Global Research

“Mercury/thimerosal and lead (and aluminum) are extremely neurotoxic and cytotoxic, but their combined synergistic effect is much worse.

A dose of mercury sufficient to kill 1% of tested rats, when combined with a dose of lead sufficient to kill less than 1% of rats, resulted in killing 100% of rats tested.

Mercury has a similar synergistic effect with aluminum, which is also in most vaccines.” — Bernard Windham, M.D.

Previously healthy infants shortly after receiving their “routine” baby shots. (Infant # 2 had been given both the live virus MMR and the mercury-containing flu shot simultaneously.)

Below are charts showing that many epidemic infectious diseases had already become far less lethal (and also less common) by the time mass vaccinations were popularized in America

Read these authors and their truth-telling books because the WHO, the CDC, the AAP, the AMA, the AAFP and most MDs, even Pediatricians, WILL NOT!

And finally, note the wisdom and skepticism in the following, very pertinent post-World War I poem that was published in the Salt Lake City Telegram in 1923. Recall that the world-wide epidemic of (likely vaccine-caused) “influenza” was most likely caused by the Rockefeller Institute’s mass (live virus) vaccination programs of all newly conscripted US soldiers shortly after they arrived at their basic training camps. The vaccine-sickened soldiers who managed to recover from their acute vaccine-caused illnesses then went “over there” and likely spread the virulent vaccine flu virus to the rest of the world.

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VACCINATION CRAZY, EH! WOT?

By F.C. BUSH, 166 East 2^nd St, Salt Lake City  

They’ll vaccinate the young men
Upon their arms so warm
They’ll vaccinate the babies
The moment they are born
They’ll vaccinate the maidens
On the ankle or the thigh
They’ll vaccinate the old men
A week before they die

Chorus:
Another craze has struck Salt Lake
Folks are asking “Did it take?”
When you go out
The news-boys shout
“Have you been vaccinate(d)?”

They’ll vaccinate the old maids
Upon their modest arms
They’ll vaccinate the sheep and pigs
Upon their separate farms
They’ll vaccinate your auto
And your license number too
They’ll vaccinate the polar bears
And the elephant in the zoo

Chorus
They’ll vaccinate the roosters
And the hens upon their legs
Two days before they’re even laid
They’ll vaccinate the eggs
They’ll vaccinate the table
They’ll vaccinate the chairs
They’ll vaccinate the apples and
They’ll vaccinate the pears

Chorus
They’re vaccination crazy
They’ll vaccinate the loon
They’ll climb up when it’s hazy
And they’ll vaccinate the moon
The sun, the stars, the universe
They are vaccination mad
They’ll vaccinate the sorrowful
And vaccinate the glad

Chorus
They’ll vaccinate the dogs and cats
They’ll vaccinate the fleas
They’ll vaccinate the cabbage head
They’ll vaccinate the peas
They’ll vaccinate the clothes you wear
Your razor, brush and soap
And if you want to hang yourself
They’ll vaccinate the rope

Chorus
The world is full of jazz and cranks
It’s full of syncopation
But let us keep these vaccine pranks
Outside of legislation
Or they’ll vaccinate your hydrant
And they’ll vaccinate your well
Then they’ll vaccinate your heaven
And make life an itching hell

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Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes a weekly column, entitled Duty to Warn, for the Duluth Reader, Duluth, Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American Friendly Fascism, corporatism, Oligarchy, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas as well as other movements that threaten the environment, democracy, civility, health and the sustainability and livability of the planet and the future of the children. Dr. Kohls is a frequent contributor to Global Research 

Many of Dr Kohls’ columns have been archived at a number of websites, including:

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2; 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national;

https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/?ptype=article; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/author/?a=Gary%20G.%20Kohls,%20MD

“The worst case scenario is a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark,” came the words of a grave Kåre Mølbak, director of the Danish health authorities, the State Serum Institute.  According to the Institute, COVID-19 infections were registered on 216 mink farms on November 6.  Not only had such infections been registered; new variants, five different clusters in all, were also found.  Mink variants were also detected in 214 people among 5,102 samples, of whom 200 live in the North Jutland Region.  

A noticeable tremor of fear passed through the public health community.  It was already known that mink are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2.  On April 23 and 25, outbreaks linked with mink farms were reported at farms in the Netherlands holding 12,000 and 7,500 animals respectively.  The mink had been infected by a farm worker with COVID-19 and, like humans, proved to be either asymptomatic, or evidently ill with symptoms such as intestinal pneumonia.  In time 12 of the 130 Dutch mink farms were struck.  What interested researchers was the level of virulence in the transmission of the virus through the population.  “Although SARS-CoV-2 is undergoing plenty of mutations as it spreads through mink,” writes Martin Enserik for Science, “its virulence shows no signs of increasing.” 

The Danish discoveries, however, fuelled another concern: the possibility that the virus from cluster 5, as identified by the Institute, was more resistant to antibodies from humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 when compared to other non-mutated SARS-CoV-2 viruses.  Potential vaccines, in other words, could be threatened with obsolescence.  “This hits all the scary buttons,” claimed evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom. 

In her November 6 briefing, Tyra Grove Krause, head of the department of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the SSI, did not wish to strike the doomsday register.  But she was none the less abundantly cautious.  “We definitely need to do more studies on this specific variant and its possible effect on future vaccines, but it takes a long time to do these kinds of studies.”  But she was in no mood to wait to “get all the evidence” given the possible risks.  “You need to act in time to stop transmission.” 

The World Health Organization is attempting to provide some reassurance, and while this is welcome, that body’s public image has been often unjustly frayed by its initial approach to the novel coronavirus.  In a statement to National Geographic, the WHO admitted concern “when a virus has gone from humans to animals, and back to humans.  Each time this happens, it can change more.”  But Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, refrained from drawing any conclusions from the current crop of revelations from Denmark.  “We need to wait and see what the implications are but I don’t think we should come to any conclusions about whether this particular mutation is going to impact vaccine efficiency.”  

Francois Balloux, director of University College London’s Genetics Institute, is also making his own infectious disease wager, thrilled by this “fantastically interesting” scenario.  “I don’t believe that a strain which gets adapted to mink poses a higher risk to humans.”  This comes with qualification, of course.  “We can never rule out anything, but in principle it shouldn’t. It should definitely not increase transmission.  I don’t see any good reason why it should make the virus more severe.”

In Denmark, no scientific chances are being taken on either the issue of virulence or the matter of vaccine effectiveness. The entire mink herd of 17 million is being culled.  The Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, attempted to see the problems of her country and its mink industry in humanitarian terms.  “We have a great responsibility toward our population,” she explainedon Wednesday, “but with the mutation that has now been found we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well.”  Residents in seven areas in North Jutland have also been told “to stay in their area to prevent the spread of infection …. We are asking you in North Jutland to do something completely extraordinary.  The eyes of the world are upon us.” 

Despite the immediate and effective destruction of an industry, Mogens Jensen, Minister for Food and Fisheries, stated that this would be “the right thing to do in a situation where the vaccine, which is currently the light at the end of a very dark tunnel, is in danger.”  Magnus Heunicke, the Minister for Health, also reiterated the point that “mink farming during the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic entails a possible risk to the public health – and for possibilities to combat COVID-19 with vaccines.”

The inevitably callous and brutal measure means that both the animals concerned and an industry, are being confined to history.  Animal welfare advocates see mixed promise in the measure: cruelty in the culling, but hope in the eradication of a trade.  “The right decision,” according to Animal Protection Denmark, “would be to end mink farming entirely and help farmers into [another] occupation that does not jeopardize public health and animal welfare.” 

Joanna Swabe, the senior director of public affairs for Humane Society International/Europe, did express some pleasure at what was otherwise a grim end to Denmark’s mink population.  As one of the largest fur producers in the global market, the “total shutdown of all Danish mink fur farms amid spiralling COVID-19 infections is a significant development.”  She even went so far as to congratulate the Danish prime minister for the “decision to take such an essential and science-led step to protect Danish citizens from the deadly coronavirus.”

Fur lobbyists and traders, while accepting of the health risks, have had reservations at the absolute nature of the Danish response.  Magnus Ljung, CEO of Saga Furs, noted how control of COVID-19 infections in mink populations was achieved in the Netherlands and Spain without a need to resort to mass culling.  Mick Madsen of the Brussels-based industry group Fur Europe accepted that “public safety must come first” but urged Danish authorities to “release their research for scrutiny amongst international scientists.” 

In the United States, mass culling is yet to take off.  The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remains cool to any drastic measures, despite cases of contracted coronavirus at mink farms in Utah, Wisconsin and Michigan.  Transmission to humans had yet to be documented, though spokesperson Jasmine Reed noted “ongoing” investigations.

Some scrutiny from international sources regarding Denmark’s decision has been forthcoming, though it is more in the order of modest scepticism.  Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, recalling the research into mink outbreaks in Dutch mink populations, considered the claim on a resistant mutation a bold one.  “That is a very big statement.  A single mutation, I would not expect to have that dramatic an effect.”  Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist based at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine in Bern, Switzerland, was also doubtful.  “It’s almost never the case that it’s such a simple story of one mutation and all your vaccines stop working.” 

After the great Danish mink massacre, it may well transpire that Prime Minister Frederiksen’s decision might have been less “science-led” as was presupposed.  This does not dishearten Hodcroft, who warmly embraces the Danish approach to “take a step too far rather than a step too little”.  Pity about the mink, then.

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

Featured image is by Jo-Anne McArthur/Redux Pictures

Azerbaijani troops and Turkish-backed Syrian militants continue storming the town of Shusha, located just south of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic capital, Stepanakert. During the past 24 hours, infantry of the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc under cover of intense artillery and drone strikes captured several heights southeast of Shusha and were able to keep fire control over the road linking the town with the Lachin corridor area. At the same time, Armenian forces repelled several Azerbaijani attacks on the town itself inflicting, at least according to Yerevan, heavy casualties to pro-Baku forces. This goes contrary to claims of Azerbaijani sources that in their reports have almost captured the town already.

In fact, Shusha is not even encircled and the Armenians still have an option to send supplies and reinforcements to it from the north and northwest. Most likely, the Azerbaijani-Turkish bloc wants to repeat the Hadrut scenario by taking control of the main heights surrounding Shusha and block the main nearby roads with drone and artillery fire. In the case of Hadrut, this forced the Armenians to withdraw their forces from the town. Nonetheless, Shusha is different story. This is the iconic town for the Armenian patriotic narrative and the gates to Stepanakert. So, Yerevan will likely try to defend it as long as it is possible.

It could be said that the fate of the entire conflict is being decided in the battle of Susha. If Armenian forces are able to contain the Azerbaijani advance, they will get a chance to keep the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc in the areas that it has captured in the south. If Shusha falls into Turkish hands, the fate of the central part of Nagorno-Karabakh will be predetermined.

The situation near Martuni, Martakert and Lachin is much better for Armenians. The trend of clashes there tend to be turned to positional fighting amid the inability of Baku and Azerbaijan to deliver a devastating blow to their opponent in this area. Nonetheless, the control of these areas will not help to the Armenians if Shusha is captured. At the same time, they are not able to redeploy forces from Lachin to the east because this will immediately trigger a new attempt by Azerbaijan to capture the area.

Meanwhile, Turkish and Azerbaijani sources complain that Armenia continues receiving help – military equipment and likely intelligence sharing assistance – in the conflict. The Armenians use this discontent to speculate that soon the airspace over Nagorno-Karabakh will be closed by Russia and the Azerbaijanis will have to run away to Baku. Despite this, the chances of a direct Russian intervention in the current regional situation remains unlikely. However, if Turkey and Azerbaijan continue to extensively exploit Syrian militants in the conflict as cannon folder, the strategy that Ankara already tried in Syria and Libya, the scale of indirect Russian support to the Armenians will definitely grow. If one takes into account the reaction in the public sphere, even current limited Russian support already created difficulties for the Azerbaijani-Turkish advance.

A further increase of involvement of Russia in the conflict will make a direct military victory over the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic a hardly possible scenario for the Azerbaijani-Turkish alliance. This explains its diplomatic positons in the region while Baku and Ankara develop their Karabakh offensive claiming that it is just a forced reaction to the regular ceasefire violations by Armenia. Nonetheless, if red lines are passed, diplomatic rhetoric alone will not help.

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In 2019, agents of the federal and state governments persuaded judges to issue 99% of all requested intercepts. An intercept is any type of government surveillance — telephone, text message, email, even in-person. These are intercepts that theoretically are based on probable cause of crime, as is required by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The 2019 numbers — which the government released as we were all watching the end of the presidential election campaign — are staggering. The feds, and local and state police in America engaged in 27,431,687 intercepts on 777,840 people. They arrested 17,101 people from among those intercepted and obtained convictions on the basis of evidence obtained via the intercepts on 5,304. That is a conviction rate of 4% of all people spied upon by law enforcement in the United States.

Here is the backstory.

Readers of this column are familiar with the use by federal agents of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to obtain intercepts using a standard of proof considerably lesser than probable cause of crime. That came about because Congress basically has no respect for the Constitution and authorized the FISA Court to issue intercept warrants if federal agents can identify an American or a foreign person in America who has spoken to a foreign person in another country.

Call your cousin in Florence or a bookseller in Edinburgh or an art dealer in Brussels, and under FISA, the feds can get a warrant from the FISA Court to monitor your future calls and texts and emails.

This FISA system is profoundly unconstitutional; the Fourth Amendment expressly requires that the government — state and federal — can only lawfully engage in searches and seizures pursuant to warrants issued by a judge based upon a showing under oath of probable cause of crime. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently that intercepts and surveillances constitute searches and seizures. The government searches a database of emails, texts or recorded phone calls and seizes the data it wants.

Thus, when the feds have targeted someone for prosecution and lack probable cause of crime about that person, they resort to FISA. This is not only unlawful and unconstitutional, but also it is corrupting, as it permits criminal investigators to cut constitutional corners by obtaining evidence of crimes outside the scope of the Fourth Amendment. The use of the Fourth Amendment is the only lawful means of engaging in surveillance sufficient to introduce the fruits of the surveillance at a criminal trial.

If the feds happen upon evidence of a crime from their FISA-authorized intercepts, they then need to engage in deceptive acts of parallel construction. That connotes the false creation of an ostensibly lawful intercept in order to claim that they obtained lawfully what they already have obtained unlawfully.

Law enforcement personnel then fake the true means they used to acquire evidence — even duping the prosecutors for whom they work — so the evidence will appear to have been obtained lawfully and thus can be used at trial. At its essence, parallel construction is a deception on the court. If the deception is perpetrated under oath, it is perjury — a felony.

This corruption of the Constitution by those in whose hands we have reposed it for safekeeping happens every day in America.

The FISA-induced corruption has regrettably bled into the culture of non-FISA law enforcement, and even into the judiciary. The statistics I cited above are not from FISA — those numbers are secret. Rather, the statistics reflect the government’s voracious appetite for spying that now pervades non-FISA law enforcement. This is so because judges accept uncritically the applications made before them for intercept or surveillance warrants.

Thus, even though the Fourth Amendment permits judges to issue warrants only upon the probable likelihood of evidence of a crime in the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized, the attitude of what constitutes probable cause has been attenuated by both the law enforcement personnel who seek warrants and the judges who hear the applications. We know this because we have not seen a number like 99% of all warrant applications — every one supposedly based on probable cause of crime — granted. Nor have we seen only 4% of those intercepts resulting in convictions.

The rational conclusion is that the government’s appetite for surveillance remains voracious, and judges — whose affirmative duty it is to uphold the Constitution as against the other two branches of government — have done very little to abate this.

So, what becomes of the remaining 96% of those on whom the government spied? That depends on whether the government charges anyone. If a person is charged and acquitted, and law enforcement unlawfully obtained evidence against that person, his remedy is either persuading the court to suppress the evidence thus resulting in the acquittal, or suing the law enforcement agents who unlawfully spied on him.

Yet, under current Supreme Court decisions about who can sue the government, if the government has spied on you and not charged you and not told you, you have no cause of action against the law enforcement agents who did this.

Stated differently, in 2019, at least 760,739 people in America were spied upon pursuant to judicial orders allegedly based upon probable cause of crime and were neither charged nor informed of the spying.

My Fox colleagues often deride my attacks on those who fail to safeguard our privacy because they argue, we have no privacy. Yet, as Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, the most comprehensive of rights is the right to be let alone. If we forget this, my colleagues will have the last laugh. If we expose its violation, we might know the joys of unmonitored personal fulfillment.

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If November 3 elections proved anything, it’s what Buttercup explained in Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, saying the following:

“Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.”

“Highlows pass as patent leathers. Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.”

“Black sheep dwell in every fold.

All that glitters is not gold.”

“Storks turn out to be but logs.

Bulls are but inflated frogs.”

There’s more, but the message is clear.

Reported US 2020 election results so far favoring Biden over Trump are “shady.”

What’s presented in key battleground states appears other than the popular will.

Trump’s team has good reason to challenge results, the winner very much uncertain until litigation plays out.

As in 2000, nine Supreme Court justices may have final say on who wins and loses in the contest for the nation’s highest office.

Nevada is one of five swing states where Trump’s team is challenging the vote count.

The others are Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

Law Professor Jonathan Turley explained the following about Nevada, saying:

“(T)hings…happen(ing) in (Las) Vegas may not stay” there.

The GOP is “arguing that thousands of votes in the close presidential election were cast by workers who moved out of the state or even by deceased individuals.”

“Various voters reported their deceased relatives receiving live ballots in the mail.”

“Many states like Nevada are relying on notoriously outdated voter lists and applying fairly lax standards for confirming the identity of voters for mail-in ballots.”

Any voting-age American who moved out-of-state to another one over 30 days pre-election is ineligible to vote in the state where they formerly claimed residence.

Trump’s team claims that thousands of votes cast in Nevada were by ineligible or deceased individuals.

If the Supreme Court hears this challenge and upholds it, results in the above five swing states —and perhaps others — will be suspect.

Turley explained that “reliance on questionable voter lists (in Nevada) and the lack of authentication systems were raised months ago.”

The same issue likely applies to other states, though proving it in court is another matter.

Turley noted that if the judicial process “believes that thousands of unlawful votes” were included in one or more state counts, “the only certain way to address a systemic failure would be a special election.”

At the same time, he believes it’s unlikely to happen in states with suspect results, especially because it could take months for the process to be planned, organized and completed.

Yet based on what’s known and discussed in previous post-election articles, fraud by Dems appears to be playing what be the decisive determinant of final results.

According to the Federalist.com’s John Daniel Davidson and Chris Bedford, pro-Biden electoral shenanigans are playing out in Pennsylvania’s self-styled “city of brotherly love” — Philadelphia, saying:

“Judges who obtained their positions by fraud, according to an indictment, have denied the Trump campaign’s ballot-watchers access, providing crucial unsupervised time (for Dem) vote counters,” adding:

During the week, “GOP monitors were being kept too far away from absentee ballot-counters to observe whether ballots were being properly counted.”

On Thursday, a state appellate court ordered that vote-counting observers be allowed to stand within six feet of the process.

Philadelphia authorities appealed the ruling to the state’s Supreme Court.

Will nine US High Court justices have final say on this and other Election 2020 issues in Pennsylvania and other contested swing states?

A GOP lawsuit “accused (Dem) election leaders (in PA) of violating state code by authorizing local election officials to give information about rejected mail-in ballots to (Dem) operatives so they could contact those voters and offer them a new ballot.”

This violates both state law and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court earlier ruling that states the following:

“(M)ail-in or absentee voters are not provided any opportunity to cure perceived defects (to their ballot) in a timely manner.”

Results so far in the above five battleground states are close.

Michigan and Wisconsin were already (perhaps prematurely) called for Biden.

Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada remain undecided.

If the above two states hold for Biden and he’s declared winner in one of the other three, he’ll reach or exceed a majority 270 Electoral College votes to triumph over Trump.

If things turn out this way, he’ll likely have won by foul, not fair, means — though at this time the race for the White House is undecided and fraud allegations require proof to hold up in court.

On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered Pennsylvania election officials to separate mail-in ballots received after election day November 3 — granting a request by the state’s Republican party, saying the following:

“All (PA) county boards of election are hereby ordered, pending further order of the Court, to comply with the following guidance provided by the Secretary of the Commonwealth on October 28 and November 1, namely, (1) that all ballots received by mail after 8:00 p.m. on November 3 be segregated and kept ‘in a secure, safe, and sealed container separate from other voted ballots,’ and (2) that all such ballots, if counted, shall be counted separately,” adding:

“Until today, this Court was not informed that the guidance issued on October 28, which had an important beating on the question where to order special treatment of the ballots in question, had been modified. The application received today also informs the Court that neither the applicant not the Secretary has been able to verify that all bards are complying with the Secretary’s guidance, which, it is alleged, is not legally binding on them.”

According to court papers filed on Friday, Republicans said that “a total of 25 Pennsylvania county boards of elections have not indicated whether they are segregating the late-arriving ballots,” adding:

“If county election boards count and do not segregate late-arriving ballots, it could become impossible for this Court to repair election results tainted by illegally and untimely cast or mailed ballots.”

Will the US Supreme Court order the same procedure for other contested states, including recounts if requested by Trump’s team?

High Court justices are likely to be the final arbiter of how the US presidential election turns out.

A Final Comment

There are many issues to be unpacked (and likely judicially ruled on at the highest level) before Trump v. Biden is decided.

At this time, the jury remains out.

Here’s what may be turn out to be the deciding factor.

According to information published by James Fetzer on his website:

“Trump and the USPS have had a master plan all along to secure the integrity of the 2020 election. Blockchain is the key.”

“In their plan, an invisible and unique QFS code was printed on each and every USPS-produced ballot.”

“They know exactly all the relevant details, including dates, paths, identities (anonymized)…et al.”

Blockchain “digital ledgers… make it virtually impossible to alter records of past events.”

“According to the USPS patent, ‘a registered voter receives a computer-readable code in the mail and confirms the identity and confirms correct ballot information in an election.’ ”

What’s going on is a “sting operation” as follows — if reported information is correct.

“(E)very ballot with QFS blockchain encryption code (was) watermarked.”

So it’s “know(n) where every ballot is, where it went and who has it” — to protect against a stolen election.

The above is a developing story with more information likely coming, perhaps very soon.

If credible evidence of fraud by Dems is presented by Trump’s team to the Supreme Court, it could order recounts that perhaps could shift final results for Biden to Trump.

How things turn out ahead will be determined one way or the other in the fullness of time.

Note: Time and again, US dark forces meddled in foreign elections to try manipulating their outcome — successfully and unsuccessfully.

Should anyone be surprised that the same thing goes on at home?

Electoral fraud and other dirty trick have been commonplace throughout US history — at the federal, state and local levels.

Perhaps the most brazen election theft happened in 1948.

Lyndon Johnson’s race for the Texas senate “miraculously” overcame a 20,000 vote deficit to gain an 87-vote triumph.

When the dust settles on Trump v. Biden, if DJT overcomes what appears to be a manipulated process against him, US presidential election 2020 may one day be memorable for having foiled the best laid plans of dark forces against him.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey in the past two years has engaged in a remarkable series of active geopolitical foreign interventions from Syria to Libya to Cyprus and most recently on the side of Azerbaijan in the territory conflict with Armenia over the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Some have called it Erdogan’s ‘New Ottoman Empire’ strategy. Yet a free-falling Lira and a collapsing domestic economy threaten to put an unplanned end to his grand geopolitical ambitions. How serious is the economic crisis in Turkey today and does Erdogan have a Plan B?

Lira Freefall

By the end of October, as open conflict between President Erdogan, who demands low interest rates from the central bank to stimulate growth, and financial markets who demand higher rates to “offset risk,” the Turkish Lira dropped a sharp 3% in a day. To date in 2020 the Lira is down 34% against the US dollar and by 70% over the past five years. While some think it would stimulate Turkish goods exports, what it is doing is exposing the entire Turkish banking system and economy to a colossal debt blowout. The problem is that to spur Erdogan’s growth agenda, Turkish banks have turned to the dollar-based low-interest rate inter-bank market to borrow funds to lend on to Turkish consumers to build houses or open hotels and other small businesses. Every time the Lira falls against the dollar, it needs that much more Lira to repay the old dollar debts, 34% more since January as of this writing.

Foreign investors, seeing the data, are rushing to liquidate Turkish stocks and bonds and exit, sending the Lira down further and hitting financial assets that back loans throughout the economy. Moreover inflation officially near 12% is adding to the crisis.

In recent years, spurred by Erdogan, the Turkish economy has expanded at an annual rate above that of China or India pre-corona. Most of that has been in the construction sector with new homes, shopping centers and tourism hotels booming. The problem is that now, with the Lira crisis showing no sign of end, and the EU states going into lockdown for coronavirus, Turkish tourism, the is being devastated. In August, peak foreign tourism season, tourism arrivals were down a huge 70% from August 2019. And with a world economic slump since the corona crisis, all exports are down.

Crisis of Foreign Debt

Erdogan’s problems are compounded by the fact that Turkish businesses and banks have largely turned to foreign markets to borrow at lower interest rates, something attractive if the Lira is stable or even rising. When the Lira falls 34% this year or more, it is a catastrophe for the borrowers. To prevent that Lira fall the central bank has used much of its hard currency foreign reserves and even drawn on foreign currency swap lines to avoid rate increases. This is bringing the situation to a new potential crisis in many ways similar to the 1997 Asia Crisis. The falling Lira means construction companies are unable to repay foreign loans in dollars or Euros. Bankruptcy is next. In 2018 Turkish banks and private companies as well as government owed some $467 billion in foreign currencies. The central bank foreign currency reserves as of September, 2020 amount to $36 billion or less, after losing some $65 billion of foreign currency reserves in a fruitless defense of the Lira. Gold reserves decreased to USD 42 billion. This is not stable.

To make matters worse, in September Moodys’ credit rating agency lowered the rating on Turkish government debt to 5 grades below “junk,” the lowest ever. At this point, Erdogan has limited options to salvage the economy and with it, his re-election in three years. Extremely low interest rates from 2012 through until 2018 created an unprecedented economic boom, but in reality a debt-financed construction and real estate bubble dependent on foreign credits. That is now unravelling and it will have major consequences for Erdogan’s “active” foreign policy.

Geopolitical Agenda Threatened

In 2010 Erdogan’s then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu proclaimed the famous “Zero Problems Policy” with its neighbors. That has long since vanished along with the foreign minister. Today Erdogan seems intent on creating clashes with all Turkey’s once-allies.

Erdogan’s bold attempt to place Turkish gas exploration ships in recent months into territorial waters of EU member Cyprus and Greece, claiming sovereignty over the offshore region, has brought it into direct clash with fellow NATO member Greece which plans a gas pipeline from Israel and Cyprus to Greece and on to Italy, as well as with France. Turkey has refused to sign the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

To further complicate matters, some months ago Erdogan openly backed the embattled Muslim Brotherhood-led Government of National Accord in Tripoli Libya against a strong military advance by General Haftar. In June Erdogan, who supports the Muslim Brotherhood, sent Turkish troops to support Tripoli. Haftar is backed by Russia, Egypt, the UAE and France. The Turkey-Libya Special Economic Zone declared earlier this year provocatively cuts across the planned EastMed Israel-Cyprus-Greece gas pipeline path.

In Syria, France supports the Syrian Kurds, bitter foes of Erdogan who maintains a military presence in the border region of Syria to control the Kurds. As well France backs the Cyprus-Greek position on their rights to the offshore gas, against Turkey. The French Total energy group is active in the Cyprus project.

Most recently, in the wake of the gruesome beheadings in France by Jihadists, Erdogan has called for a boycott of French goods and called Macron mentally ill after Macron defended the free speech rights of a French satire magazine for reprinting a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.

Straining ties with Russia in addition to Libyan adventures, has been the open backing from Erdogan, including reportedly of military supplies and possible troops, in Azerbaijan’s clash with Russian ally Armenia over Nogorno-Karabakh. A new factor in Turk-Azeri relations is the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline from Arerbaijan to Turkey where Turkey imported for the first time 5.44 bcm Azrei gas in the first half of this year, a 23 percent increase compared to the same period of 2019.

Yet Erdogan has gone to great lengths to cultivate good relations with Russia’s Putin among other things to buy the advanced Russian S-400 Russian anti-missile defense system, earning the condemnation of NATO and Washington.

At this point the hyper-active foreign interventions by Erdogan’s Turkey have met little serious sanction or opposition by the EU. One obvious reason is the large exposure of EU banks to Turkish loans. According to a September 17 report in the German Die Welt newspaper, Spanish, French, British and German banks have over a hundred billion dollars invested in Turkey. Spain is most exposed with $62 billion, followed by France with $29 billion. That means the EU is walking on eggshells, not eager to sink more money into Turkey but leery of precipitating a full clash of economic sanctions.

As Erdogan for many reasons refuses to go hat in hand to the IMF, his options at present are to drastically reduce his foreign geopolitical operations to concentrate on stabilizing the domestic economy, or find a Plan B. At this point, the only possible contender for a Plan B financial rescue would be China.

Can China Fill the Gap?

In recent years Erdogan has taken remarkable steps to better relations with Xi Jinping and China. In 2019 during a visit to Beijing Erdogan shocked many by refusing to condemn China’s reported harsh treatment of the large Muslim Uyghur population in Xinjiang region. For decades, Turkey, which calls the Uyghur region “East Turkestan,” accepted Uyghur Muslim refugees and condemned what Erdogan once called China’s “genocide” in Xinjiang. In July 2019 during a visit in Beijing, Erdogan buried all mention of the Uyghurs and praised Turkey cooperation with China. Cynics might suggest hopes of huge China financial largesse influnced Erdogan’s shift.

During the previous Lira crisis in 2018 when the Lira plunged by 40%, China’s state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China loaned the Turkish government $3.6 billion for energy and transportation projects. In June 2019, in the wake of Istanbul municipal elections that indicated crumbling support for Erdogan, China’s central bank transferred $1 billion—the largest cash inflow, under a swap agreement. The July, 2019 Beijing meeting with Xi Jinping came just after that election setback at a time Erdogan was vulnerable as never before on the economy. Chinese Uyghurs might be fellow Muslims, but they don’t vote in Turkish elections.

Beijing has responded. Under the umbrella of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), earlier this year China’s Export and Credit Insurance Corp. committed up to $5 billion for Turkey’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, to be used for BRI projects. Previously China has invested in a railroad from Kars in eastern Turkey via Tbilisi, Georgia, to Baku, Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea, where it links to transportation networks to China. In 2015, a Chinese consortium bought 65 percent of Turkey’s third-largest container terminal, Kumport, in Istanbul. Chinese investors this January saved an Erdogan prestige project buying 51 percent of the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge connecting Europe and Asia across the Bosporus when an Italian-Turkish consortium controlling the bridge opted out. And Beijing is now allowing Turkish companies to use the Chinese yuan to make trade payments, allowing them easier access to Chinese liquidity.

While the Chinese involvement clearly gives Erdogan some aid, it has not been able to stop the latest free-fall of the Lira or to be enough to replace the $100 billion EU and related borrowings to revive the Turkish economy. China yuan-Lira trade and swap agreements help Turkey import more Chinese goods, but she needs dollars to repay the EU and other dollar loans. China, despite optimistic headlines in media, has been severely hit by the global lockdowns and trade collapse from the coronavirus this year. Exports from China have by no means recovered to 2019 levels and domestic food problems from severe flooding and locust plague this year have put added strains on the world’s second largest economy.

With Beijing beefing up its military responses in the East China Sea and around Taiwan as well as being forced to renegotiate many debt deals with BRI countries in Africa and elsewhere that have been unable to pay, it is questionable whether Xi Jinping regards his recent alliance with the unpredictable Erdogan as his highest priority during China’s present redirection of its economy inward.

2023, the year of next elections was to be the glory year for Erdogan’s AKP as Turkey celebrated 100 years since founding. The party’s “2023 Vision” program calls for Turkey to become a Top Ten economy with autos, steel and defense industries of world class and a GDP of some $2.6 trillion.

That all now looks very implausible. The next months for Erdogan and the Turkish economy look to be quite turbulent and far from clear. The shrewd Erdogan is rapidly running out of winning cards to play.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from NEO

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

We have encountered day in day out language-using manipulators in practically all areas/sectors of life. In one particular instance, we regularly hear them over the radio and see them on TV. We read their messages on the pages of dailies and magazines, even in posters that line-up walls of public places. The Internet is full of websites that banner the captivating ideas of these thought influencers. The term we use to specifically refer to their kind of game is advertisement. This is the basic intent of an advertisement: To attract, fascinate and ultimately persuade people to dig into their pockets for the amount needed to satisfy the desire that has so far been created in their minds by the power of advertisement. This is manipulation at its most subtle and sophisticated refinement.

Nowadays, with the advancement of cybertechnology, professional advertisers have literally at the tip of their fingers all conceivable tools to come up with the best presentations of product promotion in all forms of the available media. Striking logos, snappy slogans, attention-grabbing illustrations, mellifluous jingles, eye-catching photos, among others, conspire altogether to create a powerful advertising stunt, so powerful that it can knock out analysis and reason in an instant. Using the classic Aristotelian categories of persuasion modes or artistic proofs, this is a case of how pathos (appeal to emotion) exerts a significantly tremendous edge over logos (appeal to reason) and ethos (appeal to a person’s credibility and ethical character). Manipulation of this type is so easily effected because its operators have already mastered the art of handling the general tendency of people to succumb to what their “hearts” dictate at the expense of what their “heads” would reasonably tell them.

This is humanity at its most prevalent and persistent configuration: a creature of emotions. And the modern – as well as post-modern – commercial sphere has taken advantage of this seemingly perennial reality to its extremest point, full steam ahead, so to speak. Within the warp and woof of the human fabric, the pathos reigns supreme and is deaf to the call of logos most of the time. It even has the forceful motion of a whirlwind to bypass and ignore the wisdom of the purveyors of ethos. The pathos is, therefore, the central arena where the ebb and flow of manipulative undertakings function with clockwork precision.

But there is nothing new in this consideration. As an emotional being, humanity has always been the subject of manipulation since time immemorial, i.e., long before the age of advertising. Well concatenated words that constitute a delightful message can instantly – i.e., spontaneously–capture the heart of an individual person. The head equipped with its reasoning power has to get through a more tedious process of coming up with a clear-cut and rational/reasonable decision on whether to accept or reject something presented before it. Besides, the individual who is supposed to be at the disposal of both heart and head has a much easier predisposition to utilize the former and set aside the latter. As has been observed time and again, it is the heart that easily gives in – even caves in – to the pleasing lines articulated by an apparent persuader like an irresistible confectionery offered to a child by someone who wants to win her/his friendship.

Friendship is basically a matter of the heart and could breed manipulation on the wrong side of its broad layout. It starts with a proposition along the line of amity that in many cases gets deeper so that it could even reach a high degree of intimate connection. And once the target has already been taken over, that’s the point where manipulation sets in. A well-stringed set of pleasurable words can easily disarm and capture the emotional framework of an individual and put her/him in a situation of non-resistance. Again, this is nothing new to us even in a large-scale scenario wherein the power of a minister’s preaching becomes a manipulative tool to gather together unquestioning believers in the context of a religious assembly. This is not advertising but all its components run parallel to its commercial counterpart.

Many religious assemblies – whether you call them “fellowships” or “churches” – in the present modern dispensation have gained the notoriety of being called manipulators of the first order as their leaders have transformed themselves into multi-millionaire and billionaire high rollers who own luxurious mansions, travel by land in their chauffeur-driven limousines and visit their overseas congregations on their sophisticated private jets. And it is a known fact that all their riches are drawn from the ten percent of the incomes sweated out by their hardworking members. This shows how powerful manipulative words are as these preaching conmen put them all together in the language of a homily that they deliver from the pulpits of their churches’ sanctuaries “Sunday in Sunday out”.

But why specifically zero in on the religious preachers when these guys have their exact kins in the political arena? We see the same manipulative acts among politicians during the campaign period prior to an election. They all want to get elected and in their campaign sorties, it is not unusual to hear the manipulative promises of these political thugs whom the electorate tends to give in and give up their votes when election day comes. But it does not stop after the election. Those elected officials continue to use the power of political rhetoric to further deceive their constituents with more promises despite the fact that those they had promised during the campaign period haven’t even been implemented, much less fulfilled. However, in this particular scenario, what is so strange is the reality that the people who have been manipulated in the past continue to allow themselves to be manipulated more.

In the final analysis, it is with a certain degree of logical accuracy to conclude that the majority of the people in the world have the general tendency to let themselves get manipulated in whatever life condition they are located. This reality is sustained by the dictum that human beings are predominantly creatures of pathos, i.e., people who find it much easier to cope with life’s complexity by way of emotion rather than by way of reason. But on a more serious note, the more honest-to-goodness question is, Is that really the best way to cope with life’s reality with all its complexity and difficulties?

*

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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.

Minor Edits on October 16, 2020. First published on October 6, 2020

It is now confirmed that the Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction Test (RT-PCR) used to estimate COVID-19 positive cases is questionable. It cannot detect or identify the virus. What it detects are particles or fragments of the virus.  

PCR- Positive does not imply Covid-19 Positive. The statistics derived from the PCR test do not adequately measure “confirmed cases”. The PCR Test does not provide the statistics required (by policy-makers and national health authorities) to assess the number of people infected. Moreover, according to the CDC “a positive [covid-19] infection” could be the result of “co-infection with other viruses… The agent detected may not be the cause of disease”.

While these  official statistics used to  “measure” the spread of the viral infection are flawed, they have nonetheless been used to support the ongoing fear and disinformation campaign. 

Because the PCR Test is faulty as a means of identifying the spread of the virus, major decisions taken by the WHO and national governments since late January 2020 (supported by faulty statistics) are potentially invalid.  Moreover, official reports including the WHO confirm that Covid-19 is not a killer virus, it has features similar to seasonal influenza.  

The purpose off this article is to examine how these far-reaching decisions, invariably based on invalid concepts and faulty statistics, have contributed to a state of economic, social and political chaos Worldwide, leading up to the March 11, 2020 lockdown and closure of 190 national economies of UN member states. Only three countries including Belarus, Nicaragua and Sweden refused to close down their national economy.

What strikes us in this analysis is the fact that major decisions from the very outset on January 30, 2020 were taken when the number of recorded positive cases was exceedingly low.

The lockdown as well as closure of national economies Worldwide on March 11, 2020 were presented as a means to confronting the “Killer Virus” and “Saving Lives”. Amply documented, the impacts have led to mass unemployment and poverty Worldwide.

The Roadmap towards Economic Chaos and Societal Destruction

October 18, 2019. 201 Pandemic Simulation Exercise

The coronavirus was initially named 2019-nCoV by the WHO, the same name as that adopted at the October 18, 2019 201 Simulation exercise under the auspices of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, Centre for Heath Security (an event sponsored by the Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum).(Event 201)

January 7, 2020: The Chinese authorities “identified a new type of virus” which (according to official reports) was isolated  on January 7, 2020.

January 20-24:  World Economic Forum Meetings at Davos. The Role of Powerful Financial Interests 

Dominant financial interests, billionaire foundations and international financial institutions played a key role in launching the WHO Public Health Emergency (PHEIC). The decision was not taken by the WHO.

In the week preceding this historic WHO decision. The PHEIC was the object of “consultations” at the World Economic Forum (WEF), Davos (January 21-24). The WHO Director General Dr. Tedros was present at Davos. Were these consultations instrumental in influencing the WHO’s historic decision on January 30th.

Was there a Conflict of Interest as defined by the WHO? The WHO’s largest donor is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which together with the WEF and CEPI had already announced in Davos the development of a Covid-19 vaccine prior to the historic January 30th launching of the PHEIC.

January 28, 2020:  The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that the novela corona virus had been isolated. To this date, the process of identification of the virus has not been made public.

January 30, 2020: The WHO’s Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)

The Worldwide population outside China is of the order of 6.4 billion. On January 30, 2020 outside China there were:

83 cases in 18 countries, and only 7 of them had no history of travel in China. (see WHO, January 30, 2020).

On January 29, 2020, the day preceding the launching of the PHEI (recorded by the WHO), there were 5  cases in the US, 3 in Canada, 4 in France, 4 in Germany.

There was no “scientific basis” to justify the launching of a Worldwide public health emergency. 

Screenshot of WHO table, January 29, 2200, 

one day prior to the WHO decision to declare a global public health emergency 

Those ridiculously low numbers  (not mentioned by the media) were used to spearhead a Worldwide fear campaign.

January 31, 2020:  President Trump’s Decision to Suspend Air Travel with China

Whereas the WHO  “[did] not recommend any travel or trade restrictions” the five so-called “confirmed cases” in the US were sufficient to “justify” President Trump’s January 31st decision to suspend air travel to China while precipitating a hate campaign against ethnic Chinese throughout the Western World.

This historic January 31st decision paved the way towards the disruption of international commodity trade as well as Worldwide restrictions on air travel.

And those flawed “confirmed cases” were for the most part using the standard RT-PCR test.

February 20-21, 2020. Worldwide Covid Data Outside China: The Diamond Princess Cruise Ship 

While China reported a total of 75,567 cases of COVID-19, (February 20) the confirmed cases outside China were abysmally low and the statistics based in large part on the the PCR test used to confirm the “Worldwide spread of the virus” were questionable to say the least. Moreover, out of the 75,567 cases in China, a large percentage had recovered. And recovery figures were not acknowledged by the media.

On the day of Dr. Tedros’ historic press conference (February 20, 2020) the recorded number of confirmed cases outside China was 1073 of which 621 were passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship (stranded in Japanese territorial waters).

From a statistical point of view, the WHO decision pointing to a potential “spread of the virus Worldwide” did not make sense.

On February 20th, 57.9% of the Worldwide Covid-19 “confirmed cases” were from the Diamond Princess, hardly representative of  a Worldwide “statistical trend”.The official story is as follows:

• A Hong Kong based passenger who had disembarked from the Diamond Princess in Hong Kong on January 25 developed pneumonia and was tested positive for the novela coronavirus on January 30.
• He was reported to have travelled on January 10, to Shenzhen on mainland China (which borders on Hong Kong’s new territories).
• The Diamond Princess arrived at Yokohama on February 3. A quarantine was imposed on the cruiser See NCBI study.
• Many passengers fell sick due to the confinement on the boat.
• All the passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess undertook the PCR test.
• The number of confirmed cases increased to 691 on February 23.

From the standpoint of assessing Worldwide statistical trends, the data doesn’t stand up. Without the Diamond Princess data, the so-called confirmed cases worldwide outside China on February 2oth would have been of the order of 452, out of a population of 6.4 billion. 

Examine the WHO Graph below. The blue indicates the confirmed cases on the Diamond Princess (international conveyance) (which arrived in Yokohama on February 3, 2020), many of whom were sick, confined to their rooms for more than two weeks (quarantine imposed by Japan). All passengers and crew took the RT-PCR test (which does not detect or identify Covid-19).

Needless to say, this so-called data was instrumental in spearheading the fear campaign and the collapse of financial markets in the course of the month of February. (see section below)

Source WHO, February 28,2020

Dow Jones Industrial Average December 2019 – March 2020

Immediately following the March 11,2020 WHO announcement, the fear campaign went into high gear. As in the case of the February 20-21 crash, the March 11 statement by the WHO Director General had set the stage. Stock markets crashed worldwide. On the following morning, the Dow (DJIA) plummeted by 9.99%  (A decline of 2,352.60 to close at 21,200.62). Black Thursday, March 12, 2020 was “the Dow’s worst day” since 1987. A massive transfer of financial wealth had taken place in favor of America’s billionaires.

Confinement instructions were transmitted to 193 member states of the United Nations. Politicians are the instruments of powerful financial interests. Was this far-reaching decision justified as a means to combating the Virus?

Unprecedented in history, applied almost simultaneously in a large number countries, entire sectors of the World economy were destabilized. Small and medium sized enterprises were driven into bankruptcy. Unemployment and poverty are rampant.

In some countries famines have erupted. The social impacts of these measures are devastating.  The health impacts (mortality, morbidity) of these measures including the destabilization of the system of national health care (in numerous countries) far surpass those attributed to Covid-19. (For further details see author’s article here,

Billionaire Enrichment. The Appropriation and Redistribution of  Wealth

Billionaire wealth has increased dramatically since early February. There are three distinct phases, which are directly related to the corona crisis, each of which is marked by major shifts in the distribution of global wealth.

1. The financial crisis initiated on February 20th, was conducive to a dramatic redistribution of money wealth and ownership of financial assets. Foreknowledge, inside information and speculative trade played a key role. Was there foreknowledge of  WHO’s Dr. Tedros February 20th Statement?
2. The March 11 lockdown and closing down of the national economies of 190 UN member states, which triggered corporate as well as SME bankruptcies Worldwide. The March 11 event was also marked by the plunge of stock markets worldwide, starting on Black Thursday March 12, 2020.
3. The third stage of billionaire enrichment pertains to the implementation of the so-called “Second Wave” which consists in triggering a renewed wave of  bankruptcies.

The redistribution of wealth in favor of the billionaire class is confirmed by an IPS study pertaining to the closing down of the global economy.

The combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by $850 billion since March 18th, 2020, an increase of over 28 percent. (This estimate does not account for the increase in wealth during the period preceding March 18, which was marked by a series of stock market crashes).

On March 18, 2020, U.S. billionaires had combined wealth of $2.947 trillion.  By October 8th, their wealth has surged to $3.8 trillion ($3.798 billion to be exact).

At the global level, billionaires are big winners during the Covid-19 pandemic.  According to a recent UBS report, the roughly 2,189 global billionaires now have $10.2 trillion.  This is an estimated increase of $1.5 trillion during the pandemic looking at both UBS and Forbes billionaire data from 2019.

The table below identifies the increase in personal wealth of the five richest US billionaires (March 18- June 17, 2020). (Not outlined in the Table, the wealth of US billionaires increased by another $266 billion from June to October 2020).

Let us now briefly reflect on the Second Wave which is now being imposed on millions of people.

The Second Wave

September-October 2020. The financial establishment has instructed governments to implement what is tantamount to a second bankrupcy program using the pretext and justification that the number of Covid positive cases has increased.

In all likelihood this second wave will lead to the further process of appropriation and concentration of wealth.

Concurrently, there is a tendency towards totalitarian forms of government.

All forms of social activity are affected including family reunions, weddings and funerals, public gatherings, not to mention the closure of schools, universities, museums, sports and cultural events. Police state measures are now being applied to enforce compliance. And people accept!

At the outset of the Second Wave, the process of postponing the reopening of the global economy will indelibly contribute to wiping out (regional and local) small and medium sized enterprises worldwide, while also precipitating the bankruptcy of entire sectors of the World economy including airlines, hotel chains and the tourist industry. This in turn will lead to the appropriation of real assets by powerful financial interests.

The fear campaign has once again gone into high gear.

Official statistics based on faulty and manipulated estimates of so-called “confirmed” Covid positive cases constitute the basis for justifying these diabolical measures.

V the virus is presented as the Threat. But the Virus has no direct impact on key economic variables.

What is at stake is unprecedented: It’s a global neoliberal agenda carried out by corrupt governments on behalf of the financial establishment.

Common sense tells us that the closure of the global economy destroys people’s lives.

Disrupting the fear campaign constitutes the first step towards reversing the tide

For details on the economic impacts. Related article

Combating The Virus: Mass Unemployment is Not the Solution

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 05, 2020

Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics

ANNEX

Below are the criteria of the CDC which firmly acknowledges that “a positive [covid-19] infection” could be the result of “co-infection with other viruses… The agent detected may not be the cause disease”.

 The criteria and guidelines confirmed by the CDC  pertaining to “The CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Diagnostic Panel” are as follows (Read carefully):

What is Covid-19, SARS-2. How is it Tested? How is It Measured? The Fear Campaign Has No Scientific Basis

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 08, 2020

 

“Your policies and politics make no scientific, medical or common sense. Your belligerent fascism will not deter us in defending our human attributes codified as constitutional rights! Your measures are destructive, irrational and unconstitutional! They serve other masters, not the citizens of this province or this country!” – Rocco Galati, Oct 17, 2020

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

As this episode goes to air, alarm bells are ringing world-wide are warning of the rise of Covid. As Director-General of the World Health Organization Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus put it during a press conference this past Monday:

“Over the weekend, we saw that while many countries had brought Covid-19 under control, cases in some countries in Europe and North America continue to spike.” [1]

We are now currently seeing the rise of secondary lock-downs, or partial lock-downs for the countries of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Netherlands, Czech Republic, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Greece.

Similar signs are springing up in various jurisdictions that lock-downs are building across Canada. [2][3][4]

In the wake of this historic turn of events, professionals, political figures and members of the general public are forced into the position of defending or attacking actions on the part of government which restrict public freedoms and public movements. Either our political leaders are acting in the best interests of the public to SAVE LIVES or they have seized power illegally and are attacking a significant portion of the people nation-wide.

Now, opposite sides of this argument are verging toward a clash. In Canada, one side is wedging litigation against Trudeau, Ford, Tory and a host of other people who are championing the fights against the virus at the expense of human rights. The other side are struggling to authorize the onslaught if it will contain the virus and end the rampage on vulnerable Canadians.

This week on the Global Research News Hour, we include representations of both sides of the argument to allow listeners to decide for themselves the responsible way out of and through the pandemic.

In our first half hour, we hear from Rocco Galati, the renowned constitutional lawyer, who has launched a challenge against three levels of government on the grounds their actions in terms of masks and other restrictions are an illegal seizure of power and a theft of human rights. He was recorded at a ‘Toronto Freedom Rally’ on October 17.

In our second half hour, we are joined for a live interview with Winnipeg based Dr Anand Kumar. Kumar, an active, on-the-ground participant in the Covid crisis and a co-signature on an open letter requesting a lock-down for Winnipeg to keep the sick-count from overwhelming the finite number of intensive care units (ICU) at their disposal.

We also encourage our listeners to revisit the other six episodes of our Coronavirus series to further your insights into big picture.

Rocco Galati has been a constitutional lawyer for roughly 30 years. He is the Executive Director of the Constitutional Rights Centre and in the past won multiple suits against the government.

Anand Kumar, MD is both a doctor and a professor of Medicine, Medical Microbiology, and the department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He has trained in internal medicine, critical care medicine and infectious diseases. He also co-signed an open letter to the Premier of Manitoba asking for a lock-down in the interests of limiting the exploding cases of Covid-19 hitting the urgent care centres hard.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 294)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Notes:

1. Monday WHO Nov 2, 2020 Press conference: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

2. https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-unveils-new-system-for-covid-19-shutdowns-here-s-how-it-will-work-1.5172308
3. https://montreal.citynews.ca/video/2020/10/26/quebec-extends-covid-19-lockdown-measures-until-november-23/
4. https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/winnipeg-metro-region-moving-to-code-red-restrictions-due-to-rise-in-covid-19-cases-1.5167904

The Task of ‘Sleepy Joe’ Is to Put Liberal America Right Back to Sleep

By Jonathan Cook, November 06 2020

After four years of Trump and in the midst of a pandemic, the idea of sleeping through the next presidential term probably sounded pretty appealing to liberals. Most of them have spent their whole political lives asleep.

Israel Carries Out Largest West Bank Demolition Operation in a Decade

By Ahmad Al-Bazz and Oren Ziv, November 06 2020

In the largest West Bank demolition operation in a decade, Israeli military authorities on Tuesday razed around 70 structures in the Jordan Valley’s Humsa al-Fuqa community in the occupied West Bank.

Imperial Overstretch Arrives: Americans Do Not Need the American Empire

By Philip Giraldi, November 06 2020

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.

The US Presidential Election: The View from Outside

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, November 06 2020

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 Corporate Dictatorship of the Very Rich

By Nora Fernandez, November 06 2020

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.

Confronting Bipartisan Repression and the US-led Axis of Domination Beyond Election Day

By Ajamu Baraka, November 06 2020

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.”

Censorship: US Department of Justice (DOJ) Closes Down Canada’s Independent Media Site AHT. Professor Anthony Hall

By Anthony Hall, November 05 2020

We stand in firm support of The American Herald Tribune and Professor Anthony Hall, who has the courage to confront the US corporate media.

Controlling Information to Protect Us?

By Prof. Ruel F. Pepa, November 05 2020

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.

The Corona Pandemic and Trump’s Trade War against China: America’s Dependence on “Made in China”. Potential Disruption of the US Economy

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 05 2020

What Prospects for trade relations with China, in the wake of the 2020 US November Presidential Election?

Former British Prime Minister May Leads Lockdown Rebellion as UK Struggles Against Second COVID Wave

By Johanna Ross, November 06 2020

Former Prime Minister Theresa May has led a backbench rebellion against a second lockdown, demanding the government provide more statistics on the adverse harm the first lockdown had on people’s health.

When farcical US elections are held, we the people have no say over who serves in high office or how the nation is run.

The nation’s founders designed things this way, creating governance of, by, and for “the rich, well-born and able,” as John Adams explained.

Behind the scenes dark forces decide things. It’s been this way from inception.

The nation’s founders created a system to serve their interests — and the nation’s privileged class overall — at the expense of the general welfare.

The Constitution was the creation of duplicitous framers and close allies, scheming to cut the best deals for themselves.

Government of, by and for the people is doublespeak. The general welfare is for the privileged few alone.

From inception to now, democracy has always been pure illusion, the real thing deemed unacceptable by the nation’s ruling class.

It was never considered as a form of government by the framers.

The same goes for so-called elections. If able to create rule of, by, and for everyone equitably, they’d be banned.

The supreme law of the land is how powerful interests define it, including all three branches of government — equity and justice never a consideration.

US one-party rule today with two right wings is totalitarian, plutocratic, and kleptocratic.

While each wing takes turns running things, on issues relating to war and peace, corporate empowerment, monied interests served over the general welfare, and increasing police state rule for unchallenged control, they’re on the same page.

The main differences between Trump and Biden/Harris are party label, style, and one more thing.

Although in his mid-70s, Trump appears in good health. His energy level appears high, and he’s never at a loss for words.

Biden appears physically and cognitively in decline with symptoms resembling early stage Parkinson’s disease.

James Fetzer believes a double debated Trump, not Joe Biden, citing the following evidence.

The real Joe Biden has ear lobes. His “double” doesn’t.

According to Fetzer, “ears cannot be surgically altered and are just as distinctive as fingerprints.”

Joe Biden “has a smoother chin. His double(’s) (chin is) strongly dimpled.”

“Biden has a wider cranium, his double a narrower (one).”

“His double appears to be a more diminutive version” of JB.

They have different color eyes. Biden’s are blue, his “double’s” brown.

Joe Biden has diminished speech fluency. He stutters and stammers, time and again making misstatements.

Calling Super Tuesday “Super Thursday” was one of many examples.

He once said the following:

My name’s Joe Biden. I’m a (Dem) candidate for the United States Senate.”

He claimed to have worked with China’s Deng Xiaoping on the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. Deng died in 1997.

He confused former UK prime minister Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher.

Most everyone makes occasional misstatements. Biden does it repeatedly, a sign of cognitive decline.

Is this a man to be trusted as president and commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces with his finger on the nuclear trigger?

At the same time, it’s true that US heads of state are figureheads for the system run by behind-the-scenes dark forces.

Domestic and geopolitical policies are what they want them to be — presidents, key congressional members, and High Court justices chosen to serve their interests.

Still, it’s fair to ask if Biden is physically and cognitively unable to carry out the duties of president, including interactions with foreign leaders, how can he  be trusted as the nation’s nominal leader?

On November 20, he’ll be age-78. Midway through his term if succeeds Trump, he’ll be the first US octogenarian president.

If unable to handle the job’s rigors now on the public stage and behind the scenes, how much further in decline will he be in two more years?

A previous day’s article discussed evidence presented by Federalist political editor John Daniel Davidson.

It appears to show that Dems “are trying to steal the election in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (through) vote counting irregularities.”

Further information from  Davidson said the following:

Overnight Tuesday vote dumps in Michigan and Wisconsin — with zero votes for Trump, erasing his lead over Biden in both states — included this anomaly:

Results “in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016…showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate…”

Another Michigan anomaly was that overnight Tuesday “votes for Biden (reflected) a ‘data error’…an alleged typo, an extra zero that had been tacked onto Biden’s vote total in Shiawassee County, Michigan.”

A video posted on Twitter by Michigan State Senator Aric Nesbitt showed Detroit mail-in ballot counting “workers cheering every time an official election observer with the Michigan GOP is ejected from the counting room.”

“Apparently this has been happening frequently, in violation of state law.”

(Dem) observers, says Nesbitt, now outnumber Republicans observers at the convention center 3 to 1.”

Former Kansas attorney general Phil Kline “filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that tens of thousands of ballots in Detroit have been illegally filled out by election officials and Democratic election observers.”

Kline: “We have confirmed evidence that (Dem) election officials have violated state law, and have opened the door for fraud involving tens of thousands of ballots.”

After ejecting numbers of Republican poll challengers from counting area in Detroit, Michigan “election officials began covering up the windows of the counting rooms with cardboard to block the view of Republican observers.”

On Thursday, the Detroit Free Press quoted attorney/GOP poll challenger Jessica Connarn saying workers in Detroit are “changing the dates the ballots were received” to make invalid ones valid, adding:

“When I approached (a) poll worker, she stated to me that she was being told to change the date on ballots to reflect that the ballots were received on an earlier date.”

According to the Detroit Free Press, when Connarn tried getting information from a poll worker, she was “yelled at by the other poll workers working at her table, who told (her) to go away and…was not allowed to talk to the poll worker.”

The Detroit News reported that  “legally incapacitated nursing home residents were being coaxed to vote and Detroit’s voting rolls were inflated with more than 300,000 names of people who had died or moved out of the city.”

Similar shenanigans happened in Wisconsin, the Trump team demanding a full recount in the state, citing “reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results.”

In Pennsylvania, “the (Dem) Secretary of State’s plan to count indisputably late mail-in ballots as though they were received on Election Day—even if they have no postmark,” adding:

The tabulation procedure was approved by Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices.

The above information — with perhaps more of the same to come out ahead — appears to show that “the only possible conclusion one can come to right now is that (Dems) are trying to steal the election in the midwest.”

Perhaps the same thing is going on in Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada.

The above information and similar shenanigans in earlier US federal, state and local elections proved time and again that democracy in America is pure fantasy.

When the dust settles on Election 2020, results for president — and perhaps in some House and Senate races — are highly likely to reflect the will of US dark forces, not voters who cast ballots.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Transcript by Rawan R. Mhamsa

Oh, working as a healthcare assistant for the NHS. I don’t think that the uniform to prove that I work for them, but today I’m publicly resigning.

OK, well.

I’m wearing this uniform sadly for the last time. I loved my job,  Have been following what’s going on.

We’ve done talks with organized protest. I got an e-mail from work last night asking me what’s going on, people who are reporting me. And unfortunately, I can’t lie anymore. The email is asking what’s going on and how can I lie?

I did something really bad.

I took a screenshot on Friday that shows the figures(data)  of how many people are in this hospital with COVID, and I shared it, because this should be public information.

OK, I can tell you that on Friday, there were three people with Covid, no extra deaths, and that covers Cuppas, WestComal and Heyo hospitals

The total deaths from these three hospitals in seven months is 76. That’s about 10 people a month over the last seven months. And we have locked down.

Lots of people have to start speaking out.

Lots of doctors and nurses have come forward. They’re all on restricted duties. They’re all seeing solicitors solicitors, etc.

Well, I’ve decided there’s no point. I have gone against the rules within the NHS.

I have shared confidential information that people need to see, OK, I’m not the sort of person that finds lying easily.

I can deny it and say someone’s going to scream and shout  my name, but they’re going to get a letter saying why I shared it because as much as I’ve always loved our NHS, it’s no longer our NHS. It is run by the corrupt government and other people running this country.

We go back, we can’t see dentists like I can tell you now, when I was working at the height of the pandemic, I had no work for three weeks because there were no patients including lar Covid because none of the wards were overflowing with patients.

And I know now the mainstream media has filled you with fear.

Yes, it really is time to face some facts on March the 19th. If you go on the government website, it’s still there now the coronavirus was classified as a non contagious disease. It’s there now.

It’s a quick Google search guys. If you think this lockdown is right and it’s going to do any difference, you are completely wrong. Our economy it’s going to crash small businesses. People are going to stop. You think it’s going to be a month?

We were flattening the curve back in April and this was when the disease was supposedly dying out.

The lockdown’s came out then the army is coming in to Liverpool to help put the mass tested. And this is a road and they are here for a while,

Guys, we are facing dangerous times and people need to speak up watching our children and our grandchildren so that they are allowed to go to school.

But we have to carry on because at the moment they want us to work.

Lots of you know that the flu and Covid cases are now combined as the same thing, ok, like if you die, with Covid  within 28 days that goes on your death certificate.

The tests were not designed to diagnose this disease, 94 percent of them are false positives.

We say no to no more lockdowns, the army and the police.

They need to stop with us now. People need to start standing up. The mainstream media that opened up, run by the World Health Organization, big countries by supplying this wonderful vaccine for. So, so there are alternatives to everything. Stop watching the MSM, start doing research. Social-distancing, there is nothing social about it.

How many people have died because of the lockdowns? Because there’s no treatment. I’ve got a friend whose mother committed suicide. When is this going to end? It is doing more damage closing our country, closing our hospitals than keeping it open.

I want to say to everybody, keep hugging, screw the social distancing, we need to fight back….. to all those people with small businesses, stay open.

Let them take you to court because they can’t do anything. So we’re going carry on now and march up to the court. But as I like to say, live in love and not fear. And if they are, we are in dangerous times. And if we don’t fight it well, we’re all in our comfortable places working at home, we have to make a stand.

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Featured image is from InfoBrics

At birth, all of us begin a journey that offers opportunities either to grow – not just physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually – or to stagnate. The journey we undertake lasts a lifetime, but there are dozens of moments each day when we have a choice to make tiny incremental gains in experience, wisdom and compassion or to calcify through inertia, complacency and selfishness.

No one can be engaged and receptive all the time. But it is important to recognise these small opportunities for growth when they present themselves, even if at any particular moment we may decide to avoid grasping them.

When we shut ourselves into the car on the commute to work, do we use it as a moment to be alone with our thoughts or to silence them with the radio or music? When we sit with friends, do we choose to be fully present with them or scroll through the news feed on our phones? When we return from a difficult day at work, do we talk the issues through with family or reach for a glass of wine, or maybe bingewatch something on TV?

Everyone needs downtime, but if every opportunity for reflection becomes downtime then we are stagnating, not growing. We are moving away from life, from being human.

Dried-out husk 

This week liberal Americans reached for that glass of wine and voted Joe Biden. Others did so much more reluctantly, spurred on by the fear of giving his opponent another four years.

Biden isn’t over the finishing line quite yet, and there are likely to be recounts, court challenges and possibly violence over the result, but he seems all but certain to be crowned the next US president. Not that that should provoke any kind of celebration. The rest of the world’s population, future generations, the planet itself – none of us had a vote – were always going to be the losers whichever candidate won.

The incumbent, Donald Trump, miscalculated, it seems, if he thought dismissing his opponent as “Sleepy Joe” would be enough to damage Biden’s electoral fortunes. True, Trump was referring to the fact that Biden is a dried-out husk of the machine politician he once was. But after four years of Trump and in the midst of a pandemic, the idea of sleeping through the next presidential term probably sounded pretty appealing to liberals. Most of them have spent their whole political lives asleep.

Four years ago, however, they were forcibly roused from their languor to protest against Donald Trump. They grew enraged by the symptom of their corrupt political system rather than by the corrupt system itself. For them, “Sleepy Joe” was just what the doctor ordered.

But it won’t be Biden doing the sleeping. It will be the liberals who cheerlead him. Biden – or perhaps Kamala Harris – will be busy making sure his corporate donors get exactly what they paid for, whatever the cost to the rest of us.

Caitlin Johnstone: 'By telling yourself you voted out fascism, you are lying yourself into a state of future complacency.. If you voted for Biden, fine. Now do what you know is right and start throwing haymakers at the new head of the fascist empire' https://t.co/MoH6sJg9OW

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 6, 2020

Anger and blame 

In this analogy, Trump is not the opposite of Biden, of course. He represents stagnation too, if of a different kind.

Trump channels Americans’ frustration and anger at a political and economic system they rightly see as failing them. He articulates who should be falsely blamed for their woes: be it immigrants, minorities, socialists, or the New World Order. He offers justified, if misdirected, rage in contrast to Biden’s dangerous complacency.

But however awful Trump may be, at least some of those voting for him are grappling, if mostly unconsciously, with the tension between stagnation and growth – and not of the economic kind. Unlike most liberals, who dismiss this simplistically as “populism”, some of Trump’s supporters do at least seem to recognise that the tension exists. They simply haven’t been offered a constructive alternative to anger and blame.

Ritually disappointed 

Unlike the liberals and the Trumpists, many in the US have come to understand that their political system offers nothing but stultifying stagnation for ordinary Americans by design, even if it comes in two, smartly attired flavours.

They see that the Trump camp rages ineffectually against the corporate elite, deluded into believing that a member of that very same elite will serve as their saviour. And they see that the Biden camp represents an ineffectual rainbow coalition of competing social identities, deluded into believing that those divisions will make them stronger, not weaker, in the fight for economic justice. Both of these camps appear resigned to being serially – maybe ritually – disappointed.

Failure does not inspire these camps to seek change, it makes them cling all the more desperately to their failed strategies, to attach themselves even more frantically and fervently to their perceived tribe.

That is why this US election – at a moment when the need for real, systemic change is more urgent, more evident than ever before – produced not just one but two of the worst presidential candidates of all time. We are looking at exactly what happens when a whole society not only stops growing but begins to putrefy.

Enervating divisions 

Not everyone in the US is so addicted to these patterns of self-delusion and self-harm.

Large swaths of the population don’t bother to vote out of hard-borne experience. The system is so rigged against them that they don’t think it matters much which corporate party is in power. The outcome will be the same for them either way.

Others vote third party, or consciously abstain in protest at big money’s vice-like grip on the two-party system. Others, appalled at the prospect of Trump – and before him the two Bushes, and before that Ronald Reagan – were forced once again to vote for the Democratic ticket with a heavy heart. They know all too well who Biden is (a creature of his corporate donors) and what he stands for (whatever his corporate donors want). But he is slightly less monstrous than his rival, and in the US system those are the meaningful electoral options.

And among Trump’s supporters too, there are many desperate for wholesale change. They voted for Trump because at least he paid lip service to change.

These groups – most likely a clear electoral majority – could redirect the US towards political, social, even spiritual growth, if they could find a way to come together. They suffer from their own enervating divisions.

How should they best use their numerical strength? Should they struggle to win the presidency, and if so should it be a third-party candidate or should they work within the existing party structures? What lesson should they draw from the Democratic leadership’s sabotaging – twice over – of Bernie Sanders, a candidate offering meaningful change? Is it time to adopt an entirely different strategy, rejecting traditional politics? And if so, can it be made to work when all the major institutions – from the politicians and courts, to the police, intelligence services and media – are firmly in the hands of the corporate enemy?

Terrible reckoning 

There is no real way to sleep through life, or politics, and not wake up one day – usually when it is too late – realising catastrophic mistakes were made.

As individuals, we may face that terrible reckoning on our death-beds. Empires rarely go so quietly. They fall when it is time for their citizens to learn a painful lesson about hubris. Their technological innovations come back to haunt them, as ancient Rome’s lead water-pipes supposedly once did. Or they over-extend with ambitious wars that drain the coffers of gold, as warrior-kings have discovered to their cost through the ages. Or, when the guardians of empire least expect it, “barbarians” – the victims of their crimes – storm the city gates.

The globe-spanning US empire faces the rapid emergence of all these threats on a planetary scale. Its endless wars against phantom enemies have left the US burdened with astounding debt. Its technologies, from nuclear weapons to AI, mean there can be no possible escape from a major miscalculation. And the US empire’s insatiable greed and determination to colonise every last inch of the planet, if only with our waste products, is gradually killing the life-systems we depend on.

If Biden becomes president, his victory will be a temporary win for torpor, for complacency. But a new Trump will emerge soon enough to potentise – and misdirect – the fury steadily building beneath the surface. If we let it, the pendulum will swing back and forth, between ineffectual lethargy and ineffectual rage, until it is too late. Unless we actively fight back, the stagnation will suffocate us all.

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

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

Featured image is from Countercurrents.org

Former Prime Minister Theresa May has led a backbench rebellion against a second lockdown, demanding the government provide more statistics on the adverse harm the first lockdown had on people’s health. A total of fifty Conservative MPs rebelled against the government bill to impose new restrictions, Theresa being one of 16 who abstained from the vote. Mrs May led criticism of the new measures, stating they would ‘shatter livelihoods’ as she raised concerns as to why parliament had not been getting access to all the data on the consequences of prolonged lockdown.

To see a former leader tear into a current PM the way May did is a rare and memorable event. In fact, not since Sir Edward Heath lambasted Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s have we seen such an overt attack of this nature. The scene however took on a rather comic nature as Johnson, not staying to face May’s tirade, slunk off like a naughty teenager avoiding a telling off from his mother. His departure didn’t go unnoticed in the House of Commons, with ministers muttering in reprehension of his actions.

Mrs May was clearly furious, and did not conceal her severe doubts over the government’s handling of the Covid crisis. Unperturbed by Johnson’s snub, she continued that, having analysed all the SAGE literature, it was clear that a two to three week ‘circuit breaker’ such as the one the government has proposed for the next month, would clearly not be adequate in combating the disease, and such a lockdown would have to be repeated several times. She raised concerns as to how ‘any economy could have borne the damage that would have done’ but moreover how such repeated lockdowns would impact people’s mental and physical health. She said no ‘proper analysis’ had been provided to MPs and that as a result, many were concluding that ‘The figures are used to support the policy rather than the policy supporting the figures’.

Theresa May’s allegations regarding the adverse effect of lockdown are in fact supported by other findings. For example, it was reported this week that there has been an alarming rise of babies deliberately injured or killed during lockdown – around 20% according to Ofsted. Such shocking statistics have been blamed on a ‘toxic mix’ of isolation, poverty and mental illness. Last month a group of high profile doctors wrote to the government, urging them to take deaths and illnesses on a par with Covid-related ones. They believe that the government’s ‘one-track response’ in fact threatens ‘more lives and livelihoods than Covid lives saved’. It is argued that prolonged lockdown, such as we saw earlier this year, created ‘myriad harms, both logged and latent, that need to be balanced with ongoing restrictions and infection control.’ In their letter, the medics cite an increase in cardiovascular deaths, child suicide deaths, and higher rates of anxiety and depression amongst the elderly.

As time goes on and the government attempts to counter this second wave of coronavirus in Britain, it will be under increased pressure to persuade both politicians and the public that its actions are based on sound scientific advice and in the country’s best interests. To an extent, it is clear that Johnson’s government will be damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. A couple of weeks ago it was accused of dividing the country and ‘treating the north with contempt’ as it put the north of England into higher restrictions than the south under the Tier system, with politicians such as Manchester mayor Andy Burnham calling for a nationwide lockdown together with the financial assistance to furlough staff across the board. Now he is facing criticism for implementing such a lockdown. Even if we cast our minds back to the beginning of the pandemic, back in March this year, Johnson was accused of acting too slowly in his response, and that he should have put in place a full lockdown sooner. But as soon as restrictions were in place, he was condemned by a large body of people shouting about their freedoms and human rights being curtailed.

The reality is that, while there is such disunity in the country, and lack of support and trust in government decision-making, Britain will find it more and more difficult to find a path out of the pandemic. If we compare ourselves to nations such as China and South Korea, where citizens largely abided by the rules and regulations from the beginning of the outbreak, our efforts look pretty pathetic. Britain’s test and trace system, it was said by the Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance earlier this week, will now have little effect, given how high the number of cases and deaths currently is. Until Brits are prepared to put their individual needs to the side for the sake of a bigger national effort, we will struggle to shrug off this virus.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In the largest West Bank demolition operation in a decade, Israeli military authorities on Tuesday razed around 70 structures in the Jordan Valley’s Humsa al-Fuqa community in the occupied West Bank. Locals reported that six bulldozers, accompanied by around 100 Israeli soldiers, carried out the demolitions, leaving 11 Palestinian families homeless.

Among the demolished structures were those seemingly funded by the European Union and other European governmental and non-governmental institutions.

“They startled us with no prior notification,” says Abdul-Ghani Awawdeh, 52, who lost every residential structure on the land where he lives, including animal shelters, water tanks and solar system units. Israeli forces also confiscated his car.

Awawdeh’s wife, Fadwa Abu Awwad, noted that the demolitions were happening at the “worst time of the year” in terms of the weather. She said she spent the first night following the demolition trying to protect her family’s furniture from rain, after sending her children to a nearby community.

“We slept on the ground covered with a plastic bag,” Awawdeh added.

The Awawdeh family said they have been renting the land from Palestinian owners for over 60 years in order to herd animals, and confirmed this was the first time they witnessed an Israeli demolition. However, they remained uncertain as to whether it was a one-off or a sign of things to come.

A little over a mile away from Awawdeh’s family, 11 members of Abu al-Kebash family also saw all of their structures and animal shelters razed. Ahmad Abu al-Kebash, 23, said the family has been renting the land from another Palestinian family for around 70 years, and that this was not the first time the Israeli military had conducted demolitions, confiscations or evacuations at the site.

“This demolition is like no other. They left nothing,” said Ahmad, while sheltering in a tent provided by the Palestinian Red Crescent following the demolition.

Dafna Banai, an Israeli who has been active in the Jordan Valley for the past 13 years, called it the “worst demolition” she’d seen during her time in the area.

Israel insists that Humsa al-Fuqa’s residents do not have property rights on the land where they live, and claim that evacuation orders are for residents’ safety due to the area being a firing zone — which Israel designated it in 1972. The military has declared around 18 percent of the West Bank a firing zone, according to UN statistics, affecting thousands of Palestinians.

Declaring Palestinian land as a firing zone is just one of many justifications Israeli authorities give for issuing demolition and evacuation orders in Area C of the West Bank, which is under full Israeli military and administrative control. Frequently, demolitions are also carried out on structures built without permits, although Israel’s military government in the West Bank only approves between 1 and 3 percent of Palestinian building permit requests.

Israeli demolitions and displacement of Palestinians in Area C form “a strategy that has been applied here for years,” said Aref Daraghmeh, a Jordan Valley-based researcher with Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem. These tactics predate Israel’s mooted plans to annex parts of Area C, he added.

At the same time, Daraghmeh noted, Israeli settlers have been increasingly active in the area, appropriating land by fencing it off and establishing three new outposts.

Israeli demolitions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are at a four-year high, according to UN data — despite the COVID-19 outbreak. Israel has demolished almost 690 structures in the West Bank so far this year, displacing around 870 Palestinians; 46 of those demolitions took place last month. Also in October, within the Green Line, Israel demolished the Bedouin village Al-Araqib in the Naqab/Negev for the 179th time.

On Wednesday, the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission delivered tents to Humsa al-Fuqa residents, and called on international organizations to provide immediate assistance in order to fight“mass demolition and ethnic cleansing.”

The Commission also announced that a further three Jordan Valley had received evacuation notices on Wednesday morning, ahead of Israeli army training next week.

In response to an inquiry from +972 Magazine, inquiry, the Civil Administration, Israel’s military government in the West Bank, stated that it had “carried out law enforcement activities against structures established illegally in a firing zone in the Jordan Valley.”

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Ahmad Al-Bazz is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in the West Bank city of Nablus. He has been a member of the Activestills photography collective since 2012.

Oren Ziv is a photojournalist, a founding member of the Activestills photography collective, and a staff writer for Local Call.

The precedent established by the Organization of American States’ claims that fraud was committed in the 2019 Bolivian presidential election after a suspicious delay in releasing the tally resulted in then-President Morales emerging the victor without a second round being necessary like would have otherwise been the case had the pre-delay trend held solid justifies Trump’s accusations that fraud was also committed during the US’ very similar electoral crisis concerning the equally suspicious and ultimately game-changing delay in reporting on mail-in ballots.

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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.

Featured image is by Tim Pierce/Flickr

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 1/10^th 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 20^th century marks a new Gilded Age of even greater inequality. (3)

By the end of the 20^th 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 20^th & 21^st 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 19^th 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

1. William Engdahl (2007) Seeds of Destruction. The hidden agenda of genetic manipulation, Global Research, Centre for Research on Globalization, Canada.
2. Howard Zinn (2001) A People’s History of the United States (1492 to present), Perennial Classics, New York.
3. Kevin Phillips (2003) Wealth and Democracy. A political History of the American Rich, Broadway Books, New York.
4. David Callahan (2017) The Givers: Wealth, Power and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age, AA Knopf, New York.
5. Rob Larson (2019), Current Affairs, Cheating at Monopoly. Forget the private-sector innovators; examining the state’s role in creating the Internet.. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/cheating-at-monopoly
6. Vandana Shiva (2013) A conversation with Vandana Shiva, Mount Allison University, NB, Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cdFXKDAaQw
7. Protecting the Planet. The Destructive Impact of Billionaires https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNM833K22LM
8. Oneness vs the 1% -UNRISD Conference in Geneva https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek2M-obq9LE&t=2191s
9. Auschwitz: 60year anniversary -The Role of IG Farben-Bayer https://ahrp.org/auschwitz60-year-anniversary-the-role-of-ig-farben-bayer/

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 25^th 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.

Featured image is from Radio NZ

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. 

Featured image is from BAR

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 COVID-19 RT-PCR Test: How to Mislead All Humanity. Using a “Test” To Lock Down Society

By Dr. Pascal Sacré, November 05 2020

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.

“New Normal”on Social Distancing and the Facemask: Neglectful Caring and Compassionate Tyranny

By John C. A. Manley, November 05 2020

“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 U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. And Dangerous.

By Glenn Greenwald, November 05 2020

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.

 

US Elections 2020: A Who’s Who of Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team

By Umar A Farooq, November 05 2020

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.

“Fantasy Democracy”: US Election 2020. Electoral Fraud??

By Stephen Lendman, November 05 2020

Electoral theft, coup d’etats by other means, have been commonplace throughout US history. Today’s modern technology makes it easier than ever.

The Foreign Policy Election that Ignored Foreign Policy

By Daniel Larison, November 05 2020

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.

Fukushima, the Nuclear Pandemic Spreads

By Manlio Dinucci, November 05 2020

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.

Online Censorship: DOJ Seizes 27 Domains, Claims They are Controlled by Iran

By Dave DeCamp, November 05 2020

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.

From Balfour to the Nakba: The Settler-Colonial Experience of Palestine

By Ilan Pappe, November 05 2020

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.

BR-319: The Beginning of the End for Brazil’s Amazon Forest

By Philip M. Fearnside, November 05 2020

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.

Global Research Editor’s Note

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. 

See screenshot of the DOJ statement.

Below is Professor Hall’s statement. 

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Here is the statement from the US Department of Justice.

Click screenshot below to access complet DOJ document.

By Prof. Anthony Hall

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.

FEBRUARY 04 ,2020

BY PROF. ANTHONY HALL

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.

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 Times descreveu 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.

1. Então comparem tudo o que aí se lê, e o mapa do caminho dos russos. Está claramente posto nas intervenções decisivas do Ministro Sergey Lavrov de Relações Exteriores e do Presidente Putin em recentes reuniões do Valdai Club.

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.

Tradução : Roberto Pires Silveira

“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. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.

Featured image is from Distract The Media

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.

According to U .S. analysts this historic Agreement signed on January 15, 2020 would “hopefully signal the beginning of the end of the trade war“.

But that did not happen.

China-US Relations and The Corona Pandemic

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”

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)

According to the Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania, emphasis added):

“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.

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.

Disruption in US-China Commodity Trade

It is difficult to assess the implications of the most recent wave of Trump accusations. Despite Trump’s most recent threats, the January 15th, 2020 bilateral US-China trade agreement has been signed.

2018-2019 Data

 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?

On May 21,  Rep Ratcliffe was nominated as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) with a mandate to “counter threats from great powers” on behalf of the Trump Whitehouse.

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.

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.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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.

According to Federalist political editor John Daniel Davidson, Dems “are trying to steal the election in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (through) vote counting irregularities.”

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.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Sky News

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.

Featured image is from Flickr

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:

The Easter Bunny’s Springless Steps

Where Can You Enjoy Cyber Monday Sales?

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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Featured image is from HIN

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.”

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.

The vast majority of the war has consisted of UAE and Saudi bombing campaigns, which have indiscriminately targeted civilians in their homes, as well as grain silos, water treatment facilities, international aid hospitals, UNESCO Heritage architecture, and even flocks of sheep on the heights.

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 11^th 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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Featured image is from Unredacted

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.”

Starmer was said to be “infuriated”.

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 Times review 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 Post reported, 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.

The closing screen to a Sesame Street Public (dis)Service Advertisement (see below) (about social distancing and masking) concludes by saying:

“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?

How is destroying family businesses caring?

How is shaming people into wearing germ collectors (that do nothing to stop viruses) caring?

How is forcing millions into unemployment and suicide caring?

How is locking elderly people up in cockroach-infested long-term care homes caring?

How is denying people needed surgical procedures caring?

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.

Featured image is from the author

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 needle showing 71% chance of Trump winning North Carolina now, "leaning Trump". 82% chance of him winning Georgia, "probably Trump". https://t.co/yIRJQIMf70 pic.twitter.com/iYoo4bOYeX

— Doge (@IntelDoge) November 4, 2020

NYT’s predictive needle for Georgia at 8:40 pm ET, Tuesday night.

The New York Times projection needle just shifted 40 points from Trump to Biden in Georgia! pic.twitter.com/Z9vpnKNIo8

— Travis Allen 🇺🇸 (@TravisAllen02) November 4, 2020

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

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 23, 2018

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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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.

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.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Five of his latest books are “China Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries, Saving Millions of Lives”, “China with John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. His Patreon He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

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 Businessweek wondered 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]

Featured image is from Infowars

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.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is by Massoud Nayeri

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?

1. 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
2. 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.
3. Bringing the American troops back home completely from places such as: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries areas of conflict
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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.

Source: https://www.abc.net.au/

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 SkyNews he 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.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/

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.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/

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.”

Source: https://www.news.com.au/

The Murdoch press reported on July 19, 2014,

“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.

Source: https://rusvesna.su/

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?”

Source:  https://rusvesna.su/

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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