough with just one.

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For over 40 years, the US never attacked Iranian territory — other than by covert operations.

Tehran’s legitimate nuclear energy program has no military component — confirmed time and again by the IAEA and US intelligence community assessments.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh earlier said the following:

According to US National Intelligence Estimates on Iran’s nuclear program, “there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb,” adding:

“Despite years of covert operations inside Iran, extensive satellite imagery, and the recruitment of many Iranian intelligence assets, the United States and its allies, including Israel, have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran…”

It’s because none exists, not now or earlier.

Iran’s nuclear program is the world’s most heavily monitored by IAEA inspectors.

Their reports across the board stress the program’s legitimacy.

No evidence suggests a future Iranian aim to develop the “bomb.”

In stark contrast, Israel is nuclear armed and dangerous. It maintains stockpiles of chemical, biological and other banned weapons.

The US operates the same way, using banned weapons in all its preemptive wars.

Yet the UN, most of its member states, and corporate-controlled establishment media turn a blind eye to vital information everyone has a right to know.

At the same time, US major media promote the myth of an Iranian threat — when none ever existed throughout Islamic State history. More on this below.

Iran is the region’s leading proponent of peace, stability, and mutual cooperation with other nations — seeking confrontation with none, threatening no other countries.

Throughout nearly four years in office, Trump waged all-out war on Iran by other means — short of military confrontation.

The one exception of sorts was last January when the Pentagon assassinated Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani and deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in their car after departing from the Baghdad International Airport.

While continuing wars he inherited, Trump launched no new ones on his own.

With his tenure nearing an end — barring a highly unlikely 11th hour Supreme Court ruling that invalidates fraudulent election results — why would he risk embroiling the Middle East in potentially greater war than anything seen since WW II?

Would he want his legacy more greatly tarnished than already?

If Iranian territory is attacked, retaliation would be swift and harsh against US regional forces, possibly against Israel.

Russia and/or China might intervene to protect their regional interests – a worst case global war scenario.

Where US ruling authorities never went since Jimmy Carter was president is highly unlikely to happen now — especially near the end of Trump’s time in office.

Yet saber-rattling US media suggest possibly otherwise.

In November, the NYT claimed Trump “asked senior advisors (for possible) options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks,” adding:

He was “dissuaded” from striking Iran militarily, including by Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley.

According to the Middle East Eye (MEE) on Tuesday, Iranian Quds Force commander General Ismail Qaani told Iraqi PMU officials in Baghdad to halt attacks on the Green Zone and US bases until Trump’s tenure ends.

According to a senior PMU commander quoted by the MEE:

“Qaani made it clear that Trump wants to drag the region into an open war before leaving, to take revenge on his opponents over losing the election, and it is not in our interest to give him any justification to start such a war.”

While it’s highly unlikely that Trump would order an attack on Iran militarily at this time, Iranian officials don’t want a pretext created for him to do the unthinkable.

Qaani added that

“(i)f war breaks out between Iran and America, its repercussions cannot be contained, and Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran will all be a battleground for both sides.”

“Therefore, the higher interest must be taken into consideration…So all attacks targeting US interests in the region should be stopped.”

According to a November 21 CENTCOM press release, a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber was sent to the Middle East on the phony pretext of “deter(ring) aggression and reassur(ing) US partners and allies.”

Reportedly, a US aircraft carrier task force is en route to the Persian Gulf, what appears to be a saber-rattling move, not preparation to strike Iran.

On Thursday, WaPo said “(a)nti-Iran hawks in the (US) and Israel see the window closing on the possibility of a preemptive US-Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear program,” adding:

Netanyahu, Pompeo, and other Trump regime hardliners support what cooler head US and Israeli officials reject.

Netanyahu cried wolf about a nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons program countless times before — knowing it doesn’t exist. Last week, he was quoted saying:

“There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement.”

“We must stick to an uncompromising policy to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons (sic)” — ignoring his own illegal stockpile.

According to an unnamed US war department official, the idea of a “clean, limited surgical strike” on one more Iranian nuclear facilities is folly.

All-out regional war could follow with potentially devastating consequences for Iran, Israel, and US-allied Arab countries.

According to individuals close to Trump, he values preservation of steps taken to draw down US regional forces, an effort to stop endless wars.

Striking Iran militarily would be a polar opposite step.

His regular intelligence briefings surely explained that Iran’s nuclear program has no military component.

On November 25, Reuters reported that Trump’s envoy for regime change in Iran Elliott Abrams said more US sanctions on the country are coming regularly through January 20.

He stopped short of suggesting possible military confrontation.

Because high-level US political and military officials oppose the idea — along with the type legacy Trump wants to preserve — anything potentially leading to war with Iran is highly unlikely.

Separately on Wednesday, Axios reported that Israel’s IDF was “instructed to prepare for the possibility that the US will conduct a military strike against Iran before President Trump leaves office,” adding:

The move was unrelated to an “intelligence assessment” or belief that Trump would order such a strike.

It’s another example of saber-rattling.

With Trump’s tenure near an end, his focus mainly on convincing at least five Supreme Court justices to reject rigged election results against him in hopes of a second term, Iran is a side issue by comparison.

The clock is ticking on his remaining days in office, as things now stand.

As January 20 inauguration day draws closer, chances for Trump ordering a military strike on Iran will likely diminish and fade away.

Hostile US actions on Iran — short of hot war — will continue as it’s played out endlessly since its 1979 revolution.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

With President Donald Trump all but conceding to the transition team that will take over after January next year, interest now shifts to President-elect Joe Biden’s choices for cabinet.  On the national security front, the imperial-military lobby will have reasons to be satisfied.  If Trump promised to rein in, if not put the brakes on the US imperium, Biden promises a cocktail of energising stimulants.

While campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Biden tried to give a different impression.  Biden the militarist was gone.  “It time to end the Forever Wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure,” he stated in July 2019. Pinching a leaf or two out of Trump’s own playbook, he insisted on bringing “the vast majority of our troops home – from the wars on Afghanistan and the Middle East”.  Missions would be more narrowly focused on Al-Qaeda and ISIS.  Support would also be withdrawn from the unpardonable Saudi-led war in Yemen.  “So I will make it my mission – to restore American leadership – and elevate diplomacy as our principal tool of foreign policy.”

This was an unconvincing display of the leopard desperately trying to change its striking spots.  During the Obama administration, the Vice-President found war sweet, despite subsequent attempts to distance himself from collective cabinet responsibility.  These included the current war in Yemen, the assault on Libya that crippled the country and turned it into a terrorist wonderland, and that “forever war” in Afghanistan.  In 2016, Biden claimed to be the sage in the administration, warning President Barack Obama against the Libyan intervention.  An impression of combative wisdom was offered.  He had “argued strongly” in the White House “against going … to Libya,” a position at odds with the hawkish Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who insisted on something a bit more than going to Libya. After the demise of Muammar Gaddafi, what then?  “Doesn’t the country disintegrate?  What happens then?  Doesn’t it become a place where it becomes a – petri dish for the growth of extremism?”  So many questions, so few answers.

The Iraq War is another stubborn stain on Biden’s garments.  His approval of the invasion of Iraq has been feebly justified as benign ignorance.  As he explained to NPR in September last year, he had received “a commitment from President [George W.] Bush he was not going to go to war in Iraq.”  Bush looked him “in the eye at the Oval Office; he said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program.”  Then came the invasion: “we had a shock and awe”.  For Iraqis, it was a bit more than shock and awe.   

With the warring efforts of the US in Iraq turning sour, Biden entertained a proposal reminiscent of Europe’s old imperial planners: the establishment of “three largely autonomous regions” for each of Iraq’s ethnic and confessional groups, governed by Baghdad in the execrable policy of “unity through autonomy”.  Not exactly an enlightened suggestion but consistent with previous conventions of dismemberment that have marked Middle Eastern politics. 

In considering Biden’s record on Iraq, Spencer Ackerman of The Daily Beast was clear in describing an erratic, bumbling and egregious performance.  “Reviewing Biden’s record on Iraq is like rewinding footage of a car crash to identify the fateful decisions that arrayed people at the bloody intersection.”

Now, we forward ourselves to November 2020.  The Trump administration has given a good cover to the incoming Democratic administration.  Considered putatively wicked, all that follows the orange ogre will be good.  In introducing some of his key appointments, Biden’s crusted choices stood to attention like storm troopers-elect, an effect helped by face masks, solemn lighting and their sense of wonder.  “America is back,” declared Biden.  A collective global shudder could be felt.  The Beltway establishment, mocked by Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes as “the Blob,” had returned.

In the cast are such figures from the past as former Deputy Secretary of State and former Deputy National Security Adviser, Tony Blinken. He will serve as Secretary of State.  National Security adviser: former Hillary Clinton aide and senior adviser Jake Sullivan.  Director of National Intelligence: Avril Haines (“a reliable expert leading our intelligence community,” remarked CNN’s unflinching militarist Samantha Vinograd of CNN, herself another former Obama stable hand from the National Security Council).  Secretary of Defence: most probably Michèle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defence for Policy.

Blinken, it should be remembered, was the one who encouraged Biden to embrace the antediluvian, near criminal project of partitioning Iraq.  This does not worry The Guardian, which praises his “urbane bilingual charm” which will be indispensable in “soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player.”  He is a “born internationalist” who likes soccer and played a weekly game with US officials, diplomats and journalists before joining the Obama administration. 

Johannes Lang, writing in the Harvard Political Review, is a touch sharper, noting that Blinken “is a committed internationalist with a penchant for interventionism.”  The two often go together.  As Blinken recently told The New York Times (members of the UN General Assembly, take note), “Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself.”

Flournoy and Blinken have been spending time during the Trump years drawing sustenance through their co-founded outfit WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm promising to bring “the Situation Room to the Board Room.”  Revolving door rhetoric is used unabashedly: We knew power; we can show you how to exploit it. Having served in a presidential administration, these individuals are keen to use “scenario development and table-top exercises to test ideas or enhance preparedness for a future contingency”.  The consultants are willing to give their clients “higher confidence in their business decisions,” as Flournoy puts it, in times of “historic levels of turmoil and uncertainty around the world”. 

The Flournoy set have also been the beneficiaries of the US defence funding complex, fronting think tanks that have received generous largesse.  In a report for the Center for International Policy, Ben Freeman notes that, “Think tanks very considerably in terms of their objectives and organization, but many think tanks in Washington D.C. share a common trait: they receive substantial financial support from the US government and private businesses that work for the US government, most notably defense contractors.”  Flournoy’s own Center for a New American Security now ranks second to the RAND Corporation in the cash it gets from defence contractors and US government sources. 

Biden’s Department of Defense agency review team, tasked with informing what is hoped will be a “smooth transfer of power,” has its fair complement of those from entities either part of the weapons industry or beneficiaries of it.  According to In These Times, they make up at least eight of the 23 people in that team.  Think tanks with Biden advisory personnel include the militarily minded Center for Strategic and International Studies, which boasts funding from Raytheon, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation and General Dynamics Corporation.

America – at least a version of it – is back, well and truly.  The stench of wars continuous, and interventions compulsive, is upon us.

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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]

The Environmental Protection Agency released a draft biological evaluation today finding that glyphosate is likely to injure or kill 93% of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The long-anticipated draft biological evaluation released by the agency’s pesticide office found that 1,676 endangered species are likely to be harmed by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the world’s most-used pesticide.

The draft biological opinion also found that glyphosate adversely modifies critical habitat for 759 endangered species, or 96% of all species for which critical habitat has been designated.

“The hideous impacts of glyphosate on the nation’s most endangered species are impossible to ignore now,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Glyphosate use is so widespread that even the EPA’s notoriously industry-friendly pesticide office had to conclude that there are hardly any endangered species that can manage to evade its toxic impacts.”

Hundreds of millions of pounds of glyphosate are used each year in the United States, mostly in agriculture but also on lawns, gardens, landscaping, roadsides, schoolyards, national forests, rangelands, power lines and more.

According to the EPA, 280 million pounds of glyphosate are used just in agriculture, and glyphosate is sprayed on 298 million acres of crop land each year. Eighty-four percent of glyphosate pounds applied in agriculture are applied to soy, corn and cotton, commodity crops that are genetically engineered to tolerate being drenched with quantities of glyphosate that would normally kill a plant.

Glyphosate is also widely used in fruit and vegetable production.

“As we prepare to feast on our favorite Thanksgiving dishes, the ugly truth of how harmful industrial-scale agriculture has become in the U.S. has never been so apparent,” said Burd. “If we want to stop the extinction of amazing creatures like monarch butterflies, we need the EPA to take action to stop the out-of-control spraying of deadly poisons.”

The EPA has, for decades, steadfastly refused to comply with its obligation under the Endangered Species Act to assess the harms of pesticides to protected plants and animals. But it was finally forced to do this evaluation under the terms of a 2016 legal agreement with the Center.

Emails obtained in litigation brought against Monsanto/Bayer by cancer victims and their families have uncovered a disturbingly cozy relationship between the agency and the company on matters involving the glyphosate risk assessment.

In one example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it would be reviewing glyphosate’s safety, an EPA official assured Monsanto he would work to thwart the review, saying, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.” The Health and Human Services review was delayed for three years.

Monsanto/Bayer has also enjoyed broad support from the Trump White House. A domestic policy advisor in the Trump administration stated, “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.”

Earlier this year, relying on confidential industry research, the EPA reapproved glyphosate. The EPA’s assessment contradicts a 2015 World Health Organization analysis of published research that determined glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.

President-elect Joe Biden has already tapped Michael McCabe, a former consultant to chemical giant DuPont, to join his Environmental Protection Agency transition board, drawing broad outrage, including from Erin Brockovich.

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Researchers at North Carolina State University are calling for a coalition of biotech industry, government and non-government organizations, trade organizations, and academic experts to work together to provide basic information about gene-edited crops to lift the veil on how plants or plant products are modified and provide greater transparency on the presence and use of gene editing in food supplies.

At issue is a May 2020 US Dept of Agriculture rule called SECURE (sustainable, ecological, consistent, uniform, responsible, efficient) that governs genetically engineered organisms. The rule is expected to exempt most genetically modified plants from pre-market field testing and data-based risk assessment. In fact, the USDA estimates that 99% of biotech crops would receive this exemption.

NC State researchers Jennifer Kuzma and Khara Grieger, in a policy forum paper published in the journal Science, say that SECURE, though decades in the making, falls short in providing enough public information about gene-edited crops in the food supply. Given consumer interest in GM foods and labelling information, the lack of public information on gene-edited crops could decrease trust and confidence as they begin to enter the marketplace and become more commonplace.

“It’s pretty clear that consumers want to know which products are genetically modified and which are not, and we suspect that these desires will not be different for gene-edited crops,” said Kuzma, the Goodnight-NC GSK Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at NC State. “Crop developers, including companies, have signalled that they want to do better with gene editing to improve public trust. We present a model for them to improve transparency and obtain certification based on providing information about their gene-edited and other GM crops in a public repository.”

To provide more transparency, the NC State researchers recommend the creation of CLEAR-GOV, or a “Community-Led and Responsive Governance” coalition, that would provide access to basic information on biotech crops in accessible language. That would include the species and variety of plant, type of trait modified, improved quality provided by the trait modification, general areas where the crop is grown, and downstream uses of the crop. CLEAR-GOV would be operated through a non-profit organization staffed by experts from a variety of academic fields.

“If leadership at a non-profit, independent research organization decided that this is something that they are passionate about, they could see a market value in housing this coalition and hosting this depository,” said Grieger, a paper co-author and assistant professor and extension specialist in NC State’s Department of Applied Ecology.

Kuzma adds that CLEAR-GOV would fill an important gap for consumers and other stakeholder groups who want to know more about gene-edited products in the marketplace.

“Because many gene-edited crops would be exempt under SECURE and new GM food labelling rules may also not apply to them, there needs to be some information repository for companies that want to do the right thing and be more transparent,” Kuzma said. “Our recommendations would provide a mechanism for that.”

This initiative is timely in light of the biotech company Cibus’s obfuscation over the origins of its gene-edited herbicide-tolerant canola. Cibus promoted the canola for years as a triumph of its proprietary “precision” gene-editing technology. But as soon as the canola became detectable through the development of a public test, Cibus did a U-turn and claimed that the herbicide tolerance was the result of an accidental mutation rather than gene editing.

We might speculate that Cibus’s turnaround came because the gene-edited canola does not have EU approval under the GMO regulations and thus any presence in EU imports would be illegal.

GMWatch welcomes the researchers’ call for more transparency. But in our view, the responsibility to deliver that transparency lies firmly with the gene-edited crop developer. It should not fall to the public, NGOs, or academics to fill the gaps in knowledge created by the secrecy of the GMO industry.

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The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations (UN), Samuel Moncada, intervened this Wednesday in the session of the Security Council to denounce the economic aggression of the United States against twenty-nine countries of the world, through their misnamed “sanctions,” and proposed the formation of an International Alliance to stop the crimes against humanity perpetuated by the US in violation of human rights and the UN Charter.

“The US pretension to impose its national legislation as if they were universal laws, through economic and military coercion, is a danger to the entire system of international relations,” said the high diplomatic representative at the UN, through the publication of several videos in his virtual participation in the session.

Through his Twitter account, @SMoncada_VEN , he reported that Venezuela supports the creation of this “International Association against Unilateral Coercive Measures,” as an operational platform that will combat the illegal sanctions that the US has imposed against a third of humanity.

Venezuela propone en ONU la formación de una “Asociación Internacional contra las Medidas Coercitivas Unilaterales” como plataforma operacional que permita combatir las sanciones ilegales de EEUU contra un tercio de la humanidad. pic.twitter.com/KdmADHesAE

— Samuel Moncada (@SMoncada_VEN) November 25, 2020

“Today we denounce in the UN Security Council, Trump’s economic aggression against twenty-nine countries—including Venezuela—representing a third of humanity, attacked in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic,” stated the Venezuelan ambassador.

He stressed that these illegal measures amount to a systematic and deliberate attack against entire populations, and against the right to self-determination of peoples, “by a permanent member of the Security Council.”

La pretensión de EEUU de imponer su legislación nacional como si fueran leyes universales, a través de la coerción económica y militar, es un peligro para todo el sistema de relaciones internacionales. pic.twitter.com/xKGYGWGxsg

— Samuel Moncada (@SMoncada_VEN) November 25, 2020

“We face the unusual situation in which a Member State with a special responsibility to comply with international law, perpetrates crimes against humanity and forces other States to assist it in committing the crime,” he reproached.

The immoral economic persecution through criminal means is aggravated by the use of military threats, which increase obstacles in the struggle of countries to combat the coronavirus pandemic. In this sense, he denounced the so-called “humanitarian exceptions” to these coercive measures, which the US says it applies to help the affected peoples, as a cruel and utter mockery.

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COVID-19, which has thus far killed over 1.4 million people globally; the alleged treatment of the Uighur minority; the neoliberal-supporting rioters in Hong Kong; and, the trade war with Washington, have all contributed to the deterioration of China’s image in the West. The majority of French people also have a negative image of China, according to the findings of a European study, which is curious as it opposes France’s own economic interests. The result of the study demonstrates that there was a successful culmination on the demonization of China by the West, especially in the Anglosphere, which in turn influences other countries in Western Europe and pro-American states around the world.

The perception of China was the subject of a vast survey carried out in September and October in thirteen European countries by the Czech Palacký University Olomouc, in partnership with the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI). And the result is interesting as 62% of French people have a negative image of China for only 16% of positive perceptions. The overwhelming negative sentiment towards China was also shared by Sweden, Germany, the UK, Czechia and Hungary. Spain, Slovakia, Italy, Poland and Latvia were more neutral towards China while Serbia and Russia had overwhelmingly positive views.

Interviewed by Le Monde, researcher Marc Julienne also observed that the French are more attached to “political than economic” interests. Thus the “first terms that come to the minds of those surveyed, apart from COVID-19, are ‘dictatorship’ and ‘authoritarian’” when they think of China. The French rank China last among trusted states and entities behind the EU, the U.S. and Russia, according to Julienne.

Such a radical opinion by Westerners against China is not surprising. One of the most determining factors in the construction of these public opinions is the posture of the direct and increasingly ideologized confrontation of U.S. President Donald Trump against China. Trump started with a trade war against China, blaming the Asian Giant for the end of U.S. manufacturing rather than the corporations that sought greater profits by using cheap labor in China. However, what started off as only a trade war against China ended up with direct attacks against the ruling Chinese Communist Party for its political and economic system.

Responding to Trump’s accusations of the “China virus,” Beijing’s diplomacy went on the offensive at the start of the year. In March, the Twitter account of the Chinese Embassy in Paris had mentioned the possibility that the U.S. was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Chinese ambassador, Lu Shaye, was even summoned by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian for his remarks publicly denigrating France’s abandonment of the elderly in the first months of the pandemic.

If Chinese diplomats ever dare to make arguments against the provocations of Western media and politicians, they are immediately described as aggressive. This is a demonstration of Western soft power, and the results of the survey are a testament to this. This is because there is an ideological alignment of the U.S.’ anti-China position which has been adopted by all Western media, a far cry from when they once adored the Cultural Revolution and Maoism at the height of the Sino-Soviet Split during the Cold War.

The demonization of China, that has spilled over into France and the majority of Western Europe, has been imposed by American diplomacy – this is whether they are backing and supporting neoliberal rioters in Hong Kong, constantly denouncing China’s alleged treatment of the Uighur minority, pushing COVID-19 conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, or instigating a trade war. The media have been unanimous on China since the accession of Trump to the presidency. We of course cannot be massively surprised that public opinion towards China has been deeply influenced by Trump’s rhetoric and the media’s portrayal of the Asian country.

China has therefore become the scapegoat for Western countries to project their own internal crises, for example the poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., or the endless protests like those by the Yellow Vests in France, or the bad treatment of minorities like Native Americans in the U.S. and Canada, or the lack of domestic manufacturing all across the Western World.

However, despite the constant antagonizations and provocations against China, economic ties have simply continued and developed. Beijing has once again opted to rhetorically react to provocations, but continue economic developments, presenting a major rift between the French political class and the economic elite. China is France’s second largest non-EU trading partner after the U.S., and is quickly rising through the ranks and even surpasses rich countries neighboring France like Switzerland and Belgium.

French President Emmanuel Macron believes that Europe stretches from Lisbon in Portugal to Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East close to the borders with China and North Korea. This is in the hope that in the future Europe will have direct access to Asia’s rising markets via the Eurasian landmass. Constant provocations by the French political elite have the risk of locking out the European country from reaching the pearl of all of Asia’s markets – China. By following the example of Trump and the U.S. media establishment, Paris risks a lot for virtually no gain by joining the U.S.’ anti-China initiative.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Credits to the owner of the featured image

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I am an independent scientist of over 30 years experience leading research into new medicines, operating up to Vice President and head of Respiratory Research at Pfizer, a US pharmaceutical company and founder and CEO of Ziarco Ltd a biotechnology company sold to Novartis in 2017.

As an independent I am less constrained than academics and commercial persons. However, I have applied the same rigour to analysing the pandemic since March as with any of my former projects.

In brief:

• I am certain the pandemic is over and was over before the end of June.
• There was a clear peak of excess deaths in spring. COVID-19 clearly caused many deaths, mostly of the elderly and already ill.
• Turning to late summer and into the autumn – despite exaggerated claims that there is an ongoing full-blown pandemic, there are still FEWER respiratory deaths than at the same time periods in all five of the years since 2015. The below shows monthly deaths with any respiratory primary diagnoses including COVID-19.

There is a small and potentially growing all-causes excess mortality signal. I am working with a pathologist and our evaluation so far shows that these excess deaths are inconsistent with being COVID-19. In short, they are not dying from respiratory illness, but from heart failure and from cerebrovascular accidents such as stroke and diabetes. An awful realisation I have is that these excess deaths are just the sort you would expect if you take a mixed population, deprive them of easy access to the healthcare system for seven months and keep them stressed.

Looking at data obtained from contacts within the NHS, we do not have hospitals full of respiratory patients to any greater extent than usual for November. There are always hotspots and we know Liverpool is one such today. Again, the evidence is against this being due to COVID-19. And to repeat, we have not had excess respiratory deaths since the spring event itself. Liverpool and other cities and towns nearby have additional capacity and ‘surge capacity’, if required. The NHS as a whole is not in crisis and there is nothing to suggest it is about to be. I also checked with a colleague regarding intensive care beds. While an increasing number of their occupants have tested positive for COVID-19, intensive care beds are at exactly normal loadings for the time of year, i.e. 82%. I believe those COVID-19 diagnoses are mostly or all incorrect. We have tested well over 30,000,000 people. It wouldn’t be surprising if lots of people get a false diagnosis from a PCR test.

Antibody prevalence in the blood of those surveyed periodically is falling steadily and has been since its peak in the spring, when the virus was moving very fast through the population, infecting perhaps hundreds of thousands per day at its very peak. That antibodies are falling was last week wrongly touted as problematic and suggested immunity was fading. That’s the wrong interpretation. The human body does not maintain high levels of antibodies which are not needed. Consequently, steady falls in prevalence of antibodies is a clear signal that people are no longer encountering the virus. I believe that insofar as it is still present, it has become endemic at low levels and represents no threat to the health of the nation.

As someone experienced at reading into adjacent areas of science which I have done time without number since obtaining my PhD in respiratory pharmacology in 1988, I was always confident that the population would speedily attain ‘community immunity’. This is what I believe has happened as detailed in my article “What SAGE has got wrong”.

In my view – probably because SAGE lacked cellular and clinical immunologist expertise earlier this year and at no time during this event has it seconded a pathologist or an expert generalist such as myself – they’ve made a series of terrible errors which continue to infect policy to this very day. If such experts had been consulted, our advice would have made a huge difference, not least to the starting assumptions which are widely criticised as outlandish in the scientific community. In addition, we could have “sense checked” some of the more perplexingly unlikely predictions, such as 4,000 deaths per day.

The most fundamental error SAGE has made was to ignore all evidence of the very existence of prior immunity in the population on the spurious grounds that this was a novel virus. This virus is in fact related to four common-cold producing coronaviruses in general circulation and it has been shown unequivocally that a sizeable proportion of the peoples of at least Europe and North America possess T-cells that provide them with some protection against both endemic and novel viruses.

This virus is a serious threat to a low proportion of the elderly, especially if they are already ill. This description of the most vulnerable accounts for the vast majority of Covid deaths and the median age of those who’ve died of COVID-19 is slightly older than the median age of those who died of all other causes. However, the majority even of this elderly group survive infection. Overall, the lethality of the virus is now known to be very close to typical seasonal influenza. Notably, in relation to risks to the working population, the lethality of the virus in those aged 60 and younger is actually less than seasonal flu.

By using several sets of data I have been able to estimate the proportion of the UK population who have been infected. If you add them to the estimated proportion of the population that had prior immunity, and take account of the fact that young children do not often participate in transmission or become very ill, it is clear that there are far too few susceptible people remaining in UK to support an expanding infection as has been suggested. Instead, the evidence is strong from practical, theoretical and observational standpoints that the nation as a whole and probably most if not all regions in the UK are already protected by community immunity as described by many world leading academic epidemiologists in UK.

I heard with disbelief suggestions that surviving infection might not lead to immunity, or that immunity might only last a few months. Let me assure you, we have known for scores of years that surviving simple respiratory viruses which are neither immuno-toxic like HIV or change their appearance yearly like flu, leads as a rule, not an exception, to long-lived and robust T-cell mediated immunity. Antibodies may play a role but they are not central. That this ordinary virus has become a global media event is simply not justified by its profile.

I have been active on Twitter rather a lot in recent months. I would suggest that the people of UK are now highly suspicious of what is claimed to be happening. Many is the time people have in exasperation said: “This just doesn’t make any sense.” Indeed, what we are being told (that there is a full blown pandemic still underway) does not make sense and while I have no idea why it is being said, it is doubtless incorrect. Ordinary people know that each season’s flu takes perhaps three-to-four months to pass through the whole population. Knowing that SARS-CoV-2 is more infectious, they know that it would take the same or less time to pass through the UK population, not more. Indeed, we know it was in the UK by February. Adding a generous four months takes us to June, where all clinical signs of COVID-19 has disappeared (ignoring PCR test results, of which more in a moment). The rise and fall of Covid deaths in the UK follows exactly the same curve as that of other, highly seeded/infected countries such as Sweden. There is no doubt that we are in the same position as Sweden and it is only the monstrously error-prone and untrustworthy PCR test that suggests otherwise. What SAGE claims is happening is immunologically implausible in light of other data, specifically the shape of the death versus time curve, which shows beyond all reasonable doubt that the pandemic was self-extinguishing.

The PCR testing machinery is, at best, greatly in error and completely misleading. I have good knowledge of mass testing systems. I have always been deeply worried about polymerase chain reaction (PCR) because of its power, not only to find one molecule as small as a broken fragment of viral RNA and amplify it, sometimes by two to the power of 40, through repeated cycling, but also because it can find something that is not there – it can yield a ‘positive’ result even though the virus is not present. The greater the amplification and the higher the number of tests being done each day day – and the lower the expertise of the staff doing it – the higher the probability of error. I was the person who, with a radio journalist, finally pressed Mr Hancock to disclose the false positive rate of the Pillar 2 test, when it was still measuring far fewer tests per day than now. Having established that false positives exist, it is important to know that the rate of these can be small yet, when the prevalence of the virus is low, many or even all the positive results are false. That’s a practical debate for another time.

Yesterday, in response to a written question, the Government disclosed that while attempts had apparently been made to determine the operational false positive rate, it still doesn’t know it. As an experienced lab scientist, I know that when testing capacity is boosted substantially and the staff recruited have less and less lab experiences, there is only one outcome: errors of handling and of procedure. These in turn destroy the integrity of the testing system. The entire response of the UK depends upon the reliability of these tests. I have to tell you quite firmly: at present, it is practically, logically and legally impossible for anyone to be able to tell you what fraction of the positive tests recently obtained are real and which are not. For a range of reasons related to strong evidence that this virus cannot just hover around as it has been suggested and viruses certainly do not perform waves ever, the most secure conclusion is that these results are not to be trusted and are not reliable in any way.

So what I am saying is this. Despite warnings from all sides over months about this test it has continued to be used with increasing ferocity. It’s a medical diagnostic test. On no occasion would such a diagnostic be put into mass testing – in the NHS, for example – without knowing in advance how reliable it is. In terms of proper characterisation, it has NEVER been measured, despite the war-like impact of the test results on the nation and its people. At a minimum, the charge is reckless endangerment. Given all this information, it is literally impossible to guess whether the FPR is 1% or 10%. If even near the latter, there are no “cases” et seq. And there are other reasons to be very concerned about mass testing which I cannot go into today.

In my view, community mass testing is the pathology in the country now – not the virus. It must cease today. Without the ‘cover’ of mass testing, there is no evidence at all that the health of the nation is under any threat whatsoever. That event occurred in spring and our responses to it have been exaggerated and – what is worse – extraordinarily persistent, even when all the evidence says the pandemic has concluded.

I have a colleague who has a half a dozen sets of data all related to the pandemic. These show clear relationships between the data in the spring, all of which illustrated the impact of the virus. However, time after time, these relationships have broken down. The explanation for this is that at least one of the measurements are wrong, and the culprit is the PCR test. This has happened before. In New Hampshire in the USA there was a hospital that was convinced it had a huge outbreak of whooping cough. Physicians, patients and parents were all very worried about the expected deaths. Eventually, an older physician examined some of the patients and did not agree with the diagnosis. Asking the staff why they were so sure it was whooping cough, the answer was it had been diagnosed by the PCR test, the sole diagnostic tool. A review was ordered and this led to culture of the organism from the suspected patients. There was not a single person who actually had whopping cough. No infectious organism was found. What had happened was a now infamous case of a “PCR False Positive Pseudo-epidemic”. That is what I believe we have now in UK and in many other countries using similar technology.

MPs: If you vote for it now, you will condemn more people to suffering and some to death and the evidence does not support this extreme measure for which, even if the virus was circulating as SAGE claims, there is no evidence of benefit.

I urge you to vote against so we can all disclose our evidence that the pandemic is over and the epidemic of PCR testing can end.

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Featured image is from LS

On Thanksgiving day, throughout the year, with likely worsening times ahead, ordinary Americans are suffering through the hardest of hard times in US history.

For 36 straight weeks since March, over one million Americans sought unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.

It’s at time when real US unemployment exceeds 26% — based on the pre-1990 calculation model.

The official Labor Department reported 6.7% rate is fabricated.

It’s part of a major media-supported grand scheme to conceal evidence of manufactured Main Street economic collapse and the nation’s dismal state.

In the past week, another 778,000 jobless Americans applied for UI, 312,000 more seeking Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) — about 1.1 million in total.

Unless renewed, these benefits expire at yearend.

An additional 13 weeks of Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) for qualified recipients also expires at yearend.

At this time, nothing is being done to provide millions of unemployed, impoverished Americans with vital aid for essentials to life.

Millions of US households are food insecure, millions more face eviction from residences in January for lack of income to pay rent.

Millions of US debt-entrapped students can’t service loans for the same reason.

The vast majority of ordinary Americans struggle daily to get by while privileged ones never had things better.

The greatest ever engineered wealth transfer from ordinary people to the super-rich added trillions of dollars to their wealth in the last four years — around $1 trillion this year alone for US billionaires.

All politicians lie, Biden as untrustworthy as Trump.

In August, candidate Biden falsely pledged to largely reverse Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.

He lied saying he’ll use the funds for education, healthcare, childcare, strengthening Social Security, and other vital homeland needs.

He’ll do none of the above. Nor will he make corporations and rich households pay their fair share.

He falsely claimed that he’ll reduce incentives for corporations to outsource jobs by raising the tax rate on offshore profits and closing tax loopholes.

His regime will continue neoliberal harshness he supported as US senator and vice president.

He’ll exclusively serve privileged interests at the expense of the general welfare at a time of greater Depression than in the 1930s.

Thanksgiving day through the weekend and what follows won’t be enjoyed by millions of hungry Americans, millions more facing possible homelessness.

What reasons exist to give thanks when endless US wars on humanity rage at home and abroad, when mass unemployment and impoverishment exists, when ordinary Americans are exploited, not served, when elections are rigged and fundamental freedoms are disappearing in plain sight.

Robert Jensen earlier called for replacing Thanksgiving with “a National Day of Atonement, accompanied by a self-reflective fasting.”

It’ll take far more than an annual day of self-reflection and fasting to change the nation’s longstanding wicked ways.

The only solution is popular revolution. It’s the only way for transformational change — what elections and legislation never accomplish.

Duopoly rule runs the US. Elections are selections, not democracy in action.

If the real thing emerged, it would be banned.

If peace took hold, another 9/11 type state-sponsored false flag would invent an enemy to attack.

If alternative voices made a difference for constructive change, they’d be silenced or otherwise eliminated.

Growing up long ago, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday.

It was at a time when America wasn’t beautiful, far from it.

Yet ordinary inner-city kids like myself benefitted from public schools teachers who taught, affordable higher education, and career opportunities after graduation.

All of the above are gone for the vast majority today, remaining only for the privileged few.

No reasons exist to give thanks at any time of year when government in cahoots with dark forces harm ordinary people instead of serving everyone equitably according to the rule of law.

I’ll spend Thanksgiving day, weekend, and throughout the year reflecting, not celebrating.

As long as my health and energy hold out, I’ll keep doing what I can for a nation safe and fit to live in, for an end to imperial wars and growing homeland tyranny.

I hope millions of others will get involved through activism for vital change.

The alternative is grim or grimmer than what Orwell, Huxley and others like them imagined.

Politicians won’t deliver governance of, by, and for everyone equitably.

Positive change only comes from the bottom up, never the top down, never through the ballot box.

It’ll only come by taking to the streets and staying the course, doing whatever it takes for constructive change.

There’s no other way.

That’s the cold, hard reality on Thanksgiving day and every other day of the year.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Needpix.com

His life was a running planetary pop opera for the ages. From Somalia to Bangladesh, everyone is familiar with the basic contours of his story – the pibe from Villa Fiorito, a poor suburb of Buenos Aires (“I am a slum dweller”), who elevated football to the status of pure art.

Being the king of the pitch is one thing. Playing on the global pitch non-stop is a completely different ball game. Multitudes instinctively seized what he was all about – like he was always emitting a magic buzz in a higher frequency, beyond the Empire of the Senses.

Italians, who know a thing or two about aesthetic genius, would compare him to Caravaggio: a wild, human – all too human – pagan deity dwelling in light and shades, hitting all time lows over and over as virtually his whole life played out in public: the dizzying ballet of all inner demons exploding, family scandals, divorces, rivers of alcohol, doping, evading the income tax enforcers, Himalayas of Colombian marching powder, countless intimations of death amid perpetual joy.

He personified the non-stop crossover of Olympian Heights with The Harder They Fall: a walking – dribbling – fest of wild contradictions, beyond good and evil. To borrow, laterally, from T.S. Eliot, he was like a river, “a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable.”

The late, great Eduardo Galeano did picture him as a pagan deity, just like one of us: “arrogant, womanizer, weak…. We’re all like that!” El Pibe was the ultimate dirty god – “a sinner, irresponsible, presumptuous, a drunkard.” He could “never return to the anonymous multitude where he came from.”

Bribery and Corruption in the Covid-19 Era

By Kristina Pierce, November 26 2020

While the world is trying to limit the destruction caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we are only starting to understand its long-term effects on governments, economies, companies and individuals. The global crisis has exacerbated existing flaws at all levels, including vulnerabilities to corruption and bribery.

World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ Plan for Big Food Benefits Industry, Not People

By Jeremy Loffredo, November 26 2020

The architects of the plan  claim it will reduce food scarcity, hunger and disease, and even mitigate climate change. But a closer look at the corporations and think tanks the WEF is partnering with to usher in this global transformation suggests that the real motive is tighter corporate control over the food system by means of technological solutions.

Brave Vandana Shiva Speaks Out Against the Great Reset

By Organic Radicals, November 26 2020

She warns in a new interview that “The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life”.

COVID Vaccine Hesitancy Widespread, Even Among Medical Professionals

By Jeremy Loffredo, November 26 2020

Pfizer recently announced that its covid vaccine was more than 90 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Shortly after this announcement, Moderna announced that its covid vaccine was 94.5 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Unlike the flu vaccine, which is one shot, both covid vaccines require two shots given three to four weeks apart. Hidden toward the end of both announcements, were the definitions of “effective.”

At the UN, Italy Abstains on Nazism

By Manlio Dinucci, November 26 2020

The political significance of this vote is clear: NATO members and partners boycotted the Resolution which, first of all, calls into question Ukraine without naming it, whose neo-Nazi movements have been and are used by NATO for strategic purposes.

Palestine and the Middle East: “Trump Will Leave this Region with Toxic Legacy When Departing White House”

By Michael Jansen, November 26 2020

When he departs the White House on January 20, Donald Trump will leave this region with a toxic legacy. First and foremost, his ongoing campaign to delegitimise the Palestinian people and encourage Israel to continue colonising their homeland has had disastrous consequences for both Palestine and countries further afield.

US Propaganda War on China

By Stephen Lendman, November 26 2020

US trade, legislative and propaganda war rage against China. Is what’s unthinkable possible? What’s gone on since the Obama/Biden regime’s 2013 Asia pivot, greatly escalated by Trump hardliners, is the stuff that preemptive wars are made of.

UK’s Military Spending Boost Will Make the World More Dangerous

By Andrew Smith, November 26 2020

‘I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and it ends now.’ These were the words of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, when he the biggest increase to the UK’s military budget since the Cold War. His shopping list includes lasers, a ‘hackers HQ’ and all sorts of conventional weapons.

US Limited Isolation from the World Stage Is Likely Coming to an End

By Paul Antonopoulos, November 26 2020

With Biden frequently emphasizing that “America is back,” it gives a clear indication that the period of Washington’s limited isolation from the world stage under Trump has come to an end. Biden has already promised to help political opposition, without specifying exactly where except in the case of Turkey, but we can expect that this would include Russia, Belarus and Syria.

UK Military’s Overseas Base Network Involves 145 Sites in 42 Countries. Encircling China? Global Military Presence

By Phil Miller, November 26 2020

Britain’s military has a permanent presence at 145 base sites in 42 countries or territories around the world, research by Declassified UK has found. The size of this global military presence is far larger than previously thought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.

US trade, legislative and propaganda war rage against China.

Will it turn hot after hawkish interventionists infesting the Biden/Harris regime’s national security team take over in January?

Is what’s unthinkable possible? What’s gone on since the Obama/Biden regime’s 2013 Asia pivot, greatly escalated by Trump hardliners, is the stuff that preemptive wars are made of.

While neither side wants hot war with the other, the absence of mutual trust — combined with US hegemonic rage to control planet earth, its resources and populations — makes the unthinkable possible.

While the US is militarily superior to other nations — except Russia because of its unmatched super-weapons — war with China would be against a far more formidable adversary than any Washington ever attacked preemptively.

Twice post-WW II, the US waged two failed Asia wars, one ending with an uneasy armistice, the other in humiliating defeat — both against nations far less powerful than China today.

Pentagon joint chiefs are very leery about war with Iran, a nation able to hit back hard if attacked.

Nuclear-armed China with intercontinental ballistic missiles and other super-weapons would be able to exact a heavy price on the US in response to aggression if launched.

While it’s clearly possible ahead by accident or design, it’s highly unlikely.

Pentagon commanders no doubt want another humiliating Asia war defeat avoided.

Most likely, Republicans and Dems will stick to war by other means on China, including use of intense propaganda — amplified by establishment media.

China’s growing political, economic, industrial, technological, and military prominence on the world stage made it Washington’s public enemy No. one.

Yet no foreign threats to the US and West exist, invented ones alone to maintain a perpetual war on humanity by hot and other means.

Pompeo and material on the Trump regime’s State Department website keep up a steady drumbeat of anti-China propaganda.

It currently features fake news about nonexistent “Chin(ese) military aggression in the Indo/Pacific region.”

It’s how the US operates globally in stark contrast to China’s pursuit of peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.

Below is a litany of Pompeo OK’d bald-faced Big Lies about China— likely to be repeated by incoming Biden/Harris regime interventionists:

“Across much of the Indo-Pacific region, (China) is using military and economic coercion to bully its neighbors, advance unlawful maritime claims, threaten maritime shipping lanes, and destabilize” regional territory (sic).

All of the above describes how the scourge of US imperialism operates worldwide — polar opposite China’s law-abiding higher standard.

US “conduct increases the risk of miscalculation and conflict,” not China’s or any other independent nation free from Washington’s control.

US policy under both wings of its war party militantly oppose “a free and open Indo-Pacific” they seek unchallenged control over.

Beijing seeks to strengthen its military capabilities because of possible US aggression, not to advance its regional “footprint” as the State Department falsely claimed.

Nor does evidence exist to suggest that China aims “to project and sustain military power at greater distances (sic).”

In stark contrast, the US empire of bases operates worldwide.

Pentagon conventional and special ops forces are based in or occupy over 150 countries on every continent — posing a major threat to world peace and stability.

According to TomDispatch’s Nick Turse, Pentagon “commandos (are) deployed (in at least) 141 countries.”

Many US “secretive bases (are) left off the (Pentagon’s) books.”

Officially it “maintains (about) 4,775 ‘sites, spread across all 50 states, eight US territories, and 45 foreign countries.”

Officially, the Pentagon operates about 800 bases globally.

Unofficially — including mini-bases and others shared with host countries — it operates thousands at home and abroad.

What’s secret and off-the-books avoids congressional and other public scrutiny.

Countless billions of dollars are spent annually to maintain the US empire of bases.

According to the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition, around 95 percent of foreign military bases are US ones.

At most, China and Russia have a scattered few abroad by comparison, none used as launching pads for hostilities toward other nations the way the US operates.

The Pentagon recently admitted having a military presence (including about “4,800 defense sites”) in 164 countries — with little or no further elaboration.

According to Turse, the Pentagon doesn’t define what it means by a “location,” adding:

“The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated $150 billion annually, according to the Overseas Bases Realignment and Closure Coalition.”

The cost of maintaining outposts is about “one-third” of the above total.

Including for intelligence, off-the-books black budgets, homeland security, and other related categories, annual US military/security-related spending at home and abroad matches or exceeds other world community of nations combined.

It represents a monumental black hole of waste, fraud and abuse.

In February 2018, Project Censored reported a whopping $21 trillion gone missing from the federal budget throughout the 1998 – 2015 period.

Most likely it went for militarism, warmaking, Wall Street bailouts and speculation, trillions more to the present day — an abuse of power left unexplained by US officials and establishment media

Countless trillions of dollars go for so-called national security, with little or no oversight, at a time when America’s only enemies are invented.

No real ones exist — not China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or any other nations.

All of the above goes on endlessly while vital homeland needs go begging — especially at a time of manufactured economic collapse with over one-fourth of working-age Americans left jobless.

The State Department falsely accused China of “stealing” South China Sea resources.

It accused Beijing of a “might makes right” agenda, “imposing its will on the region…intimidat(ing) and challeng(ing) its neighbors.”

All of the above and much more applies to US hegemonic practices worldwide, polar opposite China’s geopolitical agenda.

Claiming the US “partners (with other nations) for peace and prosperity” ignores its endless wars on humanity at home and abroad.

China, Russia, Iran, and other nations on the US target list for regime change seek cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.

Washington under both right wings of duopoly rule seeks unchallenged global dominance — endless wars by hot and other means its favored strategies.

When Biden/Harris most likely replace Trump in January, longstanding US dirty business as usual at home and abroad is sure to continue at least largely unchanged.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Joe Biden’s team has created a new body, unprecedented in the transitional period between American presidents, and provided the names of six people who will occupy some of the most important positions in his administration if he assumes the presidency on January 20. Judging from those appointed, we have a clear insight into Washington’s foreign policy if Biden enters the White House next year – and there’s no mistaking, “America Is Back,” as Biden announced once again this week.

In particular, the two most important appointments Biden made were Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor and Antony Blinken as Secretary of State as these are crucial roles. The National Security Advisor is in charge of the powerful National Security Council housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, and normally meets the U.S. President every day. The Secretary of State has the task of coordinating American diplomatic actions, both bilaterally and within many multilateral forums.

Judging from the two names listed, Biden gives a decisive sign of discontinuing Trump’s foreign and national security policies. There is also a strong feeling that Biden wants many of the policies made by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to return.

Sullivan has already held the position of National Security Advisor and his ideas resembles that of the policies enacted and endorsed by Clinton. In 2008, Sullivan was deputy political director of Obama’s election campaign and even prepared Obama’s televised debates against John McCain. When Clinton became Secretary of State, Sullivan became her Deputy Chief of Staff and the Director of Policy Planning. He has been credited with making significant contributions to Washington’s Libya and Syria policies during the so-called Arab Spring. Sullivan also took part in the negotiation process that would lead to the Geneva accords with Iran, in particular by participating in a series of secret meetings held in Oman.

As for Blinken, he was National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden between 2009 and 2013 right before Sullivan. He then became Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor between 2013 and 2015 and finally Deputy Secretary of State. In these positions, he had a significant role in policies adopted for Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as negotiations with Iran. He also influenced the American response to Crimea’s reunification with Russia where he argued the necessity for sanctions against Moscow. After Trump’s ascent to the White House, Blinken worked as a global policy expert for CNN.

The combination of these two appointments suggests important changes could begin on January 20, both in the global posture of the U.S. and in the choices that will be made in some crucial areas, confirming the underlying difference between Biden’s vision and Trump’s. Under Biden, the U.S. will attempt to regain global influence it lost under Trump. In doing so, the architects of Washington’s new foreign policies will undoubtedly have full support from the American establishment and much more resources at its disposal.

It is reasonable to assume that Washington’s re-engagement with the world under a Biden presidency will begin with renewed pressure against governments whose economic and political systems ​​do not reflect those of Western liberalism. We can expect that Biden will offer support to political oppositions, like he has already said he will do in Turkey, or with economic measures like sanctions. These measures will most likely reverberate not only against Russia, but also several countries like Syria, Turkey and Serbia.

A reassessment of bilateral relations with Iran is also likely, albeit most probably not how it was under Obama. Among the people that Biden selected, there is indeed an opportunity to abandon the policy of maximum pressure against the Islamic Republic to induce negotiations and potentially dismantle sanctions. Perhaps Tehran could be convinced to abandon its nuclear program.

With China, defined as a competitor rather than a rival by Biden, intense negotiations will likely occur. However, trade wars will probably be renounced, which for Trump was not only a system to rebalance trade and attempt to relaunch U.S. manufacturing, but also a form of disguised strategic embargo aimed at slowing the economic and military growth of China.

Although not confirmed yet, just like Biden’s success in the 2020 elections, it is being flouted in U.S. media that Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense between 2009 and 2012, will likely become the chief of the Pentagon. She sits on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, a Washington D.C. think tank known for viscerally alleging Russian hackers steered the 2016 American elections in Trump’s favor. As given in the name, the think-tank is a major hub of disseminating Atlanticism and U.S. unipolarity.

The appointments of Sullivan and Blinken, and potentially Flournoy, demonstrates that a Biden administration would be steered against states opposing U.S. unilateralism and unipolarity, particularly Russia. Although we can expect softer stances towards China and Iran, it will still be far removed from normality. In addition, with Biden frequently emphasizing that “America is back,” it gives a clear indication that the period of Washington’s limited isolation from the world stage under Trump has come to an end. Biden has already promised to help political opposition, without specifying exactly where except in the case of Turkey, but we can expect that this would include Russia, Belarus and Syria, all with the aim of weakening Moscow’s influence and geopolitical position. Therefore, we can also expect more color revolutions in areas that are critical to Russia’s security and geopolitical aims.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is CC BY-SA 2.0

The UK government has responded to pressure from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Conservative Friends of Israel by listing Israel and occupied Jerusalem together as one country in its weekly update to COVID-19 related travel corridors.

Yesterday the Board condemned the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in a tweet which contained a screenshot of the revised FCDO list that had made a clear distinction between the status of Israel and Jerusalem by including the two territories on its list as separate countries.

Though the list was in line with US foreign policy, the Board, which over the years has adopted the hard-line positions of the Israeli far-right towards the Palestinians, slammed the UK Foreign Office.  “Absolutely inappropriate to list ‘Jerusalem’ as a separate country. We have taken this up with ⁦@FCDOGovUK⁩ this morning & they are urgently reviewing it” said the Board in its tweet.

Absolutely inappropriate to list ‘Jerusalem’ as a separate country. We have taken this up with ⁦@FCDOGovUK⁩ this morning & they are urgently reviewing it. https://t.co/k7Es31SVx8 pic.twitter.com/9aqYfIuGZ4

— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) November 20, 2020

Members of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) Stephen Crabb and Eric Pickles and President Lord Polak also urged the government to make an immediate correction to the advice about Jerusalem.

“The announcement of a travel corridor with Israel is excellent news. However, the FCDO’s decision to define Jerusalem as a territory separate from Israel is offensive and hostile,” CFI is reported saying in the Times of Israel.

“Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. To describe Jerusalem as anything other than an integral part of Israel is a fiction divorced from reality and the travel advice must be immediately corrected”.

Following the complaint, the FCDO published a revised list which had Israel and Jerusalem down as the same country, even though there has been no change in the UK’s position over Jerusalem.

“The position of the UK government has remained constant since April 1950” the FCDO says on its website. “We recognise Israel’s de facto authority over West Jerusalem. In line with Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) and subsequent Council resolutions, we regard East Jerusalem as under Israeli occupation”.

MEMO has asked the FCDO to explain its reason for listing Israel and Jerusalem as the same country when hours before it had made a distinction between the two territories in line with its long-held position that East Jerusalem is occupied territory. No response has been received at the time of publication.  

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Featured image: Partition of Jerusalem? Let my people in! – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

‘I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and it ends now.’

These were the words of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, when he the biggest increase to the UK’s military budget since the Cold War. His shopping list includes lasers, a ‘hackers HQ’ and all sorts of conventional weapons.

It is hard to believe that this is the same Prime Minister who only a matter of days ago was arguing that his government could not afford to provide meals for hungry school students during the October break. But this decision does not just tell us about the domestic priorities of the PM, it also tells us a lot about how ‘Global Britain’ will act on the world stage.

With the UK in the final days of Brexit negotiations, we are starting to see the redrawing of its foreign policy. It is likely to see an even more inward-looking approach to world affairs. Earlier this week the government refused to rule out cuts to the overseas aid budget, with Downing Street sources briefing that it could be reduced from 0.7 per cent of spending to 0.5 per cent – a cut of around one third to a commitment that is enshrined in law.

In comparison, the proposed increase in military spending, of £16 ($21) billion over a four-year period, would be on top of what is already one of the highest military budgets in the world. Contrary to the image we are often given of a depleted military that is supposedly dying on its knees, data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies shows that, with £55 ($72) billion at its disposal prior to the announcement, the UK already has the sixth–highest military budget in the world.

The problem is not just the scale of military spending. It is also what it is used for. For far too long, UK security policy has been focused on military solutions, foreign wars of aggression and hypocritical and dangerous partnerships with human rights abusing regimes. These policies have had a devastating impact around the world, while doing nothing to keep us safe from many of the biggest threats, including pandemics, inequality and climate change.

With the scale of the Covid-19 crisis becoming apparent, it is clear that the government has a big job ahead in terms of rebuilding the economy after the pandemic, and, with so many sectors of the economy facing uncertain futures, it is important that it is done right.

We are told that this military funding is a necessary part of that rebuilding, and that it will be used to secure thousands of jobs. However, even if we were to strip away the dire political consequences and look at military spending as nothing more than a job creation scheme, then it is totally ineffective. There are more and better jobs that can be created through investing in far more positive and sustainable areas of engineering, such as renewable energy.

Research from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) shows that investment in offshore wind and marine energy could produce more jobs than the entire arms industry, providing alternative high-skilled employment for arms trade workers. Jobs in an industry which is growing rather than declining, and which would contribute to building a safer, rather than a more dangerous, world.

Making a transition from arms to renewables and other areas of engineering is a long-term process, but that is no reason not to do it. There is no doubt that such a change would require major support and political will from the government, but if these changes are made then it can help us to prepare for a different future based on different political and economic choices.

However, when push has come to shove the government has totally failed to face up to the challenge of climate change. This week Johnson also announced his ‘green industrial revolution.’ Most of these steps did not go far enough to meet the scale of the climate emergency we are facing, and nor did the funding. With ($4 billion) provided in additional funding, it is less than a quarter of what has been pledged for the military.

This pandemic has underlined many things: how our security is interdependent on that of our neighbours around the world; that the least well-paid with the least working rights are many of the same people that keep our societies running, and that people of colour have been hit hardest by Covid-19. That is why the government must maintain its aid commitments, while investing in the services and workers that we all rely on.

The decisions made by the government will have consequences for years to come. In a post-covid world, access to healthcare facilities, a living wage, environmental sustainability, and other essential services should be seen as a key part of a wider national security strategy. None of these causes are advanced by the ever-greater proliferation of bombs, missiles, and fighter jets. Security does not come from throwing money at the military, it comes from building more equal societies and better services.

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Andrew Smith is a spokesperson for Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT).

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

In the midst of the attempt by US President Donald Trump to nullify the 2020 election by means of an extra-constitutional coup, neither Biden and the Democrats, nor the US corporate media, have seen fit to alert the American and world public to ominous developments within the US military and its Pentagon command.

The outlines of this coup have come into sharp focus in the past few days. This is not a matter merely of Trump’s intentions, but rather of actions aimed at executing this coup that are being carried out in real time.

Trump’s invitation to the White House Friday of Michigan Republican state legislators has laid bare a definite strategy for establishing a presidential dictatorship. Trump and his supporters are carrying out an aggressive propaganda campaign to delegitimize the election with lying allegations of ballot fraud and increasingly fascistic conspiracy theories in order to provide a pretext for Republican-controlled statehouses in states like Michigan to repudiate the popular vote and select slates of pro-Trump electors.

They are counting on this extralegal operation ending up in the US Supreme Court, where fully one-third of the justices are Trump appointees, and a precedent has already been established by the 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which stopped the popular vote count in Florida and awarded the presidency to Republican George W. Bush, with no opposition from the Democratic Party.

Such a brazen attempt to overturn an election will inevitably provoke explosive resistance, particularly in the heavily working-class urban areas where millions cast their ballots to drive Trump from office. Such an assault on core democratic rights and the last vestiges of constitutional forms of rule cannot be executed without a resort to overwhelming repression.

Image on the right: Christopher Miller (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

It is in this context that a ceremony held Wednesday at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina headquarters of the US military’s Special Operations Command—comprised of the Army’s Green Berets, the Navy’s SEALs and other elite killing squads—serves as a deadly warning. The new “acting” Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller announced the elevation of the Special Operations Command to a status on a par with the existing branches of the armed forces, the Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.

As the well-connected military website breakingdefense.com explained the shakeup:

“The crux of the transformation will ensure that the top special operations official at the Pentagon can go directly to the Defense Secretary on … operational matters, including secret raids against high-value targets. The office will no longer have to move through the larger DoD Policy apparatus to reach the secretary.”

Miller, who has refused to answer any questions from the media since being installed as Pentagon chief, told an audience of assembled troops,

“I am here today to announce that I have directed the Special Operations civilian leadership to report directly to me, instead of through the current bureaucratic channels.”

Miller has not been confirmed, and will not be confirmed, by the US Senate to an office he has held for little more than a week. A retired colonel and 30-year Special Forces officer, he has no qualifications to hold the post outside of his unswerving loyalty to Trump.

Under normal circumstances, Miller would be surrendering his office to a Biden appointee in barely two months and, in the interregnum, would be collaborating closely with his incoming replacement. Instead, he is announcing the most far-reaching change in the military chain of command in recent memory.

Miller’s installation as defense secretary is the result of a wholesale purge of the top civilian leadership at the Pentagon that Trump initiated with the firing-by-tweet of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Trump’s determination to oust Esper dates back to last June, when the US president deployed federal security forces and US troops to suppress anti-police-violence demonstrations near the White House and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to send troops into the streets across the country to put down the mass protests provoked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Esper, a former lobbyist for the arms industry, voiced his opposition, saying that such a domestic deployment of the US military to suppress the American population could be ordered only as a “last resort.” His position, shared by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, expressed fears that such a use of US troops would provoke uncontrollable resistance and tear the military apart. Since his ouster, Esper, Milley and the fired number-three official at the Pentagon have all issued statements pointedly reminding US military personnel that they have sworn an oath to the Constitution.

Such invocations will have no effect on the cabal of Trump loyalists and semi-fascists that have been placed in charge at the Pentagon since the election. Miller made it clear in a confirmation hearing for another national security post that he had no compunction against using federal intelligence resources to pursue protesters at the order of the White House.

The new civilian head of Special Operations, who will now enjoy direct and secret collaboration with the defense secretary, unencumbered by “bureaucratic channels,” is one Ezra Cohen-Watnick, 34, an extreme right-wing operative. He was brought onto the National Security Council by virtue of his political connections to the likes of Trump’s fascistic former adviser Steve Bannon, the fanatically anti-Iranian and indicted ex-National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Named to the number-three post at the Pentagon, undersecretary for policy, is retired general and frequent Fox News commentator Anthony Tata, whose previous nomination for the post had to be withdrawn after it emerged that he has denounced Obama as a “terrorist leader,” a “Manchurian candidate” and a Muslim.

A similar figure has been named as Miller’s chief adviser, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, another Fox News commentator known for denouncing European countries for admitting “unwanted Muslim invaders” bent on “turning Europe into an Islamic state.” He has also condemned attempts in Germany to come to terms with the Holocaust as a “sick mentality” and called for martial law and the summary execution of migrants on the US-Mexican border.

Trump has made a particular appeal to the Special Operations forces that have now been elevated in status within the chain of command. He aggressively intervened last year in the court martial of Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher for war crimes in Iraq, protesting,

“We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”

At the close of his campaign, just five days before the election, Trump flew to Fort Bragg for closed-door meetings with Special Forces troops and their commanders. Given subsequent developments, there is every reason to believe that the purpose of this trip was to assess the level of his support within the military units stationed there, and among their commanders, and to discuss plans for an armed response to an explosion of resistance to his plans to steal the election and establish a presidential dictatorship.

The tactics being employed by the Trump White House have been rehearsed countless times abroad under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Fabricated claims of election fraud have been used to justify US-backed coups, oust presidents and foment “color revolutions” from Honduras, Bolivia and Venezuela to Ukraine and Georgia.

Now these same methods are being brought “home” under conditions of an insoluble economic and social crisis, characterized above all by staggering levels of social inequality and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the homicidal “herd immunity,” back-to-work policy of the capitalist ruling class.

The Democratic Party is well aware of Trump’s maneuvers and threats. There has been a stream of contacts between Biden’s transition team and the Pentagon, no doubt to assess the attitude of the military to Trump’s coup plotting. The widely reported discussions between the Biden camp and former Trump defense secretary James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general with wide contacts throughout the officer corps, are only the tip of the iceberg.

Former president Barack Obama said Wednesday night that in response to Trump’s intransigent refusal to concede the election, “I think we can always send the Navy SEALs in there to dig them out.” While presented by the media as a joke, this remark confirms that, in the final analysis, the Democrats rely on the military, rather than popular opposition, to remove Trump from office. Such an outcome would make the military the arbiter of American politics.

Far more than the threat of a coup and dictatorship, Biden and the Democratic Party fear an eruption of popular protest and mass resistance from below against Trump and his co-conspirators. Whatever their tactical differences with Trump, they represent the interests of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus.

The working class must intervene in this unprecedented crisis as an independent social and political force, opposing the conspiracies of the Trump White House and its military allies through the methods of class struggle and the fight for the socialist transformation of society.

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Featured image is from Syria News

On November 25, Azerbaijani troops entered the district of Kalbajar in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The district was handed over to Baku under the ceasefire deal reached between Armenia and Azerbaijan to put an end to the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War earlier in November.

In total, Armenian forces were set to hand over the following districts: Agdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin, excluding the Lachin corridor. Agdam and Kalbajar are already in the hands of Azerbaijani forces. Lachin will be handed over on December 1. Withdrawing Armenians are destroying their properties and even evacuating graves of their relatives. Just a day ago, on November 24, Armenians troops blew up their barracks in Kalbajar.

In these conditions, the presence of the Russian peacekeepers remains the only guarantee of the security of the local Armenian population. And Russian forces already suffered first casualties as a part of this mission. On November 23, a Russian peacekeeper, four employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic were wounded, and an Azerbaijani officer was killed in a mine explosion near the village of Magadiz. A joint group, that also included representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, was searching bodies of those killed in the war.

A large number of IEDs, not exploded ammunition and projectiles are an important security factor that prevents the potential return of displaced civilians to Nagorno-Karabkah. A group of Russian sappers has been already working on demining key roads and areas in the Russian zone of responsibility. Baku also vowed to demine territories that its forces captured and already started building a new road linking the town of Shusha and Ahmedbeyli.

In the coming months, the security and humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabkah will likely improve, but there are almost zero chances the Armenian population that fled the Azerbaijani advance would return. Therefore, the Azerbaijani-controlled part of Nagorno-Karabakh is in fact empty and the Azerbaijani leadership would have to launch some settlement program if it wants re-populate the region.

Pro-Kurdish sources, waging a propaganda campaign against the traditional Azerbaijani ally, Turkey, already claimed that Ankara is planning to settle families of fighters of Turkish-backed Syrian militant groups in Karabakh. According to reports, Turkish authorities opened 2 offices in the Turkish-occupied Syrian town of Afrin for this purpose. If such plans even exist, it is unlikely that Azerbaijan would be happy to support them. The one thing is to use a cheap cannon fodder recruited by the Big Turkish Brother and the very different thing is to allow multiple Syrian radicals to become the permanent factor of your internal security. The implementation of such a plan would inevitably turn the Azerbaijani-controlled part of Nagorno-Karabkah into the hotbed of terrorism.

Meanwhile, Israel has been desperately exploiting the last months of the current Trump presidency term. Early on November 25, the Israeli Air Force carried out a series of airstrikes on targets in the southern countryside of Damascus and the province of Quneitra. According to Syrian state media, missiles were launched from the direction of the occupied Golan Heights. As of now, the Syrian side denies any casualties and claims that the strike caused a material damage only. Pro-Israeli sources insist that the strike led to multiple casualties among Iranian-backed forces and Iranian personnel.

This became the second Israeli strike on Syria in the last 7 days. The previous one took place on November 18 and hit the very same areas, including Damascus International Airport. The activation of the Israeli military activity in the region indicates that Tel Aviv expects a particular decrease of unconditional support that it was receiving from the United States under the Trump administration. Therefore, it seeks to use the last days of this 4-year-long honeymoon as effective as possible. Even more Israeli and potentially US actions against Iranian interests in the region and Iran itself could be expected in the coming weeks.

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Britain’s military has a permanent presence at 145 base sites in 42 countries or territories around the world, research by Declassified UK has found.

The size of this global military presence is far larger than previously thought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.

It is the first time the true size of this network has been revealed.

The UK uses 17 separate military installations in Cyprus as well as 15 in Saudi Arabia and 16 in Oman – the latter both dictatorships with whom the UK has especially close military relations.

The UK’s base sites include 60 it manages itself in addition to 85 facilities run by its allies where the UK has a significant presence.

These appear to fit the description of what General Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain’s Chief of the General Staff, recently termed as “lily pads” – sites which the UK has easy access to as and when required.

Declassified has not included in the figures the UK’s small troop contributions to UN peacekeeping missions in South Sudan or the Cyprus buffer zone, nor staffing commitments at NATO administrative sites in Europe or most of its special forces deployments, which are largely unknown.

The findings come days after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced an extra £16-billion would be spent on the UK military over the next four years – a 10% increase.

The spending announcement was originally meant to be combined with a review of defence strategy, that was being championed by Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings.

The results of Whitehall’s “integrated defence review” are now not expected until next year. Indications suggest the review will recommend a traditional British strategy of building more overseas military bases.

Last month, former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said the UK needs a more permanent presence in the Asia-Pacific region. The current Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, has gone further. In September he announced a £23.8-million investment to expand Britain’s army and navy bases in Oman, to accommodate the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers as well as many tanks.

General Carleton-Smith recently said:

“We think there is a market for a more persistent presence from the British Army (in Asia).”

His superior, Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Nick Carter, spoke more cryptically when he said the military’s future “posture will be engaged and forward deployed.”

Encircling China?

The rise of China is leading many Whitehall planners to believe Britain needs military bases in the Asia-Pacific region to counter Beijing’s power. However, the UK already has military base sites in five countries around China.

These include a naval logistics base at Sembawang Wharf in Singapore, where eight British military staff are permanently based. The base provides Britain with a commanding position overlooking the Malacca Strait, the world’s busiest shipping lanes which are a key choke point for vessels sailing from the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean.

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has previously told Declassified: “Singapore is a strategically important location for commerce and trade.” Singapore’s most elite police unit is recruited by British soldiers and commanded by UK military veterans.

As well as having a naval base on the rim of the South China Sea, the British military has an even more central basing location in Brunei, near the disputed Spratly Islands.

The Sultan of Brunei, a dictator who recently proposed the death penalty for homosexuals, pays for British military support in order to stay in power. He also allows the British oil giant Shell to have a major stake in Brunei’s oil and gas fields.

The UK has three garrisons in Brunei, at Sittang Camp, Medicina Lines and Tuker Lines, where around half of Britain’s Gurkha soldiers are permanently based.

Declassified files show that in 1980, British troops in Brunei were based “on land provided by Shell and in the middle of their headquarters complex”.

Special accommodation for British troops is provided through a network of 545 apartments and bungalows in Kuala Belait, near the military bases.

Elsewhere in Brunei, 27 British troops are on loan to the Sultan at three locations, including the Muara naval base. Their roles include imagery analysis and sniper instruction.

Declassified has found that the UK also has around 60 personnel spread across Australia. Some 25 of these hold defence attaché roles in the British High Commission in Canberra and at Australian Defence Department sites near the capital, such as the Headquarters Joint Operations Command at Bungendore.

The remainder are on exchange to 18 separate Australian military bases, including a warrant officer at Australia’s Electronic Warfare Unit in Cabarlah, Queensland.

Four Royal Air Force (RAF) officers are based at the Williamtown airfield in New South Wales, where they are learning to fly the Wedgetail radar plane.

Britain’s MOD is also testing its high-altitude Zephyr surveillance drone at an Airbus site in the remote settlement of Wyndham in Western Australia. Declassified understands from a freedom of information response that MOD staff visit the test site but are not based there.

Two members of UK Strategic Command, which manages British military operations across the services, and one from Defence Equipment and Support visited Wyndham in September 2019.

The Zephyr, which is designed to fly in the stratosphere and could be used to surveil China, has crashed twice during testing from Wyndham. Another high-altitude drone, the PHASA-35, is being tested by staff from arms corporation BAE Systems and the UK military’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Woomera, South Australia.

Airbus also operates a ground station for the Skynet 5A military communications satellite on behalf of the MOD at Mawson Lakes in Adelaide. A British naval commander is based in the coastal city, according to a freedom of information response.

A further 10 British military personnel are based at unspecified locations in New Zealand. Parliamentary data from 2014 showed their roles included working as navigators on a P-3K Orion aircraft, which can be used for maritime surveillance.

Meanwhile in Nepal, on China’s western flank close to Tibet, the British army runs at least three facilities. These include Gurkha recruitment camps in Pokhara and Dharan, plus administrative facilities in the capital Kathmandu.

Britain’s use of young Nepalese men as soldiers has continued despite a Maoist government coming to power in Kathmandu.

In Afghanistan, where peace talks are now under way between the government and the Taliban, UK forces have long maintained a quick reaction force at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, as well as providing mentoring at the Infantry Branch School and the Afghan National Army Officers’ Academy. The latter, known as ‘Sandhurst in the Sand’, was built with £75-million of British money.

Around 10 personnel are based in Pakistan, where roles have included teaching pilots at the air force academy in Risalpur.

Europe and Russia

In addition to concern over China, military chiefs believe Britain is now locked in a permanent competition with Russia. The UK has a military presence in at least six European countries, as well as at NATO administrative sites, which Declassified has not included in our survey.

Britain continues to run four base sites in Germany that house 540 personnel, despite a 10-year drive called “Operation Owl” to scale down its Cold War-era network.

Two barracks remain in Sennelager, in northern Germany, with a vast vehicle depot in Mönchengladbach and a munitions storage facility in Wulfen on a site originally built by slave labour for the Nazis.

In Norway, the British military has a helicopter base codenamed “Clockwork” at Bardufoss airport, deep in the Arctic Circle. The base is frequently used for mountain warfare exercises and lies 350 miles from the headquarters of Russia’s northern fleet in Severomorsk near Murmansk.

Bardufoss airport and the Andselv town, centre of the municipality of Malselv, Troms (North Norway). Photo: Wikipedia

Since the fall of the USSR, Britain has expanded its military presence into former Soviet bloc states. Twenty UK military personnel are currently on loan to the Czech military academy in Vyškov.

Closer to Russia’s border, the RAF bases Typhoon fighter jets at Estonia’s Amari Air Base and Lithuania’s Siauliai Air Base, from where they can intercept Russian jets over the Baltic as part of NATO’s “air policing” mission.

In the eastern Mediterranean, Declassified has found there are 17 separate UK military installations in Cyprus, which analysts have traditionally counted as one British overseas territory comprising the “sovereign base areas” of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, containing 2,290 British personnel.

The sites, which were retained at independence in 1960, include runways, firing ranges, barracks, fuel bunkers and spy stations run by the UK’s signals intelligence agency – GCHQ.

Declassified has also found that several of the sites are located beyond the sovereign base areas, including on the top of Mount Olympus, the highest point on Cyprus.

British military exercises areas L1 to L13 are outside of the UK enclave and inside the Republic of Cyprus

A map obtained by Declassified shows that the UK military can use a large area of land outside Akrotiri known as Lima as a training area. Declassified previously revealed that low flying British military aircraft have caused the deaths of farm animals in the Lima training area.

British special forces operating in Syria are believed to be resupplied by air from Cyprus, where RAF transport planes can be seen online taking off before their trackers disappear over Syria.

Little is known about the location of UK special forces teams in Syria, aside from a claim that they are based at Al-Tanf near the Iraq/Jordan border and/or in the north near Manbij.

Guarding Gulf Dictators

RAF flights from Cyprus also frequently land in the Gulf dictatorships of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where the UK has permanent bases at the Al Minhad and Al Udeid air fields, run by around 80 personnel.

These bases have been used to supply troops in Afghanistan as well as for conducting military operations in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Qatar has a joint Typhoon squadron with the RAF based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire which is half-funded by the Gulf emirate. Defence minister James Heappey has refused to tell Parliament how many Qatari military personnel are based at Coningsby amid plans to expand the base.

Even more controversial is Britain’s major military presence in Saudi Arabia. Declassified has found that UK personnel are installed across 15 key sites in Saudi Arabia. In the capital, Riyadh, British armed forces are spread out over half a dozen locations, including the air operations centres where RAF officers observe Saudi-led coalition air operations in Yemen.

Under the Ministry of Defence Saudi Armed Forces Project (MODSAP), BAE Systems has made 73 accommodation units available to UK military personnel at its Salwa Garden Village compound in Riyadh.

RAF staff, some of whom are on secondment to BAE Systems, also serve at the King Fahad air base in Taif, which services the Typhoon jet fleet, the King Khalid air base in Khamis Mushayt close to the Yemen border and at the King Faisal air base in Tabuk where Hawk jet pilots train.

There are separate contracts for Britain to support the “special security brigade” of Saudi Arabia’s National Guard (SANG), a unit that protects the ruling family and promotes “internal security”.

British soldiers are believed to be stationed at the Guard’s ministry in Riyadh as well as at its Signals School (SANGCOM) in Khashm al-An on the outskirts of the capital, in addition to smaller teams at SANG command posts in the western and central regions at Jeddah and Buraydah.

The rest of the British personnel in Saudi Arabia are situated in its oil-rich eastern province, whose Shia Muslim majority is harshly discriminated against by the ruling Sunni monarchy.

A Royal Navy team teaches at the King Fahd Naval Academy in Jubail, while RAF staff assist the Tornado jet fleet at King Abdulaziz air base in Dhahran.

Accommodation for British contractors and personnel is provided by BAE at the company’s purpose built Sara compound at Khobar, near Dhahran. A British army lieutenant colonel advises SANG infantry units at their Eastern Command post in Damman.

These British personnel in the eastern province are close to the King Fahd Causeway, the vast bridge connecting Saudi Arabia to the neighbouring island of Bahrain where Britain has a naval base and a smaller presence (costing £270,000 per year) near the international airport in Muharraq.

In 2011, the SANG drove BAE-made armoured vehicles over the causeway to suppress pro-democracy protests by Bahrain’s Shia majority against its Sunni dictator King Hamad.

The British government later admitted: “It is possible that some members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard which were deployed in Bahrain may have undertaken some training provided by the British military mission [to the SANG].

After the uprising was crushed, Britain increased its military presence in Bahrain with the construction of a naval base that was opened in 2018 by Prince Andrew, a friend of King Hamad.

Britain maintains a substantial military presence in seven Arab monarchies where citizens have little or no say in how they are governed. These include around 20 British troops supporting the Sandhurst-trained King Abdullah II of Jordan.

The country’s army has received £4-million in aid from Britain’s shadowy Conflict, Security and Stabilisation Fund to set up a quick reaction force, with a British army lieutenant colonel on loan to the unit.

Last year it was reported that a British military adviser to Jordan’s King, Brigadier Alex Macintosh, was “fired” after becoming too politically influential. Macintosh was reportedly replaced immediately, and Declassified has seen army records that show a serving British Brigadier remains on loan to Jordan.

Similar arrangements exist in Kuwait, where around 40 British troops are stationed. They are believed to operate Reaper drones from the Ali Al Salem air base and teach at Kuwait’s Mubarak Al-Abdullah Joint Command and Staff College.

Until August, former Royal Navy officer Andrew Loring was among the college’s leading staff, in keeping with a tradition of giving British personnel very senior roles.

Although there are British personnel on loan to all three branches of Kuwait’s military, the MOD has refused to tell Declassified what role they have played in the war in Yemen, where Kuwait is a member of the Saudi-led coalition.

The most extensive British military presence in the Gulf can be found in Oman, where 91 UK troops are on loan to the country’s repressive Sultan. They are stationed at 16 sites, some of which are run directly by the British military or intelligence agencies.

These include the Royal Navy base in Duqm, which is being tripled in size as part of a £23.8-million investment designed to support Britain’s new aircraft carriers during their deployments to the Indian Ocean and beyond.

It is unclear how many British personnel will be based at Duqm.

Heappey has told Parliament: “The possibility of additional personnel to support this logistics hub at Duqm is being considered as part of the ongoing Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy.”

Duqm port expansion, 2009 (top) and 2019 (bottom)

He added that 20 personnel have been temporarily deployed to Duqm as a “UK Port Task Group” to assist with the expansion plans.

Another major development to Britain’s base network in Oman is the new “joint training area” located 70kms south of Duqm at Ras Madrakah, which it has used for tank firing practice. It appears plans are underway to move a large number of Britain’s tanks from their current firing range in Canada to Ras Madrakah.

In Oman, it is a criminal offence to insult the Sultan, so domestic resistance to the new British bases is unlikely to get far.

British forces at Duqm will likely work closely with the US military facility at Diego Garcia on the Chagos Islands, part of the British Indian Ocean territory that belongs to Mauritius under international law. Some 40 UK military personnel are stationed at Diego Garcia.

Britain has refused to return the islands to Mauritius, in defiance of a recent UN General Assembly resolution, after having forcibly removed the indigenous population in the 1970s.

In Iraq, the only democracy in the Arab world which housed British troops this year, the political figures have taken a different approach.

In January, Iraq’s parliament voted to expel foreign military forces, which include the remaining 400 British troops, and which, if implemented, would bring an end to their presence at four sites: Camp Havoc in Anbar, Camp Taji and Union III in Baghdad and Erbil International Airport in the north.

Britain’s other military presence in the Middle East can be found in Israel and Palestine, where around 10 troops are stationed. The team is split between the British embassy in Tel Aviv and the United States security coordinator’s office which is, controversially, based in the US embassy in Jerusalem.

Declassified recently discovered that two British army personnel assist the US team.

Militarised Tax Havens

Another feature of Britain’s overseas military bases is that they are often located in tax havens, with Declassified finding six such sites. Closest to home, these include Jersey in the Channel Islands, which is one of the world’s top ten tax havens according to the Tax Justice Network.

A crown dependency and not technically part of the UK, Jersey’s capital, St Helier, is home to an army base for the Royal Engineers’ Jersey Field Squadron.

Further afield, Britain continues to govern Gibraltar, at the southernmost tip of Spain, amidst demands from Madrid to return the territory which was seized by the Royal Marines in 1704. Gibraltar has a corporation tax rate as low as 10% and is a global hub for gambling companies.

Approximately 670 British military personnel are stationed across four sites in Gibraltar, including at the airport and dockyard. Accommodation facilities include the Devil’s Tower Camp and an MOD-run swimming pool.

The rest of Britain’s militarised tax havens can be found branching out across the Atlantic Ocean. Bermuda, a British territory in the mid-Atlantic, is ranked as the world’s second “most corrosive” tax haven.

It contains a small military site at Warwick Camp, run by 350 members of the Royal Bermuda Regiment which is “affiliated to the British army” and commanded by a British officer.

A similar arrangement exists on the British territory of Montserrat in the Carribean, which is periodically included on lists of tax havens. Security for the island is provided by 40 local volunteers of the Royal Montserrat Defence Force based in Brades.

This model appears to have inspired plans for similar schemes in the Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos, two British Carribean territories which are both major tax havens.

Since 2019, there have been efforts to establish a Cayman Islands Regiment, which aims to recruit 175 soldiers by the end of 2021. Much of the officer training has taken place at Sandhurst in the UK. Plans for a Turks and Caicos Regiment appear to be less advanced.

The Americas

While these military installations in the Caribbean are unlikely to grow to significant size, the UK presence in the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic is much larger and more expensive.

Thirty-eight years after the Falklands war with Argentina, the UK maintains six separate sites across the islands. The barracks and airport at RAF Mount Pleasant is the largest, but it relies upon a dockyard at Mare Harbour and three anti-aircraft missile silos on Mount Alice, Byron Heights and Mount Kent.

Their remote nature has given rise to abusive behaviour.

RAF veteran Rebecca Crookshank claims she was subjected to sexual harassment when serving as the only female recruit at Mount Alice in the early 2000s. Naked airmen greeted her upon arrival and rubbed their genitals against her in a crude initiation ritual. Later she was cable-tied to a bed.

The incident is alleged to have taken place in facilities where the MOD subsequently spent £153-million in 2017 to install a Sky Sabre air-defence system, the majority of which is supplied by Israeli arms company, Rafael. The move was criticised at the time, given Rafael’s history of supplying missiles to Argentina.

In addition to these sites, there is a local defence camp in the capital of Stanley, while Royal Navy vessels keep a constant patrol offshore.

The net result is a military presence of between 70 and 100 MOD personnel, although the Falkland Islands Government puts the figure much higher: 1,200 troops and 400 civilian contractors.

None of this comes cheap. Stationing soldiers and their families overseas requires housing, schools, hospitals and engineering work, overseen by the government’s Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO).

The DIO has a 10-year investment scheme for the Falklands budgeted at £180-million. Almost a quarter of this has been spent on keeping troops warm. In 2016, £55.7-million went on a boiler house and power station for the Mount Pleasant military headquarters complex.

In 2018, Mare Harbour was expanded at a cost of £19-million, mainly to ensure food and other supplies can reach the troops more easily. Cleaning, cooking, emptying the bins and other administrative tasks costs another £5.4-million a year, payable to outsourcing firm Sodexo.

This expenditure has been justified by the government despite a decade of austerity on the UK mainland, which saw 59-year-old army veteran David Clapson die in 2014 after his job seeker’s allowance was stopped. Clapson was diabetic and relied on a supply of refrigerated insulin. He had £3.44 left in his bank account and had run out of electricity and food.

The Falklands also serves as a link to the British Antarctic Territory, a vast area which is reserved for scientific exploration. Its research station at Rothera relies on logistical support from the UK military and is resupplied by HMS Protector, an ice patrol ship in the Royal Navy with around 65 personnel usually onboard.

Maintaining such a ‘forward’ presence in Antarctica and the Falklands is only possible because of another expensive British territory in the South Atlantic, Ascension Island, whose runway at Wideawake Airfield acts as an air bridge between Mount Pleasant and RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

Ascension recently hit the news with Foreign Office proposals to build a detention centre for asylum seekers on the island, which is 5,000 miles from the UK. In reality such a scheme is unlikely to go ahead.

The runway is in need of costly repairs, and Britain’s secretive spy agency GCHQ has a significant presence there at Cat Hill.

In total there appear to be five UK military and intelligence sites on Ascension, including accommodation at Travellers Hill and married quarters at Two Boats and George Town.

The US air force and National Security Agency operate alongside the UK personnel on the island, a relationship mirrored in the United States where 730 Britons are spread throughout the country.

Many of them are clustered in US military command centres around Washington D.C. and NATO sites in Norfolk, Virginia. The RAF has around 90 personnel based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where they fly Reaper drones on combat operations around the world.

Until recently, there were also major deployments of RAF and Navy pilots at other airfields in the US, where they were learning to fly the new F-35 strike fighter. This scheme saw 80 British personnel conducting long-term training at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) in California.

Other sites involved in the F-35 training scheme included Eglin AFB in Florida, Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina and the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. By 2020, many of these pilots returned to the UK to practice flying the F-35s from the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers.

In addition to these deployments, there are British military officers on exchange to a wide range of US units. In September 2019, British Major General Gerald Strickland held a senior role at the US army base in Fort Hood, Texas, where he was working on Operation Inherent Resolve, the mission to combat Islamic State in the Middle East.

There have also been British personnel stationed inside President Trump’s much derided Space Force. Last December, it was reported that the Deputy Director of the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was “Group Captain Darren Whiteley – a Royal Air Force officer from the United Kingdom”.

One of the few British overseas bases that looks threatened by the government’s defence review is the tank training range at Suffield in Canada, where around 400 permanent staff maintain 1,000 vehicles.

Many of these are Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles. The Defence review is expected to announce a reduction in the size of Britain’s tank force, which would decrease the need for a base in Canada.

However, there is no sign that Britain’s other major base in the Americas, in Belize, will be axed by the review. British troops maintain a small garrison at Belize’s main airport from where they have access to 13 sites for jungle warfare training.

Declassified recently revealed that British troops have access to one sixth of Belize’s land, including a protected forest area, for such training, which includes firing mortars, artillery and “machine-gunning from helicopters”. Belize is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, home to “critically endangered species” and rare archaeological sites.

Exercises in Belize are run by the British Army Training Support Unit Belize (BATSUB), located at Price Barracks near Belize City. In 2018, the MOD spent £575,000 on a new water treatment plant for the barracks.

Africa

Another region where the British military still maintains military bases is Africa. During the 1950s, the British army suppressed anti-colonial fighters in Kenya by using concentration camps where prisoners were tortured and even castrated.

After independence, the British army was able to retain its base at Nyati Camp in Nanyuki, Laikipia County. Known as BATUK, it is the hub for hundreds of British army personnel in Kenya.

Britain has access to five more sites in Kenya and 13 training grounds, which are used for preparing troops before they deploy to Afghanistan and elsewhere. In 2002, the MOD paid £4.5-million in compensation to hundreds of Kenyans who had been injured by unexploded weaponry fired by British troops at these training grounds.

From Nyati, British soldiers also make use of the nearby Laikipia air base, and the training ground at Archers Post in Laresoro and Mukogodo in Dol-Dol. In the capital Nairobi, British troops have access to Kifaru Camp at Kahawa Barracks and an International Peace Support Training Centre in Karen.

An agreement signed in 2016 set out that: “The Visiting Forces shall respect and be sensitive to the traditions, customs and cultures of local communities of the places where they are deployed in the Host Nation.”

British soldiers are also known to use local sex workers.

It has been more than three weeks since election day and the incumbent U.S. president still has yet to concede defeat. Despite the media’s distraction over the perspiration of his personal attorney during a bizarre press conference, the legal team led by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has actually done a decent job uncovering potential fraud in battleground states where vote counting was delayed for several days before the former vice president was declared a “winner” by the news media and Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, the 2020 election is not a sporting event or academic paper, therefore evidence that instances of fraud occurred will likely not be enough for the litigation to change the outcome, though it does appear his camp is finally facing up to leaving the White House come January. Then again, whether or not burden of proof was ever provided is immaterial, seeing as before he even took the oath of office a silent coup was underway to remove the democratically-elected government of Donald J. Trump that is now entering its final phase.

Trump found an unlikely voice of support contesting Biden’s premature declaration of victory in former six-term Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who this time was the running mate of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura as a write-in entrant in some eligible states for the divided Greens who officially nominated labor activist Howie Hawkins.

During the 2016 election, the Democrats scapegoated Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss, even baselessly implicating the Green Party nominee in the Russiagate hoax simply for having appeared at a 2015 Moscow gala for the RT television network where General Michael Flynn and Russian President Vladimir Putin were in attendance. Not only did the legislatures of swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin exclude Hawkins from the ballot at the behest of Democrats in a shameless act of voter suppression, but McKinney described the irregularities which plagued electronic voting machines in her home state of Georgia in 2020 as “déjà vu”, having been cheated out of Congress herself by such tactics in 2006. McKinney also previously penned an essay entitled “The Purple Revolution: U.S. Hybrid Warfare Comes Home to Roost?” on the establishment’s efforts to remove Trump which makes an apropos historical reference.

This November 22nd marked fifty-seven years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When asked for his reaction to the killing of the 35th president in Dallas back in 1963 and less than two years before his own public murder, civil rights leader Malcolm X famously stated that “chickens were coming home to roost”, alluding to the U.S. government’s interventions overseas such as the CIA-orchestrated assassination of the first Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960 following its independence from Belgian colonial rule. His remarks in the wake of a national tragedy proved too controversial even for the Nation of Islam which publicly censured its most recognizable minister who would announce his departure from the black nationalist organization a few months later. The following year, he would be gunned down in Harlem in an assassination long-suspected to have been the work of the FBI’s counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) which had infiltrated his inner circle to frame the NOI for a mysterious death equally thought by the public to have been a state-sanctioned execution like that of JFK.

It is unclear whether the African-American Muslim leader believed the U.S. government was behind Kennedy’s death, but chances are he was not naïve enough to think that the same machinations used abroad could not be implemented by those very forces domestically to remove someone elected by the American people they opposed. If the Kennedy assassination was indeed a result of the “unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex” which his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower even famously warned of during his farewell address, what took place was almost certainly a secret putsch. The president had already been undercut by his own Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Intelligence Agency in trying to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis and his back-channel negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev were sabotaged by hawkish officials within his own administration. The internal struggle that scuttled Kennedy’s attempts at détente parallels the vying factions which undermined Trump ’s diplomacy with North Korea to a near tee.

Political scientist Michael Parenti explained in his essay The JFK Assassination: Defending the Gangster State how the 35th president was targeted by the security state which perceived Kennedy as “soft on communism” and placating the Soviet Union in his diplomatic efforts following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion:

“The dirty truth is that Kennedy was heartily hated by right-wing forces in this country, including many powerful people in the intelligence organizations. He had betrayed the national interest as they defined it, by refusing to go all out against Cuba, making overtures of rapproachment with Castro, and refusing to escalate the ground war in Vietnam. They also saw him as an anti-business liberal who was taking the country down the wrong path. Whether Kennedy really was all that liberal is another matter. What the national security rightists saw him to be was what counted.”

While the widely perceived truth about the JFK assassination remains sealed from public view, the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commissions of the 1970s exposed the numerous CIA-backed juntas which unseated popular leaders in Guatemala, Syria, Iran, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, and countless other nations in the global south. Ever since, the CIA’s preferred regime change stratagem has been to use what are paradoxically labeled non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — which actually receive U.S. government funding — as cutouts to destabilize noncompliant nations under the guise of supporting “pro-democracy” opposition movements. During the Cold War, the vast majority of states overthrown were left-leaning or socialist governments aligned with the Eastern Bloc, but in the post-Soviet world many of the toppled administrations have been far from left-wing and even conservative, with their only offense favoring economic ties with Russia or China and resisting Western hegemony.

Similarly, when domestic protest movements have taken shape at home in the U.S., the political establishment has used plutocratic foundations in Big Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex to defang them for its own agenda.

Look no further than the way the nationwide mass demonstrations against racism and police brutality this year were rapidly transformed into a movement to elect Joe Biden, who drafted the senate version of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, with no substantial legislation passed to reform police. The corporatized Black Lives Matter movement, a recipient of $100 million dollar grants from the CIA’s philanthropic frontage in the Ford Foundation, grew out of the legacy of the short-lived Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 which itself were coopted by reformist and pro-Democratic Party outfits. Not coincidentally, OWS was also infiltrated by Serbian political activist Srđa Popović of Otpor! (“Resistance!”) and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) fame who previously led the Bulldozer Revolution which overthrew Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević in 2000.

A central component of the Gene Sharp-inspired ‘Color Revolution’ template is the engineering of contested election scenarios where leaders singled-out for regime change can be ousted after appearing to consolidate power, as seen in election-themed revolutions in Serbia (Bulldozer), Georgia (Rose), Ukraine (Orange), Kyrgyzstan (Tulip), Moldova (Grape), and other countries. The same manner in which Biden declared himself the victor in spite of the lawsuits filed in federal court was recently observed abroad in the disputed election aftermath in Belarus where U.S.-backed opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya announced herself the winner of its presidential contest in order to spark preplanned protests in Minsk against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. This was a replication of an unsuccessful blueprint from the 2009 Green Movement unrest in Iran during the incumbency of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidential crisis in Venezuela last year, among others.

Trump‘s lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared to be confused when he alleged that the e-voting irregularities involving the election software company Dominion Voting Systems had ties to deceased former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and international financier George Soros, who actually supports the U.S.-backed opposition to the Chavista government in Caracas. Giuliani may be mistaken but is pointing to something accurate, except in the contested U.S. election his client is in the position of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro while Biden would be the equivalent of self-appointed “interim president” Juan Guaidó. Sans a few exceptions such as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who certainly knows a rigged contest when he sees one), most of the “international community” congratulated Biden on his assumed win just like Venezuela’s illegitimate coup leader. Meanwhile, both the pseudo-left and conservative right seem to be equally misunderstood about Soros, who is neither the charitable billionaire or “globalist” bogeyman they imagine, but rather an anti-communist business tycoon who favors vulture capitalism and Western imperialism under the banner of liberal democracy.

As touched on by Cynthia McKinney, in the aftermath of Trump’s shocking triumph over Hillary Clinton in 2016, rumors began to swirl that a philanthropist-funded U.S. ‘Color Revolution’ was in the works — a ‘Purple Revolution’, monikered after the noticeable shade Mrs. Clinton chose to don in her concession speech as a combination of blue and red intended to symbolize bipartisan opposition to Trump. Whether or not that was true, it was in the wee hours following her loss that the Clinton campaign reportedly settled on placing the blame at the feet of unproven Russian interference for Trump’s unlikely victory. Or was it even earlier? Recently declassified CIA memorandums proved that months before the election in July 2016, Clinton had orchestrated a plan to whip up a smear campaign tying Trump to the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee email server. The documents also showed beyond a doubt how the Russia probe was launched even though both the FBI and CIA were privy to Clinton’s intent on linking Trump with the Kremlin.

The three-year Russia investigation and subsequent impeachment over the Ukraine scandal were only the beginning chapters in the slow-motion soft coup against Trump. When all else failed, the U.S. elite began to prepare for his ouster in the 2020 election. In fact, the possibility of a second Trump term was evidently too much of a nightmare for the establishment to even fathom, so they only prepared for his defeat and presupposed refusal to relinquish power instead. Quite literally, an exclusive cabal of Washington insiders, establishment Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were gathered by a former high-ranking Pentagon official, Nils Gilman, to participate in role-playing “election simulation” scenarios and tabletop “war game” exercises predicting various election outcomes which anticipated that Trump would resist acknowledging defeat and transferring power, precipitating a constitutional crisis. It was called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and featured Clintonites John Podesta and Donna Brazile, who were joined by prominent neoconservative figures William Kristol, Max Boot, and the former George W. Bush speechwriter who coined the “Axis of Evil” phrase, war criminal David Frum.

Most telling is that among the scenarios considered, even in the postulated drill where the premise was a decisive victory for Trump, TIP determined that Biden should ignore the vote result and consider any measures necessary to attain the presidency, including provoking a constitutional crisis and possible civil war where Democratic-held states would be encouraged to secede from the Union, the electoral college abolished, and statehood awarded to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Upon reading the TIP report, it is clear that the real purpose of the bipartisan exercise was to mastermind the very disputed election outcome and concentration of power it predicts would be triggered by Trump. It is also possible that the project enlisted mass media in its scheme. Just weeks before Election Day, a highly-publicized scandal broke at The New Yorker magazine after staff writer and CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin accidentally exposed himself during a Zoom video meeting with fellow employees. Many were too amused to notice the online conference call was revealed to be an “election simulation” featuring top columnists of the publication role-playing as participants.

It would not be out of the realm of possibility given the unprecedented extent to which corporate outlets and Big Tech companies have gone to influence the outcome of the election.

Even those within legacy media such as The New York Post, one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, found itself censored by Twitter for publishing an explosive story which contained emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop of which not even the former vice president’s campaign denied the authenticity.

When Trump delivered a press conference outlining his campaign’s allegations of election fraud, major news outlets not only made the Orwellian decision to “fact check” Trump live on-air but cut away from the speech in the middle of his remarks in coordinated unison. Then when the president’s own social media posts were censored and flagged as disinformation, the jig was truly up. It’s little wonder Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly bragged about how the platform was “partnering with the intelligence community” for censorship to be a soft power arm after the 2016 election. Lo and behold, rather than being broken up for violating anti-trust laws, Silicon Valley has already been rewarded for staying true to its roots in the national security state by Biden’s transition team which consists of executives from Airbnb, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Dell, DropBox, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Lyft, Stripe and Uber.

Can it really be that Trump is so hated because of his rejection of certain foreign policy orthodoxies like JFK alone? The truth is really so much more. It is because of his inclination to disgrace Washington’s sacred institutions for his own political gain which the entire establishment desperately needs to maintain the faith of the masses in its corrupt political system, rogue national security state, yellow press, and obsolete democratic process. It is imperative to preserve these bureaucratic cornerstones as above criticism because they are a linchpin to holding power. As a political outsider, Trump blazed his own trail to the presidency and in doing so undermined the hallowed bastions of power in Washington, promising to “drain the swamp” while eroding faith in the leading U.S. spy agencies as an unelected secret government or “deep state”, and most of all denouncing corporate media as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Even though these were accuracies cynically told by Trump for his own advantage, they were misunderstood by his detractors to be falsehoods simply because he was the source.

Trump’s populist agitation even worried his own group of backers within the ruling elite who convinced him to soften his rhetoric and reverse many of his positions once he took office. Since the 2020 election has not resulted in a desirable outcome, he has only continued to increase popular distrust of the political order and its mechanisms which guarantee the status quo overrides the will of the people, signaling he is more than willing to take the whole system down with him. Indeed, polls indicate many Americans seem to agree with the president that the election was rigged in Biden’s favor. This is precisely why his rabble-rousing is viewed as dangerous by the elite which unleashed its media organs and intelligence agencies from day one to sabotage him — they knew that he is willing to lay bare the full corruption of the powers that be in order to help his own cause. For this reason, the media has resorted to the most deceitful and partisan methods to portray Trump as a unique danger that most be ousted at any cost.

It is no wonder how a coalition as incongruous as that behind Biden came into formation, from Lincoln Project “Never Trumper” Republicans to the Democratic Socialists of America, Big Tech monopolies to Black Lives Matter, Wall Street megadonors to the remnants of Occupy Wall Street, Bush-era national security officials to the inappropriately-named Revolutionary Communist Party (Refuse Fascism), and so on. Or to really give an idea of just how absurd the ideological alliance was to ensure a Biden presidency, the Transition Integrity Project was even shamefully promoted by the likes of so-called “progressive” news outlets like Democracy Now! which made its journalistic name critically covering the very neoconservative figures from the Bush years behind TIP. Somehow, those in power managed to persuade the “anti-establishment” to side with them against the bad orange man as the supposed greater evil, tricking them into defending institutions they should oppose as inviolable and the archaic U.S. electoral system which deprives them of real democracy as unimpeachable. This is the real legacy of the Trump era — only time will tell if it is its lesson.

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Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Max may be reached at [email protected].

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