China finalised its campaign against protests in its Hong Kong territory when it expelled opposition politicians from Hong Kong’s government for endangering national security.
Following this move, opposition politicians still in office resigned in protest, leaving the territory’s government firmly pro-Beijing.
This came after a sweeping security law was passed which focused heavily on cutting foreign backing to opposition groups rioting in Hong Kong’s streets and outlawing aspirations of “independence” as a form of sedition.
With the cutting off of foreign support and the effective removal of opposition political parties supporting and driving the protests from Hong Kong’s political landscape, the prospects for another round of disruptive and violent protests is highly unlikely.
And almost as if to vindicate Beijing’s policy decisions regarding Hong Kong, the US and UK insisted on one last round of interference regarding these most recent developments.
UK’s Sky News in an article titled, “UK summons Chinese ambassador after expulsion of Hong Kong MPs,” would claim:
The government has summoned China’s ambassador to register “deep concern” after Beijing ordered the expulsion of four opposition MPs from Hong Kong’s parliament.
Kwok Ka-ki, Alvin Yeung, Dennis Kwok and Kenneth Leung were banished from the territory’s assembly for allegedly endangering national security.
They were expelled under a new Chinese law banning supporters of Hong Kong independence from holding office.
The article also claimed:
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Thursday declared China’s action a fresh breach of the Sino-British Declaration, the deal that saw Hong Kong pass back to China from Britain in 1997.
The agreement commits China to ensuring Hong Kong enjoys a “high degree of autonomy” and preserves the right to freedom of speech.
The London Guardian would also report in its article, “Hong Kong and China could face fresh US sanctions over ousting of lawmakers,” that:
Hong Kong and Chinese officials could face further sanctions from the United States over a new law that disqualified four pro-democracy legislators as “unpatriotic” and prompted a mass resignation by the pro-democracy caucus.
The UK had violently seized the territory in 1841 and occupied it until its handover back to China in 1997. Before the handover, the British government demanded Beijing recognize a series of conditions including “democratic” procedures that ironically never existed under British rule.
More recently, the UK’s attempts to maintain influence over the territory has been aided by US interference in the form of financial, political and material support provided to opposition parties and street movements culminating in open support of protests in recent years and even featuring high-profile trips by opposition leaders to Washington D.C. to directly receive US aid.
Hong Kong was never the UK’s to legitimately determine the affairs of from the beginning and only through its own military and imperial aggression did it hold any power over the territory. It parting “demands,” while agreed to by Beijing who at the time was left little choice, have no relevance in an international order the US and UK both have regularly predicated on “might makes right.”
Currently, China has the “might” to determine what is right in Hong Kong, and Beijing has correctly decided that what is right is uprooting the remnants of Western influence and interference from its territory.
While the UK government and its much larger transatlantic partners in the US are far from giving up their collective ambitions to subordinate China and greater Asia to the West, it appears that Beijing has laid the groundwork to fully shut Hong Kong off as a vector for such efforts.
The irony is that had the US and UK not pushed as aggressively as they did in Hong Kong over the past several years it is likely their proxies would have been able to maintain some form of influence in the territory for many more years to come. But by rushing in a bid to pressure Beijing, they provided the perfect justification for Beijing swiftly and completely uproot these proxies once and for all.
What’s more is that while the US and UK’s interference in Hong Kong has led what’s being called the “Hong Kong model” by other Western-backed opposition movements across Asia targeting governments friendly to China, Beijing’s success could now provide a “Beijing model” for regional governments to likewise fully and permanently uproot Western interference from within their borders as well.
What the US in particularly had regularly referred to as “America’s Pacific Century” may yet turn out to be the eventual dusk of Washington’s hegemonic ambitions in the region.
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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
While you were busy eating your Thanksgiving dinner, you probably were not paying much attention to the Danish government’s attempt to enact the ‘Epidemic Law’ which is a law in Denmark that would have given authorities the power to enforce rigid quarantines and, more importantly, mandate police enforced vaccination against coronavirus as well as ‘detainment’ if people refused.
The result of this mandate was exactly what should happen in a society when the government oversteps its bounds. The Danes took to the streets and nine days of public protests ensued. Much to my satisfaction, the Danish government relented but governments around the world are already planning on what to do for the ‘refusniks’ who do not obediently queue and roll up their sleeves.
The [fake] “left” [Dems. Joe Biden, et al] presents itself as the advocate for the common person, the voice of the oppressed and the architects of social justice. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to this subject. Suddenly all their bluster about representing individual rights is replaced with a diametrically opposed philosophy which is only one example of how their stated claims represent hypocrisy or even outright lies.
For years, the “left” [Dems] spouted the slogan ‘my body, my choice’ but rest assured that this does not apply to either masks or vaccines. Suddenly, their mentality at the expense of liberty becomes irrefutable. The next time this issue is discussed in the media, listen for the code words which lift the veil as to what is really being prepared. You will be told you need to acquiesce for the ‘common good’ or ‘for the comfort and safety of others’. This is the real face of the modern “left” which for thirty years has been using Mrs Clinton’s ‘It takes a village’ rationale to gut our civil liberties. If it indeed takes a village, then realize quickly that it is the village that will make your choices for you and you will have no say if the left’s [Dems] goals are realized.
No doubt, someone reading this in the United States is thinking ‘certainly this cannot happen here’. Think again… you are being naive. It is already happening and if there were to be a Biden or Harris Administration, this will escalate at a speed which will horrify you while your civil liberties evaporate before your eyes.
In the US, Ticketmaster controls music and drama seating and while it is currently facing a lawsuit over its near monopoly status, they are already planning on barring entry to venues for those who refuse to be forcibly vaccinated. Far more obtrusive to our lifestyle are the airlines plans to install a digital certification of vaccination they call a ‘health pass’ which will ban people from flying if they will not take the needle.
Meanwhile on the ground, Uber and other ride share companies are beginning to refuse service to those who will not accept their ‘new safety protocols’. So, protests may have the potential to officially resist mandatory vaccines but consider the ramifications. These vaccines have been rushed into production, they have been insufficiently tested and they utilize new delivery methods with unknown efficacy or side effects. The ability of those who do not wish to be test subjects may find their social lives impacted, their ability to travel outside their nation – or even state – severely limited and perhaps even potential bans from employment. So, to put it bluntly, you can refuse the vaccine so long as you are content to be a leper who remains at home and is unemployed. Even more sinister in terms of Biblical implications is that some financial institutions are considering denying banking services to those who will not obey their demands.
American Sovereignty Network is aware that we have followers in at least fourteen nations and we are honored you choose to monitor what we are doing. This truly is a subject which knows no borders and vaccination is not an ‘American issue’ because already world plans are being instituted for draconian travel passes which basically will create a global police state. In the coming weeks, American Sovereignty Network will be releasing a statement on the Great Reset that is planned by the World Economic Forum (WEF) which is working with the globalist Rockefeller Foundation to create what they term the ‘Common Pass’ which will be the addition of vaccination records to passports and visas. Simply put, vaccination will be a prerequisite for travel.
The following list was taken verbatim from The Commons Project which convened a meeting this past July in association with the World Economic Forum and The Rockefeller Foundation. Fifty Two nations were represented and over three hundred fifty political and business leaders attended. Their sinister work contains the following objectives:
Every nation must publish their health screening criteria for entry into the country using a standard format on a common framework
Each country must register trusted facilities that conduct COVID-19 lab testing for foreign travel and administer vaccines listed in the CommonPass registry
Each country will accept health screening status from foreign visitors through apps and services built on the CommonPass framework
Patient identification is to be collected at the time of sample collection and/or vaccination using an international standard
The CommonPass framework will be integrated into flight and hotel reservation and check-in processes
Your medical tests or vaccinations will be uploaded to your mobile device and will be scanned at airports, hotels, destinations or wherever they deem it necessary to control the populace. While the length of this commentary prevents a thorough summary of all the stated goals, there are enough telling excerpts to know that what is being assembled is not a temporary health safety policy until coronavirus disappears but rather a permanent surveillance and control system. This is not just a policy planned for the future, it is slowly being implemented now. CommonPass is already in use on United Airlines flights from London to Newark as well as Cathay Pacific transit from Hong Kong to Singapore. Its use is expected to be expanded with Australia being one of the next anticipated locations.
So, what can be done about this? Any examination of how to stop the infringement of civil liberties should quickly arrive at the conclusion that retaining our rights while we still have them is far easier than attempting to reclaim that which has already been lost. The first logical step is to inform as many people as you can. Remember that most people who are saturated in the mainstream media will find expressions such as ‘technocracy’, ‘mark of the beast’, ‘globalist serf state’ and other similarly themed expressions to be easy to dismiss via the now knee jerk charge of conspiracy theory. Start with something which impacts their lives. Ask them questions such as:
Do you wish life would go back to normal?
How would you feel if you were required to take a vaccine with no long term testing?
Should healthy people who do not fall into ‘high risk’ categories be required to accept an inoculation they do not want for an illness that is 0.08% fatal?
Do you want to live a life where masks and injections are mandatory from here onward?
If we can be forced to take a coronavirus vaccine, how many others will you accept?
What will you do if you are told you cannot travel, go to a hotel or large event without first being willing to receive an injection?
Do you trust the government and pharmaceutical companies with personal health choices, especially since drug companies have a strong profit motive?
These questions are nothing more than conversation starters but that is exactly the goal. Most rational people will have a difficult time hearing themselves say something to the effect of ‘People should have no right to determine what is put in their bodies; that is up to the government’.
So, finding a way to start the conversation is the first step for those willing to ponder what question(s) you have posed. Then, offer some specific sources as to validate what you are saying. Keep in mind that most people immersed in mainstream media will not be likely to gravitate towards alternative sources because they have yet to understand that 92% of media on three continents is controlled by six corporate conglomerates. So, I suggest you find a few citations that you can remember before starting such a discourse.
There are now plenty of options which acknowledge that mandatory vaccination is not just being planned and current efforts at implementation are likely to increase, not decrease. Deciding what sources to suggest should be determined by the individual’s receptiveness but as recently as Monday of this past week, Newsweek (decidedly mainstream) published an article entitled ‘With COVID-19 Vaccine On the Way, Can Employers Make Vaccination Mandatory?
The simple act of showing someone that their ability to earn a living can be impacted by this issue should hopefully help that person question the narrative blaring out of Dr Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control. Remember, the goal is to get the person to be open enough to seek information and question their previously held assertions, not to ‘win an argument’ because that will not gain converts.
Should you have the good fortune of finding someone who is either genuinely interested or dismissive enough to want to prove you wrong, then recommend them checking out the previously mentioned World Economic Forum, The Rockefeller Foundation or the Commons Project because each one of these global organizations along with the United Nations make no attempt to hide what their goals are. Hopefully, the people you speak to will be able to cast off their hive mentality when they see that this is no ‘secret plan’ but in fact is discussed openly by its advocates own web sources.
The ultimate measure of success will be to get people involved. The simplest way is to get people to be willing to contact members of elected office to encourage them to oppose mandatory vaccinations, medical travel passports or employment vaccine mandates. Like minded grass roots organizations along with other established civil liberties groups will be glad to have more people who have seen through the fog of the media fiction. As stated earlier, stopping this before it is fully implemented should be the logical immediate goal and people need to know time is not on our side. Act accordingly while we still have the opportunity.
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The current year marks the 15th anniversary of the U.S. shale boom, a period in which fracking technology across such states as Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Wyoming helped establish the nation as a top oil and gas producer.
Unfortunately, high costs of production compared with conventional drilling has led to the sector consistently printing red ink and resulted in considerable destruction of shareholder value. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent oil price crash has led to investors souring on the industry further, credit becoming harder to come by, and a cross-section of Wall Street calling the end to the sector.
But the death of the U.S. shale sector might have been greatly exaggerated.
Whereas U.S. shale has recorded a steep production decline due to sharp fall in oil and gas prices, the industry could be primed to recover much faster than what we have been led to believe.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Since its inception, the U.S. shale industry has been a big money loser.
A June report from Deloitte revealed that during its 15 years of existence, the U.S. shale industry managed to write off a staggering $450 billion in invested capital while generating $300 billion in net negative cash flow. Further, the sector has recorded more than 190 bankruptcies since 2010, the highest by any sector in the United States.
The Covid-19 pandemic only served to make a bad situation much worse. According to Deloitte:
“The oil industry is currently experiencing a ‘great compression’ in which companies’ room to maneuver is restricted by low commodity prices, reduced demand, capital constraints, debt loads, and health impacts of COVID-19. Unlike in previous downturns, these effects are now simultaneous–creating a higher level risk of technical insolvencies and building intense pressure on the industry.”
Still, the shale sector is hardly on its deathbed as has been portrayed in some circles.
The U.S. shale patch has an estimated breakeven oil price in the $60-$65 range, well above the current WTI price in the mid-40s. The historically low oil prices have definitely taken a hit on production, with the Texas’s Permian Basin pumping 4.49 million barrels a day in September down from 4.9 million barrels in March. Yet, the September figure is actually higher than in any month prior to September 2019. In fact, the decline in Permian production has been less severe compared to the cuts undertaken by the likes of Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Source: Bloomberg
Indeed, the worst might be over for the U.S. shale patch thanks to a deluge of Covid-19 vaccines arriving just when the second, third, and even fourth waves of infections have been ravaging the world and causing widespread despair.
The UK has become the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 vaccine, which has been shown to offer up to 95% protection against Covid-19. The first 800,000 doses will be available in the country starting next week, with another 40M doses on order.
Even better news: The U.S. could soon follow suit with an FDA approval and distribute enough of the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine to immunize 100M people–or a third of its population–by the end of February…
There are at least five other promising vaccine candidates from Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, CureVac, and Sanofi–GlaxoSmithKline already in the pipeline.
Further, a recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report says that shale production costs have been falling, with E&P companies operating in the lowest-cost U.S. basin, Permian and Delaware, posting breakeven levels of ~$33 a barrel, down from a $40 per barrel just a year ago.
In an earlier report, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs projected that oil prices might hit $60 a barrel by the end of 2021. Given the high efficacy that the Covid-19 vaccines have so far demonstrated, do not be surprised if Bank of America’s prediction that oil prices will hit $60 during the first half of 2021 proves to be accurate. In other words, the majority of U.S. shale companies could turn cash flow positive in a matter of months.
The U.S. shale sector might be down but is by no means about to go out. Shale companies know it, and have been busy consolidating their operations so as to be better primed for the oil price recovery.
It’s not time for shale to surprise us–yet. An oil price rally on vaccines doesn’t exactly connect with the massive impact on demand the coronavirus has had. There’s an important time lapse here.
But if American shale has finally learned its lesson on resilience, we can expect some real value-focused growth once the dust settles on multiple crises.
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Our thanks to Oil Price for having brought this article to our attention
An ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION has been filed with the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the new Pfizer COVID vaccine that has been submitted for “emergency use authorization” (EUA).
It is widely expected that the FDA is going to grant EUA fast-track approval to Pfizer’s experimental COVID vaccine within days.
The STAY OF ACTION is based upon the faulty PCR tests that were used in the vaccine trials:
Before an EUA or unrestricted license is issued for the Pfizer vaccine, or for other vaccines for which PCR results are the primary evidence of infection, all “endpoints” or COVID-19 cases used to determine vaccine efficacy in the Phase 3 or 2/3 trials should have their infection status confirmed by Sanger sequencing, given the high cycle thresholds used in some trials. High cycle thresholds, or Ct values, in RT-qPCR test results have been widely acknowledged to lead to false positives.
Dr. Lee is a world-renowned expert on DNA sequencing-based diagnostics. He has trained and taught in some of the world’s most prestigious institutions and has published scores of scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals.
He recognized very early on that the PCR tests and other tests fast-tracked by the FDA were not accurate in identifying SARSCoV-2 RNA, and even sent a letter, back in March, to Dr. Margaret Harris and Dr. Eduardo Guerrero of the World Health Organization, and Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), explaining why the tests to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA were generating false positives and negatives.
You can read his March 22, 2020 letter here. He explained that a two-phased test would “guarantee no-false positive results” based on his research and published work from Japan.
So here we are now at the end of November, 2020, and the FDA appears to be ready to grant EUA fast-track approval to COVID vaccines that have gone through Phase I, II, and III vaccine trials, all using these faulty COVID tests.
In Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION, he recognizes the great risk for harm on the American public if the vaccine trials are approved based on these faulty tests.
Petitioner and the public will suffer irreparable harm if the actions requested herein are not granted, because once the FDA licenses this COVID-19 vaccine, both governments and employers may make this product mandatory (in general, or for airline or international travel) or may recommend it for widespread use.
If the assignment of cases and non-cases during the course of the trial is not accurate, the vaccine will not have been properly tested. If the vaccine is not properly tested, important public policy decisions regarding its use will be based on misleading evidence. The medical and economic consequences to the nation could hardly be higher.
The New York State Bar Association has already issued a report on COVID-19 recommending that, “a vaccine subject to scientific evidence of safety and efficacy be made widely available, and widely encouraged, and if the public health authorities conclude necessary, required…”
Thus, it is reasonable to suspect that COVID-19 vaccines, including the Pfizer vaccine, could become mandatory. Without the FDA assuring proper efficacy trials of the vaccine now, the Petitioner and the public may not have the opportunity to object to receiving the vaccine, which was approved based on currently deficient and unreliable clinical trial data.
How likely is it that HHS and the FDA will grant this stay and deal with the PCR testing deficiencies before issuing emergency use fast-track approval to the Pfizer vaccine?
Dr. Peter Marks is the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and will be the main person to make the decision of whether or not to issue an EUA for the Pfizer COVID vaccine. He recently told the press that “Americans can expect a very open process” in their evaluation of the experimental vaccine. (Source.)
We need thousands if not tens of thousands of Americans to contact Dr. Peter Marks and let him know the public is watching, and that we want the FDA to consider Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION and respond to it.
Here is FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn’s contact info:
Dr. Stephen Hahn – email: [email protected] – Phone (Main FDA #): 1-888-463-6332 – Twitter account: @SteveFDA
A Strong Warning to the U.S. Military about Operation Warp Speed
If you are a member of the military who will soon be called upon to participate in Operation Warp Speed and help distribute the new experimental COVID vaccine, be careful that you do not end up on the wrong side of history!
Just claiming to be “following orders” if massive deaths and injuries result from this experimental vaccine may not save you!
That is what many of the Nazi doctors in Germany who served under Hitler tried to claim, but during the Nuremberg trials, and specifically the “Doctors Trial” in 1946-1947, twenty of the twenty-three defendants were medical doctors, and were accused of having been involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder.
Of the 23 defendants, seven were acquitted and seven received death sentences; the remainder received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.
What they did under German law, or maybe “emergency orders” during war time, was probably perfectly “legal” at the time, but after the Hitler regime was overthrown those who committed these “legal” actions that resulted in murder and crimes against humanity, were brought to justice after the war.
Dr. Peter Marks and Dr. Stephen Hahn would also do well to just not blindly excuse Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION, because Dr. Lee appears to have close ties to Attorney Mary Holland, currently the Counsel for Children’s Health Defense and former Professor of Law at NYU, and one of the nation’s top attorneys when it comes to vaccines.
Mary Holland works now for Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who himself has become one the top attorneys in the world taking on Big Pharma.
He currently has 4 lawsuits filed against pharmaceutical giant Merck, for their approval of the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, which has destroyed the lives of so many young people due to being fast-tracked into the market.
Here is a warning from a former Military Commander regarding current Commanders taking part of Operation Warp Speed, and the legal risks of doing so, published at Children’s Health Defense.
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The UK military supplied 2,323 spare parts for Tornado fighter jets to an arms company in Saudi Arabia last year, despite a court order against exporting weapons for use in the Yemen war, Declassified UK has found.
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Saudi planes bombing Yemen received 2,323 spare parts from the UK military last year, according to the government’s annual report into strategic export controls, which was published four months later than usual due to the coronavirus.
The long-awaited report shows that supplies to Saudi Arabia’s air force and navy continued despite a court order in June 2019 banning new export licences for use in Yemen.
Tornado spare parts were exempt from the arms embargo because they were covered by licences issued prior to the court ruling. The equipment was diverted from the Royal Air Force (RAF), which stopped flying its own Tornado fleet in March 2019.
Saudi Arabia continues to use Tornados on combat operations in Yemen, having purchased the planes from BAE Systems in the 1980s and 1990s under the notoriously corrupt Al-Yamamah series of arms deals.
The intense fighting requires a constant stream of spare parts. Some experts say the war would stop within weeks without British supplies to the Saudi air force.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels recently shot down a Saudi Tornado, leading British military officials to “verbally discuss the possibility of offering technical assistance” to help Saudi Arabia investigate the crash, although none was ultimately requested.
When asked in Parliament whether the British military had helped to maintain the jet that crashed, Defence Minister James Heappey said, “RAF personnel do not service Royal Saudi Air Force Tornado aircraft.”
In another attempt to downplay the extent of British support for the Saudi air force, the government has told Parliament that none of the Saudi Tornados has returned to the UK for maintenance since the Yemen war began in 2015.
However, Declassified has found from a freedom of information request that the RAF gave Saudi air force technicians a bespoke training course on Tornado maintenance at RAF Cosford in England last year, in addition to the export of thousands of spare parts.
There are also RAF instructors on secondment to BAE Systems who provide training support to Saudi Tornado aircrew.
Three Saudi air force officers graduating from an aerosystems engineering course at RAF Cosford in June 2015. (Photo: RAF / Facebook)
Sending spare parts to Saudi forces appears to be routine. Official documents show that 575 Tornado spares were sent to Saudi Arabia in 2018, along with 156 missiles and missile launchers. These are thought to include Paveway, Brimstone, Storm Shadow and ALARM missiles.
The conflict in Yemen has caused the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. The UN said on Tuesday that 233,000 Yemenis have died so far in the war, while more than 24 million need humanitarian assistance.
Although the UK government refuses to say how many times British-made equipment has caused civilian casualties, it has tracked more than 500 incidents of possible violations of international humanitarian law.
The UK also donates large quantities of aid to Yemen. In December 2019, the Department for International Development gifted three civilian armoured vehicles to the United Nations Verification and Inspection Mission for Yemen, for use in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah.
Export controls?
The UK’s Department for International Trade repeatedly claims that Britain has “one of the most rigorous defence export regimes in the world” which “assesses all export licences in accordance with strict licensing criteria”.
The department’s annual report into export controls shows that in 2019 customs officials made 194 seizures of exports that were in breach of the licensing regime, sanctions or embargoes – a four-year high. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) then sent 110 warning letters, but made no prosecutions.
Instead, HMRC opted to issue 12 companies with penalties “ranging from £4,000 to £90,000 for unlicensed exports of military goods, dual-use goods and related activity controlled by The Export Control Order 2008”. The penalties totalled around £408,000.
HMRC has told Declassified that it had a minimum of two officers present during the DSEI arms fair in London last year, which is one of the biggest such trade shows in the world. One company, Condor, had its stand shut down after it was found to be displaying banned electro-shock equipment.
However, HMRC refused to tell Declassified whether it had conducted a criminal investigation into Condor or issued the firm with any penalty, citing privacy exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.
Tear gas equipment on display at the Condor stand at DSEI 2019. (Photo: Phil Miller)
The Government’s Joint Export Control Unit, which also enforces the licensing regime in addition to HMRC, has just eight inspectors to conduct “compliance visits” at arms factories.
They made 554 site checks in 2019, and found that 43% of exporters were not fully complying with the licensing regime during routine checks. This resulted in 97 warning letters being sent to company directors last year, “where breaches of licence conditions were identified”, up 2% from 2018.
Five exporters surrendered licences which did not cover their goods and two exporters “had a licence suspended due to repeat infractions”.
However, as Declassified has previously revealed, four of the arms factories at the heart of the Yemen war have not been inspected within the last three years, in breach of the government’s own rules.
These include the warplane factories run by BAE Systems at Warton and Samlesbury in Lancashire, northwest England, which manufacture the Tornado.
BAE sends a weekly cargo flight from Warton to a Saudi air force facility which refuels at an RAF base in Cyprus. The flights are believed to carry spare parts, but the Ministry of Defence refuses to reveal the cargo.
Somalia and Israel
Another recipient of military equipment from the UK in 2019 was the Somali police’s Goodir Unit, which was donated £81,000 worth of ammunition and ballistic shields. The elite police unit has been supported by the British Embassy in Mogadishu since at least 2017 under a £1.14-million training contract.
The Goodir Unit comprises a “hard arrest unit”, Rapid Reaction Team and a Counter Terrorism Unit. UK training has aimed to make the Goodir Unit able to conduct “day/night detention operations”.
Somalia is designated as a “human rights priority country” by the Foreign Office and its security forces have been accused of atrocities, such as the massacre of eight health workers in May.
It is not known what role the Goodir Unit played in that incident. Witnesses claim the five masked gunmen wore a mixture of military, police and civilian clothes.
Other recipients of sensitive British equipment last year included the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has been accused of human rights abuses in the West Bank. The UK donated £900,000 worth of commercial IT and communications equipment.
In 2018, Human Rights Watch said the “Fatah-controlled PA has methodically arrested activists and supporters of Hamas or Hamas-aligned groups solely because of their political affiliation or expression”.
British trade officials have also been keen to develop ever closer ties with Israel, taking part in “an outreach event in Israel to update industry and Israeli officials involved in export control licensing of changes to the control lists.”
Israel is also designated a “human rights priority” by the Foreign Office, which has noted: “The first 6 months of 2019 saw continued violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the context of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Settlement advancements and increasing rates of demolition were particularly worrying.”
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Phil Miller is a staff reporter for Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world.
In breaking news today, the U.K. became the first country to issue emergency authorization for Pfizer’s new COVID vaccine, with the first doses being delivered “immediately” and injections expected to begin in the U.K. next week.
Pfizer and BioNTech have made history.
The two companies’ BNT162b2 has become the first COVID-19 vaccine allowed in the Western world as drug regulators in the U.K. doled out an emergency use authorization on Wednesday, ahead of decisions by the U.S. and Europe, which are expected soon.
For the broader vaccine world, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s decision means the world now has the first mRNA shot authorized for widespread use, opening up a brand-new chapter for vaccine development. (Source.)
This announcement today comes one day AFTER an emergency STAY OF ACTION was filed with the European Medicines Agency by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg and Dr. Michael Yeadon, the former head of Pfizer research.
In their STAY OF ACTION filed yesterday, one day BEFORE the U.K. issued emergency use authorization, Dr. Yeadon stated that this vaccine can make females infertile.
He writes that the Pfizer COVID vaccine as well as other COVID vaccines currently in Phase III trials are:
expected to induce the formation of humoral antibodies against spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2. Syncytin-1 (see Gallaher, B., “Response to nCoV2019 Against Backdrop of Endogenous Retroviruses” – http://virological.org/t/response-to-ncov2019-against-backdrop-of-endogenous-retroviruses/396), which is derived from human endogenous retroviruses (HERV) and is responsible for the development of a placenta in mammals and humans and is therefore an essential prerequisite for a successful pregnancy, is also found in homologous form in the spike proteins of SARS viruses.
There is no indication whether antibodies against spike proteins of SARS viruses would also act like anti-Syncytin-1 antibodies. However, if this were to be the case this would then also prevent the formation of a placenta which would result in vaccinated women essentially becoming infertile.
To my knowledge, Pfizer/BioNTech has yet to release any samples of written materials provided to patients, so it is unclear what, if any, information regarding (potential) fertility-specific risks caused by antibodies is included.
According to section 10.4.2 of the Pfizer/BioNTech trial protocol, a woman of childbearing potential (WOCBP) is eligible to participate if she is not pregnant or breastfeeding, and is using an acceptable contraceptive method as described in the trial protocol during the intervention period (for a minimum of 28 days after the last dose of study intervention).
This means that it could take a relatively long time before a noticeable number of cases of postvaccination infertility could be observed. (Source.)
As we have previously reported, Pfizer is one of the largest criminal organizations in the world, having repeatedly paid out BILLIONS of dollars in settlements for fraud. See:
These Globalist Eugenicists have one goal they intend to implement: significantly reduce the world’s population and setup a single world government, now referred to as “The Great Reset.”
The U.S. elections were always the side show to set this in place and begin the distribution of the new COVID vaccines.
So while all of you on the Religious Right and in the Alternative Media are clamoring every day that Trump needs to send the military into the cities to “Save the Nation” and overturn the election which was stolen from him, you seem to be forgetting that President Trump is behind the roll out of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, and he is going to do it through the military!
The biggest threat to the United States right now is NOT who is going to be crowned President, but whether or not the nation is going to resist the COVID vaccine which knowledgeable scientists and doctors are saying will be a “Crime Against Humanity.”
Download these articles and videos to your local computers NOW! And store them in a safe place on devices that are NOT connected to the Internet, because chances are that your Operating System, such as Windows, Android, or iOS, will soon find ways of deleting this information from your devices.
But President Trump will NOT save us from this Eugenicist program to vaccinate everyone in the U.S.!
In fact, just the opposite!! He wants the vaccine! And he is very upset with the FDA right now for not already approving it!!
Throughout the pandemic, White House officials have twisted arms at the FDA—and sometimes succeeded. Now, in the final months of the Trump administration, agency chief Stephen Hahn has been summoned to explain the timing of its review of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, Axios reports.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows called Hahn in for a 9:30 a.m. meeting Tuesday to explain why the agency hasn’t moved faster on the review, sources told the publication. Ahead of the meeting, Hahn told the news outlet that “career scientists have to make the decision, and they will take the time that’s needed to make the right call on this important decision.”
Some people in the Trump administration are “complaining the FDA is not working around the clock to get things approved,” one source told Axios, prompting Meadows to call the meeting. (Source.)
The White House has politicized the COVID vaccine like everything else, further dividing the American public at a time we need to be UNITED against the real threat here, which is the Globalist Eugenic plan to vaccinate EVERYONE and reduce the world’s population.
WAKE UP America and every other freedom loving soul around the world!! This is no longer a Conspiracy “Theory,” but a full-blown Plandemic that the Globalists have conspired and planned to do for decades now, and it is happening right in front of your eyes, if you just open them and see the truth!
All Eyes on the U.K. – Again
Since the U.K. is the center of the House of Rothchild, one of the most powerful families in the world and part of the Illuminati, it makes sense that most of the Globalist moves right now are starting in the U.K., where these “trial balloons” are being put out to see just how far they can push their agenda before the masses start revolting.
It was heartening to see the masses take to the streets this past Saturday and engage the police, but there were far too many people just standing around with their cell phones recording their fellow citizens being beat up by the police.
The masses always outnumber the tyrants, and resistance does NOT have to necessarily be violent, although it may come to that. You MUST use your bodies as human shields, and get between the police and the one being attacked.
There is strength in numbers, but you have to be wise. When you barricade an individual, or a doorway to a building, for example, LAY DOWN on the ground when an officer approaches you!
A person standing up can easily be pushed away, but bodies lying on the ground between the perpetrators and the way to be guarded will be MUCH harder to remove. It can take 2-3 officers to pick up and carry away a limp body lying on the ground.
I was personally involved with the Operation Rescue movement back in the early 1990s that shut down late-term abortion clinics, and this tactic was very effective in keeping these killing centers closed for hours if not the entire day, as it took the police literally hours to carry each one of us away to be arrested.
The horror that these young mothers observed in seeing so many people step up to try and save their baby often convinced them to change their minds and choose life instead.
But it won’t be as easy this time, because the U.K. will be deploying the military, just as President Trump is planning to do in the U.S.
The British Army’s Information Warfare Unit is being deployed to deal with “anti-vaccine propaganda” heading into the rollout of the vaccine, The Daily Mail reports. The unit was launched in 2010 and is part of the Army’s 77th Brigade, which “often works with psychological operations”.
In fact, “solders are already monitoring cyberspace for Covid-19 content”, the report reveals. The move comes as a response to a growing number of both anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests. Late last week, for example, more than 155 anti-lockdown protesters organized in Central London, marching through Westminster and chanting “shame on you” and “freedom”.
Others waved signs reading “All I want for Christmas is my freedom back”, “Ditch the face masks” and “Stop controlling us”. The country is implementing similar fines and restrictions for businesses as the U.S. government. And, similarly, businesses are starting to take matters into their own hands and defy lockdown orders. (Source.)
Time is short now, especially for those of you in the U.K., as the vaccine is in route and will be deployed very soon.
Like sheep being led to the slaughter, those who believe the Corporate Media narrative and fear for their lives from COVID, will line up to get this vaccine.
The only thing stopping them from literally taking the “mark of the beast” with this new vaccine, is YOU!
You British made the news last week with merely a handful of arrests, but those arrests need to be in the THOUSANDS with massive resistance, if you have any hope of waking up the masses who are sleepwalking to their own deaths right now.
Those of you in the U.K. need to find out NOW just where they are storing these vaccines and make every effort to get there, as well as the health centers or drug stores where the vaccines will be injected into people, so that you can use your bodies as shields to try and stop this mass genocide that the Globalist Eugenicists are planning.
If you are successful in disrupting their plans, which will spark fear and awareness among those uniformed who are showing up to get the vaccine and make them hesitant, then expect the Globalists’ next move, which will be an Internet black out. So prepare in advance for sustained opposition, and find ways to share information outside of the Internet as well.
What, then, shall we say in response to this?
If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns?
Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us!
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-39)
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Donald Trump has, once again, demonstrated that the waning weeks of his tour in the White House could be the most dangerous during his residency at the executive mansion in the US capital. Free of all constraints and wise council, Trump can now do his utmost to disrupt the international scene and create obstacles to efforts of the incoming administration to reverse some of his most egregious actions on the world scene.
It is no coincidence that Friday’s murder of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was timed to take place during the US interregnum. He was the fifth nuclear expert to be killed over the past decade, presumably by Israeli agents and since 2017 with Trump’s active or tacit blessing. He would assuredly give this to Israel after being advised by his hawkish inner circle not to bomb Iran’s main nuclear plant at Nantaz before leaving office. Therefore, the murder of Fakhrizadeh amounted to Israeli compensation for Trump for being balked in his desire to demonstrate his military might: a last hurrah for a chief executive who has disrupted the international order.
Both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to boost tension with Iran and even ignite a limited military clash ahead of the January 20th inauguration of Democrat President-elect Joe Biden. He has committed to reversing Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 agreement for lifting punitive sanctions on Iran in exchange for dismantling 80 per cent of its nuclear programme. Both Trump and Netanyahu seek to scupper Biden’s plan. During the previous Obama administration, Biden and his candidate for Secretary of State Antony Blinken played key roles in the lengthy negotiations which ended in the deal.
Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in May 2018 and has since imposed increasingly damaging sanctions on Iran with the aim of forcing Tehran to capitulate to a dozen demands it cannot accept. Ahead of the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, Israel conducted a series of strikes on targets in Syria, killing a number of Iran-deployed militiamen fighting on behalf of the Syrian government. Fakhrizadeh was, of course, the second major Iranian figure assassinated this year.
The first, Al Quds Corps commander Qassem Soleimani was murdered by a US drone in Baghdad in January. This was followed up in August by the sabotage of Iran’s Nantaz nuclear plant which destroyed late model centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
Despite of the provocative US/Israeli interventions, Iran has refrained from retaliating while the other five signatories of the nuclear deal — Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany, have held their breath and urged restraint. This region is, after all, the backyard of Europe and Russia and the main land bridge between China and Europe. Therefore, events in Iran have a major international dimension as well as a regional dimension.
Trump may gain a certain amount of satisfaction from the murder of Fakhrizadeh as the US campaign of “maximum pressure” designed to wreck that country’s economy and force Iran to capitulate to the US has failed. Consequently. the five other signatories argue that returning to the deal is the best bet as it limits Iran’s nuclear programme and subjects its nuclear sites to intrusive inspections. They also insist that allowing Iran to re-join the international community and opening Iran to foreign business and investment will ultimately compel Iran to moderate policies the West and its Arab allies oppose. Once there is progress in the effort to re-enter the nuclear deal, Biden seeks to negotiate other agreements with Iran in order to curb its development of ballistic missiles and counter some of its activities in this region. He rejects the stick and stick policy adopted by Trump and Netanyahu and favours the Obama administration’s carrot and carrot approach which kept Iran’s nuclear programme in check, provided Tehran with opportunities to grow its economy and regain respectability on the international scene.
Despite calls for revenge strikes for the killing of Fakhrizadeh from hardline Iranian politicians and members of the public, Tehran has so far kept its cool and pledged to retaliate in its own good time. Iran has acted on this policy by dispatching Quds force commander Esmail Ghaani to Beirut to urge Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hizbollah, and to Baghdad to press pro-Iranian militia commanders not to take any action that would escalate tension and provide Israel with a pretext to launch a major military operation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been preparing for the day could do just this since taking office in 2009. While Israel has not claimed the Fakhrizadeh assassination, Netanyahu openly declared him an enemy of Israel during a 2018 presentation. Since Iran has urged restraint disappointing both Trump and
Netanyahu, either the US or Israel followed up the assassination with drone attack that killed an Iranian military commander as he crossed from Iraq into Syria.
Nothing deters them. The murder of Fakhrizadeh drew sharp condemnation from the UN, European Union (EU), Britain, and Germany; and in the region, Jordan, the Emirates, Lebanon, Qatar, Oman, Syria and Turkey. The EU has called on both the Biden administration and the Iranian government to promptly address US re-entry into the nuclear accord and sanctions relief. Re-engagement would dramatically reduce tensions and end the threat of another devastating war hanging over this region.
Some US experts fear Biden’s efforts to revert to the nuclear deal could be undermined by the killing of Fakhrizadeh and non-stop Israeli/US provocation. Others argue that this could put pressure on both sides to expedite US re-entry. This could involve a simple decree from Biden, just as the US exit was effected by a Trump decree. At this stage, the US would not demand amendments to the deal as this would be likely to necessitate lengthy negotiations. Once the US was back in the deal, Biden would have to begin lifting US sanctions which have prevented Iran from benefitting from the deal. While this could involve a battle with both houses of an-anti-Iran legislature, Biden would be able to rely on a cooperative Treasury Secretary as it is the treasury department which implements sanctions.
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Featured image: President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence participate in an expanded bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, Jan. 27, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
And the first thing the American power structure doesn’t want any Negroes to start is thinking internationally. Malcolm X – Autobiography
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The United States, with the complicity of local oligarchies, used lawfare to overthrow the governments of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009; Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012 and Dima Rousseff in Brazil in 2016. Lawfare was also used for the political persecution of Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and former President Lula in Brazil.
Lawfare has thus become the Empire’s main instrument to impede the advance of progressive forces in Latin America. Before its international application, however, lawfare was widely used by the United States in the oppression and political persecution of its own Black population in the struggle for racial equality and civil rights. Thus, the origin of lawfare is intrinsically linked to racism and the maintenance of the hierarchies imposed by capitalism.
The African-American writer Charles Chesnutt, in the article ‘The Courts and the Negro’, published in 1908, already recognized it:
The function of courts in the organization of modern society is to protect rights; to pass upon disputes between man and man or between the individual and the State; and then, by their mandate, to set in motion the arm of the executive to prevent or punish a wrong or to enforce a right. Obviously if this great power be not rightly exercised, if it be swayed by prejudice or class interest, justice will not be done. Nowhere in the history of our jurisprudence has this power of courts been more strongly exerted than in the matter of Negro rights, and nowhere has it been more swayed by prejudice and class interest.
With the liberation of slaves at the end of the Civil War in the United States, the defeated oligarchy of the southern states – the Confederacy – quickly organized itself to prevent African-Americans from using the vote to challenge the hierarchies of power. On the one hand, they used the various tribunals and the Supreme Court – as Chesnutt denounced in the above citation – in a lawfare that would prevent any advance in the conquest of rights and equality by African-Americans. On the other hand, the oligarchies have also widely used terror to keep African Americans permanently oppressed and away from voting. The parallel with United States’ action in Latin America could not be closer:to the lynchings and the terroriizing of the Ku Klux Klan correspond the various death squads of the regimes supported by the Empire: Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay and the murderous military dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil, among others. In the south of the U.S. or in Latin America, the objective is the same: to prevent social advances and any change in the hierarchy of power that challenges the capitalist system. The close connection between racism and capitalist exploitation was a fact recognized in the U.S. as early as the nineteenth century.
Frederick Douglass, born a slave around 1818, a self-taught author who fled slavery and became perhaps the best-known American public figures of his time, was a profound analyst of the society in which he lived and, without having known Karl Marx, wrote:
The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slaveholder, and the former belongs to ALL the slaveholders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages.
Carrying forth Douglass’ analysis into the twentieth century, the African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction:
Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America. … Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy.
Capitalism would not have developed without slavery, and so the struggle against racism is fundamentally also the struggle against capitalism. It is not surprising, therefore, that lawfare is intrinsically linked to racism.
It was in the 1960s in the U.S. that the struggles of the progressive forces incarnated in the African-American movements for racial equality and civil rights reached their climax. It was only during this period that the main barriers imposed by lawfare to the advancement of civil rights of African-Americans finally fell, not without much struggle and much bloodshed.
Perhaps no other group has been more attacked by the capitalist order’s double strand of hierarchical power – lawfare and violent terror – than the Black Panther Party. And through the history of the Black Panther Party one can understand much better the recent history of Latin America and its relationship to the Empire.
Possibly the most complete history of the Black Panther Party is the book Black Against Empire – The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by authors Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. In this study the authors wrote:
The Panthers saw black communities in the United States as a colony and the police as an occupying army. In a foundational 1967 essay, Newton [Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther] wrote, ‘There is a great similarity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupation of our communities by the racist police’. … In 1970, the Party had opened offices in sixty-eight cities from Salem, Wisconsin, to Omaha and Seattle. The Black Panther Party had become the center of a revolutionary movement in the United States.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously declared, ‘The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security in the country’. … The federal government and the local police forces across the nation responded to the Panthers with an unparalleled campaign of repression and vilification. They fed defamatory stories to the press. They wiretapped Panther offices around the country. They hired dozens of informants to infiltrate Panther chapters. … In attacking the Black Panthers as enemies of the state, federal agents sought to repress not just the Party as an organization but the political possibility it represented.
Much more is known today about the role of the FBI in the campaign against the Black Panthers and the civil rights movement in general. Nelson Blackstock’s book COINTELPRO – The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom [COINTELPRO: for COunter INTELligence PROgram] is an excellent source of information on this subject. In this work the author states:
‘One of the things that come through clearest in the Cointelpro papers is that the FBI reserved a special hatred for the Black civil rights movement.’
Noam Chomsky, who wrote the introduction to the book, explains that the role of the FBI was ‘to block legal political activity that departs from orthodoxy, to disrupt opposition to state policy, to undermine the civil rights movement.’
Still in Chomsky’s words:
Predictably, the most serious of the FBI disruption programs were also those directed against the Black Nationalists. … Perhaps the most shocking story concerns the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police directed by the state’s attorney’s office in December 1969, in a predawn raid on a Chicago apartment. Hampton, one of the most promising leaders of the Black Panther party – particularly dangerous because of his opposition to violent acts or rhetoric and his success in community organizing – was killed in bed … there is now substantial evidence of direct FBI involvement in this gestapo-style political assassination.
It is no coincidence that the people most responsible for the putsch against elected President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil – Judge Sergio Moro and State Prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol – have allied themselves with the FBI in their efforts to criminalize former President Lula and the Worker’s Party (PT in Portuguese). The smear and criminalization campaigns against the Black Panther Party and the Worker’s Party in Brazil have much in common.
One of the Black Panther’s main programs was the distribution of food to poor African-American communities, especially children. The party also distributed clothing and organized medical care. Some of the centers where the Party distributed breakfast to children suffered bomb attacks, so violent was the reaction of the white and capitalist power hierarchy to the challenge posed by the Panthers. Some party leaders were murdered, others put in prison. As mentioned, the repression of the Black Panther through the combination of lawfare and violent terror was unprecedented but not without parallels: the Empire’s repression of social movements and leftist political parties in Latin America is similar in both action and motivation. The fundamental phrase in the above quote from Bloom and Martin’ book lays bare in all clarity the main objective of the Empire and its accomplices in Latin America:
‘In attacking the Black Panthers [or Lula, or the Worker’s Party, or Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Christina Kirchner, Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro] as enemies of the state, federal agents sought to repress not just the Party as an organization but the political possibility it represented.’
In 1981, Ronald Reagan took over the capitalist power hierarchy’s war against progressive social forces. In another important study on structural racism in the U.S. and its relation to security and repression policies – Incarcerating the Crisis – author Jordan T. Camp wrote:
The triumph of Reaganism marked the consolidation of a racial and security regime, a neoliberal regime that took shape during the Cold War counterinsurgency against the long civil rights movement. Reagan sent a message to whites that their economic problems were caused by people of color winning access to the social wage during the civil rights movement. … These neoliberal narratives defined the behaviour of the unemployed and social wager programs as the primary sources of economic insecurities. … [Reagan’s strategy was to] redirect resources away from investments in the public sector and toward an expanded budget for the neoliberal carceral-security state. … With Reagan’s election, Cold Warriors and neoliberals were able to capture state power and legitimate their class rule through appeals to security. In his first two years in the White House, Reagan doubled the FBI budget and increased the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget by 30 percent. The discourse of security was deployed as the major justification for the restructuring of the state form, much like the U.S. state’s legitimation of increased expenditures for aggressive counterinsurgency measures in Central America and apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. … By the early 1980s the U.S. imprisoned 420,000 people in federal and state prisons. Over the next decade the number of prisoners would increase more than 64 percent across the country. (…) The carceral population grew from two hundred thousand people in the late 1960s to more than 2.4 million people in the 2000s. Currently, one in thirty-five, or 6.9 million adults in the United States, are in jail or prison, or on parole or probation. Increased spending on incarceration has occurred alongside the reduction of expenditures for public education, transportation, health care, and public-sector employment. Prison expansion has coincided with a shift in the racial composition of prisoners from majority white to almost 70 percent people of color. The unemployed, underemployed, and never-employed Black and Latino poor have been incarcerated at disproportionate rates. With the highest rate of incarceration on the planet, the United States currently incarcerates Black people at rates higher than South Africa did before the end of Apartheid. All of these numbers bespeak a collision of race, class, and carceral state power without historical precedent, but certainly not without historical explanation.
This reformulation of the state by the Reagan regime still inspires the main political objectives of the Latin American oligarchies, with strong resistance from social movements and left-wing parties. The elections of Hugo Chavez, Lula, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Christina Kirchner were responses to the Empire’s attempt to promote ‘incarceration’ in Latin America.
Neoliberalism, which was born as a political reaction to capitalism’s ‘concessions’ to the ‘welfare state’, also became a reaction against the civilizing conquests of the 1960s. Hence the return of the most virulent forms of racism, of the attacks on the rights obtained by women and homosexuals. The maintenance of the capitalist hierarchy in its neoliberal stage depends fundamentally on the most reactionary part of the population. And neoliberalism, on the other hand, tries to reproduce and maintain these social forces.
The quotation from Malcolm X at the beginning of this text defines the fundamental political program of our time: the internationalization of the struggle against racism is an integral part of the construction of the international struggle against capitalism and its hierarchies of power.
[Continuação da conversa com o ativista político, doutorando e engenheiro de petróleo da Petrobrás, Paulo Henrique Tavares, atualmente morador da Bielorrússia]
YMF: A economia da Bielorrússia se manteve em grande medida planificada depois da queda soviética. Você poderia nos detalhar algo sobre esta planificação? Em que áreas ela é mais impactante (educação, saúde, energia, água)?
PHT: O fato de a tentativa de golpe aqui ter sido mal sucedida se deu exatamente porque a maior parte da economia, especialmente dos setores estratégicos, está nas mãos do estado. Para se ter uma ideia, todos os bancos são necessariamente estatais. As principais pautas de exportação aqui são tratores, metalurgia, indústria química, refinarias, energia, indústria nuclear – e tudo está sob controle estatal. E esse é o principal conflito com os liberais, ou melhor, neoliberais.
Um aluguel de um apartamento mediano – custo que no Brasil atola até mesmo a classe média – sai por uns 800 reais em Gomel, enquanto em Minsque sai uns 1200 reais. Mas, a maior economia da população está mesmo nos subsídios do estado a todas as demais despesas essenciais: luz, água fria e quente, aquecimento (vital nestas terras geladas) e condomínio não passam de 120 reais (enquanto no Brasil, com este dinheiro você paga apenas água e um botijão de gás).
A educação fundamental e média é totalmente gratuita e de qualidade. As universidades são gratuitas dependendo das notas dos exames; mas mesmo quando pagas, são bastante baratas. A saúde também é gratuita e muito mais abrangente que o nosso Sistema Único de Saúde, ainda que tenha seus problemas – como por exemplo você ter que pagar pela injeção tomada!
Andar pelas cidades bielorrussas, especialmente Minsque, para brasileiros, como nós, é como passear no paraíso: tudo limpo, bem cuidado. Aqui o estado cuida até das fachadas dos prédios. O transporte público funciona extremamente bem, pontual, rápido e barato; uma passagem de metrô em Minsque custa R$ 1,50 e o ônibus R$ 1,20. Já o ônibus ou trem de longa distância custa uns 30 reais, para percorrer 300 km.
O salário-médio aqui deve estar por volta de uns 2400 reais (1200 rublos bielorrussos, ou 400 euros). Já o salário-mínimo é cerca de 850 reais.
Quanto à alimentação básica – fator do qual alguém de esquerda, progressista e que clame pela “democracia” não deve se esquecer de considerar –, por aqui a cesta básica é bem barata: ela não passa por arroz e feijão, mas como é costume na Europa, se come a batata (ingrediente de diversos pratos), além de legumes, laticínios, sopas. Naturalmente, que num país temperado, os preços dos alimentos oscilam. Em outubro começa o frio, que vai firme até abril: o preço do quilo da batata vai de 1 a 2 reais. Mas a alimentação do dia a dia [1], de modo geral é mais barata até mesmo de que no Brasil, quanto mais se comparada à caríssima Europa Ocidental.
O tomate e o pepino, por exemplo, saem uns 2 reais o quilo: com eles, se faz uma conserva em vasilhas de vidro com água salgada, que se come durante o inverno. Um quilo de carne de porco custa o mesmo que no Brasil, uns 20 reais; o mesmo se dá com o frango, 10 reais. As frutas daqui, como a maçã e a pera, saem uns 5 reais o quilo, como no Brasil. Mas o pão é muito mais barato: cerca de 2 reais. Há também a smetana, comida típica daqui, que é uma espécie de laticínio denso e gorduroso, que o povo mistura na sopa; e se come bastante iogurte com a comida salgada, também bastante barato.
YMF: Quem são os manifestantes? De que classes sociais são a maioria deles? E em linhas gerais, o que estão reivindicando?
PHT: O que percebi do perfil dos manifestantes é que são pessoas em geral de classe média e jovens. Por isso, é que esses protestos quase que se limitam somente a Minsque. Mas na Bielorrússia, diferentemente do Brasil, não se consegue distinguir a classe social das pessoas pelo rosto ou pele, ou como no caso dos países ricos ocidentais, pelo contraste étnico com os estrangeiros serviçais. Aliás, em parte, aqui, a baixa desigualdade é expressa exatamente pelo fato de você não conseguir distinguir isso. Veja esta história: um parente de minha companheira foi preso por usar drogas sintéticas; um garoto de 20 anos, e que deve pegar muitos anos por essa bobagem. Fui visitá-lo na cadeia, e notei que simplesmente todos os presos se parecem àqueles atores dos filmes comerciais de Hollywood ou das novelas da Globo: todos loirinhos de olhos azuis – e em cana. Aliás, muitos deles presos pela mesma bobagem.
Quanto às demandas da oposição, se parecem com os discursos lava-jatistas: oficialmente, só batem na tecla do “fim da corrupção” e de “eleições sem fraude”. Veja a página da Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya [2]: só há aquelas propostas abstratas, demagógicas, sem projeto nem planejamento, com frases de efeito como “melhorar a educação”, “lutar pelas crianças”, “pela justiça”, transformar a Bielorrússia em “uma nação amiga de todos”, “acabar com a corrupção” e outras superficialidades. Claro que nas questões que interessa, ela não entra, se esquiva, se esconde. Enfim, o projeto dela, até agora, é ser esposa de um blogueiro reacionário financiado pelo Ocidente.
Já seus seguidores quem são… Na prática, a classe média insatisfeita, sobretudo em tempos de crise mundial do capitalismo, iludida com o suposto “padrão europeu”. Conversei com alguns, e o argumento deles é que “o salario médio na Europa” (qual “Europa”, para começo de conversa?) é de 1200 euros, enquanto aqui é entre 300 e 400 euros. Mas eu sempre pergunto a estas pessoas: quanto custa uma passagem de metrô, uma conta de luz, os impostos, aluguel, etc, em euros? Em resumo: eles querem ter salários em euros, mas que as contas milagrosamente continuem em rublos (1 rublo local vale 2 reais).
Ocorre que muitos destes jovens, aliciados por gente irresponsável e gananciosa, não sabem que há duas décadas o governo Lukashenko salvou a Bielorrússia de ser um país em guerra, rachado, dominado por mafiosos, cheio de prostitutas, sofrendo de fome, perdendo população com a imigração em massa.
YMF: E os trabalhadores, os partidos socialistas, trabalhistas, como têm se posicionado?
PHT: Não existem muitos apoiadores entusiastas de Lukashenko, pois a situação econômica não está fácil (como no mundo inteiro). As pessoas veem o Lukashenko como um mal menor. Só que ele comete um erro mortal, que é tentar agradar a gregos e troianos (UE e Rússia). Ele sempre tentou tirar o máximo de proveito tanto do Ocidente, quanto da relação com os russos.
Além disso, ele tem um aspecto nacionalista, e costuma boicotar os movimentos e partidos que desejam uma maior integração com a Rússia. No conflito russo-ucraniano pela Crimeia, Lukashenko não reconheceu a península como russa, e sempre criticou os separatistas ucranianos que não aceitaram o golpe, de orientação neoliberal e mesmo fascista; e ainda reconheceu o governo golpista de Poroshenko, em troca de alguns trocados nas transações comerciais com a Ucrânia (o que aumentou bastante após golpe, dado o afastamento deste país com a Rússia).
A única salvação que vejo para a Bielorrússia é aumentar a integração com a Rússia. Porém, Lukashenko não respeita uma série de acordos com Moscou, e volta e meia a Rússia interrompe as fronteiras. Ele a meu ver exagera um pouco neste seu ideário de independência; exige uma série de contrapartidas da Rússia, que Putin não está mais a fim de conceder; especialmente porque percebeu que tais facilidades dadas aos aliados bielorrussos estavam se convertendo em benefícios à traidora Ucrânia, hoje nas mãos da OTAN.
Mas depois deste “susto”, quem sabe o Lukashenko entenda que não existem caminhos intermediários neste contexto político: ou busca uma maior integração com a Rússia, ou tende à ucranização neoliberal (senão fascista, que afinal, não é muito diferente hoje em dia). Isto porque a dependência energética da Rússia é total: apenas a Bielorrússia paga a Moscou um preço subsidiado pelo gás e petróleo (como se fosse parte do próprio território russo), algo bem abaixo do preço de mercado. Aí, o que fazia era pedir muito mais gás e petróleo do que efetivamente o país consumia, para depois revender para os vizinhos (como a Ucrânia), a preço de mercado. A Rússia fazia vistas grossas, mas agora se levantou contra isso; e não porque a Bielorrússia se beneficie, mas porque estava beneficiando a Ucrânia.
Quanto aos trabalhadores, eles não saem as ruas em defesa do Lukashenko porque na política, o jogo é bruto, e a crise mundial segue fazendo suas vítimas. Como eu dizia, tudo que Lukashenko fez nestas duas décadas pelo país, perdeu muito de seu valor, principalmente para as novas gerações. As pessoas sempre querem mais, especialmente quando elas não são suficientemente politizadas, não discutem política, não praticam política, não estudam história.
Agora, essa politica de tentar agradar ao Ocidente e à Rússia entrou em colapso, porque o Ocidente quer alguém que afaste definitivamente Minsque de Moscou. E a qualquer custo.
O povão não se anima às ruas, mas faz o cálculo: “eu não quero mais o Lukashenko, mas menos ainda essa direita que quer colocar o país em guerra, como na Ucrânia”.
Mas acredito que domingo passado, dia 25 de outubro, foi o último suspiro dos liberais pró-Ocidente. Com as ameaças ingênuas de Svetlana de parar o país caso ele não “entregasse o poder”, parece-me que Lukashenko ficou politicamente maior do que já era; saiu fortalecido. Só acho curioso que ele não tenha convocado protestos a seu favor: se ele fizesse isso, muita gente iria agora para as ruas. Nos meios populares, há muitas críticas aos protestos, que podem dividir o país e mergulhá-lo numa guerra de todos contra todos. Por isso, a situação da oposição, na prática, ficou muito pior: sua rejeição aumentou, e diminuiu a de Lukashenko.
Red Zones, the facemask, social distancing, the closing down of schools, colleges and universities, no more family gatherings, no birthday celebrations, music, the arts: no more cultural events, sport events are suspended, no more weddings, “love and life” is banned outright.
And in several countries, Christmas is on hold …
It’s the destruction of people’s lives. It is the destabilization of civil society. And for What?
The Lies are sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and repetitive “Covid alerts” for the last ten months. … It is a process of social engineering.
Manipulation of the Estimates. The RT-PCR Tests are Misleading.
What they want is to hike up the numbers so as to justify the Lockdown.
This misuse of RT-PCR technique is used as a relentless and intentional strategy by some governments, supported by scientific safety councils and by the dominant media, to justify excessive measures such as the violation of a large number of constitutional rights, the destruction of the economy with the bankruptcy of entire active sectors of society, the degradation of living conditions for a large number of ordinary citizens, under the pretext of a pandemic based on a number of positive RT-PCR tests, and not on a real number of patients.
Covid-19 is portrayed as the “killer Virus”.
Falsifying Death Certificates
In the US, the deaths certificates are falsified on the instructions of the CDC.
COVID-19: The “underlying cause of death”. This concept is fundamental. It is defined by the WHO as “the disease or injury that initiated the train of events leading directly to death”.
In France “Churches are threatened with Kalashnikovs over Covid-19 outbreak” (April 2020)
The entire urban services economy is in crisis. Shops, bars and restaurants are driven into bankruptcy. International travel and holidays are suspended. Streets are empty. In several countries, bars and restaurants are required to take names and contact information “to support effective contact tracing if necessary“.
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Free Speech is Suppressed
The lockdown narrative is supported by media disinformation, online censorship, social engineering and the fear campaign.
Peer reviewed psychological “studies” are currently being carried in several countries using sample surveys.
Accept the “big Lie” and you are tagged as a “good person” with “empathy” who understands the feelings of others.
…[E]xpress reservations regarding … social distancing and the wearing of the face mask, and you will be tagged (according to “scientific opinion”) as a “callous and deceitful psychopath”.
In colleges and universities, the teaching staff is pressured to conform and endorse the official covid narrative. Questioning the legitimacy of the lockdown in online “classrooms” could lead to dismissal.
Google is marketing the Big Lie. The opinions of prominent scientists who question the lockdown, the face-mask or social distancing are “taken down”:
“YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) orlocal health authorities‘ medical information about COVID-19, including on methods to prevent, treat or diagnose COVID-19, and means of transmission of COVID-19.” (emphasis added)
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They call it “fact checking”, without acknowledging that both the WHO and local health authorities contradict their own data and concepts.
March 11, 2020: Engineered Economic Depression. Global Coup d’Etat?
The Pandemic was launched by the WHO on March 11, 2020 leading to the Lockdown and closure of the national economies of 190 (out of 193) countries, member states of the United Nations. The instructions came from above, from Wall Street, the World Economic Forum, the billionaire foundations. This diabolical project is casually described by the corporate media as a “humanitarian” endeavor. The “international community” has a “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). An unelected “private-public partnership” under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has come to the rescue of Planet Earth’s 7.8 billion people. The closure of the global economy is presented as a means to “killing the virus”.
Sounds absurd. Close down the real economy of Planet Earth is not the “solution” but rather the “cause” of a process of Worldwide destabilization and impoverishment.
The national economy combined with political, social and cultural institutions is the basis for the “reproduction of real life”: income, employment, production, trade, infrastructure, social services. Destabilizing the economy of Planet Earth cannot constitute a “solution” to combating the virus. But that is the imposed “solution” which they want us to believe in. And that is what they are doing.
“Economic Warfare”
Destabilizing in one fell swoop the national economies of more 190 countries is an act of “economic warfare”. This diabolical agenda undermines the sovereignty of nation states. It impoverishes people Worldwide. It leads to a spiralling dollar denominated global debt.
The powerful structures of global capitalism, Big Money coupled with its intelligence and military apparatus are the driving force. Using advanced digital and communications technologies, the Lockdown and Economic Closure of the global economy is unprecedented in World history.
This simultaneous intervention in 190 countries derogates democracy. It undermines the sovereignty of nation states Worldwide, without the need for military intervention. It is an advanced system of economic warfare which overshadows other forms of warfare including conventional (Iraq-style) theater wars.
Global Governance Scenarios. World Government in the Post-Covid Era?
The March 11 2020 Lockdown project uses lies and deception to ultimately impose a Worldwide totalitarian regime, entitled “Global Governance” (by unelected officials). In the words of David Rockefeller:
“…The world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” (quoted by Aspen Times, August 15, 2011, emphasis added)
The Global Governance scenario imposes an agenda of social engineering and economic compliance.
“It constitutes an extension of the neoliberal policy framework imposed on both developing and developed countries. It consists in scrapping “national auto-determination” and constructing a Worldwide nexus of pro-US proxy regimes controlled by a “supranational sovereignty” (World Government) composed of leading financial institutions, billionaires and their philanthropic foundations.”(See Michel Chossudovsky, Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis, May 1, 2020).
Simulating Pandemics
The Rockefeller Foundation proposes the use of scenario planning as a means to carry out “global governance”. (For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, May 1, 2020). In the Rockefeller’s 2010 Report entitled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development Area” scenarios of Global Governance and the actions to be taken in the case of a Worldwide pandemic are contemplated. More specifically, the report envisaged (p 18) the simulation of a Lock Step scenario including a global virulent influenza strain. The 2010 Rockefeller report was published in the immediate wake of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic.
Another important simulation was carried out on October 18, 2019, less than 3 months before SARS-2 was identified in early January 2020.
Event 201 was held under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. (For details see Michel Chossudovsky, March 1, 2020)
Intelligence and “The Art of Deception”
The Covid crisis is a sophisticated instrument of the power elites. It has all the features of a carefully planned intelligence op. using “deception and counter-deception”. Leo Strauss: “viewed intelligence as a means for policymakers to attain and justify policy goals, not to describe the realities of the world.” And that is precisely what they are doing in relation to Covid-19.
Video: The Event 201 Pandemic Exercise. October 18, 2019. Focusses on the extent of the pandemic. Also addresses within the simulation how do deal with online social media and so-called “misinformation”. (Listen carefully)
Macro-Economic Intervention. Evolution of the Global Economy
History of Economic “Shock Treatment”. From The Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) to “Global Adjustment (GA)”
The March 11, 2020 (simultaneous) closing down of the national economies of 190 member states of the UN is diabolical and unprecedented. Millions of people have lost their jobs, and their lifelong savings. In developing countries, poverty, famine and despair prevail.
While this model of “global intervention” is unprecedented, it has certain features reminiscent of the country-level macro-economic reforms including the imposition of strong “economic medicine” by the IMF. To address this issue let us examine the history of so-called “economic shock treatment”.
Flash back to Chile, September 11 1973.
As a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Chile, I lived through the military coup directed against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. It was a CIA op led by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger coupled with devastating macro-economic reforms.
Image on the left: Kissinger together with General Augusto Pinochet (1970s)
In the month following the Coup d’Etat, the price of bread increased from 11 to 40 escudos overnight. This engineered collapse of both real wages and employment under the Pinochet dictatorship was conducive to a nationwide process of impoverishment. While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty: in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six times and eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.” That was Chile’s 1973 “Reset”
Two and a half years later in 1976, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with another military coup d’état in March 1976. Behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” macro-economic reforms had also been prescribed – this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors, including David Rockefeller who was a friend of The Junta’s Minister of Economy José AlfredoMartinez de Hoz.
Image on the right: General President Jorge Videla, David Rockefeller and Argentina’s Economy Minister Martinez de Hoz, Buenos Aires (1970s)
Chile and Argentina were “dress rehearsals” for things to come: The imposition of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was imposed on more than 100 countries starting in the early 1980s. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, 2003)
A notorious example of the “free market”: Peru in August 1990 was punished for not conforming to IMF diktats: the price of fuel was hiked up 31 times and the price of bread increased more than twelve times in a single day. These reforms – carried out in the name of “democracy” – were far more devastating than those applied in Chile and Argentina under the fist of military rule.
And now on March 11, 2020, we enter a new phase of macro-economic destabilization, which is more devastating and destructive than 40 years of “shock treatment” and austerity measures imposed by the IMF on behalf of dominant financial interests.
There is rupture, a historical break as well as continuity. It’s “Neoliberalism to the n-th Degree”
Image on the left: Kissinger with Argentina’s Dictator General Jorge Videla (1970s)
Closure of the Global Economy: Economic and Social Impacts at the Level of the Entire Planet
Compare what is happening to the Global Economy today with the country by country “negotiated” macro-economic measures imposed by creditors under the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The March 11, 2020 “Global Adjustment” was not negotiated with national governments. It was imposed by a “private/ public partnership”, supported by media propaganda, and accepted, invariably by co-opted and corrupt politicians.
“Engineered” Social Inequality and Impoverishment. The Globalization of Poverty
Compare the March 11, 2020 “Global Adjustment” “guidelines” affecting the entire Planet to Chile September 11, 1973.
In a bitter irony, the same Big Money interests behind the 2020 “Global Adjustment” were actively involved in Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976). Remember “Operation Condor” and the “Dirty War” (Guerra Sucia).
There is continuity: The same powerful financial interests: The IMF and the World Bank bureaucracies are currently involved in preparing and managing the” post-pandemic “New Normal” debt operations (on behalf of the creditors) under the Great Reset.
Henry Kissinger was involved in coordinating Chile’s 9/11, 1973 “Reset”.
The Thrust of “Depopulation” under the Great Reset?
Today, Henry Kissinger is a firm supporter alongside the Gates Foundation (which is also firmly committed to depopulation) of the Great Reset under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
No need to negotiate with national governments or carry out “regime change”. The March 11, 2020 project constitutes a “Global Adjustment” which triggers bankruptcies, unemployment and privatization on a much larger scale affecting in one fell swoop the national economies of more than 150 countries.
And this whole process is presented to public opinion as a means to combating the “killer virus” which, according to the CDC and the WHO is similar to seasonal influenza. (Viruses A, B).
The Hegemonic Power Structure of Global Capitalism
Big Money including the billionaire foundations are the driving force. It’s a complex alliance of Wall Street and the Banking establishment, Big Oil and Energy, the so-called “Defense Contractors”, Big Pharma, the Biotech Conglomerates, the Corporate Media, the Telecom, Communications and Digital Technology Giants, together with a network of think tanks, lobby groups, research labs, etc. The ownership of intellectual property also plays a central role.
This complex decision-making network involves major creditor and banking institutions: The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF, the World Bank, the regional development banks, and the Basel based Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which plays a key strategic role.
In turn, the upper echelons of the US State apparatus (and Washington’s Western Allies) are directly or indirectly involved, including the Pentagon, US Intelligence (and its research labs), the Health authorities, Homeland Security and the US State Department (including US embassies in over 150 countries).
Ongoing Wealth Appropriation by The Super Rich
“V the Virus” is said to be responsible for the wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. That’s a lie. There is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables. It’s the powerful financiers and billionaires, who are behind this (decision-making) project which has contributed to the destabilization (Worldwide) of the real economy.
In the course of the last nine months, they have cashed in on billions of dollars. Between April and July the total wealth held by billionaires around the world has grown from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion,
The Forbes report does not explain the real cause of this massive redistribution of wealth:
“collective billionaire wealth has grown at its fastest rate over any period over the past decade.”
In fact it is the largest redistribution of global wealth in World history. It is predicated on a systematic process of Worldwide impoverishment. It is an act of economic warfare.
The billionaires were not only the recipients of generous “government stimulus packages” (i.e. Handouts), the bulk of their financial gains from the outset of the Covid fear campaign in early February was the result of insider trading, foreknowledge, derivative trade and manipulation of both financial and commodity markets. Warren Buffett rightfully identifies these speculative instruments as “Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction”.
The combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by $850 billion from March 18th, 2020 to October 8, 2020, an increase of over 28 percent. This estimate does not account for the increase in wealth during the period preceding March 18, which was marked by a series of stock market crashes. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Economic Chaos and Societal Destruction, November 7, 2020)
On March 18, 2020, U.S. billionaires had combined wealth of $2.947 trillion. By October 8th, their wealth had surged to $3.8 trillion.
This upper billionaire class manipulates financial markets starting in February and then orders the closing down of the global economy on March 11, the stated objective of which was to combat Covid-19, i.e. similar to seasonal influenza.
The “Real Economy” and “Big Money”
Why are these Covid lockdown policies spearheading bankruptcy, poverty and unemployment?
Global capitalism is not monolithic. There is indeed “A Class Conflict” “between the super-rich and the vast majority of the World population.
But there is also intense rivalry within the capitalist system. Namely a conflict between “Big Money Capital” and what might be described as “Real Capitalism” which consists of corporations in different areas of productive activity at the national and regional levels. It also includes small and medium sized enterprises.
What is ongoing is a process of concentration of wealth (and control of advanced technologies) unprecedented in World history, whereby the financial establishment, (i.e. the multibillion dollar creditors) are slated to appropriate the real assets of both bankrupt companies as well as State assets.
The “Real Economy” constitutes “the economic landscape” of real economic activity: productive assets, agriculture, industry, services, economic and social infrastructure, investment, employment, etc. The real economy at the global and national levels is being targeted by the lockdown and closure of economic activity. The Global Money financial institutions are the “creditors” of the real economy.
“The Second Wave”. Another Lockdown
Second Wave is a Lie. It is presented to public opinion as a means to combating the virus and saving lives.
That is what the governments are telling us. The fear campaign has gone into high gear, applied simultaneously in different regions of the world.
Test, Test, Test, In the UK, the Armed Forces are involved in mass testing operations using the PCR, the objective of which is to push up the numbers of so-called positive cases.
If you live alone in the UK, you can set up a “Support Bubble (see left)
Needless to say: at the outset of this Second Wave, the global economy is already in a state of chaos. While the reports fail to reveal the depth and seriousness of this global crisis, the evidence (which is still tentative and incomplete) speaks for itself.
The rationale of the Second Wave is to prevent and postpone the reopening of the national economy, coupled with the enforcement of social distancing, the wearing of the face mask, etc.
The target are the service economy, the airlines, the tourist industry, etc. Maintaining strict restrictions on air travel is tantamount to spearheading major airlines into bankruptcy. The bankruptcy program is engineered and imposed. Solely in the US tourism and travel industry, 9.2 million jobs could be lost and “between 10.8 million and 13.8 million jobs … are at serious risk”.
And the Second Wave is intent upon enabling the billionaires to pick up the pieces, acquiring ownership of entire sectors of economic activity at rockbottom prices.
The money they appropriated in the course of the financial crisis (through outright manipulation) will be used to buy out bankrupt corporations as well as bankrupt governments.
Image: Hong Kong Airport. Empty.
Global Governance: Towards a Totalitarian State
The individuals and organizations involved in the October 18, 2019 201 Simulation are now involved in the actual management of the crisis once it went live on January 30th, 2020 under the WHO’s Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), which in turn set the stage for the February financial crisis.
The lockdown and closure of national economies triggers a second spree of mass unemployment coupled with the engineered bankruptcy (applied Worldwide)of small and medium sized enterprises.
All of which is spearheaded by the installation of a global totalitarian State which is intent upon breaking all forms of protest and resistance.
The Vaccine
The Covid vaccination program (including the embedded digital passport) is an integral part of a global totalitarian regime.
What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity. The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity.(Peter Koenig, March 12, 2020)
“The Great Reset”
The same powerful creditors which triggered the Covid Global Debt Crisis are now establishing a “New Normal” which essentially consists in imposing what the World Economic Forum describes as the “Great Reset”:
Using COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions to push through this transformation, the Great Reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which older enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or absorbed into monopolies, effectively shutting down huge sections of the pre-COVID economy. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs will be carried out by AI-driven machines.
The jobless (and there will be many) would be placed on some kind of universal basic income and have their debts (indebtedness and bankruptcy on a massive scale is the deliberate result of lockdowns and restrictions) written off in return for handing their assets to the state or more precisely to the financial institutions helping to drive this Great Reset. The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘saving the planet’. Of course, the tiny elite who rolled out this great reset will own everything. (Colin Todhunter,Dystopian Great Reset, November 9, 2020)
By 2030, the global creditors will have appropriated the World’s wealth under the “Global Adjustment” scenario, while impoverishing large sectors of the World Population.
In 2030 “You’ll own nothing, And you’ll be happy.” (see video below)
The United Nations: An Instrument of Global Governance on Behalf of an Unelected Private/Public Partnership
The UN system is also complicit. It has endorsed “global governance” and The Great Reset.
While UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres rightfully acknowledges that the pandemic is “more than a health crisis”, no meaningful analysis or debate under UN auspices as to the real causes of this crisis has been undertaken.
According to a September 2020 UN Report:
“Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost.The lives of billions of people have been disrupted. In addition to the health impacts, COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated deep inequalities … It has affected us as individuals, as families, communities and societies. It has had an impact on every generation, including on those not yet born. The crisis has highlighted fragilities within and among nations, as well as in our systems for mounting a coordinated global response to shared threats. (UN Report)
The decisions which triggered social and economic destruction Worldwide are not mentioned. No debate in the UN Security Council. Consensus among all Five Permanent Members of the UNSC.
V the Virus is held responsible.
The WEF “Reimagine and Reset our World” in a private-public partnership has been endorsed by the UN.
Flash back to George Kennan and the Truman Doctrine in the late 1940s. Kennan believed that the UN provided a useful way to “connect power with morality,” using morality, as a means to rubber-stamp America’s “humanitarian wars”.
The Covid crisis is the culmination of a historical process.
The lockdown and closure of the global economy are “weapons of mass destruction”. What we are dealing with are extensive “crimes against humanity”.
Joe Biden and the “Great Reset”
“Elected President” Joe Biden is a groomed politician, a trusted proxy, serving the interests of the financial establishment.
Let’s not forget that Joe Biden was a firm supporter of the Invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein “had weapons of mass destruction”. “The American People were deceived into this war”, said Senator Dick Durbin. Do not let yourself be deceived again by Joe Biden.
Evolving acronyms. 9/11, GWOT, WMD and now COVID: Biden was rewarded for having supported the invasion of Iraq.
Fox News describes him as a “socialist” who threatens capitalism: “Joe Biden’s disturbing connection to the socialist ‘Great Reset’ movement”. While this is absolute nonsense, many “progressives” and anti-war activists have endorsed Joe Biden without analyzing the broader consequences of a Biden presidency.
The Great Reset is socially divisive, it’s racist. It is a diabolical project of Global Capitalism. It constitutes a threat to the large majority of Americans workers as well as to small and medium sized enterprises. A Biden-Harris administration actively involved in carrying out the “Great Reset” is a threat to humanity.
With regard to Covid, Biden is firmly committed to the “Second Wave”, i.e. maintaining the partial closing down of both the US economy and the global economy as a means to “combating the killer virus”.
Joe Biden will push for the adoption of the WEF’s “Great Reset” both nationally and internationally, with devastating economic and social consequences. The 2021 World Economic Forum (WEF) scheduled for Summer 2021 will focus on the implementation of the “Great Reset”.
A Joe Biden administration would actively pursue Big Money’s totalitarian blueprint: The Great Reset.
Unless there is significant protest and organized resistance, nationally and internationally, the Great Reset will be embedded in both domestic and US foreign policy agendas of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration.
It’s what you call Imperialism with a “Human Face”.
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In this expanded and updated edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.
This book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.
In this new enlarged edition – which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction — the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.
Barely a few weeks after the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This economic shock treatment had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys”.
At the time of the military coup, I was teaching at the Institute of Economics of the Catholic University of Chile, which was a nest of Chicago trained economists, disciples of Milton Friedman. On that September 11, in the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew. When the university reopened several days later, the “Chicago Boys” were rejoicing. Barely a week later, several of my colleagues at the Institute of Economics were appointed to key positions in the military government.
While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country was precipitated into abysmal poverty: in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six times and eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.
These events affected me profoundly in my work as an economist. Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. I started to understand that macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” – as claimed by the academic mainstream – nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation. In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” as a wellorganized instrument of “economic repression”.
France has seen a spate of attacks carried out by radicalized Muslims. The attacks and killings must be denounced.
But more so must one denounce the terrorism and killings carried out by the French state against Muslims in its wars abroad. In a move that gives a strong inkling of French values, the French state has targeted 76 mosques for “unprecedented action” and potential closure.
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France is a party to the western chorus that condemns the alleged internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China. China has rebutted the western disinformation; for example, China provided real-site photos in Xinjiang to debunk satellite images as purported evidence of so-called internment camps.
Eljan Anayt, spokesperson of the Xinjiang regional government, said,
I want to emphasize that Xinjiang is an open region, and there is no need to learn about it through satellite images. We welcome all foreign friends with objective, unbiased stance to come to Xinjiang and to know a real Xinjiang.
The Qiao Collective, an all-volunteer group comprised of ethnic Chinese people living abroad, complied a must-read report on Xinjiang that warned of “politically motivated” western disinformation:
The effectiveness of Western propaganda lies in its ability to render unthinkable any critique or alternative—to monopolize the production of knowledge and truth itself. In this context, it is important to note that the U.S. and its allies are in the minority when it comes to its critiques of Chinese policy in Xinjiang. At two separate convenings of the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 and 2020, letters condemning Chinese conduct in Xinjiang were outvoted, 22-50 and 27-46. Many of those standing in support of Chinese policy in Xinjiang are Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil, including Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, and Nigeria. On the issue of Xinjiang, the clear break in consensus between the Global South and the U.S. bloc suggests that Western critiques of Xinjiang are primarily politically motivated.
France states that its crackdown on radicalized mosques is spurred by terrorist actions. The Qiao Collective notes that France had earlier begun its own “de-radicalization programs.”
2015 October – France begins operating “de-radicalization programs.” It would seem these programs have since garnered mostly criticism from the public, but mainstream Western discourse has not accused France of cultural genocide.
Earlier in 2020, French media alleged the destruction of mosques in Xinjiang by Chinese authorities. The New York Times ran a similar story claiming that “China Is Erasing Mosques and Precious Shrines in Xinjiang …” This is coming from the US that erased several Indigenous nations from it landmass at its establishment. This is coming from a country that is engaged in genocide against Muslims worldwide — calculated to be 34 million avoidable deaths in 20 countries post-9-11. [1]
The below video depicts how US forces respect the sanctity of a mosque during its illegal war waged in Iraq, a war based on the fixing of intelligence and facts indicating that Iraq possessed weapons-of-mass-destruction (weapons that the US arrogates the right to possess to itself and some of its allies) around the policy. That war has been condemned as a genocide. [2]
Regarding the situation surrounding mosques in China, CGTN corrected the western disinformation:
Western accusations of “forceful demolition of mosques,” “persecution of religious leaders,” and “restrictions of religious freedom” in Xinjiang are “ridiculous” and “groundless,” and the lies and slandering have deeply offended the feelings of Xinjiang people and tarnished the true picture of Xinjiang, Xinjiang Islamic Association said in a statement…
Xinhua, the largest media organization in China presented an affirmative and uplifting video on the respect for Islam by the Chinese government.
Another video report cites the greater number of mosques in China than in either the US or France, even when compared per capita; the modernization of mosques having been carried out; the effectiveness of a respectful de-radicalization program in Xinjiang; and the reluctance of western governments and western media to acknowledge terrorism having been carried out in China.
The Qiao Collective provides relevant background information that China has been a victim of several attacks by Muslim terrorists:
Although there were many attacks between 1990 and 2016 and not all of the information is yet available, some high-profile attacks are as follows:
2013 October 28 – Tiananmen Attack, 5 killed, 40 wounded…
2014 March 1 – Kunming Train Station Attack, 31 killed, 141 wounded…
2014 May 22 – Urumqi Attack, 39 killed and 94 injured …
2014 July 30 – Assassination of Imam Jume Tahir at the Id Kah Mosque after morning prayers…
2016 September 6 – Kyrgyzstan’s state security service attributed the suicide bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek to the ETIM/TIP.
While terrorist actions have been carried out by Muslims, this points to a minority among Muslims. In no way does it diminish Islam as a religion compared to other religions because there is plenty of terrorism to be attributed to other confessions such as Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Unless otherwise demonstrated by solid evidence, then the terroristic actions must be acknowledged as that of a minority in the religion. Any actions taken to remediate the violent factions must be undertaken in a respectful manner that does not tarnish the entirety of a group.
Finally, to stake out the moral high ground, the state must abstain from carrying out its own terrorism.
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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
1. See Gideon Polya, US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide (Korsgaard Publishing, 2020). Review.
2. See Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States, (Clarity Press, 2013). Review.
“Yet this depraved new global architecture, dangerous to life, human, sentient and biological, is pushed forward despite advanced knowledge of foretold tragedy – solely for the pursuit of money, profits and power. It is this very fact that shows us unequivocally and irrevocably that promises for a just transition, green deals, new deals, build back better schemes, are nothing but empty, hollow assurances, void of intent. These are the lies they tell. Promises and assertions that are nothing more than alibis.” – Cory Morningstar, from The Great Reset [1]
On December 12th, on the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the world is set to host the virtual Climate Ambition Summit.
This Agreement aimed for the first time to hold global temperature rise “to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” It also called for the less developed economies to develop their economies using high efficiency technology and less high emissions technology which would require financing from developed technologies.[2]
The Agreement spotlighted the countries’ commitment to transparency, flexibility, cooperation and regular reports on their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC). And while there was no mechanism to enforce compliance with the provisions of the Accord, there was a proposal to promote compliance developed by a committee.[3]
Paris does have its critics however, not all of whom are climate change deniers. One 2016 paper stresses that the Agreement commits to “sustained industrial growth, risk management over disaster prevention, and future inventions and technology as saviour.” He argues the incompatibility of attracting economic growth and lowering greenhouse gas emission.[4]
Meanwhile, there is another agreement set to introduce a range of changes in all areas of life. The Great Reset is essentially a “reboot” of the economic system of capitalism which is starting to show signs of fatigue and failure. It claims to address the major dilemmas facing our world, including economic insecurity, gender disparity, climate change and, of course, the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic.[5]
But, given what we know about Klaus Schwab, UK Prince Charles, and all these other members of the capitalist cavalry, what can we realistically expect of this giant scheme?
This week, on the Global Research News Hour, we will address both of these changes, and what to expect of the major entities, including some of the environmental non-profit organizations, leading the charge toward restoration of the people and the planet.
Our second guest is Clive Spash, the man who wrote the 2016 article I mentioned earlier, entitled This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality. During our talk, Spash not only goes into detail about the flaws in the agreement, he also underscores the problems with any kind of “green new deal,” the mix of energy infrastructure currently with military security, and the failure of non-profit organizers generally to confront the global economic masters of industry.
Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.
Clive Spash is an economist, a teacher and an environmental activist. He works as Professor, and Chair of Public Policy and Governance in the Department of Socio-Economics, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. His books include The Political Economy of Nature (2006) and Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics (2002). He is also the author of over 100 articles.
The ruling backed the University of Sydney’s February 2019 dismissal of Dr. Tim Anderson, an economics department senior lecturer, primarily on the basis of allegations that his criticisms of US militarism and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people were “offensive.”
Most people around the globe would agree that 2020 has been a year to forget. This is certainly, if not especially, true for Venezuela’s opposition, and the upcoming parliamentary vote will only add to their misfortunes.
Forty-five years ago, under a cloak of secrecy, Operation Condor was officially launched: a global campaign of violent repression against the Latin American left by the region’s quasi-fascist military dictatorships. The US government not only knew about the program — it helped to engineer it.
England’s GPs, who are expected to play a pivotal role in the roll out of coronavirus vaccines, say they are in the dark about how exactly they will fit into the government’s plans, according to the British Medical Association.
The Fed’s policy tools – interest rate manipulation, quantitative easing, and “Special Purpose Vehicles” – have all failed to revive local economies suffering from government-mandated shutdowns. The Fed must rely on private banks to inject credit into Main Street, and private banks are currently unable or unwilling to do it.
Judicial Watch announced today that a September 2020 study revealed that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters.
Trust of citizens and their political representatives is already at drought stricken levels. Now, politicians are hoping to convince citizens that being publicly vaccinated in an effort to return to “COVID normalcy” will somehow restore confidence long shattered.
Although the Israeli government has not claimed credit for the illegal killing, there is little doubt of its culpability. Trump implicitly praised the assassination, retweeting a comment by Israeli journalist and intelligence expert Yossi Melman that the killing was a “major psychological and professional blow” to Iran.
The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.
But the issue at hand in the present undertaking is to resolve the problem of “conscious machines”. The present fundamental issue is therefore hinged on the question, Can machines be conscious? Without delving too deeply into the technical nitty-gritty and getting too strict on the understanding of what consciousness is, it is hereby supposed that it will not totally sound ridiculous or outrageous to venture to theorize that yes, machines can be conscious.
This first video interview may be one of the most important ones you listen to before the onslaught of the Covid-19 vaccine – distinction: Western style Covid-19 vaccine.
The Russian Sputnik V is not part of the same design.
The western ones are not the “normal” kind; they are RNA-type vaccines that modify the human genome, plus much more – but listen to Dr. Christiane Northrup, who has an excellent way of describing complex issues for everybody to understand. .
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An important article in RT Op Ed entitled “UK wants to use literal army to fight ‘anti-vaccine propaganda’ online” begs the question “Are we in a budding totalitarian state” involving censorship and a crackdown on free speech?
With the impending rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine, a UK military cyber unit has been tasked to crack down on “online propaganda against vaccines.” Questioning something that will be injected into your body is now deemed radical.
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With the anti-lockdown narrative beginning to become more prominent throughout the UK following the arrest of 150 people over the past weekend, a clampdown on independent thought is looming. The arrests were made because of anti-lockdown protests in London, and the heavy-handed nature of dealing with these protests is extraordinarily alarming. Now the crackdown is moving online, where the gradual destruction of free speech is becoming ever more blatant and cynical. The Sunday Times reported that there is even a brazen operation to suppress people’s fundamental right to express their opinion.
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The UK authorities intend on literally using military intelligence brigades to manage the elimination of free speech. The primary target of this military operation is what the Times calls “anti-vax militants” and supposed propaganda content across the internet and social media. (emphasis added)
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The above article by Lewis Olden is related to the video, in as much as it shows what to expect, if we let this vaccine or any of the western vaccines be put into our bodies.
This refers right now to the UK which is implementing harsh controls through a specially trained “cyber” Military Unit – mind control, basically taking away your freedom of expression and eventually of thought.
This is hard to believe. But you better be prepared for it. And Dr. Christiane Northrup explains how.
The article entitled – Breaking – by “Vaccine Impact” (2 December 2020) quotes the former Head of Pfizer Research, Dr. Michael Yeadon, as saying that the new untested mRNA (human DNA-altering) Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, BNT162b2, may make females infertile.
The two companies’ BNT162b2 has become the first COVID-19 vaccine allowed in the Western world as drug regulators in the U.K. doled out an emergency use authorization on Wednesday, ahead of decisions by the U.S. and Europe, which are expected soon.
For the broader vaccine world, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s decision means the world now has the first mRNA shot authorized for widespread use, opening up a brand-new chapter for vaccine development. (Source.)
THIS STAY OF ACTION is very similar to the one filed last week with the FDA in the U.S. by Dr. Sin Hang Lee, and “demands that clinical trials be STOPPED until there is an accurate testing mechanism in place to correctly identify SARS-CoV-2, since the PCR test is very inaccurate”. “In Dr. Lee’s ADMINISTRATIVE STAY OF ACTION, he recognizes the great risk for harm on the American public if the vaccine trials are approved based on these faulty tests”. “Dr. Yeadon, the former head of Pfizer research, also went public recently in a viral video recording where he states that the COVID Pandemic is over, and that it is being kept alive by false narratives using the faulty PCR tests.” (health impact news, op cit)
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Just think – eleven months ago, at the beginning of January 2020 – nobody would have thought – not in their wildest nightmares – what would be coming to humanity within the next few months – maybe years if we don’t stop it. Repression no end – all possible because of an atrocious fear campaign.
Clever – fear from an invisible enemy.
People with fear will end up with a vastly reduced immune system, vulnerable to all kinds of infectious diseases, not just covid. Fear also reduces the will to resist – people under fear can be manipulated. We see it every day.
This invisible enemy [V the virus[, they say has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Truth is, however, quite different. CDC figures show that there have been no excess deaths in the US in 2020 – in fact the total deaths at the end of 2020 may be even lower than in 2019. – So, what are we talking about? A phantom virus-killer? – See for yourself.
Frankly, who could have imagined that we would be loosing almost all human and civil rights only 11 months later, by December 2020?
And yes, this draconian crackdown starts in the UK (though, we have seen “examples” of it in Melbourne and Victoria State of Australia) – while people actually stand in line waiting for the vaccines, in the hope life will return to normal – IT WILL NOT.
It will get worse, and especially, you have no idea what is in the vaccine and how it will affect you – side effects and real effects. How it may affect future generations. You will never be able to detox your body from RNA vaccines, as they change your DNA, like genetically engineered organisms – think of corn, soja, rice, cotton and many more. With one of these vaccines you will become “transhuman”.
You will know much more after having listened to the interview with the renown Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Massive-massive civil disobedience may be the answer.
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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.
Peter is also co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
On November 27, Israel assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist. International law expert Richard Falk called it “an outrageous act of state terrorism.”Although the Israeli government has not claimed credit for the illegal killing, there is little doubt of its culpability. Trump implicitly praised the assassination, retweeting a commentby Israeli journalist and intelligence expert Yossi Melman that the killing was a “major psychological and professional blow” to Iran. This was an “implicit approval if there ever was one,”according to SinaToossi, a senior research analyst at the National Iranian American Council.
The Israel Defense Forces have been ordered to prepare for a possible U.S. military attack on Iran before Trump’s term ends,senior Israeli officials told Axios. They expect “a very sensitive period” leading up to Biden’s inauguration.
In mid-November, Trump requested plans to attack Iran’s Natanz nuclear power facility but was reportedly talked out of it. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and strategized about Iran. Pompeo visited Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and several countries in the Gulf to discuss Iran.
During Pompeo’s visit to the Gulf, the U.S. Central Command announcedthat B-52 strategic bombers carried out a “short-notice, long-range mission into the Middle East to deter aggression and reassure U.S. partners and allies.”
“All options are on the table,” State Department officials who were traveling with Pompeo told reporters.
Trump Appears to Have Outsourced His Iran Policy to Israel
Israeli leaders think Iran poses an existential threat to Israel’s existence, in spite of the fact that Iran has never attacked Israel or any other country in the last 200 years. In fact, Israel is the only Middle East country that has nuclear weapons and it refuses to join the new UN International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The Iran nuclear agreement is embodied in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated during the Obama administration between Iran, the U.S., France,U.K., Russia, China, Germany and the European Union. Iran, which has consistently maintained that its nuclear program is only intended for peaceful purposes, agreed to restrict its uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities.In return, it received relief from the punishing U.S. sanctions.The UN International Atomic Energy Agency certified several times that Iran was complying with its obligations under the agreement. Nevertheless, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and reimposed the sanctions against Iran.
One year after the U.S. withdrawal, Iran began to pull back from its commitmentsunder the JCPOA, whichallows a party to abandon its obligationsif another party is in noncompliance. Trump intensified the sanctionsthat have devastated Iran’s economy, impoverished 82 million Iranians and hindered its ability to respond to the pandemic.With his campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran, Trump has waged economic warfare against the Iranian people.
Trump spent his entire presidency enabling Israel’s illegal oppression of the Palestinians, withself-identified evangelicals Pompeo and Mike Pence driving Trump’s Israel policy. Christian Zionists believe there will be no second coming of Jesus until the Temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt, and that is more likely to happen if the Temple Mount remains under Jewish rather than Palestinian control.
It is becoming clear that Trump aims to cater to Israel’s agenda until he leaves office.
U.S. and Israel Try to Bait Iran to Retaliate and Lead to Middle East War
Hopefully, Iran will resist the apparent U.S.-Israeli attempt to provoke it into retaliating for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination and thereby provideTrump witha pretext to launch a retaliatory strike,which would ignite a war in the Middle East. The U.S. military already has more than 40,000troops in the region on high alert.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhanipledged to respond to the assassination of Fakhrizadeh at the “proper time.” Rouhani said, “The Iranian nation is smarter than falling into the trap of the Zionists. They are thinking to create chaos.”The day after the assassination,Iran’s parliament unanimously voted to end future UN inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites.The inspections had confirmed that Iran was in compliance with the JCPOA. Terminating them could spell an end to the nuclear deal.
Nevertheless, Zarif hopes Biden will improve relationsbetween Iran and the United States. But hard-liners, who won recent elections and are slated to pick up additional seats in Iran’s parliament in February, could doom any rapprochement with the United States. CODEPINK’sMedea Benjamin and Ariel Gold notethat this leaves only a four-month windowfor negotiations after Biden is inaugurated.
“US & Israel efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program have now morphed into Trump & Netanyahu sabotaging the next US President,” tweeted Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council. “They are trying to goad Iran into provocations & accelerating nuclear work-exactly what they claim to oppose. Their real fear is US & Iran talking”
Much to Netanyahu’s chagrin, Biden has said he wants to return the United States to the Iran nuclear deal, albeit with preconditions. Tony Blinken, Biden’snominee for secretary of state, indicated the incoming administration will pursue a policy of uncritical support for Israel.In spite ofthe mandates in the Leahy Law and the Arms Export Control Act, Blinken stated that Biden “would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes.Period.Full stop.” The U.S. government supports Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory with $3.8 billion in annual military aid, in spite of Israel’s war crimes.
Blinkenmade that statement in a briefing to the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMI), a U.S.-based advocacy group that pushes the Democratic Party to adopt pro-Israel policies. “DMI was manufactured to ensure that Democrats would not stray too far from the pro-Israel party line,” Richard Silverstein wrote at Tikun Olam.“The group has regularly acted as an enforcer within the Party when candidates espouse positions considered anti-Israel.”
It is up to Congress, as well as civil society, to preventthe Biden administration from continuing the U.S. policy of caving to Israel’s demands — a practice that not only deepens the oppression of the Palestinians but could also activelyimperil the national security of the United States.
Meanwhile, we must pressure Congress to prevent Trump from attacking Iran. The consequences to the Middle East and the entire world would be catastrophic.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” — Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence
“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.” — Ray Kurzweil
“I had a fascination with art, science fiction, and philosophy, dreaming of what robots could be. I imagined that if artificial intelligence ever did match human intelligence that it would re-design itself to be ever smarter, ever faster, you would have something like a Moore’s Law of super-intelligent machines.” — David Hanson, Founder and CEO, Hanson Robotics
A Layman’s Understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The present discussion on artificial intelligence (AI) is not a technical one and hence starts off with an uncomplicated definition based on a non-technical understanding of artificial intelligence as software intelligence found in non-human systems that “think and act rationally” like humans. We find the simplest types of such systems in the most modern appliances and equipment that make chores in households and offices easy and even enjoyable. Their most sophisticated types though are harnessed and utilized in the complex field of robotic science and technology which has been experiencing unprecedented velocity in the creation of remarkably new and more complex systems that unceasingly transcend their very recent predecessors. The path of the field’s advancement seems to be boundless and the issue of having the best is deemed irrelevant in a situation where something better perennially emerges.
People have witnessed a lot of amazing technological inventions and innovations in the multifaceted performances of artificial intelligence systems ever since the earliest stages of their development. Activities previously done with a lot of manual and muscular efforts are now accomplished with no sweat and just at the tip of one’s finger. I would venture to say that artificial intelligence is among the highest scientific and technological achievements of humanity in the post-modern civilization. As useful systems fundamentally designed to facilitate human productive activities, AI-based tools/implements/instruments should be viewed positively and with an air of appreciation and praise to the geniuses behind their creation. From this point of view, there is nothing to worry about AI as it is fully under human control generally for the purpose of work facilitation. Like when fire-making was first discovered and later enhanced with the invention of the match and the lighter, AI systems are basically facilitative. Humanity has benefitted a lot from the use of fire for so many practical purposes in the contexts of the household and the industry as well.
The positive aspect of AI is best depicted in the 1999 Robin-Williams-starrer movie The Bicentennial Man which is based on the 1993 novel The Positronic Manco-authored by the celebrated science fictionist Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. The highly sophisticated robot – an android, to be specific, having been designed to look and act like humans – which is later called Andrew Martin first arrives at the posh mansion of the wealthy Martinfamily for functional and facilitative purposes. As the story develops, Andrew Martin undergoes several upgrades – both external and internal – until the point where he develops self-consciousness and already acts spontaneously like a human and with not an iota of non-human traces anymore. The story unilaterally dwells on the good side of humanity as Andrew in his most fully developed “humanness” is the personification of a cultured, non-violent, sober, rational, and sympathetic person.
Consciousness and AI in the Science of Robotics
At this point, we need to be clear about our understanding of what being conscious is. Basically, it is taken as being able to understand and know what is happening in one’s particular spatio-temporal location and having the sensitivity and sensibility to respond to such a state of affairs as well. These are cognitive and affective properties that define the mental and emotional states of living organisms particularly the higher forms of animals including the human species but without dismissing the lower forms about which we do not have a thorough and substantial knowledge as yet.
As specific cases in point and without being exhaustive, it is a given that animals in the Class Mammalia (where the human species is included), Class Aves, and Class Reptilia are conscious entities. They do not have to express themselves using a spoken language – as in the case of the human species – to prove that they understand, know and respond to what is happening in their surroundings. The truth is, we have observed them time and again and it is not inaccurate to say that they are endowed with consciousness the fact that they are perfectly able to cope with their existence in their respective habitats.
But the issue at hand in the present undertaking is to resolve the problem of “conscious machines”. The present fundamental issue is therefore hinged on the question, Can machines be conscious? Without delving too deeply into the technical nitty-gritty and getting too strict on the understanding of what consciousness is, it is hereby supposed that it will not totally sound ridiculous or outrageous to venture to theorize that yes, machines can be conscious.
Furthermore, without spreading too thinly the concentration of our present concern, we can cite certain dramatic developments in the field of robotics. In this connection, we may mention one actual modeling project of modern humanoid robots which was inaugurated in Japan’s Waseda University in 1967 called WABOT Project and finally resulted in the creation of “the world’s first full-scale humanoid intelligent robot” in 1973. [1] Prior to and after this, a robotics history timeline will introduce us to a series of significant events and likewise familiarize us with the basic details of how humanoid robotics projects have progressed through the years up to the present. [2]
Considering the issue of consciousness on the basis of the parameters established in terms of how we basically understand it, machines can therefore be conscious. Through a scientifically controlled observation, a fully developed humanoid robot with all the complex components that constitute its system has the sophisticated capability to understand and know what is going on in the spatio-temporal surroundings where it is located.
A further observation yielded more amazing findings that it even has the sensitivity and sensibility to respond accordingly, i.e., with a human-like reaction, to what is going on around it. This is consciousness seen through the glasses of a new paradigm where consciousness is technically designed through the latest developments in electronic technology. In this sense, we cannot evaluate and make a judgment on this matter using the homo sapiens sapiens paradigm where consciousness has developed via the natural evolutionary process without any technological intervention.
Image on the right: Sophia, First Robot Citizen at the AI for Good Global Summit 2018. (CC BY 2.0)
The latest and most sophisticated human-like robot is a creation of a Hong Kong-based company called Hanson Robotics whose banner line says, “an AI and robotics company dedicated to creating socially intelligent machines that enrich the quality of our lives.” [3] The humanoid robot with a face modeled after the late American actress Audrey Hepburn has been given the name, Sophia.
“Hanson Robotics’ most advanced human-like robot, Sophia, personifies our dreams for the future of AI. As a unique combination of science, engineering, and artistry, Sophia is simultaneously a human-crafted science fiction character depicting the future of AI and robotics, and a platform for advanced robotics and AI research.” [4]
Consciousness Deconstructed within the AI Paradigm
The most fundamental controversy that arises at this point centers on the issue of how the term consciousness has been wrongly thought of and manipulated to suit the claim that even machines – and in the present discussion, humanoid robots – can have consciousness. Handling the matter philosophically, it is important to point out certain areas of concern aimed to settle the issue.
In the first place, the spur-of-the-moment reaction that there is a pernicious manipulation of semantic signification is not very accurate. In the present context, the meaning of consciousness is not adversely manipulated but rather practically redefined and hence, conveniently reinterpreted. There is actually nothing wrong with redefinition, much less with reinterpretation as long as the paradigm wherein a concept is introduced is clear and its parameters well established. In other words, consciousness is used in the present context outside of the traditional human-based paradigm with all the components and processes involved to understand the concept of consciousness as a uniquely distinct human event.
In the second place, we have to reasonably realize that isolating the human-based aspects of the concept of consciousness and concentrating more on the linguistic formulation that has no necessary connection (but only constant conjunction on the basis of habit) with such aspects to define consciousness in a new way is the essence of the technology-based paradigm aimed by no means at all to contradict, disparage and dismiss the human-based paradigm.
The evolving socio-cultural landscape, particularly in the context of the post-modern western society, has re-defined and re-interpreted myriad traditional concepts well-established in the old paradigm to understand the most recent developments obtaining in the third-wave or post-industrial civilization. Simply put, these traditional concepts appropriated in the new paradigm gain a wider scope of meanings which include the descriptions of cyberworld tools, devices, and applications among others that are better understood and utilized in the context of virtual reality. The word “notebook” is no longer an exclusive term we use for a stitched or spiraled blank book for recording notes. It is also a compact portable computer more or less with the same usefulness as the former. Even the terms “personal presence” and “face-to-face encounter” have gained third-wave significations as they are appropriated in online audio-visual communication in real-time. Though the element of actual “warm-body presence” is in absentia, so to speak, the circumstance in this kind of contact is perfectly face-to-face and never construed as less personal.
In this light, the term “consciousness” which has gained a brand new meaning as it is appropriated in the context of the post-modern robotic technology should not really shock us. The creative purpose in all of these undertakings is reflective of human ingenuity that calls for celebration and not condemnation. Echoing the words of David Hanson, the founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics, he says:
“Our robots will serve as AI platforms for research, education, medical and healthcare, sales and service, and entertainment applications, and will evolve to become benevolent, super-intelligent living machines who advance civilization and achieve ever-greater good for all.” [5]
Peeping into the Seemingly Dark Side of Where We are Heading To
We might opine that despite the leaps and bounds seen in the achievements of robotic science and technology, humanity could yet be thousands and thousands of miles away from the realization of an Andrew Martin, i.e. if such a point is ever truly realizable. But taking the matter hypothetically and imagining such a possibility, is it more rational to think of the immoral side of an android which is in diametrical opposition to the amiable “personality” of Andrew Martin in the movie? If the process basically starts off in programming, is it more rational to consider the possibility of a sinister conspiracy to create and programme diabolical androids designed to destroy significant segments of humanity for the evil programmers to take full control of planet Earth? This is the dark side of AI whose fiendish potentiality is not far-fetched. It is like fire which on the one hand is absolutely advantageous but also harmful on the other if tapped for criminal purposes. In this sense, it is reasonable to think that AI is both an opportunity and a threat.
But is there really something new in this circumstance when since time immemorial human beings, in general, are personifications of opportunities and threats toward each other? Why do we get troubled by the emerging power of AI which could on the one hand be constructive yet destructive on the other, while we fully know that the basic stuff of life is largelycharacterized by both construction and destruction? Are we worried that humanity will soon be threatened by the dark side of AI systems when the truth of the matter is long before the advent of AI, humanity has always been threatened by the evil forces of totalitarian powers well-entrenched in governments and big capitalist empires in control ofnations’ economies? Future AI systems employed and mobilized in the service of these political and economic powers will certainly heighten the degree of their oppressive domination and intensify the common people’s oppression. In this penultimate condition, large-scale chaos will multiply in geometric proportion until the final annihilation of the human species on planet Earth. Without sounding like a biblical prophet, we seem to be heading toward that direction.
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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.
Notes
[1] Robotics and Mechatronics: Proceedings of the 4th IFToMM International, edited by Saïd Zeghloul, Med Amine Laribi, Jean-Pierre Gazeau, Published by Springer International Publishing (Switzerland, 2016).
This article was originally published on Asia Times.
The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.
Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of the historical evolution of capitalism to show how the Washington consensus ended up metastasized into the Silicon Valley consensus. In a delightful twist, he brands the new grove as the “Californian ideology”.
We’re far away from Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys; it’s more like Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on steroids, complete with IMF-style “structural reforms” emphasizing “flexibilization” of work and outright marketization/financialization of everyday life.
The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.
Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.
Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.
Those Randian heroes
Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.
When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.
That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.
Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.
On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.
The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.
So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.
Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable, online real estate empire is built.
The key point is that whatever the original business – Google, Amazon, Uber – strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of “spaces of observation and capture” of data.
About the Chinese credit system…
Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system – a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3rd plenum of the 18th Congress of the CCP, under the motto “to value sincerity and punish insincerity”.
For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It’s all about trust. Beijing defines it as “a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance”.
The Chinese term – shehui xinyong – is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than “social credit”, it’s more about “trustworthiness”, in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.
Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of “mass lines”, as in “start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas”.
Durand’s analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff’s
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become “fiefdoms”: they live out of, and profit from, their vast “digital territory” peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.
And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.
It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, “Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers.”
So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:
a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the “techno-feudal” option, as defined by Durand.
Blake meets Burroughs
Durand’s book is extremely relevant to show how the theoretical and political critique of the Digital Age is still rarified. There is no precise cartography of all those dodgy circuits of revenue extraction. No analysis of how do they profit from the financial casino – especially mega investment funds that facilitate hyper-concentration. Or how do they profit from the hardcore exploitation of workers in the gig economy.
The total concentration of the digital glebe is leading to a scenario, as Durand recalls, already dreamed up by Stuart Mill, where every land in a country belonged to a single master. Our generalized dependency on the digital masters seems to be “the cannibal future of liberalism in the age of algorithms”.
Is there a possible way out? The temptation is to go radical – a Blake/Burroughs crossover. We have to expand our scope of comprehension – and stop confusing the map (as shown in the Magna Carta) with the territory (our perception).
William Blake, in his proto-psychedelic visions, was all about liberation and subordination – depicting an authoritarian deity imposing conformity via a sort of source code of mass influence. Looks like a proto-analysis of the Digital Age.
William Burroughs conceptualized Control – an array of manipulations including mass media (he would be horrified by social media). To break down Control, we must be able to hack into and disrupt its core programs. Burroughs showed how all forms of Control must be rejected – and defeated: “Authority figures are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers”.
Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.
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Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Will they ever learn? When former US Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced that they would publicly take a vaccine against COVID-19, National Public Radio seemed impressed. “Who better to promote a product than a former president? How about three?”
On SiriusXM’s The Joe Madison Show, Obama held up his hand. “I promise you that when it’s been made for people who are less at risk, I will be taking it. I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people show that I trust this science.” Clinton did the same, albeit through the medium of spokesman Angel Ureña, who stated on December 3 that he would do so “based on the priorities determined by public health officials. He would also “do it in a public setting if it will help urge all Americans to do the same.”
Bush’s chief of staff, Freddy Ford, informed CNN that his boss had been in touch with the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, letting them “know that, when the time is right, he wants to do what he can to help encourage his fellow citizens to get vaccinated.” The vaccines would first “need to be deemed safe and administered to the priority populations”. Once done, Bush would “get in line for his, and will gladly do so on camera.”
Enlisting politicians and leaders into the role of product promotion, especially in the field of vaccines, is goggling in its daftness. In the United States, the brand label of the presidential endorsement is hardly glorious. Those with longer collective memory would remember the efforts of the Ford administration in 1976 to promote a mass vaccination programme against swine flu. It was nothing short of a calamity: the flu pandemic never eventuated and the vaccine led to cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome. In December 1976, President Gerald Ford’s vaccination programme was suspended, having reached only 20% of the population. “The danger now,” concluded the New York Times, “is that the whole idea of preventive medicine may be discredited.”
Trust of citizens and their political representatives is already at drought stricken levels. Now, politicians are hoping to convince citizens that being publicly vaccinated in an effort to return to “COVID normalcy” will somehow restore confidence long shattered. The business of capitalism and trade can return. Travel can resume. Lockdowns, if they are applied, will be rarer than ever.
In due course, the vaccines in question might well work. Credibility, however, is hardly going to return before the spectacle of former presidents keen to turn vaccine taking into a celluloid spectacle. While margins of error in public health responses can, on some level, be understood, notably against an evolving contagion, the global mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis amongst political leaders has left a profound and disturbing impression.
The speed with which such vaccines as Pfizer and Moderna have been developed, not least their astonishingly high levels of effectiveness (95%), have done little to provide reassurance. Governments, notably those from countries facing another vicious surge of infections, are keeling over in desperation to get the vaccines into circulation.
The rapid approval by Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for the emergency use of the Pfizer vaccine brought the sceptics to the fore. It was enough for Fauci to suggest that the MHRA had been too hasty, though he qualified his statements in a BBC interview so as not to imply any “sloppiness” on the part of his British colleagues. “I meant that in the US, where there is a lot of scepticism over vaccines, it would not have been good to rush to approve the vaccine.” Despite his collegial qualification, Fauci had made a telling point to CBS: the MHRA had simply taken the data provided by Pfizer at face value “and instead of scrutinising it really, really carefully, they said OK, let’s approve it”.
To this can be added the pull of vaccine opponents, who have become adept at colonising social media and muddying the waters of debate. In a study analysing Facebook page content on vaccination discussions published in Nature this year, the authors were alarmed. Lead author on the study and data scientist Neil Johnson, went so far as to express his shock. 124 pro-vaccine pages were found, all sporting a total of 6.9 million followers. The anti-vaccine pages came to 317 and 4.2 million followers. The undecided field was the largest: 885 pages with 74.1 million followers. “Although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral.” The pro-vaccination discussants, for the most part, soothed themselves in an echo chamber of reassurance.
Anthropologist Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is adamant about the trends. The anti-vaccination movement “was winning” and “covering a lot more ground with fewer of them.”
A suggestion – sensible enough – is that politicians ought to retreat from the show. When they drop their oar in, notably on the issue of vaccination matters, support for taking vaccines can decline. This is especially so in the American context. The results of a survey published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open was revealing in how poorly political endorsements of vaccines can fare. As the authors note of a sample of 2,000 participants, “The probability of choosing a vaccine was lowest when the vaccine was recommended by President Trump (the baseline category), although the probability was not significantly higher when the vaccine was recommended by former Vice President Biden”.
Sarah Kreps and Douglas L. Kriner suggest a simple formula for political representatives: “Keep mum, and let the scientists and public-health experts share the facts with the American people.” Hard to disagree but for the fact that sharing accurate data in a transparent fashion can be compromised by public health agencies that are politicised.
While the full US presidential jab show risk doing a disservice to vaccine promotion, a sadistic streak can also be found in some populations. In Britain, a Daily Mailpoll (make of that what you will) in November found that 74% would take the COVID-19 vaccine. Of those surveyed, four in ten were very selective about who should take it first to prove its safety: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet colleagues. Even taking vaccines can constitute a form of pornography.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
See the video report of Michigan Election Investigation Hearings which documents evidence of election fraud
Wednesday, December 2, 2020: Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and the man in charge of Trump’s fight to overturn election results in several states, will appear in front of the Michigan House Oversight Committee
Trump Attorney Rudy Giuliani, Witnesses Testify at Michigan House Oversight Committee
Judicial Watch announced today that a September 2020 study revealed that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters. The study found eight states showing state-wide registration rates exceeding 100%: Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
The September 2020 study collected the most recent registration data posted online by the states themselves. This data was then compared to the Census Bureau’s most recent five-year population estimates, gathered by the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2014 through 2018. ACS surveys are sent to 3.5 million addresses each month, and its five-year estimates are considered to be the most reliable estimates outside of the decennial census.
Judicial Watch’s latest study is necessarily limited to 37 states that post regular updates to their registration data. Certain state voter registration lists may also be even larger than reported, because they may have excluded “inactive voters” from their data. Inactive voters, who may have moved elsewhere, are still registered voters and may show up and vote on election day and/or request mail-in ballots.
Judicial Watch relies on its voter registration studies to warn states that they are failing to comply with the requirements of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which requires states to make reasonable efforts to clean their voter rolls. Judicial Watch can and has sued to enforce compliance with federal law.
Earlier this month, Judicial Watch sued Colorado over its failure to comply with the National Voter Registration Act. In Judicial Watch’s new study, 42 Colorado counties—or two thirds of the state’s counties—had registration rates exceeding 100%. Particular data from the state confirms this general picture. As the complaint explains, a month-by-month comparison of the ACS’s five-year survey period with Colorado’s own registration numbers for the exact same months shows that large proportions of Colorado’s counties have registration rates exceeding 100%. Earlier this year, Judicial Watch sued Pennsylvaniaand North Carolina for failing to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their rolls as required by federal law. The lawsuits allege that the two states have nearly 2 million inactive names on their voter registration rolls. Judicial Watch also sued Illinois for refusing to disclose voter roll data in violation of Federal law.
“The new study shows 1.8 million excess, or ‘ghost’ voters in 353 counties across 29 states,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The data highlights the recklessness of mailing blindly ballots and ballot applications to voter registration lists. Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections.”
Judicial Watch’s study updates the results of a similar study from last year. In August 2019, Judicial Watch analyzed registration data that states reported to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in response to a survey conducted every two years on how states maintain their voter rolls. That registration data was compared to the then-most-recent ACS five-year survey from 2013 through 2017. The study showed that 378 U.S. counties had registration rates exceeding 100%.
Judicial Watch is a national leader for cleaner elections.
In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a voter-roll cleanup program that resulted from a Judicial Watch settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio. California settled a NVRA lawsuit with Judicial Watch and last year began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls. Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In September 2020, Judicial Watch sued Illinois for refusing to disclose voter roll data in violation of Federal law.
Judicial Watch Attorney Robert Popper is the director of Judicial Watch’s clean elections initiative.
States and Counties with Registration Rates Exceeding 100%
(* means no separate reporting of inactive registrations)
Alabama: Lowndes County (130%); Macon County (114%); Wilcox (113%); Perry County (111%); Madison County (109%); Hale County (108%); Marengo County (108%); Baldwin (108%); Greene County (107%); Washington County (106%); Dallas County (106%); Choctaw County (105%); Conecuh County (105%); Randolph County (104%); Shelby County (104%); Lamar County (103%); Autauga County (103%); Clarke County (103%); Henry County (103%); Monroe County (102%); Colbert County (101%); Jefferson County (101%); Lee County (100%); Houston County (100%); Crenshaw County (100%)
*Alaska:Statewide (111%)
Arizona: Santa Cruz County (107%); Apache County (106%)
*Arkansas: Newton County (103%)
Colorado: Statewide (102%); San Juan County (158%); Dolores County (127%); Jackson County (125%); Mineral County (119%); Ouray County (119%); Phillips County (116%); Douglas County (116%); Broomfield County (115%); Elbert County (113%); Custer County (112%); Gilpin County (111%); Park County (111%); Archuleta County (111%); Cheyenne County (111%); Clear Creek County (110%); Teller County (108%); Grand County (107%); La Plata County (106%); Summit County (106%); Baca County (106%); Pitkin County (106%); San Miguel County (106%); Routt County (106%); Hinsdale County (105%); Garfield County (105%); Gunnison County (105%); Sedgwick County (104%); Eagle County (104%); Larimer County (104%); Weld County (104%); Boulder County (103%); Costilla County (103%); Chaffee County (103%); Kiowa County (103%); Denver County (103%); Huerfano County (102%); Montezuma County (102%); Moffat County (102%); Arapahoe County (102%); Jefferson County (101%); Las Animas County (101%); Mesa County (100%)
*Florida: St. Johns County (112%); Nassau County (109%); Walton County (108%); Santa Rosa County (108%); Flagler County (104%); Clay County (103%); Indian River County (101%); Osceola County (100%)
*Georgia: Bryan County (118%); Forsyth County (114%); Dawson County (113%); Oconee County (111%); Fayette County (111%); Fulton County (109%); Cherokee County (109%); Jackson County (107%); Henry County (106%); Lee County (106%); Morgan County (105%); Clayton County (105%); DeKalb County (105%); Gwinnett County (104%); Greene County (104%); Cobb County (104%); Effingham County (103%); Walton County (102%); Rockdale County (102%); Barrow County (101%); Douglas County (101%); Newton County (100%); Hall County (100%)
*Indiana: Hamilton County (113%); Boone County (112%); Clark County (105%); Floyd County (103%); Hancock County (103%); Ohio County (102%); Hendricks County (102%); Lake County (101%); Warrick County (100%); Dearborn County (100%)
Iowa: Dallas County (115%); Johnson County (104%); Lyon County (103%); Dickinson County (103%); Scott County (102%); Madison County (101%); Warren County (100%)
*Kansas: Johnson County (105%)
Maine: Statewide (101%); Cumberland County (110%); Sagadahoc County (107%); Hancock County (105%); Lincoln County (104%); Waldo County (102%); York County (100%)
Maryland:Statewide (102%); Montgomery County (113%); Howard County (111%); Frederick County (110%); Charles County (108%); Prince George’s County (106%); Queen Anne’s County (104%); Calvert County (104%); Harford County (104%); Worcester County (103%); Carroll County (103%); Anne Arundel County (102%); Talbot County (100%)
*Massachusetts: Dukes County (120%); Nantucket County (115%); Barnstable County (103%)
*Michigan:Statewide (105%); Leelanau County (119%); Otsego County (118%); Antrim County (116%); Kalkaska County (115%); Emmet County (114%); Berrien County (114%); Keweenaw County (114%); Benzie County (113%); Washtenaw County (113%); Mackinac County (112%); Dickinson County (112%); Roscommon County (112%); Charlevoix County (112%); Grand Traverse County (111%); Oakland County (110%); Iron County (110%); Monroe County (109%); Genesee County (109%); Ontonagon County (109%); Gogebic County (109%); Livingston County (109%); Alcona County (108%); Cass County (108%); Allegan County (108%); Oceana County (107%); Midland County (107%); Kent County (107%); Montmorency County (107%); Van Buren County (107%); Wayne County (107%); Schoolcraft County (107%); Mason County (107%); Oscoda County (107%); Iosco County (107%); Wexford County (106%); Presque Isle County (106%); Delta County (106%); Alpena County (106%); St Clair County (106%); Cheboygan County (105%); Newaygo County (105%); Barry County (105%); Gladwin County (105%); Menominee County (105%); Crawford County (105%); Muskegon County (105%); Kalamazoo County (104%); St. Joseph County (104%); Ottawa County (103%); Clinton County (103%); Saginaw County (103%); Manistee County (103%); Lapeer County (103%); Calhoun County (103%); Ogemaw County (103%); Macomb County (103%); Missaukee County (102%); Eaton County (102%); Shiawassee County (102%); Huron County (102%); Lenawee County (101%); Branch County (101%); Osceola County (101%); Clare County (100%); Arenac County (100%); Bay County (100%); Lake County (100%)
*Missouri: St. Louis County (102%)
*Montana: Petroleum County (113%); Gallatin County (103%); Park County (103%); Madison County (102%); Broadwater County (102%)
*Nebraska: Arthur County (108%); Loup County (103%); Keya Paha County (102%); Banner County (100%); McPherson County (100%)
Nevada: Storey County (108%); Douglas County (105%); Nye County (101%)
*New Jersey:Statewide (102%); Somerset County (110%); Hunterdon County (108%); Morris County (107%); Essex County (106%); Monmouth County (104%); Bergen County (103%); Middlesex County (103%); Union County (103%); Camden County (102%); Warren County (102%); Atlantic County (102%); Sussex County (101%); Salem County (101%); Hudson County (100%); Gloucester County (100%)
*New Mexico: Harding County (177%); Los Alamos County (110%)
New York: Hamilton County (118%); Nassau County (109%); New York (103%); Rockland County (101%); Suffolk County (100%)
*Oregon: Sherman County (107%); Crook County (107%); Deschutes County (105%); Wallowa County (103%); Hood River County (103%); Columbia County (102%); Linn County (101%); Polk County (100%); Tillamook County (100%)
Rhode Island: Statewide (101%); Bristol County (104%); Washington County (103%); Providence County (101%)
*South Carolina: Jasper County (103%)
South Dakota: Hanson County (171%); Union County (120%); Jones County (116%); Sully County (115%); Lincoln County (113%); Custer County (110%); Fall River County (108%); Pennington County (106%); Harding County (105%); Minnehaha County (104%); Potter County (104%); Campbell County (103%); McPherson County (101%); Hamlin County (101%); Stanley County (101%); Lake County (100%); Perkins County (100%)
Tennessee: Williamson County (110%); Moore County (101%); Polk County (101%)
Texas: Loving County (187%); Presidio County (149%); McMullen County (147%); Brooks County (117%); Roberts County (116%); Sterling County (115%); Zapata County (115%); Maverick County (112%); Starr County (110%); King County (110%); Chambers County (109%); Irion County (108%); Jim Hogg County (107%); Polk County (107%); Comal County (106%); Oldham County (104%); Culberson County (104%); Kendall County (103%); Dimmit County (103%); Rockwall County (102%); Motley County (102%); Parker County (102%); Hudspeth County (101%); Travis County (101%); Fort Bend County (101%); Kent County (101%); Webb County (101%); Mason County (101%); Crockett County (101%); Waller County (100%); Gillespie County (100%); Duval County (100%); Brewster County (100%)
Vermont: Statewide (100%)
Virginia: Loudoun County (116%); Falls Church City (114%); Fairfax City (109%); Goochland County (108%); Arlington County (106%); Fairfax County (106%); Prince William County (105%); James City County (105%); Alexandria City (105%); Fauquier County (105%); Isle of Wight County (104%); Chesterfield County (104%); Surry County (103%); Hanover County (103%); New Kent County (103%); Clarke County (103%); King William County (102%); Spotsylvania County (102%); Rappahannock County (102%); Albemarle County (101%); Stafford County (101%); Northampton County (101%); Poquoson City (100%); Frederick County (100%)
Washington: Garfield County (119%); Pend Oreille County (112%); Jefferson County (111%); San Juan County (108%); Wahkiakum County (108%); Stevens County (103%); Pacific County (103%); Clark County (102%); Island County (102%); Klickitat County (102%); Thurston County (102%); Lincoln County (101%); Whatcom County (100%); Asotin County (100%)
*West Virginia: Mingo County (104%); Wyoming County (103%); McDowell County (102%); Brooke County (102%); Hancock County (100%)
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December 4th, 2020 by Defense for Children International - Palestine
Overview
Between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2019, Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) documented 108 cases in which Palestinian children arrested by the Israeli military were held in isolation for two or more days during the interrogation period.
The average duration of isolation in this data set was 14.3 days. Nearly 40 percent, 43 children, endured a prolonged period of isolation of 16 or more days. While mainly studying adult prisoner populations, numerous scientific sources indicate that after 15 days “some of the harmful psychological effects of isolation can become irreversible.”1
The longest documented period of isolation was 30 days, while the shortest was three days. Quteiba B. was 16 years old when he was arrested on September 23, 2018, and was subjected to 30 days of isolation in Israel’s Asqalan interrogation and detention center, located inside Israel. The 108 children whose cases were documented by DCIP were all boys aged between 14 and 17 years old, of whom 70 were aged 17, 30 were aged 16, seven were aged 15, and one was aged 14.
The children were accused of a range of offenses by Israeli authorities, predominantly throwing stones, Molotov cocktails or grenades; 76 children in the data set were accused of such offenses. A further 22 children were accused of weapons possession, and 10 children were accused of involvement with a military cell. Other accusations ranged from incitement on Facebook and plotting an attack, to membership in a banned organization or aiding a wanted individual.
Of the 108 cases, some children were detained at multiple locations, however, at least 52 children were held at Al-Jalame (also known as Kishon) interrogation and detention center; at least 29 children were held at Petah Tikva interrogation and detention center; at least 32 were held at Megiddo prison and at least 14 were held at Al-Mascobiyya interrogation and detention center in Jerusalem. These facilities are located inside Israel, and all are operated or controlled by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) and the Israel Security Agency. Palestinian children are often transferred between centers during a period of detention.
Solitary confinement of children under international law
International law prohibits the use of solitary confinement and similar measures constituting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against children, defined as any person under 18 years old.3 The practice of solitary confinement, in addition to corporal punishment, placement in a dark cell, or any other punishment that may compromise the physical or mental health of the child may, in some cases, amount to torture.4
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Mr. Juan Méndez, has noted “[t]here is no universally agreed upon definition of solitary confinement.”5 However, solitary confinement generally refers to the physical and social isolation of individuals who are confined to their cells for 22 to 24 hours a day, without meaningful human contact.6
In a 2016 statement, Mr. Méndez defined the types of human interaction that may constitute meaningful contact. “Isolation entails the lack of meaningful social contact for the detainee, whether by means of interaction with other inmates or penitentiary staff, visits, or participation in work, educational, and leisure activities, or sports. [ . . . ] The international law of human rights mandates significant human contact both within and outside of prison, including with fellow prisoners and with prison staff not strictly dedicated to security functions.”7
International law recognizes that children are inherently different from adults because they are still developing both physically and psychologically. Consequently, children are afforded special protections under international law, and the threshold for actions constituting grave human rights violations is lowered when the victim is a child. For example, the prohibition against torture is one of few absolute and non-derogable human rights standards. It applies to any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on any person for a number of reasons.8 However, the victim’s age and relative position of inferiority must be taken into consideration when assessing whether treatment or punishment may be classified as torture.9
Specifically, “[c]hildren experience pain and suffering differently to adults owing to their physical and emotional development and their specific needs. In children, ill-treatment may cause even greater or irreversible damage than for adults. Moreover, healthy development can be derailed by excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body, with damaging long-term effects on learning, behaviour and health.”10
International juvenile justice standards, which Israel has obliged itself to implement by ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1991, require that children should only be deprived of their liberty as a measure of last resort, must not be unlawfully or arbitrarily detained, and must not be subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Israel’s human rights obligations apply not only inside Israel, but also extend to the territory it occupies, including the Occupied Palestinian Territory.11
In 2011, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Mr. Juan Méndez, called for an absolute prohibition on the use of solitary confinement on children, in a report submitted to the U.N. General Assembly.12
The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child considers the solitary confinement of children, for any duration, to be cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and, in some cases, even torture.13
Mr. Méndez has stipulated that even the use of solitary confinement for the stated purpose of separating juveniles or other vulnerable detainees from segments of a prison population is “unjustified unless they actually request protection.”14
DCIP finds that the physical and social isolation of Palestinian children for interrogation purposes, without their explicit request or consent, during pre-charge and pretrial military detention by Israeli authorities, and where there is limited or no meaningful human contact, is a practice that constitutes solitary confinement. DCIP considers the aforementioned practice by Israeli authorities to amount to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
While Israeli officials consistently argue that international human rights law, specifically the treaties Israel has ratified, does not apply to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, these arguments have found no international support and have been consistently rejected by the International Court of Justice and several U.N. human rights treaty bodies when assessing Israel’s obligations under international law toward Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.15
Solitary confinement solely for interrogation purposes
Evidence and documentation collected by DCIP overwhelmingly indicates that the isolation of Palestinian children within the Israeli military detention system is practiced solely to obtain a confession for a specific offense or to gather intelligence under interrogation.
DCIP has found no evidence demonstrating a legally justifiable use of isolation of Palestinian child detainees, such as for disciplinary, protective, or medical reasons.
The practice has been used, almost exclusively, during pre-charge and pretrial detention. The practice is not generally employed after children have been convicted and are serving their sentences.
Isolation of Palestinian children typically follows a military arrest and transfer period, during which many children are subjected to numerous human rights violations.
While in isolation, the children experience minimal human contact and also commonly report significantly worse cell conditions compared to the cells in which they were placed during other periods of detention.
Almost all interrogations of Palestinian children held in isolation are carried out without prior consultation with or the presence of a lawyer or a family member. Further, children are often exposed to abuse and torture during interrogations.
Coercive tactics, including the use of informants, are frequently used and may cause children to unintentionally incriminate themselves or to issue false confessions.
Arrest and transfer
Israeli forces frequently arrest Palestinian children at night. In 71 out of 108 cases (66 percent), children held in solitary confinement reported being detained from their homes between midnight and 5 a.m. by heavily armed Israeli soldiers.
Israeli forces typically gather all the occupants of the house, regardless of age, in one area or room and demand identification.
Physical violence against family members, including other children in the home, is common. Generally, Israeli forces
separate the wanted child from his family within the home for questioning and to confirm his identity. Some children report
being subject to physical and verbal abuse and intimidation. Israeli forces often search the home during the raid resulting in
the destruction of property. Mobile phones and other items are confiscated during the raids. Once a child’s identity has been verified, Israeli forces detain and take the child into custody, removing them from the home.
Children and their families are rarely informed of the reasons for arrest, or the location where the child will be detained.
In almost all cases, children’s hands are tied behind their backs with plastic cords, often to their discomfort, rather than standard metal handcuffs, and most are blindfolded. In the solitary confinement cases documented by DCIP, all 108 children had their hands bound, and 102 out of 108 children (94 percent) were blindfolded during their arrest and transfer.
Children are also subjected to verbal and physical abuse and intimidation when taken to a military vehicle. Once inside, they are often forced to sit on the floor, bound and blindfolded, and surrounded by Israeli forces, where this abuse often continues. In 77 out of 108 cases (71 percent), children endured some form of physical violence following arrest.
They are subsequently transferred to a military base or directly to an interrogation facility.
Isolation and cell conditions
Palestinian child detainees are held in solitary confinement at detention facilities located inside Israel. These facilities include Petah Tikva interrogation and detention center in central Israel, near Tel Aviv; Al-Jalame interrogation and detention center (Kishon) in northern Israel, near Haifa; and Al-Mascobiyya interrogation and detention center in Jerusalem.
Across these locations, children reported significantly worse cell conditions during periods of isolation compared to other periods of detention in which they were not isolated. The conditions in isolation cells are commonly characterised by inadequate ventilation, 24-hour yellow lighting, no windows, unsanitary bedding and toilet facilities and hostile architectural features such as wall protrusions.
Children describe being held in isolation in a small cell measuring approximately 5 feet by 6.5 feet (1.5 meters by 2 meters). The children report either sleeping on a concrete bed, on the floor, or on a thin mattress that is often described as “dirty” and “foul smelling.” There are no windows and no natural light. The only source of light comes from a dim yellow bulb that is reportedly kept on at all hours. Meals are passed to children through a flap in the door. Cell walls are reported to be gray in color with sharp or rough protrusions that are painful to lean against. Children frequently report that the paint of the cell walls and the lighting inside hurt their eyes.
No meaningful human contact
During isolation, Palestinian children have limited or no meaningful social contact. This includes an absence of access to rehabilitative, educational, recreational and therapeutic activities or services.
Palestinian children held in isolation solely for interrogation purposes are denied access to family visits. Typically, these children experience limited contact only with facility guards, interrogators and informants. Meals are passed to children through a flap in the door, leaving children with virtually no non-adversarial or meaningful human contact.
Palestinian children who are not detained in isolation are transferred to military courts where a military judge may extend their detention, and at which they may see their parents and a lawyer. However, Palestinian children held in isolation solely for interrogation purposes have their detention extended by military judges at the detention facility itself; further forestalling contact between children and their families and lawyers.
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December 4th, 2020 by Table De Concertation De Solidarité Québec-Cuba
On November 26, the Norwegian Nobel Committee confirmed that it had accepted the candidature of the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade sponsored by Professor Gilles Bibeau from Quebec.
In a year in which global attention is being focused on the challenges of fighting a pandemic, a Cuban organization – the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade – has distinguished itself by providing selfless assistance to some 40 countries and territories.
This manifestation of international solidarity has found its echo in a movement to promote the candidature of the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade, made up of doctors and other healthcare workers from Cuba, for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Nearly 200 committees have been formed for this purpose throughout the world. The Norwegian Nobel Committee will begin its deliberations on February 1, 2021. The announcement will be made in the fall of 2021.
On the initiative of the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba (TCSQ-C),[1] a Québec committee has been formed. It is called the Comité québécois pour la nomination de la Brigade Henry Reeve au prix Nobel de la paix(Québec Committee for the Nomination of the Henry Reeve Brigade for the Nobel Peace Prize). Its first task, as announced last October 5, was to find a personality who would meet the criteria set by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for the submission of nominations. The committee found Mr. Gilles Bibeau to be the ideal sponsor to nominate the Henry Reeve Brigade.
Professor Emeritus at the University of Montreal, author of more than 300 publications, Gilles Bibeau is an expert in medical anthropology. A man who has spent much time in the field, his work on the social determinants of health in Africa, Latin America and Asia enables him to appreciate the exceptional humanitarian contribution of Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade.
On November 26, the Norwegian Nobel Committee confirmed that it had accepted the candidature of the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade sponsored by Professor Gilles Bibeau.
The attached letter was written by Professor Bibeau to justify the candidature of the Henry Reeve Brigade. The argumentation is accompanied by statistics that powerfully describes the quality of the interventions and what makes them unique. It ties in well with the contributions of the Brigade to the promotion of social justice, which is the basis of peace within and between nations. The Brigade builds bridges between peoples and nations across systems, ideologies and geopolitical tensions.
Since its creation in 2005, Cuba’s Henry Reeve Medical Brigade has responded to requests from various governments to assist their populations during health emergencies resulting from natural disasters or epidemics. In the last 15 years, more than 9,000 Cuban healthcare professionals have worked in the Henry Reeve Brigade and carried out some 60 missions on four continents. It is estimated that they have provided care to over four million people and saved nearly 100,000 lives.
As the planet grapples with a terrible pandemic, there is no better time to highlight the selfless work of Cuban professionals who, between March and November 2020, battled COVID-19 in some 40 countries and territories. Their altruism and solidarity should earn them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Comité québécois pour la nomination de la Brigade Henry Reeve au prix Nobel de la paix of the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba.
Photo : Comité québécois pour la nomination de la Brigade Henry Reeve au prix Nobel de la paix of the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba – from top left, clockwise : Sean O’Donoghue, Colette Lavergne, Guy Roy, Arnold August, Vincent Dostaler, Marie;Célie Agnant, Claude Morin.
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Note
[1] The TCSQ-C was founded in January 2002 and regroups several organizations from around Québec. Its principle activities turn around solidarity with the people of Cuba through the dissemination of factual information, material aid, as well as the organization of cultural exchanges, which testify to the friendship that binds the people of Québec and Cuba.
The TCSQ-C will ask personalities from academia, politics and the arts, as well as the healthcare field to express their support for the Québec campaign by endorsing the candidature of Cuba’s Henry Reeve Medical Brigade for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. A list of these personalities (as well as organizations) will appear in another press release to be sent to the media and partner organizations in order to raise awareness among the Québec public of the exceptional contribution of the Henry Reeve Brigade. Professor Bibeau’s letter will accompany the press release as it constitutes an essential part of our campaign.
The Fed’s policy tools – interest rate manipulation, quantitative easing, and “Special Purpose Vehicles” – have all failed to revive local economies suffering from government-mandated shutdowns. The Fed must rely on private banks to inject credit into Main Street, and private banks are currently unable or unwilling to do it. The tools the Fed actually needs are public banks, which could and would do the job.
On November 20, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin informed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that he would not extend five of the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) set up last spring to bail out bondholders, and that he wanted the $455 billion in taxpayer money back that the Treasury had sent to the Fed to capitalize these SPVs. The next day, Powell replied that he thought it was too soon – the SPVs still served a purpose – but he agreed to return the funds. Both had good grounds for their moves, but as Wolf Richter wrote on WolfStreet.com, “You’d think something earth-shattering happened based on the media hullabaloo that ensued.”
Richter noted that the expiration date on the SPVs had already been extended; that their purpose was “to bail out and enrich bondholders, particularly junk-bond holders and speculators with huge leveraged bets”; and that their use had been “minuscule by Fed standards.” They had done their job, which was mostly to be “a jawboning tool to inflate asset prices.” Investors and speculators, confident that the Fed had their backs, had “created wondrous credit markets that are now frothing at the mouth,” making the bond speculators quite rich. However, in Mnuchin’s own words, “The people that really need support right now are not the rich corporations, it is the small businesses, it’s the people who are unemployed.” So why aren’t they getting the support? According to Richter:
Powell himself has been badgering Congress for months to provide more fiscal support to small businesses and other entities because the Fed was not well suited to do so, which was the reason the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) never really got off the ground.
The reason the Fed is not well suited to the task is that it is not allowed to make loans directly to Main Street businesses. It must rely on banks to do it, and private banks are currently unable or unwilling to make those loans as needed. But publicly-owned banks would. Fortunately, Several promising public bank bills were recently introduced in Congress that could help resolve this crisis.
But first, a look at why the Fed’s own efforts have failed.
The Fed Lacks the Tools to Inject Liquidity into the Real Economy
Congress has charged the Federal Reserve with a dual mandate: to maintain the stability of the currency (prevent inflation or deflation) and maintain full employment. Not only are we a long way from full employment, but the stability of the currency is in question, although economists disagree on whether we are headed for massive inflation or crippling deflation. Food prices and other at-home costs are up; but away-from-home costs (gas, flights, hotels, entertainment, office apparel) are down. Food prices are up not because of “too much money chasing too few goods” (demand/pull inflation) but because of supply and production problems (cost/push inflation). In terms of “output,” we are definitely looking at deflation. An August 2020 Bloomberg article quotes economist Lacy Hunt:
[A]ccording to the figures of the Congressional Budget Office, the output gap will be a record this year and we will have a deflationary gap. In other words, potential GDP will be well above real GDP. And according to the CBO, we’re going to have a deflationary output gap through 2030.
The Fed’s monetary policies, it seems, are not working. On November 11 and 12, according to Reuters:
[T]he world’s top central bankers … tune[d] into the European Central Bank’s annual policy symposium … to figure out why monetary policy is not working as it used to and what new role they must play in a changed world – be it fighting inequality or climate change.
… Central banks’ failure to achieve their targets is beginning to challenge a key tenet of monetary theory: that inflation is always a factor of their policy and that prices rise as unemployment falls.
The Fed adopted a fixed 2% target in 2012. To achieve it, explains investment writer James Molony, they “have implemented unprecedented policies. Interest rates have been slashed, in some cases to near zero, and they have engaged in printing money in order to buy bonds and other assets, otherwise known as quantitative easing.”
Lowering the interest rate is supposed to encourage lending, which increases the circulating money supply and generates the demand necessary to prompt producers to increase GDP. But the fed funds rate, the only rate the central bank controls, is nearly at zero; and the equivalent rates in the European Union and Japan are actually in negative territory. Yet in none of these three countries has the central bank been able to reach its inflation target.
The Fed has now resorted to “average inflation targeting” – meaning it will allow inflation to run above its 2% target to make up for periods when inflation was below 2%. To turn up the economic heat, Chairman Powell has been pleading for more stimulus from Congress. If Congress issues bonds, increasing the federal debt, the Fed can buy the bonds; and the money spent into the economy will increase the money supply. But federal legislators have not been able to agree on the terms of a stimulus package.
Why can’t the Fed do the job though itself? In a speech to the Japanese in 2002, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke argued (citing Milton Friedman) that it was relatively easy to fix a deflationary recession: just fly over the people in helicopters and drop money on them. They would then spend it on consumer goods, creating the demand necessary to prompt productivity. So where are the Fed’s helicopters?
“The Fed Doesn’t ‘Do’ Money.”
In a recent article titled “Where Is It, Chairman Powell?”, Jeffrey Snider, Head of Global Research at Alhambra Investments, questioned whether the Fed’s policies were creating inflation as alleged at all. He wrote:
After spending months deliberately hyping a “flood” of digital money printing, and then unleashing average inflation targeting making Americans believe the central bank will be wickedly irresponsible when it comes to consumer prices, the evidence portrays a very different set of circumstances. Inflationary pressures were supposed to have been visible by now, seven months and counting, when instead it is disinflation which is most evident – and it is spreading.
The problem, said Snider, is that “The Fed doesn’t do money, therefore there’s no way the Fed can have its monetary inflation.”
The Fed doesn’t “do” money? What does that mean?
As explained by Prof. Joseph Huber, chair of economic and environmental sociology at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, we have a two-tiered money system. The only monies the central bank can create and spend are “bank reserves,” and these circulate only between banks. The central bank is not allowed to spend money directly into the economy or to lend it to local businesses. It is not even allowed to lend it directly to Congress. Rather, it must go through the private banking system. When the central bank buys assets (bonds or debt), it simply credits the reserve accounts of the banks from which the assets were bought; and banks cannot spend or lend these reserves except to each other. In an article titled “Repeat After Me: Banks Cannot And Do Not ‘Lend Out’ Reserves,” Paul Sheard, Chief Global Economist for Standard & Poor’s, explained:
Many talk as if banks can “lend out” their reserves, raising concerns that massive excess reserves created by QE could fuel runaway credit creation and inflation in the future. But banks cannot lend their reserves directly to commercial borrowers, so this concern is misplaced….
Banks don’t lend out of deposits; nor do they lend out of reserves. They lend by creating deposits. And deposits are also created by government deficits. [Emphasis added.]
The deposits circulating in the producer/consumer economy are created, not by the Fed, but by banks when they make loans. (See the Bank of England’s 2014 quarterly report here.) The central bank does create paper cash, but this money too gets into the economy only when other financial institutions buy or borrow it from the central bank in response to demand from their customers. The circulating money supply increases when banks make loans to businesses and individuals; and in risky environments like today’s, private banks are pulling back from Main Street lending, even with massive central bank reserves on their books.
The Tools the Fed Needs to Get Liquidity into the Economy
Private banks are not following through on the Fed’s attempted money injections, but publicly-owned banks would. In countries with strong government-owned banking systems, public banks have historically increased their lending when private banks pulled back. Public banks have a mandate to stimulate their local economies; and unlike private banks, they can do it and still turn a profit, because they have lower costs. They have eliminated the parasitic profit-extracting middlemen, and they do not have to focus on short-term profits to please their shareholders. They can pour their resources into improving the long-term prospects of the economy and its infrastructure, stimulating local productivity and strengthening the tax base.
Three promising new bills are before Congress that would facilitate the establishment of a public banking system in the US.
HR 8721, “The Public Banking Act”, was introduced on Oct. 30, 2020. As described on Vox, the Act would “foster the creation of public [state and local government-owned] banks across the country by providing them a pathway to getting started, establishing an infrastructure for liquidity and credit facilities for them via the Federal Reserve, and setting up federal guidelines for them to be regulated. Essentially, it would make it easier for public banks to exist, and it would give some of them grant money to get started.”
Create $9 billion in revenue for the postal service, saving it from privatization;
Protect low-income or rural families and communities from predatory lending; and
Reestablish postal banking to provide basic, low-cost financial services to those who cannot access banks
The third bill, HR 6422, “The National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2020,” is modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which funded the rebuilding of the US economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to its advocates, HR 6422 will build or restore over $4 trillion in infrastructure and create up to 25 million union jobs, while being “revenue neutral” (not burdening the federal government’s budget). The promise of HR 6422 and the model of the “American System” that inspired it – the innovative banking systems of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt – will be the subject of another article.
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The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War not only led to a shift of the military political balance of power in the South Caucasus, but the agreements reached to put an end to it would potentially greatly reshape transport links, and thus freight and passenger flows in the region. The deployment of Russian peacekeepers to Azerbaijan, the growth of Turkish-Azerbaijani cooperation and the decline of the project of the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Republic are reactivating several strategic directions that have been inactive for almost 30 years and regional players are now publicly declaring plans regarding the creation of new economic corridors.
For the first time since independence, Armenia will have to conduct work on boundary settlement, including the creation of official border crossings. Until recently, the Azerbaijani-Armenian border in the Karabakh region did not in fact exist and the Armenian government used the area as a kind of buffer zone. This cannot remain unchanged since Azerbaijan has gained districts bordering Armenia. Just recently, the vague reaction of the Armenian government to Azerbaijani troops entering the Sotk gold mine located just on the border between both states demonstrates the scale of the problem.
At the same time, the Lachin corridor, which links Armenia with what is left of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, remains under the control of Russian troops which provide security to civilians moving along it. However, the situation here is also complex. Since Azerbaijani forces captured Shusha, the road linking Stepanakert with Lachin partially passes through the zone of control of the Azerbaijani military. In future, as the reached agreements say, there is a plan for an alternative route that would by-pass Shusha.
The situation with the southern transport corridor between Azerbaijan and its Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic is also curious. Under the agreed deal, it is supposed to be unlocked under the control of the Border Service of the Russian Federal Security Service. There is not only an automobile road, but also a railway passes along the border in the south. This corridor was abandoned as a result of the First Nagorno-Karabkah War. Gradually, Armenia dismantled its parts of the railway, but Azerbaijan kept them up to Horadiz in the east, and within the Nakhichevan enclave.
In their turn, Iran, taking advantage of the years of anarchy in this “no-man’s” buffer territory, quietly built the Khudaferin hydroelectric power station and flooded about 15 km of the dismantled railway. The original landscape was seriously changed. This makes the restoration of the railway much more difficult and a part of it, after the flooding, will likely have to be created in a rock tunnel. By the way the location of the Khudaferin hydroelectric power station by itself also changed the possible route of any potential railway. In these conditions, the restoration of the railway in the area would require significant investment and work and on top of this would require a significant amount of time.
Turkey, a traditional Azerbaijani ally, would be happy to take advantage of the unblocking of transport links. Ankara has a long ago announced plan of construction of a railway to Nakhichevan and this project is being reactivated. Turkey has a relatively weak railway network in its east and even the capacity of the corridor to Iran is limited by the ferry through the Van lake. Thus, the creation of a railway link to Nakhichevan would boost not only Azerbaijani-Turkish economic ties and guarantee the ground link between Azerbaijan and Turkey, but would also increase the economic potential of the east of Turkey.
Apologists for the current Armenian government speculate that the defeat in the war and the loss of Karabakh, which is now de facto under the control of the Russians, in fact plays into the hands of the Armenians. Now, they will allegedly be able to de-escalate their relations with Azerbaijan, enter joint economic projects with it and even trade with Iran through Nakhichevan. These versions are from the same group of fairy tales that came up with a Euro-Atlantic rescue rangers team that would be compelled to protect Armenian forces in Karabakh in the event of an Azerbaijani attack because modern Armenia has a very ‘democratic’ and ‘European-oriented’ government. As might have been expected, this did not happen. Dreams about some mysterious European integration, also widely fueled by international funds and the group of traitors sitting in Armenian top offices are also hardly likely to be turned into reality. Nonetheless, if Armenia keeps its current course, it will have the opportunity to sell off the remaining vestiges of its territories and sovereignty and to turn itself into a kind of outpost for globalists and NATO in the Southern Caucasus. The only difficulty would be that together with this Armenia would likely have to surrender its south to please one well-known NATO member state led by the Neo-Ottoman-styled President.
In theory, the unblocking of transport corridors should allow to intensify economic life in the South Caucasus and to create new opportunities for the restoration of the region after years of conflict. However, in practice, the implementation of these projects would require much time and would face significant difficulties growing from the remaining tensions among the sides involved.
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England’s GPs, who are expected to play a pivotal role in the roll out of coronavirus vaccines, say they are in the dark about how exactly they will fit into the government’s plans, according to the British Medical Association (BMA).
Despite a key NHS directive on the government’s mass vaccination plans being issued to England’s 6,800 GP practices last month, the precise role of community doctors is now unclear.
Dr Richard Vautrey, chair of the BMA’s GP committee, who last month said GPs were “exactly the right people to lead the COVID vaccination campaign”, has now issued an urgent appeal to the government calling for “clarification and guidance”.
OpenDemocracy has also spoken to several GPs who expressed concern about the lack of information they had received.
His appeal followed regulatory approval for the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, the first such vaccine to be confirmed safe for use. Dr Vautrey said both NHS England and the government needed to spell out precisely the logistics of how practices will be involved in the first and subsequent phases of the vaccination programme.
According to a directive issued by the NHS at the beginning of November, GP practices – through their Primary Care Networks (PCNs), which groups practices together into administrative units – were told they would play the lead role in the distribution of vaccines.
It feels as though we are part of a massive public relations exercise, designed to make Boris Johnson’s governance look as good as it can.
Although GPs are still expected to have a major role in the national vaccine roll outs, the complexity of storage and distribution of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine means hospitals and specialist vaccine centres will instead play the lead role.
A number of GPs contacted by openDemocracy, many of them with experience of frontline medicine in both hospital and community settings, said GPs were being left “totally in the dark about what is now expected of us.”
One doctor, who asked not to be named for professional reasons, warned:
“The contract issued at the beginning of November was essentially pointless and unnecessary. It was headline-grabbing and little else. GP practices were told the NHS and the government would not be repeating the mistakes of the track-and-trace debacle, which effectively sidelined experienced public health doctors and the most community-connected part of the NHS in favour of a new privately-run operation.”
He added:
“Leaving GP practices in the dark about what needs to happen and what they need to do to prepare for this unprecedented programme, risks them being set up to fail. And once again that could lead to GPs being sidelined in favour of an untested private sector operation.”
Another GP, also speaking anonymously, told openDemocracy that more information from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the NHS was urgently needed.
“What are the nominated surgeries within each wider primary care network expected to have in place? What additional staff can be hired? What targets can be expected between now and March? These are all key questions, but at the moment we have no answers.
“It feels as though we are in a vacuum that’s part of a massive public relations exercise, designed to make Boris Johnson’s governance look as good as it can.”
Missing information
The DES (direct enhanced services) contract, issued by the NHS in November, effectively told England’s GPs that they should begin preparations for a nationwide roll-out of approved vaccines. But detailed information on what they were preparing for was absent.
The Department of Health and the NHS were already aware of growing disquiet among England’s GPs. A letter sent last month to the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, by the Doctors Association UK (DAUK) demanded that the additional costs of setting up vaccine programmes among GP groups needed to be met by the government. The letter also pointed out growing IT concerns, and the risks to other non-COVID patient care in GP practices.
Although the government has set aside a £170 million pot intended to be used in the transformation of surgeries and some pharmacists into specialist vaccination hubs, the DAUK letter said the government money being offered is too little and “unrealistic” for such a huge task.
This is not the kind of vaccine that could ever have been delivered by GPs.
The BMA, which described regulatory approval for the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine as an “incredible achievement”, nevertheless noted that the first approved vaccine represents “logistical challenges in terms of storage and immunising patients”.
The Pfizer BioNTech vaccine needs to be stored at minus 70 degrees centigrade, and requires precise storage conditions not available at most PCNs.
The storage and distribution of the Pfizer BioNTech requires additional safety approval yet to be given. Only hospitals and specialist labs are expected to be able to handle the logistics of administering this vaccine.
Although subsequent vaccines expected to be approved – such as the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine – will require less complex storage and distribution requirements, some GP practices who have indicated a willingness to participate in national roll-out plans, have told the BMA they are trying to make plans without any detail coming from the NHS or the DHSC.
A question of scale
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, BMA council chair, while welcoming news of the Pfizer BioNTECH official approval, said the government and NHS England “must not underestimate the scale of the challenges” ahead.
Dr Nagpaul added: “We need to make sure staff have the resources and support in place to turn this scientific breakthrough into an operational success.”
Dr Vautrey said that following the DES at the beginning of November, practices had tried to put in place arrangements so that they were ready to deliver vaccines once they were made available.
However, openDemocracy has learned that many GP practices have warned the NHS and the DHSC that their preparations have been severely limited because they did not know exactly what they were supposed to be preparing for.
With the Pfizer vaccine coming in vials of 980 doses and needing to be stored at minus 70 degrees centigrade, with only 5 movements authorised over a 72 hour timeframe, a military-style distribution operation is needed.
Another GP practice head contacted by openDemocracy said:
“This is not the kind of vaccine that could ever have been delivered by GPs, who are by nature, small, mobile and part of a community. So the DES should have come with caveats, then planning and collaboration could have followed.
“But once again there is division and little collaboration. This has wasted time, energy and resources and delayed the best possible implementation. We need a National Health Service that is national and is ‘a health service’, not constituent parts all floundering through lack of information.”
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Forty-five years ago, under a cloak of secrecy, Operation Condor was officially launched: a global campaign of violent repression against the Latin American left by the region’s quasi-fascist military dictatorships. The US government not only knew about the program — it helped to engineer it.
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In Buenos Aires, a former Chilean general returns home, opens his garage door, and is blasted thirteen feet in the air when his car explodes, incinerating his wife. A conservative opponent of the country’s military dictatorship and his wife take an afternoon walk on the streets of Rome and are swiftly gunned down. On a rainy autumn morning, a car blows up in the middle of Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, killing two of the three inside: a leader of Chile’s opposition in exile and his newlywed American friend.These were just some of the most prized scalps claimed by Operation Condor, officially inaugurated forty-five years and two days ago. With South America in the grip of military dictatorships and rocked by the same kinds of social and political movements that were demanding change all over the world in the 1960s and ’70s, a handful of the continent’s governments made a pact to work together to roll back the rising tide of “subversives” and “terrorists.”What followed was a secret, global campaign of violent repression that spanned not just countries, but continents, and featured everything from abduction and torture to murder. To say it was known about by the US government, which backed these regimes, is an understatement: though even this simple fact was denied at the time, years of investigations and document releases since then mean that we now know the CIA and top-ranking US officials supported, laid the groundwork for, and were even directly involved in Condor’s crimes.
Zooming out, Condor was hardly some uniquely shocking case of anticommunist paranoia spiraling out of control. As its connections to anticommunist terror in Europe have become clearer, it looks more like a particularly successful example of the covert war the US national security state had set into motion all over the world against democracy and the Left, a war that saw it get into bed with fascists and that, in some cases, arguably constituted genocide. It was the system working exactly as intended, in other words, and a stark reminder of the lengths the global centers of power will go to keep things the way they are.
World War Three
The middle of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of people’s movements in Latin America that threatened to upend the rigid hierarchies of the hemisphere: feminist and workers’ movements, movements for indigenous rights, peasant-led movements for agrarian reform, and leftist movements, to name a few. Naturally, they had to be stopped.Until then, Washington-backed juntas and dictatorships had successfully kept a lid on such social change, or simply overthrew whatever governments those movements succeeded in forming. Such changes, after all, directly threatened not just the power and privileges of the region’s long-standing elite, but Western business interests, too. So it was that, at the prodding of US-owned corporations like Chase Manhattan, Anaconda Copper, and Pepsi, former corporate lawyer and then-president Richard Nixon backed the military overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government in 1973, and its replacement by a vicious dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet.But for the region’s paranoid leadership, even their internal campaigns of terror were not enough. So, in 1975, the governments of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay secretly met in Santiago, Chile, and agreed to work together to spy on and track “suspicious individuals” and organizations “directly or indirectly linked to Marxism.” Before long, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador joined up, too. The information-gathering initiative was dubbed “Condor,” in honor of the national bird of several of the participants, including the host country.
Despite what the minutes stated, this was no mere surveillance pact. What Operation Condor meant in practice was that the state kidnappings, torture, and murder that had run roughshod over the remaining pockets of dissent within these countries would now go beyond their national borders. If you were a leftist or anyone else the government saw as a threat, then escape, exile, and even asylum would no longer save you. There was nowhere to hide.
“Argentina was still a democracy at the time, and was a safe haven for many leftists who had been forced out of several countries in the Southern Cone,” says New York University associate professor Remi Brulin. “Suddenly, they realized that was not safe anymore.”
While Condor officially lasted only a few years, the region’s governments had long collaborated in less formalized ways to stamp out their political opponents. According to the Database on South America’s Transnational Human Rights Violations, between 1969 and 1981, such cross-border operations claimed at least 763 victims of atrocities ranging from kidnapping and torture to outright murder, nearly half of them Uruguayan, close to a quarter Argentine, and 15 percent of them Chilean. Most of these atrocities took place in Argentina, which saw 544 cases, with Uruguay a distant second at 129.
As explained in a 1976 report by Harry W. Shlaudeman, Richard Nixon’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, South American officials like Uruguay’s foreign minister Juan Carlos Blanco Estradé (“one of the brighter and normally steadier members of the group”) saw themselves as fighting a “Third World War,” with “the countries of the southern cone as the last bastion of Christian civilization.” Having come to power “in battle against the extreme left,” he noted, these repressive governments had “their ego, their salaries, and their equipment-budgets” inextricably wrapped up in this concept.
The result was a stream of often stomach-churning crimes. The typical Condor operation might go something like this: once a target was identified, a team — made up of nationals from one or more member countries — would find and surveil the individual, before a second team snatched and spirited them away to a secret prison, sometimes in the country they’d been found, sometimes elsewhere. There they would be held and tortured, including beatings, waterboarding, mock executions, electrocution, rape, and worse, sometimes for months on end. In some cases, family members were kidnapped and tortured, too, or even stolen from them, for no reason beyond sadism. According to the database, there are at least twenty-three cases of the kidnapping of victims’ children, passed off to their killers to be raised as their own.
Few survived, though more often than not, the exact fate of those who were taken isn’t clear. They were simply never heard from again. On occasion, survivors brought back word about the disappeared, such as witnesses who remembered Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcón, a sociologist arrested while crossing the Argentina-Paraguay border and accused of being a courier for the far-left Chilean group MIR. The stories were never pretty. Those witnesses later testified that they’d seen Fuentes arrive at the Villa Grimaldi death camp in Santiago covered in scabies, with one victim-turned-collaborator-under-duress recalling that he was chained in a doghouse full of parasites, mockingly referred to as “pichicho” (street dog).
Yet such testimony also spoke to the resilience of the human spirit and the sense of solidarity that knitted such leftist groups together. Fuentes was in good spirits, witnesses said, and bucked up other prisoners by singing. One young prisoner recalled how Patricio Biedma, another arrested MIR member, had been a father figure for him in prison, teaching him how to survive. Biedma’s wife and three children never learned what became of their loved one.
Though Condor ostensibly targeted “guerrillas” and “Marxists,” the people of South America learned early on and in an especially brutal way what US protesters and law-abiding Muslims would learn after the Bush years: that such malleable terms can be stretched to mean almost anyone.
“Operation Condor pursued many types of political opponents, including congressional representatives, former ministers, human rights advocates (including people in Amnesty International), constitutionalist military officers, peasant leaders, unionists, priests and nuns, professors and students,” says J. Patrice McSherry, professor emerita of political science at Long Island University and author of Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. “Condor targeted not only the Left, but also the center-left and other democratic sectors that were fighting to demand their rights and make more inclusive the elitist democracies of the era.”
“First, the aim was to stop terrorism,” one operative from the Department of National Intelligence (DINA), Chile’s feared secret police, explained. “Then possible extremists were targeted, and later those who might be converted into extremists.” Or, as one Argentine general put it: “First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then their sympathizers; then those who are indifferent.”
Though this was supposed to be justified by the dire threat of left-wing violence, it’s hard to take such a threat seriously today. Not only were the Condor governments targeting individuals who were peaceful or unconnected to any revolutionary movements, but those movements had largely been defeated or even given up on armed struggle. As Shlaudeman put it to Henry Kissinger in 1976: “Both terrorists and the peaceful left have failed. This is true even in the minds of studious revolutionaries.” Fernando Lopez has argued that the regimes “grossly overstated the threat posed by the revolutionary movements” so they could go after their real target: the opposition in exile, who drew global sympathy and solidarity, and isolated the Condor governments internationally.
Image on the right: Orlando Letelier, killed by a car bomb in Washington, DC, in 1976. (The Transnational Institute)
Their plans weren’t confined to the continent. Twelve of the victims of cross-border operations came from countries outside of the region, including the UK, Italy, France, and the United States, while some of the most high-profile targets were assassinated in European countries, making Condor not just a transnational operation, but a global one. As exiled left-wing and moderate opponents of Pinochet’s dictatorship planned to campaign for diplomatic isolation of the country, he plotted to take them out.Agents of DINA planned attacks in Portugal and France, and tried repeatedly to kill Carlos Altamirano, general secretary of the Socialist Party of Chile: once in Mexico, when they showed up too late; several times in Paris, when they were foiled by French intelligence; and once in Madrid, where the attempt failed. Bernardo Leighton, the founder of Chile’s Christian Democrat Party, may not have been a radical — he opposed much of Allende’s program — but he was guilty of meeting with Socialist leaders to form an opposition front of exiles against the regime. He survived a gunshot to the back of the head in Rome, but was left with permanent brain damage, ending his opposition activities.While Pinochet took a leading role, the targets weren’t just Chilean. Scotland Yard prevented the assassination of Uruguayan senator Wilson Ferreira Aldunate in London, while then-representative Edward Koch, later to become mayor of New York City, was warned by then-CIA director George H. W. Bush that there was a threat on his life, thanks to his successful amendment to end US military aid to Uruguay. In Buenos Aires, two Uruguayan legislators and two activists were kidnapped in the early morning and later found with shots to the head in a car left under a bridge. Meanwhile, as journalist John Dinges has pointed out, a slew of seemingly natural deaths in a few short years of opponents in exile of the continent’s various dictatorships raises further suspicions.
Perhaps the most famous victim of Condor was Orlando Letelier, Allende’s former ambassador to the United States. After being detained and tortured by the regime following the coup, diplomatic pressure allowed Letelier to escape and eventually return to Washington, DC, where he soon became one of the most visible and influential members of Chile’s opposition to exile. Set up in the heart of American power and hobnobbing with US officials and their families, Letelier led a successful legislative campaign to ban US arms sales to Chile, lobbied against a $63 million investment by a Dutch company into the country, and fiercely criticized Pinochet’s free-market economic reforms.
All of it made him a marked man. In 1976, two DINA agents entered the United States on passports from Paraguay, a fellow Condor member, and with the help of two exiled Cuban anti-communists, rigged a bomb to Letelier’s car that detonated right on DC’s Embassy Row, killing him and one of his two American passengers. Until September 11, 2001, it would remain the worst act of foreign terrorism on US soil.
The Dirty Work
For years, the official story was that the US government learned about Condor roughly around the same time as everyone else, in 1976. In fact, through declassifications, firsthand testimony, and the work of historians, we now know that this program of state terror had been sanctioned, facilitated, and encouraged by the US government.Contrary to its denials at the time, a CIA report produced for Congress in 2000 would admit that “within a year after the [1973 Chilean] coup, the CIA and other US government agencies were aware of bilateral cooperation among regional intelligence services to track the activities of and, in at least a few cases, kill political opponents” — a “precursor” to Condor. Consider, too, that Manuel Contreras, the ruthless DINA chief knee-deep in Condor, was a (at one point, paid) CIA asset from 1974 to 1977, despite an internal 1975 report finding him “the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the junta.”For decades, speculation has abounded about just how unintentionally oblivious segments of the US government really were to the Letelier operation specifically. Despite being repeatedly alerted to the DINA agents’ attempts to enter the United States, and its suspicious nature, the CIA did nothing. A mere five days before they killed Letelier, Kissinger backpedaled an order for US ambassadors in a handful of the Condor countries to express the US government’s “deep concerns” over the reported plans of overseas assassination. Earlier that year, Pinochet had personally complained to Kissinger about Letelier’s activities, in a conversation in which Kissinger assured the dictator that “we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do.”
But worse, evidence uncovered by figures like McSherry and Dinges suggest the US government wasn’t just aware of the crimes of Condor, but directly involved in them.
Archival documents show the CIA, FBI, and even US embassies providing intelligence and names of suspects to the Condor governments, with both hemispheres looking into suspects on their home turf at the other’s behest. That included Fuentes, the results of whose interrogation (including the names he gave up) the US embassy in Buenos Aires relayed to Chilean police. Contreras himself later insisted, in court and to reporters, that the CIA had been involved in both the murder of Letelier and Carlos Prats, the former Chilean general blown up in Argentina a year before Condor’s founding, and that he had given the FBI documents proving his claims in 2000.There is strong evidence that US officers played a key role in the 1973 murder of two Americans, journalist Charles Horman and student Frank Teruggi, in the days that followed the coup, and that US intelligence was surveilling them. A 1979 Senate report stated that as early as 1974, the CIA had warned local authorities in France and Portugal about incoming Condor assassinations and discussed setting up a Condor headquarters with DINA in Miami — a move it rejected at the time but proceeded with a few years later with the Argentinians.McSherry later found yet another damning document, this one a 1978 cable from the then-US ambassador to Paraguay. The cable reported that Condor governments “keep in touch with one another through a US communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone” (“CONDORTEL”), using it to “co-ordinate intelligence information among the Southern cone countries.” This was just two years after Shlaudeman informed Kissinger of the “paranoia” of South American governments, who were increasingly targeting “non-violent dissent from the left and the center left” and “nearly anyone who opposes government policy,” and after the US embassy in Buenos Aires warned Kissinger that Argentinian security forces, in collaboration with neighboring governments, were involved in brutal “excesses . . . often involving innocent people.”
Image below: Henry Kissinger with President Richard Nixon, 1970.
In fact, it was precisely those at the very top, like Kissinger, who gave their approval to the Condor governments’ plans. Upon being told by Brazil’s newly installed dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici in 1971 that the South American country was planning to help overthrow Chile’s elected socialist government, Nixon offered money and aid for the effort, telling him the two governments needed to work together to “prevent new Allendes and Castros and try where possible to reverse these trends.” It was during those meetings, according to a later memo, that Nixon asked Médici for support “in safeguarding the internal security and status quo in the hemisphere,” which one general read as a request for Brazil to “do the dirty work.”
Kissinger himself infamously told the foreign minister of Argentina in June 1976, in between repeatedly assuring him the US government hoped for the new junta’s success: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”
Behind the Throne
But the US government’s role in the birth of Condor went well beyond diplomatic winks and nods.The methods and strategies employed by Condor operatives had their roots in the US training that Latin American militaries received through vehicles like the notorious School of the Americas (SOA), which aimed to pass on the battlefield and counterinsurgency lessons the US military had learned over its past decades of war-making. The SOA’s “graduates” eventually comprised one of every seven members of the DINA command staff, after learning the very things they would soon become feared for in their home countries: assassination, extortion, coercion against family members, psychological manipulation and the use of drugs, and torture techniques, including electrocution and even the specific, sensitive nerve points it could be applied to — just to name a few.Before Condor, the earliest laboratories for this training were Guatemala and Vietnam. Guatemala saw around 200,000 people killed between the 1954 coup and 1996, many of them victims of, first, a US-led assassination and paramilitary war program in the 1950s, and, through the 1960s, a counterinsurgency program that featured bombing, kidnapping, torture, and murder of “communists and terrorists” — the first instance of mass disappearances in Latin America, and all taught and facilitated by US security forces.
Running parallel to this was the CIA-led Phoenix Programin Vietnam, in which US forces financed, directed, and oversaw a campaign of assassination, terror, and torture carried out by South Vietnamese locals against the Viet Cong and, especially, their civilian sympathizers. The resulting atrocities didn’t stop the Phoenix experience from informing the training manuals for future Condor operatives.
Besides this, the United States also laid the groundwork for Condor by instigating and formalizing a unified, anti-communist front among the powerful Latin American militaries. The US government had been warning its commanders about the communist menace since at least 1945, with US money, arms, and training soon following. This escalated after the 1959 Cuban revolution, with President John F. Kennedy issuing the internal defense and development (IDAD) doctrine encouraging military repression in the region, and the Conference of American Armies (CAA) held annually from 1960 on. As one 1971 state department cable later outlined, “it is especially desirable that such neighboring countries as Argentina and Brazil collaborate effectively with the Uruguayan security forces and where possible we should encourage such cooperation.”
Like the SOA and US telecommunications networks, the CAA was a piece of the hemisphere’s wider US national security structure that eventually became the skeleton for Condor. The CAA’s charter defined its member armies’ mission as “protect[ing] the continent from the aggressive action of the International Communist Movement,” and early meetings revolved around many of the hallmarks of Condor: fighting “communist aggression,” intelligence-sharing on subversives, and systems of schools, telecommunication networks, and training programs for this purpose. In one 1966 meeting, Argentina’s military dictator floated the creation of “an intelligence center coordinated among Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay,” while seven years later, the head of Brazil’s army suggested to “extend the exchange of information” among attendees to “struggle against subversion.”
The United States then took a leading role in establishing the post-coup dictatorships’ spy agencies who provided the foot soldiers of Condor, including Paraguay’s La Técnica, Brazil’s SNI, and, of course, DINA. Contreras would later charge that the CIA officers sent down to do the honors actually “wanted to remain in Chile, in charge of the principal DINA posts,” an idea Pinochet nixed.
While sanctioned by its security forces and high-ranking officials, US involvement sometimes elicited objections, even horror from those lower down. The US embassy in Argentina warned Kissinger in 1976 that the “kind of counterviolence” employed by the country’s dictatorship “could eventually create more problems than it solves” and that “many who formerly supported the govt [sic] have been alienated by its tolerance of excesses on the part of the security forces — often involving innocent people.” It echoed the more unabashed outrage of one Guatemalan embassy official in 1968, who asked: “Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an acceptable counter-insurgency weapon?”The more information we learn only deepens US government complicity. This year’s revelation that the Swiss encryption company Crypto AG was secretly a CIA front that gave the agency a back door to the encrypted communications of the governments that used it suggests the US government was likely aware of what Condor members were up to in real time. Condor countries had, after all, built their entire communication network around Crypto AG’s hardware.“There Are No Rules”That the US government was behind a secret, continent-wide campaign of political terror and repression speaks to the paranoia of the country’s elites, inflamed by the rising power of the Soviet Union and the movements they viewed as manipulable by it. As the 1954 Doolittle Report put it, when “facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means . . . there are no rules in such a game,” “acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply,” and “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.”No wonder the blood-soaked officials of Condor countries saw kindred spirits in their US counterparts. “The only thing separating us is our uniforms, for the men of the armies of America, I believe, have never before understood one another as we do at this moment,” the commander of Uruguay’s joint chiefs told a 1975 CAA meeting. “There exists a coordination among the armies of the continent to combat and impede Marxist infiltration or whatever other form of subversion.”What this meant in practice is that the US government got in bed with not just authoritarians and dictators, but even out-and-out fascists.
Noam Chomsky has pointed out the parallels between fascist thought and the “national security doctrine” that drove the Latin American dictators’ repression, with its belief in the preeminence of the state over the individual and of permanent war. But US officials noticed it, too. As Shlaudeman noted, the Latin American dictatorships were driven not just by anti-Marxism, but by a nationalist “developmentalist” ideology in which military establishments partnered with technocrats to deliver industrialization.
“National developmentalism has obvious and bothersome parallels to National Socialism,” he wrote. “Opponents of the military regimes call them fascist. It is an effective pejorative, the more so because it can be said to be technically accurate.”
These parallels were more horrifyingly clear in the militaries’ treatment of dissidents. As figures like photographer João de Carvalho Pina and historian Daniel Feierstein have noted, the overcrowding, starvation, tortures, and general dehumanizing treatment of prisoners by the Condor dictatorships bore obvious similarities with the conditions of Nazi concentration camps.
But it went beyond mere parallels. Argentine camps were suffused with Nazism: decorated with swastikas and portraits of Hitler, recordings of Nazi speeches ringing through facilities, prisoners painted with swastikas and forced to yell “Heil Hitler,” with especially sadistic tortures reserved for Jewish captives. Escaped former Nazis had, after all, been welcomed into Latin American military dictatorships, including the former head of Gestapo in Lyon, Klaus Barbie. Wanted in France for unspeakable crimes, Barbie instead resettled in Bolivia, teaching torture and repression to military officers across the continent, before eventually helping organize the country’s 1980 “Cocaine Coup” and taking up a role in the military dictatorship that followed.
Ex-fascists “infiltrated various sectors of the Argentine Society,” Argentine journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez explained. “It would be useful to ask whether it is only a coincidence that the use of torture attained such heights of cruelty and sophistication. We should continue to ask ourselves whether or not the appearance of concentration camps, mass graves, and hundreds of bodies floating in Argentine rivers after 1974 is merely coincidental.”
This connection to European fascists links Condor to another secret, continent-wide anti-communist initiative: the NATO-led stay-behind program in Europe, the most famous of which was Operation Gladio in Italy. Like Condor, the stay-behind armies were a US-devised and US-backed network of local right-wing paramilitaries, meant to activate in case of communist invasion or simply electoral victory, and who, in the meantime, carried out a campaign of assassinations, destabilization, and general political violence in their home countries. And like Condor, they employed current and “former” fascists, usually in direct alliance with the countries’ high-ranking security forces.
The connections between the two programs were numerous. Before helpingBarbie escape to South America, the US government used him as a stay-behind recruiter in Europe. CIA officials like Vernon Walters and Duane Clarridge cut their teeth on Eurasian stay-behind operations before overseeing right-wing repression south of the border.
It was the Gladio-linked neofascist organization Avanguardia Nazionale, contracted by DINA, that carried out the failed attempt on Bernardo Leighton’s life. DINA agents and even Pinochet himself met in advance of the assassination with its leader, Stefano Delle Chiaie, who later worked for DINAand, he claimed, helped create it, before going to serve alongside Barbie in Bolivia’s coup government. Delle Chiaie also happened to meet personally with Pinochet just days before the Chilean dictator formalized the creation of Condor, and he arrived in Chile to get to work shortly thereafter.
Image on the right: Licio Gelli, member of the far-right Italian masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P-2). (Wikimedia Commons)
Particularly notable was the powerful fascist businessman Licio Gelli (“I am fascist and will die a fascist,” he once proclaimed), grandmaster of the right-wing Italian Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Due (P-2), whose members spanned virtually every segment of the Italian establishment, including future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Gelli and P-2 worked closely with the CIA and the Gladio network to manipulate Italian politics, “carefully ensuring that the Communist party should never emerge,” as he explained in 2008. Through the 1970s, he and the lodge pulled double dutyin Argentina, inserting themselves into the highest levels of business and government in the country, with Gelli “a key mover in the development of the continuity between democracy and state terrorism over the period that spans from 1974 to 1981,” as sociologist Claudio Tognonato wrote.There is, in other words, more than a hint, as McSherry has argued, that “US forces transferred the stay-behind model to Latin America” in the form of programs like Condor. As the Pentagon Papers revealed, the US government had already done so in another Cold War theater, Vietnam, where in 1956 it tasked a special forces unit “with the initial mission of preparing stay-behind organizations in South Vietnam just below the 17th Parallel, for guerrilla warfare in the event of an overt invasion by North Vietnamese forces.”But the evidence also hints at something darker: at a “global anti-Marxist agreement,” in the words of the court testimony of Michael Townley, the DINA agent behind the Prats, Leighton, and Letelier assassinations.
Coming Full Circle
Though Condor has long been over, its language and practices continue to echo today.According to Brulin, it was with the ascent of Ronald Reagan from 1981 onthat the bellicose political discourse around terrorism that had suffused the Condor countries infected the United States, with Reaganite “anti-terror” rhetoric initially focused on Central America. As the years passed, its spirit continued to haunt US politics, even as the focus shifted to the Middle East.“Everything the US has been saying after 9/11 is something Reagan is saying about Central and South America in the 1980s, and what US officers are saying to Latin American dictators in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Brulin. “And always based on the same lie: how strong the enemy was, and what we are doing about them, which in the real world is using death squads.”
Of course, it wasn’t just discourse. It’s impossible to talk about the details of Condor without thinking of the “war on terror” launched by George W. Bush nearly twenty years ago.
“We witnessed the use by US counterterrorist forces of disappearances, cross-border renditions, torture, secret ‘black sites’ located in other countries, and so on, approved by civilian authorities,” says McSherry. “All of these methods characterized Operation Condor.”
“There have been other manifestations of Condor-like practices that have taken place and are taking place in the decades since,” says Francesca Lessa, who is researching the crimes of and accountability for Condor at the University of Oxford. “If you think about the practices of clandestine rendition in the war on terror, for example — those have all of the hallmarks of what Condor used to be in Latin America several decades earlier.”
Even the torture employed by Condor operatives, such as threatening to kill or rape loved ones, squalid conditions forcing total dependence on one’s captors, and simulated drowning, was in many cases exactly the same as the techniques used by US forces against accused terrorists and taught to Latin American forces by US officers decades before that.
As the “war on terror” progressed, we’ve seen some of the hallmarks of Condor operations increasingly turned on the domestic US population. This is particularly so with Donald Trump, who, sometimes to the enthusiastic applause of liberal politicians, has repeatedly railed against socialists and other domestic enemies, and more recently engaged in a range of behavior that would be familiar to the victims of Condor: law and order rhetoric, threats to declare dissidents terrorists, and massively overstating the power of the groups he opposes. Perhaps more alarmingly, street kidnappings and other counterinsurgency tactics have now apparently become legitimate elements of domestic law enforcement under his presidency.
Ironically, this has happened at the same time that the perpetrators of Condor and its member governments have increasingly found themselves facing justice, exposing more about its workings in the process. While impunity held fast in the hemisphere as late as the 2000s, campaigns and legal efforts by survivors and victims’ families have changed all that, assisted by a vast and incriminating archival paper trail created, ironically, by the program’s highly organized and transnational nature.
According to the numbers compiled by Lessa in her Operation Condor project, since the 1970s, there have been forty-four criminal investigations into Condor-related crimes across eight countries. Those include not just Condor member nations, but Italy, France, and the United States, too.
Twenty-eight of these investigations have concluded with at least an initial sentence, says Lessa, which have seen 118 defendants convicted for crimes against 213 victims. Those include the twenty DINA agents tried for Condor activities in 2018, the 2016 conviction of eighteen former Argentine military officers for their participation in Condor, and Contreras himself, who was sentenced to 526 years in prison in 1995 and died in jail two decades later. By Lessa’s count, there are currently two ongoing trials and twelve investigations at the pretrial stage.
In a rare bit of real-world poetic justice, it is now the perpetrators of Condor who seem to have nowhere to hide. Years of pressure from those pushing for justice were given a boost by Pinochet’s arrest and nearly two-year-long detention in London, whose warrant was based partly on a Condor crime, and which firmly established that individuals really could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity regardless of where they were, where the crimes were carried out, and the nationality of everyone involved. Though he escaped extradition, it opened the door to his 2004 indictment in Chile, which in turn paved the way for further attempts at retroactive justice for the dictatorship’s crimes.
“The Pinochet case in 1998 was indeed critical in galvanizing international justice efforts in South America and beyond,” says Lessa. “But if the preexisting demand and justice efforts had not been there even before, the Pinochet case might not have been enough on its own.”
The reverberations were felt beyond Chile. Pinochet’s arrest and the investigation of Argentine military officials in foreign courts spurred a raft of new cases and even arrests and indictments in Argentina over Condor-era crimes, leading to the 2003 annulment of the country’s amnesty laws, used to protect human rights abusers for decades. A year later, an Argentine court declared that the statute of limitations didn’t apply to human rights crimes, in a case that concerned the 1974 murder of Carlos Prats.
Students from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly School of the Americas) and students from the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School conduct a joint assault on a simulated narcotics camp during a field training exercise. US Navy photo
Transnational repression has given way to borderless justice, it seems. The year 2019 alone saw Adriana Rivas, Contreras’s former secretary and allegedly one of DINA’s “most brutal torturers,” arrested in Australia (her extradition to Chile was approved last month), while a former Uruguayan naval officer was sentenced to life in prison in Italy over his role in Condor. The most recent sentence was handed down just days ago, with four former Argentine security personnel convicted for a slew of crimes, including the kidnapping and detention of two young children, privy to their mother’s torture and later abandoned in a public square in Chile.All the while, we continue to learn more about the once-shadowy program. In 2019, the US government released tens of thousands more pages worth of previously secret files relating to Argentina’s dictatorship during the Condor years. Among the revelations: that in September 1977, “representatives of West German, French, and British intelligence services had visited the Condor organization secretariat in Buenos Aires . . . to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversive organization similar to Condor.”With veterans of France’s brutal counterinsurgent wars in Algeria and Vietnam having passed on their own training and experience to their Latin American counterparts, perhaps one day we will find out that the “global anti-Marxist agreement” Condor was a part of was even broader than once thought.
A History Rewritten
As typically recounted, the story of the twentieth century goes something like this: after briefly uniting to defeat fascism, the United States and the Soviet Union turned the rest of the century into a clash of ideologies, one that always threatened to erupt, but never quite did, into outright great-power war. With nary a shot fired, free-market capitalism won out, thanks to the hearts and minds won by the power of television, cheeseburgers, and convenient home appliances.But programs like Operation Condor cast that history in a very different light. With them in mind, that triumph looks intensely violent — one in which the US government swiftly allied with autocrats and even fascists to attack democracy and brutally put down people’s movements of all kinds the world over, lest their goals of a more just, egalitarian world threaten Western strategic and business interests. And with that economic system now sputtering under the weight of several crises, the repressive measures long reserved for the rest of the world are becoming more visible at home, as an agitated US public turns ever more unruly in the face of their own long-declining living standards.It’s an episode especially relevant to the post-Trump era, where agencies like the CIA have successfully rebranded as defenders of democracy and liberal values against impending fascism. It reminds us of the unvarnished, well-organized brutality that lies behind the global order Trump and his predecessors inherited, a sometimes neo-fascist brutality engineered and led by those same agencies to protect elite power and business interests.
A well-founded fear of fascism and democracy’s subversion will remain a key part of US political discourse well beyond Trump. Examining the legacy of Operation Condor should prompt us to think about which institutions in American life have been most hostile to democracy and, when the time calls for it, eager to align with fascists. But it’s also a reminder that, in the face of popular struggle, even this violence has a shelf life, and impunity doesn’t last forever.
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Fully referenced facts about covid-19, provided by experts in the field, to help our readers make a realistic risk assessment. (Regular updates below).
“The only means to fight the plague is honesty.” (Albert Camus, 1947)
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Overview
Lethality: According to the latest immunological studies, the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of covid-19 in the general population is about 0.1% to 0.5% in most countries, which is comparable to the medium influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968.
Treatment: For people at high risk or high exposure, early or prophylactic treatment is essential to prevent progression of the disease and avoid hospitalization.
Age profile: The median age of covid deaths is over 80 years in most countries and only about 5%of the deceased had no serious preconditions. In contrast to pandemic influenza, the age and risk profile of covid mortality is thus comparable to normal mortality and increases it proportionally.
Nursing homes: In many Western countries, up to two thirds of all covid deaths have occurred in nursing homes, which require targeted and humane protection. In some cases it is not clearwhether the residents really died of covid or of weeks of stress and isolation.
Excess mortality: Up to 30% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by covid, but by the effects of lockdowns, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 40% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital.
Antibodies: By summer 2020, global hotspots such as New York City and Bergamo had reached antibody levels of approximately 25%. Capital cities such as Madrid, London and Stockholm were around 15%. Large parts of Europe and the US, however, were still below 5%.
Symptoms: Up to 40% of all infected persons show no symptoms, about 80% show at most mild symptoms, and about 95% show at most moderate symptoms and do not require hospitalization. Mild cases may be due to protective T-cells from earlier common cold coronavirus infections.
Long covid: About 10% of symptomatic people report post-acute or long covid, i.e. symptoms that last for several weeks or months. This also affects younger and previously healthy people with a strong immune response. The post-viral syndrome is known from severe influenza, too.
Transmission: According to current knowledge, the main routes of transmission of the virus are indoor aerosols and droplets produced when speaking or coughing, while outdoor aerosols as well as most object surfaces appear to play a minor role.
Masks: There is still little to no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of cloth face masks in the general population, and the introduction of mandatory masks couldn’t contain or slow the epidemic in most countries. If used improperly, masks may increase the risk of infection.
Children and schools: In contrast to influenza, the risk of disease and transmission in children is very low in the case of covid. There was and is therefore no medical reason for the closure of elementary schools or other measures specifically aimed at children.
Contact tracing: A WHO study of 2019 on measures against influenza pandemics concluded that from a medical perspective, contact tracing is “not recommended in any circumstances”. Contact tracing apps on cell phones have also failed in most countries.
Lockdowns: The WHO warned that lockdowns have caused a “terrible global catastrophe”. According to the UN, lockdowns may put the livelihood of 1.6 billion people at acute risk and may push an additional 150 million children into poverty. Unemployment, bankruptcies and psychological problems have reached record levels worldwide.
Sweden: In Sweden, total mortality without lockdown has so far been in the range of a strong influenza season. 70% of Swedish deaths occurred in nursing homes that were not protected quickly enough. The median age of the Swedish covid deaths is 84 years.
Media: The reporting of many media has been unprofessional, has maximized fear and panic in the population and has led to a massive overestimation of the lethality and mortality of covid. Some media even used manipulative pictures and videos to dramatize the situation.
Virus origin: The origin of the new corona virus remains unclear, but the best evidence currently points to a covid-like pneumonia incident in a Chinese mine in 2012, whose virus samples were collected, stored and researched by the Virology Institute in Wuhan (WIV).
Surveillance: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that the covid pandemic may be used to permanently expand global surveillance. In several parts of the world, the population is being monitored by drones and facing serious police overreach during lockdowns.
Overview Diagrams
Global covid deaths and cases vs. global all-cause deaths
Covid lethality: Most Western countries report a covid lethality (IFR) of about 0.3% in the general population (excluding nursing homes). The IFR may be even lower as antibody tests appear to miss about half of all infections. The IFR is higher if there was a local collapse of health care or elderly care. Countries with a younger population report lower IFRs: India reports about 0.1%, African countries report about 0.01%. Read more.
Why covid is a “strange pandemic”: Why does covid-19 appear to be a somewhat strange pandemic? It is because of the covid-19 mortality profile, which is almost identical to natural mortality. But this doesn’t mean covid is just a “casedemic”. Read more.
Face masks: Evidence from around the world indicates that cloth face masks used by the general population have little to no impact on coronavirus infection rates. The WHO study on face masks and social distancing turned out to be seriously flawed.
Treatment of covid-19: Early or prophylactic treatment of covid-19 is essential to prevent progression of the disease. New studies confirm the effectiveness of zinc, vitamin D, bromhexine and malaria drug HCQ in early treatment of high-risk patients. Read more.
Disease mechanisms: Several new studies show that (severe) covid is first and foremost a cardiovascular disease that causes thrombosis (blood clotting) and lung embolism by damaging the blood vessels. This explains the age and risk profile of covid-19 mortality.
Post-acute (“long”) covid: About 10% of symptomatic people, including young and healthy people, develop “long covid” that may last for several weeks or months. Of particular concern is the impact of the new coronavirus on the heart muscle. Read more.
PCR tests: As previously reported, many of the people testing positive may not carry infectious virus. A new analysis now confirms that in the US, up to 90% of positive PCR tests may have been “false positives” detecting non-infectious virus fragments.
Origin of the new coronavirus: Evidence is increasing that the new coronavirus may be linked to a covid-like pneumonia incident in a Chinese mine back in 2012. Read more.
Children: The risk of transmission and disease in children continues to be extremely low. The following chart shows cases and hospitalizations of children in Florida.
Florida: Cases and hospitalizations of children (DOH)
Country profiles
In large parts of previously locked-down Europe as well as in parts of the US, antibody values are still rather low and the risk of a renewed increase in coronavirus infections and disease is therefore high. Read our latest covid-19 country profiles:
USA: Several short regional waves, mortality comparable to 1957/68 flu pandemics
Germany: No excess mortality so far, but still very low antibody values
Sweden: No lockdown, no masks, mortality comparable to strong flu wave.
Japan: No lockdown, but by far lowest mortality among G8 countries.
Professor Mark Woolhouse (UK): Lockdown will come to be seen as a “monumental mistake on a global scale” and must never happen again. The equivalent of 400 million jobs have been lost world-wide, 13 million in the U.S. alone.
Germany: German police may have staged a run on the federal parliament in order to discredit a peaceful protest by about 100,000 people against political corona measures.
Contact tracing: Back in May, Google and Apple implemented a “contact tracing” interface into three billion mobile phones. In early September, they integrated it even deeper into their operating systems, enabling contact tracing without an official app and on a global scale. From a medical perspective, there is still no evidence that “contact tracing” reduces the covid infection rate. Swiss IT professor Serge Vaudenay warned that the Google-Apple interface is not transparent and may record every single contact.
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Most people around the globe would agree that 2020 has been a year to forget. This is certainly, if not especially, true for Venezuela’s opposition, and the upcoming parliamentary vote will only add to their misfortunes.
A revolt from within the opposition ranks who sought the ouster of self-proclaimed ‘president’ Juan Guaido as head of the National Assembly set the tone in early January, with scandals and defections cascading month after month.
Among the most notable gaffes of course was the preposterous invasion failure in May that the hapless leader feverishly denied involvement in. A member of Guaido’s inner circle resigned from his ‘post’ after the ex-US Marine turned-mercenary who headed the operation produced a recorded phone conversation along with a multi-million contract of the plot bearing Guaido’s signature.
As this now infamous year winds down, things aren’t looking any better for the would-be leader and Co., given that they will almost certainly end up in political purgatory after votes are counted in the country’s legislative election on December 6.
The most likely result of the contest – the 26th election held in 21 years of the Bolivarian Revolution – is a victory for the Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV) led by Nicolas Maduro, who even promised to step down if the opposition wins.
A certain outcome however, is that Guaido and his US-backed coalition will be left without any representation in the National Assembly after the group opted to boycott the elections, claiming a lack of guarantees for free and fair elections.
Their allegations have been echoed by US officials and parrotted by some in the mainstream media, with others going as far as to cry fraud before any vote has actually taken place.
When @TheEconomist pronounces Venezuela’s parliamentary election rigged before it even happens, and produces zero evidence to back up its claim, you can be sure the State Department is working to delegitimize the contest and compelling its paid opposition proxies to boycott it. pic.twitter.com/RvEyBBrpLN
This isn’t the first time Venezuela’s opposition parties have disavowed election authorities and results. In fact, prominent sections of the opposition have attempted to levy fraud charges in every one of those over two dozen elections, with the exception of two – the 2007 constitutional referendum and the 2015 legislative elections, both of which were won by the opposition. Opposition forces also boycotted the elections in 2005 and the 2018 presidential vote.
As with all previous elections, the upcoming vote will involve more than 1,500 registered observers involving 200 international monitors and including academics and representatives from regional groups such the Puebla Group and CARICOM. Caracas had also asked the EU to send an observer group, but this offer wasn’t taken up.
Despite the boycott from Guaido’s allies, over 14,000 candidates from over 100 parties and organizations – almost all of them connected with opposition parties from the right and left not affiliated with Guaido – are vying for the 277 seats in the National Assembly.
With over two decades of history to look on, it is clear that there are no guarantees that would allow Venezuela’s opposition to participate in a vote let alone accept the result, other than a guarantee that they would be declared winners, of course.
But even if they had contested this vote, Guaido’s forces would have been unlikely to repeat their 2015 result, when they won nearly two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. If there is dissatisfaction within the ranks of Chavismo due to the ongoing woes with oil, goods and price speculation which have been exacerbated by Washington’s sanctions, there is equal or even greater disillusionment in the opposition camp given that Guaido has proven to be at least as ineffective as opposition leaders before him.
The attempt by Maduro’s regional adversaries in Washington, Ottawa and elsewhere to crown Guaido as the country’s president was used to illegally seize Venezuelan state assets in the form of refineries, oil and gold, with the pretext of these being administered by this parallel ‘government.’
Almost two years after the move and the opposition has once again fallen into the divisions and infighting that have characterized it throughout the last two decades, especially given the serious allegations of corruption and misuse of funds being administered by Guaido ‘officials.’ For his part, Guaido has been unable to wrestle control of any institution in the country, and is on the brink of definitively losing control of the only one they did control.
With his stock in freefall, Guaido’s allies continue to jump ship, while others are invariably maneuvering to take the wheel.
But with Guaido as its leader or no, 2021 could be even bleaker than this past year for Venezuela’s opposition. Not only will they lack representation in any of the country’s key institutions, effectively removing their arguments about being the only legitimate protectors of the constitution, but they also have a dwindling roster of allies in the region.
Bolivia will likely join Argentina and Mexico in not participating in the anti-Maduro initiatives at the so-called Lima Group, which hasn’t even been able to meet in Lima given the turmoil that has claimed two presidents in as many years. Ecuador looks poised to have its own political shift in 2021, leaving a handful of governments who are immersed in their own political and economic crises.
Importantly, there will also be a new administration in Washington, which will almost certainly continue to attempt to overthrow Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution, but not in the same way as the outgoing government. The Biden White House (and Pentagon, and Langley) will have to reconcile with the fact that Guaido is not the President of Venezuela, nor is he a tenable option to lead a viable opposition.
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Pablo Vivanco is a journalist and analyst specializing in politics and history in the Americas, who served as the Director of teleSUR English. Recent bylines include The Jacobin, Asia Times, The Progressive and Truthout. Follow him on Twitter @pvivancoguzman
On the arid landscape of the Arabian deserts, the outgoing US president Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner planted a sapling called the Abraham Accords last August. They forecast it to be the harbinger of a future vineyard of luscious grapes, richly satisfying and arousing desire, which they hoped to harvest after securing their mandate to rule America for another four years.
But God willed otherwise. The sapling now becomes the inheritance of the Joe Biden presidency, which Trump tried to throttle in its cradle. It is now up to Biden to water his predecessor’s sapling, manure it and protect it from insects and desert storms, leave alone create a vineyard out of it. But Biden’s dilemma will be that Trump’s sapling can only bear grapes of wrath.
Trump and Kushner had estimated that they had an understanding with Saudi Arabia’s young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS)for the kingdom to laterally enter the Abraham Accords. But there are disquieting signals that MbS instead chose to await the outcome of the November 3 election in the US, which, of course, Trump lost.
Trump, who is known to despise ‘losers’ ought to have anticipated that the Saudis would see him in a different light today. But he persisted and deputed his most trusted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to travel to Saudi Arabia, in consultation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as to how to nudge MbS out of his inertia.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Neom, Saudi Arabia, on Nov. 22, 2020. Credit: State Department Photo by Ron Przysucha.
Pompeo and Netanyahu decided to undertake a joint mission to meet the Crown Prince. It was a tricky mission, no doubt, since there would be great sensitivity over someone like Netanyahu setting foot on the soil where the two holiest mosques of Islam are located.
However, it turned out to be an unproductive mission anyway. MbS balked. Various accounts of the secret meeting at Neom, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea resort, on November 22 have since leaked out. They all suggest that the Saudi priorities are no more the same as they used to be.
Succinctly put, Riyadh has apparently concluded that there is currently a lot of work to do to get back into the incoming US president’s good books and it requires single-minded attention. Unsurprisingly, MbS is treading carefully.
Atrocities linked back to the Saudis in Yemen, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia, etc. have cemented Biden’s perception of the kingdom as a “pariah” state. MbS has stressed that instigating a war with Iran as soon as Biden is about to take power will not be a smart thing to do.
Meanwhile, thereare other signals too that Saudi Arabia hopes to change course in its regional policies. Certainly, King Salman’s phone call to Turkish President Recep Erdogan on November 20 seeking reconciliation, Saudi overtures to normalise relations with Qatar, the painstaking efforts to project Saudi “soft power” during the recent G20 summit — all these are nascent signs of a Saudi course correction.
At the core of this course correction is MbS’ closeness to the UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ), who of course works in direct affiliation with the US and Israeli intelligence. The general perception in the region and internationally is that MbZ has MbS in the palm of his hand as a sort of “useful fool.”
Indeed, such a perception grew steadily over time. MbZ was most certainly instrumental in dragging Saudi Arabia into the war in Yemen, instigating Saudi Arabia’s rupture with Qatar (the only other Muslim country with a Wahhabi religious establishment), and the souring of ties with Turkey.
It is hard to tell whether the reading of Turkish analysts is correct or not — namely, that MbZ has Saudi Arabia wrapped around his finger and he manipulates MbS to serve the Emirati and Israeli interests. But such an estimation seems plausible.
At any rate, King Salman’s overture to Erdogan and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, would not have been to the liking of MbZ for whom these two countries are sworn enemies who mentor the Muslim Brotherhood, and, more importantly, are challenging his ambitious path to place the UAE as the number one regional power in the Muslim Middle East.
On Erdogan’s part, he suspects the UAE’s role in the failed coup attempt in 2016 to overthrow and eliminate him. Turkey takes serious note of the Emirati support of Kurdish separatists. Again, Turkey and the UAE are in conflict in Syria and Libya.
Nonetheless, Erdogan welcomed King Salman’s overture and hopes that it would lead to a Saudi-Turkey normalisation. But he also realises that everything depends on MbS stepping out of the UAE-Israeli orbit and Saudi Arabia finally getting its act together in its own interests.
No doubt, Trump’s exit brings about a paradigm change. Trump had empowered MbS to the extent the latter could literally get away with murder. But from January 20 onward, the Pottery Barn Rule will become applicable — ‘If you break it, you fix it.’
Traces of the Saudi rethink appeared at MbS’ meeting with Pompeo and Netanyahu. The US-Israeli entreaties during the meeting at Neom — principally, that Saudi Arabia should follow the UAE’s footfalls and join the Abraham Accords and as quid pro quo, Israel would pull strings in the Beltway to mitigate Biden’s antipathy toward the Saudi regime — didn’t have the desired outcome.
The US state department readout on the Neom meeting simply said, “They (Pompeo and MbS) discussed the need for Gulf unity to counter Iran’s aggressive behaviour in the region and the need to achieve a political solution to the conflict in Yemen.”
MbS acted wisely by holding back on the “Gulf unity” call Pompeo espoused and Netanyahu desired, which was, plainly put, a metaphor to attack Iran. MbS would know that if Trump proceeds to attack Iran in terms of a Israeli-Emirati-Saudi script, Saudi Arabia will not get US protection from Biden.
Saudi Arabia finds itself in a tight spot. MbS is apprehensive that the Biden Administration will be hostile toward him and make him accountable for past mistakes such as the murder of Khashoggi, and it may lethally destroy his claim to succeed King Salman. Already, there is opposition to him from within the House of Saud and some of those elements also enjoy western backing.
It is in such a complex scenario that Trump is deputing Koshner to meet MbS this week to make one final attempt to persuade the latter to fall in line. In reality, Koshner is acting on Netanyahu’s behest. Koshner is reputed to wield influence on MbS at a personal level.
The stakes are very high for all sides — for Israel and the UAE, in particular. Without Saudi Arabia entering the Israeli tent, Abraham Accords remains weak and unstable, and like many such Middle Eastern accords in history that were born in ecstasy, like the Oslo accord and the Camp David agreement, the fizz may go out of it once the godfather in the White House retires on January 20.
Biden has big decisions to make regarding the Middle East situation. With the signing of the Abraham Accords, Israel has entered the cockpit of the US regional strategy, which historically pitted the Sunni Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf against Iran. Whereas, Biden plans to negotiate with Iran.
Again, Israel lives by the sword and its ascendance in the Persian Gulf is sure recipe for seamless strife and bloodshed for years to come. Does Israel make a good ally for the US in these circumstances? Put differently, why should the US allow Israel to continue to dictate its Middle East policies?
Finally, Saudi Arabia is a regional heavyweight and Biden’s upcoming presidency could force Riyadh into a more pragmatic foreign policy by ending the Gulf crisis. Without doubt, Biden reining in on MbS would be a decisive factor.
But then, Riyadh also faces pressure from the UAE, which does not want any Saudi reconciliation with Qatar and Turkey. Yet, the intriguing part is that Biden has harshly criticised Saudi Arabia many a time, but is largely turning a blind eye on the UAE despite its expanding record of military interventions in most Middle Eastern hotspots.
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It’s why they should be avoided, safe alternatives chosen for protection.
Rushed development, inadequately tested, covid vaccines will be especially dangerous.
In what ways and to what extent will only be known in the fullness of time after mass vaxxing begins.
Inoculated individuals will be unwitting guinea pigs in a widespread experiment with human health and social control.
On Wednesday, the US war department revealed images of covid vaccination cards — to be given to every American vaxxed.
A previous article asked if they’ll be required for employment, attending school, air travel, other public transportation, hotel reservations, restaurant dining, in-store shopping, attending a sporting event, and other social interactions?
Will daily lives and routines no longer be possible without proof of covid immunity from hazardous to human health vaxxing?
On Wednesday, noted microbiologist Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi said the following about covid vaccines:
When available in the coming weeks, they’ll be “downright dangerous (and will send you) to your doom.”
He called Anthony Fauci’s claim about 75% of Americans needing to vaxxed against covid to achieve herd immunity “utter nonsense,” adding:
“Someone who says this has not the slightest inkling of the basics of immunology.”
According to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases expert Dr. Emily Erbeling, vaccine development typically takes from 8 to 10 years.
Fast-tracked development of covid vaccines will involve “not looking at all the data.”
AMA president Dr. Susan Bailey said that the number of physicians expressing concern about covid vaccines is “unprecedented.”
Polling data show that around 50% of Americans are concerned about the safety of covid vaccines.
According to Langer Research for the NAACP:
Only 14% of African Americans and 34% of Latinos believe that covid vaccines will be safe.
Only 19% of African Americans trust drug companies. Less than one-third believe that the FDA “look(s) after their interests.”
The Pentagon reportedly will distribute millions of vaccination kits — to include a vax card certification of inoculation.
In cahoots with the CDC and Big Pharma, the so-called Immunization Action Coalition “works to increase immunization rates” by promoting hazardous to human health mass vaxxing.
Its associate director Dr. Kelly Moore is promoting the idea of vax cards to keep track of everyone vaxxed for covid.
The information will be sent to state and federal registries — the latter to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Will unwilling to be vaxxed individuals be tagged as non-compliers?
Will they be penalized as explained above and perhaps additionally in other ways?
What’s going on is part of a diabolical plot to continue eroding fundamental freedoms.
Things are heading toward eliminating them altogether on the phony pretexts of protecting human health and national security.
The nation I grew up in long ago is being systematically transformed into a dystopian society only mass activism in the streets has a chance to prevent.
So-called Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is part of the diabolical plot.
It’s a secretive public/private partnership (involving the war department, HHS, DHS, and Big Pharma) in support of mass vaxxing against made-in-the-USA covid.
It’s a form of seasonal flu/influenza, an annual pandemic with no fear-mongering/mass hysteria, no ineffective hazardous to health face masks, no social distancing, or lockdowns causing economic collapse, mass unemployment, and impoverishment of millions — no totalitarian social control.
OWS reportedly intends mass surveillance of mass vaxxed Americans, likely non-compliars to be tagged for unwillingness to go along with the herd.
Tech giants Google and Oracle reportedly are involved in the mass surveillance scheme.
According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, OWS “resurrected (the Orwellian) Total Information Awareness — TIA — scheme).”
It was “devised after the September 11 attacks that was quickly defunded following public backlash over privacy concerns.”
“Is total surveillance set to become the new normal,” Dr. Mercola asked?
OWS is “being directed by (the US) military, (DHS), technology companies and US intelligence agencies…rather than (by) public health officials.”
On the phony pretext of combatting a strain of seasonal flu called covid, mass vaxxing, mass surveillance, and likely other draconian steps will be part of an unacceptable Orwellian new normal.
According to Humans Are Free.com:
“OWS architects and proponents have worked to justify these extreme and invasive surveillance programs by marketing this agenda as the ‘solution’ to whatever Americans are most afraid of at any given time.”
“It has very little to do with ‘public health’ and everything to do with total control.”
It’s also about letting Big Pharma cash in big for greater profits and stock market valuations.
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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.”
Global Research brings you a selection of three books that help give some context to the current state of the world and the power dynamics that got us here. Unfortunately, these books remain rather relevant, if not more so than at their time of publication…
In this expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.
This book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.
In this new enlarged edition – which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction — the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.
America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.
This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.
It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.
The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
Engdahl’s carefully argued critique goes far beyond the familiar controversies surrounding the practice of genetic modification as a scientific technique. The book is an eye-opener, a must-read for all those committed to the causes of social justice and world peace.
President Donald Trump may only have seven weeks left in office, but he’s given his top advisers the green light to batter the Iranian regime—anything that doesn’t hazard a full-on war before Joe Biden is inaugurated.
The first wave of lockdowns knocked us into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, it sent suicide rates soaring all over the globe. Now another wave of lockdowns is being instituted all over the planet, and this is going to perfectly set the stage for the “solutions” that the elite plan to offer all of us in 2021.
Despite the existence of regulatory mechanisms for ensuring vaccine access while keeping the authorization bar high, it’s hard to avoid the impression that sponsors are claiming victory and wrapping up their trials, and the FDA will now be under enormous pressure to rapidly authorize the vaccines.
The racist right wing was certainly ascendant during his administration, but the danger of fascism won’t leave Washington with Donald Trump. The obnoxious racist may be the public face of tyranny, but there is another danger coming from sectors of the Democratic Party. Their goal is to censor any points of view that undermine their neoliberal and imperialist narratives.
While the administration of Donald Trump readies its exit from the White House and the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s use of American diplomatic cover and weapons alike has taken on a fevered pace as the Kingdom deepens the tragedy it has afflicted upon Yemen.
“The problem with the COVID vaccine is that they recognize that it’s gonna be really hard to get a vaccine so they have been reducing our standards so they can pass the vaccine no matter what.” – Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The test was carried out on August 25 at the Tonopah shooting range in the Nevada desert.An official statement confirmed its full success: it was a real nuclear attack, proof that the fighter carried out at supersonic speed and in stealth attitude (with nuclear bombs placed in its internal hold) has the capability to penetrate through enemy defenses.
The problem with the mainstream press in the Trump-Biden race is the speed by which it concluded that the 2020 presidential election was not marred by fraud. It reached its conclusion before the election was even over.
Brits could be denied entry into bars, theaters, and sporting events if they can not prove they’ve received vaccination against COVID-19, according to the head of the United Kingdom’s vaccine rollout.
The Pakistani state needs to unequivocally proclaim that recognition of the current Israeli Apartheid state is simply off the table. Prime Minister Imran Khan needs to mobilize the people and take the National Assembly into confidence about the intense pressures being put on Islamabad to submit to this act of treachery.
The following article was first published by Global Research on March 17, 2020, following the first tests of a vaccine conducted by Moderna Inc. with human volunteers in Seattle on March 16.
Author’s Note and Update
The COVID-19 Vaccine Project had been envisaged several months prior to the official identification of the virus on January 7, 2020 by China’s health authorities.
At the 201 Simulation meeting in October 19, 2019 under the auspices of John Hopkins, the development of a vaccine for a fictitious novela virus was envisaged.
According to Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) an organization sponsored and financed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Gates Foundation the project to develop a vaccine commenced not only prior to the discovery and identification of the coronavirus (January 2020) but several months prior to the October 2019 simulation exercise. “We did that in the last year or so [early 2019]. … ” ( see interview below)
According to the WEF Video below, produced in relation to the 201 Simulation, “the organizers created a virus”
“the current strain of the coronavirus [201 simulation], known as 2019-nCoV, but claimed that the death toll could run in the millions if the virus were resistant to modern vaccines … ” (November 2019 analysis of the 201 Simulation)
Ironically, on January 30th, the WHO defined the new virus as 2019-nCoV, i.e. the same name as the “organizers invented disease” used in the 201 simulation in October 2019. No doubt a coincidence.
It was only later that Covid-19 was identified by the WHO not as a virus but as a disease: coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the Virus was identified as “severe acute respiratory syndrome” coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
Video; The World Economic Forum was a partner in The 201 Simulation.
Video Produced by the World Economic Forum in association with the 201 John Hopkins Simulation
Two weeks after the virus had been formally identified by the PRC (Jan 7, 2020), a vaccine for the novel coronavirus was announced by CEPI at the Davos World Economic Forum, January 20-24, 2020.
Michel Chossudovsky, September 18, 2020, November 25, 2020
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The tendency is towards a Worldwide lockdown spearheaded by fear and media disinformation. Currently, hundreds of millions of people Worldwide are under lockdown.
What is the next step in the evolution of the COVID-19 Crisis?
The lead entity for the novel coronavirus vaccine initiative is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) an organization sponsored and financed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Note the chronology: The development of the 2019 nCoV vaccine was announced at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) a week prior to the official launching by the WHO of a Worldwide Public Health Emergency (January 30) at a time when the number of “confirmed cases” Worldwide (outside China) was 150 (including 6 in the US).
The pandemic was launched by the WHO on March 11. And five days later, barely covered by the media, the first tests involving human volunteers were conducted in Seattle on March 16.
CEPI is seeking a “monopoly” role in the vaccination business the objective of which is a “global vaccine project”, in partnership with a large number of “candidates”. It announced funding for its existing partnership with Inovio and The University of Queensland (Australia). In addition, CEPI confirmed (January 23) its contract with Moderna, Inc. and the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been instrumental in waging the fear and panic campaign across America: “Ten Times Worse than Seasonal Flu”.
According to a report of the WHO pertaining to China’s epidemic (which has currently been resolved):
The most commonly reported symptoms [of COVID-19] included fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath, and most patients (80%) experienced mild illness. Approximately 14% experienced severe disease and 5% were critically ill. Early reports suggest that illness severity is associated with age (>60 years old) and co-morbid disease. (largely basing on WHO’s assessment of COVID-19 in China)
Screenshot The Hill, March 19, 2020
The Central Role of CEPI
CEPI is dealing simultaneously with several pharmaceutical companies. The Moderna- NIAID in all likelihood is slated to implement the COV-19 vaccine in the US.
On January 31st, the day following the WHO’s official launching of the global public health emergency and Trump’s decision to curtail air travel with China, CEPI announced its partnership with CureVac AG, a German-based biopharmaceutical company. A few days later, in early February, CEPI “announced that major vaccine manufacturer GSK would allow its proprietary adjuvants— compounds that boost the effectiveness of vaccines — to be used in the response”. (The pandemic was officially launched on March 11)
There are many “potential vaccines in the pipeline” with “dozens of research groups around the world racing to create a vaccine against COVID-19”.
In turn the EU and the US are currently competing for the vaccine markets on behalf of powerful pharmaceutical conglomerates, with the European Commission “offering up to €80 million in financial support to the CureVac AG” after it was reported that Trump “was attempting to secure exclusive access to a COVID-19 vaccine it is developing”, under the auspices of NIAID headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The October 2019 Coronavirus Event 201 Simulation Exercise
The coronavirus was initially named nCoV-19 by CEPI and the WHO: exactly the same name as that adopted in the WEF-Gates-John Hopkins Event 201 (2019-nCov) pertaining to a coronavirus simulation exercise held in Baltimore in mid October 2019.
The Event 201 John Hopkins simulation addressed the development of an effective vaccine in response to millions of cases (in the October 2019 simulation) of the 2019 nCoV. The simulation announced a scenario in which the entire population of the planet would be affected. “During the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases [in the simulation] increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.”
The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.
The COV-19 Global Vaccination Program
CEPI (on behalf of Gates-WEF, which funded the simulation exercise) is currently playing a key role in a large scale (global?) vaccination program in partnership with biotech companies, Big Pharma, government agencies as well as university laboratories.
The foregoing statement by CEPI was made nearly two months prior to the official declaration of a pandemic on March 11.
“We’re having conversations with a broad array of potential partners”. And critical to those conversations is: What’s the plan to make very large quantities of vaccine within a time frame that is potentially relevant to what people seem to be increasingly certain will be a pandemic, if it isn’t already there? …” [Richard Hatchett, CEPI CEO in interview with stat.news.com]. …
The underlying focus is to develop a global vaccine.
And part of that was doing a global survey of manufacturing capacity to think about where we wanted to plant the manufacturing of any successful products we were able to bring forward.
Of significance, Hackett confirmed that the project to develop a vaccine commenced not only prior to the discovery and identification of the coronavirus (January 2020) but several months prior to the October 2019 simulation exercise.
“We did that in the last year or so. … We are using the information that we have collected and have that team now thinking about opportunities for scaling vaccines of various different types. That is a work in progress. For some of the technologies the tech transfer [to a manufacturer] may be something that could be done in a time frame that was pertinent to the epidemic, potentially.
I think it is going to be really important to engage those folks who have access to really substantial production capacity. And having the big producers at the table — because of their depth, because of their experience, because of their internal resources — would be very, very important.
The candidate vaccines will be very, very quick. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID [who has been spreading panic on network TV], is out in public as saying he thinks the clinical trial for the Moderna vaccine may be as early as the spring. (emphasis added)
What is unfolding in real life is in some regards similar to the October 2019 simulation exercise at John Hopkins. The scenario is how to produce millions of vaccine shots on the presumption that the pandemic will spread.
The CEPI sponsored vaccine conglomerates had already planned their investments well in advance of the global Worldwide health emergency (January 20th).
I [Hackett] think part of the general strategy is to have a large number of candidates. [and] you want to have enough candidates that at least some of them are moving rapidly through the process.
And then for each candidate, you need to ask yourself the question: How do you produce that? … [And] how are you going to get to that point with production at a scale that is meaningful in the context of a disease that is going to infect the whole of society? (Interview conducted by Helen Branswell, statsnews, February 3, 2020)
Moderna Inc
Moderna Inc based in Seattle is one of several candidates involved and supported by CEPI.
Moderna announced on February 24th the development of “an experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, known as mRNA-1273″. “The initial batch of the vaccine has already been shipped to U.S. government researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)” headed by Dr. Antony Fauci.
While Moderna Inc initially stated that the first clinical trials would commence in late April, tests involving human volunteers started in mid-March in Seattle: (bear in mind the pandemic was officially launched on March 11)
Some of the study’s carefully chosen healthy volunteers, ages 18 to 55, will get higher dosages than others to test how strong the inoculations should be. Scientists will check for any side effects and draw blood samples to test if the vaccine is revving up the immune system, looking for encouraging clues like the NIH earlier found in vaccinated mice.
“We don’t know whether this vaccine will induce an immune response, or whether it will be safe. That’s why we’re doing a trial,” Jackson stressed. “It’s not at the stage where it would be possible or prudent to give it to the general population.” (FOX news local)
CEPI’s nCoV-2019 Global Vaccine and the ID2020 Digital Identity Platform
While CEPI announced the launching of a global vaccine at the Davos World Economic Forum, another important and related endeavor was underway. It’s called the ID2020 Agenda, which, according to Peter Koenig constitutes “an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity”.
“The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity”. (Peter Koenig, March 2020)
The Founding Partners of ID2020 are Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) among others.
It is worth noting the timeline: The ID2020 Alliance held their Summit in New York, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”, on September 19,2020, exactly one month prior to nCov-2019 simulation exercise entitled Event 201 at John Hopkins in Baltimore.
Is it just a coincidence that ID2020 is being rolled out at the onset of what the WHO calls a Pandemic? – Or is a pandemic needed to ‘roll out’ the multiple devastating programs of ID2020? (Peter Koenig, March 2020)
ID2020 is part of a “World Governance” project which, if applied, would roll out the contours of what some analysts have described as a Global Police State encompassing through vaccination the personal details of several billion people Worldwide.
In the Wake of the Lockdown
The fear campaign will continue in the wake of the lockdown. Will the hardships of the economic and social crisis encourage people to get vaccinated?
To implement the Global Vaccine, the propaganda campaign must continue. The Truth must be suppressed. These are their “guidelines”, which must be confronted and challenged.
The main actors including CEPI will require the firm endorsement of the WHO (which they control), a green light from the scientific community as well bold statements by corrupt politicians.
Moreover, they will have to suppress information and analysis on the features of the virus, how it can easily be cured (without a vaccine), which is currently the object of debate by virologists and physicians in several countries including the US. In recent developments, hydroxychloroquine is being used to treat patients in both Europe and North America. Big Pharma is intent upon suppressing evidence on how COVID-19 can be cured. The media is complicit. It is not informing the public.
Remember the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic when Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology compared the H1N1 pandemic to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic while reassuring the public that the latter was more deadly. (CBC: Get swine flu vaccine ready: U.S. advisers)
Based on incomplete and scanty data, the WHO Director General predicted with authority that: “as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population.” (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009).
It was a multibillion bonanza for Big Pharma supported by the WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan.
“Swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren’t successful.” (Official Statement of Obama Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009).
There was no pandemic affecting 2 billion people… Millions of doses of swine flu vaccine had been ordered by national governments from Big Pharma. Millions of vaccine doses were subsequently destroyed: a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, an expenditure crisis for national governments.
There was no investigation into who was behind this multibillion fraud. Several critics said that the H1N1 Pandemic was “Fake”
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO’s motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg,has declared thatthe “false pandemic” is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.” (Michael Fomento, Forbes, February 10, 2010)
Michael Fomento concludes:
Even within the agency, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology in Munster, Germany, Dr. Ulrich Kiel, has essentially labeled the pandemic a hoax. “We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources [$18 billion so far] in terms of public health,” he said.
They’re right. This wasn’t merely overcautiousness or simple misjudgment. The pandemic declaration and all the Klaxon-ringing since reflect sheer dishonesty motivated not by medical concerns but political ones.
Unquestionably, swine flu has proved to be vastly milder than ordinary seasonal flu. It kills at a third to a tenth the rate, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Data from other countries like France and Japan indicate it’s far tamer than that.
COVID-19 is Déjà Vu. Lets not be taken in again.
We are currently in a Lockdown, We have time to reflect. There are important lessons to be learnt from the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic is far more serious and diabolical than the 2009 H1N1. The COV-19 pandemic has provided a pretext and a justification for destabilizing the economies of entire countries, impoverishing large sectors of the World population. Unprecedented in modern history.
And it is important that we act cohesively and in solidarity with those who are victims of this crisis. People’s lives are in a freefall and their purchasing power has been destroyed. What kind of twisted social structure awaits us in the wake of the lockdown?
Can we trust the World Health Organization (WHO) and the powerful economic interest groups behind it. The answer is obvious.
Can we trust the main actors behind the multibillion dollar global vaccination project?
Can we trust the Western media which has led the fear campaign? Disinformation sustains the lies and fabrications. Can we trust our “corrupt” governments? Our national economy has been devastated.
This is an act of “economic warfare” against humanity.
In a case of what must be called incriminating timing – the facts established after official conclusions and reprisals were declared – the scientists and experts of Porton Down, the UK’s leading chemical weapons research facility, declared their extensive investigations in to the nerve agent used in the attempted murder of double agent Skripal and his family in Salisbury have concluded the country of origin is unidentifiable. By now most people have realised that, by proxy, the government, its agents in the media, are decidedly wrong, and not unintentionally, deliberately misleading the public in order to justify escalating a diplomatic crisis with Russia, the centre of which are punitive sanctions including the expulsion of 60 diplomats.
And consider the fact the subsequent day’s BBC bulletin at six o’clock made no attempt to redress its consistent, manifold errors reporting on the Skripal case and instead featured, to diversionary fanfare, a routine hip operation for Prince Phillip as a leading story. I roll my eyes every time every tragedy is declared a false flag by theorists who generate more fear and confusion than knowledge, more heat than light, but history tells us government conspiracies are real, and it’s beginning to look solid that this was one of them.
The government and its agents in media built their analysis dominantly on a foundation of selective hearing and selective presentation of cherry picked intelligence combined with sabrerattling rhetoric of anti Russian snarking; the hallowed mutual detente between Russia and the West following the downfall of the USSR isn’t sacred enough in May and Johnson’s eyes to be deemed untouchable.
Their behaviour decidedly has violated a norm which has kept international relations more stable, more peaceable since 1991 and which, having been forfeited by this government now for whatever cynical, narrow, self serving reasons, is fast being supplanted by the old norm of aggression and retrenchment of diplomacy.
Of course much of detente is public show and we, as the saying goes, kept up the Cold War through diplomacy, “warfare by other means.” We spar with Putin often, but this time, something is different. This time we took aim at a state and government who, regardless of how brutal, how thoroughly rotten its methods to propel and sustain the position of its political star, is still innocent and in the early stages itself of dealing with and investigating a crime and trauma against one of its citizens through whom the UK, itself known to deploy gruesome, underhanded tactics against declared enemies, strategic threats, has launched a sabrerattling campaign based on no credible knowledge.
Through Skripal’s case the UK state has slung dirt at an easy target who, media savvy, laugh at and welcome these stories and get them under their own thumb because it helps Putin’s own propaganda. You only need basic knowledge of international relations to know that Putin will do everything to be seen, either through genuine terror or desperately through the illusion of it, as a fearful, omnipotent dictator leading the chase followed by the West, who can cow anyone standing in opposition to his cause.
The government and media’s vacation from the truth was deeply disturbing, and its hasty action to impose sanctions without recourse to due process of allowing time to mature facts and conclusions indicative of a preplanned affair on the books for some time. This was a false flag and time may vindicate the Russians, for the facts, as they blossom, have ever more incriminated the UK as the predictable cardboard cutout villains.
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It is not often that one can agree with the pronouncements made by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, but his tweeted comment on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh suggesting that the incident “…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” was both restrained and reasonable. Or it was at least so until sentence two, which was clearly intended to attack Donald Trump and praise the incoming Joe Biden administration, which Brennan just might be seeking to join.
Bearing in mind that John Brennan was the guiding hand behind President Barack Obama’s kill lists of Americans who were marked for death by drone it is difficult to understand what moral high ground he seeks to occupy in the slaying of Fakhrizadeh. Brennan, who was a leading critic of Trump and who may have led the clandestine effort to undermine his election and term in office, subsequently found himself in an exchange of tweets with Republican Senator from Texas Ted Cruz which degenerated into a trading of insults. Cruz responded “It’s bizarre to see a former head of the CIA consistently side with Iranian zealots who chant ‘Death to America.’ And reflexively condemn Israel. Does Joe Biden agree?” This produced a riposte by Brennan that “It is typical for you to mischaracterize my comment. Your lawless attitude & simple-minded approach to serious national security matters demonstrate that you are unworthy to represent the good people of Texas.”
The assassination of Fakhrizadeh, the “father of Iran’s nuclear program,” took place on a road near the town of Absard to the east of Tehran. According to initial accounts, the Iranian scientist, who has long been targeted by name and in public fora by Israel, was traveling in an SUV together with his wife plus bodyguards and a driver. Initial reports suggested that there was a Nissan truck parked on the opposite side of the road loaded with what appeared to be wood, though it may have turned out that the wood was concealing a bomb which may have been triggered by a signal from a surveillance satellite. The bomb was detonated to disable Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle before an attack on the car by five or six gunmen with automatic weapons who had emerged from a vehicle following the SUV began, again according to initial reports, including reporting by eye witnesses. The Iranian official news agency FARS is now claiming, however, that the attack was carried out by a remote controlled machine gun concealed on the truck, which subsequently exploded, and no human attackers were involved. It is presumed that the bodyguards and driver were killed in the exchange. Fakhrizadeh was badly wounded and died in hospital shortly thereafter. Photos of the SUV reveal shattered windows, blood streaks, and numerous bullet holes as well as other damage from what may have been the bomb.
Iranian news agencies are now reporting that at least one of the attackers has been arrested, and if that is true he will surely be made to talk regarding what he knows. They are also reporting that two of the assailants were killed in the exchange with the bodyguards, which, if true, means they will possibly be identified. Clearly, the attack was well planned, was able to employ considerable resources, and was based on intelligence that would be very hard to obtain, particularly as the Iranian government was taking steps to protect Fakhrizadeh, to include details of his travels.
The killing comes just two weeks after intelligence officials confirmed that Al Qaeda’s second-highest leader Abdullah Ahmed Abdullahwas shot dead together with his daughter by alleged Israeli supplied assassins on a motorcycle on August 7th. The hit was reportedly carried out at the request of the United States based on Abdullah’s claimed involvement in the 1998 deadly attacks on two U.S. Embassies in East Africa. The claim that Iran has been harboring al-Qaeda is already being used by the Trump White House to justify increased pressure on Iran and it might possibly even serve as part of a casus belli.
The two assassinations are not linked except perhaps in terms of sending a message to high level Iranians that they are not safe even in their own country even when they are given bodyguards. The claim that Fakhrizadeh was in charge of a secret Iranian weapons program, made regularly by Israel and the U.S., is not generally believed by most authorities. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which nuclear armed Israel is not, and its facilities are subject to regular unannounced inspections.
Likewise, the killing of Qods Force commander General Qassem Soleimani in January in a U.S. drone attack was intended more regarding sending a message concerning possible consequences of reckless behavior than it was about actually killing one man. Whatever programs Fakrizadeh and Soleimani were involved in will continue without them. Nevertheless, assassination of Iranians linked to the country’s former and current nuclear program has been Israeli policy since 2010. As many as a dozen Iranian scientists and technicians reportedly have been killed. So-called “targeted killings” have been a regular feature of Israel’s “national defense” strategy. In addition to the Iranians, at least seventy Palestinians have been assassinated.
Though Israel has clearly ordered the assassinations, it is generally believed that the actual preparation for the attacks have been carried out by Mojahedin e Khalq or MEK, a Marxist cult that came into prominence at the time of the Iranian revolution against the Shah. It is generally regarded as a terrorist group that once was virulently anti-American and killed a number of U.S. officials. MEK is a curious hybrid creature in any event in that it pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians. At the same time, it is greatly loved by the Washington Establishment which would like to see the Mullahs deposed and replaced by something more amenable to western and Israeli worldviews.
MEK is run like a cult by its leader Maryam Rajavi, with a number of rules that restrict and control the behavior of its members. One commentary likens membership in MEK to a modern-day equivalent of slavery. The group currently operates out of a secretive, heavily guarded 84-acre compound in Albania that is covertly supported by the United States, as well as through a “political wing” front office in Paris, where it refers to itself as the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
MEK, which is financially supported by Saudi Arabia, stages events in the United States in Europe where it generously pays politicians like John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani and Elaine Chao to make fifteen-minute speeches praising the organization and everything it does. It’s paying of inside the Beltway power brokers proved so successful that it was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Hillary Clinton even though it had killed Americans in the 1970s. MEK also finds favor in Washington because it is used by Israel as a resource for anti-Iranian terrorism acts currently, including assassinations carried out in Tehran. Israel, in fact, directs most terrorist acts carried out by MEK inside Iran.
So those are the players and, at first glance, one might reasonably come to the Ockham’s razor conclusion, i.e. that Israel ordered MEK to kill Fakhrizadeh, an order which was then executed. But that would be to ignore some of the politics currently playing out in Washington. First of all, Israel would not have carried out the high-level assassination without the consent of the White House. Indeed, U.S. intelligence resources might well have played a key role in locating the Iranian scientist. Second, the Trump Administration has clearly adopted a policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran, which has included strangling the country’s economy through sanctions, condoning Israeli attacks in Syria and elsewhere, and destabilizing moves, to include assassinations, designed to make the nation’s leadership both vulnerable and nervous. It is the application of an Israeli strategic doctrine referred to as “Campaigns Between Wars,” meaning constant aggression to erode an enemy’s ability to fight without actually crossing a line that would start a shooting war.
A direct role by the Trump Administration in the assassination should not be ruled out as it is clearly seeking to harden Iranian antipathy towards any new comprehensive arms control or nuclear agreement with the incoming Biden team. Trump himself reportedly raised the possibility of bombing Iran earlier this month, though he was talked out of it by his national security team, but the Israeli Army meanwhile is on alert in case of an American attack. There are confirmed reports that B-52 bombers, capable of deploying the 30,000 pound penetrator bombs that can destroy targets deep underground, have been sent to the Middle East, presumably to Qatar where the U.S. has its principal airbase in the region. They would presumably be used against Iran’s main nuclear development site at Natanz.
Israel is in a strong position right now. Iran has significant military resources to respond to the killing, including the drones and missiles it developed and used in September 2019 to devastate the state-owned Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia. But if it does react robustly to the assassination and sparks a conflict that inevitably would include the United States, it would be a war that Bibi Netanyahu has long sought, destroying Iran at what he hopes would be minimal cost to Israel. If Iran does not respond, Israel will no doubt push the White House to be even more aggressive in its remaining time in office while hardliners within Iran will also demand an end to any agreements with western powers. Taken together, that would make sure that any attempt by the Biden administration to engage diplomatically with Iran would fail. The ultimate provocation by the United States would, of course, be to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Unthinkable? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is already reporting that “U.S. President Donald Trump has more than a month before he leaves the White House, and on his way out he could set the world on fire. In starting this conflagration, it seems as though he plans to strike every match in the box. Standing beside him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be more than happy to lend him a lighter.”
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Putting aside the relics of past Cold War theatrics, Pakistan has been consistently struggling to advance peace and justice in the world. The struggle though has intensified. Pakistan currently experiences unprecedented pressure from the conservative Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as the United States, to accept the Apartheid State of Israel. The Pakistani people would never succumb to this pressure. They have always stood in solidarity with the Palestinians and the Kashmiris, and no amount of coercion now is going to diminish their resolve. There is hardly a more pro-Palestinian population than the Pakistanis.
The matter should dare not have even arisen before Islamabad, about normalizing ties with a state that militarily occupies, brutalizes, and prevents justice to an occupied people. Israel has effectively destroyed any iota of a ‘peace process,’ has expanded settler-colonization of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem and ruthlessly displaced the Palestinians for decades. The Gaza Strip has been converted into an ‘open air prison,’ regulating all aspects of the lives of these people who are subject to routine Israeli bombardment and massacres. The ‘normalization’ then is that of deep injustice, sheer violence, ceaseless land theft and constant humiliation.
Indeed, Palestine is a symbol of an ongoing struggle for justice and dignity in a world where oppression of the weak reigns strong. Pakistan cannot bow down to these pressures if it is to maintain the moral authority to stand against any form of oppression, including critically that of India’s in Kashmir. The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, cannot follow the morally bankrupt path of his predecessors. He would be morally accountable to the Pakistani population, as well to the Palestinians, and everyone who has struggled for decades to end this oppression.
Islamabad not only has to take into consideration the wishes of its own people, but also the objective interests of the state. There are many compelling reasons as to why Islamabad should stand firm on its stance. There are several Gulf countries, like Qatar and Kuwait, that are already standing strong and are not moving an inch towards recognition.
Even if one puts aside the question of the inherent immorality of Israeli barbarism towards the suffering Palestinians, from the point of view of pure self-interested realpolitik – there is nothing to be gained by Pakistan here. Giving into these threats is not going to benefit Pakistan. It is certainly not going to give any leverage to Pakistan with Israel or India, rather, the vice versa will occur. It is laughable to believe that recognizing Israel will engender Tel Aviv to jeopardize its deeply intimate friendship with Modi to appease a groveling Islamabad. The costs for Islamabad, on the other hand will be incalculable: Pakistan will be at an utter loss in maintain its legitimate moral high ground on the issue of Kashmir.
The pressures to normalize, too, will most likely be short-lived. It is just matter of standing strong till it dies out. Once Biden takes over as the President of the United States on January 20, the pressure will diminish. In addition, there are also many powerful countries which do not support recognition. These include Turkey and Iran.
These threats are mostly hollow or far-exaggerated, and lack substance. The power of this UAE-MBS (Saudi Arabia)-Tel Aviv axis is over-stated as their inability to weaken Qatar or defeat the Yemeni resistance can testify. At the same time, Pakistan has diplomatic and security levers against the UAE and Saudi Arabia that it can use strategically to cripple the not-so-subtle configuration of protective military power Islamabad has in the Gulf.
Even if we take some of these possible threats to Pakistan on face value, and assume that Pakistani workers will be expelled from Saudi Arabia and potentially the UAE, the loss of remittances is likely to be harmful to the Pakistan economy in the short-term, but also be harmful to the UAE and Saudi Arabia – since it will take at least 1-2 years to replace those workers. It is to be noted that the percentage of these workers is quite high. In the medium and the long run, the return of these workers to Pakistan could reverse the brain drain, reduce reliance on remittances, and create opportunities within the country itself. This could potentially create a policy window for greater reform. Pakistan can use this moment of humiliating pressure and threats by ostensibly ‘brotherly Muslim countries’ as a catalyst to re-set Pakistan’s foreign, domestic and socio-economic relations, as well as re-build its economic structure.
The Pakistani state needs to unequivocally proclaim that recognition of the current Israeli Apartheid state is simply off the table. Prime Minister Imran Khan needs to mobilize the people and take the National Assembly into confidence about the intense pressures being put on Islamabad to submit to this act of treachery. The military high command should also be informed and persuaded of the dangers to Pakistan at this critical junction by being on the wrong side of history once again — when in fact we thought we had finally escaped those archaic and reactionary winds that blew us in that direction the previous decades of Pakistan’s short history as a nation.
Defending Palestine’s rights in the current conjuncture, means resisting the Palestinization of Kashmir, defending Kashmir’s rights means preventing Pakistan from becoming Balkanized like Palestine. Moral imperatives, religious obligation, Islamic solidarity and national interests are all aligned to reject any move to recognize Tel Aviv. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of not only the Palestinians, but country of Pakistan, its people, its future – and would also be a rejection of our faith.
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Dr. Junaid S. Ahmad is the Director of the Center for Muslim World Studies, and is Professor of Religion and Global Politics in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Die Rädelsführer der weltweiten Verschwörung gegen uns Bürger haben die Realisierung ihrer diabolischen Pläne einer Neuen Weltordnung NWO und einer Eine-Welt-Regierung nach chinesischem Vorbild sowie eines „Großen Neustarts“ und einer „Vierten Industriellen Revolution“, der Verschmelzung physischer und digitaler Identität (Transhumanismus), bereits weiter vorangetrieben als wir ahnen. WEF-Gründer Klaus Schwab bestätigt dies. (1) Viele Mitbürger fragen sich, wie kam das Böse nur in die Welt und wieso kann eine kleine Clique finsterer Gestalten die ganze Welt ins Chaos stürzen, wo der Mensch doch von Natur aus gut sei. Da man die Mahnrufe des menschlichen Gemeinschaftsgefühls zwar unterdrücken, jedoch nie gänzlich ausmerzen kann, wird die soziale menschliche Natur langfristig wieder die Oberhand gewinnen. Das Geschenk der Evolution besteht nämlich im sittlichen Bewusstsein des Einzelnen, in der Einsicht in die Verantwortung aller gegenüber allen. Wenn wir weiterhin die Gemeinschaftsgefühle pflegen und verstärken und den Menschen besser in das soziale Gefüge einordnen, dann wird der Wille zur Macht und Herrschaft über andere durch die sozialen Bindungen eingeschränkt werden – und das Böse wird nicht siegen.
Wie kann der Vater von zwei Kindern Babys erschießen?
Im Klappentext des Buches von Bernd Greiner „Krieg ohne Fronten. Die USA in Vietnam. I have died in Vietnam. But I have walked the face of the moon” steht geschrieben :
“Die Bilder der zerstörten Dörfer, der von Napalm verbrannten Kinder, von einem Land, auf das mehr Bomben geworfen wurden als auf alle Schauplätze des Zweiten Weltkrieges zusammen, prägen die Erinnerung an den Vietnamkrieg und die Jahre zwischen 1965 und 1975. In einem 1969 von CBS ausgestrahlten Interview schilderte der US-Soldat Paul Meadlo das Massaker von ‚My Lai’ so:“
„Ich hatte meine Waffe auf Automatik gestellt. Deshalb kann man nicht sagen, wie viele man erschossen hat. Ich habe vielleicht 10 oder 15 von ihnen erschossen.“ –
„Männer, Frauen und Kinder?“ – „Männer, Frauen und Kinder.“ –
„Und Babys?“ – „Und Babys.“ –
„Sind Sie verheiratet?“ – „Ja.“ –
„Kinder?“ – „Zwei.“ –
„Wie alt?“ – „Der Junge ist zweieinhalb, das Mädchen anderthalb.“ –
„Dann drängt sich doch die Frage auf, wie der Vater von zwei kleinen Kindern Babys erschießen kann.“ – „Keine Ahnung. Es kommt halt vor.“ –
„Wie viele Menschen wurden an diesem Tag erschossen?“ – „Ich schätze an die 370.“ (2)
Der renommierte amerikanische Sozialpsychologe Philip Zimbardo erläutert in seinem Buch „Der Luzifer-Effekt. Die Macht der Umstände und die Psychologie des Bösen“ (2008), wie wir alle für die Versuchungen „der finsteren Seite“ anfällig sind. Er führt aus, dass situative Kräfte und gruppendynamische Prozesse zusammenwirken können, um aus anständigen Männern und Frauen Ungeheuer werden zu lassen. (3) Karl Marx hat – gestützt auf Ludwig Feuerbach – bereits lange vor ihm die Auffassung vertreten, dass das Bewusstsein des Menschen durch die gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse geprägt wird (Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein).
Alfred Adler: „Der Mensch ist von Natur aus gut“
„Der Mensch ist von Natur aus nicht böse. Was auch ein Mensch an Verfehlungen begangen haben mag, verführt durch seine irrtümliche Meinung vom Leben, es braucht ihn nicht zu bedrücken; er kann sich ändern. Er ist frei, glücklich zu sein und andere zu erfreuen.“ (4)
Diese Aussage des Begründers der Individualpsychologie ist eine unumstößliche Erkenntnis der wissenschaftlichen Psychologie: Der Mensch ist ein naturgegeben soziales, auf die Gemeinschaft seiner Mitmenschen ausgerichtetes und vernunftbegabtes Wesen mit einer natürlichen Neigung zum Guten, zur Wahrheitserkenntnis und zum Gemeinschaftsleben. Diese Eigenschaft hilft ihm, die Gesetze der Natur beziehungsweise das Naturrichtige besser zu erkennen. Vor diesem Menschen müssen wir auch keine Angst haben. Er möchte in Freiheit und Frieden leben, ohne Gewalt und Krieg – so wie wir alle.
Das „Naturrecht“, ein „von der Natur gegebenes Recht“ sagt, dass es etwas gibt, was von Natur aus recht ist. Es unterscheidet sich vom durch Menschen gesetztes, sogenanntes „positives Recht“ dadurch, dass es dem Menschen allein schon deshalb zusteht, weil er Mensch ist. Da es durch keinen Machthaber oder wie auch immer gearteten Mehrheitsbeschluss geschaffen wird, ist es vorstaatliches Recht. Das heißt, die Gesetze eines Staates müssen sich kritisch am Naturrecht messen lassen. Das Wissen darüber, was von Natur aus recht ist, macht es möglich, totalitären Ideologien und Diktaturen von einem festen mitmenschlichen Standpunkt aus entgegenzutreten und ein Gefühl der Empörung gegen Unrecht und Unmenschlichkeit zu empfinden. (5)
Wie ist das Böse in die Welt gekommen?
Der religiöse Mythos des Abendlandes hat den Ursprung der Gewalt und des Bösen auf den Sündenfall der ersten Menschen zurückgeführt. Aus dem Paradies durch eigene Schuld vertrieben, wussten sie, was gut und was böse sei. In einer anderen Version des religiösen Denkens wird geschildert, wie Gott die Welt in aller Vollkommenheit geschaffen habe. Doch dann lehnte sich einer seiner Engel gegen ihn auf; es sei Satan gewesen, der dazu verurteilt wurde, Fürst der Unterwelt zu sein. Seitdem wirken die Macht des Lichtes und die der Finsternis gegeneinander; ihr Kampf beherrsche den Gang der Weltgeschichte. Doch dieser religiöse Mythos trägt zur Erklärung des Bösen nichts bei.
Im 19. Jahrhundert hat Charles Darwin die züchtende und auswählende Macht des „Kampfes um das Dasein“ in der Tierwelt erkannt, der das „Überleben des Tüchtigsten“ sichert. Einige seiner Schüler übertrugen diese Erkenntnis auch auf die Menschenwelt. Sie proklamierten das Gesetz des Daseinskampfes und glaubten, die Triebfeder des Fortschritts gefunden zu haben. Der Kampf aller gegen alle würde die menschliche Rasse reinigen und erhöhen. Diese Ideologie wurde vom Wirtschaftsleben des Manchester-Liberalismus übernommen. Doch sie ist ebenso falsch wie inhuman. Die Forschung hat inzwischen erwiesen, dass im Tierreich nicht nur der „struggel for life“, sondern auch das Prinzip der gegenseitigen Hilfe wirksam ist.
Der russische Anarchist, Geograph und Schriftsteller Fürst Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) beobachtete sowohl die Natur als auch die Naturwesen und bezog seine Erkenntnisse auf den Menschen. In seinem Buch „Die gegenseitige Hilfe in der Tier- und Menschenwelt“ (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution) schreibt Kropotkin, dass in Natur und Gesellschaft keineswegs nur ein Kampf aller gegen alle stattfinde, sondern dass ebenso das Prinzip der „gegenseitigen Hilfe“ vorherrsche. Diejenigen Lebewesen, die dieses Prinzip umsetzen, würden erfolgreicher überleben. (6) Die höher organisierten Lebewesen würden in Verbänden, Gruppen und Herden leben. In ihnen habe sich ein Herdeninstinkt herausgebildet, der gelegentlich die Arterhaltung über die Selbsterhaltung stelle.
In der Menschenwelt spielen soziale Gefühle und gemeinschaftliche Verbundenheit sicherlich eine ebenso große Rolle wie der Wille zur Macht und der Eigennutz. Da der Mensch frei ist, sein Leben selber zu gestalten, hat er die Möglichkeit der Wahl; sie ist die Möglichkeit des Guten und Bösen. Der Mensch ist nicht von vorneherein bestimmt, Wolf oder Lamm zu sein. Wenn der Mensch das Böse tut, so hat er sich zuvor dafür entschieden; er hat es zuvor gewollt. Die Brutalität auf menschlicher Ebene ist nicht Schicksal, sondern die Entscheidung für das Böse. Doch warum hat sich der Mensch in der Menschheitsgeschichte immer wieder für das Böse entschieden?
Der Ursprung des Bösen liegt nicht in der menschlichen Natur, sondern in den Daseinsbedingungen, die der Mensch zu Beginn der Zeiten auf der Erde vorgefunden hat. Da er den übermächtigen Naturgewalten hilflos und verlassen ausgeliefert war, muss er große Angst vor der Welt empfunden haben. Diese Angst schuf die Illusion der Götter, die sich hilfreich der Menschen annehmen sollten. Sie entfesselte auch eine starke Aggression, indem die feindselige Umwelt die Kampfbereitschaft ständig in Atem hielt.
Es lag nahe, den anderen Menschen als potentiellen Feind zu empfinden. Hinzu kamen die Schwierigkeiten der Nahrungsbeschaffung, die unter Umständen den Kampf um den Futterplatz notwendig machten. So erschien die Gewalt als ein Ausweg, als ein Mittel, das eigene Leben zu schützen und zu bewahren. Die Verlockung zur Gewalttätigkeit war umso größer, als die sozialen Bindungen noch keinen festen Zusammenhalt ergaben. (7)
Das menschliche Gemeinschaftsgefühl und der Geist der Verantwortlichkeit müssen die Gewalttätigkeit beenden
„Das Streben nach Herrschaft“, schreibt Alfred Adler, der Begründer der Individualpsychologie, „ist ein verhängnisvolles Blendwerk und vergiftet das Zusammenleben der Menschen. Wer die Gemeinschaft will, muss dem Streben nach Macht entsagen!“ Die „tiefste Idee aller Kultur“ sei die endgültige Erhebung des Gemeinsinns zur leitenden Idee. Die Kulturentwicklung besteht im Wesentlichen darin, dass sich die Stimme des Menschheitsgewissens mehr und mehr Gehör verschafft und dass der Geist der Verantwortlichkeit an die Stelle der Gewalttätigkeit tritt. Aus der Einsicht um die Zusammengehörigkeit aller, die Menschenantlitz tragen, erwuchsen die Lehren der sittlichen Führer der Menschheit, die Weisheit des Laotse, das Gebot der Nächstenliebe und die unzähligen Formen des gesellschaftlichen Lebens und Verhaltens, in denen der Gemeinsinn zum Ausdruck kommt.
Unter uns Menschen spielen soziale Gefühle und gemeinschaftliche Verbundenheit ganz gewiss eine ebenso große Rolle wie der Wille zur Macht und der Eigennutz, denn der Mensch ist zur Hingabe und Selbstaufopferung fähig. Alle unsere Bestrebungen in der Welt und der Wissenschaft sollten das Leitmotiv haben, in Zukunft einen Menschentypus hervorzubringen, für den – wie es Alfred Adler formulierte – Gemeinschaftsgefühl und mitmenschliche Verbundenheit ebenso selbstverständlich sind wie das Atmen. (8)
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Erziehungswissenschaftler und Diplom-Psychologe.
6. Kropotkin, P. (2011). Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Tier- und Menschenwelt. Grafenau; englischer Originaltitel: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
7. a.O.; Leakey, R. E. / Lewin, R. (1978). Wie der Mensch zum Menschen wurde. Neue Erkenntnisse über den Ursprung und die Zukunft des Menschen. Hamburg
8. Ansbacher, H. L. / Antoch, R. F. (Hrsg.). (1982). Alfred Adler. Psychotherapie und Erziehung. Ausgewählte Aufsätze; Band I: 1919-1929. Frankfurt
While President Trump continues to maintain that the presidential election was marred by massive fraud, the mainstream press continues to maintain that Trump’s charges are “false” and “baseless” and that his allegations are damaging trust in America’s democratic electoral system.
Actually, however, it’s the other way around: It’s the mainstream press, owing to its extreme deferential attitude toward the Washington, D.C., establishment, that has severely damaged trust in America’s democratic system.
Of course, this isn’t the first election in which the losing side has charged that he has been cheated out of his victory. In virtually every election cycle, there is at least one political candidate that charges that he lost because of fraud committed by the other side.
But let’s face it: Sometimes there is fraud. As I have pointed out before (see here and here and here), there is now no doubt that Lyndon Johnson employed fraud to win the 1948 U.S. Senate race in Texas against popular Governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson told a South Texas crony who controlled some South Texas counties to keep his poll results open in case Johnson needed extra votes to win. When the vote-counting was over, Johnson did need a few more votes to win. He called his crony, a man named George Parr, and Parr ordered a local election judge to produce 200 additional votes for LBJ, which then gave Johnson the win. Many years later, the election judge confirmed that he had done this. The 200 signatures on the voter list were all in the same ink, and the names of the 200 voters were in alphabetical order. If Johnson had lost the election, he never would have become vice-president or president, which truly made him a truly illegitimate president in U.S, history, one who ended up sending tens of thousands of American men to their deaths in a senseless war thousands of miles away in Southeast Asia.
The problem with the mainstream press in the Trump-Biden race is the speed by which it concluded that the 2020 presidential election was not marred by fraud. It reached its conclusion before the election was even over.
Now, it’s very possible that Trump’s assertions are, in fact, false and baseless, but how could the mainstream press know that before or immediately after the election without even the semblance of any press investigation into the allegations?
Perhaps the mainstream press believed that the stealing of an election through fraud is simply inconceivable. But how can it be inconceivable when it is undisputed that LBJ won his Senate race through fraud? If it happened once, doesn’t that negate the idea of inconceivability?
It certainly can’t be that the press immediately conducted an investigation and found no evidence of fraud in the Trump-Biden race because the mainstream press reached its conclusions immediately and never conducted any independent investigation.
And that’s the core of the problem — the mainstream press’s deference to the Washington, D.C., establishment by automatically embracing its official position that the election was honest and above board.
In a free society, the citizenry necessarily depend on an independent press to keep government honest. The citizenry simply lack the resources and time to investigate official misconduct. Thus, they necessarily depend on a vibrant, dynamic independent press to do this job for them.
That’s where the mainstream press has failed America and has severely damaged America’s democratic system. It has essentially become a loyal lapdog of the Washington, D.C., establishment, never daring to challenge it, question, or investigate it at a fundamental level.
That’s why people don’t trust the mainstream press. That’s one big reason why mainstream papers have lost massive numbers of subscribers ever since the Internet came into existence. People know that when it comes to confronting political power with truth, they are going to find it on the Internet rather than in the mainstream press.
In the meantime, the mainstream press cannot figure out why people don’t blindly accept its pronouncements. They cannot figure out why people have been leaving them in droves and going to the Internet for answers. They cannot figure out why people don’t trust them or believe what they say.
Now, I’m not saying that the mainstream press should go out and investigate every charge of fraud that every loser of a political race makes. What I am saying is that when there are extreme anomalies with respect to votes, as there have been in the Trump-Biden race, it is incumbent on an independent press to severely scrutinize them. Extreme anomalies, of course, don’t equate to fraud but they do equate — or should equate — to the need for extremely careful scrutiny to ensure that there is no fraud.
An independent press is in the best position to perform such an investigation. If America were characterized by such a press, it would actually strengthen, not weaken, America’s democratic system because then people would be more assured that elections were not marred by fraud. When you instead have a passive and deferential press that automatically defers to the D.C. establishment, immediately concludes that the election is on the up and up despite extreme anomalies, and just pokes fun of the losing candidate for asserting fraud, that tends to make people suspicious, distrustful, and cynical,
Of course, the passive and deferential nature of the mainstream press has been going on for much longer than the 2020 presidential race. One of the best examples is the Kennedy assassination. From the time Kennedy was declared dead, the mainstream press has always automatically accepted the official version of events of the national-security establishment, never daring to conduct independent investigations into whether that version was false and baseless.
In the 1970s, after the House Select Committee on Assassinations met to reinvestigate the assassination, several enlisted men came forward with a remarkable story. They said that they had secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue almost 1 1/2 hours before the body was officially reintroduced into the morgue. They said they they had been sworn to secrecy on the weekend of the assassination and had been forced to sign secrecy oaths. Their superiors threatened them with extreme punitive action if they ever disclosed what they had seen or done.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that was something that the mainstream press would find worth investigating? Were these enlisted men lying? Were they just making up a story? Why would the do that? Why would the national-security establishment be sneaking the president’s body into the morgue? Why was the military in charge of the autopsy?
Wouldn’t just one mainstream investigative reporter want to investigate such things? Well, if he did, he would be fired by every mainstream paper in the land, owing to the passivity and deferential attitude that the mainstream press have had about the Kennedy assassination since the beginning.
In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board discovered the existence of a Marine Sergeant named Roger Boyajian, who told the ARRB that it was his team that secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue at 6:35 p.m., almost 1 1/2 hours before the official entry time of 8 p.m. Boyajian even produced a copy of his official report that he had submitted to the military immediately after the assassination weekend in November 1963, a report that the military had kept secret. HIs statement and his report confirmed what those enlisted men has said back in the 1970s.
Did the mainstream press then conduct an investigation? Not on your life. It was still considered verboten for any mainstream news media outlet to investigate any aspect of the Kennedy assassination.
When Congress enacted the law that established the ARRB, someone slipped a provision into the law that prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. It was a prohibition that was strictly enforced by the ARRB board of trustees. Now, wouldn’t you think that some enterprising, independent-minded mainstream investigative reporter would want to find out why anyone would want to keep the ARRB from investigating things it discovered while securing the release of long secret records of the national-security establishment? Nope. It just didn’t happen.
The ARRB also discovered the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer. She was a chief petty officer in charge of the Navy’’s lab at its photography center in Washington, D.C. She had a top secret security clearance and worked closely with the White House on both classified and unclassified photographs.
Spencer told the ARRB a remarkable story. She said that on the weekend of the assassination, she had been asked to develop, on a top-secret basis, the photographs of President Kennedy’s autopsy, which had been conducted by the U.S. national-security establishment on the night of the assassination. Spencer had kept her secret for more than 30 years.
Spencer was shown the official autopsy photographs in the record. After closely examining them, she said: No, those are not the autopsy photographs I developed. The ones I developed showed a massive exit-sized wound in the back of the president’s head. The photographs in the official record show the back of the president’s head to be fully intact.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be enough to get the mainstream press to send an investigative reporter out to get to the bottom of this, especially given that Spencer’s testimony about the massive exit-sized wound in the back of Kennedy’s head matched the statements of the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, along with the treating nurses, two FBI agents, a Secret Service agent, and others? Wouldn’t you think that fraudulent autopsy photographs would be enough to generate such an investigation?
Nope. The position of every mainstream paper in the country has always been: “Stay away from the Kennedy assassination. That’s what the national-security establishment wants and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
The ARRB made another remarkable discovery. It discovered that there were two separate brain examinations in the Kennedy autopsy. At the first one, the president’s brain was “sectioned,” which meant cutting it like a loaf of bread to study the trajectory of the bullet that hit the president in the head. At the second brain exam, the brain was fully intact.
There is one big problem: Once a brain is sectioned, it cannot reconstitute itself. That means that the second brain exam had to have involved a brain that wasn’t the same brain at the first exam.
Wouldn’t you think that the mainstream press would find this worth investigating? Nope. And it’s not like they weren’t aware of the two brain exams. The Washington Post and the Associated Press both carried stories on the ARRB’s discovery (see here and here). Unfortunately, as astounding as it is, the discovery of a fraudulent brain exam was not enough to induce the mainstream press to follow up with aggressive investigations to get to the bottom of this.
Many years ago, the American people discovered the existence of Operation Mockingbird, a secret illegal operation of the CIA to convert journalists in the mainstream press into CIA assets and operatives. Mainstream journalists who were asked to serve loved it and considered it a great honor to secretly serve the national-security establishment.
Today, the CIA need not bother because the entire mainstream press has willingly made itself a de facto asset of the national-security state. The American people have been left without an independent mainstream press whose mission is to keep the government honest and instead rely on people on the Internet to perform that service. In the process, the mainstream press has done a tremendous disservice to the American people and to America’s democratic processes by abdicating its responsibility to be a watchdog, not a lapdog, to the Washington, D.C., establishment.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.
“When wearing a mask, most of us breathe with our upper chest muscles and with our mouth open,” states Children’s Minnesota on their website.
While the hospital admits this can cause “increased stress and anxiety” there are other more long-lasting concerns.
According to a paper, in the peer-reviewed journal General Dentistry, “children’s whose mouth breathing is untreated” may develop the following deformities:
long, narrow faces
narrow mouths
high palatal vaults
misalignment between the teeth of the two dental arches
gummy smiles
As well as “many other unattractive facial features.”
Yet, how many children are being taught how to breathe while wearing a mask? Instead, many (if not most) are sucking in air through their mouth, as an instinctual reaction to the rise in carbon dioxide. This lowers the position of their tongue, which is key factor in normal facial development.
As the author of the paper, Dr. Yosh Jefferson, DMD, states: “If mouth breathing is treated early, its negative effect on facial and dental development and the medical and social problems associated with it can be reduced or averted.”
Instead, face masks may very well exacerbate the problem leading to a generation of deformed children. Because, it’s not just the mouth breathing. How will a growing face and two developing ears respond to a muzzle stretched around it for hours each day?
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors. He currently writes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Daily Briefs — an email based newsletter that questions and exposes the contradictions in the COVID-19 narrative and control measures. He is also writing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Brits could be denied entry into bars, theaters, and sporting events if they can not prove they’ve received vaccination against COVID-19, according to the head of the United Kingdom’s vaccine rollout.
Nadhim Zahawi, the newly appointed minister to oversee the UK’s COVID-19 vaccine deployment, says the proof of vaccination could be held on a phone application already used in Britain as part of the government’s track and trace system.
“… I think you’d probably find that restaurants and bars and cinemas and other venues, sports venues, will probably also use that system as they’ve done with the app,” Zahawi told the BBC on Monday.
“The sort of pressure will come both ways: from service providers – who will say ‘look, demonstrate to us that you have been vaccinated’ – but also we will make the technology as easy and accessible as possible.”
Zahawi explained that while the vaccine should be voluntary, he believes Brits will find that most businesses will require proof of vaccination before providing service.
“I think people have to make a decision but I think you’ll probably find many service providers will want to engage in this in the way they did with the app,” he said.
In September, England’s National Health Service launched a smart phone app that alerts users if they have spent more than 15 minutes around or have been within six feet of another user who has tested positive for COVID-19. It also warns users if they have been in a pub, restaurant, or other kind of hospitality venue at the same time as someone who has symptoms.
Zahawi denied to provide any deadlines on when the vaccine would hit the UK market but did express hope that it would be available before Christmas.
The Ministers “new normal” outlook comes on the heels of Australia’s largest airline announcing that it is considering mandating a COVID-19 vaccinations for travelers who wish to fly with them internationally.
“We are looking at changing our terms and conditions to say, for international travelers, that we will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft,” CEO of Qantas airline, Alan Joyce said in an interview with Aussie news last week.
“I think that’s going to be a common thing talking to my colleagues in other airlines around the globe.” Joyce would add.
Perhaps coming as no surprise, both Nadhim Zahawi and Alan Joyce have ties to the World Economic forum, the organization behind the “Great Reset” agenda which has the stated goal of molding a post COVID world to its vision.
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Joseph Jankowski is the Editor-at-Large for Planet Free Will. His works have been published by major news publications such as ZeroHedge.com and Infowars.com.
Featured image: Nadhim Zahawi | Image Credit: Number 10/Flickr
Peruvian Doctors for the Truth have issued a short video, explaining the enormous risks of the three different types of vaccines currently on the market in Peru, two of them are genetically engineered in one way or another and will affect the human DNA. Humans would become “transhumans”, like genetically modified corn, soja, cotton – and more.
The breaking part of this news is that there is yet another medication, called IVERMECTIN, that has been FDA-approved and already successfully applied in Southern Peru, in Argentina and elsewhere. See this.
Ivermectin, a medication known for over 60 years, has been applied successfully for many infectious diseases – including river-blindness, throughout Africa. It was highly recommended by WHO, at a time when WHO still had a human touch.
The third vaccine would be recreating a weaker version of the virus in your body. The more traditional type of vaccine. But none of them has been seriously tested.
The trans-genetic ones have not even been animal-tested. And the few voluntary tests that were carried out in particular with the Moderna vaccine have left disastrous results. While none of the 40 robust volunteers died, all of them had serious side effects, serious health problems and had to be hospitalized – and the long-term consequences are not known. How they turn around now, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, claiming up to 95% efficiency. What a joke!!! Never tested – and lying to the people, so they will buy into the fraud.
The long-term consequences of any of these vaccines are not known, will not be known for a long time. And nobody can sue any of the pharma companies, they are “immune” under the 1986 Supreme Court ratified National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa- 1 to 300aa-34).
Pharma companies can never be sued for any damage their vaccines cause.
One of the long-term effects of covid-19 vaccines, may be reduced virility for men and infertility for women. This fits the Bill Gates, Rockefeller et al eugenics agenda (Bill Gates TedTalk in 2010 – “Innovating to Zero”). Provides an early flavor of what the Gates and Co. clan have in mind for humanity.
In 1993, WHO announced a “birth-control vaccine” for “family planning”. Published research shows that by 1976 WHO researchers had conjugated tetanus toxoid (TT) with human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) producing a “birth-control” vaccine. Conjugating TT with hCG causes pregnancy hormones to be attacked by the immune system. Expected results are abortions in females already pregnant and/or infertility in recipients not yet impregnated. Repeated inoculations prolong infertility. Currently WHO researchers are working on more potent anti-fertility vaccines using recombinant DNA. WHO publications show a long-range purpose to reduce population growth in unstable “less developed countries”. By November 1993 Catholic publications appeared saying an abortifacient vaccine was being used as a tetanus prophylactic. In November 2014, the Catholic Church asserted that such a program was underway in Kenya. Three independent Nairobi accredited biochemistry laboratories tested samples from vials of the WHO tetanus vaccine being used in March 2014 and found hCG where none should be present. In October 2014, 6 additional vials were obtained by Catholic doctors and were tested in 6 accredited laboratories. Again, hCG was found in half the samples. Subsequently, Nairobi’s AgriQ Quest laboratory, in two sets of analyses, again found hCG in the same vaccine vials that tested positive earlier but found no hCG in 52 samples alleged by the WHO to be vials of the vaccine used in the Kenya campaign 40 with the same identifying batch numbers as the vials that tested positive for hCG. Given that hCG was found in at least half the WHO vaccine samples known by the doctors involved in administering the vaccines to have been used in Kenya, our opinion is that the Kenya “anti-tetanus” campaign was reasonably called into question by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association as a front for population growth reduction.
The Kenyan Government sued WHO – which is immune for lawsuits, but had to officially apologize.
Since Bill Gates and his Foundation are behind this obsessive vaxxer craze, and they are supported by the very institution – a UN organization- imagine!!! – WHO – for which Bill Gates is one of the biggest single funders, it is not unlikely that Covid vaccines may contain similar sterilization components – the effect of which may not be seen immediately – but only over time, and especially, the weakened virility and fertility may be passed on genetically to future generations.
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Back to the three vaccines the medical doctor of Peru’s Doctors for the Truth mentions. The vaccine based on replication of a weaker virus version – has not been tested either. The Tuberculosis vaccine – a similar type – was tested for 17 years before it was applied large-scale. The next-in-line for SARS was tested during 5 ½ years.
We are talking about enormous risks – and with the fear – the extreme fear instilled in people – it is likely that there will be long lines when the vaccines become available – and people think after being inoculated with one of them, they will be home free and life will go back to “normal”.
It will not. Be aware. Life will not go back to normal.
Only our fierce resistance may eventually bring a return to something similar to what we once knew as normal. But it will be a new “normal” made by the people, for the people; and NOT by an ultra-rich elite – of which the 193 UN member governments and their respective parliaments were coopted as being part – bought, coerced, bribed. Not a “new normal”, as proposed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – The Great Reset (Klaus Schwab – July 2020), or the IMF, The Great Transformation.
This is just the beginning. If you let yourself be inoculated by these treacherous politicians – like Boris Johnson – who orders vaccination to start next week, i.e. in the week beginning on 7 December 2020 – with a vaccine that has not been tested, you may be in for nefarious surprises.
People, victims of the British warp-speed vaccination program, have no idea what is being jabbed into their bodies. This man, PM of the UK – is inhuman. The harm he may inflict on the British population is criminal. BoJo, one who serves a higher order, but for nothing does he serve the people of the country that he had been chosen to serve, the people who pay his salary. If so far, the vaccination is not forced or compulsory, it is nevertheless heavily encouraged with fear propaganda.
The solution? – First, No Fear; second: Civil disobedience. Boycott he vaccination program, demand being treated by alternatives, like Ivermectin – and there are many others – many of which are banned by governments. They were forced to ban them, by the very higher “orders” that are in bed with the pharma industry, for profit greed – trillions of dollars – to be made by the vaccine campains.
Say no to vaccination en masse, and count on herd immunity which is the logical next phase – and no vaccine is needed. Do not get bogged-down in fear.
Stand up for your rights. Fear is killing your self-esteem.
Your civil and human rights cannot, I repeat, CANNOT, be obliterated as the reigning 193 UN member governments are intent of doing. See also The Secret Agenda of the World Bank and the IMF.
Unfortunately, there is hardly a government left that is not coopted, coerced or bought by these so-called higher and darker forces, these forces that might very much be related to what people like Joe Biden and Barak Obama refer to when they warn repeatedly – like a ritual – We are facing a Very Dark Winter.
No constitution in the world gives them the right to eviscerate your civil and human rights. Do not follow the mainstream media – look for alternative information – and when you see that such information suddenly disappears from the internet, from youtube, or is being “fact-checked”, you know that you are on the right track.
There has never in recent history been a time of more censoring of more “fake news” planted by the very mainstream media.
Be aware.
Be self-assured.
Do not give in to Fear.
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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.
Included in his plans to fight the coronavirus, presumptive president-elect Joe Biden has pledged to appoint “a fully empowered supply commander in charge of filling in the gaps” in the production and supply of “essential” items needed to fight the virus.
On his website, Biden elaborates on his plan, declaring that his “supply commander” would “take command of the national supply chain for essential equipment, medications, and protective gear.”
This very Soviet-sounding position is necessary, Biden insists, because “We can no longer leave this to the private sector.”
Leaving aside Biden & Company’s laughable assertion that America’s medical industry reflects any sort of unfettered laissez-faire operation, his proposal for a centralized, command-driven medical “supply chain” under the direction of a government commander betrays a stunning ignorance of the complex and interconnected patterns of production and exchange that make up the economy.
As George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux explained in an April 2020 article published by the American Institute for Economic Research,
“The first reality is that, in our modern economy nearly every productive enterprise is connected to every other productive enterprise. This connectedness is the phenomenon alluded to by the term ‘supply chain.'”
But this term, however, is “highly misleading,” Boudreaux wrote. “Today’s economy is not a series of supply chains running side by side with each other, each largely distinct from, and independent of, the others.”
“Instead of a collection of distinct supply chains,” he continued, “our modern economy is a single globe-spanning web of interconnectedness. Within this web every output is the product of countless inputs and each kind of input typically is used to produce countless different kinds of outputs.”
The complex nature of this process of deploying a dizzying array of scarce resources with alternative uses for use in different finished products does not occur in cleanly separated and hermetically sealed “supply chains.”
“This web of interconnectedness—the complexity of which is beyond human comprehension—is indispensable for our modern mass prosperity. Yet its existence—its ‘everything-is-connected-in-some-way-to-everything-else’ reality—means that there are no objective and clear lines separating ‘critical supplies’ from ‘uncritical’ ones,” Boudreaux added.
When asking what will be considered “essential equipment, medications, and protective gear,” we must further examine the inputs required to produce these items.
Read highlighted how the pencil requires cedar wood from Oregon, which in turn requires saws and trucks and ropes to transport the raw wood to the sawmill in California, which itself requires steel for its equipment along with electricity, land, concrete, and countless other inputs. And that is just the tip of the iceberg for the wood. The lead itself, the rubber for the eraser, and the lacquer for the finish each likewise require many inputs from around the world, all necessary in order to complete the pencil.
Now imagine just how complex the processes are for producing medications, medical equipment, and protective gear. And the inputs required to produce these items will also require other inputs. If we trace back the process far enough for items like medicine and medical equipment, the list of raw materials, capital goods, labor, etc. that need to be diverted from other uses, the list would become unfathomable—certainly so for any single “supply commander.”
Moreover, not just the production process itself, but also the distribution and storage of such “essential” goods to hundreds of millions of people and healthcare workers across the nation will require substantial resources.
Importantly, nearly every resource directed to the production and distribution of these “essential” items will have alternative uses for which they will no longer be available. The result is that the “supply chains” for each and every one of these alternative products and inputs will be impacted, for instance in the form of shortages or inflated prices.
How many of these impacted items would also be considered “essential,” but for noncovid purposes? For instance, other lifesaving medicines or critical medical supplies, or food supplies? And to what degree?
No central authority could possibly know this; indeed, the top-down “supply commander” model could end up doing more harm than good.
Too often, progressives and other interventionists view an unhampered market as “chaos,” something needing to be reined in under the direction of a wise central planner, or “commander.””
However, the impulse to default to centralizing economic decision-making over such a complex ecosystem as the economy is a threat not just to our liberty, but to our well-being. The need for market prices based on private property to freely function and efficiently direct scarce resources to where they are needed most becomes even more critical in times of emergency.
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Bradley Thomas is creator of the website EraseTheState.com, and is a libertarian activist and writer with nearly fifteen years of experience researching and writing on political philosophy and economics.
On the face of it, an alliance between Turkey and Ukraine seems like a rather odd creation, yet one that may surprisingly durable simply because neither country has anywhere else to turn. What practically dooms them to a partnership if not an outright alliance is their unenviable geographic and geopolitical position of occupying the strange “no man’s land” between Russia, NATO, and the Middle East. It is, of course, largely a predicament of their own making.
Ukraine, with considerable Western backing and encouragement but nevertheless mostly through efforts of a faction of its own oligarchy, opted out of the Russia-centered network of loose alliances, trade partnerships, and other forms of cooperation that were mutually beneficial to the two in the previous two decades.
But that defection was not rewarded by the West in a way the likes of Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk, Avakov, Parubiy, and other architects of the Maidan coup expected. Merely being stridently anti-Russian did not prove enough to warrant a shower of US and European cash, only onerous IMF loans which moreover come with conditions Kiev elites are in no hurry to abide by. EU foreign policy chief Josef Borrel lecturing Kiev that the European Union is not an “ATM machine” delivered that point loud and clear: Kiev is supposed to privatize whatever crown jewels its economy still has (at this point, mainly agricultural land), fight corruption of its own elites and facilitate the corruption of Western elites. Joseph Robinette Biden Junior is hardly the only Western politician with a talentless son in need of a lucrative sinecure. There are entire Western companies eager to participate in the thinly disguised plunder that the privatization of Ukraine’s economy will inevitably turn into.
A Kiev court’s recent decision to declare the country’s anti-corruption institutions that were painstakingly stood up with considerable aid and tutelage from Western governments, down to screening appropriately-minded individuals for the job, looks as if it were calculated to send a middle-finger gesture to Borrel in terms even dense EU bureaucratic hacks will comprehend. Pro-EU newspapers like Kiev Post were quick to label this a “death of democracy”, presumably with the intent of interesting EU and NATO in sponsoring yet another Maidan since last one seems not to be delivering the goods. The expected shower of Western weaponry has not materialized, probably because NATO is afraid to give Ukraine so much aid that it will risk a full-blown war with Russia.
Erdogan’s Turkey, by contrast, is in process of de-facto opting out of NATO, though neither Turkey nor the alliance itself want to take the final step of severing ties completely. NATO membership is still beneficial to Turkey. While the procurement of Russian S-400 air defense systems angered NATO and US in particular, resulting in the expulsion of Turkey from the F-35 program and the cancellation of F-35 sale to the country, evidently Ankara hopes that by nominally remaining in the alliance it limits NATO and EU sanctions that would no doubt be far harsher if it were totally out of the alliance. The hope that Turkey, possibly post-Erdogan, will yet see the error of its ways and return to the fold, prevents NATO from adopting harsher stances that would definitely push Ankara away. Yet the drifting apart is unmistakable, and the animosity between Turkey’s leaders and their Western European counterparts is so intense as to beggar belief. While Germany’s Merkel is careful to tip-toe around the issue due to fear of another wave of refugees as well as unrest among the large Turkish diaspora in Germany, France’s Macron seems to have taken a personal affront to Erdogan’s suggestion he might need a mental evaluation and will press the issue of EU sanctions against Turkey at future Union summits.
But from Turkey’s perspective, getting a cold shoulder from the EU is par for the course. Its own migration to the geopolitical gray zone of Eurasia was motivated by EU’s failure to admit Turkey as a member after decades of leading it by the nose and promising neighborhood in some nebulously distant future right after Hell froze over. Like Ukraine, Turkey was not seeking EU membership because of some mythical “shared values”. It, too, saw EU as an ATM machine that would shower Turkey, one of the poorest countries on the continent, with development assistance and moreover allow Turks to freely travel and work throughout the Union. Needless to say, neither of these prospects appealed to pretty much any European country, no matter how close or distant it was geographically. So after decades of leading Turkey by the nose, EU politely put an end to the charade citing problems with Turkey’s democracy. Thus snubbed, Erdogan opted to chart an independent course and appears to be finding a similarly snubbed oligarch clique in Kiev looking for ways the two countries could extract mutual benefit from their isolated status.
There are plenty of those to be had, as limited as Ukraine’s and Turkey’s resources are, compared to such patrons as EU, NATO, US. Faced with isolation and even a potential ban on arms exports, Turkey has a strong incentive to exploit the resources of the Ukrainian defense industry and engage in some export substitution in case vital supplies are no longer available from the West. Canada’s and Austria’s ban on exports of optronics and engines needed for the Bayraktar TB2 combat drones means Ukraine’s ability to provide substitutes would be most welcome. Ukraine, for its part, would not be against deploying a huge attack drone fleet of its own in the hopes of replicating Azerbaijan’s successful offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh on the Donbass, though there Ukraine’s drones would probably run afoul of Novorossiya’s air defenses in the same way Turkish drones were brought to heel over Idlib.
Turkey’s Altay main battle tank is likewise little more than an assembly of components imported from other countries, particularly Germany. Since Germany has already placed a ban on export of powerpacks and transmissions for the Altay, Turkey has been casting about for replacements, looking as far as China. Whether Ukraine’s developments in this realm can be adopted to rescue the Altay project remain to be seen. However, the Oplot powerpacks and transmissions can probably be adapted to Altay use, resulting in Turkey realizing its goal of a home-grown MBT. Ultimately, the greater the contribution of Ukrainian defense industry to Turkey’s military modernization, the more freedom of action it would bestow on Turkey and make it less dependent on other foreign sources of military hardware who can exert influence over Turkey simply by withholding future technical support.
If the United States were to follow up on the F-35 expulsion with a ban on servicing Turkish F-16s which form the mainstay of its airpower, the result would be crippling of the country’s air combat capabilities that drones cannot compensate for and which would be sorely missed in any confrontation with another comparable power like Greece. Turkey’s efforts to develop an indigenous fighter aircraft would benefit from Ukraine’s technological contributions and its own interest in indigenous aircraft designs. For Ukraine, the relationship would be an opportunity to acquire NATO-compatible weaponry with the caveat that it would have to pay in full for every last drone, either with cash or in kind. Turkey’s economic situation is not so strong as to allow largesse in the form of free military aid to anyone.
Mitigating against the long-term development of what Zelensky referred to as “strategic partnership” with Turkey is the erratic behavior of Erdogan who seeks to dominate any and all partners and tries to see how far he can push before the partners push back. This practice has led to the confrontations in Syria, Libya, and eastern Mediterranean. Ukraine, in contrast to Russia, France, and even Greece, is hardly in a position to push back. The most dangerous aspect of Turkish politics, from Ukraine’s perspective, is the ideology of Pan-Turkism that just might transform Ukraine’s Tatar community into a proxy force for Turkey right inside Ukraine, adding yet another fissure to the already fractured political picture. On the plus side, Erdogan does not appear interested in “combating corruption” in Ukraine, though that does not preclude the possibility Turkey’s military collaboration with Ukraine might not cost Ukraine dearly, though not to the same extent as EU-promoted privatization efforts.
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In his first words as President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinkensaid, “we have to proceed with equal measures of humility and confidence.” Many around the world will welcome this promise of humility from the new administration, and Americans should too.
Biden’s foreign policy team will also need a special kind of confidence to confront the most serious challenge they face. That will not be a threat from a hostile foreign country, but the controlling and corrupting power of the Military-Industrial Complex, which President Eisenhower warned our grandparents about 60 years ago, but whose “unwarranted influence” has only grown ever since, as Eisenhower warned, and in spite of his warning.
The Covid pandemic is a tragic demonstration of why America’s new leaders should listen humbly to our neighbors around the world instead of trying to reassert American “leadership.” While the United States compromised with a deadly virus to protect corporate financial interests, abandoning Americans to both the pandemic and its economic effects, other countries put their people’s health first and contained, controlled or even eliminated the virus.
Many of those people have since returned to living normal, healthy lives. Biden and Blinken should listen humbly to their leaders and learn from them, instead of continuing to promote the U.S. neoliberal model that is failing us so badly.
As efforts to develop safe and effective vaccines begin to bear fruit, America is doubling down on its mistakes, relying on Big Pharma to produce expensive, profitable vaccines on an America First basis, even as China, Russia, the WHO’s Covax program and others are already starting to provide low-cost vaccines wherever they are needed around the world.
Chinese vaccines are already in use in Indonesia, Malaysia and the UAE, and China is making loans to poorer countries that can’t afford to pay for them up front. At the recent G20 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned her Western colleagues that they are being eclipsed by China’s vaccine diplomacy.
Russia has orders from 50 countries for 1.2 billion doses of its Sputnik V vaccine. President Putin told the G20 that vaccines should be “common public assets,” universally available to rich and poor countries alike, and that Russia will provide them wherever they are needed.
The U.K. and Sweden’s Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine is another non-profit venture that will cost about $3 per dose, a small fraction of the U.S.’s Pfizer and Moderna products.
From the beginning of the pandemic, it was predictable that U.S. failures and other countries’ successes would reshape global leadership. When the world finally recovers from this pandemic, people around the world will thank China, Russia, Cuba and other countries for saving their lives and helping them in their hour of need.
The Biden administration must also help our neighbors to defeat the pandemic, and it must do better than Trump and his corporate mafia in that respect, but it is already too late to speak of American leadership in this context.
The neoliberal roots of U.S. bad behavior
Decades of U.S. bad behavior in other areas have already led to a broader decline in American global leadership. The U.S. refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol or any binding agreement on climate change has led to an otherwise avoidable existential crisis for the entire human race, even as the United States is still producing record amounts of oil and natural gas. Biden’s climate czar John Kerry now says that the agreement he negotiated in Paris as Secretary of State “is not enough,” but he has only himself and Obama to blame for that.
Obama’s policy was to boost fracked natural gas as a “bridge fuel” for U.S. power plants, and to quash any possibility of a binding climate treaty in Copenhagen or Paris. U.S. climate policy, like the U.S. response to Covid, is a corrupt compromise between science and self-serving corporate interests that has predictably proved to be no solution at all. If Biden and Kerry bring more of that kind of American leadership to the Glasgow climate conference in 2021, humanity must reject it as a matter of survival.
America’s post-9/11 “Global War on Terror,” more accurately a “global war of terror,” has fueled war, chaos and terrorism across the world. The absurd notion that widespread U.S military violence could somehow put an end to terrorism quickly devolved into a cynical pretext for “regime change” wars against any country that resisted the imperial dictates of the wannabe “superpower.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell privately dubbed his colleagues the “fucking crazies,” even as he lied to the UN Security Council and the world to advance their plans for illegal aggression against Iraq. Joe Biden’s critical role as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was to orchestrate hearings that promoted their lies and excluded dissident voices who would have challenged them.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencztold NPR only a week after the crimes of September 11th, “It can never be legitimate to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done. We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others.” Neither Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine, Libya, Syria or Yemen was responsible for the crimes of September 11th, and yet U.S. and allied armed forces have filled miles upon miles of graveyards with the bodies of their innocent people.
Like the Covid pandemic and the climate crisis, the unimaginable horror of the “war on terror” is another calamitous case of corrupt U.S. policy-making leading to massive loss of life. The vested interests that dictate and pervert U.S. policy, in particular the supremely powerful Military-Industrial Complex, marginalized the inconvenient truths that none of these countries had attacked or even threatened to attack the United States, and that U.S. and allied attacks on them violated the most fundamental principles of international law.
If Biden and his team genuinely aspire for the United States to play a leading and constructive role in the world, they must find a way to turn the page on this ugly episode in the already bloody history of American foreign policy. Matt Duss, an advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders, has called for a formal commission to investigate how U.S. policymakers so deliberately and systematically violated and undermined the “rules-based international order” that their grandparents so carefully and wisely built after two world wars that killed a hundred million people.
Others have observed that the remedy provided for by that rules-based order would be to prosecute senior U.S. officials. That would probably include Biden and some of his team. Ben Ferencz has noted that the U.S. case for “preemptive” war is the same argument that the German defendants used to justify their crimes of aggression at Nuremberg.
“That argument was considered by three American judges at Nuremberg,” Ferencz explained, “and they sentenced Ohlendorf and twelve others to death by hanging. So it’s very disappointing to find that my government today is prepared to do something for which we hanged Germans as war criminals.”
Time to Break the Cross of Iron
Another critical problem facing the Biden team is the deterioration of U.S. relations with China and Russia. Both countries’ military forces are primarily defensive, and therefore cost a small fraction of what the U.S. spends on its global war machine – 9% in the case of Russia, and 36% for China. Russia, of all countries, has sound historical reasons to maintain strong defenses, and does so very cost-effectively.
As former President Carter reminded Trump, China has not been at war since a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979, and has instead focused on economic development and lifted 800 million people out of poverty, while the U.S. has been squandering its wealth on its lost wars. Is it any wonder that China’s economy is now healthier and more dynamic than ours?
For the United States to blame Russia and China for America’s unprecedented military spending and global militarism is a cynical reversal of cause and effect – as much of a nonsense and an injustice as using the crimes of September 11th as a pretext to attack countries and kill people who had nothing to do with the crimes committed.
So here too, Biden’s team face a stark choice between a policy based on objective reality and a deceptive one driven by the capture of U.S. policy by corrupt interests, in this case the most powerful of them all, Eisenhower’s infamous Military-Industrial Complex. Biden’s officials have spent their careers in a hall of mirrors and revolving doors that conflates and confuses defense with corrupt, self-serving militarism, but our future now depends on rescuing our country from that deal with the devil.
As the saying goes, the only tool the U.S. has invested in is a hammer, so every problem looks like a nail. The U.S. response to every dispute with another country is an expensive new weapons system, another U.S. military intervention, a coup, a covert operation, a proxy war, tighter sanctions or some other form of coercion, all based on the supposed power of the U.S. to impose its will on other countries, but all increasingly ineffective, destructive and impossible to undo once unleashed.
This has led to war without end in Afghanistan and Iraq; it has left Haiti, Honduras and Ukraine destabilized and mired in poverty as the result of U.S.-backed coups; it has destroyed Libya, Syria and Yemen with covert and proxy wars and resulting humanitarian crises; and to U.S. sanctions that affect a third of humanity.
So the first question for the first meeting of Biden’s foreign policy team should be whether they can sever their loyalties to the arms manufacturers, corporate-funded think tanks, lobbying and consultant firms, government contractors and corporations they have worked for or partnered with during their careers.
These conflicts of interest amount to a sickness at the roots of the most serious problems facing America and the world, and they will not be resolved without a clean break. Any member of Biden’s team who cannot make that commitment and mean it should resign now, before they do any more damage.
Long before his farewell speech in 1961, President Eisenhower made another speech, responding to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
In his first year in office, Eisenhower ended the Korean War and cut military spending by 39% from its wartime peak. Then he resisted pressures to raise it again, despite his failure to end the Cold War.
Today, the Military-Industrial Complex is counting on a reversion to the Cold War against Russia and China as the key to its future power and profits, to keep us hanging from this rusty old cross of iron, squandering America’s wealth on trillion-dollar weapons programs as people go hungry, millions of Americans have no healthcare and our climate becomes unlivable.
Are Joe Biden, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan the kind of leaders to just say “No” to the Military-Industrial Complex and consign this cross of iron to the junkyard of history, where it belongs? We will find out very soon.
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The corporate media have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear.
Ever since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 the country has been warned about the dangers of fascism. It isn’t difficult to see why that is the case, as he banned people from mostly Muslim nations from entering the country, separated families seeking asylum, weakened an already frayed safety net, and undid the protections provided by a variety of government regulations.
The racist right wing was certainly ascendant during his administration, but the danger of fascism won’t leave Washington with Donald Trump. The obnoxious racist may be the public face of tyranny, but there is another danger coming from sectors of the Democratic Party. Their goal is to censor any points of view that undermine their neoliberal and imperialist narratives.
Bill Russo, deputy communications director for the Joe Biden campaign, publicly demanded that Facebook censor more often than it already does. He and others do so under the guise of preventing Trump from spreading misinformation, using the likes of Steve Bannon as a cover for something more sinister. They may accuse Facebook of “shredding the fabric of democracy,” but they are more interested in making sure that the small group of people who are actually leftists will have no platform with which to oppose Biden policies.
The corporate media have already made themselves clear by censoring the president himself. On November 5, 2020 Trump claimed to be a victim of election fraud at a White House news conference. Instead of allowing him to make his statement and then analyzing what he said, the television networks pronounced him a liar and cut away from his remarks.
Trump’s charges are unfounded, but the public should have heard him for themselves and made their own determination about the veracity of his words. But the corporate media are done with him and have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear. They are declaring themselves the arbiters of what information should be made accessible to the rest of the world.
These open attacks against Facebook do require the left to be discerning. Big technology social media platforms are certainly not our friends. They readily silence individuals and pages that question the establishment narrative. Black people risk being kicked off entirely if they utter any words white people may find offensive. But Facebook already buckled under Democratic Party pressure that was ginned up during the Russiagate hoax. They even accepted blame for a non-existent offense. The tale of Russian government memes throwing the election to Trump was false and a useful way to silence dissent and attack another country all at once. It isn’t hard to believe that they will again bend to an establishment that is now back in power.
While keeping Facebook’s history in mind, we must also see through the machinations of a new group of thought police who have made clear that they expect social media to bow to their dictates. That is exactly what Twitter did in censoring a recent news story that was unflattering to Hunter Biden. After protecting the Democratic candidate’s son, Twitter’s CEO showed contrition after the fact and claimed the decision was a mistake.
It isn’t just corporate media who are a danger here. There are individuals on the Biden transition team who have publicly stated their support for official propaganda. Richard Stengel is the team leader for the United States Global Agency, which includes Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Networks. In 2018 Stengel had this to say about official propaganda, “My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist. I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.” It should be noted that Stengel worked for the State Department during the Barack Obama administration and not that of fascist Trump.
It is clear that Biden will be the more effective evil in this regard. There will be no buffoons like Trump or Bannon spewing obvious hatred and nonsense who can be easily dismissed. Instead we will have well spoken operatives like Stengel, who think that propaganda isn’t so bad.
The people need their own platforms, like Black Agenda Report, that will dissect the lies and obfuscations of an administration greeted with a sigh of relief by millions of people weary of Trump and his policies. Already fossil fuel companies and Congress members who benefit from their largesse are on the transition team as are chemical industry representatives slated to go to the EPA. All will end up in the White House along with self-confessed propagandists. We must be ready to engage them all.
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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at patreon.com/margaretkimberley and she regularly posts on Twitter @freedomrideblog. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Ten chapters of the national Black Lives Matter organization are in open revolt against the individuals that have treated the mass movement as their personal vehicle for upward political, professional and financial advancement.
In 2013 three Black women social activist friends working in non-profit organizations in California invented the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter which, along with #Ferguson, became most identified with the mass movement that converged on Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Mike Brown, in August of 2014. Soon the friends created a non-profit pocket to gather funds for favored projects, dubbed the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. The BLMGNF became the principal beneficiary of millions of dollars in individual and corporate philanthropy, as the social movement broadly described as “Black Lives Matter” mounted the greatest challenge to the racist criminal justice system in the United States since the 1960s. Yet, the disposition of these funds has remained solely at the discretion of the three hashtag and foundation founders — Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi – and their designated operatives.
Ten chapters of the national Black Lives Matter organization are now in open revolt against the hashtag founders and their tightly controlled formations, demanding that the BLMGNF and the recently created Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee and BLM Grassroots be made financially and political “accountable.”
Over the past six years Black Agenda Report has often been critical of the “troika” that treats the mass movement as their personal vehicle for upward political, professional and financial advancement. We hope that the revolt of Black Lives Matter chapters will spark a deep and wide examination of the direction of the U.S.-based Black liberation movement and its relationship to the global struggle against racial capitalism and Euro-American imperialism. This crucial debate now begins in earnest with the “Statement from the Frontlines of the BLM ,” issued earlier this week by chapters in Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Hudson Valley, New York; Oklahoma City; Indianapolis; Denver; Vancouver, Washington; San Diego, California; and New Jersey. The statement appears below in its entirety:
It is Time for Accountability
It was recently declared that Patrisse Cullors was appointed the Executive Director to the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) Foundation. Since then, two new Black Lives Matter formations have been announced to the public: a Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee, and BLM Grassroots. BLM Grassroots was allegedly created to support the organizational needs of chapters, separate from the financial functions of BLMGN. We, the undersigned chapters, believe that all of these events occurred without democracy, and assert that it was without the knowledge of the majority of Black Lives Matters chapters across the country and world.
We became chapters of Black Lives Matter as radical Black organizers embracing a collective vision for Black people engaging in the protracted struggle for our lives against police terrorism.With a willingness to do hard work that would put us at risk, we expected that the central organizational entity, most recently referred to as the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) Foundation, would support us chapters in our efforts to build communally. Since the establishment of BLMGN, our chapters have consistently raised concerns about financial transparency, decision making, and accountability. Despite years of effort, no acceptable internal process of accountability has ever been produced by BLMGN and these recent events have undermined the efforts of chapters seeking to democratize its processes and resources.
In the spirit of transparency, accountability, and responsibility to our community, we believe public accountability has become necessary. As a contribution to our collective liberation, we must make clear:
Patrisse Cullors, as the sole board member of BLMGN, became Executive Director against the will of most chapters and without their knowledge.
The newly announced formation, BLM Grassroots, does not have the support of and was created without consultation with the vast majority of chapters.
The formation of BLM Grassroots effectively separated the majority of chapters from BLMGN without their consent and interrupted the active process of accountability that was being established by those chapters.
In our experience, chapter organizers have been consistently prevented from establishing financial transparency, collective decision making, or collaboration on political analysis and vision within BLMGN
For years there has been inquiry regarding the financial operations of BLMGN and no acceptable process of either public or internal transparency about the unknown millions of dollars donated to BLMGN, which has certainly increased during this time of pandemic and rebellion.
To the best of our knowledge, most chapters have received little to no financial support from BLMGN since the launch in 2013. It was only in the last few months that selected chapters appear to have been invited to apply for a $500,000 grant created with resources generated because of the organizing labor of chapters.This is not the equity and financial accountability we deserve.
We remain committed to collectively building an organization of BLM chapters that is democratic, accountable, and functions in a way that is aligned with our ideological values and commitment to liberation. We will move forward with transparency and expound on our collective efforts to seek transparency and organizational unity in a fuller statement in the near future. As we collectively determine next steps, we encourage our supporters to donate directly to chapters, who represent the frontline of Black Lives Matter.
A Fork in the Road for the Movement
Movements are comprised of many components — including timely hash tag purveyors like Garza, Cullors and Tomati. It is to be expected that the various elements that emerge from social upheaval will pursue their own class and professional interests, engendering vigorous debate over the direction and nature of struggle. Black Agenda Report views the chapters’ challenge to the troika’s self-serving monetization of the first mass resistance to the racist rule of rich white men since mass Black incarceration was imposed at the tail end of the Sixties, as both welcome and overdue. As BAR editor and columnist and Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka writes in this issue, the chapters that are “raising questions about BLM from the frontlines are doing so not out of a desire to destroy but to strengthen the movement by generating this discussion.” If the Cullors-Garza-Tomati trio treats the movement as their legal property, it is because the corporate state only recognizes property relations, not human and social rights and claims. The trio have parlayed their notoriety and the trust invested in them by grassroots activists to pull the movement into the matrix of big business philanthropy and corporate Democratic politics — the cemetery of people’s struggles. But the movement refuses to be bought or buried.
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BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].
While the administration of Donald Trump readies its exit from the White House and the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s use of American diplomatic cover and weapons alike has taken on a fevered pace as the Kingdom deepens the tragedy it has afflicted upon Yemen, where millions of forgotten people are struggling against a cold winter, starvation, epidemics, and the worst blockade in the modern era.
Since November 3, 2020, when the fifty-ninth quadrennial presidential election began followed by the widespread controversy, lawsuits, and recounts across several states, the oil-riched Kingdom has waged a scorched-earth campaign against the Yemeni districts of Marib and Al-Jawf, as well as border areas in Sana’a, Sadaa, Hajjah, Amran, and Hodeida.
On Friday, Saudi warplanes struck populated neighborhoods in Sana’a with at least 20 airstrikes One person was killed and dozens were injured and a number of purebred Arabian horses were killed in strikes that hit a military college near Suq Al-Rwada. Seven airstrikes hit government buildings located near water pumps.
Thousands of tons of western weapons, particularly from the United States, were also dropped on multiple directorates across the provinces of Sadaa, Marib, and al-Jawf as well as districts and provinces across the country.
The unjustified escalation, which came on the back of a brief period of hope that briefly preceded the U.S. pre-election, was not only a last-minute gift to Saudi Arabia from the Trump administration before he leaves the White House in January, but also served to prevent the advance of the Yemeni army supported by Ansar Allah (Houthis) and tribal fighters in the oil-rich province of Marib.
On the Yemen-Saudi border, an intense Saudi bombing campaign aims to force the remaining residents in the area to flee. Saudi Arabia seeks to establish buffer zones on the border inside Yemeni territory in anticipation of any developments made by the incoming U.S. administration after Riyadh failed to achieve that goal through indirect negotiations with Sana’a, sources told MintPress.
Yemen strikes back
In retaliation for Saudi escalation, the Yemeni army, and Ansar Allah targeted Saudi Arabia’s vital oil sector, striking an oil facility in the Kingdom’s Red Sea city of Jeddah. The facility was targeted by the high precision Quds-2 winged missile, a new generation of locally-made winged missiles that recently entered service after successful tests. In the wake attack, videos circulated on social media show a column of smoke rising from burning flames at the facility as sirens of emergency vehicles can be heard in the background.
Video: Social media footage of the aftermath of an alleged Quds-2 cruise missile attack by Houthi rebels in Yemen targeting an Aramco facility in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. pic.twitter.com/mzLRwG1PfM
The move just days before news was leaked that the British government secretly sent British soldiers to protect Saudi oil facilities in the wake of a similar attack in 2009 and occurred the day after the kingdom hosted a virtual summit of G20 nations.
The spokesman for Yemen’s Armed Forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, said in a statement in the wake of the attack that the Saudi oil facility was targeted in response to ongoing Saudi military operations and blockade. He warned foreign companies operating in Saudi Arabia “to avoid vital installations” which could be involved in ongoing operations.
The strike was meant to send a signal to both Saudi Arabia and Israel, according to officials in Sana’a. The strike against the Aramco facility, located more than 390 miles from Yemen’s border, underscores Yemen’s increasing ability to hit targets deeper inside Saudi Arabia with cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as drones. A high-ranking source in Sana’a told MintPress that “the consequences of any insane recklessness by Saudi Arabia, Israel, or the current U.S. administration in the lost time of Trump’s term will be dire to Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and the interests of their allies in the region.” When pressed, he gave no additional details.
“An explosion took place as a result of a terrorist attack by a projectile, causing a fire in a fuel tank at the petroleum products distribution terminal in the north of Jeddah,” the Saudi energy ministry said in a statement. On Tuesday, Abdullah al-Ghamdi, the manager of the North Jeddah Bulk Plant, told reporters during a tour of the facility that one of the 13 tanks used for diesel oil, gasoline, and jet fuel at the facility had been damaged and was out of service, adding “ the attack had been “similar to what happened at Khurais and Abqaiq.”
With super duper technical technology (zoom 500%) you can see the penetration mark I spoke of in the first tweet. Slightly reminiscent of the impacts seen at the Arqaiq last year. pic.twitter.com/cYRyynD0cl
As the kingdom’s policy since 2015, when its war began, Saudi Arabia sold the attack to the world as targeting international interests. The Kingdom went further and accused Ansar Allah of attacking an oil tanker in the Red Sea. A Maltese-flagged oil tanker managed by Greece was damaged due to an explosion near Shuqaiq in southwestern Saudi Arabia but Ansar Allah has not yet claimed responsibility for the incident. Prior to that, the Saudi-led coalition claimed on Tuesday that it had removed and destroyed five naval mines in the southern Red Sea.
On Sunday, 15 Saudi troops, including officers, were killed or injured in another retaliatory attack, this one marketing the Saudi-led coalition’s Tadawain Camp in Ma’rib, 20 kilometers east Sana’a, according to Brigadier Yahya Saree, the spokesman of the Yemeni Army. Saree said in a statement on Sunday that missile forces hit the Joint Operations Room of a coalition camp in Marib, killing eight Saudi troops and injuring seven. He added that Yemeni forces are observing enemy movements, and will target them wherever they are. In the wake of Saree’s announcement, Saudi state media announced that Saudi troops were killed in battle with no mention of where or when they were killed.
For his part, Muhammad Abd al-Salam, a spokesman for Ansar Allah, said that Saudi wailing following every painful retaliation is what is required. He added, “the international community has to pressure Saudi Arabia to stop the aggression and [the] blockade because the Yemeni people deserve to voice their suffering too.”
Yemen suffers from the world’s worst humanitarian sparked by five years of Saudi bombing and blockade. The humanitarian crisis has worsened this year as international donations have dried up and the Trump administration has suspended aid to the north of Yemen where most of the country’s population lives. The U.N. The Secretary-General warned last week that Yemen faces the worst famine in decades, saying that the country is in imminent danger and that without immediate action, millions of lives may be lost.
Trump’s parting gift
As the Trump administration gets ready to depart the White House, the Saudi-led Coalition is scrambling to get the last-moment boon by pushing the U.S. to designate Yemen’s most powerful resistance force, Ansar Allah, as a terrorist organization in a move that would not harm the “Houthis,” but would punish millions of innocent Yemenis already suffering from widespread malnutrition, starvation, and disease. ِ
According to media reports, the Trump administration is preparing to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization before leaving office in January. U.S. policy in Yemen has been a disgrace for the past five years, drawing ire on U.S. soil and from abroad, and few Yemenis were surprised that the Trump administration would enact such a policy on its way out the door after having already suspended aid to 80% of the population residing in the north of the country.
Designating Ansar Allah as a terrorist organization will make an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis even worse and impede the work of the many NGOs providing lifesaving assistance in the country. Almost certainly, the unexpected designation would prevent the critical delivery of food, medical supplies, and other items necessary to combat both COVID-19 and famine, according to international organizations.
“The lives of millions of vulnerable children in Yemen are already at risk—this policy will only deepen their suffering by further restricting humanitarian access to vulnerable communities. Recent evidence continues to point to a worsening malnutrition crisis for children,” said Janti Soeripto, the president and CEO of Save the Children. “Even if a humanitarian exemption is permitted, this designation will likely make reaching children and families more difficult and could also heighten security risks for our staff and hinder the fragile peace process.”
The designation will not only make it more difficult to reach a negotiated settlement to end the war but will put the whole region, particularly in the Red Sea, on the edge. For their part, Ansar Allah will not remain idle by while, as a number of Ansar Allah decision-makers told MintPress, “they see their relatives dying of starvation at a time when others, those who made the country to the worst place on the earth, are blessed with oil and freedom of navigation at sea.” That message, it seems, was delivered to Jeddah on the back of Ansar Allah’s newly minted Quds-2.
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Ahmed Abdul Kareem is a Yemeni journalist. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.
Rigged Election 2020 wasn’t the first time it happened in America.
Throughout US history, it occurred time and again at the federal, state and local levels.
“Democracy” by duopoly rule eliminates competition from independent candidates, debauching the process, assuring democracy the way it should be doesn’t exist.
Most often, Republicans and Dems take turns governing.
Despite fulfilling the US privileged class’ wish list at least in most respects — notably by enriching the top 1% more greatly than ever before in a four-year period — it wasn’t good enough.
Pre-election, Trump was targeted for defeat, things pre-arranged, Biden/Harris chosen to replace him in January.
In comparison to past US rigged elections, 2020 grand theft may have been most brazen of all — a conspiracy involving undemocratic Dems, major media across the board, and a few renegade Republicans.
Their aim to replace Trump with Biden/Harris was made possible with electronic ease, vote-flipping, ballot-stuffing, and other shenanigans.
Indisputable, breathtaking, scandalous, and loathsome are a few among countless other adjectives of disgust to describe what happened.
The election came at a time when Pew Research (PR) found that most Americans “feel anger (and) fear (about) state of nation.”
“Few feel proud,” based on survey results reported on June 30.
PR found that 87% of Americans are dissatisfied with “how things are going,” 71% angry “about the state of the country,” 66% fearful.
Only 36% of respondents called Trump great or good, 42% calling him poor or terrible.
Joe Biden fared worse, only 28% calling him great or good, 43% calling him poor or terrible.
Both aspirants for the nation’s highest office were far from the people’s choice, based on the above data.
Yet voting-age Americans were virtually given no choice other than between column A or column B of duopoly rule.
PR also found that 89% of Trump voters were “very concerned about the country’s direction, and (that) Biden’s election would lead to lasting harm to the US.”
A similar overwhelming majority of Biden voters (90%) expressed the same view about a second Trump term.
PR also found that 43% of Republicans expressed concern about mail-in ballot fraud compared to 11% of Dems.
In a 46-minute Wednesday evening address on Election 2020 results, Trump delivered his most detailed denunciation of a “rigged” process, a “coordinated assault and siege” to install Biden/Harris in January.
His hyperbole aside, significant evidence, including from whistleblowers, showed brazen fraud in key swing states — manipulating results to select Biden/Harris over the incumbent.
Paul Craig Roberts cited mathematician Shiva Ayyadurai, explaining that Dominion voting machines in Arizona “weight(ed)” votes instead of tabulating them accurately.
He maintains that for each one cast electronically in the state at polls, Biden got 1.3 votes, Trump only 0.7 votes.
If Dominion Voting Systems rigged things this way in Arizona, it surely manipulated the process similarly in other key swing states where its voting machines are used.
At least 28 US states use its electronic voting machines, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — key swing states.
In 2016, Trump won them all except Nevada.
In 2020, he lost them all, based on dubious official tallies.
According to cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore, electronic voting machines are inherently flawed.
“(D)esigned (to) steal elections,” they enable losers to be winners, and not just for president.
“There is no electronic system in the world that cannot be hacked” or manipulated, he explained.
“You cannot have secure electronic voting. It doesn’t exist.”
“Paper ballots are the only way to make voting secure.”
Calling himself a “life-long Republican,” he added that on the issue of accurately tabulating election votes, he’s nonpartisan.
Earlier he explained that “(t)here is a very strong argument” that US 2000 and 2004 elections were “electronically stolen” for Bush/Cheney over Gore.
“(H)anging chads were just a distraction.”
More recently he said:
“If you don’t want people to vote, and if you don’t want people’s vote to count, you want to rule without owning it by a mandate, then you” want voting by electronic machines.
During his Wednesday night address, evidence showed Trump correct, saying there was “an orchestrated effort to anoint a winner” while votes were being counted.
Eleventh hour vote dumps for Biden/Harris, GOP observers denied close access to counting procedures, unverified and back-dated late-arriving ballots for the challengers, and many other dubious practices manipulated things to assure Election 2020 winner Trump lost to losers Biden/Harris.
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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.”
In the United States, all eyes are on Pfizer and Moderna. The topline efficacy results from their experimental covid-19 vaccine trials are astounding at first glance. Pfizer says it recorded 170 covid-19 cases (in 44,000 volunteers), with a remarkable split: 162 in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group. Meanwhile Moderna says 95 of 30,000 volunteers in its ongoing trial got covid-19: 90 on placebo versus 5 receiving the vaccine, leading both companies to claim around 95% efficacy.
Let’s put this in perspective. First, a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%. Second, these results refer to the trials’ primary endpoint of covid-19 of essentially any severity, and importantly not the vaccine’s ability to save lives, nor the ability to prevent infection, nor the efficacy in important subgroups (e.g. frail elderly). Those still remain unknown. Third, these results reflect a time point relatively soon after vaccination, and we know nothing about vaccine performance at 3, 6, or 12 months, so cannot compare these efficacy numbers against other vaccines like influenza vaccines (which are judged over a season). Fourth, children, adolescents, and immunocompromised individuals were largely excluded from the trials, so we still lack any data on these important populations.
I previously argued that the trials are studying the wrong endpoint, and for an urgent need to correct course and study more important endpoints like prevention of severe disease and transmission in high risk people. Yet, despite the existence of regulatory mechanisms for ensuring vaccine access while keeping the authorization bar high (which would allow placebo-controlled trials to continue long enough to answer the important question), it’s hard to avoid the impression that sponsors are claiming victory and wrapping up their trials (Pfizer has already sent trial participants a letter discussing “crossing over” from placebo to vaccine), and the FDA will now be under enormous pressure to rapidly authorize the vaccines.
But as conversation shifts to vaccine distribution, let’s not lose sight of the evidence. Independent scrutiny of the underlying trial data will increase trust and credibility of the results. There also might be important limitations to the trial findings we need to be aware of.
Most crucially, we need data-driven assurances that the studies were not inadvertently unblinded, by which I mean investigators or volunteers could make reasonable guesses as to which group they were in. Blinding is most important when measuring subjective endpoints like symptomatic covid-19, and differences in post-injection side-effects between vaccine and placebo might have allowed for educated guessing. Past placebo-controlled trialsofinfluenza vaccine were not able to fully maintain blinding of vaccine status, and the recent “half dose” mishap in the Oxford covid-19 vaccine trial was apparently only noticed because of milder-than-expected side-effects. (And that is just one of manyconcerns with the Oxford trial.)
In contrast to a normal saline placebo, earlyphasetrials suggested that systemic and local adverse events are common in those receiving vaccine. In one Pfizer trial, for example, more than half of the vaccinated participants experienced headache, muscle pain and chills—but the early phase trials were small, with large margins of error around the data. Few details from the large phase 3 studies have been released thus far. Moderna’s press release states that 9% experienced grade 3 myalgia and 10% grade 3 fatigue; Pfizer’s statement reported 3.8% experienced grade 3 fatigue and 2% grade 3 headache. Grade 3 adverse events are considered severe, defined as preventing daily activity. Mild and moderate severity reactions are bound to be far more common.
One way the trial’s raw data could facilitate an informed judgment as to whether any potential unblinding might have affected the results is by analyzing how often people with symptoms of covid-19 were referred for confirmatory SARS-CoV-2 testing. Without a referral for testing, a suspected covid-19 case could not become a confirmed covid-19 case, and thus is a crucial step in order to be counted as a primary event: lab-confirmed, symptomatic covid-19. Because some of the adverse reactions to the vaccine are themselves also symptoms of covid-19 (e.g. fever, muscle pain), one might expect a far larger proportion of people receiving vaccine to have been swabbed and tested for SARS-CoV-2 than those receiving placebo.
This assumes all people with symptoms would be tested, as one might expect would be the case. However the trial protocols for Moderna and Pfizer’s studies contain explicit language instructing investigators to use their clinical judgment to decide whether to refer people for testing. Moderna puts it this way:
“It is important to note that some of the symptoms of COVID-19 overlap with solicited systemic ARs that are expected after vaccination with mRNA-1273 (eg, myalgia, headache, fever, and chills). During the first 7 days after vaccination, when these solicited ARs are common, Investigators should use their clinical judgement to decide if an NP swab should be collected.”
This amounts to asking investigators to make guesses as to which intervention group patients were in. But when the disease and the vaccine side-effects overlap, how is a clinician to judge the cause without a test? And why were they asked, anyway?
Importantly, the instructions only refer to the first seven days following vaccination, leaving unclear what role clinician judgment could play in the key days afterward, when cases of covid-19 could begin counting towards the primary endpoint. (For Pfizer, 7 days after the 2nd dose. For Moderna, 14 days.)
In a proper trial, all cases of covid-19 should have been recorded, no matter which arm of the trial the case occurred in. (In epidemiology terms, there should be no ascertainment bias, or differential measurement error). It’s even become common sense in the Covid era: “test, test, test.” But if referrals for testing were not provided to all individuals with symptoms of covid-19—for example because an assumption was made that the symptoms were due to side-effects of the vaccine—cases could go uncounted.
Data on pain and fever reducing medicines also deserve scrutiny. Symptoms resulting from a SARS-CoV-2 infection (e.g. fever or body aches) can be suppressed by pain and fever reducing medicines. If people in the vaccine arm took such medicines prophylactically, more often, or for a longer duration of time than those in the placebo arm, this could have led to greater suppression of covid-19 symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 infection in the vaccine arm, translating into a reduced likelihood of being suspected for covid-19, reduced likelihood of testing, and therefore reduced likelihood of meeting the primary endpoint. But in such a scenario, the effect was driven by the medicines, not the vaccine.
Neither Moderna nor Pfizer have released any samples of written materials provided to patients, so it is unclear what, if any, instructions patients were given regarding the use of medicines to treat side effects following vaccination, but the informed consent form for Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine trial provides such a recommendation:
“Following administration of Ad26.COV2.S, fever, muscle aches and headache appear to be more common in younger adults and can be severe. For this reason, we recommend you take a fever reducer or pain reliever if symptoms appear after receiving the vaccination, or upon your study doctor’s recommendation.”
There may be much more complexity to the “95% effective” announcement than meets the eye—or perhaps not. Only full transparency and rigorous scrutiny of the data will allow for informed decision making. The data must be made public.
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When people become desperate enough, those in power can get most of them to do just about anything. The first wave of lockdowns knocked us into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, it sent suicide rates soaring all over the globe, and it plunged millions upon millions of ordinary citizens into a deep state of despair. Now another wave of lockdowns is being instituted all over the planet, and this is going to perfectly set the stage for the “solutions” that the elite plan to offer all of us in 2021.
It has been said that if you want people to be willing to accept a solution, first you have to make them realize that they have a problem.
And once this “dark winter” finally ends, almost everybody will be absolutely desperate to return to their “normal” lives.
With each passing day, more extremely harsh restrictions are being imposed. For example, a brand new “stay at home order” was just issued in Los Angeles County…
All public and private gatherings with anyone outside a single household are now banned in Los Angeles County, as most of the country grapples with an unprecedented surge of Covid-19.
The ban will last three weeks, starting Monday and ending December 20.
It would be nice if the lockdown actually does get lifted before the end of the year, but for at least the next three weeks all 10 million people living in L.A. County will be forced “to stay home as much as possible”…
All 10 million residents are asked to stay home as much as possible and wear face masks when outside — even when exercising at the beach and parks, said the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, which issued the order last week.
On top of that, California Governor Gavin Newsom is warning that he may soon impose “much more dramatic, arguably drastic” restrictions for the entire state…
California Gov Gavin Newsom just warned that more drastic steps could be taken to contain the virus after the state reported another 15k+ new cases yesterday. The Golden State could be facing “much more dramatic, arguably drastic” measures to contain the spread of the virus. The state also broke its record for hospitalized patients yesterday: The state reported 7,415 coronavirus hospitalizations, with more than 1,700 of those patients in ICUs. The number of hospitalizations broke the state’s previous record of 7,170 in July.
Unfortunately, we are witnessing similar craziness all over the nation. In New Mexico, the new restrictions that were just instituted created so much panic that people were soon waiting for hours just to get into a supermarket to shop for food…
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) has put immense pressure on businesses with her “abrupt” lockdown order – forcing “nonessential” businesses to close and creating what has been dubbed “modern breadlines” — with people waiting 2-4 hours to enter essential retailers, former GOP Senate candidate Elisa Martinez explained during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
After seeing what the first round of lockdowns did to our nation, why would these politicians want to do it again?
More than 70 million Americans have filed unemployment claims so far in 2020, more than 40 million could be facing eviction in 2021, and there has been a dramatic spike in suicides during this pandemic.
When a 90-year-old woman named Nancy Russell found out that another lockdown was happening in her area, she decided to opt for assisted suicide…
According to CTV News, a 90-year-old woman living in Toronto took her own life via medically assisted suicide, the choice made in large part due to the second surge of coronavirus cases and a looming period of increased restrictions.
As I keep reminding my readers, there is always hope if you look at the bigger picture and suicide is never the answer to anything.
Unfortunately, most people are not getting a message of hope from the mainstream media, and Russell decided that the months ahead were going to be too bleak in her nursing home for her to be able to handle…
Residents eat meals in their rooms, have activities and social gatherings cancelled, family visits curtailed or eliminated. Sometimes they are in isolation in their small rooms for days. These measures, aimed at saving lives, can sometimes be detrimental enough to the overall health of residents that they find themselves looking into other options.
Just as we are hitting a low point with this pandemic, authorities all over the globe are announcing that vaccines will soon be available.
In fact, it is being reported that as many as ten different vaccines could be available by the middle of 2021…
Ten COVID-19 vaccines could be available by the middle of next year if they win regulatory approval, but their inventors need patent protection, the head of the global pharmaceutical industry group said on Friday.
As soon as the public can get them, it is inevitable that millions upon millions of people will rush out to get their shots so that they can return to their “normal” lives.
But what they aren’t telling you is that these new vaccines are entirely different from vaccines that you may have gotten previously.
When Moderna was just finishing its Phase I trial, The Independent wrote about the vaccine and described it this way: “It uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells’ protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus.”
“In this case, Moderna’s mRNA-1273 is programmed to make your cells produce the coronavirus’ infamous coronavirus spike protein that gives the virus its crown-like appearance (corona is crown in Latin) for which it is named,” wrote The Independent.
Under normal circumstances, very few people would sign up to have their cells “hijacked”, but at this point millions upon millions of people will be so desperate for a “solution” that they will take a vaccine no matter what the long-term consequences might be.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced this week it is in the final phase of development for what it hopes will be universally accepted documentation that in turn could boost confidence among wary travelers.
The digital health pass would include a passenger’s testing and vaccine information and would manage and verify information among governments, airlines, laboratories and travelers.
If these new “digital vaccine passports” are implemented for international travel, it is probably just a matter of time before they are required for domestic travel as well.
Of course there are lots of people out there that are trying to sound the alarm about all of this, but UN communications director Melissa Fleming says that her organization has already recruited an army of “110,000 information volunteers” to combat the spread of “misinformation”…
Fleming told the World Economic Forum that #PledgetoPause and Verified have “recruited 110,000 information volunteers” thus far. She said “we equip these information volunteers with the kind of knowledge about how misinformation spreads and ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first-responders’.” Fleming has stated elsewhere that the UN has “reached out to Member States, UN media partners, celebrity supporters” and “businesses” “to help us disseminate to the millions we will need to reach” with the campaign.
They want to control what you think as they lead you into a dystopian future that will ultimately turn into a complete and utter nightmare.
The truth is that none of us will be going back to our “normal lives” ever again.
But the elite will continue to hold that carrot out there in order to get you to do what they want, and millions upon millions of people will fall for it.
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We bring to the attention of our readers, the Video as well as the complete transcript of Donald Trump’s Speech.
This is for the purpose of information only, discussion and debate.
The US corporate media has sofar provided a slanted and biased analysis of the 2020 elections.
Global Research does not endorse either candidate in the 2020 presidential election.
Full transcript below.
President Donald Trump: (00:00) Thank you. This may be the most important speech I’ve ever made. I want to provide an update on our ongoing efforts to expose the tremendous voter fraud and irregularities which took place during the ridiculously long November 3rd elections. We used to have what was called, election day. Now we have election days, weeks, and months, and lots of bad things happened during this ridiculous period of time, especially when you have to prove almost nothing to exercise our greatest privilege, the right to vote. As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege.
President Donald Trump: (00:54)
For months, leading up to the Presidential election, we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take weeks if not, months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots and to verify the results. My opponent was told to stay away from the election, don’t campaign. “We don’t need you. We’ve got it. This election is done.” In fact, they were acting like they already knew what the outcome was going to be. They had it covered and perhaps they did, very sadly for our country. It was all very, very strange. Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still being counted.President Donald Trump: (01:44)
The constitutional process must be allowed to continue. We’re going to defend the honesty of the vote by ensuring that every legal ballot is counted and that no illegal ballot is counted. This is not just about honoring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me, it’s about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections.
President Donald Trump: (02:12)
Today I will detail some of the shocking irregularities, abuses and fraud that had been revealed in recent weeks but before laying out just a small portion of the evidence we have uncovered, and we have so much evidence, I want to explain the corrupt mail-in balloting scheme that Democrats systematically put into place that allowed voting to be altered, especially in swing states, which they had to win. They just didn’t know that it was going to be that tough, because we were leading in every swing state by so much, far greater than they ever thought possible. While it has long been understood that the Democrat political machine engages in voter fraud from Detroit to Philadelphia, to Milwaukee, Atlanta, so many other places. What changed this year was the Democrat party’s relentless push to print and mail out tens of millions of ballots sent to unknown recipients with virtually no safeguards of any kind. This allowed fraud and abuse to occur in a scale never seen before. Using the pandemic as a pretext, Democrat politicians and judges drastically changed election procedures just months, and in some cases, weeks before the election on the 3rd of November.
President Donald Trump: (03:45)
Very rarely were legislatures involved and constitutionally, they had to be involved, but very, very rarely, and you’ll see that as we continue to file our suits, it’s constitutionally, absolutely incorrect what took place, even from a legal standpoint. Many states, such as Nevada and California sent millions of live ballots to every person on their voter rolls whether those individuals had requested ballots or not, whether they were dead or alive, they got ballots. Other states such as Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, instituted universal absentee balloting right in the middle of an election year, sending absentee ballot requests forms to all voters on all rolls. It didn’t matter who they were. This colossal expansion of mail-in voting opened the flood gates to massive fraud. It’s a widely known fact that the voting rolls are packed with people who are not lawfully eligible to vote, including those who are deceased, have moved out of their state, and even our non-citizens of our country.
President Donald Trump: (05:05)
Beyond this, the records are riddled with errors, wrong addresses, duplicate entries, and many other issues. This is not disputed. It has never been disputed. Dozens of counties in the key swing states have more registered voters on the rolls than they have voting age citizens, including 67 counties in Michigan. All of this is evidence. In Wisconsin, the state’s Board of Elections could not confirm the residency of more than 100,000 people, but repeatedly refused to remove those names from its voter rolls before the election. They knew why, nobody else did. I knew why. They were illegal voters. It is a travesty that in the year 2020, we do not have any means of verifying the eligibility of those who cast ballots in an election and such an important election it is, or determining who they are, whether they live in the state or whether they’re even American citizens. We have no idea.
President Donald Trump: (06:21)
We have an in all swing states major infractions or outright fraud, which is far more in numbers or votes then we need to overturn the results of a state. In other words, in Wisconsin, as an example, where we were way up on election night, they ultimately had us miraculously losing by 20,000 votes. I can show you right here, that Wisconsin, we’re leading by a lot and then at 3:42 in the morning, there was this, it was a massive dump of votes, mostly Biden, almost all Biden. To this day, everyone’s trying to figure out, “Where did it come from?” But I went from leading by a lot, to losing by a little and that’s right here. That’s at 3:42 in the morning, that’s Wisconsin, a terrible thing, terrible, terrible thing.
President Donald Trump: (07:33)
But we will have far more, many times more than the 20,000 votes needed to overturn the state. If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can’t be president. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of votes. We’re talking about numbers like nobody has ever seen before. Just as an example, in certain states, we’ll be down by, let’s say, 7,000 votes, but we’ll find later on 20,000, 50,000, 100,00, 200,000 discrepancies or fraudulent votes, and that includes votes that went through when they were not allowed to be seen by Republican poll watchers, because the poll watchers were locked out of the building. Or people that innocently came to vote on November 3rd, who were all excited about their vote, they were happy. They were proud to be citizens of the United States of America, and they went up and they said, “I’d like to vote.” They were told that they can’t vote. “I’m sorry,” they were told, “I’m sorry. You’ve already voted by mail-in ballot. Congratulations. We received a ballot, so you can no longer vote.”
President Donald Trump: (09:03)
They didn’t know what to do. They had no one to complain to, most just left and said, “That’s strange.” But many people complained and complained vehemently, and in a lot of cases, they filled out a provisional ballot, which was almost never used, but in virtually every case was a vote for Trump. In other words, they went in to vote and they were told that they voted and they didn’t vote. They left and they felt horror and they lost respect for our system. This happened tens of thousands of times all over the country. That’s how desperate the Democrats were. They would fill out ballots of people not even knowing if these people were going to show up. When they did show up, they said, “Sorry, you’ve already voted.”
President Donald Trump: (10:07)
On top of everything else, we have a company that’s very suspect. It’s name is Dominion, with the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this? We have to go to paper, maybe it takes longer. But the only secure system is paper. Not these systems that nobody understands, including in many cases, the people that run them. Although, unfortunately, I think they understand them far too well.
President Donald Trump: (10:46)
In one Michigan County, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch? Are there 100s of other examples throughout the country? Are there 1000s? We just got lucky and they called it a glitch, but we found numerous glitches that evening. 96% of the company’s political donations went to Democrats, not surprisingly. Frankly, when you look at who’s running the company, who’s in charge, who owns it, which we don’t know, where are the votes counted? Which we think are counted in foreign countries, not in the United States, Dominion is a disaster. Election authorities in Texas have repeatedly blocked the deployment of Dominion systems due to concerns about security vulnerabilities and the potential for errors and outright fraud. Every district that uses Dominion systems must be carefully monitored and carefully investigated-
President Donald Trump: (12:01)
[inaudible 00:12:00] monitored and carefully investigated, but not only for the future. Right now, we’re worried about the present, and what went on with an election that we won without question. Under my lead, the Republicans won almost every state house in the United States, which they weren’t expected to do. We went up to 16 seats in the house. The numbers are still being tabulated, because there are nine seats that nobody really knows. They don’t know. Two weeks later, it’s still under consideration, because it’s a mess. Republicans were supposed to lose many seats, and instead they won those seats in the house, and a very important election that’s coming up will determine whether, or not we hold the Senate.
President Donald Trump: (12:59)
David Perdue and Kelly Leffler are two tremendous people. Unfortunately, in Georgia, they’re using the same horrible dominion system, and it’s already been out that, think of it, hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots have been requested. You check it out who’s requesting those ballots. The difference is, it’s one state, and we will have our eyes on it like nobody’s ever watched anything before, because we have to win those two Senate seats. The tremendous success we had in the House of Representatives, and the tremendous success we’ve had so far in the Senate, unexpected success all over the country, and right here in Washington.
President Donald Trump: (13:55)
It is statistically impossible that the person, me, that led the charge lost. The greatest pollsters, the real pollsters, not the ones that had us down 17 points in Wisconsin when we actually won, or the ones that had us down four or five points in Florida, and we won by many points, or had us even, and down in Texas, and we won by a lot, not those pollsters, but real pollsters. Pollsters that are fair, and honest said, “We can’t understand a thing like this. It’s never happened before. You led the country to victory, and you were the only one that was lost. It’s not possible.”
President Donald Trump: (14:43)
The speaker of the house of a certain state said, “Sir, I expected to lose my seat, and instead, because of you, and because of that incredible charge, and all of those rallies, we had a tremendous victory, and everybody knows it. You are much more popular than me, sir, except I got many more votes than you did, and it’s impossible that that happened. There is something wrong.” I’ll tell you what’s wrong, voter fraud. Here’s an example. This is Michigan. At 6:31 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror.
President Donald Trump: (15:44)
Nobody knows anything about it. By the way, there’s your line. This is one of many. Here’s what is normal, and all of a sudden, look at that. This is normal, normal. Look even here, normal, and then boom, all of a sudden, I go from winning by a lot to losing a tight race. It’s corrupt. Detroit is corrupt. I have a lot of friends in Detroit. They know it, but Detroit is totally corrupt. Look at this, look at this. That’s at 6:31 in the morning, unexpectedly came in. In the recent recount in Georgia, which means nothing because they don’t want to check signatures, and if you’re not going to check signatures in Georgia, it doesn’t work, but we have a secretary of state, and a governor who made it very difficult to check signatures.
President Donald Trump: (16:41)
Why? You’ll have to ask them, but without a signature match, or a check, it doesn’t matter. They found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack, all against me. This was during a recount that I didn’t even think mattered. They found many thousands of votes, and that recount didn’t matter. The one that matters is the one that’s going on now, that because of the fact it’s so close, they had to by law give another recount, but the recount has to be a recount where they check the signatures. Otherwise, they’re just checking the same dishonest thing. It won’t matter.
President Donald Trump: (17:22)
In this case, the signatures on envelopes are the only thing that is relevant. We will compare the signature on the envelope to the signatures from past elections, and we will find that many thousands of people signed these ballots illegally. The Democrats had this election rigged right from the beginning. They used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China virus, where it originated as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud, a fraud that the whole world is watching, and there is no one happier right now than China.
President Donald Trump: (18:10)
Many people received two, three and four ballots. They were sent to dead people by the thousands. In fact, dead people, and we have many examples filled out ballots, made applications, and then, voted, which is even worse. In other words, dead people went through a process. Some have been dead for 25 years. Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone, and if that’s the case, the results of the individual swing states must be overturned, and overturned immediately. Some people say that’s too far out, that’s too harsh. Well, does that mean we take a precedent, and we’ve just elected a president where the votes were fraudulent?
President Donald Trump: (19:01)
No, it means you have to turn over the election, and everybody knows without going much further, and they’ve seen the evidence, but they don’t want to talk about it what a disaster this election was, a total catastrophe, but we’re going to show it, and hopefully, the courts in particular, the Supreme Court of the United States will see it, and respectfully, hopefully, they will do what’s right for our country, because our country can not live with this kind of an election. We could say, let’s go on to the next one, but no, we have to look also at our past. We can’t let this happen.
President Donald Trump: (19:43)
Maybe you’ll have a revote, but I don’t think that’s appropriate. When those votes are corrupt, when they’re irregular, when they get caught, they’re terminated, and I very easily win. In all states, I very easily win, the swing states, just like I won them at 10 o’clock in the evening, the evening of the election. We’re not looking to show you 25 faulty or fraudulent votes, which don’t mean anything, because it doesn’t overturn the state, or a fifty, or a hundred. We’re showing you hundreds of thousands far more than we need, far more than the margin, far more than the law requires. We can show many times what is necessary to win the state.
President Donald Trump: (20:34)
The media knows this, but they don’t want to report it. In fact, they outright refuse to even cover it, because they know the result if they do. Even what I’m saying now will be demeaned and disparaged, but that’s okay. I just keep on going forward, because I’m representing 74 million people, and in fact, I’m also representing all of the people that didn’t vote for me. The mail-in voting scam is the latest part of their four year effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election, and it’s been like living in hell. Our opponents have proven many times again and again, that they will say, and do anything to get back into power.
President Donald Trump: (21:28)
The corrupt forces who are registering dead voters and stuffing ballot boxes are the same people who have perpetrated one phony and fraudulent hoax after another. You’ve been watching it now for four years. These entrenched interests oppose our movement, because we put America first. They don’t put America first, and we’re returning power to you the American people. They don’t want America first, they only want power for themselves. They want to make money, that’s why they don’t want me as your president. I’ve been investigated from soon after I announced I was running for president. When I immediately went to number one in the Republican primary polls, the investigations never stopped. They went on for four years, and I won them all, I beat them all. Russia, Russia, Russia, the impeachment hoax, and so much more. Robert Mueller spent $48 million of taxpayer money investigating me for two and a half years, issued over 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, issued 230 orders for communications records, and conducted 500 witness interviews, all looking to take me down. There was no collusion in the end, none whatsoever. Senator Marco Rubio, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated, “The committee found no evidence that then candidate Donald Trump, or his campaign colluded with the Russian government.” And, I thank Senator Rubio for that statement.
President Donald Trump: (23:22)
Now, I hear that these same people that failed to get me in Washington have sent every piece of information to New York, so that they can try to get me there. It’s all been gone over, over and over again. For $48 million you go through tax returns, you go through everything. The New York attorney general, who recently ran for office campaigned without knowing me stating, “We will join with law enforcement and other attorneys general across this nation in removing this president from office.” I never met her. It’s important that everybody understand she’s…
President Donald Trump: (24:03)
… better. “It’s important that everybody understands”, she said, “that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.” And all it’s been is a big investigation in Washington and New York and any place else that can investigate because that’s what they want to do. They want to take not me, but us down. Then we can never let them do that. Everything has been looked at. A friend of mine, who’s very smart, said, “You’ve probably seen more than anybody else. You’ve probably been investigated more than anybody else. And for you to come out with a clean bill of health makes you probably the cleanest person in this country.”
President Donald Trump: (24:48)
Some people in this administration, but fortunately not all have been beaten down and disparaged. They just disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. Why aren’t they active? Why aren’t they involved? There’s so much to be involved in. The corruption is so rampant. They just couldn’t take it anymore. They were threatened by Democrats with impeachment and horrible things were said about them. And they’re good people. Even recently, the head of the GSA was hounded and harassed as she reported, like she has never been before. What can I say? We caught Comey cold, we caught McCabe cold. We caught them all. We’re still waiting for a report from a man named Durham, who I have never spoken to, and I have never met. They can go after me before the election as much as they want, but unfortunately Mr. Durham didn’t want to go after these people, or have anything to do with going after them before the election. So who knows if he is ever going to even do a report.
President Donald Trump: (26:11)
Ut if you look at the lies, and the leaks, and the illegal acts of behavior done by so many people, and their desire to hurt the president of the United States, something should happen. The hardest thing I have to do is explain why nothing is happening with all of these people that got caught spying on my campaign. It’s never happened before and it should never happen again to a president of the United States. All you have to do is watch the hearings and see for yourself. The evidence is overwhelming. The fraud that we’ve collected in recent weeks is overwhelming, having to do with our election. Everyone is saying, ” Wow, the evidence is overwhelming”, when they get to see it. But really it’s too late to change the course of an election. It’s too late to change the outcome.
President Donald Trump: (27:11)
In fact, there is still plenty of time to certify the correct winner of the election and that’s what we’re fighting to do. But no matter when it happens, when they see fraud, when they see false votes and when those votes number far more than is necessary, you can’t let another person steal that election from you. All over the country, people are together in holding up signs, “Stop the steal.” To understand how we will challenge this fraud, it is important to know the problems with mail-in balloting. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and most other states allowed anyone to get an absentee ballot and cast their vote without showing any ID. The voting took place entirely on the honor system, no identification of any kind was required.
President Donald Trump: (28:11)
Most Americans would also be shocked to learn that no state in the country verifies United States citizenship as a condition for voting in federal elections. This is a national disgrace. No other advanced country conducts elections this way. Many European countries have instituted major restrictions on mail-in voting, specifically, because they recognize the nearly unlimited potential for fraud. Out of 42 European nations, all but two prohibit absentee ballots entirely for people who reside inside the country, or else they require those who need absentee ballots to show a very, very powerful ID.
President Donald Trump: (28:54)
Throughout the Democrat effort to dramatically expand mail-in voting, the Democrat party leaders were also, feverishly working to block measures, designed to protect against fraud, such as signature verification, residency verification, or voter ID. And citizenship confirmation was almost unthought of that we should ask for it. Can you believe this? These are not the actions of people who want fair elections. These are the actions of people who want to steal elections, who are willing to create fraud. The only conceivable reason why you would block common sense measures to verify legal eligibility for voting, is you are trying to encourage, enable, solicit, or carry out fraud.
President Donald Trump: (29:47)
It is important for Americans to understand that these destructive changes to our election laws were not a necessary response to the pandemic. The pandemic simply gave the Democrats an excuse to do what they have been trying to do for many, many years. In fact, the very first bill that house Democrats introduced when Nancy Pelosi became speaker, was it attempt to mandate universal mail-in voting and eliminate measures such as voter ID, which is so necessary. Dramatically eroding the integrity of our elections was the Democrats number one priority for a simple reason, they wanted to steal the 2020 presidential election. All of the Democrat efforts to expand mail-in balloting laid the groundwork for the systematic and pervasive fraud that occurred in this election.
President Donald Trump: (30:41)
In Pennsylvania, large amounts of mail-in and absentee ballots were processed illegally. And in secret, in Philadelphia, in Allegheny counties, without our observers present. They were not allowed to be present. In fact, they weren’t even allowed in the same room. They were thrown out of the building and they looked from outside in, but they had no way of even seeing, because there were no windows. And the windows that were there were boarded up. Democrats even went to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to block observers from receiving access. There is only one possible reason that the corrupt Democrat political machine would oppose transparency during the vote counting. It’s because they know they are hiding illegal activity. It’s very simple.
President Donald Trump: (31:32)
This is an egregious, inexcusable. And irreversible harm that stains the entire election, yet this unprecedented practice of excluding our observers, our vote watchers, as some people call them, occurred in Democrat run cities and key states all across the nation. Here are just some of the additional facts that we’ve uncovered. Many voters all across Pennsylvania received two ballots in the mail, and many others received mail-in ballots for which they never applied. So many get ballots, they didn’t even know what they were for. And again, so many received more than one ballot. In some cases, more than two ballots. And they happened to be, for the most part, Democrats.
President Donald Trump: (32:22)
In Fayette County, Pennsylvania, multiple voters received ballots that were already filled out. They didn’t know what happened. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a poll watcher, overheard unregistered voters being told to return later to try to vote under a different name. Tens of thousands of voters across Pennsylvania were treated differently based on whether they were Republicans, or Democrats. Voters who submitted floored ballots in some Democrat precincts were notified and asked to fix their ballots, while Republican precincts, and in particular Republican voters, were not so notified which plainly violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.”If you are a Democrat, we’re going to fix up your ballot. make sure it’s perfect. If you are Republican, don’t even talk about it.”
President Donald Trump: (33:16)
In Michigan, a career employee of the city of Detroit, with the city workers, coaching voters to vote straight Democrat, while accompanying them to watch who they were voting for, violating the law and the sanctity of the secret ballot. You can’t do that. The same workers say she was instructed not to ask for any ID and not to attempt to validate any signatures. She was also told to illegally backdate ballots, many, many ballots, received after the deadline. This is something that is so unconstitutional and she estimates that thousands and thousands of ballots were improperly backdated by her and many others.
President Donald Trump: (34:05)
Other witnesses in Detroit also saw our election officials counting batches of the same ballots many times, as well as illegally duplicating ballots. One observer testified to seeing boxes and boxes of ballots, all bearing the same signature. Another observer in Detroit gave sworn testimony that he saw countless and valid ballots that did not belong to properly registered voters and then witnessed election workers in Wayne County entering fake birth dates into the system, in order to illegally count them. Witnesses of science wore an affidavit, so in other words, you go to jail if you lie, testifying that after election officials announced the last absentee votes had been received, a batch of tens of thousands of ballots arrived, many without envelopes, all voting for Democrats.
President Donald Trump: (35:02)
In Wisconsin, a record number of voters were categorized as indefinitely confined. A status reserved for severely disabled individuals, also for the elderly that allow them to vote without showing ID. Last year, approximately 70,000 people claimed this status statewide. This year, the number miraculously was nearly 250,000 voters, after election officials in Milwaukee and Dane County, a couple of the most corrupt political places in our country, urged citizens to improperly register under this status. And register they did in levels that don’t exist. In Wisconsin, there are approximately 70,000 absentee ballots that do not have matching ballot applications as required by law in Georgia, nine observers have testified to seeing countless irregular ballots without…
President Donald Trump: (36:03)
Testified to seeing countless irregular ballots without the creases or typical markings indicating that the ballots did not arrive in envelopes as required. A poll watcher in Fulton County estimated that approximately 98% of the large number of unusually pristine ballots that she witnessed were for Biden. Highly unusual number. In addition, thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Floyd, Fayette, and Walton counties weeks after the election, and these ballots were mostly from Trump voters. They weren’t counted. They were from Trump voters.
President Donald Trump: (36:43)
In Detroit, everybody saw the tremendous conflict and the horrible way that the two Republican canvassers were treated so horribly because they wouldn’t vote when they saw that 71% of the precincts didn’t balance. Also, there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters. That’s an easy one to figure, and it’s by the thousands. In Arizona, in-person voters whose balanced produced error messages from tabulation machines were told to press a button that resulted in their votes not being counted. Also in Arizona, the attorney general announced that mail-in ballots had been stolen from mailboxes and hidden under a rock.
President Donald Trump: (37:37)
In Clark County, Nevada, where most of the state’s voters reside, the standards for matching a signature using the signature verification machine were intentionally lowered to allow large numbers of ballots to be counted that otherwise would never have passed muster. This machine was set at the lowest level. According to one report, in order to test the process, nine voters in Clark County cast ballots with intentionally incorrect signatures, and eight of the nine ballots were accepted and counted. They said you could sign your name as Santa Claus, and it would be accepted. Last week, the Clark County Commission threw out the results of a local election after the registrar reported finding, quote, “discrepancies that we can’t explain.” Also in Nevada, some voters were entered into a raffle for more than a dozen gift cards worth as much as $250 if they could prove they had voted.
President Donald Trump: (38:42)
This took place on Indian reservations. One of the most significant indications of widespread fraud is the extraordinarily low rejection rates for mail-in ballots in many key states. These are the states that I had to win. In swing state after swing state, the number of ballots rejected has been dramatically lower than what would have been expected based on prior experience. That means years and years of voting. In Georgia, just 0.2%, that’s substantially less than 1%, of mail-in ballots have been rejected. In other words, almost none have been rejected. They took everything. Nothing was rejected, practically, compared to 6.4% in 2016. There are those that think that 6.4 was a low number.
President Donald Trump: (39:36)
Think of it. Almost none were rejected. The previous election, 6.4% were rejected. We have seen similar declines in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan. Ballots weren’t rejected, especially if they happen to be in Democrat areas. These irregularities are inexplicable unless there is a deliberate effort to accept ineligible ballots or fraudulent ballots.
President Donald Trump: (40:06)
In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state and the state supreme court in essence abolished signature verification requirements just weeks prior to the election, in violation of state law. You’re not allowed to do that. It has to be approved by the legislature. A judge can’t do it. A state can’t do it. An official can’t do it. The only one that can do it is the legislature.
President Donald Trump: (40:33)
The reason for this is clear. They were not verifying signatures because they know the ballots have not been filled out by the voters in whose names they were cast. In other words, people filled them out that had nothing to do with the names on the ballot. A simple recount of the ballots under these circumstances only compounds the fraud. The only way to determine whether there was an honest vote is to conduct a full review of the envelopes in the relevant states. You will find that many of them, tens of thousands, have fraudulent signatures. A full forensic audit is required to ensure that only legal ballots from lawfully registered voters that were properly cast are included in the final count.
President Donald Trump: (41:25)
This election is about great voter fraud, fraud that has never been seen like this before. It’s about poll watchers who were not allowed to watch. So illegal. It’s about ballots that poured in, and nobody but a few knew where they came from. They were counted, and they weren’t for me. It’s about big leads on election night, tremendous leads, leads where I was being congratulated for a decisive easy victory. All of a sudden, by morning or a couple of days later, those leads rapidly evaporated. It’s about numbers of ballots that were sent that nobody know where they came from. It’s about machinery that was defective, machinery that was stopped during certain parts of the evening, miraculously to open with more votes.
President Donald Trump: (42:24)
It was about many other things, but above all, it was about fraud. This election was rigged. Everybody knows it. I don’t mind if I lose an election, but I want to lose an election fair and square. What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people. That’s what we’re fighting for. We have no choice to be doing that. We already have the proof. We already have the evidence, and it’s very clear. Many people in the media and even judges so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say, “You’re right.” Our country needs somebody to say, “You’re right.”
President Donald Trump: (43:12)
Ultimately, I am prepared to accept any accurate election result, and I hope that Joe Biden is as well. We already have the proof. We already have tens of thousands of ballots more than we need to overturn all of these states that we’re talking about. This is an election for the highest office in the greatest country in the history of the world. Every reasonable American should be able to agree, based on what we have already documented, that we need a systematic analysis of the mail-in ballots to review the envelopes. It’s about the signature. If they’re on the envelopes, we can only review the envelopes, and that will tell us everything.
President Donald Trump: (44:01)
This is the absolute minimum we should expect. This is not just about my campaign, although it has a lot to do with who’s going to be your next president. This is about restoring faith and confidence in American elections. This is about our democracy and the sacred rights that generations of Americans have fought, bled, and died to secure. Nothing is more urgent or more important. The only ballots that should count in this election are those cast by eligible voters who are citizens of our country, residents of the states in which they voted, and who cast their ballots in a lawful manner before the legal deadline.
President Donald Trump: (44:43)
Moreover, we must never again have an election in which there is not a reliable and transparent system to verify the eligibility, identity, and residency of every single person who casts a ballot, a very, very cherished ballot. Many very smart people have congratulated me on all we’ve done: the biggest tax cuts in history, regulation cuts, the biggest in history. We rebuilt our military. We took care of our vets like never before, Space Force, and so much more. Then they went on to say, as big and as important as these events were, the single greatest achievement in your presidency will be exactly what you’re doing right now: voter integrity for our nation. It’s more important than any of the things that we discussed.
President Donald Trump: (45:40)
If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that’s taken place in our 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore. With the resolve and support of the American people, we will restore honesty and integrity to our elections. We will restore trust in our system of government. Thank you. God bless you. God bless America.
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“The problem with the COVID vaccine is that they recognize that it’s gonna be really hard to get a vaccine so they have been reducing our standards so they can pass the vaccine no matter what.” – Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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Watch the interview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with Theo Von below.
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President Donald Trump may only have seven weeks left in office, but he’s given his top advisers the green light to batter the Iranian regime—anything that doesn’t hazard a full-on war beforeJoe Biden is inaugurated.
According to multiple U.S. officials familiar with the matter, in recent weeks Trump has taken a more passive role in personally overseeing Iran policy for the critical final months until Inauguration Day. One White House official last week described Trump as mostly “checked out” on this major foreign policy issue, having become consumed by his bumbling legal effort to steal the 2020 election amid the coronavirus pandemic, as well as by other his pet grievances of the moment.
But Trump has given some of his most hawkish administration officials, particularly his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, carte blanche to squeeze and punish the Islamic Republic as aggressively as they wish in the coming weeks. All Trump asks is that they don’t risk “start[ing] World War III,” as the president has specifically put it in several private conversations with Pompeo and others, according to two senior administration officials.
That has left a host of options at the outgoing administration’s disposal—among them, a suffocating sanctions regime and a studied silence in the face of the assassination of Iranian nationals. Two officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said the administration is set to announce new sanctions on regime-linked companies and individuals in the coming weeks to solidify a years-long effort to paralyze Tehran’s economy.
Knowledgeable sources say those actions are designed to help fulfill various Trump officials’ long-brewing desire to make it more difficult for the Democratic president-elect to rekindle negotiations with Tehran and re-enter a nuclear deal. And it’s a scenario for which Biden lieutenants and allies have long prepared, having already factored into their Iran strategy that current U.S. officials would do nearly everything they could to undermine a revival of Obama-era relations between the adversarial nations.
Trump administration officials who spoke to The Daily Beast frequently point to Pompeo and Elliott Abrams, special representative for Iran, as the leaders of the administration’s last-ditch attempt at pummeling the regime.
Secretary Pompeo has been particularly forward leaning in the administration’s efforts to inflict damage on the Iranian government. In a recent trip to the Middle East, Pompeo met with leaders from Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain on ways all three countries could work together on countering the Islamic Republic. The trip followed on the heels of an announcement by the State Department that it had recently approved a massive sale of F-35 jets to the UAE. The deal has been widely viewed as a way to get Dubai to cooperate with Jerusalem on deterring Iran. And on Friday, Pompeo announced additional Iran-related sanctions, this time targeting Chinese and Russian entities for transferring sensitive technology and items to Iran’s missile program.
Both Pompeo and Abrams, officials say, are supportive of harsh measures, including the quiet backing of covert actions carried out by other actors. One other senior administration official pointed to Central Intelligence Agency Director Gina Haspel as being intimately involved in the administration’s clandestine strategy as it relates to Iran.
The president has repeatedly told his advisers that one of his priorities is to avoid a confrontation with Iran in which American military personnel would die. But Trump is comfortable letting Israel take the lead in targeting, or even slaying, Iranian regime figures in the closing weeks of his presidency, officials said. That includes Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the country’s top nuclear weapons scientist, who was killed Nov. 27 while traveling in a convoy in the northern part of the country.
Two senior Trump administration officials said Israel was behind the attack, confirming global suspicions. One of those same officials, while they did not detail the level of involvement from the U.S., noted that America’s intelligence agencies often share information with Israel on Iran-related matters.
“There’s obviously a close working relationship between Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and Haspel,” said Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a right leaning think tank that’s advised the Trump administration on Iran.
Some of the president’s confidants have urged him not to draw too much attention to the killing. The administration has chosen to remain mostly tight-lipped regarding the scientist’s death. A source close to Trump said they had counseled the president in the past few days to avoid gratuitously tweeting about the assassination. Not only would it be a “bad look,” according to this source, it would likely undermine the administration’s public position of keeping the operation at arm’s length, if not farther away.
The two senior administration officials said discussions about taking more active measures to limit Biden’s administration on negotiating a new deal with Iran ramped up this summer and coincided with several of Israel’s covert operations, including the killing of al Qaeda deputy leader Abu Muhammed in Iran, and Israel’s planting of a bomb in one of Iran’s centrifuge facilities.
“The Israelis understand that between now and Jan. 20 they will need to inflict maximum damage on the regime,” Dubowitz said.
The Trump strategy over the next few weeks is clear, one of the senior administration officials said: Continue to use sanctions as a deterrence tool while providing intelligence to regional allies such as Israel that have a mutual goal of damaging the Iranian regime.
That plan isn’t so different from the one the Trump administration has put into action over the past four years. Since Trump took office in 2017, a cohort of top officials, advisers, and external advocacy groups have helped craft and implement a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran that has relied primarily on the implementation of more than 1,000 sanctions on regime-linked officials and companies while also covertly targeting Tehran’s assets overseas.
The only difference now, officials say, is that the administration not only wants to punish Iran, it also wants to pen in President-elect Biden.
Individuals involved in the crafting of the Trump administration’s Iran policy believe the maximum pressure campaign will limit Biden’s ability to get back on track with Tehran, namely because some of the sanctions may be difficult to lift, especially those focused on human-rights and terrorism. Dubowitz and Trump administration officials familiar with Iranian sanctions said multinational corporations may be so risk averse to doing business with Iran now, following thousands of financial designations, that even if Biden lifts sanctions they will not engage in normal trade relations with Tehran.
Individuals familiar with Team Biden’s thinking say the president-elect has a clear strategy for dealing with Iran and sanctions come January. That plan rests heavily on Biden’s desire to return back to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration—if Iran comes back into compliance.
“If Iran takes the bait, which is clearly the intention behind [the Farikhzadeh assassination], then it probably makes it impossible to return to the JCPOA and diplomacy,” said Jarrett Blanc, the former coordinator for Iran nuclear implementation in the Obama State Department. “If Iran doesn’t take the bait… I don’t know that it really changes the choices that confront the Biden team or Iran in January.”
Any negotiations between a Biden administration and Iran would include conversations about the lifting of some sanctions, two individuals familiar with the Biden team’s thinking on Iran said. But those sanctions would likely only be lifted if and when Tehran complies with a deal.
“Iran says it is prepared to come back in compliance and reverse some of the decisions it’s made. And the U.S. says it would lift some of the sanctions. [There’s] no legal bar to reverse them. Many of them were imposed for political reasons,” said one former senior Obama administration official. “It’s likely going to be a two-step approach for Biden—getting back in and then perhaps renegotiating a different, better deal.”
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Alex Salmond is back. Scotland’s former First Minister, under whom the SNP went from strength to strength, has unveiled his own 5-point plan together with MSP Alex Neil, to address the economic aftershocks of the pandemic in Scotland.
There have been rumours for some time of Salmond’s return to the Scottish political scene and this was the first indication that he may do so. Having now left his court case behind him – what some of his supporters believe was a conspiracy to prevent his return – Salmond will have work to do to improve his tarnished public image. It cannot be denied that there was at some point a breakdown in relations between Nicola Sturgeon and her mentor, Alex Salmond, which has led to a divide in the party. Sturgeon, herself, when recently interviewed on Sky News, admitted that Salmond may be ‘angry’ with her because she was not prepared to lie on his behalf concerning allegations of sexual assault. Salmond’s supporters say Sturgeon herself has led a campaign to prevent Alex Salmond from returning to Scottish politics.
Therefore Salmond’s publication of a document outlining a different approach to tackling the fallout from Covid, involving ‘learning lessons from Asia’, is a highly significant move. It is essentially a direct challenge to Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, in the midst of the pandemic. At the same time, SNP grassroots members staged a rebellion during the party conference over the weekend, by electing a group of figures who disagree with Sturgeon’s independence plan. The group, which includes Joanna Cherry MP, believes the Scottish government should have a plan B should Boris Johnson continue to refuse giving Scotland a Section 30 order to allow another independence referendum. There is a growing swell of support amongst SNP grassroots members and independence activists for a second referendum as a matter of urgency. They believe that the time for such a vote is now, given the momentum the movement has received as a result of Brexit and unpopular Westminster leadership. This faction is (unofficially) led by Salmond and Cherry. There even exists a belief amongst some in this group that Nicola Sturgeon herself secretly doesn’t want independence. This, I consider to be a fallacy. Sturgeon is simply treading carefully, and trying to avoid the turmoil and political arrests we saw in the aftermath of the referendum in Catalonia.
Such divisions in the SNP, do, of course, harm the independence movement. But can Alex Salmond really provide a challenge to Nicola Sturgeon? Unlikely. Salmond may have the support of Joanna Cherry and others in the SNP for his more bullish approach to the independence movement, but Sturgeon’s more cautious style has proved highly popular with the Scottish electorate. Never before has there been so much support for the First Minister, with her approval ratings regularly soaring high above those of Boris Johnson. And only this week it was revealed that support for Scottish independence is at an all-time high of 56%. While Salmond was something of a divisive figure, Sturgeon has been far more popular. It’s almost impossible to see how he could pose any real threat to her position. Although Salmond did a huge deal to make the necessary gains the SNP needed during his 20 years as leader, his time is over. Sturgeon has broader, more mainstream appeal, and her more careful approach was just what was required during the pandemic.
Indeed the SNP is on a high right now after its conference over the weekend. Several new welfare policies were announced which will score the party points with the electorate prior to the Holyrood elections in May next year. Firstly, Scotland becomes the first nation in the world to provide sanitary products free for all women, tackling ‘period poverty’. Secondly, more money is to be given to low income families – an extra £10 a week per child from February – and before Christmas a separate ‘gift’ of £100 will be paid to every family in receipt of school meals. Another announcement at the conference was the creation of the ‘Young Person’s guarantee’, which will give all young people between 16 and 24 the guarantee of work, education or training. The Pathway to Apprenticeships scheme will provide work-based training and a grant of £100 given to school leavers up to the age of 18.
These measures are all ones which the average working person will ‘feel’ and which will have a genuine impact on their lives. It is likely these initiatives will translate into more votes for the SNP at the ballot box next year, and even more support for independence. Such focus on welfare by the Scottish government creates even more distance between it and the Westminster government. Earlier this year, top economists warned the UK government not to impose new austerity measures in response to the vast spending plans actioned during the pandemic, but there is no doubt that at some point people are going to be asked to tighten their belts. And given the Conservative government’s record on austerity, it is working people on lower incomes who will end up paying the price for future economic recovery.
All in all, it’s a fantastic time for Scottish independence. The mood has never been more buoyant, despite internal divisions. To ensure the independence goal is reached however, the party must unite. If Alex Salmond and his supporters really care about independence then they will give Nicola Sturgeon their full backing and support her strategy to secure #indyref2.
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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.
During the most severe Main Street economic collapse in US history — with over one-fourth of working-age Americans jobless — additional calamity looms in the coming weeks. According to Census Bureau estimates, 30 to 40 million Americans face possible eviction in 2021 for lack of income to pay rent or service mortgages.
The Australian Defense Force’s recent inquiry into Australian special forces conduct in Afghanistan, between 2005 and 2016, reveals that 39 Afghan prisoners and civilians were killed outside of battle, as part of a culture of “competition killings,” where commanders required junior soldiers to shoot prisoners to achieve their first kill.
Speaking during the Bayer Future of Farming online conference, Liam Condon, president of crop science at Bayer, said the company is lobbying “very strongly” to change the EU’s GMO regulations to exempt gene editing.
The documents revealed the vast scope and global reach of US imperialism’s criminal conspiracies against the international working class, and the brutality and corruption of capitalist governments the world over.
We have long been told that science is an ‘evidence-based approach’ to understanding particular phenomena and thus providing accurate guidance on how to proceed to achieve productive outcomes. Unfortunately, this claim is just propaganda for the unwary.
President-elect Joe Biden has maintained silence for years on the controversial and continued use of so-called targeted killings — lethal strikes by drones, cruise missiles, and occasionally military special operations raids. Biden has never publicly disavowed or criticized former President Barack Obama’s legacy of expanding the use of drones.
As members of the UK Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, Drone Wars and a number of other UK civil society groups have written to Secretary of State Ben Wallace on the UK’s position on the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems partly in response to recent comments by the Chief of the Defence Staff.
State efforts to control mosquito-borne illnesses may be creating a new health problem. The insecticide Massachusetts and numerous other states use for mosquito control, both applied aerially and sprayed from trucks along roads, contains per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), according to lab test results.
America regards itself as the “global policeman”, hence its arrogant actions, but it was never deputized by the international community to fulfill such a role. Some of China’s maritime neighbors object to its territorial claims, but these are all bilateral disputes that should be handled between Beijing and each of the relevant parties.
The Spanish economic situation worsens day after day. The national manufacturing sector dropped significantly in November, according to data from IHS Markit, which attributes the decline to the drop in production demand due to the pandemic.
Inizia su Davvero TV, il 1° dicembre alle 22:30, Pangea, programma di politica internazionale a cura del CNGNN (Comitato No Guerra No Nato, Italia) in collaborazione con Global Research (Centro di Ricerca sulla Globalizzazione, Canada).
Il programma sarà trasmesso ogni martedì e venerdì alle 22:30 e replicato nei fine settimana.
Pangea contribuirà a colmare il vuoto di informazione e a contrastare la disinformazione dei grandi media sulle questioni nodali da cui dipende il nostro futuro.
Gli eventi che ci coinvolgono – dall’attuale crisi economica messa in moto dal Covid-19 al crescente confronto militare anche nucleare – vanno visti in un’ottica globale.
A tal fine, insieme a esperti italiani, collaborano a questo programma esperti da altre parti del mondo.
Nella prima trasmissione, il 1° dicembre, il Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, economista, direttore del Centro di ricerca sulla globalizzazione (Canada), parlerà della crisi economica senza precedenti che, innescata dalla pandemia di Covid, sta portando a un colossale trasferimento di ricchezza da una maggioranza sempre più impoverita a una ristretta minoranza sempre più ricca.
Manlio Dinucci, giornalista e geografo, parlerà del coinvolgimento dell’Italia nella sempre più pericolosa strategia della Nato e del conseguente aumento della nostra spesa militare nel momento in cui mancano le risorse per fronteggiare l’attuale crisi economica.
Davvero Tv è la Tv dei cittadini, che ogni giorno vi racconta un mondo diverso e più ricco di sfumature, personaggi, temi e opinioni. Notizie, politica, attualità, cultura, convegni, economia e approfondimenti. La Tv dei cittadini è la sola Tv che lavora per i cittadini, pagata direttamente da loro, e che fa esclusivamente i loro interessi.
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Ti restituiamo i contenuti, oscurati dai social network, che promuovono la libertà di parola e pensiero critico
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Vi Invitiamo A Dare La Massima Diffusione All’iniziativa Attraverso La Vostra Rete Di Contatti
Ci Sentiremo Presto Cercando Di Costruire Reti Se Non Comunali Almeno Regionali Di Nostri Amici Che Si Facciano Protagonisti In Prima Persona Della Necessaria Diffusione Delle Notizie E Delle Proposte Che Facciamo.
Vi Ricontatterò Anche Per Sollecitare Un Progetto Di Finanziamento Per L’anno 2021 Che Sta Già’ Iniziando A Funzionare Ma Che Deve Estendersi Per Mantenere La Qualità’ Del Servizio Che Forniamo Ma Soprattutto Che Funzioni Da Opera Organizzatrice Di Resistenza *(O Di Resilienza Come Si Dice Oggi).
Le Interviste Che Abbiamo In Programma Vi Confermeranno Il Valore Di Questo Proposito.A Presto!
America regards itself as the “global policeman”, hence its arrogant actions, but it was never deputized by the international community to fulfill such a role. Rather, it’s more like a dangerously delusional role player than a legitimate law enforcement officer.
The Philippine National Defense Secretary warned last week that his country “will be involved whether[it] likes it or not” in the event that “a shooting war happens” between China and the US in the South China Sea. Instead of speculating which side of the conflict the Philippines would be on in that scenario, it’s much more relevant to wonder why the US is even in the South China Sea in the first place. After all, it’s America’s military involvement in this region which is raising the risk of war, not China’s.
The South China Sea isn’t just an historical region of China, but most of it is also a legitimate part of its territory too. The US’ military presence therefore isn’t just on the country’s doorstep, but literally inside its foyer so to speak despite not being invited by Beijing. Washington claims that it’s protecting so-called “freedom of navigation”, but to continue the metaphor, it actually barged into China’s house because of a dispute with some of its neighbors.
America regards itself as the “global policeman”, hence its arrogant actions, but it was never deputized by the international community to fulfill such a role. Rather, it’s more like a dangerously delusional role player than a legitimate law enforcement officer. Some of China’s maritime neighbors object to its territorial claims, but these are all bilateral disputes that should be handled between Beijing and each of the relevant parties. The US has no business to involving itself in such issues, but it does so anyhow in order to divide and rule the region.
Much has made in the American media about China’s activities on various islands, reefs, and shoals, but the fact of the matter is that China has the right to develop its territory however it sees fit. It poses no risk to others, let alone to legitimate freedom of navigation, but it does intend to defend its interests like every country has the right to do. China’s military positioning and maneuvers on and around those pieces of land and their waters actually secure the South China Sea, not destabilize it, unlike the US’ similar actions.
Not once has China ever threatened to impede the free flow of commercial vessels through its maritime territory, but American officials have publicly spoken about attacking China’s vessels and even cutting them off from the Indian Ocean for example via the Straits of Malacca. The US’ military moves in the South China Sea are an extension of that strategy, intended to bully and intimidate the People’s Republic into submitting to Washington’s foreign policy demands. They’re meant to obstruct China’s freedom of navigation, not facilitate it.
The issue has been discussed so much over the past decade that many folks would be forgiven for falling under the false impression that this has always been a cause of concern. It hasn’t, though, but is only a relatively recent development that first seriously started during the Obama Administration’s so-called “Pivot to Asia”, which was aggressively intensified under current US President Trump. The US even started pressuring its allies to follow in its footsteps and join it in violating China’s maritime territorial sovereignty.
Democrat presidential candidate Biden, who the mass media projected will become the next president-elect despite Trump refusing to concede the race and stop his legal challenges to it, should take the opportunity to reverse this destabilizing policy upon taking office. His nomination of Obama-era and -influenced officials to his administration is worrying, however, since they might simply tweak Trump’s variation of his predecessor’s “Pivot to Asia” instead of reconsidering the wisdom behind it entirely like they arguably should.
In any case, self-regulating and then moderating this policy with respect to the South China Sea — ideally with a view towards eventually reversing it in the interests of regional peace — would nevertheless be an improvement from the status quo if they have the political will to do so. All efforts must be sincerely undertaken by Biden and his team to avoid the dire scenario that the Philippine National Defense Secretary recently warned about. There’s no reason for a war to break out over the South China Sea, but if it does, then it’s entirely the US’ fault.
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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.
rights movement in general. Nelson Blackstock’s book COINTELPRO – The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom [COINTELPRO: for COunter INTELligence PROgram] is an excellent source of information on this subject. In this work the author states:
Flash back to Chile, September 11 1973.
Two and a half years later in 1976, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with another military coup d’état in March 1976. Behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” macro-economic reforms had also been prescribed – this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors, including David Rockefeller who was a friend of The Junta’s Minister of Economy José Alfredo Martinez de Hoz.
The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order
