Global Research

Facemasks are causing many problems, but the medical establishment and governments around the world who impose mandates to wear facemasks in public seem to be oblivious to the damage they are causing in order to protect us.  In this case, the cure is worst than the disease.

As many of us know, there is no credible evidence to support the claim made by doctors, scientists and the mainstream media (MSM) who are in the pockets of major pharmaceutical corporations and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation that facemasks protect us from deadly viruses.  Now there are new consequences of wearing facemasks that the MSM rarely mentions, and that is a rise of dental and acne problems that are affecting people who comply with the facemask mandates imposed by governments on behest of the so-called “medical experts” such as Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC and others.

Mask Mouth, is basically a new term coined by doctors located in New York City who describe the new phenomenon of arising dental problems that are associated to wearing facemasks on a consistent basis. In early August, The New York Post headlined with ‘Mask mouth’ is a seriously stinky side effect of wearing masks’ interviewed Dr. Rob Ramondi who is a certified dentist and a co-founder of One Manhattan Dental said that

“We’re seeing inflammation in people’s gums that have been healthy forever, and cavities in people who have never had them before,” said Dr. Ramondi, “about 50% of our patients are being impacted by this, [so] we decided to name it ‘mask mouth’ — after ‘meth mouth.”

Meth Mouth is described as addicts who smoke crystal meth (methamphetamine) that eventually develop serious dental problems such as “cracked, black- and brown-stained teeth because the stimulant causes sugar cravings, teeth grinding and jaw clenching.” Dr. Marc Sclafani, who is also one of the co-founders said that“Gum disease — or periodontal disease — will eventually lead to strokes and an increased risk of heart attacks.” He said that wearing a face mask increases the dryness of the mouth leading to an increase in unwanted bacteria.

“People tend to breathe through their mouth instead of through their nose while wearing a mask” said Sclafani “The mouth breathing is causing the dry mouth, which leads to a decrease in saliva — and saliva is what fights the bacteria and cleanses your teeth” adding the fact that “saliva is also what neutralizes acid in the mouth and helps prevent tooth decay and gum disease.”

He recommends to drink water and to practice extensive oral hygiene on a daily basis.

Despite their findings, doctors who are the opposite side of the spectrum such as Dr. Shruti Gohil, an associate medical director of Epidemiology & Infection Prevention at UC Irvine said that if masks caused dental issues, others in the medical field would also have the same problems since they wear masks all of the time according to a Los Angeles Times report from mid-August, “even dentists wear masks themselves all day long,” she said “this flies in the face of any type of known information and really is concerning to me.” Dr. Gohil was responding to a Anaheim council meeting led by councilwoman Lucille Kring who said that “dentists are finding that it’s causing very serious dental problems — cavities, gum disease and halitosis. So keep that in mind when you’re snuggling up to a mask.” Dr. Gohil also promotes vaccines. During a measles outbreak in 2015, she claimed that adults should get the measles vaccine even though they most likely received one when they were adolescents.

“The vaccine is 99 percent effective, but that can wane over time. Even people who, as a child, received the two doses required by the state might consider getting another booster,” said Dr. Shruti Gohil, “Measles is the most contagious virus known to man at this time,” Gohil said. “you can actually do something about preventing it. So why wouldn’t you?”

Sounds like Dr. Gohil is in the pockets of Big Pharma.

Not only facemasks are causing dental problems, facial issues such as pimples, zits and other forms of acne are becoming problematic as CNN, the premier propaganda channel that promotes facemasks and social distancing admitted in a headline from last June titled ‘Maskne’: Why your face is breaking out under your mask and how to stop it’ reported that “for many people that is leading to an embarrassing and unpleasant side effect: blemishes, pimples, zits — or what dermatologists call acne.” CNN interviewed Dr. Whitney Bowe, clinical assistant professor of dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center who said that “I have patients calling in despair saying ‘What is going on? I’ve never had a breakout before and now my face looks like a teenager’s!’ and Dr. Seemal Desai, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who said that “we’re seeing lots of flares of acne, especially a type called perioral dermatitis, which tends to happen typically around the mouth and in the areas around the nose.”

The dental and facial problems for those who wear facemasks on a consistent basis to supposedly protect themselves from an over-exaggerated disease is just another example of unintended consequences in the making.  Facemasks are causing many problems, but the medical establishment and governments around the world who impose mandates to wear facemasks in public seem to be oblivious to the damage they are causing in order to protect us.  In this case, the cure is worst than the disease.

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

Featured image is from howstuffworks

Today Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate confirmed its third ultra conservative Supreme Court nominee, Amy Barrett, as Supreme Court Justice. Coming in the midst of America’s current dual crisis—economic and Covid health—both now worsening, the Barrett appointment ensures the emergence of historic political instability in the USA. The dual crisis is about to become a triple crisis.

As US unemployment claims rise, rent evictions accelerate, food lines grow, the prospect of a fiscal stimulus bill in Congress fades, and as a third Covid 19 wave creates record level infections & hospitalizations, each deterioration has begun reinforcing the other.

Potentially exacerbating all the above, political instability and conflict of historic dimensions is around the corner. And the Barrett confirmation today, October 26, 2020 will put the US Supreme Court at the center of this dynamic.

The Consequences of the Barrett Confirmation

Democrats correctly complain Barrett’s confirmation will mean the end of women’s right to choose, a destruction of what’s left of the Affordable Care Act, the ending of many gay rights, a further US retreat from climate change, more deregulation of business, and a long list of other social programs of recent decades. They are right on all that. But even all that may not prove the worst of it.

Perhaps the most serious, and most immediate, consequence of the Barrett appointment to the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will be that Court’s interference once again in a presidential election—as in the 2000 national election when the Court played the central key role in stopping counting of votes and thus ‘selecting’ George W. Bush as president.

The Barrett appointment to the Court means Trump will have his 6-3 majority on the court just in time for the election and the counting of ballots. Even if chief Justice Roberts becomes an occasional swing vote, Barrett’s appointment will still ensure a 5-4 vote in favor of Trump.

The historic question thus arises: will Barrett, along with the other two Trump SCOTUS appointees Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, vote to stop the counting of mail in ballots in swing states and thus give Trump a second term? Would they dare? In particular would Barrett, being just confirmed to the Court?

More specifically, will the 6-3 SCOTUS Trump majority perform again its role of usurper of Democracy in America and intervene in Trump’s favor—as it did In 2000 when it ordered a halt to a vote re-count in Florida by declaring it “prejudiced George Bush’s’ campaign”? Is this possible again? You bet it is.

Guess who two of Bush’s main defense lawyers were in 2000 who demanded and argued to the Court at that time that it halt the vote re-count in Florida in favor of Bush? Both Barrett and Kavanaugh!

The Pusillanimity of Democrat Leadership

Democrats have been gnashing their political teeth, pounding their desks in the Senate, boycotting committee voting on the nomination, and making empty threats about stacking SCOTUS after the election. But recent history shows the Democrats themselves are complicit, and therefore responsible in part, for Barrett’s appointment, as well as for the appointments of her two radical right predecessors, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

It was the Democrats who capitulated when their nominee to SCOTUS, Garland, was nominated by Obama in early 2016. Garland’s nomination was stopped dead when the Senate’s leader, McConnell, refused to even have hearings on Garland—let alone take his nomination to a vote. McConnell used a phony Senate rule that there must be no nominations in a year of a presidential election, to halt the Garland nomination. And what did the Democrats do? Nada! They thought they would win in 2016 and push through Garland then. Bad strategy. Hillary and the Democrat party corporate moneybags who ensured Hillary was the party’s candidate in 2016 scuttled that. The Democrats capitulated to McConnell and did nothing.

That wasn’t the first time either. Remember the do-nothing Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Court? No fewer than 11 Democrats in the Senate voted for him too? Now in 2020 they’re being ‘sandbagged’ once again by McConnell, who arbitrarily changed Senate rules a few weeks ago to get Barrett approved in a mere week before the national election! Democrats couldn’t get a hearing for Garland 11 months before an election; Barrett gets approved less than 11 days before the election! Democrats didn’t fight him in early 2016. They gave tepid resistance to the Gorsuch nomination by Trump. He flew through the confirmation hearing with little Democrat resistance. Kavanaugh was a wake up call for Democrats. They fought but, as usual, with an ineffective strategy.

Democrats’ failure to effectively resist McConnell is not new. Senate leader McConnell has played hard ball with the Democrats for years, striking them out repeatedly. Their batting average is pathetic. McConnell arbitarily broke Senate rules whenever it suited him, created new ones on the fly, and has generally ran roughshod over the Democrats at will. Meanwhile, Democrats keep crying ‘foul’ with each rule change, demanding McConnell play by the (old) rules and stop throwing them curve balls they can’t hit. So McConnell just threw them a fast ball past them in the Barrett case they couldn’t even swing at. Now they can’t even step up to the plate.

It all began with Obama back in 2009. He continually tried to establish a ‘bipartisan’ consensus with the Republicans to pass legislation for economic recovery. Obama listened to their demands to reduce his stimulus. But when he did not one Republican voted for it.

But they did vote when they convinced Obama in August 2011 to cut social spending programs by $1.5 trillion—i.e. more than Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill of $787 billion. Obama kept pursuing his futile ‘bipartisanship’. But he was tricked into cutting $1.5 trillion in education and other social programs, on the Republican promise that Defense spending would be cut as well by $500 billion. Republicans later found a way around that and Pentagon spending cuts were eventually restored. Outfoxed again, Obama fell in line in 2013 in the name of ‘bipartisanship’, when he and Democrats supported the Republican demand to extend George W. Bush’s 2001-03 massive $3.4 trillion tax cuts for business and investors for another decade. That added ten years of business tax cuts cost taxpayers another $5 trillion! Obama ended up actually cutting business-investor taxes by $trillions more than George W. Bush!

Time and again Obama extended his hand to the Republican dog which repeatedly bit him. Obama kept extending it nonetheless; and McConnell kept biting. That’s the history of legislation in Congress over Obama’s entire term, 2008-2016. And it explains a lot why millions of voters abandoned the Democrats in 2016—although Hillary’s ineffective campaign helped a lot.

With Trump’s election, Republicans shifted strategy from just thwarting Democrat policies to plans to destroy the Democrats politically for a generation. The Obama era bipartisanship strategy continued for a while into the Trump era. Trump was permitted to keep raising US defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars every year, in exchange for his agreement not to cut social program spending. He gained; they kept what they had. Meanwhile, the US budget deficit reached $1 trillion a year, during what was vaunted to be a robust economy. Lasts year, 2019, the Dems woke up to the failure of bipartisanship with Trump and his transformed Trump-worshipping Republican party out to destroy them, but too late.

Now the Barrett confirmation will enable Trump and McConnell to bite off at least a couple more fingers of the Democrat hand: womens’ right to choose and the Affordable Care Act. But not just Obamacare or women’s right to choose are about to be severed. Soon Barrett will be the decider on the Supreme Court again—as in 2000—determining the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. Trump and McConnell may slice off a thumb.

With the Barrett confirmation, the US Supreme Court—with no right to select the president— may nevertheless do so again. An institution not even mentioned in the US Constitution, with Barrett providing Trump a secure 6-3 (or at minimum 5-4) majority the Supreme Court may once again usurp the sovereignty of the American people. Here’s how it may occur:

Creating One, Two, Three….Many Floridas!

In just a few short weeks, it will become apparent the USA in 2020 has entered a déjà vu contested election as in 2000. ‘Contested’ is an unfortunate term. Every election is contested. What the media really means by choosing such a safe, neutral term like ‘contested’, is that the election may be stolen… once again. And this time it may usher in a deeper coup d’etat, not just a personality change at the top, as Trump radically attacks his opponents and the last vestiges of Democracy in America upon consolidating his victory coup.

The November 3, 2020 election may be Florida 2000 all over again! Only this time, unlike 2000 when vote re-counting was halted in three counties in Florida to give George W. Bush the election, it will be two, three, many Floridas. And it won’t be vote recounting. It will be counting of initial mail-in ballot votes.

All indications are Trump clearly plans to challenge and halt the mail in ballot vote counting in swing states where the direct in person vote tally will be close—i.e. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, and maybe even Georgia or Florida. He already has more than 250 of his lawyers stationed in the swing states to file injunctions to stop the mail in ballot counts. More will be coming, poised in the wings to swoop down into the swing states if needed. They’ll demand and get preliminary injunctions to halt the mail in vote counting. Hundreds of McConnell judge appointees in the swing states in recent years will move quickly to approve injunctions and move them along quickly; ditto for McConnell Appeals Court appointees who’ll cooperate and hand off the appeals to the Supreme Court. The matter will quickly rise to the new Trump SCOTUS with 6-3 majority with Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch recent appointees to the Court. They’ll pick the most favorable to Trump case to decide on, creating a de facto precedent that can be used to halt mail in ballot counting in other swing states.

The disruption and delays in vote counting will give Trump time to declare he has won the key swing states based on direct in person voting. He’ll likely declare himself the winner late on November 3 or certainly early on November 4 based on in person voting on November 3. Mail in ballot counting will be further delayed by legal maneuvers as long as possible. Trump will publicly hammer the message he won via direct votes and mail in votes are suspect, even fraudulent, and shouldn’t be ever counted but impounded.

Democrats will again gnash their teeth, jump up and down, and declare ‘foul’. Trump’s not playing by the rules. (Of course, he’s rewriting the rules in his favor, dummies, as he has always done).

Following Trump’s November 3 or 4 declaration of himself as winner, people will take to the streets to protest and demand resumption of the mail ballot vote counting. Trump will likely call on his supporters to hit the streets as well.

Demonstrators and counter-demonstrators will clash, sometimes violently. It may well make the Antifa vs. Proud boys conflicts of recent months look like a high school play dress rehearsal.

But those clashes and growing violence will benefit Trump. His lawyers can then argue that the social and political disruptions will only worsen, unless SCOTUS puts an end to it by permanently halting the mail ballot vote count. SCOTUS will comply, as it did in 2000. Or perhaps punt the ball and declare Congress should resolve the issue—but immediately to quell the social unrest and not after the new Congress takes office. That means with the existing Congress, dominated by the Republican Senate. Intensifying social disruptions in November-December will help to push the Court to decide in his favor, whichever of the two possible outcomes. He’ll therefore incite his followers incessantly through November-December.

It’s not coincidental that Wall St. and business interests are now buying insurance and hedging their investments in expectation of a scenario not unlike that just described. Nor coincidental that police forces and local governments are quietly preparing for mass confrontations in November, even as the mainstream media is purposely refusing to report on those preparations and scenarios.

Feeble Democrat Party Counter Strategies

Biden and Democrats are hoping that by generating a mass voter turnout they can avoid the close election results on November 3 in the swing states that, should that occur, would set in motion Trump’s plans and a SCOTUS repeat of Florida 2000 now in multiple swing states.

But a record voter turnout may occur in both sides—for Trump and for Biden—in the same swing states, with neither overwhelming the other and thus resulting in a close election in the swing states with record turnout for both sides! Turnout in such a case will be irrelevant. The election results will still be close, allowing Trump to still declare himself victor early.

The fact that far more Republicans will vote directly on November 3 than will Democrats (and conversely more Democrats vote via mail than Republicans) enables Trump to declare early victory and try to stop the mail in vote count. CNN polls show nationally that 55% Republicans will vote in person November 3, and only 22% Democrats. The percentages are reversed for the mail in voting. The swing state spreads will likely be even greater than the national CNN poll percentages.

Democrats and their media (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) keep talking today about national polls showing Biden with 8-10% lead over Trump in the popular vote nationwide. National polls are totally irrelevant. Only state wide polls and winning enough small states to accumulate a required 270 electoral votes to take the president. And the swing state polls show Trump and Biden virtually tied. Trump’s halting of mail in ballot counting could tip more swing states in his favor.

This election is not about maximizing voter turnout. It’s about not fully counting voter turn out in the form of mail in ballots in the swing states!

The US Supreme Court As Bulwark Against Democracy

America is a truncated Democracy. It does not have a direct democracy form of presidential election. There is no one person one vote. There never has been.

The USA has the electoral college, created in 1789, that was designed to check the popular uprisings of the 1780s following the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783. Read the minutes of the US Constitutional Convention. The electoral college was a concession to those who feared the direct action and voting by the general population. Following the revolutionary war’s end in 1783, Yeoman farmers rose up everywhere protesting the economic depression of 1784-87.

They occupied and in some cases even seized control of their state legislatures in protest to the unpaid debts owed them by their governments and rising taxation.

The US Constitution of 1789 was created in response to their protests, designed to centralize power in the hands of northern Merchants and southern Plantation owners in order to check the popular uprisings. No women or slaves could vote was one outcome of that Constitution. Another was no direct election of Senators. Another was the electoral college, designed to allow state politicians and their appointed electors to determine the presidency. The right of women to vote, freeing of slaves and ensuring their right to vote, and Americans’ right to directly elect Senators were all achieved by means of mass popular movements that amended the original un-democratic constitution. But the electoral college still remains unamended. Neither party wants to amend it. They fear the uncontrolled will of the people still.

Here’s another fact that most Americans don’t know about their own Constitution: no where in it does it call for or authorize a US Supreme Court! Just that the Congress after the ratification of the Constitution by the States would legislate some kind of judiciary. The Congress created the court by means of legislation after the Constitution. So SCOTUS is subordinate to the authority of Congress, to whom the people in turn delegate their ultimate sovereignty periodically by means of elections. And take it back in elections.

So Congress can change anything it wants about the Supreme Court. It can add or delete justices. It can limit their terms in office, no longer for lifetime. It can make the justices serve by means of elections. It can even abolish SCOTUS altogether and replace it with something else.

The Supreme Court is thus not a co-equal to the Congress in the Constitution. It is not a co-equal institution. SCOTUS was purposely omitted by the framers of the Constitution because they didn’t want an institution of judges who were not directly elected by the people and who served for a lifetime to have any power to negate the sovereignty of the people or its elected Congress. That’s what the founders argued in the minutes of the Constitutional Convention of 1787!

Even less so was the Supreme Court given the authority to rule a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional. The legislation passed by Congress creating a court system did not give the Supreme Court authority to negate laws. That power is called ‘judicial review’, i.e. a power the Supreme Court usurped for itself in 1803 when it simply assumed the power of judicial review for itself. In short, the power of the Supreme Court to declare a law unconstitutional is not provided by the US Constitution nor passed by any law of Congress! It is therefore unconstitutional.

Even more so, neither the Constitution, nor Congress, nor any other institution ever gave the Supreme Court the authority to intervene in an election for president and decide on suspending a vote count, or any way interrupt a vote count, in order to favor one candidate for president over the other. That is, not until 2000 in Florida. And now again soon most likely in 2020!

Those who believe SCOTUS does have the right to intervene in elections, or that the Supreme Court can rule a law unconstitutional, or even that it is a co-equal branch of government simply don’t know their own US Constitution. Or how the Supreme Court usurped and declared its powers in 1803.

The usurpation was declared in 1803 by then Supreme Court chief justice, John Marshall. Who was he? He was a former Secretary of State for John Adams, president 1797-1800, who lost the election of 1800 and quickly appointed Marshall, his Secretary of State, as Chief Justice, in order to try to check the incoming new president, Thomas Jefferson, from reforming Adams’ corrupt business dominated government. Adams also tried to stack the lower courts before Jefferson took office. Sound familiar?

The purpose of all this explanation of the origins of the Supreme Court is not to provide an academic history lesson. It’s to point out that the US Supreme Court is not an institution of American Democracy. It’s an institution created by business interests more than two hundred years ago, the primary purpose of which is to check and prevent the exercise of direct democracy and direct voting rights of the American people. It’s been doing just that for two centuries!

In recent years the Supreme Court has become even more active in thwarting Democracy in America.

In 2013 SCOTUS struck down the even weak voting rights act of 1965. It passed the infamous Citizens United decision in 2010 that gave businesses and wealthy investors virtually unlimited right to spend money for their candidates in elections, presidential and all other! It has repeatedly allowed and endorsed various ‘red’ states voter repression efforts in recent years, including allowing conservative and radical right state legislaturess and governments to throw out hundreds of thousands of registered voters before elections. It ‘selected’ George W. Bush as president in 2000. And it’s about to do the same—given the Barrett approval to join the Supreme Court today—for Trump in 2020.

America’s Rolling Coup D’Etat

Readers should remember all this when they watch the news tomorrow, as Barrett takes her seat on the Supreme Court before next week’s November 3 election—i.e. just in time perhaps to do the ‘selecting’ of another president contrary to the popular vote and will of the majority of the American people!
There is a rolling coup d’etat’ in progress in America today led by Trump and the radical economic and political interests supporting him.

And the Supreme Court of the USA, now firmly in his camp with the Barrett appointment, may well prove to be one of his essential tools in pulling off that coup d’etat.

A good part of the American people will no doubt resist, setting in motion street protests and demonstrations, counter-demonstrations with associated violence, and a period of great political instability in America in coming months perhaps not seen since the 1850s. That instability will exacerbate the growing concurrent economic and Covid 19 health crises, already mutually exacerbating each other. The dual economic-health crisis may thus soon become a ‘Triple’ crisis: economic, health, and political.

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Jack Rasmus writes on his blog site, Jack Rasmus, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is an official White House photo

In a 1967 speech, Martin Luther King Jr. called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He identified economic profit as the motivator of this violence. The record of Washington’s international aggression since then has been horrendous, as tacitly recognized even by Donald Trump in his promises, before and after the 2016 election, to end the United States’ “endless wars.” Trump nonetheless takes his place in the pantheon of violent U.S. presidents who have, since King’s judgment, left millions of people dead in the Global South in the wake of incompetent military escapades and cruel economic warfare. 

What distinguishes Trump’s foreign policy is a pronounced nihilism borne of the decline of U.S. empire, which appears clearer under his administration than any other. Alfred McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and the author of In the Shadows of the American Century (Haymarket Books), told The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill in July 2017 that Trump is “accelerating perhaps markedly, even precipitously, the U.S. decline.” McCoy predicts that China will overtake the U.S. both militarily and economically by the year 2030, but he claims Trump is a byproduct, and not the root cause, of this erosion of dominance.

In foreign and trade policy, the Trump administration has lashed out not just at rival states but also Washington’s allies, which only reinforces the appearance of waning imperial influence. U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change, the U.S.-Russian intermediate missile treaty, and Trump’s threats to not renew the START agreement limiting the number of deployed nuclear warheads offer prime examples, according to Conn Hallinan, a columnist with Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. To this list we can add Trump’s pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the Iran nuclear agreement and the Palestinian peace process.

Image on the right: This file photo shows US guided missile destroyer USS Mustin, which intruded into Chinese territorial waters in South China Sea.

At the same time, the administration has demonized China—for all its domestic economic woes and the high U.S. death toll from COVID-19—while increasing U.S. military operations and surveillance in the South China Sea, making a nuclear military conflict more likely. Trump’s unmitigated hostility toward Washington’s main rivals on the world stage, China and Russia, has resulted in uniting them against him. Aside from withdrawing from the arms control treaty with Russia, Trump has imposed heavy sanctions on Moscow and is pressuring European countries who depend on Russian supplies of natural gas to stop construction of Nord Stream 2, a new pipeline that will expand Russian gas supplies to Europe (see John Foster’s article, “Canada, black swans and oil,” in the July/August 2020 issue of the Monitor).

“Trump’s campaign against China has mixed results,” Hallinan tells me. “The trade war is mostly a joke…but the relentless war on China does have an impact, partly by forcing China to spend money on its military, and to pursue policies that alienate many countries in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.”

China’s claims in the South China Sea violate international law, Hallinan continues, but they are also a reaction to the U.S. military buildup in the region beginning under the Obama administration. “In the short run, the U.S. has made some inroads in isolating China, but in the long run, the U.S. is losing influence. The Chinese economy is simply too big to suppress, and Trump’s trade war has damaged the U.S. more than China.”

Hallinan claims the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accords alienated many in Asia.

“By 2030, 600 million Indians will  not have access to sufficient water, a direct result of climate change,” he notes. “Countries all over Asia will be deeply affected by the loss of glaciers, and the U.S. position currently contributes to that looming crisis. China is making efforts to combat climate change and that sits well with many countries in the region.”

As with China, Trump has increased the prospect of nuclear war with Russia by abrogating arms control treaties and moving U.S. troops closer to Russian borders. But all this, along with economic sanctions, has failed to make Russia capitulate to U.S. dictates.

“Losing Nord Stream 2 will hurt Russia, but not enough to force it to knuckle under to the U.S.,” says Hallinan. “Russia has been developing its relations with Iran, India and China for several years, so it has outlets for its oil and gas and industrial goods.”

It’s worth noting that Russia has more nuclear weapons in storage than the U.S., rendering comments from Trump’s arms-control negotiator—“We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion,” said Marshall Billingslea in May—virtually moot.

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Abraham Accord (Official White House photo)

In the Middle East, Trump has alienated the Arab majority by supporting Israel more than any other U.S. president, especially through his moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which signified his absolute repudiation of the Palestinian peace process. To further isolate the Palestinians and strengthen Israel even more, Trump recently brokered a deal between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain (all three countries are U.S. client states) in which the latter two agree to recognize Israel and normalize relations.

“These agreements are designed to give an Arab stamp of approval to Israel’s status quo of land theft, home demolitions, arbitrary extrajudicial killings, apartheid laws, and other abuses of Palestinian rights,” says Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the U.S. women-led peace group CODEPINK and co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange.

“The deal should be seen in the context of over three years of Trump administration policies that have tightened Israel’s grip on the Palestinians: moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, and creating a so-called peace plan with no Palestinian participation or input. All of these have hurt the U.S. reputation among Arab people of the region.”

Benjamin points out that the Israel-UAE-Bahrain deal is also aimed at isolating and weakening Iran, considered an enemy by all three countries.

“This dovetails with Trump’s anti-Iran obsession, which includes U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal,” she tells me.

Earlier this year, the U.S. came very near to all-out war with Iran when Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Patrick Cockburn notes in War in the Age of Trump (Verso) that the targeted killing of Soleimani at Baghdad airport, where he was allegedly en route to meet the Iraqi prime minister, initially rallied Iranian public opinion behind the general. This opportunity for the Iranian regime was wasted, says Cockburn, when its army mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner killing 176 people, half of them Canadian citizens and permanent residents, which redirected public anger on the government.

Benjamin says she sees the imposition of severe U.S. economic sanctions and military pressures on Iran as having made life more difficult for millions of Iranians. But as far as the Iranian government goes, this aggressive policy has “empowered the more conservative factions [who are more anti-U.S.], who won the majority of seats in the recent national assembly elections and may well win the upcoming presidential election,” she says.

Trump’s Iran policy has also divided the U.S. from its closest allies in Europe such as Germany, who wanted to preserve the Iranian nuclear deal, and has isolated the U.S. internationally, according to Benjamin. She notes the recent U.N. vote in which the Dominican Republic was the only member of the Security Council to support the U.S. insistence on extending the arms embargo against Iran. “Trump has diminished U.S. power in the Middle East,” concludes Benjamin. “After 20 years of war and occupation, the U.S. has not only shed blood and trillions of dollars but has lost influence and the respect of many of the region’s people.”

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In Latin America, too, Trump’s policy has been largely destructive. He has been successful in obliterating relations with Cuba, in backing the overthrow of the elected leftist government of Evo Morales in Bolivia, in 2019, and in helping to prevent Brazil’s popular leftist former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from returning to power in the 2018 elections. Trump has tried (and, so far, failed) to overthrow governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua and has put a $15 million bounty for the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“In 2017 and 2018, the U.S. unleashed its most lethal and successful weapon: the illegal economic blockade that is restricting food and medicine to the people of Venezuela,” says Maria Páez Victor, a Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist and former instructor at the University of Toronto and York University. “The sanctions are a crime against humanity, and U.N. experts have stated so, because they directly target and hurt a human population. In just one year the sanctions directly killed 40,000 Venezuelans,” she adds, citing numbers in a 2019 study from the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

Alexander Main, director of international policy at CEPR, tells me “there is no doubt that the U.S. played a role in subverting democracy in both Brazil and Bolivia.” He points to recently produced evidence that Brazilian prosecutors, with support from the U.S. Department of Justice, “colluded with a judge (Sérgio Moro) to design a strategy, with clear political objectives, to ensure that the popular former president Lula da Silva would be jailed and barred from running in the 2018 presidential election. The banning of Lula’s candidacy, which had been leading in the polls, effectively enabled the electoral victory of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro.”

In Bolivia, former president Evo Morales was overthrown in a military coup in October 2019 after being accused of committing electoral fraud. Main points out that this accusation from the Organization of American States (OAS) was later shown to be false by various independent analyses, including at CEPR and the New York Times. “The Trump administration immediately voiced support for the far-right de facto government that illegally took power following Morales’ ouster,” he says.

Main emphasizes that these undemocratic developments in Bolivia and Brazil have had “terrible consequences for both countries.” Bolivia, for example, “has endured a racist government that has sought to roll back Indigenous rights in the country and that has massacred protesters,” he tells me. “In Brazil, the Bolsonaro government has encouraged illegal clearing of the Amazon for farming and mining and has engaged in frequent attacks on the rights of the Indigenous, Afro-Brazilians and LGBTI persons.”

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This article was originally published on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Asad Ismi reports on international affairs for the Monitor.

Featured image is from CCPA

Biden’s description of Russia as “the biggest threat to America” and China as its “biggest competitor” is an intriguing attempt to unite the anti-Russian and anti-Chinese factions of America’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) even if it’s ultimately insincere (to say nothing of being unsuccessful in the event that he tries) and intended more as a tactical short-term distraction from his son Hunter’s alleged corruption scandals.

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CDC (Center for Disease Control) scientists made some COVID admissions that totally destroy the official COVID narrative in a study published in June 2020 entitled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 from Patient with Coronavirus Disease, United States. The interesting thing about this whole scamdemic is that when you dig deep enough, the truth is out there – and it is admitted by official sources – however it does take a lot of persistence to cut through the propagandistic maze of disinfo. In this article, we’re going to take a look at the significance of what the CDC scientists revealed, namely that for their research involving the allegedly new virus SARS-CoV-2, they only used 37 base pairs from actual sample tissue and filled in the rest (around 30,000 base pairs) with computer generated sequences, i.e. they made it up! The other of the COVID admissions is equally as stunning: after testing they found that SARS-CoV-2 could not infect human tissue.

#1 COVID Admission: The Computer-Generated Frankenstein Virus: CDC Scientists Admit Only Using 37 Base Pairs from Real Tissue to Assemble SARS-CoV-2

In a previous article, I talked about how SARS-CoV-2 is a stitched-together, Frankenstein virus, because it is a computer-generated, digital, abstract creation, not a real living virus. It has never been properly purified and isolated so that it could be sequenced from end-to-end once derived from living tissue; instead, it’s just digitally assembled from a computer viral database. The CDC scientists state they took just 37 base pairs from a genome of 30,000 base pairs! That means that about 0.001% of the viral sequence is derived from actual living samples or real bodily tissue. Here is the quote:

“Whole-Genome Sequencing

We designed 37 pairs of nested PCRs spanning the genome on the basis of the coronavirus reference sequence (GenBank accession no. NC045512). We extracted nucleic acid from isolates and amplified by using the 37 individual nested PCRs.”

Interestingly enough, in the next paragraph, the CDC scientists say they used “quantitative PCR” for further analysis/construction, which goes against what Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, once said – namely that “quantitative PCR is an oxymoron” since PCR is inherently a qualitative technique not a quantitative one. I have covered how badly the PCR test is being misused throughout this entire COVID scamdemic in other articles such as this one. In his article Only Poisoned Monkey Kidney Cells ‘Grew’ the ‘Virus’ Dr. Thomas Cowan highlights this scientific fraud:

“… we find that rather than having isolated the virus and sequencing the genome from end to end, they found 37 base pairs from unpurified samples using PCR probes. This means they actually looked at 37 out of the approximately 30,000 of the base pairs that are claimed to be the genome of the intact virus. They then took these 37 segments and put them into a computer program, which filled in the rest of the base pairs.

To me, this computer-generation step constitutes scientific fraud. Here is an equivalency: A group of researchers claim to have found a unicorn because they found a piece of a hoof, a hair from a tail, and a snippet of a horn. They then add that information into a computer and program it to re-create the unicorn, and they then claim this computer re-creation is the real unicorn. Of course, they had never actually seen a unicorn so could not possibly have examined its genetic makeup to compare their samples with the actual unicorn’s hair, hooves and horn.”

Pure or true science attempts to prove whether something is so; hence true science has no room for politics, majority rules or consensus. Yet, according to Cowan, consensus was used to determine which digital SARS-CoV-2 model was the most real fake model:

“The researchers claim they decided which is the real genome of SARS-CoV-2 by “consensus,” sort of like a vote. Again, different computer programs will come up with different versions of the imaginary “unicorn,” so they come together as a group and decide which is the real imaginary unicorn.”

#2 COVID Admission: CDC Scientists Found that SARS-CoV-2 Didn’t Infect Human Tissue

A big part of the official story we were told was that COVID was a new, dangerous and unpredictable disease that was both fast-spreading and lethal. Well, it’s apparently not very lethal since the CDC scientists found that it couldn’t even infect human cells in vitro. They tested the ‘virus’ (not really, but solutions they claim contain samples of SARS-CoV-2) on 3 different types of human tissue cultures (human adenocarcinoma cells [A549], human liver cells [HUH 7.0] and human embryonic kidney cells [HEK-293T]). The ‘virus’ was not able to infect any of the 3 human tissue cultures. Here’s the quote:

“… we examined the capacity of SARS-CoV-2 to infect and replicate in several common primate and human cell lines, including human adenocarcinoma cells (A549), human liver cells (HUH7.0), and human embryonic kidney cells (HEK-293T), in addition to Vero E6 and Vero CCL81 cells. We also examined an available big brown bat kidney cell line (EFK3B) for SARS-CoV-2 replication capacity. Each cell line was inoculated at high multiplicity of infection and examined 24 h postinfection … No CPE was observed in any of the cell lines except in Vero cells, which grew to >10⁷ PFU at 24 h postinfection. In contrast, HUH7.0 and 293T cells showed only modest viral replication, and A549 cells were incompatible with SARS-CoV-2 infection. These results are consistent with previous susceptibility findings for SARS-CoV and suggest other common culture systems, including MDCK, HeLa, HEP-2, MRC-5 cells, and embryonated eggs, are unlikely to support SARS-CoV-2 replication. In addition, SARS-CoV-2 did not replicate in bat EFK3B cells, which are susceptible to MERS-CoV. Together, the results indicate that SARS-CoV-2 maintains a similar profile to SARS-CoV in terms of susceptible cell lines.”

CPE stands for cytopathic effect or cytopathogenic effect and refers to structural changes in cells caused by viral invasion. No CPE was found in any of the human tissue cells, but only in the vero cells (animal cells, in this case monkey cells). The key takeaway from the above quote is that 2 cultures had only modest viral replication, the other tissue had none, and that other common human cultures are “unlikely to support SARS-CoV-2 replication” meaning SARS-CoV-2 will not infect them! So, even by the rules of their own game, SARS-CoV-2 is not an infectious agent for humans. Here’s Dr. Cowan’s analysis:

“What does this language actually mean, and why is it the most shocking statement of all from the virology community?  When virologists attempt to prove infection, they have three possible “hosts” or models on which they can test. The first is humans. Exposure to humans is generally not done for ethical reasons and has never been done with SARS-CoV-2 or any coronavirus.  The second possible host is animals. Forgetting for a moment that they never actually use purified virus when exposing animals, they do use solutions that they claim contain the virus. Exposure to animals has been done once with SARS-CoV-2, in an experiment that used mice. The researchers found that none of the wild (normal) mice got sick. In a group of genetically modified mice, a statistically insignificant number lost some fur. They experienced nothing like the illness called Covid 19.

The third method virologists use to prove infection and pathogenicity — the method they most rely on — is inoculation of solutions they say contain the virus onto a variety of tissue cultures. As I have pointed out many times, such inoculation has never been shown to kill (lyse) the tissue, unless the tissue is first starved and poisoned.

The shocking thing about the above quote is that using their own methods, the virologists found that solutions containing SARS-CoV-2 — even in high amounts — were NOT, I repeat NOT, infective to any of the three human tissue cultures they tested. In plain English, this means they proved, on their terms, that this “new coronavirus” is not infectious to human beings. It is ONLY infective to monkey kidney cells, and only then when you add two potent drugs (gentamicin and amphotericin), known to be toxic to kidneys, to the mix.

My friends, read this again and again. These virologists, published by the CDC, performed a clear proof, on their terms, showing that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is harmless to human beings. That is the only possible conclusion, but, unfortunately, this result is not even mentioned in their conclusion.”

These 2 COVID Admissions Sink the Official Narrative Even More

So there you have it: more scientific fraud in the form of these 2 COVID admissions, and yet more evidence showing there is no real virus, and whatever the ‘virus’ is, it certainly is not anything to be worried about if you are a human – which I guess you probably are if you’re reading this. These COVID admissions go to show that the truth is often hidden in plain sight, and that people in positions of power must always be carefully scrutinized. We must apply critical thinking to everything that comes from official sources.

Hat tip to Sally Fallon Morrell and Dr. Thomas Cowan of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

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This article was originally published in The Freedom Articles.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles, author of the book Cancer: The Lies, the Truth and the Solutions and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and Parler.

Sources

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0516_article

https://thefreedomarticles.com/sars-cov-2-stitched-together-frankenstein-virus/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/covid-19-umbrella-term-fake-pandemic-not-1-disease-cause/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/busted-11-covid-assumptions-based-on-fear-not-fact/

https://drtomcowan.com/only-poisoned-monkey-kidney-cells-grew-the-virus/

Featured image is from Dreamstime.com

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province to be eventually reunited with the mainland.

Since Jimmy Carter ended US recognition of Taiwan in 1979, one China has been official US policy.

What Beijing considers “nonnegotiable…an internationally recognized fact…no one can change,” Trump earlier said “everything” is on the table in bilateral relations with China.

Last month, reports indicated that Washington intends a major weapons sale to Taiwan.

China’s Foreign Ministry stressed that US arms sales to the “breakaway province” breaches the one-China principle both countries agreed to decades earlier.

Taking this step by the Trump regime is another blow to bilateral relations with Beijing — already more dismal than at any time in the past half century.

Weeks earlier, China’s official People’s Daily broadsheet accused the Trump regime of “ratchet(ing) up its anti-China campaign in the days leading up to the (November 3) election,” adding:

Continued “provocations on the Taiwan question have seriously damaged China-US relations, posed serious threat to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and may lead to a crisis of conflict in the region.”

On Wednesday, Trump’s State Department approved the sale of US sensors, missiles and artillery to Taiwan, a package worth around $1.8 billion.

According to Reuters, the White House is set to approve the sale of five weapons systems worth around $5 billion, including drones, anti-ship and cruise missiles.

A Taiwan Defense Ministry statement said the following:

“This arms sale shows that the United States attaches great importance to the strategic position of the Indo-Pacific region and the Taiwan Strait, and is actively assisting our country in strengthening our overall defense capabilities.”

The announced sale is the most significant US one to Taiwan since one-China became official US policy.

The latest announced sale to Taiwan is the 8th one since Trump took office in January 2017.

New York-based Taiwan Security Analysis Center director Mei Fu-hsing called the newly announced package “a breakthrough in US arms sales for Taiwan.”

According to Professor Alexander Huang Chieh-cheng, Twiwan will be the first foreign buyer to have AGM-84H cruise missiles, using F-16V fighter jets, adding:

“These systems have the range to be projected to targets along the Chinese coastal area and can perform counter-strike missions, but with limited numbers and complex targeting requirements, they are primarily for deterrence purposes.”

Supplying Taiwan with sophisticated US weapons is part of Washington’s escalated hostility toward Beijing.

On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian slammed the Trump regime for “seriously violating the one-China principle,” adding:

“This not only utterly damages the national interest of China, but also sends a wrong signal for Taiwan’s separatists, which the Chinese side resolutely opposes.”

US hardliners from both wings of its war party find new ways to alienate nations over prioritizing cooperative relations in pursuit of world peace and stability — notions they long ago abandoned.

A Final Comment

On Monday, Trump’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced the sale of around 100 Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems (anti-ship missiles) and related weapons to Taiwan.

The $2.37 billion sale throws more fuel on a growing fire of anti-China actions by the US — widening the breach between both countries.

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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.

“At the moment when the facts of the case were presented to her, this arbiter of justice freely chose to side with mistruths. Judge Coney Barrett’s responses are factually inaccurate, scientifically unsound, and dangerous.”

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More than 70 science journalists have signed an open letter warning that Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett‘s close ties to the fossil fuel industry and refusal to publicly acknowledge the established science behind human-caused climate change make her an enabler of “the ecological crisis of our times.”

First published in Rolling Stone on Sunday, the letter slams Barrett’s responses to basic climate questions during her confirmation hearings as “factually inaccurate, scientifically unsound, and dangerous.” As Common Dreams reported, the right-wing judge insisted she has “no firm views” on the climate crisis and, in later written responses, called the science of climate change “controversial.”

“It is frightening that a Supreme Court nominee—a position that is in essence one of the highest fact-checkers in the land—has bought into the same propaganda we have worked so hard to dispel,” reads the letter, which was signed by author and environmentalist Naomi Klein, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, and other prominent climate writers.

“How can Judge Coney Barrett rule on pending issues of climate change liability, regulation, finance, mitigation, equity, justice, and accountability if she fails to accept even the underlying premise of global warming? The answer is that she cannot,” continues the letter, which came hours before the Republican-controlled Senate cleared a procedural hurdle and paved the way for a final vote on Barrett’s confirmation Monday.

Having a justice who is hostile to science on the Supreme Court for decades to come is a supreme threat to the planet in this era of climate emergency.

Proud to sign this letter.https://t.co/yiZEKxlBOM

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 25, 2020

Below is the full letter and list of signatories:

We are science and climate journalists. We are researchers and weavers of information, creating a fabric that explains the work of scientists who themselves are working to describe our natural world and universe. We are published in the nation’s leading outlets, both large and small, including Scientific American, Nature, National Geographic, MIT Technology Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and many more. Over decades of reporting on the threats and now deadly and devastating harms of worsening climate change, we have succeeded in at least one respect. The vast majority of the world’s people, including those in the United States, not only acknowledge the scientific certainty of climate change, but also want action taken to address it.

We have succeeded because the science is clear, despite there being a massive well-orchestrated effort of propaganda, lies, and denial by the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations, including ExxonMobil and Koch Industries and fossil-fuel-backed institutes and think tanks. It is frightening that a Supreme Court nominee—a position that is in essence one of the highest fact-checkers in the land—has bought into the same propaganda we have worked so hard to dispel.

And it is facts—a word under repeated assault by the Trump administration, which nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett—that are at issue here. “I’m certainly not a scientist…I’ve read things about climate change. I would not say I have firm views on it,” Judge Coney Barrett told Sen. John Kennedy during the Senate confirmation hearings on October 13th.

The next day, Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked Judge Coney Barrett if she believed “human beings cause global warming.” She replied: “I don’t think I am competent to opine on what causes global warming or not. I don’t think that my views on global warming or climate change are relevant to the job I would do as a judge.”

When asked that same day by Sen. Kamala Harris if she accepts that “COVID-19 is infectious,” Coney Barrett said yes. When asked if “smoking causes cancer,” Coney Barrett said yes. But when asked if “climate change is happening, and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink,” Judge Coney Barrett said that while the previous topics are “completely uncontroversial,” climate change is instead, “a very contentious matter of public debate.” She continued: “I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial because that’s inconsistent with the judicial role, as I have explained.”

Judge Coney Barrett repeatedly refused to acknowledge the scientific certainty of climate change. This is an untenable position, particularly when the world’s leading climate scholars warned in 2018 that we have just 12 years to act to bring down global average temperature rise and avert the most dire predictions of the climate crisis.

At the moment when the facts of the case were presented to her, this arbiter of justice freely chose to side with mistruths. Judge Coney Barrett’s responses are factually inaccurate, scientifically unsound, and dangerous.

How can Judge Coney Barrett rule on pending issues of climate change liability, regulation, finance, mitigation, equity, justice, and accountability if she fails to accept even the underlying premise of global warming? The answer is that she cannot.

Judge Coney Barrett’s ties to the fossil fuel industry have already proved problematic, forcing recusal from cases involving Shell Oil entities related to her father’s work as a long-time attorney for the company. She may also need to recuse herself from future cases due to her father’s former position as chairman of the Subcommittee on Exploration and Production Law of the American Petroleum Institute—the nation’s leading fossil fuel lobby.

Climate change is already an increasingly dominant aspect of American life, and an issue of growing import in American law. On the Supreme Court docket is BP P.L.C v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore—a case that involves Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and other major oil companies, and could impact about a dozen U.S. states and localities suing Big Oil over its contribution to climate change.

Judge Coney Barrett says, “I’m certainly not a scientist,” but she does not need to be a scientist, rather she needs to have faith in science. Pope Francis, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, is an ardent supporter of action on climate change, releasing in 2015 the “Encyclical on Climate Change & Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home.” The Pope embraces hard science in order to keep close to his faith.

Judge Coney Barrett has displayed a profound inability to understand the ecological crisis of our times, and in so doing she enables it.

Signed,

Bill McKibben, journalist and author, the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College

Rebecca Solnit, author and journalist

Sonia Shah, science journalist and author

Jonathan Weiner, Pulitzer Prize winning author, science journalist, and professor at Columbia Journalism School

Jeff Goodell, climate journalist and author of The Water Will Come

Naomi Klein, journalist and author

Michelle Nijhuis, science journalist and author

Amy Westervelt, climate journalist

Rachel Ramirez, environmental justice reporter

Iris Crawford, climate justice journalist

Anoa Changa, movement and environmental justice journalist

Tiên Nguyễn, multimedia science journalist

Eric Holthaus, meteorologist, climate journalist at The Phoenix

Jenni Monet (Laguna Pueblo), climate affairs journalist and founder of Indigenously

Nina Lakhani, environmental justice reporter

Samir S. Patel, science journalist and editor

Clinton Parks, freelance science writer

Meehan Crist, writer in residence in biological sciences, Columbia University

Elizabeth Rush, science writer, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

Anne McClintock, climate journalist, photographer and author, professor of environmental humanities and writing at Princeton University

Ruth Hopkins (Oceti Sakowin, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), tribal attorney, Indigenous journalist

Wade Roush, science and technology journalist and author

Kim Stanley Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of climate science fiction, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards

Jason Mark, editor in chief, Sierra

Kate Aronoff, climate journalist

Richard Louv, journalist and author

Heather Smith, science journalist

Judith Lewis Mernit, California climate editor, Capital & Main

Madeline Ostrander, climate journalist

Julie Dermansky, multimedia environmental and social justice journalist

Kenneth Brower, environmental journalist and author

Alexander Zaitchik, science and political journalist and author

Hillary M. Rosner, science journalist and scholar in residence, University of Colorado

Wudan Yan, science journalist

Debra Atlas, environmental journalist and author

Rucha Chitnis, climate, environmental justice and human rights documentarian

Drew Costley, environmental justice reporter

Jonathan Thompson, environmental author and journalist

Carol Clouse, environmental journalist

Brian Kahn, climate journalist

Geoff Dembicki, climate journalist and author

Peter Fairley, energy and environment journalist

Nicholas Cunningham, energy reporter

Nina Berman, documentary photographer focusing on issues of climate and the environment, professor of journalism at Columbia University

Michele C. Hollow, freelance journalist

Ben Depp, documentary photographer, focusing on issues of climate and the environment

Virginia Hanusik, climate photographer

Philip Yam, science journalist and author

Maura R. O’Connor, science journalist and author

Chad J. Reich, audio and visual journalist covering energy and environment in rural communities

Steve Ross, environmental writer/editor, former Columbia environmental reporting professor

Starre Vartan, science journalist

Michael Snyder, climate photographer

Brandon Keim, science and nature journalist

Tom Athanasiou, climate equity writer and researcher

Hope Marcus, climate writer

Jocelyn C. Zuckerman, freelance journalist

Dana Drugmand, climate journalist

Tom Molanphy, climate journalist

Roxanne Szal, associate digital editor, Ms.Magazine

Dashka Slater, author and climate reporter

Jenn Emerling, documentary photographer, focusing on issues of climate and culture in the American West

Christine Heinrichs, science writer and author

Clayton Aldern, climate and environmental journalist

Karen Savage, climate journalist

Charlotte Dennett, author, investigative journalist, attorney

Carly Berlin, environmental reporter

Ben Ehrenreich, author and journalist

Ibby Caputo, science journalist

Lawrence Weschler, former New Yorker staff writer, environmental author, most recently with David Opdyke, of This Land: An Epic Postcard Mural on the Future of a Country in Ecological Peril.

Justin Nobel, science journalist

Antonia Juhasz, climate and energy journalist and author

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

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Featured image is an official White House photo

Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) welcomes the 50th ratification of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – reached late yesterday – which means the treaty will now enter in force on 22 January 2021.

The treaty bans the production, testing, possession and use of nuclear weapons by signatory nations, along with other activities that could enable or assist any other nation to acquire or use these weapons of mass destruction. The treaty now puts nuclear weapons in the same category as other weapons of mass destruction – i.e. biological and chemical weapons – which are banned by international treaty.

The treaty is the culmination of the efforts by campaigners led by ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) – 2017 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize – of which SGR is a partner organisation.

Dr Philip Webber, Chair of SGR, said,

“Since SGR’s forerunner Scientists Against Nuclear Arms was formed in 1981, we have argued that nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable threat to human civilisation and indeed all life on Earth. There are still currently 1,800 nuclear weapons deployed and ready to fire at short notice – and some of these deployed by the UK. We strongly urge the UK government and other nuclear nations to support this treaty.”

Dr Rebecca Johnson, peace activist and first president of ICAN, said

“The treaty exists now because of 75 years of humanitarian activism, from the ‘Hibakusha’ and indigenous survivors of nuclear weapons and testing, to the Aldermaston marchers and Greenham Common peace women who helped to ban nuclear testing and get US cruise missiles removed from British soil. Together we persuaded UN governments to bring this ground-breaking nuclear disarmament treaty into international humanitarian law.”

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Notes

1. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was agreed by the UN in 2017. Honduras became the 50th nation to ratify on 24th October. For more details on the treaty and the wider campaign, see: https://www.icanw.org/the_treaty

2. Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) is a UK membership organisation promoting responsible science and technology. Its 700 members include natural scientists, social scientists, engineers and others with expertise in peace and environmental issues. SGR has been a partner organisation of ICAN from soon after it was formed. For more information, see: https://www.sgr.org.uk/

3. Dr Philip Webber, a physicist by training, has written and campaigned about the threat from nuclear weapons for 40 years. He is an author of the 1982 book, London After the Bomb, as well as numerous SGR briefings and articles on the issue, including some used by ICAN in a range of international meetings in Norway, Mexico and Austria in the run up to the agreement of the treaty. For a list of SGR’s key outputs on nuclear weapons, see: https://www.sgr.org.uk/projects/nuclear-weapons-threat-main-outputs

4. For more details on the current numbers of nuclear weapons, see: Federation of American Scientists (2020). Status of World Nuclear Forces. https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/

In March, it was just a three-week lockdown, to flatten the curve so as not to overwhelm the NHS. The narrative has quickly evolved. It has progressed from what seemed a reasonable idea of keeping NHS bed space free based on the completely false Neil Fergusson prediction that hospitals would be overwhelmed by patients suffering from COVID19.

This never happened. Many weeks passed where face masks were not needed and then suddenly in July, long after the majority of supposed COVID19 deaths had occurred, face masks were made compulsory.

Indeed, the UK government advice from the likes of Chris Whitty and the World Health Organisation was that face masks were not effective in stopping the spread of COVID19 or in contracting it; science does not change that quick – anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

The result is that we have now fallen deep into a Covidian Cult, a totalitarian psychotic narrative that has little connection to reality or to the facts.

The opposition to official government narratives regarding Covid19 are well known. I will not bother again telling you what is already known or can be readily ascertained.

Suffice to say, one just needs to type into Google “The Great Barrington Declaration” or ACU2020, where one can read about the doctors, scientists and lawyers who are opposing multi-governmental COVID19 restrictions and laws of social distancing, lockdown, mandatory/coerced consent to vaccines, and mandatory face masks, amongst other things.

Their essential argument, contra the multi-government policy on COVID19, is that virus is not the danger we are being told it is; the data on COVID19 is clear: we do not need to lockdown society, wreck the economy, or frighten people into death as they are scared to leave home for fear of catching COVID19 or seek medical treatment for non-COVID19 illness, which has happened.

Specifically, many doctors and scientists argue that face masks are not protective and could be very harmful. Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, which 40,000 medical, public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed, said that the use of face masks are not supported in the scientific literature. There is no randomised data to indicate if they are effective in reducing the spread of COVID19.

Indeed, face masks have no effectiveness in the spread of influenza. This is backed up by the fact that social distancing and face masks have not made a difference on yearly rate of influenza deaths in the UK.

On the 15th October 2020 the stark reality that we are being led by a psychotic Covidian cult narrative became even more evident; Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, announced with great glee that couples marrying would no longer have to wear face masks when tying the knot. Of course, the Priest, Vicar, or Registrar etc conducting the ceremonies never had to wear a mask to conduct the marriage ceremony. What kind of political leader would impose on couples, who for all intent and purposes will be living together and spending the night together after the wedding, have to wear a mask during their wedding ceremony? Would a mask be required for the happy couple to consummate their marriage on their wedding night?

This ridiculous face mask rule imposed by Nicola Sturgeon shows quite clearly the dark side of Scottish politics. It is ridiculous because Nicola Sturgeon (as well as all the other MSP’s and Holyrood staff) has met many people from other households indoors in parliament (before and after face masks were imposed), whilst at the same time continually telling the masses that they cannot meet people from other households indoors. One rule for me, one for thee.

The paranoid fuelled COVID19 rules delivered by Sturgeon on a daily basis during the week and even reiterated on her twitter account on a frequent basis, and the blatant inconsistent and illogical nature of these rules, are not meant to console or comfort the masses. No, they are a deliberate attempt to disorientate and control the minds of the masses.

Cult leaders do this to their followers to short circuit their critical thinking. Cult leaders will also change the rules or the narrative at a whim for no apparent reason. Hence the change of now being able to get married without a face mask, even though the COVID19 restrictions are being tightened again all over the UK; it makes no sense, its not meant to, and the masses are meant to follow, not question and obey.

Cult leaders want to make the masses follow chaos.

This kind behaviour is equally applicable to the realm of BDSM (bondage, domination, sado-masochism) or the Master-Slave dialectic. In the world of BDSM, a master or mistress will impose illogical rules, but demand to be obeyed. As a slave in BDSM scenario might say, “Mistress is correct even when Mistress is wrong”.

This forms the basis for a human subject becoming an object, of becoming alienated from themselves. This logical structure underpins the dictates from politicians in relation to COVID19 restrictions. The blatant flaunting of the dictates by the likes of Catherine Calderwood, Neil Fergusson, Dominic Cummings, Margaret Ferrier (and the many more we have not heard about yet) is testament to the fact that they don’t really take this COVID19 restrictions all that seriously.

This abusive objectification and alienation are what totalitarians and cult leaders want to achieve and impose on their followers. Initiation rituals like mask wearing (especially when getting married) and social distancing, attack a person with terror, pain, humiliation and subjugation. Of course, anyone who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you that pointless rituals or behaviours are demanded by the abusive and sadistic abusive partner to wear the other person down.

As is so often found in cults and individuals in abusive relationships, the cult members or abused partner will even go to great lengths to defend the cult leader’s demands or the person who abuses them. In our current predicament, this is highly ironic as the Scottish government have recently introduced psychological abuse as a crime.

This abusive dialectic that is playing out between the UK government/Scottish government/devolved assemblies and the masses might explain why so many people cannot perceive the totalitarianism that is being inflicted upon them right in front of them, or right on their faces in the guise of masks and up till recently masked up in front of the alter getting married.

The problem we have is this: people generally find it very difficult to recognise the delusional nature of a totalitarian master narrative. One case in point was Nazi Germany; cognitive dissonance was a prevalent characteristic of people during these times. People who cannot see the totalitarian moves made upon them are not ignorant or unintelligent; they have been initiated into a cult through the methods of initiation, chaos, confusion and the short circuiting of critical thinking.

We are being initiated and conditioned for a future way of life where there will be no return to normality, and it has nothing to do with a virus. This is why children are being socially distanced in schools, are made to wear masks in certain contexts, are treated like bio-hazards by their teachers and are frightened half to death by being made to obsessively wash their hands multiple times a day with an abrasive hand sanitiser.

Drawing on psychoanalytic thought, such directives pushed onto children will ensure that many children will grow up to be socially anxious and fearful of social interaction. It begs belief that the Adverse Childhood Experiences “movement” (ACEs) in Scotland are utterly silent about the harms being committed upon children as a result of these scientifically challengeable COVID19 restrictions and rules.

As the Centre for Disease Control state, the survival rate estimates for people aged 0-19 years for COVID19 is 99.997%, 20-49 years is 99.98%, 50-69 years 99.5%, and 70 years+ 94.6% respectively. And now we have a casedemic where the rates of false positives (89%-94% of positives potentially false) and the PCR test does not even test for COVID19 (See ACU, 2020). Of course, the politicians ignore the fact that the PCR test was never intended to be a diagnostic instrument to be used to inform public health policy, never mind mandate it.

The culture of deindividuation that the totalitarian abusive cult-like rituals of social distancing, mask wearing and not being able to meet people freely is also primed to be ramped up even further; Nicola Sturgeon has stated that she is considering face masks to be compulsory even in outside spaces-seven months into this COVID19 nightmare-another illogical and ridiculous idea with no basis in science.

We are now entering a precarious tipping point; not from the virus, but from deindividuated members of the cult slavishly following these new rules and not challenging the wearing of masks outside. No doubt the “nudging” from the Government will work a treat on the masses

This is because the UK and Scottish governments are manipulating, coercing and frightening us into following the rules and shaming us when we don’t. The UK and Scottish Governments are using applied behavioural psychology, breaking the ethical guidelines for psychologists, to deliberately ramp up fear in the population. A group of psychologists called Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) of SAGE have been tasked with advising the UK and Scottish Governments how to get people to adhere to COVID 19 restrictions.

From their document which is freely available on the UK Government website, it is written:

A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.”

And:

The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

The psychologists of SPI-B and the UK government knew fear alone would not be enough. Therefore, SPI-B suggested to government to use and promote social approval for desired behaviours, to consider enacting legislation to compel required behaviours, and to consider the use of social disapproval for failure to comply.

They have used the Mainstream Media and Social media, along with false fact-checking and censorship to get their message across and it has been working.

The tactics of the SPI-B psychologists informing UK and Scottish Governments’ policies on the COVID19 response are in my opinion contrary to the ethical and practice guidelines of The British Psychological Society (BPS); the psychology equivalent of the Hippocratic oath for medicine.

The mainstream media are silent on these unethical practices of deliberately ramping up people’s sense of personal threat, creating a culture of feeling shame to follow COVID19 regulations and encouraging people to shame others for not following regulations. From the reports of several mental health charities, UK and Scottish Government reports, mental ill-health is in a crisis because of the COVID19 response/measures.

Suicide risk factors have undoubtedly been hugely multiplied (house repossessions, unemployment, poverty and stress etc); when the official figures are completed, I have no doubt that there will have been, and there will be to come, many suicides because of the COVID19 lockdown and associated measures.

Our political leaders, despite their lip service to mental health, are aware of the mental health and suicide crisis that now engulfs us, yet they proceed onwards with the COVID19 agenda regardless complicit in more psychological abuse being foisted upon people, knowing full well that this will cause untold misery.

Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital (enforced incarceration for political dissidents) described well our current predicament:

The peculiar features of the Soviet political system, the Communist ideology, the uncertainties and difficulties of the science of psychiatry, the labyrinths of the human conscience-all these have weirdly woven themselves together to create a monstrous phenomenon, the use of medicine against man.”
Forward from Russia’s political hospitals, 1977 (S. Bloch and P. Reddaway) by Vladimir Bukovsky.

Like the Soviet Union today the monstrous phenomenon is again the use of science and medicine against the masses by many Governments in the battle against COVID19. Not only do our political leaders want to “keep us safe until a vaccine” but they seem to want to destroy the economy, create huge unemployment and destroy businesses. They also want to monitor our every move and impose restrictions on work, travel and social and family life.

There will be no end to this nightmare; there never is an end when one is in an abusive relationship. The goalposts always keep moving. The victim is broken down until they can offer no resistance.

Indeed, Bill Gates recently indicated that even if we get a vaccine for COVID19, there will be no return to normal as it will probably take a second or third generation vaccine to get us back to normal. Of course, we know full well, when we get that second or third generation vaccine, it will not herald a return to the old normal.

Unfortunately, at the moment there is not enough people (especially politicians and mainstream media journalists) with the necessary courage to call out the tyranny and call out the abuser. Historically this has also been a problem; politically and within an abusive context (e.g., the victim finds great difficulty calling out their abuser). In a critical remark and warning to the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Harvard address in 1973:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations…..Should one (have to) point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

Is this Scotland’s beginning of the end? Will the masses start to wake up to the dictatorial and totalitarian measures? Only time will tell. It might be too late. If it is the end, just don’t say you didn’t see it coming or nobody told you.

There is hope. We can learn from history and enact that famous dictum after World War II; it should never happen again. Perhaps our politicians should mediate upon the Nuremberg Code of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime and UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights Article 6.

The Nuremberg Code and UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights Article 6 make for sobering reading when it comes to governmental mandates or ideas in the pipeline regarding COVID19.

Just think of face masks (especially for children), social distancing, travel restrictions, work restrictions, immunity passports and ideas about giving people a rushed out unlicensed vaccine for COVID19 (which will be indemnified) which has not been assessed for the long-term side effects.

The cult-like nature of the Brave New Normal that is COVID19 is insidiously pervading more and more aspects of our lives, with seemingly less and less science to back it up, and curiously being seen by those in power as an opportunity to reshape our society, not for our good, but for the good of those in power.

Perhaps we should all think about what all this means for us, our children, our grandchildren and democracy in the UK and wider world.

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Dr Bruce Scott is a Psychoanalyst in Edinburgh/Scottish Borders who trained with the Philadelphia Association, London. He is the author of Testimony of Experience: Docta Ignorantia and the Philadelphia Association Communities (2014) and a contributor to RD Laing: 50 Years since the Divided Self (2012, edited by Theodor Itten and Courtenay Young), both published by PCCS Books Ltd. He is also the English language Edition Editor of Psychotherapy with life: intensive therapeutic life, by Alexander Alexeychick (2019), Published by Angelika Belolipetskaya. He can be reached through his website, twitter, youtube and bitchute.

Amid naval patrols, live military drills, island building, trade wars and diplomatic breakdown, drones are making an increasing impact on the security situation in the South China Sea and the relationship between China and the US.  Smaller nations in the region are also acquiring further reaching surveillance UAVs, while a number of states are looking to bring armed drones in to service over the next few years.

A new report from Drone Wars UK, Contested Sea, Crowded Sky, looks at the steady acquisition of drones by smaller states in South East Asia and their deployments in the South and East China Seas that are contributing to destabilisation in the region and deteriorating relations between China and the US.

Just last week, Congress received notification from The Whitehouse of a proposed sale of a maritime version of the Reaper drone to Taiwan, while US drone crews have been recently training for Reaper operations in the pacific region (“With an Eye on China, Reaper Drones Train for Maritime War”) as part of the ‘pivot away from the Middle East’.  Both incidents have greatly angered China.  Caught in a super-power stand-off, smaller states in the region also have security concerns regarding contested island chains, natural resources under the sea bed and access to fishing waters. China claims many of the small island chains but most are also claimed by several smaller states. The tensions over ownership and resources are contributing to military build-up in the South and East China seas. As well as upgrading jets and naval vessels, states are investing in longer range, more persistent unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to enhance security.

For new weapons systems, South East Asian states have primarily looked to Israel, China and the US – the major drone exporters – for the latest surveillance technology and some are also investing heavily in their own capabilities, in order to acquire armed systems.

Currently, it is only China that has the capacity to operate armed drones in the region, although Indonesia has purchased Chinese CH-4B drones and is designing their own version, the MALE Elang Hitam (Black Eagle), which the manufacturers hope will be fully certified by 2024. Thailand too, are working towards an armed drone – an upgraded version of the SkyScouttactical drone.

Unarmed surveillance drones are also adding to air and maritime capabilities. The report covers the recent US deal with four South East Asian nations for Scan Eagle 2 drones, worth $47mn. Meanwhile, Taiwan, has fielded a tactical drone, the Chung Shyang 2 in 2019 for coastal monitoring.

There are also a growing number of larger drones in service, primarily Israeli exports. Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines have signed deals for or have in service Heron and Hermes models respectively. The US has also sanctioned the export of Northrop Grumman’s HALE Global Hawk to Japan and South Korea, while Singapore is exploring a future Global Hawk purchase.

The report also covers China’s drone use in South and East China Sea. Having first escalated tensions with Japan in 2013 in the East China Sea by flying the BZK-005 in contested airspace over the Senkaku/Daioyu islands, there is now a new drone programme with the Ministry of Natural Resources that observers think may be connected to the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Either way, its gives Chinese authorities much more surveillance capacity in disputed areas where neighbouring states are also ramping up security and surveillance.

Drones make up only part of this military build-up in the South and East China Seas, where island and peninsular nations rely on other aircraft and naval vessels for security. However, drones are increasingly favoured for their wide-ranging surveillance capabilities, particularly models that can be launched from frigates, such as the Scan Eagle. China’s project with the Ministry of Natural Resources, noted above, will allow it specifically to collect surveillance from around disputed islets and reefs. And if the Japanese deal with the US for Global Hawk goes ahead, for example, this will give Japanese defence forces wide ranging and persistent surveillance potentially over disputed East China Sea territories like the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

Report author Joanna Frew discusses drone proliferation and the South China Sea

The problem with an increasing array of drones over these contested seas are that, although mostly unarmed (for now), they can enhance targeting capacity, can take more risks than manned aircraft and are thus more likely to be used in contested air space. However, this is not a region where state authority has broken down allowing a ‘permissive’ airspace – such as in Libya or Afghanistan and Somalia. Rather, missteps or overreach could result in serious repercussions from neighbouring states.

As the proliferation of drones continues without any international agreements on standards for use, the increasing of addition of drones in the South and East Asian region highlights how another region is succumbing to a drone race to retain a strategic advantage over neighbours and adversaries.  The reality is that drones lower the threshold for the use of force and make armed conflict more likely. Adding this dangerous technology into this highly militarised zone could fan the flames of any smouldering conflict and turn it into a conflagration.

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First published August 4, 2020

1. Studies on the effectiveness of face masks

So far, most studies found little to no evidence for the effectiveness of cloth face masks in the general population, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control.

1. A May 2020 meta-study on pandemic influenza published by the US CDC found that face masks had no effect, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control.
2. A July 2020 review by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medince found that there is no evidence for the effectiveness of cloth masks against virus infection or transmission.
3. A Covid-19 cross-country study by the University of East Anglia came to the conclusion that a mask requirement was of no benefit and could even increase the risk of infection.
4. An April 2020 review by two US professors in respiratory and infectious disease from the University of Illinois concluded that face masks have no effect in everyday life, neither as self-protection nor to protect third parties (so-called source control).
5. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine from May 2020 came to the conclusion that cloth face masks offer little to no protection in everyday life.
6. A July 2020 study by Japanese researchers found that cloth masks “offer zero protection against coronavirus” due to their large pore size and generally poor fit.
7. A 2015 study in the British Medical Journal BMJ Open found that cloth masks were penetrated by 97% of particles and may increase infection risk by retaining moisture or repeated use.

Additional aspects:

Japan, despite its widespread use of face masks, experienced its most recent influenza epidemic with more than 5 million people falling ill just one year ago, in January and February 2019. However, unlike SARS-2, the influenza virus is transmitted by children, too.

Several countries and states that introduced mandatory face masks on public transport and in shops in early summer, such as California and Argentinia, nevertheless saw a strong increase in infections from July onwards, indicating a low effectiveness of mask policies.

There is increasing evidence that SARS-2 is transmitted, at least indoors, not only by droplets but also by smaller aerosols. However, due to their large pore size, cloth masks cannot filter out aerosols.

The WHO admitted to the BBC that its June 2020 mask policy update was due not to new evidence but “political lobbying”:

“We had been told by various sources WHO committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks but they recommended them due to political lobbying. This point was put to WHO who did not deny.” (Deborah Cohen, BBC Medical Corresponent).

2. Studies claiming face masks are effective

Some recent studies argued that cloth face masks are indeed effective against the new coronavirus and could at least prevent the infection of other people. However, most of these studies suffer from poor methodology and sometimes show the opposite of what they claim.

Typically, these studies ignore the effect of other measures, the natural development of infection numbers, changes in test activity, or they compare countries with very different conditions.

An overview:

1. A German study claimed that the introduction of compulsory masks in German cities had led to a decrease in infections. But the data does not support this: in some cities there was no change, in others a decrease, in others an increase in infections (see graph below). The city of Jena was an ‘exception’ only because it simultaneously introduced the strictest quarantine rules in Germany, but the study did not mention this.
2. A study in the journal PNAS claimed that masks had led to a decrease in infections in three hotspots (including New York City). This did not take into account the natural decrease in infections and other measures. The study was so flawed that over 40 scientists recommended that the study be withdrawn.
3. A US study claimed that mandatory masks had led to a decrease in infections in 15 states. The study did not take into account that the incidence of infection was already declining in most states at that time. A comparison with other states was not made.
4. A Canadian study claimed that countries with mandatory masks had fewer deaths than countries without mandatory masks. But the study compared African, Latin American, Asian and Eastern European countries with very different infection rates and population structures.
5. A much-cited meta-study in the journal Lancet claimed that masks “could” lead to a reduction in the risk of infection, but the studies considered mainly hospitals (Sars-1), medical (not cloth) masks, and the strength of the evidence was reported as “low”.

Mandatory masks in German cities: no relevant impact. (IZA 2020)

On October 23, Sudan became the third Arab state to normalize relations with Israel.

The UAE in August and Bahrain last month took this step — what Hamas called “a stab in the back of the Palestinian cause…serv(ing) only the Israeli occupation and crimes.”

A Palestinian Authority (PA) statement also slammed what it called surrendering to Israeli occupation and annexation of West Bank territory.

Following Sudan’s announced normalization with Israel, the PA “condemn(ed) and reject(ed)” it.

Hamas called on the Sudanese people to “fight all forms of normalization and have nothing to do with the criminal enemy.”

The Trump regime arranged the deal through typical US pressure tactics and a benefit at a stiff price handed to Sudan’s transitional government.

Khartoum was delisted from the State Department’s state sponsors of terrorism list.

It’s comprised of nations unwilling to sell their soul to the US and its imperial allies.

Currently, they include North Korea, Iran and Syria — nonbelligerent states threatening no one.

In stark contrast, the US, other NATO countries, Israel, and their imperial partners threaten humanity by their endless wars and other hostile actions.

Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and chairman of the country’s transitional Sovereignty Council Abdel Fattah al-Burhan agreed to bow to the will of Washington and Tel Aviv.

They agreed to pay $335 million in compensation for two 1998 truck bomb explosions at US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya — causing large numbers of deaths and injuries, few US citizens harmed.

When the incidents occurred, US envoys were not in the facilities.

Weeks before both incidents, Israeli intelligence told US embassy officials to ignore information suggesting a security threat to both facilities.

Security cameras were conveniently turned off. Israeli special forces and Mossad agents were first on the scene after these incidents.

At the time, bin Laden and al-Qaeda were accused of the bombings.

Bin Laden was a CIA asset, al-Qaeda a US creation. If responsible for what happened, they were acting on orders from Washington.

No evidence links Sudan to what either the US, Israel, or regimes in both countries were responsible for.

The US falsely accused bin Laden of all sorts of incidents, including 9/11, the mother of all state-sponsored false flags he had nothing to do with.

According to retired Italian Carabinieri officer Capt. Aurelio dell Acqua at the time, a diplomatic security expert:

“We don’t know yet who was at the wheel of those car bombs. But we do know that the long fuse leading to these terrorist flare-ups was lit in Israel.”

An unnamed Gulf nation official accused Israel of “staging a new regional crisis.”

The US Dar es Salaam embassy earlier was an Israeli compound.

Following a call from Trump and Netanyahu with Hamdok and Burham, a pre-drafted statement said the following:

Sudanese “leaders agreed to the normalization of relations between (their country) and Israel and to end the state of belligerence between their nations,” adding:

They “agreed to begin economic and trade relations, with an initial focus on agriculture.”

They “also agreed that delegations would meet in the coming weeks to negotiate agreements of cooperation in those areas as well as in agriculture technology, aviation, migration issues and other areas for the benefit of the two peoples.”

“The United States will take steps to restore Sudan’s sovereign immunity and to engage its international partners to reduce Sudan’s debt burdens.”

“The United States and Israel also commit to working with their partners to support the people of Sudan in strengthening their democracy (sic), improving food security, countering terrorism and extremism and tapping into their economic potential.”

It’s unclear what the US and Israel will do for Sudan, other than exploiting the country and its people.

The unacceptable deal hasn’t gone down well in Khartoum.

On Sunday, Sudanese parties rejected normalization with Israel, some officials saying they’ll form an opposition bloc against the deal they reject.

Street protests occurred over the weekend in Khartoum.

Sudan’s Popular Congress Party said the following:

“We see that our people, who are being systematically isolated and marginalized from secret deals, are not bound by the normalization agreement.”

“Our people will abide by their historical positions and work through a broad front to resist normalization and maintain our support for the Palestinian people in order for them to obtain all their legitimate rights.”

Former Sudanese Prime Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi denounced the deal, saying:

It “contradicts the Sudanese national law…and contributes to the elimination of the peace project in the Middle East and to preparing for the ignition of a new war.”

He withdrew from a state-sponsored religious conference on Saturday in protest.

Popular Congress Party leader Kamal Omar said “(t)his transitional government hijacked the Sudanese position to satisfy regional and international intelligence agencies.”

Sudanese Baath Party leader Muhammad Wadaa warned that he and other parties involved in the transitional government will withdraw support if official Sudanese normalization with Israel occurs.

Protesters in Khartoum chanted “no peace, no negotiation, no reconciliation with the occupying entity,” expressing support for Palestinians.

A statement by Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the following:

“Pay enough ransom, close your eyes on the crimes against Palestinians, then you’ll be taken off the so-called ‘terrorism’ blacklist.”

“Obviously the list is as phony as the US fight against terrorism. Shameful!”

A Final Comment

Israel’s creation and establishment of the CIA happened around the same time in the late 1940s.

The spy agencies of both countries have a long history of state-sponsored criminality.

It’s unsurprising that Israel’s dirty hands may have been all over the 1998 US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.

Maybe Mossad and the CIA partnered in what happened.

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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.

In his latest book, ‘This Land – The Story of a Movement’ (Penguin, ebook version, 2020), The Guardian’s Owen Jones charts the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn.

Jones depicts Corbyn as a ‘scruffy,’ (p.8), ‘unkempt’ (p.50), thoroughly shambolic backbench MP, ‘the most unlikely’ (p.50) of contenders for the Labour leadership. In May 2015, Corbyn reluctantly dipped his toe in the water of the leadership contest, saying: ‘You better make fucking sure I don’t get elected’ (p.54), only to be swept away on a tide of popular support.

As this suggests, Jones argues that while Corbyn was indeed relentlessly savaged by forces both inside and outside the Labour Party – including the ‘mainstream’ media, with ‘profound hostility’ from ‘the publicly funded, professedly impartial’ BBC (p.68) – he was out of his depth, his team making constant, massive mistakes from which all progressives must learn. It is not at all inevitable, says Jones, that future leftist movements need suffer the same fate.

Much of this analysis is interesting and useful; Jones interviewed 170 insiders closest to the action, ‘people at the top of the Labour Party right down to grassroots activists’, who supply important insights on key events.

Jones portrays himself as someone who fundamentally agrees with much that motivated Corbyn, emphasising that his disagreement lies in tactics and strategy. But, once again, we note a remarkable pattern of omissions in the work of Jones, an ostensibly outspoken, unconstrained leftist, and by his serious misreading of the antisemitism furore that engulfed Corbyn.

Jones recognises that people loved Corbyn because, unusually for a UK politician, he was made of flesh rather than PR plastic; he told the truth:

‘While other contenders refused to give direct answers to questions, and were caught squirming between their principles and their political compromises, he spoke with immediacy – sometimes rambling, always authentic, always passionate.’ (p.57)

Ironically, Jones does plenty of his own ‘squirming’ between ‘principles’ and ‘political compromises’ as he airbrushes out of existence facts, views and voices that are consistently and conspicuously Guardian-unfriendly. He writes:

‘Corbynism… was woven together from many disparate strands: from people who marched against the Iraq war in 2003’ to people hit by the ‘trebling of college tuition fees in 2010’ and ‘the millions more frightened by a looming climate emergency’. (p.10)

Above all, of course, ‘Corbyn’s entire career had been devoted to foreign affairs’. (p.29) Andrew Murray of the union, Unite commented: ‘Corbyn was very prominent in the anti-war movement.’ (p.33)

Thus, deep popular outrage at the Iraq war is key in understanding Corbyn’s popularity. And yet, in discussing this central feature of the movement, Jones makes no mention at all of Julian Assange (or WikiLeaks), of Noam Chomsky, or John Pilger – the most important anti-war voices – exactly as he made no mention of them in his previous book, ‘The Establishment’, published in 2014.

Jones has not mentioned Assange in his Guardian column in the last twelve months. Indeed, his sole substantive mention came in April 2019.

Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015, but Jones mentions NATO’s catastrophic, 2011 war on Libya, opposed by Corbyn, once in passing, noting merely that Labour MP Chris Williamson had ‘supported the war in Libya’. (p.251)

Jones’ previous book, ‘The Establishment’, published three years after NATO’s assault, similarly granted ‘Libya’ a single mention, noting that UK voters were ‘Weary of being dragged by their rulers into disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya…’. (Jones, ‘The Establishment – And how they get away with it’, Penguin, ebook version, 2014, p.275. See our discussion.)

The fact that the US-UK assault resulted in mass death, ethnic cleansing, mass displacement for millions of Libyans and the destruction of the entire country was not mentioned in either book.

Elsewhere, Jones has been more forthright. In February 2011, with NATO ‘intervention’ clearly looming, he tweeted:

‘I hope it’s game over for Gaddafi. A savage dictator once tragically embraced by me on left + lately western governments and oil companies.’ (Jones, Twitter, 20 February 2011)

On 20 March 2011, one day after NATO bombing had begun, like someone writing for the ‘Soaraway Sun’, Jones commented:

‘Let’s be clear. Other than a few nutters, we all want Gaddafi overthrown, dead or alive.’ (Jones, ‘The case against bombing Libya’, Left Futures, March 2011)

Similarly, in 2012, Jones reacted to news of the killings of Syrian ministers in a bomb explosion with:

‘Adios, Assad (I hope).’ (Jones, Twitter, 18 July 2012)

After all, Jones tweeted, ‘this is a popular uprising, not arriving on the back of western cruise missiles, tanks and bullets’. (Jones, Twitter, 18 July 2012)

As was very obvious then and indisputable now, Jones was badly mistaken – the West, directly and via regional allies, played a massive role in the violence. The New York Times reported that the US had become embroiled in a dirty war in Syria that constituted ‘one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A’, running to ‘more than $1 billion over the life of the program’. (Mark Mazzetti, Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt, ‘Behind the sudden death of a $1 billion secret C.I.A. war in Syria’, New York Times, 2 August 2017)

As though tweeting from the NATO playbook, the same Guardian columnist now analysing the peace movement supporting Corbyn, wrote:

‘I’m promoting the overthrow of illegitimate and brutal dictatorships by their own people to establish democracies.’ (Jones, Twitter, 18 July 2012)

In ‘This Land’, Jones mentions Saudi Arabia’s disastrous war in famine-stricken Yemen exactly once, again in passing:

‘…Labour MPs refused to back Corbyn’s call for a UN investigation into alleged Saudi war crimes in Yemen’. (p.81)

There is no mention of the UK’s support for these crimes since 2011, no discussion of the horrors the UK has inflicted (See our discussion). The word ‘Yemen’ was unmentioned in Jones’ previous book in 2014. To his credit, he has written several Guardian pieces on the war in Yemen, the most recent in 2018.

Gaza was mentioned once, in passing, in Jones’ previous book and three times, in passing, in ‘This Land’. Our media database search found that, since he joined the Guardian in March 2014, Jones has made three substantive mentions of Gaza, in 2014 (a philosophical piece focusing on ‘How the occupation of Gaza corrupts the occupier’, with few facts about the situation in Gaza) a brief piece here, and one in 2018 (with a single paragraph on Gaza).

‘This Land’ simply ignores the Western propaganda wars on Iran and Venezuela.

Remarkably, while recognising the role of climate fears in the rise of Corbyn and discussing the UK’s ‘Climate Camp’ in the late 2000s, Jones makes no mention of Extinction Rebellion or of Greta Thunberg, both strongly supported by Corbyn, further fuelling popular support for his cause.

There is no mention of the Guardian’s lead role in destroying Corbyn; although, ironically, Jones does celebrate the fact that, ‘I wrote the first pro-Corbyn column to appear in the mainstream media: a Guardian piece’. (p.53)

The silence is unsurprising. In 2017, Jones tweeted:

‘I’m barred from criticising colleagues in my column.’ (Jones, Twitter, 19 November 2017)

He wasn’t joking:

‘Guardian colleagues aren’t supposed to have these public spats…’

Of his own opposition to Corbyn, in the Guardian and elsewhere, Jones writes:

‘Although I voted for him again in 2016, I had a period of disillusionment before the [June 2017] general election – something which still riles his most ardent supporters.’ (p.14)

In fact, the ‘period of disillusionment’ was extensive and began long before the 2017 election. In July 2016, fully one year earlier, Jones wrote:

‘As Jeremy Corbyn is surrounded by cheering crowds, Labour generally, and the left specifically, are teetering on the edge of looming calamity.’

He added:

‘As things stand, all the evidence suggests that Labour — and the left as a whole — is on the cusp of a total disaster. Many of you won’t thank me now. But what will you say when you see the exit poll at the next general election and Labour is set to be wiped out as a political force?’

Similar comments followed in February, March and April 2017. For example:

‘My passionate and sincere view is Jeremy Corbyn should stand down as soon as possible in exchange for another left-wing MP being allowed to stand on for leadership in his place: all to stop both Labour and the left imploding, which is what is currently on the cards.’ (Jones: ‘“I don’t enjoy protesting – I do it because the stakes are so high”’, Evening Standard, 3 February 2017)

Blaming The Victim – The Great, Fake Antisemitism Scandal

Time and again, Jones criticises the Corbyn leadership for failing to deal adequately with antisemitism claims: ‘there was no coherent strategy within the leader’s office on how to tackle claims of antisemitism’. (p.227)

While Jones accepts that there were ‘bad-faith actors opposed to Corbyn’s policies’, his emphasis is focused elsewhere: ‘ultimately there were severe and repeated errors by the leadership, which resulted from those two characteristic failings: a lack of both strategy and emotional intelligence’. (p.254)

Remarkably, Jones concludes that the crisis ‘need never have happened’. (p.254)

This is nonsense. The crisis had to happen because sufficiently powerful forces within the Labour Party and Conservative Party, and across the corporate media ‘spectrum’, were determined to make it happen.

Compare Jones’ account with that of Norman Finkelstein, whose mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek concentration camp and two slave labour camps. Finkelstein’s father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp. In an interview with RT in May, Finkelstein commented:

‘Corbyn, he did not present a threat only to Israel and Israel’s supporters, he posed a threat to the whole British elite. Across the board, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, they all joined in the new anti-semitism campaign. Now that’s unprecedented – the entire British elite, during this whole completely contrived, fabricated, absurd and obscene assault on this alleged Labour anti-semitism, of which there is exactly zero evidence, zero.’

He added:

‘Yeah, there’s some fringe members of Labour who, you know, play the anti-semitic [interrupted by interviewer]… I read the polls, I read the data – it hovers between six and eight per cent are hardened anti-semites in British society. It’s nothing! Yeah, so there are a few crazies, but there’s no “institutionalised” anti-semitism in the British Labour Party. There’s no threat of anti-semitism in British society. I’ve read all the data, I’ve studied it closely. It just doesn’t exist. It’s all being designed and manipulated… I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, as you know, but this is a conspiracy.’

Jones accepts that ‘the former leadership and the vast majority of Labour’s membership abhor antisemitism’, arguing that the problem lay with a ‘small minority’. (p.254) But Jones does not cite an October 2016 report by the Commons home affairs committee, which found:

‘Despite significant press and public attention on the Labour Party, and a number of revelations regarding inappropriate social media content, there exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party.’

And he does not cite a September 2017 report by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which found:

‘Levels of antisemitism among those on the left-wing of the political spectrum, including the far-left, are indistinguishable from those found in the general population… The most antisemitic group on the political spectrum consists of those who identify as very right-wing: the presence of antisemitic attitudes in this group is 2 to 4 times higher compared to the general population.’

Instead, Jones pours scorn on leftists who ‘still were in denial, claiming that the antisemitism crisis had been entirely manufactured by a media “out to get” Corbyn…’ (p.254)

Rational commentators have always accepted that antisemitism exists within the Labour Party. The point is that making that ugly reality a ‘crisis’ specifically for Labour, rather than for other parties and other sectors of society, and above all making it a ‘crisis’ for Corbyn – reviled as a dangerous antisemite – was entirely manufactured.

Jones cites ‘the passionately anti-Corbyn editor of the Jewish Chronicle’, Stephen Pollard, who grotesquely claimed to perceive ‘nudge, nudge’ (p.253) antisemitism in one of Corbyn’s self-evidently anti-capitalist critiques. Such outlandish claims, Jones notes, only encouraged leftists to believe the whole furore was a smear campaign:

‘It was a vicious circle, and it turned to nobody’s benefit – least of all Corbyn’s, while causing more hurt and distress to Jewish people.’ (p.253, our emphasis)

But this is absurd. Quite obviously, the smear campaign was to the very real benefit of the political and media forces trying to crush Corbyn’s version of socialism.

The claims targeting Corbyn were fake and they depended on ignoring as non-existent a mountain of evidence indicating that Corbyn is a passionate, committed and very active anti-racist. What is so outrageous is that this was accepted by essentially everyone before Corbyn stood for the leadership in 2015. As Jones comments:

‘Anti-racism is core to Corbyn’s sense of identity. He believes, proudly, that he has fought oppression all his life, so being labelled a racist was a cause of profound personal trauma to him.’ (p.228)

Corbyn’s chief of staff, Karie Murphy, commented on the impact of the smear campaign:

‘This was a man who was beyond broken-hearted, that, as a proud antiracist campaigner, he was being accused of racism. So he was paralysed… It wasn’t true – no one will convince me that he has an antisemitic bone in his body…’ (p.242)

Genuine racists are not left ‘beyond broken-hearted’ by claims that they are racist. They are not ‘paralysed’ by a sense of injustice and grief.

Jones comments on Corbyn: ‘no one close to him believes for a moment that he would ever willingly associate with a Holocaust denier’. (p.222) And Corbyn ‘could point to an extensive record opposing antisemitism and showing pro-Jewish solidarity’ (p.221). Jones lists some of Corbyn’s efforts in this regard: helping to organise a counter-mobilisation to a demonstration by National Front fascists in the so-called Battle of Wood Green in 1977; taking part in a campaign to save a Jewish cemetery from being sold off to property developers in 1987, calling on the British government to settle Yemeni Jewish refugees in 2010.

Before the sheer intensity of propaganda caused most commentators to find truth in lies, Corbyn’s deep-rooted opposition to racism was simply unquestioned. Chris Mullin, who did not vote for Corbyn to either become or remain leader, commented:

‘I’ve always liked him as long as I’ve known him. He’s a thoroughly decent human being, almost a saintly man.’ (p.30)

As Jones writes of Corbyn at the time he stood for the leadership in 2015:

‘Corbyn had no personal enemies. Everyone liked him. Relentlessly cheerful, endlessly generous with his opponents, he exuded integrity.’ (pp.50-51)

Despite this, Jones says of the antisemitism crisis:

‘The damage to Corbyn’s Labour was grievous. The crisis led to months of media coverage.’ (p.254)

In fact, the media coverage was the crisis! It was this real crisis that was the cause of the ‘crisis’. The antisemitism ‘crisis’ was just one more fabrication by an awesomely corrupt and immoral media system willing to throw, not just the kitchen sink, but – God help us! – Nazi gas chambers at Corbyn.

The key to understanding the anti-semitism ‘scandal’ was explained by Jones himself:

‘Anybody who knows anything about the British press knows that it is almost unique in the Western world for its level of commitment to aggressively defending and furthering right-wing partisan politics… the media onslaught that greeted his [Corbyn’s] leadership win in 2015 was as predictable as it was unrelentingly hostile.’ (p.67)

Jones lists only a few of the endlessly fabricated stories used to smear Corbyn: he supposedly planned to ‘abolish’ the army, refused to bow his head on Remembrance Day, danced happily on Remembrance Day, didn’t sing the national anthem loudly enough, and so on. The London School of Economics reported in 2016:

‘the British press systematically delegitimised Jeremy Corbyn as a political leader’ through a ‘process of vilification that went beyond the normal limits of fair debate and disagreement in a democracy’. (p.68)

Corbyn’s great anti-semitism ‘scandal’ was a non-story, a fabricated non-event, a Soviet-style propaganda smear. Sufficient numbers of people wanted it to be true because they wanted to be rid of Corbyn. Everyone else bowed their heads to avoid being subject to the same career-destroying smears.

Jones often mentions Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite Union, in ‘This Land’. McCluskey commented in the New Statesman last week on Corbyn’s press chief Seumas Milne and chief of staff Karie Murphy:

‘Having given a brilliant and detailed polemic of the history of anti-Semitism, he [Jones] veers away to lay blame at the [door of] Milne and Murphy, based on a distorted view of what it was like trying to deal with the constant daily attacks.

‘When you are in a war – and be under no illusion, from day one of his leadership, Corbyn was subjected to an internal and external war – you develop methods of defence and attack that change by necessity almost on a daily, if not hourly basis.  Being in your living room, observing with a typewriter, is a damn sight easier than being in the ditches on the front line, trying to dodge bullets flying at you from all angles, especially from your own side.’

Establishment forces were out to destroy Corbyn with antisemitism, or whatever else they could think of, no matter what he did, how he replied. And it worked. The incompetence of Corbyn’s team may have made things worse, but the truth that matters is that a form of ruthless fascism arose out of British society to crush an attempt to create a more democratic politics.

Needless to say, Jones has not one word to say about the lead role of his employer, the Guardian, in the antisemitism smear campaign.

Conclusion

Why do we focus so intensely on popular progressives like Owen Jones, George Monbiot and loveable, NATO-loving loon Paul Mason?

The reason is that they breathe life into the faded dream that progressive change can be achieved by working within and for profit-maximising corporations that are precisely the cause of so many of our crises. Even the best journalists cannot tell the truth within these undemocratic systems of top-down power. As Jones freely admits, they have to compromise, to self-censor. Guardian colleagues may not be criticised! Ultimately, they have to compromise in ways that allow the state-corporate status quo to thunder on.

Our most celebrated public radicals – almost all of them made famous by corporate media – function as dissident vaccines that inoculate the public against a pandemic of authentic dissent.

Corporate media are careful to incorporate a tiny bit of progressive poison, so that we all hang around for a whole lot of propaganda-drenched news and commentary, and a perma-tsunami of unanswered corporate advertising persuading us that status consumption, status production and paper-thin concern for the problems of our world are all there is.

Ultimately, corporate dissidents are the final nail in the corporate coffin, normalising the blind, patently doomed rush to disaster called ‘business as usual.’

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Capitalism Is Double-billing Us: We Pay from Our Wallets Only for Our Future to be Stolen from Us

By Jonathan Cook, October 26 2020

As we shall see, externalities mean someone other than the company itself pays the true cost behind its profits, either because those others are too weak or ignorant to fight back or because the bill comes due further down the line.

Sesame Street Offers “New Normal” Brainwashing for the Very Young and Vulnerable

By John C. A. Manley, October 26 2020

This clumsy puppet also makes a guest appearance on World Economic Forum’s The Great Reset Podcast where he offers more dehumanizing advice to lonely and depressed children.

The Global Takeover Is Underway

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, October 26 2020

The World Economic Forum public relations video, “8 Predictions for the World in 2030,” short as it may be, offers a telling glimpse into what the technocratic elite has in store for the rest of us.

FDA Lets Pfizer Test Experimental COVID-19 Vaccine on U.S. Children

By Children’s Health Defense, October 26 2020

Pfizer announced that it had received FDA permission to administer the unproven vaccine to children as young as 12, becoming the first company in the U.S. to include young participants in Phase 3 trials.

Will the Next Head of the WTO Impose a Gates-Davos “Great Reset” Agenda?

By F. William Engdahl, October 25 2020

She presently heads an organization created by the seeming omnipresent (not omniscient) Bill Gates together with the Davos World Economic Forum—both involved in implementing the Great Reset–and she is deeply tied to the prime institutions of globalization and international finance. 

“Democracy” vs. COVID: A No-Go. The Great Reset is the Antidote of Democracy

By Peter Koenig, October 25 2020

On 21 October 2020, the German Press Agency (dpa) reports that Germany pledges NATO soldiers for possible Covid-19 operations.

US-China Confrontation: The Hijacking of the United Nations Security Council Continues

By Carla Stea, October 25 2020

The Security Council meeting on October 5^th, 2020, during the Russian Presidency,  is a dramatic demonstration of US and allied manipulations and falsifications, the very manipulations and falsifications they accuse China of.

Video: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: International Message for Freedom and Hope

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr, October 26 2020

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman of Children’s Health Defense, provides an inspirational message for freedom and hope to activists around the world.

Coronavirus: Killer Virus or Common Flu

By Michael Welch, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, and Prof Mark Crispin Miller, October 24 2020

This is part one of a special series devoted to the global pandemic that has coordinated an unprecedented attack on lives and civil liberties everywhere. In this chapter, we have two guests concluding that the threat is not nearly catastrophic as to demand lock-downs and masks.

50 Years Ago: The Assassination of René Schneider, Chile’s Constitutionalist General

By Adeyinka Makinde, October 26 2020

The assassination of Chilean General René Schneider who died on October 25th 1970 from wounds sustained in an an attack three days earlier is worth recalling because of his stand in protecting the constitutional process in his country, as well the circumstances of his murder.

Impunity and Carefree Violence: Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 26 2020

In 2016, Australian Major General Jeff Sengelman approached the then chief of the Australian army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell with a nagging worry. The concern lay in allegations that Australian special forces had committed various war crimes in Afghanistan. 

Death, Money, and the Dueling Frauds: Trump and Biden

By Edward Curtin, October 25 2020

Only people who still believe in professional wrestling would think these clowns don’t work for the same bosses – the Umbrella People, aka the power elites, the national security state, etc., who own the country and choose their stooges to represent their interests in the White House.

The assassination of Chilean General René Schneider who died on October 25th 1970 from wounds sustained in an an attack three days earlier is worth recalling because of his stand in protecting the constitutional process in his country, as well the circumstances of his murder.

He was a pro-democratic military official who affirmed that the role of the armed forces should be apolitical. During a General Staff meeting on July 23rd 1970, Schneider said the following:

The armed forces are not a road to political power nor an alternative to that power. They exist to guarantee the regular work of the political system and the use of force for any other purpose than its defence constitute high treason.

Schneider had issued this powerful statement at a time when there was agitation within the Chilean army to block the confirmation of Salvador Allende, a Marxist-influenced politician, as the President-elect of Chile. It came to be known as the “Schneider Doctrine”.

His murder, at the hands of a right-wing faction of the army led by General Roberto Viaux, a retired officer who had previously engineered a mutiny over soldiers pay and conditions, was a state-sponsored enterprise involving the United States Central Intelligence Agency with the knowledge of Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor during the Nixon presidency.

The “Schneider Doctrine” would be challenged and finally destroyed on September 11th 1973, when a violent military coup deposed President Allende and brought to power a military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. And on March 30th 2004, Schneider’s murder was the subject of a legal complaint brought by his estate against Kissinger in the United States. The action was dismissed and finally ended in 2006.

The threat of the rise of governments which could be perceived as anti-American in Latin America, had of course obsessed the United States for decades before the enunciation of the Schneider Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, through which the United States demarcated its Western Sphere of influence, applied not only to the old European powers but to the emerging power of the USSR. The reported plan by the Socialist Junta to confiscate wealth while operating a soviet form of government caused a great deal of apprehension in Washington when the Government Junta of Chile was established in June 1932. American interventions in Latin America were persistent and in the Cold War era, Allende, who pursued a policy of nationalisation, and who was a self-described “implacable enemy of Yankee imperialism” drew the ire of the United States which subsequently aided his overthrow.

Although the era of the military junta appears to be in the distant past, the relevance of the Schneider Doctrine remains. The military coup which overthrew Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009, has been followed more recently by the pivotal role played by the Bolivian military in securing the resignation and resulting exile of President Evo Morales, as well as President Jair Bolsonaro raising the prospect of military intervention in Brazil to protect his hold on power.

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Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He writes on his blog site where this article was originally published.

Featured image: Chilean Stamp commemorating the second anniversary of the death of General Rene Schneider (Source: author)

In his new book, “The Event Horizon: Homo Prometheus and the Climate Catastrophe”, Dr. Andrew Glikson discusses the impact of the mastery of fire, presents global climate change and its consequences and provides projections of future evolution.

About the book

With the advent of global warming and the nuclear arms race, humans are rapidly approaching a moment of truth. Technologically supreme, they manifest their dreams and nightmares in the real world through science, art, adventures and brutal wars, a paradox symbolized by a candle lighting the dark yet burning away to extinction, as discussed in this book. As these lines are being written, fires are burning on several continents, the Earth’s ice sheets are melting and the oceans are rising, threatening to flood the planet’s coastal zones and river valleys, where civilization arose and humans live and grow food.

With the exception of birds like hawks, black kites and fire raptors, humans are the only life form utilizing fire, creating developments they can hardly control. For more than a million years, gathered around campfires during the long nights, mesmerized by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, prehistoric humans acquired imagination, a yearning for omnipotence, premonitions of death, cravings for immortality and conceiving the supernatural. Humans live in realms of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts, waking up for a brief moment to witness a world that is as beautiful as it is cruel. Existentialist philosophy offers a way of coping with the unthinkable. Looking into the future produces fear, an instinctive response that can obsess the human mind and create a conflict between the intuitive reptilian brain and the growing neocortex, with dire consequences. As contrasted with Stapledon’s Last and first Man, where an advanced human species mourns the fate of the Earth, Homo sapiens continues to transfer every extractable molecule of carbon from the Earth to the atmosphere, the lungs of the biosphere, ensuring the demise of the planetary life support system.”

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Andrew Yoram Glikson, an Earth and paleo-climate scientist at the Australian National University, studied geology at the University of Jerusalem and graduated at the University of Western Australia. He conducted geological surveys of the oldest geological formations in Australia, South Africa, India and Canada, underpinning the effects of large asteroid impacts, including their effects on the atmosphere and oceans and the mass extinction of species. Since 2005 he studied the relations between climate and human evolution.

The Event Horizon: Homo Prometheus and the Climate Catastrophe

Author: Andrew Glikson

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-54734-9

Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-54733-2

Number of Pages: XI, 134

Click here to order.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s recent comments regarding his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron’s mental state has led to the recall of the French ambassador from Ankara. His assertion that Macron was “in need of mental health treatment” was not his first barb aimed at the French president. Back in August, he accused Macron of having “colonial aims” in Lebanon and referred to Macron’s visit to Beirut as a “spectacle”. But if there is any truth to Erdogan’s accusation, it is almost certainly a case of psychological projection. Erdogan himself has been explicitly engaged in a perennial quest aimed at restoring Turkish grandeur and influence to the great cost and the irritation of his country’s neighbours and traditional allies. 

That Recep Erdogan would be sensitive to comments construed as anti-Muslim in sentiment, is not particularly surprising. He is by all accounts a devout Muslim. Further, many consider his ideological roots when he began a path into politics as akin to that professed by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He is today perceived by many to be an al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in a suit.

But his publicly uttered umbrage at President Macron’s speech cannot merely be interpreted as a spontaneous reaction of a pious statesman. His failure to express regret over the beheading of a French History teacher by an Islamist student who was offended by the display of two cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad alongside other cartoons during a discussion on freedom of speech speaks volumes. Those who know the man well will be bound to see it as a calculated move geared toward building up his image at home, as well as promoting himself as a righteous leader of the Muslim world.

Erdogan is a man who is adept at self-promotion. He is also consistently involved in one or other conspiratorial endeavour aimed at expanding Turkey’s geopolitical sphere of influence. It is neither inaccurate nor lazy to attribute his agenda as being that of attempting to facilitate the emergence of a neo-Ottoman state.

Yet, all his designs have so far ended in failure.

His attempt at weaving this Ottoman dream in Central Asia went awry in the 2000s because his Turkic cousins wanted more money than Erdogan could afford. Erdogan was knee-deep in the attempt to balkanise Syria in concert with the Saudis, Israelis, and US-led NATO states. But this was frustrated by the actions of Russia, Iran, and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. More recently, Erdogan tried to bolster his prestige at home by asserting a Turkish sphere of influence across the Mediterranean by threatening the Greeks and intervening in the Libyan mess created by NATO’s overthrow of Gaddafi. He was frustrated in this endeavour not only by Egyptian and Greek actions which called his bluff, but also by Macron’s stated intent to militarily oppose any overt acts of Turkish aggression in the region.

Ever the troublemaker, Erdogan has been revealed as an active backer of the Azeri attack on Armenian-controlled Nagorno Karabakh, an action that has brought back memories among the Armenian populace and the Armenian Diaspora of the Ottoman orchestrated anti-Armenian genocide of the early 20th century.

Back in July, Erdogan’s decision to sign a decree which will turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque will signal the final nail on Christendom in what used to be the Christian city of Constantinople. An ineradicable opportunist, he likely chose this moment in time to capitalise on the recent schism in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is based on the geopolitical animus between Russia and Ukraine.

Through all of this he has lost friends: Erdogan has fallen out with President Bashar Assad of Syria, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, as well as the Saudis. The European Union, which Erdogan once aspired to join, has become wary of him -if not hostile- because of his intermittent attempts to extort money through the threats of coercive engineered migration. And his relationship with the United States has been poor since the 2016 coup which he believes was a NATO-backed operation using the followers of the exiled Fethullah Gulen.

Through all his adventures, he has burnt bridges as well as his fingers. The “Zero Problems with Neighbours” policy which he trumpeted at the beginning of his tenure in office has long been in tatters. But the parlous state of the Turkish economy which had been steadily contracting prior to the global recession caused by the covid-pandemic may mean that his endless scheming and posturing will not abate.

The question that now remains is when will the world be finally rid of this meddlesome and mischievous neo-Ottoman sultan?

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Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He has a keen interest in issues pertaining to global security. He writes on his blog site where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Long-suffering Iraqis have legitimate grievances in the post-Saddam Hussein era.

Notably they include rampant corruption, high unemployment, impoverishment affecting millions — the nation’s youths notably affected — and lack of essential to life public services.

Saddam ruled despotically but he wasn’t all bad. According to UNESCO, he established one of the region’s best educational systems that was free to the highest levels.

Healthcare was near-universal, available in nearly all urban areas and most rural ones, according to UNICEF.

Pre-Gulf War, it ranked with the region’s best. Since that time, things changed dramatically for the worst.

For the last 30 years, the US waged wars on Iraq by hot and other means.

Sanction following the Gulf War caused about 1.5 million deaths.

Mostly young children, the elderly and infirm, about 7,000 died monthly — a US-imposed system former UN humanitarian coordinator Denis Halliday called “genocide.”

The US-launched Gulf and 2003 wars erased the cradle of civilization.

An occupied wasteland/US controlled free-trade zone replaced it.

US “shock and awe,” followed by “shock therapy” produced repression, daily killings, deprivation, mass detention and torture.

US regimes bear full responsibility for wrecking the country to plunder its resources.

Iraq under Saddam was no rose garden. Decades of US rampaging made life for the vast majority of Iraqis far worse than any time under his rule.

Before his death from imprisonment and mistreatment by US occupying forces, former Iraqi foreign minister and deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz said the following in 2013:

“There is nothing here any more. Nothing. For thirty years Saddam built Iraq, and now it is destroyed. There are more sick than before, more hungry.”

“The people don’t have services…We are all victims of America and Britain. They killed our country.”

The US killed Aziz slowly by neglect and other mistreatment, the same thing true for Iraq.

The prosperous nation of long ago no longer exists, destroyed by US rapaciousness.

Ordinary Iraqis suffered hugely since the US-orchestrated 1980s Iran/Iraq war — followed by the Gulf War, genocidal sanctions, Bush/Cheney’s aggression and its violent/chaotic aftermath to the present day.

A year after Iraqis took to the streets in 2019 because their rights and welfare were unaddressed, they’re protesting again because promises made remain unfulfilled.

In Baghdad, Basra, Najaf and elsewhere, they demand fundamental change.

Instead of addressing their justifiable concerns, security forces attacked them with tear gas, stun grenades, and other harsh tactics, making a bad situation worse.

Chanting “(o)ur our souls, we sacrifice for you Iraq,” they marched through Baghdad’s Tahrir Square.

One protester likely spoke for others, saying “(t)oday is an important day as it marks a year since October 25, 2019 and our revolution for which we gave our blood and sacrificed many martyrs.”

“On the top of our demands is holding the killers and kidnappers accountable. Justice must be achieved and we’ll keep coming until we see that.”

Other protesters gathered outside the US-controlled/heavily fortified Green Zone.

A year ago, tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets, hundreds killed or wounded before energy waned and relative quiet returned.

Then-Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi was forced from office. Mustafa al-Kadhimi replaced him.

According to a 2020 Arab Opinion Index survey, most Iraqis and others in the region said they don’t have enough income for their basic family needs.

Iraqi regimes give short shrift to public rights and needs.

According to Iraqi analyst Sajad Jiyad, “protests have continued for over a year and are being renewed today (because) the ruling elite (instituted) no significant reforms…”

“The size of protests have not reached the numbers from a year ago but given that the economic situation has deteriorated and trust in the political system continues to fall, it will be very likely that protests will gain momentum.”

Along with failure of Iraqi  governance to address fundamental rights and needs of all Iraqis, as long as US forces occupy the country and remain in the region, they’ll never be free from want and the threat of more Pentagon-led aggression.

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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.

“Hello everybody! It’s your old pal Grover with some health tips…” begins the spindly blue monster in a Sesame Street PSA.

After teaching kids to wash their hands Grover transitions into some new normal brainwashing: “Another way for everyone to stay healthy is by practicing physical distance and staying six feet away from people in public. That is right, six cute little feet like this…”

Grover takes a step to his left, yells and slips on the soap he dropped during his hand washing class. When his furry blue head appears on camera again a pink mask is draped overtop.

“Here’s another tip to stay healthy,” he continues with dwindling scientific efficacy. “Wear a mask in public to protect yourself and others…. You should wear a mask securely on your face covering your mouth and nose. Everyone can do their part to stay healthy and…” He then slips again.

This clumsy puppet also makes a guest appearance on World Economic Forum’s The Great Reset Podcast where he offers more dehumanizing advice to lonely and depressed children in lockdown: “At first it was hard when nobody could go to school. And I could not visit my friends like Elmo or, well, even Oscar the Grouch. But then we learned to have video play time; which was a lot of fun and made us feel better.”

In Your Guide to the Great Reset, James Corbett sums up “this propaganda for the whole family” rather succinctly: “Remember kids, wash your hands, wear a mask and keep six feet away from other human beings — because they are icky, biological being that can shed their disgusting viruses around you and we have to be protected at all times. Yay!”

Rather appropriately, the Muppet Wiki says that Grover “loves to help people, but is very bad at it.” This appears to be the case when we can consider that there is no evidence social distancing works and SickKids warns it “could cause significant psychological harm.” Likewise, masks have many known and potential harms, including tooth decay. And “video play,” formerly known as “screen time,” is the very thing the Journal of Pediatrics attributes to rising obesity among teens; and the Journal of Mental Health cites as a major cause of depression among youngsters.

Hey Grover! what about time-tested health advice like running around and playing ball, eating your vegetables and getting kids to bed before nine?

Just goes to show you and your children shouldn’t take health advice from a propaganda puppet — whether it looks like a monster, government official or a newscaster.

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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.

This CTV Report confirms police violence in Poland directed against Covid Lockdown Protesters

Protesters gathered without face masks, saying curbs are not needed and holding up banners saying “Let us work, and let us decide on our own.”

Police responded with force, including tear gas, on several occasions. Protests are banned in light of the pandemic, Warsaw police spokesman Sylwester Marczak said, adding some in the crowd were aggressive at times. CTV

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Our thanks to Julian Rose for bringing this to our attention.

Since the re-election of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko on August 9, deemed a rigged election by the West, protests have persisted for nearly three months. Led by opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the protests do not only continue to persist, but neighboring countries are actively intervening in the domestic affairs of Belarus in the hope that Lukashenko will be toppled, and thus, in their view, weaken Russian influence.

Just days after the election, a faction of the Homeland Union-Lithuanian Christian Democrats in the Seimas, the unicameral parliament of Lithuania, called for the immediate announcement of Lithuanian sanctions against 39 of the most influential representatives of the “Alexander Lukashenko regime,” as they termed it.

“Lithuania must clearly, quickly and unambiguously formulate and consolidate strategic provisions for the Belarusian regime at the European Union and transatlantic level, be an icebreaker in the fight for freedom and against tyranny. Sanctions must also send a signal to other influential members of the regime that continue to support Lukashenko, will mean a stalemate and further sanctions against a wider range of the current elite,” said leader of the Seimas opposition, Gabrielius Landsbergis.

With full backing from the opposition, decision makers in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius achieved complete unanimity to pressure Belarus on behalf of NATO and the European Union. Taking on the so-called responsibility of dealing with the situation in Belarus, Lithuania developed a plan to challenge the legitimacy of Lukashenko by providing visas, housing and financial support to opposition figures; promoting Belarusian activists in Lithuanian universities, including awarding educational scholarships at the expense of the Lithuanian Ministry of Education, Science and Sports; simplified employment in the Lithuanian labor market; and, free medical services.

In addition, separate assistance is also provided to the Belarusian opposition in the form of a €200,000 grant to the Belarusian European Humanitarian University, a private liberal arts university founded in Minsk in 1992 shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has however been operating in exile in Vilnius since 2004 after being shut down for “unsuitable classes,” but more likely for aggressively promoting liberal ideology.

While Vilnius may be proud of its role in the Belarusian conflict, Lithuanians are beginning to realize the economic consequences of such assistance, especially since a Ukraine-style color revolution was averted and Lukashenko’s position is consolidated and secure. Despite the fact that Vilnius annually receives visible support from the European Union, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and his government ineffectively allocates resources received towards anti-Lukashenko activities.

Social protection spending in Lithuania is among the lowest in the Europe Union while the poverty rate is among the highest. Lithuanian citizens do not have enough employment opportunities, which is why they seek for it in Western Europe. Many educated Lithuanians travel abroad for work opportunities but often end up doing mundane work, irrespective of their university qualifications. In the United Kingdom it is common to find Lithuanians doing construction, nannying or maid work. According to a statement by representatives of the Ministry of Social Security and Labor, the situation with unemployment in Lithuania is absolutely critical.

Belarusian migrant workers to the Baltic country are just worsening the situation, especially since 2,360 labor permits were issued since the beginning of the year, a significant amount considering Lithuania’s population is only about 2.7 million. This would be especially frustrating for Lithuanians considering unemployment in Belarus was 4.6% in 2019, lower than Lithuania’s 6.35%. Belarus is also capable of consistent GDP growth without having to rely on remittances unlike Lithuania which is experiencing a population decline due to immigration to the West because of the lack of employment opportunities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not been any kinder to Lithuania’s prospects as a negative trend continues in almost all sectors of the economy, including wholesale trade and retail business, transportation, food services, industrial output, the scientific and technical service sector, construction and tourism.

Vilnius’ priority in favor of the Belarusian opposition instead of Lithuanian citizens has seen a degradation of living quality. In fact, crime is beginning to explode in Lithuania, partially because of the lack of opportunities. In all of the EU, Lithuania had the second highest number of intentional homicides in 2017. It was only behind Latvia and recorded 4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. It can only be assumed until the next release of official statistics that crime in Lithuania has only become worse as a result of the downturn in the economy because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Primary care and public health measures in Lithuania are underfunded but there is no shortage for the defense sector, whose funding is steadily growing. While Lithuania spends 2.02% of their GDP on defense, parliamentary parties signed an agreement pledging to increase the country’s defense spending to 2.5% of the GDP by 2030. An increasing military budget and prioritized funding for the Belarusian opposition will only see more Lithuanians become dissatisfied with the domestic situation.

Lithuania claims its bloated military budget is part of their NATO responsibilities and is a deterrence against Russia. Although Lithuania cannot match Russia militarily, the justification of stalling the Russians long enough so that NATO can intervene in a hypothetical war is being actively used. Of course, Russia has no ambitions of conquering the Baltic States as they would try to have us believe, but this permanent paranoia cannot be shaken off. This paranoia and servitude to Atlantic-Euro interests drives Vilnius’ anti-Lukashenko policies.

Whereas Lukashenko is believed to be a Russian puppet, he was actually far more dynamic as he attempted to balance Moscow and the West. In fact, Lukashenko often prioritized relations with the West over Moscow. However, given Belarus’ recent negative experience with the West, largely spearheaded by Lithuania, it has only forced Lukashenko to return to Russia’s sphere of influence. Effectively, rather than pressuring Lukashenko into capitulation, Lithuania has only driven him back to Moscow, thus weakening their own geopolitical positioning and failed to strengthen. While Lukashenko is secure in Minsk, Lithuanian citizens are increasingly impoverished as their government does everything it can to topple the Belarusian leader.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Alfred Nobel himself might see the irony. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry – named after  the inventor of dynamite and founder of one of the largest bomb factories in the world – has been awarded to researchers who developed the genetic engineering technique CRISPR-Cas9. 

Some of the applications of this technology could have such an explosive effect on nature and people that it has been called a “gene bomb”.

CRISPR itself is not an invention. It is a natural mechanism that allows bacteria to recognize viruses.  The award-winners J. Doudna and E. Charpentier, published a paper in 2012 describing a means by which this feature of bacteria could be artificially constructed, and added a construct that allows it to cut DNA:  Cas9, a “Crispr associated system”.

Risk 

The design allows genetic engineers to recognize a specific site in the DNA of an organism where CRISPR-Cas9 is introduced and cut the DNA strands at that site. In this way, geneticists can for instance, prevent gene expression and  introduce new genetic material, which then result in a new transgenic organism.

CRISPR seemed at first to be a faster and more accurate means of genetic engineering than previous approaches that had no control over the site where foreign genetic material is inserted. But it was not long before several researchers showed that CRISPR is not as accurate as the hype had claimed.

Although it can reach and modify a particular site in an organism’s  genome, the technique also alters other sites in the genome, with the potential to produce a multitude of “off-target effects”, even erasing or rearranging long sequences outside the target site, causing changes that can cause serious disease.

In 2018, a study by the Karolinska Institute (the organisation that awards the Nobel Prize for medicine), argued that manipulating human cells with CRISPR and then introducing it in humans, could increase cancer risk. Other scientific studies have argued a series of other potential harmful impacts of CRISPR use, in animals, plants and human cells, to the point that George Church, biotechnology pioneer from Harvard University, in 2019 called CRISPR “a blunt axe“, whose use is “genome vandalism”.

Since its release in 2012, and despite the bitter patent dispute that arose shortly thereafter with another US team, which also claims to have been the inventors – the technology has been licensed and applied to a large number of experiments.  These have taken place using plants, animals, human cells and even in humans (an illegal experiment in China with pregnant women, at least one of whom gave birth to twins).

Danger

Doudna and Charpentier, have made millions of dollars from patents on the technology, and have founded or have financial interests in several spin-off and other companies.

The government allocated $65 million to the US Defense Research Agency (DARPA) for the “Safe Genes” project, to defend the US against potential bioweapons that other developers could create with CRISPR. However, the line between developing bioweapons and researching how to defend against them is blurred: this program could be working on developing bioweapons as well.

This program funds research projects in the United States and other countries to develop “gene drives,” an application of CRISPR to change the laws of inheritance in sexually reproducing species in order to make engineered genes dominant in such species. For example, manipulating the genetics so that only males are born, which would quickly lead a species becoming extinct.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds the development of this same technology, but they do not call attention to the bioweapons aspect, instead, they try to highlight only its alledged potential in health projects. The UN tried to establish a moratorium on this dangerous application, but Gates’ money sabotaged it.

Jennifer Doudna herself has stated that CRISPR has tremendously dangerous uses, even referring to a nightmare in which Hitler asks her for the CRISPR formula. Both the projects financed by DARPA and the Gates Foundation, as well as the experiments with humans, transgress fundamental ethical, ecological and political boundaries. Such developments should be prohibited.

Industry 

A more immediate threat to humanity is the pressure from transnational companies to commercially release the so-called gene editing (“new GM”) in plants and animals for the agricultural and livestock industry.

The GM industry has made a deceitful campaign to make believe that the products of technologies like CRISPR do not need to go through biosafety evaluations, or at least they should be more lax than the existing ones. They have done so in the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Honduras and Guatemala, countries that are lackeys of the GM agribusiness and in treaties with the United States.

They are now advancing these regulatory changes in further countries, by taking advantage of the limited information and restrictions due to the pandemic. The European Union, thanks to protests and a collective lawsuit put forward by La Via Campesina and other organizations, has so far stopped these changes to biosafety regulations.

CRISPR and all forms of genetic editing introduce new risks to the environment and health, so existing biosafety regulations – contrary to what the industry claims – are completely inadequate.

These new forms of manipulation must not be allowed anywhere near our food systems or into the wider environment.

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Silvia Ribeiro is a journalist and the Latin American Director of ETC Group, based in Mexico City. She is a well-known lecturer, writer, editor and educator on emerging technologies including geoengineering and biotechnology. 

Featured image is from Flickr/National Human Genome Research Institute Follow

Here is a word that risks deterring you from reading on much further, even though it may hold the key to understanding why we are in such a terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is “externalities”. 

It sounds like a piece of economic jargon. It is a piece of economic jargon. But it is also the foundation stone on which the west’s current economic and ideological system has been built. Focusing on how externalities work and how they have come to dominate every sphere of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet – and offer at the same time the waypost to a better future.

In economics, “externalities” are usually defined indifferently as the effects of a commercial or industrial process on a third party that are not costed into that process.

Here is what should be a familiar example. For decades, cigarette manufacturers made enormous profits by concealing scientific evidence that over time their product could prove lethal to customers. The firms profited by externalising the costs associated with cigarettes – of death and disease – on to those buying their cigarettes and wider society. People gave Philip Morris and British American Tobacco their money as these companies made those smoking Marlboros and Lucky Strikes progressively unhealthier.

The externalised cost was paid – is still paid – by the customers themselves, by grieving families, by local and national health services, and by the taxpayer. Had the firms been required to pick up these various tabs, it would have proved entirely unprofitable to manufacture cigarettes.

Inherently violent 

Externalities are not incidental to the way capitalist economies run. They are integral to them. After all, it is a legal obligation on private companies to maximise profits for their shareholders – in addition, of course, to the personal incentive bosses have to enrich themselves, and each company’s need to avoid making themselves vulnerable to more profitable and predatory competitors in the marketplace.

Companies are therefore motivated to offload as many costs as possible on to others. As we shall see, externalities mean someone other than the company itself pays the true cost behind its profits, either because those others are too weak or ignorant to fight back or because the bill comes due further down the line. And for that reason, externalities – and capitalism – are inherently violent.

All this would be glaringly obvious if we didn’t live inside an ideological system – the ultimate echo chamber enforced by our corporate media – that is complicit either in hiding this violence or in normalising it. When externalities are particularly onerous or harmful, as they invariably are in one way or another, it becomes necessary for a company to obscure the connection between cause and effect, between its accumulation of profit and the resulting accumulation of damage caused to a community, a distant country or the natural world – or all three. 

That is why corporations – those that inflict the biggest and worst externalities – invest a great deal of time and money in aggressively managing public perceptions. They achieve this through a combination of public relations, advertising, media control, political lobbying and the capture of regulatory institutions. Much of the business of business is deception, either making the externalised harm invisible or gaining the public’s resigned acceptance that the harm is inevitable.

In that sense, capitalism produces a business model that is not only rapacious but psychopathic. Those who pursue profit have no choice but to inflict damage on wider society, or the planet, and then cloak their deeply anti-social – even suicidal – actions.

Psychopathic demands 

A recent film that alludes to how this form of violence works was last year’s Dark Waters, concerning the long-running legal battle with DuPont over the chemicals it developed to make non-stick coatings for pots and pans. From the outset, DuPont’s research showed that these chemicals were highly dangerous and accumulated in the body. The science overwhelmingly suggested that exposed individuals would be at risk of developing cancerous tumours or producing children with birth defects.

There were huge profits to be made for DuPont from its chemical discovery so long as it could keep the research hidden. So that’s exactly what its executives did. They set aside basic morality and acted in concert with the psychopathic demands of the marketplace.

Not every day a Hollywood movie – Dark Waters, on DuPont's intentional, profit-driven poisoning of America (and the planet) – concludes that the system is rigged to protect corporations from being held accountable for their psychopathic criminality https://t.co/BMpJSinso9

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 19, 2020

DuPont produced pans that contaminated its customers’ food. Workers were exposed to a cocktail of lethal poisons in its factories. The company stored the toxic waste products in drums and then secretly disposed of them in landfills where they leached into the local water supply, killing cattle and producing an epidemic of disease among local residents. DuPont created a chemical that is now everywhere in our environment, risking the health of generations to come. 

But a film like Dark Waters necessarily turned a case study in how capitalism commits violence by externalising its costs into something less threatening, less revelatory. We hiss at DuPont’s executives as though they are the ugly sisters in a pantomime rather than ordinary people not unlike our parents, our siblings, our offspring, ourselves.

In truth, there is nothing exceptional about the DuPont story – apart from the company’s failure to keep its secret hidden from the public. And that exposure was anomalous, occurring only belatedly and against great odds.

An important message the film’s feelgood ending fails to deliver is that other corporations have learnt from DuPont’s mistake – not the moral “mistake” of externalising their costs, but the financial mistake of getting caught doing so. Corporate lobbyists have worked since to further capture regulatory authorities and to amend transparency and legal discovery laws to avoid any repetition, to ensure they are not held legally liable, as DuPont was, in the future.

Victims of our bombs 

Unlike the DuPont case, most externalities are never exposed. Instead they hide in plain sight. These externalities do not need to be concealed because they are either not perceived as externalities or because they are viewed as so unimportant as to be not worth factoring in.

The military-industrial complex – the one we were warned about more than half a century ago by President Dwight Eisenhower, a former US general – excels in these kinds of externalities. Its power derives from its ability to externalise its costs on to the victims of its bombs and its wars. These are people we know and care little about: they live far from us, they look and sound different to us, they are denied names and life stories like us. They are simply numbers, denoting them either as terrorists or, at best, unfortunate collateral damage. 

The externalities of the west’s war industries are opaque to us. The chain of cause and effect is nowadays obscured as “humanitarian intervention”. And even when war’s externalities come knocking at our borders as refugees flee from the bloodshed, or from the nihilistic cults sucked into the power vacuums we leave behind, or from the wreckage of infrastructure our weapons cause, or from the environmental degradation and pollution we unleash, or from the economies ruined by our plunder of local resources, we still don’t recognise these externalities for what they are. Our politicians and media transform the victims of our wars and our resource grabs into, at best, economic migrants and, at worst, barbarians at the gate.

Exclusive footage of a beach landing at St Margaret's Bay, Kent. More illegal migrants hit the jackpot. pic.twitter.com/BqNaWaTIzU

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 1, 2020

Snapshots of catastrophe

If we are entirely ignorant of the externalities inflicted by capitalism on victims beyond our shores, we are gradually and very late in the day waking up to some of capitalism’s externalities much closer to home. Parts of the corporate media are finally admitting that which can no longer be plausibly denied, that which is evident to our own senses.

For decades politicians and the corporate media managed to veil two things: that capitalism is an entirely unsustainable, profit-driven, endless consumption model; and that the environment is being gradually damaged in ways harmful to life. Each was obscured, as was the fact that the two are causally connected. The economic model is the primary cause of the environmental damage.

People, especially the young, are slowly awakening from this enforced state of ignorance. The corporate media, even its most liberal elements, is not leading this process; it is responding to that awakening.

Last week the Guardian newspaper prominently ran two stories about externalities, even if it failed to frame them as such. One was about micro-plastics leaching from feeding bottles into babies, and the other about the toll air pollution is taking on the populations of major European cities.

The latter story, based on new research, specifically assessed the cost of air pollution in European cities – in terms of “premature death, hospital treatment, lost working days and other health costs” – at £150 billion a year. Most of this was caused by pollution from vehicles, the profitable product of the car industry. The researchers admitted that their figure was an under-estimate of air pollution’s true cost.

But, of course, even that underestimate was arrived at solely on the basis of metrics prioritised by capitalist ideology: the cost to the economy of death and disease, not the incalculable cost in lost and damaged human lives, and even less the damage to other species and the natural world. Another report last week alluded to one of those many additional costs, showing a steep rise in depression and anxiety caused by air pollution. 

The other story, on baby bottles, is part of a much bigger story of how the plastics industry – whose products are derivatives of the fossil fuel industry – has long been filling our oceans and soil with plastics, both of the visible and invisible kind. Last week’s report revealed that the sterilisation process in which bottles are heated in boiling water resulted in babies swallowing millions of micro-plastics each day. The study found that plastic food containers were shedding much higher loads of micro-plastics than expected.

These stories are snapshots of a much wider environmental catastrophe unfolding across the planet caused by profit-driven industrialised society. As well as heating up the climate, corporations are chopping down the forests that don’t burn down first, ridding the planet of its lungs; they are destroying natural habitats and soil quality; and they are rapidly killing off insect populations.

As should be obvious by now, the ecological destructiveness of capitalism is baked in: whether it's climate breakdown, pollution or the imminent extinction of most of the insect life on which wider life depends. Ignoring one doesn't make the others go away https://t.co/1pEojqcBiy

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 13, 2019

These industries’ externalities are, for the time being, impacting most severely on the natural world. But they will soon have more visible and dramatic effects that will be felt by our children and grandchildren. Neither of these constituences currently has a say in how our capitalist “democracies” are being run. 

Perception managers 

Capitalism isn’t only harming us, it’s double-billing us: taking first from our wallets and then depriving us of a future. We have now entered an era of deep cognitive dissonance.

Unlike a few years ago, many of us now understand that our futures are at grave risk from changes in our environment – the effect. But the task of today’s perception managers, like those of yesteryear, is to obscure the main cause – our economic system, capitalism.

The increasingly desperate effort to dissociate capitalism from the imminent environmental crisis – to break any perception of a causal link – was highlighted early this year. It emerged that counter-terrorism police in the UK had included Extinction Rebellion, the west’s main environmental protest group, on a list of extremist organisations. Under related “Prevent” regulations, teachers and government officials are already required by law to report anyone who they suspect of being “radicalised”.

Extinction Rebellion's demands are the very minimum rationale response to an imminent climate catastrophe, and yet UK security services have been outed internally classifying it as an ideological equivalent to terrorism https://t.co/V9iJKSHEx2

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 11, 2020

In a guide explaining the purpose of the list, officials and teachers were told to identify anyone who speaks in “strong or emotive terms about environmental issues like climate change, ecology, species extinction, fracking, airport expansion or pollution”.

Why was Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent, civil disobedience group, included alongside neo-Nazis and Islamic jihadists? A whole page is dedicated to the threat posed by Extinction Rebellion. The guide explains that the organisation’s activism is rooted in an “anti-establishment philosophy that seeks system change”. That is, environmental activism risks making apparent – especially to the young – the causal connection between the economic system and damage to the environment.

Once the story broke, the police hastily rowed back, claiming that Extinction Rebellion’s inclusion was a mistake. But more recently establishment efforts to decouple capitalism from its catastrophic externalities have grown more explicit.

Last month England’s department of education ordered schools not to use any materials in the curriculum that question the legitimacy of capitalism. Opposition to capitalism was described as an “extreme political stance” – opposition, let us remember, to an economic system whose relentless pursuit of growth and profit treats the destruction of the natural world as an uncosted externality.

Paradoxically, education officials equated promotion of alternatives to capitalism as a threat to free speech, as well as an endorsement of illegal activity, and – inevitably – as evidence of antisemitism.

Suicidal trajectory 

These desperate and draconian measures to shore up an increasingly discredited system are not about to end. They will get much worse.

The establishment is not preparing to give up on capitalism – the ideology that enriched and empowered it – without a fight. The political and media class proved that with their relentless and unprecedented attacks on Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn over several years. And Corbyn was offering only a reformist, democratic socialist agenda.

The establishment has also demonstrated its determination to cling on to the status quo in its relentless and unprecedented attacks on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is locked away, seemingly indefinitely, for revealing the externalities – the victims – of the west’s war industries and the psychopathic behaviour of those in power.

Efforts to end the suicidal trajectory of our current “free market” system will doubtless soon be equated with terrorism, as the Prevent strategy has already intimated. We should be ready.

There can be no escape from the death wish of capitalism without recognising that death wish, and then demanding and working for wholesale change. Externalities may sound like innocuous jargon, but they and the economic system that requires them are killing us, our children and the planet.

The nightmare can end, but only if we wake up.

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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.

Donald Trump, the Mr. Magoo of geopolitics, has shot his big mouth off again and incited warfare between Egypt and Ethiopia.

Trump said, according to the BBC, that Egypt cannot accept the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam that is being built on the Blue Nile, which the government of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi believes will reduce water flow to Egypt. Trump went on to crack that Egypt might “blow it up.”

The head of state of a superpower cannot afford to speak this way. What Addis Abbaba heard was that al-Sisi likely said some such thing to Trump, which the blabber-mouth-in-chief was now inadvertently making public.

Ethiopia’s foreign minister, Gedu Andargachew, angrily summoned the US ambassador in Addis Ababa, Michael Raynor, on the mat to explain Trump’s wild comments. Raynor is a career foreign service professional and must be really tired of having to explain Trump to people. Andargachew told Raynor, “It is unacceptable for the current American president to incite war between Ethiopia and Egypt.”

Egypt’s minister of water resources and irrigation, Muhmmad `Abd al-`Ati, complained last week that no progress has been made with Ethiopia on negotiations over the Renaissance Dam, despite a 2015 agreement on principles. After Trump’s comment, `Abd al-`Ati came out to blame Ethiopia for having caused the failure of Washington’s diplomatic initiative to resolve the conflict.

The two goliaths of northeast Africa are at odds over this giant dam of Ethiopia’s. There are two Niles below Sudan, which flow together as one river through Egypt up to the Mediterranean. The White Nile originates in Tanzania and is unaffected by the dam. The Blue Nile originates in Ethiopia and flows up to Sudan, where it joins the White Nile and proceeds through Egypt.

Ethiopia is building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile in its territory to generate electricity. This seems a shame because Ethiopia is rich in sunlight and wind and if it had spent as much money on wind and solar farms as it is putting into the dam, I think it could have had the electricity without putting Sudanese and Egyptians in danger of not having enough water. 

Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed maintains, like his predecessors, that the dam will not interfere with the flow of water to water-poor Egypt. It is true that if the reservoir created by the dam is filled very, very slowly, over years, the impact on the Egyptian water supply can be reduced. In wet years, thereafter, the dam should not have a significant impact on Egypt. But a recent study in Nature suggested that if there is another multi-year drought, the Renaissance Dam could act as a multiplier in reducing Egypt’s water supply.

The reservoir also has a bigger surface than the river, and as global heating advances, it could lead to substantial evaporation of precious water.

I lived in Egypt altogether something like three or four years on and off between 1976 and 2014, and I think I was rained on three times, briefly. Egypt would just be the northeastern edge of the Sahara if it were not for the Nile. Most people live along its banks. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus called Egypt “the gift of the Nile,” and he was not wrong. Egypt, with 100 million people, does not have enough water. It needs to build some solar-driven water purification plants, but has not done so yet.

Egypt did once fight a modern war with Ethiopia, in 1874-76, when Cairo had expanded south into the Sudan and beyond in search of land on which to grow cotton for the world market. The Ottoman viceroy or Khedive Isma`il prosecuted this war. I once saw some documents on it in the Egyptian archives. Egypt was decisively defeated, and the loss contributed to Ismai`il’s weakening and the loss of confidence in him of the European Powers. He was deposed in 1879.

As for the Mr. Magoo reference, I was a little afraid it was a Boomer thing that wouldn’t be any longer widely understood. But I checked and there is a new ‘Mr. Magoo’ series on CBS All-Access just this year. For those who don’t know, in the cartoon he is a near-sighted older gentleman whose inability to see clearly leads him into hilarious misunderstandings and confuses everyone around him. Whatever is wrong with Trump seems to operate similarly.

Ironically, Trump’s nickname for Jeff Sessions was ‘Mr. Magoo.’ Talk about the pot calling the kettle black:

Mr. Magoo sometimes in the cartoons imagines that he has been conscripted and caught up in a war. I don’t know if he ever provoked one.

Trump is much more terrifying, if equally cartoonish.

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Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Featured image is a screenshot from the WaPo video above

With the victory of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) in the Bolivian elections on October 18, the de facto coup government presided over by Jeanine Áñez, has requested visas from the United States for its officials according to a US-based network.

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NBC news network journalist Tom Brokaw reported Thursday on a letter from Jeanine Áñez, in which he has requested 350 visas from the U.S. government for officials of his de facto coup government.

The report, cited by the communication platform Resumen Latinoamericano, indicates that the reason behind the request is the concern that the Bolivian de facto government has about being prosecuted by the government of President-elect Luis Arce Catacora.

The news has gone viral on social networks under the title: “Time to Escape?”

On Sunday, the candidate of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), Luis Arce, managed to win the first round of elections in Bolivia, elections that took place 363 days after the coup d’état orchestrated by the opposition and supported by the US, after which Evo Morales resigned as President of the country.

This triumph has been possible despite the efforts of the de facto government of Jeanine Áñez, which was installed after the coup d’état of November 2019, to perpetuate itself in the government with measures such as the postponement of the elections and repression of MAS leaders and sympathizers.

Jeanine Añez begins to plan her escape from Bolivian justice, she has already applied for 350 visas to the United States#Bolivia pic.twitter.com/AYgxtaqdF7

— Anon Candanga EN🌍🌎🌏 (@anon_candanga) October 23, 2020

Despite her attempts to prevent the return to power of the MAS in Bolivia, Áñez has even been forced to recognize Morales’ party’s resounding victory in the elections, thus ending her mandate with several unfulfilled promises and acts of crime and violence.

Now, the MAS has returned to power, after a year, with the commitment to resolve the serious problems that afflict the Andean nation, above all the economic crisis.

#Bolivia | While Indigenous people are protesting the regime, the country’s oligarchy is financing and equipping far-right paramilitary groups. pic.twitter.com/ifuGihTOTW

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) August 10, 2020

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Featured image is from EFE/Joédson Alves

Former intelligence officials, Democratic leaders, and media outlets dismissing the Hunter Biden story as “Russian disinformation” are spreading more Russiagate disinformation, ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern says.

Media outlets are amplifying the claims of former intelligence officials, including John Brennan and James Clapper, as well as of top Democrats, including Joe Biden and Adam Schiff, that the Hunter Biden laptop revelations are “Russian disinformation.”

They have done so even though no one from the Biden camp has disputed the authenticity of a single leaked email or document, or denied that the laptop belongs to Hunter Biden. Ray McGovern, a former career CIA officer who served as chief of the CIA’s Soviet analysts division and chaired National Intelligence Estimates, discusses the widespread disinformation about “Russian disinformation,” and why it raises new questions about the conduct and claims of the intelligence officials behind Russiagate.

Guest: Ray McGovern. Former longtime CIA officer, who served as chief of the CIA’s Soviet analysts division, chaired National Intelligence Estimates, and prepared the President’s Daily Brief. He is also the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

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Aaron Maté is a journalist and producer. He hosts Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone. He is also is contributor to The Nation magazine and former host/producer for The Real News and Democracy Now!. Aaron has also presented and produced for Vice, AJ+, and Al Jazeera.

Amnesty International has catalogued how the actions of Boris Johnson’s Conservative government led to the deaths of thousands of elderly people in care homes during the first stage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Amnesty’s report was largely ignored by the media or relegated to inside pages. Yet it presents evidence that the government’s policy of herd immunity was responsible for what could easily be accepted by many families as little more than mass murder. The government was entirely aware of the probable outcome of their policy and went ahead regardless of the risk to thousands of lives.

The report, “As if expendable: The UK government’s failure to protect older people in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic”, details how, between March 2 and June 12, 18,562 residents of care homes in England died with COVID-19. The vast majority (18,168) were aged 65 and over, representing almost 40 per cent of all deaths involving the virus in England during this time frame. Of these, 76 per cent (13,844 deaths) occurred within care homes for the elderly.

In the meantime, the care home industry is literally on the brink – with many going out of business at a crucial time. A typical story was published recently in the mainstream media about an 85-year-old resident at Newfield Nursing Home in Sheffield, where 25 people living there died with the virus after more than 110 residents and staff members tested positive. The result is that the care home is closing for good, with 38 nurses and carers facing redundancy.

And it is as if the lessons from the first wave were completely ignored, as Boris Johnson has decided that the very same strategy should take place once again.

Even the right-wing Daily Mail wrote in dismay last week – “Care homes are once again being asked to take in elderly hospital patients infected with coronavirus to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed this winter. The sensational decision has sparked widespread fears No 10 has not learnt from its catastrophic errors during the first wave of the pandemic, which led to the disease killing tens of thousands of elderly residents.”

Amnesty International said through its Crisis Response team  – “A series of “shockingly irresponsible” Government decisions put tens of thousands of older people’s lives at risk and led to multiple violations of care home residents.” Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK went on to say:

“The Government made a series of shockingly irresponsible decisions which abandoned care home residents to die. … The appalling death toll was entirely avoidable – it is a scandal of monumental proportions.”

Amnesty International UK has launched a new campaign calling for a full independent public Inquiry into the pandemic, with an interim phase starting immediately focusing on older people in care homes.

Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser, said:

“It is as if care home residents were seen as expendable. Despite thousands of empty beds they were de-prioritized when it came to getting access to hospital care, and had blanket do not resuscitate orders imposed on them without due process. Such abuses are deeply disturbing. It is imperative that lessons are learned so that the same mistakes are not repeated, and that those responsible for such disastrous decisions are held accountable.”

Amnesty received multiple reports of care home residents’ right to NHS services – including access to general medical services and hospital admission – being denied during the pandemic. Care home staff and relatives told Amnesty how sending residents to hospital was discouraged or outright refused.

The son of one care home resident who passed away in Cumbria said that sending his father to hospital had not even been considered:

“From day one, the care home was categoric it was probably COVID and he would die of it and he would not be taken to hospital. He only had a cough at that stage. He was only 76 and was in great shape physically. He loved to go out and it would not have been a problem for him to go to hospital. The care home called me and said he had symptoms, a bit of a cough and that doctor had assessed him over mobile phone and he would not be taken to hospital. Then I spoke to the GP later that day and said he would not be taken to hospital but would be given morphine if in pain… He died a week later.”

Amnesty received multiple reports right across the country of doctors refusing to enter care homes and only being available for consultations by phone or video call, regardless of a sick resident’s symptoms or even in the case of end-of-life support.

The misuse of ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ forms, inadequate access to testing, insufficient PPE and the devastating impact of prolonged isolation were also highlighted in Amnesty’s report.

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In 2016, Australian Major General Jeff Sengelman approached the then chief of the Australian army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell with a nagging worry. The concern lay in allegations that Australian special forces had committed various war crimes in Afghanistan.  Sengelman was then special forces commander; Campbell was chief of the army.  Sociologist Samantha Crompvoets was duly commissioned to write a report on “Special Operations Command Culture interactions”.  It was leaked in 2018, and claimed that Australia’s special forces had engaged in the “unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations” aided by a timorous leadership and perception of impunity. 

Campbell duly tasked the inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force, James Gaynor, with the role of investigating war crimes allegations connected with the Special Operations Task Group during stints in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.  Paul Brereton, a New South Wales Supreme Court judge and major general in the Army Reserve, was given the task of leading the inquiry.  For four years, it has been conducted under conditions of utmost secrecy.  The instrument directing the inquiry, and the terms of reference of the inquiry, remain unpublished. 

Screenshot from aph.gov.au

The report is expected to be completed by year’s end, though some preparations for softening the blow are already being made.  The IGADF annual report  of 2018-9, tabled in parliament in February, at least alludes to the fact that more than 338 witnesses have been examined since March 2016, noting “55 separate incidents or issues under inquiry covering a range of alleged breaches of the Law of Armed Conflict, predominantly unlawful killings of persons who were non-combatants or were no longer combatants, but also ‘cruel treatment’ of such persons.”  Exclusions are already clear: decisions made during the “heat of battle,” for instance, are of no concern.  Focus, instead, “is on the treatment of persons who were clearly non-combatants or who were no longer combatants.”

In an interview with journalist Stan Grant in an online conference series, Defence Minister Linda Reynolds was not optimistic about what would be unearthed. 

“I think that will make some very significant findings, ones that I’m certain will make Australians uncomfortable and also dismayed at.  So, I think we do need to prepare ourselves for that.” 

While she had not seen the report, she felt that there was enough to be troubled by, though “that in no way reflects on our current serving men and women both here and overseas who are doing an extraordinary job for your nation.”

The Senator is keen to push the point that things have improved since those dark days.  Army Commander Lieutenant General Rick Burr also made the point in a note to Australia’s soldiers that,

“This is not who we are and not what we stand for.” He seemed to show some fondness for the bad apple theory, “concerned about the impact of those findings on those of you who served in Afghanistan and other operations and who served as professionals with pride and integrity.  You did the right thing.”   

The ADF establishment has been particularly concerned with what is seen as the isolation of the special unit arm from the rest of the army.  Over the course of 20 rotations over 11 years in Afghanistan, “catastrophic and cultural shortfalls” have been identified within the Special Operations Command.  The Special Air Service Regiment and commandos have also been at each other’s throats in what can only be described as competitive viciousness.

Lying behind such lines of inquiry is a policy of containment: the idea that atrocities can be stemmed, cordoned off, and identified as the work of a few rotters within a rotten culture.  Identify the culture and its advocates; neutralise them.  Burr is confident that this has already taken place, using the insufferable language of organisational management in describing “substantial cultural and professional transformation.”  The question as to why such outfits should be deployed in the first place is never asked, leaving politicians and commanders immune and smug from the horrors of war and the stupidities of armchair planning.  

While the IGADF inquiry has been moving slowly along, the exposes have come thick and fast.  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has become the main font of disturbing revelations, its Afghan Files a trove of bloody and brutal adventurism.  The impact of their exposure led to investigations by the Australian Federal Police, not into allegations of such atrocities, but those who wrote about them.  Only this month, ABC journalist Dan Oakes received the comforting, if cold news, that he would not be prosecuted by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions in the aftermath of raids conducted on the national broadcaster last year.  The CDPP waved the magic wand of public interest, and thought it poor form to be pursuing a journalist for exposing the misdeeds of Australia’s military effort in Afghanistan.  But more troubling for Oakes, the CDPP thought that any prosecution would have stood a reasonable chance of success.

Another matter of concern regarding the future efficacy of the inquiry has also surfaced.  This month, the ABC obtained an internal Defence Department bulletin noting the placing of an embargo on the shredding of any records relating to ADF operations in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015.  The embargo stemmed from the Afghanistan Inquiry Task Force established with the “primary role” of preparing “Defence to receive and respond to the IGADF Afghanistan Inquiry report.”  Startling that this should have taken four years, but the Defence Department saw little trouble with it.  According to the dull formulation of a spokesperson, “In accordance with these requirements, key operational records relating to planning and conduct become eligible for destruction after 20 years.”

This should have caused a flurry of consternation.  For Rawan Arraf, director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, the timing of the embargo raised “serious questions about whether the Defence Department has had the proper processes in place; whether it has been complying with its regulations and international guidelines on record keeping and data protection, especially where it’s relevant to investigating any potential violations of international humanitarian law or the laws of armed conflict.”

While the findings of such inquiries will duly fill the books of military history, they will not alter the central problem in Australian military and foreign policy: that constant craving to deploy personnel to harsh foreign theatres without obvious strategic necessity.  Australia’s SAS and the commandos can rightly be seen to be the Ghurkhas of the US military, an elite annexe serving as auxiliaries for foreign power.    

Troubled and ruined, Afghanistan has been killing, maiming and driving the imperially minded insane for centuries.  It has mocked and derided invaders, swallowed up armies.  The tag of military professionalism is mere dinner table formality in the face of unconventional warfare; when engaged in such areas of battle, the rules will go out the window.  By all means, hold the soldiers to account for such cruelties, but the same could be said about those who sent them there in the first place, decision makers who remain perennially immune from a prosecutor’s brief.

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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]

Damascus confirmed the visit of President Donald Trump’s Special envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens and Senior Director for Counterterrorism Kash Patel to Syria and their meeting with the Syrian Director of the National Security Ali Mamluk (sanctioned by the European Union and the US administration). It was the last of three visits the US took to Damascus where the first one was in 2017 when the United Arab Emirates arranged for a visit of a political and a military US delegation whose plane landed at Damascus airport and met with Mamluk.

The title of the US visit concerned the release of US prisoners arrested in Damascus. More than one of these captured have double Syrian-American nationalities and others who visited the country without going through the official channel but were ‘sold’ by rebels.

Sources in Damascus said that “the leadership has no intention to boost President Trump’s election and no American captured is expected to be released this year as long as Trump is in power”.

“Brigadier general Ali Mamluk asked from the US officials who visited his office in the Syrian capital if they have a plan of the US withdrawal from the Syrian occupied territory starting with the oil and gas-rich area in north-east Syria. If the Syrian Army is allowed to cross the river to regain control of the sources of energy, then Syria is ready to look into the matter seriously not before”, said the source.

Mamluk rejected an offer by the US senior diplomatic delegation to ease sanctions on Syria imposed by the EU and the US in exchange for an immediate release of at least one hostage. The US delegation members were pressing for the time of release. Still, they had no authority to discuss the withdrawal of all US forces from the occupied Syrian territory in north-east Syria.“

Click here to access full article.

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On October 2 Canadian peace activists held their second pan-Canadian Day of Action against the purchase of 88 new fighter jets. At some locations activists also underscored their objections to the purchase of 12 armed drones at a projected cost of $5 billion. The activists delivered letters to 27 Members of Parliament opposing the purchase of these killing machines and urged actions for peace, protecting the environment and a just economic recovery.

The October 2 Day of Protest, like the July 24 Day of Protest, was spearheaded by Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and allied peace and solidarity organizations. October 2 was also the International Day of Non-Violence named in honour of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi on October 2, 1869.

At some of the protests at the offices of Members of Parliament, peace councils affiliated with the Canadian Peace Congress handed out a leaflet prepared by the Congress executive. Referring to the reasons for the purchase of the fighter jets they stated, “the true purpose is to prepare for war against the people of Russia, China or any other country unwilling to comply with demands coming from the US empire.” They also referred to Canada’s membership in the “aggressive NATO alliance which still operates on the dangerous premise that it can start and win a nuclear world war.” The Congress leaflet also pointed out that “Canada has participated in NATO wars of destruction against Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Libya (2011) and Syria (2011).”

The Peace Congress suggests another vision for Canada:

“We see a Canada upholding international law and the UN charter. We see a country emphasizing peaceful co-existence of all states and actively opposing policies and actions that worse international relations. We see a Canada out of NATO.”

The leaflet concluded by urging its readers to take the threat of a Third World War seriously; to join a local peace council or group and participate in building a strong and engaged Peace Network across Canada.

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This article was originally published on People’s Voice.

Ed Lehman is a member of the Canadian Peace Congress Executive and the Regina Peace Council

Featured image is from People’s Voice

This evening, Mr. Markus Haintz, a prominent and courageous human rights lawyer in Germany was brutally arrested by Berlin police. His assistant, Frederike, was also brutally arrested. The arrest was filmed.

It is important to report this arrest worldwide and denounce such terror tactics by the German police.

Please inform your friends how the German authorities are directing the police to escalate violence.

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2020 marks the 75th Anniversary of the world’s most important and visionary organisation, the United Nations. Everything TFF has done during its 35 years of existence has been based on one mission – namely, to promote the UN Charter’s Article 1 which states that peace shall be brought about by peaceful means.

That is a typical Gandhian inspiration – “the means are the goals in-the-making” – as he said. You cannot use destructive means to achieve constructive goals.

Regrettably, one hears many – thoughtless – voices accusing “the UN” of being too expensive, too bureaucratic, too ineffective, too corrupt, too this and that.

Why must this be seen as an indicator of intellectual poverty?

First, as stated by its first Secretary-General, Norwegian Trygve Lie – the UN shall never become stronger or better than its member states want to it to be. And, sadly, they are more nationalist than globalist.

Lie’s words are still spot-on correct and mean, simply, that it is the member-states (some more than others) that behave internationally and in their UN policies in such a manner that the world organisation and its norms are weakened, its power and role undermined and its operations marginalized.

Secondly, those who say that the world could just as well close down the “outdated” UN just don’t consider how small its budget is and how impossible it would be to make the world a better place with so little funds given the destructive forces that are pitted against the UN and its norms.

The fact is that the United Nations and its organisations operate on a regular administrative budget of US$ 3 billion and that the total annual expenditures of all its member agencies (such as WHO, UNICEF etc) is US$ 50-60 billion. That is 3 per cent of the costs of global militarism which are US$ 2000 billion annually.

What fires can you prevent or extinguish against militarist pyromaniacs having 30-40 times more resources at their disposal to start new fires?

Thirdly, whether intended or not, these critics implicitly say: We’d rather have a world run by the US (and a few others) than by the UN. This is a dangerous way of thinking that totally undermines international law and the extremely important UN Charter – the most Gandhian document the world’s governments have ever signed.

There is no doubt that saving humankind and our common global future goes through the United Nations and its Charter norms – not as the only change-maker but as the most central.

Yes, the UN needs reform. But as we show below, there is a much larger need for government and peoples to reform their attitudes and policies concerning the United Nations.

As a matter of fact, it’s part of a much larger process of democratizing decision-making beyond the national and regional level and begin to think of global governance in completely new, future-oriented ways.

If and when humankind develops something far better than the UN – then we may switch to that and close down the UN as we know it today. Not a second before!

And that new institution shall not be located in the member state that has harmed the UN the most. But until that moment, let’s make the present UN stronger so it can eventually do what it was intended to: Serve the common good and abolish.

Only “we, the peoples” can do that – from below since “they, the governments” have consistently violated that tremendously important Article 1!

Below please find 23 proposals for global democracy and a strong UN.(1)

Let us first focus on democracy in relation to the United Nations. It deserves emphasis that there are many problems pertaining to democracy and the international community.

First, democracy itself is a complicated term, an essentially contested concept.

Second, what to do with the fact that democracy, athough perhaps being the best so far, is considered “pseudo” and ineffective and is systematically circumvented by a number of power elites in the Western world (and Japan).

Third, it is Western-biased concept and most often taken to imply only elements such as multi-party system, equality before the law, free speech, and a set of social institutions such as parliaments and the free press. Thus, many consider the Soviet Union a dictatorship because it has one party and the United States a democracy because it has two parties. India is called the world’s largest democracy while thousands starve to death unnecessarily, and China in which the people’s basic welfare is satisfied is called authoritarian, or worse.

Fourth, democratization is desirable but how do we avoid, on the one hand, the cultural imperialism of universalizing a deeply Western definition and, on the other, the cultural particularism in which any system or dictator is permitted to call a society democratic with reference to local interpretations?

Fifth, there is no democracy at the international level, no institutions that resemble those of the nation-states; therefore, we will have to build on the only institution that can be reformed in the direction of a multi-cultural democratic institution at the supranational level, the U.N. But that itself must be democratized and it must come to embody, sooner rather than later, a democratized world order. It is time to take “we, the peoples” serious and look into which peoples should be given a say in world – and UN – affairs. The catchword, of course, is popular sovereignty, i.e., a systematic acknowledgement of the principle that sovereignty resides with the people.

Sixth, as pointed out by Gandhi, democracies are based on regress to violence (armies, state repression, prisons, courts, capital punishment etc.) to uphold its order. And all democracies with exceptions such as Costa Rica, Iceland and perhaps a few more benefit from arms exports and support, more often than not, political interventionism and nuclearism.

Seventh, the same could be said about the attitudes in most democracies about the relationship between society and Nature. The complete, general entanglement of modern democracies in capitalism entails environmental destruction. It is the democratic world, not communism or dictatorships, that chop down rain forests and kills species, languages and “primitive” cultures.

Fortunately, both the environment and the development serve more convincing than any other problematic as an argument for restructuring existing international organizations, creating new ones and changing the meaning of government politics.

This is what eco-politics is about.

Today, the United Nations is totally unable to deal effectively with this civilizational challenge. The fact that sustainable development is a concept that has come to stay justifies the establishment of an entirely new organization within the United Nations. The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Brazil must deal effectively with this and like-minded ideas.

After all, the environmental agenda is the only: one that reflects the common interest of all humankind.

The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Sweden recently published a TFF Statement entitled A United Nations of the Future. What ‘We, the Peoples’ and Governments Can Do to Help the U.N. Help Ourselves.

In it, we suggest radical reforms in peacekeeping, development and environment and democratization of the U.N. itself and of the world community.

Here follows the 23 proposals relating to the latter:

1. The UN Security Council must undergo reforms and the veto power be restricted.

The exceptionally strong influence of the five permanent Security Council members is incompatible with democracy.

The veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council (SC) ought to disappear or its use restricted to certain areas and situations. Instead of the veto power, the SC could work with a double majority among the permanent members and among the elected members. Whatever we prefer, we can no longer ignore the need for, a comprehensive reform of the Security Council, its membership criteria, and modes of operation.

We believe that a gradual fading away of the veto power is not only desirable but also possible. Furthermore, it is important to strengthen the remunerative, peaceful and democratic powers of the General-Secretary and a new leadership structure as well as the General Assembly in the future rather than relying on the negative power of the veto. Hence:

The provisions for the functions of the Secretary-General (particularly Article 99 and 100) are, in fact, the only concession made in the Charter to supra-nationality. However, it demands a super human being to fulfil all the requirements of a Secretary-General laid down in the Charter and practices developed since then, not to speak of the personal qualities demanded.

Collective leadership in the top echelon is now a necessity. It could consist of five: the Secretary-General him- or herself, the three deputies – for peace and security, economic and social matters and for administration and management. The fifth would be a new deputy in charge of relations with the public, the non-governmental and private sector.

3. The General Assembly should be invigorated.

Maybe the most important role for the General Assembly (GA) in the future will be to raise political awareness on global issues. It could sponsor Special Sessions to get the facts and evaluations as well as the urgency expressed to a wide audience.

The legislative authority of the GA needs to be binding and linked to actions decided upon at the same time (as well as their financing). It has to be consensus decisions. There need to be legally binding conventions. The “United Action for Peace” Resolution from November 1950 provided that the General Assembly would meet to recommend collective measures in situations where the Security Council was unable to deal with a breach of peace or act of aggression.

The United Nations is, in fact, the United Governments. It is beyond doubt that a number of the governments are “non-peoples organizations” (NPOs) whereas many so-called NGOs are, in reality, People’s Organizations (PO) but have no access to UN forums.

So, new actors should be brought into the picture in various ways and with guarantees that they are truly independent of states. We suggest the following categories: a) international organizations, b) transnational organizations, in which people represent causes or worldwide issues but not parties or countries, such as various movements and initiatives, c) minorities and indigenous peoples, d) refugees and displaced persons, e) children and youth and f) transnational corporations.

Consultative status, direct participation in commissions and agencies, an elaborate system of hearings throughout the UN system, sounding of analyses and proposals and inviting statements, commissioning fact-finding, research etc. with these organizations – are all measures that would facilitate such a democratization.

Tapping non-governmental resources effectively would lead to a tremendously enriched UN and would turn the organization into a much more dynamic body perceived by citizens worldwide to be relevant to them.

We think they should be granted direct decision-making power in the not so distant future. The often proposed Second Chamber or “parallel structure” is an idea we fully endorse. The 1992 Conference Environment and Development could be a starting point for such an assembly, being formed and growing initially outside but parallel with the General Assembly. We find it wise to introduce it gradually and to establish first which constituencies it should have (see a-e above) and how to elect them. And this is the next point:

Today, Ministries of Foreign Affairs appoint by far the majority of UN civil servants. This leaves no chance for citizens to influence who will represent them – “We, the peoples.”

This creates a sense of distance. However, nothing in the statutes of the United Nations seems to forbid any member from appointing their representatives by direct election, but obliging them to do so would hardly be possible today.

For other bodies than the General Assembly such as for agencies and the proposed Second Chamber of non-governmental actors, citizens should be given the opportunity to vote for candidates.

Why are totally unnecessary products and glittering pseudo messages broadcasted constantly worldwide while an organization such as the United Nations has no commercials, no educational programs, no campaigns, no reports and no debates and analyses that reach us?

Most UN documents and even public information materials appear anything but stimulating to ordinary citizens. Year after year, public information has decreased as a share of the total budget. We live in the age of electronic communication and the UN must have creative media competence as well as sufficient funds to reach into our living rooms. There are not only ample opportunities for using satellite broadcasting, local stations and cable networks for global communication. We can also use these new technologies creatively for conflict-resolution.

And, now, what can the member governments do?

Obviously, the nation-state as such is losing influence vis-a-vis transnational actors and the environment. Governments should acknowledge that while they give up some sovereignty now, they harvest the benefits of cooperation, early solutions to problems and order instead of chaos later. Taking others into account in new ways is the sine qua non of survival for all.

Any national moves towards purely defensive military and/or civilian postures and doctrines would solve – automatically – a number of serious problems that would otherwise be dumped on the Secretary-General or settled through naked force in the battlefield.

It would indeed be illusory to expect the United Nations – armed with an annual budget for all UN activities of 5/1000 of world military expenditures – to solve the cumulative problems arising from the fact that practically all member states, to some degree, practice national defence policies in contradiction with the spirit, if not also the letter, of the United Nations.

Each member, through national law-making, ought to make it possible for any citizen otherwise eligible for military service to seek recruitment with the United Nations, for military and civilian peacekeeping, on an equal basis.

Recent analyses show that only around 32% of all disputes involving military operations and fighting have been referred to the UN during the 1980s, the lowest share since 1945.

Imagine that the whole range of ecological conflicts that are developing these years will also be referred – and you have the perfect argument for transnational management and a considerable boost in the capacity and budgets of the UN for these types of activities.

This applies particularly to those relating to non-use of force and the peaceful settlement of disputes, respect for the spirit and letter of the Charter combined with a firm commitment to make available all kinds of civilian and military peacekeeping forces as well as all expertise relating to non-violent, peaceful conflict-resolution.

There is a need for a “new, common-sense coalition” consisting mainly of middle size and non-aligned countries, determined to use the UN machinery effectively. The Soviet Union of 1990, with its new support for the UN, certainly belongs to such a commonsense coalition. Common sense coalitions will be needed not only in the field of peacemaking but also in creating genuine, globally sustainable development and ecological security. The UN is no substitute for governmental action.

No member should be allowed to exert political pressure within the organization because of the size of its financial contribution. No member should contribute more than, say, 15% of its budget. Sharing in relation to size of population and/or GNP may be the easiest, with compensation for the poorest, i.e., resembling some kind of progressive taxation.

There is no doubt that the UN, unfortunately, is a huge bureaucracy, but reality is also that it is also pitifully lacking funds; the entire staff of 50,000 is equivalent to 1/8 of all military researchers and engineers worldwide or l/3 of the British Railways.

We doubt the bureaucratic problem within the UN is that much worse than in most other large organizations. Evidently it should be rationalized and better coordinated, and deep cuts should hit extravagant salaries, per diem and travel costs.

Having said so, the UN will need resources many times what it has today to be an effective actor in the future world community. It is a shame upon humanity that the UN is constantly forced to live close to bankruptcy while Hollywood films make multibillion-dollar business.

There are at least two ways in which the United Nations could supplement its budget: members could earmark a certain percentage of personal incomes and consumption taxes, and the United Nations and its organizations could raise funds from not-for-profit foundations, private donators, big and small throughout the world. The criteria must, of course, be that no formal or informal strings be attached.

They should be staffed with experts, politicians, public servants and representatives of movements, minorities, refugees, children and youth and charged with raising issues, presenting proposals, holding hearings, etc.

Each such national committee would in various ways monitor all the nation’s policies and programs for the UN and its agencies and help create a much wider public consciousness on world affairs. It should carry out “global impact assessments” of national decision-making, preferably in cooperation with UN agencies and regional bodies.

It could also facilitate better national and regional coordination of UN activities. While governments often demand “improved coordination” of the UN, they themselves have created a loose system and often fail to coordinate their own policies in different forums within the UN system.

They could operate together with the United Nations associations and monitor security, development and environmental policies and actions and report back to regional organizations, UN agencies and central UN bodies on these matters. Naturally, they should place their advice and analyses at the disposal of governmental, non-governmental groups and associations as well as explain UN affairs to media.

In other words, they would serve as “go-betweens” in each country, with consultative and observer status and no more. They would make the presence of the UN and its norm system felt locally and balance the governments’ representatives to the UN. This is an obvious solution to the problem of the very low worldwide profile of the UN.

Now is the best chance ever! If humanity has a common future and shares common interests at all, one of them certainly is that of using and developing the United Nations and transform it into a global authority of the future.

Surveys unequivocally show that people worldwide want the UN. Change means struggle. Paradoxically, we must cooperate to create that regime of cooperation without which there will not be a better world for humankind.

The struggles for change at all levels by all actors converge naturally at the United Nations. The more we help it, the more we are all helped by it. Nations can make a difference – if united!

Hopefully, human energies will be employed to take stock of what we have and, sooner rather than later, take stock of what we need.

The Charter does not mention environmental problems or ecological balance at all. Peace is understood as non-war between governments and not as harmony between Nature and human beings.

Few would dispute today that the two are intimately linked and that peace with Nature is of the highest priority.

It will have to have very extensive non-violent powers but operate in a manner totally different from the present Security Council. It should deal with all matters related to issues such as global warming, ozone layer depletion, pollution, waste, ecological assessment (also of consumerism in rich countries), clean water and air, urbanization, transport systems and infrastructure. Further it should decide global environmental standards and depletion quotas of threatened resources and energy sources.

The United Nations, its Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are “anthropocentric.” The UN should strive to establish a normative framework which integrates humankind and Nature.

Whether we cherish and care for Nature and its bio-diversity in consideration for human beings or believe that Nature has rights and values in and of itself, we shall not solve the environmental problems and learn to live in sustainable ways without a concept of human duties and obligations vis-a-vis Nature.

It is time that the United Nations, in cooperation with all relevant constituencies, begin the work of drafting a “Universal Declaration of Human and Governmental Duties and Obligations”.

The ESC should cooperate with the SC in demilitarizing the common heritage and developing a global governance over the parts of the earth not now under national sovereign control: outer space, Antarctica and the high seas.

Today it is virtually without tasks and could be given authority over the common heritage areas, resources and culture. The modalities for such a new, much larger role for the Trusteeship Council should be investigated and proposals made.

If territories, resources and various objects could, either permanently or for limited periods be entrusted to the United Nations, it would solve many problems and reduce environmental damage.

We think here of resources such as oil, rain forests and resources threatened by depletion that could be protected and managed by the Trusteeship Council. Depending on circumstances, the Council would cooperate with the ESC and perhaps the SC. Setting depletion quotas for resources and reduction standards for threatened species should become the prerogative of the UN system.

The first step would be to coordinate already existing institutions worldwide. For the first time, the word “regional” would not mean political or geographical but biological or ecological regions. Governments and many other actors would cooperate in new bio- or eco-regional patterns, often crisscrossing other types of boundaries, and the commissions would report directly to the Secretary-General.

To summarize it all: the United Nations is … we.

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1. What follows from that point in the article was written in 1991 when I served as a visiting professor at the International Christian University, ICU, in Tokyo. It was published in “Alternatives To World Disorder In The 1990s” – Educational Series Nr 25, Institute of Asian Cultural Studies.

Over these almost 30 years, world disorder has only increased – particularly since the West chose the triumphalistic response to the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. And now the US, NATO and other West is in decline and will fall.

How much better it would have been for the West itself – and the world as a whole – to have worked instead for the common good and given the UN the power and resources to serve the common good of all humanity!

Still, we feel that good ideas should never be scrapped just because they are not picked up in the micro-historic time frame that 30 years are.

There will come a day when the world is looking intensely for good ideas about global governance – after nationalism and militarism and other constructs of lesser minds have declined too.

Featured image is by edgarwinkler / Pixabay

Since the CIA elevated Augusto Pinochet to power on an earlier 9/11 day of infamy in 1973 — replacing social democracy with tyrannical fascist rule — Pinochet’s ghost still haunts most Chileans.

Billionaire Sebastian Pinera governs the country with an iron fist, enforcing neoliberal harshness under police state rule.

Since 2019, millions of Chileans took to the streets against deep-seated corruption and inequality, high prices, poverty wages, and governance for privileged interests exclusively at the expense of most others.

For nearly half a century, Chilean ruling authorities followed Chicago School fundamentalist/IMF diktat policies.

They privatized state enterprises, handing them to corporate predators.

Mass layoffs, deregulation, deep social spending cuts, wage freezes or cuts, free market accesses for corporate America, business tax cuts, and tax increases for ordinary Chileans followed.

So did harsh repression against labor and other ordinary people.

Among 27 OECD member states,  Chile ranks highest in income inequality.

Most Chileans demand Pinera’s resignation and a new constitution.

He remains in office. On Sunday, Chileans are voting up or down on drafting a new constitution to replace the current repressive one.

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Chileans filled Santiago streets and elsewhere in the country for fundamental changes they demand.

They include higher wages, affordable prices, pension reform, free education and healthcare, along with a nation fit to live in.

Voting age Chileans are expected to turn out en masse for democratic change over fascist repression and a constitution that reflects it.

Widely despised Pinera has rock-bottom support of around 10% or less.

Choice for voters on Sunday is twofold: whether or not to draft a new constitution and if approved, what type body to prepare it.

On the latter issue, voters have two choices:

A constitutional convention with equal numbers of legislators and popularly elected delegates or a body comprised entirely of voter-elected members.

According to results of an Activa Research poll published on October 10, nearly 85% of Chileans want a new constitution, only 15% against drafting a new one.

Nearly 78% of respondents favor a “constitutional convention” option — MPs excluded, all delegates popularly elected.

If majority Chileans approve preparation of a new one, a vote to elect drafting body delegates will follow on April 11, 2021.

Once assembled, the Constitutional Convention will have nine months to draft a new document.

It must be approved by a two-thirds majority.

Within 60 days of approval, Chileans will have final say up or down on the new document by a simple majority through a national plebiscite.

If approved, it would become effective in 10 days.

It’ll be months to complete the process that begins on Sunday — with no assurance of the outcome no matter what changes most Chileans demand.

They’ve lived under repressive rule for nearly half a century.

Based on large-scale protests since last year, Chileans want equity and justice over ongoing fascist rule.

If the referendum and constitutional drafting process don’t deliver it, they’ll likely be back in the streets again demanding their fundamental rights.

A Final Comment

Chile has around 15 million eligible voters. They include citizens aged-18 or older and foreign nationals who’ve lived in the country over five years and have not been convicted of a crime.

Chileans abroad may vote at consulates where they reside.

Voting is scheduled from 8AM to 8PM or later at stations if queues remain.

Special voting hours for Chileans aged-60 or older exclusively are from 2PM – 5PM.

Individuals diagnosed with covid disease are prohibited from taking part in the process.

Official results of Sunday’s referendum may not be known until late November.

Electoral officials have until November 27 to announce them.

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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 InfoBrics

Today, October 24, 2020, there are many rallies around the world. Activists in these countries are joining in a common voice: Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay, Italy, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Austria.

Citizens of all countries are paying an enormous price for the pandemic. They have not only lost their loved ones, but their freedoms, their livelihood, their joy. Children and youth are suffering due to this crisis too. Without their friends and social activities, mental health problems in our young are at an all-time high. People around the world are demanding to be spared from the devastating consequences of the pandemic.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman of Children’s Health Defense, provides an inspirational message for freedom and hope to activists around the world.

Full transcript by Transcript by Rawan R. Mahmasa

Hey, everybody, it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. here, and I cannot tell you how happy I am to be able to have this opportunity to talk to thousands of citizens in 15 countries and all the continents in the world who have come together today to protest this coup d’etat by big data, by big telecom, by big tech, by the big oil and chemical companies, and by the global public health cartel led by Bill Gates and the WHO  that now amounts to two trillion dollars and wants to magnify and amplify its wealth and its power over our lives, over our liberties,

It wants to subvert our democracy and wants to destroy our sovereignty and our control over our lives and our children’s health.

And I want to remind you, those of you who are not Americans, of something that every American child learns when we’re growing up in this country about our history. And during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, who was one of the greatest presidents in American history, said to the American people: “the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself”

And we grow up hearing that but  people don’t really understand what it means. And it was a very, very profound warning by Roosevelt because he saw what the Great Depression was doing in Eastern Europe, in Italy and Germany and Spain, where that crisis was turning people towards fascism in the eastern countries, where the same crisis was turning citizens and governments towards communism and also causing the collapse of governments all over the world. And in our country, In the United States, it’s hard for people to remember today that almost a third of the people in our country were completely disillusioned with capitalism and wanted to turn to communism and another third wanted to turn to fascism. And Franklin Roosevelt wanted to preserve our country for democracy, for free market capitalism, for civil rights and to preserve our Constitution.

And he recognized that the weapon of authoritarian control was going to be fear. And when I spoke a few weeks ago in Berlin, I reminded the people of Germany of a very famous story that happened during the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, when Hitler’s closest lieutenant  the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, was asked by one of the prosecutors, how did you get the German people?, the German people are the most educated people in the world,

They were some of the most tolerant people in the world. The Weimar  Republic was one of the strongest democracies in the world. How did you take them? These people were so well educated and so awakened and so tolerant and turned them into obedient slaves who had committed some of the worst atrocities in human history? and Goring said, ” oh, that’s a simple thing.” And any of you can look up his quote and I urge you to do so. And he said, “And it works not just in the fascist government, but it works in a democracy, in a monarchy and in a communist government, and any government that you want, the job of the government is to put the people in fear. And and if you can keep them in fear, you can get them to do anything that you want them to do, that they will turn into sheep.

And there’s a famous book by Naomi Klein and all of us should read called Disaster Capitalism. And that book shows it’s a historical chronology of all of the times in American history, the history of the world during the Great Depression and during the financial collapse in 2008, during the financial collapse in Chile, for example, in 1973, during the time of the World Trade Center bombing, that authoritarian elements in a society and large corporations and wealthy plutocrats and oligarchs, wealthy families and individuals use crises to shift wealth upward to obliterate the middle classes of those countries and to clamp down totalitarian control.

And of course, that’s an obvious thing that people who are used to voting for their governments are not going to vote for policies that make the rich people richer and give corporations even more power over their lives, that reduce democracy and reduce civil rights. These are not good vessels for populism, in order to transform the government so that it will reward the rich with even more wealth.

The people who want to do that, the large corporations who orchestrate that kind of change, have to get rid of civil rights. The first civil right that they begin with is freedom of speech. They need to clamp down censorship because censorship is the most important right. And our country, we put it, number one, the First Amendment of the Constitution, because all the other rights depend on it. If a government can hide what it’s doing, it can get away with anything it wants.

If a corporation can lie to you and conceal information, if there’s no transparency in a democracy, you do not have a democracy. So, if you want to get rid of all the other rights, like freedom of assembly, which you are exercising today, some of you are exercising it at grave threats. Some of you will suffer, some of you will be jailed, some of you will suffer injuries.

But that is a basic right, the right to freedom of expression, the right to a jury trial, the right to freedom of religion, the right to privacy, the right to have governments don’t spy on you and keep your information.

All of those other rights can only be subverted if they begin imposing censorship, by being able to silence people who want to speak. So the coup d’état that we are all fighting today, is a coup d’etat that starts with a conspiracy between the government agencies and the big technology companies that Silicon Valley billionaires, people like Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and the people who run Google and Facebook and Pinterest and all of these other Silicon Valley corporations who are now in this conspiracy to make sure that we cannot talk about our grievances, we cannot say bad things about pharmaceutical products.

We can not question government policies that make no sense to us. And I’m going to say a few things about some of those government policies. Number one, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I follow the facts. I don’t know that the covid illness was laboratory generated in Wuhan. There is plenty of evidence that  it was, but  not enough evidence for me to say that it’s a fact. My question is, why don’t we know the answer to that?

Why is Tony Fauci not being asked that question? Why is President Trump not launching an investigation? or President Xi Jinping or the presidents of any of these countries? Saying, “Where did this come from?”  Because we need to know that, but global citizens, this is the worst calamity in history. And nobody seems curious about where this actually comes from?

We know it didn’t come from a bat in the wet market in Wuhan.

And that story was a fable that now has no basis, in fact.

There are many other questions that I’d like to know the answer. Questions about masks. I’m very willing to accept if the masks work. Then I want to wear them, if they’re going to protect other people from tansmissibility then I want to wear them, but the studies I have seen indicate that they do not work against viral transmission for the most part, there’s some that  say they may work under limited circumstances. What I don’t want to be told is: they work and you’re going to wear them, and you’d better not ask questions about it.

Most Americans and most of people on this planet, we want leadership but we don’t want bullying. And we know the difference between bullying and leadership. We want to know the truth about hydroxychloroquine, we want to know why are we spending 18$ billion on vaccines and only 1.4$ billion on therapeutic drugs.  What is the sense of that? There are many, many other questions that we, in a democracy, have a right to have answered, without being called conspiracy theorists, without being vilified as “inconsiderate” or being bad “citizens”.

Everybody who’s part of these demonstrations is people who are striving with their lives to become good citizens. Now let me tell you what we need to do to win this battle, the only way we can win it is with democracy. We need to fight to win our democracy back, to reclaim our democracy from these villains who are stealing it from us. And you notice the people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of the quarantine.

Who’s becoming the richest? Jeffrey Bezos, $83 billion he’s made, and he owns Amazon, and he’s censoring books that criticize the quarantine. Zuckerburg, who owns Facebook, who’s made tens of billions of dollars by this quarantine and he is censoring information that is critical of the quarantine. He censors my Instagram, he censors my Facebook, my Twitter page is also censored. And all of these people are people who are making billions of dollars on the quarantine. And what I want to know is a simple question: is the quarantine actually effective?

You know we’ve had plenty of pandemics in the past. In 1969, we had a Hong Kong Flu pandemic that killed 100,000 people in the United States. It’s the equivalent of 200,000 people today who are being killed by coronavirus. Did we go into lockdown? No. Did we wear masks? No. We went to Woodstock. We went to the Democratic Convention in Chicago and had huge crowds of people. Nobody was told to lockdown, and don’t see your girlfriend, and wear a mask and don’t go out of your house, and shutdown your business and bankrupt every business in the country.

Last year, there were 1.6 million people in the world who died from tuberculosis. We have 1.6 million people die every year from tuberculosis. We’re not wearing masks. We’re not on lockdown. What’s the difference between tuberculosis and coronavirus? Tuberculosis has a vaccine, and the vaccine costs about $3 and that’s why we’re not on lockdown because nobody is making $39 a vaccine, or $300 a vaccine, the way that Moderna, and AstraZeneca, and Johnson  & Johnson are making from this catastrophe, and that is the only reason that I can think of. And I’m happy if somebody tells me there’s another reason, but let’s hear it. Don’t just shut me up. Don’t just tell me that I can’t debate. Here’s what we need to do. We need to do exactly what you’re doing today. We need to come out on the street and we need to stick together.

What the Big Tech villains and scoundrels, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeffrey Bezos, and Bill Gates, and Toni Fauci want you to do is they want us fighting with each other, they want blacks fighting against whites, they want republicans fighting against democrats, they want everybody polarized, they want everybody fragmented, cause they know if we all get together, we’re going to start questions, and those are questions that they can’t answer, “why are you getting rich?” And “Why are we all getting poor?” And “What’s the difference between tuberculosis and coronvirus?” And “Why are we not wearing masks for tuberculosis but we are for the coronavirus?” And “Where did it all come from?” And all of those questions that we deserve an answer to that we’re not getting answers, we need to stick together.

If you’re a republican or a democrat, stop talking about that. Stop identifying yourself. The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us from our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly, and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity. And the last thing that all of us need to do is we need to stay educated and informed.

One of the things that I want to announce to you today is that Children’s Health Defense, my organization with the help of many of you who are in these crowds, is launching a journal, a daily journal, and we are going to  weaponize information for you, we’re going to tell you what the newest science is.

We’re going to take all the information that is censored everywhere else and we’re going to reprint it in our publication, and you can get that everyday, so, if you see something that is censored, we want to hear about it because we want to put it up.

We are going to be the enemies of censorship. We are going to be the refuge, and we’re going to allow debate. We’re going to make sure it’s civil debate. We’re going to encourage people to be non-partisan. But we’re going to allow people to comment and have different opinions than us, we are not scared of debate, the way pharmaceutical companies and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeffrey Bezos, and Toni Fauci, are terrified of debate. We welcome debate, we want to hear if we’ve got a different opinion than me, I want to hear about it, and I want to see your science. And I want the public to hear us talking about it and debating about it because the free-flow of information, the cauldron of debate is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually work and triumph.

You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history and it is the battle to save democracy and freedom and human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us simultaneously in every nation in the world of the rights that every human being is born with.

So thank you for your courage, thank you for your commitment, so thank you for your brotherhood, and I can pledge to you, I will go down dying with my boots on, fighting side-by-side with all of you to make sure that we return these rights and preserve them from our children.

And I will see all of you on the barricades, thank you.

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According to reports on the ground, Azeris are using Israeli-supplied cluster munitions in Nagorno-Karabakh.

More on this below.

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The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) bans production use, transfer, and stockpiling of these terror weapons that scatter submunition bomblets over a wide area.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams called CCM “the most important disarmament and humanitarian convention in over a decade.”

Brightly colored, children mistake cluster bomblets for toys. Picking them up risks serious injury or death.

The US and Israel notoriously use these and other banned weapons in their preemptive wars.

Both countries failed to join over 100 others that are parties to the CCM.

Cluster munitions can be fired by artillery, rockets, and missiles, or air-dropped by warplanes.

Most often, they open when airborne, dispersing multiple submunitions (bomblets) over a wide area.

Acting like landmines, they remain dangerous for years unless professionally destroyed.

In November 2017, a Trump regime war department memo indefinitely delayed implementation of a ban on these weapons.

Current US policy gives military commanders discretion to use them “until sufficient quantities” of “enhanced and more reliable” versions are developed and deployed.

Despite years of research, no  safer substitutes were found.

The US, NATO, and Israel use chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons in all their wars of choice — the human toll never an issue, nor the rule of law.

The Cluster Munition Coalition promotes nonuse of these weapons — a futile initiative as long as they continue to be used by US-led Western countries and Israel.

Reportedly, Azeri forces are using cluster munitions indiscriminately in terror-bombing Nagorno-Karabakh (NK below) residential areas, including in Stepanakert, NK’s capital.

Remnants of unexploded Israeli Mo95 submunition bomblets were found on the ground.

No evidence indicates that Armenian or NK forces have these terror weapons — either self-produced or obtained from foreign suppliers.

Reports on the ground indicate that Azeri forces used these weapons nearly straightaway after launching war in NK on September 27.

According to Southfront on October 3, “the Armenian Unified Infocenter shared photos showing the remains of Israeli-made M095 submunitions found in a civilian settlement that was the target of an Azerbaijani rocket strike.”

“According to the Infocenter, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces carried out the strike using a LAR-160 multiple rocket launch system (MRLS).”

“At least 30 LAR-160 MRLS are reportedly in active service with the Azerbaijani Armed Forces. The Azerbaijani systems are apparently armed with Mk.”

“II cluster rockets, which are known to carry M095 submunitions.”

Use of these terror weapons against combatants or civilians — designed to indiscrdiminately kill or maim over a distance of several hundred yards — constitutes a war crime.

Preemptive wars of course are the ultimate high criminal actions — the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners guilty time and again.

Separately on Saturday, Armenian President Armen Sarkissian’s press office said the following:

“In the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Russia is a trusted and pro-active mediator between the conflicting sides. Russia plays a crucial role here, and it demonstrated its commitment to finding a peaceful solution to the conflict by brokering a ceasefire on 10 October.”

“We must admit that this was a courageous and timely move, even though the Azeri side remained aggressively stubborn and destructive.”

After nearly a month of Azeri launched war in NK, it continues because Baku and Turkey’s Erdogan want conflict, not resolution.

Erdogan earlier said the following:

“We support the friendly and fraternal Azerbaijan in every way possible and we will continue to do it. This struggle will continue until Karabakh is liberated from occupation.”

On Friday, he expressed willingness to work with Moscow on conflict resolution — adding that he wants a seat at the table along with Minsk Group countries Russia, France and the US.

At the same time, he added: “Azerbaijan is putting its righteous demand forth” — wanting control over NK instead of Armenia.

That’s a prescription for continued conflict, resolution only possible through diplomacy and compromises by both warring sides.

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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.

An outspoken proponent of government-led tactics to influence public opinion on policy and to undermine the credibility of “conspiracy theorists” will lead the World Health Organization’s (WHO) efforts to encourage public acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine, Children’s Health Defense has learned.

Last week, WHO’s general director, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, tweeted that he was glad to speak with the organization’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health to “discuss vaccine acceptance and uptake in the context of COVID-19.”

In his next tweet Ghebreyesus announced that Cass Sunstein, founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, will chair the advisory group, which was created in July.

Sunstein was former President Barack Obama’s head of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where he was responsible for overseeing policies relating to information quality.

In 2008, Sunstein wrote a paper proposing that governments employ teams of covert agents to “cognitively infiltrate” online dissident groups and websites which advocate “false conspiracy theories” about the government. In the paper, Sunstein and his co-authors wrote:

“Our principal claim here involves the potential value of cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, designed to introduce informational diversity into such groups and to expose indefensible conspiracy theories as such.”

The government-led operations described in Sunstein’s paper would work to increase faith in government policy and policymakers and undermine the credibility of “conspiracists” who question their motives. They would also maintain a vigorous “counter misinformation establishment” to counter “conspiracy” groups opposed to government policies that aim to protect the common good.

Some of this would be accomplished by sending undercover agents, or government-paid third parties, into “online social networks or even real space groups.”

Sunstein also advocated in 2008 that the government pay “independent experts” to publicly advocate on the government’s behalf, whether on television or social media. He says this is effective because people don’t trust the government as much as they trust people they believe are “independent.”

WHO has already contracted the public relations firm, Hill + Knowlton. The PR giant, best known for its role in manufacturing false testimonies in support of the Gulf War, was hired by WHO  to “ensure the science and public health credibility of the WHO in order to ensure WHO’s advice and guidance is followed.”

WHO paid Hill + Knowlton $135,000 to identify micro-influencers, macro-influencers and “hidden heroes” who could covertly promote WHO’s advice and messaging on social media, and also protect and promote the organization’s image as a COVID-19 authority.

There’s no evidence that WHO has yet implemented any “cognitive infiltration” policies similar to what Sunstein advocated in 2008. If the organization were to adopt such a strategy, and use it to convince hesitant populations to take a COVID vaccine, it would raise questions of legality.

As put forward in a report by the Congressional Research Service, illegal “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials; (2) purely partisan activity; or (3) “covert propaganda.” By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

Because WHO is a multinational organization and not a U.S. Government agency, covert “cognitive infiltration” policies could fall into a gray area, or even be considered legal.

Dr. Margaret Chan, former general-director of WHO, once stated that the organization’s policies are “driven by what [she called] donor interests.”

According to a 2012 article in Foreign Affairs, “few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the WHO are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.” Or, as other sources told Politico in 2017, “Gates’ priorities have become the WHO’s.”

WHO’s current general director, Ghebreyesus, was previously on the board of two organizations that Gates founded, provided seed money for and continues to fund to this day: GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, a public–private global health partnership focused on increased access to vaccines in poor countries, and the Global Fund, which says it aims to accelerate the “development, production and equitable global access to safe, quality, effective, and affordable COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.”

If, as Politico put it, “Gates priorities have become the WHO’s,” and if WHO’s policies are driven by “donor interests,” this raises questions as to what online groups, people and websites would be targeted by such covert programs.

The idea of government agents carrying out psychological operations on social media is not far fetched. Earlier this year the head of editorial for Twitter’s Middle East and Africa office was outed as an active officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit, known as the 77th brigade, which specializes in online behavioral change operations.

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Jeremy Loffredo is a reporter for Children’s Health Defense.

Featured image is from CHD

“The truth is, the technocrats have no intention of ever letting us go back to normal,” writes Dr. Joseph Mercola in Fear Secures Obedience in COVID-19 War. “The plan is to alter society permanently. Part of that alteration is the removal of civil liberties and human rights, and it is now happening at breakneck speed.”

It may seem like we are outnumbered in an impossible battle against the Corona World Order. The majority of the population have already succumbed to the mass brainwashing operation underway.

Yet, 605 years ago, King Henry V found his army outnumbered by six-to-one on the fields of Agincourt in Northern France.

Before the battle, in Shakespeare’s King Henry V, the king overhears his cousin lamenting how so many men in England were sleeping in bed that morning of the battle. King Harry responds:

Despite being so outnumbered, the English won the battle. Partly, the historians say, because 80% of the army was made up OF soldiers skilled in the use of the longbow.

Likewise, we may not have great numbers, but we have facts and figures on our side. Truth seems a far sharper weapon than the mind control dribble the other side is showering upon the public.

So best hope have I, too.

Now, for a stirring dose of inspiration, on this the 605th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt check out Kenneth Branagh’s performance of speech that roused fearful men to victorious battle. And for the cutest rendition, check out my son reciting the speech at age six.

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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 Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: John Gilbert – The Morning of the Battle of Agincourt (1884), Guildhall Art Gallery (Public Domain)

Whether it be because the EU is staying true to its pledge to protect the freedom and well-being of its citizens, or because it wishes to increase its relevance and importance in the mind of Europeans, the matter is of no small importance. The Court of Justice of the European Union, through its Advocate General, Giovanni Pitruzzella, could put an end to a creeping campaign led by private organizations to discontinue physical currency. The motion aims to protect vulnerable citizens and fundamental liberties.

The numerous enemies of cash

The war on currency started so long ago that few agree on the birth year. But a ball park date would be the 1960s and 1970s, when alternative payment methods started slowly replacing banknotes in transactions. Nowadays, countless options are offered to consumers during their purchases. CSR reports that “electronic forms of payment have become increasingly available, convenient, and cost efficient due to technological advances in digitization and data processing. Anecdotal reporting and certain analyses suggest that businesses and consumers are increasingly eschewing cash payments in favor of electronic payment methods.” Along the way, many organizations saw in the societal shift an opportunity, and started trying to rush it, against public interest or, at the very least, disregarding it. Now that consumers in the EU have a large pallet of payment options, these organizations realized that cash held its ground, and that numerous daily transactions were still being carried out with good old-fashioned banknotes. And this is where, gradually, push came to shove. 

Big Tech wishes to increase profit

There are two reasons why financial service companies wish to eradicate hard currency. The first one is direct: with a small commission paid in every digital transaction, it takes no genius to figure out why these companies would wish to increase the number of non-cash payments on markets. The Congressional Research Service released a global study in 2019, stating that “Such trends have led analysts and policymakers to examine the possibility that the use and acceptance of cash will significantly decline in coming years and to consider the effects of such an evolution.” The second reason is indirect. While banks and financial institutions can sometimes be creative and at the tip of ingenuity, they followed suit in this case, after GAFA companies built their fortunes by collecting information on their clients. Banks and financial institutions eventually realized that they, too, could collect rich data on people, as digital payments leave a generous paper trail behind them: who paid what to whom, for what, where, and when. Such a treasure trove of information would be valuable to these companies, or to the highest bidder.  But for that, cash payments, which can be used to evade Big Tech control, need to be eliminated first. And, given that cash is used in larger proportions by the more vulnerable segments of society, this would amount to harming the poor, homeless and elderly, so that large corporations may increase their profit.

Some national governments keen on a cashless world 

Banks and large companies found themselves alongside some governments, in this struggle: namely those who were eager to increase their control over their populations. The most prominent example came in 2016, when India brutally attacked cash and sent destructive shockwaves throughout the nation, in an attempt to aggrandize its reach and power. In Europe, as well, some governments dream of achieving complete control over their economies and population. A cashless economy would indeed provide this level of power, as any citizen could be kept under scrutiny and controlled in its economic life. If companies drawing profit with their information on people wasn’t bad enough, civil liberties activists dreaded what some European governments could do with such power. Hungary, an EU member, as recently tipped into brutal dictatorship and could easily use enhanced data on its population to intimidate citizens and opponents into silence.

Giovanni Pitruzzella steps in

These trends warmed up quietly for years, until they came to a boiling point in the 2010s. The EU let itself be influenced for a very short period, before it realized what was at stake. Various anti-cash measures were implemented but, in 2018, when Brussels realized there was a larger agenda behind these pushes, it put an end to it. Recently, two German citizens who attempted to pay their taxes in cash were turned away, and struck with mark-ups, as their tax offices insisted they pay digitally. They brought the matter to the CJEU, which ruled in their favor. Giovanni Pitruzzella seized the occasion to put an end to the matter and remind all organizations involved that cash was not only a citizen’s guarantee for economic independence. He stated that: “despite widespread usage of electronic forms of payment in the EU, […] cash still plays an important role in the euro area economy and thus the advent of a cashless society does not seem as imminent as some people like to think”. He also confirmed that economic decisions should be made, taking into account the interests of the poorest, and keeping in mind the cost-benefit balance. “There is a direct link between cash and the exercise of fundamental rights […] which does exist in cases where there is a social inclusion element of the use of cash”, he added. In this case, the assessment was made that an opportunity for private profit or government control could not take precedence over the protection of the EU’s most vulnerable and the freedom of choice of its citizens. 

The EU has been facing headwinds in recent years, in no small part due to the UK questioning its relevance, leadership, or even integrity. As public and private corporations around the world turn away from their mission to protect their most vulnerable, and towards self-interest, the CJEU has made it clear that no such breaches would occur within the confines of the European Union. If the EU was seeking an occasion to show its worth, it came in the person of its Advocate General.

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Featured image is from the public domain

It is all but certain that the next head of the influential World Trade Organization (WTO) will be an African by birth and a woman. But neither is what makes the all-but certain naming of Nigerian-born Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala cause for alarm. Rather it is who she is and who she presently is tied to that insure she will implement the unfolding agenda of the Great Reset transformation of the world economy, using the coronavirus pandemic as a prime lever. She presently heads an organization created by the seeming omnipresent (not omniscient) Bill Gates together with the Davos World Economic Forum—both involved in implementing the Great Reset–and she is deeply tied to the prime institutions of globalization and international finance. Some background we should know about.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has just won the unanimous support of the 55 nations of the African Union, defeating an Egyptian candidate. As of this writing she faces certain approval over her South Korean opponent. On October 17, the 55 member countries of the African Union voted to back Okonjo-Iweala against her only remaining opponent, Yoo Myung-hee of South Korea, their current Minister of Trade. The Nigerian candidate claims also to have the backing of a group of Caribbean and Pacific states, bringing the number of countries officially endorsing her candidacy to 79 out of the 164 states that comprise the WTO. It looks like a done deal.

Who is Okonjo-Iweala?

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala comes from senior ministerial posts in Nigeria, one of the world’s most corrupt states with a 2019 Transparency International index of 146 from 180 states evaluated. Notably, she was Finance Minister in the Nigerian government twice, first under President Olusegun Obasanjo from 2003–2006. Then again, from 2011–2015 under President Goodluck Jonathan when she was named Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy. Though she was never charged with corruption, in 2015 almost $20 billion was discovered “lost” after an audit by PriceWaterhouseCoopers of state oil revenues. She also convinced Goodluck Jonathan to lift gasoline subsidies in 2012 triggering massive street protests as many Nigerians see cheap gasoline as the only benefit they get from the country’s vast oil wealth. Cutting such subsidies is standard World Bank fare.

As Finance Minister she backed the usual IMF/World Bank demands for slashing state subsidies for gasoline and privatization of electricity. It was no surprise, as Okonjo-Iweala was with the World Bank in Washington for 25 years. After Obasanjo terminated her first stint as Finance Minister, she returned to the World Bank to become Managing Director of Operations from 2007–2011. Several times she made clear her ambition to become head of the World Bank, a post traditionally filled by an American Citizen. Indeed, she went so far as to take American citizenship in 2019 when the World Bank post again became vacant, but to no avail.

The World Bank is one of the pivotal UN-based instruments for advancing the globalist corporatist economic agenda, along with the IMF. Like the IMF the World Bank uses its money as a carrot to impose draconian conditionalities on recipient governments in developing countries. This is called the “Washington Consensus” and imposes an unsuitable “free market” agenda that inevitably includes demands to slash state budgets, cut state subsidies to food and fuel, make the currency convertible and cheap, and eliminate protectionist barriers. The Structural Adjustment Programs of the World Bank and IMF in West Africa led countries to prioritize debt payments over investment in public services including in education, infrastructure or basic health services. In short, it is a brutal form of what has been called technocratic neo-colonialism, far more sinister than the British or French or Belgians ever managed because they use Africans or other developing country technocrat “faces” to impose the draconian austerity that forces countries to open to foreign plunder, typically by the western corporate giants.

GAVI and Gates

Okonjo-Iweala left the corrupt government of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 to become Chairman of GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, where she sits until today. GAVI stands for Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. It was founded in 2000 with an initial $750 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates was joined by the World Bank and GAVI was all agreed at the Davos World Economic Forum, the globalist hub at the center of the Great Reset. GAVI claims to have spent more than $4 billion on vaccines. Its main target is vaccinating every child in Africa, India and the developing world. GAVI declares on its website,

“As part of its mission to save lives, reduce poverty and protect the world against the threat of epidemics, Gavi has helped vaccinate more than 822 million children in the world’s poorest countries.”

The Board of GAVI includes, in addition to Chairman Okonjo-Iweala, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers, GSK, as well as the Gates Foundation, World Bank, WHO and UNICEF. Under the chairmanship of Okonjo-Iweala, GAVI has been involved in the scandalous spread of polio in Africa as a result of their polio vaccine strategy. As well also in India GAVI and the Gates Foundation were sued in Indian High Courts for “criminally negligent trialling the vaccines on a vulnerable, uneducated and under-informed population– school administrators, students and their parents– who were not provided informed consent or advised of potential adverse effects or required to be monitored post-vaccination.” A number of vaccinated Indian girls died after receiving HPV vaccines from GSK, a board member of GAVI.

Most recently, under Okonjo-Iweala’s term as Chairman of GAVI, cases of paralytic polio resulted in African and Indian children who had been vaccinated by GAVI and Gates Foundation Oral Polio Vaccine programs. GAVI and Gates did so despite the fact they knew that the OPV had been dropped by the US CDC in 1992 from its vaccine schedule in the US because it was causing polio. Under the GAVI-Gates polio vaccination program polio cases have been registered in more than a dozen African countries including Angola, Congo, Nigeria and Zambia and Okono-Iweala’s Nigeria. But the shocking thing is that the outbreaks are all reportedly caused by the Gates-backed oral polio vaccine. GAVI and Gates engage in a colossally corrupt and even criminal enterprise in which the tax exempt Gates Foundation invests in vaccine companies like GSK and others that then sell their vaccines to huge new markets such as Africa and India. As stock prices in GSK rise as a result of rising sales of vaccines, Gates Foundation net worth rises too. “Charity” for profit is the model.

In short Okonjo-Iweala’s role as head of the corrupt GAVI as well as World Bank and Nigerian Finance Ministry make her a superb candidate to head the globalist World Trade Organization. Looking further into her ties adds to that picture.

Revealing Board Ties

While taking the position as Chairman of GAVI Okonjo-Iweala also became “Senior Advisor” to Lazard Ltd., a US investment bank which claims to be the world’s largest independent investment bank, with principal executive offices in New York City, Paris and London. The current Lazard board includes among others Richard Haass, head of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Lazard chairman Kenneth Jacobs sits on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group. Then in 2018, while still advising Lazard and heading Gates’ GAVI, she joined the board of Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, infamous these days for massive political censorship.

She also took a position in 2018 on the Board of the major international bank Standard Chartered, whose major shareholder is the government sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, and whose banking operations are in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In 2012 the New York Department of Financial Services accused Standard Chartered of hiding $250 billion (!) in transactions involving Iran, labelling it a “rogue institution.” The bank has been involved in money laundering US sanctions-violations also involving Myanmar, Libya and Sudan and Hong Kong, where it has major business with China. The Nigerian WTO candidate is well-connected to the world of global finance powers that be, in short.

The former Nigerian Finance Minister and World Bank official is also well-versed in the globalist dystopian UN Agenda 2030 backed by the Davos WEF and Gates. She is co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate which calls for “bold climate action,” alongside the head of the IMF, and former head of the agribusiness giant Unilever among others. She also served on the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the infamous “sustainable development” agenda. And she is listed as an “Agenda Contributor” to the Davos World Economic Forum.

The WTO Agenda

If she is elected which seems all but a done deal, she will head one of the central globalist institutions. The WTO was created in 1995 to advance the Davos agenda of globalization, arguably one of the most economically destructive agendas in history. WTO rules on agriculture trade were drafted by the agribusiness cartel companies led by Cargill to force open agriculture markets in the developing countries to agribusiness products from the global food cartel companies. Rather than eliminate food subsidies in the North American and EU producer countries, subsidies of over 40% on key products have allowed giant agribusiness companies like Unilever to flood local markets in Africa and Asia which bankrupt local small producers, forcing them to flood into urban centers for cheap labor. As one analyst put it, reforms demanded by the WTO have destroyed guaranteed prices and state-sponsored extension services, and governments of the Global South have had to dismantle programs for food security and rural assistance in favor of those that would help them meet WTO mandates.

With her ties to Bill Gates, to the World Bank, the Word Economic Forum, to international finance and even Twitter, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is well-suited to supervise the planned imposition of the totalitarian agenda of the Gates-WEF Great Reset. That she will owe her election to WTO to the backing of African and other developing country governments is a bitter commentary on the cynical manipulations of the Powers That Be in today’s world.

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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

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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.

Russia and the United States, after several months of moving forth and back with negotiations, have finally moved closer to agree on extending the controversial nuclear treaty for one year. The one-year short-term agreement was on the initiative, or better still a proposal offered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It would be extremely sad, if this Treaty ceased to exist and was not replaced by another fundamental document of this kind. During all the previous years, the New START worked and worked properly, performing its fundamental role as a constraint curtailing the arms race and a tool of arms control. It is clear that we have new weapons systems that the American side lacks, at least for the time being. We are not refusing to discuss this aspect of the matter as well,” Putin said at the Russia’s Security Council meeting on October 16, transcript made available on the Kremlin website.

“In this regard, I have a proposal to extend the Treaty now in effect unconditionally for at least a year in order to have a chance to hold substantive talks on all the parameters of problems that are regulated by treaties of this kind, lest we leave our countries and all nations of the world with a vested interest in maintaining strategic stability without such a fundamental document as the Strategic Offensive Arms Limitation Treaty,” he further added.

In response, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov mentioned that Russia has remained quite proactive in contacts with American colleagues on strategic stability matters in all their aspects, including by emphasizing our initiative to take a decision without delay to extend the New START, set to expire in February 2021, for a new five-year term without any preconditions. This initiative remains on the table.

According to Lavrov, Russia would be ready to continue working on new agreements, clear proposals in furtherance of the comprehensive approach to strategic stability, which have been forwarded to the US side. In reply, the United States has sent its proposals, which have been presented as conditions, or rather preconditions for the extension of the New START.

On October 20, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued an official statement that surprised experts in arms control both, in Russia and the United States. The ministry suddenly announced that Moscow was ready to prolong the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) for one year, undertaking the political obligation along with Washington to freeze the amount of its nuclear warheads for that period.

The official statement said that Russia offers to extend the New START Treaty for one year and meanwhile is ready to jointly with the U.S. undertake a political commitment to “freeze” for the above-mentioned period the number of nuclear warheads that each side possesses.

This position of ours may be implemented only and exclusively on the premise that “freezing” of warheads will not be accompanied by any additional demands on the part of the United States. Were this approach be acceptable for Washington, then the time gained by the extension of the New START Treaty could be used to conduct comprehensive bilateral negotiations on the future nuclear and missile arms control that must address all factors affecting strategic stability, the statement said.

Despite the fact that both Russia and the United States get closer to agree on short-term extension, Russian experts still have deep reservations and oscillating perceptions about the relations with United States. On the other hand, some believed that the decision did not only demonstrate a radical change in Russia’s stance but also would pave the way for future negotiations.

New START is the last major bilateral treaty related to nuclear arms control, Director General at the Russian International Affairs Council, Andrey Kortunov, pointed out in comments to Vedomosti daily newspaper, added that without the agreement, the era of bilateral arms control, which began 50 years ago, would come to an end.

Putin’s initiative was targeted at US President Donald Trump who may need to showcase himself as a champion of peace ahead of the presidential election, Kortunov noted. Russia actually suggested that talks should be continued later, in case Trump wins.

“If Trump fails to be re-elected, then [Russia] would continue the conversation with the Democrats. Especially since Biden seems to be willing to preserve the bilateral mechanism of strategic arms control,” the expert added.

Kortunov believes that even if New START is extended, the current arms control mechanism cannot be salvaged. “In any case, there is a need to shift to a new mechanism. Not only in terms of engaging China, but also because of changes in nuclear weapons technologies,” the expert stressed.

In addition to above, Russia’s Izvestia newspaper also reported that Moscow and Washington continued to have different assessments of the future of the treaty. Thus, Russia is sure that the chances of extending the document are “close to zero” because of the position of the United States. At the same time, the US claims that they have reached an agreement, in principle, and would be able to approve all the formalities before the presidential elections in the United States.

“The extension of the agreement is hindered by the current American administration’s efforts to solve its internal problems by using the Treaty. They practically want to receive a certain document for the elections, which can be trotted out as a victory. But the conditions they offer are unacceptable,” Ilya Kramnik, an Expert at the Russian International Affairs Council told the Izvestia newspaper in comments.

Konstantin Bogdanov, Senior Researcher at the Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), believes that Russia was in no hurry to sign the deal under such conditions.

“The Americans are increasingly demonstrating their dependence on the upcoming elections. They need at least some ‘paper’ before the national ballot and they are noticeably anxious. That is why right now, before the elections, there will be no agreements on American terms,” the expert assured.

The possibility of extending the treaty will exist until February 2021, with the deal actually expiring only three months later, said Dmitry Stefanovich, a Researcher at the International Security Center, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

According to him, Putin is ready to continue substantial discussions of mutual concerns in the strategic field. His order to the Foreign Ministry to get a clear-cut answer from the United States points to Moscow’s annoyance at “the mess in Washington.”

Russia is still convinced that proliferation risks and threats that are rampant today can be eliminated by the strict observance of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), while respecting and ensuring the balance between its three components: nonproliferation, disarmament and peaceful use of nuclear energy.

It restricts the numbers of strategic nuclear warheads that Russia and the United States can deploy as well as the missiles and bombers that carry them. Despite their differences, Moscow and Washington appear to be moving closer to a deal on a new agreement. Moscow and Washington signed the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms in 2010. Under the terms, the Treaty concluded for a period of ten years, it therefore means until February 5, 2021.

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

Featured image: President Putin by Harold Escalona/shutterstock; President Trump by Drop of Light/Shutterstock

The Armenian defense in the southern part of the Nagorno-Karabakh region seems to be collapsing as the advancing Azerbaijani forces are about to reach the strategic Lachin corridor.

On October 23, Azerbaijani troops were filmed near the village of Muradxanlı, which is located in about 15 km from this strategic area. Even if this Azerbaijani unit was just a field recognizance patrol and the main forces of the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc still have to overcome Armenian resistance to reach the area, the fact of the Azerbaijani presence there marks the hard situation on the frontline for the Armenians.

The Lachin corridor is a mountain pass within the de jure borders of Azerbaijan, forming the shortest route between Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (Republic of Artsakh). The cutting off of Lachin will destroy the remaining hopes of the Armenian side to achieve a military victory in the ongoing war. Meanwhile, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev announced that his forces took full control of the Azerbaijani-Iranian border after capturing the village of Aghband. The Azerbaijani leader also declared that the Armenians lost 21 more settlements in the districts of Zangilan, Fuzuli and Jabrayil.

The Armenian military denies the collapse of its defense lines in the south and claims that Azerbaijani units appearing on video are just sabotage parties. According to the Armenian side, various Azerbaijan troops tried to advance in the western, northern and northwestern directions, but all of these offensive attempts were repelled. The Azerbaijani military allegedly suffered heavy losses.

The Armenian side insists that the towns of Hadrut and Fuzuli are in fact not in the hands of Azerbaijan. It insists that various units of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan penetrate into different settlements in the front-line zone trying to create panic and make selfies there. These groups, according to Armenian media, are very small and often run away from Armenian troops. The optimism of Armenian officials is at least surprising.

According to reports, Armenian troops left the town of Aghband with almost no resistance to the Azerbaijani Armed Forces supported by Turkish specialists and Syrian militants. This move was likely a result of the need to save personnel and keep at least some reserves needed on other parts of the frontline. The defending of the almost surrounded town makes no sense. Nonetheless, videos and photos appearing online indicate that Armenian sabotage groups are also active in the rear of the advancing Azerbaijani forces. In that area, if they have enough supplies and weapons, they would be able to deliver painful blows to the logistical convoys of the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc. It is likely that his activity is a formal pretext behind the statements of the Armenian Ministry of Defense that Azerbaijan has not gained full control of the border with Iran.

Forces of Azerbaijan continue to take control of settlements and villages in the south of Karabakh. Most of them are empty as the locals (ethnic Armenians) know well what fate they could face. It seems that the south of Karabakh is already lost for Armenia.

The Azerbaijani advance along the border with Iran through the relatively flat ground (if one compares it with the rest of Karabakh) appears to be a success. Now the Azerbaijani military and its allies are working to fully secure the border with Iran and set conditions for an operation to capture the Lachin corridor. The ability or inability of Azerbaijan to capture Lachin could become another turning point in the war.

Under the current conditions, it seems that a relatively positive outcome of the conflict for Karabakh forces would be possible in the event of the involvement some third power that would provide them with direct military assistance. Nonetheless, this scenario remains unlikely as long as even Armenia, which for years has been using Karabakh as its own protectorate, is not hurrying up to do so. Some Armenian sources even claim that the Pashinyan government oriented towards the West and NATO has just opted to sell the contested region to Azerbaijan under some formal pretext to remove the unresolved territorial disputes factor and open a way towards the further ‘democratic’ transformation of Armenia that it desires so much.

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“Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice”

Paul Robeson, 1937

America today stands at a crossroads. Where an entrenched oligarchy strives desperately to keep hold of those military, intelligence, financial and federal institutions which it spent decades infesting, while attempting to overthrow a nationalist president who has worked to end the “forever wars” while cooperating with both Russia and China.

This fight within the heart of America has been confusing for many people who accustomed themselves to interpret world history from the distorted lens of the age in which they live.

Such confused people cannot fathom HOW America could possibly be anything but an imperialistic nation infested with self-contradiction: A nation founded on Liberty but relying on exploitation, usury and institutional racism.

This confusion can easily be resolved by taking off the distorted glasses of “the present” and look at history as a process defined by the clash between two opposing views of mankind: a creature born free or enslaved.

Where the oligarchical system defines humanity as simply a mass of enslaved apes controlled by higher ‘alpha’ apes, the humanist system defines humanity as a species made in the image of a creator with inalienable rights. Abstract notions of “law, value, goodness, purpose, beauty, creativity or even potential” flow equally as words from each system, but with definitions that stand in stark opposition to each other.

Paul Robeson lived his remarkable life according to this knowledge and gave everything to awaken what he understood as the real America as a force of opposition to the racist, imperialistic machine that had made its move to take control of the republic on the eve of President Roosevelt’s early death in 1945.

Who was Paul Robeson?

Paul Robeson is a man who defies categorization. Although famous as a great African American baritone and actor born of an escaped slave, Robeson was so much more. While his life’s work should be basic knowledge and pride of every American today, the deep state which ran America for over 70 years has done all but erase him from existence labelling him a “communist crackpot” and Soviet spy. Why is the oligarchy so afraid of his memory?

Robeson is a cultural warrior of the highest caliber who knew over 20 languages including Russian, Chinese, Arabic and several African dialects, he early on became a cultural ambassador expressing the universality of mankind as he sung folk songs around the world and created institutions to enhance the best of each cultures development. He combined the anti-imperialist fight to liberate all former colonies with the combat for racial equality in America. He was the most vocal opponent to the Wall Street takeover of America and was recognized internationally as the leading figure and founder of America’s Civil Rights movement.

Music as a Weapon

Robeson famously called “music his weapon”, and used it masterfully to build spiritual bridges with all cultures by absorbing their languages, stories and folk songs. He wrote: “folk songs are, in fact, an expression of a peoples’ innermost nature, of the distinctive and multifaceted conditions of its life and culture, of the sublime wisdom that reflects that peoples’ great historical journey and experience.

In Russia, Robeson sang numerous patriotic pieces like Song of the Plains in perfect Russian:

In China, he sang popular folk songs and was the first western singer to sing Chi Lai (Arise) in 1940 which later became China’s national anthem:

He even learned Yiddish and sang the anti-fascist Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ballad:

Nothing more powerfully conveys the insight Robeson had into the universality of mankind when one hears his incredible description of the universal harmonies, and patterns underlying world languages and folk music conveyed during his 1958 Carnegie Hall concert featuring international folk music:

Political Freedom as the Highest Art

Counted among his close friends and allies were Albert Einstein, Vice President Henry Wallace (who Robeson campaigned vigorously for in his 1948 bid for the presidency), Jawaharlal Nehru, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah. Kenyatta and Nkrumah became leaders of the powerful Pan African movement and were members of an organization called the Council on African Affairs founded and chaired by Robeson in 1937.

Presiding over the 1944 Council on African Affairs conference alongside emerging Pan African leaders and American workers of all colors, Robeson oversaw the resolutions defining the conferences’ objectives:

• To Give concrete help to the struggle of the African masses
• To disseminate accurate information concerning Africa and its people; in that, to wake up Americans to what is happening in Africa; the one continent where undisguised colonial slavery is still practiced.
• To influence the adoption of governmental policies designed to promote their advancement and freedom and preserve international peace.
• To smash the iron curtain of secrecy and double talk surrounding the schemes for imperialist exploitation of Africa and its people.
• To prevent American loans and guns from being used to crush the freedom struggle of Africans and other subject peoples.
• To strengthen the allegiance of progressive Americas, black and white, with the peoples of Africa and other lands in the struggle for world peace and freedom.

Albert Einstein who also suffered under McCarthyism, co-chaired the American Crusade Against Lynching founded and chaired by Robeson in response to Truman’s failure to enforce anti-lynching legislation in 1946. Between 1945 and 1946, well over 100 black war veterans were lynched and many more “disappeared” as the south re-asserted their hegemony through terror.

It is not always appreciated today, but the fascist takeover of America in the wake of FDR’s death saw the resurgence of the southern establishment which Lincoln sought to destroy 80 years earlier. African American servicemen returning from WWII expecting to find equal rights, encountered a newly empowered Ku Klux Clan and racist Jim Crow laws- now protected by Hoover’s FBI and a racist little President who was working hard to undo all of FDR’s accomplishments.

Einstein, Wallace and Robeson in 1948

Reviving the Anti-Colonial America

As the founder of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), Robeson not only fought for racial equality at home but united this new movement with the international anti-colonial struggle saying at a CRC meeting:

“The guarantee that our day of liberation is not far off is that this is a time of colonial liberation. It is a time when dark men and women in Asia and Africa are pulling off their shackles of exploitation which have kept them bound for centuries… As they succeed in Asia and soon, you may be sure, in Africa- as more than half the world escapes the clutches of the Dulles, Rockefellers and Firestones, they lend a powerful stimulus to our freedom struggle here at home.”

In describing the American corporations moving into controlling positions in Africa, Robeson made sure to differentiate the deep state from the real America when he asked:

“Are these financial big boys America? No! They are the former enemies of Roosevelt. They were the ones who were glad when Roosevelt died. They are the same ones who Roosevelt said were the core of American fascism. They are the allies of the remains of the Hitler entourage- they are the friends of Franco, the living representatives of the Spanish conquistadores who enslaved us and still enslave us in Latin America. They are the ones who hate American democracy as did the enemies of Jefferson and Lincoln before them. They are no part of America. They are the ‘would-be’ preservers of world fascism and the enemies of progressive America!”

It is no wonder then that Robeson became enemy #1 for Hoover’s FBI, Dulles’ State Department and Red hunters like Joe McCarthy who did everything in their power to destroy his life by labelling him a “Black Mussolini” and “Soviet agent”. In truth, they were afraid that he was more of a “Black Solon” who would destroy their usurious power hold over the republic and free the bond slaves at the first opportunity.

Resisting American Fascism

Speaking at a rally at Madison Square Garden, Robeson identified the real evil agenda lurking behind the Anglo-American Cold War:

“The ‘Stop Russia’ cry really means- stop the advance of the colonial peoples of Asia and Africa toward independence; stop the forces of the new democracy developing in Europe; stop the organized workers of America from trying to hold their ground against their profit-greedy employers; stop the Negro people from voting and joining trade unions in the South- ‘Stop Russia’ means- stop progress- maintain the status quo. It means- let the privileged few continue to rule and thrive at the expense of the masses. We must indeed win the peace- but we can do it only by using methods exactly the opposite of those pursued at present by the British Foreign Office and our own State Department. To win total peace there must be total freedom”.

The highest leading official in America who stood up to this agenda was “the man who should have been president” Henry Wallace (Vice President 1940-1944), who was fired from his position as Commerce Secretary by Truman in 1946 for the crime of demanding Russia-US friendship. Speaking to thousands on September 21, 1946 Robeson stated: “We are shocked by the forced resignation of Wallace. We join with the overwhelming majority of Americans who want peace and democracy for this country and the world, in fully supporting Wallace’s criticism.  We cannot avoid the painful conclusion that Truman’s action represents a complete capitulation to the reactionary minority in our country who seek world domination”.

When Wallace announced his presidential bid in 1948, Robeson was asked to run as his Vice-presidential running mate, but declined feeling that he could do more good on an international level but dedicated his every waking hour campaigning for Wallace and the Progressive Party in 1948.

In a March 1948 campaign speech for Wallace, Robeson said:  “Either we get along with the Communists, jump in the ocean or blow up the whole world. Saying you can’t get along with Communists is like saying you can’t get along with the birds”. In that speech Robeson described himself as “an advanced New Dealer” and said he supported Wallace because “if anybody continues the new deal traditions of Franklin Roosevelt, it is Wallace.” Robeson’s concept of an “advanced New Dealer” and Wallace’s fight against the deep state was elaborated on in Wallace’s Vision for the Post-War World Order. (1)

Image on the right: Wallace and Robeson at the Progressive Party Convention in 1948

Robeson vs the Deep State

Sadly the entire force of the deep state came down on Wallace resulting in his defeat in 1948 bringing Truman in for another 4 years.

Robeson was punished by John F. Dulles who revoked his passport in 1949, preventing him from travelling while the FBI ensured that he was un-hirable, his records unplayable and his words unprintable. The singer’s revenues collapsed and he relied heavily on the kindness of friends during this time. In 1956, Robeson said “there is a deliberate policy of attempting to prevent me from making a living by practicing my profession as an artist.” In a famous 1956 testimony to the House of Un-American Activities, Robeson courageously called out the fascist nature of the proceedings.

International pressure resulted in an end to his “imprisonment” and he began a new world tour where he sang, performed Othello in Shakespeare’s play in Stratford England, wrote his autobiography Here I Stand and campaigned against neo-colonialism. In a 1960 Australian ABC interview Robeson eloquently laid out his thoughts on the freedom struggle:

In 1961, Robeson began another world tour and let it be known that he would go to the Soviet Union, then to Africa and finally to Cuba where he was scheduled to meet with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara putting into jeopardy Dulles’ plans for a Cuban invasion. After this, Robeson intended to return to America to lead the Civil Rights movement that he had, in large measure began. Sadly, Robeson made it no further than Moscow. Dulles’ invasion of Cuba occurred three weeks later.

MK Ultra and the Deconstruction of Robeson

Much has been written on the topic of Robeson’s victimization under MK Ultra. The most pioneering work having been done by his son Paul Robeson Jr. who spent over 30 years investigating the matter. In short, Robeson had found himself at a surprise party in a Moscow hotel hosted by CIA-funded Soviet dissidents. According to reports, Robeson fell into a paranoid hysteria, hallucinating and locking himself in a room where he tried to commit suicide.

He was quickly sent to London’s Priori hospital where he was put through 54 electro shock therapy sessions and huge doses of psycho-active drugs. Robeson’s son proved that three doctors performing these “treatments” were CIA contractors while MI5 operatives oversaw the entire process. Robeson Jr. wrote that his father was “subjected to mind de-patterning under MK Ultra”.

It took two years for Robeson’s family and friends to get him out of Priori and into a German clinic before returning him home in August 1963 where doctors were shocked to discover the scale of drugs and electro shock he suffered in London.

Although he recorded a handful of messages in support of the Civil Rights movement after 1963, which had thankfully found competent leadership under Martin Luther King Jr., Robeson never recovered, living as a recluse and passing away at 77 years of age in 1976.

Today, as America is again forced to decide whether it wishes to go down the road of fascism and self-annihilation or renew its proper heritage as a defender of liberty, it is worth listening to the wise words of Robeson who gave his last recorded speech in January 1961:

“Despite common suffering, an even greater responsibility lies upon us to guarantee our children and all children everywhere that we shall do everything in our collective power to refrain our ‘would-be’ world dominators, our ‘would-be’ new masters of the century. They must understand that while we are uttering these very words, a new day has dawned in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia and this light awaits just beyond the horizon.”

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Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. He can be reached at [email protected]

Note

[1] For anyone doubtful of Robeson’s characterization of FDR, believing the singer to be naïve, I invite them to read my previous article documenting Roosevelt’s war with Wall Street and London.

All images in this article are from SCF unless otherwise stated

When The New York Times and CNN recently referred to the staged town hall spectacles of Biden and Trump as dueling events, they inadvertently revealed the truth that U.S. presidential elections are America’s favorite movie and that the corporate media is in the entertainment business.

While it is ludicrous to imagine these tottering actors crossing swords in tights, their skirmishes in suits and ties are good for a few laughs, if you have the stomach to watch them. Only people who still believe in professional wrestling would think these clowns don’t work for the same bosses – the Umbrella People, aka the power elites, the national security state, etc., who own the country and choose their stooges to represent their interests in the White House.

I much prefer Mel Brooks, a genuinely funny guy.

The columnist Russell Baker once said the purpose of such political entertainment is to “provide a manageably small cast for a national sitcom, or soap opera, or docudrama, making it easy for media people to persuade themselves they are covering the news while mostly just entertaining us.”

As for debates and town hall farces in television prime time, the witty Baker said that “the charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.”

Now let’s proceed to the dark side, where the sardonic screams of laughter dissolve into tears.

For such entertainment serves a devious distracting purpose: to conceal the nature of social evil and the driving forces behind American politics today.  It is not particularly complicated unless the syllogism – All cats die/Socrates is dead/ therefore Socrates is a cat – rings true.

Then it’s an impossible conundrum.

We are not cats or Socrates, as far as I know.  But like them, we will also die. Everyone knows this, but the thought of death is not particularly “have-a-nice-dayish,” so people deny it as much as possible in a host of ways. Most people prefer life over death, and when death does approach and can no longer be denied, most hope for immortality in some way, shape, or form.

Yes, there are those who assert this isn’t true for them, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. There are philosophical arguments to support their position, such as that of the Roman poet Lucretius in his famous poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). But I would maintain with the great psychoanalyst Rollo May that all such naturalistic efforts, including Lucretius’s, to explain away human anxiety rooted in death, founder on the human emotions of pity, grief, love, and loneliness. Rational explanations take us only so far.  In their efforts to deny the human condition and dismiss the spiritual dimension, the irrational, and the daimonic, they open the door to madness, as is happening today with the push by the world’s economic elite to convince people that they are machines and that their machine dreams will conquer death.

For those who love life, it seems axiomatic to me that some form of perpetuation and redemption of an individual’s life in the face and fear of death is widely desired. This can take many forms: a literal afterlife, fame, heirs, monuments, money, children, etc. History is quite clear that people have always sought some way of transcending their physical fates.

This was aptly noted by Graham Greene, the English novelist, when, as an old man approaching death, he was asked if he was disappointed at not receiving the Nobel Prize, and he said no, since he was hoping for a greater prize.

In his important book, The Denial of Death (Pulitzer Prize 1974 for general non-fiction), the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, puts it succinctly:

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

Faced with such an impossible situation, then, overwhelmed from childhood with a sense of one’s own ultimate physical powerlessness but being symbolic creatures as well as physical ones, the normal person learns to repress the terror of death by building various defenses that allow one to believe that he ultimately controls his death.  One’s natural impotence is then hidden within “ the vital lie of character”; one lives within the manageable social world that helps one blot out existential awareness by offering various social games and cultural symbols, agreed forms of madness that narcotize the fear.  One learns to adjust. The aim is to cut life down to manageable proportions, domesticate terror, and trust in the cultural and social authorities for protection and reassurance. Obedience is key.

Listen to Big Daddy and he will rescue you , especially when he first tells you that Mr. Pumpkin Head is coming to get you unless you run into his protective embrace.

These days, it’s Halloween all year round in the land of the free and the home of the brave where the fear of death is handed out like poisoned candy and Big Daddy waits at the door disguised as everyone’s benevolent grandfather.  To be treated, you must be masked. That is his trick. “Stay well,” he mutters, after he drops a dollop of sweet fear into your bag and cackles behind his face.

Everywhere you look these days, people are doubly masked. The paper kind and by definition, since the the word person, being derived from the Latin, persona, means mask, while there is another Latin word, larva, that also means mask or ghost or evil spirit.  Clearly there is a dance contest underway, a danse macabre.  And who will win nobody knows.

“Every conflict over truth,” wrote the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, “ is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over … immortality.”

This is exactly what is going on now with the fierce disagreements over Covid-19.

Like the attacks of September 11, 2001, the anthrax attacks, the ginning up of terrorism fear with Homeland “Security’s” color-coded warning system, the lies about weapons of mass-destruction, and the coronavirus early warning systems, people have adopted positions upon which they stake their psychological lives. To admit you were snookered is a little death that is hard to swallow.

We are being subjected to mind-control on a vast scale, the continual pumping up of the fear of death to control the population.  Americans have been living in an atmosphere of dread for almost twenty years.  It’s so old and so obvious but cuts so deep it works like a charm. “You don’t want to die, do you, so come here into Big Daddy’s arms.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell writes that “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.”  It is a famous quote that is not true when taken out of context.  The Umbrella People and their lackeys don’t seek power entirely for its own sake. They have a larger agenda: immortality.

If one reads Orwell carefully, one comes upon a key passage that clarifies the previous quote. The evil O’Brien, the torturer and member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of the resistance to Big Brother (sound familiar?), asks his victim Winston Smith to reverse the slogan from “Freedom is Slavery” to Slavery is Freedom:

Alone – free – the human being is always defeated.  It must be so, because every human being is destined to die, which is the greatest of all failures.  But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he will be all-powerful and immortal.  The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings.  Over the body – but, above all, over the mind.  Power over matter – external reality as you would call it – is not important.  Already our control over matter is absolute.

All power is fundamentally power to deny mortality.  This is true whether it is the power of the state or church.  And it is always sacred power.

Many often ask why do the super-rich and  powerful always want more.  It’s simple.  They wish to transcend their pre-existing human mortality and become gods – immortals.  They stupidly believe that if they can lord it over others, kill, dominate, achieve status, become billionaires, presidents, magnates, celebrities, etc., they will somehow live in some weird forever.

In a process that has spanned at least a hundred and fifty years or so, our traditional cultural/religious symbol systems have been radically undermined, most momentously by the Faustian creation of Lord Nuke.  All forms of symbolic immortality (theological, biological, creative, natural, and experiential) that formerly provided a sense of continuity have been severely threatened. This is the haunting specter lurking in the background of life today.

What is death?  How to defeat or transcend it?  How to affirm life in the face of death?

One paradoxical way that political leaders do this is by killing.  Followers who accede to such killing join their leaders, not simply to see others dead, but to acquire power over death itself – to kill their own deaths.  It is perverse of course, and is summed up in the saying to love the bomb joyously, to experience the nightmare of oblivion as ecstasy.  Isn’t this what the philosophy of voting for the lesser of two evil is about?  At least he will be our killer.  Our evil killer, but not as bad as yours.  You lose.

I have read that there is a painting still visible at the entrance to a house in ruined Pompeii that tells us much about power and wealth. It perfectly symbolizes the meaning of the economic gap between the super-rich – e.g. those behind the World Economic Forum, the CIA, the presidential candidates, the corporate media – and the rest of us.  It pictures a man weighing his penis on a scale of gold coins. Gold, God, wealth, and power.  It’s an old story.

Today, however, there is a difference, for the spirit of nihilism has grown as belief in the spiritual dimension and God has diminished dramatically. Money or gold, wealth in all its forms, is today’s foremost immortality symbol, a sign that one is powerful and can conquer death. What else are Trump’s gold-emblazoned Tower and hair, and Biden’s boastfully admitted threat to withhold one billion dollars from Ukraine unless they fire the prosecutor investigating his son, Hunter. The greasing of palms, bribery, tax theft, etc. – par for the course in a corrupt society run by thieves and criminals.

Becker says of this wealth obsession:

The only hint we get of the cultural repression seeping through is that even dedicated financiers wash their hands after handling money.  The victory over death is a fantasy that cannot be fully believed in; money doesn’t entirely banish feces [decay and death that is of course defeated with toilet paper as Covid-19 has proven], and so the threat of germs and vulnerability in the very process of securing immortality.

Pseudo immortality.

Enter Covid-19.  Like the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is death writ large. An insidious terrorist threat.  Invisible, sneaky, ready to pounce. Fear and trembling.  So-called surprise attacks that were preceded by simulations and live drills.  Numerous parallels, too many to mention.  Let’s not.  Have a nice day!  Stay safe!

So what do the super-rich controllers want now?  What are the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, Google and the Defense Department’s Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, Ray Kurzweil of Google and “The Singularity,” et al. pushing now that Covid-19 has so many cowering in fear?

These people have realized that the thing that their money and power must do is to create a world where trans-humanism must triumph and people of flesh and blood must be induced and forced to become the machines they have been told they are. If you doubt this is underway, research the World Economic Forum’s agenda, see what the Great Reset is about, the Build Back Better slogans, the massive push to create on-line existence for everyone, etc.  As a recent ad I saw says: “The world is going digital.”

The goal of these mad technocratic elites is to create a fabricated reality where the visible world becomes nearly meaningless once the screen world becomes people’s “window on the world.” An electronic nothingness to replace reality as people in the industrialized countries gleefully embrace digital wraparound apparitions and the poor and vulnerable of this world suffer and die out of sight and out of mind. It is the fundamental seismic shift of our era and perhaps the greatest propaganda operation ever undertaken.  A sort of end-times desperate gambit.

And “it just so happens” to revolve around the use of death fear to accomplish its goals.

But for the elites, there will be no death.  For having realized that their stolen wealth and power can only take them so far, and they too will become food for worms, they have commandeered science and medicine to undertake their immortality projects.  If medicine fails to find for them the secret of immortality, then computer science and Artificial Intelligence will, and they will be uploaded into computers and live forever in their beloved cyberspace.  Digital immortality is not a joke for these people – see  Kurzweil’s (the director of engineering at Google) “The Singularity,” etc. – for they are actually insane but hold key positions throughout the computer and biotechnology industries.  Check where the super rich invest their money to confirm this.  None of it is secret.

Having heeded Russell Baker’s words about television offering no mental distraction between dinner and bedtime, I took to my crib early, knowing Tweedledee and Tweedledum would be dueling again, this time in what they humorously called a debate.  I was surrounded by my stuffed animals that protected me and I slept safe and sound.

Upon awakening, I read that the gladiators had exchanged blows but that both were left standing for the big showdown on November 3.  I also noticed that each had used the words “dark winter” in reference to Covid-19. Biden said one was coming and Trump said he didn’t know.

Neither, of course, spoke of the Dark Winter Exercise, a senior level war game conducted on June 22-23, 2001, about a biological attack, a smallpox outbreak, the public health response, the lack of vaccines, the need for quarantine and isolation, the restriction of civil liberties, and the role of the Defense Department and the military in the response. Nor did they speak of anthrax attacks, but the Canadian researcher, Graeme MacQueen, will here fill you in on both, in case you don’t know.

Maybe the boys just forgot.

I am sure they didn’t talk about the elements of Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” but if you wish to understand how we are being gamed, Whitney Webb will tell you here.

Was there any mention of the Russians?  I haven’t heard.  They are always a kind of a solution.  As my friend Joe Green has said:

All dissenting opinions are Russian. I think Socrates said that. I’m paraphrasing.

Maybe many are still Waiting for the Barbarians.

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

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

Featured image is from InfoWars

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Author: Edward Curtin

ISBN: 9781949762266

Published: 2020

Options: EBOOK – Epub and Kindle, paper, PDF

Click here to order.

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Former OPCW Director-General Bustani Banned From Speaking At UN Security Council

October 5: Western Delegations Oppose Presentation of Evidence that OPCW Report Of Chemical Weapons Attack on Douma, Syria May Have Been Falsified. 

October 21: In New York Post Article, US Ambassador Falsely Accuses China of Precisely the Same Tactics that the US Has Used for 75 Years at the UN.

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Introduction

US Ambassador publishes article in New York Post, October 21, 2020 accusing China of precisely the tactics the US has been using at the UN since its inception.

Screenshot from New York Post

China replies today:

“On  21 October the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations published an article, viciously attacking cooperation between China and the UN.  The article disregards facts, and features lies, twisted logic, ideological bias and a cold war mentality.  It is an embodiment of McCarthyism in the new era.  We firmly reject it.”

The Security Council meeting on October 5^th, 2020, during the Russian Presidency,  is a dramatic demonstration of US and allied manipulations and falsifications, the very manipulations and falsifications they accuse China of.

Background

The scandalous pattern of deceit:

On February 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell knowingly lied to the UN Security Council, insisting that the U.S. possessed irrefutable proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, although there was no such proof, and he knew that.

This falsification, which Powell, in shame now admits was the lowest point in his career, was used in an attempt to justify the US attack on Iraq the following month, in March, 2003, which resulted in more than 100,000 civilian deaths, and the complete destruction of the Iraqi state, leaving it an incubator of terrorism to this very day.

Prior to this Bush Administration engineered war, on July 6, 2003, Ambassador Joseph Wilson published an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled:

“What I Did Not Find in Africa,” refuting allegations that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium tubes in Niger to restart his nuclear program.

In retaliation for Wilson’s exposure of the falsity of Bush’s numerous allegations, the Bush Administration revealed the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA operative, henceforth “Fair Game,” endangering her life, and the lives of all her contacts and associates.

Wilson’s refusal to support the Bush administration’s false allegations against Iraq led to escalating harassment of him and his wife, threats to their lives and their children’s lives, until, ultimately, at the National Press Club Wilson and Plame announced their lawsuit against Vice-President Cheney and the CIA, and fearful for their lives, ultimately left Washington, D.C.

In 2002, The Washington Post had headlined complaints by CIA intelligence staff that they were being forced to politicize intelligence, and, indeed, CIA Chief John Tenet had written a letter to Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Congressional Committee on Intelligence, stating that Saddam Hussein would not attack the U.S. unless the U.S. initiated an attack against Iraq.

Left: Tenet, Cheney, Bush

The facts did not demonstrate that Iraq was a threat to the U.S. and the facts did not  justify a U.S. attack against Iraq, but the facts were ignored in the U.S. obsession with regime change.  The unconscionable lies and falsification of evidence were scandalous, but the warhawks were undeterred.  The famous British “Downing Street Memo” confirmed that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of war against Iraq.

Less than a decade later, in March, 2011 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 on Libya, based on similar falsification of reality, and resulting in the destruction of the Libyan state, and another incubator of terrorism in the Middle East.

Soon after the US, UK and France had collaborated to destroy Iraq and Libya, in 2011 Syria erupted in demonstrations, resulting in chaos, and the US, UK and France tried repeatedly to force through the UN Security Council another “war resolution to ‘protect the civilians of Syria’.”

This time, however, Russia and China were wise to the ploy, and both countries vetoed efforts to obtain Security Council authorization for military or “humanitarian” intervention in Syria, recognizing that this would ultimately consign Syria to the horrific fate of Iraq and Libya, and this Western covert and overt strategy might ultimately be used to destroy Iran, as well.  These famous “double-vetoes” by Russia and China, however, seem in hindsight to have only slowed down the Western powers’ inexorable determination to destroy the independent government of Syrian President Assad, using the most corrupt and venal  means.  Colin Powell’s deceitful performance at the Security Council in 2003 appears to be repeating itself in variations, culminating on October 5, this month.

Today

The official OPCW report on Douma alleges that the Syrian Government attacked its own people in Douma on April 7, 2018, using chemical weapons, specifically chlorine.  Veteran OPCW inspector Ian Henderson, ultimately a whistleblower, was present on the ground in Douma, interviewed numerous witnesses living in Douma, and found no evidence of any attack by the Syrian government on Douma, and strong evidence that an appearance of an attack had been staged, and this fabrication was ultimately used as an attempt to justify the bombing of Syria by the U.S. immediately afterward.  Little by little, Syria is deteriorating under these stealthy and relentless hostile actions by the West, covert and overt, as terrorists from countries throughout the world are arriving in Syria to continue the destabilization of one of the most progressive countries in the Middle East.

OPCW inspector Ian Henderson, who headed the team initially investigating the Douma incident, and present, himself in Douma during this initial investigation,  attempted to expose the fraudulence of the final official report by the OPCW, which states the the Syrian government had attacked its own people in Douma, using chemical weapons in violation of its pledge to the OPCW.  Henderson’s repudiation of the final report, and the repudiation by another OPCW inspector who, fearful of the consequences, has remained anonymous, is credible and a serious indication that the OPCW has been compromised, and has capitulated under the pressure of Western countries to issue a fraudulent report condemning the Syrian Government, with no legitimate proof.

Credible OPCW inspectors repudiating the report are being silenced, and their alarm at the corruption of the OPCW is being, at best, ignored.  The OPCW’s final and official report, used to justify the U.S. bombing of Syria soon after the alleged events in Douma, which were, according to Ian Henderson, events which never occurred, is no different than Colin Powell’s presentation of falsified “evidence” to the UN Security Council in 2003, just prior to the Bush Administration’s devastating “shock and awe” attack on Iraq.  This now seems to be the pattern:  falsely accuse the target government of a heinous crime, a “false flag,” then used as justification for military attack against the falsely accused government.  This bears ominous similarity to Hitler’s use of the Reichstag fire to justify his extermination of the Jews.

On October 5, 2020, the Russian President of the UN Security Council, Ambassador Nebenzia, had invited former Director-General of the OPCW, Jose Bustani, to brief the Security Council, providing additional information about the so-called chemical attack in Douma, and discussing Ian Henderson’s allegations that the OPCW had been corrupted under pressure by Western powers.  The UK, France and the US ferociously banned Bustani from the Security Council meeting, claiming that he was not “qualified” to speak on the issue!!!!  This was the UK’s objection, quite preposterous, considering that Bustani had been Director-General of the OPCW at its inception, and had been forced to resign by John Bolton. According to Business Insider,

“The retired Brazilian diplomat, Jose Bustani, who was then serving as the Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was trying to negotiate with Iraq and Libya to allow chemical weapons inspectors into their borders and to have them agree to destroy their chemical weapons.  But the US was reportedly not fond of Bustani’s outreach to these countries, and Bolton, who was one of the primary architects of the Iraq War that began in 2003, himself visited Bustani to pressure him to step down from his post.

‘We can’t accept your management style,’ Bolton told Bustani in 2002.  ‘You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don’t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you,’ he continued.

Bolton reportedly said, ‘We know where your kids live.  You have two sons in New York.’  Bustani was taken aback by Bolton’s directness, but did not back down.

‘John Bolton is a bully.’ Bustani told his colleagues at the OPCW about the encounter, and one former official who was in the room at the time, Gordon Vachon, said Bolton had made another threat to Bustani as well.  Vachon told The Intercept that he recalled Bolton saying Bustani ‘could go quietly, with little fuss and restraint on all sides, and without dragging your name through the mud.’  Bustani eventually was forced to step down after the US convinced its allies in the OPCW to rally against him, according to the Times.  He was forced out by a stunning vote of 48 to 7 and 43 abstentions.”

The ILO subsequently ruled that the ouster of Bustani was illegal.

After this disposal of its Director-General, Bustani, who was forced out because he showed integrity, the OPCW cannot claim impartiality, as it is so obsequious to the Western countries:  this may explain why it won the Nobel Peace Prize, which is becoming something of a political award for obedience to interests other than peace.

On October 5, 2020, the UK, the US, France, Belgium and Estonia spearheaded the banning of Bustani from testifying before the Security Council, attempting to deprive its members of information that may be crucially important in its decisions on war and peace. Their intellectual and moral cowardice in suppression of inconvenient facts disputing their false narrative was vividly exposed by their infantile performance. The Chinese delegation brilliantly defended the right of the members of the Security Council to hear Bustani, whom it identified as far more qualified to address the council than many other briefers who had been permitted to speak.

The Chinese arguments were excellent, but to no avail.  Once again the lies of the OPCW prevail, and Bustani, personally, was muzzled.  Fortunately, nevertheless, in his capacity as Representative of the Russian Federation, the President of the Council, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia read aloud Bustani’s complete statement, with the emphatic instruction that this be entered into the official record of the Security Council meeting.  Obviously, the clique that prohibited Bustani’s presence were infuriated by Russia’s determination that Bustani’s words be heard.

Tragically for the world, the hijacking of the UN Security Council continues, from its complicity in the Korean War in the 1950’s through today, 75 years later.

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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York. 

Featured image is from Syria News

This article was originally crossposted in April 2020.

The arrogance and brutality of the ruling class – is nothing less than breathtaking.

Let’s begin.

April 9 2020, Business Insider: “Many Americans will not have jobs to return to after the coronavirus pandemic ends, according to former US presidential candidate Andrew Yang”:

“Many Americans will not have jobs to return to after the coronavirus pandemic ends…”

“We’re going to see something like 10 years of change in 10 weeks…”

“The fact is right now this virus is the perfect environment for companies to get rid of people, bring in robots and machines, and figure out how they can operate more efficiently.”

“Universal basic income is going to become the topic, not just here in the United States, but Spain’s adopting a version of a minimum income. Legislatures around Europe are all very, very much focused on this.”

“We’re going to see the progressive Amazonification of our economy as Amazon’s one of the only businesses out there that’s hiring more and more. You’re seeing more robots are in grocery store aisles cleaning after we all supposedly go home…”

“One thing I’ve been saying is that we’re going to see something like 10 years of change in 10 weeks, because businesses are being put in a position where it makes sense to speed up a lot of the automation that they were considering investing in.”

“The fact is right now this virus is the perfect environment for companies to get rid of people, bring in robots and machines, and figure out how they can operate more efficiently.”

“My kids are at home just like everyone else’s kids and they’re getting taught online…they’re going to be many, many families that actually make a different determination where they actually say, “Hey, this online thing is working well.”

“If you can find a way to, frankly, make yourself useful from afar, that’s going to be something that unfortunately we all have to think about more and more.”

“I think at this point it’s actually going to need to be a bit higher than that, because the $1,000 a month is enough for baseline needs for at least most of us, but the economy is going to become even more inhuman and punishing, both during this crisis and afterwards.”

“… I’d be looking at something higher than $1,000 a month that would be more robust & helping people not just be able to meet their needs, but also have a real path forward.”

“we’re going to be dealing with the consequences of this crisis for years to come, and we need a Marshal Plan style initiative to rebuild the country… helping create that vision for what America in 2022, 2023, is going to look like after we have a vaccine in place.”

March 31 2020, Business Insider: “RESTAURANT APOCALYPSE: More than 110,000 restaurants expect to close up forever in the coming weeks, with millions out of work and the industry’s future uncertain.”

And while the Amazonification of our economy ploughs full steam ahead, independent shops and services are pounded into dust, while public services are shut down, opening the door for further privatization. While prepping the citizenry for coming and required “certifications”, the deliberate and violent contraction of the economy continues. The decimation of small enterprise with monetary wealth directed, again, upward. McDonald’s, Starbucks and Walmart (“essential services”) remain open while small business is forced to remain closed. On April 13 2020, Amazon announced they would hire Amazon will hire an additional 75,000 workers to keep up with its soaring volume of online sales.

A brilliant idea: We all live on $1,000 a month – when Klaus Schwab, Andrew Yang, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bezos, et al. – live on $1,000 a month. The rich are dangerous, calculating, insane hypocrites.

April 12 2020, Business Insider: “Pope Francis says it might be ‘time to consider a universal basic wage’ in Easter letter”:

“In an Easter letter to leaders of prominent social movements, Pope Francis suggested that it might be time for countries to consider a universal basic wage.

“This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out,” The Pope wrote in his letter.

Over a dozen countries are implementing or experimenting with some form of temporary or permanent universal basic income in response to the current economic devastation and massive unemployment.”

Feb 28 2020, Business Insider:

“The pope has joined forces with Microsoft and IBM to create a doctrine for ethical AI and facial recognition. Here’s how the Vatican wants to shape AI.”

The Pope’s collaboration with corporate giant Microsoft and the Vatican Bank is deep into social impact investing. Citizens are on UBI [Universal Basic Income] will still require privatized public services – a massive impact market. [Source]

Impact investing is predicated on turning people into investments as human capital. [Further reading]

Oct 18 2019, Slate MoneyBox, Andrew Yang Keeps Talking About the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What the Heck Is That?:

“Yang likes branding. He calls his marquee policy idea—a UBI of $1,000 a month—a “freedom dividend.” …And lately, he can’t stop talking about “the fourth industrial revolution.”

“The fourth industrial revolution is the shorthand Yang now uses to describe the wave of massive technological change that he believes has decimated manufacturing employment and will soon automate away millions of American jobs.”

“The fourth industrial revolution is now migrating from manufacturing workers to retail, call centers, transportation, as well as to white-collar workers like attorneys, pharmacists, and radiologists…”

“In a World Economic Forum video from 2016, experts offered up predictions such as ‘Our bodies will be so high-tech we won’t really be able to distinguish between what’s natural and what’s artificial…’”

“It’s self-serious, Star Trek–style sci-fi for people who wear expensive suits and maybe have an endowed lab at Harvard. These are the intellectual waters Yang swims in, and that’s disconcerting. Aside from the fact that these conferences tend to be pretty intellectually bankrupt”—even JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has joked that “Davos is where billionaires tell millionaires about what the middle class feels”—they by definition reflect the interests and values of the global capitalist class.”

June 20 2019, World Economic Forum: “Can UBI survive financialization?”:

“Following this pattern, by providing a stable income stream and thus a reliable form of collateral, paid by the state, UBI would strengthen and even create financial markets, particularly for consumer credit, mortgages, and pensions. Far from serving as a revolutionary route to freedom from the whip of the market, UBI may end up yoking all citizens to rentier capital through indebtedness.”

Jan 31 2019, Wrench in the Gears, “Good Guy in Davos? Not So Fast”:

” This panel and the viral video clips flying around the internet are a brand-building exercise for Bergman’s neoliberal snake oil. If UBI is implemented in the current climate of austerity, economic precarity, and social entrepreneurship, you can be sure payments will be linked to digital identity to track “impact.” That $1,000 a month distribution will be just enough to scrape by. But hey, you’ll be able to sell personal data if you want more than gruel for dinner. Check out the Netherlands’ foray into personal data curation via the DecodeProject.eu here. It’s being run in partnership with NESTA, the global impact innovation unit out of the UK.”

March 26 2020, The London Freepress: “Keep it quiet, but universal basic income is coming”:

“You think that after six months or a year of this we will just go back tamely to the old economic rules? I rather doubt it.”

The rise of fascism & the 2nd World War required the creation of the full welfare state… The current emergency may be fostering the rise of ideas previously seen as too radical to contemplate…”

July 31, 2017, World Economic Forum, “We should let the robots take our jobs – and then pay us all a basic income”:

“As developments in artificial intelligence and robotics advance, there is going to be a severe and swift disruption of many working classes.”

“UBI, an economic proposition in which a sum of money is regularly paid to a population, could be a vital bulwark against the unintended consequences of automation in the workforce.”

“Companies will profit significantly from workforce automation, so the private sector will be able to afford shouldering this burden, while at the same time still making greater profits.”

“After all, a full-time human has needs: 30 minutes for lunch each day, vacation and sick time, toilet breaks, and health benefits, to name a few. Meanwhile, an automated worker would only require an initial installation and the occasional repair or upgrade.”

“The BCG report stated that a human welder today is paid around $25 an hour (including benefits) versus the equivalent operating cost of around $8 for a robot.”

“In 15 years, that gap will widen even more dramatically,” the report states. “The operating cost per hour for a robot doing similar welding tasks could plunge to as little as $2 when performance improvements are factored in.”

“This trend will only continue to accelerate. McDonald’s, an early pioneer of automation, is already replacing human workers with automated kiosks. They expect a 5% to 9% return on investment in just the first year; in 2019 they expect this return to balloon to double digits.”

“And this is only one sector: PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that 38% of US jobs will be in danger of being replaced by automation by 2030.”

“Companies that automate their workforces should be taxed on these new massive profits, and some of the resulting capital given back to workers by the government in the form of UBI.”

“While the idea of a UBI is popular—Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all championed it—how exactly would a universal basic income be engineered?

“Large swaths of laborers are going to lose their jobs, leading to unprecedented levels of unemployment.”

That moment has arrived.

March 18 2020: Over 500 academics and public figures called on governments to implement universal basic income via an open letter: “It is time for governments to enact emergency universal basic income, ensuring that everyone in their jurisdiction has enough money to buy the food and other essentials they need to survive.”

McKinsey places the number of jobs to be replaced by automation at close to 50% by 2030. The COVID-19 virus provides an opportune moment to push the envelope of automation forward.

April 9 2020: “Global statistics reported by UNESCO reveal that since the last week of March roughly 1.7 billion students from pre-primary to tertiary education levels are out of school, affecting 91.3 percent of all enrolled learners and including every student in 188 countries that have mandated nationwide closures. With most schools set to remain closed through the rest of the current academic year, the scale of these closures is unprecedented in the history of world capitalism.”

We must recognize we live in a capitalist economic system that serves capital first & foremost. Further, it is imperative to recognize that the UN & UN agencies, inclusive of the WHO (WEF/Gates), exist in name only. The WEF is at the helm of a consolidation of global power.

With the first of three scheduled presidential debates (aka brawl) between President Donald Trump and his opponent, former vice-president Joe Biden, now history, the pundits will fall all over themselves to determine what it all means. Who won? Did either candidate deliver a fatal blow to the election chances of the other? Did Biden disprove the Trump-encouraged rumors about his senility? Did Trump manage to sway any undecided voters?

We will not dwell here on the fact that many other, highly-qualified candidates are running for president (this writer, a U.S. citizen who moved to Canada fifteen years ago, will vote for Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation for president).

No, with all the discussion about Trump and Biden, it is beneficial, this writer thinks, to consider what continues to happen in the world, that has lost the attention of the press, and therefore, the public. We will present a short, albeit incomplete, list.

Internationally:

• Millions of people in Yemen, many of them children, risk starvation due to the U.S.-supported Saudi Arabian assault on that nation.
• Palestinians still live under the harshest and most brutal conditions in the world, all financed and supported by the United States.
• The U.S. war against the people of Afghanistan continues in it’s nineteenth year. A large segment of the Afghan population now has never known anything but war.
• The people of Iran continue to struggle in many ways – economically and medically – against U.S. sanctions, imposed when the U.S., against the wishes of the other participants of the agreement and most of the world community, violated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
• The people of Venezuela struggle against sanctions, also imposed by the United States, because they had the temerity to re-elect a president displeasing to the U.S. Trump and his cohorts say that Nicholas Maduro is not the legitimate president, forgetting or ignoring the fact that Trump himself did not win the majority vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His odious opponent in that election, Hillary Clinton, did.
• Migrant children continue to be caged at theS. – Mexico border.
• The U.S. continues to maintain the most cordial relations with some of the world’s major violators of human rights, including Israel and Saudi Arabia. This should not be surprising, since the U.S. itself made the list of ’10 Global Hotspots for Major Human Rights Violations in 2017’, and things have only worsened since then.
• As India heads towards genocide in Kashmir, the U.S. government, not wanting to annoy the Indian government, ignores it, as it ignores the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.

Domestically

• Black citizens – men, women and children – continue to die at the hands of white police officers at a rate higher than other citizens; the perpetrators are seldom, if ever, charged with a crime, and even more rarely convicted.
• People are dying in numbers greater than anywhere else in the world due to Covid-19.
• The S. economy is in shambles with retail bankruptcies and store closings at record highs.
• The U.S. education system lags behind many other nations.
• The people of Flint, Michigan must still purchase bottled drinking water, because what comes out of their taps isn’t fit to drink.

It is, perhaps, whimsical for this writer to hope that the public will concern itself with these issues, and ponder carefully the upcoming election. Yes, another Supreme Court appointment by Trump could turn back the U.S. clock to a time of very limited consumer protections, a further reduction of environmental regulations, and greater racial inequality (even worse than it is today), and a host of other hard-won victories. Black lives will not matter; international law will continue to be held in contempt (although that is business-as-usual for the U.S.), and U.S. warmongering and war-making will continue, with all the destruction and slaughter of innocent men, women and children that that always brings.

There are some people who believe a Biden presidency will usher in change. Has hell frozen over? He has a long record in government of ‘business as usual’, so looking for change from him and the Democratic Party is an exercise in futility.

Others praise Trump as an effective leader, one who has done much to help the people of the nation.  This narrative deserves a prominent place with ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Jack and the Bean Stalk’ and other fairy tales. It, like them, has no basis in reality and is simply a figment of the collective right-wing imagination.

The United States, from its earliest years, has a been a force for violence, destruction and death on the global stage. As its wealth and power have increased, so have its violent tendencies. It overthrows foreign governments, invades sovereign nations, issues crippling sanctions against governments and individuals that displease it, and threaten its allies if they don’t follow along.

The 2020 election will change none of this.

It is said that a sign of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Unless and until the public stops looking to the Democratic and Republican Parties for solutions to problems, leadership in troubled times and assistance in creating and maintaining a peaceful world, no election will alter the tragic and violent trajectory of the United States. The longer that recognition is delayed, the more people will suffer, in the U.S. and around the globe.

*

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..

Gerald Celente, the popular publisher of The Trends Journal, is sounding the alarm on what he sees as a coming economic catastrophe.

“They are killing us,” says Celente referring to the current lockdown of many businesses.

In the interview with Stansberry Research anchor Daniela Cambone, Celente discusses what he is doing to protect his assets.

He also details how he is preparing for what he considers the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression…

..

In a 2014 interview (below), Celente confirmed that “it is not a conspiracy theory. The markets are rigged.”

See 2014 interview below: 2. 48″

And they were rigged in February 2020 leading to massive appropriation of money wealth by a handful of billionaires.

We fully concur with Gerald Celente’s analysis of the Lokckdown.

They, the politicians are destroying people’s lives, Worldwide. The markets are rigged. The media is rigged. 

“On March 11, the WHO officially declared a Worldwide pandemic at a time when there were 18,000 confirmed cases and 4291 deaths out of a total World population outside China of the order of 6.4 billion people.  What do these “statistics” tell you? Most of these confirmed “positive cases” were estimated using the RT-PCR test which does not detect or identify the virus.

Immediately following the March 11 WHO announcement the fear campaign went into high gear. Confinement instructions were transmitted to 193 member states of the United Nations. The outright closing down of national economies was upheld as a means to resolving a public health crisis.

Politicians are the instruments of powerful financial interests. Was this far-reaching decision justified as a means to combating the Virus? Did the “numbers” (of confirmed cases) justify a Worldwide pandemic?

Unprecedented in history, applied almost simultaneously in a large number of 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 devastating 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.

Michel Chossudovsky, October 2020

“It destroys peoples lives! And it destroys the nation-state! And eventually, what is happening is a structure whereby the financial establishment takes over the structures of government.”

– Professor Michel Chossudovsky (from this week’s interview)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

While there is much reporting on the daily increases COVID carriers (assuming the tests are reliable) and the regrettable deaths (assuming COVID was the cause), there is less attention to the horrendous difficulties wrought by the shut-downs of the economy as a necessity to halt the spread of the virus.

Starting in March, we have seen several centres close down services, including schools, universities, and museums. An entire season of festivals and public engagements have gotten cancelled. Businesses having to deal with less business than usual are worried about their futures, and some are definitely in trouble. As a result, workers face unemployment. [1][2][3]

This has resulted in increases in domestic violence and increasing poverty. And the suicide rate has gone through the roof!

Is this truly a price worth paying? Is the carnage induced by the lock-downs part of the casualties we must endure while we await the cherished vaccine?

Or could there be other entities who privately benefit from this situation in ways that are on a whole different level than public health?

These are just a few of the concerns the Global Research News Hour show will ponder as we take a look at the pandemic from a social and economic perspective.

Our first guest, Professor Michel Chossudovsky, has been very informed about the virus not being what we are told. He is also an economist with a background in studying health economics. In this interview, Professor Chossudovsky mentions that moves by the elites seemed to have foreknowledge of the spread of the virus. He also mentions that elites got very wealthy from the subsequent collapses of companies and economies.

In our second half hour, after a brief talk about the “Great Reset” of the entire system, Professor Radhika Desai talks about the structure if the collapse due to COVID denying us any sense of a new economic normal. She also suggests the Chinese approach to the pandemic crisis was fundamentally far more helpful and sensible than that in the U.S. or Canada. This interview is shared with us by Chris Cook of CFUV’s Gorilla-radio!

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 

Radhika Desai is a professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba and currently serves as the director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group. She is currently working on a 7-part  multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitled WHAT IS TO BE DONE? A MANIFESTO FOR POLITICS AMID THE PANDEMIC AND BEYOND.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 292)

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. https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1064362
2. https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse
3. https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/universities-brace-for-a-permanent-wave-of-closures-as-coronavirus-pushes-schools-to-brink-153123471.html

This is part one of a special series devoted to the global pandemic that has coordinated an unprecedented attack on lives and civil liberties everywhere. In this chapter, we have two guests concluding that the threat is not nearly catastrophic as to demand lock-downs and masks.

The first guest is Sucharit Bhakdi. This renowned expert in microbiology along with Karina Reiss wrote a book – Corona: False Alarm? Facts and Figures. He breaks down how the facts he chronicles show how mightily deceived the public has been.

Our next guest is Mark Crispin Miller. A noted academic from New York, he took a particular interest in the mask question used to contain the spread of the virus. He analyzes the situation in an article that he is in the process of writing. He joins us to share his thoughts about masking, and the various methods used to further this remedy and other aspects of the COVID situation.

Sucharit Bhakdi, MD is a physician and  a post-doctoral researcher. He was named chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz in 1990, where he remained until his retirement in 2012. He has published over three hundred articles in the fields of immunology, bacteriology, virology, and parasitology, for which he has received numerous awards and the Order of Merit of Rhineland-Palatinate. He is a specialist in microbiology and one of the most cited research scientists in German history. His book, co-authored by Karina Reiss, is Corona: False Alarm? Facts and Figures. 

It is available now in the English language.

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, and author of numerous articles on media censorship and election fraud. He is also authoring a major article which is focused on the widespread lies about the safety of the masks we put on to protect us from the threat of COVID 19.

Transcript of Sucharit Bhakdi in Conversation with Global Research News Hour host Michael Welch.

Global Research: Sucharit Bhakdi.

Sucharit Bhakdi, MD: If you look at the statistics of how many percent of infected, in terms of the coronavirus, I would ask the audience whether they had any inkling how many percent died. Was it 40 percent? 20 percent? 10 percent? 5 percent? Make a cross when you think you’ve got the answer. I tell you, it was way, way under 1 percent. Meaning that even without any antibodies, we didn’t have any antibodies, therefore they got the infection with this new, so called new coronavirus that was supposedly deadly and dangerous.

Anyone below the age of 70 even with pre-existing illnesses, the chances of dying was less than 1 percent. And if you have no pre-existing illness, the chances of dying of this COVID-19 was less than 0.1 percent meaning that 99.9 percent would not die because of course, we have modern medicine today. We have excellent possibilities of treating these patients. We are not of the age 1918 where there were no antibiotics, no intensive care medicine so you can’t go around comparing this sort of thing. And if you do, you may be making a big mistake.

GR: Today, from the onset of the virus, 200,000 people in the United States died from the virus. So should these numbers not spark an outrage?

SB: Well you see the whole problem about this virus is that the definition of virus, death, corona, victim” – entirely unscientific and violated all the basic rules of infectious disease. If you had a positive test for this virus, a lab test mind you, which is a PCR test, this is a test where you…The gene or gene fragments of the virus are multiplied so that it’s like putting a loop on what you’re trying to look at to see if the virus is there or not. This test was never intended for diagnostic use. This test was created for laboratory use and there was no mention at all that you could use this test to diagnose an infection and in fact this test does not diagnose an infection.

If you have a positive test it does not mean that you have an active infection. It does not mean that the infection made you ill. And it certainly does not equate with, if you die of this, that the infection killed you. Because this is something that caused the whole wave of misunderstanding to go off all over the world. If anyone tested positive for this virus and jumped off a cliff, then it wasn’t suicide anymore, the virus killed him. All right? I mean, it’s so ridiculous and this is what has been happening and what is happening, even today, even in the US. The virus does no more and no less than any other coronavirus that would have done a year ago or two years ago. Except that last year and the year before, no one would have thought about looking for a coronavirus because these viruses are not important enough to get diagnosed.

If you die of a heart attack, you die of a heart attack, and for that virus there, or a flu virus, or any other virus, it’s immaterial. It doesn’t really matter, and it shouldn’t matter, because if you do this sort of thing you are forcing upon others a false diagnosis. And making the correct diagnosis at death is so important for science and medicine, and you can see, after six months, how much self destruction has already taken place, how many existence are ruined, how many, you know, people have died because they haven’t been treated properly because hospitals have been closed to them. My god, now people in Europe are wearing masks, children are forced to wear masks in school, they’re going crazy, all these sort of thing, for what? Just because people are afraid. But if you look at the number of deaths, you see that if you’re under 70 it’s very, very soft. I’m not being [inaudible] it’s almost difficult to die.

The people who are dying are those whose lives are coming to an end with pre-existing illnesses, and it is correct these people are at risk, but they are at risk for the flu, they’re at risk for pneumococcal, they’re at risk for any agent that happens to hit them. So what one has to do is to protect those people specifically. In the nursing home, in the… People of old age are being taken care of. But you don’t go around doing what governments are doing now, putting masks on people who are not infected, prohibiting them to make a living. You know this is crazy.

GR: Could you talk about the lockdowns that were introduced, because there are some countries that went to extremes and others that did not. Could you maybe point to a few scenarios that show that the lock down…Lockdowns, I mean, on the one hand, maybe you’re protecting people from the virus, on the other hand there are a lot of, you know –

SB: Collateral damage

GR: —collateral damage that could be committed by the lock down, so could you just point to an example that shows that the lockdowns that are triggered is not really making the, doing it, making a positive difference?

SB: Well, the pure evidence in retrospect is that the lockdowns never did any good…and… because they came too late anyway. When the epidemics were already going down, any effect that you thought you might see was there anyway and of course you… Prime example is Sweden which didn’t do the lockdown, as we all know, and without the lockdown Sweden has not been doing worse than France, Italy, the U.S. And, you know, looking at this there’s no question whatsoever that the lockdowns have done nothing but damage. Damage. And all these restrictions that have been continued in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, Spain, whereby in Scandinavia. There is no mask there. They don’t have to wear masks, nothing happens to them either. I mean, it is as clear as day and we can’t understand that people just don’t stand up and say no mask anymore.

GR: Dr Bhakdi, you mentioned the masks, could you point to examples of how these masks were not only ineffective but could even be harmful to those who wore it.

SB: Well, it is well known that wearing masks causes so many psychological damage, harm to children in schools. You know they go really crazy and we have so many examples of children who hate these masks. The moment out they’re out of school they tear them to bits, and they start saying and they scream, “I don’t want to go to school anymore. I hate these masks!”

Masks are also known to increase the concentration of CO2, you know, that you breathe in and out because CO2 does accumulate in the mask. And this is very bad for elderly people who have lung problems…people who… I can tell you openly that my mother-in-law has lung cancer, and she’s an old lady. She’s in terminal stage lung cancer, she was forced to wear a mask when she went to buy milk and bread in the supermarket, and she collapsed in the supermarket and almost had to be taken to a hospital, but then she said, “I will not go to the hospital because if I go to the hospital I will never see my grandson again, and I will also probably never see my children. And if you try to take me to the hospital, I have a plastic bag that I’m going to put over my head.” She did.

And so I’m rather emotional about this. I myself, I can tell you cannot wear a mask because my blood pressure is on the border line. My blood pressure is about 135 to 140, okay? When I put in a mask within 10 to 15 minutes my blood pressure is 145/150 which shortens my life. Now there are millions of you in America, there are millions of people in Germany, in Europe, who are in the same position as me, and when they wear these damn masks, their blood pressure goes above the critical limit and their lives are being shortened. Not by years, but by days and maybe months. I don’t know how much, but I refuse to wear a mask. These are just two examples, but there’s so many others, there are people who get frantic when they put on masks, they get psychic, you know, break downs. And so it’s absolutely unethical that the politicians are forcing their people…They’re dehumanizing them all right, I’m using a very strong word, but it’s true.

GR: Could you maybe just talk about the role of other scientists because I know that there’s a fairly high number of people that are refusing to go along with this, something in the order of the hundreds, but there’s still some scientists who stick to that…you know, the idea that this is something that we should be taking precautions against it and so on. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on what would guide them to go along with the normal course of action.

SB: Well, we’re all so perplexed, we can’t really understand that our colleagues don’t see through this. We have colleagues who are absolutely terrified of the virus despite the fact that after six months, what I’ve been telling you is… anyone can look up these numbers in the register. I mean it’s so easy, just look at the numbers and you see that everything I said is true. And despite this, they still refuse to stop being afraid and stop inciting fear in their patients and all their friends.

But there’s a real rift now in the medical community. Ever more physicians and people at the front who are seeing patients see that it is not true that this virus is going rampant. We have hardly any patients in the ICUs in Germany with COVID-19. Hardly any. We have hardly any deaths. You can count them on one hand every day. No, we have 2500 deaths a day in Germany and we have maybe five so-called COVID-19 deaths because they are dying with or because of the virus. So, in fact the COVID-19 is one of the most seldom causes of death in Germany at the moment.

To our great delight, it was yesterday, I think, that one thousand four hundred Belgium doctors signed and opened their voices, their opinion, that they said that this whole thing is a bogey. That SARS-COVID-2 is not the killer virus that people have been saying it is. And yet, just yesterday I think, Boris Johnson tightened the measures, and the Bavarian government are thinking of getting soldiers in to control people. It’s incredible, they want to mobilize the army. Oh my god, I mean where are we going? I hope that America doesn’t go this way, but sometimes when I see what the Americans are doing, I start to get my doubts.

We’re in Switzerland right now, I’m trying to talk to the Swiss because the Swiss are also behaving very, very childishly, extremely unSwiss. This was, used to be, the courageous independent people who showed the world the way to go. America used to be one of those too, but no. No way.

GR: That was Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, microbiology specialist and author on the threat of COVID-19 being exaggerated. Sucharit Bhakdi’s book, Corona, False Alarm? published by Chelsea Green Publishing is now available in the English language. Go to the site chelseagreen.com to order a copy or order from your local bookstore.

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Mark Crispin Miller: Well, over the summer, in fact since this crisis began, and once I came over, I got over my own panic over the coronavirus…I mean, I lost a friend to it and nearly lost another. You know, whatever exactly it is. And I’m seventy, I have Lyme disease so I was duly cautious and kind of on the fence about its seriousness, but as time wore on, I became more and more struck by a significant chinks in the official narrative.

I mean, going all the way back to the zoonotic origin theory that it had leapt from a bat to human, you know it comes right out of the end of the movie Contagion. I’m a student of propaganda, that’s probably my major intellectual interest nowadays and has been for some time. So I realized that this was, we’re living in the midst of, and in a world devastated by a propaganda drive of unprecedented scope and sophistication. And as the mask mandates were imposed and became all the more aggressive, I was increasingly struck by this, in particular.

It started with…what peaked my interest in the beginning was the fact that governor Greg Abbott of Texas who had been a staunch proponent of reopening and had even been invited to the oval office by Donald Trump to get the presidential salute for his position. Suddenly, I think in June, abruptly pivoted, and was now mandating masks in Texas. His pivot is very similar to the one by the CDC and Dr Fauci and the WHO, all three of which were whom had basically articulated the scientific consensus on the usefulness of masks against respiratory viruses. And all said very publicly that healthy people shouldn’t wear them. Fauci was on 60 minutes saying this, that they may make you feel a sense of security, but they’re not really that effective.

Then they all switched, they all shifted. And governor Abbot shifted, and that was a significant moment in the politicization of this issue because it was reported by The New York Times and others as a kind of come-to-Jesus moment, that Abbott had seen the light and understood that indeed the United States should have been following China’s example all along, and that was kind of the subtext of this because the World Health Organization has always strongly championed China’s draconian approach to this and hailed New Zealand for following China’s example.

So then other southern governors began to fall into line and Sean Hannity of Fox News did a TV spot or PSA urging people to wear masks. It was coming at us from every direction as winning propaganda always does. It uses every available medium, every possible stimulus to move large numbers of people to some thought or action and it was happening here. So that we had Tom Hanks, you know, a kind of reliable, arguably CIA-connected movie star saying, “I don’t trust anybody who doesn’t wear a mask.” You had Banksy, the radical street artist doing works of art about the necessity of masking. It was really everywhere we looked, everything we read, everything we saw, masks along the highway, “Wearing is Caring.”

So I was very struck by the summary published in April by Denis Rancourt, a fellow Canadian. You know, deftly and expertly summarizing the findings of seven randomized controlled tests of mask wearing, in hospital settings, from the past 10 or 15 years and they’re all in agreement, and it’s really very simple, that the variants of these respiratory viruses are simply too small for paper or cloth masks to prevent their transmission. One doctor, Dr Simone Gold, in LA, has used the metaphor that…trying to protect yourself from this virus with a face mask is like trying to use a chain link fence to keep out a mosquito. It’s a very apt analogy. It’s just as ridiculous. And the N.95 masks which are harder to penetrate are somewhat more effective but only as long as they fit your face very, very tightly, and with use the fit loosens and that opens up a pathway for the virus to enter.

Now let me pause and note something that nobody thinks about. What is it that health care workers in covid wards have used to protect themselves from infection? Well, they wear masks and respirators and goggles and face shields, and gloves and a gown and booties. That’s the full regalia. You know I spoke to nurses about this. That’s pretty formidable protection against a highly infectious virus in a hospital setting.

So the idea that, first of all, that that’s in any way comparable to what we have to do out in the streets in the open air when we’re healthy, that’s ridiculous because this is.. life is not a covid ward. And secondly, the idea that one of these masks by itself can offer any protection against the virus theoretically passed along by a passer-by on the sidewalk, which doesn’t happen either – these are completely irrational notions. And the more deeply I dug, the more stuff I found, rigorous studies, there’s one in the British medical journal about cloth masks in particular which warns against their use…I think it’s from 2015, it warns against the use of cloth mask by health care workers because these are basically bacteria traps and are dangerous.

Global Research: There has been a major study published by Texas A&M University highlighting how masks were by and large beneficial in protecting from covid. Professor Miller took a look at this and discovered several prominent voices calling for a retraction.

MCM: The one you mentioned is the one most often cited. It was published I think in June in proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a team in Texas A&M University and it got all kinds of press, you know, the media was headlining this and so on. Well, as I took a close look at this, and let me add Michael, I don’t tend to be a scientist myself I mean, I … my…doctorate is in English, and I’ve become a kind of expert in propaganda study and media ownership and things like that, and I’ve learned how to consult those with the appropriate expertise to judge these things. I went and I consulted the scientific reviews of that article. I went to the scientific media center in Britain, this is a control center and there’s a whole number of a lot…a big number of responses to this article, and it’s very damning. They pointed out the data was unreliable, the methodology was faulty, and researchers at Johns Hopkins did the same thing. The article was a fraud. Well they didn’t retract it.

This then prompts a closer look at Texas A&M University. What’s this say about that? Well it turns out it has extremely lucrative contracts with, I think, Pfizer and another pharmaceutical company, they’re in business with them, okay? So this is not a disinterested institution. This is an institution with an interest in keeping, [inaudible] clear for the vaccine or vaccines that are coming at us, see?

Anyone asks protract the error to maintain the actual lockdown…even things might nominally loosened up.

It is related to the scandalous campaign to discredit hydroxychloroquine, which had been proven overwhelming to be extremely successful in treating this disease. This has been affirmed in numerous studies worldwide and in countless clinical practices [inaudible] in Houston. And the local TV station, where they actually did a report on this hospital success rate in treating covid19. They had not lost a single patient. [inaudible] steroid.. cocktail that they use. There are hospitals in Florida that have used it with a perfect rate of success. And here they are telling us that it’s not effective.

GR: Mainstream media have not been doing the job of reviewing the efficacy of masks, among other problems with the covid story. I asked Miller about the press being held hostage by not only corporations, but conglomerates, and what role big pharma could be playing in this.

MCM: You raised a really good and complicated question. I mean first of all the fact that the media is largely concentrated and in the hands or within the tentacles of I think five multinational corporations is already a dangerous development that I.. I’ve been sounding the alarm about since the nineties, when it was accelerating, and as we approached the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which just made everything much, much worse. So that’s…definitely, that lays the groundwork for propaganda across media that are all owned by the same corporation, and all five of them are very closely involved with each other, and they all are connected to the CIA and the National Security State and their advertisers. Paramount among whom is big pharma.

Then there’s the Gates Foundation. There’s a superb article that was in the Columbia Journalism Review [inaudible] media peace keepers, and it gets into his having so far donated around $250 million to media outlets of all kinds, you know NBC News, The Atlantic, NPR, indirectly The New York Times. So that they are all functioning as part of the Mighty Wurlitzer that serves his and Big Pharma interests. So this is a, you know, the classic example of the kind of corruption that has bedeviled the commercial press from the beginning. What has now become, you know, a major threat to public health and the survival of humanity, I think. Because it’s so concentrated. There is no competition within it and NPR, which is supposed to be public broadcasting, is among the worst and so is PBS.

But Gates has also given to the BBC you know. He’s been very generous with media outlets abroad so that it’s difficult to, you know, find genuinely independent media and this extends to medical journals, you know, for the reasons I alluded to in talking about Texas A&M, that university scientists and medical journals are you know, basically in the pocket of the CDC which is itself.. .the Center for Disease Control is not acting in the public interest, it’s a deeply corrupt organization, as is the World Health Organization. And yet our media, naturally, being complicit and being owned, always piously invokes them as if they were, you know, ordained by God to tell us the truth about matters of public health. The opposite is true. The same is the case with Dr Fauci. He’s an extremely corrupt person with a very destructive record in public health. But with the media running interference for him and those agencies, it’s very hard to get at those truths and it’s especially difficult with the most educated people, I have found.

GR: I’d like to then ask you, I mean you’ve been outspoken in this in a number of different areas and I’m wondering about the backlash about, you know, personally, I mean, could you share with our listeners examples of how you’ve been treated for speaking so forthrightly about masking, a parallel of peril to civil liberties.

MCM: Well you know I.. I.. was…I’ve been written off as a conspiracy theorist since I wrote my book on the theft of the 2004 election. It’s called, Fooled Again. It came out in 2005 from a major publisher, who, like myself, was really kind of staggered by the blackout on the book when it appeared. And I was especially staggered by, not a blackout by, but a slander by the left media, many outlets for which I’d written, pieces by people I was friends with, who actually called the book conspiracy theory, and me a conspiracy theorist and it’s not a work of theory, it’s all documented. That was the… that was the meme that was used to shoot me down from the so called left, okay?

I’ve been tagged as a conspiracy theorist. I had been frequently invited on NPR to speak on various aspects of media. I was now persona non grata. I had written a number of opeds for the New York Times, I think 4 or 5. And now I was a pariah, and you know, so my reputation took a public hit. Lately, as I have been focusing on the covid crisis and the disinformation over it, and the disastrousness on the approach to it, through lockdowns and so on, I’ve been specifically targeted at NYU where I teach. A few months after I started doing these things, my department chair sent me four what do you call…negative student reviews from a course I taught on propaganda the previous fall, this is months later. Four single sentences, very, very damning, claiming that I had harangued them in class, and that I did nothing but flawed conspiracy theory and so on. And he said none of these have come from any student evaluations. And he wouldn’t tell me who had given them to him. And he urged me to, you know, straighten up, clean up my act, change my course descriptions, I guess to say, “You should be forewarned that I’m insane and I will be flogging insane theories in the class,” something like that.

So my response to this was to gather together a couple of dozen glowing emails from students, in that class and others, graduates and undergraduates, thanking me for opening their eyes, expressing gratitude for the opportunity to learn how to study these things critically, right? And I sent them to him, and I said, “This is the real consensus. You know, I don’t know where you got that quartet of put downs, but I’m not even convinced they’re authentic.” So that went away.

Now, just this week what’s happened is that a student in my current propaganda course who had come to the class late, about a week-and-a-half into the class, missed the opening week where we talk about all of these general issues, you know, the difficulty of being truly skeptical, the challenge of being genuinely skeptical, and the necessity to be prepared to move out of your comfort zone when you study propaganda, because often you discover that things you have believed – and this has happened me repeatedly in my life, happened to everyone who.. who’s… thoughtful. You come to see that something you believe to be true is not true. It’s the result of very, very sophisticated propaganda. She missed those classes.

So when she came, we were talking, I mean, in such classes I always focus on ongoing propaganda drives, because this is not an academic subject. This is not something you talk about the Nazis and the Bolsheviks only, or you talk only about World War One when modern propaganda began. If you approach it that way, you’re basically doing propaganda because you’re implying that we don’t do it, you know. The North Koreans do it, the Chinese do it, we don’t do it. Well in fact, the United States and Britain invented it, they invented political propaganda. They invented commercial propaganda as it’s been used ever since.

So, my view is that, you know, that you study its history and then you move directly to propaganda drives that are now on going, you have the students do the investigation, you know. I mean, I tell them things that startle them, always saying pointedly do not believe a single word I say, okay? Don’t take my word for anything! I could be wrong, you know, I could be right, it’s irrelevant. I’m not making proclamations of the truth here. I’m setting an example of a kind of critical investigation you have to carry out yourselves. So if something I say strikes you, you are obliged to look into it, yourself. Okay? So, naturally, since I’m forced to teach online, their lives have been completely upended, their socializing is under, you know, police surveillance, and the university is punishing students for having small gatherings in their own apartments, okay? Since we’re living in… in the heart of an unprecedented propaganda maelstrom, how can we not talk about it in class?

So I brought up the mask thing, I mentioned it. I mentioned the scientific studies. I recommended them. I sent them links. And this one student, I mean, who never said a word about any of this during a class discussion but sat there in what I recall now is a kind of stony silence, just on Tuesday started tweeting really hostile statements about my course and demanding that NYU fire me, okay? That I be fired for putting everybody at risk, for flogging dangerous disinformation. She refers contemptuously to the links I sent because, you know, this is very revealing, because I don’t run across many young people like this, but certainly older people, you know, certainly my peers and younger people in their 30s, 40s, 50s who’ve been steeped in The New York Times and so on. They have a tendency to simply shut down in the face of counter evidence. They sometimes become abusive. You know, there’s something about the fear of death that does this.

GR: In the minutes we had left I asked Mark Crispin Miller to expand on the issue of what informed citizens could do to reverse the direction of a massive fraud carried out at their expense.

MCM: Yeah. Well I’m in New York, which is one of the most dystopian cities around I’m afraid. It is unrecognizable to me as New York City. I am very heartened by resistance movements, particularly in Europe. I thought that the turnout in Germany was extraordinary and very, very inspiring, and that Bobby Kennedy Junior’s remarks were right on target, that we are witnessing the rollout of a totalitarian movement, the likes of which we have never seen anywhere, this is global now. And we’ve got all these liberals and progressives screaming about Trump as a fascist, okay. We can get into that whole subject, but to point to Trump as a fascist threat when we’re being faced with mandatory vaccination, immunity passports, we’re having our temperatures taken remotely, our movements are being tracked on cellphones, our socializing and gathering has been forbidden and is sometimes punished. If people can’t see that that’s totalitarianism, then they have been, they have their eyes wide shut. So what’s the solution?

The solution is for people to… those who’ve looked into this to spread the word, you know, however you can do it. It’s what I try to do in class, it’s what I’m doing with you, it’s what you guys do at Global Research. This means, increasingly, that we have to find alternatives to Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and people are finding them. I mean people have to resist, they have to say no. And not look at this in a politicized way, it has nothing to do with Trump or you know, whatever, I mean that… that’s all irrelevant. What matters is the truth, what matters is free and open discussion. That a student of mine would go on Twitter and demand I be fired for sharing certain kind of information and that the university would apparently back her up! I mean, my chairman sent her a reassuring tweet that they would make this a priority, which I found staggering, okay? The good news is that the reaction on Twitter has been overwhelmingly positive you know in… I’m… I don’t want to say in my favor, but in favor of free and frank discussion without having to fear the threat of unemployment or punishment. It is now astonishingly the left, it is more totalitarian, more pro-war, more pro-censorship, more pro-bio security than any other part –constituency.

We need to tell the truth, as George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” and that is unfortunately true. That’s the truth today, and therefore we have to heed his advice, because I think his work and the work of other authors who understood the dangers of dystopian surveillance and control, you know, including E.M Forster and Aldous Huxley and others. Their relevance to this crisis is actually far greater than the work of Karl Marx, because this isn’t just about capitalism. This is about a global elite heading in the direction of a kind of neo feudalism where they will own most of the land, control the food supply, where they are actually at work on a eugenics project to lower the population, and this is something that Gates has talked about openly, Ted Turner as well, thinks the population should be reduced by between 80 and 90 percent of the world’s population. This is the biggest landowner in the United States with huge herds of bison, right.

So we’ve got to wake up to this fact, we have to tumble to it, we can’t turn away from it and say it’s all just for short term profits. We follow the money, we follow it beyond the quid pro quos that we talked about before, the Big Pharma profits from this kind of coverage. It’s actually following the money to see that it also involves dividing and conquering the people. Splitting us up in as many ways as possible: red versus blue, black versus white, masked verses unmasked.

And then we follow the money beyond that to see that the eugenics project which began with the twentieth century, funded by the Rockefellers, the Carnegie Foundation and the Harriman family, never went away, it was embarrassed by the Holocaust. Although all those interests backed and supported Hitler before the war, sometimes during the war, and it reemerged a few years later as population control. And that’s now a key part of the Green New Deal and all that stuff. So part of the environmental movement is captive. It is an elite movement, and that’s where the money leads us, and I’m saying to you, Michael, that in order for us to survive this and to defeat it, as I believe it can and will be defeated, because to be perfectly honest, it is evil, and I don’t think evil can ultimately triumph – but God helps those who help themselves. So in order for good to triumph we have to step up, we have to be brave, we have to speak out.

GR: Mark Crispin Miller’s essay is entitled “Masking Ourselves to Death.” It will be released soon. His site is markcrispinmiller.com.

Iran, Russia and electoral interference.  It is all part of the delicious mess that any observer of US politics has come to expect.  Were the US body politic capable of being examined on the clinician’s couch, historical fears, psychic disturbances, and a range of unsettling syndromes would be identified.  The issue of electoral interference would certainly be at the fore; it would also be fitting that a state so indifferent to the electoral sovereignty of others would now find itself constantly fearing large return servings. 

On some level, this standards to reason.  In 1948, the United States, still flushed with victory, made a punchy bid to interfere with the outcome of the Italian elections.  It was the Central Intelligence Agency’s first covert operation, and it was ignominiously undemocratic.  As Walter Dowling, Italian desk officer at the US State Department urged in a memorandum in November 1946, the US had to become increasingly involved with Italian affairs, making itself “so pro-damned Italian that even the dumbest wop would sense the drift.” Being so damnably pro-Italian naturally meant being anti-communist.  US intelligence officials got to work ensuring that the Italian Communist Party (PCI), allied with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) were kept out of office in favour of Alcide De Gasperi.  Contingency plans were laid for the prospect of US military intervention in the event of civil strife.  After De Gasperi’s victory, covert US aid to Italy’s centrist parties continued into the 1960s.  

Hair splitting in these sorts of things is the order of the day.  Chat in the land of political inference, especially when appraising the US role, focuses on how considerably different the meddling tends to be.  “Unlike Russian electoral interference,” suggests Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “US democracy promotion does not … favour particular candidates, or undercut the technical integrity of elections.  On the whole, it seeks to help citizens exercise their basic political and civil rights.”  Carothers had obviously forgotten Chile in all of this, along with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s infamous remarks about correcting the democratic choice of Chile’s voters.

Post-Cold War history has not been freed from the meddling hand of Washington.  In 1996, President Bill Clinton had to admit to efforts assisting Shimon Peres as the preferred candidate in Israel’s general elections.  Benjamin Netanyahu prevailed, and Clinton conceded on Israel’s Channel 10 news that he “tried to do it in a way that didn’t overtly involve me.”  When Netanyahu visited the White House as Israel’s prime minister, he “wanted me to know that he knew I wasn’t for him and he beat us anyway.”

Such behaviour shows that allies are not exempt from the practice.  The CIA did its bit in the lead-up to the French elections in 2012, though the effort was modest.  Available in the WikiLeaks CIA Vault 7 Series, a number of “tasking orders” were executed in an effort to infiltrate French political parties and conduct surveillance.  As WikiLeaks describes it, “All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA’s human (‘HUMINT’) and electronic (‘SIGINT’) spies in the seven months leading up to France’s 2012 presidential election.”  Despite being seen as pro-American, President Nicolas Sarkozy was not exempt from Washington’s prying eyes.

With such a glorious record, it is little wonder that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, when asked about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, had little time for the fuss.  In an interview with CNN’s Jack Tapper, Paul suggested that the electoral interference game was a buffet of reciprocal options: “they’re going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same … We all do it.   What we need to do is make sure our electoral process is protected.”   The investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign and Russian interference was a needless “witch hunt”.

With only a brief interval now to the presidential elections next month, it would have been odd not to have another set of allegations of interference.  This latest round of claims has even been a bit neurotic.  It began as accusations of interference from a domestic source: the far-right Proud Boys group.  Emails, supposedly sent from “[email protected],” warned registered Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and Alaska to “vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” 

Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys and Florida state director of Latinos for Trump, denied that the group had a hand in the effort.  “We don’t do mass emails,” he told Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.  “This is definitely, definitely not us.” 

With little care for caution and corroboration, a good stable of mainstream media outlets jumped on the narrative, accepting the premise that the Proud Boys had orchestrated a domestic campaign of electoral intimidation.  It seemed to tally with image and reputation.  Some group members have promised to keep an eye on polling stations across the country in a show of political heft.  The Lincoln Project was furious, claiming that “the Proud Boys are attempting to scare voters away from the polls.”  Such an act was “punishable by up to a year in jail and a blatant attempt to prevent people from voting.  Let’s find them and make them famous.” 

Then came the press conference of October 21, convened by the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  FBI director Christopher Wray and the Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe were present.  According to Ratcliffe, Iran and Russia “have taken specific actions to influence public opinion relating to our elections.”  Voter registration information had been obtained by both countries. 

“This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos, and undermine your confidence in American democracy.” 

Reference was made to the intimidating emails, which would not have comforted the anti-Trump camp. 

“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump,” stated Ratcliffe. 

“You may have seen some reporting on this in the last 24 hours or you have been one of the recipients.”  Iran was also “distributing other content,” including a video implying “that individuals could cast fraudulent votes, even from overseas.  This video – and any claims about such allegedly fraudulent ballots – are not true.”  

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, never one to be entirely balanced when viewing material on the White House Ogre, questioned the assertions made during the press conference.  Interference in US elections over the last four years had always been taken to be against the Democrats and favourable to Trump.  Could it actually be designed to sabotage the US president?  Good of Ratcliffe, claimed Maddow, to be having the gathering (there was “drama” in holding a “short-notice press conference on election security”). “But when it comes to what he actually communicated, frankly nobody actually knows what he was talking about.” 

It should have been clear from the context, but clarity was not dawning on Maddow.  “We assume what he’s talking about here is these intimidating ‘vote Trump or else’ emails that were sent to Democratic registered voters in Florida and in numerous other states, but maybe that’s not what he’s talking about.” 

For the devotees of Russia gate, any reverse angle was hard to stomach.  Ideology must shape reality.  Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, in an effort to move the focus away from any specific targeting of Trump, claimed to have a different account of the security briefing he had been given.  “From the briefing, I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections and not aimed at any particular figure”. 

A passable knowledge of recent Iran-US relations would surely make Ratcliffe’s assertions credible, not least Trump’s effort to sink the Iran nuclear deal and the ordered killing of Quds leader Major General Qasem Soleimani.  But partisanship has been the order of the day for four years.  Even in matters of electoral inference, trusted demonologies cannot be disturbed.

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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]

Those who have been waiting for the elusive October Surprise that will upset the apple cart on election day are admittedly running out of time. The media’s unwillingness to even consider that the antics of Hunter Biden just might constitute an embarrassment of major proportions or even something worse has done much to kill that story. And the old tried and true expedient of starting a little war somewhere is also proving to be a false hope as no one appears ready to provoke the righteously wrathful Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by ponying up a casus belli. Maybe there is still time for a false flag operation, but even that would require more prior planning than the White House appears capable of.

There is, however, one area that might just be exploitable to create a crisis, though it much depends on whether a tired public is willing to go one more round over the issue of “foreign election interference.” And yes, the Russians are presumed to be involved, on this occasion, as they always are, joined by the ever-vengeful Iranians.

On Wednesday Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe held a news conference at which he laid out details of the most recent dastardly plot against American democracy. He described how Iran and Russia both obtained American voter registration data, apparently through publicly accessible databases and through purchases of email lists. Though no actual votes have been altered, they are using that information “to influence the presidential election as it enters its final two weeks.” Ratcliffe elaborated how “This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine…confidence in American democracy.”

Ratcliffe focused mostly on Iran, saying that it had been identified as the source of what he described as a claimed 1,500 “spoofed emails” routed through Estonia that “seek to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump.” Iran was also blamed for other material, to include a video encouraging the casting of illegal ballots both domestically and overseas. Additional intelligence suggests that Iran is planning to take more steps to influence the election in the coming days, though what those measures could possibly be was not revealed.

Other government sources elaborated, indicating that Iranian intelligence has been credited with the sending of the email messages going out to Democratic voters in four states, including hotly disputed Pennsylvania and Florida. The emails falsely claimed to be from the alleged far-right group Proud Boys which has been much in the news.  Their message was that “we will come after you” if the recipients fail to vote for Donald Trump.

It doesn’t take much to realize that threatening messages relating to voting for Trump allegedly coming from a source described as “racist” would undoubtedly motivate most registered Democratic voters to do the opposite, but that seems to have escaped the analysts of the Directorate of National Intelligence. And one must also ask why Tehran would want the re-election of a president who has been unremittingly hostile, including imposing crippling sanctions, withdrawing from a beneficial nuclear agreement, and assassinating a leading Revolutionary Guards general. Even U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer appears to have figured that one out, saying “It was clear to me that the intent of Iran in this case and Russia in many more cases is to basically undermine confidence in our elections. This action I do not believe was aimed… at discrediting President Trump.”

The anti-Trump New York Times has, of course, another, more sinister interpretation, suggesting that “…it may also play into President Trump’s hands. For weeks, he has argued, without evidence, that the vote on Nov. 3 will be ‘rigged,’ that mail-in ballots will lead to widespread fraud and that the only way he can be defeated is if his opponents cheat. Now, on the eve of the final debate, he has evidence of foreign influence campaigns designed to hurt his re-election chances, even if they did not affect the voting infrastructure.”

The Times also notes a broader conspiracy by the dreadful Persians, explaining how “Iran has tinkered at the edges of American election interference since 2012, but always as a minor actor. Last year, it stepped up its game, private cybersecurity firms have warned. They have caught Iranian operatives occasionally impersonating politicians and journalists around the world, often to spread narratives that are aimed at denigrating Israel or Saudi Arabia, its two major adversaries in the Middle East.” Again, however, the article provides no explanation of what Iran could possibly hope to gain from the minimal “tinkering” it might be able to engage in an American election in which billions of dollars will be spent by Democrats and Republicans who are viciously attacking each other without any outside help.

Ratcliffe had less to say about Russia but U.S. media coverage of the story included a referral to a recent account of how the U.S. military’s Cyber Command helped take down a network developed by Russian hackers called TrickBot that had been used in ransomware attacks directed against companies as well as cities and towns across the United States. It also reported how “In recent days, another Russian hacking group called Energetic Bear, often linked to the F.S.B. — one of the successors to the Soviet Union’s K.G.B. — appears to have focused its attention on gaining access to state and local government networks. That has caught the attention of federal investigators because, until now, the group had largely targeted energy firms, including public utilities.”

There was, however, no evidence that either hacking group was being directed against voter systems, so Russia’s inclusion in the front-page Times story headlined “Iran and Russia Seek to Influence Election in Final Days, U.S. Officials Warn” has to be considered questionable editorial judgment. Perhaps scaremongering would be a better description. In any event, the story itself is much ado about nothing. Iran’s sending out 1,500 emails if that actually occurred, would have zero impact. Likewise, the claimed existence of alleged Russian hacking groups that have done nothing directed against voters or balloting systems with only a few days left until the election would appear to be an electoral tactic rather than exposure of any genuine threat. One might even describe it as a bit of deliberate disinformation.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. Credit: The Hill/ YouTube

During the presidential debate alongside Donald Trump in September, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden uttered the invocative Islamic expression “Inshallah,” meaning “God willing,” to woo the Muslim American voters, which was cheered by Democratic supporters across the Islamic World.

Being misinformed viewers of the Western mainstream media, however, the Democratic Party-leaning Muslims didn’t realize that all the missiles the liberal interventionist Obama-Biden administration deployed to bomb eight Islamic countries during its eight-year tenure were also inscribed with “Inshallah.”

Empty rhetoric, no matter how bombastic and noble-sounding, is never a substitute for tangible benevolent deeds. If nurturing patron-client relationship with autocratic rulers of the Islamic World is the touchstone for being an Islamic sympathizer, then the Trump administration has forged friendlier relationships with absolute monarchs of the Gulf States, the military dictator of Egypt and the populist demagogue of Turkey.

All Joe Biden did for the Islamic World in his over forty-year political career, first as a longtime senator from Delaware and then as Obama’s vice president, was to underwrite the Machiavellian policy of the US national security establishment to train and arm Islamic jihadists and use them as proxies against strategic adversaries in regions as disparate as the Af-Pak, Chechnya in the North Caucasus, Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans, Libya in North Africa and Syria in the Near East.

Before being elected as Obama’s vice president in 2008, as a senator and subsequently as the member and then the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, alongside inveterate hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, was one of the principal architects of the Bosnia War in the Clinton administration in the nineties.

Naively giving credit to former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden for his supposed “humanitarian interventionism” and for creating a catastrophe in the Balkans in the nineties, Paul Richter and Noam N. Levey, writing for the LA Times [1] in August 2008, observed:

“Biden has frequently favored humanitarian interventions abroad and was an early and influential advocate for the US military action in the Balkans in the 1990s.

“Biden considers his most important foreign policy accomplishment to be his leadership on the Balkans in the mid-1990s. He pushed a reluctant Clinton administration first to arm Serbian Muslims and then to use U.S. air power to suppress conflict in Serbia and Kosovo.”

Biden’s belligerent militarism, however, didn’t stop in the Balkans, as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden said in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was a threat to national security and there was no option but to eliminate that threat. In October 2002, he voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, approving the US invasion of Iraq.

More significantly, as chair of the committee, he assembled a series of witnesses to testify in favor of the authorization. They gave testimony grossly misrepresenting the intent, history of and status of Saddam and his Baathist government, which was an openly avowed enemy of al-Qaeda, and touting Iraq’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Writing for The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” in February, Mark Weisbrot contends [2] that Joe Biden was at the forefront of mustering bipartisan support for the illegal Iraq War and it would come back to haunt him in the forthcoming presidential elections like the criminal complicity of Hillary Clinton in lending legitimacy to the Bush administration’s unilateral invasion of Iraq had thwarted her presidential ambitions, too, in the 2016 presidential elections.

Weisbrot observes:

“When the war was debated and then authorized by the US Congress in 2002, Democrats controlled the Senate and Biden was chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations. Biden himself had enormous influence as chair and argued strongly in favor of the 2002 resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

“‘I do not believe this is a rush to war,’ Biden said a few days before the vote. ‘I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur …’

“But he had a power much greater than his own words. He was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position. They argued in favor of ‘regime change as the stated US policy’ and warned of ‘a nuclear-armed Saddam sometime in this decade.’ That Iraqis would ‘welcome the United States as liberators’ and that Iraq ‘permits known al-Qaida members to live and move freely about in Iraq’ and that ‘they are being supported.’”

When the ill-conceived invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t go as planned and the entire region slipped into myriad ethnic and sectarian conflicts, including the spillover of militancy across the porous border in neighboring Syria in 2011, Biden sought refuge in “plausible deniability” and blamed Syria’s neighbors Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf States for fueling the conflict.

Addressing a seminar at Harvard in 2014, Joe Biden said [3] that Saudi Arabia and the UAE had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars and large amounts of weaponry to a variety of Islamist militias inside Syria, including at least one with ties to al Qaeda.

“The Turks were great friends, and I’ve a great relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, … the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do?” Biden asked, according to a recording of the speech posted on the White House’s website.

“They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra, and al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

To his credit, despite being a warmonger masquerading as “a pacifist,” former President Obama was at least smart. Having graduated as one of the poorest student from the law school, then-Vice President Biden didn’t realize the irony of his remarks.

The Gulf States, Turkey and Jordan didn’t funnel money and weapons into Syria’s proxy war without a nod from Washington. In fact, the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore to train and arm Syrian militants battling the Bashar al-Assad government from 2012 to 2017 in the border regions of Jordan and Turkey was approved and supervised by the Obama administration of which Biden was the vice president and second-in-command.

Regarding the creation and composition of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, apart from training and arms which were provided to Syrian militants in the training camps located in the Turkish and Jordanian border regions adjacent to Syria by the CIA in collaboration with Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies, another factor that contributed to the success of the Islamic State when it overran Raqqa in Syria in 2013 and Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in 2014 was that its top cadres were comprised of former Baathist military and intelligence officers from the Saddam era.

Reportedly, hundreds of ex-Baathists constituted the top- and mid-tier command structure of the Islamic State who planned all the operations and directed its military strategy. The only feature that differentiated the Islamic State from all other insurgent groups was that its command structure which was comprised of professional ex-Baathists and its state-of-the-art weaponry that was provided to all militant outfits fighting in Syria by the intelligence agencies of the Western powers, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states.

In fact, Washington exercised such an absolute control over Syria’s theater of proxy war that although the US openly provided the American-made antitank (TOW) weapons to Syrian militant groups, it strictly forbade its clients from providing anti-aircraft weapons (MANPADS) to the militants, because Israel frequently flies surveillance aircrafts and drones and occasionally conducts airstrikes in Lebanon and Syria, and had such weapons fallen into the wrong hands, they could have become a long-term security threat to the Israeli Air Force.

Although ostensibly fighting a “war on terror” for the last couple of decades, the American deep state and political establishment have clandestinely nurtured Islamic jihadists and used them as proxies in myriad conflict zones of the Middle East to achieve “strategic objectives.”

If we take a cursory look at the history of the recent US administrations, the Carter and Reagan administrations trained and armed Afghan Mujahideen against the former Soviet Union during the Cold War in the late 1970s and 80s, those same “freedom fighters” later mutated into al-Qaeda and Taliban; the Clinton administration used Islamic jihadists to break up former Yugoslavia in the 1990s; the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003 that gave birth to al-Qaeda in Iraq; and the Obama-Biden administration initiated proxy wars in Libya and Syria in 2011 to topple Arab nationalist governments of Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad that gave birth to extremist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and Islamic State and al-Nusra Front in Syria.

Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The only difference between the Soviet-Afghan jihad back in the 1980s, that spawned Islamic jihadists such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda for the first time in history, and the proxy wars in Libya and Syria 2011-onward was that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then, the Western national security establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those rocket-propelled grenades and stingers to the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western deep states and corporate media became a lot more circumspect, therefore this time around, they waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad government in Syria, in which Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) were sold as “moderate rebels” with secular and nationalist ambitions to the Western audience.

Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, therefore the Western national security establishments and the corporate media tried to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits that operated in Syria: such as the red militants of the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, which the Western powers wanted to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, including Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits, which together comprised the elusive “moderate” Syrian opposition that existed only in the mainstream media’s fictional narrative of Syria’s proxy war but was nowhere to be found on the ground.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] On foreign policy, he’s willing to go his own way:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-24-na-foreignpol24-story.html

[2] Joe Biden championed the Iraq war. Will that come back to haunt him now?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-biden-role-iraq-war

[3] Joe Biden is the only honest man in Washington:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/07/joe-biden-is-the-only-honest-man-in-washington/

Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria the issue of Syrian refugees and internally displace has been the subject of countless articles and reports with international humanitarian organizations and countries involved in the Syrian conflict shifting responsibility for the plight of migrants.

The most notorious example of human suffering put against political games is the Rukban refugee camp located in eastern Syria inside the 55-km zone around Al-Tanf base controlled by the U.S. and its proxies.

According to official information, more than 50,000 people, mostly women and children, currently live in the camp. This is a huge number comparable to the population of a small town. The Syrian government, aware of the plight of people in Rukban, has repeatedly urged Washington to open a humanitarian corridor so that everyone can safely return home. However, all such proposals were ignored by the American side. U.S. also refuse to provide the camp with first aid items. Neighbouring Jordan is inactive, too, despite Rukban being the largest of dozens other temporary detention centres in Syria, where people eke out a meager existence.

At the same time, the problem is not only refugee camps. Syria has been at war for a decade. The country’s economy has suffered greatly over this period, and many cities have been practically grazed to the ground. Moreover, the global coronavirus epidemic didn’t spare Syria and drained the already weakened economy even more. However, Damascus’ attempts of post-war reconstruction and economic recovery were undermined by multiple packages of severe sanctions imposed by the U.S. At the same time, U.S.-based human rights monitors and humanitarian organizations continue to weep over the Syrian citizens’ misery.

The situation is the same for those refugees who stay in camps abroad, especially in countries bordering on Syria, particularly Jordan and Turkey. Ankara has been using Syrian citizens as a leverage against the European states in pursuit of political benefits for a long time. No one pays attention to the lives of people who are used as a change coin in big politics. This is equally true for Rukban where refugees are held in inhuman conditions and not allowed to return to their homeland. In those rare exceptions that they are able to leave, refugees have to pay large sums of money that most of those living in camp are not able to come by.

It’s hard to predict how long the Syrian conflict will go on and when – or if – the American military will leave the Al-Tanf base. One thing can be said for sure: the kind of criminal inaction and disregard for humanitarian catastrophe witnessed in refugee camps is a humiliating failure of modern diplomacy and an unforgivable mistake for the international community. People shouldn’t be a tool in the games of politicians.

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Ahmad Salah is a freelance Syrian journalist focused on the Middle East and especially the Levant. 

Featured image is from the author

In Colombia, popular dissatisfaction with President Iván Duque‘s policies is growing day after day. Popular protests started late last year and peaked between September and October this year. During this period, the number of claims increased significantly, mainly due to the advance of the new coronavirus pandemic, which caused a serious economic and social crisis in the country – with which the government has been incompetent to mitigate the effects. Last month, 13 people died during the demonstrations due to the great police violence that has been used to suppress the demonstrations. Now, in October, the scenario is being repeated.

In this context of protests, the 21st of October was marked by an unusual agitation. Thousands political activists, students and indigenous people attended a national strike in Colombia on Wednesday to protest against the economic policies of Iván Duque, the murder of protesters and human rights activists and the police violence. Still, protesters are demanding a variety of government grants, including guaranteed income for those who lost their jobs in the pandemic and more funding for health and education and measures.

The national strike of 21 October was a real mark in the demonstrations, mainly due to the presence of more than 8,000 indigenous people. The indigenous protests are organized through long marches known as “La Minga”. In fact, Colombian native communities have been the biggest victims of the insecurity that is taking over the country. Such communities live in the midst of conflicts between different paramilitary militias and drug trafficking organizations, having their rights constantly violated.

The indigenous people demand a personal meeting with Iván Duque to request their needs. In search of a dialogue with the president, the indigenous people managed to start some negotiations with Duke’s advisers, but the president continues to ignore the requests. Days before the general strike, Commissioner for Peace, Miguel Ceballos, had announced that he would head a presidential delegation that would visit the department of Cauca, western Colombia, where a large part of that community resides. However, “La Minga” was already in Bogotá demanding to speak to Duque in person. Its members had been going to the capital for more than a week through the long marches. Thus, the indigenous people decided to join the protests in the capital.

The Colombian government has always wanted to stigmatize indigenous demonstrations.

Currently, the Colombian government’s main rhetoric to undermine all social unrest is the need to fight the pandemic. With the justification of “avoiding agglomerations” and “protecting the health of the population”, the government has repressed protests with extreme violence, while remaining silent about popular demands. The “Miga” organizers have already spoken out during the general strike stating that the pandemic will not cease the demonstrations. In the same vein, as the government fails to respond to the protesters requests, the turmoil tends to increase.

The most curious thing to note is that even in the face of this scenario, the Colombian government continues trying to make the country a South American NATO satellite and to invest large amounts of money in this project. Colombia is a key point in a strategic siege against Venezuela that is planned by Washington with the assistance of Brazil. Basically, the government’s priorities do not correspond to the basic needs of the population. While indigenous people are murdered by drug traffickers, the armed forces plan to invade a neighboring country; while unemployment and poverty increase exponentially, public spending on defense remains enormous. Colombia is the country that spends the most on defense in the entire South American continent, allocating more than 3% of its GDP to this sector. Obviously, defense spending and military alliances with foreign powers are important. But how can a country prioritize such issues to the detriment of internal public security and the material well-being of its people?

In parallel, the pandemic is indeed advancing in the country. Despite a small drop in the number of cases in the past month, the country is still severely affected by the virus, approaching the 30,000 dead. The protests tend to actually increase the number of cases and to reverse the recent decline. But how can the population remain silent and comply with social isolation standards when there is no income to supply their needs? Without government assistance, it will be impossible to keep the population off the streets and, consequently, the pandemic situation will worsen.

So, what will the Colombian government choose? If it maintains the strategy of simply suppressing protests with police violence, not guaranteeing any improvement for the population, there will be no change, as the demonstrations will continue and the cases of COVID-19 will increase.

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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

Like the US, Turkey’s Erdogan pursues interests at the expense of peace and stability.

He favors war for extending Turkey’s borders to further his neo-Ottoman aims.

He, his family members and regime profited earlier from stolen Syrian oil.

He gave ISIS and other terrorists safe haven in Turkish territory, providing them with weapons, other material support, and a launching pad for attacks on Syrian soldiers and civilians.

Turkey under Erdogan is a fascist police state — speech, media and academic freedoms they way they should be banned.

So is dissent. Anyone publicly criticizing or insulting him risks prosecution for terrorism, espionage or treason, including children.

As long as he doesn’t act against US interests, as a NATO member and in other ways, his tyrannical rule and regional destabilizing actions are tolerated — if only barely.

On Wednesday, his Vice President Fuat Oktay said Ankara is ready to send troops to back Azerbaijan’s war on Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh (NK below).

In response to Turkey’s deployment of armed and directed jihadists to combat Armenian forces in NK, the country’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called on regional countries to unite against them and their Turkish paymaster.

“Regretably (they) have not responded to this reality seriously enough yet,” Pashinyan added.

“It is beyond doubt that the presence of foreign terrorists will pose a threat to the region in the future.”

“The region’s countries must deal with this issue more seriously.”

The Erdogan regime is also involved militarily in NK by providing Baku with command and control services, training of its military forces, and heavy weapons for warmaking.

He and hardliners surrounding him support war, not resolution in NK.

Pashinyan stressed it, saying “the Karabakh question…cannot have a diplomatic solution.”

“Everything that is diplomatically acceptable to the Armenian side…is not acceptable to Azerbaijan…”

Baku’s ruling authorities intend endless war until Armenian forces are driven from NK — no matter the human toll, according to comments from its leadership.

As Azeri forces advance, civilians in harm’s way are caught in the crossfire.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that they’ve taken control of areas bordering Iran and Armenia’s international border — increasing the risk of conflict spilling into both countries.

Armenia’s Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan accused Azerbaijan of sending “small…subversive groups…into villages and towns, film(ing) themselves there, spread(ing) those images…to feed their society. But, unfortunately, this also affects us.”

While conflict continues, foreign ministers of both warring sides will meet with Trump regime’s Pompeo for talks in Washington on Friday.

Yet on Tuesday, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said the following:

“We are fighting on our own land, giving martyrs and restoring our territorial integrity. These steps will continue to be taken.”

“Armenia must declare before it is too late that it is withdrawing from the occupied territories. After that the fighting may stop.”

From the above remarks and two failed Russian/Minsk Group arranged ceasefire, Aliyev is unwilling to compromise on his aims in NK.

With support from Turkey, including Erdogan’s willingness to send troops if asked, Aliyev rejects diplomacy while sending his foreign minister to discuss ceasefire with his Russian, French and US counterparts.

According to the Asia Times, Erdogan’s support for Azerbaijan is driven by energy interests in competition with Russia.

An unnamed Erdogan advisor said “Russia is neither an ally, nor an enemy, but we can’t negotiate if we are too dependent on them, especially when it comes to energy.”

“We have vital interests to protect,” including two pipelines from Azerbaijan to Europe, one for oil, the other for gas.

One runs close to NK, the other near northern Armenia, the unnamed advisor close to Erdogan adding:

“We can’t afford losing our sight on what’s going on around our pipelines in the Caucasus, especially in the Tavush region, where there have been several clashes (with Armenia) over the last years.”

The so-called BTC oil pipeline is owned by Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Britain’s BP.

The South Caucasus Pipeline runs from Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea field to Turkey, and Georgia — soon as well to Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.

Earlier in October, Erdogan accused Armenia of endangering supplies of energy to Turkey and other European countries.

Oil and gas pipelines from Azerbaijan to Europe are only endangered by its preemptive war on Armenia in NK.

No danger would exist if conflict resolution ended weeks of fighting.

Russia also supplies gas to Turkey through Turkstream 1.

Turkstream 2 is under construction, completion expected around yearend.

Azerbaijan will compete with Russia for the European natural gas market.

Moscow prioritizes cooperation with other nations, confrontation with none.

Turkey’s Erdogan prioritizes the advancement of his neo-Ottoman interests.

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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.

The US has taken Sudan off the list of state-sponsors of terrorism, and with UAE support to provide several billion dollars of aid, in exchange for normalization with Israel.

US President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Monday: “GREAT news! New government of Sudan, which is making great progress, agreed to pay $335 MILLION to U.S. terror victims and families. Once deposited, I will lift Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. At long last, JUSTICE for the American people and BIG step for Sudan!”

Sudan’s de-facto leader, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, welcomed Trump’s tweet: “I would like to express my deep appreciation and that of the Sudanese people to President Trump.”

Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok tweeted: “Thank you so much, President Trump!”

Legitimate Sudanese businesses were handicapped, foreign direct investment was frozen, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank couldn’t adopt a package to relieve its massive debt of about $72bn as long as Sudan was on the terror list.

The scale of hunger today is monumental, and the UN counts 9.6 million Sudanese as “severely food insecure”. This is made worse by the Covid-19 shutdown and floods. It is a crisis that cannot be overcome by food handouts but requires a massive injection of financial assistance.

Sudan has already agreed with the US to a compensation deal for victims of the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were orchestrated by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network while he was living in Sudan.

The elephant in the room

Regardless of the economic benefits, Sudan would receive from normalizing relations with Israel, public hostility toward Israel remains strong, with many who insist on Palestinian rights. Sudan, a Muslim-majority Arab country, has long said there are three rules: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations.

Trump, Netanyahu, the Gulf Arabs, and now Sudan’s leaders are not dealing with the elephant in the room, which is the apartheid condition in Occupied Palestine.

Normalizing relations with Israel

The prize Israel is seeking is to be recognized by a truly democratic nation within the Arab world. The other nations who previously signed the ‘Abraham Accords’ on September 15 at the White House are monarchies, and far from anything considered democratic; however, Sudan is now in the first stages of a transition to democracy, after shedding an authoritarian past. Experts are worried that this fragile new democracy could break apart if the public rises up in defiance of the relationship with Israel, and the country could plunge into chaos.

Burhan’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Uganda in January was met with shock and dismay not just among Islamists, but among many of the liberal and secular forces that were active in promoting democracy.

The normalization process could begin with a phone call between Trump, al-Burhan, Hamdok, and Netanyahu.

“Now, whether we like it or not, the removal is tied to (normalization) with Israel,” the deputy head of the council, Gen. Mohammed Dagalo, told a local television station on October 16, while adding, “We need Israel … Israel is a developed country and the whole world is working with it,” he said. “We will have benefits from such relations … We hope all look at Sudan’s interests.”

The Israeli government hopes a deal can be wrapped up before the US election on November 3.

The US pressure and the election

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Khartoum on August 25 and a later trip to Abu Dhabi by al-Burhan, on September 20 are the basis for speculation.

While in Khartoum, Pompeo proposed a deal to Hamdok: if Sudan recognized Israel, President Trump would remove Sudan from the terror list, and announce an aid package to include financial aid and wheat, medicine, and oil shipments.  Trump also committed to mobilize private sector investments in Sudan and to organize a Sudan donors conference.

Trump would reap a huge boost to his campaign for normalizing Arab relations with Israel in the days before the election, while Trump would appear in a foreign policy victory. The pressure on Sudan’s leaders is intense, as they fear incentives being offered now could be withdrawn after the US election.

The oil-rich Arab Gulf influence

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain joined Egypt and Jordan in declaring peace with Israel, and when Sudan joins them the US and UAE would provide Sudan with a big aid package, which was offered in Abu Dhabi last month.  Almost $1 billion in cash was being offered, mostly to be paid by the Emirates, but the Sudanese team had asked for $3 billion.

Sudan’s resources

Sudan is rich in natural resources, including natural gas, gold, silver, chromite, asbestos, manganese, gypsum, mica, zinc, iron, lead, uranium, copper, kaolin, cobalt, granite, nickel, tin, and aluminum.

Petroleum is Sudan’s major natural resource, though much of it went to the split with South Sudan; however, nearly 30 tons of gold is produced annually.

Sudan’s main crops include cotton, peanuts, sesame, gum arabic, sorghum, and sugarcane. Agriculture and livestock raising are the main sources of livelihood for most Sudanese.

In late 1999, the Jordanian army found a food-growing paradise in Sudan, with flat, nutrient-rich soil, and plentiful water.

Besides the Jordanians, Pakistanis, Syrians, Emiratis, Lebanese, Yemenis, and others began flocking to Sudan and snapping up huge acreages to farm. In 2016 the Saudi government leased 1 million arable acres in the east of the country, while Bahrain leased 100,000 acres. The Qataris, Saudis, and Emiratis are Sudan’s largest financial benefactors, while all depend heavily on food imports.

The past leader

President Omar al-Bashir was deposed in April 2019 following a 30-year rule. Violent street protests began immediately after al-Bashir returned from a visit to Syria, which resulted in a military coup.

After seizing power in a military coup in 1989, President Bashir turned Khartoum into a global center for militant extremism, and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network operated freely in Sudan in the 1990s before he moved to Afghanistan.

Sudan will now pay compensation for victims of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania conducted by al Qaeda. After the first terror attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, the US designated Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism.

In 2016, under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Bashir government cut its ties with Iran.

Sudan’s current government

In a deal brokered by the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, Sudan agreed to share power with a civilian cabinet. Sudan’s transition to democracy presents an opportunity for the country to chart a path out of autocracy and violence toward stability.

However, one year into the transition, the security and economic crises that were the trigger of the revolution have worsened. Millions remain displaced, while the value of the Sudanese pound has fallen from 45 to a US dollar in August 2019 to nearly 300 this month. More than half of the country is severely food insecure, and despite pledges of support, the international community has failed to mobilize financial aid to support the transition, which has caused the population to distrust the new transitional government.

Sudan is currently ruled by a fragile transitional Sovereignty Council run by the top military official, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, with the cabinet led by a technocratic prime minister in Abdallah Hamdok, along with a legislative assembly.

Sudan’s political landscape was one of the most diverse and vibrant in the Arab world, with organized forces ranging from communists and Baathists to liberal secular forces to a range of Islamist-oriented groups.

Backed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, the chairman of the transitional council, al-Burhan, and his deputy Lt Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as “Hemeti”, command troops and money. Burhan met Netanyahu in February, without Hamdok knowing.  Burhan and Hemeti want international recognition, without the burden of democracy.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from MD