Global Research

In the mist of the gloom generated by the twin health and economic crises, the birth of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a ray of light auguring hope.

More than a million lives have been lost world-wide as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, there is massive unemployment and entire societies have been devastated. For the 10 ASEAN states and their 5 partners, 3 from North East Asia and 2 from South Pacific to come together to form RCEP in a situation like this is a bold and brave leap of faith. They are of course hoping that the new grouping will accelerate their economic recovery since they have all been affected by the twin crises to a greater or lesser degree. As trade barriers are removed and bureaucratic hurdles overcome, there will be a greater flow of affordable goods and services across borders leading to enhanced economic growth and more opportunities for shared prosperity.

RCEP however is more than a response to immediate, urgent challenges. It is a tremendous boost to regionalism at a time when the concept and practice is faced with new problems as witnessed by the experience of the European Union (EU) in recent years. Regional cooperation promises the more rational and efficient utilisation of new technologies. RCEP may well serve as a platform for this.

It is also the re-assertion of the importance of multilateralism which has also been subjected to immense pressures in the last few years. The very creation of RCEP is a statement that economies at different levels of progress need not succumb to myopic nationalistic measures in order to preserve their political independence and sovereignty. Indeed, multilateral arrangements can always been worked out which will help nation-states to achieve their economic goals while strengthening their autonomy and independence.

More than contributing to regionalism and multilateralism, RCEP may also pave the way to a positive re-orientation of its member states which in turn will impact upon the global economy and world politics. Through RCEP, ASEAN states may begin to realise that getting closer to their North East neighbours, China, Japan and Korea, on the one hand, and their South Pacific neighbours such as Australia and New Zealand, on the other, not only makes economic sense but also denotes deeper geographical roots and cultural meanings which have yet to be discovered.  The same argument goes for the North East Asian states whose interaction with ASEAN at the cultural and societal levels remains somewhat limited.  Perhaps re-orientation will have the greatest significance for Australia and New Zealand as they come to appreciate through RCEP that their real neighbours are in ASEAN and North East Asia. To put it starkly, RCEP may be the conduit through which the two countries finally acknowledge that they are not part of the West but integral to Asia. In other words, for Australia and New Zealand, RCEP could turn out to be an identity marker.  It is not inconceivable that as the 15 members of RCEP re-orientate, their regional and even international roles will change considerably.

But attempts to consolidate and strengthen RCEP will not be a walk in the park.  Even as it is there are major political- cum- security issues facing individual RCEP states. For instance, they relate differently to China on the contentious South China Sea (SCS) issue. The United States’ stance on the issue complicates matters. There are also longstanding disputes between RCEP states which occasionally erupt into friction. Relations between China and Japan; Japan and Korea; China and Vietnam; Thailand and Cambodia; Singapore and Malaysia; Malaysia and the Philippines; Myanmar and Malaysia; and Australia and Indonesia have all had their ups and downs.  What makes it worse is the role played by individuals and groups outside the region, including sections of the media who are ever ready to exploit disputes between and among RCEP members with the aim of weakening the organisation.

This is why RCEP should develop mechanisms that will address these disputes. It could be an Eminent Persons Group (EPG) drawn from within RCEP or an Early Response Caucus which will deliberate on a dispute and recommend solutions to the RCEP leadership.   What RCEP should not do is to sweep problems under the carpet.

In this regard, appointing a RCEP Secretary-General who will focus upon its primary agenda of developing the economies of the region but is also deeply cognisant of political undercurrents, is imperative.   It could be a retired political leader or a retired diplomat who is also knowledgeable about RCEP’s complex cultural nuances. He or she will serve as the regional grouping’s anchor in the initial years.

The Secretary-General’s principal task is to ensure that RCEP does not flounder and fail. Its success which in the ultimate analysis will depend upon the collective political leadership of the grouping will be a fundamental prerequisite for the evolution of a new global economic order.

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Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Malaysia. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Featured image is from InfoBrics

On November 17, under Russia’s BRICS Chairmanship, Vladimir Putin hosted the 12th BRICS Summit via videoconference. The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa participated to discuss the state and prospects of cooperation within BRICS, discussed the global stability and security, and most importantly exchanged views on joint efforts to halt the spread of coronavirus pandemic.

President Vladimir Putin reviewed BRICS activities since Russia took over from Brazil, highlighted achievements and set the challenges for the future of BRICS. During the Russia’s Chairmanship the BRICS, Russia has held 130 events, including some 25 ministerial meetings, many of them online.

Within the context of the current global health situation, Putin pointed to the subject of medical cooperation among BRICS, and reminded the Ufa Declaration which was adopted five years ago included an agreement to work together to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

Pursuant to that agreement, the BRICS countries created an early warning system for infectious disease outbreaks, which could be used during the COVID-19 pandemic. The BRICS countries promptly responded to the disease outbreak and took practical measures to combat the pandemic.

He said that the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) has signed agreements with Indian and Brazilian partners on clinical tests of the Sputnik V vaccine and with pharmaceutical companies in China and India on the production of this vaccine not only for own use, but also for third countries. There are Russian vaccines, and they are effective and safe. The next task is to launch large-scale production. It is very important to join forces for the large-scale manufacturing of this product for public use.

Besides this, it important to accelerate the establishment of the BRICS Vaccine Research and Development Centre, as agreed at the Johannesburg summit two years ago at the initiative of South African.

Due to the pandemic, many countries have taken emergency measures to support national industries, finance and the social sphere, to revive their economies and return them to a trajectory of sustainable growth. This is the goal of the Strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership for the period until 2025, prepared for this summit.

The New Development Bank is in great demand in the current situation. The Bank has reserved $10 billion to combat the pandemic, while its overall portfolio of investment projects now exceeds $20 billion. As many as 62 large projects are being implemented in the BRICS countries. Incidentally, a regional branch of the bank will soon open in Moscow to implement lending programs across the Eurasian space. The BRICS countries have a special insurance tool in case of a crisis in the financial markets: the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, with a $100 billion fund.

The BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism is important in the parties’ cooperation on credit and investment policy. This year, they have agreed on the rules and principles of responsible financing of development institutions within its framework.

The five countries are enhancing cooperation in science, technology, and innovation. Intensive contacts have been underway between our academic and scientific centers. Their coverage is truly impressive – from ocean and polar research to astronomy and artificial intelligence. Experts from the five countries carry out joint energy research: reports have been prepared on the projected development of the fuel and energy sectors in the BRICS countries until 2040.

Putin further highlighted the challenging global and regional security environment. International terrorism and drug trafficking continue to pose serious threats, and cybercrime has greatly expanded its reach.

“We are witnessing dangerous destabilizing trends in the Middle East and North Africa. The armed conflicts in Libya and Yemen are continuing. There is still a lot to be done to bring about a political settlement in Syria, and the risks of escalation persist in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and in the Persian Gulf,” he told the gathering.

It is highly satisfying that the BRICS countries have been closely coordinating their efforts on current international and regional matters. A policy document, the BRICS Counter-Terrorism Strategy, drafted for the summit. The BRICS countries are expanding their cooperation on combating drug trafficking and corruption, as well as on international information security.

During the meeting, the leaders of the BRICS member countries heard reports from other speakers who have overseen the work on each track of the association’s activity.

Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev spoke about cooperation in the coronavirus pandemic response, in combating terrorism and cybercrime.

President of the New Development Bank Marcos Troyjo cited the financial institution’s performance data and plans for next year.

President of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Sergei Katyrin spoke about the Business Council events, while Chairman of VEB RF Igor Shuvalov covered the BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism.

The report by Chair of the Board of Directors of Global Rus Trade Anna Nesterova addressed the establishment of the BRICS Women’s Business Alliance.

President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, President of China Xi Jinping and President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, during the meeting, exchanged views on the state and prospects of the five-sided cooperation.

The 12th BRICS Summit Moscow Declaration was adopted which reflects the five countries’ consolidated approach to the further development of the association, as well as the Strategy for the BRICS Economic Partnership until 2025 and the BRICS Anti-Terrorism Strategy.

“India, China, South Africa and Brazil commend Russian BRICS Chairmanship in 2020 and express their gratitude to the government and people of Russia for holding the XII BRICS Summit,” the adopted document says. Besides that, Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa extended full support to India for its BRICS Chairmanship in 2021 and the holding of the 13th BRICS Summit.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah is a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Kremlin.ru

A British MP faced backlash Monday after suggesting that employees in the UK should not be allowed to go to work unless they can prove that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19, when the shot becomes available.

“If vaccination works and if we’re confident it’s safe, and all indications so far are good, then I can certainly see the day when businesses say: ‘Look, you’ve got to return to the office and if you’re not vaccinated you’re not coming in,’” said Tom Tugendhat.

“And I can certainly see social venues asking for vaccination certificates,” Tugendhat added.

Far from being some extreme leftist politician, Tugendhat is a Conservative MP, he chairs the foreign affairs committee under Prime Minster Boris Johnson’s government.

Tugendhat also suggested that there are precedents for requiring vaccinations for foreign travel.

“I remember when I used to travel rather more than I do now – when you go into certain countries you had to show a yellow fever certificate and if you did not have a yellow fever certificate you weren’t allowed in the country and that was that,” said Tugendhat.

“There was no debates, no appeals and no further requests. And I can see a situation where yes, of course you’re free not to have the vaccine, but there are consequences,” he added.

Tugendhat also suggested that vaccine status could even be required to use public transport, saying “It would depend what the public services were, and who and when, so I wouldn’t want to start predicting.”

“But I do think that if things are shown to be safe then rejecting them when they have a wider effect on the whole of society is going to have consequences,” the MP added.

AN ORWELLIAN FUTURE
Tom Tugendhat, Conservative MP & Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has stated he could “certainly see the day” when people are refused entry into pubs & restaurants, and they may not be allowed to return to their workplace until they've had the vaccine. pic.twitter.com/AWBlkK59Fy

— Jim Slater (@Dailybugle1898) November 15, 2020

“Conservative Tom Tugendhat has warned that he could 'certainly see the day' when proof of vaccination was required to return to normal life.” @TomTugendhat Really??! You think this is OK?!https://t.co/Qj8Raj5l4z

— B Beetle (@busybee8009) November 17, 2020

Advocates for mandatory vaccination like @TomTugendhat always say that the vaccine is safe. What is safe? No vaccine can possibly be 100% safe.
Has the government indemnified the vaccine manufacturers against any liability for their vaccine prior to production I wonder? https://t.co/pvyPJ3r5HJ

— John Fisher (@thejohnfisher) November 17, 2020

I hope this proves to be safe and accurate. https://t.co/u1n8YhSkUf

— Tom Tugendhat (@TomTugendhat) November 16, 2020

Make no mistake; this will be the next divide:

How to “encourage” people to take the vaccine, polls suggest at least 40% of the population will refuse
👇👇
Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat suggested anti-vaxers could be banned from workplaces and social venues until they get jabs

— Ajay Jagota 🏃‍♂️ (@ajayjagota) November 13, 2020

Tugendhat’s suggestion is just the latest in a string of indications that anyone who chooses not to be vaccinated will be effectively ostracised from society.

Airlines are likely to require passengers to sign up for a “health pass” which includes a digital certificate of vaccination against COVID-19 before allowing them to fly, according to a recent report.

The system would be similar in nature to that being considered by Ticketmaster, who it was revealed are considering making customers prove they’ve had the vaccine or a negative coronavirus test before allowing them to purchase tickets.

Ticketmaster later clarified that a final decision on such measures would be up to event organizers but that they were still mulling over the implementation of the system.

With Uber and other companies also beginning to refuse services to people who fail to comply with coronavirus restrictions, the “new normal” will likely create a lower caste of refusniks who are barred from traveling, any form of social life, and in the future even basic financial services.

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Featured image is from Health Impact News

The US military establishment will breathe a sigh of relief at Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Nearly 800 former high-ranking military and security officials penned an open letter in support of the Democratic candidate during the campaign. A who’s who of former generals, ambassadors, admirals and senior national security advisers—from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to four-star admiral and Bush-era Deputy Homeland Security Advisor Steve Abbot—backed Biden as the best bet to revive US power. A month earlier, 70 national security officials who served in Republican administrations threw their weight behind Biden (the list soon grew to 130), arguing that, on foreign policy, Trump “has failed our country”. 

Why was Biden the war criminals’ candidate of choice? The foreign policy chaos and controversy of the Trump years were a symptom of a global superpower in relative decline, with no real strategy out of the quagmire.

The US empire is at a turning point. It is the world’s undisputed superpower; its reach is global, both militarily and economically. The US has been the world’s largest economy since 1871, and its military has close to 800 installations in 80 countries around the world. But today, it is facing a growing economic rival in China, and several lesser powers challenging its ability to call the shots in every corner of the globe, most notably Iran and Russia.

The War on Terror, launched by the administration of George W. Bush, resulted in the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It killed more than a million people and cost upwards of US$2.4 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For the people of the Middle East, it was a massacre. For US empire, it was a disaster. The destabilisation of Iraq led to the expansion of Iranian influence across the region, rather than the regime change in Tehran the Pentagon dreamed of. The intervention in Iraq was meant to secure US dominance. It instead exposed the weaknesses and limits of US power right at the moment when China’s dramatic economic expansion was beginning.

Tensions between the US and China have been increasing for years. Since its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, China has built its economic power, its diplomatic power and its military power, while the US became bogged down in endless wars and suffered economic crisis and depression with the 2008 financial crisis.

Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, with its plan to increase US naval forces in the Asia-Pacific, was a signal that the US ruling class wanted to contain and encircle China. Obama’s then classified Air-Sea Battle doctrine was an effort to create an operational plan for a possible military confrontation. Leaked cables made public by WikiLeaks reveal that Australia was in lockstep with US imperial strategy. In conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd confirmed Australia’s willingness to “deploy force if everything goes wrong”. But Obama’s strategy was too little too late for containment. China became more aggressive in pressing claims in the South China Sea while beginning to close the enormous gap in military capabilities with the United States, engaging in the most rapid peacetime arms build-up in history.

Under Trump, these tensions further increased. Trump’s confrontational rhetoric and trade war were a sharp break from the decades-long US strategy of integrating China into the international liberal order. Since the Republican administration of Richard Nixon—who in 1972 became the first US president to visit Beijing—the US ruling class thought it could ensure global supremacy by incorporating China into the world system. For a while, it appeared to work. China became the world’s sweatshop and a key site of investment for US companies such as Apple and General Motors. But the strategy could be mutually enriching for only so long. Today, China is leveraging its meteoric growth to challenge the United States’ leadership in the Asia-Pacific.

Obama’s signature containment strategy was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP would have been the largest free trade deal in history, lowering tariffs and other non-tariff barriers to trade between eleven Pacific countries and the US. Its goal was to lock out China and further integrate Pacific countries with the US economy. Obama’s Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the TPP was “as important … as another aircraft carrier”.

But just a few years later, Donald Trump tore up the TPP. The move was at odds with the consensus among the US economic and military elite, but the new president had his own ideas about how to contain China. Trump railed against the US trade deficit, accused Beijing of currency manipulation and, as Obama did, of stealing technology from US companies. In the 2019 State of the Union address he said, “We are now making it clear to China that after years of targeting our industries and stealing our intellectual property, the theft of American jobs and wealth has come to an end”.

By August this year, Trump had slapped tariffs on $550 billion of Chinese goods, with a targeted campaign against tech giant Huawei, which had been tipped to overtake Apple in global phone sales. While Republican and Democratic politicians have backed a hardline approach to China, Trump’s erratic protectionist approach to trade has alienated large sections of the capitalist class otherwise happy with domestic tax cuts and deregulation. A Bloomberg Economics report, released before the pandemic gripped the country, estimated that the escalating tariffs on China would cost the US economy $316 billion by the end of this year.

More worryingly for the US establishment, Trump adopted a dismissive attitude towards US allies, particularly the European Union. Trump prided himself on his ability to cut deals with other nations that favoured the US. He signalled that the multilateral approach to trade was over when he tore up the TPP, and followed that by applying tariffs on German cars, Canadian steel and French luxury goods. For much of the US elite, these moves have simply created a void that Beijing is attempting to fill with its own free trade deals and the $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative, which aims to incorporate more than 138 countries into trade routes and production chains centred on China.

The International Monetary Fund, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the UN and other international institutions project US dominance by drawing allied nations behind US leadership. Trump’s presidency delegitimised or sidelined those institutions as he focused on an “America first” posture. The military establishment believes that this has threatened, rather than strengthened, US power—although there is now an acknowledgement that those institutions failed to keep China in check, something a Biden presidency will also grapple with.

The war criminals hope that Biden will restore political legitimacy to the office by rehabilitating the liberal ideology that manufactures consent for American imperialism, pitching US aggression as necessary to “make the world safe for democracy” and defending the “rules-based liberal world order”. Above all, the US establishment hopes that Biden will restore relationships with US allies and construct a coalition of nations to confront China, after a disastrous four years that called into question US global leadership. As the National Security Leaders for Biden open letter bemoaned: “Our allies no longer trust or respect us, and our enemies no longer fear us”.

Biden has a proven record as a hawkish proponent of US empire. For decades, he served on the Senate foreign relations committee. He was an early proponent of the expansion of NATO to project US influence into the former eastern bloc after the fall of the USSR. He backed US intervention in the Balkan war, supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, voted for the war on Iraq in 2003 and, as vice president, backed the US intervention in Libya.

There is consensus within the US ruling class over the need to “get tough” with China. The military establishment expects Biden to turn the screws. On the campaign trail, he accused Trump of “getting played” by Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he called a “thug”. This is consistent with Democratic Party practice in the Congress, which is to criticise Trump for not being tough enough. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, for example, accused Trump of “selling out” by cutting a trade deal with China. Schumer also spearheaded legislation to implement bans on Huawei when Trump appeared to back down.

Since his first days in Congress, Biden has also made a name for himself as a staunch supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. According to Israeli publication Haaretz, Biden is said to have a “real friendship” with Israel’s far-right president, Benjamin Netanyahu. He was vice president when the US signed a $38 billion military aid deal with Netanyahu, which the State Department called the “single largest pledge of bilateral military assistance in US history”. So while Trump pushed pro-Israeli rhetoric far to the right, abandoning any pretence of support for Palestinian statehood, Biden put his money where his mouth is when it came to propping up Israeli apartheid in Palestine.

On Afghanistan, Biden may prove to be to the right of Trump. As vice president, he supported an enduring US military presence in the country. Trump, by contrast, shocked the US military when he announced on Twitter that he wants all troops out by Christmas. In contrast, Biden in an interview with Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper, said he would maintain a troop presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anti-imperialists need to judge Biden by his blood-soaked record in Congress and by the company he keeps. The bulk of the US military establishment has backed Biden precisely because they think his multilateral approach will restore credibility to US interventions. It’s for this reason that Forbesmagazine senior contributor Loren Thompson predicted last month: “A Biden presidency … would be more likely to use US military forces overseas than President Trump has been”.

Global capitalism is facing a profound crisis that is reshaping international relations and putting pressure on the fault lines of existing conflicts. Open imperialist rivalry will be a feature of the coming period, along with wars over regional disputes. There is no length to which the US ruling class won’t go to safeguard its position as global superpower. And Joe Biden is the commander-in-chief. He is now the most dangerous man in the world.

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Who lost China? The question, first asked when Mao’s dictum about power coming from the barrel of a gun proved pertinent and Truman was in the White House, is being asked again with renewed vigor. Some in the West believed that greater engagement with China would inevitably lead to the country opening up and forging closer ties to the Unites States and Europe. China always viewed things differently. It is often overlooked, though not in China, that it has engaged with the West before, not to its advantage. And then there was 1999. Chinese-people are convinced they were deliberately attacked by America. The US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 was no accident, most people in China believe.  US President Bill Clinton apologizing for the bombing, stating it was accidental did nothing to alter this viewpoint.

The US selling arms to Taiwan or keeping close ties with the Dalai Lama is not exactly viewed, in Beijing, as the behavior of a friendly partner. But up until now at least, optimism, based on “differences, sure we have them, but things will get better”, reigned. For decades since the historic Nixon-Mao meetings of the early 1970s, US policy to China has been noted for its lack of change, unlike say US relations with Moscow. Ever greater engagement with China has been the mantra.

That policy survived Tiananmen Square in 1989 and China’s premature (its market was not ready) entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and China’s trade surpluses.

US presidents have essentially drawn from the same playbook. They have turned a blind eye, the other cheek, perhaps too often as they emphasized support for China’s continued economic emergence at the expense of human rights. A wealthier China they were convinced  benefits everyone. The view in China is more nuanced. Fine if the people are wealthier but more important for stability, the country’s rulers believe, is that the Party is more secure.

The common-held view that China’s moment has finally arrived at the expense of the US is wrong.

China has made ground but the US retains the dominant role. China is not seeking dominance, certainly a greater say on the world stage, but not dominance.

This is not for altruistic reasons. Beijing’s believes establishing a global presence on the world stage makes the party stronger at home. Anything more, such as being Number 1, and the benefits (from greater responsibility) immediately dry up as seen by the US. The financial crisis of 2008 started in America, after five years of a disastrous Middle Eastern war. And the Trump presidency, especially its inability to cope with the end game, has given China a greater belief in itself.

There is a swagger about Beijing. But there are huge challenges facing China. Certain sectors of the economy are doing well, but the fastest growing business in Beijing is food deliveries. The e-commerce sector is beginning to lose momentum, food deliveries aside. COVID, at least in its widely contagious form, came from Wuhan. Beijing is generally behaving arrogantly abroad and fearful at home. Its trade deals with other countries are facing a wave of criticism, something difficult for Beijing to deal with and counteract. No, this does not mean collapse is imminent but it does suggest that events could take place that the party may find threatening. For instance, an incident that ignites a surge of nationalism on the streets that sees the party hesitant and weak in its response or a naval clash in the South China Sea. Neither scenario can be discounted.

China’s accomplishments, not least economic growth and combating COVID, must be applauded but on the streets of Beijing there is little indication of celebration. Relief? Yes. Gratitude? Yes. A new US administration may mark a more cooperative phase in relations. But as the year ends the chill in the air is not just because of plunging temperatures. The last 12 months show that the unexpected may not be that unusual.

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Scott Atlas, the medical professional who’s been tasked under President Donald Trump to help decide best coronavirus practices and policies, called for citizens, particularly in Michigan, particularly in tyrannically-governed Michigan, to “rise up” and fight unconstitutional crackdowns from overreaching, overbearing public servants.

He’s right.

The longer this coronavirus madness goes on, the more apparent it becomes: civil disobedience and only civil disobedience will rein in the, well, madness.

Here’s what Atlas said, via Twitter:

“The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters. #StepUp.”

He also tweeted this, an apparent clarification:

“Hey, I NEVER was talking at all about violence. People vote, people peacefully protest. NEVER would I endorse or incite violence. NEVER!!”

His tweets came after Michigan’s resident-in-tyranny Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced new crackdowns on freedoms due to, sigh, sigh, once again, the coronavirus. Specifically, she announced a three-week ban on indoor dining; on in-person learning in high schools and in colleges and universities; on in-person working “when work can be done from home;” on organized sports; on theater, movie, stadium, and arena attendance; on bowling, on ice skating, on indoor water park play; on bingo-ing in bingo halls, on gambling in casinos; and on going to the gym to take group fitness classes.

I am zee law.

Happily, she didn’t ban the buying of seeds this time.

She also graciously allowed for the playing of professional sports — minus the spectators — and for the mourning at funerals, so long as not more than 25 were in attendance.

Strangely, preschools, kindergartens, elementary schools and middle schools through grade eight, along with day cares, can remain open. Because the coronavirus only infects the higher grade levels?

Anyhow, Whitmer, as expected, expressed shock and awe — shock and awe! — at Atlas’s tweets.

“It actually took my breath away, to tell you the truth,” she told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” in reference to the tweets.

But here’s the thing, America: At what point do coronavirus crackdowns on freedoms become unacceptable?

At what point is the breaking point?

Founding Fathers knew well the reluctance of a people to “rise up,” as Atlas put it, and cast off an unjust government. They wrote, in fact, in the Declaration of Independence that “all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

True.

Look around at all the face mask-wearing people, take note of all the business closings and church attendance limits, take a gander at all the kids home from school and it’s clear: “Mankind are more disposed to suffer.”

But these same Founding Fathers also wrote this: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

Peaceably, if possibly.

Are we there yet?

If Michigan were the only state, if Whitmer were the only governor, taking this coronavirus chaos and running roughshod over personal rights, maybe America could afford to ride out the storm, wait out the virus, patiently obey all the orders.

But the nonsense is widespread, from California to Michigan to Virginia to Massachusetts.

Atlas is right. Founders were right.

Civil disobedience is the only way to reel in the madness. Americans must beat back the health bureaucrats and political opportunists now — or forever wear the face mask. Forever cede freedoms. Forever give government the right to rule, not serve.

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Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.

Featured image is from Flickr

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem passed away earlier this week, but his multipolar vision will be remembered forever. The Arab Republic’s top diplomat previously served as his country’s Ambassador to the US from 1990-1999 prior to becoming Assistant Foreign Minister in 2000, Deputy Foreign Minister in 2005, Foreign Minister in 2006, and even Deputy Prime Minister in 2012. He was also Syria’s Minister of Expatriates too. In order to appreciate his legacy, the reader must understand the complex circumstances in which he worked.

The US became the world’s unipolar superpower after the end of the Cold War right when Mr. Muallem became the Syrian Ambassador to that country. He was charged with managing Damascus’ changing relations with the world during that very difficult time. It was during that period that both countries attempted to normalize their formerly hostile Cold War-era relations. Although extremely challenging, Mr. Muallem succeeded as best as he could with his very important task.

Just before becoming Foreign Minister, Syria militarily withdrew from neighboring Lebanon in response to the domestic political changes that took place there during its Cedar Revolution after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Damascus was blamed for that crime but vehemently denied it, and Mr. Muallem provided plenty of evidence in defense of his country to the United Nations. That was his first real challenge in his new post. The year after, in 2007, Israel bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria, which caused a brief crisis.

Mr. Muallem also had to contend with the increasingly aggressive US military presence in neighboring Iraq. Washington had accused Damascus of supporting anti-American militias, and some voices were even urging the Pentagon to go to war against the Arab Republic. Thankfully nothing ever came out of those hawkish cries, but that’s largely the result of Syria’s diplomatic success in standing strong against this bullying. Syrian-American relations then thawed for a short period of time after Secretary of State Kerry visited Damascus in 2010.

It was after the onset of the regional regime change operation popular described as the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2011 that Mr. Muallem became a globally recognized diplomatic figure even though he arguably deserved this distinction earlier for the aforementioned reasons. Syria was victimized by an externally waged hybrid war of terror which included foreign sponsorship of terrorist groups, crippling Western sanctions, and several false accusations that Damascus used chemical weapons against its own people.

The most dramatic of the latter occurred in late 2013 and almost led to the US launching a conventional all-out war against Syria like it had against Libya just two years prior. Mr. Muallem played a leading role in resolving this global crisis, which resulted in Syria surrendering its chemical weapons stockpile to the international community. Two years later, Russia launched a game-changing anti-terrorist military intervention in Damascus’ support to help defeat ISIS, which Mr. Muallem also played an integral role in organizing behind the scenes.

All the while, he simultaneously helped Syria react to several Turkish military interventions without escalating them to the point of a larger war, the same as he did whenever Israel launched literally hundreds of strikes against his country in the proceeding years as well, to say nothing of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition’s attacks too. It took exceptional patience and restraint to avoid overreacting to those provocations like others in his position elsewhere might have done, but he kept his cool and thus helped manage those destabilizing developments.

It should also be mentioned that Syria retained its historic alliance with Iran that preceded Mr. Muallem’s tenure as Foreign Minister by several decades. He masterfully balanced between that Mideast country and Syria’s other Russian ally without playing either off against the other unlike other smaller- and medium-sized states in similarly difficult positions had historically attempted in the past with different partners. Importantly, Mr. Muallem also oversaw the improvement of Syrian-Chinese relations during this time as well.

China, Russia, and Iran are completely different countries but are all united in spirit because of their belief in a multipolar world order, which Syria also supports. Mr. Muallem proved that countries such as his can successfully bring all three of them together to synergize their efforts in pursuit of this vision. The example that he set in this respect, among the many others that were mentioned in this analysis, will ensure that he’s remembered the world over as one of the greatest diplomats of the 21^st century.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is OGL v1.0

Masks can prove liberating.  The hidden face affords security.  Obnoxious authority breathes better and with greater assurance, hiding in comfort.  Behind the material, confidence finds a home.  While tens of millions of jobs have been lost to the novel coronavirus globally, security services, surveillance officers and pen pushers are thriving, policing admissions to facilities, churning through health and safety declarations, and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Consider the state of Victoria in Australia.  The pandemic lockdown measures have softened but have left a thick film of bureaucracy.  For the overly eager employee wishing to come into work to retrieve necessary materials (the definition of what is necessary varies), the task is irritating, even taxing.  First, temperature check.  Second, checking in via smart phone with a health declaration, a step discriminatory to those who have no interest in having such devices.  Third, clearance with security to ensure the activation of relevant cards, and the lending of necessary keys.  Even through masks, those lining up exude weariness, feeling saggy after months in epidemiological confinement.    

With the card activated and ready to access the necessary buildings, it is time to make way to the office, a space neglected since March.  Books, sulking at not having been consulted.  Detritus of memories on the wall: posters and pictures of travel to places now inaccessible for reasons of cost or the pandemic.  Towers of paperwork left unattended, rendered irrelevant by digitalisation.  White board, uncleaned.  A sense of woe grips: the days for having such a space of monkish calm and serene bliss are numbered.

During the pandemic, employers have been chorusing about the benefits of making people work from home.  This has very much to do with them, though other virtues are also celebrated: the conveniences of work and home living; avoiding long, draining commutes; spending more time with family.  We are doing it for you. 

This has meant the invasion of the employee’s home, and often not a voluntary one.  Urban managerialism, already identified in the 1970s by the English sociologist Ray Pahl, has been hyper charged by a reallocation of resources, the imposition of stresses upon the toilers.  The nature of parasitic capitalism, as Andy Merrifield puts it, has come to the fore with aggression.  “World cities,” he reasons, “are giant arenas where the most rabid activity is the activity of rabidly extorting land rent, of making land pay anyway it can; of dispatching all non-parasitic activities to some other part of town (as Engels recognized long ago), so as to help this rental maximisation.”  The almost operatic description of Karl Marx in the first volume of Das Kapital comes to mind: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more and more it sucks.”

And sucking it does, making sure that employees feed the beast by shouldering more expenses while all the time being told they are fulfilling their civic obligations and minding their good health.  The fact that doing this also means reducing the ongoing costs of the business or entity, ensuring greater rental maximisation, is seen as ancillary to the main show. 

Prior to the pandemic, the literature on attitudes to remote work was already sounding like an urban manager’s small book of maxims and clichés.  Sophia Bernazzani of the video conferencing company Owl Labs, writing in December last year, announced how “new survey data revealed that remote work is a major benefit for employees.  In fact, 34% of US workers would take a pay cut of up to 5% in order to work remotely.  And those who do work remotely say they’re happy in their jobs 29% more than on-site workers.” 

With COVID-19 yet to make its telling presence, Forbes was already diving into reasons why a remote workforce was an exhilarating boon for business.  As contributor Amar Hussain reasoned, “Although there are challenges that come with hiring and organizing a remote workforce, the reality is working with a remote team might end up being one of the best decisions you could make for your business.”  More work is accomplished by such remote teams (time otherwise wasted on commuting, for instance, can be used); a “larger talent pool” can be drawn from, given the absence of geographical constraints; rental costs will be spared, meaning that US companies would be saving $10,000 per employee per year.  Finally, a health dividend (because they care), would accrue.  “Remote work removes the need to commute and the associated negative effects.”

Urban planning academic Richard Shearmur sees past the glossy narrative of saving costs, tilting the focus away from proselytisers of the religion of remote work.  “Whatever the personal and productivity impacts of remote work, the savings of US$10,000 per year are the employer’s.  In effect, this represents an offloading of costs onto employees – a new type of enclosure.”  With this comes loneliness, reduced productivity and various inefficiencies. 

Shearmur also sees a historical parallel of expropriation.  “In 16^th-century Britain, powerful landowners expropriated common land from the communities, often for the purpose of running lucrative sheep farms.  Today, businesses like Shopify appear to be expropriating their employee’s private living space.”  They do so by making employees purchase more work equipment for the home (ergonomic chairs, desks and so forth), placing the emphasis on them to maintain such equipment and the premises that house them.

Such businesses are also casting an Orwellian eye over employees in their home environment.  Expropriation, in a fashion, is not enough; it must come with the monitoring gaze.  Productivity targets must be maintained.  Elizabeth Lyons of the University of San Diego explains what that entails.  “The things employers are really looking for is what websites are employees on, are these productive or unproductive websites, what apps are they using, how much time they are spending on their different tasks.”

In an online survey of 1,800 people in October conducted by Prospect, a UK trade union representing engineers, scientists and civil servants, two-thirds of workers expressed discomfort at the idea of programmes being used to check the frequency of their typing.  Up to 80% were also unsettled by the use of cameras recording them as they sat at their home computer, with 76% uncomfortable with the idea of wearing devices noting their location.

Some employees have been encouraged to believe in the narcotic of efficiency and productivity.  Take Candice, a “digital marketer” behind podcasts aiding students undertaking English proficiency tests.  Interviewed for ABC Radio National in Australia, she is sympathetic to her employer who “has no idea of what I’m doing all day long.”  Except that he does.  But never mind that: home surveillance technology “keeps me on track … I can see exactly how much time I’ve spent doing work”.  Good for the unassuming Candice and co-religionists of remote work; bad for many of us.

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

Featured image: Public domain image from Wiki’s COVID-Protest page.

Joe Biden is not and never will be US president-elect legitimately.

Clear evidence shows significant election fraud in key swing states — favoring Biden/Harris over Trump.

If all US Election 2020 votes were tabulated accurately, Trump would carry key swing states he won in 2016, enough for reelection.

As things turned out, deep state dark forces orchestrated a diabolical plot to prevent him from winning a second term.

Along with corporate-controlled establishment media, state officials in key swing states and their courts (the latter so far) are complicit with the plot.

If successful, election-rigging will be official US policy henceforth in all races for high office.

If election fraud is exposed and reversed, there’s a chance that future contests will require paper ballots with verified registered voter signatures.

When elections are transparent, the old-fashioned way works best.

Corporate-run voting machines can rig the process with electronic ease, software designed to make losers winners and vice versa.

Mail-in ballots would remain an issue. They can be discarded or counted when arriving post-election.

Independently verified signatures would reduce the chance of fraud.

Proof-positive open, free, and fair elections won’t ever likely be achieved.

What’s only possible is minimizing what’s able to corrupt them.

The outcome of US Election 2020 will likely decide what follows. Now is the moment of truth.

An electronically-controlled system will either be allowed to continue manufacturing outcomes of key races ahead — assuring fraudulent results at will — or the scam will be exposed, a new system replacing it.

A Gateway Pundit analysis discussed in a previous article showed that “millions of votes (were) either switched from…Trump to Biden…were lost” or discarded.

In key swing states and elsewhere, election-rigging was rife, including in Virginia.

In the Old Dominion state, “three entries of over 300,000 votes were posted in the data base to Biden’s vote total. Two entries of over 300,000 votes were taken away,” Gateway Pundit reported, adding:

“The same happened to President Trump’s totals but in much smaller amounts.”

“Overall 851,000 votes were added to Biden’s totals and only 318,000 were awarded to President Trump between 11:14pm (Eastern) on November 3rd and 5:00am November 4th.”

“This resulted in over half a million more votes net going to Biden and 73% of the votes during this timeframe.”

It provided his winning margin in the state of around 450,000 votes.

Similar activity happened in Pennsylvania. What appeared to be an insurmountable lead for Trump evaporated, flipping the state to Biden/Harris.

In key swing states and others, evidence shows that numerous votes for deceased and non-state residents were counted.

So were un-postmarked mail-in ballots and others arriving post-November 3.

Whistleblowers sounding the alarm about widespread fraud were ignored or treated dismissively.

Biden/Harris didn’t win Election 2020. They stole it.

Key Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell claims she has hard evidence to prove significant election fraud — favoring Biden/Harris over Trump.

DJT was reelected by millions of votes, she maintains —fraudulently shifted from him to Biden/Harris by software designed for this purpose.

An algorithm was used to calculate the number needed to swing key states to Biden/Harris by fraudulent means, she said.

According to Powell, significant election fraud occurred in “at least 29 states,” adding:

“It’s going to blow the mind of everyone in this country when we can get it all together and can explain it with the affidavits and the experts that have come forward.”

Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, producers of electronic voting machines and software, were used to flip states from Trump to Biden/Harris.

Powell maintains that the Trump campaign is preparing “to overturn election results in multiple states.”

All of the above and perhaps more will have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in court.

If state courts in key swing states continue to side with Biden/Harris over Trump, nine Supreme Court justices will likely have final say over who won and lost.

Will massive election fraud triumph over an open, free and fair process, or will it be the other way around?

Much depends on how things turn out.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Judging the effects of something on a state of affairs requires a standard scale characterized by a spectrum that separates two opposite axiological points: the positive and the negative. The context of the present issue brings us to the question, What are the positive and the negative effects of technology on society? We raise this question this early so as not to be distracted by the unilateral notion that technology is always on the right track as far as its effects on society are concerned. This mentality gets prevalent because the loudest voices we hear and ofttimes choose to listen to are those of the fanatical proponents and users of the technology in question. Their advocacy achieves high-profile strength as media back-up through advertising blows out of proportion the spun-off story of such technology’s best points. This strategy sways people away from getting themselves into a critical mode which generally leads them to a state of pathetic gullibility.

This line of concern does not, however, prevent us from coming up with a positive judgment. Rather, the challenge put forward is to engender a fair and hence impartial acuity on the issue of technology’s effects on society. This is deemed reasonable as the task considers the intermediary stages that run from one end of the scale to the other. We are therefore looking into the fuzzy shades that constitute the spectrum on whose basis our evaluation is intended to issue out.

Technology is generally humanity’s achievement to facilitate an otherwise burdensome endeavor. At the onset, we see the worthwhile intent that pushes onward the positive value of technology. It is not aimed to destroy but to build, not to obstruct but to facilitate, not to generate problems but to solve them. At the inaugural stage, technology is stamped with a pristine character that promotes productivity, facilitates proficiency, enhances expertise, and advances competence. All these even transcend the individual beneficiary to fully embrace an entire society’s movement towards a higher level of progressive refinement. In this sense, technology fulfills its fundamental mandate in the service of humanity.

However, technology’s value is never inherent in itself; it is rather an attribution that emanates from its human users. It is also in the hands of its human users that technology could go awry and have its course diverted from its original trajectory. Technology that has originally been projected to serve the interest not only of its individual users but also of the society which has tolerated and accepted its operation can, therefore, lead to negative impacts when used irresponsibly.

In the post-modern/post-industrial era, post-modern technology has dominated the socio-cultural landscape. There’s no doubt that society has tremendously benefitted from the amazing technology that has continually been invented and innovated in a seemingly uninterrupted direction. Household chores, office works and factory operations that used to be a drag in the past have been transformed by new technology into no-sweat tasks. We are surrounded by amazing gadgets, equipment, and tools at our beck and call–facilities effortlessly operated at our fingertips literally.

In the present dispensation, the Internet dominates the post-modern technological scenario. It has brought us to unprecedented wonders in the cyber-world of instant information and facilitative applications. The exhilaration seems endless as we explore novel and yet uncharted regions that pop up along the information superhighway. We have even discovered recreational activities that enthrall our playfulness to the point of getting ensnared by their challenging offers to go on and on and on until the wee hours of the morning. We are caught flat-footed by the magic of this technology in the “third wave” civilization (with apologies to the late futurologist Alvin Toffler) which is more popularly called the age of information.

But what the Internet offers is not always beneficial to individual persons in particular and to society in general. It has introduced social network sites and exciting applications like online games that have led people to the point of addiction. Time wastage has increased and gainful productivity has decreased. Young people, in particular, would rather spend endless hours beating virtual adversaries, watching rib-tickling videos and comical photos on tablets, mobiles, and laptops at the expense of spending more quality time attending to serious school assignments or job responsibilities. In this kind of situation, the excitement seems endless and the passing of time is something immaterial.

Too much exposure to the aforementioned gadgets affects brain functioning and the circadian rhythm as well. In the process, what is actually affected is the brain as enthusiasts lose their sense of concentration. People in this condition cannot be expected to function effectively and efficiently in more serious undertakings both in society and in the workplace. If worse comes to worst, the whole scenario may even end up to be a serious case of a health hazard as people get too preoccupied with games and social networks so that they simply settle to consume junk foods and find it difficult to schedule a time for physical exertions.

Alone in front of the screen, they have put themselves segregated from their fellow human beings in the context of a community of warm bodies. A face-to-face conversation is no longer a common encounter as sending online messages via email or Whatsapp among others has become the order of the day. In this sense, socialization has been redefined in a way that doesn’t require the actual presence of individual persons in paramount reality.

In conclusion, we say that it’s one thing to cherish the positive effects of technology and it’s another to be conscious of its detrimental impacts on the individual and society. We all want to enjoy the amenities and benefits offered by present-day technology but we should also be aware of their negative aftermath when utilized irresponsibly. We still have a long way to go and it is important to instill the positive value of technology to the youth of this generation and beyond if such technology is used with a high degree of responsibility, creativity, and efficiency.

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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.

Credits to the owner of the photo

In October and the first half of November, the war in Syria remained in a relatively calm phase, which was not marked by any active military actions of the sides involved in the conflict. Nonetheless, this period demonstrated several trends that would shape the further development of the situation in the war-torn country.

Despite the collapse of ISIS’ self-proclaimed Caliphate and repeatedly declared defeat of the group, ISIS cells still remain a major factor of instability in eastern Homs, southern Raqqa, in the countryside of Deir Ezzor and in the areas surrounding the US military garrison in al-Tanf. ISIS cells regularly conduct attacks on civilian and military convoys moving between Homs and Deir Ezzor as well as on patrols and checkpoints of the Syrian Army in the aforementioned areas.

For example, on November 14, ISIS ambushed a convoy of the al-Qatirji security group, which guards government oil shipments in southern Raqqa. The incident took place on the Ithriyah-Raqqa road. 5 pro-government fighters were killed. A day earlier, on November 13, ISIS blew up an oil tanker guarded by al-Qatirji group with an improvised explosive device. The al-Qatirji security group is affiliated with the al-Qatirji Company that imports oil from Syria’s northeastern region, controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, to government-controlled areas. The company and its owners are on the US sanction list. On November 11, ISIS cells stormed SAA military positions north of al-Sukhna and blew up a local gas pipeline. The ISIS news agency Amaq claimed that 11 Syrian soldiers were killed in the attack.

ISIS also has a wide network of cells on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, especially near the Omar oil fields area, but it rarely conducted attacks there in recent months. Local sources claim that ISIS members use the eastern bank of the Euphrates and border areas close to al-Tanf as rear bases for operations in central Syria.

The US military is present in northeastern Syria in much larger numbers than the US President Donald Trump used to think. This was an open secret since the very start of the implementation of the Trump-declared troop withdrawal. However, on November 12, this fact was openly confirmed by James Jeffrey, former Special Representative for Syria Engagement, that said that US officials routinely lied to Trump over the number of troops deployed in Syria. Currently, US sources admit that up to 1,000 US troops remain in the conflict zone. Together with military contractors and civilian specialists the real number is most likely closer to 2,000-2,500.

The south of Syria remains one of the points of instability despite the Russia-backed reconciliation efforts there. On November 12, a Tigr vehicle of the Russian Military Police was struck with an improvised explosive device on the road between al-Musayfrah and al-Sahoah in the eastern countryside of Daraa. The incident took place amid a new round of tensions between pro-government forces and former members of reconciled militant groups in the area.

The Syrian Army took control of the region and allowed the relatively moderate part of militant groups there to lay down arms as a part of a wide reconciliation agreement in 2018. However, since then, the local reconciliation process has faced several obstacles, including the resistance of a part of the local elites affiliated with militants. Together with the close proximity to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, this turns the province into a permanent headache for the Damascus government.

The de-escalation deal in Greater Idlib and the creation of the demilitarized zone in its south is once again stalled due to the Turkish unwillingness to break its ties with the al-Qaeda-like terrorist groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkistan Islamic Party because these groups are the core of the so-called Turkish-backed opposition. This situation cannot be changed without another military operation of the Syrian Army or the Turkish will to finally start working against terrorists in Idlib. The second scenario seems unlikely as it does not go in the interests of Ankara.

Nonetheless, it seems that Moscow has not abandoned the idea to motivate Turkey for some constructive actions and during the last 2 months, warplanes of the Russian Aerospace Forces conducted a large number of strikes on infrastructure and training camps of Turkish-backed terrorists.

At the same time, Ankara has evacuated its observation posts in Maar Hattat, Morek and Sher Mughar, and started withdrawing forces from Qabtan al-Jabal and Sheikh Aqil. Most of these positions were surrounded by the Syrian Army during the previous anti-terrorist advances. This move goes contrary to the loud claims of the Turkish leadership that it will withdraw zero posts, even surrounded ones, from Greater Idlib and instead of this will force the Syrian Army to withdraw to positions behind them. This is a visual demonstration that the airstrike diplomacy efforts of the Russian side has a particular effect.

The war in Syria did not end and a comprehensive diplomatic solution has not yet been found due to the serious contradictions between the sides involved in the standoff. Nonetheless, the current format of the conflict allowed to put to an end the wide-scale military confrontations on the ground and moved the main agenda towards counter-terrorism efforts, economic and diplomatic questions.

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After last week’s firing of various Pentagon officials including Sec. of Defense Mark Esper, the Undersecretaries of Intelligence and Policy, and Chief of Staff to the Sec of Defense, Democrats and Republicans, eager to get back to a status quo under a pending-Biden administration that is already stacked with op-ed publishing, arms manufacturer-funded think tankers, were irate with another reckless decision that cuts across the Bush-Obama grade of military thinking.

In Esper’s place come former-Army colonels Christopher Miller to serve as Defense Sec. and Douglas Macgregor to serve as his senior advisor.

In Macgregor there’s a renowned soldier who commanded one of the tank contingents in the famous Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War, as well as a man who has called the Iraq wars a failure, and famously said we should “run” rather than walk out of Afghanistan. Around this date two years ago, he published an op-ed of his own on the precarious position of the U.S. forces in Syria, entitled “The Case for Leaving Syria”.

Douglas Macgregor meeting with IDF Chief of the General Staff Lieutenant General Aviv Kochavi (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Miller on the other hand was up until last week the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and commander of some U.S. special forces in Afghanistan, with whom he fought al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Upon his appointment, he penned a letter to all Defense Department staff which said “we are not a people of perpetual war – it is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought,” before adding “all wars must end”.

What’s more, his admittance of the costs of war were not included with any of the get out of jail free cards politicians and generals so often use to avoid scrutiny, and that start with something like “I agree we should try to draw down these wars…” and that end with something like “but our withdrawal has to be based around conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timelines,” or “but we have to do it responsibly, in a way that doesn’t endanger our allies and partners,” or “but we have to make sure that when we leave the country won’t be used as a haven to plan attacks against us in the future”.

In part paraphrase, these platitudes have been said by everyone from David Petraeus to Pete Buttigieg, and in leaving them out, Miller substituted only the modest coda that “ending wars requires compromise and partnership. We met the challenge; we gave it our all. Now, it’s time to come home.”

It seems that after 4 years of disastrous foreign policy appointments like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Mark Esper, Jim Mattis, Robert O’Brien, and James Jeffery, Trump has finally put some men in important cabinet positions that may actually agree with him on ending wars.

Too Little Too Late

Too little too late as the old saying goes, and the appointments are likely to enrage both supporters and opponents of the lame duck president. Trump has about 60 days left in office, and while he has now appointed someone who wants to “run not walk” out of Afghanistan, a fitting policy stance if Trump wants to fulfill his promise and bring the troops home by Christmas, supporters of Trump’s anti-war stance are left grinding their teeth, wondering why the ever-available Macgregor wasn’t appointed earlier.

Meanwhile, opponents have lined up to criticize the head chopping of Pentagon officials whom White House Spokesmen told the Washington Post were seen as “the leader(s) of the resistance to his agenda [of troop withdrawals]”.

“President Trump’s decision to fire Secretary Esper out of spite is not just childish, it’s also reckless,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-WA) said in a statement.

James Stavridis, former-Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and senior advisor to former-Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld, described to Time Magazine that these moves are “significantly diminishing our national security over the next few months until the Biden Administration takes over,” and collectively something that will cause “high fives” from “Beijing to Moscow to Caracas”.

Trump’s anti-war base was found in high war-casualty states like Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It may well have been that it was their votes for Biden, who at least talked a less-hawkish game compared to Hillary, that lost him the election, as a troop reshuffle in Europe, no new wars, and the lagging of the implementation of the pre-peace arrangement with the Taliban couldn’t merit their support in the face of the failure to remove troops from Somalia, Iraq, or Syria.

Furthermore, prospects for future wars look greater now after the last four years than in 2016 in the face of the bitter animosity created with the Iranians and Venezuelans, the assassination of General Soleimani, the continued support for the Saudis and Emiratis in the War in Yemen, and the steady dismantling of nuclear control agreements between the Russian Federation and the United States.

For those anti-war voters familiar with Macgregor, the appointment must be a source of real frustration, as the first chance since Jimmy Carter to break with the tradition of foreign interventionism comes with less than 3 months left in the Trump Presidency.

Instead of simply starting his administration with men like Macgregor and Miller, Trump floundered on with appointments spelled out to him by the military-intelligence-arms manufacturing alliance, with opposition coming from every department if he tried to drawdown anywhere in the world.

His now-retiring Special Envoy to Syria explained in an interview with Defense One that he and his staff would regularly lie to the president about troop numbers in Syria, a war which Trump described as “not our business,” and one which he ordered an end to in his typical fashion, via Twitter, and which caused his first Defense Sec. General Jim Mattis to resign.

These late appointments are infuriating to the establishment who were hoping Trump would roll over and take his election loss, with one report from CNN citing anonymous defense officials saying that Biden could have used the experience of Esper and his undersecretaries, but instead are dealing with less long-serving military bureaucrats.

They are nonetheless, equally infuriating to anti-war Trump sympathizers who gave the ultimate critique of his failed foreign-policy-that-could-have-been in the form of their no-confidence vote on November 3^rd.

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Andy Corbley is an American writer based in Italy, and the founder and editor of World at Large News, a small news outlet focusing on American foreign policy, travel, health and fitness, and environmental news.

Featured image: CC BY-SA 4.0

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the clarion call has been to test, test and test some more. However, right from the start, serious questions arose about the tests being used to diagnose this infection, and questions have only multiplied since then.

Positive reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests have been used as the justification for keeping large portions of the world locked down for the better part of 2020.

This, despite the fact that PCR tests have proven remarkably unreliable with high false result rates, and aren’t designed to be used as a diagnostic tool in the first place as they cannot distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones.

Dr. Mike Yeadon, former vice president and scientific director of Pfizer, has even gone on record stating¹ that false positive results from unreliable PCR tests are being used to “manufacture a ‘second wave’ based on ‘new cases,'” when in fact a second wave is highly unlikely.

Understanding PCR Tests

Before his death, the inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis, repeatedly yet unsuccessfully stressed that this test should not be used as a diagnostic tool for the simple reason that it’s incapable of diagnosing disease. A positive test does not actually mean that an active infection is present. As noted in a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and prevention publication on coronavirus and PCR testing dated July 13 2020:²

• Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms.
• The performance of this test has not been established for monitoring treatment of 2019-nCoV infection.
• This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.

So, what does the PCR test actually tell us? The PCR swab collects RNA from your nasal cavity. This RNA is then reverse transcribed into DNA. However, the genetic snippets are so small they must be amplified in order to become discernible. Each round of amplification is called a cycle.

Amplification over 35 cycles is considered unreliable and scientifically unjustified, yet Drosten tests and tests recommended by the World Health Organization are set to 45 cycles.

What this does is amplify any, even insignificant sequences of viral DNA that might be present to the point that the test reads “positive,” even if the viral load is extremely low or the virus is inactive. As a result of these excessive cycle thresholds, you end up with a far higher number of positive tests than you would otherwise.

We’ve also had problems with faulty and contaminated tests. As soon as the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 became available in January 2020, German researchers quickly developed a PCR test for the virus.

In March 2020, The New York Times³ reported the initial test kits developed by the CDC had been found to be flawed. The Verge also reported⁴ that this flawed CDC test in turn became the basis for the WHO’s test, which the CDC ended up refusing to use.

Perhaps most importantly of all, the PCR tests cannot distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones. What that means is that PCR tests cannot detect infection. Period. It cannot tell you whether you’re currently ill, whether you’ll develop symptoms in the near future, or whether you’re contagious.

The tests may pick up dead debris or inactive viral particles that pose no risk whatsoever to the patient and others. What’s more, the test can pick up the presence of other coronaviruses, so a positive result may simply indicate that you’ve recuperated from a common cold in the past.

An “infection” is when a virus penetrates into a cell and replicates. As the virus multiplies, symptoms set in. A person is only infectious if the virus is actually replicating. As long as the virus is inactive and not replicating, it’s completely harmless both to the host and others.

Chances are, if you have no symptoms, a positive test simply means it has detected inactive viral DNA in your body. This would also mean that you are not contagious and pose no risk to anyone.

For all of these reasons, a number of highly respected scientists around the world are now saying that what we have is not a COVID-19 pandemic but a PCR test pandemic. In his September 20, 2020, article⁵ “Lies, Damned Lies and Health Statistics — The Deadly Danger of False Positives,” Yeadon explains why basing our pandemic response on positive PCR tests is so problematic.

In short, it appears millions of people are simply being found to carry inactive viral DNA that pose no risk to anyone, yet these test results are being used by the global technocracy to implement a brand new economic and social system based on draconian surveillance and totalitarian controls.

Artificially Created Justifications for Totalitarian Controls

As reported by The Vaccine Reaction, September 29, 2020:⁶

“The test’s threshold is so high that it detects people with the live virus as well as those with a few genetic fragments left over from a past infection that no longer poses a risk. It’s like finding a hair in a room after a person left it, says Michael Mina, MD, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.⁷

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90% of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The New York Times found⁸ …

‘We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,’ Dr. Mina said. ‘We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.’

But ‘yes’ or ‘no’ isn’t good enough, he added. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. ‘It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue,’ Dr. Mina said.”

Again, medical experts agree any cycle threshold over 35 cycles makes the test too sensitive, as at that point it starts picking up harmless inactive DNA fragments. Mina believes a more reasonable cutoff would be 30 or less.

According to The New York Times,⁹ the CDC’s own calculations show it’s extremely unlikely to detect live viruses in samples that have gone through more than 33 cycles, and research¹⁰published in April 2020 concluded patients with positive PCR tests that had a cycle threshold above 33 were not contagious and could safely be discharged from the hospital or home isolation.

Importantly, when officials at the New York state laboratory, the Wadsworth Center, reanalyzed testing data at The Times’ request, they found that changing the threshold from 40 cycles to 35 cycles eliminated about 43% of the positive results. Limiting it to 30 cycles eliminated a whopping 63%.¹¹ The Vaccine Reaction adds:¹²

“In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90% of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. ‘I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,’ he said.

‘I’m really shocked that it could be that high — the proportion of people with high CT value results,’ said Ashish Jha, MD, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. ‘Boy, does it really change the way we need to be thinking about testing’¹³ …

In late August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first rapid coronavirus test that doesn’t need any special computer equipment. Made by Abbot Laboratories, the 15-minute test [BinaxNOW] will sell for U.S. $5 but still requires a nasal swab to be taken by a health worker.¹⁴

The Abbot test is the fourth rapid point-of-care test that looks for the presence of antigens rather than the virus’s genetic code as the PCR molecular tests do.¹⁵“

Massive Waste of Resources

As noted by Dr. Tom Jefferson and professor Carl Henegan in an October 31, 2020, article in the Daily Mail,¹⁶ mass PCR testing has been a massive waste or resources, as it doesn’t provide us with the information we actually need to know — who’s infectious, how far is the virus spreading and how fast does it spread?

Instead, it has led to economic devastation from business shutdowns and isolating noninfectious people in their homes for weeks and months on end. Jefferson and Henegan claim they shared their pandemic response plan with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson over a month ago, and just presented it to him again. “We urge him to pay attention and embrace it,” they write, adding:

“There are only two things about which we can be certain: first, that lockdowns do not work in the long term … The idea that a month of economic hardship will permit some sort of ‘reset’, allowing us a brighter future, is a myth. What, when it ends, do we think will happen? Meanwhile, ever-increasing restrictions will destroy lives and livelihoods.

The second certainty is this: that we need to find a way out of the mess that does no more damage than the virus itself … Our strategy would be to tackle the four key failings.”

These four areas are:

1. Addressing the problems in the government’s mass testing program
2. Addressing “the blight of confused and contradictory statistics”
3. Protect and isolate the vulnerable — primarily the elderly, but also hospitalized patients in general and staff — while allowing the rest to maintain “some semblance of normal life”
4. Inform the public about the true and quantifiable costs of lockdown that “kill people just as surely as COVID-19”

“If we do these things, there is real hope that we can learn to live with the virus. That, after all, was supposed to be the plan,” Jefferson and Henegan note. With regard to testing, the pair call “for a national program of testing quality control to ensure that results are accurate, precise and consistent.”

Importantly, we must not rely on positive/negative readings alone. The results must be assessed in relation to other factors, such as the age of the subject and whether they are symptomatic, to determine who actually poses an infectious risk. You can review the full details of their proposed plan at the end of their Daily Mail article.¹⁷

Lockdown Dangers Have Been Kept Out of Public Discussion

Jefferson and Henegan aren’t the only ones highlighting the fact that the global lockdown strategy is causing more harm and destruction than the virus itself. In a June 16, 2020 article in The Federalist, James Lucas, a New York City attorney, wrote:¹⁸

“If we’re going to allow models and modelers to dictate the entire nature of our society, one would hope that the models are as complete as possible. Yet the epidemiological models that have so transformed our world are seriously incomplete, and therefore fundamentally inadequate.

Any medical therapy is supposed to be tested for both efficacy and safety. There have been several studies¹⁹ examining the effectiveness of the lockdowns in combating the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with mixed conclusions.

So far, however, none of these studies or models have analyzed the safety side of the lockdown therapy. In response to questions from physician Sens. Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy, Dr. Anthony Fauci admits²⁰ this side of the equation has not been accounted for in the models now driving our world.

As noted in an open letter²¹ recently signed by more than 600 health-care professionals, the public health costs from the lockdowns — described as a ‘mass casualty incident’ are real and growing.

These models are estimations based on existing research. The constantly changing projections of coronavirus deaths are extrapolations from research on previous epidemics. Yet modelers have no excuse for leaving evaluations of the lockdowns’ massive costs to public health out of their models.”

The Hidden Costs of Lockdowns

How does the “lockdown therapy” affect public safety? In his article, Lucas highlights the following:²²

• Increased chronic disease rates due to unemployment, poverty and putting non-COVID medical care on hold — Research²³ by the Veterans Administration has shown delaying cancer treatment for just one month led to a 20% increase in mortality. Another study²⁴ found each one-month delay in breast cancer diagnosis increased mortality by 10%
• Increased rates of mental health problems due to unemployment and isolation
• Increased mortality rates from suicide — In one study,²⁵ being unemployed was associated with a twofold to threefold higher relative risk of suicide. A more recent study²⁶ estimates “deaths of despair” linked to lockdowns may be around 75,000 in the U.S.
• Reduced collective life span — Extended unemployment is also associated with shorter, unhealthier lives. Hannes Schwandt, a health economics researcher at Northwestern University, estimates an extended economic shutdown could shorten the lifespan of 6.4 million Americans entering the job market by an average of about two years.²⁷ Lucas notes:

As noted by Lucas, in addition to calculating the overall costs on society, modelers must also determine “on whom those costs fall,” because the costs are not borne equally by all. The consequences of the lockdowns disproportionally affect those who are already the most vulnerable — financially and health wise — such as those living near the poverty line, the chronically ill, people with mental illness and minorities in general.

“Contrary to the PR slogan, we are NOT all in this together,” Lucas writes.³⁰ “We need less insipid pro-lockdown propaganda extolling the virtues of the ‘essential’ workers, and more serious analysis of the enormous public health toll the lockdowns are imposing on them. Otherwise, we may come to see the era of coronavirus as simply the time where pro-lockdown elites sacrificed the working class³¹ to protect themselves.”

A Pandemic of Fearmongering

An October 28, 2020, article featured by the Ron Paul Institute points out that:³²

“Ever since the alleged pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum fear among the citizenry.

But the facts and the science simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the land. Yes, we do have a pandemic, but it’ a pandemic of ginned up pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact.”

Nine facts that can be backed up with data “paints a very different picture from the fear and dread being relentlessly drummed into the brains of unsuspecting citizens,” the article states. In addition to the fact that PCR testing is practically useless, for all the reasons already mentioned, these data-backed facts include:

All in all, there are many reasons to suspect that continued lockdowns, social distancing and mask mandates are completely unnecessary and will not significantly alter the course of this pandemic illness, or the final death count.

And, with regard to universal PCR testing where individuals are tested every two weeks or even more frequently, whether they have symptoms or not, this is clearly a pointless effort that yields useless data. It’s just a tool to spread fear, which in turn allows for the rapid implementation of the totalitarian control mechanisms required to pull off The Great Reset. Fortunately, more and more people are now starting to see through this plot.

About 45,000 scientists and doctors worldwide have already signed the Great Barrington Declaration,⁴⁰ which calls for the end to all lockdowns and implementation of a herd immunity approach to the pandemic, meaning governments should allow people who are not at significant risk of serious COVID-19 illness to go back to normal life, as the lockdown approach is having a devastating effect on public health — far worse than the virus itself.^41,42 The declaration states:⁴³

“Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health …

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to coronavirus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this focused protection.”

The declaration points out that current lockdown policies will result in excess mortality in the future, primarily among younger people and the working class. As of November 5, 2020, The Great Barrington Declaration⁴⁴ had been signed by 11,791 medical and public health scientists, 33,903 medical practitioners and 617,685 “concerned citizens.”⁴⁵

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Notes

¹ The Huntingtonian October 6, 2020

² CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel July 13, 2020 (PDF)

³ New York Times, March 20, 2020

⁴ The Verge, March 17, 2020, Current Gold Standards

⁵ Lockdownskeptics September 20, 2020

^6, 11, 12 The Vaccine Reaction September 29, 2020

⁷ Daily Mail August 30, 2020

^8, 9, 13 The New York Times August 29, 2020

¹⁰ Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases April 27, 2020; 39(6): 1059-1061

¹⁴ Abbott Press Release August 26, 2020

¹⁵ Business Insider September 21, 2020

^16, 17 Daily Mail October 31, 2020

^18, 22, 30 The Federalist June 16, 2020

¹⁹ National Review May 22, 2020

²⁰ WSJ Opinion May 13, 2020

²¹ Letter from Doctors to President Donald Trump May 19, 2020

²³ Health Services Research 2007 Apr; 42(2): 644–662

²⁴ The ASCO Post April 14, 2016

²⁵ Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 2003; 57: 594-600

²⁶ Well Being Trust Projected Deaths of Despair During COVID-19

²⁷ Reuters April 3, 2020

²⁸ Pandemic Data and Analytics — Quantifying Years of Lost Life

²⁹ Center on Society and Health February 13, 2015

³¹ The Federalist May 4, 2020

^32, 36, 39 Ron Paul Institute October 28, 2020

³³ Doctors for Disaster Preparedness

³⁴ CDC.gov Pandemic Planning Scenarios Updated September 10, 2020

³⁵ Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-5352

³⁷ YouTube, SARS-CoV-2 and the rise of medical technocracy, Lee Merritt, MD, aprox 8 minutes in (Lie No. 1: Death Risk)

³⁸ Technical Report June 2020 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.24350.77125

^40, 43, 44 Great Barrington Declaration

⁴¹ Sky News October 7, 2020

⁴² Washington Times October 8, 2020

⁴⁵ Great Barrington Declaration Signatures

“Even as many cultural figures in Sweden after his death were quick to witness to his importance, they pissed on his memory by pointing out the many issues they disagreed with him. Their problem was often that they never read what he said correctly”.

The Swedish writer Jan Myrdal, a giant among European intellectuals, has passed away after a 75 year career as a political writer of thousands of articles and more than 100 books. Above all he was a political activist who in the spirit of Karl Marx believed it was more important to change the world than only to understand it. But he was best known for his encyclopedic knowledge of social history and discourse and his constant encouragement to readers to “Go to the sources!” to be able to speak truth to those in power. In his youth he was an organized communist but later chose to describe himself as an independent socialist thinker who could contribute more to popular struggles in his role as a disciplined and factually unchallengeable political writer.

An avid reader as a youngster he credits the influence of a school year in NY as a child with his early exposure to  the debates of class struggle and mass politics in the era of the New Deal and his appreciation of freedom of speech as well as American writers.

Jan Myrdal speaking at a demonstration against the Vietnam War at Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm, 1966. (Public Domain)

One of his first books, The Careerist, exposed the corruption and degeneration afflicting the reformist social democratic movement whose ideals had begun to transform Sweden into a modern welfare state. In the sixties he began producing his travel books which examined societies he stayed long periods in, such as Turkmenistan and Afghanistan  and Angkor Wat as well as the first of a series on Life in a Chinese Village during the Cultural Revolution which was followed by many return visits.

But it was his book Confessions of a Disloyal European that was to have an enormous impact on anti-imperialists and leftists in many countries with its third world perspective. His wife of more than 50 years, the painter and photographer Gun Kessle worked with him in documenting these travels. He returned to Sweden after these travels and became a leading Vietnam activist and supporter of national liberation struggles.

During these years he also finished his monumental work India Waiting.  His anti-imperialism led him to visit the Khmer Rouge held areas during the Vietnamese invasion and the liberated Naxalite controlled areas of India in his 80´s. He participated in the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul in 2005 where he compared the war propaganda used by the imperialists in the two world wars which he had explored in his Selling war like margarine with the false language used by the US in the Iraq invasion and occupation. Al Intiqad, the magazine of Hezbollah, described him as one of Europe´s leading intellectuals and published a long interview with him in which he discussed the historical role of religion and war.

But he was also an important figure in Swedish literature, like the Swedish writer August Strindberg, who he considered his inspiration. His writing had a distinct, direct style, often using spoken and understood language and moving comfortably and without difficulty between tenses so that the past became the present for the reader. His texts were often long, logical reasoning with countless references or asides for further insights. He was as challengeable to read as a Chomsky who did not use commas.

Myrdal was famous for his texts on Balzac, Twain and Dickens, all of whose work he explored and cited in his own writings. He became famous as a prose writer with his I-stories. The first three, The Childhood Trilogy used the perspective of growing awareness of a child growing up to young adulthood. This resulted in his victory in a court case for libel from his Nobel Prize winning parents.

The series continued with Tomorrows, where as a young teenage radical he commits himself to the political and personal discipline that the struggle demanded. of a revolutionary committed to making a better world. His last work in this genre used the perspective of old-age to relook at the recollections of his part. Even that became a bestseller in Sweden.

A true historical materialist all his writings were characterized by an underclass perspective against the superstructure of capitalist politics and culture. He was one of the founders of Folket i Bild/Kulturfront (People in Pictures/the Cultural Front) a broad based movement and magazine to defend People´s culture, freedom of speech and anti-imperialism, in which he continued to have a regular column for almost half a century.

Myrdal was a controversial figure, admired greatly or hated by his detractors. He had no regrets for the positions he took. Even as many cultural figures in Sweden after his death were quick to witness to his importance, they pissed on his memory by pointing out the many issues they disagreed with him. Their problem was often that they never read what he said correctly. For those of us who followed his writings for half a century, he provided inspiration and pointed out a way to understand our world and to act to change it.

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“I expect the prevailing direction of U.S. foreign policy over these last decades to continue: more lawless bombing and killing multiple countries under the cover of “limited engagement,” – Biden Biographer Branko Marcetic 

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After triumphing in a bitterly contested presidential election, all eyes are on President-Elect Joe Biden and who he will choose to run his new administration. For much of October, media spent their time dissecting the news that, despite living a lavish billionaire lifestyle, Donald Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. In contrast, little was made of Biden’s self-published tax documents. This is surprising because the returns show that he is rich. Filthy rich.

The 77-year-old Delawarean likes to paint himself as a man of modest means. “I entered as one of the poorest men in Congress, left one of the poorest men in government — in Congress and as vice-president,” Biden said during the Democratic presidential nomination process. And while that was technically true, since leaving the White House, he and his wife Jill have amassed a fortune of more than $16.7 million. For comparison, the median net worth of U.S. households is $97,300. His tax returns show that he received over $900,000 from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and 2019. “When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor,” at the Ivy League institution, he told the country in March. Yet records show he has not taught even a single class during his time there.

Speaking engagements make up the majority of his earnings, where he is often paid princely sums for minutes’ work. For example, his tax returns show that he was paid over $134,000 for a talk in Fort Lauderdale, FL in January 2019. In this sense, he is following in the footsteps of the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, who command enormous sums for public appearances — a practice often condemned as little more than payoffs for “good behavior” while in office.

Source | Forbes

Biden is no stranger to the rich and powerful. He kicked off his presidential campaign last year with a dinner for ultra-rich patrons at a Manhattan hotel, insisting that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected, reassuring them that he would never demonize the rich and that they were not at fault for growing inequality. “I need you very badly,” he concluded.

Building Back Better?

The former vice-president’s team is also looking to be made up of extremely wealthy individuals as well. His transition task squad has been, in his website’s words, crafted to ensure they “reflect the values and priorities of the incoming administration,” and includes executives from Lyft, Amazon, Capital One, Uber, Visa, and JP Morgan.

One name being strongly floated for a cabinet position is former mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, a move being met with vocal opposition from the left. Emanuel’s first tour of duty in the White House came under President Bill Clinton, where he was one of the key architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a deal that decimated manufacturing in the Midwest, hobbled union power, and sent well paying blue-collar jobs to Mexico. In 2016, Trump constantly brought up NAFTA as a weapon to attack Hillary Clinton, winning him votes (and states) across the region. Emanuel also pushed through welfare “reform” bills that sharply reduced benefits for the poor and worked with Biden on the now-infamous 1994 Crime Bill, a key accelerator of mass incarceration. He then left politics to pursue a lucrative career in finance — something that quickly netted him a reported $16 million fortune — before returning and becoming President Obama’s advisor and enforcer.

Biden’s war room

Many of the president-elect’s potential picks for foreign policy positions — including Susan Rice and Michele Flourney — have onlookers worried. “With a Biden administration, we can expect a continuation of the Middle East wars and possible escalations in places like Syria. Biden could be better than Trump on Iran and Yemen, but judging by his potential cabinet picks, that should not be expected without significant pressure from antiwar activists and lobbyists in Washington,” Dave DeCamp, assistant news editor of AntiWar.com told MintPress. “His administration will likely be more successful than Trump at expanding the empire, with a more diplomatic and coherent approach at building alliances to face Russia and China.”

Rice, who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and National Security Advisor under Obama, has amassed a fortune of around $40 million. After leaving office, she was given a spot on the board of Netflix, being paid $366,666 as a base salary. On top of that, she was given $2.3 million worth of the company’s stock. However, it is her husband, former ABC News executive producer Ian O. Cameron (whose father was a super-wealthy industrialist), who is the prime source of her wealth. She was a key driver in U.S. action in Libya, and also successfully lobbied Obama to place harsher sanctions on North Korea and Iran.

Ambassador Rice speaks in front of an Israeli missile battery in Tel Aviv during an 2014 visit to Israel. Photo | US Embassy Tel Aviv

Flournoy, meanwhile, was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012 in the Obama administration under Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. After “serving the country,” she received lucrative consulting contracts, joined corporate boards, and began her own security think tank, WestExec Advisors. By 2017, she was making a reported $452,000 annually.

“Certainly the possible selection of Michele Flournoy and other WestExec advisors people is concerning,” Biden biographer Branko Marcetic told MintPress.

This isn’t just because of their corporate/financial ties, though of course that’s alarming — can we be sure that people whose private sector career involved leveraging their government experience and contacts to help multinationals secure favorable business conditions will have their intentions calibrated toward good policy and not to their private sector career?”

“Biden claims he wants an end to the Yemen conflict, but again, words are only so much. It’s highly likely that he will have Michele Flornoy as his Secretary of Defense who was one of the voices that stated that weapons should continue to be sold to Saudia Arabia (during the Yemen conflict), under certain conditions, as they have a right to protect themselves. This speaks volumes,” said Mariamne Everett of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Rice and Flournoy, she added, were vocal supporters of the disastrous Iraq War, which does not bode well for those concerned with peace.

Marcetic agreed, noting that, while in office, Flourney was “a major liberal interventionist hawk who not only wants U.S. troops deployed all over the world, but has also publicly advocated for the U.S. to majorly exploit its fossil fuel reserves for global dominance,” something  which would be a “disaster for containing climate catastrophe.”

Back in the game

The recycling of old faces (many of them considerably richer than before) into the new administration suggests that there will be few breaks from the past on policy, and more in the way of continuation. Biden himself has largely acknowledged this, tweeting, “When I’m speaking to foreign leaders, I’m telling them: America is going to be back. We’re going to be back in the game.” To many suffering under U.S. sanctions or hiding from U.S. bombs, these words will likely not comfort them. DeCamp suggested that there will be no great difference in policy between Trump and Biden administrations:

Despite Trump being painted as an ‘isolationist,’ his administration has actually expanded NATO, shored up the support of some Asian countries to counter China, and significantly increased Washington’s military footprint in the Pacific. Biden will continue this as he made clear in recent phone calls with Asian leaders and his tough talk on China’s claims to the South China Sea during the last presidential debate.”

Flournoy meets with Afghan Army personnel during a tour of the Kabul Military Training Center Aug. 7, 2010. Photo | DVIDS

Everett offered a similar analysis, suggesting that, with pro-Israel zealots like Rice advising him, the Biden administration would “expand” on what Trump had done in Palestine as well. Meanwhile, for Latin America, his foreign policy team intends to revive the so-called “anti-corruption drives” of the Obama era, which ultimately overthrew an elected government in Brazil and paved the way for the ascendency of far-right figure Jair Bolsonaro.

Marcetic suggested that Biden would attempt to rejoin many of the international treaties and organizations that the Trump administration had undermined or pulled out of, including NATO and the Paris Climate Agreement.

I expect the prevailing direction of U.S. foreign policy over these last decades to continue: more lawless bombing and killing multiple countries under the cover of “limited engagement,” continuing genocidal sanctions against countries like Iran and Venezuela, ongoing treatment of Latin America as an American fiefdom, and militarism and conflict continuing to be the dominant organising principle of U.S. foreign policy, rather than, say, co-operation and stopping climate change,” he added.

Independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone recently mockingly wrote that Biden will have “the most diverse, intersectional cabinet of mass murderers ever assembled.” If representation is important, it is because it helps assure that people from all walks of life will have a seat at the negotiating table. However, judging by Biden’s wealthy picks, it appears that yet again, no one will be representing the great majority of working-class Americans.

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Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Featured image: Graphic by Anontio Cabrera for MintPress

On 12 March 2020, British PM Boris Johnson, referring to COVID-19, informed the public:

“We’ve all got to be clear; this is the worst public health crisis for a generation.”

Since that time, we have seen lockdowns, on ongoing government-backed fear campaign, fundamental rights being stripped away, dissent censored, inflated COVID-19 death numbers and the use of a flawed PCR test to label perfectly healthy individuals as COVID-19 ‘cases’ in order to fit the narrative of a ‘second wave’.

But, just for a moment, consider an alternative scenario.

The government is extremely worried about a substance that could be contributing to a spiralling public health crisis that has been decades in the making. It has been detected in food and in urine. The government has therefore decided to carry out mass urine testing. It has found millions of ‘cases’. The more it tests, the more ‘cases’ it finds. The government and the media promote the message we are all at risk and should get tested. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent to allow for the testing of the entire population.

All cafes, pubs, restaurants and food stores are locked down, aside from those designated to sell only food that is regarded as ‘safe’ by the government. All weddings, parties and get-togethers are banned because contaminated food might be passed around.

Severe restrictions are put in place because this ‘stuff’ is in the air, water, plants, animals, grains, vegetables and meats. And it is in beer and wine, children’s breakfast cereal and snack bars and even in our vaccines. Everyone is under virtual house arrest until this public health crisis is addressed.

Daily government briefings are held on TV with the PM and health officials in attendance. The PM tells everyone that this thing is linked to various conditions, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.

Imagine that scenario. But the substance being referred to is very real. It is heavily associated with all the conditions mentioned and is present in our urine and food. But the government does nothing. It does not just do nothing but actively facilitates the marketing of this substance and collude with its manufacturers.

And the name of this ‘stuff’? Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide. The main culprit – Monsanto’s Roundup. But it is not just glyphosate. It is the cocktail of agricultural chemicals that have been in use for decades.

The real public health crisis

Earlier this year, in a 29-page open letter to Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason spent 11 pages documenting the spiralling rates of disease that she says (supported by numerous research studies cited) are largely the result of exposure to health-damaging agrochemicals, including glyphosate-based herbicides.

The amount of glyphosate-based herbicide sprayed by UK farmers on crops has gone from 226,762 kg in 1990 to 2,240,408 kg in 2016, a 10-fold increase. In her letter, Mason discussed links between multiple pesticide residues (including glyphosate) in food and steady increases in the number of cancers both in the UK as well as allergic diseases, chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, obesity and many other conditions.

Agrochemicals are a major contributory factor for the spikes in these diseases and conditions. This is the real public health crisis affecting the UK. Each year, there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers in the UK and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with treatments not making any difference to the numbers.

While there is much talk of the coronavirus placing immense strain on an underfunded NHS, the health service is already creaking. And people’s immune systems are already strongly compromised due to what Mason outlines. But do we see a ‘lockdown’ on the activities of the global agrochemical conglomerates? Not at all.

We see governments and public health bodies working hand in glove with the agrochemicals manufacturers to ensure ‘business as usual’.

It might seem strange to many that the UK government is seemingly going out of its way (by stripping people of their freedoms) under the guise of a public health crisis but is all too willing to oversee a massive, ongoing one caused by the chemical pollution of our bodies.

Unlike COVID-19, this is a ‘silent’ crisis that actually does affect all sections of the population and causes immense widespread suffering. It is silent because the mainstream media and various official reports in the UK have consistently ignored or downplayed the role of pesticides in fuelling this situation.

Hundreds of lawsuits are pending against Bayer in the US, filed by people alleging that exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks (Roundup is linked to cancers of the bone, colon, kidney, liver, melanoma, pancreas and thyroid).

The WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has declared glyphosate as a 2A carcinogen. In 2017, in a public hearing in Brussels, Dr Christopher Portier and Dr Kate Guyton defended IARC’s position. Portier drew attention to the significance of statistically significant tumour findings that had not been discussed in any of the existing reviews on glyphosate.

Portier concluded that as the regulatory bodies, the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency’s analyses were scientifically flawed. These organisations had also used industry studies that were not in the public domain for ‘reasons of commercial confidentiality’ to support their case that glyphosate was not carcinogenic.

Mason has written numerous open letters to officials citing reams of statistical data to support the contention that agrochemicals, especially Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup, have devastated the natural environment and have also led to spiralling rates of illness and disease, not least among children.

Regulators around the world have falsely assumed that it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes and the effects of dosing whole regions with chemicals have been largely ignored.

A report delivered to the UN Human Rights Council, says that pesticides have catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole.

Authored by Hilal Elver, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, and Baskut Tuncak, UN special rapporteur on toxics, the report states:

“Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.”

The authors argue:

“While scientific research confirms the adverse effects of pesticides, proving a definitive link between exposure and human diseases or conditions or harm to the ecosystem presents a considerable challenge. This challenge has been exacerbated by a systematic denial, fuelled by the pesticide and agro-industry, of the magnitude of the damage inflicted by these chemicals and aggressive, unethical marketing tactics.”

Elver says:

“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies.”

Tuncak states:

“Paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability. Exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes and cancer. Because a child’s developing body is more sensitive to exposure than adults and takes in more of everything – relative to their size, children eat, breathe and drink much more than adults – they are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals.”

According to Tuncak, increasing evidence shows that even at “low” doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result. But most victims cannot prove the cause of their disability or disease, limiting our ability to hold those responsible to account.

He concludes:

“The overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.”

The authors were severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”.

Way back in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring raised the red flag about the use of harmful synthetic pesticides; yet, despite the warnings, the agrochemical giants have ever since been poisoning humans and the planet, raking in enormous profits.

Michael McCarthy, writer and naturalist, says that three generations of industrialised farming with a vast tide of poisons pouring over the land year after year after year since the end of the Second World War is the true price of pesticide-based agriculture, which society has for so long blithely accepted.

Power is now increasingly concentrated in the hands of a handful of transnational agribusiness corporations which put profit and market control ahead of food security, health and nutrition and biodiversity. Due to their political influence and financial clout, these companies are waging a chemical warfare on nature and people, while seeking to convince us that their model of agriculture – based on proprietary seeds and chemicals – is essential for feeding a burgeoning global population.

Consider that none of the more than 400 pesticides that have been authorised in the UK have been tested for long-term actions on the brain: in the foetus, in children or in adults.

Theo Colborn’s crucial research in the early 1990s showed that endocrine disrupters (EDCs) were changing humans and the environment, but this research was ignored by officials. Glyphosate is an EDC and a nervous system disrupting chemical.

In the book published in 1996 ‘Our Stolen Future: How Man-made Chemicals are Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival’ Colborn and colleagues revealed the full horror of what was happening to the world as a result of contamination with EDCs. There was emerging scientific research about how a wide range of these chemicals can disrupt delicate hormone systems in humans. These systems play a critical role in processes ranging from human sexual development to behaviour, intelligence and the functioning of the immune system.

In addition to glyphosate, EDCs include polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). DDT, chlordane, lindane, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, toxaphene, heptachlor, dioxin, atrazine and dacthal.

In 2007, 25 experts in environmental health from 11 countries (including from the UK) met on the Faroes and contributed to this statement:

“The periods of embryonic, foetal and infant development are remarkably susceptible to environmental hazards. Toxic exposures to chemical pollutants during these windows of increased susceptibility can cause disease and disability in infants, children and across the entire span of human life.”

The Department of Health’s School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme (SFVS) has residues of 123 different pesticides that impact the gut microbiome. Obesity is associated with low diversity of bacteria in the microbiome and glyphosate adversely affects or destroys much of the beneficial bacteria. Roundup (and other biocides) is linked to gross obesity, neuropsychiatric disorders and other chronic diseases, which are all on the rise and adversely impact brain development in children and adolescents.

Moreover, type 2 diabetes is associated with being very overweight. According to NHS data, almost four in five of 715 children suffering from it were also obese.

Graham MacGregor, a professor of cardiovascular health at Queen Mary University of London who is also the chair of the campaign group Action on Sugar, says:

“Type 2 diabetes is a disaster for the child and their family and for the NHS. If a child gets type 2 diabetes, it’s condemning them to a lot of complications of that condition, such as blindness, amputations and kidney disease.”

He went on to explain that we are in a crisis and that the government does not seem to be taking action. UK obesity levels now exceed those of the US.

The human microbiome is of vital importance to human health yet it is under chemical attack. Glyphosate disrupts the shikimate pathway within these gut bacteria and is a strong chelator of essential minerals.

Many key neurotransmitters are located in the gut. Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, these transmitters affect our moods and thinking. There is strong evidence that gut bacteria can have a direct physical impact on the brain.

Image on the right: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc

Dr Michael Antoniou of King’s College London has found that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate cause a dramatic increase in the levels of two substances, shikimic acid and 3-dehydroshikimic acid, in the gut, which are a direct indication that the EPSPS enzyme of the shikimic acid pathway has been severely inhibited. Roundup and glyphosate affected the microbiome at all dose levels tested, causing shifts in bacterial populations.

A quarter of all food and over a third of fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK contain pesticide cocktails, with some items containing traces of up to 14 different pesticides. The industry (for it is the industry that does the testing, on behalf of regulators) only tests one pesticide at a time, whereas farmers spray a cocktail of pesticides.

Ian Boyd, the former Chief Scientific Adviser to Defra, says pesticides, once they have been authorised, are never reviewed.

Glyphosate is distributed to every organ of the body and has multiple actions: it is an herbicide, an antibiotic, a fungicide, an antiprotozoal, an organic phosphonate, a growth regulator, a toxicant, a virulence enhancer and is persistent in the soil. It chelates (captures) and washes out the following minerals: boron, calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, nickel and zinc.

In a paper published in King’s Law Journal –  ‘The Chemical Anthropocene: Glyphosate as a Case Study of Pesticide Exposures’ – the authors Alessandra Arcuri and Yogi Hale Hendlin state:

“As the science against glyphosate safety mounts and lawsuits threaten its chemical manufacture’s profits, the next generation of GMO crops are being keyed to the pesticide dicamba, sold commercially as XtendiMax® – and poised to be the next glyphosate. Regulatory agencies have historically been quick to approve products but slow to reconsider regulations after the decades of accumulated harms become apparent.”

They add that the entrenched asymmetries between public and ecological health and fast-to-market new chemicals is exacerbated by the seeming lack of institutionalised precautionary policies.

Britain and the US are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. These countries are experiencing not merely a slowdown in life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across all our populations, men and women alike. People are needlessly dying early.

Research by US-based EWG found glyphosate residues on popular oat cereals, oatmeal, granola and snack bars. Almost 75% of the 45 samples tested had glyphosate levels higher than what EWG scientists consider protective of children’s health with an adequate margin of safety. Disturbing levels of such residues have been detected in the UK too.

There are shockingly high levels of weed killer in UK breakfast cereals. After testing these cereals at the Health Research Institute in Iowa, Dr Fagan, director of the centre, said:

“These results are consistently concerning. The levels consumed in a single daily helping of any one of these cereals, even the one with the lowest level of contamination, is sufficient to put the person’s glyphosate levels above the levels that cause fatty liver disease in rats (and likely in people).”

Glyphosate also causes epigenetic changes in humans and animals: diseases skip a generation. Washington State University researchers have found a variety of diseases and other health problems in the second- and third-generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate. In the first study of its kind, the researchers saw descendants of exposed rats developing prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, obesity and birth abnormalities.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers say they saw “dramatic increases” in several pathologies affecting the second and third generations. The second generation had “significant increases” in testis, ovary and mammary gland diseases as well as obesity. In third-generation males, the researchers saw a 30% incidence of prostate disease — three times the rate of a control population. The third generation of females had a 40% incidence of kidney disease, or four times the rate of the controls.

More than one-third of the second-generation mothers had unsuccessful pregnancies, with most of those affected dying. Two out of five males and females in the third generation were obese.

Researchers call this phenomenon “generational toxicology” and they have seen it over the years in fungicides, pesticides, jet fuel, the plastics compound bisphenol A, the insect repellent DEET and the herbicide atrazine. At work are epigenetic changes that turn genes on and off, often because of environmental influences.

A study published in February 2019 found glyphosate increased the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma by as much as 41%. A Washington State University study published in December 2019 found state residents living close to areas subject to treatments with the herbicide are one-third more likely to die an early death from Parkinson’s disease.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of the attorney’s fighting Bayer (which has bought Monsanto) in the US courts, has explained that for four decades Monsanto manoeuvred to conceal Roundup’s carcinogenicity by capturing regulatory agencies, corrupting public officials, bribing scientists and engaging in scientific fraud to delay its day of reckoning. He says that Monsanto also faces cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.

Moreover, strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.

And yet, as Mason has described in her work, the UK government had colluded with Monsanto for many years.

Boris Johnson, in his first speech to parliament as PM, said:

“Let’s start now to liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules…”

This could mean the irresponsible introduction of genetically modified Roundup Ready food crops to the UK, which would see the amount of glyphosate in British food reaching new levels (levels which are already disturbing).

So much for protecting public health.

Government collusion

David Cameron appointed Michael Pragnell, founder of Syngenta and former Chairman of CropLife International, to the board of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) in 2010. He became Chairman in 2011. At one time or another, CropLife International´s member list has included BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, FMC Corp, Monsanto, Sumitomo and Syngenta. Many of these make their own formulated glyphosate.

Syngenta is a member of the European Glyphosate Task Force, which sought to renew (and succeeded in renewing) European glyphosate registration. Not surprisingly, the CRUK website denies that there is any link between pesticides and cancer.

In February 2019, at a Brexit meeting on the UK chemicals sector, UK regulators and senior officials from government departments listened to the priorities of the Bayer Crop Science Division. During the meeting (Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Forum Keynote Seminar: Priorities for UK chemicals sector – challenges, opportunities and the future for regulation post-Brexit), Janet Williams, head of regulatory science at Bayer Crop Science Division, made her priorities for agricultural chemical manufacturers known.

Dave Bench was also a speaker. Bench is a senior scientist at the UK Chemicals, Health and Safety Executive and director of the agency’s EU exit plan and has previously stated that the regulatory system for pesticides is robust and balances the risks of pesticides against the benefits to society.

That statement was merely for public consumption and the benefit of the agrochemical industry. The industry (for it is the industry that does the testing, on behalf of regulators) only tests one pesticide at a time, whereas farmers spray a cocktail of pesticides.

But such is the British government’s willingness to protect pesticide companies that it is handing agrochemical giants BASF and Bayer enormous pay-outs of Covid-19 support cash. The announcement came just weeks after Bayer shareholders voted to pay £2.75 billion in dividends. The fact that Bayer then went on to receive £600 million from the government speaks volumes of where the government’s priorities lie.

In Mason’s report, ‘Why Does Bayer Crop Science Control Chemicals in Brexit Britain’, she states that Bayer is having secret meetings with the British government to determine which agrochemicals are to be used after Brexit once Britain is ‘free’ of EU restrictions and becomes as deregulated as the US.

Such collusion comes as little surprise as the government’s ‘strategy for UK life sciences’ is already dependent on funding from pharmaceutical corporations and the pesticides industry.

Syngenta’s parent company was in 2010 AstraZeneca. At that time, Syngenta and AstraZeneca were represented on the UK Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Foods, Consumer Products and the Environment. The founder of Syngenta, Michael Pragnell, was the Chairman of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) from 2011-2017. CRUK started by giving money (£450 million a year) to the Government’s Strategy for UK Life Sciences and AstraZeneca provided 22 compounds to academic research to develop medicines. AstraZeneca manufactured six different anti-cancer drugs mainly aimed at breast and prostate cancer.

It seems like a highly profitable and cosy relationship between the agrochemical and pharmaceuticals sectors and the government at the expense of public health.

In finishing, let us take a brief look at the Washington-based International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). Its members have occupied key positions on EU and UN regulatory panels. It is, however, an industry lobby group that masquerades as a scientific health charity.

The ILSI describes its mission as “pursuing objectivity, clarity and reproducibility” to “benefit the public good”. But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Bocconi University in Milan and the US Right to Know campaign assessed over 17,000 pages of documents under US freedom of information laws to present evidence of influence peddling.

ILSI Vice-President, Prof Alan Boobis, is currently the Chairman of the UK Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoT).

He was directly responsible for authorising chemicals such as glyphosate, chlorothalonil, clothianidin and chlorpyrifos that are impacting human health and creating a crisis in biodiversity. His group and others have authorised glyphosate repeatedly. He and David Coggon, the previous Chairman of CoT (2008-2015), were appointed as experts on Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), a group allied with the agrochemical industry and is fighting for higher pesticide exposure.

The reality of the agrochemical industry is masked by well-funded public relations machinery. The industry subverts official agencies and regulatory bodies and supports prolific lobby organisations and (‘public scientists’) which masquerade as neutral institutions.

And for the record, it is possible to farm productively and profitably without the use of synthetic agrochemicals – and to achieve food security. For instance, see the article ‘A Skeptical Farmer’s Monster Message on Profitability’ based on one US farmers journey from chemical-dependent farming to organic on his 8,000-acre farm (discussed on the AgWeb site) or ‘The Untold Success Story of Agroecology in Africa’ in the journal Development (2015). From the Tigray region of Ethiopia to various high-level (UN) reports that have recommended agroecology there are many examples, too many to discuss here.

The UK government says it cares so much about the nation’s health (the infection mortality rate for COVID-19 appears to be similar to those of a bad seasonal flu) but has presided over and facilitated a genuine public health crisis for years. And it is now pumping billions of pounds of public money into a track, trace and test regime when it could have used it to boost overall NHS capacity; remember when the government stated that the initial lockdown was implemented to protect the NHS?

In fact, the government is spending the equivalent of 77% of the NHS annual revenue budget on an “unevaluated, underdesigned national programme leading to an insufficiently supported intervention – in many cases for the wrong people” says a recent editorial in the BMJ.

In the meantime, it is investing heavily in a (possibly mandatory) vaccine that based on the design of the trials – according to a recent article in the same journal – may have no discernible impact on saving lives or preventing serious outcomes or the transmission spread of infection.

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Readers can access all Rosemary Mason’s reports on the academia.edu site.

Rosemary Mason is a retired doctor and environmental campaigner.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Global Justice Now /Flickr/CC BY

At the June 2020 Annual Meeting, Council of Canadians’ members voted to endorse and promote a Canadian nominating process for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to go the Henry Reeve medical teams from Cuba for their international work in the context of COVID-19. 

In 2005, Cuba’s leaders looked ahead and saw a world increasingly beset by pandemics and natural disasters. This led them to initiate a program to train professional medical personnel to be able to respond quickly to emergency requests from other nations. This initiative resulted in the mobilization of thousands of Cuban medical personnel with the skills and training to deal with a variety of global calamities, known as the Henry Reeve brigades.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Cuba responded to emergency requests for trained medical personnel by sending 53 health teams to 39 countries on four continents. The health teams were able to assist countries with fragile health systems that were ill-equipped to deal with COVID-19.

Cuba’s response to COVID-19 eclipses all other front-line efforts from industrialized nations in the fight against COVID-19. This response is more remarkable given that the island nation has been under a decades-long embargo by the United States of America. The U.S. State Department has made it known since the beginning of the pandemic that they might retaliate against any country receiving Cuban medical personnel. Only one country has capitulated to these threats from the U.S., and that country is Canada.

We are fortunate to have Dr. John Kirk as the nominator. As an expert on Cuba’s humanitarian efforts and its medical internationalism and a professor at Dalhousie University’s Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, Dr. Kirk easily meets all of the strict requirements outlined by Oslo for those individuals heading up a nomination process for the Nobel Peace Prize. Read Dr. Kirk’s nomination.

The Council of Canadians fully supports this nomination effort, and are honoured to be working in solidarity with the endorsers listed below.

Individual Canadian endorsers for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination for the international work of Cuban medical personnel

• The Hon. Lloyd Axworthy – Canadian politician, elder statesman and academic served as Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs under P.M. Chretien, invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada and honoured at a sacred pipe ceremony as Waappski Pinaysee Inini (Free Range Frog Man), Chair of the World Refugee Council, among other prestigious international and academic positions;
• Dr. Anna Banerji – Pediatrics and infectious disease specialist and Associate Professor at University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, Faculty lead for Indigenous and Refugee Health, invested in the Order of Ontario, 2014 Women’s Courage Award International, among other citations;
• Jane Bunnett – Flautist, saxophonist and bandleader and jazz legend is a five-time Juno Award winner, invested in The Order of Canada and has more than a dozen albums featuring Cuban music, jazz, and classical as well as dance and pop music;
• John Cartwright – Chairperson of the Council of Canadians Board of Directors and a long-time labour leader and social justice advocate. He is also the President of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, and over the years helped develop the Campaign for Public Education, Public Transit for the Public Good, the Toronto Waterwatch and Toronto Hydro campaigns as well as crafting the “Green Jobs Strategy” for the Canadian Labour Congress.
• George Elliot Clarke – Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic, known for chronicling the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (“Africadia”), has served as Poet Laureate of Toronto and Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, appointed to the Order of Nova Scotia and as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has received many other distinctions;
• Bruce Cockburn – Canadian roots-rock legend, 13-time Juno Award winner, Officer of the Order of Canada, recipient of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, recipient of the environmental Earth Day Award, and many others honours;
• Elizabeth Hay – Prize winning author of numerous novels, short stories, non fiction and essays. Among many honours, she was the co-winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, received the Ottawa Book Award, won the Giller Prize in 2007, was accorded the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Medal, and most recently won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Elizabeth worked for ten years as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, and also did radio documentaries for CBC’s Sunday Morning.
• The Rt. Hon. Michaelle Jean – Canadian stateswoman, journalist and a refugee from Haiti, was the 27th Governor General of Canada and the third Secretary-General of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, named member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada, and has received many Appointments, Medals, and Awards as well as multiple Honorary degrees;
• Dr. Noni E. MacDonald – Paediatrics infectious disease specialist and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Dalhousie University, invested in the Order of Nova Scotia and in the Order of Canada, and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Society for International Health, among other honours;
• MP Elizabeth May – Canadian politician who served as leader of the Green Party of Canada from 2006 to 2019. An environmentalist, author, activist and lawyer, May founded and served as Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada from 1989 to 2006. Elizabeth has been an officer of the Order of Canada since 2005, and has been named by the United Nations as one of the leading women environmentalists worldwide, among other citations.
• Senator Pierrette Ringuette – The first francophone woman to be elected to the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick. In the 1993 federal election she won a seat in the House of Commons of Canada as a Liberal Member of Parliament. In 2002 she was appointed to the Senate on the recommendation of Prime Minister Jean Chretien. In 2007 she received the grade of Officer of the Ordre de la Pleiade in recognition of her contribution to the development of francophone and Acadian culture.  In 2016 she chose to sit as part of the Independent Senators Group. Senator Ringuette continues to be a member of several standing committees and is currently a Counselor of The Inter-Parliamentary Forum of the Americas, Co-Chair of the Canada-Cuba Inter-Parliamentary Group.
• Svend Robinson – Canadian politician and Member of Parliament for the New Democratic Party, a strong environmentalist and outspoken advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples both in Canada and internationally, he was adopted into the Haida Nation (“White Swan”), J.S. Woodsworth Resident Scholar at Simon Fraser University, and among several awards…the Elena Iberoamerican Award on Ethics and the Hero Award, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity;
• David T. Suzuki – Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist is a Companion of the Order of Canada and invested in the Order of British Columbia, recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and has been awarded honorary degrees from over two dozen universities around the world, and is the host the CBC’s long running series The Nature of Things;

Organizational Canadian endorsers for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination for the international work of Cuban medical personnel

• Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research
• Canadian Society for International Health
• Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)
• Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 
• Canadian Unitarians for Social Justice
• Common Frontiers
• Council of Canadians
• Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)
• Peace Brigades International – Canada
• Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC)
• Sisters of Providence of Saint Vincent de Paul
• Unifor
• United Church of Canada 
• United Steelworkers (USW)

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Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual.

In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt to the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it induced a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity among its members. In modern western societies, where automation and mass consumption betray basic human needs, insanity might not be an aberration but the norm.

Fromm wrote:

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Challenging definition

This is still a very challenging idea to anyone raised on the view that sanity is defined by consensus, that it embraces whatever the mainstream prefers, and that insanity applies only to those living outside those norms. It is a definition that diagnoses the vast majority of us today as insane.

When Fromm wrote his book, Europe was emerging from the ruins of the Second World War. It was a time of reconstruction, not only physically and financially, but legally and emotionally. International institutions like the United Nations had recently been formed to uphold international law, curb national greed and aggression, and embody a new commitment to universal human rights.

It was a time of hope and expectation. Greater industrialisation spurred by the war effort and intensified extraction of fossil fuels meant economies were beginning to boom, a vision of the welfare state was being born, and a technocratic class promoting a more generous social democracy were replacing the old patrician class.

It was at this historic juncture that Fromm chose to write a book telling the western world that most of us were insane.

Degrees of insanity

If that was clear to Fromm in 1955, it ought to be much clearer to us today, as buffoon autocrats stride the world stage like characters from a Marx Brothers movie; as international law is being intentionally unravelled to restore the right of western nations to invade and plunder; and as the physical world demonstrates through extreme weather events that the long-ignored science of climate change – and much other human-inspired destruction of the natural world – can no longer be denied.

And yet our commitment to our insanity seems as strong as ever – possibly stronger. Sounding like the captain of the Titanic, the unreconstructed British liberal writer Sunny Hundal memorably gave voice to this madness a few years back when he wrote in defence of the catastrophic status quo:

If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?

As the clock ticks away, the urgent goal for each of us is to gain a deep, permanent insight into our own insanity. It doesn’t matter that our neighbours, family and friends think as we do. The ideological system we were born into, that fed us our values and beliefs as surely as our mothers fed us milk, is insane. And because we cannot step outside of that ideological bubble – because our lives depend on submitting to this infrastructure of insanity – our madness persists, even as we think of ourselves as sane.

Our world is not one of the sane versus the insane, but of the less insane versus the more insane.

Intimate portrait

Which is why I recommend the new documentary I Am Greta, a very intimate portrait of the Swedish child environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

Before everyone gets started, let me point out that I Am Greta is not about the climate emergency. That is simply the background noise as the film charts the personal journey begun by this 15-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome in staging a weekly lone protest outside the Swedish parliament. Withdrawn and depressed by the implications of the compulsive research she has done on the environment, she rapidly finds herself thrust into the centre of global attention by her simple, heart-felt statements of the obvious.

The schoolgirl shunned as insane by classmates suddenly finds the world drawn to the very qualities that previously singled her out as weird: her stillness, her focus, her refusal to equivocate or to be impressed.

Footage of her father desperately trying to get her to take a break and eat something, if only a banana, as she joins yet another climate march, or of her curling up in a ball on her bed, needing to be silent, after an argument with her father over the time she has spent crafting another speech to world leaders may quieten those certain she is simply a dupe of the fossil fuel industries – or, more likely, it will not.

But the fruitless debates about whether Thunberg is being used are irrelevant to this film. That is not where its point or its power lies.

Through Thunberg’s eyes

For 90 minutes we live in Thunberg’s shoes, we see the world through her strange eyes. For 90 minutes we are allowed to live inside the head of someone so sane that we can briefly grasp – if we are open to her world – quite how insane each of us truly is. We see ourselves from the outside, through the vision of someone whose Asperger’s has allowed her to “see through the static”, as she too generously terms our delusions. She is the small, still centre of simple awareness buffeted in a sea of insanity.

Watching Thunberg wander alone – unimpressed, often appalled – through the castles and palaces of world leaders, through the economic forums of the global technocratic elite, through the streets where she is acclaimed, the varied nature of our collective insanity comes ever more sharply into focus.

Four forms of insanity the adult world adopts in response to Thunberg, the child soothsayer, are on show. In its varied guises, this insanity derives from unexamined fear.

The first – and most predictable – is exemplified by the right, who angrily revile her for putting in jeopardy the ideological system of capitalism they revere as their new religion in a godless world. She is an apostate, provoking their curses and insults.

The second group are liberal world leaders and the technocratic class who run our global institutions. Their job, for which they are so richly rewarded, is to pay lip service, entirely in bad faith, to the causes Thunberg espouses for real. They are supposed to be managing the planet for future generations, and therefore have the biggest investment in recruiting her to their side, not least to dissipate the energy she mobilises that they worry could rapidly turn against them.

One of the film’s early scenes is Thunberg’s meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, shortly after she has started making headlines.

Beforehand, Macron’s adviser tries to pump Thunberg for information on other world leaders she has met. His unease at her reply that this her first such invitation is tangible. As Thunberg herself seems only too aware when they finally meet, Macron is there simply for the photoshoot. Trying to make inane small talk with someone incapable of such irrelevancies, Macron can’t help but raise an eyebrow in discomfort, and possibly mild reproof, as Thunberg concedes that the media reports of her travelling everywhere by train are right.

Cynically insane

The third group are the adults who line the streets for a selfie with Thunberg, or shout out their adulation, loading it on to her shoulders like a heavy burden – and one she signally refuses to accept. Every time someone at a march tells her she is special, brave or a hero, she immediately tells them they too are brave. It is not her responsibility to fix the climate for the rest of us, and to think otherwise is a form of infantilism.

The fourth group are entirely absent from the film, but not from the responses to it and to her. These are the “cynically insane”, those who want to load on to Thunberg a burden of a different kind. Aware of the way we have been manipulated by our politicians and media, and the corporations that now own both, they are committed to a different kind of religion – one that can see no good anywhere. Everything is polluted and dirty. Because they have lost their own innocence, all innocence must be murdered.

My latest: The more Greta Thunberg articulates the terrifying emotions of awakening to our impending extinction as a species – as she did at the UN this week – the more many of us dig in our heels to resist her role as an agent of change https://t.co/zEZYMuotZv

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 24, 2019

This is a form of insanity no different from the other groups. It denies that anything can be good. It refuses to listen to anything and anyone. It denies that sanity is possible at all. It is its own form of autism – locked away in a personal world from which there can be no escape – that, paradoxically, Thunberg herself has managed to overcome through her deep connection to the natural world.

As long as we can medicalise Thunberg as someone suffering from Asperger’s, we do not need to think about whether we are really the insane ones.

Bursting bubbles

Long ago economists made us aware of financial bubbles, the expression of insanity from investors as they pursue profit without regard to real world forces. Such investors are finally forced to confront reality – and the pain it brings – when the bubble bursts. As it always does.

We are in an ideological bubble – and one that will burst as surely as the financial kind. Thunberg is that still, small voice of sanity outside the bubble. We can listen to her, without fear, without reproach, without adulation, without cynicism. Or we can carry on with our insane games until the bubble explodes.

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

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Even though there was virtually no debate on foreign policy during the recent presidential campaign, there has been considerable discussion of what President Joe Biden’s national security team might look like. The general consensus is that the top levels of the government will be largely drawn from officials who previously served in the Obama administration and who are likely to be hawkish. There has also been, inevitably, some discussion of how the new administration, if it is confirmed, will deal with Israel and the Middle East in general.

Israelis would have preferred a victory by Donald Trump as they clearly understand that he was and still is willing to defer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on nearly all issues. Indeed, that process is ongoing even though Trump might only have about nine more weeks remaining in office. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is reportedly preparing to sanction several international human rights organizations as anti-Semitic due to the fact that they criticize Israel’s brutality on the West Bank and its illegal settlement policies. The White House is also prepared to free convicted but paroled Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from travel restrictions so he can move to Israel, where he is regarded as a hero. Pollard was the most damaging spy in U.S. history and any mitigation of his sentence has been opposed by both the Pentagon, where he worked, and also by the intelligence community.

Finally, it is widely believed that before the end of the year Trump will declare that the United States accepts the legitimacy of Israeli intentions to declare annexation of nearly all the Palestinian West Bank. The White House will actually encourage such an initiative reportedly “to sow hostility between Israel and the Biden administration.” One should note that none of the pro-Israeli measures that are likely to come out of the White House enhance U.S. security in any way and they also do nothing particularly to benefit Trump’s campaign to be re-elected through legal challenges.

If Biden does succeed in becoming president, the special place that Israel occupies in the centers of American power are unlikely to be disturbed, which is why Netanyahu was quick off the mark in congratulating the possible new chief executive. Biden has proudly declared himself to be a “Zionist” and his running mate Kamala Harris has been a featured speaker at the annual gatherings of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington. Both are strongly supportive of the “special relationship” with the Israel and will make no effort to compromise America’s apparent commitment to protect and nourish the Jewish state.

Though Israel is central to how the United States conducts its foreign policy, the country was invisible in the debates and other discussions that took place among candidates during the recent campaign. American voters were therefore given the choice of one government that panders to Israel at the expense of U.S. security or another party that does exactly the same thing. To be sure, Biden did state that he would work to reinstate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) relating to Iran’s nuclear program, which was canceled by Trump. But he also indicated that it would require some amendment, meaning that the Iranians would have to include their missile program in the monitoring while also abandoning their alleged propensity to “interfere” in the Middle East region. The Iranian government has already indicated that additional conditions are unacceptable, so the deal is dead in the water. Israel has also privately and publicly objected to any new arrangement and has already declared that it would “save the option” of working through the Republican Senate to thwart any attempts by the Biden Administration to change things.

That Israel would blatantly and openly interfere in the deliberations of Congress raises some serious questions which the mainstream media predictably is not addressing. Jewish power in America is for real and it is something that some Jews are not shy about discussing among themselves. Jewish power is unique in terms of how it functions. If you’re an American (or British) politician, you very quickly are made to appreciate that Israel owns you and nearly all of your colleagues. Indeed, the process begins in the U.S. even before your election when the little man from AIPAC shows up with the check list that he wants you to sign off on. If you behave per instructions your career path will be smooth, and you will benefit from your understanding that everything happening in Washington that is remotely connected to the interests of the state of Israel is to be determined by the Jewish state alone, not by the U.S. Congress or White House.

And, here is the tricky part, even while you are energetically kowtowing to Netanyahu, you must strenuously deny that there is Jewish power at work if anyone ever asks you about it. You behave in that fashion because you know that your pleasant life will be destroyed, painfully, if you fail to deny the existence of an Israel Lobby or the Jewish power that supports it.

It is a bold assertion, but there is plenty of evidence to support how that power is exerted and what the consequences are. Senators William Fulbright and Chuck Percy and Congressmen Paul Findlay, Pete McCloskey and Cynthia McKinney have all experienced the wrath of the Lobby and voted out of office. Currently Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is running against Georgia Loeffler for a senate seat in Georgia demonstrates exactly how candidates are convinced to stand on their heads by the Israel Lobby. Warnock was a strong supporter of Palestinian rights and a critic of Israeli brutality. He said as recently as 2018 that the Israelis were shooting civilians and condemned the military occupation and settlement construction on the Palestinian West Bank, which he compared to apartheid South Africa. Now that he is running for the Senate, he is saying that he is opposed to the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement due to what he calls the movement’s “anti-Semitic overtones.” He also supports continued military assistance for Israel and believes that Iran is in pursuit of a nuclear weapon, both of which are critical issues being promoted by the Zionist lobby.

There is some pushback in Washington to Israeli dominance, but not much. Recent senior Pentagon appointee Colonel Douglas Macgregor famously has pointed out that many American politicians get “very, very rich” through their support of Israel even though it means the United States being dragged into new wars. Just how Israel gains control of the U.S. political process is illustrated by the devastating insider tale of how the Obama Administration’s feeble attempts to do the right thing in the Middle East were derailed by American Jews in Congress, the media, party donors and from inside the White House itself. The story is of particularly interest as the Biden Administration will no doubt suffer the same fate if it seeks to reject or challenge Israel’s ability to manipulate and virtually control key aspects of U.S. foreign policy.

The account of Barack Obama’s struggle with Israel and the Israeli Lobby comes from a recently published memoir written by a former foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes. It is entitled The World As It Is, and it is extremely candid about how Jewish power was able to limit the foreign policy options of a popular sitting president. Rhodes recounts, for example, how Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once nicknamed him “Hamas” after he dared to speak up for Palestinian human rights, angrily shouting at him “Hamas over here is going to make it impossible for my kid to have his fucking bar mitzvah in Israel.”

Rhodes cites numerous instances where Obama was forced to back down when confronted by Israel and its supporters in the U.S. as well as within the Democratic Party. On several occasions, Netanyahu lecture the U.S. president as if he were an errant schoolboy. And Obama just had to take it. Rhodes sums up the situation as follows: “In Washington, where support for Israel is an imperative for members of Congress, there was a natural deference to the views of the Israeli government on issues related to Iran, and Netanyahu was unfailingly confrontational, casting himself as an Israeli Churchill…. AIPAC and other organizations exist to make sure that the views of the Israeli government are effectively disseminated and opposing views discredited in Washington, and this dynamic was a permanent part of the landscape of the Obama presidency.”

And, returning to the persistent denial of Jewish power even existing when it is running full speed and relentlessly, Rhodes notes the essential dishonesty of the Israel Lobby as it operates in Washington: “Even to acknowledge the fact that AIPAC was spending tens of millions to defeat the Iran deal [JCPOA] was anti-Semitic. To observe that the same people who supported the war in Iraq also opposed the Iran deal was similarly off limits. It was an offensive way for people to avoid accountability for their own positions.”

Many Americans long to live in a country that is at peace with the world and respectful of the sovereignty of foreign nations. Alas, as long as Israeli interests driven by overwhelming Jewish power in the United States continue to corrupt our institutions that just will not be possible. It is time for all Americans, including Jews, to accept that Israel is a foreign country that must make its own decisions and thereby suffer the consequences. The United States does not exist to bail Israel out or to provide cover for its bad behavior. The so-called “special relationship” must end and the U.S. must deal with the Israelis as they would with any other country based on America’s own self-interests. Those interests definitely do not include funding the Israeli war machine, assassinating foreign leaders, or attacking a non-threatening Iran while continuing an illegal occupation of Syria.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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.

In lieu of writing reviews of their own books – with the exception of Walt Whitman, who did that with Leaves of Grass – writers often write introductions or prefaces. The purpose of such introductions is to give the prospective readers a sense of what to expect in the pages that follow, as if the author knew exactly what he was writing when he was writing it, as if he weren’t waylaid by words along the way, or could possibly know what a reader may experience when reading them.  In a way, I too have done that, even while knowing that all writing, if it is any good, is a leap into the relative dark, both for the writer and the reader.  We can’t know beforehand how either will affect us.  What changes us in life and in books is always surprising.

Who knows?

The following is the Introduction to my new book, Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.  I offer it here as an invitation to consider joining me in the book so we may seek together.  Sort of like Whitman’s invitation:

Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,/ To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and /laughingly dash with your hair.

Introduction

In putting together this selection of essays, I was reminded of what Albert Camus once wrote:

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

While I do not claim that all these essays are art, they are my efforts to say in the most eloquent way I can what really has mattered to me in recent years, not just politically but personally, since they are entwined. Upon reflection, I see that what matters to me now is what mattered to me when I was young. Although the issues have changed in certain ways as they must, I have not—unless, or because, my wanderings through life with all its changes have paradoxically meant, in Nietzsche’s words, that I have been becoming who I am.

This seems true to me, and the essaying of the words that follow are part of that becoming. Ortega y Gassett once said that “whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.” I agree. While a book of essays is not a  novel, if read in its entirety, it does tell a story that reveals the times and the man who tells them; it expresses two stories simultaneously. And each story, if told well, always has a double dimension, the old and the new. Every life and every event is disclosed in an historical context, now and then and all the time in between.

While hoping I am an original, I know that I have learned and borrowed from many others. My greater hope is that what I say here is said in a way no other could, that it bears my original stamp. That it is novel. For I am convinced that we  cannot grasp the unique nature of our current era simply by repeating straightforward political analyses. That approach is necessary but not enough. For  it leaves out the hidden heart of a world that seems to be spinning madly toward some kind of denouement. It omits all the little thoughts, secrets, fears, and desires of so many people who wish to speak but can’t find the words to express their thoughts.

From a young age, I have been obsessed with truth, death, and freedom. As I recall, those words have been synonymous for God for many thinkers. So I suppose you could say that I have always been intoxicated with God or for God, or maybe God has been intoxicated with me. I don’t know, nor do I care to: knowledge overrated. I know what I feel. My concerns have been those of many writers throughout the ages—poets, rebels, journalists, philosophers, passionate writers of every stripe, desperados for truth and a peaceful world of love and kindness. Those I have admired the most, believers or unbelievers—it is often hard to tell the difference, nor does it matter—were those who  dismissed categories, distinctions, or labels, but who wrote freely because for them to write freely was to live freely and not to be caged by anyone’s restrictions as to what they should be saying or how they were saying it. For them truth was their God, and through the weaving of words down a page they were always seeking to disclose what was hidden from common sight. They used language to open up cracks in the consensus reality that the great poet and writer Kenneth Rexroth called the “social lie”:

“Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting  classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.”

Indeed, we live in the era of massive fraud where the trans-national wealthy elites, led by the American war and propaganda machine, continue to try to convince the gullible that they are saviors of humanity even as they lie and cheat and murder by the millions.

So what follows are my efforts to unearth the fraud, while celebrating the beauty of life and telling little stories here and there that I hope exemplify its comedy and tragedy. I am always experimenting every time I sit down to write. Not consciously, since I let inspiration guide me. Often, as I think is evident in many pieces, thoughts come to me when walking, and from those initial thoughts comes the path I follow, not knowing exactly where I am headed. Some of these  essays are highly intellectual and structured; some, straightforwardly political; others are meanderings that seek to express essential truths I sense in the telling.

The process feels physical to me. It has a feel and smell. A rhythm. Like a song. Like a dawdling walk in the woods or by a flowing river. If I call them all essays, it is to indicate that they are my attempts, my experiments, my experience (Latin:  exigere: trial, attempt, try) to disclose to myself and anyone who might read them what is going on in the world that I find important and worth investigating. To use my artistic and sociological imagination to connect the dots between the personal and the social and in so doing to say something worth sharing with others.

Whatever my ostensible starting point—a major event, a book, an experience—you can usually be sure that by the time you have read to the end of the piece, I will have branched off down by-ways that lead to other trails that eventually reconnect to the main path. Or so I hope. While I usually see how the roads all lead back to one, sometimes I only intuit it and the reader is left to do the reconnoitering alone. I think this is good. For while these essays are set in ink within the covers of a book, verbal tenses and ink can be misleading. They suggest  that the author’s quest is over, that what motivated the initial words is past, that   the case is closed and the reader and writer are dead-heads satisfied with their knowingness. For me, that is far from true. The paradox of having written these  essays is that I have tried to do so in language that evokes in the reader the  exhilaration I felt in writing them, and that such aliveness will be carried into the  world as rebellion against war and injustice.

I have arranged the essays in no particular order, except to begin and end with a few that tell you something about me. I think it is always good to have some deeper sense of who the author is whose words you are reading, beyond the brief notices on the back of books.

These essays cover a wide variety of topics: propaganda, wars,  government assassinations, work, nature, time, the CIA, silence, poetry, digital dementia, etc. They range far and wide, as I try to connect the scattered dots to draw a coherent picture of our world today. Since I write with no particular goal in mind except truth as I see it, perhaps readers would be best served by randomly choosing a piece and seeing where it might lead them. As with living, I suspect that reading is best done somewhat randomly in the hope that one experiences a sense of liberation in the process. I have scattered some satirical pieces throughout to add a bit of levity to serious matters and hope the reader will not mistake their “authors” for the real me. But if so, that would add to the humor, something we need to survive.

Three authors whom I hold in high esteem and whose names I mention numerous times in this book are John Berger, Albert Camus, and James W. Douglass.

Berger is often described as a Marxist art critic, but such an appellation is misleading, for he was much more than that. While always situating his analyses in historical and cultural contexts, and never forgetting the class structure that  underlies the cruel capitalistic order, he was acutely aware that consumerism and therefore global capitalism as well as philosophical materialism rested upon a  “materialist fantasy” that denied the spiritual power of evil and the spiritual power of good to respond. As a counter-weight, Berger always made sure to cling close to human reality and include what he called “enclaves of the beyond” in his writing. These were often the marginalized hiding places of hope where the spiritual faith in human love and solidarity was nourished and sustained despite the world’s evil.

Albert Camus was very similar in many ways. An avowed atheist with a spiritual core, he was an artistic anarchist with a passionate spiritual hunger and an austere and moral Don Juan. He could not be pigeonholed. This drove many crazy. His allegiance was to truth, not ideologies. He tried to fight injustice while extolling life’s beauty and the human search for happiness. He grasped the essence of the ever-recurring plague that evil doers inflict upon the world. He was preoccupied with death, freedom, and an absent God, but never gave up hope and insisted that rebellion was the only honorable course. Yet the fight against the plague must go on; that was Camus’ message. If not, you will be destroyed by your own complicity in evil.

James W. Douglass, although a writer of a more overt spiritual sensibility, continues to write brilliantly about “the unspeakable” that has been used to cover-up the U.S. government’s assassinations of its greatest anti-war leaders: JFK, Malcom X, MLK, and RFK. The unspeakable is a term coined by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in the mid-1960s. He meant it to point to a systemic evil that permeates American society that defies speech: “It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience . . . .” It is, in other words, the plague that is us when we live in the nest of the unspeakable as obedient servants of the American Empire. Douglass makes the plague manifest in order to give us hope, and in speaking the unspeakable, he shows us both the radical evil and the redemptive courage that we are all capable of.

I mention these three brilliant writers here to say how grateful I am for their work. There are many others, of course, whom you will encounter in the course of reading these essays. For even when we write alone, even when we think we walk alone, we are always following in others’ footsteps.

As Camus says in one of his short stories, it is hard to distinguish between solitary and solidary.

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

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

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Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Author: Edward Curtin

ISBN: 9781949762266

Published: 2020

Options: EBOOK – Epub and Kindle, paper, PDF

Click here to order.

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This article was published more than 13 years ago.

Is it relevant to the ongoing political crisis in the US in the wake of 2020 Presidential Elections.

Read carefully.

The President of the US namely Donald Trump could invoke the John Warner NDAA 07 and thereby call  upon the unrestricted and arbitrary “Use” of the military in police and law enforcement functions, while bypassing the US Congress and the Judiciary.   

This is not the only piece of relevant legislaiton which repeals the Posse Comitatus Act.

Another important piece of legislation (National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) HR 1540) was adopted under the Obama administration:

HR 1540 (signed into law by president Obama on December 31, 2011) set the stage for the repeal of constitutional government,  not to mention the development of the “Surveillance State”, which has recently been the object of heated debate.

The adoption of  the “National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), HR 1540) reinforces NDAA 07. It is tantamount to the militarization of law enforcement, the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act. 

Michel Chossudovsky, November 18, 2020

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In October 2006, Bush signed into law the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, (also known under the title Department of Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007) [The John Warner NDAA 07 was adopted on 17 October 2006]

NDAA 07  includes specific provisions which allow the military to take control of  normal police and law enforcement functions at the Federal and State levels.

Sec. 1076 of the NDAA 07 overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevents the military from intervening in the conduct of civilian government activities, including the conduct of Justice and Law Enforcement. Posse Comitatus has been central to the functioning of constitutional government. (It should be noted that other previous pieces of legislation have already invalidated the substance of Posse Comitatus).

What is significant in these specific provisions of NDAA 07 (Sec. 1076) is that  they dovetail the provisions of Bush’s National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive (NSPD 51, HSPD 20) enacted on May 9, 2007.

NSPD 51 would essentially scrap Constitutional government in the case of a so-called  “Catastrophic Emergency”. .

If an emergency situation were to be called by the President, NSPD 51 would instate martial law under the authority of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security. It would suspend constitutional government under the provisions of Continuity in Government (COG). It would establish extraordinary powers for the president and vice-president.

The provisions of NSPD 51 are consistent with an existing body of legislation and regulations pertaining to alleged terrorist attacks on the Homeland and the declaration of martial law. Sec. 1076 of NDAA 07 (DDAA 07), however, goes much further in defining the role of the Military in the case of a “Catastrophic Emergency.”

Sec 1076 essentially defines the discretionary powers which would be conferred to the president and the vice president if  NSPD 51 were to be applied.

Sec. 1076 of the NDAA 07, which was apparently slipped in at the last minute at the request of the White House as an amendment of Sec. 333, pertains to the  “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”

Sec 1076 is extremely explicit; it virtually creates a Pinochet style environment for the mass arrest of political dissidents without trial, the storming of public rallies, etc.

It provides specific details regarding the powers conferred to the President and Vice President in the case of a “Catastrophic Emergency” as envisaged under NSPD 51:

The president “may employ the armed forces … to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States” 

Unrestricted powers are granted to the White House. The President [Trump] would have the authority to suspend  civilian law enforcement at the federal and state levels and call in the Military, which would be in charge of  suppressing “domestic violence” “insurrection”( e.g. public rallies), or “conspiracy”, meaning anybody who might express dissent, indignation or opposition to the Bush Administration for having scrapped the Constitution.

The emphasis of Sec. 1076 is in relation to actions directed against “domestic enemies” rather than bona fide “defense” in relation to attacks by foreign forces, which is part of the Military’s mandate.

Taken together, NSPD 51 and Sec 1076 of the NDAA 07 define the contours of a “democratic dictatorship” in America  under the authority of the White House.

We are not dealing, however, with “Military Rule” or “Military Government” as normally understood, because the authority to govern under the provisions of NSPD 51 is vested in the President and the Vice President.

What is at stake  is the unrestricted and arbitrary “Use” of the Military by the President /Vice President in the conduct of police and law enforcement functions, while bypassing the US Congress and the Judiciary.

Below is the full text of Sec 1076 of NDAA 07 which amends Sec 333. 

[Please note a correction was brought to this article on June 28, 2007. What was initially reproduced in Annex was Sec.1042 of the initial bill DDAA 07 which amends Sec. 333. In substance Sec 1076 of NDAA 07 with some minor changes in emphasis is similar to Sec 1042 of DDAA 07. Both amend Sec 333.

Below is the relevant excerpt (Sec 1076) of the John Warner NDAA 07 signed into law by President Bush in October 2006. ]  

SEC. 1076. USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.

(a) Use of the Armed Forces Authorized-

(1) IN GENERAL- Section 333 of title 10, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

`Sec. 333. Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law

`(a) Use of Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies- (1) The President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to–

`(A) restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that–

`(i) domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order; and

`(ii) such violence results in a condition described in paragraph (2); or

`(B) suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation, combination, or conspiracy results in a condition described in paragraph (2).

`(2) A condition described in this paragraph is a condition that–

`(A) so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that State or possession, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

`(B) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

`(3) In any situation covered by paragraph (1)(B), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.

`(b) Notice to Congress- The President shall notify Congress of the determination to exercise the authority in subsection (a)(1)(A) as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of that authority.’.

(2) PROCLAMATION TO DISPERSE- Section 334 of such title is amended by inserting `or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws’ after `insurgents’.

(3) HEADING AMENDMENT- The heading of chapter 15 of such title is amended to read as follows:…

The Imperative to Achieve National Improved Medicare for All

By Margaret Flowers, November 17 2020

Foto : il missile sm-6 della  raytheon da cui la lockheed martin derivera’ il missile balistico nucleare a medio raggio da installare in europa

Oltre cinque anni fa titolammo sul Manifesto (9 giugno 2015) «Ritornano i missili a Comiso?». Tale ipotesi fu ignorata dall’intero arco politico e liquidata da qualche sedicente esperto come «allarmistica». L’allarme, purtroppo, era fondato.

Pochi giorni fa, il 6 novembre, la Lockheed Martin (la stessa che produce gli F-35) ha firmato un primo contratto da 340 milioni di dollari con lo US Army per la produzione di missili a medio raggio, anche a testata nucleare, progettati per essere installati in Europa.

I missili di tale categoria (con base a terra e gittata tra 500 e 5500 km) erano stati proibiti dal Trattato Inf, firmato nel 1987 dai presidenti Gorbaciov e Reagan: esso aveva eliminato i missili balistici nucleari Pershing 2, schierati dagli Stati uniti in Germania Occidentale, e quelli nucleari da crociera Tomahawk, schierati dagli Stati uniti in Italia (a Comiso), Gran Bretagna, Germania Occidentale, Belgio e Olanda, e allo stesso tempo i missili balistici SS-20 schierati dall’Unione Sovietica sul proprio territorio.

Nel 2014, l’amministrazione Obama accusava la Russia, senza alcuna prova, di aver sperimentato un missile da crociera (sigla 9M729) della categoria proibita dal Trattato e, nel 2015, annunciava che «di fronte alla violazione del Trattato Inf da parte della Russia, gli Stati uniti stanno considerando lo spiegamento in Europa di missili con base a terra».

Il testimone è quindi passato all’amministrazione Trump, che nel 2019 ha deciso il ritiro degli Stati uniti dal Trattato Inf, accusando la Russia di averlo «deliberatamente violato».

Dopo alcuni test missilistici, è stata incaricata la Lockheed Martin di realizzare un missile da crociera derivato dal Tomahawk e uno balistico derivato dallo SM-6 della Raytheon. Secondo il contratto, i due missili saranno operativi nel 2023: quindi pronti tra due anni ad essere installati in Europa.

Va tenuto presente il fattore geografico: mentre un missile balistico nucleare Usa a medio raggio, lanciato dall’Europa, può colpire Mosca dopo pochi minuti, un analogo missile lanciato dalla Russia può colpire le capitali europee, ma non Washington. Rovesciando lo scenario, è come se la Russia schierasse missili nucleari a medio raggio in Messico.

Va inoltre tenuto presente che lo SM-6, specifica la Raytheon, svolge la funzione di «tre missili in uno»: antiaerea, anti-missile e di attacco. Il missile nucleare derivato dallo SM-6 potrà quindi essere usato dalle navi e installazioni terrestri dello «scudo» Usa in Europa i cui tubi di lancio, specifica la Lockheed Martin, possono lanciare «missili per tutte le missioni».

In una dichiarazione del 26 ottobre 2020, il presidente Putin riafferma la validità del Trattato Inf, definendo un «grave errore«» il ritiro statunitense, e l’impegno della Russia a non schierare missili analoghi finché gli Usa non schiereranno i loro a ridosso del suo territorio. Propone quindi ai paesi Nato una «reciproca moratoria» e «reciproche misure di verifica», ossia ispezioni nelle reciproche installazioni missilistiche.

La proposta russa è stata ignorata dalla Nato. Il suo segretario generale Jens Stoltenberg ha ribadito, il 10 novembre, che «in un mondo così incerto, le armi nucleari continuano a svolgere un ruolo vitale nella preservazione della pace».

Nessuna voce si è levata dai governi e parlamenti europei, pur rischiando l’Europa di trovarsi in prima linea in un confronto nucleare analogo o più pericoloso di quello della guerra fredda. Ma questa non à la minaccia del Covid e quindi non se ne parla.

L’Unione Europea, di cui 21 dei 27 membri fanno parte della Nato, ha già fatto sentire la sua voce quando, nel 2018, ha bocciato alle Nazioni Unite la risoluzione presentata dalla Russia sulla «Preservazione e osservanza del Trattato Inf», dando luce verde alla installazione di nuovi missili nucleari Usa in Europa.

Cambierà qualcosa una volta che Joe Biden si sarà insediato alla Casa Bianca? Oppure, dopo che il democratico Obama ha aperto il nuovo confronto nucleare con la Russia e il repubblicano Trump lo ha aggravato stracciando il Trattato Inf, il democratico Biden (già vice di Obama) firmerà l’installazione dei nuovi missili nucleari Usa in Europa?

Manlio Dinucci

Introduction

A dangerous, life-threatening sequence of events has unfolded since The Lancet’s fraudulent[i] hydroxychlorquine (HCQ) article appeared May 22, followed by headlines demonizing this ancient anti-malarial drug – aka quinine, aka chloroquine, and known to antiquity as the “sacred bark”.[ii]

The false news that 96,032 hospitalized patients on six continents were at risk for lethal heart rhythms sent shock waves throughout the world. Immediately, many randomized control trials (RCT’s) at the World Health Organization and elsewhere were suspended until the Lancet article was finally retracted two weeks later, June 5.

But the damage was done. The WHO had ordered countries to stop using it, and European Union countries had banned its use (outside clinical trials) for Covid-19 treatment.  Clinical trials themselves, such as the NAID trial announced by the US National Institutes of Health on May 14,[iii] were cancelled.  A hostile press frightened people from re-entering clinical trials that might have cleared it for use.

Worst of all, newly symptomatic people who had formerly benefitted from early outpatient treatment were now progressing to Phase 2 of the disease, during which the dangerous immune system “cytokine” storm[iv] often leads to hospitalization and death.

On May 27, less than a week into this disaster, a top world epidemiology journal, the American Journal of Epidemiology, issued an urgent call from award-winning Yale Professor, Harvey Risch: “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis.”

The abstract reads:

“Hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin has been widely misrepresented in both clinical reports and public media, and outpatient trials results are not expected until September. Early outpatient illness is very different than later hospitalized florid disease and the treatments differ. Evidence about use of hydroxychloroquine alone, or of hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin in inpatients, is irrelevant concerning efficacy of the pair in early high-risk outpatient disease. Five studies, including two controlled clinical trials, have demonstrated significant major outpatient treatment efficacy…These medications need to be widely available and promoted immediately for physicians to prescribe.”(author’s bolding)[v]

A Google News search reveals the astonishing truth that the corporate media, with the exception of Fox News,[vi] did not report this article.

Is the media interested in a cure for Covid-19? Or is it in lockstep with Big Pharma, which seems to have little interest in an existing treatment for the disease?

As one analyst reported,

“The possibility of a cheap and easy treatment for Covid from re-purposed generic drugs, especially hydroxychloroquine, is a mortal threat to these financial interests.[vii] As France Soir put it: the trial management must ‘never put low-cost hydroxychloroquine therapy in direct competition with remdesivir’. Or with mass vaccination.”[viii]

What better strategy than for these financial interests to manufacture a hydroxychloroquine controversy?

A June 17 article titled “Behind the French controversy over the medical treatment of Covid-19: The role of the drug industry,” reveals just how such a tactic has been brought to bear on the issue.[ix]

When did the hydroxychloroquine “controversy” first appear? 

Santa Monica cariologist Dr. Dan Wohlgelernter reported on June 18 that “there was never controversy about hydroxychloroquine right up until March 20, 2020.”[x]

He was referring to Donald Trump’s tweet of March 21:

“HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains – Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)…..”[xi]

Dr. Wohlgelernter continues:

“We had data from China and from France well before that in February showing a significant beneficial impact of hydroxychloroquine – yet you saw physicians, politicians, journalists, saying that hydroxychloroquine is all hype and it’s all due to the president pushing it. That’s revisionist history.

The fact is there was a great deal of excitement in the medical community internationally a month before President Trump ever mentioned it, because of the data reported from China and from Dr. Raoult in France and it said that people used whatever political animosity they had towards the President to attack the medication that in fact had helped many people with coronavirus and could have helped many more had it and its reputation not been so sullied by political accusations and by poorly designed studies and by medical journals allowing publications that were negative as far as their conclusions – publications that never should have reached print because they hadn’t been adequately vetted.[xii]

What has been the role of Dr. Raoult in France?

Dr. Didier Raoult (image on the right) was born in Senegal in 1952.  His parents, a nurse and a French military doctor, moved the family to Marseille in 1961, where Raoult later became a physician and microbiologist, holding both M.D. and PhD degrees. He is married to psychiatrist and novelist Natacha Caïn, and they have three children together.

Raoult is the director ofthe Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit (URMITE) in Marseille (Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) Méditerranée Infection), with 200 staff.  He also teaches infectious diseases in the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University.

He has received numerous honours and awards, including Officer of the Legion d’honneur, Price Excellence in Clinical Medicine, Netherlands; J.D. Williams Award, United Kingdom; and Award of Excellence from the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.[xiii]

With more than 2,300 indexed publications to his name, he is the most cited microbiologist in France, and is cited seventh in the world. He has 625,000 followers on Twitter.

Raoult is also active in Africa, returning every year to laboratories he set up in Dakar, and conducting tropical disease research all over Senegal.[xiv]

On June 25, Professor Raoult and his COVID-19 Task Force published their much-anticipated research on 3,737 COVID-19 patients, in the journal Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease.[xv]

(The team, knowing their treatment was effective, had decided not to conduct randomized controlled studies, which would have meant denying treatment to large numbers of placebo patients, letting their disease evolve untreated, and sending many to their deaths. The team’s approach reflects the “Ethical Principles for Medical Research” from the Declaration of Helsinki.[xvi])

The long-awaited article reported an overall 1.1% case fatality rate for the patients included in its study. More specifically:

“Our approach of early diagnosis and care of as many patients as possible results in much lower mortality rates than other strategies. The test-and-treat strategy adopted in Marseille also seems capable of shortening the duration of the outbreak when compared to data from France overall by identifying infected people and reducing their viral shedding duration. In fact, more people were tested in Marseille than in most other areas, and the outbreak lasted only 9 weeks…

Conclusion: 

“Results suggest that early diagnosis, early isolation and early treatment of COVID-19 patients, with at least 3 days of HCQ-AZ lead to a significantly better clinical outcome and a faster viral load reduction than other treatments.”

On the day of Raoult’s publication, the Dr. Been Medical Lectures on YouTube, with 176,000 subscribers, explained the study in graphics, but could not find media coverage.[xvii]

On the days following its publication, Google News showed no English-speaking media coverage appearing under Raoult’s name, or under the first words of the title, “Outcomes of 3,737 COVID-19 patients”.

On June 24, the day before the article’s publication, Raoult had testified at the French National Assembly, saying that the article had been refused by The Lancet the very same week that the journal accepted the fraudulent and now retracted anti-HCQ article by Mehra et al.[xviii]

The hydroxychloroquine “controversy” thus shows clear signs of having been manufactured and orchestrated by the immensely wealthy drug industry through its power over the “captured media,”[xix] government agencies,[xx] and reluctant journal editors.[xxi]

How the media’s “randomized control” strategy is fueling the controversy 

The day before the Lancet’s hydroxychloroquine embarrassment[xxii] was published May 22, the New York Times had updated its feature May 12 hit piece on Dr. Raoult Didier – having sent a reporter to France to round up Raoult’s critics and to report, in an epic 7,500 words, on “the man behind Trump’s favorite unproven treatments.”

The article dwelled at length on Raoult’s unorthodox methods and forthright personality, using an ad hominem approach rather than actual evidence against the microbiologist’s position.[xxiii]

The NYT provides a high-level example of the media trivializing hydroxychloroquine on the basis that it has not been proven in randomized control trials (RCTs) – which take months, if not years, to perform.

Meanwhile, the global pandemic is killing hundreds of thousands of people.

There is no vaccine for the common cold, which is caused by strains of the coronavirus and the rhinovirus. If a safe, effective Covid-19 vaccine can even be developed, at least a year will be needed to produce enough for worldwide use.

Four hundred years before randomized control trials existed, quinine, made from the “sacred bark” of the South American quina-quina tree, was used to treat malaria. Pharmacologically, it has been synthesized as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). This cheap abundant drug has been on the WHO list of essential medicines since the list began in 1977.

Thousands of doctors are reporting that in the early phase of COVID-19, patients given a low dose of this drug in combination with azithromycin and zinc, get better.[xxiv]

However, this ancient gift to humankind was immediately outlawed for Covid-19 use in many countries following the fraudulent May 22nd Lancet study. Treatment is still denied to untold numbers of people, many of whom will have certainly died.

Additionally, HCQ’s bad press from the drug industry’s scare media has driven people away from enrolling in HCQ prophylaxis trials.

Instead, the media is giving good press to randomized control trials.  It is true that in many settings RCT’s are considered to be the gold standard. But what is their value in the midst of a crisis such as Covid-19, when susceptible people require early prevention within days?

Hydroxychloroquine proponents do not claim that HCQ works on seriously ill Covid-19 patients in the hospital setting.  Instead they understand the reality that HCQ+azithromycin succeeds only during Phase 1,[xxv] when people first show symptoms.

But others have been designing studies (including the disgraced Lancet and NEJM studies, and the abandoned NIH study) that examine HCQ in precisely the opposite context to its reported efficacy in Phase 1. And not in combination with zinc and azithromycin, but by itself.

This strategy is known as the “straw-man fallacy” – where you attribute a false position to your opponent, then easily knock it down.

These studies are systematically setting hydroxychloroquine up to fail. As stated by Dr. Wohlgelernter below, it is sabotage, pure and simple.

With the help of a colluding media, confusion now reigns supreme while the world awaits a profitable vaccine from the drug industry.

We will turn now to frontline doctors who have been protesting the suspension of this inexpensive, plentiful, generic drug that they have used successfully – while in some countries their patients are now dying without it.

Frontline doctors testify that HCQ works – and protest its sabotage

An April 2020 survey of 6200 doctors in 30 countries showed that globally, half of the doctors polled said they had used hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.[xxvi]

On April 6, wider access to the drug was urged in a petition signed by nearly 500,000 French doctors and citizens.[xxvii]

On April 7, U.S. physician Jeffrey A. Singer wrote about prescribing HCQ in an independent (non-corporate-media) magazine:

“The FDA lets doctors prescribe off-label drugs all the time. Now that there’s a pandemic, some governors have decided doctors can’t make those decisions for themselves.

Doctors should not be prohibited from using their best clinical judgment and recommending it to patients—especially considering the fact that these drugs have been around for a long time, which means we are familiar with their risks and complications. The government should stay out of this and let clinicians practice medicine, provided they get their patients’ informed consent.”[xxviii]

On May 5, it was reported in France:

As France scrambles to prepare to lift its 2-month lockdown from 11 May, a group of doctors has published a new study they say proves the efficacy of the controversial malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, combined with the antibiotic azithromycin, in treating Covid-19.

The trial carried out on nearly 100 infected doctors and their families found that an HCQ and azithromycin combination at the first sign of symptoms, substantially reduced the viral load of Covid-19.[xxix]

On May 28, in consternation over the false Lancet article, an open letter from 200 scientists to the authors and The Lancet requested details of the data and an independent audit. The letter was “signed by clinicians, medical researchers, statisticians, and ethicists from across the world.”[xxx]

On June 1, Professor Harvey Risch, at the Yale Schools of Medicine and Public Health, was interviewed about HCQ:

The combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin has been used for decades in hundreds of thousands of people with rheumatoid arthritis. There is a concern that these medications do change the heart pacing a little and could cause cardiac arrhythmias. However, these arrhythmias are still very rare in people using these medications.[xxxi]

Santa Monica cardiologist Dr. Dan Wohlgelernter said in a June 18 interview:

“I’ve prescribed it…recommended it to people…had conversations with physicians literally around the globe in Israel and Italy and England and the east coast of the United States, and I’ve read the literature extensively. Hydroxychloroquine definitely has a role; that role is specific.  It’s an antiviral agent that is effective in early stages of infection; when used in that context it is effective and it is safe.  Unfortunately, there have been studies that have looked at hydroxychloroquine in the wrong context; looked at it in severely critically ill people in the hospital setting.  At that point the antiviral isn’t effective because you’ve gone beyond viral infection to an immune mediated widespread inflammatory reaction, so that was the wrong population to look at hydroxychloroquine.

That kind of study, that sabotage, is the whole story about hydroxychloroquine…it was obvious that hydroxychloroquine would fail in that context. Hydroxychloroquine has been reported to have heart toxicity and as a cardiologist I’m intimately aware of this literature and I’m familiar with hydroxychloroquine.

The study that was most specific in looking at the cardiac issues specifically with rhythm abnormalities was done in the East Coast in the New York area where they looked at 200 patients and carefully monitored their EKGs and looked for arrhythmias and they found no serious arrhythmias in any of those patients.

This is an FDA approved drug for 65 years; it’s generic, cheap, widely available. We give it to pregnant women, to breastfeeding women, to elderly patients, to patients who are immune-compromised…”[xxxii]

On a June 12 radio talk show in St. Louis, Missouri, Doctor Steve Crawford, Medical Director at Festus Manor, reported a 100% survival rate with early administration of hydroxychloroquine.[xxxiii]

On June 25 in India, where the media is not under western corporate control, the New Indian Express reported that Mandya district, which had a record number of Covid-19 cases, “has been recording an impressive turnaround despite continuing arrivals from hot spot states. Health officials claim that one of the reasons is because they are giving hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to all those quarantined…They also quoted the government guidelines which permit prophylactic usage of HCQ (prevention).” Furthermore, “health workers and police personnel are given seven-week doses of HCQ as a preventive measure.”[xxxiv]

On June 19, the Economic Times in Jaipur, India reported:

“More than 4,300 healthcare workers including doctors and nurses have been given HCQ to help them prevent the infection as there are high chances of them getting infected while treating Covid patients.”[xxxv]

The right-wing medical group, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) asked, in a June 17 press release:

“How can we trust the established authorities or prestigious journals when, in this perilous time, trials of an available, inexpensive, long-established drug appear to be designed to fail, while risking the lives of their subjects through deliberate or negligent drug overdoses?”[xxxvi]

The US media did not pick this up.

Nor did it pick up a second AAPS Press Release, June 22, which should have been more than newsworthy:

TUCSON, Ariz., June 22, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Today the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons files its motion for a preliminary injunction to compel release to the public of hydroxychloroquine by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), in AAPS v. HHS, No. 1:20-cv-00493-RJJ-SJB (W.D. Mich.). Nearly 100 million doses of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) were donated to these agencies, and yet they have not released virtually any of it to the public…

“Why does the government continue to withhold more than 60 million doses of HCQ from the public?” asks Jane Orient, M.D., the Executive Director of AAPS. “This potentially life-saving medication is wasting away in government warehouses while Americans are dying from COVID-19.”[xxxvii]

Conclusion

When a pandemic is raging across the entire planet, with people social distancing and national economies in turmoil, what is the most urgent approach to drug therapy?

To do nothing while randomized control trials await results months or years later?

Or to follow recommendations that have emerged from infectious disease specialists after treating thousands of cases using a consistent protocol?

The media shapes society’s common reality. This over-arching power carries a pervasive and commensurate responsibility.

The drastic failure to report honestly on HCQ goes far beyond incompetence:  it is abetting the unspeakable forces who do not want people to be reliably cured during this pandemic until they can realize pandemic-level profits.

*

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Notes

[i] Evidence of the origin of this fraudulence is given in: Elizabeth Woodworth, “Leaked: ‘Deadly’ HCQ:  How the world’s top medical journals, The Lancet and NEJM, were cynically exploited by Big Pharma,” Global Research, 14 June 2020 (https://www.globalresearch.ca/leaked-deadly-hcq-world-top-medical-journals-lancet-nejm-exploited-big-pharma/5715859).

[ii] The anti-malarial natural substance quinine, taken from the bark of the South American quina-quina tree, is now sold as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. Jane Achan, et al., “Quinine, an old anti-malarial drug in a modern world: role in the treatment of malaria,” Malaria Journal,  24 May 2011 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3121651/).

[iii] “NIH begins clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to treat COVID-19,”NIH News Release, 14 May 2020 (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-begins-clinical-trial-hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin-treat-covid-19). This trial has not been re-instated.

[iv] Amber Dance, “What is a cytokine storm?” Knowledge Magazine, 10 April 2020 (https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2020/what-cytokine-storm).

[v] Harvey A. Risch, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis,” Amer. J. Epid, 27 May 2020 (https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586). Risch is Professor at the Yale Schools of both Medicine and Public Health.

[vi] “Yale paper finds strong evidence for efficacy of use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as COVID treatment,” Fox News, “The Ingraham Angle,” 29 May 2020 (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6160199007001#sp=show-clips).

[vii] The financial interests referred to were Gilead, Big Data, and Astra-Zeneca, which is “in merger talks with Gilead in a plan to create the world’s largest pharmaceutical company”.

[viii] Edmund Fordham, “RECOVERY: The plot sickens,” The Conservative Woman, June 19, 2020 (https://conservativewoman.co.uk/recovery-the-plot-sickens/).

[ix] Laurent Mucchielli, “Behind the French controversy over the medical treatment of Covid-19: The role of the drug industry,” Journal of Sociology, 17 June 2020 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1440783320936740).

[x] “SECOND OPINION: Doctors Discuss the Politicization of Hydroxychloroquine,” June 18, 2020, at 3:42 min. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=m_JIz780i5w&feature=emb_logo).

[xi] Twitter:  https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1241367239900778501

[xii] SECOND OPINION, at 10:21 min. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=m_JIz780i5w&feature=emb_logo).

[xiii] Elsevier, “Meet the Editor-in-Chief,” Human Microbiome Journal, 2020 (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/human-microbiome-journal/news/meet-editor-in-chie).

[xiv] Marième Soumaré, “Coronavirus: Didier Raoult the African and chloroquine, from Dakar to Brazzaville,” The Africa Report, 15 April 2020 (https://www.theafricareport.com/26264/coronavirus-didier-raoult-the-african-and-chloroquine-from-dakar-to-brazzaville/).

[xv] Jean-Christophe Lagier, et al, “Outcomes of 3,737 COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin and other regimens in Marseille, France: A retrospective analysis,” Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, 25 June 2020 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893920302817). This investigation by the 19 members of the IHU COVID-19 Task force was conceptualized by Raoult. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

[xvi] Declaration of Helsinki Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects

HELSINKI WORLD MEDICAL ASSOCIATION STATEMENT – Section No. 32:

“32. In the treatment of a patient, where proven prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic methods do not exist or have been ineffective, the physician, with informed consent from the patient, must be free to use unproven or new prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic measures, if in the physician’s judgement it offers hope of saving life, reestablishing health or alleviating suffering. Where possible, these measures should be made the object of research, designed to evaluate their safety and efficacy. In all cases, new information should be recorded and, where appropriate, published. The other relevant guidelines of this Declaration should be followed.”  (https://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/79(4)373.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0dyzXSt12H0fvt6xL7Zk-29FPprs7i0EDCPKWk5Ux1UiES17J2Nr0-YjY).

[xvii] “Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin Two Studies,” DrBeen Medical Lectures, 25 June 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgQqT2xbXlo).

[xviii] The Lancet, “RETRACTED: Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis, by Mandeep R. Mehra et al,” Lancet,5 June 2020 (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext).

[xix] Anya Schiffrin, “Government and corporations hinder journalists with ‘media capture,’”Columbia Journalism Review, August 29, 2017 (https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/media-capture.php).

[xx] Laurent Mucchielli, “Behind the French controversy over the medical treatment of Covid-19: The role of the drug industry,” Journal of Sociology, 17 June 2020 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1440783320936740).

[xxi] Woodworth, “Leaked: ‘Deadly’ HCQ” (https://www.globalresearch.ca/leaked-deadly-hcq-world-top-medical-journals-lancet-nejm-exploited-big-pharma/5715859).

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Scott Sayare, “He was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19,” New York Times, 12 May 2020, updated May 21, 2020 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/magazine/didier-raoult-hydroxychloroquine.html).

[xxiv] “The esteemed Dr Cristiana Altino de Almeida, who is a specialist in nuclear medicine with over 50 years of experience, is part of a movement of thousands of Brazilian medical doctors who are now treating COVID-19 patients at the early stage of the disease, with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, zinc and other medications, mostly through telemedicine, the patients not being hospitalized.” In: “Interview with Dr Altino de Almeida, from Recife, Brazil,” Posted on June 28, 2020 (http://covexit.com/interview-with-dr-altino-de-almeida-from-recife-brazil/?fbclid=IwAR3Q-P3Uml5_5gTAIz33ZZX_RnWPgMsoQfs3Qh5BkHUmT0CVi4oEB4LrP8Y.)

[xxv] Dr. Raoult has explained in relation to the Oxford RECOVERY Trial, that “at the first viral stage, one must give medicines against the virus; in the second inflammatory phase, one needs to give medications against that reaction; and then in the third phase, it’s work to be done in intensive care units. Therefore, the same medication cannot be used for the three stages of the disease. He insists that it was a trial that was designed before one had an understanding of the disease, and that such randomized clinical trials should not be done before one has such an understanding.” Summarized from Didier Raoult, at: “The Marx Brothers are Doing Science: the Example of RECOVERY,” 9 June 2020 (http://covexit.com/professor-raoult-compares-the-oxford-recovery-trial-academics-to-the-marx-brothers/).

[xxvi] Katharina Buchholz, “Prescription Rate of Hydroxychloroquine Varies Widely,” Statista, 21 April 2020

(https://www.statista.com/chart/21411/share-of-doctors-using-hydroxychloroquine-for-covid-19/).

[xxvii] Lee Mclaughlan, “Covid-19 France: petition for wider chloroquine access,” 6 April 2020 (https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Time-wasted-over-use-of-choroquine-coronavirus-drug-says-petition-by-former-French-health-minister).

[xxviii] Jeffrey A. Singer, “Doctors, Not Politicians, Ought To Decide Whether Off-Label Drug Use of Hydroxychloroquine Is Appropriate for COVID-19 Patients,” Reason Magazine, 7 April 2020 (https://reason.com/2020/04/07/doctors-not-politicians-ought-to-decide-whether-off-label-drug-use-of-hydroxychloroquine-is-appropriate-for-covid-19-patients/).

[xxix] Christina Okello, “French doctors renew bid to clear HCQ to treat Covid-19 ahead of lockdown exit,” RFI, 5 May 2020 (http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200505-french-doctors-renew-push-to-clear-malaria-drug-hydroxychloroquine-to-secure-covid-19-lockdown-exit).

[xxx] The full-text letter and signatories appear

at https://zenodo.org/record/3862789#.XuQiNmYTGhM

[xxxi] Harvey Risch, “Using Hydroxychloroquine and Other Drugs to Fight Pandemic,” Yale School of Public Health Newsletter, 01 June 2020 (https://publichealth.yale.edu/news-article/25085/).

[xxxii] “SECOND OPINION: Doctors Discuss the Politicization of Hydroxychloroquine,” June 18, 2020, 0:14 min. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=m_JIz780i5w&feature=emb_logo).

[xxxiii] “Local physician has 100% survival rate with early administration of hydroxychloroquine,” 97.1 FM Talk, Marc Cox Morning Show, 12 June 2020 (https://971talk.radio.com/blogs/the-marc-cox-morning-show/dr-steve-crawford-of-festus-manor-on-hydroxychloroquine?fbclid=IwAR2MjR2RBoJeofbg01eLuuAc3d4X543zpW_G_cClxxikzii3mAq0A3vvUeM).

[xxxiv] M.S. Ajith, “Hydroxychloroquine helped Mandya fight virus: Officials,” New Indian Express, 25 June 2020 (https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/2020/jun/25/hydroxychloroquine-helped-mandya-fight-virus-officials-2161022.html).

[xxxv] Economic Times HealthWorld (India Times), 19 June 2020 (https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/diagnostics/hcq-beneficial-as-preventive-drug-sms-doctors-told-icmr/76464620).

[xxxvi] Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, “Researchers Overdosing COVID-19 Patients on Hydroxychloroquine,” States Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS), Tucson, Arizona, 17 June 2020 (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/researchers-overdosing-covid-19-patients-on-hydroxychloroquine-states-association-of-american-physicians–surgeons-aaps-301078986.html).

[xxxvii] Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, “Preliminary Injunction Sought to Release Hydroxychloroquine to the Public, in the Lawsuit by the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS),” Tucson, Arizona, 22 June 2020 (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/preliminary-injunction-sought-to-release-hydroxychloroquine-to-the-public-in-the-lawsuit-by-the-association-of-american-physicians–surgeons-aaps-301081160.html).

Kosovo Albanians via their allies in Tirana are once again attempting to antagonize Serbia, this time through the Self-Determination Movements initiative. The Movement is trying to push through the Albanian Parliament a declaration condemning the so-called “Serbian genocide in Kosovo.” The initiative, launched by the representative of the Self-Determination Movement in Albania, Elvis Hoxha, is a response to the trials in The Hague against the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) terrorist leaders. It is an attempt to distract attention from Albania’s terroristic role in the 1999 Kosovo War and put it back onto Serbia.

Despite attempts by the Self-Determination Movement to distract indictments against the top KLA leaders, there were nervous reactions in the de facto Kosovo capital of Pristina and in the Albanian capital of Tirana after Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić made a statement comparing the situation in Kosovo to that of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), i.e. an indigenous population being replaced and ruled over by a later migratory and invading force.

Kosovo Albanians are trying through Tirana what they cannot do alone. It is for this reason that the Self-Determination Movement launched this initiative in the Parliament of Albania and not in the Parliament of Kosovo. This would suggest that the Movement is aware that the self-proclaimed independent state of Kosovo does not have international legal subjectivity, which is why they are trying to see the international aspect of this initiative done through Albania. It is in the belief that because Albania is a NATO member it is afforded extra international privileges that Serbia does not enjoy.

Despite the initiative having no factual basis, if it is accepted and a resolution is passed in the Albanian parliament, it is possible that it will be presented before international forums such as the Council of Europe and the United Nations. If the declaration on genocide were adopted in the Albanian parliament, and later possibly in the European one, the image of the Specialized Court in The Hague would be significantly changed and could lead to accused KLA leaders, such as former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi, being found innocent.

The indictment against the KLA leadership also mentions three military training camps close to Kukës in northern Albania near the border with Kosovo. It is generally known that the first KLA brigades entered the Serbian province from northern Albania where training centers were located. In addition, active officers of the Albanian military commanded KLA forces. We also cannot forget that Kosovo’s former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj is alleged to have been a mastermind behind the kidnapping of Kosovo Serbs who were taken to the infamous “Yellow House” in Albania where their organs were harvested.

The entire Serbian military, political and police leadership were tried and convicted before the Hague Tribunal because of the war in Kosovo. However, now that KLA figures will be tried for their terrorist and human rights breaking activities, the Albanians are attempting to distract The Hague with cheap tricks. Albanian politicians will try to turn the story around by claiming that Serbia is solely responsible for the crimes in Kosovo and not the KLA leadership and certain political structures in Albania.

Considering that the borders between Serbia and Albania have been open since November 10 within the framework of the “Little Schengen,” and that relations between Belgrade and Tirana have never been better, the adoption of such a declaration would lead to a cooling of relations between the two countries. However, despite these attempts by members in the Albanian Parliament, it is unlikely that such a resolution on genocide will be adopted.

Taking into account the insistence of Brussels and Washington that it is necessary for Belgrade and Tirana to raise their level of mutual cooperation, and considering that both countries are EU member candidates, it is doubtful the resolution will be passed in the Albanian Parliament. Given that, except for the former Minister of Defense and the current president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Albanian Parliament, Mimi Kodheli, none of the key political players in Albania support the initiative for now.

As far as Serbian-Albanian relations are concerned, Tirana has already acted as a dosed patron of the Kosovo Albanians. This is not such a significant leap from the usual strategy of Tirana. What can be observed is that Albania’s tactics are hot and cold, especially if we remember the constant inappropriate statements made by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and other Albanian officials, which replaced the so-called conciliatory rhetoric towards Serbia at international conferences and forums.

According to Mimi Kordelja, a similar initiative existed in 1998. However, it failed due to, as she said, the poor coordination of Kosovo and Albanian politics. Therefore, it appears that Albania is far more emboldened today due to its accession into NATO and its advanced pathway into the European Union.

Serbia for the foreseeable future, despite pressure from liberal forces within the country, is neither an EU or NATO member, or in an advance position in the accession processes. Because of this, Albania has the option to utilize its NATO membership and more advanced pathway towards EU membership to continue pressuring Serbia over the Kosovo issue. This is despite the hopes of Brussels and Washington for the two countries to cooperate under their own liberal vision. Despite the Self-Determination Movements initiative to distract The Hague from KLA crimes, which includes ethnic cleansing, drug and human trafficking, organ harvesting and destruction of historical religious sites, it is likely that it will not amount to anything as it is a cheap attempt to make a mockery of the international court.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Freedom of Information requests submitted by Cherwell have revealed that Oxford University accepted at least £726,706 from the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), the designer and producer of the UK’s nuclear warheads, during the years 2017-19 alone.

The majority of this money was awarded to the Oxford Centre for High Energy Density Science (OxCHEDS), which advertises AWE as one of its “national partners” on its website.

AWE’s funding is mostly used by OxCHEDS to fund individual research projects and studentships, with a substantial portion (£82,863 in 2019) funding the department’s William Penney Fellowship, named after the head of the British delegation for the Manhattan Project and ‘father of the British atomic bomb’. According to the AWE website, William Penney Fellows “act as ambassadors for AWE in the scientific and technical communities in which they operate”.

This fellowship is currently shared by two professors, Justin Wark and Peter Norreys, both of whom collaborate closely with US state laboratories that develop nuclear weapons, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

AWE donations have also funded projects at the University’s Departments of Chemistry, Engineering, and Physics, a number of which are directly linked to the design of nuclear weapons. One AWE-funded paper, published in 2019, investigated fusion yield production, a vital way of testing the destructive power of a warhead prior to manufacturing, whilst another project researched methods used by nuclear weapons designers for simulating the interior of a detonating warhead.

This research also has civilian applications, and does not in itself point towards the development of nuclear weapons. A spokesperson from Oxford University stated: “Oxford University research is academically driven, with the ultimate aim of enhancing openly available scholarship and knowledge. All research projects with defence sector funding advance general scientific understanding, with a wide range of subsequent civilian applications, as well as potential application by the sector.”

However, AWE is not a civilian organisation. As Andrew Smith of Campaign Against the Arms Trade told Cherwell, “the AWE exists to promote the deadliest weaponry possible. It is not funding these projects because it cares about education, but because it wants to benefit from the research and association that goes with it”. Mr. Smith concluded: “Oxford University should be leading by example, not providing research and cheap labour for the arms industry”.

Responding to Cherwell’s findings, Dr Stuart Parkinson, Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, described Oxford University’s ties with AWE as “shocking” and called for the work to be “terminated immediately”. He said that the findings “point very clearly to Oxford University researchers being involved in the development of weapons of mass destruction”.

In the face of this criticism, the University spokesperson claimed: “All research funders must first pass ethical scrutiny and be approved by the University’s Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding. This is a robust, independent system, which takes legal, ethical and reputational issues into consideration.”

However, there are growing concerns over the ethics and efficacy of this process, which has seen controversial donations from the Sackler family, Wafic Saïd, and Stephen Schwarzman given the green light despite internal and public protests. The committee’s deliberations are frequently subject to Non-Disclosure Agreements, meaning that they are not accountable to members of the University and to the wider public. Moreover, Freedom of Information requests submitted earlier this year revealed that the committee accepts over 95% of the funding it considers, with congregation members describing the committee as a “smokescreen” and a “fig leaf”.

In recent years, the University has faced increased opposition from student groups such as the Oxford Climate Justice Campaign and Oxford Against Schwarzman over the companies Oxford chooses to affiliate itself with through investments and donations. From this term onwards, a newly formed student group, Disarm Oxford, will be campaigning against the University’s numerous ties with the arms industry. Oxford Amnesty International is working with Disarm Oxford on the global Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, and to strive for the disarmament of the University more broadly.

Dr Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and Chair of the Trustees of the Council for the Defence of British Universities, told Cherwell: “The recent publicity around university divestment from fossil fuels has highlighted the need for university bodies to be transparent about the ethical standards they apply to their funding, and it is encouraging to see this crucial question being raised also in the context of armaments-related funds and research.”

The combination of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic has created a particularly difficult time for university research finances. In a marketised higher education system, seeking and welcoming money from industry partnerships seems like an inevitability. However, while some industries rely on academic research to save lives, others are predicated on taking them. With the UK confirmed this year as the world’s second biggest exporter of arms, the University’s significant ties to the development of weaponry has an alarming global significance which is now beginning to be called into question.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden has not been officially declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, but that has not stopped him from forming a coronavirus task force. The task force is composed of supporters of increased government control.

One idea Biden and his task force are considering is a four to six weeks nationwide lockdown. However, supporting a nationwide lockdown would violate Biden’s campaign pledge to “listen to the science.” The evidence regarding lockdowns is so overwhelming that even the World Health Organization (WHO) has been forced to admit the truth: lockdowns do more harm than good.

Lockdowns result in more instances of depression, suicide, domestic violence, and alcohol and drug abuse. Lockdowns also cause people to not go to hospitals or doctors’ offices, leading to people dying because they failed to obtain medical assistance in a timely manner.

Biden also is working with governors, mayors, and other state and local officials to create a de facto national mask mandate. Biden has also declared he will mandate mask wearing in all federal buildings and for people traveling interstate. A mask mandate for interstate travel could mean you will be required to wear a mask on airplanes, trains, and even when driving in your own car if you cross state lines.

Yet again, Biden is ignoring the science. In this case the science has demonstrated that most masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of a virus. Medical science also shows that wearing a mask for extended periods of time can cause health problems. For example, mask wearing interferes with proper breathing. Long-term mask wearing may also cause serious dental problems. Ironically, major victims of mask mandates include low-wage workers Biden and his fellow progressives claim to care so much about. Many of these workers are required to wear masks on the job.

Biden has also proposed raising an army of “culturally competent” contact tracers. According to the University of California, San Francisco, which is helping train that California’s contact tracers, contract tracers “….ask questions related to topics that can be sensitive, including health, work, living arrangements and food resources” in order to identify someone who should be quarantined. These contract tracers could also be able to enforce masks or other mandates — including a potential vaccine mandate — by helping ensure that those who refuse to comply are indefinitely quarantined.

Biden is not the only politician pushing authoritarian “solutions” to coronavirus. The government of Washington, DC is considering authorizing vaccinating of children without parental consent. This ignores the science that some people will have a negative reaction even to a generally safe vaccine, so individuals should make their own decision in consultation with their physician. This is especially important these days, as we are dealing with a vaccine that is being rushed into production for political reasons and that even the manufactures admit will have serious side effects.

Lockdowns, masks, and other authoritarian measures do little or nothing to promote health. Instead, they erode freedom and create their own health problems. Those who know the truth must make Joe Biden and other authoritarians listen to the true science. While those more at risk — such as the elderly and people with certain health problems — could be encouraged to take extra precautions, all Americans should be given back the liberty to make their own healthcare decisions.

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A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people’s personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.

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The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a “level” app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.

Through public records, interviews with developers, and technical analysis, Motherboard uncovered two separate, parallel data streams that the U.S. military uses, or has used, to obtain location data. One relies on a company called Babel Street, which creates a product called Locate X. U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), a branch of the military tasked with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, bought access to Locate X to assist on overseas special forces operations. The other stream is through a company called X-Mode, which obtains location data directly from apps, then sells that data to contractors, and by extension, the military.

The news highlights the opaque location data industry and the fact that the U.S. military, which has infamously used other location data to target drone strikes, is purchasing access to sensitive data. Many of the users of apps involved in the data supply chain are Muslim, which is notable considering that the United States has waged a decades-long war on predominantly Muslim terror groups in the Middle East, and has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians during its military operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Motherboard does not know of any specific operations in which this type of app-based location data has been used by the U.S. military.

The apps sending data to X-Mode include Muslim Pro, an app that reminds users when to pray and what direction Mecca is in relation to the user’s current location. The app has been downloaded over 50 million times on Android, according to the Google Play Store, and over 98 million in total across other platforms including iOS, according to Muslim Pro’s website.

“The Most Popular Muslim App!,” Muslim Pro’s website reads. The app also includes passages and audio readings from the Quran. Another app that sent data to X-Mode was Muslim Mingle, a dating app that has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Do you work at Babel Street, X-Mode, Venntel, or one of the apps mentioned in this piece? Did you used to, or know anything else about the location data industry? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email [email protected].

Some app developers Motherboard spoke to were not aware who their users’ location data ends up with, and even if a user examines an app’s privacy policy, they may not ultimately realize how many different industries, companies, or government agencies are buying some of their most sensitive data. U.S. law enforcement purchase of such information has raised questions about authorities buying their way to location data that may ordinarily require a warrant to access. But the USSOCOM contract and additional reporting is the first evidence that U.S. location data purchases have extended from law enforcement to military agencies.

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Featured image is by Cathryn Virginia via Vice

In what critics are calling a parting gift to the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration on Tuesday will ask oil and gas companies to choose which areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—which is the sacred homeland of the Gwich’in Indigenous people—they would like to drill. 

The Washington Post reports the administration’s call for nominations is a key part of a rush to lock in drilling rights before President Donald Trump leaves office on January 20. The president has made drilling on public lands and waterways a key component of what he calls his “America First” energy agenda, while President-elect Joe Biden has said he opposes such action.

The Republican-controlled Congress approved drilling in the massive, pristine ANWR in 2017. The reserve is home to the Gwich’in people, who call it “Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit,” or, “the sacred place where life begins.” ANWR boasts some 270 species, including all of the world’s remaining South Beaufort Sea polar bears, 250 musk oxen, Arctic foxes, and hundreds of thousands of snow geese and other birds which fly there from all 50 states and around the world.

The Gwich’in rely on the region’s rich biodiversity, especially its 200,000-strong porcupine caribou herd, for their survival. “What impacts the caribou, impacts the Gwich’in,” Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, told Yes!.

Quannah Chasinghorse is continuing the legacy of Gwich’in women working to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.https://t.co/lJdWHtBD7P

— YES! Magazine (@yesmagazine) November 16, 2020

In addition to opening ANWR to oil and gas drilling, the Trump administration is also redefining what constitutes a “critical habitat” for endangered species, as well as when corporations are deemed liable for killing migrating birds.

While the Iñupiat—another Alaska Native people who call ANWR their home—cautiously welcome the possibility of drilling and the economic benefits they believe it will bring, the Gwichin’in and their allies, which include environmental groups and progressive lawmakers, have vowed to fight any attempts to defile the unspoiled land.

🚨 ARCTIC REFUGE NEWS ALERT 🚨
The Trump administration has announced that the sacred and pristine Arctic Refuge is open for a lease sale. RT to voice your opposition! #ProtectTheArctic #StandWithTheGwichin pic.twitter.com/f91h7nJKho

— Sierra Club (@SierraClub) November 16, 2020

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) strongly opposes drilling, telling the Post that “this administration is ending as it began, with a desperate push for oil drilling regardless of the human or environmental costs.”

Rep. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) tweeted that drilling in the refuge “would threaten the climate, wildlife, and Indigenous rights.”

“Despite a last-second push to complete oil leases, it is no wonder major banks are pledging not to finance these destructive drilling projects,” he added.

Indeed, after decades of grassroots pressure from environmentalists and Indigenous activists and in the face of an ever-worsening climate crisis, numerous major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, have announced they will not finance ANWR drilling projects.

We cannot allow Trump to put the fossil fuel industry's short-term profits ahead of the climate and rights of indigenous peoples.

We must stand with the Gwich'in Nation, stop this drilling in the Arctic, and aggressively transition away from fossil fuels. pic.twitter.com/ka69Bq9jGq

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 17, 2020

The Gwich’in and several environmental groups including the National Audobon Society, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and Natural Resources Defense Council (NDRC), have sued the administration in a bid to stop drilling plans from proceeding. Erik Grafe, deputy managing attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm representing the plaintiffs, condemned what he called a “midnight effort to sell off irreplaceable lands in the refuge before a new day dawns.”

“We are already in court challenging the administration’s decision to open the whole coastal plain to leasing, and we’ll hold the line against this rushed attempt to implement the unlawful program,” Grafe said in a statement. “As the majority of Americans know, the Arctic Refuge is no place to drill.”

Gwich’in Nation launches lawsuit in effort to stop oil drilling in #Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.@OurArcticRefuge@bernademientief#StandWithTheGwichin #ProtecttheArctichttps://t.co/D0BMq2JlN6

— Land is Life (@landislife) October 24, 2020

Ellen Montgomery, public lands campaign director for Environment America, issued a statement asserting that “there is no way to do massive, industrial-level oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Refuge without damaging vital habitat.”

“Building roads and bringing in heavy equipment disfigures the landscape before the drilling even begins,” she said. “Once ruined, the refuge cannot be restored.” Montgomery called on fossil fuel companies to “read the tea leaves and take a pass” on ANWR drilling.

However, it is the Gwich’in who are standing the firmest in the face of the administration’s attack on their sacred land.

“Any company thinking about participating in this corrupt process should know that they will have to answer to the Gwich’in people and the millions of Americans who stand with us,” Demientieff told the Post. “We have been protecting this place forever.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image: Caribou graze on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. (Photo: USFWS/Flickr cc)

Results of the Nagorno-Karabakh war continue shaping the balance of power of the South Caucasus. The ceasefire regime established as a result of the Russian diplomatic intervention and the deployment of the Russian peacekeeping force in the region nears the end of its first week.

As the outcome of the war, Azerbaijan achieved an important victory over Armenian forces and seized the symbolic Armenian stronghold of Shusha. Baku and Yerevan also reached an agreement that is set to allow Azerbaijan to return districts lost during the first Karabakh war excluding the Lachin corridor as well as finally establish a transport link between Azerbaijan’s mainland and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, a landlocked Azerbaijani exclave bordering Armenia, Turkey and Iran. The latest development is in fact even more important for Azerbaijani national interests than any propaganda achievements in the war with the Armenians. This will not only allow to finally establish a ground link between the main territory Azerbaijan and the country’s autonomous region, but also strengthen economic and cultural cooperation with Turkey, a traditional Azerbaijani ally. Ankara, together with Israeli weapon suppliers, played an important role in the Azerbaijani victory through providing its forces with weapons, ammunition, intelligence and military advisers and specialists that helped to plan and turn into reality the Karabakh advance.

For years, Turkey has been employing the “two states, one nation” concept in its relations with Azerbaijan as a part of the wider claim to be the formal, military and spiritual leader of the so-called Turkic world and the Muslims in the Greater Middle East and Central Asia in general. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who sees himself as the Sultan of the New Neo-Ottoman Empire, does not hide Turkish plans to annex territories of northern Syria and northern Iraq, where Ankara already has a permanent military presence. Azerbaijan is seen by Erdogan and his circle as a logical and important part of this Greater Turkey project with a particular autonomy. Therefore, the Turkish military presence in Azerbaijan and the further expansion of the economic, political and cultural links between the countries is a logical step in this plan. During the past years, Ankara has repeatedly announced the plans to build a new railway road to Nakhchivan. Now, the preparations for the implementation of this project will likely reach their finishing straight.

At the same time, there are some factors often ignored by pro-Turkish analysts boasting about the great Neo-Ottoman victory in Karabakh. First of all, the control over the so desired by Turkey ground link with Azerbaijan will be in the hands of the Russians under the Moscow-brokered deal between Baku and Yerevan. The control over the transport link between Nakhchivan and the Azerbaijani mainland will be exercised by the Border Service of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). At the same time, the Russian peacekeeping force will also control the corridor between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, and a large part of the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the largest regional city Stepanakert.

Russian forces supported by combat helicopters, electronic warfare systems, BTR-80A armoured personnel carriers and various armoured vehicles of other types already established 25 observation points (18 permanent and 7 temporary) in the region. One of the posts is in fact located at the gates of Shusha. Additionally to the 1960-strong contingent in Karabakh, the Russian military also created a gathering center, in other words a temporary military base, in the Armenian city of Goris, near the border. Battle tanks and multiple rocket launching systems spotted in the area indicate that the operation there involves additional means and forces. Moscow is also creating a special humanitarian center for Karabakh. The center will be controlled by Russia and overseen by the FSB thus cutting off the possibility of looting of humanitarian aid for the region.

Taking into account the deep crisis of the current pro-Western Armenian government, led by Nikol Pashinyan who is still hiding in some basement in Yerevan, the control over Nagorno-Karabakh territories, which should not been returned to Azerbaijan as the part of the November 10 deal, has been in fact transferred to Russia.

Now, Russia has officially established a military presence on the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan for the next 5 years. This term also can be prolonged under the existing deal. This unprecedented development for the modern South Caucasus caused little happiness in Ankara causing the Turkish attempt to promote the idea of the deployment of some ‘Turkish peacekeepers’ to the combat zone. However, all what it achieved was the draft plan for the creation of a joint Russian-Turkish ceasefire monitoring center on the territory of Azerbaijan. According to the Russian foreign minister, the center will be located in the part of the territory that is not close to Karabakh and no field missions are planned. The posture of Azerbaijan, which did not support the Turkish field deployment in Karabakh, in this unfortunate situation for Ankara became an unpleasant surprise for Turkish commentators.

Furthermore, Baku demonstrated an unexpected softness by shifting the schedule of the Armenian withdrawal from the contested region. Under the initial deal, the Kalbajar district was set to be transferred to Azerbaijan by November 15, a top aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced that the deadline was extended till November 25. These steps show the readiness of the Azerbaijani side for the constructive actions in the framework of the existing Yerevan-Moscow-Baku format. Summing up, it seems that Mr. Aliyev is not going to pay back by turning Azerbaijan into the province of Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman Empire. In this case, the closer cooperation with Russia, which is also an important economic and security partner of Azerbaijan, is an apparent solution.

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Drafted in 2015, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) was signed in 2016, involving a dozen nations, including the US before Trump pulled in 2017.

It’s now the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) among seven Asian nations — excluding China and the US — plus Canada, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.

It’s separate from the newly consummated Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

Involving 10 ASEAN nations along with Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, it was signed on November 15 in a virtual ceremony, hosted in Hanoi by Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

The US is not part of the world’s largest ever free trade agreement RCEP or CPTPP.

Nations involved in the former account for nearly a third of world trade, GDP and population.

As Asia’s largest economy, on a path toward surpassing the US as world’s No. One, China is a winner in what was agreed on.

So are other RCEP participating nations, the US a loser for opting out.

It’s rare for the US to be on the sidelines when major international agreements are consummated.

Following Sunday’s virtual signing ceremony, it awaits ratification by nations involved to become effective, a process likely to take months or longer.

Countries involved are among the world’s fastest growing ones, this deal to advance their growth further.

The deal reduces tariffs, prohibits others, unifies rules of origin among participating nations, strengthens supply chains, and establishes e-commerce rules.

Noninvolvement by India in RCEP disadvantages its trade with bloc nations.

The same is true for the US, a regional loser in stark contrast to China’s gain.

Washington’s anti-China agenda under Obama/Biden, hardened by Trump, failed to achieve its objectives.

CNBC noted that “RCEP may cement China’s position more firmly as an economic partner with Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea, putting the world’s second-biggest economy in a better position to shape the region’s trade rules.”

If Biden/Harris succeed Trump in January, what’s most likely but not certain, it’s unclear if the new US regime will pursue membership in what its predecessor rejected.

A joint statement by participating nations said RCEP “is an unprecedented mega regional trading arrangement that comprises a diverse mix of developed, developing and least developed economies of the region.”

China’s Premier Li Keqiang  called RCEP “not only a landmark achievement of East Asian regional cooperation, but also a victory of multilateralism and free trade.”

China’s official People’s Daily broadsheet said the agreement “will play an important role in building the region’s resilience through inclusive and sustainable post-pandemic economic recovery.”

Sunday’s signing ceremony came after 30 rounds of negotiations, begun in November 2012.

China’s Global Times called RCEP’s signing a “framework that works to benefit all Asian economies…a landmark step toward achieving closer economic integration in East and Southeast Asia.”

Noninvolvement by the US leaves it “detach(ed) from the process of Asia’s economic integration.”

Will Dems call RCEP a new China threat? Will Republicans join them to call for US involvement in the CPTPP and/or RCEP?

Terms of both deals were agreed on by member states.

If the US seeks involvement in either or both agreements, it won’t be able to demand changes, favorable to its own interests.

Unilateralism by Trump regime hardliners aimed to contain China on the world stage, wanting its development curtailed, a failed agenda shorter and longer-term.

Will Biden/Harris go a different way or continue waging war on China by other means — the latter approach most likely.

Neither country will hold back the other’s development.

China pursues a longterm winning strategy by seeking cooperative relations with other nations.

It’s in stark contrast to US-sought global dominance by whatever it takes to achieve its aims, including wars by hot and other means.

ASEAN countries initiated RCEP, China and other nations invited to participate, India as well.

The Modi government withdrew from talks in November 2019, a strategic error.

What benefits participating nations through RCEP and CPTPP mutual cooperation excludes the US.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is by Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

Hollywood knows how to put the scare in people. Songbird, a new film produced by Michael Bay and directed by Adam Mason exploits the Covid-19 pandemic which complements the mainstream-media’s (MSM) fear campaign among its audience. Last month, The Guardian reported that the film “portrays a love story between Nico (Riverdale’s KJ Apa) and Sara (Sofia Carson) during America’s 214th week of lockdown in 2024, as a late-stage version of “Covid-23” mutates to infect people’s brains.” The report describes the most disturbing aspects of the film:

The film appears to extract the worst of the past six months, strip it of sensitivity and then paint it on doubly thick in big-budget, Hollywoodized, exaggerated style. In the trailer a Los Angeles billboard ticks up to 8.4m deaths, infected Americans are forced into quarantine camps, and sanitation “police” raid homes for suspected patients. 

This shoehorning of a real and ongoing tragedy which has killed 229,000 Americans and counting has not gone down well with some still in the grips of the pandemic, which is to say: the movie going American public outside of Hollywood

Although it’s just another exaggerated Hollywood-style film that goes beyond today’s reality, it is a film that will sell fear to its audience.

Fear is a weapon used against humanity.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said that certain words cause fear, but he decided to use that word, “Pandemic”. USA Today reported back in March that “Tedros said WHO was aware the word could “cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over,” if incorrectly used.” Words and inflated numbers used by politicians and “health experts” paid by Big Pharma know how to use the pandemic to their advantage in order to gain power and control over the people, especially in modern Western societies.

Hollywood is in partnership with the MSM, therefore both are in the service of the establishment.  If Biden is declared the winner on January, it will mean more lockdowns and facemask mandates because they want total control of the population to enforce its dangerous vaccines.  The MSM and Hollywood use propaganda and fear that is crippling todays society, and because of that, they are complicit in crimes against humanity.

Here is the trailer to Songbird:

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

Featured image is from SCN

Russia’s draft deal to open up a Red Sea naval base in Sudan amounts to a strategic recalibration of its careful “balancing” act between the GCC and Turkey after moving more closely to the latter following the end of the Nagorno-Karabakh War, which in turn shows how important Moscow regards its “Ummah Pivot” as being by seeking to maintain equally excellent relations with all majority-Muslim countries without any of its bilateral relations being misperceived as directed against any third country in this civilizational sphere.

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When Gutenberg introduced the printing press in 1440, the world had no idea that things were about to drastically change. Prior to the release and production of the printing press, books were incredibly expensive, rare, mostly written in Latin, and reserved for royalty and clergy.

The spread of information was kept under lock and key.

However, in just a few decades after its spread throughout the world, Gutenberg’s press had rolled out hundreds of millions of books. The operation of a printing press became synonymous with the enterprise of printing and lent its name to a new branch of media, the press.

The world was becoming informed.

Hailed as one of the most important inventions in human history, the printing press helped societies break free from the ignorance and bondage imposed upon them by the keepers of information. Over the next 400 years, those with access to information about peace and freedom began to rise up against their oppressors. Instead of monarchies and dictatorships, republics and democracies were born.

The world was well on its way to becoming a Land of the Free. Unfortunately, however, with information — comes propaganda and censorship.

Not being able to control the dissemination of information, tyrants decided to control the actual information instead. Certain books were burned, banned, and shunned. Only establishment-supporting nationalistic books were promoted which led to entire societies believing their patriotic stories about how their countries ‘played the key role in the development of the modern world’ — up to and including societies like Nazi Germany who were convinced that murdering millions of Jews was the right thing to do.

For decades, the world was tricked by slick establishment propagandists, who wrote their version of heroic history. Tyrants were painted as saviors; mass murderers hailed as great discoverers. The world was slipping back into a dark age of control and manipulation.

Luckily, there were a few voices who resisted mass censorship, the book banners and burners, and the last century has seen incredible growth and freedom of speech. But, like all empires inevitably do, America is increasingly slipping into despotism and, once again, the alleged “arbiters of truth” are attempting to silence information with which they disagree.

One example of this new “book burning” is taking place in California. Schools in Burbank, California have banned multiple books after a handful of parents expressed concern over them. To be clear, these books do not advocate racism, violence, hatred, or anything of the sort. These books have won multiple awards and have achieved literary godliness.

Burbank schools are now being forced to teach other titles because a small group (exactly 4) of offended parents have succeeded in depriving thousands of other children from reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

That’s right, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry — that was written by a black woman about racism in America during the Jim Crow era — was banned because it is supposedly racist. Someone should probably ask Newbery Award-winning author, Mildred DeLois Taylor, how she feels about her book, written about her own life experiences, getting banned for being racist.

To be fair, the parents said their children experienced racism in schools which is unacceptable — but also exceedingly improbable that this racism was derived from a child reading a novel.

As Newsweek reports, Carmenita Helligar said her daughter, Destiny, was approached by a white student in math class using a racial taunt including the N-word, which he’d learned from reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry while both attended the David Starr Jordan Middle School.

“My family used to own your family and now I want a dollar from each of you for the week,” another boy is said to have told Destiny.

“My daughter was literally traumatized,” Helligar said. “These books are problematic … you feel helpless because you can’t even protect your child from the hurt that she’s going through.”

While no one wants their child to experience the horrific scenario described above, the idea of a classic book — that is actually anti-racist — turning a child into a racist is absolutely absurd. If someone is so hateful that they are willing to say this to a child in middle school, blaming a book is asinine. This kid was either brought up as a racist or, he made a tone deaf, disgusting attempt at teasing.

Either way, it doesn’t matter what actually transpired as the results are the same — books are banned in the land of the free. Sadly, it is indeed likely that those calling for banning these books, have never even read them. If they did actually read them, they would understand that they are not at all racist and, in fact, inspire kids to do the right thing, well, because it’s the right thing.

Luckily, the banning of these books did not go unnoticed and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) sent a letter to BUSD urging the district to allow teaching of the books while the challenges are under review.

“[W]e believe that the books… have a great pedagogical value and should be retained in the curriculum,” read the letter from the NCAC.

Some of the children are speaking out against the banned books as well. Sungjoo Yoon, 15, a sophomore at Burbank High School, also launched an online petition on Change.org to stop what he called a “ban on antiracist books.”

“In a time where racism has become more transparent than ever, we need to continue to educate students as to the roots of it; to create anti-racist students,” Yoon wrote. “These literatures, of which have been declared ‘Books that Shaped America’ by the Library of Congress, won Newbury Medals, and are some of the most influential pieces, cannot disappear.”

PEN America (an acronym for Poets, Essayists, Novelists) also released a petition calling to reinstate the banned books.

“Each of the books in question deal with difficult subject matter from our country’s complicated and painful history, including systemic racism,” an excerpt from the petition reads. “Blocking engagement with these important books is also avoiding the important role that schools can and should play in providing context for why these books inspire and challenge us still today.”

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Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.

Featured image is from The Free Thought Project

Patrick Bet-David has a virtual sit down with consumer protection trial lawyer Reiner Fuellmich to talk about the Coronavirus and his work on the German Corona investigation committee.

Dr Reiner Fuellmich is one of four members of the German Corona Investigative Committee, which since July 10, 2020, has been listening to large number of international scientists’ and experts’ testimonies, to find answers to questions about the pandemic, being asked by people worldwide.

Patrick Bet-David is CEO, author and Founder of Valuetainment Media. Patrick has interviewed athletes, notorious individuals, politicians, authors and entrepreneurs from all walks of life.

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This is the greatest public health fiasco in the history of the world, and the media has distorted it so badly, that much of the general public is celebrating villains and hissing at heroes. And, even — perversely enough — celebrating the destruction of their own lives and their children’s lives.

According to Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “Cult seems to describe what we are dealing with. Outside the cult are sub-human and selfish, to be shamed and ridiculed.

They have slogans “Listen to the science”.

Maybe that slogan is meant to be funny because these are the least scientific people I have ever encountered in my life.”

Watch full presentation below.

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The current situation in India’s  illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJ&K) is not without current, tragic precedent. Bringing non-native Kashmiris into the territory, and since April, two million non-natives have been approved to do so, with the goal of eliminating Kashmiri culture and the nation itself follows the Israeli model in Palestine. This is not lost on Indian government officials. On November 16 of last year, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s consul-general to New York City, was attending a private event in New York. He told Kashmiri Hindus and Indian nationals that India will build settlements modelled after Israel to bring the Hindu population to Kashmir. He did not mince words; said he: “you will be able to go back … and you will be able to find security, because we already have a model in the world. I don’t know why we don’t follow it. It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.” We can refer to Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which reads, in part, “Everyone has the right to a nationality”.  India’s actions violate that basic right.

By looking at what the Israeli model, that Chakravorty is so anxious to implement in Kashmir, has meant for the Palestinians and for peace in the Middle East, we can draw some conclusions on what the result may mean for Kashmir and peace there and in neighboring countries.

1. We can expect the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris; this slaughter has been ongoing for decades and will only continue. There will also be the displacement of millions more with no place to go except refugee camps in their own or neighboring countries. Typically, such camps are grossly overcrowded; have limited sanitary facilities; provide few, if any, educational opportunities for children and youth, and are breeding grounds for despair.
   • Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care, etc.”
   • Article 26 states that “Everyone has a right to education.”
2. We can expect ongoing clashes between the marginalized Kashmiris and the Indian settler-colonists, resulting in the deaths of many innocent Kashmiri men, women and children and long imprisonment for others who, like the Palestinians, are only exercising their internationally-guaranteed right to resist the occupation. Resistance to occupation is not terrorism, as both India and Israel would have us all believe.
   • United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of November 29, 1978 reads, in part, as follows: “Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle.”
3. We will see the slow obliteration of Kashmiri culture. As more non-Kashmiris settle in Kashmir, driving out the Kashmiris, the settlers, again in the same style as the Israelis in Palestine, will destroy mosques, museums, cemeteries and other landmarks vital to Kashmiris and their culture. Let’s not forget that Israel bulldozed the ancient cemetery, Ma’man Allah in Palestine to create a ‘museum of tolerance’ on the site. The hypocrisy is astounding.
   • Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, in part, that ‘Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community….”

These actions are, of course, components of genocide.

4. Another result will be heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, both nuclear states. We know that even a so-called ‘limited’ nuclear war would have catastrophic impacts on the entire planet. Even a conventional war between those nations would draw in other countries, leading to disastrous results in loss of human life, ecological damage and global economic disruption.

We may see some limited action in the United Nations, since what India is doing in Kashmir violates various Security Council resolutions and international laws. But, again drawing conclusions from the Palestine-Israel situation, the people of Kashmir cannot rely on the U.N. to bring them peace and justice. Kashmiris have known this as long as the Palestinians have.

But the situation is certainly not without hope, because people around the world can and must help. There are several things we can all do. Not everyone can do all of these, perhaps, but everyone can certainly do some of them.

1. Become educated. Webinars such as this are an excellent way to gain knowledge, which will enable each of us to better articulate the specifics of the suffering of the Kashmiri people, and how it is India that is fully culpable for that suffering. Join groups and get on mailing lists.
2. Write to news organizations. Doing a search on ‘contact CNN’ or ‘contact MSNBC’ or any other news agency will bring you to a site explaining how to contact that agency. Generally, there is a form on the site that you will be asked to complete. Ask specific questions such as this: “Social media sites have been shut down or greatly limited in Kashmir by India for over a year. Why has your outlet not covered this?” Or: “The Indian government is forbidding foreign news correspondents from entering Kashmir, and is harassing those already in the country. Why have I not seen this information on your news programs?”
3. Contact your member of Parliament; write and visit, and do it more than once. Hold them accountable for allowing India’s crimes against humanity.
4. Write to newspapers. Letters to the editors of different publications serve two purposes: they inform the editors that their readers are concerned about and interested in this issue, and, when letters are published, they inform other readers.
5. Fight Islamophobia. It seems that since it is a mainly Muslim country that is being victimized, the level of outrage is very low. We must be cognizant of the fact that attitudes in the U.S. influence those in Canada and the rest of the world. As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump said this: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” Trump’s one-time national security advisor, Michael Flynn, said that “Fear of Muslims is rational”. This attitude is nothing new. In 2010, Sarah Palin, who ran for vice-president in 2008, tweeted this when a mosque was proposed in downtown New York City: “Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing.” This ridiculous statement, of course, unjustly associates Islam with the September 11, 2001 attacks.

We fight Islamophobia by countering every anti-Muslim comment we hear. If it’s in a tweet, we respond that way. If on a news program, we contact that program. If in a newspaper, we write a letter to the editor, refuting what was said. If it’s a comment made by an acquaintance, we calmly counter whatever statement has been made. I include ‘calmly’, because, although I am not Muslim, Islamophobic comments anger me, so I need to remind myself to respond calmly and politely.

I would like to close with one of my favorite quotations, this one by the anthropologist Margaret Mead; it is one you are probably familiar with. She said this:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, organized citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

We have formidable foes in our quest to liberate the people of Kashmir from Indian oppression, and to assist them in achieving their basic right to self-determination. Our task is not an easy one, but it is a moral imperative.

 

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A crucial advantage that China enjoys over its Western rivals, principally the United States, is the country’s rebuffing of neoliberalism. Under its present leadership, Beijing’s influence over corporations and private power has increased substantially.

By contrast to America, almost all of China’s 25 largest corporations are state-owned. The Chinese president Xi Jinping, in power since March 2013, has indeed tightened his administration’s control over big business. He is correct to do so, and it is in fact of high importance that a government is free to move and intervene freely when required, unshackled from the chains of private power. In the West and elsewhere under the neoliberal assault, governments cannot even act without the consent of corporate executives which is a recipe for disaster.

China is led through a system in which power is centralised around the government, with Xi himself possessing huge influence, more so than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. The 67-year-old Xi is to remain in control “indefinitely”, presumably for as many years as he deems fit. Beijing’s centralisation of power is consistently portrayed in a negative light by Western media and politicians – but in reality the Xi administration, and the Chinese Communist Party, constitute much stronger institutions by comparison to the Western neoliberal model, that is increasingly in shambles.

This autumn, China’s government outlined bluntly that private businesses will “firmly listen to the party and follow the party”, while president Xi stresses that “the party exercises overall leadership” through “all endeavours across the country” (1). The political scientist Steve Tsang, a noted professor of Chinese studies, said that “Ever since the 19th congress [in October 2017], Xi has made it clear that the party would be at the centre of everything, private businesses included”.

For a number of years the world’s foremost neoliberal country, the US, has shown the hallmarks of being a failed state (2). America continues to be called a “democracy” by its top brass, which is plainly untrue. About 70% of the American population is effectively disenfranchised, having no influence on policy formation. A democracy scarcely equates to the masses being called upon to vote for an elite candidate every four years, thereafter slipping back into isolation. America consists of a plutocratic state, in which the key decisions are made by the richest business class who engineer government policy. America’s two largest political parties, slightly more so the Republicans than the Democrats, have sunk deep into corporate pockets since the early 1980s.

There is something dismal about government leaders who bend to the will of multinational corporations, and it is an indication of how far the political system has declined in the West over the past 40 years. The advent of modern day neoliberalism was championed firstly by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan said that “government is the problem, not the solution” while Thatcher spoke of “no society, just individuals”, as both revealed their disregard for democratic ideals.

With corporations continuing to dictate across much of the world, it has meant that governments have been unable to sufficiently address their rising carbon emission levels. Just over 97% of scientists agree that “humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming” (3). As of December 2019 only two countries on earth, Morocco and the Gambia, had committed fully to reducing their carbon emissions to meet agreed targets. Global emissions reached an all time high in 2019, but during the first six months of 2020 worldwide emissions dropped by nearly 9%, as outlined by reports – due to a temporary slow down in human activity related to Covid-19, not because of governments tackling climate change. (4)

It can be important to provide an insight into the advantage that a non-neoliberal state, like China, has over its opposite numbers, America and Britain. Regarding healthcare, US and British hospitals have been stripped of “non-essential items” in recent decades, as health services are run according to neoliberal policy, ensuring that profiteering rules over patient needs. The result? In 1975 there were 1.45 million hospital beds in America, by 2018 it had dropped to 924,000 beds in US hospitals.

In Britain there were 240,000 hospital beds there in 2000, and by 2019 it had dropped to less than 164,000 beds in UK hospitals. Moreover, in both American and British hospitals there is often a critical shortage of medical equipment, from ventilators and drip stands to oxygen cylinders (5) (6). All of this has occurred while executives receive large sums in bonuses, an indication of how rotten the system is with governments unwilling to intervene.

In China, through the state’s direct intervention, the number of hospital beds increased from almost 3 million in 2008, to 6.5 million by 2018, more than doubling in the space of a decade (7). Chinese hospitals are well stocked with medical equipment and supplies, ensuring they are prepared in advance for a health crisis.

One consequence of handing power over to corporations – which are unaccountable to public scrutiny – is the significant rightward shift on the political spectrum across the world’s richest countries, most notably in America. Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president from the 1950s who continued Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs including social security, would now be considered a somewhat radical figure. Mainstream Democrats today hold similar attitudes to mainstream Republicans from half a century ago. Barack Obama’s policies as president were those of a moderate Republican from two generations before.

Bernie Sanders’ political beliefs consist of a New Deal Democrat, placing him modestly to the left on the political spectrum. Many of Sanders’ policies would have been acceptable to Eisenhower, neither would they have surprised Richard Nixon, another Republican president. Yet Sanders is erroneously called “a socialist”, an almost extreme figure, by the political elite and media commentators. The establishment has been petrified of Sanders, mainly due to the popular support which he gathered around him. Sanders was unfairly denied the Democratic presidential nominee over four years ago, in favour of an unpopular candidate in Hillary Clinton. Sanders would most probably have defeated Donald Trump by a considerable margin in 2016.

The Republican Party of the 21st century, according to veteran US authors Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, is “a radical insurgency – ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”. It has abandoned the pretense of being a normal parliamentary party, and will remain “ideologically extreme” with Trump at its head.

It is quite likely also that Sanders would have enjoyed a more comfortable victory than Joe Biden has in recent days. Worryingly, Trump has officially received over 10 million more votes than in 2016. Yet Trump’s exit from the White House early next year should be regarded as a very positive outcome. Though Biden can hardly be described as a progressive figure – he endorsed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq while he is a strong NATO supporter – the next US president is still moderate in comparison to his soon-to-be predecessor.

The Biden administration could prove receptive to the left-leaning mass activism mobilised by Sanders, an indication of the latter’s success. Many Sanders supporters later voted for Biden, part of the reason for the high turnout. Trump may well run for the presidency again in 2024, when he will be 78, just a few months older than Biden is now.

During the past four years, Trump’s policies led most seriously to an increased risk of nuclear war occurring, while the press were distracted with disingenuous attempts to tie him to Moscow. Trump’s dismantling of arms control treaties resulted in “lowered barriers to nuclear war” according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Four more years of Trump could have culminated in a nuclear war erupting though, remarkably enough, this crucial topic was barely raised in campaign discussions. He still has two more months to wield his wrecking ball.

Entering office in January 2021, among Biden’s most pressing issues should be to safeguard and restore the weapons treaties, while establishing a civil dialogue with China and Russia. This is pertaining to global security risks and the threats posed by thermonuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems – near the borders of China and Russia we can note, not in the Western hemisphere. Whether Biden will actually seek de-escalation with America’s main rivals is doubtful, however. At least a third of Biden’s 23 member Pentagon transition team has links to the weapons industry. (8)

Another critical area is to reinstate America to the Paris Climate Agreement, as Biden has promised, but the nuclear threat remains the more severe of the two. The military analyst and author Daniel Ellsberg said last year, “It is true that climate change may totally disrupt civilization as we know it, but how many lives would it cost? Whatever the number, some form of civilization would probably survive. By contrast a nuclear winter, which has a non-zero possibility of occurring, would occasion near extinction”. (9)

In spite of how serious climate change becomes, the likelihood is that it will not result in the extinction of humans, nor in the end of our planet. The earth endured greater upheavals in the past and it survived, such as absorbing a large asteroid impact about 66 million years ago, which resulted in apocalyptic scenes and the dinosaurs’ rapid demise. Life returned to flourish again.

Climate change may eventually render organised human existence difficult, if not impossible, but that is not an extinction scenario, as Ellsberg suggests. Unlike with nuclear conflict, some people will surely survive, such as those residing in countries where the climate is still comfortable overall – like northern parts of America, Canada, China, Russia, etc. Though a warming world will negatively impact on the majority of species, some are currently thriving because of rising temperatures. These include mammals such as wild boar and red fox, both growing in numbers globally, along with increasingly common birds like Eurasian wren and long-tailed tit.

Climate change over the past 50 years has benefited much more bird species, for example, in England than it has harmed (10). Whereas one harsh winter always results in lasting declines in small birds, who do not have the bodily strength to withstand prolonged cold weather. A nuclear war between America and Russia or China, which within weeks would bring about the Ice Age-like nuclear winter, is a death knell for the above species, including humanity.

In July 1955 president Eisenhower, addressing a Russian delegation in Geneva, said that “It is essential we find some way of controlling the threat of the thermonuclear bomb. You know we both have enough weapons to wipe out the entire Northern Hemisphere from fallout alone. No spot would escape the fallout from an exchange of nuclear stockpiles” (11). Eisenhower’s warnings remain relevant. Dating to 1945 Eisenhower sharply criticised the atomic bombings of Japan, speaking of his “grave misgivings” and how he believed correctly, “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary”. (12)

Atomic attacks on Japan were the instigation for the nuclear proliferation which later followed. Ellsberg noted that, “We have survived the nuclear danger for seventy years, although we have come close to conflict more frequently than the public realizes. I am not talking about just the Cuban Missile Crisis; in 1983, for example, we were also at the brink of a nuclear exchange, and there have been other instances. The risk of conflagration remains continuous and potentially catastrophic”.

A major failure of the mainstream press has been the lack of coverage it affords to the nuclear threat. The scant analysis devoted to nuclear weapons is limited largely to the Cuban Missile Crisis and atomic bombings of Japan, while some mass media outlets report on the annual Doomsday Clock announcement in January. There are powerful vested interests involved here, as nuclear arsenals are controlled by the arms corporations and military-industrial complex. Tens of billions in profits accrue for US arms manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, in the maintenance and upgrading of nuclear weapons systems (13). The US nuclear budget has been increasing year-on-year since 2015, dating to Barack Obama’s second term.

Expenditure on nuclear weapons rose further under the current US president, and Ellsberg observed that, “It didn’t start under Trump. But right now, under Trump, we are budgeting 40% higher than in the Cold War. It is obscene, it is crazy, it is wrong” (14). The potential consequences for the world are obvious, and the Atomic Bulletin noted in January of this year how, “any belief that the threat of nuclear war has been vanquished is a mirage”. (15)

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

Notes

1 Laura He, “Xi Jinping wants China’s private companies to fight alongside the Communist Party”, CNN, 22 September 2020

2 Tom Engelhardt, “The US Is a Failed State”, The Nation, 10 September 2020

3 Dana Nuccitelli, “Millions of times later, 97 percent climate consensus still faces denial”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 15 August 2019

4 Leslie Hook, “Global carbon emissions fell by 8.8% in first half of 2020, study shows”, Financial Times, 14 October 2020

5 Denis Campbell, “NHS hospitals facing serious shortages of vital equipment”, The Guardian, 25 January 2018

6 Chaun Powell, Soumi Saha, “The Untold Reality of Medical Device Shortages in the US”, The Health Care Blog, 5 November 2019

7 Lai Lin Thomala, “Number of hospital beds in China from 2008 to 2018”, Statista, 4 November 2019

8 Sarah Lazare, “One third of Biden’s Pentagon transition team hails from organizations financed by the weapons industry”, In These Times, 11 November 2020

9 Daniel Ellsberg, Allen White, “The Truth-Teller: From the Pentagon Papers to the Doomsday Machine”, Global Research, 19 May 2019

10 Adam Vaughan, “Climate change has created more bird losers than winners in England”, New Scientist, 2 September 2019

11 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Viva Books, New Delhi, 1 Jan. 2005) p. 10

12 Timothy P. Carney, “’It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing’ — Why dropping the A-bombs was wrong”, Washington Examiner, 8 August 2013

13 Jon Schwarz, “How to dismantle the absurd profitability of nuclear weapons”, The Intercept, 4 May 2019

14 Daniel Ellsberg, Dennis Bernstein, “A conversation with legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg”, Newcoldwar.org, 17 October 2019

15 John Mecklin, “Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 23 January 2020

Featured image is by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

“Anyone who cares for someone with a developmental disability, as well as for disabled people themselves [lives] every day in fear that their behavior will be misconstrued as suspicious, intoxicated or hostile by law enforcement.”—Steve Silberman, The New York Times

They shot at him fourteen times.

Walter Wallace Jr.—a troubled 27-year-old black man with a criminal history and mental health issues—was no saint. Still, he didn’t deserve to die in a hail of bullets fired by two police officers who clearly had not been adequately trained in how to de-escalate encounters with special needs individuals.

Image on the right: A screenshot taken from a video of a dispute between two police officers and Walter Wallace, Jr. (Fair use photo)

Wallace wasn’t unarmed—he was reportedly holding a knife when police confronted him—yet neither cop attempted to use non-lethal weapons on Wallace, who appeared to be in the midst of a mental health crisis. In fact, neither cop even possessed a taser. Wallace, fired upon repeatedly by both officers, was hit in the shoulder and chest and pronounced dead at the hospital.

Wallace’s death is yet one more grim statistic to add to that growing list of Americans—unarmed, impaired or experiencing a mental health crisis—who have been killed by police trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

It’s also a powerful reminder to think twice before you call the cops to carry out a welfare check on a loved one. Especially if that person is autistic, hearing impaired, mentally ill, elderly, suffering from dementia, disabled or might have a condition that hinders their ability to understand, communicate or immediately comply with an order.

Particularly if you value that person’s life.

There are some things that don’t change. Even as the nation grapples with the twin distractions of political theater and a viral pandemic, there are still deadlier forces at play.

This is one of them.

At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

Unfortunately, police—trained in the worst case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—increasingly pose a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent or require more finesse than the typical freeze-or-I’ll-shoot tactics employed by America’s police forces.

Just last year, in fact, Gay Plack, a 57-year-old Virginia woman with bipolar disorder, was killed after two police officers—sent to do a welfare check on her—entered her home uninvited, wandered through the house shouting her name, kicked open her locked bedroom door, discovered the terrified woman hiding in a dark bathroom and wielding a small axe, and four seconds later, shot her in the stomach.

Four seconds.

That’s all the time it took for the two police officers assigned to check on Plack to decide to use lethal force against her (both cops opened fire on the woman), rather than using non-lethal options (one cop had a Taser, which he made no attempt to use) or attempting to de-escalate the situation.

The police chief defended his officers’ actions, claiming they had “no other option” but to shoot the 5 foot 4 inch “woman with carpal tunnel syndrome who had to quit her job at a framing shop because her hand was too weak to use the machine that cut the mats.”

This is what happens when you empower the police to act as judge, jury and executioner.

This is what happens when you indoctrinate the police into believing that their lives and their safety are paramount to anyone else’s.

Suddenly, everyone and everything else is a threat that must be neutralized or eliminated.

In light of the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data such as FitBits and Apple Watches and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA, the “Health Advanced Research Projects Agency”), encounters with the police could get even more deadly, especially if those involved have a mental illness or disability.

Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. (People of color are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.) If you’re black and disabled, you’re even more vulnerable.

A study by the Ruderman Family Foundation reports that “disabled individuals make up the majority of those killed in use-of-force cases that attract widespread attention. This is true both for cases deemed illegal or against policy and for those in which officers are ultimately fully exonerated… Many more disabled civilians experience non-lethal violence and abuse at the hands of law enforcement officers.”

For instance, Nancy Schrock called 911 for help after her husband, Tom, who suffered with mental health issues, started stalking around the backyard, upending chairs and screaming about demons. Several times before, police had transported Tom to the hospital, where he was medicated and sent home after 72 hours. This time, Tom was tasered twice. He collapsed, lost consciousness and died.

In South Carolina, police tasered an 86-year-old grandfather reportedly in the early stages of dementia, while he was jogging backwards away from them. Now this happened after Albert Chatfield led police on a car chase, running red lights and turning randomly. However, at the point that police chose to shock the old man with electric charges, he was out of the car, on his feet, and outnumbered by police officers much younger than him.

In Georgia, campus police shot and killed a 21-year-old student who was suffering a mental health crisis. Scout Schultz was shot through the heart by campus police when he approached four of them late one night while holding a pocketknife, shouting “Shoot me!” Although police may have feared for their lives, the blade was still in its closed position.

In Oklahoma, police shot and killed a 35-year-old deaf man seen holding a two-foot metal pipe on his front porch (he used the pipe to fend off stray dogs while walking). Despite the fact that witnesses warned police that Magdiel Sanchez couldn’t hear—and thus comply—with their shouted orders to drop the pipe and get on the ground, police shot the man when he was about 15 feet away from them.

In Maryland, police (moonlighting as security guards) used extreme force to eject a 26-year-old man with Downs Syndrome and a low IQ from a movie theater after the man insisted on sitting through a second screening of a film. Autopsy results indicate that Ethan Saylor died of complications arising from asphyxiation, likely caused by a chokehold.

In Florida, police armed with assault rifles fired three shots at a 27-year-old nonverbal, autistic man who was sitting on the ground, playing with a toy truck. Police missed the autistic man and instead shot his behavioral therapist, Charles Kinsey, who had been trying to get him back to his group home. The therapist, bleeding from a gunshot wound, was then handcuffed and left lying face down on the ground for 20 minutes.

In Texas, police handcuffed, tasered and then used a baton to subdue a 7-year-old student who has severe ADHD and a mood disorder. With school counselors otherwise occupied, school officials called police and the child’s mother to assist after Yosio Lopez started banging his head on a wall. The police arrived first.

In New Mexico, police tasered, then opened fire on a 38-year-old homeless man who suffered from schizophrenia, all in an attempt to get James Boyd to leave a makeshift campsite. Boyd’s death provoked a wave of protests over heavy-handed law enforcement tactics.

In Ohio, police forcefully subdued a 37-year-old bipolar woman wearing only a nightgown in near-freezing temperatures who was neither armed, violent, intoxicated, nor suspected of criminal activity. After being slammed onto the sidewalk, handcuffed and left unconscious on the street, Tanisha Anderson died as a result of being restrained in a prone position.

And in North Carolina, a state trooper shot and killed a 29-year-old deaf motorist after he failed to pull over during a traffic stop. Daniel K. Harris was shot after exiting his car, allegedly because the trooper feared he might be reaching for a weapon.

These cases, and the hundreds—if not thousands—more that go undocumented every year speak to a crisis in policing when it comes to law enforcement’s failure to adequately assess, de-escalate and manage encounters with special needs or disabled individuals.

While the research is relatively scant, what has been happening is telling.

Over the course of six months, police shot and killed someone who was in mental crisis every 36 hours.

Among 124 police killings analyzed by The Washington Post in which mental illness appeared to be a factor, “They were overwhelmingly men, more than half of them white. Nine in 10 were armed with some kind of weapon, and most died close to home.”

But there were also important distinctions, reports the Post.

“This group was more likely to wield a weapon less lethal than a firearm. Six had toy guns; 3 in 10 carried a blade, such as a knife or a machete — weapons that rarely prove deadly to police officers. According to data maintained by the FBI and other organizations, only three officers have been killed with an edged weapon in the past decade. Nearly a dozen of the mentally distraught people killed were military veterans, many of them suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their service, according to police or family members. Another was a former California Highway Patrol officer who had been forced into retirement after enduring a severe beating during a traffic stop that left him suffering from depression and PTSD. And in 45 cases, police were called to help someone get medical treatment, or after the person had tried and failed to get treatment on his own.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, as might be expected, has thus far continued to immunize police against charges of wrongdoing when it comes to use of force against those with a mental illness.

In a 2015 ruling, the Court declared that police could not be sued for forcing their way into a mentally ill woman’s room at a group home and shooting her five times when she advanced on them with a knife. The justices did not address whether police must take special precautions when arresting mentally ill individuals. (The Americans with Disabilities Act requires “reasonable accommodations” for people with mental illnesses, which in this case might have been less confrontational tactics.)

Where does this leave us?

For starters, we need better police training across the board, but especially when it comes to de-escalation tactics and crisis intervention.

A study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that CIT (Crisis Intervention Team)-trained officers made fewer arrests, used less force, and connected more people with mental-health services than their non-trained peers.

As The Washington Post points out:

“Although new recruits typically spend nearly 60 hours learning to handle a gun, according to a recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, they receive only eight hours of training to de-escalate tense situations and eight hours learning strategies for handling the mentally ill. Otherwise, police are taught to employ tactics that tend to be counterproductive in such encounters, experts said. For example, most officers are trained to seize control when dealing with an armed suspect, often through stern, shouted commands. But yelling and pointing guns is ‘like pouring gasoline on a fire when you do that with the mentally ill,’ said Ron Honberg, policy director with the National Alliance on Mental Illness.”

Second, police need to learn how to slow confrontations down, instead of ramping up the tension (and the noise).

In Maryland, police recruits are now required to take a four-hour course in which they learn “de-escalation tactics” for dealing with disabled individuals: speak calmly, give space, be patient.

One officer in charge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “mental response teams” suggests that instead of rushing to take someone into custody, police should try to slow things down and persuade the person to come with them.

Third, with all the questionable funds flowing to police departments these days, why not use some of those funds to establish what one disability-rights activist describes as “a 911-type number dedicated to handling mental-health emergencies, with community crisis-response teams at the ready rather than police officers.”

Increasingly, funds are being directed towards technologies that support predictive policing and behavioral and health surveillance. For instance, HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) would take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home. The Trump Administration has already awarded contracts worth $22.8 million to seven major corporations to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning connected to smartphone apps, wearable devices and software that can identify and trace contacts of “infected individuals,” keep track of “verified” COVID-19 test results, and monitor the health states of infected and “potentially” infected individuals.

It wouldn’t take much for these nascent predictive programs to give rise to healthcare versions of red flag gun laws, which allows the government to preemptively take action against individuals who may be perceived as potential threats. Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

In the end, while we need to make encounters with police officers safer for people with suffering from mental illness or with disabilities, what we really need—as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People—is to make encounters with police safer for all individuals all across the board.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Professor Bhakdi is a Thai-German specialist in microbiology and co-author of Corona, False Alarm?: Facts and Figures.

According to Prof. Bhakdi, “this virus is no more deadly than a seasonal flu and for people under 70, it is even less deadly than the seasonal flu.

If you are under 70, your chances of dying with this virus are less than 0.1 percent. In fact, there are about 0.05 percent.”

Watch full interview below.

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Any discussion of Arab Americans must consider, at the outset, both the deep diversity as well as the shared attitudes and concerns that exist within the community. As is the case with most ethnic groups, Arab Americans are not a monolith. They hail from 22 Arabic-speaking countries. They are of different religious traditions. And while three-quarters are native born, some being fourth-generation American born, the rest are foreign-born naturalised citizens. Despite this rich diversity, a recent poll conducted by the Arab American Institute (AAI) revealed a great number of shared attitudes among significant numbers of respondents from all demographic subgroups.

While it has already been reported that the AAI poll found Arab American voters favouring Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a 59 per cent to 35 per cent, also explored were how Arab Americans viewed a number of Middle East related issues and how they evaluated both candidates’ handling of many of these same issues.

Weighed against a list of 14 major policy concerns, only 5 per cent of Arab Americans ranked resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a priority issue in determining their vote for President, the only foreign policy issue included in the list. Nevertheless, 44 per cent of the respondents indicated that resolving this conflict was one of the most important foreign policy challenges facing the US administration. In fact, this issue was ranked the most important of the seven Middle East-related concerns covered in the poll. In second place, at 33 per cent, was “meeting the humanitarian needs in Syria.“ Addressing the political and economic crisis in Lebanon” was third, at 28 per cent. These were followed by the ending the war in Yemen, improving relations with the Arab World, countering the threat posed by Iran, and stabilising and rebuilding Iraq, seen as important by between 16 per cent to 11 per cent of Arab Americans.

A strong plurality of Arab Americans saw Donald Trump’s handling of each of these foreign policy challenges as ineffective. And by a margin of 48 per cent to 32 per cent, the community’s voters said they believed that Joe Biden would be best at improving ties with the Arab World.

When asked for their attitudes about “several nations across the Middle East who are playing increasingly important roles”, Arab Americans were most favourably disposed toward Egypt, with 73 per cent saying they had favorable attitudes towards that country. Next in line was Turkey, with a 68 per cent favourable rating, followed by the United Arab Emirates at 66 per cent, Saudi Arabia at 56 per cent and Iran at 47 per cent.

Seventy-eight per cent of Arab Americans said they viewed the recently signed UAE and Bahrain agreements with Israel as a positive development, with 63 per cent expressing the hope that “it may contribute to making the Middle East a more peaceful region” and 57 per cent hoping that “it might contribute to advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace”.

The AAI poll also asked Arab Americans how they are most likely to define themselves, whether by country of origin, religion, or as Arab American. The preferred identity was simply “Arab American” (29 per cent), followed by country of origin (27 per cent), and religion as the preferred self-identity of only 15 per cent. “All three”, Arab American, country of origin and religion, was the choice of 17 per cent.

More than three-quarters of all Arab Americans said they were “very proud” of their ethnic heritage. It is important to note that they maintain this pride despite the fact that 61 per cent claim they have “personally experienced discrimination because of my ethnicity or country of origin”. This fear remains strong, with 70 per cent of all Arab American respondents saying they are “concerned about facing future discrimination because of their ethnicity or country of origin”.

In the end, what emerges from this survey of Arab Americans is that with all of its diversity, it is a community proud of its heritage, concerned with discrimination and sharing many attitudes on a range of issues both foreign and domestic.

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James J. Zogby is president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute.

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Ho Chi Minh, in his eternal abode, will be savoring it with a heavenly smirk. Vietnam was the – virtual – host as the 10 Asean nations, plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, on the final day of the 37^th Asean Summit.

RCEP, eight years in the making, binds together 30% of the global economy and 2.2 billion people. It’s the first auspicious landmark of the Raging Twenties, which started with an assassination (of Iran’s Gen. Soleimani) followed by a global pandemic and now ominous intimations of a dodgy Great Reset.

RCEP seals East Asia as the undisputed prime hub of geoeconomics. The Asian Century in fact was already in the making way back in the 1990s. Among those Asians as well as Western expats who identified it, in 1997 I published my book 21st: The Asian Century (excerpts here.)

RCEP may force the West to do some homework, and understand that the main story here is not that RCEP “excludes the US” or that it’s “designed by China”. RCEP is an East Asia-wide agreement, initiated by Asean, and debated among equals since 2012, including Japan, which for all practical purposes positions itself as part of the industrialized Global North. It’s the first-ever trade deal that unites Asian powerhouses China, Japan and South Korea.

By now it’s clear, at last in vast swathes of East Asia, that RCEP’s 20 chapters will reduce tariffs across the board; simplify customs, with at least 65% of service sectors fully open, with increased foreign shareholding limits; solidify supply chains by privileging common rules of origin; and codify new e-commerce regulations.

When it comes to the nitty gritty, companies will be saving and be able to export anywhere within the 15-nation spectrum without bothering with extra, separate requirements from each nation. That’s what an integrated market is all about.

When RCEP meets BRI

The same scratched CD will be playing non-stop on how RCEP facilitates China’s “geopolitical ambitions”. That’s not the point. The point is RCEP evolved as a natural companion to China’s role as the main trade partner of virtually every East Asian player.

Which brings us to the key geopolitical and geoeconomic angle: RCEP is a natural companion to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which as a trade/sustainable development strategy spans not only East Asia but delves deeper into Central and West Asia.

The Global Times analysis is correct: the West has not ceased to distort BRI, without acknowledging how “the initiative they have been slandering is actually so popular in the vast majority of countries along the BRI route.”

RCEP will refocus BRI – whose “implementation” stage, according to the official timetable, starts only in 2021. The low-cost financing and special foreign exchange loans offered by the China Development Bank will become much more selective.

There will be a lot of emphasis on the Health Silk Road – especially across Southeast Asia. Strategic projects will be the priority: they revolve around the development of a network of economic corridors, logistic zones, financial centers, 5G networks, key sea ports and, especially short and mid-term, public health-related high-tech.

The discussions that led to the final RCEP draft were focused on a mechanism of integration that can easily bypass the WTO in case Washington persists on sabotaging it, as was the case during the Trump administration.

The next step could be the constitution of an economic bloc even stronger than the EU – not a far-fetched possibility when we have China, Japan, South Korea and the Asean 10 working together. Geopolitically, the top incentive, beyond an array of imperative financial compromises, would be to solidify something like Make Trade, Not War.

RCEP marks the irredeemable failure of the Obama era TPP, which was the “NATO on trade” arm of the “pivot to Asia” dreamed up at the State Department. Trump squashed TPP in 2017. TPP was not about a “counterbalance” to China’s trade primacy in Asia: it was about a free for all encompassing the 600 multinational companies which were involved in its draft. Japan and Malaysia, especially, saw thought it from the start.

RCEP also inevitably marks the irredeemable failure of the decoupling fallacy, as well as all attempts to drive a wedge between China and its East Asian trade partners. All these Asian players will now privilege trade among themselves. Trade with non-Asian nations will be an afterthought. And every Asean economy will give full priority to China.

Still, American multinationals won’t be isolated, as they will be able to profit from RCEP via their subsidiaries within the 15-nation members.

What about Greater Eurasia?

And then there’s the proverbial Indian mess. The official spin from New Delhi is that RCEP would “affect the livelihoods” of vulnerable Indians. That’s code for an extra invasion of cheap and efficient Chinese products.

India was part of the RCEP negotiations from the start. Pulling out – with a “we may join later” conditional – is once again a spectacular case of stabbing themselves in the back. The fact is the Hindutva fanatics behind Modi-ism bet on the wrong horse: the US-fostered Quad partnership cum Indo-Pacific strategy, which spells out as containment of China and thus preclude closer trade ties.

No “Make in India” will compensate for the geoeconomic, and diplomatic, blunder – which crucially implies India distancing itself from the Asean 10. RCEP solidifies China, not India, as the undisputed engine of East Asian growth amid the re-positioning of supply chains post-Covid.

A very interesting geoeconomic follow-up is what will Russia do. For the moment, Moscow’s priority involves a Sisyphean struggle: manage the turbulent relationship with Germany, Russia’s largest import partner.

But then there’s the Russia-China strategic partnership –which should be enhanced economically. Moscow’s concept of Greater Eurasia involves deeper involvement both East and West, including the expansion of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which, for instance, has free trade deals with Asean nations such as Vietnam.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is not a geoeconomics mechanism. But it’s intriguing to see what President Xi Jinping said at his keynote speech at the Council of Heads of State of the SCO last week.

This is Xi’s key quote:

“We must firmly support relevant countries in smoothly advancing major domestic political agendas in accordance with law; maintaining political security & social stability, and resolutely oppose external forces interfering in internal affairs of member states under any pretext.”

Apparently this has nothing to do with RCEP. But there are quite a few intersections. No interference of “external forces”. Beijing taking into consideration the Covid-19 vaccine needs of SCO members – and this could be extended to RCEP. The SCO – as well as RCEP – as a multilateral platform for member states to mediate disputes.

All of the above points to the inter-sectionality of BRI, EAEU, SCO, RCEP, BRICS+ and AIIB, which translates as closer Asia – and Eurasia – integration, geoeconomically and geopolitically. While the dogs of dystopia bark, the Asian – and Eurasian – caravan – keeps marching on.

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Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: China’s Belt and Road Initiative will be given new momentum with new RCEP trade pact. Photo: iStock

Both Lithuania and Poland are attempting to challenge Russian and Belarusian energy dominance in the Baltics. Although Poland is trying to wean itself off Russian energy reliance, Lithuania is acting far more aggressively by attempting to force Latvia to follow their anti-Russian/Belarusian agenda.

The Lithuanian Seimas (Parliament) called for strict political pressure on neighboring Latvia, a fellow Baltic member of the EU and NATO. This response by the Seimas is because of Latvia’s pragmatic desire to ensure energy security through trade relations with Russia and Belarus.

The Lithuanian Seimas agreed that relations with Latvia needed to move from friendly appeals to direct political pressure, which also includes threats and blackmail. The Seimas Committee on European Affairs called on the Conservative-led new government to increase pressure on Latvian leaders in Riga over alleged violations of Latvia’s 2018 tripartite agreement on electricity trade with third countries.

Latvia buys electricity produced by the Belarusian Astrava nuclear power plant, and this is a major problem for Lithuanian leaders. Lithuania considers the Astrava power plant to be a threat, not only to the health of the Lithuanian citizens, but also to the energy security of the entire European Union.

“After the start of operation of the Belarusian nuclear power plant, the analysis of electricity flows shows that Latvia successfully sells the electricity entering Lithuania through the Lithuanian-Belarusian connection, which remains exclusively in Lithuania. In this way, Lithuanian consumers finance Lukashenko’s regime,” said MP Dainius Kreivys from the conservative Homeland Union Party.

This means that calls for political pressure against Riga are not empty words, but an action program of the Lithuanian government. This pressure will also come with approval from Brussels and Washington as they claim Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is illegitimate. Thus, Minsk and Moscow must prepare for a difficult confrontation not only on the political front, but also on the Baltic energy one.

Baltic States are rapidly preparing to synchronize their energy networks with Europe so they can disconnect from the BRELL (Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) energy ring in 2025. This means that Vilnius and Riga will have to rely mainly on Poland and a submarine power cable with Sweden, which breaks several times a year.

It becomes clear that from 2025, Riga will become fully dependent on European electricity transit through the territory of Lithuania. It is clear that transit must also be paid for, meaning Latvia will become entirely reliant on Lithuania for the sake of European electricity. This is especially curious considering electricity from the Belarusian nuclear power plants is perhaps the closest source of cheap energy.

Approved by the Ministries of Energy of the three Baltic States, Latvia and Estonia reserve the right to import missing amounts of electricity from Russia until their complete disconnection from BRELL. However, according to Lithuanian conservatives, there is no guarantee that Russia will not supply electricity via Belarus to Latvia and Estonia. This means that there is a real threat that this so-called “dangerous electricity” will enter the Lithuanian and pan-European electricity networks. It is this uncertainty that causes much outrage in the new Lithuanian government. Thus, Riga must be ready for the Lithuanians to try and overthrow their government in the next four years and essentially turn Latvia into their vassal.

Lithuania’s pressure against Latvia also comes at a time when Russian state-owned Gazprom has applied for changes in the price of gas supplied to Poland under the Yamal contract. The Polish oil and gas company PGNiG expressed confidence that Gazprom did not meet their contractual requirements. Poland has previously asked for gas prices to be reviewed and reduced; however, this is not provided for in the contract.

An agreement on the supply of gas to Poland was concluded in 1996 to the tune of about 10 billion cubic meters per year. This agreement does not conclude until 2022. In addition, Warsaw must receive at least 8.7 billion cubic meters under the “take it or pay it” rule. Poland’s reaction is all the more surprising given that the country has no plans to extend the long-term gas supply agreement with Russia anyway. Moreover, Poland is filing counterclaims.

Earlier this year, a Polish company won a dispute over the revision of gas prices for supplies from November 2014. Gazprom transferred $1.5 billion to PGNiG, but is still challenging the decision in the Court of Appeal. This is a significant risk for Warsaw as it may lose more than one lawsuit as a result. This penalty – compensation for Gazprom’s allegedly high prices when Poland went to arbitration in spring 2015 – gave the impression that the gas price was not in line with the situation on the European energy market.

In addition, this autumn Poland filed a new $7.6 billion claim against Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Poland does not consider itself a major consumer of gas but rather a potential energy hub despite having no gas distribution center, no free gas volume, and no business approach. Rather, Warsaw is hinging its bets on the Baltic Pipeline which intends to connect Poland with Norwegian energy via Denmark by October 2022.

However, there is a noteworthy nuance: the construction of the pipeline requires permission from Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2, and one of the main shareholders of both companies is Gazprom.

Therefore, no matter what Poland attempts, it finds itself in the same position – needing to cooperate and coordinate with Russia to achieve its energy interests. The rest of the Baltics is in this same position too, and although Latvia may recognize this reality, Lithuania is still trying to bully its Baltic neighbor to move it away from Russian and Belarusian energy sources.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Health care will be a major issue early in the new Biden/Harris administration. Unemployment is still high with over a million people applying for unemployment benefits last week and 42.6% of working age people without a job.

In the United States, losing employment often means losing health insurance. On top of the 30 million people who are already uninsured, it is estimated that nearly 15 million people lost their health insurance due to becoming unemployed as of June. The current number of people without health insurance is not known, but as Biden takes office, it could surpass the 44 million who were uninsured when Obama took office in 2008.

Biden’s healthcare plan looks like a replay of the health reform process of 2009-10 when the Democrats effectively divided the movement in support of national improved Medicare for all and pushed through the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA), which passed without Republican support.  Health insurance and pharmaceutical corporate profits have soared since then while people struggle to afford healthcare.

In a time of the COVID-19 pandemic when over 250,000 people have already died and the University of Washington predicts over 500,000 deaths by the end of February, we cannot allow a repeat of the failed ACA. It is unconscionable to create anything less than a universal single payer healthcare system.

2012, rally outside the Supreme Court. Popular Resistance.

The ACA Challenge in the Supreme Court

This week, oral arguments in a case against the ACA were heard by the US Supreme Court. This is the third Constitutional challenge to the law and the second time the individual mandate, which requires people to have health insurance or pay a penalty, has been questioned.

During the first challenge, I was part of a group of fifty physicians and lawyers who filed an amicus brief with the court arguing that national improved Medicare for all is the most Constitutionally-sound healthcare system. Read the open letter here: amicus-brief-open-letter.

Traditional Medicare has been our national healthcare system for seniors and people with certain health conditions since 1965. It meets the definition of “taxation for the general welfare” in Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution. On the other hand, the ACA uses our public dollars to subsidize private health insurers with hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Those health insurers then pay their CEOs multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses and dividends to their stockholders. The Congressional Budget Office estimates those subsidies will be $920 billion in 2021.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, private health insurers are taking over our public insurances, Medicaid and Medicare. Most Medicaid enrollees are in plans managed by private insurers. Over a third of seniors are in private “Medicare Advantage” plans that rip them off when they have health problems. Private insurers are working aggressively to increase their Medicare takeover. Private insurers also provide health plans to public employees and the military. Modern Healthcare reports that by 2017, 50% or more of the revenue of the top health insurance corporations came from the government.

Many of us saw what the ACA actually was, a bailout for the private insurance industry that had raised premiums so high people couldn’t afford them. The ACA not only subsidized people purchasing health insurance, it required the government to sell the plans and forced people to buy them with the individual mandate.

Ten years after its passage, the ACA has left our healthcare system in a similar state to when it began. Healthcare costs are too high. People are delaying and avoiding necessary care. Hundreds of thousands of households still become bankrupt each year due to medical illness. And at a time when support for national improved Medicare for all is high, the incoming president is advocating for more of the same.

Understanding the Biden Health Plan

During the 2009-10 health reform process, the Obama/Biden administration used the idea of a “public option” to divide progressives away from the movement for national improved Medicare for all. Tens of millions of dollars went to unions and so-called progressive organizations whose task was to convince people that national improved Medicare for all was asking for too much but what was “on the table” was a public option that they argued was achievable and could lead to single payer healthcare.

None of what they said made sense from a health policy perspective but with enough groups saying it, people were convinced it was true. In reality, adding one more insurance to the mix of thousands of plans doesn’t change much. As exists with Medicare and Medicare advantage plans, the healthy population is courted for the private plans and when people become ill, they leave those private plans for the public plan. This puts the burden of paying for care on the underfunded public plan. When it struggles, this is used to reinforce the myth that private is better.

If a public option, the foundation of the Biden plan, were created, it would struggle to compete with the well-marketed private plans. Eventually, it would turn into a high-risk pool and fail. If anything, it would be a relief valve for the private insurers where they could offload expensive patients.

What was most striking during the last health reform process is that all along the widely-promoted “public option” was never intended to be in the final legislation. It was a ploy to keep progressives from demanding single payer healthcare. In December, 2009, when the Senate was being pressured by groups to include a public option in their legislation, as the House had done, the White House started pushing the Senate not to include it. Their plan, which they executed, was to have two different bills from the House and Senate so the final legislation would be crafted in a conference of a select group from the House and Senate in order to pick and choose what was in it. And, of course, the public option was not in the final bill.

Biden claims that he will take action to reduce the costs of pharmaceuticals. The most effective way to do this is through a national single payer healthcare system. When the government is the single purchase of goods, like medicines, it has the most leverage to reduce the prices. Without that, reducing prices in one part of the healthcare system, such as Medicare, which Biden proposes, will result in higher prices in another sector. The pharmaceutical corporations have a legal responsibility to protect their investors’ interests. They always find a way.

A single payer system also has the ability to nationalize parts or the whole pharmaceutical industry if needed to protect the public good. Imagine if production of lifesaving medications like insulin was public. Nobody would have to ration their doses or die because they couldn’t afford it. Imagine if a COVID-19 vaccine were publicly manufactured. The government could increase production and instead of selling to the highest bidder, it could prioritize giving the vaccine to those who need it the most. This is how other nations operate their healthcare systems.

A final point is that, as happened in 2009-10, an important issue will be used to win the support of Democratic Party voters and convince them to support it. Last time, they used pre-existing conditions and the cost of healthcare for women. This time, it is reproductive rights. People will be pushed to support an inadequate reform because they will be told that not supporting it means they will take away reproductive rights. This issue will also be used to differentiate the Democrats from the Republicans.

What we ought to be demanding is what we need: a national universal publicly-financed healthcare system such as national improved Medicare for all or a fully public system as exists in the United Kingdom that includes all necessary care, which means reproductive care. We must not allow the Democrats to weaken our demand that every person in the United States have access to the care they need without fear of financial ruin. The private health insurers must go. They are parasites sucking the blood out of our healthcare system and they will never be satisfied until they have it all.

How We Win Universal Healthcare

The Democrats are using the same tactics they used in the last go-round because they work. People cannot allow themselves to be fooled again. How to avoid that was the subject of last week’s newsletter. It is critical that people know what those tactics are, recognize them when they are being used and take action to counter them.

If we are able to hold firm in our demand that we will accept nothing less than healthcare for everyone, not promises of healthcare for everyone but an actual healthcare system that can deliver that, then we will win. At every turn, when the Democrats offer less than that, their offer must be forcefully rejected.

Over the years, the biggest impediment to not achieving a universal healthcare system is that people don’t believe we have the power to win it. They believe the excuses that are used such as it is asking for too much or there isn’t the “political will” to pass it. Who creates “political will”? The people do!

The majority of people in the United States support a universal healthcare system. The opportunity to win it is now because the recession means our uninsured numbers will soar and the current healthcare system cannot address the COVID-19 crisis. As the crisis worsens, our voices must be louder. Universal healthcare is imperative.

And when we win this struggle, it will have two major impacts that will lead to more victories. First, it will demonstrate that people have power to achieve transformational systemic change. And second, it will create a social solidarity – everyone rich or poor in the same system – which will demonstrate that universal systems are superior to the privatized and complicated mess we have now. When we are all in the same system, we all have an interest in making it the best it can be instead of poor systems for the poor and high-quality systems for the rich. We will go on to demand other universal rights such as housing, education, internet access, jobs with a living wage and more.

This time around, the “Yes we can” slogan so common under Obama must mean that, yes, the people can overcome the plutocrats and put people over profits.

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Margaret Flowers writes on and directs Popular Resistance where this article was originally published. 

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Dispel the “Magical Belief in Authority”. Confront The Greed For Power and Violence. Strengthen Community Feelings

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, November 16 2020

By Stephen Lendman, November 16 2020

See more articles on Asia-PacificResearch.com

The Asia-Pacific Research website at www.asia-pacificresearch.com publishes news and feature articles, background research and analysis on social, economic, geopolitical and environmental issues with a specific focus on the dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region.  APR combines Asia-Pacific country level news with a broader regional and international perspective of World events. Click here to visit Asia-PacificResearch.com.

The New England Journal of Medicine has published a study that goes to the heart of the issue of lockdowns. The question has always been whether and to what extent a lockdown, however extreme, is capable of suppressing the virus. If so, you can make an argument that at least lockdowns, despite their astronomical social and economic costs, achieve something. If not, nations of the world have embarked on a catastrophic experiment that has destroyed billions of lives, and all expectation of human rights and liberties, with no payoff at all. 

AIER has long highlighted studies that show no gain in virus management from lockdowns. Even as early as April, a major data scientist said that this virus becomes endemic in 70 days after the first round of infection, regardless of policies. The largest global study of lockdowns compared with deaths as published in The Lancet found no association between coercive stringencies and deaths per million.

To test further might seem superfluous but, for whatever reason, governments all over the world, including in the US, still are under the impression that they can affect viral transmissions through a range of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) like mandatory masks, forced human separation, stay-at-home orders, bans of gatherings, business and school closures, and extreme travel restrictions. Nothing like this has been tried on this scale in the whole of human history, so one might suppose that policy makers have some basis for their confidence that these measures accomplish something.

A study conducted by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in cooperation with the Naval Medical Research Center sought to test lockdownism along with testing and isolation. In May, 3,143 new recruits to the Marines were given the option to participate in a study of frequent testing under extreme quarantine. The study was called CHARM, which stands for COVID-19 Health Action Response for Marines. Of the recruits asked, a total of 1,848 young people agreed to be guinea pigs in this experiment which involved “which included weekly qPCR testing and blood sampling for IgG antibody assessment.” In addition, the CHARM study volunteers who did test positively “on the day of enrollment (day 0) or on day 7 or day 14 were separated from their roommates and were placed in isolation.”

What did the recruits have to do? The study explains, and, as you will see, they faced an even more strict regime that has existed in civilian life in most places. All recruits, even those not in the CHARM group, did the following.

All recruits wore double-layered cloth masks at all times indoors and outdoors, except when sleeping or eating; practiced social distancing of at least 6 feet; were not allowed to leave campus; did not have access to personal electronics and other items that might contribute to surface transmission; and routinely washed their hands. They slept in double-occupancy rooms with sinks, ate in shared dining facilities, and used shared bathrooms. All recruits cleaned their rooms daily, sanitized bathrooms after each use with bleach wipes, and ate preplated meals in a dining hall that was cleaned with bleach after each platoon had eaten. Most instruction and exercises were conducted outdoors. All movement of recruits was supervised, and unidirectional flow was implemented, with designated building entry and exit points to minimize contact among persons. All recruits, regardless of participation in the study, underwent daily temperature and symptom screening. Six instructors who were assigned to each platoon worked in 8-hour shifts and enforced the quarantine measures. If recruits reported any signs or symptoms consistent with Covid-19, they reported to sick call, underwent rapid qPCR testing for SARS-CoV-2, and were placed in isolation pending the results of testing.

Instructors were also restricted to campus, were required to wear masks, were provided with preplated meals, and underwent daily temperature checks and symptom screening. Instructors who were assigned to a platoon in which a positive case was diagnosed underwent rapid qPCR testing for SARS-CoV-2, and, if the result was positive, the instructor was removed from duty. Recruits and instructors were prohibited from interacting with campus support staff, such as janitorial and food-service personnel. After each class completed quarantine, a deep bleach cleaning of surfaces was performed in the bathrooms, showers, bedrooms, and hallways in the dormitories, and the dormitory remained unoccupied for at least 72 hours before reoccupancy.

The reputation of Marine basic training is that it is tough going but this really does take it to another level. Also, this is an environment where those in charge do not mess around. There was surely close to 100% compliance, as compared with, for example, a typical college campus.

What were the results? The virus still spread, though 90% of those who tested positive were without symptoms. Incredibly, 2% of the CHARM recruits still contracted the virus, even if all but one remained asymptomatic. “Our study showed that in a group of predominantly young male military recruits, approximately 2% became positive for SARS-CoV-2, as determined by qPCR assay, during a 2-week, strictly enforced quarantine.”

And how does this compare to the control group that was not tested and not isolated in the case of a positive case?

Have a look at this chart from the study:

New England Journal of Medicine

Which is to say that the nonparticipants actually contracted the virus at a slightly lower rate than those who were under an extreme regime. Conversely, extreme enforcement of NPIs plus more frequent testing and isolation was associated with a greater degree of infection.

I’m grateful to Don Wolt for drawing my attention to this study, which, so far as I know, has received very little attention from any media source at all, despite having been published in the New England Journal of Medicine on November 11.

Here are four actual media headlines about the study that miss the point entirely:

• CNN: “Many military Covid-19 cases are asymptomatic, studies show”
• SciTech Daily: “Asymptomatic COVID-19 Transmission Revealed Through Study of 2,000 Marine Recruits”
• ABC: “Broad study of Marine recruits shows limits of COVID-19 symptom screening”
• US Navy: “Navy/Marine Corps COVID-19 Study Findings Published in New England Journal of Medicine”

No national news story that I have found highlighted the most important finding of all: extreme quarantine plus frequent testing and isolation among military recruits did nothing to stop the virus.

The study is important because of the social structure of control here. It’s one thing to observe no effects from national lockdowns. There are countless variables here that could be invoked as cautionary notes: demographics, population density, preexisting immunities, degree of compliance, and so on. But with this Marine study, you have a near homogeneous group based on age, health, and densities of living. And even here, you see confirmed what so many other studies have shown: lockdowns are pointlessly destructive. They do not manage the disease. They crush human liberty and produce astonishing costs, such as 5.53 million years of lost life from the closing of schools alone.

The lockdowners keep telling us to pay attention to the science. That’s what we are doing. When the results contradict their pro-compulsion narrative, they pretend that the studies do not exist and barrel ahead with their scary plans to disable all social functioning in the presence of a virus. Lockdowns are not science. They never have been. They are an experiment in social/political top-down management that is without precedent in cost to life and liberty.

[The earliest version of this article misstated the conditions of the control group. They were equally locked down with those who participated in the study. The difference between the two concerned testing frequency and the isolation response. This does not affect this article’s conclusion; indeed it strengthens it: even under extreme measures, the virus spread, and more so with the extra measure intended to control the virus. Nearly all infections were without symptoms.]

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is available for speaking and interviews via his email.  Tw | FB | LinkedIn

Featured image is from AIER

This question could have both positive and negative implications. It is positive, on the one hand, if taken in the context of security and protection as in a situation where one is in a particularly unfamiliar place at an unholy hour where s/he feels uneasy and worried. Police presence is usually what we have in mind (not necessarily in places like the Philippines where ordinary people fear the police and feel uncomfortable when and where there are policemen milling around), at least in the context of a civilized European city. Are we being watched by police authorities ready to protect us in troubled times, i.e., when disturbance or disorder presents the possibility of a clear and present danger, so to speak?

On the other hand, the question could take a negative undertone in the context of a police state where the same police authorities are being used by the dictatorial leadership of a country to closely watch and monitor the activities of people, particularly those suspected to be involved in clandestine undertakings with the intent to topple the powers-that-be. In this circumstance, the police and the armed forces as well are given extrajudicial powers to implement draconian measures and execute tyrannical orders issued by the despotic leadership. This is basically a condition in a country where there is curtailment of the citizens’ freedom to congregate and ventilate in public their opinions critical of the failures of government to deliver and fulfill its mandate for the welfare and benefit of the nation.

In less economically developed – or to put it in a more sociologically technical parlance, developing – countries, this ambiance takes the semblance of legitimacy through the imposition of martial rule whose conditions are appropriated from the nation’s constitution itself. In so many instances, victims of police and military intimidation, persecution, and brutality are ordinary and innocent people initially set up by an all-encompassing state surveillance network and later unjustly indicted through the unilateral decision orchestrated within a judicial system that absolutely functions at the behest of its authoritarian overlords.

It is in this negative aspect of “being watched” – or to put it in a more politically accurate term, surveillance – that makes the question “Are we being watched?” worth considering. Nevertheless, a deeper question that spontaneously arises from its affirmation, i.e., if we really believe that we are watched, is, “Why are we being watched?” This question doesn’t, however, apply across the board since it is not accurate to assume the universality of the issue presented by the first question. In other words, we affirm that we are being watched if and only if we are subjects of particular interest for those who have realized and decided afterward that we are worth watching for whatever serious and compelling reason(s) they have.

The art and practice of surveillance have already reached their apex with the leaps and bounds achieved in the “third wave civilization” (with apologies to Alvin Toffler) also known as the Information Age. Tracking lairs of criminal elements has already become a no-sweat operation. However, on a more disturbing side of the coin, even the shrouded activities and conspiratorial schemes of undercover agents of powerful countries operating outside of their territorial jurisdictions are very efficient and effective in tracking down government enemies through the information superhighway.

Though not exactly in a totalitarian political milieu, this situation is now a reality in the present dispensation known as the “Age of Information”. The condition may not be as harsh as the tyrannical ambiance in Orwell’s fiction but in our time, the constant flow of information via online monitoring even on the most guarded secrets of an individual person’s daily conduct of life may be accessed through the most sophisticated instruments and devices electronically connected/linked to computers and hand-held equipment we use and without which life doesn’t seem liveable to many of us on a daily basis. In other words, we denizens of the post-modern world are generally in one way or another being subjected to constant surveillance by the powers that be both in global and domestic landscapes. There may not be commensurate punishment yet at this point in time for every misdeed and misconduct people do but the fast-evolving information technology we have had in the post-modern reality could sooner or later be utilized by despotic and authoritarian regimes as a concrete tool to effect oppressive and onerous measures against their own citizens. If actual oppression is conceived as a real possibility in 1984 by sowing widespread terror even with all the technological limitations in the plot’s context, could such possibility be more highly conceivable in the present post-modern era with all the sophisticated technological devices the age of cyberspace has at its beck and call? [“Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World?” by Prof. Ruel F. Pepa]

Yet, more than what we may associate with intimidation, harassment, and oppression in the political context, we could, at this point, advance the general notion that surveillance of subjects of interest in whatever conceivable context we could think of is fundamentally effected for manipulative purposes and more sophisticatedly for exploitative intentions. It has almost become an effortless endeavor for these manipulators and exploiters to watch the movements and activities of people of interest through well-formulated machinations utilizing the seemingly unlimited power of the Internet with all the available software applications and tracking devices that unceasingly evolve in the boundless realm of the cyberspace.

This entire scenario triggers the question, “Who among us are being watched?” In other words, who among us are the subjects of interest that have drawn the attention of these manipulators and exploiters? The truth is, there are millions of us who are wired to the inexhaustible reaches of the cyberworld’s information superhighway. We have left traceable “footprints” of habits, predispositions, liabilities, proclivities, enchantments, desires, hopes and wishes, among others which are all recorded and thus detectable within and through the universal archive of a “global village” (with apologies to Marshall McLuhan) accessed online via the World Wide Web. In the most trivial consideration, a lot of us have already exposed online our vulnerabilities and weaknesses. At this point, we get into a cycle and return to the original question,

“Are we being watched?” and of course, the re-affirmation that yes, we who have been wired are definitely being watched.

But the crucial issue is, are we being watched for our safety and protection, or are we within the amplitude of a landscape ruled and overseen by the mighty controllers of the world order for the safety and protection of their very own jealously guarded global interest?

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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.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

According to the findings of the human sciences of anthropology, sociology and psychology, human beings have a healthy mind and natural powers of judgement by nature. This common sense works empirically, i.e. it makes concrete judgements based on everyday life experience and observation. Man is also autonomous. Autonomy is the state and attitude to life of self-determination, independence and self-administration. Philosophically, it is the ability to see oneself as a being of freedom and to act from this freedom. Equipped with these special abilities, however, man always hands over to another person the power to decide on his life and his future.

In the democracies of the Western world, for example, corrupt politicians are elected to high government offices and are regarded as respectable authorities. With this attribution, politicians immediately associate claims to power, create a relationship of superiority and subordination and enforce the instructions of their clients – the global “power elite” – on the citizens. In doing so, they pursue policies at the expense of the working population that enable a nefarious “billionaire clique” to steal together so many billions of dollars that they can buy almost anyone: from corrupt politicians to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Many adults react to these politicians like children or like primitive man reacted: in the form of a “magical belief in authority”: uncritical and clouded by moods, feelings and promises of happiness. And that has consequences: The belief in authority inevitably leads to a sense of belonging to authority, which usually triggers the reflex of absolute spiritual obedience and paralysis of the mind.

Hand over power to no one! To no other human being, but also to no supernatural being. After all, we are embedded in the community of conspecifics on whose support and solidarity we could build. However, the majority of adult humans cling to an imaginary supernatural power and try to influence it favourably. Is this an expression of human helplessness and lack of self-confidence?

Not only is the intelligence of full-minded adults intimidated and degraded, but also their will and self-confidence. In many cases this leads to fatalism, feelings of guilt, depression and the inability to connect with fellow citizens. For this reason, all possible motivations of the deplored human reaction patterns must be explored – in particular authoritarian and religious education at home and school and the influence of society.

All those involved in the education of children and young people should do their utmost to avoid using authoritarian education methods to make the adolescent generation “obedient” and “compliant” on its way into adult life. Nor should they burden them with the mind-numbing “ballast” of religion. Only in this way can the young people, as free thinking, courageous and compassionate citizens, one day steer the world in a different direction.

Fostering and strengthening community feelings rather than violence and greed for power

Human nature

It is an incontrovertible insight of scientific psychology that man is a naturally social being, oriented towards the community of his fellow human beings and endowed with a rational faculty, with a natural inclination towards the good, the knowledge of truth and community life. This characteristic helps him to better recognise the laws of nature or what is right in nature. “Natural law” says that there is something that is right by nature. It differs from the so-called “positive right” established by man in that man is entitled to it simply because he is human.

Since it is not created by any ruler or majority decision of any kind, it is pre-state law. This means that the laws of a state must be measured critically against natural law. Knowing what is right by nature makes it possible to confront totalitarian ideologies and dictatorships from a firm human standpoint and to feel a sense of outrage against injustice and inhumanity. (1)

People also always strive for a better life. The desire for peace and freedom is at the forefront. All people want to be free and live in peace, without war and without violence. But the reality is different. As long as people remain silent, we have democracy. As long as they remain silent, pay taxes and join the military at the right time, we have democracy. But this democracy is nothing more than a “silent dictatorship”.

The clandestine “transformation” of the “silent” into the “open” dictatorship

Not only the events of the past 120 years, with two World Wars and countless other wars, but also the events surrounding the corona pandemic declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in early 2020 have given us a thorough lesson in the historical significance of power and violence. In the following months, the “transformation” of the form of government of democracy or “silent dictatorship” into the form of “open dictatorship” was initiated in countless countries on behalf and for the benefit of the global “billionaire and power elite”.

The fear of the supposedly highly infectious virus led to many people being paralysed, public life in several states being shut down, at the same time fundamental civil liberties were “honed” and the military was also brought into readiness. It seemed as if “time had gone out of joint” (Shakespeare). (2) However, some alert contemporaries suspected even then that something was “rotten in the state of Denmark”. But there was no public social discourse about the narratives of the ruling class. Dissenters are either not listened to at all or discredited by the media and society.

The “hidden agenda” of the so-called elite

But gradually it became clear what sinister plans the self-appointed “elite” was pursuing: For example, all citizens of the world are to be vaccinated and, in addition, controlled by implanted nano-chips. This “mass protection vaccination” may well lead to a population decline. Two of these “world citizens” who have been pursuing such plans for a long time are former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the wealthy US entrepreneur William “Bill” Henry Gates III. (3) On 1 April 2020 the “Washington Post” published an article by Gates to this effect. (4)

But Kissinger and Gates are not the only elite figureheads. All the others also command and use a whole range of controlling, disease-causing or even deadly “tools” for their diabolical plans: One of them is a technology for mind control, the “mind control technology”. These include microwaves, artificial intelligence, quantum computers, robotics, 5 G and 6 G, nanotechnology, identification chips and much more. It is also worth mentioning the philosophical line of thought they favour, “transhumanism”, one of the most dangerous ideas in the world. Transhumanism seeks to expand the limits of human possibilities intellectually, physically or psychologically by using technological processes.

“(They) don’t rob banks, they become bank executives.”

If one sifts through the biographies of the “elite” in politics, business, the military and also in science and art, it reads in places like pure “psychopathology”, the doctrine of pathological changes in the life of the soul. The Canadian criminal psychologist Robert D. Hare lists a total of 20 criteria for this in his Psychopathology Checklist (PCL-R). (5) People with this personality disorder are not only overrepresented among criminals and in prisons, but also in leading positions. But with one difference, the founder of psychopathology research said: “(They) do not rob a bank, they become bank directors.” (6)

The call for “social distancing” also has hidden aims

“Social Distancing” is not proven to be an effective protection and is highly controversial among medical and psychological experts because the relationship with conspecifics is as important to us humans as the air we breathe. The restriction of social contacts is therefore an attack on human nature and leads to serious consequential damage for young and old.

We must also be concerned about school children and young people. Due to the increasing digitalisation of the entire education system and the lack of relationships with teachers and classmates through homeschooling, socially disadvantaged children are deprived of educational opportunities and stand out due to hyperactivity, emotional problems and behavioural disorders. The isolation also leads to isolation of the young people. Despite countless virtual contacts with their peers, a large number of them live alone in their own “Facebook world”, where internet addiction is on the rise. This development has been consciously driven forward for years. Because the isolated young person, isolated from his peers, whose family and community roots are cut off, can be better controlled, manipulated and instrumentalised for violent excesses and wars. (7)

Fomenting irrational fears as a means of discipline and domination

When citizens get their fears and panic under control, they see through the lies of the rulers and their diabolical plans. This is why people’s natural fears of illness and death are constantly being fuelled by the mass media. This leads to a “flooding of reality by the imaginary” (Klaus-Jürgen Bruder), to a “high level of aggressive emotionality” and a “return of the block-keeper mentality and denunciation”. (8)

Fear and anxiety are part of human life. But when unscrupulous despots – whether medieval popes, modern dictators or supposed “philanthropists” – deliberately fuel this everyday fear from the outside, they want to satisfy their greed for power and discipline and dominate peoples. In doing so they are doing the work of the devil and not the work of God (F. J. Strauß). Most people react to this diabolical “game” of the ruling class with a reflex of obedience.

The human reflex of absolute obedience

Large parts of the population are like confused and paralysed because of the “hysterisation of the pandemic fear” (K.-J. Brother). Very quickly they declare themselves willing to accept the drastic and questionable restrictions of basic rights guaranteed by the state without contradiction as necessary and without alternative –  such as the fundamental right of personal freedom and the right to physical integrity. (9)

If one looks at the worldwide horror scenario and the shock paralysis of the citizens, one is reminded of Naomi Klein’s bestseller “The Shock Strategy”. In it, she demonstrates that neo-liberal governments have single-mindedly exploited the confusion and paralysis of the people after political and economic crises or natural disasters to quickly crack the capitalist economic system in its purest form. It was a “shock treatment” before the population had the strength to resist again. This geopolitical operation of the “global elite” with its diabolical agenda is a crime against humanity.

The pitiful and sinister role of the “Journaille” (press rabble)

The mass media could make an important contribution to educating and encouraging people, as they are committed under international agreements to providing truthful information to citizens and to peace. But the opposite is the case. In 1883, John Swinton, the former veteran of the New York Press Corps, gave a speech to fellow journalists on the occasion of his retirement. This honest and sharp reckoning with his own guild is highly topical and does not only concern America:

“There is no such thing as an independent press in America, (…) You are all slaves. You know it and I know it. Not one of you dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know in advance that it would never appear in print. (…) The journalist’s business in New York is to twist the truth, to lie bluntly, to pervert, to revile, to grovel at the feet of mammon, and to sell his own country and people for his daily bread, or, which is the same thing, for his salary. (…) We are tools and servants of rich men backstage. We are jumping jacks. They pull the strings and we dance. Our time, our skills, our life, our possibilities are all the property of other people. We are intellectual prostitutes.” (10)

From “Great Reset” to the “Great Transformation”

On 3 June 2020, the World Economic Forum WEF in Geneva announced a “unique twin summit” in Davos as a consequence of the “global health crisis” for 2021. The theme is to be “The Great Reset”. The WEF defines the “Great Reset” as “a commitment to jointly and urgently build the foundations of our economic and social system for a fairer, more sustainable and resilient future”. (11) Klaus Schwab, founder and Chairman of the World Economic Forum, writes:

“We can bring a better world out of this crisis, (…). To achieve a better outcome (than the 1930s Depression, R.H.), the world must act together and quickly to renew all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to technology, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘major reset’ of capitalism”. (12)

Despite many promises of salvation made by the Kabbalistic World Economic Forum and the predatory International Monetary Fund IMF, it is not to be expected that there will be a de-globalisation and a turning away from inhuman neo-liberalism. The ruling “elite” will use the meeting in Davos to further advance the global control of citizens by destroying nation states.

The announcement of a “Great Reset” is now complemented by the call for a “Great Transformation”, a shift of power in the global political and economic sector that goes hand in hand with the pandemic. What is meant is a “great transformation” of the global industrial society towards a society of sustainability. (13) This demand must be considered together with the “UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development” and its 17 sustainable development goals. According to this, a “One World Government” is planned under the UN umbrella – and, since China’s totalitarian regime serves as a model, a socialist “One World Government”.

What to do? A mid-term review

“Have the courage to use your own intellect!” (Sapere aude!)

The worldwide exceptional situation requires us to be wise, to distinguish between truth and lie and to act accordingly. But it is not only the “simple” people who are failing in their resistance against the emerging totalitarianism and fascism. The academic circles are also failing to live up to their responsibility. Immanuel Kant defined “Enlightenment” (image below) in 1784 as follows:

“Enlightenment is man’s exit from his self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s intellect without the guidance of another.” (14)

According to Kant, human immaturity is self-inflicted when it is not a lack of understanding that is the reason, but the fear of using one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Kant coined the motto of the Enlightenment: “Have the courage to use your own intellect!” Enlightenment is thus the maxim to think for oneself at all times.

According to Kant, one reason for immaturity is laziness and cowardice. Being underage is comfortable and independent thinking is a “grumpy business”. In this way it becomes easy for others, says Kant, to become “guardians” of these underage people. These guardians would also do everything possible to ensure that the underage people would not only find the step to maturity arduous, but also dangerous.

Reducing greed for power and violence by fostering and strengthening community feelings

Since politics is being prepared in people’s minds and hearts and people tomorrow will act as they think today, a priority task for the future will be to educate our fellow citizens: The purpose of enlightenment efforts is to purify human consciousness from individual and collective prejudices.

More important than the Enlightenment, however, is education. Deep psychological insight has made clear the immense importance of education. We know today that man is the product of his education to such an extent that one can hope to educate people through better, i.e. psychological, methods of education who will be immune to the entanglements of the power madness.

Thus, pedagogy at home and at school must renounce the authoritarian principle and the use of violence. Educators must adapt to the child’s spiritual life with true understanding, respect the child’s personality and turn to him or her in a friendly manner. Such an education will produce a type of person who has no “subject mentality” and will therefore no longer be a docile tool for those in power in our world.

In today’s violent culture, however, the path of the individual inevitably comes under the influence of the desire for power and domination. All models and ideals under which the child of our culture grows up are coloured by the will to power. The illusion of violence takes possession of the soul of the individual at a time when he or she has neither conscious insight nor a developed sense of justice. Our task for the future is therefore above all to nurture and strengthen community feelings.

Common sense instead of belief in authority and magic worldview

Religious and authoritarian education – and the reflex of absolute spiritual obedience

A vivid example of the psychological problem of absolute obedience is provided by the autobiographical notes of Rudolf Höß, the former commander of Auschwitz. In his childhood, Höß underwent an upbringing based on strictly religious and military principles and therefore reacted as an adult with unrestricted obedience, a “cadaver obedience”. (15)

Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, wrote an illuminating text in the middle of the 16th century, to which the German word “Kadavergehorsam” is derived. In the version published by the Congregation of the Order in 1558 it reads:

“We should be aware that each one of those who live in obedience must be guided and directed by Divine Providence through the Superior, as if he were a dead body that can be taken anywhere and treated in any way, or like an old man’s staff that serves wherever and for whatever purpose he wishes to use it.” (16)

Common sense versus magic worldview

In the following critical thoughts about religion and its effect on human feeling, thinking and acting, the author draws on the science of psychology. A further basis are the works of the French enlightener and encyclopaedist Baron Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and other critics of religion. Holbach’s religion-critical book “System of nature or of the limits of the physical and moral world” was published in 1770 under fictitious authorship and caused a scandalous stir. (17) A short excerpt from the author’s foreword gives an idea of this:

“Man is unhappy only because he misjudges nature. His mind is so polluted by prejudice that one might think he was condemned to error forever: it is so firmly bound up with the veil of opinion that has been spread over him since childhood that it can only be removed with the greatest difficulty. A dangerous ferment has been added to all his knowledge, making it necessarily wavering, unclear and false; to his misfortune he wanted to cross the boundaries of his sphere and tried to rise above the visible world; (…).” (18)

Two years after the publication of “System of Nature”, the religion-critical book “Common Sense” appeared. To escape persecution by the “holy inquisition”, Holbach published his thoughts under the name of the already deceased free-thinking priest Jean Meslier. (19) 1878 a German translation was published. Orthography, punctuation and sentence order are adopted unchanged in the following quotations. Already in the introduction Holbach writes:

“It is a wasted effort to want to heal people from their vices, if one does not begin with the healing of their prejudices. One must show them the truth so that they may know their most expensive interests and the true motives which lead them to virtue and their true happiness. (…) Let us tell people to be righteous, charitable, moderate and sociable, not because their gods demand it, but because one must seek to please one’s neighbours; let us tell them to abstain from sin and vice, not because one is punished in another world, but because evil punishes itself already in this life. (…).” (20)

Religion versus science

The term “religion” encompasses a multitude of different world views, the basis of which is the respective belief in certain supernatural, supernatural or extrasensory powers. The teachings of a religion about the sacred and transcendental are based on the belief in communications of certain mediators. They are not provable in the sense of the theory of science. Sceptics and critics of religion, on the other hand, seek only controllable knowledge through rational explanations.

For example, there is the question of the doubling of human existence in body and soul and the corresponding doubling of nature into a this world and a hereafter. These “doublings” are an “original sin” of religion. Common sense assumes the unity of body and soul. Therefore man does not have to strive for a reunification beyond earthly life. There are also no double truths, one historical and one religious.

In contrast to the worldview and science based on causality, religion is a magical worldview. Religious belief places a magical illusory world next to reason and knowledge, to which scientific analysis does not have to come too close. Religions consider themselves to be something above all else, something that cannot – and should not – be the subject of empirical-rationalist investigation. They are of the opinion that science is not at all capable of grasping the field of religion, which is of divine origin, in its totality. Of course, it remains the inalienable right of religious man to draw revelations of the highest religious truths from the words of the Bible. But it is also the unconditional duty of the researcher to infer historical truths only from absolutely perfect testimonies.

The religious willingness to believe is supported to a large extent by the more or less great suggestibility of almost all people. “Suggestibility” is a personality trait that expresses the extent of “receptivity” to suggestions. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions or ideas are taken over from outside which do not correspond to reality and which are supposed to influence the person mentally and psychologically in a manipulative way. Suggestibility in children is very high, which is why young people are particularly susceptible to manipulative influence. In addition, children can tend to confuse suggested information with what they have experienced. (21)

Through religious suggestion not only the intelligence is intimidated, but also the will and the self-confidence, because apostasy and leaving the church has been considered a grave sin since apostolic times and as infidelity and Judas’ deed. The healthy person, who is not mentally or psychologically manipulated, only expresses judgements after he has checked them against experience and recognised them as not contrary to reason.

The influence of society on people’s religious attitudes

Man is not only a natural being, but also a socialised being. This means that his so-called metaphysical need to believe in a supernatural being is also influenced and directed by social factors: by class factors, especially economic factors. Religion will therefore continue to exist as long as material and thus spiritual and mental need exists.

Every form of society has at all times its specific religious-philosophical-ethical ideologies. It is the thought structures of the respective ruling class that serve to spiritually legitimise their rule – ultimately their political and economic power over the minds of the people. This power is founded on the ideological concept of “authority”. And this in turn is supported by the idea of the “absolute”, which eludes any possibility of control through experience. In the sense of the ruling class, the highest power of such an ideology is “God” – as “unrecognisable”, “ultimate” cause and ethical legislator.

According to Karl Marx the metaphysical need of man is only a protest against the misery of this world. He came to the conclusion that man could not change until the structure of society had changed. As long as not everyone could live in this world with dignity and without fear, there would be a belief in a better hereafter, in a balancing justice. (22)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, was also a critic of religion. He taught that religious ideas were so effective because they were illusions, arising from very old, fierce human desires: the desire for a just world order, for freedom from want, and the desire for eternity of personal existence.

The intimidation of reason and reason begins in childhood

Man is born neither religious nor believing in God. The mentally healthy child, however, is born into a society where delusional ideas and illusions predominate. As soon as the little child shows the first emotional impulses and learns to speak, it is “taken into care” by society, i.e. by its parents and the church. It is made clear to him that his nature must not develop freely with regard to his feeling for nature and his world view.

If the consciousness of the “I” then forms in the 3rd year of life, God and the devil of the religion concerned already intervene and teach the child not to trust in itself, but to let itself be led and dominated by supernatural powers and to pray fervently so as not to fall prey to their revenge. The child gets to know the fear of demons. The “virtues” of submissiveness, obedience and humility are imprinted. The belief in demons taught to the child finds its crystallisation point in the ideas of devil and hell.

Fear generates emotional reactions in the child which are directed against the human being: it is afraid of the human being. The young person grows up and as an adult is not able to cooperate and live together. One uses the years of man’s strongest suggestibility to inoculate him with mystical ideas, to make him immune to the use of reason in religious and ideological matters and to bind him to a certain religious institution. The child must not be allowed to develop naturally and without force. This puts very strong and paralysing pressure on the child’s souls.

Outlook

The church’s religious doctrine presupposes the world view of primitive man. This prerequisite is no longer given by modern science. We find the “divine”, the ideal in nature, in the lawful, no longer in the mystical. We must no longer allow ourselves to be distracted by wonderful fables from a vague transcendent and must work for the real here and now. From the very beginning, we must impart to young people in education values that correspond to our present day and that are still valid in adulthood.

The school has the task of putting morality on an earthly basis. The pupil must be shown that there is a high level of ethics even without beliefs and that it has existed in various countries for thousands of years. It must be shown to him that the justification of ethical teachings from an inner drive and the social coexistence of people is at least as understandable and compelling as the religious justification.

We should help the young person to express his or her own being without being restricted by a denomination. This person will generally also be moral, because since he lives in harmony with himself, he also lives in harmony with his environment. And also vice versa: whoever lives in harmony with his environment is usually also balanced himself and lives according to the ethical “commandments”.

The school also has to strengthen the young people’s own strength and self-confidence and distract them from their own beloved salvation of soul to the salvation of the general public, to the necessity of helpfulness, to an ideal which no longer sees the highest moral strength in the religious but in the social idea, in the creation of a “paradise” of humanity on earth.

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Notes 

(1) Messner, J. (1984, 7th unchanged edition). Natural law. Handbook of Social Ethics, State Ethics and Business Ethics. Berlin; http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26728; https://www.globalresearch.ca/preserve-human-dignity/5709617

(2) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26681; https://www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-new-world-order-something-rotten-state-denmark/5706464

(3) https://deutsch.rt.com/international/100535-henry-kissinger-zur-corona-krise/

(4) https://www.welt.de/newsticker/dpa_nt/infoline_nt/wissenschaft_nt/article206943381/Bill-Gates-Massenproduktion-von-Corona-Impfung-vorbereiten.html

(5) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Hare

(6) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathie; http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26915

(7) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26868; 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/social-distancing-lonely-isolated-youngsters-easy-prey-global-rat-catchers/5716281

(8) https://deutsch.rt.com/gesellschaft/107528-auswirkungen-massnahen-gegen-corona-pandemie/; http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26792; 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/diabolic-game-fear-instrument-domination/5712556

(9) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26737; 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/psychological-remarks-authority-obedience/5710555

(10) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_#Die_Rede_im_Twilight_Club_1883

(11) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26851; 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/davos-reset-2021-agenda-world-economic-forum/5715508

(12) http://www.weforum.org, under “Now is the time for a ‘great reset'”.

(13) https://vera-lengsfeld.de/2020/10/05/es-geht-nicht-um-die-pandemie-es-geht-um-die-grosse-transformation/; https://www.globalresearch.ca/imf-wef-great-lockdown-great-transformation/5721090

(14) De.wikipedia.org, keyword “Immanuel Kant”; http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=26713;

https://www.globalresearch.ca/psychological-philosophical-remarks-present-world-situation-sapere-aude-dare-wise/578603 

(15) Broszat, M. (eds.) (199414). Commander at Auschwitz. Autobiographical notes of Rudolf Höß. Munich. In the following I refer to the article published on 22.04.2015 in NRhZ Online No. 507 “Psyche of Commander Rudolf Höß” and take over essential passages from it

(16) https://de.wikipedia.org./wiki/Kadavergehorsam

(17) d’Holbach, P.-H. T. (1978). System of nature or of the laws of the physical and moral world. Frankfurt am Main, p. 2

(18) loc. cit., pp. 11ff.

(19) d’Holbach, P.-H. T. (1976). The common sense of the parish priest Meslier. Critical thoughts on religion and its impact on cultural development. Zurich

(20) I.c.f., p. 4ff.

(21) https://de.wikipedia.org./wiki/Suggestibilität

(22) De.wikipedia.org, keyword “The German ideology” 

 

BBC recently reported some shocking statistics regarding UK health, but which will perhaps come as no surprise to those critics who warned that far-reaching national lockdowns would cause other unseen adverse effects:

Compared with normal years, there have been more deaths at home from a number of major causes, including cancers and respiratory diseases, during the last six months.

The latest analysis published by Britain’s Office for National Statistics found that more than 26,000 “extra” deaths occurred in private homes this year, while simultaneously hospital deaths have been lower than usual.

“More men than normal are dying at home from heart disease in England and Wales, and more women are dying from dementia and Alzheimer’s, figures show,” the report says.

The figures had been issued just ahead of European officials in Germany, France, and Italy contemplating ‘severe’ extended measures that could last as long as four to five months, as Germany is now said to be mulling.

The BBC report further cited Alzheimer’s charity groups as lamenting the “heartbreaking” and devastating hidden adverse impact of both stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures, particularly on elderly men.

Deaths attributable to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease at home are on a major upward trajectory while being down in hospitals, strongly suggesting that more people with life-threatening but treatable diseases are simply avoiding professional medical services for fear of COVID-19 or possibly on fear of violating social distancing measures or travel bans.

The report found that hospital deaths that were dementia-related were down by 40% in England and 25% in Wales.

The UK Office for National Statistics further found that heart disease is wreaking havoc among men at a moment all eyes are on the coronavirus surge:

Between March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve Covid-19.

Of these, an extra 1,705 men died from heart disease at home in England – 25% more than normal.

In Wales there was a similar rise in men dying from heart disease at home, of 22.7%.

And again simultaneously deaths in hospitals from such significant conditions not related to coronavirus are noticeably down.

England’s current lockdown measures in place since the start this month through December 2nd include the following:

• Restaurants, pubs and bars will close, except for takeaways and deliveries.
• All leisure and entertainment venues and most non-essential stores will shut.
• The public will be asked to work from home if possible and domestic travel, except for essential purposes, will be frowned upon.
• Schools, universities and colleges will remain open, along with the construction and manufacturing sector.
• Different households will be banned from mixing inside homes.
• People will only be able to leave home for a few reasons including exercise.
• Courts and Parliament will remain open.
• Religious services will also be stopped.
• International travel, apart from for business purposes, must also be put on hold.
• English Premier League matches will continue to be played.

The measures were put in place despite the ONS figures having been available since mid and late October, and showed soaring non-COVID deaths going back to April and May, which was at the height of the UK epidemic.

Despite the hard data showing the rapid rise in potentially treatable diseases that led to non-COVID deaths, leaders in Europe on the whole seem committed to reimposing blanket coronavirus restrictions and lockdowns, which currently includes shuttering pubs, restaurants and night venues, but in most places has stopped short of closing down schools.

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Pakistan released a detailed dossier during a press conference on Saturday  making the case that India is a state sponsor of terrorism whose intelligence services have weaponized this phenomenon as part of the proxy war that they’re fighting with respect to the UNSC-recognized international Kashmir dispute and against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), with it now being the responsibility of the international community to investigate these scandalous claims in order to decide whether India deserves to be sanctioned by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and other related bodies for its rogue behavior.

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Fifteen Asia-Pacific economies formed the world’s largest free trade bloc on Sunday, a China-backed deal that excludes the United States, which had left a rival Asia-Pacific grouping under President Donald Trump.

The signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) at a regional summit in Hanoi, is a further blow to the group pushed by former U.S. president Barack Obama, which his successor Trump exited in 2017.

Amid questions over Washington’s engagement in Asia, RCEP may cement China’s position more firmly as an economic partner with Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea, putting the world’s second-biggest economy in a better position to shape the region’s trade rules.

The United States is absent from both RCEP and the successor to the Obama-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), leaving the world’s biggest economy out of two trade groups that span the fastest-growing region on earth.

By contrast, RCEP could help Beijing cut its dependence on overseas markets and technology, a shift accelerated by a deepening rift with Washington, said Iris Pang, ING chief economist for Greater China.

RCEP groups the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It aims in coming years to progressively lower tariffs across many areas.

The deal was signed on the sidelines of an online ASEAN summit held as Asian leaders address tensions in the South China Sea and tackle plans for a post-pandemic economic recovery in a region where U.S.-China rivalry has been rising.

RCEP will account for 30% of the global economy, 30% of the global population and reach 2.2 billion consumers, Vietnam said.

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The Vote Fraud is all over America, it leaps out in huge quantities and the NY Times denies the obvious. The Fraud is Overwhelming. It is so massive it is suffocating.

Here is the reported arrest of Biden campaign official Dallas Jones and two Texas Democrat officials for “orchestrating a ballot harvesting scheme.” See this, this and this.

I can’t confirm whether the Texas Democrat officials are arrested or accused.

Here is a partial description of the vote fraud in Texas, which, although extensive, was not enough to steal the state for Biden:

Even conservative states run by Republicans have not been immune to Democrat fraud. In Texas, for example, Harris County, home to left-leaning Houston, appears to be the epicenter of most of the fraud. Raymond Stewart, a poll watcher and retired police officer, submitted a sworn affidavit to the district attorney about a Houston precinct judge — identified in news reports as a Democrat — and election staff who unlawfully used a “large stack of Texas driver’s licenses” to allow people to vote illegally at a “drive-through voting window.”

“Staff would come inside from the drive-through voting booth and scan a driver’s license from someone outside and get a ticket and return outside,” Stewart said. “But sometimes a staff member would search through the stack of driver’s license on the table, then scan it, receive a ticket and also go outside to the drive-through booth. As a Police Officer, I quickly became suspicious that they were committing a crime by having the unattended D.L.’s just sitting on the table and that possible voting crimes were being committed using these forms of ID.”

The problems in Texas appear to go very deep. The state political director for Joe Biden’s campaign, Dallas Jones, has been accused in affidavits filed at the Texas Supreme Court of operating a massive, illegal ballot-harvesting scheme involving as many as 700,000 ballots. The affidavits making the accusations, filed by a former FBI agent and retired police officer, allege that Jones was also ordering those ballots to be filled out in the names of homeless, dead, and elderly people. National File broke the story.

“This scheme involves voter fraud on a massive scale,” explained retired Houston Police Department Captain Mark Aguirre in his sworn statement. Using interviews, documents, and other information, Aguirre publicly identified Jones, Texas State Senator Borris Miles, political consultant Gerald Womack, and Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis. “This entire operation is being run by the elite politicians of the Democrat Party in Houston/Harris County,” the retired lawman explained, adding that he had video evidence as well.

Project Veritas also released video footage from San Antonio suggesting electoral fraud there, with somebody “helping” an elderly citizen to change her votes from Republican to Democrat. “What’s shown in the video is shocking and should alarm all Texans who care about election integrity,” Texas Attorney General Paxton said in a statement. “We are aggressively investigating the serious allegations and potential crimes that Project Veritas’s documentary audio and video recordings shed light on today.”  See this. 

Sidney Powell in a Fox News interview says the evidence of fraud is overwhelming and is so extensive that it overturns the entire election.  She says she has signed affidavits  from a software designer who attests that the software was designed for stealing elections.  She says it was used to switch millions of votes. See this.

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