This piece is being written as voters are going to the polls on election day in the United States. While it has been useful to consider how things might change, possibly for the worse, one must also recognize that much of what happens in the U.S. and in its far-flung empire operates by virtue of its own internal dynamics and rules, something that is often referred to as the “Deep State” or perhaps more accurately as the Establishment.
Witness for example the occasional possibly sincere but unsuccessful White House attempts over the past four years to withdraw or reduce the numbers of U.S. troops embroiled in various armed conflicts worldwide. All of those initiatives have been frustrated or redirected in one way or another and it is not simply a question of bungling by a politically insensitive Donald Trump versus the result that might have been obtained by a more experienced and responsible Democrat. What drives the empire’s engine is essentially bipartisan, even in its own way, apolitical, existing as it does as a form of leaderless shadow government that functions as a community-of-interest rather than a bureaucracy. It is inclusive and reflective of the real centers of power in the country, namely the national security state and Wall Street.
In a recent article Pepe Escobar dispels any expectation that a kinder, gentler foreign policy might emerge from the election. He describes with some alarm how victory by Biden will mean that the national security “Blob” team that wrecked Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya while also assassinating Americans overseas under President Barack Obama will be back. He cites former CIA presidential briefer Ray McGovern who persuasively describes the “Blob” as the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex). One might well add the Federal Reserve Bank to that list.
So, the engine keeps chugging on, driven my its own self-interests and completely oblivious to what is going on around it. The irony is that the crisis in confidence that simultaneously is besetting the United States in part reflects a very real, largely self-inflicted decline in America’s place in the world due to insistence that it maintain global hegemony. It comes at a time when the empire is entering into a phase of increasing irrelevancy which many of the key players involved are either unable or unwilling to recognize, no matter what their political affiliation might be. That means that the United States is locked into a pattern of behavior that it is incapable of changing. It is a nation that has become addicted to war for no good reason, and that addiction has brought neither security nor prosperity.
The signs are everywhere. The costs of empire continue to rise while real benefits to be derived from it are elusive. The United States government spends far more on a bloated defense budget than it can afford, adding to an unsustainable national debt that currently exceeds $27 trillion, which is 128% of the country’s entire gross domestic product. The debt will likely increase dramatically if there are any more coronavirus stimulus packages. The nation is becoming hollowed out as a result.
America’s “allies” have inevitably rightly become increasingly disengaged from Washington, reluctant to comply with Washington’s directions and demands, while the developing transition from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is proceeding and will have catastrophic consequences. When the U.S. Treasury stops being able to print money at will, there will be national insolvency.
In terms of the United States’ interaction with the world, a country that not so long ago was widely respected is now regarded as the principal source of international instability, disliked everywhere but Israel, another rogue nation. And the internal damage inside the U.S. to core values and expectations is also evident, to include increasingly dysfunctional schools that focus on political correctness rather than education, crumbling infrastructure, a broken health care system, and a dying industrial and manufacturing base. Unique among all developed countries, life expectancy among working class Americans is declining.
At the root of it all is what Yale professor Paul Kennedy once described as “imperial overstretch,” which means projection of power in support of global commitments that are not essential to national well-being and bankrupting oneself in the process. The reality is that unless an “imperial” acquisition is done purely for exploitative reasons, as Belgium did in the Congo, having an empire operates at a considerable loss. Napoleon “overstretched” when he invaded Russia and both Russia and Austria-Hungary collapsed as a result of the First World War because the stress of external conflict made their obligations far exceed their resources. Great Britain’s Empire likewise became expendable after World War Two when the costs of maintaining outposts “east of Suez” became much larger than the benefits.
So, there are many good reasons for the United States to retrench and again become a “normal” nation, if that is at all possible, but the fact that no candidate but Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders even suggested that America’s global interventionism might be reconsidered or even reversed is telling. Both were eliminated by the Democratic party establishment. In the case of Gabbard, the executioner was no less than Hillary Clinton. Whoever is the new president, he will inherit the awful conceit that he is the “leader of the free world.” It is past time for a serious discussion of America’s proper place in the world, but that will require completely overturning the country’s Establishment and challenging the “exceptionalism” view that the U.S. must dominate as a “force for good.” Unfortunately, there is no politician anywhere on the horizon who is able and willing to take the lead on such an endeavor.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
It was now the turn of other states to vent about, and at, the United States. The 2020 US presidential elections were coming down to a razor sharp wire. The Democrats were starting to feel confident in the swing states. Republicans and the Trump camp were mustering aggressive arguments on potential electoral fraud, lawyering up the heavies. The picture is increasingly ugly, and the view from political outsiders is a mix of concern laced with a touch of bemusement.
Various countries and organisations were weighing in on the US elections in a manner normally reserved for seedier regimes and states in ill repair. The International Crisis Group, in a report published just prior to the election, is all warning and woe.
“The 2020 US presidential election presents risks not seen in recent history. It is conceivable that violence could erupt during voting or protracted ballot counts. Officials should take extra precautions; media and foreign leaders should avoid projecting a winner until the outcome is certain.”
The last line has a fabulously understated tone of irony, given the more than enthusiastic pronouncements previously made by US administrations on which spoiler should be recognised over another in the elections of other countries. Interfering in the elections of other states has been something of a Washington speciality, notably since the nascent days of the Cold War.
The Crisis Group believes that the US is in a terrible mess, a patient politically ill.
“Beyond the implications for any Americans caught up in unrest, the election will be a harbinger of whether its institutions can guide the US safely through a period of socio-political change.”
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe has suggested that President Donald Trump risked causing harm to “public trust in democratic institutions” notably in prematurely claiming victory. Polish ambassador Urszula Gacek, as chief of the US OSCE’s mission, despaired at the rash of lawsuits already dotting the political landscape. Such cases were “changing the rules of the game while the game is still going on.” (For the untutored, this assessment is understandable; but any seasoned observer would have to accept that behind every US election lies an army of lawyers in brief wielding wait.) The body’s 30 observers and 11 election experts took note of “grave concerns” from US election officials that legitimacy was being questioned “due to the incumbent President’s repeated allegations of a fraudulent election process.”
A range of reactions have also been documented – anonymously, naturally – by Time. One “senior western official” was “shocked that Trump rejected a peaceful handover of power.” Another noted concern about impending “chaos”, adding that, “Everyone here is armed.” Diplomatic missions and embassies in Washington were preparing for something akin to an apocalypse. Some diplomats have wondered whether to arm themselves in the event of violent demonstrations engulfing the city.
The view from various US allies has also been one of caution tempered with fear. Over his tenure, Trump has been rather moody about the transatlantic alliance.
“This is a very explosive situation,” warned the German defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. “This is a situation that can lead to a constitutional crisis in the US, as experts are rightly saying. And it is something that must cause us great concern.”
EU foreign affairs minister Josep Borrell was more measured.
“The American people have spoken. While we wait for the election result, the EU remains ready to continue building a strong transatlantic partnership, based on our shared values and history.”
Fans of US imperial power were also melancholy about the election outcome so far. In Britain, it was typically vicarious, a fear that Anglophone democratic standard bearing was in for some punishment.
“My biggest worry,” speculated former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, “is that we forget that the US is the leading democracy in the world, and if we end up with a huge argument about process, and people talking about a stolen election left, right and centre, we are only going to put a smile on the face of people like President Putin and President Xi who will look at their own people and say ‘are you not pleased we have not got this mess?’ and that would be an absolute disaster.”
In his assessment, Hunt espouses the conventional, error filled wisdom about the US being a democracy, when it would be best described as a republic with plutocratic credentials. But myths need nourishment and encouragement.
Thinking in the vein of the indispensable nature of US power, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, former UK ambassador to Washington, was very much of the school that the US had underperformed in turning inward. Trump had not fulfilled the remit given US leaders for generations.
“I fear we will get more of the same or, even worse, an even worse, an even more unpredictable and inconsistent leader than in the first term.” A eunuch presidency in the making.
In Russia, some of the sharper comments could be found. Konstantin Korsachev, chair of the upper house Federation Council committee of foreign affairs, insisted that Russia benefitted “from any certainty in which losers won’t need to resort to [claims of] foreign interference. It’s time for America to return to the politics of sanity, in which case we will always support it.” The path to sanity may be rather more cluttered than Korsachev thinks.
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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]
I heard friends praising Bill Gates philanthropy a while ago; it still surprises me how people respond to billionaires. The wealthy improve their image financing self-serving projects they present as “serving others” but few question their motives or suspect them of hidden agendas. Most take billionaires at face value and forget how they made their fortunes.
Gates is a monopolist who crushed others in the process of building Microsoft. At least, J.D. Rockefeller (the first) made it a bit easier for us, he was blatant enough to call competition a “sin” and built Standard Oil monopoly trying to protect its privileges even from government antitrust legislation, “dissolving” the company while keeping it secretly alive through a hidden network managed by the exactly same nine men who managed it before. Rockefeller was devious but not unique among Robber Barons. Neither is Gates; one in a group with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other monopoly billionaires with their private foundations.
The impact of the Rockefellers funding organizations and projects, in the US and abroad, was immense; the world, their oyster; and their goal, “full spectrum dominance.” Not surprisingly, the Rockefellers worked at extending their power, profits and the use of oil and found, in controlling food through biotechnology, a path to their goals. The very idea of “agribusiness” is theirs; and, conveniently, agribusiness brings together mechanized agriculture (increased oil use), petrochemicals (synthetic herbicides, insecticides, fertilizers) and rent (patents for seeds & animals). The Rockefeller saga for total control is described as a novel by F. William Engdahl in Seeds of Destruction, a must read. The Rockefellers financed the Green Revolution, biotechnology, agribusiness, eugenics (in the US and Germany), had the ear of at least four US presidents, and hand-picked Henry Kissinger -their protégé, to manage their foundation and use food as a weapon -rewarding friends, hurting enemies; first used in Chile against Allende’s government. Bill Gates admires the Rockefellers and joined them in funding the Green Revolution; he now says he wants to “save” Africa with GMOs and we should at least wonder. (1)
New State, Old Hierarchy – a bit of history is good for the soul
Although much of the actual fighting for independence in the colonies that would become the US was done by poor people, enforced hierarchy (in Army and nation) was such as to made everyone know his place and keep it and penalties for breaching, 30-40 lashes. Suppressed conflicts between rich and poor kept re-emerging in a time of huge profits for the rich and hardships for all others. Inflation and speculation led to riots: growing needs made it difficult to accept the privileges and safety of the wealthy. A new class of men had not emerged: the men engineering this war were part of the colonial ruling class and quite concerned with keeping relations of wealth and power. People were together because of the rhetoric, the fight, the camaraderie of military service and some land distribution. The makers of the Constitution worried about popular rebellion against wealth and favored a particular order. James Madison praises it as preventing “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property or for any other improper or wicked project.” Men decided, women were left out. No efforts were made towards equality -between slaves and masters, property holders and people without property, Indian Nations and whites. The Constitution improved after the Bill of Rights, it seemed to turn government into “protector” of people’s liberties. The language was new so it was unclear to most that everyone’s liberty would be in the hands of a government of the rich and powerful. (2)
Independence caused the exodus of 100,000 loyalists, a hole on top of wartime costs and destruction. Some received government contracts during the war, a few were portrayed as financing the war effort, but in truth the war financed them. Still, for most the war was about hardships. Crisis, like the one of 1837, filled the Hudson Valley with unemployed people seeking land. By the summer of 1839 land tenants resolved “to take up the ball of the Revolution and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence of the masses.” Petitions for Anti-Rent resolutions signed by 25,000 tenants were put before the legislature (1845) but the bill was defeated. Voting did not change the system either as government enlarged the number of small landowners but left the basic structure of rich and poor intact. After the Civil War (1865) ordinary people lived in cities full of diseases, hunger, fire, thousands of women working in houses of prostitution. Garbage two feet deep (full of rats) filled the streets. And, while the rich had access to drinking water from a clean river everybody else drank from the Delaware into which 13 million gallons of sewage were dumped daily. The Civil War was lethal, it included artillery shells and bayonet charges, a combination of mechanized war with hand-to hand combat that killed 623,000 and left 471,000 wounded. Still, in the middle of the battles, Lincoln took time to sign into law a number of Acts giving business what they wanted. After the war, workers organized for the eight-hours in St Louis; the Workingmen’s party denounced capital and serfdom calling for the nationalization of railroads, mines and all industry. Black men joined in the fight against Monopoly, but after the railroad strikes were defeated (1877) blacks realized they will not have the promised equality. Working people knew they were defeated by the joining of private capital and government power; the rich managed political life. (2)
Wealth & Inequality – growing and growing
In the American colonies of the 1690s wealth evolved from covert expeditions by merchants (to plunder gold, silks, ivory); by 1763 the richest merchant families owed 40% of their wealth to war, privateering and earlier piracy. After independence (1805-40) shipping, banking and ties to government were key, while real estate (plantations-in the South, commercial-in the North, shipping and merchandise-outshore) became crucial later (1840-60). Later yet, the civil war pushed shipping, merchandise and real estate to the side bringing forth railroads, iron, coal, oil, and finances. Fortunes became larger: from $10-20 million (1840s) to $200-300 million (1890s). Wealth grew connected to government from the beginning. Alexander Hamilton, in favor of a wealthy elite proposed the early republic to create the Bank of the United States & a project to redeem -at full face value, US debts & certificates and debt instruments of the various states. These bonds, paid to speculators (Morris, Duer, Bingham) who bought them at 1/10th of face value, made them rich. This scheme ended but later on, Jefferson, critical of Hamilton but in favour of a political & wealth elite of rich men of his own (Dem-Republican) worked it with Astor and Hampton I. The new state believed in wealth and loved wealthy men. (3)
Rug to riches is a myth, while few multimillionaires started in poverty most came from middle or upper-class families. Most fortune building was not illicit either, but legally done with much help from courts and government. At times this collaboration was paid, like when Edison promised politicians $1,000 each in return for supportive legislation or when Drew and Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize overprized stock on the Erie Railroad. J.P. Morgan, son of a banker and builder of the House of Morgan, started selling stock for the railroads for high commissions before the war. During the civil war he bought and sold defective rifles at a profit making a bundle, he cared little that his failing rifles will shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. Morgan escaped military service by paying $300 to a substitute fighting on his behalf, so did JD Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, James Mellon. Instead of challenging the rich, government helped them – as when it decided to issue bonds for a value of $260 million and rather than selling them directly gave them to Drexel, Morgan & Company in a contract paying the bankers a $5 million commission. (2)
Inequality grew with the growth of American fortunes. The size of the largest of them jumped from $1 million to $100 billion between 1790 and 2000. The ratio of largest fortune to median grew too, from 4,000:1 to 50,000:1 (1790-1848) and kept increasing until 1982 (60.000:1) and again during the 1990s. The highest ratio of fortune to media was in 1912 -with JD Rockefeller’s fortune (1,250.000:1) then again in 1999 -with Bill Gates’ fortune (1,416.000:1). The high ratio of 1910-40s reflects the Gilded Age -a time of great inequality. The high ratio at the end of the 20th century marks a new Gilded Age of even greater inequality. (3)
By the end of the 20th Century, Miringoff (in Phillips) argued that inequality measurements put English-speaking nations with their greater emphasis on markets and individualism, at the lead among Western nations in term of poverty among people over 65 (US, Australia and Britain are top three), child poverty (US, Britain, Australia, Canada and Ireland are top five) and overall inequality (US, Ireland, Australia, Britain and Canada among the top eight). (3)
Image on the right: Senator John Sherman (Source: Wikiwand)
Concerned about the size of monopolies, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which passed in 1890 (protecting trade & commerce against unlawful restraints, making it illegal to form a combination or conspiracy to restrain trade in interstate or foreign commerce). The Court, however, interpreted Sherman Act (1895) so as to make it harmless and used it against interstate strikes. Years later the Court refused to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies interpreting the Act as barring only “unreasonable” combinations or conspiracies -not the usual ones. The justices of the Supreme Court were not just interpreters of the Law but men with particular interests and backgrounds. (2)
As today, some preached then about the honesty of rich men to the detriment of poor people. Russell Conwell, graduate of Yale Law School and founder of Temple University, was one of those arguing that rich American men were honest while the poor deserved poverty. Philanthropy played a role in making the rich likeable though, improved their image and increased their power. Givers shaped society through money while avoiding taxes; many institutions, such as universities, were funded by them. The first Rockefeller donated to colleges all over the US; Carnegie gave money to colleges and libraries; Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. Giving worked for the rich, made them popular while weakening government and subordinated it to them. It was a win-win tactic then and now: philanthropic giving is a strategic form of taking. (2)
When Giving is Taking – the ownership society
Contributions to federal politics proves that giving works for the wealthy. The money contributed by the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector increased almost as fast as the money channeled to them by federal bail-outs and permissive regulation. Political contributions went from $109 million to $297 million by 2000 (FIRE, collectively the largest giver). Congressional tax-writing committees were FIRE’s target in giving -the House and Senate committee members received $45.7 million in the 2000 cycle. The giving was not for nothing. In 1998 industry executives and lobbyists led by Citigroup Co-CEO Sanford Weill convinced Congress to revoke the Glass-Steagall Act (set to separate banks from insurance companies). The boundary was gone, the door opened for great speculation – leading to the 2008 financial collapse and frenzied winnings. (3)
In terms of return for your giving, billionairesforbushorgore.com, depicted contributions as a “market” and posted this:
“While you may be familiar with stocks and bonds…there’s a new investment arena: legislation…Just check out these results:The Timber Industry spent $8 million in campaign contributions to preserve the logging road subsidy, worth $458 million -return on investment: 5,725%. Glaxo Wellcome invested $1.2 million in campaign contributions to get a 19-month patent extension on Zantac worth $1 billion: net return 83,333%. The Tobacco Industry spent $30 million in contributions for a tax break worth $50 billion in campaign contributions: return on investment 167,000%. For a paltry $5 million in campaign contributions, the Broadcasting Industry was able to secure free digital TV licenses, a give-away of public property worth $70 billion -an incredible 1,400,000% return on their investment.” (3)
In the 20th & 21st centuries rich people giving went to institutions and projects but also to think-tanks. The ultra-rich went to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington. Some right-wing rich preferred the Heritage Foundation. Libertarians believing in free market donated to the Cato Institute. Still, all shaped politics and moved agendas forward. Heritage was part of the “war of ideas” fueling Reagan policies and the Gingrich Congress. AEI working better for rich from the knowledge economy still favors low taxing to capital gains (crucial if you make money from investments) and opposes stronger regulation to Wall Street even after the 2008 collapse. (4)
Callahan classifies givers for us into “super-citizens” shaping communities by pledging money (which government matches) improving their neighbourhoods (adding value to their real estate) often in sync with their own business plans. Poor communities receive nothing but neglect. The “disrupters,” are impatient, over-confidant, not accountable, like Michael Bloomberg, ex-Mayor of NYC, pushing for a third term and gaining track from his Carnegie Grants program but ending it once he got his way. The “advocates” are effective, like Tim Gill pushing gay marriage -a gay billionaire, working strategies to move his agenda forward. The “networkers” can bring monies from many rich donors to focus on making the change they want to see. Giving to the poor is a thing of the past. The rich get into public life to implement their plans and give to their foundations. Their voices are amplified by money in a society where a growing number feel unheard and powerless. (4)
Already in 1999 Miringoff said (in Phillips) that inequality measurements put the English-speaking nations with their greater emphasis on individualism and markets, leading in percentage of poverty among people over 65 (US, Australia and Britain as top three), child poverty (US, Britain, Australia, Canada and Ireland the highest five) and overall inequality (US, Ireland, Australia, Britain and Canada on top eight). (3)
Robber Barons – old and new
Image below: Bill Gates, 16. November 2004 at IT-Forum in Copenhagen. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/Flickr)
The pejorative term, from the 19th century, describes rich men who built fortunes by monopolizing essential industries and using intimidation, violence, corruption, conspiracies and fraud what would mark organized crime today. Among them were J.J. Astor (Fur Trade), James Frisk (Wall Street), Leland Standford (CP Railroad) and J.D. Rockefeller the first (Standard Oil). Monopolies are created and maintained through questionable tactics. J.D. Rockefeller, a bookkeeper, accumulated money as a merchant and went for oil thinking “who controls oil refineries controls the industry” -a true monopolist can be a control freak. Billionaires today build monopolies too -Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and in ways not that different from then. To gain control they deal with competition. A supportive context (rules, laws, regulations, government and infrastructure) helps them. Big Tech would not exist without the Internet (developed with public monies in universities and the military under the name of ARPANET). Global policies (globalization, deregulation, financialization) imposed by US institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization) to the world opened markets for penetration facilitating corporate globalization. And, the resulting massive privatizations of state enterprises and the commons ended in private hands making a few very rich. (1,2,5)
Huge fortunes are made from rent extraction and stock and share speculation. Talking about patents (government-granted monopoly on an invention to an inventor for a limited time) Vandana Shiva points to how corporations look for rent extraction in new areas, privatizing natural processes and the commons. Naturally occurring organisms, like seeds, could be mapped, genetically modified (GMOs) patented and sold for profit. The process is not as “scientific” as they pretend; it involves guessing (cannot be sure the seed received the selected trait) and can create toxicity (not investigated). It is the corporate way of appropriating of what belongs to all of us exploiting it for money. Monsanto tried to supplant natural seeds with GMOs, sold them with Round Up (seeds and poison) to farmers on credit. Many could not pay and killed themselves; 300,000 farmers in India committed suicide because of debts, their lands destroyed by these toxics. GMO seeds are not needed and put soil, water beds, animals, nature and people at risk. Nature gives us seeds for free, evolved by nature for us -rich, diverse, nutritious, no rent attached, no poisons. We can grow seeds safely and keep our soil, water, air, bees, birds, other animals, our children, ourselves HEALTHY. We need to enrich the soil with life not with oil. Only the “poison cartel” (evolved from Nazi Germany in THE war and killing of millions of people) wants to force this on us for profits. (6)
Monsanto could be stopped by the Courts as everybody knows Monsanto did not invent seeds. Before biotechnology, Monsanto produced poisons like agent orange -a defoliant used by the US in Vietnam proven to cause cancer in humans and prohibited. The first Rockefeller, while apparently combatting Nazi economic interest in Latin America, was selling gasoline to German aviation through Standard Oil, Britain itself was being bombed by these planes. The main stockholder of Standard Oil, after the Rockefellers, was IG Farben, a vital part of the German war industry and the parent company of a subsidiary producing the pesticide Zyklon B (cyanide-based) used as a gas in German killing chambers in concentration camps. (1,9)
Big Tech extracts rent also; when people use their platforms – even if the platform is free, data can be mined, collected, sold, a form of rent. Cambridge Analytical used data mined and provided it to the Trump campaign transforming the results of the US election (data was about hatred -of Women, Blacks, Muslims, Immigrants – mined from Facebook users, turned into knowledge what helped Trump win in specific areas of the US). Thus, we pay even if we do not know: we are raw material. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook make money through the Pandemic: we are at home, use platforms more, for buying, paying, getting information, communicating, educational purposes: they profit. (6, 7,)
Billionaires are behind their corporate world and favor an “ownership society,” a form of corporate dictatorship where water, cells, genes, animals, plants, biodiversity are property, and lifeforms have no intrinsic value and are for sale. The anti-life philosophy of those who want to own, control and monopolize Earth’s gifts and human creativity, enclosing our commons and creating scarcity for the many and growth and wealth for the few. People displaced become irrelevant, not having even right to live. (8) Among billionaires Bill Gates is the one doing the work of Monsanto today. Vocal about his admiration for the Rockefellers, he might want to pursue their full spectrum dominance agenda. Gates imposes GMOs resurrecting plants defeated in India (GMO cotton, golden rice) to grow them in Bangladesh and Philippines. There is evidence from the United Nations’ Food Agriculture Organization but Gates persists, take the world’s failed projects and dangerous thinking forward. What if life to him is like his programs (select, copy, cut, paste) and fails to realize that life has complexity, follow the cell organizing processes called autopoiesis and is able to write itself, no need for programs or programing technicians. Gates needs to stop imposing costly, dangerous, criminal technology destroying us and our planet to create new monopolies. One comes to realize that it seems to be more than just about profits anymore, but about arrogance and control. Surrounded by pleasers, billionaires can easily come to believe not only that money is value, but that they are more than who they are and correct at trying, even entitled, to get their way on everything and imposing it on others.
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Notes
William Engdahl (2007) Seeds of Destruction. The hidden agenda of genetic manipulation, Global Research, Centre for Research on Globalization, Canada.
Howard Zinn (2001) A People’s History of the United States (1492 to present), Perennial Classics, New York.
Kevin Phillips (2003) Wealth and Democracy. A political History of the American Rich, Broadway Books, New York.
David Callahan (2017) The Givers: Wealth, Power and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age, AA Knopf, New York.
This article was originally published on Asia Times.
A gaming exercise of the perfect, indigenous color revolution, code-named Blue, was leaked from a major think tank established in the imperial lands that first designed the color revolution concept.
Not all the information disclosed here about the gaming of Blue has been declassified. That may well elicit a harsh response from the Deep State, even as a similar scenario was gamed by an outfit called Transition Integrity Project.
Both scenarios should qualify as predictive programming – with the Deep State preparing the general public, in advance, for exactly how things will play out.
The standard color revolution playbook rules they usually start in the capital city of nation-state X, during an election cycle, with freedom fighting “rebels” enjoying full national and international media support.
Blue concerns a presidential election in the Hegemon. In the gaming exercise, the incumbent president, codenamed Buffon, was painted Red. The challenger, codenamed Corpse, was painted Blue.
Blue – the exercise – went up a notch because, compared to its predecessors, the starting point was not a mere insurgency, but a pandemic. Not any pandemic, but a really serious, bad to the bone global pandemic with an explosive infection fatality rate of less than 1%.
By a fortunate coincidence, the lethal pandemic allowed Blue operators to promote mail-in ballots as the safest, socially distant voting procedure.
That connected with a rash of polls predicting an all but inevitable Blue win in the election – even a Blue Wave.
The premise is simple: take down the economy and deflate a sitting president whose stated mission is to drive a booming economy. In tandem, convince public opinion that actually getting to the polls is a health hazard.
The Blue production committee takes no chances, publicly announcing they would contest any result that contradicts the prepackaged outcome: Blue’s final victory in a quirky, anachronistic, anti-direct democracy body called the “electoral college”.
If Red somehow wins, Blue would wait until every vote is counted and duly litigated to every jurisdiction level. Relying on massive media support and social media marketing propelled to saturation levels, Blue proclaims that “under no scenario” Red would be allowed to declare victory.
Countdown to magic voting
Election Day comes. Vote counting is running smoothly – mail-in count, election day count, up to the minute tallies – but mostly favoring Red, especially in three states always essential for capturing the presidency. Red is also leading in what is characterized as “swing states”.
But then, just as a TV network prematurely calls a supposedly assured Red state for Blue, all vote counting stops before midnight in major urban areas in key swing states under Blue governors, with Red in the lead.
Blue operators stop counting to check whether their scenario towards a Blue victory can roll out without bringing in mail-in ballots. Their preferred mechanism is to manufacture the “will of the people” by keeping up an illusion of fairness.
Yet they can always rely, as Plan B, on urban mail-in ballots on tap, hot and cold, until Blue squeaks by in two particularly key swing states that Red had bagged in a previous election.
That’s what happens. Starting at 2 am, and later into the night, enter a batch of “magic” votes in these two key states. The sudden, vertical upward “adjustment” includes the case of a batch of 130k+ pro-Blue votes cast in a county alongside not a single pro-Red vote – a statistical miracle of Holy Ghost proportions.
Stuffing the ballot box is a typical scam applied in Banana Republic declinations of color revolution. Blue operators use the tried and tested method applied to the gold futures market, when a sudden drop of naked shorts drives down gold price, thus protecting the US dollar.
Blue operators bet the compliant mainstream media/Big Tech alliance will not question that, well, out of the blue, the vote would swing towards Blue in a 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 margin.
They bet no questions will be asked on how a 2% to 5% positive ballot trend in Red’s favor in a few states turned into a 0.5% to 1.4% trend in favor of Blue by around 4am.
And that this discrepancy happens in two swing states almost simultaneously.
And that some precincts turn more presidential votes than they have registered voters.
And that in swing states, the number of extra mysterious votes for Blue far exceeds votes cast for the Senate candidates in these states, when the record shows that down ticket totals are traditionally close.
And that turnout in one of these states would be 89.25%.
The day after Election Day there are vague explanations that one of the possible vote-dumps was just a “clerical error”, while in another disputed state there is no justification for accepting ballots with no postmark.
Blue operators relax because the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance squashes each and every complaint as “conspiracy theories”.
The Red counter-revolution
The two presidential candidates do not exactly help their own cases.
Codename Corpse, in a Freudian slip, had revealed his party had set up the most extensive and “diverse” fraud scheme ever.
Not only Corpse is about to be investigated for a shady computer-related scheme. He is a stage 2 dementia patient with a rapidly unraveling profile – kept barely functional by drugs, which can’t prevent his mind slowly shutting down.
Codename Buffoon, true to his instincts, goes pre-emptive, declaring the whole election a fraud but without offering a smoking gun. He is duly debunked by the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance for spreading “false claims”.
All this is happening as a wily, old, bitter operator not only had declared that the only admissible scenario was a Blue victory; she had already positioned herself for a top security job.
Blue also games that Red would immediately embark on a single-minded path ahead: regiment an army of lawyers demanding access to every registration roll to scrub, review and verify each and every mail-in ballot, a process of de facto forensic analysis.
Yet Blue cannot foresee how many fake ballots will be unveiled during recounts.
As Corpse is set to declare victory, Buffon eyes the long game, set to take the whole thing all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Red machine had already gamed it – as it was fully aware of how operation Blue would be played.
The Red counter-revolution does carry the potential of strategically checkmating Blue.
It is a three-pronged attack – with Red using the Judiciary Committee, the Senate and the Attorney General, all under the authority of codename Buffoon until Inauguration Day. The end game after a vicious legal battle is to overthrow Blue.
Red’s top operators have the option of setting up a Senate commission, or a Special Counsel, at the request of the Judiciary Committee, to be appointed by the Department of Justice to investigate Corpse.
In the meantime, two electoral college votes, one-month apart, are required to certify the presidential winner.
These votes will happen in the middle of one and perhaps two investigations focused on Corpse. Any state represented at the electoral college may object to approve an investigated Corpse; in this case it’s illegal for that state to allow its electors to certify the state’s presidential results.
Corpse may even be impeached by his own party, under the 25th Ammendment, due to his irreversible mental decline.
The resulting chaos would have to be resolved by the Red-leaning Supreme Court. Not exactly the outcome favored by Blue.
The House always wins
The heart of the matter is that this think tank gaming transcends both Red and Blue. It’s all about the Deep State’s end game.
There’s nothing like a massive psy ops embedded in a WWE-themed theater under the sign of Divide and Rule to pit mob vs. mob, with half of the mob rebelling against what it perceives as an illegitimate government. The 0.00001% comfortably surveys the not only metaphorical carnage from above.
Even as the Deep State, using its Blue minions, would never have allowed codename Buffoon to prevail, again, domestic Divide and Rule might be seen as the least disastrous outcome for the world at large.
A civil war context in theory distracts the Deep State from bombing more Global South latitudes into the dystopian “democracy” charade it is now enacting.
And yet a domestic Empire of Chaos gridlock may well encourage more foreign adventures as a necessary diversion to tie the room together.
And that’s the beauty of the Blue gaming exercise: the House wins, one way or another.
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Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
No matter who sits in the white peoples’ house, we will have to continue to fight for social justice, democracy, and People(s)-Centered Human Rights.
“Our survival depends on seeing this violent, barbarian behemoth for what it is.”
Chaos, violence, legal challenges, voter suppression and party suppression all culminated in the pathetic display of democratic degeneration on Election Day. After two decades of losing wars, plus the economic collapse of 2008, the response to COVID-19, and now the election debacle, if there were any doubts the U.S. is a morally exhausted empire in irreversible decline, they would have been erased with yesterday’s anti-democratic spectacle.
Democratic Party propagandists and “frightened” leftists are desperate. They tell their supporters and the public that the republic will not survive another term of Donald Trump. They point to his despicable, racist descriptions of undocumented migrant workers from Mexico; his characterization of some global South nations; his misogyny; his crude and obvious white supremacy; his authoritarian proclivities; and his pathological dishonesty—among his many character flaws—as reasons why he must be stopped.
However, for those of us who have been historically subjected to the colonial fascism that is the U.S. settler project, the liberal-left argument that the Trump regime represents some fundamental departure from previous administrations that were equally committed to white power and that he is an existential threat (to whom, we are not clear) remains unpersuasive.
As the Biden and Trump drama plays out, we ask from our experiences some simple questions on what might happen when a victor emerges:
Will either candidate really have the ability to restore the millions of jobs lost during the current economic crisis?
Will the illegal subversion of Venezuela and Nicaragua stop, and the blockade of Cuba end?
Will the prison-industrial complex that is housing ten of thousands of the Black and Brown economically redundant be closed?
Will the charges be dropped against Edward Snowden and the extradition demand for Julian Assange end?
Will Gaza continue to be the largest open-air prison on the planet?
Will the U.S. reverse its decision to deploy new intermediate-range missiles that will be equipped with nuclear warheads targeting Russia in Europe and China in the Asia-Pacific?
Will the Saudi and Obama-originated war on Yemen end?
Will the U.S. settler-colonial state really defund the police and the military?
“The liberal-left argument that the Trump regime represents some fundamental departure from previous administrations remains unpersuasive.”
What is this “new fascism” the latte-left talks about? What is this “existential threat”? For most of us, the threat has always been existential. When colonial Nazism that was inspired by the U.S. Jim Crow South was applied in Europe—with its violence and racism—it was only then that it took on a different moral and political characterization.
The racist French government launches a domestic terror campaign against Muslims in the country, while bombing Africans in Africa and overthrowing their governments. The European Union gives a human rights award to a political opposition in Venezuela that burns Black people alive because those Black people are seen as Maduro supporters. Meanwhile, NATO, the military wing of U.S. and European white supremacy, expands into South America to support the Monroe Doctrine that morally justifies U.S. regional domination. But fascism is coming to the U.S., they cry!
For those of us who reside in the colonized spaces of empire, leading with uncritical emotionalism as we confront and attempt to deal with the Trump phenomenon, is a self-indulgent diversion we cannot afford. That is because, for us, the consequences truly are life threatening.
In occupied Palestine, Venezuela, Yemen, the South-side of Chicago, Haiti, the concentration camps for Indigenous peoples called “reservations,” as well as “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana, our survival depends on seeing this violent, barbarian behemoth for what it is. We must have no sentimental delusions about the difference between the governance of either of the two ruling class-dominated parties.
For us, both parties are ongoing criminal enterprises that are committed to one thing and one thing only: Ultimately serving the interests of the capitalist ruling class—by any means necessary!
It is in that commitment that we, the colonized, the excluded, the killable, who experience the murderous sanctions that deny us food and life preserving medicines, the killer cops who slowly snuff out our lives with their knee on our necks, the deadly military attacks that destroy our ancient nations and turn us into refugees, the subversion of our political systems, the theft of our precious resources, and the literal draining of the value of our lives through the super-exploitation of our labor.
“Both parties are ongoing criminal enterprises.”
For us, we ask, what will be the difference if Biden wins? Wasn’t Biden part of the administration that conspired with the Department of Homeland Security and Democratic mayors to repress the Occupy movement once it became clear the movement could not be co-opted?
Didn’t Obama place Assata Shakur as the first woman on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list and increase the bounty on her head? A recent release of FBI documents revealed it was during the Obama-Biden years that the “Black Identity Extremist ” label was created.
The illegal subversion of Venezuela began with Bush, but intensified under Obama. The sanctions slapped on that country—that were expanded under Trump—have resulted in tens of thousands of innocent people dying from lack of medicines. It was the Obama-Biden administration that decided to devote over $1 trillion to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next decade.
Democratic and Republican strategists support the white supremacist NATO structure, the “Pivot to Asia,” and the insane theory being advanced by military strategists, who are wargaming a nuclear “first-strike” strategy against Russia and China that they believe can be successful in destroying those countries’ intercontinental ballistic missiles while the missiles are still in their launchers. That is why the Trump administration pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and has so far failed to renew the START nuclear treaty with Russia, scheduled to end in February 2021.
“It was during the Obama-Biden years that the ‘Black Identity Extremist’ label was created.”
Not being confused by the liberal framework that advances a cartoonish understanding of fascism that Trump’s bombastic theatrics evokes in the public imagination, it is clear the threat of increased authoritarianism, the use of military force, repression, subversion, illegal sanctions, theft, and rogue state gangsterism is on the agenda of both capitalist parties in the U.S. and the Western European colonizer states.
No matter who sits in the white peoples’ house after the election, we will have to continue to fight for social justice, democracy, and People(s)-Centered Human Rights.
It is important to re-state that last sentence because the left in the U.S. is experiencing extreme anxiety with the events around the election. They want and need to have order, stability and good feelings about their nation again. But for those of us from the colonized zones of non-being, anything that creates psychological chaos, disorder, delegitimization, disruption of the settler-colonial state and demoralization of its supporters is of no concern for us.
Unlike the house slave who will fight harder than the Massa to put out the flames in the plantation house, we call to the ancestors to send a strong breeze.
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Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch.He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.
The Turkish military continues to demonstrate its non-involvement in the war with Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. On November 4, the heroic defense ministry of Turkey announced that Azerbaijani forces had shot down one more Armenian Su-25 warplane in the conflict zone. Thus, the claimed number of downed Armenian warplanes has reached seven. The only issue is that Azerbaijan itself did not claim such an incident, when the Turkish defense ministry made its statement. So, it seems that Ankara knows much more than do the Azerbaijani forces themselves, who are allegedly alone in their fight against the mighty Armenian aggressors.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev undertook another Twitter advance announcing the capture of the villages of Mirak and Kavdar in the Jabrayil district, Mashadiismayilli and Shafibayli in the Zangilan district, and Basharat, Garakishilar and Garajalli in the Gubadli district. The Azerbaijani military also reported clashes in the district of Adhere. In the last 48 hours, according to Azerbaijan, Armenian forces suffered multiple casualties and lost over two dozen equipment pieces.
Fortified positions and settlements controlled by Armenian forces in the central and northern parts of Nagorno-Karabakh are regularly being targeted with air and artillery strikes by Azerbaijani forces. The most intense strikes hit the areas of Shusha and the Lachin corridor.
Armenian officials kept apace with their Azerbaijani counterparts and also made several victorious statements. For example, on November 4, Armenian forces allegedly eliminated a large group of Azerbaijani soldiers in an operation code-named “Gyorbagyor.” The troops were amassing south of the town of Shusha, when they were detected by an Armenian drone and were targeted by artillery. Dozens were reportedly injured or killed.
In another development, the Armenians allegedly eliminated an Azerbaijani sabotage group operating on the road between Shusha and Lachin. Despite this statement, as of November 5, the road remains closed to civilian traffic. This means that the situation there is more complicated than Yerevan wants to admit. This highlights the unresolved crisis. If Armenian forces fail to push the Azerbaijani units away from the road and to restore free communication along it, the position of the forces defending Shusha will seriously worsen.
In the coming weeks, Azerbaijani forces supported by Syrian militants and Turkish special forces, who allegedly are not participating in the conflict, will continue attempts to cut off the Shusha-Lachin road, and to capture Martuni and Shushi. The Lachin area itself, due to its close proximity to the state border of Armenia, is the more complicated and protected target. Thus, the focus of clashes will likely remain on the center of Nagorno-Karabakh.
If the Turkish Defense Ministry does not forget to inform Baku about military developments on the ground in a timely manner, Azerbaijan still has a significant chance of developing its initial success in the south of Nagorno-Karabakh and making even more gains before the start of winter, which, given the mountainous terrain, will reduce the intensity of the clashes.
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Previously redacted portions of the Mueller report into supposed Russian interference in the US, released this week, have shown that despite every effort, the Justice Department was unable to concoct evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on the part of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange in relation to their 2016 publications exposing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton.
The revelation is the latest proof of the fraudulent character of the entire “Russiagate” narrative, used not only to smear Assange, but also to justify expanded online censorship and to push for greater US military aggression. It is evidence that the US state had been attempting to manufacture criminal charges against Assange, before an indictment was finalised in late 2017 over WikiLeaks’ completely unrelated 2010 and 2011 publications.
Assange interviewed by CNN in August, 2016. The network had a strap beneath him reading “Political disruption” throughout most of the interview. (Credit: Screenshot CNN online broadcast)
The 13 new pages of the 448-page Mueller report were released on Monday as the result of a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Buzzfeed News.
The Justice Department has sought to block the full release of the report since it was brought down in March, 2019, including through the use of extensive redactions. In September, a US judge ruled that the government had violated the law by withholding sections of the report without legitimate cause, labelling some of the redactions as “self-serving.”
The contents of the new material shows why the Justice Department was so intent on keeping it hidden. The documents disclose that despite a two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with nothing to prove the collusion between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence that had been trumpeted by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and the corporate media.
This is in line with the character of the report as a whole, which was unable to substantiate any of the “Russian interference” in the 2016 US election that the Mueller investigation had been tasked with identifying.
The new pages reveal that one of the focuses of the Mueller investigation was laying the groundwork for criminal charges against Assange and WikiLeaks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
This was premised on the assertion that the internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications and emails of Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, were hacked by the GRU Russian military intelligence agency before being published by WikiLeaks.
In May, it was revealed that CrowdStrike, a cyber security company handpicked by the Democratic Party to examine the DNC servers had been unable to find evidence that documents had ever been exfiltrated from them. In other words, there may not have been any successful hack, Russian or otherwise.
This aligned with Assange’s repeated insistence that Russia was not the source of the material. It lent weight to the claims of WikiLeaks collaborator and former British diplomat, Craig Murray, who has stated that he has personal knowledge of the source of the DNC documents, and that they were provided by “disgruntled insiders.”
Significantly, even though it is based on the discredited Russiagate framework, the newly-released material from the report concluded that there was no basis for laying conspiracy charges against Assange.
“The most fundamental hurdles” to such a prosecution, it stated, “are factual ones.” There was not “admissible evidence” to establish a conspiracy involving Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks and Trump campaign insider Roger Stone.
To justify the fact that all of the resources of the American state were insufficient to manufacture evidence of the theory that it had promoted for years, the Mueller report pathetically claimed that one of the problems was that WikiLeaks’ communications with the GRU were encrypted.
“The lack of visibility into the contents of these communications would hinder the Office’s ability to prove that WikiLeaks was aware of and intended to join the criminal venture comprised of the GRU hackers,” the report stated.
This is truly clutching at straws and desperately attempting to save face. Mueller was left to claim that the only possible evidence of a conspiracy was contained in encrypted messages that he and the intelligence agencies had presumably never seen!
The report concluded that an attempted prosecution would fail. “[S]uccess would also depend upon evidence of WikiLeaks’s and Stone’s knowledge of ongoing or contemplated future computer intrusions—the proof that is currently lacking,” it stated.
The centrality of Stone to the attempts to concoct charges against Assange underscores the frame-up character of the entire operation. After the Mueller report was finalised, Stone was successfully prosecuted. But it was not for involvement in any conspiracy. Rather, Stone was sent to prison for falsely claiming under oath that he had ever had any relationship with WikiLeaks or Assange.
The new documents show that Mueller was intent on establishing the grounds for a prosecution of Assange, with the precise allegations and charges a secondary matter entirely subordinate to the overarching goal of imprisoning the WikiLeaks founder.
Thus the Mueller investigation extraordinarily canvassed the possibility of charging Assange with having made “illegal campaign contributions” to Trump. These contributions were not financial, but were the publication of the DNC and Podesta emails.
Mueller was well aware that this would be an attempt to criminalise the publication of true and newsworthy information, concluding that such a prosecution would come up against the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Significantly, the Mueller report also warned that a conspiracy prosecution, even if evidence could be concocted, would confront similar obstacles. Precedent, it noted, had established that “the First Amendment protects a party’s publication of illegally intercepted communications on a matter of public concern, even when the publishing parties knew or had reason to know of the intercepts’ unlawful origin.”
The Russiagate narrative had already been entirely discredited before the release of new information from the Mueller report.
But the material further highlights the flagrant illegality of the US attempt to extradite Assange from Britain, and prosecute him on conspiracy and Espionage Act charges over WikiLeaks 2010–11 publications of the Iraq and Afghan war logs, US diplomatic cables and files from Guantánamo Bay.
All of the First Amendment issues relating to the 2016 publications apply with equal force to the 2010–11 releases. They were obtained by the courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who had lawful access to them as an army intelligence analyst. The documents were published by Assange, who acted as an editor and a journalist exposing evidence of war crimes, human rights abuses and diplomatic intrigues.
That Mueller was seeking to lay the grounds for a criminal prosecution against Assange, on matters completely unrelated to those he has since been charged with, demonstrates the vindictive and political nature of the US Justice Department’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder.
It paints a picture of a US state apparatus, intent on silencing Assange because he exposed their crimes, searching for years to find some basis for bringing legal action against him. Virtually all of the evidence relating to the 2010–11 publications has been known for a decade. The Mueller report suggests, however, the US state may first have been seeking to charge Assange over the 2016 releases. Only as it became clear that this would fail was a December, 2017 indictment filed in relation to the 2010–11 material.
That indictment, which has since been repeatedly superseded, was based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the exact same legislation Mueller unsuccessfully investigated prosecuting Assange under.
The clearly political character of the entire process means that Assange’s extradition to the US would be unlawful. Existing treaty arrangements between Britain and the US explicitly ban extraditions for offences of a political nature.
The latest Mueller material has been overshadowed by the 2020 US election crisis. It has been ignored by almost all of the publications that promoted the fraudulent Russiagate campaign, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The timing, however, is somewhat fitting. For the past four years, the Democrats, in line with their character as a party of Wall Street and the intelligence agencies, have sought to divert all opposition to the Trump administration into right-wing channels, including feverish claims that the president is an agent of Russia.
The current election crisis has underscored the utter bankruptcy of that strategy.
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The misuse of the RT-PCR technique is used as an intentional strategy by some governments, supported by scientific safety councils and by the dominant media, to justify the violation of a large number of constitutional rights, the destruction of the economy with the bankruptcy of entire active sectors of society.
“Caring for each other. Because we are all in this together.” What a blatant hijacking of virtue. I simply can’t see something like that and not speak out. If for no other reason, because I don’t want to become numb and accepting to such brainwashing.
The richest and most powerful country on earth — whether due to ineptitude, choice or some combination of both — has no ability to perform the simple task of counting votes in a minimally efficient or confidence-inspiring manner.
Democratic nominee’s advisers consist of many former Obama-era officials, some who helped craft the Iran nuclear deal, drone strikes programmes and sanctions on Syria and Libya.
The 2020 presidential campaigns have ignored foreign policy more this year than in any election since the turn of the century, but the 2020 election will have significant foreign policy consequences no matter the outcome.
It was not Covid, therefore the news went almost unnoticed: Japan will release over a million tons of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea. The catastrophic incident in Fukushima was triggered by the Tsunami on March 11, 2011.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Wednesday that it seized 27 online domains, claiming the websites were controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The DOJ seized the domains under the guise of enforcing US sanctions.
The late prominent scholar of settler-colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, reminded us repeatedly that it is not an event, it is a structure. While settler-colonialism in many cases has a historical starting point, its original motivation guides its maintenance in the present.
The currently proposed “Reconstruction” of BR-319, which would build a new paved road atop the old dirt roadbed, is certainly among the most consequential decisions facing Brazil today.
We stand in firm support of The American Herald Tribune and Professor Anthony Hall, who has the courage to confront the US corporate media.
The tendency is towards online media censorship in derogation of the Rights to Free Speech. Google and Facebook are collaborating with the FBI in this endeavor.
Our writers are from all over the world expressing themselves freely on a variety of issues as they see fit.
I have been Editor in Chief of AHT since its inception. AHT draws contributions from journalists of many backgrounds throughout the world.
We do have some contributors from Iran who express themselves as they wish. I have attended New Horizon conferences in Iran and most recently in Beirut a year ago. In this milieu I met many well-known journalists from throughout Europe and North America some of whom have contributed to AHT.
Editorially AHT is pro-peace and the contributors are overwhelmingly opposed to the intrigues of the anti-Iranian war hawks intent on invading the Islamic Republic.
Here is an excerpt of an earlier article I wrote to respond to the fake news being published by CNN and the Washington Post concerning the Intelligence agencies disinformation on American Herald Tribune.
Who wins and who loses in the fake news sweepstakes?
AHT is a news site that I helped get off the ground beginning in 2015 when I agreed to become Editor in Chief of the small but exceptionally lively Internet publication. In wrongfully accusing AHT, CNN and Washington Post are adding to the scale of a wide constituency that is coming to the conclusion that these media operations are serial manufacturers of fake news
In doing research into the antics of the two media ventures I came across the story of a well-publicized move by a member of the Tennessee Legislature to have CNN and Washington Post legally reprimanded. Representative Micah Van Huss formulated a resolution asserting “the State of Tennessee recognizes CNN and Washington Post as fake news and part of the media wing of the Democratic Party.” The text of Resolution 779 continues,
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we condemn them [CNN and Washington Post] for denigrating our citizens and implying they are weak-minded followers instead of people exercising their rights that our veterans paid for with their blood.
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Antony Hall is Editor in Chief of The American Herald Tribune and Professor Emeritus in Liberal Education and Globalization Studies, University of Lethbridge, Alberta.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Wednesday that it seized 27 online domains, claiming the websites were controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The DOJ seized the domains under the guise of enforcing US sanctions against Iran and the IRGC.
Wednesday’s announcement followed the seizure of 92 domains in October that the DOJ also claimed were operated by Iran. The DOJ purports that the domains were being used to spread “Iranian propaganda” and “disinformation.”
The DOJ and the FBI work with US tech companies to make these seizures. “Thanks to our ongoing collaboration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the FBI was able to disrupt this Iranian propaganda campaign and we will continue to pursue any attempts by foreign actors to spread disinformation in our country,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Craig D. Fair said in a statement.
Among the domains seized on Wednesday were four news websites the DOJ seized under the guise of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The claim against the websites is that they targeted US audiences without disclosing ties to a foreign government.
“Here, the four domains purported to be independent news outlets, but they were actually operated by or on behalf of the IRGC to target the United States with pro-Iranian propaganda in an attempt to covertly influence the American people to change United States policy concerning Iran and the Middle East,” the DOJ said.
One of the news sites taken down was the American Herald Tribune (AHT), a website whose editor in chief, Anthony Hall, is based in Canada. It’s not clear how the US government decided that AHT or the other websites are affiliated with Iran.
Investigative journalist Gareth Porter wrote about social media censorship AHT has faced. Porter’s report says the FBI encouraged Facebook, Instagram, and Google to remove or restrict ads on AHT. In 2018, AHT’s Facebook page was deleted, and the outlets account on Facebook-run Instagram was also removed.
In January of this year, CNN published a story that claimed AHT was founded in Iran. CNN quoted an unnamed official from the cyber-security firm FireEye. According to Porter, FireEye boasts that it has contracts with “nearly every department in the United States government.”
The official told CNN that FireEye had “assessed” with “moderate confidence” that the AHT’s website was founded in Iran and was “part of a larger influence operation.” The term “moderate confidence” comes from US intelligence agencies and means there is plenty of room for doubt.
AHT published authors with dissenting views, who often criticized US foreign policy towards Iran. If the DOJ uses shaky assessments like the one from FireEye to take these sites down, it sets a dangerous precedent for independent media outlets.
Sejam quais forem as consequências geopolíticas e geoeconômicas da espetacular distopia norte-americana, a parceria estratégica Rússia – China, em seus específicos registros levemente diferentes, já votaram e decidiram o próprio caminho adiante.
Aqui (ing.) e aqui (port.) o modo como expus o coração do plano quinquenal da China para 2021-2025 aprovado no Pleno em Pequim, semana passada.
Aqui (ing.) a interpretação publicada de um think-tank chinês padrão.
E Aqui, contexto especialmente pertinente de explicação de o quanto a cinofobia rampante é impotente, quando encontra pela frente um modelo de governança made in China extremamente eficiente. Esse estudo mostra que os complexos axiomas civilizacionais e da história e cultura da China simplesmente não cabem na visão de mundo hegemônica ocidental e cristã.
O ‘segredo’ nem tão secreto do plano quinquenal da China para 2021- 2025 – que Global Timesdescreveu como a “confiança na autossuficiência econômica” – está em basear em avanços tecnológicos, o crescente domínio geopolítico buscado pelo estado-civilização.
Crucial, para que se compreenda o processo, é que a China põe-se numa trilha “autoconduzida” – que depende pouco, ou nada, de impulso exterior. Está proposto até um claro horizonte “pragmático”: 2035, fixado como marco intermédio, entre hoje e 2049. Até 2035, a China deve estar no mesmo patamar que os EUA, ou talvez mesmo já os tenha ultrapassado, em poder geopolítico, geoeconômico e techno.
Essa é a razão de fundo que explica que a liderança chinesa estude tão ativamente a convergência de dois campos: da física quântica e das ciências da informação – convergência considerada a espinha dorsal do movimento “Made in China” rumo à 4 a Revolução Industrial.
O plano quinquenal expõe bem claramente que os dois vetores chaves são Inteligência Artificial e Robótica – nos quais a pesquisa chinesa já está bastante avançada. Inovações nesses campos gerarão uma matriz de aplicações em praticamente todas as áreas, de transportes a medicina, para nem falar de armamentos.
Huawei é essencial nesse processo em curso, e não é simples gigante em matéria de “dados”, mas também como fornecedor de hardware, que cria plataformas e a infraestrutura física para que muitas empresas desenvolvam as respectivas versões de cidades inteligentes, cidades seguras – ou de medicamentos.
O Big Capital – do Oriente e do Ocidente – está muito finamente sintonizado no que tenha a ver com o rumo que tudo isso vai tomando, processo que também implica os principais entroncamentos das Novas Rotas da Seda. Sintonizado com o roteiro da “terra de oportunidades” do século 21, o Big Capital cada vez mais estará tomando o rumo do Leste da Ásia, China e desses entroncamentos da Novas Rotas da Seda.
Essa nova matriz geoeconômica repousará, sobretudo, no que brote da estratégia “Made in China 2025”. Uma escolha a ser oferecida com clareza à maior parte do planeta: jogo de “ganha-ganha” ou jogo de “soma zero”.
Fracassos do neoliberalismo
Tendo já podido observar o violento confronto, agravado pela pandemia do Covid-19, entre o paradigma neoliberal e “socialismo com características chinesas”, o Sul Global está apenas começando a extrair as conclusões necessárias.
Não há tsunami de propaganda ocidental que consiga convencer a opinião pública e seus ‘especialistas de TV’ quanto às ‘vantagens’ de algo que, com efeito, não passa de devastador, avassalador colapso ideológico.
O abjeto fracasso do neoliberalismo na luta contra o vírus Covid-19 é manifesto, evidente em todo o Ocidente.
A distopia que são as eleições nos EUA apenas exibem, consumado, o abjeto fracasso da “democracia” liberal ocidental: que espécie de “escolha” estaria dada aos eleitores, entre Trump e Biden?
E acontece no mesmo momento em que o eternamente e incansavelmente demonizado e ultraeficiente “Partido Comunista Chinês” expõe, claríssimo, o mapa do caminho para os próximos cinco anos. Washington não consegue planejar nem o dia de amanhã!
O movimento inicial de Trump, sugerido por Henry Kissinger antes da posse em janeiro de 2017, seria – e que outra ideia teriam?! – Dividir para Governar. Que Trump seduzisse a Rússia, contra a China…
Era, como ainda é, anátema absoluto para o Estado Profundo e seus cachorrinhos Democratas amestrados. Daí a subsequente infindável demonização de Trump – com “Russiagate” à frente e acima de todos os crimes imagináveis. Então, Trump decidiu unilateralmente sancionar e demonizar também a China.
Se os democratas ficarem com a presidência, o cenário passa a ser de demonização ainda mais ensandecida contra a Rússia, mesmo que persista em todos os fronts a Guerra Híbrida mais histérica – uigures Tibete, Hong Kong, Mar do Sul da China.
Numa de suas falas crucialmente importantes sobre o papel do Capital, Putin destacou a necessidade de “abandonar a prática de consumir sem restrições e sem limites – o superconsumo –, e de favorecer a suficiência judiciosa e razoável, quando não se vive só para o dia de hoje, mas também se pensa no amanhã.
E, fazendo eco à continuada experimentação chinesa, acrescentou que, de fato, nenhuma regra econômica é eterna e imutável: “Nenhum modelo é puro ou rígido, nem na economia de mercado nem a economia controlada que se tem hoje. Simplesmente, temos de determinar o nível de envolvimento do estado, na economia. E o que usamos como fator básico para essa decisão? A necessidade e a utilidade para dado fim. Temos de evitar usar qualquer modelo e, até aqui, temos conseguido;.”
Pragmático, Putin definiu como “uma forma de arte”, o modo como regular o papel do estado.
Ele exemplificou: “manter a inflação um pouquinho elevada facilitará o pagamento dos empréstimos tomados por consumidores e empresas russas. Economicamente é mais saudável que as políticas deflacionárias levadas a efeito pelas sociedades ocidentais.”
As políticas pragmáticas de Putin tiveram consequências diretas – programas sociais abrangentes e grandes projetos nacionais – enquanto isso, o ocidente ignora que a Rússia pode estar no caminho para superar a Alemanha como a quinta maior economia mundial.
O resultado é que a combinação da parceria estratégica entre Rússia e China oferece, em especial para o Sul Global, duas abordagens radicalmente diversas em oposição ao axioma padrão neoliberal do ocidente. Ocorre que isso é anátema para o conjunto do establishment dos Estados Unidos.
Então, não importa qual o resultado da “escolha” entre Trump e Biden, o choque entre a potência hegemônica e os Dois Soberanos está destinado se tornar cada vez mais incandescente.
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Artigo original em inglês : Bidding farewell to America’s failed democracy. Neither Trump nor Biden can stop a China-Russian partnership that is blazing new state-led paths to progress and prosperity, Asia Times, le 3 novembre 2020.
“The control of information is something the elite always do, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.” –Tom Clancy
“Information is not knowledge.” –Albert Einstein
“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
“And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggests that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.” —Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture
“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.” –Bruce Coville
The era of the Internet has dramatically inaugurated, fervently boosted, and vigorously sustained the massive flow of information in a staggering proportion of global magnitude. There is a saying in reference to the ancient Roman world that “all roads lead to Rome”. In our present world, however, which Alvin Toffler dubs as the “Third-Wave Civilization,” also known as the “Information Age,” post-modern realities, in general, are discovered both wittingly and unwittingly along the expansive cyberspace superhighway whose breadth and length are of infinite span. [Cf. Toffler’s trilogy, Future Shock, The Third Wave,and Powershift] To be “wired” in the post-modern parlance is to be in the cockpit of a virtual spaceship capable of traveling in the “cyber-cosmos” and exploring on one´s fingertips every corner, nook and crevice of realms unimaginable or only fantastically conceivable some few decades ago. For the more sparing and focused on her/his particular field of personal interest, professional concentration, or career discipline, the Internet is a versatile “super reference” that gives automatic access to most needed information relevant and imminent here and now.
Yet, an unrestrained and “unprogrammed” exploration of cyber-information could lead us from one information source branching out to a myriad of other related sources to another source that does the same, ad infinitum ad nauseam. All taken seriously, this deluge of information accumulation is known as “information overload”. In many instances, it unnecessarily complicates and even muddles up the specific processing of a certain amount of information specifically needed in a neat and ordered presentation of a particular concern. As a general attribute, the enormity of the cyber-cosmos is like a boundless “super-mind” devoid of personal disposition and hence utterly deficient of any moral fiber without actually being immoral. For the stupid Christian fundamentalist, the “cyber-super-mind” could be the “antichrist” and could also be the “impersonal god” for the pantheistic intellectual who obviously can’t get rid even of the metaphorical concept of “god” off her/his cultural apparatus.
In situations of information overload where cases of “garbage-in-garbage-out” are a common thing, sorting out more important and appropriate pieces for specific purposes is one of necessity. A deluge of seemingly interrelated/interconnected data could lead us from one analytic moment to another without seriously taking into consideration the need to check source credibility. With the generally subjective tendency of people to be on one side of an issue rather than on the other, information exploration and gathering could be more of a quantitative rather than a qualitative exercise. In this connection, we are commonly inclined to feed and reinforce our opinion and argument with one-sided information to the utter neglect of the necessary points vital in the opposite argument. We call it “cherry-picking”. In this particular condition, unilateral information—which could at worst be coming from spurious and hence unreliable sources—appropriated to beef up a stand on a certain issue will and can never lead to a meaningful and truthful understanding of reality.
In stressing the importance of exploring and accessing trustworthy and valuable information (which of course emanates from credible sources) for worthwhile purposes contributory to a reasonable, factual, accurate, and consistent understanding of certain states of affairs obtaining in the social, political, economic, and cultural scenes, a substantial amount of “philosophical” sensitivity and prudence is of the essence. By and large, information flow should therefore be controlled to basically protect us and more expediently, to protect us from ourselves. The unimpeded course of information surge in the present era may both be beneficial and detrimental. The “metropolitan soul” engulfed in the “Internet bubble” and is constantly overwhelmed by a seemingly endless information bombardment does not act on her/his “predicament” not because s/he is paralyzed and helpless but simply because s/he is literally hooked into the system which is fundamentally endowed with the “spiritual power” to weaken one’s resistance to disengage her/himself from that very system.
In the present dispensation, virtual reality is henceforth not only an aspect but an interwoven fiber of paramount reality. There is no turning back for the ladder used by the precursors of this technological ascent is nowhere to be found below. With a significant amount of external prodding, push, and shove, we have joined the uphill procession that leads to exploratory treks in the cyber-cosmos. And here we are now, all denizens, nay netizens, of a “brave new world” (with apologies to Aldous Huxley) whose tide of information dares us to envision new possibilities and create fresh realities hitherto undreamt of.
But can we really control information? How? Is the process inclusive of both the incoming and the outgoing? Is the issue of information control a legal or a moral matter?
The flow of information on the virtual superhighway of the contemporary cyber-age is perennial and seemingly uncontrollable. Activate the operating system, access the Internet and the torrent of information is set in motion. But the entire situation is actually a matter of one’s individual predisposition. In other words, it is the person’s decision and her/his decision alone—her/his strength of will—that bestows power to control information flow, both incoming and outgoing. Control in this sense doesn’t only mean censure and disposal but also selection and appropriation. It is us and us alone who are individually responsible to control information. We need meaningful and trustworthy information. Hence, selection as a matter of control should lead us to credible sources and not to spurious and questionable ones just to satisfy our subjective bias. In doing so, we significantly close the gap between information and knowledge as the two do not necessarily mean the same. Strictly, knowledge as a special concern of epistemology in classical philosophy, on the one hand, is necessarily true for its modified Platonic conception as “true justified belief” remains standing, as it has always been. On the other hand, information can be anything, regardless of whether it is true or otherwise. This is a crucial concern that should be seriously taken: The age of information is not necessarily an age of knowledge. Responsible netizens committed to the ascendancy of knowledge over mere information are also conscientious “controllers” of information useful, relevant, and thus consequential to what is true, good, and beautiful.
This being the case, nobody could be construed as a truly accountable information controller except someone who is committed to knowledge dissemination. This however may not really be a tough matter for anybody who really wants the truth has equal access on the same cyber-domain to verify the information s/he has been fed with. It is therefore within the sphere of our power to control the flow of information coming to us and likewise from our end, the information we issue out for others to access. Such information control is deemed to protect us.
With all the above issues taken up, information control is really a moral rather than a legal concern. It is us and us alone who are morally responsible for controlling information flow. No state or government entity has legal jurisdiction over information control at the public level. As private individual entities, we have the sole control of incoming and outgoing information within our individual orbits. Classified high-security information strictly for the official perusal of government agencies/institutions are jealously controlled within their specific jurisdictions and ranks. These are matters the public is deemed not to know but that is only from the viewpoint of government. There is however crucial information concocted by the state government yet are not released to the public despite the fact that the latter has to be informed about them.
As has been clarified earlier, information control is a moral rather than a legal issue. Its morality encompasses not only individual persons but also public institutions/organizations, government or otherwise, with significant responsibility towards their specific subjects at the least and to humanity in general at the most. It is therefore one thing to talk of information control on the side of private and individual persons and another on the side of institutions or organizations accountable to the public. For such institutions or organizations to control information as to hide the truth from the public to whom they are accountable is an obvious act of perfidy that openly desecrates the inviolability of public trust.
In the same vein, concealing crucial information about a government’s foreign policy to destroy certain geographical areas inhabited by human beings through the exportation of wars and other forms of destabilization schemes is an indubitably immoral case of information control. Corollary to this immorality, however, is the morality of some conscientious individuals who came out and revealed to the world the nefarious activities taken up and despicable plans of action yet to be taken up against other countries by powerful governments these individuals had previously been officially connected with before their exposés.
Viewed from different angles, information control—both incoming and outgoing—is one critically serious issue of ethical scale aimed to protect us and other people as well.
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Prof. Ruel F. Pepais a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.
First published in May 2020, updated June 14, 2020
What Prospects for trade relations with China, in the wake of the 2020 US November Presidential Election?
Introduction
The US has been threatening China with trade sanctions for several years. At the outset of the Trump administration in January 2017, Washington not only envisaged punitive trade measures, it also called for “an investigation into China’s trade practices” focussing on alleged violations of U.S. intellectual property rights.
This initiative was then followed by renewed threats to “impose steep tariffs on Chinese imports [into the US], rescind licenses for Chinese companies to do business in the United States….” And then in September of 2019 “The Trump administration enacted tariffs on roughly $112 billion worth of Chinese imports,”
An understanding of the geopolitical and strategic dimensions is crucial. The conflict with China is not limited to bilateral trade. President Trump’s political rhetoric directed against China has become increasingly aggressive. Washington’s unspoken objective is to derail China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which consists in developing trade relations with a large number of partner countries in major regions of the World.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) predicated on Eurasian economic integration is viewed by Washington as an encroachment on US hegemonic interests.
“Over time the BRI could threaten the very foundations of Washington’s post-WWII hegemony”,(Thomas P. Cavanna The Diplomat)
US hegemony is also coupled with US militarization of strategic waterways in the East and South China seas combined with numerous US military bases in locations within proximity of China.
In a bitter irony, the rhetorical gush of threats by president Donald Trump, was accompanied by seemingly “constructive” bilateral trade negotiations leading up to the signing of the First Phase of a detailed and comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between the United States and China in mid-January 2020 at the very outset of the coronavirus pandemic in China.
Two weeks after the signing of the Agreement, the Trump administration announced the curtailment of air travel with China, which was accompanied by the disruption of transportation and trade relations with China, with repercussions on China’s export manufacturing sector.
Trump’s decision on January 31, 2020 was taken immediately following the announcement by the WHO Director General of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) (January 30, 2020). In many regards, this was an act of “economic warfare” against China.
And then, following Trump’s January 31st decision to curtail air travel and transportation to China, a campaign was launched in Western countries against China as well against ethnic Chinese. The Economist reported that “The coronavirus spreads racism against and among ethnic Chinese”
“Britain’s Chinese community faces racism over coronavirus outbreak”
“Chinese communities overseas are increasingly facing racist abuse and discrimination amid the coronavirus outbreak. Some ethnic Chinese people living in the UK say they experienced growing hostility because of the deadly virus that originated in China.”
And this phenomenon happened all over the U.S.
China Town, San Fransisco
US-China Trade. America’s Dependence on “Made in China”
While China is the object of tariffs, trade restrictions, not to mention veiled threats, what the Trump administration fails to comprehend is that the United States is heavily dependent on commodity imports from China.
The unspoken truth is that America is an import led economy with a weak industrial and manufacturing base, heavily dependent on imports from the PRC. Despite America’s financial dominance and the powers of the dollar, there are serious failures in the structure of America’s “Real Economy”: i.e marked by the closing down of factories as well as failures at the level of both physical and social infrastructure.
This Import-led economic structure has a long history. It was the result of US policies formulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s to delocate a large part of its industrial base to “low cost” locations in China including the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) (created in 1979) and the “development zones” or “special trading areas” (established in 14 designated coastal cities in 1984).
A large share of US manufacturing was relocated, followed by a later stage of relocation of several high technology production sectors.
High Technology
The US no longer has a hegemony in high technology production and intellectual property. In the course of the last decade, China has consolidated its position. China is now leading in several areas of high tech development and production which are dependent on Chinese owned intellectual property.
This inevitably had repercussions on California’s Silicone Valley, the once prosperous cradle of high tech industries and research labs.
A contradictory relationship has evolved in which the US is not only dependent on “Made in China” imported manufactured goods, China has surpassed the US in several areas of high technology including the telecom industry and 5G:
All the cases form a big picture in which Washington and its allies are suppressing Chinese telecom companies. Huawei is the world’s largest telecom equipment maker and second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. It also produces high-quality chips. It is pathetic that such a comprehensive high-tech enterprise [Hwawei] is accused and undermined. The US is realizing its political purposes by judicial means. (Global Times, January 17, 2019)
“China’s technology sector has grown so rapidly in the last two decades that it is pushing the United States out of its long-held position at the top of the digital food chain. Advancements by companies like Huawei, WeChat, Baidu, Tencent and others are helping the Chinese economy grow at an unprecedented rate and influencing the global economy. China and the U.S. are battling to be the leader in 5G technology, a fight it seems that Chinese tech companies are winning.
According to author Rebecca Fanning “The U.S. needs a policy that can address China’s rise in technology”. It would appear that the “policy” contemplated by Washington precludes the notion of US “acceptance” of China’s lead in several high technology sectors.
“China has top-down government directives that are propelling the country forward in all kinds of technology sectors. The “Made in China 2025” [plan] has designated time periods where China is going to lead globally in certain sectors, and the U.S. really does not have anything that’s the equivalent to that.” (Wharton School Interview, emphasis added)
The “Made in China 2025” 中国制造2025 first launched by Beijing in May 2015, essentially consists in supporting the high technology sectors while also upgrading China’s industrial base in manufacturing. The Made in China 2025 agenda also “highlights green manufacturing, energy saving and new energy vehicles, high-end equipment manufacturing, including new information technology and robotics…” (Global Times, May 20, 2015)
Made in China: Retail Trade in the US
Imagine what would happen if president Trump decided from one day to the next to significantly curtail America’s “Made in China” imports. It would be absolutely devastating, disrupting the consumer economy, an economic and financial chaos.
A large share of goods displayed in America’s shopping malls, including major brands is “Made in China”.
“Made in China” also dominates the production of a wide range of industrial inputs, machinery, building materials, automotive, parts and accessories, etc. not to mention the extensive sub-contracting of Chinese companies on behalf of US conglomerates.
What the Trump Administration does not comprehend is how the US trade deficit ultimately benefits the US Economy. It contributes to sustaining America’s retail economy, it also sustains the growth of America’s GDP.
“Made in China” is the backbone of retail trade which indelibly sustains household consumption in virtually all major commodity categories from clothing, footwear, hardware, electronics, toys, jewellery, household fixtures, food, TV sets, mobile phones, etc.
Ask the American consumer: The list is long. “China makes 7 out of every 10 cellphones sold Worldwide, as well as 12 and a half billion pairs of shoes’ (more than 60 percent of total World production). Moreover, China produces over 90% of the World’s computers and 45 percent of shipbuilding capacity (The Atlantic, August 2013) .
It is the source of tremendous profit and wealth in the US. Consumer commodities imported from China’s low cost economy are often sold at the retail level ten times their factory price. This process creates a “value added” which then leads to an increase in Gross Domestic Product.
In a wide range of economic activities, production does not take place in the USA. The producers have given up production.
The US trade deficit with China is instrumental in fuelling the profit driven consumer economy which relies on Made in China consumer goods.
Case studies suggest that China imports trigger an increase in value added in the US of 8-10 times the factory price of the commodities imported from China. What this means is that a large share of US GDP growth is attributable to production outside the US, namely China. Without Chinese imports, the US growth of GDP would inevitably be undermined.
What this signifies is that in real economy terms, China is the largest national economy Worldwide.
Chinese policy makers are fully aware that the US economy is heavily dependent on “Made in China”.
Trump: The “Paper Tiger”. How does the Coronavirus Crisis affect US-China Relations?
With an internal market of more than 1.4 billion people, coupled with The Belt and Road initative and a buoyant global export market, the veiled threats by President Trump are not always taken seriously. Trump is “A Paper Tiger”. In the words of Mao Zedong:
“Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality … it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain… (US Imperialism is a Paper Tiger, Selected Works, 1951)
Bilateral Trade Crisis
US imports from China have declined significantly as a result of the pandemic, the impacts on US retail trade are potentially devastating. In this review, we should distinguish between the following factors:
1) The disruption in trade largely triggered by concrete economic factors (production, supply lines, international transport caused by the corona crisis. This process of disruption was largely initiated in late January early February).
2) The disruption of a political and geopolitical nature largely related to accusations and threats by the Trump administration, claiming that China is responsible for “spreading the virus”. These accusations started in April. At the time of writing, there is no evidence that president Trump’s accusations have a bearing on the April commodity trade figures analyzed below. In April the tendency was towards a recovery of US-China trade.
US imports from China were of the order of $452.243 billion. In contrast, US exports from the US to China were of the order of $106.627 billion reflecting a significant decline in bilateral US-China trade in relation to 2018.
The US trade deficit with China in 2019 was a staggering $345.617 billion.
January-April 2020
The available monthly figures for 2020 suggest a substantial decline in (monthly) US commodity imports from China (in relation to 2019): A 28.3% decline (average over first three months of 2o2o in relation to first 3 months of 2019), largely attributable to the coronavirus crisis.
What are the prospects? The decline of US imports from China in the month of March was of a staggering 36.5% in relation to March 2019.
Does this figure indicate a significant collapse in US-China trade?
While China’s export economy is in the process of normalization in the wake of the China pandemic, the political confrontations including the accusations directed against China by president Trump could potentially lead to a “slump” in US-China bilateral trade.
Moreover, according to figures quoted by the the Financial Times (largely attributable to the deep-seated financial crisis which started in February 2020), the value of newly announced Chinese direct investment projects into the US has fallen by about 90%: $200m in the first quarter of 2020, down from an average of $2bn per quarter in 2019.
“Chinese direct investment into the US stood at $5bn, a slight drop from $5.4bn in 2018 and well off a recent peak of $45bn in 2016, when Chinese companies were much more free to acquire US counterparts”
What is significant, however, is that China’s overall exports (dollars) in April rose by 3.5%(in relation to April 2019), according to data from China’s General Administration of Customs released in early May. While these figures reflect a recovery of China’s overall export trade, China’s exports to the US in April experienced a significant decline, namely 7.9%. Similarly, in May there was decline of 8.5% in relation to May 2019.
A major redirection of China’s exports has taken place:
A 3.5 % overall increase in exports coupled with a 7.9% decline in exports to the US, which inevitably will have a detrimental impact on the U.S. economy.
Exports to the US in April were of the order of the order of 32,060.4 million (compared to 34,798.9 million in April 2019). In contrast, compensating for the decline in exports to the US, China’s Eurasian trade has picked up.
China’s total imports in April 2020 fell 14.2% in relation to the same period in 2019. China’s trade surplus for the month of April was a staggering $45.34 billion.
China Viewed as a “Threat” by the Trump Whitehouse.
How will US-China Relations evolve?
The US president is not only blaming China for the corona pandemic without a shred of evidence, his newly appointed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Rep. John Ratcliffe stated unequivocally at the US Senate confirmation hearing:
“I view China as the greatest threat actor right now,”
“Look with respect to COVID-19 and the role China plays; the race to 5G; cybersecurity issues: all roads lead to China,” he told the panel. (emphasis added)
To which the Senate Committee asked him to clarify:
“whether he would politicize the intelligence process to keep the president happy”.
Does this appointment have a bearing on the future of US-China relations?
The Director of the DNI oversees and coordinates 16 intelligence bodies, including the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI’s counterintelligence division.
The head of the DNI has links to the White House. While the DNI coordinates the various Intel entities, it is not intelligence agency. Declarations from the head of the DNI are more of political nature. Will Ratcliffe’s declarations be used in support of Trump’s 2020 election campaign?
UPDATE ON US-CHINA TRADE (includes figures for May 2020, reflects a decline of 8.5% in relation to May 2019).
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Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the Twenty-first Century (2009) (Editor), Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015). He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.
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Arce’s victory was not enough to overcome the effects of the coup in Bolivia. Currently, the country is strongly threatened by the confluence of the anti-democratic interests of various political groups, paramilitaries and religious fundamentalists who seek to prevent the inauguration of the new government, scheduled for November 8. Institutionally, there is no doubt about the validity of Arce’s victory, which has already been confirmed by the Bolivian Electoral Court, but even so, several groups continue to question the procedure. Day after day, new allegations of fraud and all sorts of accusations arise, even without any material evidence.
As expected, the core of criticism against the electoral process comes from the city of Santa Cruz, a fortress of the Bolivian far right and where the articulations that led to the overthrow of Evo Morales originated last year. In Santa Cruz, the demonstrations have already started, and the agenda is just one: that the elections be annulled. With this goal, the demonstrators have hardened their speech and called on the Bolivian Armed Forces to intervene.
On the evening of November 2, at a meeting, the Cruceñista Youth Union (UJC) – a Santa Cruz-based far-right paramilitary group – decided to completely ignore the election results, demanding a “citizen, military and police audit” of the current Bolivian electoral situation. UJC is one of the most violent political groups in Latin America, having carried out beatings and murders during the protests against Evo Morales last year. In addition to calling on the military to “put order in the country”, UJC militants are blocking roads and various strategic locations in the country with the aim of causing chaos and instability – in short, the strategy is to generate social disorder to justify the necessity of military intervention – which will seem to be the only possible way out.
However, now the problem goes beyond UJC: some retired military personnel have recently come together to form active political groups, characterized by common agendas with the UJC, such as policy of alignment with the US, economic liberalism and racism against indigenous people. These military nuclei currently ask Añez to refuse to pass the position to Arce. Although Arce’s victory was recognized, Añez and her ministers made no public response to repudiate the requests they have been receiving from extremist groups, which raises great concerns, considering that such proclamations are truly illegal acts and the silence of the president may, for some analysts, indicate some type of conspiracy or collusion with an attempted coup.
Some religious groups have also joined the movement against Arce. Representatives of the Bolivian Catholic community spoke during a public hearing on October 18 questioning the outcome of the elections. In addition, neo-Pentecostal groups have traditionally opposed the Bolivian political left and these groups are now gaining prominence in protests against Arce. Religious fundamentalists have been associated with the Bolivian coup since the initial articulations and continue to be an essential part of the political right in the country, having a strong influence on popular unrest.
Given this scenario, it is important to remember that in July there was a serious confrontation between the government and the parliament in Bolivia. The crisis was due to the fact that Añez proposed to promote some generals of the Army without the approval of the Parliament, which caused great agitation among the senators. At the time, the Commander of the Armed Forces, General Sergio Orellana, in an act of insubordination, demanded that the senators approve the list of promotions within a maximum period of one week. Añez remained silent and did not disapprove of the military’s attitude, so, under violent coercion, the senators approved the list.
The Bolivian constitution completely vetoes the possibility for the government to unilaterally promote army and police generals, so the current commanders of the armed forces have been appointed illegally. This is important to consider because it shows, in addition to the chaotic state of the Bolivian legal order, an evidence of real collusion between Añez and the current generals. This, combined with the fact that the government remains silent in the face of the violent acts of the UJC and other extremist groups, leads us to question: Will Añez really accept the democratic decision or do we have another coup on the way?
The next few days will be tense. Probably, the protests will increase exponentially the Bolivian streets will be marked by the confrontation between supporters and opponents of Arce. In addition to the mere inauguration, it remains to be seen what the Arce government will be like in the face of so much pressure and violence. Will Arce be able to rule?
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
First said in America’s early 1930s, the expression “we wuz robbed” echoed in various forms following losses in close sports contests.
Time and again, it’s been true as well about US elections at the federal, state and local levels since the early 1800s.
Electoral theft, coup d’etats by other means, have been commonplace throughout US history.
Today’s modern technology makes it easier than ever.
Cyber crime expert Stephen Spoonamore earlier explained that electronic voting machines “are brilliantly designed (to) steal elections.”
Losers can be declared winners and not just for president.
America’s fantasy democracy is flawed by design, the way it’s always been from inception.
Things are pre-scripted. Secrecy and back room deals substitute for a free, fair and open process.
Party bosses chose candidates. Big money owns them. Key outcomes are predetermined.
Powers in charge of counting votes matter, not individuals casting them with no say over how the US is run or by whom.
This year, mail-in ballots are more important than ever. Around 100 million US voters exercised their franchise this way.
After Wisconsin and Michigan were dubiously called for Biden Wednesday night, he leads Trump by a 264 – 214 Electoral College margin — 270 needed to win.
Unless Trump team court challenges overturn results in one or more contested states — a long shot but possible — DJT needs to win the four remaining undecided battleground states for a second term: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada.
Here’s where things stand in those states:
Pennsylvania: With 89% of votes counted, Trump’s earlier near-double-digit lead narrowed to a 2.6% margin.
North Carolina: With 94% of votes counted, Trump leads Biden by 1.4% of the votes.
Georgia: With 98% of votes counted, Trump is ahead by a slim 0.4%.
Nevada: With 75% of votes counted, Biden leads Trump by 0.6%.
The popular vote count— that has no bearing on the outcome — has Biden ahead by around two points, a far lower margin than most polls predicted.
He maintains that Dems “flooded the election with millions of fake ballots…”
“[It] follow(ed) from the discovery that they LOST some 22 of 25 contested House seats, which would have been impossible had the ‘Biden voters’ voted the down-ballot races or a straight (Dem) ticket.”
“This means they were predicting a Biden landslide,” but guessed wrong.
Wednesday evening, Trump led Biden in the above three states, especially Pennsylvania.
Overnight Wednesday, vote counts went “100 percent” for Biden, “zero percent” for Trump…not even one vote” for DJT.
Along with others like it, the following tweet was deleted by Twitter:
“So while everyone was asleep (overnight Wed.) and after everyone went home, (Dems) in Michigan magically found a trove of 138,339 votes…all…magically (for) Biden?”
According to Davidson, “another mysterious all-Biden vote dump happened in Wisconsin.”
It let him erase a 4.1% Trump lead and go ahead, in the middle of the night getting 100% of the vote count.
Another deleted tweet noted that election day results showed the Biden camp how many votes they needed to defeat Trump in the above states — then magically created them in Michigan and Wisconsin.
In Pennsylvania, ballots received post-election in envelopes with no postmark are being counted.
Were they mailed or ballot-box stuffed by different means?
While a post-election assessment of Tuesday’s process remains to be made once results are finalized, what’s known suggests Dem shenanigans in play to replace Trump with Biden in January.
If things turn out this way — what’s likely based on results so far —it won’t be the first time a US presidential election was stolen, nor the last.
What dark forces in the country want, they get. In 2016, they favored Trump over Hillary. He won. She lost.
As things now stand, it appears that they want Biden/Harris to replace DJT.
Challenges by Trump’s team may delay the outcome for an unclear number of days or longer.
On Wednesday, lawsuits were filed to halt voting in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Ballot-counting in Georgia was challenged, along with a recount sought in Wisconsin.
Other Trump team legal action challenged voter identification procedures in Pennsylvania.
Chatham County, Georgia election officials were sued by the Trump team, alleging that ballots arriving after the election deadline passed were counted.
Trump told supporters he won, his goal “to ensure the integrity” of the election.
Vowing to take his fight to the Supreme Court, it’s clear that if declared the loser to Biden, he won’t go quietly into that good night.
If Biden succeeds him in January — what’s likely based on results so far, but not certain given legal challenges and four undecided key battleground states — Trump will continue being a vocal public voice however things turn out.
A Final Comment
No matter which right wing of the US one-party state controls the White House and/or Congress, privileged interests will be served exclusively at the expense of ordinary people everywhere.
Wall Street, the nation’s military, industrial, security complex, and other corporate interests are winners every time US elections are held — Main Street losing out.
One more thing. If Biden replaces Trump in January, running-mate Harris may succeed him as president before end of his term because of diminishing physical and cognitive ability to lead the nation on the world stage.
Was that what Dems planned all along, as well as electoral theft to unseat Trump?
Historians one day will likely elaborate in detail on what’s known or believed so far.
In 1895, Chicago Daily News columnist Findley Peter Dunne used his fictional Mr. Dooley character to explain that “politics ain’t beanbag,” adding:
“Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.”
It’s clearly not for the fainthearted, not then or now.
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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.”
Democratic nominee’s advisers consist of many former Obama-era officials, some who helped craft the Iran nuclear deal, drone strikes programmes and sanctions on Syria and Libya
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As a two-term vice-president under President Barack Obama, Joe Biden played a leading role in the US’s often contradictory policies concerning Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Libya.
So ever since the former Delaware senator announced his decision to run for president in April 2019, it’s no surprise that the 77-year-old has been rather coy over his foreign policy plans should he win the race for the White House.
Trying to strike a balance between some Democrats who crave a resumption of Obama-era policies and a new wave of progressives who want to correct the party’s glaring failures in the Middle East, the campaign has been quiet over how it plans to address major foreign policy challenges in the region.
Biden has said he plans to pursue drastically different positions from President Donald Trump, pledging to reassess US-Saudi relations and re-enter the Iran nuclear deal. But how does he plan to go about it? There are few details offered by his campaign team.
Biden’s critics say that throughout his political career he has appeared to lack an overarching vision for foreign policy and has instead proposed ad hoc solutions to problems as they arise.
In 2003 when he was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, he voted for the invasion of Iraq. Then in 2007 Biden opposed the surge in troops as the country descended into civil war.
Robert Gates, a life-long Republican who served as Obama’s first defence secretary, wrote a scathing review of the White House hopeful in his 2014 memoir, saying “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”.
Heading into the 2020 election, Gates’s damning assessment has raised an awkward question: would Biden’s foreign policy be any better than that of Trump?
In an attempt to lay out his worldview to undecided voters, Biden wrote an article in Foreign Affairs earlier this year stating:
“The Biden foreign policy agenda will place the United States back at the head of the table, in a position to work with its allies and partners to mobilize collective action on global threats.”
“As a nation, we have to prove to the world that the United States is prepared to lead again.”
As Foreign Policy magazine noted in July, his campaign has assembled a team of more than 2,000 informal foreign policy and national security advisors, including 20 working groups.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has slammed the massive foreign policy team, calling for advisers to be brought in that don’t “have a track record” for “disastrous military interventions”.
“It is time to reject a foreign policy based on patronage of authoritarians, regime change, failed military interventions and world policing,” an open letter signed by 400 delegates from the Democratic National Convention said.
“The people of the United States are tired of squandering our resources on perpetual war and occupation that result in carnage, breed global resentment and drain our treasury of funds needed to address environmental sustainability, health care, housing and education at home.”
Middle East Eye reached out to several of the people who have been officially or unofficially offering advice to Biden’s campaign for this story, but many did not respond to requests for comment.
Mildred Elizabeth Sanders, a professor of government and foreign affairs at Cornell University, said that if elected it was unclear if Biden would forgo policies of regime change, drone strikes in the Middle East and supporting autocrats.
“So far, aside from the Paris agreement, there isn’t much evidence of a foreign policy conversion among Biden and his advisers,” Sanders told Middle East Eye. “We can only hope.”
Here’s a who’s who of Biden’s foreign policy advisers:
Antony Blinken
Biden’s foremost foreign policy aide is Antony Blinken, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has been at the former vice president’s side for nearly two decades.
Blinken was an adviser to Biden in 2002 when as a Delaware senator he voted for the Iraq war, a decision that has cast a dark shadow over Biden’s track record on foreign policy.
Later, he joined Biden in the White House where he served as deputy national security adviser for Obama.
Washington insiders have speculated that if Biden gets elected, Blinken would probably hold one of the administration’s senior positions, either as secretary of state or as national security adviser.
In recent months, the 52-year-old has repeatedly spoken to the media about Iran, stressing that Washington wouldn’t re-enter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal until Tehran returns to compliance.
“Iran would have to come back into full compliance and unless until it did, obviously, all sanctions would remain in place.”
He has also reiterated the campaign’s pro-Israel stance, denouncing the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which seeks to pressure Israel through non-violent means to end its abuses against Palestinians.
“You’ve probably heard the vice president say this. He opposes any effort to delegitimise or unfairly single out Israel, whether it’s at the United Nations or through the BDS movement.”
Jake Sullivan
Jake Sullivan served as national security adviser to Biden and helped establish back-channel talks with Iran that led to the Iran nuclear deal. Sullivan later became a protégé of Hillary Clinton during her failed presidential campaign in 2016.
Since Trump walked away from the Iran nuclear deal, the 43-year-old has been an advocate for returning to the accord but also lessening the US’s military footprint in the Middle East.
In an article in Foreign Affairs, Sullivan said that the US under a Biden administration should reestablish nuclear diplomacy with Iran, as doing so is the only way to reduce tensions and allow for withdrawing troops from the region.
“In choosing to abrogate the nuclear deal and bring the United States to the edge of war with Iran, Trump all but guaranteed that whatever his rhetoric on endless wars, the US presence would become even more heavily militarized.
“A new administration should aim to test the opposite premise: whether by restoring nuclear diplomacy, lowering regional tensions, and forging new arrangements, it can manage the Iranian challenge with fewer forces in the region.”
According to the Jerusalem Post, Sullivan’s role goes beyond Iran by playing a role in shaping the Democratic Party’s foreign policy platform after being appointed in January by Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez.
Colin Kahl
Colin Kahl previously served as Biden’s national security adviser and is now serving as an informal adviser to his campaign.
While he has become the go-to person for the campaign on issues related to Iran, he has also been outspoken on the issue of arms sales to Gulf Arab countries.
He told the Financial Times earlier this year that a Biden administration would scrutinise all arms sales to partners in the region, saying both Saudi Arabia and the UAE had lost a lot of friends on Capitol Hill.
“Both Saudi Arabia and especially the UAE are sufficiently pragmatic to understand that they have to recalibrate their policies, or they very much run a risk of losing bipartisan support,” he said.
Elizabeth Rosenberg
Elizabeth Rosenberg served as a senior adviser at the Treasury Department under Obama and is now giving “outside informal counsel exclusively to the Biden campaign for President”, according to her bio for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
During her tenure at the White House, she pushed for the implementation of sanctions on Iran, Syria and Libya.
In a paper she co-authored for the CNAS in 2016, which was written as a guide for the new president to follow, Rosenberg aggressively pushed for sanctions on Iran, while also lifting others under the 2015 nuclear deal.
Avril Haines
Avril Haines is a former deputy director of the CIA and is expected to lead the foreign policy side of Biden’s transition team if he wins.
Her appointment by the campaign caused a split between liberals and progressives in the party.
Haines helped craft Obama’s policies on drone warfare as well as the administration’s tough approach to North Korea which Biden has promised to revive.
She is praised by liberals who point out that she promoted restricting the administration’s drone campaign and also advocated for the release of Guantanamo detainees. Still, she was responsible for crafting the contentious drone policy alongside former CIA director John Brennan, which led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians.
Others note that she helped redact the Senate Torture Report and spared CIA employees for spying on Senate torture investigators. She also supported Gina Haspel for CIA director. Haspel had been directly implicated in the infamous torture programme.
Michele Flournoy
Michele Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defence for policy in the Obama administration, has emerged as a possible secretary of defence if Biden gets elected.
She was widely thought to be Hillary Clinton’s pick for secretary of defence in 2016 and remains a likely pick in a Biden administration.
“The next five years will be pivotal for US national security,” Flournoy wrote in an op-ed that she co-authored last month for the Defense One website.
“The coronavirus pandemic lays bare the fragility of our health security,” she wrote.
“Climate change threatens generations of Americans. We must build a new American foreign policy fitted to the global challenges we face.”
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Featured image: Colin Kahl (L), Antony Blinken (C), and Michele Flournoy are all advisers to Biden’s presidential campaign (AFP/File photo)
The currency markets have just announced what is coming for silver. This was explained in my previous article.
The USD/ZAR ratio has now broken down. This sets silver up to finish the year with a very strong rally:
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Although silver has been strong since the peak of the USD/ZAR ratio in April, this breakdown means that we are likely to see an acceleration in price increases.
This breakdown also means that silver’s key breakout is soon to follow:
A breakout would set silver up for the all-time high of $50, based on the flag-type pattern.
On this pitchfork previously featured, the price is at an important battle for rights to move in the higher channel:
The path to $50 (possibly at the red line) has very little resistance. Dollar weakness is one of the main drivers for this setup.
Gold, silver and cryptocurrencies will feast on US Dollar weakness like hungry lions on weak prey.
What makes the current situation so significant is its position on the larger economic scale:
Silver is not just going to $50, but much higher.
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Polish leaders at all levels continue to speak with enthusiasm about the need to fully support “peaceful protests” in Belarus and to help them morally and financially. However, with widespread protests across Poland now, the same national leaders are angrily condemning their “peaceful protesters.” Not only do they condemn the protestors, they are also supporting the use of police violence and threaten harsh prison sentences.
The Belarusian protests are for the impositions of neo-liberalism. The Poles however are protesting about abortion rights. Although the reason for protests in Minsk and Warsaw are completely different, they are both using the same methods to protest.
For example, on Sunday the leaders of the women’s strike in Poland officially legitimized the introduction of their advisory council, similar to the Coordinating Council of Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Polish protest leader Marta Lempart makes it clear that she has been inspired by events in Minsk:
“We are looking at Belarus and we see the importance of coordinating action.”
Just like in Belarus, the ultimate goal of these Polish rallies is for the unconditional resignation of the government. The official bodies created by Tikhanyovskaya and Lempart, in their own words, should facilitate a “peaceful transfer of power.”
The glorification of events in Belarus by the Polish media, along with the active participation of Warsaw, led the Poles to emulate their protesting neighbors. It is no coincidence that posters saying
“They educated us by romanticizing the uprisings and now they are surprised that we are protesting,” have appeared at rallies in Warsaw.
Weeks ago, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote directly about the need to support protestors in Belarus and even announced a drawing contest to “illustrate the courage and heroism of Belarusian women.” Some of these creative images were used by Poles during a mass rally in Warsaw last Friday.
However, the Polish Prime Minister is now outraged at his people’s methods of protest, calling them “barbaric and illegal,” as well as actively urging law enforcement agencies to arrest protestors. For several weeks, the Polish authorities demanded widespread condemnation of the Alexander Lukashenko government for supposed repression against the Belarussian opposition. And now Polish Deputy Justice Minister Michał Woś is calling on the prosecutor’s office to launch a crackdown on protesters.
“All Polish prosecutors should consider the organizers of illegal meetings to be criminals. Threats to life and health will put them at risk of imprisonment for up to eight years,” Woś said threateningly in an interview with Radio Maryja.
Polish authorities attribute the repression against the protesters to a difficult COVID-19 situation. Local state television channels are constantly spreading the word about how large crowds of people are adversely affecting the health of others during a severe pandemic. Hypocritically, the same media in support of the mass protests in Minsk did not have any health concerns for the Belarusian protestors.
However, the people involved in anti-government actions in Poland are by no means innocent and often resort to harsh and provocative actions. They were aggressive towards law enforcement officers, government officials, and attacked the Catholic Church and priests. Contradictorily, Polish media completely ignore the provocations of Belarusian protestors. In addition, state-run television does not hesitate to call the protesters “left-wing fascists attacking Polish values.”
Another point of contradiction is that Belarusian protest icon Tichanovskaya has paid Polish women with ingratitude. Polish women have continually supported her, but she has expressed no solidarity with their struggle. This is because the Belarusian opposition are afraid of losing their main financial backers, Warsaw.
Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Minister Linas Antanas Linkevičius is also constantly announcing support for the Minsk protesters and emphasizes his admiration for “the incredible courage of Belarusian women.” But the minister has not uttered a single word in support of the Polish women protesting or their actions.
Strangely, Warsaw, which does not hide their direct interference into the domestic affairs of Belarus, has started looking for “external influence” as responsible for the protests in Poland. Even Jarosław Aleksander Kaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice Party in Poland, has already named “Russian agents” as responsible for the protests in his country.
Russia has long been well aware that interfering with the internal affairs of other states can spill over into another country. The latest Polish example proves this. By sowing discord in Belarus, Poland is now facing a similar uprising, albeit for different reasons. However, this has exposed Poland’s deep contradictions and hypocrisy.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
Featured image is by Krzysztof Kaniewski/ZUMA wire/picture-alliance
The late prominent scholar of settler-colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, reminded us repeatedly that it is not an event, it is a structure. While settler-colonialism in many cases has a historical starting point, its original motivation guides its maintenance in the present.
By and large, settler-colonial projects are motivated by what Wolfe defined as “the logic of the elimination of the native”. Settlers’ wish to create a new homeland almost inevitably clashes with the aspirations of the local native population. In some cases, this clash leads to the physical elimination of native populations, as seen in the Americas and Australia; in others, such as South Africa, settlers enclave the indigenous population in closed areas and impose an apartheid system.
Zionism in Palestine is a settler-colonial project, and Israel remains to this day a settler-colonial state. This depiction is now widely accepted in the scholarly world, but rejected by mainstream Israeli scholars.
On 2 November 1917, Arthur Balfour, then British foreign secretary, endorsed the idea of a “national home for the Jewish people” without “prejudice” against the “civil and religious rights” of the “non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. While this might imply that Jews were the native and majority population of Palestine, in reality, they comprised 10 percent of the population.
This misrepresentation of the Palestinian reality in the Balfour Declaration shows how applicable the settler-colonial paradigm is to the case of the Zionist movement in Palestine. The settler movement obtained the support of a colonial and imperial power, one that it would disown from 1942 onwards, and shared the perception of the local population as – at best – a tolerated minority, and at worst as usurpers. Britain granted international legitimacy to this act of colonisation, sowing the seeds for the future dispossession of the native population.
Many historians explain the Balfour Declaration in terms of British strategic thinking. It was part of an attempt to prevent a Muslim holy land, and an apprehension that other European powers might support the Zionists.
British support for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine had its roots in evangelical Christian Zionist dogma, already mushrooming on both sides of the Atlantic by the early 19th century. Long before the Balfour Declaration, Christian settler-colonialism penetrated North America and Africa.
Defenceless and leaderless
The British branch of Christian Zionism focused more closely on the religious significance of a Jewish “return” to Palestine – a precursor for the Second Coming of the Messiah. This millenarian ideology influenced key British politicians at the time of the Balfour Declaration, including then-Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
Connections between the British empire, Zionism and other settler-colonial projects became even clearer in the years that followed the Balfour Declaration. It became a crucial factor in the history of the country when it was integrated into the mandatory charter the League of Nations granted Britain over Palestine.
Palestinians flee Qumiya village during the Nakba in 1948 (Archive/Palestine Remembered)
Its importance was enhanced by the appointment of Herbert Samuel, a pro-Zionist Anglo Jew, as the first high commissioner of Palestine. Immediately upon his arrival to Palestine in 1920, Samuel put in place policies that allowed the settler-colonial movement to bring in more settlers and expand its foothold in the country by purchasing land, mainly from absentee landlords.
The Palestinian national movement was organised enough to resist by popular and violent means. In the early years, the vulnerable Jewish colony was protected by the British, who were particularly important during the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt, brutally crushed with all the might the British empire could muster. This resulted in the destruction of the Palestinian military and political elite, with many killed, wounded or expelled – leaving Palestinian society defenceless and leaderless when it was needed most in 1948.
Western hypocrisy
There is a direct line connecting the vague British promise given to the Zionist movement a century ago and the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948. A few British policymakers must have developed second thoughts about the declaration’s validity. In 1930, they pondered the repudiation of the Balfour Declaration, but retreated quickly from such a dramatic U-turn.
In 1939, British policymakers tried to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine and the purchase of land, but they were later castigated for this policy due to the rise of Nazism and fascism, which turned Palestine into one of the few safe havens for Jews escaping from Europe. The condemnation came from a hypocritical western world that did very little to save the Jews during the Holocaust, or to open its gates to survivors immediately after the war.
The British had to accept an international verdict that European Jews should be compensated by allowing the Zionist movement to further colonise Palestine. They also became the enemies of the Zionist movement. These pressures, together with the transformation of Britain from a world power to a second-grade actor on the international scene, led to its decision in February 1947 to refer the question of Palestine to the United Nations.
Britain was still responsible for law and order between February 1947 and May 1948, and within this responsibility it witnessed, remained indifferent towards and at times acted as an accomplice to the final and disastrous outcome of the Balfour Declaration: the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
Blueprint for ethnic cleansing
The British decision prompted the military and political leadership of the Jewish community to devise its own version of “the logic of the elimination of the native”. In March 1948, this leadership produced Plan Dalet, which I believe was a clear blueprint for the systematic removal of Palestinians from Palestine.
The plan’s significance lay in how it was translated into a set of operative commands despatched to Jewish forces in March, April and May 1948. The essence of these orders was to occupy villages, towns and neighbourhoods, expel their people, and in the case of the villages, detonate houses so as to prevent any return to them.
The British were already retreating from parts of Palestine when this ethnic cleansing commenced, but they were present in the urban space of Palestine, and it was there that the main ethnic cleansing efforts took place. They watched and mediated, as in the case of Haifa, but did not intervene when the people who began to leave under an agreement were shelled by Jewish forces en route to the harbour.
This was a shameful chapter, as shameful as the declaration itself. When the ethnic cleansing ended, half of Palestine’s population was expelled, half of its villages demolished and most of its towns depopulated. On their ruins, Israel built kibbutzim and planted European pine trees to try and erase the Arab nature of Palestine.
The path forward
Britain recognised quite quickly the Jewish state and contributed further to the Palestinian disaster by supporting the partition of post-mandatory Palestine between Jordan and Israel. Moreover, the British did all they could to prevent the making of a Palestinian state in even part of Palestine. The ruination of Palestine became the inevitable consequence of the Balfour Declaration.
Yet, the settler-colonial project of Zionism is not as successful as the American or Australian ones, and may still have an ending similar to the one in South Africa. It is too early to tell, but through this prism, one can understand better why there is a conflict in Israel and Palestine and what – at least in principle – should be the way forward for solving it.
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Ilan Pappe is a professor of history, and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies and co-director for the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies at the University of Exeter.
The current “war against the Coronavirus” is primarily an information war, with the corporate media putting forth a unified message they want the public to believe, and any efforts to present alternative information is vigorously opposed and ridiculed.
Six major companies own almost all of the media outlets in the U.S., including TV, print, and Internet, which includes video games.
WebFX documented this a few years back with an infographic. The Infographic is a bit dated, as AT&T bought Time Warner in 2018, for example, which just led to further consolidation of the media giants.
In modern America, it feels like you have an unlimited variety of entertainment and media options right at your fingertips.
Television, film, and video game companies seem to come out of the woodwork in today’s startup-centric economy. Who knows what they’ll do next? But while it may seem like you have limitless options, most of the media you consume is owned by one of six companies. These six media companies are known as The Big 6.
While independent media outlets still exist (and there are a lot of them), the major outlets are almost all owned by these six conglomerates. To be clear, “media” in this context does not refer just to news outlets — it refers to any medium that controls the distribution of information. So here, “media” includes 24-hour news stations, newspapers, publishing houses, Internet utilities, and even video game developers.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at each of The Big 6, who control them, and what they own.
Walter Cronkite was one of the most famous TV journalists and perhaps one of the most trusted men in America in the 1960s and 1970s. He read the news on the CBS TV network each evening Monday through Friday from 1962 through 1981.
This is what Walter Cronkite wrote in the introduction to the 1996 book Censored – The News That Didn’t Make the News- And Why, by Carl Jensen. Walter Cronkite wrote:
A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal…. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power… a strongly editorial power.
…we must decide which news items out of hundreds available we are going to expose that day. And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.
Late night comedian Conan O’Brien produced some clips some years ago that showed how these corporate media companies control the narrative on your local and national news stations to broadcast a unified message, showing that very little, if any, real investigative reporting was being done.
Watch:
Campaign Final Days Can Get a Little Salty:
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The End Of E-mail Overload?
Using “Medical” Doctors to Sell Products or Ideas – Appeal to Authority
As I reported recently (Doctors vs. Doctors: Who’s Telling the Truth?), there is a huge difference between medical doctors out on the frontlines actually treating patients, and political or TV doctors who do not actually treat patients, but use their American-accepted status symbol of authority to try and convince the masses to believe what the Corporate Media companies, and their sponsors, want you to believe.
Today, the main sponsors of the six largest media corporations are pharmaceutical companies.
But some 60 years ago, those sponsors were mainly the tobacco industry.
Here are some “blasts from the past” that most of our readers are probably too young to remember.
If any of these gems from YouTube disappear, let us know, and we will get them back up on another platform.
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The text of this commentary is updated from an earlier Portuguese-language version of the author’s column at Amazônia Real.
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The BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) Highway was built in the early 1970s by Brazil’s military dictatorship, but was abandoned in 1988. In 2016, a “maintenance” program was authorized, and the highway is now passable during the dry season.
The currently proposed “Reconstruction” of BR-319, which would build a new paved road atop the old dirt roadbed, is certainly among the most consequential decisions facing Brazil today. The environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the project has been submitted to the licensing agency (IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency), where it is receiving accelerated treatment for what appears to be a foreordained approval. The hasty authorization of a project that implies a major expansion of the area in Amazonia that is exposed to deforestation is extremely unwise.
So far, deforestation has been almost entirely limited to the “arc of deforestation” along the southern and eastern edges of the Amazon forest in Brazil, and to the eastern half of the region where road access is already implanted.
Brazil’s Legal Amazon region. The “arc of deforestation” is the red area along the southern and eastern edges of the forest. The BR-319 cuts the remaining Amazon basin forest in half, providing access to vast areas of standing forest by those who have deforested the eastern and southern portions of the region. Deforestation data courtesy of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
Large-scale impacts
The impact of the BR-319 will extend far beyond the strip along the highway route that is the subject of the EIA.
The BR-319 opens the central and northern portions of Amazonia to the migration of land grabbers (grileiros), loggers, cattlemen, individual squatters (posseiros) and organized landless farmers (sem-terras). These actors are already present in the “arc of deforestation” and have moved into areas in the southern portion of the state of Amazonas where there is road access, including Apuí, Igarapé Realidade and Lábrea (see black and white map below).
Critically, BR-319 is associated with plans for additional roads, such as AM-366, that would open the vast area of intact rainforest in the western part of the state of Amazonas.
Opening this “Trans-Purus” region in western Amazonas to deforestation would be catastrophic for Brazil, leading to loss of critical environmental services. These include water supply to the city of São Paulo: the Trans-Purus area is the last great block of intact forest in Brazilian Amazonia, and losing this area means losing the Amazon forest’s function of recycling the water that is carried in the “flying rivers” to Brazil’s major urban and agricultural areas (see here, here, here, here and here). Amazonia is supplying 70% of the water during the peak of the rainy season in São Paulo, when the reservoirs that supply the city fill. São Paulo has nearly run out of water several times, even with Amazonia’s water cycling function still intact.
The environmental impact assessment (EIA) for reconstructing the “middle stretch” of the BR-319 is now publicly available. The EIA defines an “area of direct impact” (ADA) and an “area of indirect impact” (AIA) that excludes the wider impacts of the highway, including the critical “Trans-Purus” region to the west of the Purus River.
The BR-319 Highway and its planned side roads, including AM-366 that would open the vast intact forest area between the highway and Brazil’s border with Peru (Source: Fearnside & Graça, 2006).
Despite the many deficiencies of the EIA, buried in the document’s 3735 pages there are passages that recognize many of the project’s true impacts, for which the authors should be congratulated. Among these is the threat that reconstructing the BR-319 poses to the Trans-Purus region by unleashing a chain of events that would result in opening the planned AM-366 road, thus allowing deforesters to enter this critical region:
The repaving and full operation of the BR-319 along its entire length may encourage regional politicians to pressure the government of Amazonas to resume the project to implement the AM-366 highway. This risk is very concrete in that, a few years after the opening of BR-319, a “picadão” [big trail] linking BR-319 to the city of Tapauá was opened by an initiative that was probably from private agents. (ECI-Apurina, p. 119).
The EIA also mentions the relevance of Brazil’s current presidential administration to the increased danger of the AM-366 being built:
In the political-institutional conditions now present in the region and in the country, added to the initiatives of the executive branch of the federal government to review environmental protection measures and to facilitate the advance of agribusiness in southern Amazonas — as previously noted — it is quite possible that the AM-366 could obtain sufficient political support for its implementation. (ECI-Apurina, p. 119).
The potential for invasion of the areas opened up by the AM-366 road and the illegal side roads along its route between Tapauá and the BR-319 is mentioned:
[AM-366] would offer migrants from the south and southeast regions, and especially those from Rondônia, an open route for opening lots in government lands — at zero cost. (ECI-Apurina, p. 83).
The EIA also mentions the likelihood of the AM-366 sprouting side roads (ramais) to provide access to oil and gas production areas planned for exploitation under the massive “Solimões Sedimentary Area Project”:
The question of the exploration of the blocks in the Solimões [Upper Amazon] basin. ,,, gains greater relevance due precisely to the possible interconnection between the BR-319 and the municipalities of Tefé and Coari via the AM-366 highway, from which ramais [side roads] could “branch off” to the locations of the oil installations … (ECI-Apurina, p. 106).
Illegal side roads (ramais) branching off BR-319 are already being built, such as one begun in February 2020 entering a protected area, the Lago do Capanã Grande Extractive Reserve. There are also illegal roads being built in the opposite direction, starting from towns on the Purus River and progressing towards the BR-319. In addition to the illegal side road being built from Tapauá (ECI-Apurina, pp. 119-121), the EIA mentions a similar illegal road being built to connect Canutama to the BR-319, which is already 40 kilometers long (EIA, p. 2565). The obvious lack of governance in the area is a key issue in the battle over licensing.
Bridge built across a stream in February 2020 on an illegal side road (ramal) branching off of BR-319 and penetrating a protected area, the Lago do Capanã Grande Extractive Reserve. Image courtesy of Indigenous leader whose identity is withheld.
The oil and gas project is a major threat to the forests of the Trans-Purus region because the scale of the project means that the companies exploiting the oil and gas would have a major motive for pressuring the government to provide road access.
The EIA touches on the responsibility of DNIT, Brazil’s National Department of Transportation Infrastructure, for the disastrous outcome that would result from the BR-319’s role in increasing the likelihood of the AM-366 being built:
….this chain of events…, in a certain way, gives the entrepreneur some degree of responsibility for the eventual terrestrial connection of BR-319 to the city of Tapauá …. (ECI-Apurina, p. 120).
Despite some passages in the EIA recognizing the BR-319’s wider impact, this does not translate into recommendations about what to do about it. Instead, the focus is restricted to the ADA and AIA, and the recommendations are limited to pointing out that governance is needed to minimize impacts. Questioning the existence of the project, or delaying it for a substantial period of years while governance is established, are not presented as serious options.
Instead, the recommendations for avoiding the massive impacts are limited to the standard call for “governance,” but the chances of such a program being implemented on a scale that would avoid disaster are near zero. The BR-319 area is essentially lawless today, with land grabbing (grilagem) and illegal land invasions, logging and building of side roads occurring with impunity. It is simply fictitious that “BR-319 will be an example of sustainability for the World,” as the members of the Legislative Assembly of the state of Amazonas claim.
The BR-319 is now passable in the dry season due to a “maintenance” program begun in 2016. (Photo: P.M. Fearnside).
Impacts on Indigenous peoples
The Indigenous component is critical. This project element was apparently submitted to the licensing agency (IBAMA) some time after the rest of the EIA. Although the separation in time was relatively short in this case, it is an important irregularity, repeating the scandal that surrounded the 2015 EIA for the São Luis do Tapajós Dam. As with that controversial dam, the Relatório de Impacto Ambiental (RIMA), which is the document that serves for public discussion of the BR-319 project (including the public hearings), was obviously completed before the Indigenous component was available and contains no information on Indigenous peoples.
The question of consultation of Indigenous peoples affected by the BR-319 highway project represents a key test of Brazil’s legal system. Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry (a public prosecutor’s office established by Brazil’s 1988 constitution to defend the rights of the people) has long been trying to bring the rule of law to Brazil in this regard, but these efforts have so far failed, as in the cases of the Belo Monte and São Manoel Dams (see here, here and here).
The EIA for the BR-319 mentions the fact that Brazilian law and Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO-169), of which Brazil is a signatory, require prior consultation of affected Indigenous peoples. This legally required consultation needs to not only occur before the construction work begins, but rather before any decision is made on whether or not to go ahead with the project:
And Article 15 of the Convention makes it explicit that this consultation must take place before governments undertake or authorize any program for prospecting or exploiting resources that exist in the habitat of Indigenous peoples. (ECI-Apurina, p. 27).
In the case of BR-319, no Indigenous people have been consulted, despite the project’s bidding already having been opened and its initiation being immanent in violation of ILO-169 and by Brazilian law (10.088, de 5 de novembro de 2019, formerly 5.051, de 19 de abril de 2004), which implements the convention.
However, DNIT plans to do its “consultation” while the road construction is underway. The plan is to only consult five Indigenous areas, despite the road’s impact extending much farther. IBAMA’s internal regulations (Portaria Interministerial Nº 419, de 26 de outubro de 2011, Anexo II) consider all Indigenous areas within 40 kilometers of a highway in Amazonia to be “directly impacted” and requires them to be included in the Indigenous component of the EIA. In the case of the entire BR-319 highway (not only the “middle stretch”), there are 13 Indigenous areas within the 40-kilometer limit.
Reconstruction of the middle stretch is what would trigger the socio-environmental impacts from the entire road by opening the floodgates for traffic and migration. ILO-169 and its replication in Brazilian law have no distance limit for impacts requiring consultation. These impacts clearly go far beyond the area considered in the EIA. In addition to adversely affecting Indigenous peoples already living within the areas of migration flow that the highway would stimulate, such as those in the state of Roraima, deforestation from the highway route itself can spread far beyond 40 kilometers. If a 150-kilometer limit is considered, 63 Indigenous areas would be considered impacted.
In conclusion, reconstructing the BR-319 highway would have enormous impacts and few benefits. In addition to the need to comply with legal requirements such as obtaining the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples, Brazil’s leaders should pause to consider the wisdom of the project itself, given the threat it represents to the country’s national interests. Risking the loss of Amazonia’s environmental services, such as supplying water to São Paulo, is no small matter for Brazil.
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Featured image: The BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) Highway passes through large areas of intact rainforest, seen here in 2018 with road “maintenance” underway. Source: Folha de São Paulo.
Many states allow voters to fix and resubmit ballots rejected for technical reasons. It’s called “curing” votes, and the GOP is trying to prevent them from being counted because they could help Biden win.
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Victoria Benedict, a stationery store owner in Atlanta who has been voting by mail for years, was surprised last month when she went to the Georgia secretary of state’s website and found her ballot had been rejected. A problem with her signature — the state said the one on her ballot did not match what it had on file — set her on a dayslong quest to make sure her vote would be counted.
County staff told her that she would either have to show up at the local election office to sign her ballot or vote in person on Election Day. Either option would risk her health during a pandemic. Instead, on the advice of a friend who volunteers with the state’s Democratic Party, she filled out a form known as a ballot cure affidavit. This time, her vote was accepted.
“I knew to press,” Benedict said. “It just worries me that other voters who didn’t may fall through the cracks.”
The blue wave widely predicted by pollsters never came Tuesday. Now, the unexpectedly thin margins in key states, combined with the vast increase in voting by mail, are highlighting the esoteric process of “curing” ballots, in which people whose mailed ballots are rejected because of signature or other problems are given a second chance. Since mailed ballots in most states tilt Democratic, curing them so that they can be counted is believed to help former Vice President Joe Biden.
“The cure process is going to be really important for a lot of close states,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the voting advocacy group Vote At Home, which tracks rejection rates and suggests best practices for states to cure rejected ballots.
Even a few thousand cured ballots could potentially affect the outcome in states still in play in the presidential race as well. As with other aspects of the mail voting process, curing is now the focus of attacks by the GOP. Republicans have already sued in Pennsylvania to block the counting of cured ballots. In many states, voters don’t have to submit their cured ballots until a week or more after Election Day, potentially delaying a final count. In the meantime, Biden campaign workers are engaged in a post-election get-out-the-vote effort, calling and texting these voters and encouraging them to cure their rejected ballots.
While the term may be new to many voters, the curing of rejected ballots has been part of the American electoral process for decades.
“We need to let election administrators finish their work,” said Ben Hovland, the chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Hovland is a Democrat who was appointed by President Donald Trump. “The cure process is simply part of counting, as it always has been, and we need to allow the professionals to finalize the count and certify the results.”
Curing rules vary from one state to the next. In Wisconsin and Michigan, cured ballots must be returned on or before Election Day. In North Carolina and Nevada, ballots can be cured until a week or more after the election. In Michigan and Georgia, election officials must tell voters that their ballots have been rejected, providing an opportunity for curing; Michigan’s legislature added this requirement in fall, after hundreds of curable ballots were rejected in its August primary. In Wisconsin, notification is only encouraged, as was the case in North Carolina until August, when a federal judge ruled that the board of elections must provide a cure process.
In Nevada, 3,536 mail ballots have been rejected for signature problems as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the Nevada secretary of state. Those voters have until Nov. 12 to fix their ballots so they can count.
The number of rejected ballots in Nevada could grow because officials are still collecting mail ballots from drop boxes and the U.S. Postal Service. And whether they’re cured could matter because Biden’s current lead in the state is less than 8,000 votes. Officials said they’ll release more resultson Wednesday night.
Counties make lists of voters whose ballots were rejected available to the parties. Democrats in Nevada are organizing hundreds of staff and volunteers to remind voters to cure their ballots before the deadline, according to state party spokeswoman Molly Forgey. Democrats have already successfully fixed 2,340 ballots, compared with 825 Republicans and 1,354 independents, according to data from the secretary of state.
The Nevada Republican Party didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a statement, the party complained it wasn’t being allowed to observe or challenge signature matches. The GOP has sued to stop counting mail ballots in Clark County, the state’s largest and most Democratic, but a judge rejected the Republicans’ motion for a temporary restraining order.
Republicans in Pennsylvania have challenged ballot curing in lawsuits in state and federal court.
In Pennsylvania, a voter whose ballot was rejected can’t mail in a new one. Instead, curing takes a different form. The secretary of state released guidance Oct. 21 that voters whose absentee or mail-in ballots were rejected by county boards of elections could be issued a provisional ballot on Election Day. The county board of elections would then determine later whether the ballot should be counted, according to the guidance.
On Tuesday night, Rep. Mike Kelly, a Republican who represents the northwestern corner of the state, and others sued the secretary of state over the policy in Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania. The suit seeks to block rejected ballots from being cured by casting a provisional ballot.
It’s not clear how many such ballots there are, and a spokesperson for the secretary of state declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
In a separate federal suit challenging 98 cured ballots in Montgomery County, a judge seemed unmoved by Republican lawyers’ arguments at a Wednesday morning hearing in Philadelphia. The case is still pending.
“Taken together, these lawsuits amount to an argument that boils down to: ‘Voters get one chance, and if they make a mistake, too bad,’” said Michelle Kanter Cohen, senior counsel at the nonpartisan Fair Elections Center. “This isn’t the way to approach our fundamental rights in a democracy.”
In Georgia, any voter whose ballot is rejected is notified by the county and then will have until Friday to submit a cure form that will allow their signature to be validated. The law requires count officials to reach out to voters by phone or by email, and they must send a letter with instructions if a voter’s contact information is unavailable. Gabriel Sterling, a state official who manages Georgia’s voting equipment, projected on Monday afternoon that the state would reject about 3,000 total ballots.
McReynolds said Vote At Home believes the Georgia outcome will come down to as few as 1,000 votes, making even a small number of rejected ballots crucial to the final result. Neither the Trump nor Biden campaigns have requested the names of voters whose ballots were rejected, but the state would do so if asked, said Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state. North Carolina will be counting cured ballots as well as absentee ballots that were postmarked by Election Day until Nov. 12, an extended deadline that was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in late October despite two separate attempts by Republicans to block the extension.
Data from the State Board of Elections on Tuesday indicated that 6,148 voters have cured their ballots so far, with an additional 6,947 voters whose ballots are “pending cure.” Barack Obama won the state in 2008 by 14,177 votes. The board has reported Trump leading by 76,701 votes, with 117,000 absentee ballots that were requested and have yet to be returned.
The Biden campaign has organized post-Election Day door knocking and phone-banking through Fight for NC to encourage voters to cure rejected ballots. Laurel Birch Kilgore, executive director of the Democratic Party chapter in Wake County, which is the most-populous county in the state, said she had planned to take the day after the election off but has instead been working to recruit volunteers for canvassing. Attempts to reach the North Carolina Republican Party for comment were unsuccessful.
Voters whose ballots need curing tend to be relatively young. Those voters are disproportionately more likely to have their signatures rejected because they have fewer examples on file with the state — either at the department of motor vehicles or the elections office — to check against. “On average, Coloradans have about eight signatures on file, but younger people might have zero or one or two,” said Jenna Griswold, secretary of state for Colorado. “So their rate of rejection is going to be higher — it can be as much as triple that of older voters, but as you get older the rate decreases.”
Izzy Bronstein, a national grassroots organizer for Common Cause, said curing is most prevalent where it’s easy, as in Florida, where it can mostly be done online. She added that curing can be especially impactful in state and local races: “In a presidential election, a single ballot sometimes isn’t going to change anything, but in a city council election it might.”
Beena Raghavendran, Ariana Tobin, Ian MacDougall, Derek Willis and Rachel Glickhouse contributed reporting.
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Justin Elliott is a ProPublica reporter covering politics and government accountability. To securely send Justin documents or other files online, visit our SecureDrop page.
Jessica Huseman covers voting rights and election administration for ProPublica.
Isaac Arnsdorf is a reporter at ProPublica covering national politics.
Dara Lind covers immigration policy for ProPublica in Washington, DC.
Lydia DePillis covers trade and the economy.
Sally Beauvais is an engagement reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative.
Ash Ngu is a journalist, designer and developer with ProPublica Illinois.
Featured image is by Brian Scagnelli, special to ProPublica
Lost in this whole pandemic hysteria are some key considerations that when carefully analyzed place the whole COVID-19 narrative in a highly questionable light. The gatekeepers of information dissimulation are manufacturing consent at an alarming rate, but their fatigue is setting in, and their masks are falling off. What better, albeit unlikely, source to go for some much needed illumination than the New York Times?
During a considerably quieter time, back in 2007, the New York Times featured a very interesting exposé on molecular diagnostic testing — specifically, the inadequacy of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test in achieving reliable results. The most significant concern highlighted in the Times report is how molecular tests, most notably the PCR, are highly sensitive and prone to false positives. At the center of the controversy was a potential outbreak in a hospital in New Hampshire that proved to be nothing more than “ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.” Unfortunately, the results wrought by the PCR told a different story.
Thankfully, a faux epidemic was avoided but not before thousands of workers were furloughed and given antibiotics and ultimately a vaccine, and hospital beds (including some in intensive care) were taken out of commission. Eight months later, what was thought to be an epidemic was deemed a non-malicious hoax. The culprit? According to “epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists … too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test .. led them astray.” At the time, such tests were “coming into increasing use” as maybe “the only way to get a quick answer in diagnosing diseases like … SARS, and deciding whether an epidemic is under way.”
Nevertheless, today, the PCR test is considered the gold standard of molecular diagnostics, most notably in the diagnosis of COVID-19. However, a closer analysis reveals that the PCR has actually been pretty spotty and that false positives abound. Thankfully, the New York Times is once again on the case.
“Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive; Maybe It Shouldn’t Be,” according to NYT reporter Apoorva Mandavilli. Essentially, positive results are getting tossed around way too frequently. Rather, they should probably be reserved for individuals with “greater viral load.” So how have they’ve been doing it all this time you ask?
“The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample . .. the more likely the patient is to be contagious.”
Unfortunately, the “cycle threshold” has been ramped up. What happens when it’s ramped up? Basically, “huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus” are deemed infected. However, the severity of the infection is never quantified, which essentially amounts to a false positive. Their level of contagion is essentially nil.
How are they determining the cycle threshold? If I didn’t suspect that it was based on maximizing the amount of “cases,” I would find the determination pretty arbitrary. More than a few of the professionals on record for Times report appear pretty perplexed on this vital detail which is essentially driving “clinical diagnostics, for public health and policy decision-making.” Considering all that’s at stake and everything that hinges on positive vs negative case tallies, it’s outrageous that these tests would be tweaked in a way that would inflate the positive rate totals and percentages. According to one virologist, “any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive.” She went on to to say, “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive.”
Personally, I think the science is just about settled on COVID-19. The conclusion? We’ve been duped!
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Featured image: Public domain image from Wiki’s COVID-Protest page.
Congressmen Eliot Engel (D-NY) and a number of his colleagues from both sides of the isle have introduced legislation into the House that would prohibit the sale of F-35 fighter jets to the UAE unless a long list of conditions are met that would ensure the sale doesn’t jeopardize Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge,” something which the U.S. is beholden to do under federal law involving arms sales in the Middle East.
To say nothing of the UAE’s complicity with the war of genocide in Yemen, Engel maintains that it’s Congress’ job to ensure that Israel maintains the ability to militarily outgun any of their Muslim neighbors.
Stating that the Trump Administration has no qualms about selling arms to dangerous governments, which as seen from the exercise of his Presidential veto on 22 joint resolutions which passed the Senate last year, is true, Engel resolves that “it’s up to Congress to consider the ramifications of allowing new partners to purchase the F-35 and other advanced systems”.
“We need to know that such weapons will be used properly and in a way aligned with our security interests, which include protecting Israel’s qualitative military edge and ensuring adversaries can’t get their hands on American technology,” said Engel, who chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee.
It’s already to the great shame of the Obama and Trump administrations that the United States launched, continued, and then failed to stop, the Saudi-UAE persecution of the Yemenis, which has been called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis by the UN. It’s been more than a year since the UN models predicted that at least 140,000 victims of the war on the people of Yemen have been children under the age of 5, and the same report predicted that if things carried on in the same vein that the number would become 316,000, and the total human deaths closer to half a million.
The Yemen Civil War
In 2015 when the former Saudi-supported President of Yemen, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi was chased out of Sanaa by a Zaydi-Shia rebel group called the Houthis, Saudi Arabia took charge of a military coalition that includes Bahrain, the UAE, the United States, France, Senegal, Qatar, and Morocco, called the Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen.
Radio host and foreign policy expert Scott Horton has described it as “a deliberate campaign of genocide against the civilian population,” while adding that his sources claim American Air Force pilots fly in the Saudi and Emirati jets “all the way to the target”.
Blockades of the ports in the south of Yemen by the UAE have contributed to the food shortages that in 2018 were placing 13 million men, women, and children at risk of starvation.
Yemen has also played host to the largest cholera epidemic in recent history, and in 2017, approximately 700,000 cases of cholera had been recorded according to Human Rights Watch.
The United States has been selling weapons to the Saudis and Emiratis for years, and it has been airstrikes that have been responsible for the vast majority of battlefield deaths in the conflict.
As Shi’ites, the Houthis violated the United States’ stance in the Middle East of restricting Iranian influence in the region, and it’s been alleged by the Pentagon and State Department that the Houthis are funded by Iran.
However al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the direct perpetrators of the September 11th attacks, is also present in the country, aiding and ignoring the Sunni Saudi-UAE coalition forces. In reality, the U.S. stands only 2 degrees of separation away from flying as al-Qaeda’s air support in the War in Yemen.
Taking all this into account, it doesn’t seem possible that a man with even half a heart would fail to suggest that sales of advanced fighter jets to a country actively bombing a civilian population in league with AQAP, should be the principle topic in any legislation to restrict the sale of arms, an action which Congress has limited involvement in.
However, as Philip Weiss recently wrote, Engel is nothing if not ardently aware of every potential threat towards Israel.
Dual Loyalties
Receiving nearly $600,000 in campaign contributions from right-wing pro-Israel groups, Engel bragged at an American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) meeting that “there’s a bunch of legislation coming out of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I want to tell you that I sit down with AIPAC on every piece of legislation that comes out. I think it’s very, very important. In the past 30 years I have attended 31 consecutive AIPAC conferences in March, I haven’t missed one”.
Supporting progressive policies like the Green New Deal, universal American healthcare, better treatment of immigrants, and higher minimum wages hasn’t stopped Engel from ensuring Israel is continually militarized and protected against all things, even from his colleagues’ occasional criticism of their treatment of the Palestinian people.
Engel has been chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee since 1994, and could be considered as a paramount force in pushing the base of the Democratic Party towards the U.S.-Israeli alliance. He criticized Trump for withdrawing troops from Germany, since Germany is used by the United States as one of the closest American power centers to the Middle East.
He is the perfect example of men in Washington that have, as Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MI) described last year, “dual loyalties”.
“Protecting Israel’s qualitative military edge,” is something that Engel has devoted his whole career to, and so it’s unsurprising that the focus of the proposed arms limitations for the UAE is how it affects Israel, even though she recently normalized relations with the UAE after 26 years, and not on how it may affect the people of Yemen.
Far from simply idle tunnel vision, Engel boasted in his 2018 AIPAC speech about becoming head of the Appropriations Committee, in addition to the Foreign Affairs Committee, meaning that at any time he could rally his fellow Congressmen, who last year voted in the House and Senate to invoke the War Powers Resolution to end all support to the Saudi-UAE bombing in Yemen, to alter the National Defense Authorization Act so as to appropriate nothing for Yemen-related activities.
Instead the NDAA for fiscal year 2021 added no such restrictions on the allowances for action in Yemen, leaving almost nothing in American law to protect the Yemenis.
All they have to hope for now is that Engel’s law passes, and the UAE doesn’t violate two subject lines in the bill which state: “the recipient country will not violate international humanitarian law or internationally recognized human rights,” and “the recipient country will consult with the United States relating to the mission, flight plan, and purpose of use of the weapons.”
International law forbids war on civilians, targeting civilian infrastructure, and targeting international aid facilities, but a lot of good those laws have done the Yemenis thus far.
It’s for speculation why men like Engel and Trump care so much about Israel and the UAE, and so little about Yemen, even though it’s Yemen that the world will look back on in the 2030s as potentially the site of the greatest tragedy of the century, the culpability of which rests largely in the lands of the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
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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.
The forecast of 4,000 people dying per day from COVID-19 by next month could be four or five times too high and does not reflect the current situation, a leading Oxford professor has warned.
The incredible figure was presented by Sir Patrick Vallance during Saturday’s TV briefing where the Prime Minister announced the UK would be thrust into a second lockdown.
But it has emerged the forecasts are out of date and inaccurate, with SAGE accused of ‘misleading’ the public and MPs by cherry-picking the scariest data.
Professor Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford said he ‘cannot understand why they have used this data’.
The 4,000 deaths per day forecast was based on the assumption of there being an average of 1,000 per day at the start of November. The real number is significantly lower, with 162 confirmed for yesterday in the whole UK.
The scenario of 4,000 deaths a day by December is based on there being an average of 1,000 deaths per day in the UK right now. In reality the daily average was 182 last week, according to Department of Health data.
Conservative MPs said they were worried the forecasts were ‘misleading’.
David Davis told the Telegraph: ‘The first responsibility of the scientific advisors to the Government is to give the truth to the public and not to cherry-pick the data.
‘This is a fairly major error on their part if they’ve used old data which effectively misleads the public.’
Steve Baker, who was initially support of a second lockdown, said: ‘This evidence does appear to indicate that the death models are already wrong and by quite a considerable margin.’
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One of the lesser known aspects of Keir Starmer’s assault on the left of his party since becoming Labour leader is his growing silence on Palestine.
Silencing the Palestinian lobby in Britain has always been a goal of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which has gone to some lengths to condition debate inside the Labour Party on Israel.
In 2017, an Al Jazeera documentary exposed the efforts of the ministry’s man in London, Shai Masot, to start a youth wing in the Labour Party. Masot was also filmed by an undercover reporter saying he wanted to “take down” government ministers and MPs considered to be causing “problems” for Israel.
When Masot was rumbled and expelled, a continuous feed of Jeremy Corbyn’s meetings as a backbench MP with Palestinians, dating back in some cases over a decade, was created to stoke the furore over the then-Labour leader.
This feed was doctored.
When Corbyn met three Hamas politicians whose Jerusalem IDs had been revoked and had staged a sit-in a tent in the grounds of the Red Cross (this was a cause celebre at the time and many Israelis went to show solidarity with the case), the presence of a second Labour MP, Andy Slaughter, who is not a Corbyn ally but is pro-Palestinian, was excised from British reports.
However, a picture of Slaughter appeared in Israeli news channel i24’s exclusive of “Corbyn’s secret visit” in its report in 2018, which was eight years after the MPs’ visit took place in November 2010.
Role of Shin Bet
The precise details of Corbyn’s visit to Israel in 2010, including who was on it, who arranged it and who they met, were monitored and logged by Israel’s domestic security service, Shin Bet.
When these visits were over, Shin Bet invited Corbyn’s local fixer in for what turned out to be five hours of questioning in a police station in Haifa.
Shin Bet told her they were relaxed about her charity work for the Palestinian cause, but would not tolerate her campaigning inside the Houses of Parliament in the UK.
If she did not heed the warning, she would spend the rest of her days in prison as an enemy of the state. Her lawyer told her that such a charge could indeed be fabricated against her and that an Israeli court would send her to prison if this happened. She is an Israeli citizen.
At the very least, the warnings given to Corbyn’s fixer confirm that Israel’s security services had set their sights on the MP at least five years before he became Labour leader and long before antisemitism in Labour became a newsworthy issue.
Nobody in the Labour Party was bothered with Corbyn’s travels, which certainly were not secret. He was a backbencher on the fringes of the party. Only Shin Bet took note.
The smear campaign has been wonderfully effective. Of course, many groups joined in for different reasons, including people indifferent to the conflict in Palestine who had shown no past interest in it.
The compromising material of Corbyn’s past contacts would have had no purchase had there not been a determination within the Parliamentary Labour Party and at Labour headquarters to stop Corbyn at all costs. But taken together, it worked.
A poll conducted by Survation last year asked member of the British public who were aware of antisemitism in Labour what percentage of party members had complaints against them.
Their mean average reply was 34 percent. The real figure is a fraction of one percent. The perception of antisemitism was over 300 times the reality in Corbyn’s party.
Palestine lost
Since becoming leader, Keir Starmer has avoided contact with Palestinian leaders, either in Israel or in Britain.
Starmer has had two opportunities to engage.
On 26 June this year, 15 members of the Knesset who comprise the Joint List wrote to all party leaders in Britain to urge them to “actively oppose” attempts by Israel to annex territory unilaterally.
The Joint List, the main coalition representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, is the third largest group of MKs in the parliament. The letter was sent by Yousef Jabareen, the head of the Joint List’s international committee.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson instructed one of his ministers, James Cleverly, minister of state for the Middle East and North Africa, to reply.
“We continue to urge Israel not to take these steps. The prime minister has conveyed the UK’s opposition to unilateral annexation to Prime Minister Netanyahu on multiple occasions,” Cleverly wrote.
Starmer did not reply, and still has not replied. Jabareen received an automated reply from Starmer’s office, telling him that he receives hundreds of emails each day.
On 16 September, a group of leading British Palestinians, many of whom were members of Labour, but some not, wrote an open letter to the Labour Party insisting on “the right of Palestinians to accurately describe our experiences of dispossession and oppression” and rejecting Labour’s attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
The letter was accompanied by emails to Starmer to set up a meeting. They were told that Starmer was too busy to meet them. They were referred to Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, who also declined to meet them.
A ‘dressing down’
However when Stephen Kinnock, who comes from the right wing of the party and is a bitter critic of Corbyn, called in a parliamentary debate for the UK to “ban all products that originate from Israeli settlements in the occupied territories”, Nandy found the time to intervene.
Nandy told the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council – according to a source quoted by MailOnline – that Kinnock, a consistent and long-standing critic of Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, had been given a “dressing down” for his remarks made during the Commons debate.
“Lisa made no secret of the fact she and the leader were angry with Kinnock,” the source is quoted as saying.
“Especially after all the work that has been done to try and restore Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community.”
Nandy herself proposed a ban on the import of goods from illegal settlements in the West Bank, but only if Israel pressed ahead with annexation.
Starmer’s sole intervention in this debate occurred when he was asked by Jewish News about sanctions and he stressed the need instead to maintain a “strong working relationship with Israel”.
Image on the right: Starmer speaking at a leadership hustings in Bristol in February 2020 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Starmer said:
“I don’t agree with annexation and I don’t think it’s good for security in the region, and I think it’s very important that we say that.
“Whether sanctions follow is another matter but at the moment let’s resolve this in the proper way. But this is not good for security in the region. That should be a paramount consideration.”
When pressed further, he added:
“There needs to be a strong working relationship where we are able to exchange views frankly, as you would with an ally and on some of these issues, a frank exchange is what we most need, I think.”
Labour’s history
This Monday marks 103 years since the Balfour Declaration committed British governments to support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The 1917 document predates Labour’s emergence as a political force in the years after World War One, but the party has a history of its own in the Middle East which no leader can ignore.
In 1944, when the territory of Palestine was still under British control, its national executive committee authored a motion, passed by conference, which read: “Palestine surely is a case, on human grounds and to promote a stable settlement, for transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in. Let them be compensated handsomely for their land and let their settlement elsewhere be carefully organised and generously financed.”
But it has history more recent than that.
The suspension of Corbyn after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report into antisemitism last week contrasts with Corbyn’s treatment of Tony Blair, who as a former Labour prime minister was excoriated by the 2016 Chilcot Report over his decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
John Chilcot, a former senior diplomat, eviscerated Blair, stopping short of accusing him of lying to parliament.
Chilcot said that at the time of the invasion, Saddam Hussein “posed no imminent threat” and revealed a private note that Blair sent to Bush in July 2002 which read: “I will be with you, whatever.”
In a two-hour press conference following the publication of the report, Blair was unrepentant. “I believe we made the right decision and the world is better and safer,” he declared.
He argued that he had acted in good faith, based on intelligence at the time which said that Iraq’s president had weapons of mass destruction. This “turned out to be wrong”.
Corbyn’s suspension
Corbyn offered a total apology on behalf of the party for the decision to invade Iraq.
He said:
“So I now apologise sincerely on behalf of my party for the disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq in March 2003. That apology is owed first of all to the people of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and the country is still living with the devastating consequences of the war and the forces it unleashed. They have paid the greatest price for the most serious foreign policy calamity of the last 60 years.”
He went on:
“The apology is also owed to the families of those soldiers who died in Iraq or who have returned home injured or incapacitated. They did their duty but it was in a conflict they should never have been sent to.”
Blair at the time was just a member of the party, in the same situation as Corbyn was last week.
Corbyn, however, did not suspend Blair for not apologising and uttering words which went against the party line.
Instead, the opposite was happening. The “party of war” within the Parliamentary Labour Party went on the offensive against the leadership.
MPs who had backed the Iraq war, and consistently voted against inquiries into it, went after Corbyn.
Of the 71 MPs who voted no confidence in Corbyn in 2016 and who had been in parliament in 2003, 92 percent had voted in favour of the Iraq war and seven against.
In justifying his action to suspend Corbyn, Starmer said that the former leader had defied his response to the EHRC report, which condemned anyone trying to claim that antisemitism had been exaggerated for political reasons.
The night before the report was published, Starmer phoned Corbyn to say he would not be condemning him by name in his statement of reply to the EHRC report. Corbyn and his team repeatedly asked Starmer what he would say in his statement. Starmer said he would send them his lines.
Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, also promised Corbyn’s team that she would send them the lines of Starmer’s statement. Both failed to do so. The reactions of the two men were thus set on collision course.
Corbyn appeared as if he was defying the leadership, even though at the time he spoke, he had no idea what Starmer would say on a key point that defined their dispute.
Corbyn subsequently failed to back down, but one possibility is that Starmer’s team knew what Corbyn would say, while Corbyn himself was kept in the dark until it was too late.
The left bites back
Corbyn did not defend himself against allegations that he tolerated antisemitism or that he himself was an antisemite, claims that are still being made today. To the extent that he let this campaign run unchallenged in the High Court, he himself is responsible.
On the day Corbyn was suspended, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the original complainant in the EHRC investigation, wrote to Starmer and David Evans, the general secretary, demanding investigations into 32 members of the Labour Party, including Angela Rayner, Starmer’s current deputy, and 10 other MPs.
In response, seven trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party and one which backed Starmer as candidate, published a statement expressing “serious concern” about the manner and rationale for Corbyn’s suspension, suggesting it had undermined party unity and democratic processes.
Far from being his “Clause 4” moment – the issue that Tony Blair used to define New Labour by dropping the party’s historic commitment to state ownership of key industries – the suspension of Corbyn could define Starmer’s leadership in the same way that Blair’s decision to invade Iraq has cast a shadow over everything a man elected three times as prime minister did. The ghosts of Iraq follow Blair around to this day.
Quite apart from the fate of Corbyn, support for Palestine is much greater in the party than Starmer is comfortable with. Palestine, which he knows about much less than Corbyn, is his blindspot.
Unless Corbyn is reinstated quickly, the decision to suspend him from the party could prove to be a permanent and defining stain on Starmer’s leadership.
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David Hearst is the editor in chief of Middle East Eye. He left The Guardian as its chief foreign leader writer. In a career spanning 29 years, he covered the Brighton bomb, the miner’s strike, the loyalist backlash in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Northern Ireland, the first conflicts in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia and Croatia, the end of the Soviet Union, Chechnya, and the bushfire wars that accompanied it. He charted Boris Yeltsin’s moral and physical decline and the conditions which created the rise of Putin. After Ireland, he was appointed Europe correspondent for Guardian Europe, then joined the Moscow bureau in 1992, before becoming bureau chief in 1994. He left Russia in 1997 to join the foreign desk, became European editor and then associate foreign editor. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he worked as education correspondent.
The mainstream pro-Biden media is poking fun at Donald Trump’s suggestion that there could be fraud involved in the post-election receipt of mail-in ballots. Apparently they’re not familiar with the election-theft case of Lyndon Johnson, who would go on to become president of the United States.
The entire matter is detailed in Robert Caro’s second book in his biographical series on Johnson. The book is entitled Means of Ascent.
Johnson election theft took place in 1948, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate against Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, one of the most admired and respected governors in the history of the state.
In the primary election, Stevenson led Johnson by 70,000 votes, but because he didn’t have a majority of the votes, he was forced into a run-off. The run-off was held on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning after the run-off, Stevenson was leading by 854 votes.
As a New York Timesreview of Caro’s account stated, the day after the run-off election it was “discovered” that the returns of a particular county had not yet been counted. The newly discovered votes were overwhelmingly in favor of Johnson. Then, on Monday more returns came in from the Rio Grande Valley.
Nonetheless, on Tuesday, the State Election Bureau announced that Stevenson had won by 349 votes. Nothing changed on Wednesday and Thursday after the election. On Friday, precincts in the Rio Grande Valley made “corrections” to their tallies, which narrowed Stevenson’s lead to 157.
But also on Friday, Jim Wells County, which was governed as a personal fiefdom by a powerful South Texas rancher named George Parr, filed “amended” returns for what has become famous as “Box 13” that gave Johnson another 200 votes. When all was said and done, Johnson had “won” the election by 87 votes.
It was later discovered that one of Parr’s men had changed the total tally for Johnson from 765 to 965 by simply curling the 7 into a 9.
Where did the extra 200 votes come from? The last 202 names on on the election roll in Box 13 were in a different color ink from the rest of the names, the names were in alphabetical order, and they were all in the same handwriting. When Caro was researching his book, he secured a statement from Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County, who acknowledged the fraud and confessing his role in it.
As the Washington Postreported, to investigate what obviously appeared quite suspicious Stevenson employed the assistance of Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who had trapped and killed Bonnie and Clyde. It was to no avail. Johnson got a friendly state judge to issue an injunction preserving the status quo, after which the Democratic executive committee, by one vote, declared Johnson to be the winner.
Stevenson took the matter to federal court but the Supreme Court punted, declaring that it had no right to interfere with a state election.
So, Lyndon Johnson stole the election and ended up going to Washington as Texas’ U.S. Senator. Ironically, if Stevenson had become the state’s senator instead, Johnson would never have been selected to be John Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate and, consequently, would never have been president.
No wonder Donald Trump is worried about those Democrats! For that matter, those Democrats should be just as worried about those Republicans!
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
“Caring for each other. Because we are all in this together.”
What a blatant hijacking of virtue. I simply can’t see something like that and not speak out. If for no other reason, because I don’t want to become numb and accepting to such brainwashing. They might as well point at the moon and tell us it’s the sun. What is caring about any of these pointless and unwarranted COVID-19 restrictions?
When one looks at the facts they will not find any proof that there ever was a deadly coronavirus pandemic. And even the mainstream media admits to the many harms of the (ineffective) corona containment measures.
Notwithstanding, we have the WHO locking people up, the media counting common cold infections like they were cases of the Bubonic plague and church bizares selling homemade masks.
These types of contradictions set up stress within peoples’ heads.
The government is committing harmful acts against its own people while calling such actions “caring,” “compassionate” and “keeping everybody safe.”
“No! There’s no way our government would do such a thing. You’re nuts! You need help!” Someone emailed me this not-so-convincing argument last week.
Sadly, one only has to look to recent Canadian history to see that the government has committed far worse acts against 150,000 aboriginal children from 1879 until 1986. Richard Wagamese summarizes the life of these native children, abducted from their homes and forced into labour camps (disguised as schools), run by pedophiles (disguised as priests), in his book Indian Horse:
“The beatings hurt. The threats belittled us. The incessant labour wearied us, made us old before our time. The death, disease, and disappearances filled us with fear. But perhaps what terrified us most were the nighttime invasions…. We’d push our faces into our pillows or bury our heads beneath our blankets, to drown out the surf of woe that came each night… Other times boys would be led from the dorms. Where they went and what happened to them was never spoken of.”
The next morning the children would be seated in the chapel for Mass, at the end of which the priest would proclaim: “We brought you here here to save you from heathen ways, to bring you to the light of salvation of the one true God. What you learn here will raise you up, make you worthy, cleanse your body, and purify your spirit.”
But the government wasn’t aware of what was going on, one might argue.
Really? John S. Milloy’s A National Crime cites a review printed in a 1908 by the Honourable S.H. Blake, for the Minister of Indian Affairs, which says: “The appalling number of deaths among the younger children appeals loudly to the guardians of our Indians. In doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death, brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.”
Five years earlier, Dr. J. P. Rice arrived to serve as principal of Red Deer Industrial Institute in Alberta. He reported: “… the sight of the ragged ill-kempt and sickly looking children was sufficient to make me sick at heart.”
Compulsory schooling and mainstream media has done a good job at teaching us to believe what we are told, not what we perceive. That’s why history is able to repeat such crimes. Governments have a reputation for sinking into tyranny under the guise of keeping its trusting masses safe.
Albert Camus said in his essay, A Homage in Exile: “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”
This type of tyrannical caring appears to be happening again as countries return to self-destructive lockdowns. But the COVID crimes can be stopped. We need only trust our own common sense, look at the facts and resist in any way we can.
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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Posts – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the powers that should not be from using an exaggerated pandemic to violate our health, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The richest and most powerful country on earth — whether due to ineptitude, choice or some combination of both — has no ability to perform the simple task of counting votes in a minimally efficient or confidence-inspiring manner. As a result, the credibility of the voting process is severely impaired, and any residual authority the U.S. claims to “spread” democracy to lucky recipients of its benevolence around the world is close to obliterated.
At 7:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, the day after the 2020 presidential elections, the results of the presidential race, as well as control of the Senate, are very much in doubt and in chaos. Watched by rest of the world — deeply affected by who rules the still-imperialist superpower — the U.S. struggles and stumbles and staggers to engage in a simple task mastered by countless other less powerful and poorer countries: counting votes. Some states are not expected to finished their vote-counting until the end of this week or beyond.
The same data and polling geniuses who pronounced that Hillary Clinton had a 90% probability or more of winning the 2016 election, and who spent the last three months proclaiming the 2020 election even more of a sure thing for the Democratic presidential candidate, are currently insisting that Biden, despite being behind in numerous key states, is still the favorite by virtue of uncounted ballots in Democrat-heavy counties in the outcome-determinative states. [One went to sleep last night with the now-notorious New York Times needle of data guru Nate Cohn assuring the country that, with more than 80% of the vote counted in Georgia, Trump had more than an 80% chance to win that state, only to wake up a few hours later with the needle now predicting the opposite outcome; that all happened just a few hours after Cohn assured everyone how much “smarter” his little needle was this time around].
NYT’s predictive needle for Georgia less than four hours later, at 12:12 a.m., early Wednesday morning.
Given the record of failures and humiliations they have quickly compiled, what rational person would trust anything they say at this point? A citizen randomly chosen from the telephone book would be as reliable if not more so for sharing predictions. And the monumental failures of the polling industry and the data nerds who leech off it, for the second consecutive national election, only serve to sow even further doubt and confusion around the electoral process.
A completely untrustworthy voting count is now the norm. Two months after the New York state primary in late June, two Congressional races were in doubt by what The New York Times called “major delays in counting a deluge of 400,000 mail-in ballots and other problems.” In particular:
Thousands more ballots in the city were discarded by election officials for minor errors, or not even sent to voters until the day before the primary, making it all but impossible for the ballots to be returned in time.
It took a full six weeks for New York to finally declare a winner in those two primary races for Congress.
The coronavirus pandemic and the shutdowns and new votings rules it ushered in have obviously complicated the process, but the U.S. failure to simply count votes with any degree of efficiency, in a way that inspires even minimal confidence in the process, pre-dates the March, 2020 nationwide lockdowns. Even if one dismisses as aberrational the protracted, Court-decided, and still-untrusted outcome of the 2000 presidential election — only four national election cycles ago — the U.S. voting process is rife with major systemic failures and doubt-sowing inefficiencies that can be explained only as a deliberate choice and/or a perfect reflection of a collapsing, crumbling empire.
Recall the mass confusion that ensued back in January, in the very first Democratic Party primary election in the Iowa caucus, where a new app created and monetized by a bunch of sleazy Democratic operatives caused massive delays, confusion and an untrustworthy outcome. Later in the process, many Super Tuesday states — including California — were still counting votes weeks or even longer after the election was held (more than a week after the Democratic primary, California had still only counted roughly 75% of the ballots cast, depriving Bernie Sanders of a critical narrative victory on election night).
The 2018 midterm elections were also marred by pervasive irregularities. The Washington Post noted “thousands of reports of voting irregularities across the country…. with voters complaining of broken machines, long lines and untrained poll workers improperly challenging Americans’ right to vote.”
Voter suppression in NY is rampant and repressive.@NYGovCuomo is acting in the interests of Wall St, Big Pharma, and luxury developers by allowing 1.8 million New Yorkers to languish without representation.
Right in line with GOP tactics to suppress ppl of color at the polls. https://t.co/fsUaixkqrv
And the full extent of the “irregularities” and treacherous outright cheating by the Democratic National Committee in the 2016 primary race between Clinton and Sanders was never fully appreciated given how pro-Clinton the press was. As just one example, “200,000 New York City voters” — many in pro-Sanders precincts — “had been illegally wiped off the rolls and prevented from voting in the presidential primary” (for one of the best-documented histories of just how pervasive were the shenanigans and cheating in the 2016 Democratic primary across multiple key states, listen to this TrueAnon episode).
However one wants to speculate about the motives for all of this, one thing is clear: it does not need to be this way. To eliminate all doubts about that fact, just look at Brazil.
After the pervasive voting problems in the 2018 midterms, I wrote an article with my Brazilian colleague Victor Pougy describing the extraordinary speed and efficiency with which Brazil — a country not exactly renowned for its speed and efficiency — counts its votes.
Brazil is not a small country. It is the fifth most-populous nation on the planet. Although its population is somewhat smaller than the U.S.’s (330 million to 210 million), its mandatory voting law, automatic registration, and 16-year-old voting age means the number of ballots to be counted is quite similar (105 million votes in Brazil’s 2018 presidential election compared to 130 million votes in the 2016 U.S. presidential election). And on the same date of its national elections, it, too, holds gubernatorial and Congressional elections in its twenty-seven states.
And yet Brazil — a much poorer and less technologically advanced country than the U.S., with a much shorter history of democracy — holds seamless, quick vote counts about which very few people harbor doubts. The elections are held on a Sunday, to ensure as many people as possible do not have work obligations to prevent voting, and polls close at 6:00 p.m.
For the 2018 presidential run-off election that led to Jair Bolsonaro’s victory, 90% of all votes were counted and the results released by 6:00 p.m. on the day of the election: the time the last state closed its polls. The full vote tally was available within a couple of hours after that. The same was true of the first-round voting held three weeks earlier — which also included races for governor, Senator and Congress in all the states: full vote totals were released by computer shortly after the polls closed and few had any doubts about their accuracy and legitimacy.
Hundreds of millions of Americans went to bed on Tuesday’s election night seeing Trump in the lead in key states, with the data experts of major outlets indicating that his victory in many of those states was highly likely. They woke up to the opposite indication: that Biden is now a slight favorite to win several if not all of those remaining key states. But what is clear is that it will be days if not longer before the votes are fully counted, with judicial proceedings almost certain to prolong the outcomes even further.
No matter what the final result, there will be substantial doubts about its legitimacy by one side or the other, perhaps both. And no deranged conspiracy thinking is required for that. An electoral system suffused with this much chaos, error, protracted outcomes and seemingly inexplicable reversals will sow doubt and distrust even among the most rational citizens.
The next time Americans hear from their government that they need to impose democracy in other countries — through wars, invasion, bombing campaigns or other forms of clandestine CIA “interference” — they should insist that democracy first be imposed in the United States. An already frazzled, intensely polarized and increasingly hostile populace now has to confront yet another election in the richest and most technologically advanced country on earth where the votes cannot be counted in a way that inspires even minimal degrees of confidence.
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The article below was written by Zafar Syed Zaffsyed for the Pakistan Independent and published on November 2, 2020. The original is available here. The text below was translated by Reprieve staff.
Our thanks to Reprieve for bringing this important article to our attention
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“I learned about my father’s case on Google when I was twelve or thirteen years old, using Wikipedia. My name is Jawad. I am the son of Ahmed Rabbani who is in Guantánamo Bay. I am 17 years old and I have never met my father.”
Jawad Rabbani, the son of Guantánamo Bay detainee Ahmed Rabbani, spoke to an Independent Urdu correspondent in Karachi about his life. Here is his story.
“I was born five or six months after Abu went to prison,” he said. “When I was little, I didn’t tell my friends who my father was and where he was. I used to say he is not in the world. When we first spoke, he said he was in prison. I asked him, ‘Why are you in jail? Are there bad people in jail?’”
Ahmed Rabbani is on hunger strike and says he is prepared to die. He has written a letter to Independent Urdu, stating:
“it is not possible to be released from this prison in life, so I want to die and get rid of this prison. Americans are afraid to starve me to death, so they force-feed me every day, but this is no less than torture.”
Five thousand dollar deal in Musharraf era
According to official US Department of Defense documents published in the New York Times, Rabbani has admitted to being an al-Qaeda facilitator and working directly for al-Qaeda’s senior planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The US considers him “high risk” and claims he should be kept in custody.
Clive Stafford Smith, co-founder of the UK-based human rights organisation Reprieve which is fighting for Ahmed Rabbani’s rights, told The Independent Urdu that Rabbani had no links to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organisation. There is no connection and these confessions were obtained from him through torture.
Stafford Smith says Pakistani authorities sold Rabbani to the United States in exchange for $5,000 saying he was a terrorist called Hassan Gul. Oddly enough, the real Hassan Gul was arrested in 2004, held with Rabbani in the same prison, but released by the Americans after only three years. According to Stafford Smith, Hassan Gul rejoined the terrorists and was killed in a drone strike in Waziristan in 2012.
According to a report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Ahmed Rabbani was subjected to “Enhanced Interrogation,” which means torture. [The report notes that he was held in the ‘Dark Prison’ in Afghanistan for 540 days, where he was hung from the ceiling until his shoulders dislocated, beaten, threatened and kept in total isolation and darkness, among other tortures.]
“My volunteer American lawyers documented 60 methods of torture, from ordinary beatings to fake executions,” Rabbani told Independent Urdu.
Ahmed’s hunger strike
Ahmed Rabbani has been imprisoned all this time, and is still being held at Guantánamo Bay. He has started a hunger strike to protest against this.
“Due to the continuous hunger strike, Rabbani has lost 37 kg, and is forced to be given liquid food daily through a tube,” said Stafford Smith.
Mahvish Ahmed Hayat Khan, a human rights lawyer working with Reprieve and author of My Guantánamo Diary, told The Independent Urdu:
“Ahmed Rabbani was arrested due to a misidentification. The United States has acknowledged that they do not have wanted people, but some are still being held captive. This is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, international law and the US Constitution. 740 out of 780 prisoners have been released before Ahmed, which has made him very depressed.”
In a letter to Independent Urdu, Rabbani writes that he has no choice but to go on a life-threatening hunger strike. “They have kept me locked up for more than 18 years and in my eyes there is no end to this suffering.”
Behaviour of the Dark Ages
Rabbani is force-fed daily to prevent him dying of starvation.
“They are trying to keep me alive, not because they care about me, but because if I die, it will make them look bad. They ruined my life, destroyed my family and subjected me to the Dark Ages,” Rabbani wrote in the letter.
“One day I was wearing a long T-shirt that came down to my knees. I called the supervisor and asked him to take a photo of me so that he could use it in his medical class. Students should learn what a person looks like shortly before their death.”
“I am nothing but skin and bones and I move around with a cane. I’m only 51 but I look like a 95-year-old. I saw my shadow through the window and thought I might be in the movie Unbroken which showed American pilots who died of starvation as prisoners of war in World War II.”
Why are they tortured?
“My American captors also want me to say goodbye to my conscience and my caste for a little food, to betray my religion and morals. It’s not possible for me to do that,” Rabbani wrote.
“Maybe I will finally go to my family in a coffin and escape from Guantánamo completely. I hope that doesn’t happen. But they think that after all these years, they can weaken my peaceful protest with more violence. It’s not going to happen, so I just have to follow the path that has been chosen until the government of Pakistan takes me to my family.”
Reprieve has created a website about Ahmed Rabbani’s hunger strike which can be viewed here.
Ahmed Rabbani’s son Jawad Rabbani, who is studying in Karachi, has written to President Trump about his father’s case, but received no response “If someone commits a crime and it is proven, then it is a different matter, but we do not know why Abu is in jail, nor does Abu know,” Jawad said. “Why is he in jail?”
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The 2020 presidential campaigns have ignored foreign policy more this year than in any election since the turn of the century, but the 2020 election will have significant foreign policy consequences no matter the outcome. The neglect of foreign policy by the campaigns and the media has been a great disservice to the country, since the president wields such extensive power in this area. The choices that a president makes can have devastating effects on tens of millions of people in other countries, and they can sometimes impose huge costs on the United States.
By all rights, foreign policy should account for the majority of what presidential candidates talk about, because it is such a large part of what presidents do once in office, but the public’s lack of interest has created incentives for the candidates and journalists to pay it as little attention as possible. It is no wonder that we have no accountability in foreign policy when foreign policy plays such a small part in the process of selecting a president.
If Trump defies the odds and wins re-election, he will take it as a vindication for his destructive unilateralist policies, and he will presumably be more aggressive in pursuing those policies in a second term. The national security team in a second Trump term will likely be a Who’s Who of the worst hard-liners, possibly including Ric Grenell, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham. A Biden win will in all likelihood lead to an attempt to revive a pre-2016 consensus that was already hollowed out and discredited by the failures of the last two decades.
There will therefore be some major differences in policy depending on the outcome. A Biden win might mean more confrontational policies toward Russia and North Korea, while a Trump victory would all but guarantee continued relentless hostility toward Iran and Venezuela. Tensions with China seem likely to increase in different ways no matter which candidate prevails. Neither candidate is offering foreign policy restraint as we understand it, but a Biden administration might at least be open to some ideas from restrainers. A second Trump term seems likely to be dominated even more by the president’s loyalists and the hard-liners he has surrounded himself with for the last four years.
The final presidential debate included some brief discussion of foreign policy broadly defined, but almost all of that time was consumed by mutual accusations of corruption and taking foreign money. Voters have never heard a substantial exchange of views between the candidates on what they would do overseas in the next four years, because the candidates prefer not to talk about it and no one seems inclined to ask them. Other than attacking Trump over engagement with North Korea and the dubious Russian bounty story, Biden has said very little recently about specific Trump policies that he opposes. During the primaries, we heard some commitments from him that he would treat the Saudis like pariahs, end U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen, and reenter the nuclear deal with Iran, but there has been precious little discussion of the other wars that the U.S. continues to wage in at least half a dozen countries. Other than boasting about the Israel normalization agreements that have been concluded in recent months, Trump has said very little about his record because there is so little to tout.
The candidates’ reticence is understandable. Biden’s foreign policy record is hardly awe-inspiring, and at different points he has taken some awful and misguided positions. His vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq is well-known, and it stands out as the worst decision in his career, but we shouldn’t forget that he has been a consistent and vocal backer for NATO expansion, including in Ukraine and Georgia. Adding these countries to the alliance in the near future is very unlikely, but it does not bode well for our government’s Russia policy that the next president could be one of the biggest cheerleaders for this terrible idea. He has repeatedly poured cold water on the idea of engagement with North Korea, and he sticks to an outdated demand for denuclearization that North Korea is never going to accept.
On the plus side, Biden reportedly advised against intervening in Libya, and he opposed Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, but he lost those internal battles and can’t easily criticize those policies without impugning the judgment of the man who chose him to be vice president. If he becomes president, he will be able to get his way, but it is anyone’s guess whether he will follow his more cautious instincts or indulge his more conventional hawkish views. The names being floated as possible choices for Biden’s national security team don’t inspire confidence that it will be the former.
Trump’s foreign policy record has little to recommend it, especially for those interested in restraint. He has made a mockery of real diplomacy with photo-op summits and Potemkin agreements, and at the same time he has thrown up as many roadblocks as possible to impede meaningful negotiations with Iran in the future. Few presidents have talked so much about making deals while delivering so few. The failure to extend New START is a case in point. Even though it would have been very easy, and it would have put some meat on the bones of his promise to cooperate with Russia, he has dithered and dragged his feet with the apparent goal of letting the treaty die. The president has refused to take the foreign policy equivalent of a lay-up because it would require him to acknowledge that his predecessor may have been right about at least one thing. The rest of his arms control agenda amounts to tearing up one treaty after another and inviting a new arms race in Europe.
The Iran crisis that he precipitated when he reneged on the JCPOA has taken the U.S. to the brink of war more than once, and that crisis is far from over. The pitiless economic wars that he has waged on the civilian populations of Iran, Venezuela, and Syria have achieved nothing except to starve and impoverish tens of millions. Pseudo-engagement with North Korea has yielded no results except to interfere with South Korea’s own genuine efforts at rapprochement.
The continued, enthusiastic backing of the Saudis in their war on Yemen and the determination to keep the U.S. involved in that atrocious mean that the president has taken full ownership of an indefensible policy that he has made worse. U.S. support for the Saudi coalition has been going on for five and a half years, but almost four of those years will have been on Trump’s watch. Yemen is the blackest mark on Trump’s record, because it is the most destructive policy and it is the one that he could have easily ended at any point. Congress gave him the perfect opportunity to end U.S. involvement in that war by passing a war powers resolution last year. Instead of doing the right and smart thing by signing it, the president vetoed it. He had a chance to end a foreign war, and he refused because he wants to sell more weapons to the client states that are destroying the poorest country in the region.
Trump and Biden are separated by wide divides on many specific issues, but one thing they continue to have in common is their commitment to maintaining U.S. primacy. The president understands this more in terms of domination and military strength, and Biden is much more supportive of multilateral agreements and institutions, but both remain wedded to an activist U.S. “leadership” role that no longer makes sense for this country. The U.S. will continue to exhaust itself in unnecessary wars and unwise security commitments as long as leaders in both parties believe that U.S. global hegemony and dominance are beyond question. No matter which candidate wins the election, the U.S. will remain committed to a strategy of primacy, and it will be at least another four years before the voters are presented with a serious alternative to that failed strategy.
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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
This article by the late Andre Vltchek was first published in 2019.
In 2019, I have written a long analysis about “the Uyghur issue”; analysis which will be soon published as a book.
For some time, I have been warning the world that the West, and the United States in particular, are helping to radicalize the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province and outside.
And not only that: I clearly mapped movement of the Uyghur radicals through some countries like Indonesia, towards Turkey, from where they are then injected into brutal war zones like Idlib in Syria. I worked in Idlib area, with the Syrian commanders, and I spoke at length with the Syrian internally displaced people; victims of the Uyghur genocidal attacks.
The majority of Uyghur people are Muslims. They have their own, ancient, specific culture and most of them are, of course, very decent human beings. Northwest China is their home.
The “problem” is that Urumqi, Xinjiang, are located on the main branch of BRI (The Belt and Road Initiative) – an extremely optimistic, internationalist project which is ready to connect billions of people on all continents. The BRI is infrastructural as well as cultural project, which will soon pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and under-development.
Washington is horrified that China is taking a lead in building a much brighter future for humanity. It is because, if China succeeds, it could be the end of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism, leading to real freedom and independence for dozens of until now suffering nations.
Therefore, Washington has decided to act, in order to preserve the status quo and its dominance over the world.
Step one: to antagonize, provoke and to smear China by all means, be it over Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China Sea or, above mentioned “Uygur Issue”.
Step two: to try to turn a part of China’s constitutionally-recognized national minority – Uyghurs – into “rebels”, or more precisely, terrorists.
Turkey, a member of NATO, offered the U.S. a helping hand. Uyghurs were flown with their families to Istanbul, with Turkish passports, through hubs in Southeast Asia. Then, their passports were confiscated in Istanbul. Many Uyghurs were recruited, trained, and then transported into war-torn Syria. Smaller group stayed in places like Indonesia, joining jihadi cadres there. When terrorist groups in Syria were almost thoroughly defeated, some Uyghurs were moved to Afghanistan, where I also used to work, and investigated.
Needless to say, Afghanistan has a short but important border with China.
Why all this complex operation? The answer is simple: NATO/Washington/West hope that the hardened, well-trained Uyghur jihadi fighters will eventually return home to Xinjiang. There, they would start to fight for “independence”, and while doing that, they would sabotage the BRI.
This way, China would be injured, and its most powerful global project (BRI) would be disrupted.
The Chinese government is, naturally, alarmed. It is clear that the West has prepared brilliant trap: 1) If China does nothing, it will have to face extremely dangerous terrorist threat on its own territory (remember Soviet Union being dragged into Afghanistan, and mortally injured by Western trained, financed and supported Mujahedeen? West has long history of using Islam for its Machiavellian designs). 2) If China does something to protect itself, it will get attacked by the Western media and politicians. Precisely this is what is happening now.
Everything is ready, prepared.
On 12 September 2019, South China Morning Post, reported:
“US Senate passes Uygur Human Rights Policy Act calling for sanctions on Chinese officials over Xinjiang camps
Bill also urges Trump administration to prohibit export of goods and services to state agents in Chinese region where upwards of 1 million Uygurs are being held
Beijing describes move as a ‘gross interference in China’s internal affairs’”
Naturally, the so-called rights act to interfere in Xinjiang’s affairs is one great exercise in hypocrisy and intimidation.
Let us not forget that the United States is treating Muslim people with absolute spite. It even bans them from entering the country, if they happened to live in certain nations. It arbitrarily bombs them in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, worrying nothing about the loss of civilian lives. It tortures Muslims, and it humiliates them at home and even in their own countries.
And frankly: by trying to trigger the Uyghur insurgency in China, Washington is clearly doing a great harm to the Uyghurs themselves, and actually to all people of Northwest China. It is not just wrong; the United States is committing crime against humanity.
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China is a multi-national, multi-cultural country. The Muslim culture is part of PRC’s identity. I suggest anyone who doubts that, to travel to Xi’an, one of three ancient capital cities of China.
Xi’an is where the old great Silk Road originated (ancient BRI, one could argue). Until now it is proud of its tremendous Muslim monuments, as well as of wonderful Muslim food and music. Every year, tens of millions of Chinese visitors travel to Xi’an, to understand its legacy, and enjoy its culture. The city is loved and appreciated, mainly because of its vibrant Muslim identity.
It is thorough nonsense that China is ‘anti-Muslim’. Both China (and Russia) are much more tolerant towards Islam than the West. Historically, and currently.
The same nonsense is to claim that China is building “concentration camps” in Xinjiang.
China’s position is clear: what the West describes as camps, are “vocational training centers” where “trainees” can learn Chinese and gain job skills to stop them becoming victims of “terrorism and religious extremism”. A group of Muslim Indonesian leaders, which gained access to these so-called ‘camps’ in Xinjiang, recently told my colleague, that people who spend some time in these institutions can actually sleep at home, at night.
Hardly a Guantanamo Bay, frankly speaking.
The self-proclaimed “judge”- the United States – has hundreds of high-security prisons, scattered all over the country. It is well known fact that throwing often innocent people to jail is big (privatized) business there, already for long decades. Millions of people are locked in for nothing. How can a country with one of the greatest number of prisoners on earth (on per capita bases) dare to preach anyone about justice? It is actually a great mystery.
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What is the true purpose of such acts?
The answer is easy to define: It is that the determined unwillingness of the U.S. to share influence on the world, with other, much more humanistic countries, such as China; it is its unwillingness to compete, on the basis of great ideas and goodwill.
The more nihilist the U.S. foreign policy becomes, the more it accuses others of ‘murder’.
The way things function is simple: Washington creates some terrible conflict, somewhere. When the victim-country tries to resolve the conflict, and so-to speak ‘extinguish fire’, it is accused of ‘violating rights’ and gets slammed by sanctions.
All this has to stop, at some point, soon. This policy of Washington turns millions of human lives into agony.
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This article was first, in shorter version, published on China Daily.
The great bard remarks in Henry VI: Part II that all the lawyers ought to be killed. In entertaining this homicidal formula, William Shakespeare had yet to encounter that barnacle breed known as the pollster. There is much to suggest that those practising this dark and futile art ought to be done away with, with their special ability to suggest realities buried in the entrails of malleable opinions. Their failings have been regular and profound: the Brexit referendum in 2016; the US presidential victory that same year for Donald J. Trump.
Cue to 2020. The scene set before the November 3 vote: the wooden, barely breathing Joe Biden, whose only claim to fame in this presidential race has been not being Trump. A vote for Biden; a vote for a return to amnesia, self-denial and the fiction of “decency”. Trump, campaigning manically across several swing states in the last days; Biden, doing his little bit in Pennsylvania, strumming his Scranton, working class tune to voters.
Democrats were again counting on the weakness of their opponent, misreading him. Strategists could only see a monster, an apparition that would pass. Left unseen was a campaigner who never left the rally; a person whose four years in office has been one long pitch to retain power. In the meantime, despite the president’s predations and the personalisation of high office, Trump’s supporters have noted the hum of the economy (prior to the coronavirus), delighted in his hard stance on treaties, his pugilism towards Washington’s allies and foes.
The death rate of COVID-19 might have seen him off; indeed, Trump might himself have become a viral casualty were it not for the highly priced medical treatment he received. But even here, this mendacious wonder managed to suggest that he contracted it for the American people, did it for them; the foolish minimiser of disease turned brave warrior, albeit it one with a large medical bill attached.
In this mess were the pollsters – again. Data from Real Clear Politics suggested that Biden would sail into the White House on a sea of blue, ahead with 51 percent compared to Trump’s 44 percent in the seven-day rolling average. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reported a 10 point lead favouring Biden (52 percent to 42 percent).
Emblematic in all of this was the result in Florida. Victory was secured by Trump by a margin three times that of 2016. The polling suggested that Biden would be breathing easy with a margin of 2.5 points. Another glaring error for the books.
Looking at Florida, John Podhoretz raged, wondering why “we fell for their crap again.” Such polling could only be seen as “a fraud. It claims to measure something that, it is now unmistakably clear, cannot be accurately measured. Polling’s seductive promise is that it will take the guesswork out of understanding a complex and changing set of circumstances and replace that uncertainty with something that looks like science.”
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson was similarly livid. Suggesting that the polling industry was “dead”, he advocated mass firings. “I could name some of the people who should be fired immediately.”
One figure in the firing line of vituperation was Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism blog described by Aaron Timms in The New Republic as having “no politics – or rather, no politics beyond a mute approval of the status quo.” Silver has turned into a shape changer over the years, moving beyond the astrology of polling into strident pontifications, some of which are suitably dotty. But elections are meant to be his ham and eggs, and in November 2020, he was nodding the way of a convincing Biden victory.
This prompted Erik Engquist, senior managing editor of The Real Deal, to release a volley of indignation. “How many elections can Nate Silver’s model do this before people stop taking him seriously? It gave Biden a 95% chance to win MI, 94% chance to WI, 69% to win FL etc.” Reuters investigative reporter Joel Schectman suggested that Silver had “a lot of mansplaining to do” though took the barb off his remarks by claiming irony; Ashlee Vance of Businessweekwondered how many poles it would take “for Nate Silver to get a forecast right.”
Away from the convenient, readymade fictions of the polling industry, the US political ground is looking ugly, fractured and desperate. This has not stopped Democrats remaining wrapped up in an entitlement narrative that continues to repel voters with its own form of snobbery. Biden’s promise on Election Day that “there will be no red states or blue states just the United States of America” is supremely fanciful when looking at a country distinctly divided between them. What is abysmal for the Donkey Party this time around is not that Trump just might win (again), but that his record on pandemic mismanagement, politicisation of US institutions and science, to name but a few, did not guarantee a blue stampede. Across the country, the revolted remain in revolt.
Instead, Trump has managed to turn the political fabric of the US inside out, sowing seeds of chaos and now, with a promise of litigation, to reap them in the various courts of the country. His overt turn to hucksterism – the claim that an electoral fraud has been committed – is very fitting. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” The pollsters have now been replaced by the vote counters. The lawyers, far from being done away with, are being hired by the platoon.
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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]
In my article last week, ‘Why the Record Vote Turnout May Not Matter’, I predicted the election via electoral college would look very much like 2016: the 3 swing states (PA, MI, WI) would determine the outcome again, and maybe one other state could flip (either Arizona or, less likely, North Carolina). I predicted, as of a week ago, the electoral college vote was very close, with 244 votes for Biden and 248 for Trump.
As of last night, Nov. 3 late, it was exactly that, according to CNN. 44 to 248. This morning, Nov. 4, it’s come down to NV, AZ, WI, MI likely ending up for Biden once final votes are counted; and GA, NC likely for Trump. With Pennsylvania undetermined for days yet. And maybe weeks should Trump take legal action to stop the mail in vote count, which is likely.
As I also predicted last week, Trump came before the TV cameras late last night Nov. 3 and declared the election was a fraud, that the vote counting of mail in ballots should halt in all the swing states only, and that he was going to the US Supreme Court.
Democrats’ naive prediction during the election that they would carry several of the big red states: Texas, Florida, Ohio turned out, as I predicted in my article last week, to be ‘wishful thinking’. As I argued then, these states were long time notorious voter suppression states and would remain Trump’s. Georgia and Florida each already prevented the right to vote, or have impounded, hundreds of thousands of eligible voters in each of those two states, as reported by investigative journalist, Greg Palast.
As of noon today, Nov. 4, should Biden win MI, WI, NV, AZ, where he now leads, and also carry the one special district in Nebraska, he will then have 269 electoral college votes. He won’t win GA or NC. And Pennsylvania is undetermined.
So where could Biden get votes to put him over the required 270? Only one state left: Maine with its 4 votes.
If this scenario holds, the US election will be therefore determined by less than five votes. The country remains fundamentally split and divided.
The policy gridlock concerning economic stimulus will likely continue as a result, as the Senate appears will remain in Republican hands and Senate votes will be driven by the Republican right wing led by Rand Paul who wants no more stimulus but wants more austerity cuts to government spending.
Republicans in Senate will continue their stacking of the Federal courts, and will rely on the ideological partner of the US Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Trump majority, from time to time, to help them block and undermine legislation already passed.
In many ways the election map now looks very much like 2016, with one or so states flipping Democrat but not much change except two ‘blue wall’ swing states going Biden by very thin margins.
In terms of government policy to follow, however, the country will look more like 2012–with McConnell’s Republican Senate thwarting initiatives on economics (stimulus, health, jobs, taxes, etc.) by the US House of Representatives and President (presuming Biden wins).
Consequences for the US economy are not good. The chances are less than 50-50 that a stimulus bill of necessary proportions will be passed before January 2021, just as Covid worsens and dampens household spending and business investment. But big corporations will be happy with this continued gridlock, since it means it is unlikely their massive 2018 tax cut of $4 trillion plus will be reversed for another four years, as the McConnell Senate now prevents all efforts to raise revenues for stimulus spending.
Another important outcome of the election is that the Democrats have actually lost seats in the US House, but not yet control. They expected a ‘blue wave’ that did not occur. The Democrats also failed to take back the US Senate. And Biden as president has no clear mandate. They are in a very weak position to make changes but in a position to be blamed for the failure to make changes which will have negative impact on them in 2022 midterm elections.
The Democrats failure in general, apart from maybe squeaking out a presidential win, shows their election strategy was wrong. As I argued back in November 2018 after the midterms, their strategy of focusing on the suburbs and upper middle class professionals and independents, would not succeed in a general election. It hasn’t.
So where does the country go politically from here?
First, Trump will not go away. That means not just leave office quietly–but also Trump as a social-movement will remain and likely grow stronger as his base believes the election was ‘stolen’ from him as he so often warned. Trump is an unstable, reactionary social movement, not just an unstable individual.
Second, both political parties may split before 2024 (and certainly before 2028) causing a basic party realignment in the US.
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Dr. Jack Rasmus writes on his blog site where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The Azerbaijani Armed Forces and their allies continue to storm Armenian positions in the mountainous terrain near Shusha and the Lachin corridor in Nagorno-Karabakh. After making rapid advances, the Azerbaijani forces now appear to be stuck in a kind of positional fighting. The intensity of the clashes has not lessened and both sides still regularly suffer notable casualties. Meanwhile, Azerbaijani forces are still deployed just south of Shushi and pose a serious threat to the defenders of the town. Some sources say that they are now even regularly shelling the road linking the Lachin corridor to the town. If the reports about the Azerbaijani side having fire control over the road turn out to be true, the situation in Shusha for the Armenian forces will become more and more difficult as the fighting continues.
Armenia, from its side, insists that its forces have been successfully repelling all Azerbaijani attacks. For example, on November 3, the Armenians reportedly repelled an Azerbaijani attack in the Karvachar area killing at least 6 troops, destroying 2 battle tanks and capturing an infantry fighting vehicle. An alleged ‘special forces unit’ of Azerbaijan was also ambushed by Armenian forces near Tagavard. As of November 4, the Armenian military says that its forces have surrounded – and are working to eliminate – another group of Azerbaijani troops south of Shusha.
Meanwhile, the number of Azerbaijani casualties claimed by Armenia since the start of the war has reached 7,095. 251 UAVs, 16 helicopters, 25 planes, 685 armoured vehicles and 6 rocket launchers have allegedly also been destroyed.
Azerbaijan reports regular successes on the battlefield while pro-Azerbaijani sources vow to capture Shusha and the Lachin corridor in the coming days (which is unlikely due to the heavy fortifications in the area). Armenian saboteur groups also appear in statements by the Azerbaijani military as a permanent factor impacting the situation behind the frontlines. Azerbaijan still has a lot of work to do if it wants to secure the recently captured areas.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry officially confirms operations in the Tartar, Aghdam, Khojavend, Zangilan and Gubadli areas. According to them, on November 3 and November 4, a large number of Armenian forces, two T-72 tanks, three D-30 howitzer-guns, a “Zastava M-55” anti-aircraft gun, a tactical UAV, and 3 military trucks were destroyed.
In an interview with the La Repubblica newspaper, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that he is ready to stop the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. This statement was covered by Armenian sources as a kind of sign of an imminent Armenian victory due to the fact that Azerbaijani forces are exhausted by heavy clashes and casualties and that winter is coming. In fact, Aliyev repeated that Armenia must agree on the withdrawal of troops from the contested region for peace to be achieved and said that the only possible compromise with Yerevan is Armenian withdrawal from Azerbaijani territory.
In general, the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc still keeps the initiative but the Armenians used their chance to stabilize the situation and if Baku does not achieve a breakthrough in the coming month, the deteriorating weather conditions together with increasing losses will slow down the Azerbaijani advance even further. The issue of the presence of Turkish-backed Syrian militants fighting on the side of Azerbaijan also does not play into the hands of Azerbaijan and Turkey.
In an interview with Kommersant, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the number of Turkish-backed militants in the area had reached 2,000.
“We are, of course, concerned about the internationalization of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the involvement of militants from the Middle East. We have repeatedly called on external players to use their capabilities to stop the transfer of mercenaries, whose number in the conflict zone, according to available data, is already approaching two thousand,” he said.
The Armenian leadership seems to understand this and recently increased its media and diplomatic activity using the ‘anti-terrorist narrative’. If Yerevan is able to convince the international audience that the actions of the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc in Nagorno-Karabakh increase the terrorist threat not only in the South Caucasus but also in Europe, it will become much easier for Armenia to receive additional support in the ongoing standoff.
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After months of campaigning and a record $14 billion spent by the Trump and Biden teams, it all comes down to results in 5 battleground states.
Here’s where things stand at the moment with vote counting still ongoing:
Pennsylvania: Trump leads by 9.1% — with 36% of votes to be counted, most mail-in ones favoring the challenger.
Keystone State results may be decisive. Pre-election, I told a friend that if Trump wins PA, Ohio and Florida, he should triumph over Biden.
Wisconsin: Biden up by 0.6% — with 5% of votes to be counted.
Michigan: Biden ahead by 0.7% — also with 4% of votes to be counted.
North Carolina: Trump leads by 1.4% — with 6% of remaining votes to be counted.
Georgia: Trump up by 2.2% with 6% of votes to be counted.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, Biden taking Wisconsin and Michigan, DJT will need Nevada’s 6 Electoral College votes for a 270 majority over Biden by a whisker.
As things stand at mid-morning Wednesday, Biden has 238 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 213.
Note: The above differential is the Wall Street Journal’s spread.
For the NYT, it’s 227 to 213, favoring Biden.
The Washington Post puts Biden ahead by a 224 – 213 margin.
At this time, things can go either way. In the popular vote that doesn’t matter, Biden leads Trump by a 50% – 48% margin.
According to the most recent pre-election polls, Biden was projected to win the popular by over 7 points.
Three polls had him up by 10 points, another by 11. One poll alone called the race a near-dead heat, Biden ahead by one point.
As things now stand, that poll was closest to how things may turn out — a very close race that likely won’t be decided at least for a few more days.
Results depend on how quickly remaining votes will be counted.
With completing Pennsylvania’s vote count likely to be last among the above swing states, its final tally may decide things for Trump or Biden.
A sidebar to the election is the amount being bet on the outcome.
Reportedly it’s around $1 billion, double the amount in 2016.
According to head of the British sports political betting firm GVC Matthew Shaddick, the Trump/Biden race has been a boon for UK betting houses.
Betting at GVC’s Ladbrokes, Coral and BWin houses have Biden winning over Trump.
Yet according to Shaddick, 70% of bets placed over the past week were for Trump, calling the turnaround “astonishing.”
Rival house William Hill also has the Dem candidate as the favorite.
Shaddick called the US presidential race the biggest betting event of the year.
William Hill’s spokesman Rupert Adams made a similar comment, adding:
It’s because “colorful character” Trump brings out the animal spirits of gamblers.
The race without him would attract much less interest.
No matter who wins, gaming houses profit hugely when volume is high.
Given teams of lawyers representing both candidates with a possible High Court battle ahead, counsel for Trump and Biden will be winners no matter how the race turns out.
Although well short of an Electoral College majority on Wednesday, Trump declared victory pre-dawn.
Never short of hyperbole, he said, “(w)e were winning, and all of a sudden it was just called off.”
He accused Dems of trying to “disenfranchise” his voters, adding:
“They knew they couldn’t win. This is a fraud on the American public.”
Separately, his campaign manager Bill Stepien said “(w)e trust our data.”
“We trust our math. It’s called this race spot on to this point. It’s why we feel the confidence we have in the votes left to be counted.”
“If we count all legally cast ballots, we believe the president will win.”
According to senior Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller, “(w)e are obviously leading a full-court press to make sure that we have all of our legal teams…in place.”
“We want to make sure that all legally cast ballots are counted.”
“We also want to make sure that illegally cast ballots are not counted.”
Whenever US elections are held, privileged interests benefit exclusively at the expense of ordinary Americans — exploited, not served.
That’s the disturbing reality of US fantasy democracy — benefitting the privileged few at the expense of the great majority.
Instead of improving over time, things noticeably worsened in recent decades.
The chasm between super-rich Americans and the nation’s working class is likely greater than ever before in the nation’s history.
It’s at a time of Greater Depression with harder than ever hard times perhaps to continue for years.
If Trump surprises by defeating Biden and Depression conditions deepen next year — what’s likely — will many DJT supporters have voter remorse?
Whatever the outcome, hard times are likely to be around for some time.
Both right wings of the one-party state are committed to serve monied interests alone.
On that score, Trump and Biden are two sides of the same coin. So are Republicans and Dems.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
The exit of the American forces from Iraq and Syria, finding a solution to the Palestinian issue and the Syrian and Libyan crisis and ending the war in Yemen is what the Arab World wants, in addition to ending the US interference in the internal affairs of sovereign Arab countries.
Most of the Gulf states prefer Biden to win because Trump forced them to pay huge sums and sign agreements in exchange for the purchase of weapons. But there is an exceptional case, Saudi Arabia, where Mohammed bin Salman prefers Trump’s victory because he does not have a good relationship with Biden.
If Biden wins, then Mohammed bin Salman’s throne is in great danger because the Democrats are closer to the alliance of Muhammad bin Nayef and may work to restore his strength in the event that Biden wins, and so far the Saudi leadership has not forgiven Obama for signing the nuclear agreement with Tehran in 2015.
Between Trump’s policy towards the Middle East and Biden’s policy, Biden prefers the Arabs, especially Libya, Syria, and others for one reason, which is that Biden, the representative of the Democratic Party, was the architect of the so-called “Arab Spring” during his tenure as Vice President to Obama, who brought havoc to the Arab world and divided its countries, unlike Trump, who did not escalate and start new wars … while “Netanyahu” wants Trump to win what he has achieved with what is called “normalization with Israel” with a number of Arab countries, including the UAE and Bahrain.
What Americans want from the next president of the United States?
They want the economy to get stronger and that means:
more jobs in all industries: vehicles, weapons, energy, agriculture and manufacturing among others
lowering the taxes on the middle-class while making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, and avoid paying none
reducing the deficit of the USA
supporting American-made products
Health care for all Americans. The Affordable Health Care Act, also known as Obama-Care, made it possible for millions of Americans to be covered on their first medical insurance. The extremely poor in USA have access to free medical services, but the poor working class did not have any medical coverage.
Bringing the American troops back home completely from places such as: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries areas of conflict
Police reforms which would address police brutality of African Americans, or minority persons, as well as better methods to stop the raging crime statistics in USA. People generally want better security, while maintaining human rights of minorities
The European Union is backing up Biden because in the last 4 years Trump put tariffs on the EU products coming in to the USA that caused huge losses to the ٠EU, and Trump forced NATO to pay the USA to defend Europe, while treating European leaders with little respect
The American people don’t want war, and do want the US troops back home, but the they don’t mind having others acting as their foot-soldiers such as what Obama and Biden did in the Middle East previously. The American people feel they will not be affected by their part in wars for regime change
Many Americans will support their President no matter what mistakes he makes, as long as the US remains the superpower.
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It was not Covid, therefore the news went almost unnoticed: Japan will release over a million tons of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea. The catastrophic incident in Fukushima was triggered by the Tsunami that struck the northeastern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, submerging the power plant and causing the core of three nuclear reactors to melt.
The power plant was built on the coast just 4 meters above sea level with five-meter-high breakwater dams, in a tsunami-prone area with waves 10-15 meters high. Furthermore, there had been serious failures by the private company Tepco managing the plant, in the control of the nuclear plant: the safety devices did not come into operation at the time of the Tsunami.
Water has been pumped through the reactors for years to cool the molten fuel. The water became radioactive, and was stored inside the plant in over a thousand large tanks, accumulating 1.23 million tons of radioactive water. Tepco is building other tanks, but they will also be full by mid-2022.
Tepco must continue pumping water into the melted reactors and has decided to discharge, in agreement with the government, the water accumulated so far into the sea after filtering it to make it less radioactive (however, to what extent it is not known) with a process which will last 30 years. There is also radioactive sludge accumulated in the decontamination filters of the plant, stored in thousands of containers, and huge quantities of soil and other radioactive materials.
As Tepco admitted, the melting in reactor 3 is particularly serious because the reactor was loaded with Mox, a much more unstable and radioactive mix of uranium oxides and plutonium.
The Mox for this reactor and other Japanese ones was produced in France, using nuclear waste sent from Japan. Greenpeace has denounced the danger deriving from the transport of this plutonium fuel for ten thousand kilometers.
Greenpeace also denounced that Mox favors the proliferation of nuclear weapons, since plutonium can be extracted more easily and, in the cycle of uranium exploitation, there is no clear dividing line between civilian and military use of fissile material.
Up to now, around 240 tons of plutonium for direct military use and 2,400 tons for civil use (nuclear weapons can however be produced with them), were accumulated in the world (according to 2015 estimates), plus about 1,400 tons of highly enriched uranium for military use. A few hundred kilograms of plutonium would be enough to cause lung cancer to 7.7 billion inhabitants of the planet, and plutonium remains lethal for a period corresponding to almost ten-thousand human generations.
A destructive potential has thus accumulated, for the first time in history, capable of making the human species disappear from the face of Earth. The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the more than 2,000 experimental nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, at sea and underground; the manufacture of nuclear warheads with a power equivalent to over one million Hiroshima bombs; the numerous accidents involving nuclear weapons and those involving civilian and military nuclear plants, all this has caused radioactive contamination that has affected hundreds of millions of people.
A portion of approximately 10 million annual cancer deaths worldwide – documented by WHO – is attributable to the long-term effects of radiation. In ten months, again according to the World Health Organization data, Covid-19 caused about 1.2 million deaths worldwide. This danger should not be underestimated, but it does not justify the fact that mass media, especially television, did not inform that over one million tons of radioactive water will be discharged into the sea from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, with the result that it will further increase cancer deaths upon entering in the food chain.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
A freelance Australian-Ukrainian reporter named Demjin Doroschenko (lead image), employed by the Australian, British and US press to report from the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014, has been exposed this week as an agent of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU). Reporting to a figure he calls “my SBU handler”, he had been operating in the Donetsk area before and after the crash, and had been spying on groups fighting the Ukrainian regime in Kiev.
In the record of an interview Doroschenko gave to agents of the Australian Federal Police and Australian foreign ministry in Kiev in March 2015, the man admitted he had been paid by the SBU to pass himself off as a freelance journalist for western media in the Donetsk area before and after the MH17 shoot-down. He had met, he said, with Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Dutch police in July 2014, and then again in November of that year, to give them physical evidence he said he had taken from the crash site, as well as purported witness testimony identifying a Russian missile unit as the cause of the aircraft shoot-down. The evidence appears to have been given to him by the SBU.
Doroschenko also ackowledged that he had been trying to sell his information to Dutch police investigators until the SBU confiscated his computer files, and handed them over to the Dutch directly.
The media which paid Doroschenko to report from the MH17 crash scene included the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a state broadcaster; the Murdoch press in Sydney and in London; Associated Press; and NBC of New York.
Of the 298 passengers and crew killed on board the aircraft, 189 were Dutch; 44 were Malaysia; 27 Australian; 12 Indonesian; and 9 British.
Reporting to the Sydney Morning Herald on July 18, the day after the shoot-down, Doroschenko categorically denied the Ukrainian government forces were responsible.
“They don’t have any weapons like this that could have brought down an airliner at ten thousand meters. No way. So it had to come from the other side and only a very modern weapon system could have done that. I can only think it would have been deliberate, because air defense systems have IFF recognition system so you can tell if it is a military aircraft or a civilian aircraft you are going to shoot down. It could only have come from across the border. It is an act of absolute barbarism and terrorism in my opinion.”
The press reports of the time identified Doroschenko as either a “photojournalist”, a “videojournalist”, or a newspaper reporter. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), he had been born in the Ukraine in 1971, migrated to Australia, and taken Australian citizenship. There is no record of any publication by Doroschenko in Australia before MH17 was shot down on July 17, 2014. He had reportedly returned from Australia to Ukraine at the beginning of 2014, when the US-directed protest movement against the Yanukovich government in Kiev’s Maidan Square, was beginning to attract worldwide press.
Doroschenko told ABC on February 1, 2014, that he himself had been “hit with rubber bullets and had stun-grenades hurled in his direction as he filmed and photographed the demonstrations last month. ‘People who were unprotected were the main targets,’ he told the ABC. ‘I was next to one fellow who was shot in the head with a rubber bullet and he fell like a tree…The plight of Ukraine has often been ignored in the West and we really need to stand up and tell the West this is what is happening in our [sic] country, and this is what the government is doing to peaceful protesters.’”
The ABC made no attempt at the time – or since – to verify what Doroschenko was reporting from Kiev. The state propaganda unit published pictures Doroschenko claimed he had taken. The possibility that their source was a Ukrainian disinformation agent did not occur to the Australians.
On March 1, 2014, Doroschenko said he attempted to fly from Kiev to Simferopol in Crimea as a reporter for the international Murdoch media. He was reported by Sky News as claiming “the plane was told to turn around. We tried to land in Simferopol but that was refused, we tried to land in Odessa but that was refused, so we had to go back to Kiev.”
Doroschenko fumbled his cover story. In Kiev on March 12, 2014, Doroschenko, wearing a yellow vest with press accreditation, told SkyNewshe had been born in Australia and was living in New Zealand.
“V.K Demjin Doroschenko is one of the best know[n] figures in the [Maidan] square but his accent betrays his background. He was born in Australia and is based in New Zealand, but descends from a family that ruled Ukraine at various times over the last century”.
Doroschenko was a “first generation Australian-Ukrainian [who] was in the region working as a freelance journalist when MH17 was shot down,” ABC reported later. “The 45-year-old [in 2016] said he was one of the first on scene and formed the self-proclaimed MH17 Donbass Recovery Team. He said he collected pieces of evidence for ‘safekeeping and out of reach of the forces of the Russian Federation. It needs to be rescued or otherwise the Russians will appropriate any other pieces that they can use in their case against the Joint Investigation Team [JIT],’ he said.”
The ABC did not report how Doroschenko, who speaks English with an Australian accent, came to be in eastern Ukraine at the time, or what his credentials as a journalist were. The media publishers did not suspect, as Doroschenko admitted to Australian government officials in Ukraine at the time, that he was a Ukrainian government employee. The Australian police and intelligence agents were happy for their state media to be printing what they knew to be Ukrainian propaganda.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on July 18 the “Australian journalist” at the site of crash:
“Denjen [sic] Doroschenko, an Australian journalist working in Ukraine, said he had seen about 60 bodies, including several children, many of whom he had uncovered himself… Emergency services on the ground appeared to be ineffective and separatist organisations were ‘sort of in control’, Doroschenko said… Doroschenko reported that pro-Russian rebels had tried to prevent access to the crash site by blocking major roads. He and three other journalists travelled to the scene by car using back roads.”
He quoted “rebel fighters with guns” as apologising to him for what, Doroschenko implied, they had done.
On air on July 18, Doroschenko was asked by a commercial Australian television news broadcaster whether the Ukrainian government was responsible for the shoot-down. He said:
“They [the Ukraine Government] don’t have any weapons like this that could have brought down an airliner at ten thousand meters. No way. So it had to come from the other side and only a very modern weapon system could have done that. I can only think it would have been deliberate, because air defense systems have IFF recognition system so you can tell if it is a military aircraft or a civilian aircraft you are going to shoot down. It could only have come from accross the border.”
At that moment, as the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD reported later, the Ukrainian Army had several batteries of Buk anti-aircraft missiles in operation in eastern Ukraine.
Doroschenko claimed that “pro-Russian rebels” had “actually apologised” while he was at the crash site.
“Yes, they were filming…They stood with us looking at the bodies on the ground, and just shook our hand and said, you know, we’re sorry.”
“the 43-year-old [in 2014], who has been covering Ukraine-Russian tensions for six months, said he had rummaged through some of the passengers belongings, determined to retrieve personal information including their passports and boarding passes for their families. But he said many of the passengers had items from their luggage stolen and not one wallet found had any money in it. ‘I arrived last night [July 18] when almost no-one else was here so I started looking around the site for Australians,’ Doroschenko said.”
It is now known that Doroschenko was a Ukrainian secret service (SBU) plant in the area who was paid to pretend to be an Australian journalist; report what the Kiev regime wanted to appear in the western press as the Russian cause of the crash; and present evidence from the crash site which Doroschenko had obtained from the SBU.
Doroschenko’s propaganda was widespread in the international media for several days.
“Australian, UK, and US media all made use of Demjin’s services on the day. He was interviewed by ABC (AUS), The Sun (UK), NBC (US), Triple M, News Limited, Seven News, 6PR, The New Daily, Ten News, 3AW, Associated Press, The Mirror. Subsequently, Demjin went on to work exclusively for Seven News in Australia, providing coverage in the aftermath of the event.”
Australian government officials knew Doroschenko was a Ukrainian agent because he told them himself. On March 4, 2015, at a Kiev hotel Doroschenko was recorded in interview with Australian Federal Police (AFP) and other Australian agents claiming to be from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. In the official, secret transcript, Doroschenko and one of the police mentioned he had already had interviews with them in July and again in November of 2014. The AFP admitted those interviews with Doroschenko had taken place at an SBU office in Kiev.
“DORESCHENKO was at the Intercontinental Hotel speaking with members of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in relation to his Visa”, reads the header of the document. This was false. As a dual Australian-Ukrainian national, Doroschenko carried two passports, and did not need a visa so long as he remained in Ukraine or returned to Australia.
At his July 2014 meeting with the AFP, Doroschenko claimed he had provided crash site evidence.
“I did hand over some items to some AFP guys who were in in [sic] July some items. We forensically handed them over, that’s how we handed things over. They were quite happy with the way I had forensically dealt with each item.”
The AFP agents were identified as “Alex” and “Trevor”. Doroschenko boasted to the AFP that “in terms of specialisation I’m actually highly specialised in explosives and firearms so you’d be quite surprised by what I can do, my skill set is quite extensive.” The Australian police knew this training – if Doroschenko wasn’t faking — had come from the SBU.
The documentary record has come from the case file of the Dutch prosecutors in The Hague. It is part of the trial of four men, three Russian soldiers and a Ukrainian, accused by the Dutch of firing the missile which brought MH17 down. For the story of the trial, read the book.
The file document, uncovered this week, has been tagged by the prosecutors “Primo 170-470 and 170-401”. The document was reported in The Hague Times, a publication in English, by Max van der Werff. The report, issued on October 27, can be read here. Click to read the full transcript of the interview record.
The press office of the AFP was asked yesterday to confirm the authenticity of The Hague Times document, and to confirm that AFP officers in Ukraine had interviewed Doroschenko in July and November 2014, and March 2015. The AFP replied that it will not confirm or deny the Doroschenko record; it is not disputing the authenticity of the leak.
No Australian newspaper, commercial television channel, or the state broadcaster, which had originally published Doroschenko’s claims from the crash scene, has reported that he has been uncovered as a Ukrainian spy and media disinformation agent.
Doroschenko told the AFP that at the time he was working in eastern Ukraine he was an SBU agent. The Australian police told him this added to the credibility of the information they were asking him to hand over – photographs at the crash scene; records of local interviews; pieces of MH17 wreckage he claimed to have picked up himself. “I’ve got some work to do with the SBU,” Doroschenko told the AFP, “ who have requested me to continue on with my work there.”
In January of 2015, he said, he had run into trouble at a Ukrainian border checkpoint. “When I was taken by the Ukrainian Border Security they stole my computers, money and hard drives and other things. I was promised to get them back, I submitted a complete incident report but nothing has happened since the 6th of January. A similar incident happened on the 17th or 18th of January, while they worked out who I was and called my SBU handler and say he’s fine, he’s with us, let him go.”
“You’ve taken some good photos that is [sic] of interest to us,” the AFP interviewer told Doroschenko. He answered: “I worked on the sight for 5 months.” The AFP transcription misspelled sight for site. The time period Doroschenko was referring to was from July through December of 2014.
Doroschenko added: “I’ve collected a few more things, taken a few pictures, still trying to triangulate where the rocket motor of the BUK is. Have got very close to it, have got physical pieces of the missile as evidence to give to the JIT but the engine is of course the smoking gun, we need it because it has all the serial numbers that will implicate Russia to the letter.”
He was following the script he had been given by his “SBU handler”. The Australian policeman wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. Doroschenko acknowledged he had been trying to sell his services, and also his purported evidence, to Dutch investigators from the Dutch Safety Board (DSB), the Dutch police, and Dutch prosecutors working for the Joint Investigation Team (JIT). “They said that my work was exemplary and we’d like you to work with us and we’ll pay you. That unfortunately hasn’t happened yet although the promises still remain. I spent twenty thousand Euro working on the sight [sic], it’ll be great to get paid by the Dutch and their promise to pay for the work I’ve done which is great. It hasn’t happened and Dutch Safety Board said they would pay as well and that hasn’t happened either.”
The AFP agent replied:
“We’d love you to hand over this evidence that you say you have, we’d love you to hand over the belongings because they might have evidentiary value. We have to get past this. We are not going to pay you, the JIT is not going to pay you. That’s been specifically talked about and I’m here to tell you the JIT will not be paying you for that. And as the senior Australian representative here I am telling you that with absolute fact.” [Doroschenko] So why was I offered by the DSB [Dutch Safety Board] and the JIT? [AFP] I can’t speak for that but the JIT never offered it and I know that for a fact because I’ve been here for a long time too. The JIT never offered you money.”
Record of payment for evidence of the kind Doroschenko was offering to hand over, and of the role the SBU played in recruiting, coaching and fabricating crash site witnesses, has already been revealed in the Dutch prosecution records. The Dutch lawyers in the MH17 trial have failed to use it in defence of the accused, however.
Doroschenko asked the AFP why their investigators did not go to the Donetsk area to search for evidence. The Australian policeman told him he was under orders from Canberra not to go into the region. Both of them understood that Doroschenko was operating undercover as a journalist whose fake accreditation had been accepted by the Donetsk and Lugansk administration authorities.
But that cover was blown when Doroschenko was leaving the Donetsk sector and trying to return to Kiev through the Georgievka checkpoint on January 7, 2015. A Russian language website, Russkaya Vesna, published by the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), reported on Doroschenko’s arrest by Ukrainian border guards.
The report also exposed the Australian government’s involvement in the false journalist operation.
“Through Western media, [Doroschenko] spread false information about Russia’s involvement in the downed plane, and also stated that ‘as an eyewitness’ he watched ‘as militias robbed the property of the dead.’ Earlier, Doroschenko stated through the Ukrainian media that he was a ‘Maidan activist’ and was ‘fighting for the independence of Ukraine.’ He wrote about the alleged ‘violence from the Berkut’ and called on the protesters to ‘retaliate.’”
According to the website report, the Australian Embassy in Kiev tried intervening on Doroschenko’s behalf on both sides of the border. As a result of this contact with the DPR Foreign Ministry,
“for the first time it was possible to find out the name of the detained journalist, and [we] also informed the Australian government and media about the detention of an Australian citizen by the SBU. Only through this did the Australian authorities have to respond to this message. Currently, the Australian media carefully picks up the words that corroborate this fact. Indeed, according to the laws of Australia, Doroshenko can be declared a terrorist (the cartridges found give reason for this) and imprisoned… the official statement of the DPR Foreign Ministry as a specialized state body emphasizes the inadmissibility of detentions and obstruction of journalistic activities in general, regardless of the views, beliefs and political orientation of the journalists themselves. I wonder how the Ukrainian authorities will decide his fate when they find out that they arrested their own?”
From this time on, Doroschenko and the Australian agents agreed, he could no longer go back to DPR territory.
“[AFP] It’s not safe for us right now. Which is why we have given you warning after warning about your own position down there and advised you not to go back and that’s been well documented as well. And again I say you should not be down there, it’s not safe. [Doroschenko] Well this is my country [Ukraine] as well and I do work for this country.”
Doroschenko repeated he was working for the Kiev regime.
“I have my job to do here for the Government, ok? very specific and people with my training don’t really exist in Ukraine. It’s that simple. So after I’ve done this particular task we can discuss this further.”
He also said he was considering selling evidence and testimony to a Dutch law firm, Van Der Goen Advocaten. According to Doroschenko,
“I’ll have to speak to the Dutch legal team representing the victims and their position about what you’ve both said today and they can say we know and yes it’s good or no it’s not and we’ll talk to the JIT and the Dutch Safety Board and we’ll organise something. I have been categorically [told] by them not to hand anything over to the JIT at all.”
At the time in Amsterdam, the principal of the law firm, Bob van der Goen (right), was highly critical of the Dutch Government. Later, he would tell the Dutch press, the Dutch had “completely botched” the investigation. According to Doroschenko, he told the AFP, “I’ll contact these Dutch guys because I don’t want things to blow up and I become responsible for some legal thing because the Dutch have got up in arms about these guys and the victims are suing the Dutch Government and suing the JIT team and anyone else that may be involved in any what they can see as inappropriate actions done by you guys… if they [SBU] decide to hand over X Y Z to these guys [Dutch lawyers] then that will be the end of it. I have to cover my arse essentially.”
Doroschenko was threatening to switch sides if he were paid. The Australian policeman warned:
“Forget the lawyers, you’ve got to remember that lawyers representing the families of crash victims have other motives than just seeing an end result. They will work towards compensation issues and that type of stuff. That is why you have to be very careful about what advice you take from them. They are lawyers not law enforcement officers, they are not involved in the investigation into this crime, we are. So you have to think which ones are you going to trust, the people charged with investigating it or the people representing the families of the people that were killed in it.”
In retrospect, after this interview in March 2015, Doroschenko was discredited as a source by both the Australian police and the SBU. In April 2016, the AFP told Australian state media: “ ‘Items recovered from the MH17 crash site should not be used to obtain a profit or benefit,’ an AFP spokesman said. ‘To do so only harms the families of victims who are looking for a resolution that could be provided by investigators having access to all of the crash site evidence. The AFP and JIT are aware that Mr Doroschenko may have visited the MH17 crash site and have provided him with a process of how he can provide those items to the JIT.’”
The real reason for the AFP warning against Doroschenko was not that he was trying get paid for his evidence. Rather, Doroschenko was threatening to become a witness to the faking of evidence from the crash site by the SBU, the Australian police, and the Dutch prosecutors.
He has since disappeared from print. Whether his silence has been remunerated is not known; he was still alive last week. According to the report by The Hague Times: “We contacted mister Doreschenko and had an exchange of emails. However, he did not send us any verifiable information.”
As the SBU’s conduit of disinformation on the MH17 story Doroschenko has been replaced by the NATO and British-funded Bellingcat group. According to its figurehead, Doroschenko’s evidence of faking of the MH17 evidence should not be believed.
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In the 2020 documentary film, The Plot Against the President, filmmaker Amanda Milius examines the conspiracy to sabotage President Donald Trump.
“The true story of how Congressman Devin Nunes uncovered the operation to bring down the President of the United States.
Following the book The Plot Against the President by investigative journalist Lee Smith, this feature length documentary explores new information and additional interviews as the case unfolds.”
Watch full documentary below.
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As countries across Europe went into lockdown earlier this year to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, there was one early and obvious casualty: transparency. In the rush to obtain critical supplies, many countries suspended their usual public procurement rules, resulting in billions of euros of spending that remains largely hidden from the public.
So we at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) decided to find out what happened to that money.
Along with media partners in 37 countries, we collected information from over 37,800 COVID-19 related tenders and contracts worth over 21 billion euros (U.S $24.9 billion), running from February to October this year. They cover key goods such as personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, tests, and medications.
What we found was often fascinating. Governments bought respirator masks at prices that varied wildly, from just 20 cents per unit to 37 euros each. The pandemic also prompted a boom for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, controversial drugs promoted by many as a miracle treatment for COVID-19, despite limited evidence. Data obtained by reporters showed the number of large contracts for these drugs increased 15-fold so far this year. Dexamethasone, a steroid that has met with more clinical success, saw a 36-fold increase.
The data is far from complete, but it gives an unprecedented view of just what Europe’s governments have been spending their billions on — and where things may have gone astray.
Bargains and Black Holes
The data we obtained gives just a snapshot of Europe’s COVID-19 spending. We pulled data from the European Union’s procurement portal, Tenders Electronic Daily, and national and regional governments.
The number of contracts we obtained from each country reflected its level of transparency, not necessarily how much it spent.
We obtained the most contracts, roughly 15,000, from Portugal. Despite its relatively small size, it was one of the few European countries to publish all its contracts online, along with an overview of its COVID-19 related purchases.The runner-up, with 12,000 contracts, was Russia.
Other countries have been virtual black holes of information. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark rejected reporters’ data requests outright, typically arguing that it was necessary to preserve secrecy so as to not undermine negotiations for the purchase of goods. In response to a freedom-of-information request, Norway provided some details on contracts, such as company names, but would not give price information.
Big Contracts, Little Competition
The 20.8 billion euros’ worth of contracts that we collected included some very big deals.
Nearly half the total (10 billion euros) are contracts from the U.K., including a series of PPE purchases by the Department of Health and Social Care for 4.9 billion euros.
The largest single national contract was in Spain, where the government bought 181 million euros’ worth of PPE in a no-bid deal.
We obtained 3.4 billion euros’ worth of tenders from the European Commission on joint procurement and two billion euros of tenders from Germany.
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I have been covering the fraud that happens every year with how the CDC tracks incidents and deaths due to the annual influenza for almost a decade now.
The numbers used each year to scare the public into getting the flu vaccine are based not on actual data, but estimates of number of people who die from the flu according to the CDC. Basically, anyone dying from “influenza-like” symptoms are all lumped together into supposed flu deaths each year. Autopsies are seldom performed to prove cause of death.
The CDC has admitted publicly in the past that these numbers are just “estimates.” If the real number of those infected with the influenza virus, and resulting deaths, were vastly lower than what the CDC reports based on their “estimates,” the public would have no way of knowing it.
So this has presented quite a dilemma for the CDC for the first couple of weeks of the 2020-21 flu season, which have just passed.
Because “flu-like” symptoms could also be attributed to COVID-19, and they have the now widely known ineffective COVID PCR test to back up these claims, which also kicks in federal funding for hospitals to treat COVID patients.
As one might expect, with the media widely reporting that cases of COVID are now increasing just as flu season starts, reports of flu cases have dropped dramatically during the same time period last year. Across the globe, it has been reported that incidents of influenza have dropped by about 100%. (Source.)
Whoops! How did the CDC allow these numbers to be published?
In an apparent response to media reports about the fast declining flu cases here at the beginning of the 2020-21 flu season, the CDC did what any corrupt agency would do which doesn’t want the public to know the truth: They decided to “suspend data collection for the 2020-21 influenza season.” (Source.)
To my knowledge, this is unprecedented, and has never happened before.
Correlation Between Flu Shot and Senior Deaths Allegedly due to COVID
It is important to remember that most of the deaths in the U.S. attributed to COVID have occurred among those over 70 years old, with co-morbidity factors.
Another factor to consider is that seniors over 65 in the U.S. get a different flu shot than everyone else each year, one that is much stronger.
Most of the initial deaths attributed to COVID in early 2020 occurred in nursing homes or assisted care facilities for the elderly, where the flu vaccine is routinely given every year as a matter of policy.
Deaths in these facilities are common every year just after administering the flu vaccine, but never reported in the corporate media.
Health Impact News had a nurse whistleblower contact us in 2014 to report that 5 seniors in a Georgia assisted care facility died the same week the flu shot was given. We were threatened with a lawsuit for reporting this. See:
A recently published study out of Mexico confirmed the correlation between senior flu shots and COVID deaths.
A recently published study in PeerJ by Christian Wehenkel, a Professor at Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango in Mexico, has found a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination rates in elderly people worldwide.
According to the study, “The results showed a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and IVR (influenza vaccination rate) of people ≥65 years-old. There is a significant increase in COVID-19 deaths from eastern to western regions in the world. Further exploration is needed to explain these findings, and additional work on this line of research may lead to prevention of deaths associated with COVID-19.”
To determine this association, data sets from 39 countries with more than half a million people were analyzed. (Read the full article.)
Verified Death Statistics Will Tell the True Story
Once 2020 is complete, it will probably be seen that total deaths that have been recorded will be similar to previous years.
The difference will be the number of deaths attributed to COVID to justify all the government fear and tyrannical actions, as deaths by other causes will drop so that the end result will be about the same.
These kinds of stats are becoming more and more difficult to find, but here is one projected total compared with total deaths from the previous 3 years.
I am not sure of the original source of this graph (it is most likely a compilation of available health statistics), but the graph was published here.
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On November 2, Trump signed an executive order that aims to manipulate the minds of young children.
“We will state the truth in full, without apology (sic),” he said, adding:
“We declare that the United States of America is the most just and exceptional nation ever to exist on earth (sic).”
If bipartisan US hardliners get their way, education at all levels may resemble Nazi Germany and Israeli indoctrination of children.
After Nazis gained control in 1933, the infamous Nuremberg Laws followed.
Education featured indoctrination and loyalty to the Reich. It laid the groundwork for wars to come.
Scholar Louis L. Snyder witnessed Nazi rallies and practices firsthand.
He explained that “(t)here were to be two basic educational ideas…”
“First, there must be burnt into the heart and brains of youth the sense of race.”
“Second, German youth must be made ready for war, educated for victory or death.”
“The ultimate purpose of education was to fashion citizens conscious of the glory of country and filled with fanatical devotion to the national cause.”
As one of the world’s most militarized societies, Israel resembles Nazi German.
It’s notably by indoctrination through education, waging wars on Palestinians and neighboring state, along with mandating military service as a rite of passage.
Militarism is fundamental in Israeli society, young children brainwashed to be warriors.
Starting in pre-school, it continues through higher education.
What’s ingrained in young children at an impressionable age sticks most often when becoming adolescents, youths and adults.
When I attended public schools long ago, teachers taught and children learned, preparing me and many others for higher education and later life.
Historically in the US, local authorities determine educational policy, not the federal government.
The 10th Amendment was the basis for making it a function of individual states and local communities.
Nationwide, local school districts decide on how it’s to be financed and administered.
Until the 1960s, the federal government had virtually no role in setting policy.
Since then, it’s been involved in fostering equal access to education, along with safeguarding constitutional rights of students and teachers.
While not constitutionally protected it as a universal right, the 14th Amendment safeguards it against discrimination based on race, gender, religion, or disability, or ethnicity.
Federal funding of education also plays a role in its content. Funds can be advanced or withheld based on whether local authorities stick to federal standards.
Trump’s EO establishes a so-called President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.
It’ll be charged with “work(ing) to improve understanding of the history and the principles of the founding of the United States…”
According to remarks by Trump weeks earlier, he’s opposed to truth-telling works like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States — what he called “left-wing indoctrination,” adding:
We will “reclaim our history, and our country, for citizens of every race, color, religion and creed.”
He and hardliners surrounding him want children, adolescents and youths brainwashed in the American way — its mindset ingrained into their consciousness by sanitizing the nation’s history.
They want an obedient population for easier control.
Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of scoundrels.”
Thomas Paine called dissent its highest form. So did Howard Zinn.
When governments ill-serve, exposing wrongdoing is vital.
It takes courage and involves sacrificing for the greater good.
It includes risking personal harm and welfare.
It means doing what’s right because it matters.
It reflects patriotism’s highest form.
It’s not what Trump and other US hardliners have in mind by his EO.
Their ideas are more akin to the USA Patriot Act that trampled on the Bill of Rights — eroding fundamental freedoms, not protecting them.
Each new US ruling regime advanced things toward greater totalitarian rule.
Perhaps over the next four years, remaining freedoms will disappear altogether.
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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.”
Since 1928, rising stock market valuations favored incumbent US presidents 86% of the time, according to Bloomberg News. Results this year are mixed.
Investment strategist Sam Stovall noted that in US presidential election years since 1944, rising equity prices from July 31 – October 31 usually correspondent to an incumbent’s electoral triumph.
Results for the S&P 500 this year were down but nearly flat for this period.
Compared to the July 31 close at 3,271.12, the S&P 500 stood at 3,269.96 on October 31.
On election eve November 2, the S&P 500 rose 1.78%. Other major averages were also sharply higher.
When polls closed Tuesday, S&P futures rose. According to Stovall’s “Presidential Predictor,” Tuesday’s rally was positive for Trump.
Real Clear Politics noted that polls, on average, from October 25 – November 2 gave Biden a 7.2 point advantage over Trump.
Polls were wrong in 2016. Defying the odds and predictions of most pundits, Trump defeated Hillary.
It’s too early to tell after polls closed Tuesday in what’s shaping up to be a close race. It’s unclear if he’ll surprise again.
The stock market predictor isn’t perfect. In 1956, despite a 7.7% S&P decline from 7/31 – 10/31, Dwight Eisenhower defeated challenger Adlai Stevenson for a second term.
It was wrong in 1968, Republican Richard Nixon defeating Dem Hubert Humphrey.
It was wrong again in 1980 when Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter.
Despite falling from a record high on September 2, the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite gained around 2% last week.
After pulling back on Friday, the averages posted sharp election eve gains.
According to market analysts, these results favor Trump.
Yet pre-election events this year are unlike any others in modern memory — notably because of economic collapse.
Real unemployment is 26.9%, not the phony BLS 7.9%.
For 32 straight weeks, over one million jobless Americans filed for unemployment benefits.
Nothing remotely like what’s gone on ever happened in US history, not even during the depths of the 1930s Great Depression.
Congressional wrangling failed to extend vitally needed aid to the nation’s unemployed.
The great majority of Americans are experiencing the hardest ever hard times in their working-age lives.
It’s at a time that David Stockman called “fiscal and monetary madness…the nation spiraling toward the mother of all financial disasters” no matter how election 2020 turns out.
Republicans and Dems both one-sidedly favor Wall Street over Main Street, along with whatever benefits the nation’s military, industrial, security complex and other corporate favorites.
As a previous article explained, 2020 has been a bonanza for America’s 644 billionaires.
Profiting hugely from economic collapse, their super-wealth increased by nearly $1 trillion — at a time when Federal Reserve data show over 100 million working-age Americans without jobs.
An unprecedented disconnect exists between bubble-level equity prices and dismal main street economic conditions gone largely unaddressed by the US ruling class when vital help is most needed.
Presidential election 2020 results may not be known for days or longer.
Around 100 million US registered voters cast ballots in advance by mail or in-person. Tabulating the former totals will take time.
Like most often before, key battleground states will decide if Trump gets a second term or is unseated by Biden/Harris.
Early results after polls closed have the incumbent winning Ohio and Florida, two key swing states.
No Republican won the White House since the Civil War without taking Ohio.
Pennsylvania results may decide the outcome. Counting the high volume of mail-in votes only began after polls closed Tuesday.
Tabulation will take days or longer.
A Final Comment
After rising when polls closed, Dow futures fell sharply before Wednesday’s market opening in response to Trump calling vote tabulations a “major fraud.”
Swinging widely, they then turned slightly positive before Wednesday’s market opening.
Late Tuesday, he claimed victory over Biden, telling supporters at the White House:
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win” — despite undecided results from key battleground states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia.
Pre-dawn Wednesday, he and Biden were short of an Electoral College majority.
Yet Trump said there’s “a major fraud” going on…So we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court.”
With Trump ahead in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, tens of thousands of mail-in votes remain to be counted, most of them likely favoring Biden — whether enough to win these states unknown.
In Pennsylvania with most mail-in ballots remaining to be counted, most likely favoring Biden/Harris, Trump is ahead by a 55.7% – 43.1% margin.
With nearly all Wisconsin votes counted, it’s a dead heat.
With over 80% of Michigan votes counted, Trump leads Biden/Harris by a 51.6% – 46.8% margin. Remaining mail-in ballots to be counted may or may not lose the state for DJT.
With over 90% of ballots tabulated in North Carolina, Trump is ahead by a slim 50.4% – 49.1% margin.
Biden told reporters: “I am here to tell you tonight we believe we are on track to win this election.”
In Georgia, Trump leads Biden/Harris by a 50.5% – 48.3% margin with nearly all votes counted.
Trump claimed that he’s “up big, but they are trying to steal the election,” adding:
“We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the polls are closed!”
No evidence backs his claim.
Trump said he’ll contest results at the Supreme Court. If he gains an Electoral College majority, Biden/Harris may challenge the result.
When US elections are held, dark forces — not voters — have final say over who’ll be president and hold key congressional posts.
At the same time, on issues relating to war by hot and/or other means v. peace and stability, corporate empowerment, and harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers, both right wings of the US one-party state are on the same page.
Names and faces change over time. Yet dirty business as usual continuity is always assured when US elections are held.
The jury remains out on whether Trump gets a second term of if Biden/Harris succeed him in January.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
In this article I want to document a sample of the rapidly increasing evidence of how this coup is taking shape and to reiterate a strategy for defeating it.
The coup was designed to take immediate measures to ensure that fundamental rights and freedoms, only ‘won’ (in name at least) after many centuries of struggle, were stripped away from us and to do it in such a way that people would fearfully accept it.
This is why the idea of a virus ‘pandemic’ was quite clever.
Because the fear of contracting the virus (and its possibly deadly consequences) could be grotesquely magnified by inflating the figures, constant harping on it by the World Health Organization, the medical industry (in league with the pharmaceutical industry) and governments, and then magnified by the corporate media – with one outlet laughably suggesting COVID-19 could be worse than the flu outbreak in 1918 (falsely attributed to Spain): see ‘COVID-19 has the potential to become as severe as the Spanish flu’– it made virtually all people submissive to any measure taken, or order given, ostensibly to prevent the spread of the virus.
Fear manipulated by propaganda defeats knowledge and evidence every time, as history has endlessly demonstrated. Just ask Joseph Goebbels how they did it in Nazi Germany. Play on the fear, play on the fear….
But if you are not too scared to seek out the evidence, you get an utterly different picture of what is taking place.
So, for example, US physician Dr. Annie Bukacek observes that (image right)
‘The real number of COVID-19 deaths are not what most people are told and what they then think. How many people actually died from COVID-19 is anyone’s guess. … Based on inaccurate, incomplete data, people are being terrorized by fear-mongers into relinquishing freedoms.’
If you would like to read a wider sample of the literature and videos discussing how the infection and death rates from COVID-19 have been deliberately misinterpreted, inflated and presented in a way that induces fear, and hence willing submission to elite control, see the daily updates on
As a result of this pandemic of fear, the human rights to privacy (Article 12), freedom of movement (Article 13.1) and freedom of assembly (Article 20.1), for example, which are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (but not necessarily legislated into law by individual countries and routinely violated by governments in any case) have now been publicly and completely eviscerated in one fell swoop with bans on gatherings, legal requirements for ‘social distancing’ and even greater surveillance of our private activities with barely a murmur of protest.
For a comprehensive global summary, which monitors individual government responses to the pandemic that affect civic freedoms and human rights focusing on emergency laws, see the ‘COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker’.
Denied these fundamental rights, others – including those preventing arbitrary arrest or detention (Article 9), entitlement to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal in response to any criminal charge (Article 10), to make a living in the manner of our choosing (Article 23), to adequate healthcare irrespective of personal circumstances (Article 25.1) and to have some say in how we are governed (Article 21) – have, if they previously existed in practice, largely disappeared as many governments around the world have used a variety of illegal and sometimes unconstitutional measures – ranging from ‘lockdowns’ and curfews to martial law and suspensions of parliaments in favour of dictatorships – to usurp more complete control of national societies.
For just a brief taste of what is taking place in some countries, see
In addition, by deliberately crashing national economies it was easy to conceal the fact that they were on the brink of crashing anyway. In the words of Scott C. Tips:
Moreover, adverse outcomes from the use of COVID-19 to wreak this economic destruction will multiply rapidly but the underlying corporate dysfunctionality will now escape the blame from most observers just as COVID-19 will help to obscure the elite’s true purpose in precipitating this crisis.
But apart from these more obvious encroachments on our rights, freedoms and economic well-being, there is a vast range of encroachments happening either outside or on the periphery of public view, given the phenomenal corporate media attention focused on COVID-19 to distract us.
Talking about US government surveillance in 2014, former Technical Director of the NSA, William ‘Bill’ Binney, explained that the NSA sought ‘total population control’. See ‘Whistleblower: NSA Goal Is “Total Population Control”’.
Six years later it is clear that the global elite is now making another push in its ongoing and longstanding effort to achieve total control. Will this be the final push?
As you consider this question, here is another small sample of those encroachments and devastating impacts that are happening while our attention is elsewhere:
If you think this is fairyland stuff, check out the website of the elite agents advocating it: ‘The need for good digital ID is universal: The ability to prove who you are is a fundamental and universal human right. Because we live in a digital era, we need a trusted and reliable way to do that both in the physical world and online.’ See ‘The Need for Good Digital ID is Universal’.
Without thinking too hard, I can list a few ‘fundamental and universal human rights’ that I would nominate before I got too excited about my digital identity. I wonder if these people are concerned about whether I have enough to eat, whether I am clothed and housed…. Of course, I know they have no interest in my privacy given that digital ID and the surveillance that goes with it will make that non-existent.
The deployment of the highly dangerous 5G which, under the guise of improving internet speed and capacity, will vastly expand everyone’s exposure to electromagnetic radiation with its long list of seriously adverse health impacts. For a taste of the extensive documentation on this point, see the ‘International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’.
Obviously, I am heartily in favour of ending war. But this is only going to happen when we campaign strategically to do so and provided we have sufficient political freedom to do it. See ‘Strategic Aims’ (for ending war).
Dramatic increases in absolute impoverishment among marginalized individuals and communities throughout the Global South who barely survive day-to-day under their usual, difficult economic circumstances. As one Asian NGO network, engaged in attempting to secure emergency relief to assist those most adversely impacted, has just reported: ‘We are receiving alarming reports that ADB and AIIB project-affected communities across Asia, especially South Asia and South East Asia are in an absolute state of crisis. Due to the enforced lockdown, they have no work or access to sanitizers and food supplies. Leaving them completely exposed and vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The state responses are slow and in some cases non-existent.’ See ‘COVID-19 Community Emergency Fund’.
And Arundhati Roy wrote an evocative account of how the Indian government’s lockdown exposed the ‘brutal, structural, social and economic inequality’ in that country and the government’s ‘callous indifference to suffering’ as the lockdown caused employers and landlords in cities and towns to drive out millions of impoverished, homeless and hungry workers to walk the hundreds of kilometres to their villages. Many have died along the way, but not of COVID-19. See ‘Social Devastation and Despair. How Coronavirus Threatens India’.
What Ms. Georgieva didn’t mention is that these loans will no doubt be done on the usual highly conditional and exploitative basis for which the IMF has built its reputation for destroying the lives of ordinary local people by opening the door for corrupt or naive governments to accept corporate exploitation of their people and natural resources while building unsustainable levels of national debt trying to pay back the loans and interest to the IMF. For more detail on how this exploitation works, see the many Global Justice Now reports on the IMF and the book The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
In contrast, World Bank President David Malpass was not so coy, clearly declaring that COVID-19 would be used to further exploit poorer countries by making any funding conditional on a willingness to make such exploitation easier in future: ‘Countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong. For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.’ See ‘Remarks by World Bank Group President David Malpass on G20 Finance Ministers Conference Call on COVID-19’.
To reiterate: The World Bank will help existing heavily exploited countries with some funding for short-term health measures directed at containing COVID-19 provided the country removes laws that would make it difficult to exploit it indefinitely thereafter.
And while there has been a short-term reduced negative impact on the climate as a result of the slowdown in industrial activity and the use of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, the ongoing COVID-19 coup has been used to destroy whatever momentum has been achieved by the climate and environment movements in recent years.
While COVID-19 is causing problems for the 100,000 skilled technicians responsible for controlling, maintaining and fuel loading/unloading of the 96 remaining nuclear power plants in the USA, given the confined space in which the technicians work which make ‘social distancing’ virtually impossible, ‘The industry is now using the Coronavirus Pandemic to rush through a wide range of deregulation demands. Among them is a move to allow radioactive waste to be dumped into municipal landfills.’ See ‘Terrified Atomic Workers Warn That the COVID-19 Pandemic May Threaten Nuclear Reactor Disaster’.
If you are a US citizen and wondering how the ‘largest industrial project in the history of the planet’ will be financed, look in your own purse or wallet and wonder how much more will be taken from you so that, as usual, you pay the upfront costs associated with the vast profits they plan to make. Of course, you will also pay with budget cuts to health, education and social security funding.
The 13-point list above is actually very short – and confined to readily observable ‘moves’ – but, hopefully, it gives you some idea of what is taking place behind the elite’s barrage of COVID-19 fear-mongering. Needless to say, it is the ‘moves’ that we do not know about that are, no doubt, even more troubling.
So what can we do in response to this fear-mongering and the coup it is being used to disguise?
Resisting the Elite Coup Powerfully
I have previously outlined this nonviolent strategy, identifying its political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’– and I have set out a basic list of 26 strategic goals, of which eleven are as follows:
(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity, such as an image of several people of different genders/races/religions/abilities/classes holding hands.
(2) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting all corporate media outlets (television, radio, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter…) and by seeking news from progressive news outlets committed to telling the truth.
(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks that are supporting the coup and to deposit their money in local community banks or credit unions.
(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)
(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.
(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.
(7) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.
(8) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.
(9) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.
(10) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].
(11) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].
Rather than detail all 26 strategic goals here, you can read the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic Aims’.
Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel. These include the need to provide leadership and mutual aid at local levels, which are already happening in many places, as part of the overall effort.
It is worth emphasizing that, in some contexts, there is a place for large public nonviolent actions for those who are inclined to plan and conduct them. And the article just referenced will assist you to conduct them with minimal risk of violent repression. However, because the bans on public gatherings are being implemented widely, I have concentrated on providing tactical options in the examples above that do not depend on gathering in one place.
Nevertheless, as more people become aware of the coup and the energy to resist it gathers pace, it will be worthwhile to choose a locally significant date on which as many people who are willing to do so act to ‘End the Lockdown’ in that country. Using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist the coup that is taking place. Because the actions taken will be dispersed with large numbers of people responding in a vast number of locations, it will be impossible for police and military forces to inflict violent repression against everyone, particularly if local organizers have implemented the points in ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.
Equally importantly to any of the points above, particularly given the pressing threat of human extinction – see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’– but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.
And given the enormous pressure on children at the moment, as their lives are upended, it would be useful to spend time listening to them. Of course, if you know an adult who is having trouble coping, it will help them enormously as well if you listen while giving them the opportunity to talk about, and focus on feeling, their own emotional reactions to what is taking place. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. If you do not have anyone who can listen to you, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.
Moreover, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world, and the coup it is now implementing, is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
Given that the statistics clearly show that the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ is already fading in most places where it previously had serious impact, it is possible that the global elite will not complete its execution of this coup against humanity in the near future. It will be content with the demonstration of its phenomenal power to manipulate populations into passively submitting to its bidding and defer its final putsch for a short time.
If that is the case, the damage wrought by this socalled pandemic – on our rights, freedoms, economic security, opportunities, democratic governance, the global economy and the environment – will be irreparable and it would take many years to even restore a partial version of what we thought we had while knowing that they can be taken away, again, at any time just as they were on this occasion.
But, quite frankly, if I was a member of the global elite and had witnessed the remarkably submissive manner in which even activists were deceived by the COVID-19 coup, I would advocate for completing the coup now and lock us down, force-vaccinate us with our own unique digital ID and surveillance chip, and promptly implement all of the measures necessary to take final control of the prison planet previously known as Earth.
However, because I am not a member of the global elite, I will continue to draw attention to what is taking place and encourage people to resist in the strategic ways I have outlined above.
And then do what I can to ensure that as many people as possible, who are powerful enough to do so, respond before it is too late.
I would rather act sooner, while we still have some room to move, rather than later, when we might have much less.
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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to ‘Global Research’.
The Earth Pledge
Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:
I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.
“If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.” – Julius Caesar
The illegal invasion of Libya, in which Britain was complicit and a British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s report confirmed as an illegal act sanctioned by the UK government, over which Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister (weeks before the release of the UK parliament report), occurred from March – Oct, 2011.
Muammar al-Gaddafi was assassinated on Oct. 20th, 2011.
On Sept 11-12th, 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyron Woods and Glen Doherty were killed at two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi.
It is officially denied to this date that al-Qaeda or any other international terrorist organization participated in the Benghazi attack. It is also officially denied that the attack was pre-meditated.
On the 6th year anniversary of the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama stated at a partisan speechon Sept 10th, 2018, delivered at the University of Illinois, that the outrage over the details concerning the Benghazi attack were the result of “wild conspiracy theory” perpetrated by conservatives and Republican members of Congress.
However, according to an August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report (only released to the public in May 2015), this is anything but the case. The report was critical of the policies of then President Obama as a direct igniter for the rise of ISIS and the creation of a “caliphate” by Syria-based radical Islamists and al-Qaeda. The report also identified that arms shipments in Libya had gone to radical Islamist “allies” of the United States and NATO in the overthrowing of Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi. These arms shipments were sent to Syria and became the arsenal that allowed ISIS and other radical rebels to grow.
“AQI [al-qaeda –iraq] SUPPORTED THE SYRIAN OPPOSITION FROM THE BEGINNING, BOTH IDEOLOGICALLY AND THROUGH THE MEDIA… WESTERN COUNTRIES, THE GULF STATES AND TURKEY ARE SUPPORTING THESE EFFORTS… THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEYSUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT,IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME…” [emphasis added]
Screenshot below from Judicial Watch:
Image on the right: Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.
Another DIA document from Oct 2012 (also released in May 2015), reported that Gaddafi’s vast arsenal was being shipped from Benghazi to two Syrian ports under the control of the Syrian rebel groups.
Essentially, the DIA documents were reporting that the Obama Administration was supporting Islamist extremism, including the Muslim Brotherhood.
There was just one problem; Lt. Gen. Flynn was backing up the reliability of the released DIA reports.
Lt. Gen. Flynn as Director of the DIA from July 2012 – Aug. 2014, was responsible for acquiring accurate intelligence on ISIS’s and other extremist operations within the Middle East, but did not have any authority in shaping U.S. military policy in response to the Intel the DIA was acquiring.
In a July 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera, Flynn went so far as to state that the rise of ISIS was the result of a “willful decision,” not an intelligence failure, by the Obama Administration.
In the Al-Jazeera interview Flynn was asked:
Q: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?
FLYNN: I think the Administration.
Q: So the Administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?
FLYNN: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.
Q: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?
FLYNN: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.
Flynn was essentially stating (in the 47 minute interview) that the United States was fully aware that weapons trafficking from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels was occurring. In fact, the secret flow of arms from Libya to the Syrian opposition, via Turkey was CIA sponsored and had been underway shortly after Gaddafi’s death in Oct 2011. The operation was largely run out of a covert CIA annex in Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence.
This information was especially troubling in light of the fact that the Obama Administration’s policy, from mid-2011 on, was to overthrow the Assad government. The question of “who will replace Assad?” was never fully answered.
Perhaps the most troubling to Americans among the FOIA-released DIA documents was a report from Sept. 16, 2012, which provided a detail account of the pre-meditated nature of the 9/11/12 attack in Benghazi, reporting that the attack had been planned ten days prior, detailing the groups involved.
The report revealed that it was in fact an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group that was responsible for the Benghazi attack. That despite this intelligence, the Obama Administration continued to permit arms-trafficking to the al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels even after the 9/11/12 attacks.
In August 2015, then President Obama ordered for U.S. forces to attack Syrian government forces if they interfered with the American “vetted, trained and armed” forces. This U.S. approved Division 30 Syrian rebel group “defected” almost immediately, with U.S. weapons in hand, to align with the Nusra Front, the formal al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
Obama’s Semantics War: Any Friend of Yours is a Friend of Mine
“Flynn incurred the wrath of the [Obama] White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria… He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out.” – Patrick Lang (retired army colonel, served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency)
Before being named Director of the DIA, Flynn served as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, as Director of Intelligence for the U.S. Central Command, and as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command.
Flynn’s criticisms and opposition to the Obama Administration’s policies in his interview with Al-Jazeera in 2015 was nothing new. In August 2013, Flynn as Director of the DIA supported Gen. Dempsey’s intervention, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in forcing then President Obama to cancel orders to launch a massive bombing campaign against the Syrian government and armed forces. Flynn and Dempsey both argued that the overthrow of the Assad government would lead to a radical Islamist stronghold in Syria, much like what was then happening in Libya.
This account was also supported in Seymour Hersh’s paper “Military to Military” published in Jan 2016, to which he states:
“Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he [Flynn] said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’
[According to a former JCS adviser]’…To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing U.S. intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State [ISIS].” [emphasis added]
According to Hersh’s sources, it was through the militaries of Germany, Israel and Russia, who were in contact with the Syrian army, that the U.S. intelligence on where the terrorist cells were located was shared, hence the “military to military”. There was no direct contact between the U.S. and the Syrian military.
“The two countries [U.S. & Syria] collaborated against al-Qaida, their common enemy. A longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command said that, after 9/11, ‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his Syrian handlers.
…It was this history of co-operation that made it seem possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to the new indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S.”
In Sept. 2015, Russia came in and directly intervened militarily, upon invitation by the Syrian government, and effectively destroyed ISIS strongholds within Syrian territory. In response, Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 on Nov 24th, 2015 for allegedly entering Turkish airspace for 17 seconds. Days after the Russian fighter jet was shot down, Obama expressed support for Erdogan and stated at a Dec. 1st, 2015 press conference that his administration would remain “very much committed to Turkey’s security and its sovereignty”. Obama also said that as long as Russia remained allied with Assad, “a lot of Russian resources are still going to be targeted at opposition groups … that we support … So I don’t think we should be under any illusions that somehow Russia starts hitting only Isil targets. That’s not happening now. It was never happening. It’s not going to be happening in the next several weeks.”
Today, not one of those “opposition groups” has shown itself to have remained, or possibly ever been, anti-extremist. And neither the Joint Chiefs nor the DIA believed that there was ever such a thing as “moderate rebels.”
Rather, as remarked by a JCS adviser to Hersh, “Turkey is the problem.”
China’s “Uyghur Problem”
Imad Moustapha, was the Syrian Ambassador to the United States from 2004 to Dec. 2011, and has been the Syrian Ambassador to China for the past eight years.
“‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’ ” [emphasis added]
This view was echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, informing Hersh that:
“Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.”
China understands that the best way to combat the terrorist recruiting that is going on in these regions is to offer aid towards reconstruction and economic development projects. By 2016, China had allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria.
The long-time consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could not hide his contempt, according to Hersh, when he was asked for his view of the U.S. policy on Syria. “‘The solution in Syria is right before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis and all of us – the United States, Russia and China – need to work together.’“
The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September 25th, 2015. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2015, two months before assuming office, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia.”
Flynn’s Call for Development in the Middle East to Counter Terrorism
Not only was Flynn critical of the Obama Administration’s approach to countering terrorism in the Middle East, his proposed solution was to actually downgrade the emphasis on military counter-operations, and rather focus on economic development within these regions as the most effective and stable impediment to the growth of extremists.
“Frankly, an entire new economy is what this region needs. They need to take this 15-year old, to 25 to 30-year olds in Saudi Arabia, the largest segment of their population; in Egypt, the largest segment of their population, 15 to roughly 30 years old, mostly young men. You’ve got to give them something else to do. If you don’t, they’re going to turn on their own governments, and we can solve that problem.
So that is the conversation that we have to have with them, and we have to help them do that. And in the meantime, what we have is this continued investment in conflict. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop,that just fuels the conflict. Some of that has to be done, but I’m looking for other solutions. I’m looking for the other side of this argument, and we’re not having it; we’re not having it as the United States.” [emphasis added]
Flynn also stated in the interview that the U.S. cannot, and should not, deter the development of nuclear energy in the Middle East:
“It now equals nuclear development of some type in the Middle East, and now what we want… what I hope for is that we have nuclear [energy] development, because it also helps for projects like desalinization, getting water…nuclear energy is very clean, and it actually is so cost effective, much more cost effective for producing water from desalinization.”
Flynn was calling for a new strategic vision for the Middle East, and making it clear that “conflict only” policies were only going to add fuel to the fire, that cooperative economic policies are the true solution to attaining peace in the Middle East. Pivotal to this is the expansion of nuclear energy, while assuring non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, which Flynn states “has to be done in a very international, inspectable way.”
When In Doubt, Blame the Russians
How did the Obama Administration respond to Flynn’s views?
He was fired (forced resignation) from his post as Director of the DIA on April 30th, 2014. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who was briefed by Flynn on the intelligence reports and was also critical of the U.S. Administration’s strategy in the Middle East was also forced to resign in Feb. 2015.
With the election of Trump as President on Nov. 8 2016, Lt. Gen. Flynn was swiftly announced as Trump’s choice for National Security Adviser on Nov. 18th, 2016.
Just weeks later, Flynn was targeted by the FBI and there was a media sensation over Flynn being a suspected “Russian agent”. Flynn was taken out before he had a chance to even step into his office, prevented from doing any sort of overhaul with the intelligence bureaus and Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was most certainly going to happen. Instead Flynn was forced to resign on Feb. 13th, 2017 after incessant media attacks undermining the entire Trump Administration, accusing them of working for the Russians against the welfare of the American people.
Despite an ongoing investigation on the allegations against Flynn, there has been no evidence to this date that has justified any charge. In fact, volumes of exculpatory evidence have been presented to exonerate Flynn from any wrongdoing including perjury. At this point, the investigation of Flynn has been put into question as consciously disingenuous and as being stalled by the federal judge since May 2020, refusing to release Flynn it seems while a Trump Administration is still in effect.
The question thus stands; in whose best interest is it that no peace be permitted to occur in the Middle East and that U.S.-Russian relations remain verboten? And is such an interest a friend or foe to the American people?
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Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).
In early November, the Azerbaijani-Turkish advance in the directions of the Lachin corridor and the town of Shusha in the Nagorno-Karabakh region slowed down.
The main factors are the fierce resistance of Armenian forces, the complicated terrain, deteriorating weather conditions and overextended communications that run through recently captured territories, where Armenian sabotage units are still able to deliver regular attacks. 9 villages, the capturing of which Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced recently, are in fact located inside the territory captured by Azerbaijani forces earlier. This showcases the lack of progress of Baku’s forces in the recent battles.
Commenting on this situation, Armenian sources argue that right now Yerevan has been preparing a powerful counter-attack to push the Azerbaijanis out of the south of Karabakh. The only factor that allegedly stops Armenia from such a move right now is the commitment of the Armenians to the reached ceasefire agreements that Baku blatantly violates.
Meanwhile, the Armenian side continues to regularly release updates about the losses of Azerbaijan in the conflict. The Azerbaijani military allegedly lost 10 UAVs, 21 armoured vehicles, and 103 soldiers in recent clashes. While the high casualties of the sides are not a secret and widely confirmed by visual evidence regularly appearing from the ground, the claims that the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc somehow lost the strategic initiative in the war are at least overestimated. Azerbaijani artillery, combat drones and even warplanes still regularly pound fortified positions, manpower and military equipment of the defending forces. The Armenians do not have enough means and measures to protect its supply columns and manpower from regular and intense airstrikes.
As of November 3, Azerbaijani forces supported by the Turks and Turkish-backed Syrian militants are still deployed within striking distance of Lachin and Shusha. The loss of any of these points may mark the collapse of the entire Armenian defense in the area. Any large Armenian counter-attack, if it does not deliver a rapid and devastating blow to the Turkish-Azerbaijani forces, will likely not allow to achieve a strategic success. Instead, it will uncover the existing Armenian units and increase the number of casualties from air and artillery strikes. The dominance in the air also means an advantage in reconnaissance and target accusation. In these conditions, small regular counter-attacks mostly aimed at disturbing the advancing Azerbaijani-Turkish units, and undermining their efforts to secure the newly captured positions, look more likely. Despite the lack of notable Azerbaijani gains in recent days, the Armenian defense is still in crisis and, if Ankara and Baku succeed in securing communications and regrouping their forces, the new push towards the Lachin-Shusha-Stepanakert triangle seems to be inevitable.
The diplomatic attempts to de-escalate the conflict have so far led to little progress as Turkey and Azerbaijan feel themselves too close to the desired military victory. President Aliyev wants to write his name down in history as the leader that returned Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, while his Turkish counterpart Erdogan sees himself as the sultan of the New Ottoman Empire, pretending be the leader of the entire Turkic world and even wider – of all the muslims in the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia.
The entire Turkish foreign policy of previous years was a policy of aggressive advances, confrontations and raising bets. This led to particular diplomatic and economic problems on the international scene and undermined the Turkish national economy. However, it looks like the Turkish leadership believes that the potential revenue of turning the Neo-Ottoman and pan-Turkic declarations into a hard reality will generate revenue of such a scale that it would allow to compensate for existing tactical difficulties. Therefore, the Turkish-Azerbaijani stance towards the further confrontation in Karabakh is not something surprising.
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Incisive article first published on April 14, 2020
“Researchers in Wuhan…reported that, of 37 critically ill Covid-19 patients who were put on mechanical ventilators, 30 died within a month. In a U.S. study of patients in Seattle, only one of the seven patients older than 70 who were put on a ventilator survived; just 36% of those younger than 70 did.” (“With ventilators running out, doctors say the machines are overused for Covid-19”, STAT News)
Think about that for a minute. What these figures mean is that, if you’re over 70 and you’re put on a ventilator because you have coronavirus, you’re probably going to die. More importantly, it means that it was probably the ventilator that killed you. Isn’t that something the public ought to know?
I think it is.
“One in seven” is very poor odds. They aren’t the odds a rational person would bet his life on unless he had a death wish or a very serious gambling problem. So what’s going on here, and why is there so much misleading blabber about ventilators?
The root problem seems to be that coronavirus is a relatively new phenomenon and the methods for treating it are still in their early phases. Nothing is set in stone, not yet at least. Even so, you might have noticed that, when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson contracted the infection and was bundled off to ICU, the medical team did NOT put him on a ventilator, but put him on oxygen instead. And the difference couldn’t be more striking, because today, after 3 days in ICU, Johnson is alive, whereas he probably would be dead if he was intubated. Yes, I am making a judgment about something of which I cannot be entirely certain, but I think I’m probably right. If Johnson had been put on a ventilator, he probably would have died.
But, why, that’s what we want to know?
The answer to that question can be found in the article cited above. Take a look:
“Many (coronavirus) patients have blood oxygen levels so low they should be dead. But they’re not gasping for air, their hearts aren’t racing, and their brains show no signs of blinking off from lack of oxygen.
That is making critical care physicians suspect thatblood levels of oxygen, which for decades have driven decisions about breathing support for patients with pneumonia and acute respiratory distress, might be misleading them about how to care for those with Covid-19. In particular, more and more are concerned about the use of intubation and mechanical ventilators. They argue that more patients could receive simpler, noninvasive respiratory support, such as the breathing masks used in sleep apnea, at least to start with and maybe for the duration of the illness.
The question is whether ICU physicians are moving patients to mechanical ventilators too quickly. “Almost the entire decision tree is driven by oxygen saturation levels,” said the emergency medicine physician, who asked not to be named so as not to appear to be criticizing colleagues.” (“With ventilators running out, doctors say the machines are overused for Covid-19”, STAT News)
Okay, so doctors are making their decisions based on “blood oxygen levels”, right? But blood oxygen levels might signal the need for a different treatment for coronavirus patients than they do for pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients. In other words, one size does not fit all. The problem is that too many people are ending up on ventilators when ventilators are undermining their chances for survival. Here’s more:
“….one of the most severe consequences of Covid-19 suggests another reason the ventilators aren’t more beneficial. In acute respiratory distress syndrome, which results from immune cells ravaging the lungs and kills many Covid-19 patients, the air sacs of the lungs become filled with a gummy yellow fluid. “That limits oxygen transfer from the lungs to the blood even when a machine pumps in oxygen,” Gillick said.
As patients go downhill, protocols developed for other respiratory conditions call for increasing the force with which a ventilator delivers oxygen, the amount of oxygen, or the rate of delivery, she explained. But if oxygen can’t cross into the blood from the lungs in the first place, those measures, especially greater force, may prove harmful. High levels of oxygen impair the lung’s air sacs, while high pressure to force in more oxygen damages the lungs.
“We need to ask, are we using ventilators in a way that makes sense for other diseases but not for this one?” Gillick said. “Instead of asking how do we ration a scarce resource, we should be asking how do we best treat this disease?” (STAT News)
Can you see the problem? Virus victims develop a mucousy-yellow gunk in their lungs that prevents oxygen from transferring to the blood. Forcing more air into their lungs with a ventilator, doesn’t help that process, it just damages the lungs. In short, it is the wrong treatment for this particular illness. This explains why Johnson was not put on a ventilator, because the risks far outweighed the potential benefits. Here’s more from the same article:
“In a small study last week in Annals of Intensive Care, physicians who treated Covid-19 patients at two hospitals in China found that the majority of patients needed no more than a nasal cannula. Among the 41% who needed more intense breathing support, none was put on a ventilator right away. Instead, they were given noninvasive devices such as BiPAP; their blood oxygen levels “significantly improved” after an hour or two. (Eventually two of seven needed to be intubated.) The researchers concluded that the more comfortable nasal cannula is just as good as BiPAP and that a middle ground is as safe for Covid-19 patients as quicker use of a ventilator…..“Anecdotal experience from Italy [also suggests] that they were able to support a number of folks using these [non-invasive] methods,” Japa said.” (STAT News)
So the treatment for patients with coronavirus is rapidly evolving, but serious mistakes are undoubtedly still being made. One can only wonder how many people might have survived their trip to ICU had their physicians been more aware of the non-invasive alternatives? But don’t think for a minute that I’m blaming anyone for using methods or devices that may be discarded in the near future. I’m not, but from my vantage point, it looks like the over-dependence on ventilators might have been a very costly mistake. Check out this last clip from the article:
“Because U.S. data on treating Covid-19 patients are nearly nonexistent, health care workers are flying blind when it comes to caring for such confounding patients. But anecdotally, Weingart said, “we’ve had a number of people who improved and got off CPAP or high flow [nasal cannulas] who would have been tubed 100 out of 100 times in the past.” What he calls “this knee-jerk response” of putting people on ventilators if their blood oxygen levels remain low with noninvasive devices “is really bad. … I think these patients do much, much worse on the ventilator.”
That could be because the ones who get intubated are the sickest, he said, “but that has not been my experience: It makes things worse as a direct result of the intubation.” High levels of force and oxygen levels, both in quest of restoring oxygen saturation levels to normal, can injure the lungs. “I would do everything in my power to avoid intubating patients,” Weingart said.” (STAT News)
“Flying blind” sums it up perfectly. Doctors and health care workers have proceeded on the basis of guesswork and intuition without any empirical evidence that they’ve settled on the proper treatment for the infection. That should give us all pause.
Assuming that we’re still in the early days of the pandemic, many of us might have to decide whether we’ll allow ourselves or a loved one to be put on a ventilator. This new research could help us to make a more informed decision. I certainly hope so.
Please watch this excellent 6 minute video of Dr Cameron Kyle Sidell, E.R. and Critical Care Doctor, NY City
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
According to “racist thinking”, certain groups of people innately have inferior characteristics that make them undesirable, unworthy, and dispensable. The purveyors of racist views believe they, in contrast, are superior, exceptionally worthy, and indispensable.
There is a virtually unrecognized form of racism that affects almost every human being on Earth.
It is a form of racism that denigrates billions of people and abusively claims that almost all in that group are intrinsically weak in character and hopelessly so.
More specifically, this is a racism that claims that all human beings are, by nature, predominantly and hopelessly selfish and largely unworthy. It is a racism directed against the entire Human Race.
Who has promoted this perception of Human Nature and the Human Race? How accurate, complete, and wise is this perception? Who benefits from its promotion?
This view of the Human Race happens to be the cornerstone, the foundation of the world’s prevailing economic model-–an economic model that affects everyone on earth. This economic model, Corporate Capitalism, espouses a shallow, incomplete, negative, pessimistic, and abusive view of Human Nature. Capitalism claims that human beings, by nature, are predominantly selfish and hopelessly so.
Capitalists use this view to claim that capitalism is “the only realistic economic model” and that economic models based on Human Goodness and altruism are doomed to failure, “because of Human Nature.” Corporate capitalism justifies itself with this view. Corporate capitalism depends upon, requires, and rewards this view of Human Nature and Human Beings.
The above view of human nature accentuates the negative behavioral capacities of human beings and is incomplete. It largely ignores the positive capacities of human nature. It is anti-people in that it shows little respect for and little faith in the positive behavioral capacities of human beings. It also ignores how the social milieu can up-regulate or down-regulate expression of people’s positive or negative behavioral capacities, individually and collectively.
There is another, more positive, more complete, more accurate, deeper, healthier, and more helpful understanding of “human nature.” It is this:
All human beings innately have capacities for both altruistic and selfish behaviors. There is probably a spectrum regarding the extent to which individual people possess and express innate altruistic capacities versus innate selfish capacities. At one end of the spectrum are people who possess and express large capacities for altruism, compared to their capacities for and/or expression of selfishness. At the other end are people who possess and express large capacities for selfishness, compared to their capacities for and/or expression of altruism. In the exact middle are people who possess roughly equal capacities (for altruism and selfishness) and express those capacities roughly equally. There is probably a bell-shaped curve regarding the distribution of these innate capacities and the ability to express them—although it is likely that this curve, in actuality, is shifted considerably towards the altruistic end—that is, considerably more than half of people probably fall along the altruistic half of the spectrum. (See Note #9, Human Nature—A Graphic Depiction.)
This more comprehensive understanding of Human Nature also emphasizes the great extent to which the social milieu can either up-regulate or down-regulate expression of the behavioral capacities of people, individually and collectively.
As with all forms of racism, the racism that capitalism directs against the entire Human Race is abusive, oppressive, demeaning, dispiriting, demoralizing, depressing, controlling, shaming, powerful, and leaves people, individually and collectively, feeling insecure, unworthy, “dirty,” fearful, ashamed, powerless, and hopelessly trapped. Though not as horrific in scale, these feelings are similar to those experienced by women who have been chronically subjected to the physical and emotional torment of abusive, controlling men who systematically damage a female’s self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. Though not as horrific in scale, these feelings are also similar to those endured throughout history by oppressed populations throughout the world—Africans; African-Americans; indigenous peoples on all continents; and exploited, impoverished, and abused peoples throughout the world.
So, the racism that affects the most people in the world is the anti-Human racism espoused, promoted, practiced, and powerfully imposed by corporate capitalism. Just as abused women deserve to be freed from the abusive men who control them; all members of the Human Race deserve to be freed from the view of Human Nature that corporate capitalism uses to control and abuse them. Just as abused women and the many severely oppressed populations in the world deserve to discover, celebrate, and protect their abundant goodness and worth; the Human Race as a whole deserves to discover, celebrate, and protect its human goodness and worthiness. Just as informed solidarity helps abused women and other oppressed groups to challenge their oppressors; informed solidarity can help free the Human Race from the oppression of corporate capitalism and its racist view of Human beings. In this liberation effort, those who have experienced the greatest degrees of racism and have been exploited the most can provide invaluable insight and great leadership. They deserve our greatest attention.
Although capitalism’s negative and abusive view of human nature and the Human Race is the greatest source of its power and control over human beings, this view is also its greatest weakness, its Achilles heel. For, if this view of human nature is exposed and effectively challenged, capitalism’s power will collapse. Just as the power of an abusing male dissolves when he is exposed and held to account; the power of corporate capitalism will dissolve when its view of human nature is fully exposed and it is held to account.
Just as liberated women are free to evolve into the marvelous women they were intended to become; a Human Race, liberated from capitalism’s abusive view of Human Nature, becomes free to develop new, healthy social arrangements and the Social Beauty that human beings were intended to create and enjoy.
So, in addition to continually addressing the horrible systemic racism that has been directed against specific groups within the Human Race (e.g. the racism experienced by African Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans, et al), the systemic racism that capitalism has directed against the entire Human Race also needs to be exposed and corrected. While continuing to address the racism that has been directed against individual groups of people, it will be important for all groups to avoid generalization, stereotyping, divisiveness, intolerance, and violence—all of which are counterproductive and distract from the additional task of recognizing and correcting the racist view of Humanity promoted by the capitalist economic model. Capitalism depends on a strategy of “divide and conquer” to gets its way. Such division distracts people from recognizing and addressing the deepest roots of their oppression. The Human race must avoid falling into that trap of division and entrenched polarization. (At least to some extent, have we already fallen into that trap—a trap set by and even financed by powers behind corporate capitalism?)
Liberation of the Human Race and creation of widespread Social Beauty will become possible only when one of the most pervasive and powerful forms of racism—the anti-Human racism espoused, practiced, and imposed by corporate capitalism—is effectively challenged. Exposure and correction of the anti-Human racism promoted by capitalism is a key to the elimination of the horrific racism experienced by Africans, African-Americans, indigenous populations, and oppressed people throughout the world. Elimination of all forms of racism and creation of Social Beauty will require replacement of the capitalist economic model and its abusive view of Human Nature with an economic model based on a healthier and more accurate view of Human Nature. All of Humanity, including all the most obvious historical and current victims of racism, can unite to develop a healthier economic model, healthier social arrangements, and, thereby, Social Beauty bereft of racism.
In short, we must all become anti-racists, and this includes being anti-capitalist—because capitalism, fundamentally, is based on, justified by, and depends upon its anti-Human racism. Capitalism without its anti-human racism is no longer capitalism.
Bottom line: Capitalism is a racist economic model. It promotes a negative, abusive, denigrating, demoralizing, and inaccurate view of human nature and the entire human race, and it leads to unhealthy social arrangements and behaviors. We need to expose this abuse and replace capitalism with an economic model that is based on a more accurate understanding of human nature and creates kinder, more healthy and helpful social arrangements. This is best accomplished by encouraging all groups of people to unite and collaborate to expose and replace capitalism with a deeper understanding of human nature and a healthier economic model (e.g. Public Economy).
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Rob Rennebohm, MD is a pediatrician, pediatric rheumatologist, and social clinician who writes about Social Beauty and encourages all to evaluate illness of society in the Social Clinic. His writings, including analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, are posted on the following website: notesfromthesocialclinic.org
Bulgaria’s veto against North Macedonia’s accession into the European Union (EU) remains very likely despite initial speculations that it would not obstruct the former Yugoslav country from joining the bloc. Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zakharieva said that her country would block North Macedonia from joining the EU if it did not recognize that its national identity and language has Bulgarian roots.
If decisionmakers in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje agree, then Sofia is ready to recognize Macedonian as one of the official languages of North Macedonia as long as it “acknowledges the historical truth.”
“We are not disputing their right for self-determination, neither their right to call their language what they like. We are ready to re-confirm the current realities, but they have to acknowledge the historical truth,” Zaharieva told Reuters.
Bulgaria was the first country to recognize the independence of North Macedonia when it separated from collapsing Yugoslavia in 1991. It was first called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia when it achieved independence. However, despite being the first country to recognize its independence, Sofia does not recognize their language as Macedonian and emphasizes that not only is their language a dialect of Bulgarian, but also their ethnicity.
Sofia and Athens stress that the Macedonian nation and language was engineered by Yugoslav communists in the late 1940’s to legitimize Marshal Tito’s claims over the northern Greek province of Macedonia, and to also weaken Bulgarian identity in the region so they would not make demands for unification with Bulgaria. Сenturies earlier, most people in what is today’s North Macedonia considered themselves Bulgarian. So the Yugoslavs had established a committee in 1945 to “create” a Macedonian language. In fact, Venko Markovski, a communist politician who participated in the Commission for the Creation of the Macedonian Alphabet in 1945 stated in an interview for Bulgarian National Television only seven days prior to his death that ethnic Macedonians and the Macedonian language do not exist and were the result of Comintern’s plans for the Balkans.
However, with the collapse of European communism in the early 1990’s, attempts of re-Bulgarianization were made against the people now calling themselves Macedonian. Further complexing the issue is Skopje’s insistence that a Macedonian minority exists in Bulgaria.
“Our concerns come from the never-ending claims for a Macedonian minority in Bulgaria. The acknowledgment of Bulgarian roots would put an end to this,” Zaharieva told.
Last Thursday, North Macedonia’s Prime Minister Zoran Zaev said he hoped the two countries would find a solution, but said that the identity and language of the country were not up for debate. It appears that North Macedonia’s first steps towards accession into the EU will end even before they begin.
Bulgarian demands are not new and it is likely they will opt to veto. Western powers interested in North Macedonia’s accession into the EU are expected to push Bulgaria to take a step back from their demands or form a compromise. North Macedonia’s problem is that even if accession negotiations start, there is still a long way to go.
On the other hand, there are many internal problems in the EU. This makes it difficult for the bloc to move towards enlargement in the coming years. At the top of the problems is the pandemic that is enough to put a brake on all enlargement processes. But there is also the deep division within the EU on how to deal with Turkey’s aggression against member states Greece and Cyprus.
From the Greek perspective, Bulgaria’s opposition to North Macedonia joining the EU is humiliating. Not only has it undermined Greece’s supposed elevated position to guide Balkan countries into joining the EU, but undermines Greece’s decision to recognize a Macedonian language in 2018. Athens effectively involved itself into a dispute that does not concern them, especially since there is no specific international agreement that defines language.
The 2018 Prespa Agreement that settled the name of “North Macedonia” between Athens and Skopje, was solely signed so that North Macedonia could join NATO, creating a host of other issues.
A few months ago, Bulgaria submitted to the capitals of the other EU Member States a lengthy memorandum entitled “Explanatory Memorandum on the Relations between the Republic of Bulgaria and the Republic of North Macedonia in Relation to the EU Enlargement, Accession and Stabilization Process.” Central to this memorandum is the national and linguistic interventions that took place in North Macedonia after World War II.
However, for all of Bulgaria’s opposition for North Macedonia to join the EU, they made no objections to them joining NATO. This suggests that Bulgaria found resisting Russian influence in the Balkans to be a bigger priority then the reclamation of the Bulgarian language and identity in North Macedonia. This of course is a curious decision, even when ignoring Bulgaria’s shared religion, alphabet and Slavic heritage with Russia.
Although Bulgaria’s independence was only secured thanks to Russian assistance against the Ottoman Empire, today Sofia is fully integrated into the Atlanticist world system, which is why they did not oppose North Macedonia’s accession into NATO, but takes a different line into integrating the former Yugoslav country into the EU. Bulgaria will likely veto the process into starting North Macedonia’s accession into the EU. For Brussels, this will not be a major issue as they are already dealing with a second wave of COVID-19, Turkish aggression against two member states, and a new wave of terrorism that has already struck France and Austria.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
President Donald Trump has succeeded, aided and abetted by a willing and corrupt senate, in ramming through his third Supreme Court nominee, the very conservative Amy Coney Barrett. Her successful appointment to the nation’s highest court does not bode well for freedom and justice at home or abroad.
There has been much conversation about Barrett’s Catholic faith, which, in and of itself, is entirely irrelevant to any discussion of her qualifications. But there are many issues that are pertinent to any conversation about her lack of suitability for her new position, and one of them does relate to her religious beliefs.
While Barrett’s association with the ‘People of Praise’ cult should have disqualified her, one might argue that that is placing too much emphasis on her religious beliefs. This writer thinks that emphasis is completely appropriate, but if not, let’s look at another extremely troubling aspect of her history.
For several years, a terrorist organization called the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (Mujahadeen-e-Khalk; known simply as MEK) was officially designated a terrorist organization by the United States government. The sole purpose of the existence of the MEK is to overthrow the government of Iran and install a right-wing replacement, one that would be reminiscent of the brutal reign of the Shah of Iran.
Masquerading as a pro-democracy organization, the secretive group is responsible for the deaths of at least 12,000 Iranians. On June 28, 1981, the group bombed the Islamic Republic Party headquarters in Tehran, killing seventy-three people. The group has been accused of working with Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists.
The MEK was started by Massoud Rajavi and his wife, Maryam, who fancied themselves the next rulers of Iran, once they and their 2,000 – 3,000 followers were able to convince the 80,000,000 Iranians to reject the Islamic Revolution they fought so hard for, and follow them. Like Giuliani, realistic thinking is not their strong suit. As of this writing, Massoud Rajavi is believed to be dead, and his wife is seldom, if ever, seen in public.
This is the organization that the United States’ newest Supreme Court justice has defended. These are the people – who have killed thousands of Iranians and who support the overthrow of the sovereign, people’s government of Iran – that Barrett says are not terrorists. The Intercept reported that many female members over the years were force to have sex with Rajavi; many were forced to be sterilized, so they would not be distracted by children, and could fully devote their time to Rajavi and his unholy cause. Based on her association with the ‘People of Praise’ cult, this is probably just fine with her.
As of this writing, the U.S. election has not been decided. It is disheartening to imagine that so much of the citizenry has bought into Trump’s lies, Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism and misogyny. A Biden victory will not bring substantial change, but would not necessarily spell the end of any semblance of democracy. Should Trump be re-elected, it is likely that the MEK will continue to receive praise and financial assistance from the U.S. government. Other organizations, perhaps Black Lives Matter, may be designated terrorist organizations. In the Orwellian world of Donald Trump, this is only too possible. And the gradual erosion of human rights and respect for international law, neither of which the U.S. ever cared much about anyway, will become a fast-moving landslide.
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In 36 years of living in Latin America I have learned that any time a country changes its conditions so that poverty decreases and the standard of living improves, the United States wages some kind of war on that country. It has waged unconventional warfare on Nicaragua since the Sandinistas returned to the presidency in 2007 providing millions of dollars to nongovernmental organizations, more than 25 different media, three “human rights” groups and many individuals whose job is to lie for their salaries. Since 2017, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has disbursed over $89 million with the primary focus on “governance” and promoting challenges to the Nicaraguan government. Another aspect of US aggression is the economic sanctions. The U.S. uses its influence to oppose any loan, financial or technical assistance to the government of Nicaragua from international banks and organizations.
In July this year, USAID contracted a US company to head up the current phase of their war through the November 2021 elections. The plan is titled RAIN – Responsive Action in Nicaragua. It is a thinly veiled plan to mount domestic and international pressure for “regime change” in Nicaragua. RAIN is a plan to undermine public order with actions [violent and otherwise] before, during and after the 2021 elections. The document suggests there is a crisis and “economic debacle” with potential to become a “humanitarian emergency” due to Covid-19. Since March the opposition focused most of their attention on telling lies in the media. This strategy had some success internationally but not much at home since Nicaragua has the lowest Covid mortality rate in the region.
The opposition is now on to new topics – like trying to spread the lie that some of the grass-fed beef that is exported to the US is from Indigenous land supposedly stolen in recent years. Although Nicaragua has had some problem with this, it has been much less under the Sandinista government than under the three previous US-supported governments.
One reason the government has a good relationship with much of the Indigenous is their commitment to granting title to the original territories. There are now autonomous indigenous governments elected according to their ancestral forms of organization. There are 23 original territories with 314 communities and 200,000 people. Nearly 38 thousand square kilometers have been titled to the indigenous groups. They have non-transferrable titles, helping to curb illegal land sales and deforestation. The authorities that administer these lands are designated by the communities themselves.
This is 31% of the national territory and more than 55% of the territory of the Caribbean Coast where 61% have some type of forest. Nicaragua has gained great credibility in environmental issues and was just voted to be part of the World Bank’s Carbon Fund Board (Informe Pastran, 23 Oct. 2020).
There is now a special battalion patrolling these extremely large expanses of land in coordination with many of the Miskito and Mayagna communities. Since 2007 special emphasis has been given to improving every aspect of life in the Autonomous Regions increasing dramatically health and school facilities, electricity, potable water, sanitation, good paved roads and decreasing every aspect of poverty.
There are internal disputes related to selling land among the 75 different communities of the Mayagna. Their communities elect their own authorities. But things aren’t perfect and the violence is sometimes internal. On Jan. 29, Gustavo Sebastian, president of the Mayagna indigenous territory government, said that a group of Mayagnas shot at a group of community members in an act of revenge for a December 2019 action. Four men were killed, two hospitalized with injuries and 12 homes burned. Then on February 12 the police captured the leader of the group responsible for the January violence in Alal and Wakuruskasna. (Radio La Primerisima, 12 Feb. 2020)
On October 22, Solón Guerrero, director of the Federation of Nicaraguan Cattlemen’s Association, stated that they will present documents that prove that their group signed agreements to protect the reserves held by the indigenous populations. The executive director of the Nicaraguan Chamber of the Meat Industry, Juan Bautista Velásquez, said that the cattle that are processed are identified with two tags, because the cattle come from farms certified by the Institute for Agricultural Protection and Health (IPSA). He said that if the North American market was cancelled, more than 600 thousand people would lose their jobs and 140 thousand producers would be affected.
This misleading story is being promoted by members of Nicaragua’s opposition who are paid with USAID or NED (National Endowment for Democracy) funds. It is a new attempt to interfere with and hurt Nicaragua. Now it is under the guise of protecting indigenous people. While it is true that things are not perfect in Nicaragua, the advances and protections for Indigenous people are much better than in most other countries. Certainly the U.S. treatment of indigenous people is no model to follow. While there are periodic incidents of friction or conflict in the vast expanse of the autonomous zones, this has little to do with the cattle raising and beef export industry where hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans work.
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Nan McCurdy is a United Methodist Missionary and 36 year resident of Nicaragua. She is currently working with the rural poor in Puebla Mexico and can be reached at [email protected]
Good people of the Third World should not let themselves be taken in by worldwide satellite beamed CIA-fed media prattling on continuously about American democracy during ongoing presidential elections. Sadly, Americans are duped into participating in elections that back crimes against humanity ordered by the ruling genocidal Wall St. plutocracy which militarily and financially plunders 3rd World humanity.
The good people of the Third World should not let themselves be taken in by worldwide satellite beamed CIA-fed media prattling on continuously about American democracy during ongoing presidential elections. Sadly, Americans are duped into participating in elections that back crimes against humanity ordered by the ruling genocidal Wall St. plutocracy which militarily and financially plunders 3rd World humanity and corrupts American society.
A great many Americans voting believe the lies their criminal corporate media pours out daily, and are therefore gung-ho proud of Americans killing media-designated ‘bad guys” all around the world. These completely fooled Americans are happy to vote for the next commander-in-chief, but a substantial amount of Americans voting know they have been and are unhappy with what they feel is a mockery of the so called democratic process that has them voting for a choice that is still represents evil.
Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, once the highest law officer of the USA, who helped write both important civil rights laws, speaks to his fellow Americans clearly, and meant that all the world should know this truth.
“We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.”:
One of the most internationally powerful plutocrats in US history, John Pierpont Morgan, in a candid moment admitted, ”Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy”:
The well respected third president of the USA, Thomas Jefferson, saw the plutocracy coming when he said,“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Already in 1922, America’s most famous economist Thorstein Veblen wrote,
”The current situation in America is by way of being somethingof a psychiatrical clinic...Perhaps the commonest and plainestevidence of an unbalanced mentality is to be seen in a certainfearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion ofAmericans are affected…. There is a visible lack of composure andlogical coherence, both in what they will believe and in what theyare ready to do about it.”
Veblen assumed depression to be the normal condition in a business-enterprise economy, to be relieved in periods of excitation caused by stimuli not intrinsic to the system like war and expansionabroad. Veblen saw the modern business leader as essentially a latter-day predatory warrior. [Thorstein Veblen by Douglas Dowd, 1966]
Veblen’s observation is born out by Americans always having been willing to follow criminal orders and bomb, invade and occupy other people’s lands the world over.
Paul Craig Roberts, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Undersecretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, in his article, The Looting Machine Called Capitalism, wrote,
“Americans are the least exceptional people in human history. Americans have no rights at all. We hapless insignificant beings have to accept whatever capitalists and their puppet government impose on us. And we are so stupid we call it ‘Freedom and Democracy America.’”
Americans today are wildly mesmerized in avid interest in who will be president for the next four years. However, given the continual American wars in smaller countries and perpetual ramped up fear of nuclear Armageddon, its obviously of some greater significance who will serve as Commander-in-Chief of the American worldwide genocidal killing machine, because whether Americans realize it or not, they, each citizen, has a portion of citizen co-responsibility for the crimes of their fellow Americans ‘serving’ as soldiers following criminal, and therefore illegal, orders.
Those Americans voting, who believe the lies their criminal corporate media pours out daily and are therefore gung-ho proud of Americans killing media-designated ‘bad guys” everywhere and anywhere, believe US democracy makes them and all Americans to be above the law – above all law. On the other hand, that substantial amount of Americans voting, who know they have been frightened into voting for what they hope is the lesser of two evils are well aware of their tacit complicity in the crimes against humanity in other peoples countries. Some more modest amount of Americans voting, or refusing to vote, realize that they have already been prosecuted in the court of public opinion and in the hearts of parents of children blown to pieces or starved to death by the actions of Americans. Hopefully, this is what people overseas, especially in nations under American attack, understand.
At the same time a multitude of Americans vote, other Americans have been fueling, arming and target selecting for the Saudi airstrikes for five years. Already back in November 2017, Save the Children reported that 130 children were dying every day, with 50,000 children already believed to have died in 2017. The U.N. officials said more than 20 million people, including 11 million children, are in need of urgent assistance, with 7 million totally dependent on food assistance. The U.N. has called it the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”
US CIA controlled media is so sure of the headlock it has on the American public, its mainstream media can even inform of Yemeni children dying from bombs & starvation knowing its captive audience will not turn against their American killing machine. Even the most eye-rebounding photos published in wars supporting New York Times Yemen Girl Who Turned World’s Eyes to Famine Is Dead (Published 2018) and seen on PBS television channels did not put a dent in American solidarity with its government’s and military’s genocidal actions in Yemen – prosecutable genocidal crimes against humanity.
During the current presidential election campaign criminal war promoting news and entertainment networks are making no mention of President Trump’s veto of a bipartisan Congressional resolution that would have forced an end to American military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s civil war in Yemen a year and a half ago.
In One American Ear and Out the Other
In 2008, for two weeks the major networks telecasted as humorous, Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s cry, his finger pointed to the sky, “God bless America? No, no, God damn America for her crimes against humanity!”
In 2012, prime times news during the Republican debates of presidential candidates, candidate Rep. Ron Paul was heard denouncing “all US bombings and invasions beginning with those in Korea as illegal, unconstitutional and a horrific loss of human life.”
But nothing seems to effect a change in American dedication to their military and its military’s heritage (of gore, death and destruction).
American film maker Michael Moore’s castigates his fellow Americans as“sick and twisted violent people that we’ve been for hundreds of years, it’s something that’s just in our craw, just in our DNA.Americans kill people, because that’s what we do. We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians.”
In one American ear and out the other.
Martin Luther King made bold headlines in newspaper throughout the world with, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my government. In Vietnam we may have killed a million already, mostly children.” King cried out,“Silence is treason!”but at home extremely few Americans spoke out in agreement, many spoke against him, most were silent, and King was shot to death within the year.
This archival research peoples historian activist is convinced that no change will be coming from anywhere in the American led First World, especially now as it is hard pressed losing its hegemony to a future multipolar world with China’s economy now the largest.
Some of us work to somehow make this Americans killing millions of children come to be a topic of conversation in the Third World for the children’s lives that could be saved once enough people became enraged enough to demand prosecution and justice.
Once USA-EU loses world economic hegemony and can no longer sanction, the many nations that have seen their children murdered by Americans and their European allies will demand justice in the courts of a reconstituted and reorganized democratic United Nations. In the meantime let’s have faith that the astounding intelligence witnessed in the miraculous achievements in outer and inner space will eventually manifest itself in ending the five centuries of European and American genocide for money and power.
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This article was originally published on Countercurrents.org.
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Minority Perspective, UK and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which Dissident Voice supports with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.
A final rule to remove the iconic species from the Endangered Species Act has now been published. Read more about the science and politics of wolf conservation.
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As expected the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today issued a rule that would remove gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the protection of the Endangered Species Act.
The long-in-the-works move becomes effective 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register on election day — Jan. 4, 2021. It will put wolf conservation back in the hands of states and tribes, each of which would then have the right to decide on their own acceptable wolf population levels or hunting limits.
Ironically, the new rule comes less than a week before residents of Colorado will vote on a ballot measure to reintroduce wolves to the state. Many states maintain their own endangered species lists, which can offer protection if federal rules do not, but experts argue that states lack the resources to protect endangered species within their borders without federal support.
The announcement was made during an off-the-record phone call to which few media were invited, and to which this reporter’s request to attend received no response.
Still, it immediately generated criticism from scientists and conservationists, who have worked for decades to restore the species in the lower 48 U.S. states.
“This delisting is an unfortunate and politically driven decision as the best available science provides evidence that the gray wolf’s population is not fully restored throughout its historic range,” wroteJacob Carter of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Five scientists who are experts on gray wolf taxonomy, ecology and genomics reviewed the FWS’s proposed delisting of the gray wolf last year and found serious issues with the science.”
The Service and livestock trade groups, on the other hand, position the current state of wolf recovery as a major success. “Today’s action reflects…the parameters of the law and the best scientific and commercial data available,” Secretary of the Interior David L. Bernhardt said in a press release, which positioned the rule as part of ongoing efforts to “reform” the Endangered Species Act. “After more than 45 years as a listed species, the gray wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery. Today’s announcement simply reflects the determination that this species is neither a threatened nor endangered species based on the specific factors Congress has laid out in the law.”
Conservationists argue that wolf populations have not reached sustainable levels and that delisting the species would then open them up to future hunting, which could further devastate populations. To see what could happen, look no further than Idaho, where wolf hunting is legal. Recent analysis by the Western Watersheds Project found that 570 wolves — including 35 pups, some just weeks old — were killed by hunters, trappers and government officials in the year ending June 30.
This delisting effort continues a twisting, turning path toward wolf conservation in this country, which has seen the iconic species gain and lose protection multiple times.
And as always, the story is not yet fully written. Conservation groups have already announced their intention to sue — a process they’ve won in the past.
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John R. Platt is the editor of The Revelator. An award-winning environmental journalist, his work has appeared in Scientific American, Audubon, Motherboard, and numerous other magazines and publications. His “Extinction Countdown” column has run continuously since 2004 and has covered news and science related to more than 1,000 endangered species. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and the National Association of Science Writers. John lives on the outskirts of Portland, Ore., where he finds himself surrounded by animals and cartoonists.
Having conquered, colonised and regimented cyberspace and its flow of data, driven away from us and in to orbit in secret stores, telecommunications companies are now looking to occupy public infrastructure with their next generation data network 5G.
Because 5G technology needs a much denser network of 10 to 100 times as many antenna locations, companies are vying to carve up city-owned, public infrastructure — utility poles, streetlights — to host new equipment. When the conflict comes out in to the open in congress this year and climaxes it will raise questions about and draw public attention towards the tensions between the cumbersome but constitutional processes of local government and the demands of corporations to have their way quickly.
“Today, it can take a year or more to get a permit, but only an hour to install a small cell. This has to change,” says Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure.
Local governors have voiced critique over corporations’ use of their clout in the state legislatures to override, suppress, local democracy. Corporations keep restating the tired efficiency argument over and over again. Why should their cheapest, chosen method triumph over public will? Why should we foot the bill of interception and surveillance we never voted for? They own a company, or conglomerate. But a company or conglomerate is not the entirety of the public will. They aren’t because they are privatised, Wall Street floating authoritarian transnationals that offer nothing but secrecy, control and social and environmental degradation. They have the same effect on democracy, justice and equality as fascism. Corruption has allowed these companies to come in and rob all our private data the better to target us as captive consumers. We got nothing in return. They added nothing to the community but an invisible prison.
If you value your voice and freedom your only choice is to oppose 5G’s assault on local democracy and vote for candidates that defend your power and the principle of public ownership. Apathy, by signalling public acquiesence in the prostration of legislature to corporate agendas, will result in no less, no more than an escalation of lobbying that runs against the public interest, to further simplify, streamline and automate our captivity. Like the vast censorship and surveillance systems they created, corporations are hybrids, old elite networks as well as armed with cyber-equipment. It is no accident nor footnote to history that the success of silicon valley and its vision resulted in the single biggest expansion of control over citizens ever seen. Physical occupation of public utilities is a natural consequence and farthest extension of the algorhythmic logic of a new age society in which the current problem is the conquest of unaccountable power over cyberspace. Many of us have unwitting been attending to the task of bloating corporate data warehouses on social media, sleepwalking in to dystopia. But having to see our land and utilities weaponised against us so blantantly in this heist may wake us up, may be one step too far.
Make no mistake, this technology has been engineered to service more than consumer needs alone. Let’s for a second pretend it was. Then why would it be included and praised in a congressionally-mandated National Security Strategy report released by the White House? The report mandates federal agencies use startup technology more quickly in the field and pushes to improve deployment strategy. It also hopes for more collaboration between technology companies and the Defense Department, essentially creating, or staunching, an interface between Defense and Silicon Valley. Why is it wrong to hack and hold to account a government when we are monitored through the technology we consume, when government is supposed to be based on a fair balance of power? The disparities grow deeper per byte of information created or consumed.
The telecoms and big data lobby must not be allowed to control politicians. That the system allows it is a symptom of a deeply dysfunctional political culture where politicians spend less time representing citizens than on lobbying work for corporations to fundraise for re-election. Communities must be listened to and grassroots expertise and ownership of utilities acknowledged if we are to make democracy an enduring reality and put an end to censorship and surveillance.
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Scotland has failed to meet a ten-year-old target to prevent damage to precious marine wildlife, according to a leaked Scottish Government report seen by The Ferret.
The report reveals that “priority” seabed habitats meant to be protected around the coast have declined in five large areas since 2011. Seagrass, flame shells, seaweed beds and tubeworm reefs have been destroyed by the fishing industry and pollution, it says.
Campaigners warn that these habitats – vital for fish and as a store for carbon – are now “perilously close” to being wiped out after a “decade of decline”. They accuse ministers of breaking promises made a decade ago to prevent the marine environment from being harmed.
Experts describe the declines as “shocking” and “tragic” and call for damaged habitats to be restored. The Scottish Government says it is “working towards a full assessment” of the state of Scotland’s seas that will be published “in due course”.
The Marine Scotland Act was agreed by the Scottish Parliament in March 2010. It required the Scottish Government to ensure the “protection and enhancement of the health of the Scottish marine area”.
This involved conserving a series of key habitats, seen as vital for plants and animals and as nurseries for fish. They are described as “priority marine features”.
They include swaying green fields of seagrass and small, bright orange, multi-tentacled shellfish called flame shells. There are also beds of purple seaweed known as maerl and “serpulid” reefs created by red, pink and orange tubeworms.
Video thanks to Howard Wood
The leaked report is called a “Scottish Overall Assessment 2020” and examines the state of six vital habitats in 11 marine regions around Scotland. It is a draft dated October 2019 compiled by scientists from the government’s NatureScot, formerly Scottish Natural Heritage, and Marine Scotland.
The report’s main conclusion is that the marine habitats in five regions have shrunk between 2011 and 2019. “The target of no loss…has not been achieved in the Moray Firth, West Highlands, Outer Hebrides, Argyll and Clyde regions,” it says.
A summary table from the report lists the five areas in red for having failed to meet the target. There is “insufficient data” to judge whether Scotland’s six other marine regions have met the targets or not, it adds.
Summary table from leaked Scottish Government report, showing habitat losses between 2011 and 2019.
The report blames the declines on dredging, trawling, anchoring, overfishing and engineering works. It also fingers climate change, ocean acidification and pollution from fish farms and other sources, as well as diseases and storms.
Losses have been particularly severe in the Argyll marine area. Since 2011 it has lost 53 per cent of its flame shell beds and 35 per cent of its serpulid tubeworm reefs, known as aggregations, as well as unspecified areas of seagrass and horse mussel beds.
The report highlights a “marked deterioration” and “widespread fragmentation” of serpulid reefs in Loch Creran in Argyll. The cause is said to be “uncertain”, though there has been damage from fishing and pollution in the past.
According to the leaked report, more than 90 per cent of the serpulid reefs in Loch Teacuis, an arm of Loch Sunart in the West Highlands, have been lost. Virtually all of the blue mussel beds in the Dornoch Firth, part of the Moray Firth marine region, are said to have gone.
Loch Fyne in the Clyde region has lost 10 per cent of its maerl beds and nine per cent of its flame shell beds. The report points out these have been damaged by scallop dredging in the past.
The Sound of Barra in the Outer Hebrides has lost 27 per cent of its seagrass beds, partly because of the construction of the causeway connecting Eriskay and South Uist in 2001.
The report stresses that there is “low confidence” in its overall assessments because records only exist for a “small proportion” of the habitats. There is also “uncertainty” over how much human activities can be blamed for the declines, it says.
Video thanks to Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST).
The unpublished government report was obtained by the campaign group, Open Seas. It contrasted the report’s bleak scientific assessments with the Scottish Government’s upbeat announcement in September that 30 per cent of Scotland’s seas was now protected by marine conservation areas.
Phil Taylor, head of policy for Open Seas, accused ministers of failing in their duty to protect and enhance the health of the marine environment. “The declines are really serious and show these habitats are now perilously close to being effectively wiped out in our seas,” he said.
“Human impacts, including expansion of scallop dredging in the 1990s and the deregulation of bottom trawling in inshore waters, have contributed to widespread decline. Scotland’s underwater habitats have been reduced to isolated patches covering a fraction of their former extent.”
Taylor pointed to estimates in the report suggesting that only small beds of flame shells and maerl were left in the Clyde marine region. Both were believed to have been widespread 50 years ago.
“These habitats are the foundation of a functioning ecosystem, and they are important for capturing and storing carbon, for fish to spawn and feed,” he told The Ferret.
“We cannot afford yet another decade of decline. The Scottish Government is required by law to protect inshore marine habitats from bottom-towed fishing, but has repeatedly missed its own deadlines.”
Professor Murray Roberts, a leading expert on marine ecology from the University of Edinburgh, urged action to stem the losses. “The declines in iconic Scottish marine habitats in this unpublished report are shocking,” he said.
“It is simply tragic to think that we might have lost over 90 per cent of the beautiful tubeworm reefs from the western Highlands. Thanks to global climatic change, the seas across the world are warming, becoming more acidic and running short of the oxygen vital to life.”
He added: “It’s essential humanity’s use of marine ecosystems becomes sustainable and that we protect and restore the patchwork of iconic habitats that define Scotland’s marine natural heritage.”
Underwater wildlife on a flame shell bed. Photo thanks to NatureScot.
Our Seas, a coalition of 69 coastal business, community and environmental groups in Scotland, described the situation as urgent. “The last fragments of these once widespread habitats are being further degraded within our own lifetimes,” said the group’s co-ordinator, Ailsa McLellan.
“The Scottish Government maintains that 30 per cent of our seas are protected. But this is misleading because many of these supposedly protected areas have no protective measures in place at all.”
She maintained that only around five per cent of the inshore seabed had permanent protection from bottom-towed fishing gear. “If the Scottish Government continues to sit on its hands whilst remnant habitats disappear from our seas, then it will be failing us as a nation,” she said.
The Scottish Greens contended that targets were useless without government action to meet them.
“These figures show a shocking level of environmental destruction to Scotland’s marine environment,” said the party’s environment spokesperson, Mark Ruskell MSP.
“The Scottish Government cannot continue to hide behind its targets. It needs to act to stop this destruction now.”
Close-up of serpulid reef. Photo thanks to NatureScot.
The Marine Conservation Society warned that business-as-usual was driving a “spiral of ocean decline” that had to be reversed. The new findings painted “a worrying picture”, according to the society’s head of conservation in Scotland, Calum Duncan.
“If hundreds of hectares of valuable carbon-storing, nursery-providing, biodiversity-enriching living reef and seagrass habitat have been lost in the years since the Marine Scotland Act was established to help protect and enhance our seas, then everyone should be concerned,” he said.
“The true picture of loss is likely to be even greater since the trends for most habitats in most regions appears to be unknown.”
Video thanks to Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST).
The Scottish Government’s wildlife agency, NatureScot, confirmed that it had contributed to the leaked report as part of a full assessment of Scotland’s seas. “NatureScot’s assessment is based on data from seabed surveys carried out mainly in marine protected areas between 2011 and 2018,” said a spokesperson for the agency.
“The losses reported may be caused by a range of pressures including those associated with human activities or natural drivers of change including storm action and fluctuations in recruitment of the habitat-forming species.”
Nature Scot pointed out that management measures were put in place in 2016 to protect the most sensitive seabed habitats. “It will take time for the benefits of these measures to be seen and for this to be reflected in the results of our marine protected area monitoring work,” the spokesperson added.
The Scottish Government reiterated that more than 30 per cent of Scotland’s seas were covered by protection areas designed to achieve conservation objectives while allowing “sustainable use” to continue.
A government spokesperson said: “We are working towards a full assessment of Scotland’s waters that will inform our vital work in supporting nature conservation, marine planning, and helping to develop new approaches to marine management. This work will be published in due course.”
This committed this fishing industry to “taking all necessary and appropriate measures to ensure that the fisheries and ecosystems in which they operate are accessed and managed responsibly to preserve their sustainable use for current and future generations.”
SFF said it “supports the principle of marine protected areas for conservation of biodiversity and geodiversity features in particular areas, and will continue to work towards striking a balance between conservation and sustainable harvesting.”
It also “acknowledges that its fisheries are a shared resource at national and international level” and promised to “cooperate with all relevant stakeholders.”
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The Ferret’s policy is to publish documents on which our stories are based whenever possible. In this case, however, we have decided not to release the full text of the draft Scottish Government report on the marine environment in order to protect sources.
This story was published in tandem with the Sunday National.
On October 29, 2020, Joseph Cannataci, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy delivered an address to the General Assembly warning that “Widespread use of contact tracing technology to fight the Covid-19 pandemic has led to almost incessant and omnipresent surveillance in some parts of the world.”
Cannataci continued:
“This is a very disturbing trend; all-pervasive surveillance is no panacea for COVID-19” According to the news release, he was “concerned about reports of personal and health data being used to exert control over citizens, possibly to little public health effect.”
The UN Secretary-General expressed exactly his own concern that “certain governments or national entities are using the pretext of COVID to increase surveillance and limit the space for dialogue.”
This is an alarming trend, and the General Assembly’s Third Committee (Human Rights) held an interactive dialogue on 29 October, 2020 with the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy. The resolution on the right to privacy in the digital age has been adopted by the Third Committee since the sixty-eighth session without a vote. This year, Brazil and Germany introduced an updated draft, which covers such topics as use of artificial intelligence, spread of misinformation, digital divides, and protection of the right to privacy while developing technological means in response to disasters, epidemics and pandemics (COVID-19). As of today, this draft has been co-sponsored by more than 40 Member States.
This concern is paramount, as wide-spread, and, indeed, targeted surveillance has been used to terrorize people, a devastating example of which occurred during the McCarthy witch-hunts in the United States. These abuses did not end with McCarthy’s demise, as the FBI continued dictatorial abuse of their powers, keeping under illegal surveillance such public leaders as Martin Luther King, the renowned actress Jean Seberg, and any and all dissidents during the anti-Vietnam war organizations in the USA, and the Sanctuary Movement. The surveillance and lies spread about the courageous American actress Jean Seberg were tantamount to psychological rape, staggering and criminal violation of all the most intimate spaces of her life. This violation of her privacy led to her suicide, a goal undoubtedly sought by the Bureau. The FBI was often complicit in murder of both well-known and little-known dissidents, including the Black Panthers, who were, almost to a man, murdered.
An important documentation of this deadly national surveillance by the FBI was published in the non-fiction book, “The Burglary,” by Washington Post correspondent, Betty Metzger. Files violating the privacy, violating the most intimate spaces of the lives of peaceful demonstrators, were compiled in the so-called democracy of the USA, and these abuses of privacy, rationalized by pseudo-threats to “national security” have been a scourge and a menace to the lives of American citizens. One of the most scandalous and egregious examples of FBI Gestapo tactics can be summarized by J. Edgar Hoover’s description of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as “The most dangerous woman in America.” The FBI file on the widow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was larger than 6000 pages. Her authorship of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was considered communist propaganda. Eleanor Roosevelt described the FBI as an American Gestapo, the description of them also used by Ernest Hemingway, whom they hounded to suicide.
The abuse of Covid-19 intimate personal data provides a perfect opportunity and mask for political repression, and ultimately for political violence. The United Nations attention to this danger is crucial. It is also a recognition that certain so-called conspiracy theories may be based on fact.
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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York.
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