Everybody’s Favourite COVID Jester Makes a Big Math Blunder

October 9th, 2020 by John C. A. Manley

In his recent skit, comedian JP Sears makes a big math blunder regarding the COVID death count. One I’ve made before.

Imitating a spokesperson of unclear affiliation, with tape on his glasses and a psychedelic T-shirt, JP starts off by poking fun at bizarre masking etiquette: “So I should put the mask on while I walk from here to podium and then take it off?”

Once at the mic, JP says: “We have updated numbers on the infection-fatality rate for COVID-19 directly from the CDC.” He then references the CDC’s most recent infection-fatality estimates, claiming that it says only 0.054% of people over 70 (who are infected with SARS-COV-2) are dying.

My immediate reaction was: “Whoa! That’s too low. Has the CDC gone from over-exaggerating the deaths to under-exaggerating?”

The commonly accepted fatality rate for the flu (among the general population) is 0.1%. Seniors should be higher than that, not lower. Looking at the source document, I saw JP’s error — he’s talking in percentages but CDC’s table clearly indicates ratios:

I made this same mistake in an article I wrote two months ago, where I calculated the infection-fatality rate in Canada. It was thanks to an email from Dr. Ron Brown PhD that I was able to spot and remove the error. As Brown said: “That decimal point is a killer! Just remember to move the decimal over TWO places to the RIGHT to convert [a ratio] to a percentage. (And TWO places to the LEFT to convert a percentage to a [ratio].)”

Here’s how I would explain the difference between a ratio and a percentage, using the above CDC estimate for those over 70:

A ratio is dealing with only just one infected person. For every ONE person infected with SAR-COV-2 the CDC is estimating that 0.054 will be having an permanent out-of-body experience.

But a percentage is showing how many will die out of ONE-HUNDRED infected (cent being Latin for one hundred). In order to arrive at a percentage from the ratio, the ratio needs to be multiplied by 100. Therefore, if 100 are infected that would mean 5.4 are doomed to die. 5.4%.

Yesterday, I sent an email to Prof. Denis Rancourt PhD to confirm whether or not I had indeed spotted an error. His to-the-point reply: “Yes, JP f*cked up. He took the CDC ratios to be percentages.”

Like I said, I did the same mistake a month or so ago. I would ask that JP Sears do what I did: Remove the error. In this case, delete the video. Make a new one. Even if you go with the higher percentages, a 5.6% fatality rate for seniors over 70 doesn’t justify destroying a nation. A 2003 study in Clinical Infectious Disease, for example, cites flu fatality rates as high as 25% for elderly people in nursing homes — and an average of 8%.

JP’s a skilled comedian. He can make an even funnier video without having to falsify what the CDC says. Just like his clever janitorial skit or his brilliant video about staying healthy in 2020. His satirical work is invaluable for helping change the not-so-funny direction the world is headed.

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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, Brave New Normal: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

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Removing Trump from Office Attempt 2.0?

October 9th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

In December 2019, Pelosi-led House Dems showed contempt for the rule of law.

Two articles of impeachment to oust Trump from office were spurious.

Accusing him of abuse of power, they falsely claimed he sought foreign interference from Ukraine in the US 2020 presidential election.

At the time, Ukrainian President Zelensky debunked the accusation, publicly saying there was no Trump blackmail threat, no quid pro quo, no conspiracy, nothing discussed about withholding US aid for political reasons.

A second phony charge claimed obstruction of Congress, falsely saying he “directed (an) unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to its sole Power of Impeachment (sic).”

No evidence proved it. Trump’s unwillingness to participate in the sham process did not obstruct Congress.

At the time, Law Professor Jonathan Turley said: “You could impeach every living president” by standards Dems used to impeach Trump.

The unacceptable action set a disturbing standard that may be used against future US presidents by either wing of the one-party state against the other.

A House member for nearly three decades Pelosi supports domestic and geopolitical issues across the board that just societies abhor.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimated her household wealth at over $114 million — ranking her 6th among super-wealthy House members.

On domestic issues alone, she supported neoliberal harshness on ordinary Americans throughout Obama’s tenure and after Trump took office.

She backs increasingly unaffordable marketplace medicine — by far the world’s most expensive, making it unaffordable for millions of Americans.

Throughout her time in office, she’s been beholden to powerful monied interests at the expense of public health and welfare.

Since taking office in January 2017, she wanted Trump ousted for defeating media darling Hillary.

On Thursday, she threatened to try ousting Trump again on spurious grounds, saying:

Trump “is…in an altered state right now (sic). The disassociation from reality would be funny if it weren’t so deadly (sic).”

“We’re going to be talking about the 25th Amendment.”

It states that when US presidents are “unable to discharge the powers and duties of (their) office…such powers and duties shall be discharged by the vice president as acting president.”

The president pro tempore of the Senate and House speaker are next in line.

Pelosi is involved in preparing House legislation to create a commission that will decide if Trump is too ill to perform his duties.

Pulling this off is no simple task, Trump sure to challenge it — in which case a two-thirds congressional majority would be required for a transition of power to new leadership.

Republicans would likely reject the idea, a coup attempt by other means, a hugely dangerous precedent if succeeds.

Trump slammed Pelosi, tweeting:

“Crazy Nancy is the one who should be under observation. They don’t call her Crazy for nothing!”

When GW Bush was president and hugely unpopular in his second term, she said impeaching him was “off the table,” adding:

“I took (impeachment) off the table a long time ago. You can’t talk about impeachment unless you have the facts, and you can’t have the facts unless you have cooperation from the” White House.

Having none didn’t deter her earlier attempt to remove Trump by impeachment.

It surely won’t if she tries removing Trump from office for dubious health reasons.

As earlier explained, many past US presidents were ill in office, some seriously.

None were replaced for this reason. None voluntarily or involuntarily stepped down for ill health.

California’s 8th congressional district voters would best be served by voting for House representation to serve their interests over Pelosi’s consistent record otherwise.

GOP Rep. Mark Green tweeted:

“I wouldn’t put it past @SpeakerPelosi to stage a coup” attempt.

“She has already weaponized impeachment. What’s to keep her from weaponizing the 25th amendment? We need a new Speaker!”

Throughout her time in office — especially as House speaker — she’s been a loyal guardian of wealth and power interests exclusively over what matters most to most people.

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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 Massoud Nayeri

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In her September 17 speech to parliament, the Attorney General of the Australian state of Victoria, Jill Hennessy, explained various provisions of the COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill.  Of most interest was the proposal that would dramatically inflate the scope of public health power in ostensibly preventing a spread of COVID-19.  “The broader class of persons who may be appointed as authorised officers may include public sector employees from Victoria and other jurisdictions.  For example, health services staff, WorkSafe officers such as Inspectors, Victoria Police members and Protective Service Officers.”   

The formulation seemed an odd one: health services staff as designated officers to halt transmission perhaps, but unqualified members of the Victoria Police, along with Protective Service Officers?  The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was the proposed appointer; the appointees (“authorised officers”) would be anybody deemed to possess appropriate skills, attributes or experience.  Such elevated, muscularly vested officers would have the power to detain anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19, or anyone who had been in close contact with a positive case, for a period “reasonably necessary to eliminate a serious risk to public health,” provided it was “reasonably believed”  they would fail to comply with a direction of self-quarantine. 

Hennessy evaded the severe implications of such a broadly worded provision, arguing for convenience and efficiency, the two traditional hallmarks of the authoritarian mentality. The appointment power would focus upon “individuals with particular attributes, such as connection to particular communities”.  “Contact tracing” would be able to take place in “a culturally safe manner.”  A for any oversight limitations, these appointments would be subject to a “specific instrument” outlining specific authority and limitations authorised by the Secretary and Chief Health Officer. 

This was something that did not escape the notice of some members of the Victorian Parliament.  Greens MP Tim Read noted how the Omnibus Bill, in that draft form, gave police, protective services officers and private security guards powers to unilaterally determine who constituted a high risk with little regard to medical expertise.  “Currently only public servants with the relevant skills and experience can make that decision”.  Enforcing directions was a separate function of law enforcement.  “So the bill would allow police to both make health directions on individuals and then to enforce them.” 

The Omnibus Bill also saw various legal advocates spring into action. Michael Borsky QC went for understatement in claimingthat detaining someone for hypothetical future conduct was a “very unusual legal construct”.  The provision was “open to abuse”.  Nor did impress the legal heads at the Victorian Bar, where there was much head shaking.  The proposed criteria for appointing such officers was deemed too “broad and generic”.  Their lack of precision “potentially opened the door for those who are not trained as health professionals to be appointed ‘authorised officers’.”

Granting such individuals unilateral powers of detention against individuals not abiding by a public health direction was another point of concern. An officer’s “reasonable belief” was a “standard of validation” vast and subjective.  The Victorian Bar also suggested some measure of accountability: that decisions made by such authorised officers be “reviewed by the Chief Health Officer (or senior delegate) within a short, stipulated period (preferably not longer than 24 hours).”

The talents of Victorian policing have already been found wanting during one of the most extreme lockdown measures in the developed world.  Reem Mussa, humanitarian advisor on forced migration to Médicins Sans Frontières, remembered the terror caused by the appearance of five hundred police “on housing estates [in Melbourne], trapping residents inside with no coherent health strategy or plans to keep them safe, fed or with access to medication and essentials.”  23 confirmed cases of COVID-19 had been found on the estates in July.  Panic coursed through the various administrative arms of government.

In September, a very public display of policing mismanagement took place with the arrest of Ballarat resident Zoe Buhler, a pregnant mother apprehended in front of her children and husband in their home for a Facebook post inciting protest against the lockdown rules.  No police officer thought it necessary to explain the offence of incitement, nor accept her offer to remove the offending post.  It was such conduct that prompted Greg Barns of the Australian Lawyers Alliance to argue for limits on police powers when linked to pandemic controls.

The Police Accountability Project, based at the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre in Melbourne, has also been alarmed by the aggressive, untutored policing formula pursued in the state.  “The policing we have seen in Victoria to date and the scale of the policing we have seen [on July 4] and today in Flemington & North Melbourne, has caused and continues to do harm.”

Over the course of the lockdown, the PAP project has noted ten concerns about how harsh Stage 4 restrictions have been enforced.  A few are worth noting.  Police, for instance, were ill trained to make complex assessments about exemptions requiring health expertise.  “Police ignored genuine health based exemptions and continually resorted to lock-down responses because it more closely aligned with their training.”  They had failed to comprehend the public health impacts of their work, and that most pressing of points that policing “undermines public health responses.”  The policing of curfews had been “applied in a discriminatory, abusive and harmful manner.”  With such a stunning resume of faults and blunders, it is a wonder how the drafters in the Attorney-General’s department took leave of their senses.

On October 8, the Victorian government quietly trimmed parts of the proposed bill dealing with detention.  Finding themselves in retreat, a flutter of qualifications were made.  “We have always said we would negotiate in good faith,” claimed a less than chastened Hennessy.  Giving little away, the Attorney-General claims to have made such amendments that will continue “to deliver the temporary, necessary changes we need to respond to the challenges the pandemic presents”.

According to Guardian Australia, the proposed table of changes will still preserve the power to appoint police and protective services officers as authorised officers, but with fewer powers.  They will still be able to exercise considerable discretion in, for instance, searching property without a warrant if “necessary for the purpose of investigation, eliminating or reducing the risk to public health”.  The daft dangers of making police and security personnel pseudo-health officers remain.

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

Featured image: A woman walks her dogs in Fitzroy Gardens park as police and defence force officers patrol in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia [David Crosling/EPA]

Over six thousand scientists and doctors have signed a petition against coronavirus lockdown measures, urging that those not in the at risk category should be able to get on with their lives as normal, and that lockdown rules in both the US and UK are causing ‘irreparable damage’.

Those who have signed include professors from the world’s leading universities. Oxford University professor Dr Sunetra Gupta was one of the authors of the open letter that was sent with the petition, along with Harvard University’s Dr Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya.

It declares that social distancing and mask mandates are causing ‘damaging physical and mental health impacts.’

The petition, dubbed the Great Barrington Declaration after the town in Massachusetts where it was written, has been signed by close to 54,000 members of the public at time of writing, as well as over 2600 medical and public health scientists and around 3500 medical practitioners.

“Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal,” it notes, adding “Keeping these [lockdown] measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration also declares.

It continues,

“The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular [heart] disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.”

“Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” the declaration adds.

“Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal, it concludes, explaining that “Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.”

“Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home,” it emphasises.

Finally, the declaration demands that normal life should resume, stating that

“Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”

The declaration echoes President Trump’s words earlier this week when he returned to the White House and asked Americans not to live in fear or let let the virus dominate their everyday lives:

The declaration dovetails with other research that has concluded lockdowns will conservatively “destroy at least seven times more years of human life” than they save.

Germany’s Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Muller, has warned that lockdown measures throughout the globe will end up killing more people than the Coronavirus itself.

In an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt, Muller warned that the response to the global pandemic has resulted in “one of the biggest” hunger and poverty crises in history.

Muller’s comments come five months after a leaked study from inside the German Ministry of the Interior revealed that the impact of the country’s lockdown could end up killing more people than the coronavirus due to victims of other serious illnesses not receiving treatment.

As we have previously highlighted, in the UK there have already been up to 10,000 excess deaths as a result of seriously ill people avoiding hospitals due to COVID-19 or not having their hospital treatments cancelled.

Professor Richard Sullivan also warned that there will be more excess cancer deaths in the UK than total coronavirus deaths due to people’s access to screenings and treatment being restricted as a result of the lockdown.

His comments were echoed by Peter Nilsson, a Swedish professor of internal medicine and epidemiology at Lund University, who said, “It’s so important to understand that the deaths of COVID-19 will be far less than the deaths caused by societal lockdown when the economy is ruined.”

According to Professor Karol Sikora, an NHS consultant oncologist, there could be 50,000 excess deaths from cancer as a result of routine screenings being suspended during the lockdown in the UK.

In addition, a study published in The Lancet that notes “physical distancing, school closures, trade restrictions, and country lockdowns” are worsening global child malnutrition.

Experts have also warned that there will be 1.4 million deaths globally from untreated TB infections due to the lockdown.

As we further previously highlighted, a data analyst consortium in South Africa found that the economic consequences of the country’s lockdown will lead to 29 times more people dying than the coronavirus itself.

Hundreds of doctors are also on record as opposing lockdown measures, warning that they will cause more death than the coronavirus itself.

Despite citizens across the world being told to observe the lockdown to “save lives,” numerous experts who are now warning that the lockdown could end up costing more lives are being ignored or smeared by the media.

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This Week’s Most Popular Articles

October 9th, 2020 by Global Research News

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Selected Articles: Assaulting Science in the Name of Science

October 8th, 2020 by Global Research News

The Construction of an Alternative to “Manufactured Dissent”

By Prof. Charles McKelvey, October 08 2020

In The Globalization of War, Michel Chossudovsky writes of the process of “manufacturing dissent,” which functions to channel the anger and frustrations of the people in a direction that does not challenge elite interests.

Racism and the Death Penalty

By Abayomi Azikiwe, October 08 2020

DPIC entitled its study “Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty”. The research report looks at the application of the death penalty historically and draws striking parallels to event taking place in the 21st century.

What’s Wrong with Development? The Geopolitics of The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

By Keith Lamb, October 08 2020

The Belt and Road Initiative seeks to bring development to the world. Why is this a problem for the USA and some of its Western allies?

The Biden Doctrine: Cheerlead Wars, Feign Ignorance Later

By Nauman Sadiq, October 08 2020

If we look at the track record of Joe Biden during his political career first as a senator and then as Obama’s vice president, he is a typical establishment Democrat who has played into the hands of the US national security establishment like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before him.

Assaulting Science in the Name of Science: Exploring the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, October 08 2020

There is a battle going on over who and what most credibly represents science. As the months pass, the contest over science is integral to the acrimony concerning the nature of COVID-19.

Evo Morales’ Ally Has Real Chance of Winning Bolivia’s Upcoming Elections

By Paul Antonopoulos, October 08 2020

In the near full year since the accession of Añez to power, Bolivia has regressed in social and economic terms, is tinkering with inflation, and has seen an increase in unemployment and poverty.

US Military Bases Are Key Pieces of the Global War Machine

By Sarah Lazare, October 08 2020

We don’t hear about them very often, but the estimated 800 US military bases around the globe have played an essential role in turning the whole world into a bloody battlefield. Any effort to roll back US empire has to include dismantling the machinery of US military bases.

Fires Raze Nearly Half of Indigenous Territories in Brazil’s Pantanal

By Bianca MunizBruno Fonseca, and Raphaela Ribeiro, October 08 2020

In September, 164 fires were recorded across Indigenous territories in the Brazilian Pantanal, the world’s biggest wetland. In August, there were more than 200.

Resisting Corona “New Normal” Oppression: Every Civil Rights Movement Begins with a Shunned 5%

By John C. A. Manley, October 08 2020

After a TV interview on Canada Citizen’s Forum, host Jack Etkin said to me something to the effect of: We’re really in the minority, aren’t we? Probably only 5% of people see through the COVID-19 hoax. 80% completely believe the official story. And 15% fall somewhere in between.

Matters of International Justice: Challenging Trump’s ICC Sanctions

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 08 2020

On September 2, US sanctions – the sort normally reserved for fully fledged terrorists and decorated drug traffickers – were imposed on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda and her colleague Phakiso Mochochoko, head of Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation.

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The Turkish reports alleging that the Kurdish-allied Syrian-Armenian militia “Nubar Ozanyan Brigade” is fighting in Azerbaijan on the side of the separatists prompt questions about exactly how Damascus regards this armed group, but if Syria’s official statements pertaining to the US-backed “Syrian Democratic Forces” umbrella organization under which those fighters operate are any indication, then everything suggests that it presently considers them traitors although their recent military adventure might end up being their “saving grace” which could pave the way for “reconciliation”.

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Are Syrian-Armenian Mercenaries Fighting In Azerbaijan?

Most of the world never heard of the “Nubar Ozanyan Brigade” (NOB) until recently when Turkish reports alleged that this Kurdish-allied Syrian-Armenian militia was dispatched to Azerbaijan by Yerevan in support of the separatists fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh. To those who only have a casual understanding of the region’s complex dynamics, it might have seemed like pure propaganda since few were probably aware that there was even such a group in the country to begin with, let alone allied with the US-backed Kurds. Many are already familiar with most Syrian Armenians’ patriotic support of their government, especially since it stands for their constitutionally secular state and has sacrificed plenty in defending religious minorities such as themselves from Takfiri terrorists. That’s why these reports were probably dismissed by all non-Turks who came across them, but that’s a huge mistake since the NOB veritably exists even if its illegal presence in Azerbaijan has yet to be independently confirmed, and its activities in Syria are curious enough that they deserve a closer look.

The “Nubar Ozanyan Brigade’s” Founding Statement

The NOB was established in April 2019 in US-occupied Northeastern Syria in response to Turkey’s latest military intervention at the time. Their official founding statement declares in part that the NOB’s formation “is a step towards organizing the unorganized strength of the Armenian people in Rojava and to defend them and the Rojava revolution. The Kurdish, Arab, Syriac and Assyrian peoples in the Rojava revolution have formed their self-organizations, brigades and regiments. It was a shortcoming and a need for the Armenian people to do the same. We as the Martyr Nubar Ozanyan Armenian Brigade feel this burning need and base ourselves on the military, ideological, cultural and social aspects and on learning our mother tongue to never experience a genocide again. To that end, we will organize more and increase our self-organization to grow our revolution.” Quite clearly, they’re a militant ethno-nationalist group with an extreme left-wing ideology considering their support for the “Rojava” project, which also makes them fiercely anti-Damascus too.

Syria’s Official Condemnation Of The SDF

The Syrian government has taken a very strong stance against the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) umbrella organization under which the NOB operates. For example, the country’s official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) information outlet reported in May 2019 less than a month after the NOB’s formation that “Syria called on the Security Council to shoulder its responsibilities by working to stop the attacks and treasonous actions of the SDF militias, which are backed by the US and some Western states.” This was echoed by Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Maqdad’s comments about the SDF in October 2019, who said that these “armed groups had betrayed their country and committed crimes against it. We won’t accept any dialogue or talk with those who had become hostages to foreign forces…There won’t be any foothold for the agents of Washington on Syrian territory.” President Assad also predicted “popular resistance” to the US if it doesn’t leave Syria during his interview earlier this week with Sputnik, which also implies a grassroots rebellion against its SDF proxy groups.

Treason Is Treason Regardless Of Whoever Commits It

Since Damascus officially regards the Kurdish-led SDF umbrella organization as “treasonous”, “backed by the US and some Western states”, “hostages to foreign forces”, and “agents of Washington on Syrian territory” which are provoking “popular resistance” from the patriotic locals, it can naturally be understood that it also holds this opinion of the Kurdish-allied Syrian-Armenian NOB militia too. Syria isn’t the “racist regime” that its enemies spent years portraying it as and therefore isn’t ethnically selective in accusing its citizens of treason. Whether of Kurdish, Armenian, Arab, and/or any other ethnicity, those that collude with occupying US forces like the NOB does through its membership in the American-backed SDF are considered traitors. It wasn’t just coincidental either that the politically radical minority of Armenians in Syria decided to ally with the Kurds since there’s a long history of the Armenian ASALA and Kurdish PKK terrorist groups cooperating with one another. This is just the latest manifestation of their alliance, which was forged under the cover of “Neo-Marxism”.

Armenia’s Inadvertent Admission

It should be pointed out that since Syria doesn’t exert sovereignty over the northeastern corner of its internationally recognized borders, Damascus shouldn’t be held responsible for the NOB’s activities, but that still doesn’t mean that they didn’t actually travel to Azerbaijan in support of the Nagorno-Karabakh separatists. According to an article from “The Armenian Weekly” in October 2019, “While the Armenian government has announced its readiness to take in Armenian refugees from Rojava, it is yet unclear how many have taken them up on the offer. Armenian repatriates from the region have proven to successfully integrate in the past. For the 29 Armenian families who resettled from the Qamishli area to Artsakh’s Kashatagh District in 2012, for instance, acclamation to a rural lifestyle and experience in agriculture was an asset for them as well as for their adopted communities. Thanks to them, Artsakh will soon be exporting olive oil.” Since the Armenian government can resettle refugees in occupied territory, it also obviously has the capabilities to transfer NOB fighters there too.

Strategic Cynicism

It’s unclear whether Syria is aware of Armenia’s likely ties to the NOB “agents of Washington” on its territory, let alone what might be the South Caucasus country’s illegal dispatch of this militia to universally recognized Azerbaijani territory in order to fight against its government, but that wouldn’t automatically mean that Damascus would disapprove of this even if it did. It would be strategically cynical for Syria to hold such a stance since Turkey illegally dispatched foreign armed groups to Damascus’ universally recognized territory during the course of the ongoing nearly decade-long war, but if a variation of the reverse happened whereby Syrian armed groups were sent to fight against a Turkish ally and happened to inflict devastating losses against them in a way that impeded the effective execution of Ankara’s regional policy, then the scenario can’t be ruled out that Damascus might be interested in “reconciling” with them as a “reward”. All potential moral, ethical, and legal qualms about this aside, as they say, “all’s fair in love and war”, and Syria and Turkey are unofficially at war.

Concluding Thoughts

Officially speaking, while President Assad recently accused Turkey of rekindling the formerly frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh by sending anti-government Syrian terrorists there, he gave no indication that he’s aware of the Turkish reports alleging the presence of the Kurdish-allied Syrian-Armenian NOB militia fighting on the side of the Armenian separatists. There’s likely much more credibility to those reports than many in the Alt-Media Community might feel comfortable admitting since the NOB veritably exists as one of many proxy groups operating under the SDF umbrella, the latter organization of which Damascus officially condemned as “treasonous”, “backed by the US and some Western states”, “hostages to foreign forces”, and “agents of Washington on Syrian territory”. Even so and for as strategically cynical as it may be, Syria might tacitly approve of this development if turns out to be true despite playing no role in it since it could represent an indirect way to pay Turkey back for the war that it unofficially waged on the Arab Republic for almost a decade already.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

The Construction of an Alternative to “Manufactured Dissent”

October 8th, 2020 by Prof. Charles McKelvey

In The Globalization of War, Michel Chossudovsky writes of the process of “manufacturing dissent,” which functions to channel the anger and frustrations of the people in a direction that does not challenge elite interests.

The concept of manufacturing dissent takes as its point of departure the notion of “manufactured consent,” used by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to refer to the forging by the mass media of a popular consensus in support of established norms, values, and institutions.  Fabricated through the media’s narrative and its factual distortions, the consensus functions to serve the interests of corporate elites.  This fabricated mainstream narrative, Chossudovsky maintains, includes affirmation of the principle of democracy, and accordingly, the elite has an interest in accepting dissent and protest, in order to create the illusion of democracy.  But the dissent cannot go too far, in that it cannot actually threaten elite interests.  Therefore, the elite seeks “to shape and mold the protest movement, to set the outer limits of dissent, to control dissent.”  It seeks to channel popular discontent in a direction that does not threaten to expose the fundamental historical and contemporary facts that presently are beyond the horizon of popular consciousness.

Funding Dissent

The manufacturing of dissent, Chossudovsky maintains, is achieved by donating financial resources to NGOs, civil society organizations, trade unions, and political parties that are involved in organizing protests against the established order.   In this way, social movement leaders are coopted and manipulated, channeling the movement away from ideas and strategies that would constitute a true threat to elite interests.

Central to the funding of dissent are private foundations, including the Ford, Rockefeller, and McCarthy foundations, which fund antiwar collectives and people’s movements as well as environmental movements and supposedly progressive anti-capitalist networks, with the intention of molding and manipulating the protest movement.  In addition, the channeling of protest movements is aided by the fact that “many NGOs are infiltrated by informants often acting on behalf of western intelligence agencies.”  Through these means, the illusion of democracy is maintained, with anti-establishment organizations and protests visible to the public eye.  But the elite remains firmly in control, as the protests and supposedly anti-establishment movements are rendered incapable of asking the most fundamental questions.

Elite funding of civil society organizations tends to focus on particular issues, such as the environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, or climate change.  This leads to the compartmentalization of dissent, which undermines the formation of a cohesive mass movement that integrates the various popular sectors and issues, thus limiting its impact on political dynamics and popular consciousness.

Chossudovsky provides numerous examples indicating U.S./NATO support for “opposition” sectors in the Middle East and Eastern Europe as an imperialist strategy.  He further notes that the anti-globalization and occupy movements in the United States were infiltrated and manipulated.  I would submit that similar questions should be asked with respect to the Black Lives Matter Movement, which provides a unidimensional explanation of a multifaceted historical and contemporary problem, bursting on the national scene in an historic moment in which various social sectors are in a condition of anxiety and a disposition to rebellion, due to the economic consequences of worldwide health restrictions.  Why was it that, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, prominent political figures not known for their commitment to social transformation expressed support for the Black Lives Matter Movement?

What can be done?

Chossudovsky maintains that the development of a true mass movement “cannot be led by organizations which are financed by corporate foundations.”  On the ideological plane, he maintains that the lies and fabrications that legitimate the “war on terrorism” must be exposed; and that the structures of power and the nature of the capitalist world order must be challenged.

With respect to strategies and tactics, Chossudovsky maintains that “the holding of mass demonstrations and antiwar protests is not enough. What is required is the development of a broad and well-organized grassroots antiwar network, nationally and internationally.”  What is required is “a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, schools, universities and municipalities.”

I would like to further reflect on the development of a national mass network of people in places of work and study and in neighborhoods.  And I would like to begin by basing our reflection in the study of revolutions and mass movements in other lands, where the peoples confronted challenges similar to the challenges that we face today, in that they confronted their own powerlessness before structures of domination, exploitation, and ideological distortions.  Many of the most successful of these revolutionary movements of the last 100 years are known to us, but for the most part we do not study them with sufficient care to enable us to discern how they accomplished the taking of political power and the partial, even if sometimes temporary, transformation of structures of power in their various nations.  I refer to the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the socialist revolution in Chile led by Salvador Allende, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, the Movement toward Socialism led by Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the Citizen Revolution headed by Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

We have in these cases the experience of revolutionary theory developing in practice, providing sources for our understanding of human social dynamics and of the process through which humanity can take steps toward the development of a more just world.

The first and most important lesson to be learned from the world’s revolutions is that the political and economic accomplishments of these processes were forged through the development of an integrated movement of all of the sectors of the people.  Although it was natural for the people to think of themselves as peasants or workers or professionals, as blacks or whites or mulattos or mestizos, and as men or women, all the revolutions proceeded on a foundation of the unification of all the people in united political action in support of common principles and political proposals.  Our observation of these revolutions confirms Chossudovsky’s lament of the fragmentation of the popular movement today.

The second important lesson is that none of these revolutions were confused or divided concerning what their fundamental objective was or ought to be.  For all of them, the fundamental objective was the taking of political power, by themselves, and in the name of the people.  The taking of political power can only occur in a form that is adapted to national conditions, and therefore, the tactics varied.  In Russia, the revolutionary party seized power on the basis of the control of popular councils by workers, peasants, and soldiers.  In China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua, power was taken by a guerrilla force that began in the countryside and triumphed in the city.  And in Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, political power was taken through the electoral process of representative democracy.  In spite of these differences, the leadership of these revolutionary processes were clearly committed to the taking of control of one or more state structures, and of continuing the revolutionary struggle against the national and international counterrevolution from that position of triumph.  In revolutionary practice, the fundamental slogan has been “Power to the people.”

With consciousness of these dynamics of revolutionary processes of the last 100 years, we are able to see the necessity of forming a political party or a political movement that seeks to take political power.  Our agenda ought not be the pressuring or persuading of elites to enact particular reforms.  Nor should it be “speaking truth to power.”  And our agenda must go beyond the education of the people to the taking of power by the people, in the long term and in accordance with a formulated plan.  The road to a more just world is the taking of control of the political structures of nation-states, so that the peoples can govern said states in accordance with their interests, continuing the struggle of the world’s revolutions.

Taking into account the corruption of political parties in processes of representative democracy, a newly formed political party must be an alternative party that redefines what a political party is and does.  It has to be a party that above all educates the people, and the first lesson to be taught is the capacity of the people to take power and to govern by and for themselves.  And it has to educate the people beyond the superficialities of the current prevailing tendencies of reform and rebellion, guiding the people to a profound understanding of the historical development of the established political-economic-ideological system and of the structural transformations that are necessary for genuine human liberty and for a more just society.

In the revolutions of the last one hundred years, manifestos and platforms were written, with the intention of explaining to the people.  The example of reading and seeking to understand was placed before the people, and commitment to developing understanding was established as a responsibility of membership in the revolutionary party.  This integration of intellectual work in the revolutionary process was fully present in the American Revolution; during the entire revolutionary era of 1763 to 1840, numerous pamphlets were written, and pamphleteering played a central role in the political process and public debate.

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn writes that the spokespersons for the revolution were active politicians, merchants, lawyers, plantation owners, and preachers who expressed their ideas in pamphlets, usually from 5,000 to 25,000 words printed in ten to fifty pages, although some extended to sixty or eighty pages.  Most were responses to the great events of the time, such as the Stamp Act or the Boston Massacre.  Some generated a series of replies, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals.  Some were published in commemoration of the anniversary of the particular events.  And the pamphlets were written with the intention to persuade.

“The American writers were profoundly reasonable people.  Their pamphlets convey scorn, anger, and indignation; but rarely blind hate, rarely panic fear.  They sought to convince their opponents, not . . . annihilate them. . . .  The communication of understanding, therefore, lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement, and its great expressions, embodied in the best of the pamphlets, are consequently expository and explanatory: didactic, systematic, and direct, rather than imaginative and metaphoric. . . .  The reader is led through arguments, not images.  The pamphlets aim to persuade.”

We have to retake these examples in the history of popular revolutions.  We have to forge the unity of the people through a narrative and a platform that is historically informed, scientifically based, and politically intelligent.  We have to write pamphlets that explain to the people the fundamental facts of our reality.  Pamphlets that explain the central role of European conquest and colonialism, which provide the structural foundation for today’s global inequalities.  Pamphlets explaining that development through domination and exploitation has reached its limits, because the capitalist world-economy has reached and overextended the geographical and ecological limits of the earth.  Pamphlets that explain to the people that the governments and movements of the Third World are proclaiming the need for cooperation among the nations and peoples as the only possible way toward a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system.  Pamphlets that call the people toward that cooperation and mutually beneficial trade that is the necessary road for humanity today, leaving behind the historically outdated matrix of economic development through domination and exploitation and leaving behind the stage of competing imperialisms.

Our peoples already know that their governments lie to them, so the alternative political party ought to be able to delegitimate the lies and distortions that establishment politicians and parties routinely disseminate.  And the focus ought to be on the big lies, such as omitting the history of colonialist exploitation and intervention with respect to a particular region; and presenting governments that defend the sovereignty of their nations as threats to humanity.  In every case in which the global powers designate a country as a supposed threat, the alternative political party has to be present distributing PDFs that explain the true history and political-economy of said nation.  If we explain with thoroughness and clarity, our people would be able to understand that the government is distorting reality in order to advance its imperialist objectives.

We have to explain to our peoples that imperialist wars are not in their interests.  Wars are in the interests of corporations, because they provide spectacular markets and profits in the production and distribution of arms and military supplies.  And if successful, imperialist wars can make markets, raw materials, and cheap labor available in a relatively permanent form.  Moreover, wars give corporations a free hand, because the government is dependent on them to produce arms and military supplies.

But if the nation is at peace, and if the people have control of the government, there is the possibility that the government can regulate the corporations and direct the economy, channeling productive processes toward responding to the fundamental human needs of the people as well as toward addressing the serious problems that humanity confronts.  The alternative political party has to be present with pamphlets and public discourses that debunk the distorted claims that are designed to provide pretexts for imperialist wars, pamphlets and discourses that are effective in explaining to and persuading the people and in presenting an alternative approach to the development of the nation’s economy.

The alternative political party has to develop mastery of the art of politics.  It should put forth candidates in demographically favorable districts, with the intention that elected representatives of the party would be visible on a national level, educating the people with respect to the party’s understanding, analysis, and platform.  And the party should avoid putting forth a candidate in any election in which the party’s candidate would enable a fascist to defeat a liberal.  The party should cooperate with liberal politicians on some issues, as it focuses on the education and organization of the people and its goal of taking political power in the long run.

Can we move beyond critique and protest to the offering of politically viable alternatives to our peoples?

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Charles McKelvey is Professor Emeritus, Presbyterian College, Clinton, South Carolina.  He has published three books: Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science (Greenwood Press, 1991); The African-American Movement:  From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition (General Hall, 1994); and The Evolution and Significance of the Cuban Revolution: The Light in the Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).


150115 Long War Cover hi-res finalv2 copy3.jpg

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Corruption Inc. – Somalia Style

October 8th, 2020 by Dr. Bischara A. Egal

This article was originally published in February 2020.

Political corruption is so rampant in Africa and Somalia in particularly since the civil war 1991. Resource-rich African countries such as Angola, Algeria, DRC, Libiya, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan suffer from the curse of resources which attracts foreign/Western governments and their intelligence agencies which wage hybrid warfare by dumping hugh amounts of corrupt money to the local political and social arena in order to Balkanize, divide and colonize the country.

“Only in Africa will thieves be regrouping to loot again and the youths whose Future is being stolen will be celebrating…” -Professor & Nigerian Nobel prize laureate Wole Soyinka

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Introduction

Corruption is a form of dishonesty or criminal offense undertaken by a person or organization entrusted with a position of authority, to acquire illicit benefit or abuse power for one’s private gain. Corruption may include many activities including bribery and embezzlement, though it may also involve practices that are legal in many countries (1)

Political corruption occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts in an official capacity for personal gain. Corruption is most commonplace in kleptocracies, oligarchies, narco-states and mafia states.

Corruption can occur on different scales. Corruption ranges from small favors between a small number of people (petty corruption) (2), to corruption that affects the government on a large scale (grand corruption), and corruption that is so prevalent that it is part of the everyday structure of society, including corruption as one of the symptoms of organized crime. Corruption and crime are endemic sociological occurrences which appear with regular frequency in virtually all countries on a global scale in varying degree and proportion. Individual nations each allocate domestic resources for the control and regulation of corruption and crime. Strategies to counter corruption are (3).

Corruption involves more than high-level officials taking bribes. Low-level officials are addicted to abusing their authority and milking the public with Hugh amounts of bribes of cash, material gifts; and even sexual favors which stains the office and authority they are so entrusted.

Corruption is destructive and contagious in developing world and in particularly resources rich war-torn countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where Western intelligence agencies and their governments funnel cases full of brand-new American dollars notes to local political leadership in order to curry favor.

Somalia ranks among the world’s most corrupt countries. Insecurity is also a major issue; the ongoing instability greatly restricts business. Corrupt government officials tolerate illegal activities in return for bribes.

Dysfunctional institutions facilitate an environment of lawlessness, and the absence of any form of regulatory framework hinders prospects of economic competitiveness. Business is based on patronage networks, and tight monopolies dominate the market. Somalia’s Provisional Constitution criminalizes several forms of corruption (including abuse of office, embezzlement and bribery); however, implementation is non-existent. The governing elite is continuously involved in allegations of embezzlement of public funds from the already meager Somalian coffers. Finally, bribery is commonplace in all sectors, and procurement contracts frequently involve corruption (4).

Political corruption is the abuse of public power, office, or resources by elected government officials for personal gain, by extortion, soliciting or offering bribes. It can also take the form of office holders maintaining themselves in office by purchasing votes by enacting laws which use taxpayers’ money. Evidence suggests that corruption can have political consequences- with citizens being asked for bribes becoming less likely to identify with their country or region (5).

Political corruption is so rampant in Africa and Somalia in particularly since the civil war 1991. Resource-rich African countries such as Angola, Algeria, DRC, Libiya, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan suffer from the curse of resources which attracts foreign/Western governments and their intelligence agencies which wage hybrid warfare by dumping hugh amounts of corrupt money to the local political and social arena in order to Balkanize, divide and colonize the country.

Western Corporate empire elites have no respect for any African and Somalia in particularly, nor our culture or future development. They dislike our African and black skin and culture more than anything on earth as Franz Fanon wrote.

Colonial era in Africa has been replaced with “neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism”. It means that Africa is now undergoing a profound economic and socio-cultural exploitation and plundering by the same imperial capitalist powers as well as their proxies from Gulf-Arab countries.

Somalia has experienced death, destruction, poverty at the hands of US/EU powers and their local African and Gulf proxies since 1999.

Western corporate empire in cahoots with local corrupt political and economic elites are looting and pillaging Somalia through privatization and neo-liberal economic models which they are buying up public-owned industries and corporations of Somali Democratic Republic (SDR) built over 30 years of scientific socialism without public participation and oversight. These foreign corporate empire elites have employed local corrupt politicians and Tribal warlords who are only interested in “Getting Rich Quick “ at the public expenses.

These massive corrupt and criminal financial transactions are encouraged and supported through the IMF-World Bank and other financial Institutions such as (Saudi, Qatari & Emirati Banks) financing capital markets . Just as they have done in the former USSR republics of Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, as well as Romania, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Former republics of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).

Conclusions

For the first time in Somali history, corrupt and unelected governments and leaders have sold off public agricultural, industrial, military, commercial and real estate without the full consent, approval and votes from the so-called parliament and the Somali public from 1991 -2016. They gave away public (national) properties to foreigners.

Somalia ranks among the world’s most corrupt countries. Insecurity is also a major issue; the ongoing instability greatly restricts business. Corrupt government officials tolerate illegal activities in return for bribes. Dysfunctional institutions facilitate an environment of lawlessness, and the absence of any form of regulatory framework hinders prospects of economic competitiveness. Business is based on patronage networks, and tight monopolies dominate the market. Somalia’s Provisional Constitutioncriminalizes several forms of corruption (including abuse of office, embezzlement and bribery); however, implementation is non-existent. The governing elite is continuously involved in allegations of embezzlement of public funds from the already meager Somali coffers. Finally, bribery is commonplace in all sectors both public and private enterprises and procurement contracts frequently involve corruption.

Somalia has again been ranked the world’s most corrupt country, according to the just released 2019 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) released by Transparency International, TI. Somalia was bottom of the standings with 9 / 180 (score/rank).

Other African countries that ranked at the bottom of the list were: South Sudan (12 / 179), Sudan (16 / 173), Equatorial Guinea (16 / 173) and Guinea-Bissau (18 / 168).

The ranking measures perceived public-sector corruption using a scale on which 100 is seen as very clean and zero is very corrupt. More than two-thirds of countries around the world scored below 50% and the average score was pegged at 43%.

This year’s results reveal that a majority of the 180 countries analyzed are showing little to no improvement in tackling corruption.

Somalia’s government has in the past dismissed poor rankings on the CPI terming them as “unreliable and falsehood”, with the country’s Finance Minister Abdirahman Duale Beyle previously threatening to sue Transparency International.

New Zealand was named the most corrupt free country followed by Denmark and Finland respectively. Somalia has been wracked by vicious tribal civil –war since 1991 and terrorist violence unleashed by al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab group since 2010.

The current government led by Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo has continued to make gains in seeking international assistance across different sectors to rebuild the country despite repeated deadly attacks especially in the capital Mogadishu (7).

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Dr. Bischara A. Egal is Chief Executive Director of the Horn of Africa Center for Strategic and International Studies (http://www.horncsis.org).

Notes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Somalia (accessed on Feb. 16)
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/somalia/ (accessed on Feb. 16, 2020)
  5. https://www.academia.edu/6868546/Bribery_and_Identity_Evidence_from_Sudan(accessedfeb.22, 2020)
  6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/159742 (accessed Feb. 22, 2020)
  7. https://www.africanews.com/2020/01/24/the-other-insurgency-somalia-ranked-world-s-most-corrupt-nation// (accessed Feb. 25, 2020)

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Armenian forces launched a missile attack on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, according to Azerbaijan. The country’s prosecutors said that Armenian forces had carried out the attack, which was prevented by the Azerbaijani military, on the pipeline in Yevlah at around 9 p.m. local time on October 6. The incident was described as a “terrorist act”.

The BTC pipeline delivers Azeri light crude oil (mainly from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field) through Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan for export via tankers. Another crucial Azerbaijani energy infrastructure object, which could become a potential target of Armenian attacks is the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline, which connects the giant Shah Deniz gas field with Europe through Georgia and Turkey. The Armenian side denounced the Azerbaijani report as fake news. Both Azerbaijan and Armenia regularly accuse each other of striking civilian and infrastructure objects on their sovereign territory and denounce the opponent’s claims as propaganda and fakes.

It is interesting to note that just a few hours earlier Vahram Poghosyan, the press secretary of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) President, claimed that Armenian forces had delivered powerful missile and rocket strikes on military objects in large Azerbaijani towns destroying multiple pieces of equipment and eliminating the enemy. The Azerbaijani official narrative provides a similar position that Azerbaijani forces are pulverizing Armenian military targets.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov threatened Armenia with “using the weapons with great destructive power” to deliver strikes on “the military-strategic infrastructure” of Armenia if it employs its Iskander operational-tactical missile systems against Azerbaijani forces.

However, it does not seem that the Armenian political leadership is ready to employ all the variety of its means and forces to fight back in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region. Instead, the government of Nikol Pashinyan is now mostly focused on the diplomatic campaign in Western media in an attempt to convince the so-called international community to help it to keep control over Karabakh. Mr. Pashinyan, who just a few days ago was promising to inflict a military defeat on what he called the Azerbaijani-Turkish terror alliance even declared that Armenia is ready for mutual concessions. Nonetheless, Baku and Ankara do not seem to be ready for a new ceasefire and the resumption of negotiations at the present time.

On the frontline in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region itself, the main hot point is the district of Jabrayil. Using the worsening weather conditions (fog and thick clouds), which complicate the work of Azerbaijani combat drones, Armenian forces were able to stabilize the frontline and prevent further gains of the Azerbaijani military in this part of Karabakh. On October 7, Armenia even claimed that a large-scale Azerbaijani attack had been repelled in the area. The Defense Ministry claimed that over 60 dead and multiple equipment pieces were left by Azerbaijan on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Armenian forces and cities of the region are still subjected to intense artillery bombardment by the Azerbaijani military. Heavy destruction was inflicted on the city of Stepanakert. As soon as the weather improves, Azerbaijan with help from Turkey will likely resume active drone strikes and launch a new phase of the ground offensive along the contact line.

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Juan Guaidó Creates a Parallel Consulate in Brazil

October 8th, 2020 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

A “parallel” Venezuelan Consulate in Brazil was condemned in a recent statement by Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza. In late September, supporters of the Venezuelan opposition leader, the self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó, announced that they would form a new consulate in Brazil. Basically, the objective is to create a parallel Venezuelan diplomatic representation, which meets the interests of the opposition – which is supported by the Brazilian government. The decision has received strong criticism from the Venezuelan government, which considers it illegal. However, despite the criticism, the consulate is starting its operations this week in the Brazilian state of Roraima – a region strategically chosen because it borders Venezuela.

Jorge Arreaza, head of the Bolivarian government’s foreign relations, reinforced his criticism and published an official statement warning the international community against the activities of the opposition, which he classified as fraudulent. According to Arreaza, there is an attempt to usurp the legitimate consular power of the Venezuelan government – which, in legal terms, is correct, considering that Guaidó is not actually the president of Venezuela.

Guaidó’s initiative in Brazil continues a series of clashes between the government of Jair Bolsonaro and representatives of Nicolás Maduro. Last month, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared Venezuelan diplomats as “persona non grata” after setting a deadline in April for them to leave the country – which did not happen due to a later decision by the Supreme Court. Now, with the appointment of new “diplomats” by Juan Guaidó, the situation between both countries is even more tense, since the Brazilian government will publicly recognize the role of the opposition’s parallel diplomatic service, while denying maintaining relations with the Venezuelan official diplomacy.

No specific date has been set for the opening of the parallel consulate, and it has just been announced that from this week on the agency would be fully operational. In fact, Guaidó’s “diplomats” are already acting freely in Brazil and even distributing documents to Venezuelan citizens in Brazilian territory. The Maduro government has already stated that such documents have no validity, but the Brazilian government recognizes the actions and cooperates with the oppositionist Consulate. It is also important to emphasize that the employees of the parallel consulate have no diplomatic training, being political militants chosen by Guaidó to represent his interests in Brazil.

Brazil is making a serious mistake in accepting the formation of an illegal consulate in its territory. This represents a total violation of good customs in international relations. Although Brazil is directly opposed to the Venezuelan government, recognizing the legitimacy of an illegal “consulate” and allowing parallel diplomats to act in its territory sets an undesirable precedent in bilateral relations between these states. According to the Montevideo Convention, a State is constituted by the presence of territory, government and diplomatic relations. Therefore, when recognizing a new diplomacy, Brazil is, in practice, recognizing the existence of a Venezuelan State parallel to the Bolivarian Republic. The Venezuelan case, moreover, illustrates an absolutely inappropriate international behavior among the nations that oppose Maduro. To recognize a deputy as president for the simple fact that there was political opposition to the legitimate government had already been a serious violation of international customs. Now, with the creation of parallel consulates, the situation is likely to get even worse, mainly due to the fact that Brazil may not be the only country to receive the “Guaidó’s diplomats”.

Interestingly, the inauguration of the parallel Consulate in Brazil takes place a few weeks after the visit of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to four countries in South America. The head of American diplomacy met with Brazilians including Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs Ernesto Araújo and Venezuelan immigrants precisely in the state of Roraima. The secret talks between Pompeo and Araújo still remain obscure. When called by the Senate to clarify the content of the meeting, Araújo gave no details and mentioned only generic aspects of the conversations he had with Pompeo. The other countries visited by Pompeo were Colombia, Guyana and Suriname – countries strategically chosen to form a siege against Venezuela. Considering that Pompeo’s visit to Brazil was most likely decisive for the Brazilian government to agree to cooperate with Guaidó’s parallel diplomacy, it is possible to foresee that anytime soon some of the other countries visited by Pompeo will also announce a similar decision, receiving “diplomatic missions” coming from the self-proclaimed and illegitimate government of Juan Guaidó.

It remains to be seen what consequences of these acts will be from now on. The parallel consulate is already acting freely in Brazil, consolidating a historic act of violation of Venezuelan state sovereignty perpetrated by the Brazilian government. However, the US – the world power that promotes the crusade against Maduro – has not yet made such a bold decision and does not publicly have “diplomats” in the service of Guaidó. In fact, Brazil is being the laboratory of a great experiment, where the limits of the violation of Venezuelan sovereignty are being tested. Depending on the reaction of Caracas and its allies, other countries will receive – or not – such “diplomats”.

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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.

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Racism and the Death Penalty

October 8th, 2020 by Abayomi Azikiwe

Christopher Vialva, 40, was executed by the United States government on September 24 in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Vialva was the first Black person put to death by the federal criminal justice system since the resumption of executions by Washington earlier this year.

The now deceased Vialva committed his crimes in the state of Texas as a youth. His offenses were designated as a federal crime due to the fact that it took place in an area considered under the control of the Fort Hood military base. Vialva’s mother, Lisa Brown, who is Caucasian, pleaded with President Donald Trump to commute the death sentence of her son, to no avail.

Six others faced the same fate in rapid succession during 2020. These events, overshadowed by the presidential elections, the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread mass demonstrations and rebellions fueled by racism and national oppression, represents the continuing unjust treatment of people of color communities, working and poor people in the most advanced capitalist state in the world.

The death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after being suspended for four years. Nonetheless, only three federal executions were carried out between 1976 and the beginning of 2020, after a 17 year hiatus.

The escalation in federal executions is a direct result of the policies of the administration of President Donald Trump. Attorney General William Barr was instrumental in facilitating the renewal of capital punishment on a federal level.

Even within the state criminal justice systems in the many areas where the death penalty remains legal there has been a notable decline in the utilization of this outmoded and barbaric form of punishment. However, the current administration in Washington is seeking to illustrate that it is committed to the maximum sentencing of prison inmates despite its claims of prison reform directed towards African Americans. Barr was quoted as saying “we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” (See this)

Racism, National Oppression and the Death Penalty

A recent study released by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) further exposes the link between race and criminal justice. The study comes at a critical conjuncture in the U.S. when millions have demonstrated and spoken out against the arbitrary use of lethal force involving police and vigilante contacts with African Americans and people of Latin American descent.

The recrudescence of federal capital punishment is a ruthless by-product of the ideological racism of the current administration. Trump built his 2016 presidential campaign through the targeting and denigration of immigrant workers, African Americans, women and other oppressed groups. Yet this stiffening of overt national discrimination and bigotry has prompted widespread opposition both domestically and internationally.

This report by the DPIC was issued prior to the November 3 national elections. The findings reinforce the narratives related to the expanding prison-industrial-complex which is inextricably linked to the disproportionate profiling, arrest, sentencing, imprisonment and execution of oppressed people in comparison to whites in the U.S.

DPIC entitled its study “Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty”. The research report looks at the application of the death penalty historically and draws striking parallels to event taking place in the 21st century.

Death Penalty and Race graph

According to Ngozi Ndulue, lead author and Senior Director of Research and Special Projects for DPIC:

“The death penalty has been used to enforce racial hierarchies throughout United States history, beginning with the colonial period and continuing to this day. Its discriminatory presence as the apex punishment in the American legal system legitimizes all other harsh and discriminatory punishments. That is why the death penalty must be part of any discussion of police reform, prosecutorial accountability, reversing mass incarceration, and the criminal legal system as a whole.” (See this)

DPIC study cover on Enduring Injustice

In the U.S. in 2020, there are approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated in numerous jails, juvenile detention centers and prisons. Millions more are under some form of judicial and law-enforcement supervision. African Americans and other people of color make up over half of all those locked up while these communities constitute less than 40% of the overall population of the U.S. combined.

The Executive Director of DPIC and the editor of the report, Robert Dunham, said of the study that:

“If you don’t understand the history — that the modern death penalty is the direct descendant of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow-segregation — you won’t understand why. With the continuing police and white vigilante killings of Black citizens, it is even more important now to focus attention on the outsized role the death penalty plays as an agent and validator of racial discrimination. What is broken or intentionally discriminatory in the criminal legal system is visibly worse in death-penalty cases. Exposing how the system discriminates in capital cases can shine an important light on law enforcement and judicial practices in vital need of abolition, restructuring, or reform.”

Movements Aimed at Prison Abolition and National Liberation Are Needed Today

Consequently, the system of national oppression and institutionalized racism in criminal justice requires consistent work and political struggle. Those incarcerated and targeted by the correctional system are also the victims of super-exploitation.

Many prisoners and those threatened with imprisonment are forced to work under slave-like conditions. In California, inmates are being utilized to fight forest fires which are a direct outcome of the failure of the capitalist and imperialist system to place adequate focus on the environmental impact of climate change.

Other inmates are brutalized by guards and administrators, many of whom are racists. The prison system is both public and private. There has been a dramatic increase in the proliferation of private correctional facilities. Migrant workers in greater numbers are being imprisoned, including children. Recent reports indicate that these inmates are being molested by guards and subjected to unwanted medical procedures related to their reproductive health.

Mass incarceration and the death penalty are also forms of social containment. Millions over the last four decades have been removed from society away from families, neighborhoods and workplaces. Therefore, the growth in the prison industry has contributed immensely to the destruction of Black, Brown and working class families.

The new DPIC report points to the insidious character of the federal executions by noting that the renewed process of capital punishment was begun with six white death row inmates. Nevertheless, the report states emphatically:

“Although the first set of executions scheduled by the federal government in 2020 have been strategically directed at white people, the federal death penalty has long been plagued by the same racial bias present in state death penalty systems. Thirty-four of the 57 people currently on federal death row are people of color, including 26 Black men. Some were convicted and condemned by all-white juries. In an action widely regarded as an assault on Native sovereignty, the sole Native American on federal death row was executed for an offense on tribal lands over the repeated objection of his tribe and Native American leaders across the country.”

Any analysis related to the emancipation from national and class oppression must include a critique of the criminal justice structures in the U.S. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a large-scale movement among prisoners themselves surfaced leading to protests, strikes, rebellions and the takeover of correctional institutions.

In 1971, thousands of inmates at the Attica State Prison in New York seized the facility and made militant demands on the warden and then Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Instead of negotiating in good faith with the African American-led insurrection, Rockefeller ordered the state police to retake the prison, afterwards killing dozens of inmates and most of the guards held by the prisoners.

Since the early 1970s, periodic eruptions of resistance have occurred in the prison system. These efforts include petitioning for better treatment, hunger strikes and work stoppages which demand an end to brutality and harassment. These actions are occurring in California, Georgia, Michigan, among other states.

These struggles inside the prison system are part and parcel of the movement to end racism, national and class oppression. With no end in sight of the prison-industrial-complex under capitalism, only the building of a socialist society can guarantee equal protection under the law.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author; featured image: Christopher Vialva and his mother Lisa Brown just days before his execution in Indiana

The Belt and Road Initiative seeks to bring development to the world. Why is this a problem for the USA and some of its Western allies? Keith Lamb explains why.

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The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a series of, land and sea, infrastructure projects that will link up the “world-island” that is Africa and Eurasia. Should the West join then railway tunnels, under both the Gibraltar and Bering Straits, will link-up the world.

However, so far, the West has reflected its worst history onto the BRI, “marketing” it as a Chinese neo-imperial plan to dominate the world through “debt-trap diplomacy”. For example, 70% of the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota being leased out, for 99 years to a Chinese venture, is widely disseminated as proof of this.

Largely, unreported is that the Chinese debt still stands because this soft-debt is not the problem. Hambantota was leased out to pay back private capital lenders who comprise the majority of Sri Lanka’s debt.

Western apprehension over the BRI is sold as concerns over human rights. However, even recent history shows that material priorities undermine the smoke and mirrors of human rights discourse.

For example, the Western destruction of Libya and Iraq, usually labelled as “interventions”, which linguistically conceals tragic human rights atrocities, was paradoxically justified through liberal human rights narratives, much of which turned out to be atrocity propaganda.

In fact, Western support for jihadi groups in Libya and the invasion of Iraq launched from Saudi Arabia, a state with a worse human rights record than Iraq, belies human rights explanations.

While both states had oil wealth to be plundered, Libya and Iraq also presented a systemic threat to US hegemony. Both challenged the US’s exorbitant dollar privilege. Gaddafi sought to create a gold-backed African Dinar and Saddam started selling oil in Euros.

The carnage caused in both countries, and others across the world, is flippantly dismissed as unintended consequences to what were otherwise good intentions. However, the strategy of keeping the world in a state of uneven development through war and sovereign interference is no accident and it is precisely this status quo that the BRI resists.

Having a hegemonic power like the USA, and previously Britain presents a systemic disincentive to developing the majority of the earth. This is because both powers are geographically disconnected from the continents they seek to administer. This fact was also the case for previous European colonialists too.

European empires differed from those that came before them. They were multi-transcontinental, and parcelled-out across the globe, rather than being in one continuous civilizational space. This succeeded because Western powers possessed superior war and naval technology.

Consequently, Western monopoly capitalism intertwined with colonialism was built on controlling the seas. This is not just a historical fact it is a current reality too. The USA, with its invisible neo-colonial empire, is far from the majority of the earth’s inhabitants on the world-island. As such, it dominates largely through naval projection.

Keeping the mass of trade oceanic means that, he who controls the seas controls the world. Development of the inlands, which would bring about poverty relief to the mass of humanity, would create boundless competition to naval hegemony.

Furthermore, inland development away from sea routes is harder to dominate and economic expansion there leads to augmenting the military strength of states who could then resist hegemonic belligerence. Therefore, both Britain and the USA have sought to privilege their sea power and prevent continental competition.

Britain fearing losing its monopoly through the Suez Canal restricted German economic expansion across Eurasia. The building of the Berlin-Bagdad railway, just at a time when oil was discovered in Iran, was an underlying factor for the outbreak of WWI. In Eurasia imperial Russia was always frustrated by Britain’s “great game”.

The USA buttresses countries around the edges of states which are capable of developing the world-island. For example, with the rise of the USSR and the PRC; Germany, Japan, and the Tiger economies received preferential economic treatment.

After the collapse of the USSR, when the Washington Consensus inflicted deprivation upon the Russian people, US relations with Russia were first-rate. However, today Russia, though capitalist, is no longer a basket-case and consequently faces the US’s ire. The privileging of sea power and opposition to continental development is likewise played out in the Nord Stream saga.

When China was poor, from the late-seventies though governed by the CPC, it also enjoyed positive relations with the US. It was theorized that integration into the existing liberal capitalist world-order would inevitably lead to its collapse.

However, China though accepting the Western created multilateral order and the WTO trading system, now also faces the indignation of the current US naval hegemon.

This is because China has become a technological powerhouse and broken free from the role assigned to it of producing the world’s “tat”. It has proven that capital overseen by state power produces rapid development which defies the order of uneven development which disadvantages the inlands.

Unlike the USA, China is firmly entrenched within the world-island and so cannot follow a similar naval hegemonic strategy. China borders powerful nuclear states and consequently truculent actions lead to chaos in its own backyard.

Unlike previous Western colonial powers, China’s development is founded on peaceful trading even with advanced states like Britain and the US, rather than colonial aggression. Accordingly, China is cognizant that development for others, even powerful states with differing ideologies to its own, can be beneficial.

However, China, having been colonized from the sea and now surrounded on the “first island chain” by US bases, is only too aware that it must seek a strategy to counter de-developmental bids by naval hegemony.

Subsequently, the BRI for China, which creates both land and sea trade routes that are independent of US control, is a hedge against a US approach which seeks to prevent China’s growth and maintain the current order of uneven global development.

This sentiment, of resisting uneven development, enjoys democratic support from the global community. Currently, 138 states, largely from the South, have signed up to the BRI. In addition, states in Eastern Europe and Italy have also joined.

The BRI which seeks global development for the entire world contests the very foundations of US naval-hegemony which due to the structural imperatives, aforementioned have left the majority of the earth undeveloped.

Additionally, the levelling of global development, which the BRI strives to introduce, threatens the foundations of capitalism as we know it. This is because private capital can no longer run amok playing non-developed states against developed ones. Instead, it is forced to work, hand in glove, with state power for real development. Thus, capital comes under democratic control.

For the context of China beyond resisting the US, the BRI is also premised on socialist principles set out by Deng Xiaoping. He always demanded that China must eventually see even development in its poor east even if that meant, through engagement with Western capitalism, improving China’s western seaboard first.

Indeed, the BRI being part of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and “Xi Jinping Thought” purposely seeks innovative ways to co-opt capital through inter-governmental planning, for the purpose of long-term sustainable development. As such, the BRI transcends short-term profit-seeking motives and many of the BRI projects will not see returns for decades.

The problem then with the BRI, beyond the reported human-rights discourse, is that its development presents a direct contest to an order of uneven-development. It is within this context too that the inexhaustible war in Afghanistan becomes comprehensible beyond just war for war’s sake and de-development.

While Afghanistan provides a never-ending excuse for military-industrial complex profiteering it also allows the US to station troops in a country that borders six central Asian states including China. From here the US can aggravate both inland Eurasian development and irritate China.

While the US and its Western allies may believe they have much to lose from global even development, the truth is they only lose their exorbitant privilege of being the sole developed pole which confers them with hegemony. At any rate, the endless wars to maintain this hegemony drain resources, moral and human life.

Overall, for Europe and the USA, BRI provides an opportunity for a better more democratic world where innovation and development come from the whole of humanity.

Europe on the other side of Eurasia, and to the North of Africa, has the opportunity to rejuvenate its old self through new trade routes. Evidently, Eastern European states, who did not rely on sea power for their growth, already understand this better than Western Europe.

The USA, though rich, is lagging behind in basic infrastructure which could be remedied through BRI cooperation. In addition, the US with its technological prowess could easily take a leading position in the BRI and become a driving force in developing “its continent”, as well as the world, rather a driving force for “intervention”.

For the populations in the West divided by infighting over identity politics the recognition that uneven development represents the primary global contradiction has the potential to create unity that transcends divisive ethnic tensions.

For example, the Right seeks to convince us that mass immigration into the West is immoral. Indeed, they have a point, for mass immigration arises from the desperate fleeing poverty and war caused by the current liberal naval-hegemonic order.

A developed multi-polar world, which the BRI seeks to create, would fashion democratic globalization where the movement of people becomes a choice rather than an imperative.

The BRI then is not a neo-imperialist venture. Development is in opposition to the hegemonic tool of uneven development and even development creates the basis for global democracy at home and abroad.

The task now remains to convince the West, for the sake of itself and all of humanity, to transcend the current order that has been inherited from European colonialism. Real democracy and human rights are constructed on solid material foundations rather than on empty discourse that excuses “intervention” which is the greatest human rights abuse.

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If we look at the track record of Joe Biden during his political career first as a senator and then as Obama’s vice president, he is a typical establishment Democrat who has played into the hands of the US national security establishment like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before him.

But considering his hawkish record in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supporting the Yugoslav wars during the Clinton presidency in the nineties, voting in favor of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the Bush tenure and being a vocal proponent of the purported “humanitarian intervention” in Libya and the proxy war in Syria as Obama’s vice president, the Biden presidency would risk plunging the world into many more devastating conflicts.

As 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 [1] 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 country slipped into myriad ethnic and sectarian conflicts, in November 2006, Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, released a “comprehensive strategy” to end sectarian violence in Iraq. Rather than continuing the previous approach or withdrawing the US forces, the plan called for “a third way”: federalizing Iraq and giving Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis “breathing room” in their own regions.

In September 2007, a non-binding resolution endorsing such a scheme passed the Senate, but the idea was unfamiliar, had no political legitimacy, and failed to gain traction. Iraq’s political leadership denounced the resolution as a de facto “Balkanization of Iraq,” and the US Embassy in Baghdad issued a statement distancing itself from it. Foreign policy “maven” Biden laughed it off as nothing more than one of his facetious gaffes.

Had supporting the illegal Iraq War been the only instance of Biden’s hawkish interventionism, one could have overlooked it. But he was also a vocal supporter of the so-called “humanitarian intervention” in Libya and the proxy war in Syria as Obama’s vice president.

Addressing a seminar at Harvard in 2014, Joe Biden said [2] 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.

Over the decades, it has been a convenient stratagem of the Western powers with two-party political systems, particularly the US, to evade responsibility for the death and destruction brought upon the hapless Middle Eastern countries by their predecessors by playing blame games and finger-pointing, as exemplified by Joe Biden in his asinine remarks.

For instance, during the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the eighties, the Carter and Reagan administrations nurtured the Afghan jihadists against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul with the help of Saudi petro-riyals and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. The Afghan jihad created a flood of millions of refugees who sought refuge in the border regions of Pakistan and Iran.

The Reagan administration’s policy of providing training and arms to the Afghan militants had the unintended consequences of spawning al-Qaeda and Taliban and it also destabilized the Af-Pak region, which is still in the midst of lawlessness, perpetual anarchy and an unrelenting Taliban insurgency more than four decades after the proxy war was fought in Afghanistan.

After the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1988, however, and the subsequent change of guard in Washington, the Clinton administration dissociated itself from the ill-fated Reagan administration’s policy of nurturing Afghan militants with the help of Gulf’s petro-dollars and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and laid the blame squarely on minor regional players.

Similarly, during the Libyan so-called “humanitarian intervention” in 2011, the Obama administration provided money and arms to myriads of tribal militias and Islamic jihadists to topple the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime. But after the policy backfired and pushed Libya into lawlessness, anarchy and civil war, the mainstream media pointed the finger at Egypt, UAE and Saudi Arabia for backing the renegade general Khalifa Haftar in eastern Libya, even though he had lived for more than two decades [3] in the US right next to the CIA’s headquarter in Langley, Virginia.

Regarding Washington’s modus operandi of waging proxy wars in the Middle East, since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of master strategists at NATO to raise money [4] from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms markets[5] in the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Libya or Syria, the same playbook was executed to the letter.

Raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf Arab States allows the Western executives the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; the benefit of buying weapons from unregulated arms markets of the Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists were the blowback of the proxy war in Syria.

On the subject of the supposed “powerlessness” of the US in the global affairs, the Western think tanks and the corporate media’s spin-doctors generally claim that Pakistan deceived Washington in Afghanistan by providing safe havens to the Taliban; Turkey hoodwinked the US in Syria by using the war against the Islamic State as a pretext for cracking down on Kurds; Saudi Arabia and UAE betrayed the US in Yemen by mounting ground offensive and airstrikes against the Houthis rebels; and once again, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt went against the ostensible policy of the US in Libya by destabilizing the Tripoli-based government, even though Khalifa Haftar is known to be a CIA stooge.

This perennially whining attitude of the Western corporate media that such and such regional players betrayed them, otherwise they were on top of their game is actually a clever stratagem that has been deliberately designed by the spin-doctors of the mainstream media and foreign policy think tanks to cast the Western powers in a positive light and vilify adversaries, even if the latter are their tactical allies in some of the regional conflicts.

Fighting wars through proxies allows the international power-brokers the luxury of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” in their defense, and at the same time, they can shift all the blame for wrongdoing on minor regional players. The Western powers’ culpability lies in the fact that because of them a system of international justice based on sound principles of morality and justice cannot be built in which the violators can be punished for their wrongdoing and the victims of injustice, tyranny and violence can be protected.

Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects of insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining to conferring international legitimacy to an armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called “freedom struggle” of the Cold War, or the supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and Syrian insurgencies of the contemporary era, it is simply beyond the power of minor regional players and their nascent media, which has a geographically and linguistically limited audience, to cast such heavily armed and brutal insurrections in a positive light in order to internationally legitimize them; only the Western mainstream media that has a global audience and which serves as the mouthpiece of the Western national security establishments has perfected this game of legitimizing the absurd and selling Satans as saviors.

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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] 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

[2] Joe Biden is the only honest man in Washington:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/07/joe-biden-is-the-only-honest-man-in-washington/

[3] Leaked tapes expose Western support for renegade Libyan general.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/revealed-leaked-tapes-expose-western-support-renegade-libyan-general-185825787

[4] U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/world/middleeast/us-relies-heavily-on-saudi-money-to-support-syrian-rebels.html

[5] Billions of dollars weapons flowing from Eastern Europe to Middle East.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/27/weapons-flowing-eastern-europe-middle-east-revealed-arms-trade-syria

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On September 2, US sanctions – the sort normally reserved for fully fledged terrorists and decorated drug traffickers – were imposed on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda and her colleague Phakiso Mochochoko, head of Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation.  For Balkees Jarrah, senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, it was a “stunning perversion of US sanctions, devised to penalize rights abusers and kleptocrats, to target those prosecuting war crimes”.  

This followed from the authorisation by the Trump administration of economic and travel sanctions against employees of the ICC.  According to Executive Order 13928, “The entry of such aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States and denying them entry will further demonstrate the resolve of the United States in opposing the ICC’s overreach by seeking to exercise jurisdiction of the United States and its allies.”  

On June 11, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed his objection to how the Court’s Office of the Prosecutor had, in November 2017 “announced its intention to investigate our brave warriors for alleged crimes arising from counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan.”  This was not a “prosecution of justice” so much as “a persecution of Americans.” 

Bensouda’s original November 2017 request to investigate was less dramatic, focusing “solely upon war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed since 1 May 2003 on the territory of Afghanistan as well as war crimes closely linked to the situation in Afghanistan allegedly committed since 1 July 2002 on the territory of other States Parties to the Rome Statute.”

President Trump’s executive measures are both threatening and disruptive, attempting to add a few holes to what is already a complex investigative process.  They grant the US Secretary of State the power of designating such foreign persons as have engaged or assisted efforts by the ICC to investigate or prosecute crimes allegedly committed by Americans or personnel of certain United States allies. Included are also those who have assisted, supported or provided services to or in support of such persons. Engaging in prohibited interactions with such individuals is unlawful, opening the subject to civil and criminal fines.  If a “natural person”, 20 years of incarceration might follow, pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

This pugilistic approach to the ICC has not been well received by numerous signatories of the Rome Statute, which established the court.  A statement endorsed by countries from several continents was issued on June 23 affirming “unwavering support for the Court as an independent and impartial judicial institution.” Using the stock language familiar with US diplomacy, the states claimed to “remain committed to an international rule-based order.”

Such rules-based orders can be the stuff of exaggeration and make believe.  International law remains susceptible to political pull, influence and manipulation.  Accusations have been levelled against the ICC for its purported biases, notably against African states.  Rwandan President Paul Kagame repeated that common line of criticism in 2018.  “The ICC was supposed to address the whole world, but it ended up covering only Africa.”  A decade prior, Kagame had taken issue with the efforts of Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the then ICC chief prosecutor, to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. “If you use a fraudulent mechanism or institution against somebody who needs to be held accountable, in the end you are not helping people understand whether this person needs to be held accountable.”

Those keen on more expeditious procedures have also taken the court to task for inefficiency.  The court’s proceedings have been derided as, according to Elizabeth Wilmshurst of Chatham House, too “cumbersome” and “lengthy”.  Money has been spent for poor returns. The Ivory Coast’s ex-President Laurent Gbagbo was acquitted of war crimes charges in 2019.  Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, saw crimes against humanity charges against him dropped in 2014.

Context is all, and the court’s weaknesses have as much to do with problems of state cooperation – or its absence – as they do with feasibility and focus.  (In Kenyatta’s case, prosecutors complained that the Kenyan government had refused to submit vital evidence.)  Having a supremely powerful international court with razor sharp teeth, abundant resources and the means to satisfy the cravings of civil society, seems improbable, and even undesirable.  But the latest efforts from Washington go further, an attempt defang the fundamental workings of the court itself. 

With that in mind, a domestic legal experiment is underway in the United States.  In an attempt to counter the Trump administration, the Open Society Justice Initiative, along with four prominent academics of the law, have filed an action challenging the lawfulness of Executive Order 13928, along with implementing regulations issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control.  The plaintiffs admit to having history of involvement with the ICC “including in its investigations and prosecutions”.  They express no desire to stop engaging with it.  They also admit to having assisted “two high-ranking officials within the Court’s Office of the Prosecutor – by educating, training or advising them and members of their Office, and by undertaking public advocacy in support of their mission and work.” 

The plaintiffs cite several grounds, notably that the Executive Order and accompanying regulations “impermissibly restrict [their] First Amendment rights to freedom of speech by prohibiting them from providing the speech-based services and assistance” so described, including in connection with ICC investigations and prosecutions the US supports.  They also argue that the Executive Order is decidedly vague in what acts it prohibits, leading to “arbitrary enforcement.”

The executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, James Goldston, had a whole spray for the administration in a statement.  “By issuing this outrageous order, the Trump administration has betrayed Washington’s long-standing support for international justice, snubbed its allies, and violated the US constitution.”  Going to court served to “end this reckless assault on a judicial institution and the victims it serves.”

Despite the predictable theatre that often accompanies these policy announcements, the burdens imposed on the ICC are not insuperable.  The main site of the investigation remains Afghanistan, where the alleged crimes, including those committed by US personnel, took place.  Most of the evidence will be gathered in Afghanistan.  Witnesses and relevant individuals in the US may be interviewed by remote means.  This act of US imperial machismo, despite its punchy seriousness, may fall flat.

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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]

There is a battle going on over who and what most credibly represents science. As the months pass, the contest over science is integral to the acrimony concerning the nature of COVID-19. In February of this year the UN’s World Health Organization, an agency largely funded by Bill Gates, bestowed the name, “COVID-19” on the supposedly new coronavirus.

Many powerful interests have combined to argue that science justifies the government-led initiatives to impose, for instance, economic lockdowns, social distancing, mandatory masking, and a future of compulsory vaccines. A growing international movement of people, however, is coming to see that the impositions being done in the name of fighting COVID-19 are not scientific at all. Instead we are in the midst of a propaganda war aimed at inciting fear and even panic.

Josh Mitteldorf has written an illuminating essay about this struggle over who really speaks on behalf of the scientific method.  From his analysis he concludes, “never before 2020 have so few people with so little scientific credentials claimed to speak for the scientific community as a whole; and never has the public been asked to modify our daily lives and sacrifice our livelihoods on such a scale.” 

After describing “COVID-19 and the Perversion of Science,” Mitteldorf lists ten of the lies and deceptions pushed on us without the backing of scientific authority. Mitteldorf writes,

Here are ten messages that are essential pieces of the standard COVID narrative, but which are unfounded in actual science. Stay tuned for a detailed rebuttal of each.

1. “The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was one of many random events in nature in which a virus jumps from one species to another.”

2. “Chloroquine kills patients and is too dangerous to use against COVID”

3. “The Ferguson model warned us of impending danger in time to take action and dodge a bullet.”

4. “American deaths from COVID: 200,000 and counting”

5. “New cases of COVID are expanding now in a dangerous Second Wave”

6. “Masks and social distancing are keeping the virus in check in our communities”

7. “Dr Fauci and the CDC are guiding our response to COVID according to the same principles of epidemic management that have protected public health in the past.

8. “Asymptomatic carriers are an important vector of disease transmission, which must be isolated if we are to stop the spread of COVID”

9. “The lower death rates now compared to April are due to protective measures such as social distancing, mask-wearing, and limited travel.”

10. “With enough resources, pharmaceutical scientists can develop a vaccine in a matter of months, and provide reasonable assurance that it is safe.”

This list of false claims pushed on us by a small clique is far from complete. The inducement of fear and panic is the primary strategy for getting people to go along with the imposition of such monumental changes in our lives. The task of arousing fear is performed by a compliant media that 24/7 exaggerates the severity of COVID-19 while predicting more terrible calamities to come.

As University of Ottawa Professor, Michel Chossudovsky reports in Global Research, “The Fear Campaign Has No Scientific Basis.”

Professor Chossudovsky founded the Global Research.ca site shortly following the 9/11 fiasco in 2001. The site is rich with articles based on scientific analysis that cuts against the power-serving reports on mainstream media. For a survey of recent articles on Global Research, which is based in Montreal, see this.

Professor Chossudovsky presents a video overview of the misnamed pandemic here.

One of the major stories outlined in this array of Global Research stories is that there is really no method to determine who is “infected” with the virus and who is not. Indeed the results of the PCR test are virtually meaningless. Accordingly, the whole story line of the number of cases increasing towards the need to impose a second set of lockdowns is specious. It is nothing but calculated disinformation.  See, for instance, this, this and this.

A related essay by Michael Thau is entitled, “NY Times: Up to 90% Who’ve Tested COVID-19 Positive Wrongly Diagnosed! TRUTH: A Whole Lot Worse?

By now it is well known that the rules for registering deaths were altered in many countries to clear to way for gross exaggerations of COVID-19 death statistics. Moreover, hospital administrators were given financial rewards for going along with the deception. One of the web sites where this story is explained is the Children’s Health Defense, see this.

The alteration of laws, policies and practises in many countries to create the condition for major overcounts of COVID-19 deaths is well known. The phenomenon has been widely reported in alternative media. See this for instance.

The available data on the inflation of case numbers as well as morbidity rates attributed to COVID-19 are founded in fraud, misinformation, lies and specious assumptions. Hence it can be said that the real threat to the public comes not from a killer virus, whose true lethality so far is no more serious than the annual flu. Rather we are dealing with a vile political virus, a massive political deception, being pushed on us by a combination of Big Pharma and globalist financiers. These financiers, as best personified by racketeer Bill Gates, have deep roots in Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and even in the enormous wealth-generating capacities of Communist China.

Literally billions of people worldwide are being placed in harm’s way based on a lavishly financed manipulation of media outlets and public officials. The lockdowns, the muzzling with masks, as well as the “immunity passport” vaccines, are meant to advance a number of goals, most of which have little to do with public health. They are meant to further enrich the rich by ruthlessly assaulting the middle class and further impoverishing the poor.

This agenda extends to schemes to robotize almost everything and to inject into humans chip nanotechnology. The injection of biotechnological interfaces into our DNA will help make us more docile, obedient and compliant so we can be made to conform to the engineering requirements of AI, Artificial Intelligence. Already some of the COVID vaccines are being designed to transform us humans into GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms. See this.

The political emergency misrepresented as a viral emergency is creating the necessity for close collaboration between scientists and lawyers. This partnership is welcome and necessary. It is a vital means of defending the great mass of humanity from the many-faceted assault presently being aimed our way.

Increasingly those most effective in defending against the assault combine the tools of scientific evaluation with expertise in international criminal law. Increasingly concepts like crimes against humanity and the Nuremberg Principles are being brought to the analysis of what is being forced on us based on the perversion of science, not the expression of science.

One of the most authoritative interventions combining rigorous science with legal acumen comes from a German-based Coronavirus Investigation Committee that began its deliberations in July. This Committee is seeking international collaborators in all countries.

The spokesperson in the video is a lawyer licensed to practise in Germany and California. He is Dr. Reimer Fuellmich who puts forward a blockbuster of a presentation rich in data, scientific analysis and legal interpretation. I consider this presentation to be the most incisive analysis to date of what must be done to hold the culprits accountable for “the biggest crime against humanity ever.”

Another important case, combining the contributions of legal practitioners and scientific experts, is being pressed against the state government of Ohio by the lawyer, Tom Renz. The video highlights a very informative discussion between Renz and the well-known investigative journalist, Jon Rapport.

Rappaport is a veteran reporter on health issues who has long been very critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci played a controversial role in aspects of the HIV-AIDS controversy that many see as still unresolved. As he is doing in the present crisis, Fauci pushed aside health regulations in disseminate the very expensive supposed remedy, AZT. AZT turned out to be lethal for many of those that received this poisonous and untested false remedy.

I especially appreciate Rappaport’s ability in this video to boil down complex issues into simple, plain language. Tom Renz explains his own lead role in the case with similar clarity. Clearly Renz is preparing to wage the good fight for genuine public health based on the application of science rather than on the denigration of science in the cause of societal corruption.

Several hundred doctors in Belgium organized themselves to submit two letters presenting their own highly critical assessment of the coronavirus abuses imposed by their own government.

Rocco Galati has mounted a case in the Superior Court of Ontario accusing many public officials and government broadcasters, including the CBC, of many criminal violations against the Canadian constitution and international law. The first video is spoken largely in English. When the conversation turns to French, a written translation appears in subtitles.

Here is a conversation between Ezra Levant and Rocco Galati.

Here is an interview with Galati by Bright Light News.

The interview is posted on the web site, End Calgary Lockdown.

One of the subjects raised by Galati is the lack of any scientific justification for masking, let alone mandatory masking as ordered by some governments. Galati observes, “masks are the props of the masquerade.” This masquerade is based on disguising a political epidemic as a viral epidemic.

One of the most widely cited international experts on masking is a retired physicist from the University of Ottawa, Dr. Denis Rancourt. Here is Denis as filmed in a video where he is the esteemed guest of US Senator Ron Paul.

Here is that report that Prof. Rancourt wrote for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association in its intervention with the Director-General of the World Health Organization, the WHO.

I distributed paper copies of the Ontario Civil Liberties document to all City Councillors in the Lethbridge Municipal Government in Alberta Canada weeks before the elected officials voted to approve mandatory masking. I have yet to receive a response specifically addressing the content of the document I sent these elected officials.

There are several articles on masking in the Global Research collection of most popular essays for the month of September.

These articles on different aspects of the masking issue include the following: this, this, this and this.

The masking issue is becoming a matter of life and death. The number of cases is growing where individuals have been killed, severely beaten, arrested, incarcerated, and probably tortured for the alleged crime of not wearing a mask or not wearing a mask in the regimented fashion. Why is this violence against those who opt not to wear masks becoming so dangerous?

My colleague in the Media Department of New York University, Prof. Mark Crispin Miller, has written a detailed article entitled “Masking Ourselves to Death.” The author begins the article by introducing accounts of some of the crimes committed by pro-maskers. Some of these individuals, both police and civilian, have been socialized to embark on violent power trips.

Here is Prof. Miller’s commentary on the push towards mandatory masking as one of the pointed moving edges of the accelerating political virus.

Prof. Miller is running into heavy opposition from powerful interests able to exercise their influence in mass media and apparently also in the administration of New York University. The media’s hit jobs against Dr. Miller are widespread including here and here.

A petition has been mounted in the case by the defenders of Prof. Miller, free speech and academic freedom. The petitioners are calling on NYU’s administrators to serve the interests of independent scientific research, publication and pedagogy rather than push forward the self-interested agendas of powerful political lobbies.

Please consider signing this petition in support of Prof. Miller and the principles of academic freedom.

The petition itself touches on issues similar to those raised by the administration of the University of Lethbridge in its attack on me and on open academic debate in 2016. In recent years the perversion of academic governance in order to control what can or cannot be articulated on university campuses is becoming epidemic in scope. The authors of the petition exclaim,

We see Prof. Miller’s situation as a flashpoint in the struggle not just to reclaim but to protect free speech and free inquiry. NYU officials have no right to intervene in Prof. Miller’s courses or message his students surreptitiously undermining his integrity as an instructor. They have no right to deprive him of the courses he was hired to teach and they should not join in a public smear campaign against the very rights they should uphold at a university.

This kind of abuse pressed against a senior, tenured and well published university professor is an aspect of the contemporary assault on science presently plaguing society. One of the major emerging issues concerns the question of whether governments the world over can impose mandatory vaccines on citizens in the name of a public health emergency. It turns out the Alberta Public Health Act already has a provision for government-ordered mandatory vaccines. Please see section 38 in here, see especially pages 27-44.

It seems the former NDP government of Premier Rachel Notley inserted the provision on mandatory vaccination without seeking significant public consultation. Alberta’s current Health Minister, Tyler Shandro, indicated in mid-September that he favours “repealing” the enactment enabling compulsory vaccinations. See this.

I have been publishing articles on the misnamed pandemic since the subject mushroomed into prominence last winter. Some of these articles have been published at Global Research. See this.

My most recent contribution to GR is “The Perversion of Science to Clear the Way for the Imposition of Compulsory Vaccines”.

I have written two major pieces on the crisis, one highlighting the integration of military and public health initiatives in the genesis of a coronavirus that seems to have some attributes of an engineered bioweapon. See this.

I was especially interested in the role of Canadian centers for military and medical research on viruses in both Winnipeg and Lethbridge. See this.

I “follow the money” on the issue of the economic implication of the lockdowns here.

For those who read German this 20,000 word article has been translated and published here.

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After a TV interview on Canada Citizen’s Forum, host Jack Etkin said to me something to the effect of: We’re really in the minority, aren’t we? Probably only 5% of people see through the COVID-19 hoax. 80% completely believe the official story. And 15% fall somewhere in between.

I had to admit I agreed with his math; but I still hold much hope.

If we went back a hundred years to 1920 America the numbers would probably be the same for the Civil Rights Movement: 5% were against racism. 80% thought African-Americans were an inferior race to be mistreated without conscience. And 15% hovered in between.

Today, however, 5% of people are probably true racists, 80% oppose racism, and 15% hover in an apathetic limbo.

If you spoke out against racism in the 1920s you would have been shunned and ridiculed — if you were lucky. We know that many brave people (both black and white) lost property, limbs and life standing up for racial equality.

In contrast, people protesting racism today are hardly going against the majority. Most people agree racism is bad — even the once racist media and government.

Yet with COVID-19 the majority of people believe in the hoax and applaud the governments for stripping them of their civil liberties — a view backed by every TV, radio and wifi connection.

So, like all great freedom movements, we are starting in the 5% minority. The 5% who will be ridiculed for speaking out against social distancingface masks and lockdowns. The 5% who may even be jailed or segregated for refusing vaccinations.

Just as coloured people were ostracized for fear that they spread diseases, now such unscientific bigotry has been extended to every human being — riding on the back of a “pandemic” no more deadly than the regular seasonal flu. In 1920, African-Americans were not allowed into many stores, restaurants, churches, public restrooms or even hospitals. In 2020, people without a mask are facing the same baseless discrimination.

We may be the shunned minority today, but the applauded majority tomorrow. How long will it take for such a tomorrow to arrive? That depends on how brave, active and persistent we are today.

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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, Brave New Normal: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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

A corrupt, manipulative and indolent government in Bolivia, coupled with problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has only exacerbated the many issues the country has faced since Evo Morales was ousted from power on November 10, 2019. Interior Minister Arturo Murillo, the main figurehead of Interim President Jeanine Añez, went to Washington to receive difficult instructions – defeat the candidate for the Movement for Socialism (MAS), Luis Arce. As Evo also belongs to the MAS, Arce is running on the same policy ideas and platform as the former president. 

In the near full year since the accession of Añez to power, Bolivia has regressed in social and economic terms, is tinkering with inflation, and has seen an increase in unemployment and poverty. Arce is an economist and has been recognized as one of the best economic ministers in the region. It was under his ministership that Bolivia was among the countries that greatly reduced poverty, while he also oversaw high growth rates in a sustainable manner.

Today Bolivia has fallen into a deep crisis, and is now far from the growth rates seen under Evo’s administration. Since Añez became president, power and wealth in Bolivia is once again being monopolized and the country is governed by a handful of people whose party did not even have 4% of the electorate in 2014. She did not choose to be president, she was chosen by a group led by the heads of the Bolivian Catholic Church, minor political parties, the Brazilian Embassy and the Jubilee Foundation, with the blessing of Washington.

With elections being held in only 10 days, the legacy of Añez is not only mired by increasing poverty and a decline in the economy, but also corruption scandals, along with the dismantling of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Ministry of Communication and the Ministry of Sports. The consequences are already being felt in the economy. The Sacaba and Senkata massacres, where innocent people were killed, are also on their backs.

Within the Añez government there are three ministers with Croatian roots in key areas – Interior Minister Arturo Murillo, Foreign Minister Karen Longaric and Minister of Economy and Finance Branko Marinkovic. All of them were very politically active, although to get to government they needed a soft coup against Evo.

Marinkovic was accused of taking part in the violent 2009 uprising which also involved the now former minister Óscar Ortiz Antelo. Armed cells led by Bolivian Croats and Hungarians were involved, but the trial that followed the violent uprising attempt was recently shelved following Marinkovic’s appointment as minister. Investigations revealed some politicians and businessmen financed the purchase of weapons, explosives, and other weapons for the group, led by the Bolivian-Hungarian militant Eduardo Rózsa Flores, to assassinate Evo and fragment Bolivia. Canela Crespo, a candidate for the MAS, also revealed on Twitterthat Marinkovic’s parents were involved with the Nazi-collaborating Croatian Far Right Ustaše movement.

Some mistakes by Evo also contributed to the decline that Bolivia is experiencing today. Morales attempted to appease the military, even gifting 100% of their salary as a retirement package. He and his administration trusted many of the generals, the same ones who, according to the ultra-right candidate Luis Fernando Camacho, coordinated the soft coup against Evo.

Without Evo, Bolivia is falling into significant indebtedness that will only reverse all the decreases in poverty, unemployment and dependency that his administration oversaw. With Arce they can recover and continue the path started in 2006 that oversaw all these impressive progresses.

Whoever comes into power in the aftermath of the October 18 elections must avoid devaluation and inflation, whilst also continuing policies that restores production and industries, reduces poverty, renegotiates foreign debt and increases international reserves. However, this can only be done with a sovereign government without genuflecting before powers or credit institutions. Bolivians will have the opportunity to make their choice on October 18, but there are already threats that endanger the legitimacy of the elections because many foreign interests are at stake, especially American, as they would not want a reversion to limitations on foreign ownership of key industries and investments.

Holly K. Sonneland wrote on Americas Society/Council of the Americas that “Añez dropped out of the presidential race on September 17, saying she was doing so because she didn’t want to fracture the anti-MAS vote and thereby allow the MAS presidential candidate, Luis Arce, [to] win.” However, as she highlights, Añez is yet to endorse a candidate, with most of the anti-MAS constituency split between centrist former President Carlos Mesa and Catholic right-wing Luis Fernando Camacho, as well as many of the minor parties.

According to the October 2 CELAG poll, Arce leads with 44.4%, Mesa with 34% and Camacho with 15.2%. If the opposition were able to unite, they would be able to comfortably topple the MAS candidate. However, as usually occurs in post-coup/coup-attempt Latin America, the opposition disintegrates into competing factions and is unable to unite, as we see today in Venezuela. If Arce is successfully elected in 10 days’ time, we can expect a quick reversal of Añez’s policies that led to increased unemployment and poverty, while re-establishing Bolivia’s independent foreign policy – and this is exactly what Washington wants to avoid from occurring.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

In September, 164 fires were recorded across Indigenous territories in the Brazilian Pantanal, the world’s biggest wetland. In August, there were more than 200. Nearly half of the certified Indigenous areas in the region have already been subject to fires that cut off villages, destroyed homes and farms, and sent community members to hospital for respiratory problems.

These are the findings of a study carried out by Agência Pública, an investigative journalism outlet, based on satellite date from INPE, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research. The study analyzed all fire outbreaks reported in the Pantanal this year and showed that the number began increasing at the end of July but really took off in August and September: 72% of all the fires so far this year occurred in these two months.

The satellite data also revealed that in some of the areas hardest hit by the fires, the burning first appeared — and multiplied — on private properties before spreading to the Indigenous territories. Some fires began inside legal reservation areas and native forest on private properties that are supposed to be protected by law and conserved.

Fires in Indigenous territories and protected parks

In all, Agência Pública found fire outbreaks inside five of the 11 Indigenous territories in the municipalities that make up the Pantanal. The reserve with the highest number of outbreaks is also the largest, the Kadiwéu Indigenous Territory, home to the Terena and Kadiwéu peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul state. There have been 176 fire outbreaks there since May this year, most of them in August.

Throughout the rest of the Pantanal, there have been reports of fires in three state parks, one national park, one environmentally protected area, two private reserves, and one ecological station.

All of the municipalities in the Pantanal reported fire outbreaks between July and September. Those with the highest numbers were Poconé and Barão de Melgaço in Mato Grosso state; Encontro das Águas State Park straddles these two municipalities.

‘The fire came suddenly’

“The fire began outside the Indigenous territory. When it came, it came very fast, and crossed into our land from one minute to the next,” said Indigenous educator Estêvão Bororo, also known as Estevinho.

Agência Pública sought him out after seeing on satellite images that the Tereza Cristina Indigenous Territory, home to the Bororo people, was covered in fire outbreaks. There have been 86 of them reported in the territory, which lies in the transition zone between the Cerrado grasslands — South America’s second-largest biome — and the Pantanal in the municipality of Santo Antônio do Leverger, in Mato Grosso state. All but five of those outbreaks were reported in the first two weeks of September alone.

“The land is cut through by the São Lourenço River: the left bank of the river caught fire, cut off two villages, and burned a bridge. Then it advanced toward the Córrego Grande village, which was the hardest hit,” Estevinho said. “It came very fast and even surrounded the homes. Even though the houses themselves didn’t catch fire, our leader had to be taken to Rondonópolis because he inhaled a lot of smoke. We have elderly people, pregnant women, new mothers and children here.”

Fires surround a village of the Bororo people in the Tereza Cristina Indigenous Territory. People were forced to leave their land, and one leader was taken to hospital because of respiratory problems. Image by Estevão Bororo. 

The situation is also critical in Baía dos Guató, the land of the Guató people, in the municipality of Barão de Melgaço, next to Santo Antônio do Leverger. INPE satellite data recorded 57 fire outbreaks in the region in September and 85 in August. Nearly the entire swath of land was consumed by the fires.

“The fires destroyed our farms; they burned our homes,” said community member Alessandra Guató. “They destroyed a very large part of our territory, many trees, animals and birds, harming our fauna and flora and threatening our food safety.

Indigenous people reported that Tadarimana land, near Rondonópolis and outside the Pantanal, suffered earlier from the fires. People had to go there when the fires hit the land Tereza Cristina, in August and September.

“We are very concerned with our forests because it is there that we gather our sustenance and our traditional medicines. The fires have placed all this at risk,” Alessandra added. “We are not finding the herbs we use to treat illnesses and also the acuri palm, which we use to make the roofs on our traditional homes and some utensils, and to make our traditional chicha drink. Everything is disappearing.”

The Guató territory lies near Encontro das Águas State Park, one of the world’s largest refuges for jaguars, which also burned: there were 456 outbreaks in the park in August and September alone. According to a report from G1, 85% of the park’s area was destroyed by the fires.

The case of the Guató territory is an example of how outbreaks can start on private properties and then spread to Indigenous territories and conservation areas. At the beginning of August, there were almost no fires north of the Guató land. But soon fires began to be reported in the legal reserves and native forests lying on private properties north of the Indigenous Guató territory. The fires appeared in the territory later. By the end of August, there were fires across almost the entire Indigenous territory, with 36 reported in a single day.

Indigenous people warn that, aside from destroying vegetation and killing animals, fires affect rivers and leave them vulnerable to silting up. Image by Gustavo Figueiroa/SOS Pantanal.

Delays and budget cuts for firefighters

Agência Pública spoke with an agent at PrevFogo, the National Forest Fire Prevention and Combat System, who asked not to be identified because of fear of retaliation. According to the official, meteorologists had warned that fires were intensifying in 2020 due to higher-than-average temperatures and little rainfall.

The official said strategic planning at the fire agency called for early contracting of firefighters to work on prevention efforts. However, the hiring process, which usually begins in mid-April, only began on June 23.

The agent said this delay in hiring prevented the agency from being able to prevent the fires. “We believe this greatly harmed our work. Our plan was to work on prevention in June so we would have a season with less damage than we are seeing now,” the agent said.

According to a firefighting official, weather data had already predicted the fires in 2020, but the government delayed the hiring of new firefighters, dashing prevention efforts. Image courtesy of PrevFogo. 

Even as they’re affected by the fires spreading across the Pantanal, the Indigenous people are part of the force trying to stop the burning of their territories. According to the most recent information from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental watchdog, four of the five firefighting brigades in Mato Grosso do Sul state are Indigenous.

Eliane Bakairi, from the Federation of Indigenous Peoples of Mato Grosso (FEPOIMT), said there aren’t enough brigades, especially in the most affected territories like Baía dos Guató and the Perigara Indigenous Territory in Barão de Melgaço. She also said that budget cuts at PrevFogo are affecting their work.

The Indigenous brigades are part of PrevFogo’s Federal Brigades Program, which is part of IBAMA and is tasked with controlling, preventing and combating forest fires. However, according to a report by Deutsche Welle, between 2019 and 2020, the federal government slashed funding for PrevFogo by 58%, or 13.79 million reais ($2.45 million), impacting the hiring of firefighters to prevent and control forest fires.

Fires between the cities of Miranda e Corumbá. Image by Chico Ribeiro/Governo MT. 

Fewer fines for environmental crimes

Under the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, IBAMA has been imposing fewer fines throughout Brazil for environmental violations, and the Pantanal is no exception. According to data collected by Agência Pública, there was a 71% drop in the number of flora-related fines in the Pantanal in 2019, the first year of Bolsonaro’s presidency, compared to the previous year. Fines in this category are imposed for infractions including deforestation and illegal burning.

The numbers continued to drop in 2020. By the end of August, 21 fines had been recorded in the municipalities inside the Pantanal. It was the lowest number for the period going back a decade. In 2019, there was more than double that figure, 54 fines, issued within this region between January and August.

The number of fines imposed in 2019 fell in 10 of the 16 municipalities that make up the Pantanal, compared to 2018. Among them is Corumbá, the city with the largest number of fire outbreaks reported this season and where an investigation into possible criminal activity related to the setting of the fires is underway.

“People ended up feeling at liberty to commit environmental crimes. This attitude is being reinforced by the president himself,” an IBAMA firefighter told our reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity. The firefighter said the agency has been having difficulties embargoing properties and destroying the machinery used for environmental crimes, which has made control difficult.

In August, Agência Pública revealed a similar situation in the Amazon, where the number of fines imposed has fallen in regions with more deforestation.

Our reporters sought comment from IBAMA and Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, but did not receive a response.

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This article was first published in Portuguese by Agência Pública, translated to English by Maya Johnson.

The arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture known as Wildlife Services killed approximately 1.2 million native animals in 2019, according to new data released by the program this week.

The multimillion-dollar federal wildlife-killing program targets wolves, coyotes, cougars, birds and other wild animals for destruction, primarily to benefit the agriculture industry in states like Texas, Colorado and Idaho. Of the 2.2 million animals killed last year, approximately 1.2 million were native wildlife species.

“Year after year Wildlife Services continues to needlessly kill wildlife, even though effective tools exist to prevent most conflicts,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The scientific consensus is that killing carnivores like coyotes to benefit the livestock industry just leads to more conflicts and more killing. This taxpayer-funded slaughter needs to stop.”

According to the latest report, the federal program last year intentionally killed 301 gray wolves; 61,882 adult coyotes, plus an unknown number of coyote pups in 251 destroyed dens; 364,734 red-winged blackbirds; 393 black bears; 300 mountain lions; 777 bobcats; 124 river otters plus 489 killed “unintentionally”; 2,447 foxes, plus an unknown number of red fox pups in 94 dens; and 24,543 beavers.

The program also killed 14,098 prairie dogs outright, as well as an unknown number killed in more than 35,226 burrows that were destroyed or fumigated. These figures almost certainly underestimate the actual number of animals killed, as program insiders have revealed that Wildlife Services kills many more animals than it reports.

According to the new data, the wildlife-killing program unintentionally killed more than 2,624 animals in 2019, including bears, bobcats, mountain lions, a wolf, foxes, muskrats, otters, porcupines, raccoons and turtles. Its killing of non-target birds included ducks, eagles, swallows, herons and turkeys.

Dozens of domestic animals, including pets and livestock, were also killed or caught. Such data reveals the indiscriminate nature of leghold traps, snares, poisons and other methods used by federal agents.

Last year Wildlife Services poisoned nearly 8,200 animals using M-44 cyanide bombs. Of these deaths 209 were unintentional, including those of a black bear, two dogs and dozens of foxes. Its use of M-44s has increased since 2018, when the program used M-44s to kill 6,579 animals.

“I’m sickened by the thought of intelligent and beautiful animals like wolves and mountain lions suffering and dying from poisons and in strangulation snares and cruel leghold traps,” Adkins said. “We’re doing everything we can to shut down the Wildlife Services program.”

The wildlife-killing program contributed to the decline of gray wolves, Mexican wolves, black-footed ferrets, black-tailed prairie dogs and other imperiled species during the first half of the 1900s and continues to impede their recovery today.

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One of the most imposing features of state-corporate propaganda is its incessant, repetitive nature. Over and over again, the ‘mainstream’ media have to convince the public that ‘our’ government prioritises the health, welfare and livelihoods of the general population, rather than the private interests of an elite stratum of society that owns and runs all the major institutions, banks, corporations and media.

We are constantly bombarded by government ministers and their media lackeys telling us that ‘our’ armed forces require huge resources, at public expense, to maintain the country’s ‘peace’ and ‘security’. We do not hear so much about the realpolitik of invading, bombing or otherwise ‘intervening’ in other countries with military force, diplomatic muscle, and bribes of trade and aid deals to carve up natural resources and markets for the benefit of a few.

For those old enough to remember 2002-2003, who can forget the endless repeated rhetoric of the ‘threat’ posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, of how his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ could be launched within 45 minutes of his order, and how ‘we’ simply had to remove him from power? Or how, in 2011, the US, UK and France had to launch ‘humanitarian intervention’ to stop the ‘mass slaughter’ of civilians by Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. And on and on.

Moreover, the public is saturated by obsequious ‘news’ about the royal family, allowing for the odd scandal now and again, to convince us of their ‘relevance’, the ‘great work’ they do for the country, not least ‘boosting the tourism industry’, and their supposedly vital role in maintaining a ‘stable society’ steeped in tradition and rich history.

But when it comes to arguably the most important political trial in our lifetimes, there is a not-so-curious media reluctance to dwell on it or even mention it, never mind grant it the kind of blanket coverage that celebrity trials regularly generate.

Thus, media attention given to the extradition hearing of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and editor, was minimal and dwarfed by the coverage devoted to the actor Johnny Depp over the summer.

We monitored BBC News at Ten, the main evening BBC news programme on BBC1, during the four weeks of the Assange hearing. As far as we could tell, there was not a single substantive item (there may have been passing mention on the first day). We observed that the last time Paul Royall, the editor of BBC News at Ten, had mentioned Assange in his daily tweets giving the running order for that evening’s News at Ten was in November 2019. We challenged Royall politely several times on Twitter, but received no response. We received the same non-response from deputy editor Lizzi Watson and her colleague Jonathan Whitaker.

We also challenged Daniel Sandford, the BBC’s home affairs correspondent whose remit, according to his Twitter bio, includes law.

We asked him:

 

To his credit, Sandford did at least respond, unlike the majority of his BBC colleagues in recent years. He told us:

Those words – ‘slightly repetitive’ – look destined to become Sandford’s journalistic epitaph. Ironically, they have been endlessly repeated back to him by members of the public who were understandably incredulous, perplexed, irritated or even angry at his dismissive response to Assange’s ordeal and the huge implications of the trial.

We asked Sandford why he had never mentioned the testimony of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture:

We received no further response from the BBC correspondent. However, Rebecca Vincent, Director of International Campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, followed up our challenge and told Sandford:

Sandford bristled:

‘Pile-on’ is the pejorative term used when a journalist receives critical replies from the public. Unfortunately, Sandford had received some abuse, but most people made polite and rational points. As we have learned over the years, most journalists hate being challenged by informed members of the public. And any instances of abuse – usually in the minority – are often leaned upon as an excuse to ignore or dismiss all challenges.

The home affairs correspondent continued:

Rebecca Vincent replied again:

Teymoor Nabili, a former news presenter on Al Jazeera, BBC and CNBC, replied to Sandford:

Indeed. In the ‘mainstream’ media – BBC News included – ‘press freedom’ amounts to publishing power-friendly ‘news’ articles, biased ‘analysis’ and commentary, and diversionary pabulum and tittle-tattle.

Journalist Mohammed Elmaazi, who had been reporting daily from the trial, also replied to Sandford:

As John McEvoy noted in a piece on The Canary website:

‘To write about the greatest press freedom case in recent history, it has been necessary to rely almost exclusively on the work of independent journalists.’

An extensive list of these journalists can be found here.

Richard Medhurst, one of the independent journalists reporting the trial, made a powerful short speech outside the Old Bailey on one of the final days. The trial, and the lack of media coverage, was ‘an abomination’, he said. So too was the fact that the West’s war criminals were not even mentioned in court – Tony Blair, George Bush, Jack Straw, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest. In sum, the hearing was:

‘An absolute mockery of any kind of semblance of justice in this country’.

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray concurred when he too spoke outside the Old Bailey, saying of Assange:

‘His ordeal goes on and on. And all because he published the truth. There is no allegation in that court room that anything he published was a lie. Anything he published was true. And much of that truth revealed terrible crimes – war crimes and crimes against humanity, and lies and corruption by government. And not one of the people who committed those war crimes is on trial anywhere. Instead we have the man who had the courage to reveal those war crimes is the one whose liberty is at stake.’

A Twitter commenter made a point about one of the independent reporters at the trial:

Gosztola, editor of Shadowproof.com website, followed up with:

And yet, bizarrely, there was a BBC reporter present throughout the Assange hearing, according to both Rebecca Vincent and James Doleman of Byline Times, who was providing daily trial updates. As Vincent noted:

So, what was happening to the reports that were presumably being submitted by the BBC reporter? Nobody could tell us, including the ever-silent editors of BBC News at Ten.

Investigative journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis of Declassified UK have extensively studied numerous aspects of the Assange extradition hearing and published seven articles concerning legal irregularities and conflicts of interest in the case. These articles revealed:

  1. Julian Assange’s judge and her husband’s links to the British military establishment exposed by WikiLeaks
  2. The son of Julian Assange’s judge is linked to an anti-data leak company created by the UK intelligence establishment
  3. Chief magistrate in Assange case received financial benefits from secretive partner organisations of UK Foreign Office
  4. UK minister who approved Trump’s request to extradite Assange spoke at secretive US conferences with people calling for him to be “neutralized”
  5. At risk from coronavirus, Julian Assange is one of just two inmates in Belmarsh maximum-security prison held for skipping bail
  6. UK government refuses to release information about Assange judge who has 96% extradition record
  7. As British judge made rulings against Julian Assange, her husband was involved with right-wing lobby group briefing against WikiLeaks founder

BBC News and other corporate media could certainly not be accused of being at all ‘repetitive’ about such deeply damaging aspects of the extradition hearing.

Observing the court proceedings from the limited space of the public gallery day by day, Murray warned:

‘It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that [magistrate Vanessa] Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.

‘I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.’

Murray added:

‘The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.’

In a superb piece for Consortium News, political commentator Alexander Mercouris demolished the shifting and nonsensical US case for extradition. He nailed the fundamental reason that Washington is pursuing Assange:

‘Julian Assange and his organization WikiLeaks, have done those things which the U.S. government and its national security apparatus most fear, and have worked hardest to prevent, by exposing the terrible reality of much of what the U.S. government now routinely does, and is determined to conceal, and what much of the media is helping the U.S. government to conceal.’

He continued:

‘the true purpose of the U.S. government’s relentless pursuit of Assange is to prevent him from exposing more of its crimes, and to punish him for exposing those of its crimes which he did expose, if only so as to deter others from doing the same thing, is perfectly obvious to any unbiased and realistic observer.’

Mercouris added:

‘Assange and WikiLeaks have exposed rampant war crimes and human rights abuses over the course of illegal wars waged by the U.S. government and its allies.  The death toll from these wars runs at the very least into the tens of thousands, and more plausibly into the hundreds of thousands or even millions.’

In conclusion:

‘In other words, it is Assange and his sources, first and foremost Chelsea Manning, who are the defenders of international law, including the Nuremberg Principles, and including in the case which is currently underway, whilst it is those who persecute them, including by bringing the current case against Assange, who are international law’s violators.

‘This is the single most important fact about this case, and it explains everything about it.’

At the end of the trial, RT’s Afshin Rattansi noted:

We highlighted that last sentence on our Twitter feed, adding:

This, of course, is a central reason why state-corporate ‘journalists’ are so disinterested in the trial. The overwhelming majority simply do not – cannot – see themselves threatened by Washington’s assault on real journalism and truth-telling.

Closing Scene: A BBC Man Appears

On the penultimate day of the four-week hearing, the BBC’s avuncular veteran reporter John Simpson turned up (‘Still with BBC after 53 yrs, trying to make sense of a mad world’, says his Twitter bio): someone we had sparred with on the topic of Iraq in the early days of Media Lens.

He tweeted after his day at court:

Simpson’s comment was not entirely accurate or comprehensive. According to whistleblower testimony presented at the Old Bailey by former employees of UC Global, a Spanish security company, attempts had allegedly been made by the company to bug Assange and his lawyers inside the Ecuador embassy, under the auspices of the CIA. That fact alone should have been sufficient to throw out any court case against Assange, given the supposedly sacrosanct confidentiality of private legal conversations between lawyers and clients. There were even proposals by UC Global to kidnap or poison the WikiLeaks publisher on behalf of the CIA. Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal has done valuable work in exposing all of this, as he detailed in an interview with Deepa Driver of the campaign group Don’t Extradite Assange, and in an extensive article for The Grayzone website.

These shocking details appear never to have surfaced in BBC coverage, such as it was. On October 2 – the day after the hearing had ended – we observed that there had been just four articles published on the website during the hearing. One was a short, bland report of the first day of the case. Two were more ‘human interest’ pieces about Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, and their two children. A fourth piece was titled, ‘Julian Assange: Campaigner or attention seeker’. Perhaps ‘the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster’believes the latter to be the case, thus deciding to all but ignore the hearing and its serious implications for justice, journalism and democracy.

It is worth noting that Stuart Millar is the digital news editor at BBC News, so presumably has responsibility for the website. He is the former head of news at the Guardian. This ‘comical’ tweet about Assange dates from Millar’s time at the Guardian:

Yet more proof, if any were needed, of the groupthink that prevails among even the most ‘respected’ media outlets. If you need to demonstrate that your media credentials are bona fide – that you are ‘one of us’ – making a ‘joke’ at the expense of Julian Assange is a sure-fire way to show you can be trusted.

It would never do, for example, to give headline coverage to the CIA-instigated spying of Assange in the Ecuador embassy, the torture he is enduring by his incarceration, his parlous mental and physical state, the real risk of suicide should he be extradited to the US, almost certainly being dumped into the ‘hellhole’ of a ‘supermax’ US prison. All of this is to ensure that Assange serves as a warning example to anyone – anywhere in the world – who might dare to publish information that the US government does not wish to be made public.

Such grotesquely disturbing details did not even approach becoming ‘slightly repetitive’ to consumers of BBC News. Instead, they were buried. The BBC could, for instance, have interviewed Fidel Narvaez, former Ecuadorian Consul, to speak about the spying (which took place after Narvaez had been replaced in the embassy, following the election of Ecuador president, Lenin Moreno, who has been bending over backwards to do the US’s bidding under Donald Trump).

BBC journalists, and other ‘mainstream’ reporters could have included something of Noam Chomsky’s five-page submission to the hearing in support of Assange. They could have printed just one line, namely that Assange:

‘has performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy’.

Reporters routinely behave as stenographers to power – the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and ITV’s political editor Robert Peston are prime examples. But to be a stenographer to cogent commentary from Noam Chomsky is, of course, unthinkable. As we pointed out on Twitter on October 2, the day after the hearing ended, Kuenssberg has mentioned Assange a grand total of four times on her Twitter account – all back in 2014. Then, she had asked blankly:

‘What do you think should happen to him?’

Her silence on the extradition hearing spoke volumes: BBC News in a nutshell.

As far as we can tell from Twitter searches, Peston last mentioned Julian Assange on January 29, 2017. When we published a media alert last month that discussed Assange, we challenged Peston and Kuenssberg about their long-term silence on the WikiLeaks founder. Needless to say, they did not reply.

Likewise, other high-profile media figures including the BBC’s Andrew Marr, Huw Edwards, Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson, and Sky News political editor Adam Boulton, kept quiet when we asked them to explain their silence on Assange.

As US comedian Jimmy Dore said:

‘Free Julian Assange’ campaigner John Mcghee, one of those protesting outside the Old Bailey on the day John Simpson was there, wrote an account of having met the BBC world affairs editor and enjoying a warm friendly exchange:

‘We talked for a few minutes and he revealed to me his incomprehension at the glaring absence of media representatives in or indeed outside the Old Bailey. He was genuinely shocked by the fact that a mainstream media embargo has apparently been imposed on the trial of the century that could sound the death knell for freedom of speech the world over.’

Certainly, some credit is due to John Simpson for reporting on the extradition hearing on that day’s BBC Radio 4 PM Programme. But it was a short segment of just 3 mins, 28 secs near the end of the hour-long programme, and it wasn’t even trailed at the start of PM. Shocked or not, Simpson certainly made no mention of his ‘incomprehension’ at the lack of media coverage.

Moreover, although it included short quotes from Stella Moris, Assange’s partner, and Jen Robinson, one of Assange’s lawyers, it was a thin piece that even repeated the debunked claim that US agents and informers had been harmed as a result of the work of WikiLeaks and Assange. It missed out so much of importance that was being diligently chronicled daily by Craig Murray. His detailed updates included copious vital facts that were glaringly absent from almost all ‘mainstream’ coverage; in particular BBC News.

Simpson reacted with short shrift (or silence) to those who complained to him on Twitter about the dearth of BBC coverage. He replied to one:

We are aware that the BBC did not totally blank Assange. But surely even Simpson could recognise that coverage had been pitifully inadequate given the importance and possible repercussions of the case? No ‘conspiracy theory’ is required. It is simply a fact.

Recently, when Tim Davie, the new BBC director general, tried to make his mark by declaring:

he was asked by MPs ‘about the impartiality of those who work for the BBC’. But so far, none of them have asked about the impartiality of those who work for the BBC and have tweeted (or reported) nothing about a hugely significant political trial taking place in this country. It is what John Pilger rightly calls, ‘lying by omission’.

We sent an open tweet to any prospective BBC whistleblowers struggling with their consciences:

Nobody has responded, so far.

‘Shaming’

Afshin Rattansi interviewed John Pilger about the Assange hearing and its ramifications on the Going Underground programme on RT (which, as Twitter is keen to tell everyone, is ‘Russia state-affiliated media’. As yet, BBC News Twitter accounts have not been labelled as ‘UK state-affiliated media’).

Rattansi asked Pilger to respond to Daniel Sandford’s excuse for not reporting on the hearing as it was ‘slightly repetitive’. Pilger said:

‘For that BBC journalist to describe [the hearing] as “repetitive” doesn’t quite leave me speechless. But it leaves me with a sense that it’s over with much of the media.’

He explained:

‘To watch this day after day. This extraordinary, important trial telling us so much about how those who govern us, those who want to control our lives, and what they do to other countries, how they lie to us – watch this day after day and see none of it reported. Or, if you do see it reported, you’ll see something like “Assange told to pipe down” by the judge on a day – he only did this two or three times, I don’t know how he kept his mouth shut – where he stood up and protested at evidence that was clearly false and offensive to him. That was the headline. That was the story of the day.’

One vital example was when Assange was wrongly accused by the prosecution lawyers of having endangered the lives of US agents and their informers in releasing WikiLeaks documents that had not been redacted of names. This endlessly repeated propaganda claim was refuted by the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who testified on behalf of Assange:

‘I have also spoken to [Assange] privately over many hours. During 2010 and 2011, at a time when some of the published material had not yet seen the light of day, I was able to observe [Julian’s] approach. It was the exact opposite of reckless publication and nor would he wilfully expose others to harm.

‘Wikileaks could have published the entirety of the material on receipt. Instead I was able to observe but also to discuss with him the unprecedented steps he initiated, of engaging with conventional media partners, [to maximise] the impact of publication [so] it might [best] affect US government policy and its alteration.’

Award-winning Australian journalist Mark Davis was an eye-witness to the preparation of the Afghan War Logs in 2010 for newspaper publication, documented in Davis’s film, ‘Inside Wikileaks’. Davis spoke at a public meeting in Sydney last year and said that he was present alongside Assange in the Guardian’s ‘bunker’ where a team from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel worked on the publication of articles based on, as the NYT put it:

‘a six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war.’

Davis attests that, far from being ‘cavalier’ about releasing documents that might endanger lives, it was:

‘Guardian journalists [who] neglected and appeared to care little about redacting the documents.’

Moreover:

‘They had a “graveyard humour” about people being harmed and no one, he stated emphatically, expressed concern about civilian casualties except Julian Assange.’

Assange had:

‘subsequently requested that the release of the Afghan War Logs be delayed for the purpose of redaction, but the Guardian not only insisted on the agreed date, they abandoned him to redact 10,000 documents alone.’

In fact, Assange worked through the night to do this, after the Guardian journalists had gone home.

Moreover, the claim that lives had been put at risk by WikiLeaks in publishing US cables could not even be substantiated by the US itself. As Patrick Cockburn observed in the Independent:

‘The Pentagon has admitted that it failed to find a single person covertly working for the US who had been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures. This failure was not for lack of trying: The Pentagon had set up a special military task force, deploying 120 counter-intelligence officers, to find at least one death that could be blamed on Assange and his colleagues but had found nothing.’

In the same RT interview mentioned earlier, Rattansi asked about the role of the Guardian in the Assange case; something we have documented at length. Pilger summed up their ‘campaign of vilification against Assange, the way they turned on their source, as ‘a disgrace’.

In an interview for the Australian magazine Arena, Pilger expanded on this important component of the Assange story:

‘How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assange’s work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian’s David Leigh, now retired as “investigations editor” and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardianscoop” that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assange—written behind their subject’s back—disclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardian’s ‘partnership’. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.’

He continued:

‘Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.’

True to their role as ‘leftist’ Guardian figleaves, neither Owen Jones nor George Monbiot published an article so much as mentioning Julian Assange during the four-week hearing. Jones tweeted ‘support’ by linking back to an article he published in April 2019. Monbiot stumped up the energy to send out three token tweets. But he tweeted nothing about Nils Melzer, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky or the shocking revelations from UC Global whistleblowers about spying on Assange, along with CIA-sponsored plans to kidnap or poison him.

One Twitter user asked:

‘Why are people “spooked” by the Assange case? It’s a genuine question, the media silence is weird, even on the left, @AyoCaesar @AaronBastani @GeorgeMonbiot to name a few.

‘What’s stopping them from screaming this from the rooftops? Are they scared, threatened, what?’

Monbiot at least replied:

‘I’ve tweeted about it many times. But for me it’s one of hundreds of crucial issues, many of which are even more important. It’s terrible, but compared to, say, soil loss, it’s a long way down my list.’

Challenged further about his near-silence, he said:

‘I have nothing to add to what others have already said. I never write about an issue unless I have something new and original to say. It’s not about ticking boxes for me, it’s about expanding the field.’

We responded:

‘What a happy coincidence that @GeorgeMonbiot can find nothing “new and original” to say about Assange, who has been targeted with a ferocious smear campaign by his employer. Try citing @NilsMelzer’s arguments, George, that would be “expanding the field” for most Guardian readers.’

As the former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook noted:

‘Monbiot could have served as a counterweight to the relentless maligning of Assange in the Guardian’s pages by pointing out how these smears were unfounded. Instead he has either echoed those smears, or equivocated on them, or remained silent.’

Cook added:

‘Monbiot is not the free thinker, the fearless investigator of difficult truths, the leftwing conscience he claims to be. It is not really his fault. It is in the nature of the function he serves at the Guardian …He enjoys the freedom to speak out loudly on the dangers of environmental destruction, but that freedom comes at a price – that he closely adhere to the technocratic, liberal consensus on other issues.’

In short:

‘Monbiot, therefore, treads the finest line of all the Guardian’s columnists. His position is the most absurd, the one plagued with the biggest internal contradiction: he must sell extreme environmental concern from within a newspaper that is entirely embedded in the economic logic of the very neoliberal system that is destroying the planet.’

This is supremely relevant to the Assange case. Because if the US wins, then journalism and the public’s ability to know what is going in the world will be even more crushed than they already are. And that spells disaster for avoiding worldwide environmental breakdown in an era of rampant global capitalism.

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Featured image is from Lawyers for Assange

Libya on Tuesday refused to assume the presidency of the current session of the Arab League, after Palestine resigned the position in protest at the organisation’s failure to take a stand against the UAE-Bahrain normalisation deals with Israel.

Qatar also rejected the Arab League presidency towards the end of last month.

A spokesman for the Libyan Government of National Accord’s foreign ministry, Mohammed Al-Qablawi, said that the country had informed the Arab League of its decision.

He added that Libya was looking forward to assuming the presidency of the Arab League “under better circumstances” and that the country “reserved the right to chair the Arab League”, Al-Jazeera Arabic reported.

The Palestinians assumed the rotating presidency of the Arab League last month and were due to stay in that role until next March.

However, after Arab League foreign ministers refused to condemn the UAE and Bahrain normalisation deals with Israel, or even agree to a resolution affirming support for Palestinian rights, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki announced Palestine’s resignation from the Arab League Presidency on 22 September.

He said that the organisation had shown “a regression in values and principles”. The UAE and Bahrain normalisation deals with Israel represent a major break with the Arab League’s 2002 Peace Initiative, which offers Israel normal relations only in return for a full withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory.

The Palestinians have condemned the normalisation deals as a “betrayal”, saying that they allow Israel to continue to occupy the West Bank and East Jerusalem and besiege the Gaza Strip.

Senior Palestinian official Saeb Erakat has called on Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit to resign for his comments praising the deals.

Qatar was next in line for the Arab League presidency after the Palestinians resigned but announced that it would not take up the role until 2021.

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Greece: Golden Dawn Trial Ends with Guilty Verdict

October 8th, 2020 by Freedom News

The heavily guarded Court of Appeals of Athens delivered the verdicts today in a five-year-long Golden Dawn trial.

Thousands gathered in an antifascist rally outside of the court this morning to await the ruling. The trial, widely covered in Greek media, was dubbed “great trial” and historic due to the number of defendants, the seriousness of charges and its political implications.

The 454th court sitting in the case started shortly after 11am Greek time.  In the most important charge, that of creating and running of a criminal organisation, the court found the Golden Dawn leadership guilty.

The leadership members found guilty are: Nikos Michaloliakos (GoldenDawn leader) Ilias Kasidiaris (former MP) Ioannis Lagos (former MP and sitting MEP) Giorgos Germenis (former MP) Ilias Panagiotaros (former MP) Christos Pappas (former MP) Artemis Mattheopoulos (former MP).

The verdicts for the rest of the defendants will be announced later today, and Freedom will update this text as they come.

Golden Dawn leadership and members, including the party’s leader and founder Nikolaos Michaloliakos, were arrested shortly after the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, a popular Greek rapper using the stage name Killah P and known for his leftist politics, in September 2013.

It was the largest prosecution of nazis since Nuremberg. The court compiled a 15,000-page dossier detailing the Golden Dawn crimes since 2008, and charged 68 defendants, including Golden Dawn leadership, all members of its parliamentary club, and a currently sitting Greek MEP. They were charged with an array of crimes, including robberies, beatings, intimidation, illegal arms possession, attempted murders and murders; and the most serious and politically charged one: the creation, under the disguise of a political party, of an organised crime group.

Golden Dawn was founded by Nikolaos Michaloliakos in the 1980s. Michaloliakos was no stranger to nazi politics and violence. In the 1970s, while in prison, he met Georgios Papadopoulos: the head of the military coup d’état that took place in Greece in April 1967, and leader of the junta that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. Michaloliakos was serving a 13-month prison sentence for bomb attacks on Athens cinemas screening soviet films, while Papadopoulos was serving a life sentence for his role in the Greek dictatorship. During World War II, Papadopoulos was an active Axis collaborator in the Security Battalions which hunted down Greek resistance fighters.

Shortly after his release from prison, Michaloliakos set up a nazi magazine “Golden Dawn”. One of the magazine’s issues featured a photo of Adolf Hitler on its cover, with the caption “heroic visionary of Europe”. The magazine turned into a political party in 1983. For years, the party struggled with irrelevance, scoring something like 0,1% in polls. In 2005, Golden Dawn activities were suspended due to the clashes with anarchists and the party members were instructed to organise within the closely related Patriotic Alliance party. The breakthrough came in 2010, when Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens Council, and the party’s support and membership started to grow. In 2012, Golden Dawn entered the Greek Parliament.

Image on the right: Pavlos Fyssas performing in 2011. Photo by John D. Carnessiotis

The murder of Pavlos Fyssas

On the evening of 17th of September 2013, Pavlos Fyssas went to the Korali cafe in his neighbourhood Keratsini in Piraeus. He was in a company of his girlfriend and a group of friends. They had planned to watch a Champions League football match in which the Greek club Olympiakos was playing. In the cafe, they were spotted by a group of laud and aggressively behaving men who quickly started to harass the rapper, shouting that they know who he is and claiming that his songs are just some leftist bullshit. Pavlos and friends quickly figured that the intimidating men are local neo-nazis and decided to leave the cafe.

Despite the late hour, about 30 strong group of men, armed with baseball bats and dressed in black t-shirts with the swastika-like meander adapted by Golden Dawn as its symbol, was waiting for Fyssas and his friends, who then decided to run.

The nazis caught up with them just before the group managed to reach the nearby high street. That’s when the beating started. Police were called, but, as per usual with Golden Dawn violence, chose not to intervene. It was nearing midnight.

At this point, a Golden Dawn member Giorgos Roupakias drove to the scene of the fight, parked his car, went straight to Pavlos and repeatedly stabbed him, turning the knife inside his body to be sure the wounds are lethal. Pavlos died shortly after midnight that night. Before his death, he identified Roupakias as his killer. He was also later identified by two students: witnesses of the events.

Roupakias is a dedicated Golden Dawn member and had attended both its political and combat workshops. He was a vice-leader of Golden Dawn’s Nikaia neighbourhood chapter “strike brigade”, and worked in the cafeteria of the party’s offices. He was today found guilty on all charges.

In June 2019, a Golden Dawn member Ioannis Aggos testified during the trial that it was he who set in motion the chain of events which lead to the murder of Fyssas. Aggos stated that he was sitting nearby Pavlos and his party at the Koralia cafe that night and called Ioannis Kazantzoglou, a high ranking Golden Dawn member from the Nikaia chapter, to report to him the rapper’s whereabouts. The murderer Roupakias himself called Giorgos Patelis: the leader of the Nikaia chapter. Patelis in turn called Yiannis Lagos (now the MEP and the defendant in the trial). Patelis and Lagos were continuously in touch with each other via phone until 2.30am that night.

Named after another Piraeus neighbourhood, the Nikaia chapter of Golden Dawn was notorious for violence. Only 6 days before the murder of Pavlos, they have partaken in a savage beating of the PAME trade unionists who were putting up posters in Perama, near Piraeus. This incident also occurred at night and saw about 50 Golden Dawn members armed with iron bars attacking a group of about 30 communists, sending 8 of them to the hospital. The court ruled today to reduce the charge in this case, from attempted murder to grievous bodily harm.

Attacks on migrant people

While Golden Dawn was known for horrific violence against its political opponents, LGBTQ+ community, alternative artists and everybody else they considered “undesirable”, they were mainly focussed on violence, intimidation and harassment of the Greek migrant community, with a particular focus on people from Africa and Asia.

Golden Dawn have set on the mission to “cleanse” Greece of migrants, and their crimes in a pursue of it are pretty much countless.

The Golden Dawn’s mission to “cleanse” Greece of migrants flared up in 2009, when the party activists descended on Agios Panteleimonas square in Athens, where they have effectively occupied and shut down a kid’s playground because the fascists didn’t want Greek children to play with migrant children. The playground was closed down by the Golden Dawn members, and its occupation lasted until 2015, when, after 6 years, the playground was opened for all by the Antifa Social Center “Distomo” activists and given back to the children: Greek and migrant alike.

One of the many charges in the Golden Dawn trial was for the beating of Abuzid Embarak, an Egyptian fisherman, during a late-night attack on his home where he lived with two others.

Testifying in court in September 2016, Abuzid Embarak described how, on 12th June 2012, 17 or 18 Golden Dawn members, all dressed in black and armed with iron bars, attacked him as he slept on the terrace of his home in Perama district in Athens. The attack left him near-dead and unable to eat solid foods for six months. During his testimony, more than four years after the attack, he still has not recovered, was unable to work fully and could not stand for long periods.

He told the court that he has passed out during the attack, and that “If they knew I was still alive, they would never have left. They believed I was dead – and then they said ‘go’.”

During Abizid’s testimony, the court had to warn the fascists’ lawyers that they are breaching the curt protocols, as, in the attempt to belittle his statement, they were talking loudly and laughing. One of the fascist lawyers, defending the Golden Dawn MP Christos Pappas, demanded to know if the victim worked in Greece legally. Another of Golden Dawn lawyers claimed that Abizid was being paid by George Soros for his testimony.

The court today found all three defendants charged with the attempted murder of Abuzid Embarak guilty.

Another horrific Golden Dawn crime happened in 2010, when the party members locked with padlocks the only door to a basement where 40 people from Bangladesh were praying, threw Molotov cocktails inside, and stood outside watching it burn. The fire was, thankfully,  put out by the people trapped inside, who also called the police. The cops, on their arrival, told the nazis to disperse.

Today’s verdict, if guilty, will likely be the end of Golden Dawn as a political party and a massive blow to Greece’s neo-nazis. However, in the anticipation of the verdict, some Golden Dawn members have already set up two new nazi groupings, and are unlikely to stop their hateful activities. But, at least, they will be doing it without having a parliamentary representation allowing them legitimacy in the mainstream politics, and without the 8 million Euro government subsidy granted to Golden Dawn due to its presence in the Greek parliament, and frozen pending the trial verdict.

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Some of the Golden Dawn crimes, and the plight of migrants in Greece, are described in the 2013 Reel News film Into the Fire:

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Featured image: Golden Dawn members at a rally in Athens, 2015. Credit: DTRocks, published under CC BY-SA 4.0

We don’t hear about them very often, but the estimated 800 US military bases around the globe have played an essential role in turning the whole world into a bloody battlefield. Any effort to roll back US empire has to include dismantling the machinery of US military bases.

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The estimated eight hundred US bases in more than seventy countries around the world are a massive military presence unlike anything else seen today, yet rarely acknowledged in US political discourse.

The Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa might occasionally grab a headline thanks to sustained and vigorous anti-base protests, and US military bases in Guam might briefly make news due to public opposition to “Valiant Shield” war exercises that have taken place on the US colony during the pandemic. But, overwhelmingly, foreign bases simply are not discussed.

They are immutable, unremarkable facts, rarely considered even during an election cycle that repeatedly invokes concepts like “democracy” and “endless war” and, thanks to a raging pandemic and climate crisis, raises existential questions about what “America” is and should be.

The people living in the countries and US colonies impacted by these bases — the workers who build their plumbing systems, latrines, and labor in the sex trades that often spring up around them, the residents subjected to environmental toxins and war exercises — simply do not exist.

Yet according to David Vine, a political anthropologist at American University, these military bases hold the key to understanding why the United States has consistently been in some state of war or military invasion for nearly every year of its existence as a country.

The United States of War by David Vine

In his new book, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, Vine starts with a simple premise: US military bases around the world, from Diego Garcia to Djibouti, are nuts and bolts in the war machine itself. Military bases provide the logistical, supply, and combat support that has allowed the United States to turn the whole world into its battlefield. They make conflict more likely, and then more wars lead to more military bases, in a vicious cycle of expansion and empire.

“Put another way,” Vine writes, “bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”

Any effort to understand the US government’s near-constant state of war since independence must examine this key infrastructure — not only in its present form, but dating back to the days of Manifest Destiny when “foreign” forts were outposts on Native American land.

While the idea that the global expansion of military bases corresponds with the rise of US empire may seem obvious, this book convincingly shows that it is both consequence and cause. Vine brilliantly documents the way widespread global military positions — which are always sold to the public as defensive — are, by their very nature, offensive and become their own, self-fulfilling ecosystems of conquest.

Just as the “induced demand” principle shows why building more lanes on highways actually increases traffic, United States of War makes the argument that military bases themselves incentivize and perpetuate military aggression, coups, and meddling.

From Manifest Destiny to Global Empire

The trajectory toward empire started with white settler expansion within the United States. In 1785, the US Army initiated what “would become a century-long continent-wide fort-construction program,” Vine writes. These forts were used to launch violent invasions of Native American lands, to protect white settler towns and cities, and to force Native Americans further and further away from the East Coast.

They were also used to expand the fur trade, which, in turn, encouraged other settlers to keep moving west, with some forts functioning in part as trading posts. The famed expedition of Lewis and Clark was a military mission (Meriwether Lewis was an army captain and William Clark a former infantry company commander) to collect geographic data that would be used for more “fort construction, natural resource exploitation and westward colonization by settlers,” Vine notes.

While the United States was expanding its frontier, its Navy was also pursuing fort construction overseas, from North Africa’s Barbary Coast to Chile, often for the purpose of securing trade advantages. In the thirty years following the war of 1812 — primarily a war of US expansion — settlers pushed westward within the United States, building infrastructure as they went: roads, trails, and more than sixty major forts west of the Mississippi River by the 1850s. After the United States went to war with Mexico, army bases were constructed in the annexed territory. Forts in Wyoming protected wagon trails, allowing settlers to expand through the western United States.

The violent conquest and massacre of Native Americans did not stop during the Civil War, and it escalated from 1865 to 1898, when “the U.S. Army fought no fewer than 943 distinct engagements against Native peoples, ranging from ‘skirmishes’ to full-scale battles in twelve separate campaigns,” writes Vine. Exterminationist, white supremacist policies were particularly pronounced in California, but took place across the West. After 1876, when President Ulysses S. Grant “turned over” Native Americans to the War Department, Fort Leavenworth was transformed into a prisoner of war camp for the Nimi’ipuu tribe.

Over “almost 115 consecutive years of U.S. wars against indigenous nations,” as Vine puts it, US military forts played a consistent role in protecting white settler pillaging and conquest.

In Vine’s telling, the War of 1898 was “the start of a new form of overseas empire” which “saw the country expand across the continent with the help of U.S. Army forts and near-continuous war.” In some cases, it’s possible to draw a direct line between expansion within the United States and conquest abroad.

Nelson A. Miles, US Army commanding general, waged brutal battles against the Kiowa, Comanche, Sioux, Nez Perce, and Apache tribes, then ordered Gen. George Custer’s calvary to massacre as many as three hundred Lakota Sioux in 1890, then violently put down the Pullman, Illinois railroad workers strike in 1894.

Miles also led a bloody counterinsurgency war in the Philippines, aimed at defeating its independence movement. (Similar continuity between domestic and global repression can be found today as counterinsurgency tactics and military weapons and equipment are used by US police departments.)

Organized labor, immigrants, recently freed slaves, indigenous peoples at home and abroad: They were all subdued by the same military and police forces making way for white settlement and capital expansion.

After seizing Spanish colonies during the 1898 war, the United States began to pursue a new form of imperialism that was “less dependent on the creation of new formal colonies and more dependent on informal, less overtly violent — but violent nonetheless — political and economic tools backed by military might, including bases abroad,” Vine writes. The United States built up the military presence in the Philippines to seventy thousand troops, using these forces to help put down China’s Boxer rebellion, and used its military might to intervene ruthlessly in Panama.

World War II saw the dramatic expansion of military bases, an era inaugurated in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a deal with Prime Minister Winston Churchill to trade naval destroyers for ninety-nine-year leases in eight British colonies, all located in the Western Hemisphere. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States temporarily shrank military personnel spending, and returned roughly half its foreign bases.

Yet the basic global infrastructure of bases (many of which were built with the labor of colonized workers) would remain entrenched — and a “permanent war system,” as Vine puts it, was established. During the post–World War II era of decolonization, the United States used its military base network and economic influence, buttressed by new institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to protect its preeminence.

During the Cold War, overseas base expansion became central to the goals of containment and forward positioning, premised on the idea that global bases allow quick response to threats and rapid interventions and deployments in crises. While giving the illusion of increased safety, these bases actually made foreign wars more likely, argues Vine, because they made it easier to wage such wars. In turn, conflict increased construction of US bases.

The Korean War, which killed between three and four million people, prompted a 40 percent increase in the number of US bases abroad, and increasing concern about maintaining bases in the Pacific Ocean. Bases also spread across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.

CIA stations expanded alongside military bases, and clandestine meddling and supporting coups became a preferred tool of US empire. When the United States waged brutal war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, it was assisted by “hundreds of bases in Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Guam,” Vine notes.

The fate of the roughly one thousand Chagossians (descendants of Indian indentured workers and enslaved Africans) from Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, spotlights the remarkable cruelty of the United States’ embrace during this period of “strategic island” approach, whereby the United States established control over small, colonial islands.

After making a secret agreement with Britain in 1966 to purchase basing rights, the US and UK governments expelled its residents between 1967 to 1973, leaving them trapped on Mauritius and Seychelles, without jobs or homes, many of their possessions lost to them forever.

During some phases of the expulsion, residents were forced onto cargo ships, their dogs killed. By 1973, the United States was using this base to support Israel in its 1973 war with Arab nations.

“To this day,” Vine notes, “Chagossians and many others among the displaced are struggling to return home, to win some justice and recompense for what they have suffered.”

This is where Vine’s book is at its best: showing the moral stakes of US empire. Shrouded in the sanitized and sterile think tank–ese of “forward positions,” “kinetic action,” and “open door policy,” the average media consumer would be hard-pressed to know the human costs of these bases. Vine documents the stakes from the vantage point of the displaced and disenfranchised.

As the author of the definitive English-language book on Diego Garcia, and a supporter of the return of the organizing efforts of the Chagossians, Vine rightly does not hide his opposition to this profound injustice. He keeps his critiques grounded in recognition of powerful anti-base movements, including the mass protests and strikes that forced the United States to withdraw from all but two bases in Turkey in 1975, and the No-Bases Movement that booted the United States from the Philippines in 1991 (though the United States would later return).

F-15C Eagle takes off at Kadena Air Base

A F-15 deploy to Guam to take part in Exercise Valiant Shield. This is the first time this year that the F-15s have deployed to Guam. (USAF photo by Senior Airman Darnell T. Cannady)

This choice is well conceived. The global movement against US bases — seen in regional cooperation between colonized Pacific islands like Guam (whose indigenous name is Guåhan) and Hawai’i, or the international solidarity developed by the Koreans of Jeju Island — even where it lacks integration and structures for truly coordinated work, is a crucial force in the struggle against US dominance.

War on Terror

The United States used bases from Diego Garcia to Oman to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and, once there, established more bases, and took over former Soviet ones. Likewise, bases from Kuwait to Jordan to Bahrain to Diego Garcia were critical for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where the United States immediately began building bases and installations post-invasion.

While the Bush-Cheney administration closed some bases in Europe, overall spending on bases “reached record highs” during their time in office, Vine writes. The war with ISIS has seen troops return to Iraq, and the acquisition of bases, even after the Iraqi parliament in 2011 rejected a deal to keep fifty-eight bases in the country.

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has also expanded its presence in Africa, building “lily pads” across the continent — smaller profile, somewhat secretive installations, suggesting “a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad toward its prey,” writes Vine. US bases have been central  to waging the 2011 NATO war in Libya, drone strikes in Yemen, military intervention in Somalia and Cameroon.

“The military has been conducting a variety of operations regularly in at least 49 African countries,” writes Vine. “It may be operating in every single one.”

Meanwhile, base spending has played a key role in the steady uptick of overall military spending. In addition to the direct harm they do through enabling war, bases are associated with incredible fraud and waste, and base contractors renowned for their significant political contributions. This political force, and self-contained logic of sustenance and expansion, is key to understanding how the Military Industrial Complex “can be like Frankenstein’s monster, taking on a life of its own thanks to the spending it commands,” writes Vine.

The War on Terror ethos, in which the whole world is considered a US battlefield and the United States grants itself broad latitude to wage preemptive war, has come to define US foreign policy. George W. Bush talked about the importance of having a military “ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world,” a racist reference, Vine says, to the Middle East, Africa, and Muslim areas of Asia.

Today, the war on ISIS — responsible for significant civilian deaths — continues, as does dangerous brinkmanship with Iran, hedging against China, brutal war in Afghanistan, and US support for the war on Yemen, which has unleashed a profound humanitarian crisis.

Military bases, installations, lily pads, and outposts remain the foundation of this bloody US empire, as they have since the first days of Manifest Destiny.

A Call to Action

Vine’s effort to trace the role of US military bases in fomenting wars, and vice versa, is stunningly ambitious. As it should be: the role of US military bases in shaping global history and modern-day cycles of endless war is vast and largely untold. And the only way to explore this relationship is by asking big questions.

Vine should be commended for hurtling himself deftly and intelligently toward a gargantuan task, a thread that runs throughout his work. In his 2015 book Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, Vine similarly tackled a simple yet huge question: How do US military bases hurt people and societies?

Through this lens, he traced stories of forced displacement, environmental destruction, economic dependency, and loss of sovereignty in countries hosting such bases. By asking questions that should be obvious yet are almost entirely omitted from US discourse, Vine places himself among great anti-militarist writers like the feminist Cynthia Enloe, whose book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics asks how women’s “private” lives shape war and foreign policy.

Engaging Vine’s book is less like reading a tidy cause-and-effect theory of the relationship between US military bases and wars, and more an exploration of the symbiotic relationship between capital, US empire and racism, and their primary mode of interaction: the military base.

The causal relationship isn’t always clear or neat, but this is true of most complex ecosystems. Vine, to his great credit, leans into this messiness. The effect is that one both absorbs a wealth of information and analysis, and leaves with big questions about the supposed moral foundations of Pax Americana.

Vine’s discussion of the role of the inertia and corruption of the Military Industrial Complex leaves one hungry to know more about how this self-perpetuating machine operates: What are the mechanisms by which lobbyists, think tanks, soft power operations, and defense contractors collaborate and collude to build public support for, and funnel tremendous funds and resources into, the sprawling US empire? How do State Department forward positions like embassies, and soft power agencies like USAID, factor in on a global scale?

Our current pandemic and related economic crisis has shown that the military, one of the most well-resourced institutions in our society, is not only useless at keeping people safe and well, but is actually making the coronavirus crisis worse by bombing and sanctioning hard-hit countries, and contributed to a bloated, militarized state that siphons public resources away from public health.

Could the crisis shatter the notion that the US military truly protects “security,” and therefore present opportunities for deep change? And how has the rapid upshoot of the movement to defund the police domestically created openings for mass numbers of people to question and reenvision “security” at home and abroad?

Vine’s brief discussion at the end of the book of how to correct the profound injustices he has detailed has many great policy solutions but at times feels a bit disconnected from the damning critique in his historical analysis itself. He rightly talks about the need to reduce the political power of the Military Industrial Complex, slash military budgets, and close military bases; and raises the possibility of using antitrust laws to break the power of weapons contractors, as well as introducing legislation prohibiting the Pentagon from lobbying Congress for public funds. He talks about giving people in US colonies full citizenship rights, which would certainly be an improvement on the status quo, but how does this comport with independence movements in places like Puerto Rico?

He argues that “Congress should create a regular review process to assess the need to maintain every base overseas. The Pentagon should be required to scrutinize every base annually as well.” But after reading the horrors he lays out in his book, these suggestions seem too incremental and slow.

The most powerful prescription in this book comes through in the historical analysis itself. One walks away convinced that the US empire and its global network of bases must be dismantled if we are to have any hope of putting a stop to the devastating cycle of endless US wars and meddling.

Ultimately, Vine does not tie up every loose end. That’s fine — he never promises to. This book should be viewed as the equivalent of a long-distance runner passing a baton, inviting others to take up the inquiry, toward the goal of creating a better world.

“Those concerned and hopefully angered by the U.S. record of war must find ways to demand and force change,” Vine writes. Any such change must include the building blocks of US empire: the bases, installations, and lily pads that sprinkle the globe, undermine sovereignty, and make war always seem like the easier, more attractive, more lucrative option.

To oppose this injustice, we must first recognize that it exists and tell its insidious history. Vine’s book takes incredible strides toward that end — the rest is up to us.

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Sarah Lazare is web editor at In These Times. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including the Intercept, the Nation, and Tom Dispatch.

Featured image: US naval base in Apra Harbor, Guam. (US Navy / Codie L. Soule / Flickr)

Why Canadians Should Support the Cross-Canada Campaign to Free Meng Wanzhou

By Ken Stone, October 07 2020

This judicial action against Meng is unjust, politically motivated by the USA, and contrary to the national interests of Canada. In fact, Meng’s arrest is being cynically used by the Trump Administration to drag Canada into a trade war and a new cold war with China.

Will America Turn Their Back on Armenians Again?

By Steven Sahiounie, October 07 2020

They say, ‘Timing is everything’.  US President Trump fell ill with COVID-19 simultaneously as Armenian Prime Minister, Nicol Pashinyan, was waiting for a phone reply to his previous request for urgent help from the White House.

Video: Covid-19, We Are Being Lied to! Here Is How… The PCR Test

By Spiro Skouras, October 07 2020

But was PCR really developed with the intention of diagnosing infectious diseases? Is PCR capable of diagnosing infectious diseases? How could a test developed almost 40 years ago be used to diagnose a brand new disease found less than one year ago?

Gates, Kissinger and Our Dystopian Future. The Political Side of Covid

By Mike Whitney, October 07 2020

In my opinion, Gates’ interest in these matters is not merely speculative curiosity. He and his fellow elites are conducting an elaborate science experiment in which we– mere mortals– are the lab rats.

Hypoxia Experiment: Do Face Masks lower our Blood Oxygen Levels?

By John C. A. Manley, October 07 2020

Do face masks lower our blood oxygen levels? I decided to put it to the test. But first, let me state my bias: I disagree with face mask mandates. I’ve reviewed randomized controlled trials and find no evidence that masks reduce the spread of infectious diseases. Masks also have many physical, social and, mental harms. So I would love to prove that they cause hypoxia.

Trump Scuttles a Fiscal Stimulus–Again!

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, October 07 2020

This past Tuesday, October 6, Trump pulled the plug once again—a second time—on negotiations on a fiscal stimulus between House speaker, Pelosi, and his Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin.

IMF and WEF – From Great Lockdown to Great Transformation. The COVID Aftermath

By Peter Koenig, October 07 2020

The WEF and its players and “Deep-State-Actors” (which represent “Affluence”). behind the scene were using Covid to the fullest to cause a total lockdown of people as well as of the world economy. This happened virtually simultaneously Worldwide in almost all 193 (UN member) countries.

George Monbiot’s Excuses for Not Speaking Out Loudly in Defence of Assange Simply Won’t Wash

By Jonathan Cook, October 07 2020

Faced with a barrage of criticism from some of his followers, George Monbiot, the Guardian’s supposedly fearless, leftwing columnist, offered up two extraordinarily feeble excuses this week for failing to provide more than cursory support for Julian Assange over the past month.

UK Court Decision on Venezuela Gold Deals, Blow to Regime Change Efforts. One Billion Dollars of Country’s Gold to be Released

By Alan MacLeod, October 07 2020

A UK court ruled that the administration of Boris Johnson’s position that Juan Guaidó is the legitimate ruler of Venezuela is far from equivocal, paving the way for over $1 billion of the country’s gold to be released.

OPCW Rubber-Stamps Novichok Poisoning of Navalny Hoax

By Stephen Lendman, October 07 2020

Replacing the OPCW with an independent chemical watchdog — free from ties to the US and West — is long overdue. As things now stand, its so-called probes are political lynchings of US enemies like Syria and Russia.

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OPCW Rubber-Stamps Novichok Poisoning of Navalny Hoax

October 7th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

Operating as an imperial tool, the chemical watchdog OPCW transformed itself into a pro-Western lapdog.

Abandoning its mandate for higher priorities, the organization no longer can be taken seriously.

Replacing the OPCW with an independent chemical watchdog — free from ties to the US and West — is long overdue.

As things now stand, its so-called probes are political lynchings of US enemies like Syria and Russia.

At the same time, it consistently ignores use of chemical, biological, radiological and other banned weapons by the US, NATO and Israel in all their preemptive wars against invented enemies.

Russia earlier slammed the organization, saying the following:

“There is no difference with the vicious principles of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission in Syria (FFM) and the former OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM).”

Its probes “are conducted in flagrant violation of the provisions of the CWC, without respecting the key principle of fulfilling procedures to ensure preservation of physical evidence (so-called ‘chain of custody’), which, inter alia, requires  the evidence to be collected on site and exclusively by (organization) specialists.”

In Syria, OPCW “sources” include establishment media, dubious blogs, pro-Western NGO websites, and al-Qaeda-linked White Helmets — rendering its reports exercises in mass deception.

No credible evidence supports the OPCW’s claim that Syria’s military used sarin gas, chlorine, or any other banned weapons.

Credibility lost by serving Western interests over fulfilling its Chemical Weapons Convention mandate cannot be regained.

The organization’s de facto mandate is serving Western interests, demonizing its enemies, inventing evidence that doesn’t exist.

Its so-called Report on Technical Assistance Requested by Germany (dated October 6) is the latest example of OPCW mass deception over analysis the way it’s supposed to be — stating the following:

“The results of the analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team and shared with the Federal Republic of Germany confirm that the biomarkers of the cholinesterase inhibitor found in Mr Navalny’s blood and urine samples have similar structural characteristics as the toxic chemicals belonging to” the novichok family.

Analysis of the same blood and urine from Navalny by Russian and German doctors at Berlin’s Charite hospital found no novichok or other toxins in his system.

Germany’s military lab dubiously claimed otherwise.

The OPCW called its so-called “results…a matter of grave concern,” adding:

“The use of chemical weapons by anyone under any circumstances.”

Their use is “reprehensible and wholly contrary to the legal norms established by the international community” —  except when used by the West and Israel against their invented adversaries, the organization failed to add.

Separately, the UK OPCW delegation tweeted the following:

“A banned chemical weapon has been used against a Russian citizen on Russian territory. Russia must uphold its obligations under the #CWC and explain what happened.”

In response to the OPCW’s dubious claim, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the following:

“(T)here needs to be some time to hand it over through diplomatic channels and for us to receive this information” for review.

Ahead of the report’s release, Sergey Lavrov accused the OPCW of operating as a tool of Western interests.

Clear evidence is indisputable — falsely claiming Navalny was poisoned by novichok the latest example.

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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 Land Destroyer Report

Trump Halts Talks on New Economic Stimulus

October 7th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

At a time of dire economic conditions — worse than during the Great Depression with real unemployment at 26.9% and likely to rise ahead — Republicans and Dems remain at odds over federal aid to jobless Americans, small businesses, states, and local communities.

On Tuesday, Trump said the following:

“I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major stimulus bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and small business.”

Last week, House Dems passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package by a narrow 214 – 207 margin — 18 Dems breaking ranks to oppose the measure.

It calls for aid to unemployed US households through January, Payroll Protection Program loans for businesses in need, financial help for cash-strapped states and local governments, among other provisions.

A reported Treasury Secretary Mnuchin $1.6 trillion counter-proposal is a similar aid package with less than Dems proposed.

While it’s unclear whether Republicans and Dems would reconcile differences for a package to be passed by both houses in the coming days, Trump’s action scuttled the possibility until at least post-November 3 elections.

Follow-up tweets that call for congressional bills on aid to unemployed households, small businesses, the airlines, and other economic sectors separately — instead of a comprehensive package in one measure appears to be a pre-election stunt to take credit for anything passed by Congress he signs into law, rejecting what he opposes.

Dems are unlikely to go along with the unacceptable idea.

At a time of unprecedented economic crisis conditions, over one million Americans applying for unemployment insurance or Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) for 28 straight weeks, and countless numbers of businesses going bankrupt, the need for federal help during the hardest of hard times is overwhelming.

Instead of prioritizing this issue over all others by Congress and the White House, both right wings of the one-party state politicized it — each seeking an advantage over the other ahead of upcoming elections.

Millions of unemployed workers with no income and scant savings face possible eviction or foreclosure of their mortgages because they’re unable to meet their financial obligations — through no fault of their own.

At the same time, business bankruptcies are accelerating.

According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), around one-fifth of US small businesses closed or will shut down in the coming months because of dire economic conditions with no relief in prospect for turning things around.

Between now and yearend, conditions are likely to worsen.

If Biden defeats Trump, DJT will have no incentive to go along with Dems on fiscal stimulus, leaving things in limbo at least until a changing of the guard in late January.

As economic conditions keep weakening, large US corporations are announcing tens of thousands of layoffs, making a dire situation worse.

If Biden wins in November — what’s most likely based on poll results — and Trump challenges the outcome, political instability, rioting, more looting than already, and violence could follow.

DJT is whistling past the graveyard with tweets like (o)ur economy is doing very well.”

“The stock market is at record levels. Jobs and unemployment (are) coming back in record numbers.”

“We are leading the world in economic recovery, and the best is yet to come.”

While he tweets, Rome burns.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is by Matt Kenyon/Financial Times

Faced with a barrage of criticism from some of his followers, George Monbiot, the Guardian’s supposedly fearless, leftwing columnist, offered up two extraordinarily feeble excuses this week for failing to provide more than cursory support for Julian Assange over the past month, as the Wikileaks founder has endured extradition hearings in a London courtroom. 

The Trump administration wants Assange brought to the United States to face espionage charges that could see him locked away in a super-max prison on “special administrative measures”, unable to have meaningful contact with any other human being for the rest of his life. And that fate awaits him only because he embarrassed the US by exposing its war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq in the pages of newspapers like the New York Times and Guardian – and because Washington fears that Assange, if left free, would publish more disturbing truths about US actions around the globe.

But there is much more at stake than simply Assange’s rights being trampled on. He is not simply the western equivalent of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident who notably offered his own support to Assange during the hearings. Weiwei covered his mouth outside the Old Bailey courtroom in protest at the media’s blanket silence over the crimes being perpetrated against Assange.

Assange faces a terrifying new kind of extraordinary rendition – one conducted not covertly by US security services but in the full glare of publicity and, if the London court approves, with the consent of the British judiciary. If extradition is authorised, a precedent will be set that allows the US to seize and jail any journalist who exposes its crimes. Inevitably, that will have a severe chilling effect on all journalists investigating the world’s only super-power. It will not only be the death of journalism’s already enfeebled role as a watchdog on power but a death blow against our societies’ commitment to the principles of freedom and openness. 

The barest minimum 

This should be reason enough for anyone to be deeply concerned about Assange’s extradition hearing, most especially journalists. And even more so a journalist like Monbiot, whose work’s lifeblood is the investigation of unaccountable power and its corrosive effects. If any British journalist ought to be shouting from the rooftops against Assange’s extradition, it is Monbiot.

And yet, he has failed to write a single column in the Guardian on Assange, and in response to mounting criticism from followers pointed to three retweets backing Assange during the past four weeks of extradition hearings. All three, we should note, were of articles published in his own newspaper, the Guardian, that broke with its hostile coverage and could be considered vaguely sympathetic to Assange.

This was the barest minimum that Monbiot could afford to be seen doing. After all, positioned as the Guardian’s leftwing conscience, it would have been strange indeed had he not retweeted the rare instances, in a sea of Guardian articles ridiculing and vilifying Assange, of the paper making a nod to its more leftwing readers.

But notably, Monbiot failed to retweet any of the daily articles posted by former UK ambassador Craig Murray that detailed the horrifying abuses of legal process against Assange during the extradition hearings as well as evidence from expert witness after expert witness that demolished the central claims of the US case. Monbiot did not retweet any of the articles or comments by the renowned investigative journalist John Pilger, who has been a stalwart defender of Assange.

He did not retweet the testimony of Noam Chomsky, the celebrated linguist and political analyst, that the US charges against Assange are entirely political in nature and therefore void the US extradition request. Monbiot has similarly ignored the comments of Nils Melzer, the United Nations’ expert on torture, that Assange is already being psychologically tortured by the combined actions of the UK and US to keep him locked up in extreme isolation and in a prolonged state of chronic fear for his future.

Monbiot also did not retweet the astounding evidence last week from a former employee of the Spanish company that provided security at the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange spent seven years in political asylum. The whistleblower testified that under CIA direction the company broke the law by surveilling Assange, even in the toilet block, and listened in to his privileged conversations with his lawyers. This fact alone should have been enough to force the presiding judge, Vanessa Baraitser, to rule against the US extradition request.

Cowardly excuses 

No, Monbiot told his followers about none of these developments or about much more that has emerged over the past four weeks. Instead he offered two cowardly excuses for why he has remained so mealymouthed at the worst assault on press freedom in living memory.

The first was that the Assange extradition hearing apparently isn’t important enough. It is simply “one of hundreds of crucial issues” and “compared to say, soil loss, it’s way down my list”.

 

No one can doubt that Monbiot rightly takes environmental issues extremely seriously. But he doesn’t just tweet and write about the environment. There are many others issues, entirely unconnected to the environment and of which he appears to know almost nothing, that he regularly writes about. 

One will suffice as illustrative. For the past two years Monbiot has dedicated a great deal of time and energy – time and energy he has refused to expend on defending Assange and press freedom – to attack those who have questioned claims by the US and UK intelligence services that the Syrian government under Bashar Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018. The supposed attack provided the pretext for the US to launch a bombing attack on Syria – an example of a supreme international crime, according to the Nuremberg principles.

Monbiot has tried to intimidate into silence those, including whistleblowers from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), who have suggested that in fact the evidence points to jihadist groups being responsible for what happened in Douma. Those jihadists – labelled “terrorists” by the western media in all countries other than Syria – have been explicitly financed by western allies like Saudi Arabia, and more covertly by the west itself. Nonetheless, Monbiot has smeared anyone sceptical of the official western narrative about Douma as an “Assad apologist”, including by implication the distinguished Middle East reporter Robert Fisk, who, unlike Monbiot, actually visited Douma.

Monbiot has no expertise on the Middle East, and presumably has drawn his conclusions from reading the Syria coverage of the Guardian, whose positions he precisely echoes. It is bad enough that he has used his platform to go on the offensive against those taking a critical position on the events in Douma. But worse still, he has swept up in his smear campaign whistleblowers from the OPCW, the United Nations’ chemical weapons watchdog body, who have been warning that the OPCW is no longer independent but has become a deeply politicised body that tampered with the inspectors’ findings in the Douma case to bolster Washington’s self-serving agenda in Syria.

The whistleblowers’ claims are hardly out of line with the wider picture of the OPCW. The organisation has been falling under Washington’s thumb for nearly two decades. The previous head of the OPCW, Jose Bustani, was forced out by the Bush administration after he sought to negotiate further weapons inspections of Iraq to deprive the US of a pretext to launch its illegal invasion in 2003. Angry that US plans for regime change might be disrupted, John Bolton, the warmongering US ambassador to the UN, even threatened Bustani: “We know where your kids live.”

At least three members of the OPCW team that investigated the Douma events have tried to warn that the evidence blaming Assad was doctored by the organisation’s officials and that their own research showed that the most likely culprit were jihadist groups – who presumably hoped to engineer a pretext for more direct western intervention in Syria to help them bring down the Syrian government.

Misinformation around the Douma events has grown so dire that Bustani himself recently tried to intervene on behalf of the whistleblowers at the Security Council. He noted in testimony blocked by the US and UK: “At great risk to themselves, they [the whistleblowers] have dared to speak out against possible irregular behaviour in your Organisation [the OPCW].” He added: “Hearing what your own inspectors have to say would be an important first step in mending the Organisation’s damaged reputation.”

Absurd argument

There are plenty of reasons, therefore, to criticise Monbiot for his smearing of the Douma sceptics and the OPCW whistleblowers. But I am not interested here in revisiting the Douma episode. The point I am making relates to Assange.

In asserting that he doesn’t have time to defend Assange, Monbiot is implicitly arguing that opposing the current all-out war by the US on journalism is a lower priority than his smearing of the OPCW whistleblowers; that bullying and silencing Douma sceptics is one of those “hundreds of crucial issues” more important than preventing Assange from spending the rest of his life in jail, and more important than saving investigative journalism from this gravest of assaults by the US.

To understand how absurd Monbiot’s argument is, let us note that the only way we can ever properly settle the Douma case – without regurgitating claims by the US and UK intelligence services, as Monbiot has been doing – is if someone manages to leak the classified communications on Douma between the US administration and the OPCW leadership. That would let us know whether it is the OPCW whistleblowers telling the truth or the suits in head office. The whistleblowers have already stated that US officials turned up at an OPCW meeting unannounced and in violation of the body’s independent status in a bid to lean on staff.

The only way we will learn the truth with any certainty is if there is a leak of documents – to an organisation like Assange’s group Wikileaks.

The war on Assange has not only been a war on journalism. It is also a war on the whistleblowers who have assisted journalists and Wikileaks in arriving at the truth. Hanging on the outcome of Assange’s case is not only his personal fate, but journalism’s very ability to tap into sources close to the centres of power. In abandoning Assange, we abandon any hope of finding out the truth on a whole range of the most pressing issues facing us.

If Monbiot hopes to be able to campaign more effectively on “hundreds of crucial issues” like soil loss and other environmental concerns, he needs Assange and Wikileaks as vigorous as possible, not Assange locked away in a dark cell and Wikileaks a shadow of the organisation it once was.

Monbiot, of course, does not need me to tell him all this. He understands it already. Which is why his behaviour needs explaining – a matter we will get to in a minute.

All too ready to tick boxes 

But before that, let us turn our attention to his second, extraordinary excuse for failing to raise his voice above a whisper on Assange’s plight.

Monbiot claims he cannot add anything “original” to what has been said already about the Assange case and that “It’s not about ticking boxes” but about “expanding the field”.

Let us set aside the obvious lacuna in this argument: that Monbiot has been ticking every box imaginable on the Douma incident. He added precisely nothing to the debate apart from his own smears of the whistleblowers. All he did was echo the intelligence services’ talking points, which had already been given an extensive and uncritical airing in the Guardian.

So Monbiot is quite clearly capable of being highly unoriginal when he chooses to be.

But there are, of course, lots of original things Monbiot could contribute to the coverage of the Assange case in his own newspaper, the Guardian, given that the only people speaking up for Assange – apart from one article by Patrick Cockburn in the Independent – have been outside the “mainstream”, without a platform in the corporate media.

Monbiot could have served as a counterweight to the relentless maligning of Assange in the Guardian’s pages by pointing out how these smears were unfounded. Instead he has either echoed those smears, or equivocated on them, or remained silent. He could have, for example, observed that there were very good grounds for Assange to seek political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, as the extradition hearings have confirmed, in contrast to the constant claims in the Guardian that Assange was “fleeing rape charges” – charges that existed only in the imagination of newspaper editors – or that he was paranoid and arrogant.

Or Monbiot could have pointed out that the Guardian fabricated an easily disproved smear story that a Trump aide, Paul Manafort, and unnamed “Russians” had supposedly visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in secret three times – without leaving any evidence, even though the embassy was the most heavily surveilled building in London, both inside and out.

The story, presumably provided to the Guardian on an unattributable basis by one of the security services involved, was published to ensnare Assange in evidence-free Russiagate claims and thereby alienate liberals so that they would not oppose the US extradition case. Monbiot could have added that the Guardian was wrong not to apologise for the deceitful, malicious report and retract it.

Or Monbiot could tell his readers that the Guardian is not declaring a glaring conflict of interest in its coverage of the Assange hearings. Rather than being a neutral observer of developments, the paper is in fact deeply implicated in the very charges levelled by the US against Assange. Its former investigations editor David Leigh was the one who recklessly published the password to a critically important trove of secret documents held by Wikileaks, giving every security service in the world access to them. Eventually, in a damage limitation operation, Wikileaks was forced to publish the files unredacted to let anyone named know they were in danger.

If anyone should be on trial for endangering US informants – no one should be, and no informants were harmed – it is not Assange but Leigh and other senior Guardian editors.

All of these would be highly “original” things for Monbiot to write about that would undoubtedly “expand the field”. But I am not really suggesting that he go so far as to be honest about the vile role played by his employer in selling out Assange. I am worldly enough to know how things work. He has a good, mainstream platform that weekly publishes his articles – and he does not want to jeopardise that by criticising his own newspaper. 

But of course Monbiot does not need to criticise the Guardian to support Assange. There are plenty of other, important things to write about if he chooses to. The point is he chooses not to. The real question, once his pathetic excuses are stripped away, is why.

Mopped up by the Guardian 

And that, sadly, is because Monbiot is not the free thinker, the fearless investigator of difficult truths, the leftwing conscience he claims to be. It is not really his fault. It is in the nature of the function he serves at the Guardian – and with which I am only too familiar myself from my years working there.

The Guardian is the main outlet of the Guardian Media Group, which depends on advertising to survive. It is a corporate venture premised on exploiting the Guardian’s market share to the greatest extent possible, just as the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Times do with their own markets. In this regard, newspapers are no different from supermarkets. If they fail to corner their section of the market, another corporation better suited to do so will step in and seize it from them.

Assange understood this only too well, as he explained in an interview back in 2011 after learning that the Guardian had been breaking its agreements with Wikileaks and sharing confidential files with others. He observed:

“What drives a paper like the Guardian or New York Times is not their inner moral values. It is simply that they have a market. In the UK, there is a market called ‘educated liberals’. Educated liberals want to buy a newspaper like the Guardian and therefore an institution arises to fulfil that market.”

Most of the Guardian’s writers pander squarely to the general “educated liberals” market. But some, like Monbiot, are there with a more specific purpose: to mop up sections of the population that might otherwise stray from the Guardian fold.

Owen Jones is there to mop up leftwing supporters of the Labour party to persuade them that the Guardian is their friend, as he continued to do even while the paper was helping to destroy the party’s elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Jonathan Freedland is there, in part, to reassure liberal Jews that the Guardian is on their side, which he did by playing up the evidence-free smears that Labour had an especial antisemitism problem under Corbyn. Hadley Freeman is there, as are others like Suzanne Moore, to represent liberal women deeply invested in identity politics and to make sure they keep them away from class politics.

The point is that the Guardian is a corporate endeavour that makes sure its columnists cover as many liberal-left bases as possible without allowing any really subversive voices a platform from which they can challenge or disrupt the neoliberal status quo.

Monbiot, therefore, treads the finest line of all the Guardian’s columnists. His position is the most absurd, the one plagued with the biggest internal contradiction: he must sell extreme environmental concern from within a newspaper that is entirely embedded in the economic logic of the very neoliberal system that is destroying the planet.

The Guardian understands its own urgent need to greenwash too. Its market, educated liberals, are increasingly frightened by the multiple environmental threats we face, which is why very belatedly – decades late, in fact – the paper has been prioritising this issue above all others.

But of course, given the logic of its corporate, money-making, advertiser-driven agenda, the Guardian is not just highlighting the threat to the environment to win over more educated liberals. It is also monetising this threat for itself as aggressively as it can. It did so again this week as its editor, Kath Viner, appealed to educated liberals to make a subscription donation to the paper based on the claim that it will campaign to protect the environment better than any other UK newspaper. That, of course, is a remarkably low bar it has set for itself.

Treading a fine line 

Monbiot is trapped in this same logic: campaigning for the environment from within an organisation whose economic imperatives are designed to trash the planet.

He treads this very fine line by deviating as little as necessary from the Guardian’s own narrow, status quo-hugging agenda. He enjoys the freedom to speak out loudly on the dangers of environmental destruction, but that freedom comes at a price – that he closely adhere to the technocratic, liberal consensus on other issues. The paradox is that on foreign policy matters we have Monbiot effectively colluding in the propaganda of the west’s war industries – the most polluting on the planet – as he professes his environmental credentials to the Guardian’s liberal readers.

This stance is not imposed on him. He does not receive orders from Guardian editors to smear OPCW whistleblowers or to restrain himself from tweeting forthright support for Assange. Instead he has imbibed the corporate culture of the Guardian – as I once did, as most of us do in our daily lives – as a sanity survival strategy, as way to placate the cognitive dissonance that would overwhelm him if he did not.

Paradoxically, the two excuses he offered justifying his lack of support for Assange followed a tweet in which he had just castigated the left – as he is wont to do when confronted with evidence he would rather not hear – for preferring conformity over solidarity.

I’m no psychologist, but this sounds suspiciously like projection to me. Monbiot was immediately and rightly pulled up by followers who pointed out that, in his abandonment of Assange, he had once again shown a high degree of conformity to official, intelligence agency-serving narratives, as well as to those of his employer, the Guardian. He had also shown a very low degree of solidarity with a man who has almost single-handedly taken on the western power establishment in the hope of helping us finally to hold it to account.

Ultimately, the problem lies not with Monbiot. He is just serving the market, attracting socially responsible liberals to the Guardian, rationalising the paper’s reformist agenda within a suicidal, global, neoliberal economy, and preventing leftwingers from straying too far, to the point where they might contemplate a more revolutionary form of politics.

The problem lies not with Monbiot. It lies with us. We continue to ignore the fact that we are being played by the system, that we are being placated by pale offerings like Monbiot, that our consent is needed and that we keep finding reasons to give it rather than withdraw it. Neither Monbiot nor the Guardian is going to liberate our minds. Only we can do that.

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

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

Featured image: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.

Do face masks lower our blood oxygen levels? I decided to put it to the test.

But first, let me state my bias: I disagree with face mask mandates. I’ve reviewed randomized controlled trials and find no evidence that masks reduce the spread of infectious diseases. Masks also have many physical, social and, mental harms. So I would love to prove that they cause hypoxia.

To find out I loaded my backpack with surgical tape, my notebook, a MacBook (to record the experiment), an oximeter, a medical-grade surgical mask and a Guy Fawkes mask. Ten minutes later, I had biked to an ideal spot to conduct the experiment: Atop a rather high hill on a wooded trail. Clamping the oximeter on my middle finger, I found my oxygen saturation was at 98% and my heart was thumping 77 beats per minute.

I then conducted four 10-15 minute experiments running up and down the hill with either no mask, a surgical mask, or a surgical mask plus a Fawkes mask. At all times I had my mouth taped shut (to prove I was breathing properly and restrictively through my nose). The following table shows the results:

I started off wearing a surgical mask and the Fawkes mask. I had no problem running, but the feeling of suffocation was intense. My breathing also increased. The Fawkes mask has only two small holes for the nose. After 10 minutes my oxygen saturation dropped from 98% to 86%. Below 90% is considered hypoxic by the Mayo Clinic (at least, at rest). My heart rate only increased 5 bpm.

Taking the Fawkes mask off and another 10 minutes of running brought my O2 up to 93%. That felt better. my heartbeat rose to 99 bpm.

Taking the surgical mask off, however, and continuing with another ten minutes of running made zero difference in the readings or how I felt.

Lastly, I donned both the surgical and Fawkes masks again and ran for another 15 minutes up and down the hill. This time my oxygen held at 90%. With this final round my breathing was more relaxed which might explain the higher blood oxygen saturation.

As has long been my contention, the above experiment shows that the surgical mask makes absolutely no difference in blood oxygen levels. It did not cause hypoxia.

Yes, I know many people say it does. I would argue that such drops in blood oxygen levels were not caused by the mask, but instead caused by the wearer beginning to hyperventilate in reaction to the rise in CO2 the mask causes. I’ll write more about this in future Red Pill Posts.

It’s rather funny to think that our large respiratory system is so inadequate that a thin, breathable, cloth mask would pose such a threat to our oxygen intake. (Plastic Guy Fawkes masks, on the other hand, are a little iffy.)

I’m not trying to defend mask wearing. I’m trying to defend the truth. It’s hard to argue that masks don’t stop the spread of infection, but do stop oxygen absorption. Arguing masks cause hypoxia may only discredit the views of those trying to stop masking mandates. There are enough problems with masks that we don’t need to make any up. And the fact they’re ineffective at stopping illness makes them an unnecessary distraction.

As Gandhi said: “Truth never damages a cause that is just.”

Mind-numbingly boring video evidence of the entire 55-minute experiment is available here.

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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, Brave New Normal: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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First published on March 27, 2020. Interview conducted in mid-March.

So there you are. You simulate and then you go live. I’m not suggesting any kind of conspiratorial relationship, but I’m just saying there was a simulation [Event 201, October 2019]  and a couple of months later the whole thing goes live with the same actors involved in the simulation who are now involved in saving the world from the coronavirus.” 

Michel Chossudovsky discusses his new series of research articles on the “pandemic” including, “COVID-19 Coronavirus “Fake” Pandemic: Timeline and Analysis” and “Coronavirus COVID-19: “Made in China” or “Made in America”?, among others. A blockbuster show!

Now includes full transcript

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 On January 30th 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) in relation to China’s novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) categorized  as a viral pneumonia.  The virus outbreak was centred in  Wuhan, a city in Eastern China with a population in excess of 11 million.

In the week prior to January 30th decision, the WHO Emergency Committee “expressed divergent views”. There were visible divisions within the Committee. On January 30th, a far-reaching decision was taken without the support of expert opinion at a time when the coronavirus outbreak was limited to Mainland China.

There were 150 confirmed cases outside China, when the decision was taken. 6 in the United States, 3 in Canada, 2 in the UK, etc.

150 confirmed cases over a population of 6.4 billion (World population of 7.8 billion minus China’s 1-4 billion).

What was the risk of being infected? Virtually zero.

Michel Chossudovsky and Bonnie Faulkner on Guns and Butter

Read the transcript below.

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This is Guns and Butter.

The WHO Director-General, who had been in Davos just a few days earlier, determined that the so-called outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and, as I mentioned, that decision was taken on the basis of 150 confirmed cases outside China. Now, anybody who takes cognizance of that should not trust anything else that they say because at the beginning is a big lie, and it’s a big lie which is instrumented by very powerful people. It’s the combination of what I call Big Money and Big Pharma.

I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Michel Chossudovsky. Today’s show: COVID-19 Coronavirus: The Crisis.

Michel Chossudovsky is an Economist and the Founder, Director and Editor of the Center for Research on Globalization, based in Montreal, Quebec.  He is the author of eleven books including Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September Eleventh, America’s “War on Terrorism” and The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity.

Today we discuss the historical background and lead-up to the World Health Organization’s January 30th Declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern; Event 201: Simulation of a Coronavirus Pandemic; the World Economic Forum; financial warfare; and the economic and human toll of the declared pandemic.

Bonnie Faulkner: Michel Chossudovsky, welcome.

Michel Chossudovsky: Good morning.  Delighted to be on Guns and Butter.

Bonnie Faulkner:The United States government has now declared the COVID-19 virus a global pandemic. Your article, COVID-19 Coronavirus “Fake” Pandemic: Timeline and Analysis, begins with the January 30th, 2020 World Health Organization declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in relation to China’s novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV, categorized as a viral pneumonia.  Both the timing and the intent of the WHO’s declaration raise serious questions.  Where is the best place to start and examine what is behind this now global disruption?

Michel Chossudovsky: First of all, I should mention – and this is where all the lies come in – is that on the 30th of January the global public health emergency was declared on the orders of the Director-General of the WHO ( right) . There have been recent statements that this public health emergency has been declared but, in fact, it was declared on the 30th of January, but nobody wants to talk about that for the simple reason that at that time there were only 150 confirmed cases outside of China. In other words, we’re talking about a population of 6.4 billion, (excluding China which is 1.4), out of a world population of 7.8 billion, and there they go ahead and declare a global health emergency. 150 cases does not justify it. But in fact, it did, but it was dictated by very powerful economic interests. So we’re starting with a lie.

But the thing is, we’re starting with a lie on January 30th. And then on January 31st what happens? Immediately the Trump administration calls for a ban on air travel to China. In other words, a declaration to the effect that both Chinese and foreign travelers (from China) will not be admitted to the United States. This has the effect of essentially intimidating people, closing down trade and trade transactions.

We’re talking about a very important volume of trade and transportation with China, affecting, of course, major airlines and shipping companies. So that happened on the 31st. We’re talking about the timeline. On the 31st of January, Trump already launches a hate campaign against China, and there was no health issue of concern, because 150 cases worldwide outside China is virtually nothing as far as risk is concerned.

Then we see the evolution of this crisis and what I’m saying, and we must be very clear on that, is that this is not a biological war against China or against of anybody else; it is the use of the coronavirus as a pretext to implement drastic changes which affect economic activity, trade, transportation, which ultimately has an impact on national economies. It sort of pushes national economies into a situation of crisis. At the outset, we were dealing with economic warfare supported by a media campaign, and this was coupled with the deliberate intent by the Trump administration to undermine the Chinese economy.

But I think we should be clear that the media disinformation campaign was fundamental, because first of all, they never mentioned that it was 150 cases to start with, and they’ve always distorted the figures with regard to the extension of this health threat throughout the world.

Bonnie Faulkner: What is the WHO Emergency Committee?

Michel Chossudovsky: The WHO Emergency Committee is a committee made up of specialists – and I should mention that they first met on the 22nd of January and there were divisions within the committee as to whether they had the justification to actually declare a global emergency [the pandemic was declared on March 11]. And then, when they met on the 30th, the meeting on the 30th took place shortly after the Davos World Economic Forum, which took place from the 21st to the 24th of January. And at that meeting there were important discussions between different partners including the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and various entities linked up to Big Pharma.

Those consultations at the World Economic Forum were essentially instrumental to the decision taken on the 30th. It happened just about a week later. It was essentially the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, a body called CEPI, which is this Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations for the Development of Vaccines – already there were discussions with Big Pharma, GlaxoSmithKline, which is also integrated into this group. There were discussions with the IMF and the World Bank, with the State Department, with US Intelligence. And one suspects that the decisions were taken a few days before, because when they met on January 30th in Geneva there was virtually no discussion. The WHO Director-General, who had been in Davos just a few days earlier, determined that the so-called outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and, as I mentioned, that decision was taken on the basis of 150 confirmed cases outside China.

Now, anybody who takes cognizance of that should not trust anything else that they say because at the beginning is a big lie, and it’s a big lie which is instrumented by very powerful people. It’s the combination of what I call Big Money and Big Pharma. And essentially they initiated this process. They also have a vaccine program and, ironically, the vaccine program was – in a sense also announced at Davos before even having pandemic. It was announced at Davos and discussed, and it was only much later in February that the vaccination campaign was announced by the World Health Organization. In fact, it was February 28th. It was a month later. Dr. Tedros of WHO announces that a massive WHO vaccination campaign has been approved by the World Health Organization. And who is behind that campaign? GlaxoSmithKline in partnership with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is a Gates/World Economic Forum partnership.

Another important thing is that back in October, on October the 18th, the Gates Foundation together with the World Economic Forum and in partnership with Johns Hopkins School of Public Health – but it was a very specific component of the School of Public Health – it was the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. You can see that Johns Hopkins School of Public Health is already linked to Wall Street.

But it was the Center for Health Security. So there you have a partnership between the Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and what do they do on October 16th? This was, of course, way before the public announcement of the coronavirus, which was at the beginning of January when the Chinese authorities discovered it and began testing it. They discovered it on January 1st and then on January 7th they actually came up with lab exams and so on.

But back on October 18th there was a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic. It was called Event 201. That simulation was integrated by a whole series of people from mainly private financial institutions, corporate execs, foundations, Big Pharma, CIA, there was a representative from the CDC but there were no health officials on behalf of national governments or the WHO. It was essentially a simulation which included quite a number of things, including the collapse of stock markets, the extension of the virus to something like 65 million people and so on and so forth.

Now, what I am suggesting, without necessarily drawing conclusions, is that the organizations involved in the simulation, which was a detailed simulation with videos and so on examining what would happen to financial markets, what would happen to the media, to the independent media and so on – essentially the people involved in the simulation were also involved in the actual management of the pandemic once it went live.

So the people who were simulating actually went live on January 30th, 2020, which was the day when that [global health emergency was launched] [Officially the pandemic was launched on March 11]. I should mention that the people who actually were behind the WHO meeting on the sidelines of Davos are the same people who organized and financed the [global health emergency]: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

So there you are. You simulate and then you go live. I’m not suggesting any kind of conspiratorial relationship, but I’m just saying there was a simulation and a couple of months later the whole thing goes live with the same actors involved in the simulation who are now involved in saving the world from the coronavirus.

Now, here’s another element, whether it is relevant or not. On October 18th Event 201, Baltimore, Coronavirus Simulation and Emergency Preparedness Task Force at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health Security, they identified the virus under the acronym nCoV-2o19. I’ll repeat: nCoV-2019. Now, when the actual virus was discovered two months later – it was early January, two and a half months later. To be precise, it was on January the 7th that the Chinese authorities identified a new type of virus. They isolated it on 7 January and the coronavirus was named by the WHO as 2019-nCoV – exactly the same name as that adopted in the World Economic Forum/Gates/Johns Hopkins October 18th, 2019 simulation exercise. So it’s as if they took that name and they stuck it into – it became then, of course, a real pandemic. But bear in mind, at a later date they changed the name. They must have realized that that name was misleading because it was the name of a simulation. But it started up as 2019-nCoV and then after that they adopted the COVID-19. But I think that happened almost a month later, and these were names which were attributed to the virus by the World Health Organization.

Bonnie Faulkner: It seems to me that they had to change the name because it was too big of a giveaway as to what was going on.

Michel Chossudovsky: I don’t want to draw any kind of implications. I’m just saying it appears odd that they would choose the same name for the virus as the one which they had for the simulation, and in my view, the nCoV reflects what it is. N stands for novel and Co, Coronavirus. It was a novel coronavirus.

Now, I think to avoid any confusions they then adopted a different name to that of the simulation and exercise. Nobody denies that these simulations took place. There’s a video – I’m going to play that video for you, and I think it’s the video from the simulation. They had tons of videos – you can go through it, but let’s say this video is so incredible because it’s the first few minutes. Here it is:

Woman: Okay. We will now advance three weeks to the fourth and final meeting of the Pandemic Emergency Board, on December 18th, 2019.

Man: Okay. Thank you for reconvening and let’s get an update from Dr. Rivers.

Dr. Rivers: In the last three weeks, case numbers have continued to grow exponentially. We now have an estimated 4.2 million cases, and 240,000 deaths. Almost every country is now reportinßg cases, and those who aren’t may simply not have the resources to conduct surveillance. We don’t see any change in the rate of rapid spread, and models estimate that we could have more than 12 million cases and close to a million deaths by mid-January. We’re not sure how big this could get, but there’s no end in sight. Financial markets are universally down by 15% or more on the year. Fear of a catastrophic pandemic and uncertainty about the capacity for governments to respond –

 

When the organizers of the simulation were confronted, particularly at the height of the financial crash, end of February, they said, “Well, we’re not predicting anything. We’re not predicting what happened. We’re just simulating.” But it just so happens that in fact it was practically word by word, that they simulated an initial collapse of financial markets of “15% or more.” Now, I checked the financial press in late February. In late February I checked the financial press and Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, and that was exactly what happened, and they used the same words, 15% or more, was the collapse of money markets at that time. Now, since then, the situation has evolved.

But the thing is that this simulation was not taken by an independent body of scientists and researchers and economists. No, it wasn’t. It was taken by Big Money and Big Pharma. Big Money and Big Pharma were simulating. And then, meanwhile and before the pandemic was actually declared on January 30th– and there was no basis for declaring that pandemic – there were only 150 cases outside of China. About, what, six cases in the US, three in Canada, two in the UK.  Well, we have the complete list; it’s provided by the World Health Organization. But before that historic venue, there was already a vaccination program, which was ongoing by different pharmaceutical companies.

Bonnie Faulkner: Michel, I’d like to go over some of this in greater detail. You write that, “The World Health Organization did not act to reassure and inform world public opinion. Quite the opposite. A fear pandemic rather than a genuine Public Health Emergency of International Concern was launched.” Would you describe this development as a media disinformation campaign?

Michel Chossudovsky: Absolutely. And I don’t think that the World Health Organization spearheaded the media disinformation campaign. The media disinformation campaign was already embedded with the organizations who were behind this initiative, in other words, the foundations, the World Economic Forum and so on. The media campaign, if it had been real news, first of all they should have said the decision of the WHO borders on ridicule; it’s in violation of its mandate; you don’t declare a global health emergency for 150 people. Punto. Six in America, two in Canada, three in the United Kingdom and so on. I think that should have been put forth, that this historic January 30thdecision was a big lie. And it was not only a big lie; it was the launchpad of a process of ultimately economic warfare.

I should clarify, because there’s a lot of confusion. This is not biological warfare, because the coronavirus is not a dangerous virus. It has certain similarities with other viruses. It triggers pneumonia, then there’s a recovery process. In fact, if we look at recent developments, the pandemic in China is more or less resolved. They’ve announced that more than 80% of confirmed cases have been resolved. Now, the media will not discuss that because once they say, “Oh, people are recovering, they’re getting well” and so on, that sort of undermines the panic. What they want to do is trigger panic, and that’s what people are doing right now. It’s fear and intimidation, it’s panic. People feel threatened, and the authorities are taking actions, which are not protecting people’s health but ultimately doing exactly the opposite.

Now, I’m not saying that coronavirus is not a health concern. It really is. But what is more of a concern are all the millions of people who lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus, not to mention those who lost their lifelong savings on the stock exchange. Think of all the smaller investors who put their money with their broker and so on, and what happens? They lose everything when the market collapses. Now, that, of course, is a concern, and that has also health implications. Some people commit suicide when they lose their savings. But that simply is considered as part of a market mechanism.

It’s not part of a market mechanism. It is part of a process of manipulation through sophisticated speculative instruments such as short selling. We know that. And if you have foreknowledge that President Trump is going to implement a ban on trans-Atlantic travel to the European Union, immediately those who have foreknowledge can speculate on the collapse of the airline stocks. It’s very easy. They place a bet and if it goes down, they make money, and they know it’s going to go down. So that is where, of course, these powerful corporate interests and financiers and hedge funds are making a tremendous amount of money.

And what we are witnessing now is a transfer of money wealth, a concentration of money wealth, which I think is unprecedented. It’s perhaps one of the largest transfers of money wealth in modern history. In other words, it’s characterized by bankruptcies of small and medium-sized firms, mounting debt, mounting personal debts, corporate debts, the takeover of competing companies. And in a sense, it’s characterized by conflict within the financial establishment.

It’s not only a war against China. At the beginning it appeared to be an economic war against China, which led to the closing down of trade and shipping and so on, where factories had to close down and so on, not to mention the tourist industry. But it is more than that, because it also affects the internal balance of power within the financial establishment. The fact that the airlines are the victims of this is significant, because the airlines – their stock may collapse and then, of course, they’ll be bought up, and that means that there’s been a redistribution not only of money wealth but also of real wealth. These are assets.

Without pointing to the fact that the existence of the coronavirus, which generates uncertainty, panic, is ultimately the ideal environment for people who want to speculate and make money at the expense of those who have savings, at the expense of small businesses and at the expense of perhaps competing corporations. That’s the situation we’re in, and I don’t recall any period in our recent history that is comparable to what we’re living now, where entire economies are in a standstill – I think of Western Europe, Italy, where people are ordered to stay at home and so on, and this ultimately has been achieved under the pretext – the pretext – of a virus, of a coronavirus. They said, “We must protect our population so let’s close down the economy.” Well, you don’t protect your population by closing down an economy. You can take certain public health actions which are selective and well thought out, but that’s not what’s happening.

Bonnie Faulkner: Getting back to the virus, you write, “Remember the unusual circumstances surrounding the April 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic.” What were these unusual circumstances? Was the data manipulated?

Michel Chossudovsky: This is not the first time that the WHO has declared a fake pandemic. I am talking about the decision taken on the 30th of January where we only had 150 people outside of China who were confirmed cases.

In 2009, April, there was another case, which was called the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic. The same atmosphere of fear and intimidation prevailed. The process was somewhat different but the statements made by the WHO Director-General at the time were far-reaching, because Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General in 2009, stated with authority that as many – I’m quoting, from the World Health Organization – “as many as two billion people could become infected over the next two years, nearly one-third of the world population.”

Now, what was Margaret Chan involved in, in making this statement? It was a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for Big Pharma, which was instructed by the WHO Director-General Margaret Chan to implement a massive vaccination program. She further states later on the following and, again, I’m quoting, “Vaccine makers could produce 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario.” Can you imagine 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario? In other words, this was a green light to the vaccine producers to produce billions of flu shots for the H1N1 and it was also a green light to national governments to actually purchase these billions of flu shots from the pharmaceutical companies.

Now, it turns out that this campaign in 2009, which was launched by the WHO, relied on fake news, fake statistics and lies at the highest levels of government. When it was debated under the Obama administration, Obama actually said, “Swine Flu could strike up to 40% of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren’t successful.” There were several statements – Associated Press: “The US expects to have 160 million doses of Swine Flu vaccine available sometime in October.” That statement was made in July of 2009. Business Week: “Wealthier countries such as the US and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose for the H1N1 flu; developing countries will pay a lower price.” And so on. This was a multi-billion-dollar fraud in favor of Big Pharma and, in fact, there was no pandemic. Millions of doses of Swine Flu vaccine had been ordered by national governments. Millions of vaccine doses were subsequently destroyed. There was a problem of collecting the data as to whether it was the seasonal flu Influenza Virus B, or whether it was the Swine Flu vaccine. The data was manipulated and there was ultimately no investigation into who was behind this multi-million-dollar fraud.

But I think we have to acknowledge, because things sometimes come much later, that in the wake of that fake pandemic there was a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which is a human rights watchdog, and they questioned the motivations of the WHO. They actually made the statement that the World Health Organization was involved in conflict of interest and that the pandemic was fake. That investigation is on record with the European Parliament. There we have an example of what happened. There were no economic and social implications as exist today, there were no actions to repeal air travel and so on but, let’s say from the point of view of the vaccination program – that vaccination program was launched and ultimately it was totally dysfunctional and the pharmaceutical companies cashed in on large amounts of money, which were largely funded by the taxpayers’ because it was the budget of the Ministries of Health.

And then, of course, the H1N1 mutated. So the vaccines were totally useless. It’s very similar to a seasonal flu pandemic; there’s a mutation of the virus. I recall in Canada, the Ministry of Health ordered millions of doses of the vaccine and then they acknowledged, they said, well, we can’t use them because you know the H1N1 virus has mutated. So what they did is they said we’re going to send that in the form of aid to developing countries, which was in effect also a fraud because the vaccine couldn’t be used from a health point of view, but then they decided simply to send it off to some country in Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa, knowing that the virus in itself had mutated and that these vaccines were totally useless.

So there we have a situation where the Director-General of the WHO gives the green light to Big Pharma, making erroneous statements to the effect that billions of people across the world will be affected, as many as two billion, she said, and we must act, and Big Pharma comes to the rescue and in effect the vaccine makers made a bundle of money at the expense of the public purse.

Bonnie Faulkner: Now, in the current situation, coming up to 2020 – you’ve been talking about 2009 – you write that, “The campaign to develop vaccines was initiated prior to the decision of the WHO to launch a global public health emergency.” Is that right?

Michel Chossudovsky: That’s correct. There are several things. One, there was a decision taken at Davos where they actually stated that a vaccine campaign was necessary, and that decision precedes the pandemic by about a week. But there are indications that, in fact, for them to have made that statement the companies involved were already working on the vaccine. Now, I can’t say exactly when they started, but certainly well before the World Economic Forum and certainly well before the launching of the pandemic. Mind you, the number of cases were so small in late January of 2020 – it was 150 cases outside China; those are WHO statistics. Now, you’re not going to initiate a vaccine campaign internationally for 150 people, but I think that there must have been some kind of foreknowledge that eventually the pandemic would move forward with a fear campaign, the media disinformation and then ultimately the recipients would be the vaccine producers, Big Pharma. And they already had a working relationship with the foundations. They were involved in the consultations in Davos. They were also directly or indirectly involved in the simulation scenario back in October. So maybe the simulation back in October is what gave the green light to Big Pharma. I think that’s certainly feasible because they were already talking about vaccinations in the simulation. So the simulation was talking about the need to develop vaccines for their hypothetical nCoV virus, as it was called at the time, and there was also evidence that before the pandemic was actually officially launched on 30th of January that the vaccination program had been announced at Davos.

Now, there’s another important announcement that was made, but it came a month later. That was by the WHO saying – I think it was in mid- to late-February when the WHO confirmed categorically that there was the need for a vaccination campaign. But that statement was made after the industry took the decision to develop the vaccines. And there are quite a number of companies involved.

Bonnie Faulkner: What is CEPI? What does that stand for? Is this a vaccine organization?

Michel Chossudovsky: Yes. The CEPI is a very important body and also actor in this whole process. It is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and it is essentially part of the World Economic Forum/Gates partnership. They made an announcement quite early in the game to the effect that they would be funding several programs to develop vaccines against the so-called coronavirus. At that time it was called nCoV-2019. The CEPI works in consultation with the Gates Foundation and the WEF, and it also is tied into the pharmaceutical industry. Their major partner is GlaxoSmithKline.

Bonnie Faulkner: Now, at the same time as this simulation Event 201 in Baltimore on October 18th, from October 18th to the 27th of October 2019, the CISM Military World Games were taking place in Wuhan, China. What are Military World Games, and who were the participants?

Michel Chossudovsky: These games, it’s a sport event, which takes place I guess once a year in different countries. There are more than 100 countries which participate, and they send in members of the armed forces, but essentially for sport events. Some people call it the Military Olympics.

Now, what the Chinese authorities have raised, and this relates in a very direct way to the fact that the virus may not have originated in China but may have originated in a foreign country, including the United States, is that there were 200 American military personnel participating in this 10-day event. Of course, they’re there and they visit the city and they go around, etc., etc. It has been intimated that the virus could have been either accidentally or deliberately dropped somewhere in the seafood market in Wuhan.

Now, we have absolutely no proof, but there are scientific assessments of the virus, and it’s a bit complex to explain, to the effect that what they call patient zero which – there’s patient zero and patient one – the thing is, where is that patient zero? Is the patient zero in the United States? In other words, assuming that it comes either from an animal or from a lab, etc., and then it’s transported to China.

Also, interestingly, the Chinese as well as Taiwanese and Japanese virologists have examined – looking at different strains of the virus in different locations – they have come to the conclusion that the virus was not made in China. At this very moment there’s a big debate in China on whether the virus is made in China or made in America. Increasingly, the scientific evidence points to the latter.

What is significant is that in recent developments we even have evidence that emanates – at least statements which emanate from the Director-General of the CDC – in other words, I’m talking about Robert Redfield, who made a statement just this week to the US Congress. It was during hearings of the so-called House Oversight Committee. He makes statements to the effect that some of the diagnoses of the common flu in the United States, the seasonal flu, Virus B, could have been coronavirus. This was in a committee context, and he answered the questions in a somewhat candid way and he said, “Yes, in some cases diagnosed as seasonal flu could have been coronavirus.”

Bonnie, there are two pieces of audio which I think you should broadcast. I’ll broadcast the first one now and you’ll hear it. That is the one by Redfield. It’s 30 seconds.

Redfield: University of Washington has developed their own tests –

Congressman: Were those test kits available last Friday?

Redfield: Yes, sir.

Congressman: Thank you. And without test kits, is it possible that those who had been susceptible to influenza might have been mischaracterized as to what they actually had, it’s quite possible they actually had COVID-19?

Redfield: The standard practice is the first thing you do is tests for influenza. So if they had influenza they would be positive for –

Congressman: But only if they were tested. So if they weren’t tested, we don’t know what they had.

Redfield: Correct.

Congressman: Okay. And if somebody dies from influenza, are we doing post-mortem testing to see if it was influenza or it was COVID-19?

Redfield: There is a surveillance system to test for pneumonia that the CDC has. It’s not in every city, every state, every hospital.

Congressman: So we could have people in the United States dying for what appear to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus or COVID-19.

Redfield: Some cases have been actually diagnosed that way in the United States today.

Congressman: Thank you.

Now, that statement corroborates the studies conducted in China and Japan and Taiwan, but it also begs the question, when? Was it in October? Was it in November? Was it in December? In other words, Redfield’s statement doesn’t say when those influenza tests were conducted. Well, they’re conducted on a routine basis. Presumably if it’s seasonal it starts in November or October and it extends right through the winter.

But what happened is that this statement in effect provides legitimacy to studies conducted by Japanese, Chinese and Taiwan virologists to the effect that it is possible that the virus did not originate in the seafood market in Wuhan; it actually could have originated in the United States of America. And the Taiwan virologist stated, because he was following what was going on, that there were more than 200 pneumonia type cases which resulted in death in the United States, and it was triggered by the patient’s inability to breathe. Then he said he was in touch with US health authorities and he begged the question whether those deaths could have been the result of the coronavirus. He also said that the virus outbreak may have begun at an earlier period than what is assumed, suggesting that it could even go back to September. And I presume it goes back to September because that’s when the flu virus actually starts to develop.

But I think what’s important is that – one of our own authors, Larry Romanoff, who is based in Shanghai, has done extensive research on this issue and if we patch together the statements of Robert Redfield, the Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese studies, there is a good likelihood that the virus did not come from China but it could well have originated in the United States. It is a talking point in China at this very moment because the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – and the Chinese don’t actually improvise in the same way as Americans their foreign policy stance – but when they’re commenting on the CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield they say, well, you know, this kind of information has to be explained. If the US reported 34 million cases of influenza that’s – I think he’s exaggerating but that’s what he says – I’m talking about the representative from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I think it’s more like 15 million – but in any event, he then concludes and says, please tell us how many are related to COVID-19. That is a tweet – the Chinese also adopted tweets.

What the Director Robert Redfield has admitted is that seemingly some people who have died from influenza could have been tested positive for the coronavirus. So this has opened up Pandora’s Box, so to speak, because the consensus in China is that the virus was not made in China; it was made in America.

It remains to be fully assessed and so on, but it changes the rhetoric. It also changes China’s geopolitical position. China is now at the stage where the pandemic is almost over. I think in a matter of a couple of weeks they’re going to go back to normal life throughout the country, and then they also are now going to acknowledge that the possibility is that this virus did not originate in China.

Bonnie Faulkner: Michel Chossudovsky, thank you so much.

Michel Chossudovsky: Delighted to be on the program. This is a very important topic. Best wishes.

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I’ve been speaking with Michel Chossudovsky. Today’s show has been COVID-19 Coronavirus: The Crisis. Michel Chossudovsky is an economist and the Founder, Director and Editor of the Center for Research on Globalization, based in Montreal, Quebec.  The Global Research website, globalresearch.ca, publishes news articles, commentary, background research and analysis. Since posting a series of very credible research articles on the novel coronavirus, GlobalResearch’s readership has exploded, and they have added many tens of thousands of new readers in China.

Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter at gandbradio.

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This interview was originally published on Guns and Butter.

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Global Reset is being ‘paralleled’ – not challenged – by the IMF. Both are pulling in the same direction, shoveling more assets from the lower echelons to a small elite, through debt enslavement – shifting from consumer capitalism to Green (consumer) capitalism – and all with an allure of friendliness towards the environment and the world population.

The WEF is an NGO, registered in a lush suburb of Geneva, with ambitions towards worldly power command. The IMF, created under the UN Charter, is an official international financial organization – one of the two Bretton Woods Institutions, the other one being the World Bank.

The IMF was created to watch over and regulate the world monetary conundrum. Both, IMF and WB, are controlled by veto-power by the US Treasury. The discourse of both, the WEF and the IMF, is to “doing as much good to a covid-disaster stricken world as we can.”  None of them mentions how their actions will put the world – especially the developing world, into even deeper ‘sustainable’ disaster.

The WEF’s main message delivered by WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab, called on June 3, 2020, for:

“The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.” 

You notice, the Great Reset is about preserving capitalism – and what Schwab and the elite “directors” behind him don’t say, is how to accelerate the shift of assets from the grassroots to the oligarchs, while blinding the public’s eyes and minds with the “Sustainable Green” slogan. That always sells. And – consuming “green” whatever is called green – we believe it anyway – gives a good feeling, a good conscience.

In a formidable discovery – conclusion of a scientific study – the WEF concludes that the evil of all evils is “affluence”. Much worse than the corona virus. “Affluence is the biggest threat to our world, according to a new scientific report.” (See this).

The WEF got it right, COVID-19 is of course by far not as bad as is Affluence, namely Money Wealth that has been accumulating over centuries, making the world an ever more unbalanced place – with increasing poverty famine, misery – and vulnerability to catch diseases, such as Covid.

Yes, the WEF and its players and “Deep-State-Actors” (which represent “Affluence”). behind the scene were using Covid to the fullest to cause a total lockdown of people as well as of the world economy. This happened virtually simultaneously Worldwide in almost all 193 (UN member) countries.

The few exceptions included Sweden and Belarus. This mighty lockdown order, instigated from “high-up”, way above the world’s governments and the UN, and with such co-opted “authorities”,  like the  WHO, has brought the world economy down on its knees within less than 6 months; and now to be continued, under the transformation to a new color “Green”.

As if the virus would have hit at the same time the entire world. Nobody in his or her clear mind can believe this. It never happened in the history of mankind. Yet, the masterminds behind this fraud are getting away with it – with so far relatively little protest. But with a massive all over-arching FEAR campaign.

Fear has been weaponized to intimidate the entire world population. Fear, anxiety and frustration are the core causes for most diseases. In other words what the false and fear propaganda does, is making us more vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, including cancer.

This is further enhanced by the strictly ordered social distancing. Prohibiting people getting together, socializing, ‘solidarizing’, and thus reducing their level of fear, is a clever dictate of the Masters. Strategizing collectively on how to get out of the dilemma and of the covid-stranglehold, has become a virtual impossibility.

The shock slowly but surely abides among some “thinking” people and they get together in masses, protesting, despite the prohibition – Berlin, 1 August 2020, 1.3 million people in the streets. Others are demonstrating for Black Lives Matter (BLM), against police brutality and for or against the Woke movement. Most are funded generously by foundations of rich oligarchs like, Ford, Gates, Soros, Rockefeller – and more. Starting in the US, protests have now also spread to major European cities. They are all an exasperation and anger against repression, hence unknowingly linked to the corona-fever, the covid-repression – raising more and more havoc.

The Global Great Reset 

It’s time for “appeasing” actions. The WEF is there with the global Great Reset, that propagates what the protesters knew all along: Affluence is the problem. It’s as simple as that. Some details were released by Klaus Schwab, that endless consumerism has to stop and that Mother Earth needs to be protected and rehabilitated – and that more balance has to be brought into humanity. And all that veering the economy – mind you CAPITALIST economy – to a concept of GREEN living. Voilà. More details pertaining to these noble objectives and to mechanisms on how to achieve the objectives, will be divulged at the January 2021 Davos WEF.

Sounds good. Do away with affluence and promote more equality. Concepts that sell easily, but nor the WEF or the IMF believe in them. It’s anathema to their dogma of free-for-all capitalism, with a fundamentalist Market theory that resolves all the world’s ills.

Green Capitalism

Now comes the IMF with its parallel dogma for shifting away from “what didn’t work” – towards another form of capitalism, a “sustainable capitalism” – would you believe, also a Green Capitalism ; promoting the US Democratic (sic) Party’s New Green Deal, fashioned after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930’s. The Roosevelt New Deal was officially designed as a program of relief from the 1929-1933 economic depression. It consisted of public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations, leading right up to 1939, the beginning of WWII.

In her remarks to the US Chamber of Commerce, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF, announced to the distinguished guests,

“there is no stronger advocate for markets than a person who has lived in the highly distorted environment of a non-market system. I learned firsthand the cost of bad policies, and the benefits of good policies. In fact, it was partly due to the IMF that Bulgaria turned a corner in the 1990s and was able to participate in both the European Union and the world economy.”

Kristina is Bulgarian. She went on to say,

“What does it tell us that somebody who came from a Communist system now leads the IMF and is invited to address the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? Put simply, it tells us that change for the better is unstoppable.”

That says it all. Market fundamentalism must continue come hell or high water. And if the IMF has its way, it will. Kristina’s three-point program joins closely the WEF approach to the “new” economic paradigm, the Great Reset. A shift from “capitalism of affluence’ to a more egalitarian “Green Capitalism”. There is no shift that doesn’t shovel assets. And since the rich will be doing the shoveling, the few remaining assets of the people will be shoveled from below to the top. The usual.

The first point of “what did we learn from the crisis, leads to stocktaking. Ms. Georgieva points out some of the “collateral damage” of the obligatory lockdown – obligatory, because we were and still are fighting a deadly virus.

According to the IMF, by the end of 2020,

“170 countries—almost 90 percent of the world—will be worse off with lower per capita income.”

This disastrous and wanton destruction of the world economy has already prompted “massive fiscal measures—totaling nine trillion dollars, globally”, according to the IMF.

In reality these measures, including the semi-clandestine rescue packages to banks and other financial institutions, plus, to the corporate giants, have in the US alone exceeded 20 trillion (fiat) dollars. Add to this what the rest of the world, especially the EU, via the European Central Bank (ECB), has dished out in so-called rescue money – we are reaching a huge package of“Quantitative Easing” – QE – debt-money made out of thin air. By far, most of it went at lenient conditions to corporate finance, production and services; and only a small percentage went to those people in most need. In the US, millions of unemployed received an extra US$ 600 per week for the past few months. But this benefit stopped on 31 July 2020. This is having dire consequences for millions.

Point two is the pathway to recovery”. Here, the IMF foresees the great reopening of the economy. That means a careful approach to building a recovery that is focused on a great transformation as we emerge from this exceptional crisis.”

The WEF calls the transformation ‘massive reforms.” Reforms and transformations are key words in the jargon of the Washington Consensus. They reverberate well in the language of neoliberalism. A country to be salvaged by the IMF has to “reform”, “transform” and to “adjust”. WEF and IMF go hand-in-hand.

The Great Transformation

The process of reopening is now starting across the globe—some 75 percent of countries are reopening. So says the IMF. Now is the moment to think carefully about what comes next. The IMF suggests, building a recovery that is focused on a Great Transformation as we emerge from this exceptional crisis. What precisely the Great Transformation entails, Ms. Georgieva does not explain.

One of the opportunities the IMF sees emerging from this crisis, is the digital transformation — a big winner from this crisis”. The IMF doesn’t say what it means, but it requires foremost digitizing people’s identity and digitizing money – total control over people’s movements, health records, cash flow, bank accounts and more. See also this

Although, both WEF and IMF recognize that this crisis will bring more debt, higher deficits, higher unemployment and higher levels of poverty, they both want adjustments. And adjustments usually target the lower income groups, the poor. “Adjustments” is the lingo of the IMF and the World Bank, “reforming” public administration, i.e. firing a large segment of state employees, thereby increasing unemployment, deprivation and despair; privatizing public assets and services (stealing people’s accumulated assets); giving concessions to foreign corporations to exploit the countries’  national natural resources – and the carrot is: An IMF or WB loan, or both. Bravo. It brings debt and debt service – and foremost more control by the Global North over the Global South.

Which brings us to the Third Point – building a fairer society, the role of the IMF. It offers another opportunity, going green. The IMF does not miss its chance to point to the climate change which still looms over us all, man-made climate change which went almost forgotten in the saga and drama of the corona virus. It has to be revived. And what better opportunity than looking into the future – and going Green.

This is precisely what the WEF is also propagating – a new Green Agenda or the New Green Deal. It costs a lot of money. It means transforming wasteful, polluting industries to green and clean industries – like, among others, electric cars. It’s a visible icon for a clean and conscious society.

Where does the electricity come from for charging the environment-destroying lithium batteries of electric cars? In most countries it’s still made by combustion of hydrocarbons. In this case and in many others, the “transformation” from “black energy” to “green energy” uses more black energy than was used before. See also the remarkable documentary on the subject by Michael Moore, “Planet of the Humans” (full length feature documentary)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE&feature=emb_title ).

 

The IMF is ready to lend billons for so-called debt-relief and Financial Assistance (FA) to allow new investments for the projected transformation.

FA and Debt Relief in the jargon of the IMF is adding new debt to pay off the old debt, and in rare cases, it contains some real relief, or debt forgiveness. The huge new transformation investments required to go SUSTAINABLY GREEN, may come from private banking, leveraged by World Bank loans and lending from other official and regional lending institutions.

In fact, the IMF has put in place a Covid-19 Financial Assistance and Debt Service Relief Program.

Under this plan, the IMF is providing FA and debt service relief to member countries facing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For that purpose, the IMF’s Executive Board, since late March 2020, has approved an increase of the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust (CCRT), from US$ 250 billion to US$ 1 trillion. These funds are made available to IMF members who ask for relief support. So far (as of August 10, 2020), some 80 countries have applied for relief under the CCRT.

These charts provide lists of countries by region and the corresponding loans for financial assistance and / or debt service relief per country. Total FA for 80 countries amounts to US$ 87.8 billion; Debt Relief for 28 countries amounts to US$ 251.2 million, a fraction of what was transferred from the Global North to the Global South in the form of new debt, new dependence – or to call it what is, new slavehood.

It is interesting to observe that all the FA funds go to developing countries. Debt relief is clearly for poor developing countries. But why would FA funds only flow south? The industrialized north also incurred huge amounts of covid debt, most probably sums larger by orders of magnitude than those of developing countries. Yet, these “developed” countries manage to survive without help from the IMF or WB. Why? – Because most covid-accumulated debt is local, internal debt and can be managed locally through sovereign national monetary policies.

Dedollarization

Why would developing countries not handle their local debt internally? – One may just guess. There is very likely a lot of arm-twisting or outright threats and corruption going on, for those countries to stay in the orbit of financial predators, of dependence on the west, the Global North. Many of their currencies are partially or fully dollarized – and using their own sovereign money to manage their internal debt – would require dedollarization which doesn’t happen overnight. And especially not in an emergency. Examples abound. Venezuela is a case in point.

That’s what’s at stake for most developing countries, and most of them are rich in natural resources. Dedollarization means regaining their national and monetary sovereignty. It is a crucial step, if what both the IMF and the WEF profess – more socioeconomic equilibrium, more economic justice – were to become reality. It’s not a question of “Black” or “Green” – it’s a question of justice, justice based on social equality. Unfortunately, that’s not meant with the Great Reset, nor with the Great Transformation. They are slogans of deception. In reality, both mean a new Great Capitalism – shaded green, as it were, for popularity.

Actions and professed policies of both, WEF and IMF, go into the direction of continued unfettered capitalism. To become independent again, rather than swelter under continued neo-colonialism, defy WEF and IMF advice and work steadily with perseverance towards political and financial autonomy. De-dollarize and de-globalize and turn to local production for local consumption with local sovereign money and local public banking, directed by a sovereign local central bank that works for the socioeconomic development of her country’s people, not for the faraway shareholders of a Wall Street or internationally affiliated bank.

The IMF is ready to lend billons for so-called debt-relief and Financial Assistance (FA) to allow new investments for the projected transformation. FA and Debt Relief is jargon of the IMF, for adding new debt to pay off the old debt, and in rare cases, it contains some real relief, or debt forgiveness. The huge new transformation investments required to go SUSTAINABLY GREEN, may come from private banking, leveraged by World Bank and IMF loans, as well as lending from other official and regional financial institutions.

In fact, the IMF has put in place a Covid-19 Financial Assistance and Debt Service Relief  Program  Under this plan, the IMF is providing FA and debt service relief to member countries facing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For that purpose, the IMF’s Executive Board, late in March 2020, has approved an increase of the Catastrophe Contain call I am sorryment and Relief Trust (CCRT), from US$ 250 billion to US$ 1 trillion. These funds are made available to IMF members who ask for relief support. So far (as of August 10, 2020), some 80 countries have applied for relief under the CCRT.

These charts (see link below) provides lists of countries by region and the corresponding loans for financial assistance  and / or debt service relief per country

Total FA for 80 countries amounts to US$ 87.8 billion; Debt Relief (grants) for 28 countries amounts to US$ 251.2 million, a fraction of what was transferred from the Global North to the Global South in the form of new debt, new dependence – or to call it what is, new colonialism.

It is interesting to observe that all the FA funds go to developing countries. Debt relief is clearly for poor developing countries. But why would FA funds only flow south? The industrialized north also incurred huge amounts of covid debt, most probably sums larger by orders of magnitude than those of developing countries. Yet, these “developed” countries manage to survive without help from the IMF or WB. Why? – Because most covid-accumulated debt is local, internal debt, and can be managed locally through sovereign national monetary policies.

Why would developing countries not handle their local debt internally? – One may just guess.

There is very likely a lot of arm-twisting or outright threats and corruption going on, for those countries to stay in the orbit of financial predators, of dependence on the west, also the Global North. Many of developing countries’ currencies are partially or fully dollarized – and using their own sovereign money to manage their internal debt – would require dedollarization which doesn’t happen overnight. And especially not in an emergency. It would be fought nail and tooth by the owners of the dollar economy. Examples abound. Venezuela is a case in point.

Imagine a country like Ecuador making her own monetary policy. Ecuador not only is 100% dollarized but uses the actual US dollar as its currency. Impossible. Countries like Peru and Nicaragua are tacitly and partially dollarized, to the tune of about 70% and 90-plus%, respectively. Most developing countries are to some extent in this predicament. It’s the US Treasury that makes monetary policy of these countries.

Take the weaker and debt-ridden southern countries of the EU’s Eurozone. They cannot act independently. They are euro-ized. It’s not the directly the US Treasury, but the ECB (and IMF) that call the shots. Would Greece have stepped out of the Eurozone in 2008 to 2010 economic crisis, reverting to a devalued Drachma (their former currency), called for a Paris Club renegotiation of their debt, they would be sailing into a much brighter future today.

That’s what’s at stake for most of the Global South, still rich in natural resources. Dedollarization means regaining their national and monetary sovereignty. It is a crucial step, if what both the IMF and the WEF profess – more socioeconomic equilibrium, more economic justice – were to become reality. It’s not a question of “Black” or “Green” – it’s a question of justice, justice based on social equality. Unfortunately, that’s not meant with the Great Reset, nor with the Great Transformation. They are slogans of deception. In reality, both mean a new Great Capitalism – shaded green, as it were, for popularity.

Actions and professed policies of both, WEF and IMF, go into the direction of continued unfettered capitalism. To become independent again, rather than swelter under continued neo-colonialism, defy WEF and IMF advice and work steadily with perseverance towards political and financial autonomy.

De-dollarize and de-globalize and turn to local production for local consumption with local sovereign money and local public banking, directed by a sovereign local central bank that works for the socioeconomic wellbeing of her country’s people, not for the faraway shareholders of a Wall Street or internationally affiliated banks.

*

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO); RT; Countercurrents, Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press; The Saker Blog, the and other internet sites.

He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.

He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.  Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

First published on September 10, 2020

In times of great confusion and anxiety, when it feels like everything is going down the drain, like everyone is stumbling down a steep road, driven by a supposedly unstoppable disaster, it might be helpful to take a moment and a deep breath, to step aside and turn around. One might ask: What brought us here? What is the origin of this road? From where did we follow it? Who was sending us in this direction? Have we been here before? And, maybe even more important: Where will it lead us?

As the Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In this sense, the following is meant as a chronology of some selected events of the last twenty years related to our current situation, some more or less known, some more or less forgotten.

CHRONOLOGY (2000 -2020)

2000

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (founded in 1999), UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank found the “Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization“, GAVI. The main goal of this PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP (PPP) is to shape healthy vaccine markets. “GAVI brings together the vaccine industry with governments in both developing and industrialized countries, technical agencies, civil society and private PHILANTROPISTS.” In 1999, the Gates Foundation had pledged $ 750 million to set up GAVI and will make additional future donations of more than $ 4 billion until 2020.

March 15, 2003

Gro Harlem Brundtland, WHO Director-General, states in an alert about the “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome“: “This syndrome, SARS, is now a worldwide health threat. The world needs to work together to find its cause, cure the sick, and stop its spread.”

Note: SARS, “the FIRST Pandemic of the 21st Century“, caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV, originated from China, lead to 8,096 reported cases of illness and 774 deaths worldwide.

Note: Later, in 2019, Brundtland will be co-chair on the “Global Preparedness Monitoring Board” (GPMB), when the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak begins.

November 11-12, 2004

An “Informal meeting on influenza pandemic vaccines” of WHO, influenza vaccine manufacturers, national drug licensing agencies and government representatives takes place in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting’s goal is to “explore ways to expedite the development of pandemic vaccines by establishing PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS.

January 2005

As a result of the meeting in November the WHO publishes a report with the title “Avian influenza: assessing the pandemic threat. The authors claim that “during 2004, the world moved closer to a further pandemic than it has been at any time since 1968. About the H5N1 bird flu virus: NEVER BEFORE had any avian influenza virus caused such extremely high fatality in humans, taking its heaviest toll on children and young adults in the prime of life.”

Note: At this point, the bird flu has caused 50 cases in South-East-Asia during the years 2003 / 2004.

The report emphasizes the importance of vaccination during a pandemic. Under the heading Vaccines: the first line of defence” it says: “WHO network laboratories developed a prototype virus, for use as the “seed” for vaccine production, and made it available to manufacturers in April 2004.

During pandemics, more severe disease tends to arrive with the SECOND WAVE. Should this happen, a few more months could be available to augment vaccine supplies. Each day gained means an additional 5 million doses of vaccine. Larger quantities of vaccine, supported by well-planned distribution strategies, will SAVE many LIVES.

Ideally, safety testing should be exceptionally extensive, but the pressure to manufacture RAPIDLY during a public health emergency is expected to shorten the time available for testing.”

The authors also recommend the use of the antiviral drugs Tamiflu (Roche) and Relenza (GlaxoSmithKline) for treatment and prevention: “… Drugs in the second and newer class, the neuraminidase inhibitors (oseltamivir and zanamivir), have a better safety profile and are less prone to the development of drug resistance. Here, the main constraints are price and supplies. The drugs are much more expensive than the M2 inhibitors and supplies are very limited.”

March 7, 2005

In an interview with the German news magazine SPIEGEL, Klaus Stoehr, virologist and leader of WHO‘s Global Influenza Program, is asked about the bird flu: “How dangerous will this pandemic be?” He replies:

The pandemics in 1957 and 1968 were relatively mild with between 1 to 4 million dying in each. (…) Taking into account the increase in the world population since then, one would estimate that a mild pandemic would result in between 2 to 7 million deaths and a further 28 million hospitalized. Health care systems will be OVERWHELMED very QUICKLY .”

Note: Later Stoehr will become Vice President and Global Head of the Influenza Strategy Liaison for Novartis Vaccines, “…driving influenza based interactions with national and international authorities.”

August 3, 2005

Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at the Imperial College London, UK, warns THE GUARDIAN about the bird flu virus H5N1:

What can we do if it hits our shores? We couldn’t stop it. There would be a constant number of NEW cases and we would be OVERWHELMED very RAPIDLY. (…) In just one year, half the world’s population – more than 3 billion people – would be infected.”

According to the article, Ferguson, other researchers and British government officials recommend to create a stock of millions doses of antiviral treatment and vaccines as a first line of defenceagainst a catastrophic virus outbreak. “Currently the antiviral drug Tamiflu, made by Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Roche, stands the best chance of curbing pandemic bird flu. (…) Prof Ferguson said he understood Roche was prepared to make free donations of Tamiflu to the World Health Organization to help meet the threat.”

Note: In 2002 Ferguson had predicted 150.000 deaths in the UK from the Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as the mad-cow-disease. During the following 16 years 178 persons died from BSE in the UK.

September 20, 2005

In an interview, published under the headline “H5N1 – KILLER Flu“, Antony Fauci, immunologist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) suggests that the US should buy at least 100 million vaccine doses.

“Well, that takes many months. It takes several months to do if you’re doing nothing else. And that’s the reason why one of the issues that comes up when you talk about pandemic flu, is that the vaccine development and production enterprise in this country and worldwide is very fragile.

… the vaccine industry is fragile. It is not a big money maker.”

September 29, 2005

WHO‘s Director-General for Health Action in Crises, David Nabarro, physician and newly appointed senior UN system coordinator for avian and human influenza (bird flu), states in a UN press conference:

I’m not, at the moment, at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million.”

Note: Following WHO’s recommendations and driven by panic about an expectable outbreak of a bird flu pandemic, governments worldwide started stockpiling antiviral drugs and vaccines for large parts of their populations.

September 30, 2005

Neil Ferguson is quoted in an article in THE GUARDIAN: “Last month Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, told Guardian Unlimited that up to 200 million people could be KILLED (Note: by the bird flu).”

“Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”

Note: Between 2003 and 2009 worldwide 282 people died from the bird flu.

2006

Warren Buffett, US American business tycoon and Philanthropist, pledges $ 37 billion (85% of his fortune) to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

November 26, 2006

Warren Buffett is quoted in the NEW YORK TIMES: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war and We’re winning.”

April 24, 2009

WHO announces an outbreak of human cases of H1N1, the swine flu, confirmed in Mexico and the USA.

April 27, 2009

The first two UK cases of H1N1 are confirmed in a couple from Scotland, WHO raises its alert level to Phase 4.

April 29, 2009

British PM Gordon Brown announces that the stockpile of antivirals will be increased from 33.5 to 50 million.

Note: The UK government spent £ 424 million on flu drug Tamiflu, the US government spent $ 1.3 billion on stockpiling 65 million dosages. Global sales of Tamiflu is estimated at almost $ 3 billion at the height of the swine flu pandemic.

May 4, 2009

On WHO‘s website, the criteria for a pandemic

An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” are altered.

The new definition is: “An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.” For the declaration of phase 6 (the highest level, the pandemic) the presence of several simultaneous epidemics and high death numbers are no longer necessary.

Note: Later Andrej Hunko, German MP, will say in a speech at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 24.06.2010:

Here I have secret contracts that were signed in Germany between GlaxoSmithKline and the German state. As a simple Member of Parliament, officially I am not allowed to view these contracts. They were posted on the Internet by whistleblowers in Germany.

These contracts specify exactly what needs to happen when phase 6 is announced: what amounts of vaccine doses the states have to buy, etc.. Such contracts were concluded by most states before the criteria have been changed.”

June 11, 2009

WHO‘s Director-General Margaret Chan declares the swine flu pandemic:

This particular H1N1 strain has not circulated previously in humans. The virus is entirely new  (…) Further spread is considered inevitable. On the basis of available evidence, and these expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. I have therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 5 to phase 6. The world is now at the START of the 2009 influenza pandemic.

WHO has been in close dialogue with influenza vaccine manufacturers. I understand that production of vaccines for seasonal influenza will be completed soon, and that full capacity will be available to ensure the largest possible supply of pandemic vaccine in the months to come.”

Note: Under enormous pressure (and because of the existing contracts) governments bought millions of vaccine doses. Germanyfor example, bought 34 million doses for € 280 million. Only 14% were used, the rest had to be disposed as hazardous waste at high costs.

July 16, 2009

Based on Neil Ferguson‘s advice, the British government warns about the swine flu that “in the worst case scenario 30% of the UK population could be infected by the H1N1 virus, with 65,000 Killed.”

Note: Eventually, the swine flu killed 457 people in the UK.

December 18, 2009

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) publishes a motion for a recommendation with the title “Faked Pandemics – a Threat for Health“.

The document states about the birds-flu-campaign (2005/06)” and the swine-flu-campaign (2009/10)”:

In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies (…) to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.”

The authors also see “a great deal of damage for the “credibility and accountability of important international health agencies”. Meant is the WHO: “The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers.”

January 2010

Exactly 10 years before the outbreak of the “pneumonia of unknown etiology” in Wuhan, Bill Gates calls for a “DECADE of Vaccines” and pledges $ 10 billion to the WHO for this purpose.

February 2010

In a TED talk Bill Gates says:

“First, we‘ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion.

Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent.”

May 2010

The Rockefeller Foundation publishes “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development“. The report predicts four different possible future scenarios. In one of them, called “LOCK STEP“,

…the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this NEW influenza strain (…) was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were QUICKLY OVERWHELMED when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and KILLING 8 million in just seven months.

The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains.

The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, SAVED millions of LIVES, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries.

During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of FACE MASKS to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stationsand supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified.

Citizens willingly gave up some of their sovereigntyand their privacy – to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability. Citizens were more tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight, and national leaders had more latitude to impose order in the ways they saw fit. In developed countries, this heightened oversight took many forms: BIOMETRIC IDs for all citizens, for example…”

June 7, 2010

PACE, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe publishes the reportThe handling of the H1N1 pandemic: more transparency needed“. The report criticizes

possible influence of the pharmaceutical industry on some of the major decisions relating to the pandemic.

The way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, not only by WHO, but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level, gives rise to alarm. Some of the consequences of decisions taken and advice given are particularly troubling, as they led to distortion of priorities of public health services across Europe, waste of large sums of public money and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks faced by the European public at large.”

August 10, 2010

The Director-General of WHO, Margaret Chan, declares the end of the influenza (H1N1) pandemic.

Note: The swine flu killed 18.500 people worldwide. For comparison: the seasonal flu 2017 / 2018 killed 25.000 in Germany alone.

December 2, 2010

WHO, UNICEF, US’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Gates Foundation announce the “DECADE of Vaccines Collaboration“, a partnership to increase coordination across the international vaccine community and create a “Global Vaccine Action Plan” (GVAP).

The collaboration follows the January 2010 call by Bill and Melinda Gates for the next ten years to be the Decade of Vaccines. The Global Vaccine Action Plan will enable greater coordination across all STAKEHOLDER groups – national governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, the private sector and Philanthropic organizations.”

Note: Among others, the Leadership Council is comprised of Margaret Chan and Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Steering Committee includes (among others) Seth Berkley, President & CEO, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).

September 2012

The “Better Than Cash Alliance” is launched by the UN Capital Development Fund, the United States Agency for International Development, the Gates Foundation, Citigroup, the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and VISA. The global PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP consisting of companies, international organizations and 25 (mostly developing) countries, aims to “accelerate the transition from cash to DIGITAL PAYMENTS.”

April 10, 2014

The international network of researchers, Cochrane, provider of “evidence-based informations to make health decisions”, publishes a systematic review about neuraminidase inhibitors (NIs) like Tamiflu. The researchers were also able to use previously secret studies conducted by the manufacturers.

The review found that

while oseltamivir and zanamivir have small, non‐specific effects on reducing the time to alleviation of influenza symptoms, oseltamivir (Tamiflu) increases the risk of adverse effects, such as nausea, vomiting, psychiatric effects and renal events in adults and vomiting in children, and both drugs do not reduce the important outcomes such as pneumonia and hospitalizations.”

January 17-20, 2017

World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Official announcement of the foundation of the “Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations” (CEPI), a global partnership to develop vaccines to stop future epidemics by the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, WEF and the governments of Norway and India.

February 8, 2017

The government of India cuts all ties with Gates Foundation on immunization, after scientists blamed the Gates-funded polio vaccination campaign for almost half a million cases of childhood paralysis. From an article of the INDIAN JOURNAL OF MEDICAL ETHICS: “During the last five years, globally, cases of polio caused by vaccine viruses have outnumbered those of polio caused by natural (wild) polioviruses“.

July 2017

WHO downgrades the status of Tamiflu from a “core” drug to a “complementary” drug. At this point, Roche‘s Tamiflu has generated over $18 billion in sales worldwide, half of it from governments stockpiling the drug.

November 13, 2017

Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI and board member of ID2020, publishes his articleImmunization needs a technology boost” in the science magazine NATURE. Berkley emphasizes the importance of digital tracking of children who receive vaccines in order to provide “a full course of a vaccine regime to 100% of “infants living in the world’s 73 poorest countries” and to “ensure that everyone has a legal identity by 2030.”

January 23, 2018

WEF‘s reportThe Known Traveller – Unlocking the potential of DIGITAL IDENTITY for secure and seamless travel” is published in consultation with Accenture, the Government of Canada, Google, Interpol, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Marriott International, UK National Crime Agency, US Department of Homeland Security, VISA and others.

The “Known Traveler Digital Identity” (KTDI) website claims that KTDI

brings together a global consortium of individuals, governments, authorities and the travel industry to enhance security in world travel. (…) KTDI allows individuals to manage their own profile and collect DIGITAL ATTESTATIONS of their personal data, deciding what data to share and when. The more attestations a traveller accumulates and shares, the better consortium partners, governments and other parties can provide a smooth and safe travel experience.”

Note: Conversely, this could imply that a person unwilling to share data might have to face a hard time in an attempt to travel.

January 25, 2018

At the 48th World Economic Forum‘s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, several “STAKEHOLDERS” from finance, business, tech companies, foundations and international organizations call to unite in a global PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP in order to push along the idea of a “DIGITAL IDENTITY for everyone. Among them: ID2020, World Bank, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Mastercard, Visa, Microsoft, Accenture, Consumers International, Omidyar Network, FIDO Alliance, GSMA, Hyperledger, Open Identity Exchange, World Identity Network, sedicii, World Food Programme and the UNHCR.

Derek O’Halloran, WEF:

Digital identities and access systems are foundational elements of our shared digital future. They offer tremendous opportunities for individuals and society, especially for those without formal ID.”

The Government of Canada announces that it will pioneer the testing of the KTDI prototype system together with the with the Kingdom of the Netherlands to “explore opportunities for demonstrating the potential of digital identity systems to engender trust and cooperation between international partners.”

April 18, 2018

At the Malaria Summit in London Bill Gates says: “The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for WAR.”

September 25, 2018

At the “Sustainable Development Impact Summit 2018” in New York, USA, the WEF is announcing the launch of a shared platform for “Good Digital Identity“. Good DIGITAL ID is supposed to provide “access to digital services, enabling personalization, customer loyalty, increased security and reduced costs. Innovative customer services are possible: telemedicine and digital prescriptions, gig economy, more fluid workforce, DIGITAL BANKING via devices in the internet of things (IoT), digital transformation of supply chains and the provision of government services.”

November 18, 2018

Billionaire Media Mogul and former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg donates $ 1,8 billion to the Johns Hopkins University, the largest donation on record to an American academic institution.

September 12, 2019

Global Vaccination Summit“, Brussels, Belgium. Organized by the European Commission and the WHO, the event‘s overall objective is to “demonstrate EU leadership for global commitment to vaccination, boost political commitment towards eliminating vaccine preventable diseases and engage political leaders and leaders from scientific, medical, industry, PHILANTROPIC and civil society in global action against the spread of vaccine MISINFORMATION.”

The summit’s synopsis

Ten Actions Towards Vaccination For All” complains that “vaccine shortages, misinformation, complacency towards disease risks, diminishing public confidence in the value of vaccines and disinvestments are harming vaccination rates worldwide.”

September 19, 2019

At the annual summit of the ID2020 Alliance in New York, USA, the “Good Digital ID” project named “Access to Information Cooperation (a2i) is announced, run by ID2020, GAVI and the Government of Bangladesh. “Recognizing the opportunity for immunization to serve as a platform for DIGITAL IDENTITY, this program leverages existing vaccination and birth registration operations to offer newborns a persistent and portable biometrically-linked digital identity.”

Note: Immunization means vaccination.

September 24, 2019

António Guterres, UN‘s Secretary General, calls on all sectors of society to mobilize for a DECADE of Action to deliver the Global Goals“.

October 18, 2019

Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise takes place in New York, USA. Organized by the Johns Hopkins University, the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation, the exercise simulates a pandemic outbreak of a NEW coronavirus from the SARS family. Purpose of the exercise is to show that only with the help of PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS the states will be able to face the next severe pandemic(s) without catastrophic loss of lives and economic destruction.

The participants (“players):

  • Brad Connet, President of Henry Schein’s U.S. Medical Group
  • Adrian Thomas, Vice President Global Public Health at Johnson & Johnson
  • Christopher Elias, President of the Global Development Program of Gates Foundation, adviser of the U.S. CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention)
  • Tim Evans, formerly World Bank Group, WHO, Rockefeller Foundation, co-founder of GAVI
  • Avril Haines, formerly Deputy Director CIA
  • Jane Halton, later member of Australia’s COVID-19 Coordination Commission in March 2020
  • Matthew Harington, CEO of Edelman, the world’s biggest PR and marketing consultancy firm
  • George Fu Gao, Director-General, Chinese Center for Disease Control
  • Steven Redd, Incident Commander of CDC’s swine flu response (including vaccination of 81 million US citizens) in 2009 / 2010.
  • Sofia Borges, Vice President of the UN foundation
  • Hasti Taghi, Vice President & Executive Advisor, NBCUniversal Media
  • Eduardo Martinez, WEF’s “Managing the Risk and Impact of Future Epidemics Steering Committee. Dr. Martinez also serves on the UN Global Logistics Cluster’s Logistics Emergency Team Steering Council (…) and he serves on the Executive Committee of IMPACT 2030, a business-led coalition to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and on the Board of UN’s public-private sector coalition innovation incubator, Global Humanitarian Lab.”
  • Latoya Abbott, Marriott International
  • Martin Knuchel, Lufthansa Group
  • Lavan Thiru, “Monetary Authority” of Singapore

“In this NEW ERA of extreme pandemic threat, public-private cooperation is essential for an effective response.” said Tom Inglesby, Director of Center for Health Security, Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “While governments and public health systems are already strained due to the increase in dangerous outbreaks, experts agree that a severe, fast-spreading human-to-human pandemic incident could happen at any time.”

Note: Tom Inglesby, Christopher Elias and George Fu Gao are, together with Antony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar (Director Wellcome Trust) board members of the “Global Preparedness Monitoring Board” (GPMB), the “joint forces” of WHO and World Bank.

Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO‘s “Health Emergencies Programme“, stated in his introduction:

I don’t think we have ever been in the situation where we have had to respond to so many health emergencies at once. This is a NEW NORMAL.”

According to the event’s scenario, the number of cases would increase exponentially, because the whole human population is vulnerable. Until the end of the pandemic 18 months later, when a vaccine is available, the disease will cause 65 million deaths.

One segment of the exercise deals with “MISINFORMATION and disinformation“. From the fact sheetCommunication in a Pandemic“:

Disinformation campaigns are widely recognized in the political world but have been identified in the public health realm as well. In the fall of 2018, a team of researchers systematically identified a concerted effort to spread disinformation and discord about vaccine safety.

More than 50 countries globally have taken different government-led actions that, in theory, aim to combat misinformation. These actions can range from media literacy campaigns and fact-checking websites to more extreme measures, such as jailing users for publishing content deemed to be misinformation. In some cases, authorities have shut down social media sites or the internet entirely.

Misinformation and disinformation are likely to be serious threats during a public health emergency. Unfortunately, thus far, there are limited ways to control the propagation of misinformation, leading to potentially draconian methods to manage this problem.”

Note: Later, the European Commission will state on its website:

MISINFORMATION and disinformation in the health space are thriving, including on COVID-19. It is important that you rely only on authoritative sources to get updated information on the COVID-19 outbreak.

WE suggest that you follow the advice of your public health authorities, and the websites of relevant EU and international organizations: ECDC and WHO. You can also help by not sharing unverified information coming from dubious sources. The fight against coronavirus misinformation and disinformation SAVES LIVES.”

November 2019

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s national public health institute, receives a $ 253,000 donation from the Gates Foundation.

November 20, 2019

After a prioritized procedure, the European Patent Office grants a patent on a genetically modified coronavirus. Patent claim #5: “The coronavirus (…) is an infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), preferably IBV M41.”

Patent holder: the Pirbright Institute in Surrey, England. Major STAKEHOLDERS (among others): the WHO, the European Commission and the Gates Foundation.

December 1, 2019

China‘s new “Law on Vaccine Administration” comes into effect. According to the law, China is to implement a state immunization program, and residents living within the territory of China are legally obligated to be vaccinated with immunization program vaccines, which are provided by the government free of charge. Local governments and parents or other guardians of children must ensure that children be vaccinated with the immunization program vaccines.

An electronic information system will be set up to make all information of vaccines trackable, such as production and package information of vaccines, period of validity, date of vaccination, medical workers who conduct the vaccination and the recipients.

The law introduces a compensation system for cases of adverse events leading to death, serious disability or organ damage during or after vaccination. For mandatory vaccination, the compensation must be paid through local fiscal budgets, while for voluntary vaccination, the vaccine license-holder must shoulder the responsibility.

December 18, 2019

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announce the development of a NOVEL way to record a patient’s vaccination history“, using smartphone-readable nano-crystals called “quantum dots” embedded in the skin using micro-needles. “The work was funded by the Gates Foundation and came about because of a direct request from Microsoft founder and Philanthropist Bill Gates himself.”

December 31, 2019

Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, reports a cluster of cases of pneumonia to the WHO.

January 11, 2020

China publicly shares a draft of the genetic sequence of the “Wuhan virus”.

January 13, 2020

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director General, states:

WE face shared threats and WE have a shared responsibility to act. With the deadline for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals QUICKLY approaching, the United Nations General Assembly has underscored that the next 10 years must be the “DECADE of Action“.

Declared goals (among others): “Expanding access to medicines”, “Stopping infectious diseases”, “Preparing for epidemics”, “Earning public trust”, “Harnessing NEW technologies”, “Protecting the medicines that protect us“.

January 16, 2020

The Charité university in Berlin, Germany, announces the successful development of a test for the  Wuhan virus, based on the Chinese researchers’ description of the virus’ genetic sequence:

“The coronavirus, which first emerged in Wuhan, China, and can cause severe pneumonia, can now be detected in the laboratory. Developed by a group of DZIF researchers working under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten, Director of the Institute of Virology on Campus Charité Mitte, the world’s first diagnostic test for the coronavirus has now been made publicly available. Following its online publication by the WHO, the test protocol will now serve as a guideline for laboratories. An international consortium is currently conducting a joint evaluation study.”

Note: Drosten was also the first to develop tests for SARS-CoV (2003), bird flu (2005), swine flu (2009), Chikungunya virus(2009), MERS (2012), ZIKA (2016) and yellow fever in Brazil (2017).

Note: The PCR tests that will be developed later, based on this invention, are not approved for diagnostic use. The instruction manual of “RealStar” by Altona Diagnostics: “For research use only! Not for use in diagnostic procedures.”Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit” of Creative Diagnostics: “This product is for research use only and is not intended for diagnostic use.” The product announcement of the “LightMix Modular Assays” by Roche: “These assays are not intended for use as an aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection. For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.”

January 16, 2020

Germany joins the1+Million Genomes Initiative“. German Research Minister Anja Karliczek and  Health Minister Jens Spahn sign the declaration “Towards access of at least 1 million sequenced genomes in the EU by 2022” in Berlin. The aim of the initiative is to enable “safe and regulated access to at least one million complete genome sequences and other health data across national borders.”

January 21-24, 2020

At its 50th Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum celebrates STAKEHOLDERS for a Cohesive and Sustainable World and Defining the DECADE of Delivery“.

January 22-23, 2020

Meeting of the WHO Emergency Committee in Geneva, Switzerland.

From the statement about the meeting:

“The Committee’s role is to give advice to the Director-General, who makes the final decision on the determination of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Several members considered that it is still too early to declare a PHEIC, given its restrictive and binary nature. Based on these divergent views, the EC formulates the following advice: To WHO – The Committee stands ready to be reconvened in approximately ten days’ time, or earlier should the Director-General deem it necessary.”

January 29, 2020

The Institut Pasteur, which is responsible for monitoring respiratory viruses in France, sequenced the whole genome of the coronavirus known as “2019-nCoV”, becoming “the first institution in Europe to sequence the virus since the START of the outbreak”.

February 11-12, 2020

WHO holds a “Research and Innovation Forum” on COVID-19 in Geneva, Switzerland, attended by more than 400 experts and funders from around the world, which included presentations by George Fu Gao, Director General of China CDC.

The meeting was hosted in collaboration with “Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness” (GloPID-R), a global network, launched in Brussels, Belgium, in February 2013. The members: Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, numerous international governmental organizations, the European Commission (secretariat) and, as observers, the WHOand CEPI.

The network’s mission: “GloPID-R is the only alliance of its kind to bring together research funding organizations on a global scale to facilitate an effective and rapid research of a significant outbreak of a NEW or re-emerging infectious disease with epidemic and pandemic potential.”

February 12, 2020

HEALTHINSIGHT UK’s article Coronavirus: a reliable test is badly needed. We don’t have one talks about the Canadian Scientist David Crowe:

“Crowe describes the current response as a ‘rush to judgement, based on the rapid application of an unproven test, made worse by the use of powerful unproven drugs with toxic side-effects on those who test positive.’

False positives are dangerously misleading. For instance, even if an epidemic began to die out, public health officials would still be getting positive results from an unreliable test and insist that the epidemic was still a threat. Testing all of Wuhan’s 10 million inhabitants with a 99% accurate test would give you 100,000 false positives.

The original WHO guidelines for diagnosing 2019 Coronavirus said that a positive test was all that was needed. The person didn’t need to have symptoms or to have had recent contact with someone who was infected.”

Crowe about Chinese government’s new way of counting: “Now cases that were diagnosed without symptoms are being removed from the record of new cases if they don’t develop them. A recognition of the failings of the test that should make infection figures more realistic.

With the unreliable test, however, uninfected healthy people may be treated with toxic drugs, and unhealthy people, sick for some other reason, may also be treated with inappropriate drugs. Isolation, and other medical procedures such as invasive ventilation, also have their own side effects. This means that we cannot distinguish the dangers of testing positive from the dangers of the virus.”

February 27, 2020

From an article published in the German medical journal AERZTEBLATT: “According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the NOVEL coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 is more deadly than the flu. The likelihood of dying from flu is 0.1 to 0.2 percent, said RKI President Lothar Wieler today.

According to the figures known to date, the rate for the Sars-CoV-2 virus is almost ten times higher – at one to two percent. Eighty percent of those infected had mild symptoms, but 15 percent were seriously ill with Covid-19 lung disease. “That’s a lot,” said Wieler.”

February 29, 2020

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) is Germany’s national public health institute in the field of surveillance, control and prevention of diseases. It “evaluates, analyses and researches diseases that are very dangerous or very prevalent or of increased public or health-related political significance.”

RKI’s Arbeitsgemeinschaft Influenza (AGI) (Influenza Working Group) has established a so-called sentinel system, a representative network of doctor’s offices from allover the country (including more than 1% of Germany’s primary care physicians), who report their cases of acute respiratory diseases and send samples to the AGI to be tested for viruses. Since 2009, AGI publishes weekly reports about virus activities during the flu season.

From this day on, AGI will also examine the samples for SARS-CoV-2 viruses, with validated, officially approved tests.

March 2020

German Charité university receives a donation of almost $ 250,000 from the Gates Foundation. Purpose: “To develop diagnostics and virology tools to enable a RAPID response to the NOVEL 2019 coronavirus.”

March 10, 2020

The Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard commit up to $ 125 million in seed funding to SPEED-UP the response to the COVID-19 epidemic by identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling-up treatments.”

March 11, 2020

Anthony Fauci, who has become the “face of America’s response to the coronavirus”, states that the Coronavirus is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

March 11, 2020

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, current WHO director, declares the next pandemic:

… WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. WE have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.

Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death. (…) We have NEVER BEFORE seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus. This is the FIRST pandemic caused by a coronavirus.”

March 11, 2020

AGI publishes the report for the 10th calendar week (29.2.- 6.3.2020), when the scientists detected the SARS-CoV-2 virus for the first time in one sentinel sample. The other positive tested samples of this week: 106 influenza viruses, 20 rhinoviruses, 17 hMP-viruses, 15 RS-viruses, 1 PIV (1-4) viruses.

Note: see table on page 4 of the report(s).

Note: Statistically, the numbers multiplied by 100 would be what to expect for the whole country.

March 13, 2020

Bill Gates steps down from Microsoft‘s and Berkshire Hathaway’s boards of directors to dedicate more time to PHILANTROPIC priorities“.

March 13, 2020

According to the NYT and others, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that in a worst case scenario 214 Million US Americans would be infected and 1.7 Million dead.

March 16, 2020

Media briefing by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus:

We have not seen an urgent enough escalation in testing, isolation and contact tracing – which is the backbone of the response. (…) WE have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test.

This is the defining global health crisis of our time. The days, weeks and months ahead will be a test of our resolve, a test of our trust in science, and a test of solidarity.”

March 16, 2020

Neil Ferguson, adviser of the British government and leader of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, publishes his study about COVID-19:

In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being OVERWHELMED on mortality.”

Note: The same month the Imperial College receives a $ 79 million donation from the Gates Foundation.

March 16, 2020

Antony Fauci demands that “Americans must be ready to take more drastic steps.”

March 16, 2020

French President Emmanuel Macron announces the nationwide lockdown. “WE are at WAR“, Macron said several times during his TV speech.

March 17, 2020

Robert Koch Institute President Lothar Wieler increases the risk classification of the Coronavirus from “moderate” to “high“, in parts of the country even “very high“. He justifies this with the great dynamics of the pandemic and the sharp increase in the case numbers.”

Note: It seems hardly credible that Wieler doesn’t know about the findings of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Influenza (AGIaffiliated to the Robert Koch-Institute., which is subordinated to the RKI.

March 17, 2020

UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson states in a press conference:

“This is a disease that is so dangerous and so infectious that without drastic measures to check its progress it would OVERWHELM any health system in the world. (…) That is why WE announced the steps yesterday that we did – advising against all unnecessary contact – steps that are unprecedented since World WAR II.

WE must act like any WARTIME government and do whatever it takes to support our economy.”

March 17, 2020

Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms declare in a joint statement that “WE are combating fraud and MISINFORMATION about the virus, elevating authoritative content and “sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world.”

March 18, 2020

At a White House press conference, US president Donald Trump says about the fight against corona: “I view it – in a sense as a WARTIME president.”

March 18, 2020

AGI publishes the report for the 11th calendar week (07.-13.3.2020). Positive tested samples from the sentinel this week: 66 influenza viruses, 18 rhinoviruses, 14 hMP-viruses, 8 RS-viruses, 2 PIV (1-4) viruses, 1 SARS-CoV-2.

March 18, 2020

The German Federal Ministry of the Interior distributes an internal strategy paper to other German ministries. An excerpt:

“In order to achieve the desired shock effect, concrete effects of a spreading infection on human society must be communicated (…) Choking or not getting enough air is a primal fear for everyone. The situation in which there is nothing you can do to help relatives who are in danger of life, also. The pictures from Italy are disturbing.

Children will get infected easily, even with exit restrictions, e.g. from the neighboring children. When they infect their parentsafterwards and one of them dies painfully at home and they feel guilty because, e.g. they forgot to wash their hands after playing, it’s the most terrible thing a child can ever experience.

Consequential damage: Even if we only have reports on individual cases so far, they paint an alarming picture. Even those who seem to have healed after a mild course can apparently experience relapses at any time, which then suddenly end in death, due to cardiac infarction or lung failure, because the virus has unnoticed found its way into the lungs or heart. These might be isolated cases, but will always hover like a sword of Damocles over those who have been infected once.”

Note: The paper will be leaked in April.

March 19, 2020

Announcement on the website of the British government: “Status of Covid-19: As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK.”

March 20, 2020

The WHO guideline on Implementation of global surveillance of COVID-19 defines a confirmed case as “a person with laboratory confirmation of COVID-19 infection, irrespective of clinical signs and symptoms.”

   20.03.2020

Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli history professor, author, and participant of the 2020 WEF meeting, writes about the corona crisis in the FINANCIAL TIMES: “Yes, the storm will pass (…) but WE will inhabit a DIFFERENT WORLD.”

March 20, 2020

Meeting of Chancellor Angela Merkel with the heads of the German federal states. From the protocol: The rapid spread of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in the past few days in Germany is worrying.” Drastic measures to limit social contacts are agreed, including restriction of fundamental civil rights like the right to demonstrate.

March 23, 2020

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces the lockdown.

March 24, 2020

In an interview with “TED ConnectsBill Gates states:

WE don’t want to have a lot of recovered people. To be clear, WE’re trying – through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the population infected. WE’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million. I believe WE will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.

Eventually what WE’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person, because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around. So eventually there will be this DIGITAL IMMUNITY PROOF that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

Note: One week later, the last sentence was edited out of the official TED video.

March 25, 2020

AGI publishes the report for the 12th calendar week (14.-20.03.2020). Positive tested samples from the sentinel this week: 40 influenza viruses, 13 rhinoviruses, 14 hMP-viruses, 16 RS-viruses, 3 PIV (1-4) viruses, 3 SARS-CoV-2.

March 26, 2020

British Ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls for a global government to handle the Corona crisis. “This is not something that can be dealt with in one country. There has to be a coordinated global response. (…) This is first and foremost a medical emergency and there has to be joint action to deal with that.”

March 27, 2020

The “American Association For The Advancement Of Science” (AAAS) publishes an interview with George Fu Gao:

The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing MASKS. (…) Many people have asymptomaticor presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.

And a really important outstanding question is how stable this virus is in the environment. Because it’s an enveloped virus, people think it’s fragile and particularly sensitive to surface temperature or humidity. But from both U.S. results and Chinese studies, it looks like it’s very resistant to destruction on some surfaces. It may be able to survive in many environments.

We shared the information with scientific colleagues promptly, but this involved public health and we had to wait for policymakers to announce it publicly. You don’t want the public to panic, right? And no one in any country could have predicted that the virus would cause a pandemic. This is the FIRST noninfluenza pandemic EVER.”

March 29, 2020

Larry Fink, founder and CEO of BlackRock, the largest money-management firm in the world, writes in his “Chairman’s letter to SHAREHOLDERS“: “When WE exit this crisis, the WORLD will be DIFFERENT.”

March 30, 2020

As Part of “Operation Warp SPEED“, that aims to deliver 300 million doses of vaccine for COVID-19 by January 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced $ 456 million in funds for Johnson & Johnson’s candidate vaccine, with Phase 1 clinical trials set to begin this summer.

April 1, 2020

AGI publishes the report for the 13rd calendar week (21.-27.3.2020). Positive tested samples of this week: 13 rhinoviruses, 11 influenza viruses, 10 hMP-viruses, 8 RS-viruses, 3 SARS-CoV-2, 1 PIV (1-4) virus.

April 1, 2020

During a White House briefing, Antony Fauci says: “I think if we get to the part of the curve (…) when it goes down to essentially no NEW cases, no NEW deaths at a period of time, I think it makes sense that you gonna have to relax social distancing.”

Note: With an estimated false-positive rate of the PCR test between 1 and 5% and all positive tested  persons considered as “new cases”, it is statistically impossible to ever get to this point.

April 2, 2020

In an interview with the FINANCIAL TIMES, Bill Gates is asked if he sees

a situation where the global economy could be virtually at a standstill for a year or even more”. He replies: “Well, it won’t go to zero, but it will shrink. (…) But in my lifetime this will be the greatest economic hit. But you don’t have a choice. People act like you have a choice.

There will be the ability, particularly in rich countries, to open up if things are done well over the next few months. But for the world at large, NORMALCY ONLY returns when WE‘ve largely vaccinated the ENTIRE global population.”videoclip

Note: Exactly 100 years ago, “Return to normalcy” was presidential candidate Warren G. Harding’s campaign slogan for the first US election after World WAR I in 1920. He was elected with 60,3% of the votes.

April 3, 2020

According to an EURONEWS article “more than 3.9 billion people, or half of the world’s population, have now been asked or ordered to stay at home by their governments to prevent the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus.”

April 1, 2020

Henry Kissinger writes in the WALL STREET JOURNAL: “The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever ALTER THE WORLD ORDER.”

April 7, 2020

The WHO warns against too early easing of coronavirus restrictions.

April 8, 2020

AGI publishes the report for the 14th calendar week (28.03.-03.04.2020). Positive tested samples of this week: 8 rhinoviruses, 8 hMP-viruses, 3 SARS-CoV-2, 3 PIV (1-4) viruses, 1 influenza virus, 1 RS-virus.

April 8, 2020

Beate Bahner, German specialist lawyer for medical law, applies for an immediate suspension of all Corona restrictions at the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Germany’s highest court. On her homepage, she calls upon participation in a demonstration for fundamental civil rights on Easter Saturday.

Note: Next day Bahner’s homepage will be shut down by her internet provider.

April 9, 2020

German Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares the people for a “life with the virus”. “Even if the numbers get better one day, the pandemic will not go away until WE really have a vaccine with which WE can immunize the population.”

April 11, 2020

Swiss medical doctor Thomas Binder is arrested by a heavily armed police squad and brought to a closed department of a Psychiatric ward. Binder had criticized the government’s corona measures, claimed that there is only a simple flu virus around and called German virologist Christian Drosten a “clown” in a Twitter post.

April 15, 2020

While lawyer Beate Bahner is interrogated by the police in Heidelberg, between 150 and 200 demonstrators express their solidarity with her in front of the police station. The police forces on site do not intervene.

Later that day police headquarters in Mannheim establishes a twelve-head task force to identify the participants and bring them to prosecution.

April 15, 2020

AGI publishes the report for the 15th calendar week (04.-10.04.2020). Positive tested samples of this week: 1 SARS-CoV-2, 0 rhinoviruses, 0 hMP-viruses, 0 PIV (1-4) viruses, 0 influenza viruses, 0 RS-viruses. In this calendar week, SARS-CoV-2 is detected for the last time by the sentinel until now.

Later AGI will announce on its homepage that “The flu wave of the 2019/20 season ended with the 12th KW 2020.”(12th calendar week 2020, 14.-20.03.2020)

April 15, 2020

In a telephone conference German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Heads of government of the federal states agree on the following: “Due to the high dynamics of the spread of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in Germany in the first half of March, federal and state governments had to impose drastic restrictions on citizens in order to protect people from the infection and to avoid an OVERLOAD of the Health system.” It is agreed that the measures like social distancing remain in place.

“Germany has a high test capacity of up to 650,000 tests per week to determine corona infections (PCR tests).” It is agreed that the government guarantees the purchase of additional test kits and equipment.

“A fast achievement of immunity against SARS-CoV-2 in the population without a vaccine is not possible without OVERWHELMING the health system and the risk of MANY DEATHS. This is why vaccine development is of central importance. The Federal Government supports German companies and international organizations in advancing vaccine development as QUICKLY as possible. A vaccine is the key to getting back to NORMAL life. As soon as a vaccine is available, sufficient vaccine doses must be available as QUICKLY  as possible for the entire population.”

April 16, 2020

As Part of “Operation Warp SPEED“, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announces up to $ 483 millionin support for Moderna‘s candidate vaccine, which began Phase 1 trials on March 16 and received a fast-track designation from FDA.

April 21, 2020

The Rockefeller Foundation publishes its “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”.

The first step of the plan is a massive expansion of Covid-19 testing: 3 million US citizens tested weekly, with an increase of the number to 30 million per week within six months. The goal to be achieved within one year: the ability to test 30 million people a day. For each test, a “reasonable market price of $ 100 is estimated.

Note: Because of the 1% false-positive results, mathematically, 30 million tests per day would inevitably generate at least 9 million false-positive tested persons (subsequently quarantined) and costs of $ 90 billion per month, payed by taxpayer’s money.

Step two: The creation of a Covid Community Healthcare Corps (CCHC), “… at least 100,000 people and perhaps as many as 300,000 must be hired to undertake a vigorous campaign of test administration and contact tracing.” Also, “a national system to track Covid-19 status must be created.”

Step three: “Integrate and expand Federal, state, and private data platforms to cover the full range of data required to monitor the pandemic.”

In the appendix of the paper (page 28):

We therefore propose the creation of a Pandemic Testing Board (PTB), akin to the WAR Production Board that the United States created in World WAR II, in order to massively scale up production and deployment of testing. The Pandemic Testing Board would consist of leaders from business, government, academia, and labor.

It would have authority to identify supply chain elements necessary for manufacturing, procuring, scaling, and deploying any items related to testing, the power to procure these materials via contracting with producers and servicers, and the power to mandate production or services, akin to authorities in the Defense Production Act.” Finally, if necessary, the PTB will also be authorized to create a Pandemic Response Corps, comprised of tested civilians, to assist in the testing.”

April 21, 2020

Lars Schade, RKI‘s Vice-President, claims that “there is no end of the epidemic in sight, the number of cases may rise again. (…) As long as there is no vaccine, the restrictions must remain in place. Even if there are no NEW cases in Germany, the virus could come back into the country from outside.”

   24.04.2020

The Cologne District Court orders Beate Bahner‘s compulsory detention in the closed department in a Psychiatric ward. According to her testimony, she was repeatedly exposed to massive physical violence, “fixation” and multiple accommodation in an isolation room. She was also given forced medication. One month later she will be released.

April 30, 2020

A representative study, commissioned by the Austrian Government and carried out in the beginning of April, finds that (with a 95 percent probability) between 0.12 and 0.77% of the population in Austria would show a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test.

Note: This result corresponds to the estimated percentage of false-positive results of PCR tests.

May 4, 2020

Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz states in an interview: “As long as there is no vaccination or no effective medication, this disease will accompany us. And as long as that, the unrestricted freedom of travel as we have known it will not come back.”

May 12, 2020

The BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL publishes the articleInterpreting a covid-19 test result“:

No test gives a 100% accurate result; tests need to be evaluated to determine their sensitivity and specificity, ideally by comparison with a “gold standard”. The lack of such a clear-cut “gold-standard” for covid-19 testing makes evaluation of test accuracy challenging.”

The researchers work shows that the “Pre-Test probability” (the likelihood a person has covid-19 based on their characteristics) has a decisive influence on the probability of a false-positive result. E.g. a Pre-test probability of 80% (using a PCR test with a standard sensitivity of 70% and a specificity of 95%) leads to one false-positive in 100 tests. If the influenza season is over, no significant virus activity left and therefore, for example, the Pre-test probability is assumed to be 5%, the number of false-positive test results raises to 5 in 100 tests.

May 15, 2020

A leaked paper of Germany’s Federal Ministry of the InteriorInternal evaluation of Corona crisis management” claims that an expert panel considers the dangerousness of Covid-19 was highly overestimated: “Probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm.

The people who die from Corona are essentially those who would statistically die this year, because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies can no longer cope with any random everyday stress (including the approximately 150 viruses currently in circulation).

The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. We are probably dealing with a global false alarm that has remained undetected for a long time.

The collateral damage (Note: of the lockdown measures) is now higher than the apparent benefit.”

May 21, 2020

A REUTERS article quotes Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI, speaking at WHO‘s 73rd World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland:

Doubts about vaccines have spread across social media like a disease and FALSE INFORMATION that “KILLS people” should be taken down by the companies running digital platforms.” … “WE have to think about it as a disease. This is a disease“, Berkley said, “this spreads at the speed of light, literally.”

May 21, 2020

As Part of “Operation Warp SPEED“, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced up to $ 1,2 billion in support for AstraZeneca’s candidate vaccine. The agreement is to make available at least 300 million doses of the vaccine for the United States, with the first doses delivered as early as October 2020 and Phase 3 clinical studies beginning this summer with approximately 30,000 volunteers in the United States.

May 27, 2020

Statement of German Chancellor Angela Merkel about easing the Corona measures:

“We are still living at the beginning of the pandemic. We don’t have a vaccine, we don’t have any medication yet. But WE have gained better control.” She is grateful to the citizens for that: “They are the ones who have made a significant contribution to this, and they are the ones who have the essential control that this will continue to be the case.”

June 9, 2020

Analyzing approximately 35,000 SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequences, British / Australian scientists have identified more than 100 different virus strains of SARS-CoV-2 until now. The “original” Wuhan virus is no longer detectable.

June 13, 2020

Researchers of the University Barcelona, Spain, detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in samples of waste water in Barcelona, collected on 12.03.2019.

June 14, 2020

Jens Spahn, German Minister of Health, says: “Now we have to be careful that we don’t have too many false-positive results in the end, because of too extensive testing. Because the tests are not 100 percent accurate, they also have a small, but still existing error rate. And when, so to speak, the overall infection process continues to decrease, and you expand testing to millions at the same time, you suddenly have a lot more false-positives than true-positives.”

June 22, 2020

In a study of the University of Calgary, Canada, the researchers come to the conclusion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus “has likely possessed high affinity for human cell targets since at least 2013.”

June 23, 2020

In an interview with the “US Chamber of Commerce Foundation” Bill Gates is asked about his current concerns.

This won’t be the last pandemic that we face. (…) WE‘ll have to invest in making sure that WE catch the disease sooner and that WE have platforms to make diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines very QUICKLY .

WE‘ll have to prepare for the next one. THAT… you know, what I would say is… WILL get attention this time.”videoclip

June 27, 2020

John Ioannidis, leading epidemiologist at Stanford University states in an interview with the GREEK REPORTER:

“I feel extremely sad that my predictions were verified. Major consequences on the economy, society and mental health have already occurred.

Globally, the lockdown measures have increased the number of people at risk of starvation to 1.1 billion, and they are putting at risk millions of lives, with the potential resurgence of tuberculosis, childhood diseases like measles where vaccination programs are disrupted, and malaria. I hope that policymakers look at the big picture of all the potential problems and not only on the very important, but relatively thin slice of evidence that is COVID-19.”

July 1, 2020

The Bulgarian Pathology Association publishes the articleCOVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless“. The authors state: “Though the whole world relies on RT-PCR to “diagnose” Sars-Cov-2 infection, the science is clear: they are not fit for purpose.

Lockdowns and hygienic measures around the world are based on numbers of cases and mortality rates created by the so-called SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests used to identify “positive” patients, whereby “positive is usually equated with infected“.

But looking closely at the facts, the conclusion is that these PCR tests are meaningless as a diagnostic tool to determine an alleged infection by a supposedly new virus called SARS-CoV-2.”

July 2, 2020

Wellcome Trust‘s Director Jeremy Farrar, board member of the “Global Preparedness Monitoring Boardwrites in the GUARDIAN:

Forget any false sense of security: WE are still at the START of the global pandemic.

Note: Make yourself a little more familiar with the Wellcome Trust here.

July 17, 2020

Klaus Schwab, WEF founder, presentsThe Great Reset“, his vision of a post-COVID world.

WE are at a turning point of humankindWE should not underestimate the historical significance of the situation WE are in.”

Note: At WEF‘s “Strategic Intelligencewebsite one can explore all the connections between the topics of the Great Reset(activated java script necessary).

July 21, 2020

The EVENING STANDARD quotes Jeremy Farrar:

Even, actually, if WE have a vaccine or very good treatments, humanity will still be living with this virus for very many, many years… DECADES to come.”

July 23, 2020

Antony Fauci tells CNN that life could return to NORMAL by sometime next year with sufficient coronavirus vaccine production:

“The timetable you suggested of getting into 2021, well into the year, then I can think with a successful vaccine – if WE could vaccinate the OVERWHELMING majority of the populationWE could start talking about real NORMALITY again.”

He added:

“But it is going to be a gradual process.”

Note: In his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond presented the concept of “Creeping normality” as a way, in which a major change will be accepted as a normal situation if it happens slowly through unnoticeable increments of change. If the change would take place in a single step or a short period, it could be rejected.

July 24, 2020

Statement on the homepage of the German Federal Statistical Office: “According to the preliminary death figures, the effects of the flu wave in 2020 were very slight compared to previous years.”

August 8, 2020

The Daily Situation Report of the Robert Koch Institute shows (Note: see page 9, table 5) that in beginning of June during 23rd calendar week 340,986 tests have been conducted, leading to 3,208 positive results (0,9%). Until beginning of August the number of tests was almost doubled. 32rd calendar week: 672,171 tests, 6,909 positive (1% of the tests).

August 13, 2020

From an article in the German newspaper RNZ: “On Thursday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 1,445 NEW corona infections in Germany within 24 hours.”

Note: A accurate term would be “1,445 positive RT-PCR test results“. Also, a serious, respectable report would present the number of positive tested persons in proportion to the absolute number of conducted tests.

“The peak of the daily reported NEW infections was at more than 6000 in beginning of April. The number had tended to fall after the values still exceeded 1000 in May, and has been rising again since the end of July. A further worsening of the situation must be avoided at all costs, warns the RKI.”

August 19, 2020

Robert-Koch-Institute’s “Daily Situation Report” (Note: see page 9, table 5) shows that during the 33rd calendar week (08.-14.08.2020) no less than 875,524 RT-PCR tests (over 200,000 or 30% tests more than the previous week) in Germany had been necessary to manufacture the reported “1,445 new corona infections in 24 hours”. For the whole week, 8407 positive test results (0,96%) were recorded. This percentage equals the estimated false-positive rate of the RT-PCR test.

Note: In the German version of the reports the numbers of tests carried out are not mentioned at all.

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By strengthening the presence of warships from non-Black Sea NATO members in the Black Sea, the military bloc is attempting to demonstrate its dominance in the region and the Alliance’s desire to neutralize and pressurize Russia’s influence in the area. Moscow’s Black Sea influence significantly increased after Crimea’s 2014 reunification with Russia. NATO’s military presence in the Black Sea is significantly strengthening, especially as warships in the area increased by 33% from January to September compared to the same period time last year. In 40% of cases, these ships are equipped with high-precision long-range weapons. This can be seen as a NATO attempt to intimidate Russia.

NATO is undeniably trying to put pressure on Russia by demonstrating its power. However, another important goal of the Alliance is to conduct intelligence operations against Crimea and Russia’s south. The Alliance is trying to locate Russian facilities, communication links, navigation systems, electronic warfare systems and other related military assets. There is of course the additional goal of training by simulating a battle with the Russian military.

After the reunification of Crimea, Russia gained a huge strategic advantage in the Black Sea region as it prevented NATO warships from being able to go to Sevastopol and turning it into a powerful pivot point that hypothetically could block Russia’s access to the Sea of Azov in the event of war. The Sea of Azov is critical to the security of Russia’s south as it is the beginning of the Volga–Don Canal.

Officially, the increased presence of NATO warships is in support of the Ukrainian navy. They are constantly participating in manoeuvres, such as the “Sea Breeze” exercises held in July. The number of military exercises is even growing. Countries far from the region, such as Canada and the Scandinavian states, are appearing in the Black Sea. Even this year, despite COVID-19 and all the restrictions, a large number of NATO warships arrived in the Black Sea. The last recorded case of non-Black Sea navy ships entering the Black Sea was recorded on Sunday when a British torpedo destroyer sailed in.

Warships of non-Black Sea countries can only be in the Black Sea for a limited time in accordance to the 1936 Montreux Convention. Therefore, that Convention is actually an obstacle for NATO today. Without this treaty, American and British warships could be permanently stationed in the Black Sea. The significance of this convention is based on guaranteeing the free passage of civilian ships through the Black Sea during peacetime and restricting the passage of warships of non-Black Sea states. According to the Convention, countries that do not go out to the Black Sea are not allowed to keep their ships in the Black Sea region for more than 21 days. In addition, there are restrictions when it comes to the tonnage and number of warships belonging to non-Black Sea countries – no more than 30,000 tons and nine ships. This means that no aircraft carrier can enter the Black Sea, since they weigh between 45,000 to 100,000 tons.

Also, according to the Montreux Convention, Turkey must not close access to and from the Black Sea via the Bosporus and the Dardanelle Straits during peacetime. During a war in which Turkey does not participate in, the sea must be closed to the passage of warships of any country participating in the war. Turkey, as a Black Sea state and member of NATO, can stay in the Black Sea as long as it wants and send as many ships as it wants, and has always participated in NATO Black Sea manoeuvres.

Although NATO countries do not recognize Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, this does not correspond with the reality on the ground and they know that the Russian Black Sea Fleet is in a state of combat readiness and will respond to any threat. This increasing pressure in Black Sea also corresponds with pressure against Russia in the seas in the Arctic, the Baltics and the Pacific. The presence of NATO warships in the Black Sea is just a show of strength and it is highly unlikely that this will intimidate the Russian military in the region or make it withdraw from Crimea. For now NATO are respecting the 1936 Montreux Convention but this has not subsided any pressure that is being applied against Russia.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst. 

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The Kyrgyz government’s decision to annul the results of the latest elections which were exploited as the “trigger event” for the preplanned Color Revolution against it might be interpreted by some as submitting to that regime change operation even though the argument can also be made that it ‘s a pragmatic move for peace undertaken as a last-ditch effort to stave off a seemingly impending civil war.

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“Shuffling The Cards”

The author claimed on Tuesday that “The Kyrgyz Color Revolution Crisis Intensifies The US’ Hybrid War Containment Of Russia” after regarding it as the third unconventional front of aggression against the Eurasian Great Power after the ongoing regime change operation in Belarus and Armenia’s efforts to drag Moscow into the South Caucasus cauldron. That analysis still stands even though an attempt at compromise appears to be in the works in the Central Asian country after the government’s decision to annul the results of the latest elections which served as the “trigger event” for the preplanned unrest. The Prime Minister also resigned and was replaced after a parliamentary vote by a former Prime Minister who was jailed for corruption but released by rioters the day before. The previous speaker of parliament also resigned and was replaced by an opposition lawmaker too.

Russian Pragmatism

In response to this “shuffling of the cards”, Kyrgyz President Jeenbekov said that he’s ready to talk to the opposition, suggesting that the “possible way out of the crisis might be organization of new elections or division of power between political forces” but also warning that “There are risks that the country will fall victim of not only internal but also foreign forces.” It’s because of the latter concerns as expressed in the author’s earlier cited analysis that the Russian airbase in the country was put on high alert and the Russian Foreign Ministry “call[ed] on all political forces at this critical moment for the republic to show wisdom and responsibility in order to preserve internal stability and security.” The rapidly unfolding events in this historically unstable country are now moving in the direction of a “political solution”, one which appears to be a Russian-”supervised” “phased leadership transition” in the best-case scenario.

As the author wrote in his earlier piece, “Moscow might succeed in mitigating the blow to its geopolitical interests in the scenario of a regime change in Bishkek since it had previously worked real closely with Atambayev (who’s the most likely candidate to seize power, either directly or by proxy), though only if it can prevent a civil war from breaking out first.” He also advised that “The Kremlin will therefore have to carefully weigh its options in Kyrgyzstan” in order to avoid “the risks that any well-intended Russian military stabilization intervention via the CSTO could entail, perhaps explaining why one never happened in 2010 during more dangerous times.” Unlike in the Belarusian scenario where such an option is largely unrealistic due to the nature of its “national democracy”, Russia seems both able and willing to engage with the Kyrgyz opposition largely considered to be under the control of former President Atambayev.

The North-South Fault Line

There are reasons to suspect that the opposition either coordinated with and/or received unclear degrees of support from Western patrons (through both NGOs and foreign embassies) in executing its regime change operation earlier this week but that doesn’t in and of itself exclude Russia from having pragmatic relations with it in the interests of peace, primarily in order to avoid a disastrous civil war between Kyrgyzstan’s northern and southern halves. This fault line had previously been exploited during its 2005 and 2010 Color Revolutions since it’s a simplified model for explaining its clan competitions. It also adds a geopolitical dimension to the country’s many crises, one which suggests the possible solution of federalizing the state along this axis and incorporating Bosnian- and Lebanese-like “power-sharing” guarantees into the constitution for managing this centrifugal factor. This solution is admittedly imperfect, even fatally flawed one might say, but it’s a solution nonetheless.

Stopping A Civil War Before It Starts

It must be remembered that a civil war should be avoided at all costs because of the very high chances that it could destabilize Central Asia and its neighboring Great Powers of Russia and China. With this in mind, even the most imperfect and perhaps fatally flawed solutions should be seriously countenanced in order to at least buy enough time to bring the country back from the brink of collapse. While some might describe President Joonbekov’s interest in negotiating with the Color Revolution forces as a submission to this preplanned regime change operation, others could just as rightly describe it as a pragmatic move for peace. Russian support for this development would suggest that the country is quickly learning from the five constructive criticisms of its grand strategy that the author outlined over the summer and also imply a willingness to experiment with the equal number of practical recommendations that were proposed, including engaging with its allies’ opposition.

Giving Credit To The Critics

For as optimistic as well-intended observers might want to be, the hard reality of the situation must be accepted by all. Kyrgyzstan is once again on the brink of civil war, and the Western-backed opposition might interpret President Joonbekov’s interest in talks as a sign of weakness presaging the fall of his “regime” (as they and their foreign supporters might describe it) as long as they just “push a little harder” like the EuroMaidan forces did in February 2014 when they toppled President Yanukovich. Critics of the Kyrgyz President’s peacemaking approach might argue that he should show a strong hand, not extend an olive branch (let alone consider the author’s federalization proposal), but this “solution” runs the risk of making civil war inevitable. With the opposition having already recruited so many willing “human shields” (politically sympathetic peaceful civilians) to protect its most radical elements from the security forces’ kinetic responses to their provocations, the collateral damage that this scenario could entail might create a self-sustaining cycle of Hybrid War unrest.

SCO-Supported Federalization Might Be The Best Solution

It’s therefore difficult to judge the Kyrgyz government for its peacemaking outreaches to the opposition, both in terms of its President’s willingness to talk to them and the replacement of its Prime Minister and speaker of parliament with their representatives, since the alternative might arguably be an inevitable civil war. If the latter assessment is accurate, then it suggests that the authorities lost the Color Revolution even before it began since they failed to anticipate events, take appropriate preemptive action, and properly respond to its kinetic manifestation on the night when rioters torched the seat of government and broke two opposition leaders out of prison (the former President and Prime Minister). These dynamics make it natural that the government might now seek to “accommodate” some of the opposition’s demands, but it should be done with the intent of not leading to an all-out lustration of sitting officials, nor any irresponsible developments that could inadvertently provoke the civil war scenario (albeit driven by the incumbent government’s supporters).

The Kyrgyz political system is broken because of the authorities’ inability to keep clan-related politics in check, the proliferation of Western NGOs, and the history of unrest this century which made some members of society hated enemies of one another. Its perpetuation without any meaningful reform will only delay the inevitable repeat of unrest. Although the proposed solution of federalization is basically the “peaceful Balkanization” of the country in practice, it might still be able to avoid a future civil war scenario and help make Kyrgyz politics more manageable for its citizens as well as the regional stakeholders in that country’s stability. The author is therefore suggesting that the government table this proposal, hold new elections within the constitutional timeframe for doing so under these circumstances, and have all candidates commit to constitutional reform in this direction after the end of the vote. The SCO might even be requested to mediate and/or host these discussions in order to maintain civility between all sides as they partake in this sensitive process.

Concluding Thoughts

In one way or another, the Color Revolution already won in Kyrgyzstan, and it can be argued that it was predetermined to win given what’s known in hindsight about the state’s failure to anticipate this scenario, take appropriate preemptive action, and properly respond to its kinetic manifestation following the “trigger event” of a contentious election. That said, it’s not so much “submitting” to it which motivates the Kyrgyz President’s peacemaking outreaches to the opposition, but his well-intended and pragmatic desire to promote peace instead of what seems to be an impending civil war if the situation continues to spiral out of control. Even if there’s a Russian-”supervised” “phased leadership transition”, it’ll only postpone this crisis to a later date since the Kyrgyz political system is broken beyond repair and needs radical reform in order to avoid regularly repeating this scenario. That’s why the best-case scenario would be for government to declare constitutional reform as its priority, get all political forces to agree to it, and then request SCO support in this respect.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

A UK court ruled that the administration of Boris Johnson’s position that Juan Guaidó is the legitimate ruler of Venezuela is far from equivocal, paving the way for over $1 billion of the country’s gold to be released.  

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AUnited Kingdom court has handed the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro a major win today, overturning a previous ruling from a lower court that legitimized the British government’s decision to freeze Venezuelan government gold reserves held in the Bank of England. The English Court of Appeal ruled that the Conservative administration of Boris Johnson’s position that Juan Guaidó is the country’s legitimate ruler was far from equivocal, potentially paving the way for some $1.95 billion of the Central Bank of Venezuela’s gold to be accessed.

Following President Trump’s lead, in July, the U.K. government took the extraordinary step of derecognizing President Maduro in favor of the self-declared Guaidó, despite the fact that for nearly six months, he had not even been a member of his Popular Will party, let alone its leader. The move was labeled “highway robbery” by supporters of the Venezuelan government.

A nearly unheard of politician before his ascension to the role of head of the Venezuelan National Assembly (a post given out on a yearly rotational basis among all parties in the institution) in January 2019, Guaidó shocked the country by using his appointment to unilaterally declare himself president of the country. He then led a series of coup attempts throughout 2019 and 2020, the last of which involved paying Trump-linked American mercenaries to shoot their way into the presidential palace. However, the plan ended in complete disaster, with the Americans subsequently sentenced to 20 years of prison time.

Guaidó based his claim to power on Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, which allows a president to be removed if he “abandons his position” or becomes “permanently unavailable to serve” for whatever reason. Maduro, however, had clearly not left his post. Regardless, if he had, Article 233 states that the vice-president would take charge until a new election by universal suffrage was held. Guaidó’s party was not even registered to stand in elections, having boycotted them the year previously under U.S. orders. The Trump administration had attempted to organize a total boycott from opposition parties, thereby undermining the process’ legitimacy, even threatening to sanction opposition presidential candidate Henri Falcón. Despite the partial boycott, turnout was relatively high. A larger percentage of the total electorate still cast their ballot for Maduro than Americans did for Trump in 2016 or Obama in 2012. The U.S. government is currently trying the same tactic in the upcoming December elections to the National Assembly, the State Department releasing a memo in September declaring that all opposition parties taking place were considered “puppet parties” participating in an “electoral charade,” and would therefore be sanctioned.

The United Kingdom and the United States have been leaders in a years-long economic and political campaign to oust Maduro from power, hitting the country with sanctions and attacking it politically. When Maduro attempted to use the impounded gold to buy humanitarian aid from the United Nations to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the Johnson administration blocked it. Meanwhile, American sanctions, declared illegal by the U.N., have been responsible for over 100,000 Venezuelans’ death. The U.S. government is also continually provoking Venezuela militarily. Last week, it sent a warship — the U.S.S. William P. Lawrence — into the Caribbean, just 16 nautical miles from Venezuela’s coast. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino described the action as “erratic and childish,” implying Trump was attempting to foment an “October Surprise” conflict to boost his reelection chances.

The U.S. has also funded and supported Guaidó throughout his coup attempts, grooming him since he was a student leader. Recently, they have been channeling money confiscated from the Venezuelan government to Guaidó so that he can personally pay every healthcare worker a huge stipend.

While the Maduro administration is very unpopular, the opposition has had little success shaking their image as elitists interested only in returning Venezuela to its former status as a U.S. client state. Guaidó is presented in Western media as a breath of fresh air and a break with that tradition. However, as the privately-educated son of an international airline pilot, and somebody who attended George Washington University (an impossible task for those who do not come from the elite), he has had little success persuading his countryfolk to get behind his vision for the country. A recent poll found that 3 percent of Venezuelans recognize him as president. Despite this, he has received virtually unanimous support in Washington and London. However, there is no doubt that today’s court ruling is a loss for him and a win for Maduro.

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

Featured image:Self-declared Venezuelan President Juan Guiado meets with UK PM Boris Jonson in London in January, 2020. Photo | Public Release

Cuba Says: Doctors, Not Bombs

October 7th, 2020 by Granma

In a letter sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the World Peace Council formally registered the candidacy of Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Disaster Situations and Serious Epidemics for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Emphasizing the great challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has meant for humanity, and the essential role international solidarity plays in aiding those who suffer most during such emergencies, the letter draws attention to the work of the island’s health professionals, stating: “We see as the most sincere example of such international solidarity the work that the Cuban medical contingent “Henry Reeve” has been performing since much before the coronavirus outbreak was announced.”

In listing the dozens of countries in different regions of the world that have been assisted, the Council notes that this altruistic work is not a passing event, but “a long lasting Cuban tradition of humanist care for other peoples which is carried out even in the face of dire economic challenges for the Island, which suffers from the extremely harsh sanctions that, in a stark contrast with Cubans’ disposition, also lasts over six decades and impose grave hardships on the Cuban people.”

Sent on behalf of dozens of national committees for peace in approximately one hundred countries, the message notes that, before expanding support to nations that requested assistance in the COVID-19 battle, Cuban specialists had already collaborated to overcome the impact of 16 floods, eight hurricanes, eight earthquakes and four epidemics.

The Council’s nomination, dated September 22, states that the Henry Reeve Contingent has saved countless lives and shown “humane empathy and kindness for which they remain known wherever they have visited. This work is key in building peace amidst violent and structural conflicts and in setting conditions for people to have their most basic needs met in conditions of disaster and extreme impoverishment.”

In contrast to the slander campaign, financed by the United States, to discredit Cuba’s international medical collaboration, the formalization of the Henry Reeve’s candidacy reflects worldwide appreciation of the noble principles of Cuban medicine, whose professionals, as Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel recently stated before the United Nations, whether they receive the Nobel Prize or not, “they have been recognized for years by the peoples blessed by their health work.”

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Featured image: José Martí provided Cuba the guiding principle, “Homeland is humanity.” Photo: Juvenal Balán

Trump Scuttles a Fiscal Stimulus–Again!

October 7th, 2020 by Dr. Jack Rasmus

This past Tuesday, October 6, Trump pulled the plug once again—a second time—on negotiations on a fiscal stimulus between House speaker, Pelosi, and his Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin.

This past week Pelosi and Mnuchin had reportedly been quietly negotiating toward a compromise fiscal stimulus package and were making progress while Trump was in the hospital with his Covid infection. But as soon as Trump returned to the White House, one of his first moves Trump was to scuttle the negotiations. On Tuesday, October 6, he dramatically declared the negotiations were over. Furthermore, he added, there would be no stimulus until sometime after the November elections.

This was not the first time House speaker, Pelosi, and Mnuchin were growing closer to a deal and Trump abruptly intervened unexpectedly and scuttled it.

In an almost identical event earlier this past August Trump intervened and declared the negotiations over. Negotiating with Mnuchin in July and early August, Pelosi had reduced her original fiscal stimulus package costing $3.4 trillion—i.e. the Democrats ‘Heroes Act’ passed way back in late May—to a proposal costing $2 Trillion. That was a drop of $1.4 trillion. The Republican position at the time was the Republican Senate’s so-called ‘Heals Act’, with a cost of $1.5 trillion. Thus the parties were only about $500 billion apart and a deal looked possible in early August.

But once Pelosi-Shumer cut their offer by $1.4 trillion, to $2 trillion, Trump had his lead negotiator, chief of staff Mark Meadows, who had taken over as lead negotiator from Mnuchin, abruptly break off negotiations and walk out. That was done without making a counter-offer to Pelosi. In bargaining parlance, Trump had thus ‘sandbagged’ Pelosi with a cheap bargaining trick: namely, get your opponent to make a major move, then instead of countering, break off negotiations altogether. Should negotiations ever resume, your opponent then has to make a second move and concession while you consider only one.

In less than 24 hours after breaking off negotiations in early August, Trump quickly announced his four Executive Orders (EOs). That overnight response strongly suggests Trump had pre-planned to scuttle the August negotiations and had his four Executive Orders already in his pocket, ready to go. It was planned well in advance with the intent of Trump personally taking over the bargaining agenda and to deny Pelosi-Shumer any credit for any eventual stimulus.

Trump’s Executive Orders were largely smoke and mirrors. Clearly Trump wanted to be identified with the public as the guy who delivered the stimulus, and no one else—especially Pelosi and the Democrats. There would be no shared responsibility for delivering the stimulus benefits.

Here’s why Trump’s August EOs were more smoke and mirrors:

The first Executive Order recommendation that governors could, if they wished, extend the moratorium on rent evictions that was contained in the March 2020 Cares Act passed by Congress. Trump’s EO did not provide for a continuation of a moratorium; just a recommendation, and only if a governor wanted. And few would subsequently prove they wanted.

Trump’s second August EO provided a supplemental unemployment benefit of $300 a week, to replace the $600/wk. benefit that expired at the end of July. That $600 expiration meant $65 billion a month in income for consumption by households was taken out of the economy, in August and every month thereafter. In fact, when a standard fiscal multiplier effect is applied, it reduced potential GDP spending by $130 billion a month. With few states offering even half of that, the US economy lost nearly $100 billion a month, every month, in spending with Trump’s first EO.

But there was more ‘smoke’. Trump’s $300/wk. substitution benefit would apply only if a state threw in another $100. Many state unemployment benefit funds were broke or near busted and many states could not afford the $100, so their workers never got the $300.

More interesting still, the funding for the $300 was taken from the fund for disaster relief, which had only $50 billion or so in it. So the $300 was a transfer of funds—from the disaster relief fund to unemployment benefits. That offered no net fiscal stimulus to the economy. At only $50 billion, the fund was exhausted anyway in just six weeks, by mid-September. By October, moreover, the western fires season reached record levels and while southeast coast hurricane season recorded more hurricanes than there were names from letters of the available. But the disaster relief fund was now depleted as well as the six weeks of $300!

An even greater ‘bag of policy worms’ was Trump’s third EO. It called for a cut in workers’ payroll tax for social security and Medicare. Apart from the unconstitutionality of the Executive branch of government introducing a tax measure unilaterally—when such tax legislation may only arise in the US House of Representatives per the US Constitution—Trump’s payroll tax cut EO was not really a tax cut. It was a payroll tax deferral. (Note that business’s share of the payroll tax was already deferred to the end of 2021 by the March Cares Act). So workers, like businesses, have to pay double payroll taxes sometime in 2021 according to Trump’s payroll tax EO. Given that businesses are legally responsible for collecting and distributing workers’ share of the payroll tax to government, many businesses complained if they didn’t collect the payroll tax cut legally they might be liable for paying for both deferrals in 2021—i.e. their deferred tax share and their workers’ deferred tax. So many have since decided to not cut their workers payroll tax. To this date, little research is available summarizing how much payroll taxes for workers have actually been cut.

But Trump could and did still claim publicly during when campaigning in blue collar states that he’s cutting their taxes—not just deferring them. Most will not realize they will eventually have to pay double payroll taxes in 2021. When questioned about this possibility, Trump has replied he would later make the payroll tax deferral permanent, if he were re-elected. But that’s not likely without Congress approval (which is highly unlikely) and even more unlikely if he’s not elected.

The payroll tax EO is also an insidious way of undermining social security and Medicare—one of Trump’s, and Republicans’, major policy objectives: i.e. reduce the revenues necessary to make social security retirement benefits and Medicare payments for retirees in 2021. Then call for massive social security and Medicare benefit cuts to make up the difference.

A fourth EO extended payments by students on their government education debt until the end of December 2020. With record and rising levels of defaults on the $1.7 trillion current student debt, the extension only recognized the obvious: that debt payments wouldn’t be paid for the overwhelming majority of the unemployed anyway.

These four Executive Orders, issued in mid-August, represent Trump’s taking over control of the bargaining agenda for the fiscal stimulus. Pelosi-Shumer and company were cleverly set up and then ‘punked’, as they say. Trump looked like he had the real control over whether a fiscal stimulus would happen or not, and that he alone was powerful enough to deliver any stimulus. It would be his stimulus. The problem was, the four EOs amounted no stimulus at all!

More than a million and a half workers every week, from mid-August to early October, continued to file every week for first time unemployment benefits. As a million and a half applied for benefits for the first time, another million a week, every week, began exhausting the unemployment benefits they had been collecting since March-April. By October more than 20 million workers would be considered long-duration jobless, and thus unlikely to ever get their jobs back. More than 5 million workers dropped out of the labor force, giving up on getting jobs. Another 4.3 million in two paycheck families would have to quit work to manage their K-6 grade children struggling with remote education from home.

Tens of millions of working families would start being evicted from their rents, and hundreds of thousands of lower income family home owners would begin to default and go into foreclosure as well.

Meanwhile, millions of small businesses began go bankrupt by late summer, with millions by year end 2020. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), a trade association for small businesses, no fewer than 21% of the approximate 30 million small businesses in the US had closed, or would close, in the coming months!

In other words, Trump’s feeble four Executive Orders had virtually no positive on the economy by September-October 2020—as jobs, unemployed, rent evictions, foreclosures, business closings all began to deteriorate by late 3rd quarter 2020.

Given these conditions, Pelosi-Shumer and Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, attempted one last time in early October to try to reach a deal on a stimulus bill before the November 3 elections. Mnuchin reportedly raised his offer from his late July $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion. Pelosi-Shumer position as of early October was $2.2 (having raised it slight from $2 trillion in response to Trump’s breaking off negotiations in August after the Democrats reduced their proposals to $2 trillion). Reportedly as well, however, they again considered $2 trillion.

With around only $400-$500 billion difference in terms of final cost of a fiscal package both parties—Pelosi and Mnuchin—were not so far apart they couldn’t reach an agreement. That is, until Trump abruptly intervened again and called off the Pelosi-Mnuchin negotiations.

In early October, as in August previously, the main sticking points to an agreement appeared to be the Democrats’ demand to bail out State and Local governments, which were soon to have to layoff hundreds of thousands of public employees due to tax revenue collapse. The Trump-McConnell position has always been to deny any funds for state-local government since, in their view, most would go to the larger ‘blue’ states. The other sticky qualitative issue was the Republican-Trump demand that businesses be absolved from all liability claims during the pandemic period. Democrats feared this blanket liability exclusion would allow businesses exemption from all liabilities for health and safety of their workers or the local communities in which they did business.

Despite both negotiating parties closing the gap toward a deal, Trump abruptly broke off the negotiations once again, a second time, on October 6 and declared the negotiations dead until after the election.

As in August, Trump again a second time personally took over control of the bargaining agenda on October 6. But by saying ‘no further negotiations until after the election’ he set off a shit storm of complaints from his business base. The stock markets, which had been hundreds of points up on October 6, after Trump’s theatrical return from the hospital to the White House, in late hours tanked hundreds of points into the red after Trump’s announcement of no stimulus until after the elections.

So Trump put on his twitter hat after the markets closed and slung out a series of tweets, including retracting his earlier announcement of no new negotiations until after November 3.

But that was not all. Further tweets challenged Pelosi-Shumer to agree to separate bills on the content of the Pelosi-Mnuching talks. He taunted Pelosi to agree to a bill just to bail out the airlines. Another just to provide a second round of $1,200 income checks. Another to provide more grants for small businesses. And so on. The not so clever intent here was obviously to suck Pelosi and Shumer to break up their package proposal, and negotiate directly with Trump, item by item. But to do so would concede all their bargaining leverage, as they say. Trump would be in a position to cherry pick and agree to the separate provisions he wants, and veto line by line the ones he doesn’t. It was evidence that Trump just can’t let any one else take credit for a deal. It has to be all his to brag about.

It will be interesting to see if Pelosi and the Democrats fall for Trump’s latest bargaining trick. He’s proven in the past not to be a trustful good faith bargainer. They enter Trump’s latest fools game at their risk!

But regardless whether they fall for Trump’s latest trick or not, Trump has once again grabbed control of the bargaining agenda. Whatever comes out of the latest developments, it will appear as if he delivered the deal—not Congress and Mnuchin. Trump’s the great negotiator. Knows the ‘Art of the Deal’. But that’s all Trump. Take the credit always, appear responsible for everything positive, and throw all others under the bus when anything fails! And never, never negotiate in good faith. That’s only for “suckers and losers”, in Trump parlance.

Like his obviously staged return from the hospital to the White House, Trump is all drama and theater. To borrow a well worn literary phrase, “there’s no there there”.

But the US economy now more than ever needs a real fiscal stimulus, not phony theater. It has entered the fourth quarter of 2020 with ominous negative economic signs on the horizon: large corporations are now announcing permanent layoffs (not furloughs) by the tens of thousands. Unemployment claims have begun to clearly rise again. Evictions and foreclosures and business closures are now escalating as well. A second Covid 19 wave is beginning to appear in the US, just as it has in Europe and elsewhere. That will mean more shutdowns, even if only partial. And more reluctance by consumers to spend on services like travel, leisure, hospitality, restaurants, movies, theater, entertainment, shopping at malls, buying gas, sports events, to name but the most obvious.

The combination of no fiscal stimulus and a Covid resurgence is ominous for the US economy. Even more ominous is the growing likelihood of major political instability erupting—institutionally and in the streets—around Trump’s oft-stated intent not to recognize the outcome of the November elections should he lose, driven by his unsubstantiated claim of fraudulent mail in ballot voting.

Trump has already begun moving his political chess pieces to challenge the election and refuse to leave office. Teams of his lawyers are filing hundreds of court injunctions against counting mail in ballots, in particular in the swing states. Pro-Trump red state legislators meanwhile are throwing hundreds of thousands of voters off the voting rolls, reducing polling locations in minority neighborhoods, eliminating drop boxes for ballots in some cases to one per city, sending ‘observers’ to intimidate voters at polling stations. Simultaneously, Mitch McConnell in the Senate is rushing to confirm Trump’s latest Supreme Court nominee, to ensure he has a 6-3 safe majority on the Court should it come down to the Supreme Court calling for a halt to counting mail in ballots, especially in swing states that will determine the election; or to legitimize other tactical moves by Trump lawyers trying to prevent mail in ballot vote counting.

A most likely scenario is the following: Trump lawyers in swing states get recent McConnell appointed pro-Trump district and appeals court judges to declare mail in ballots cannot be accurately counted for various reasons. With mail in ballot counting suspended, Trump lawyers then ask Republican controlled state legislators to pick the ‘electors’ for the electoral college, who would almost certainly vote for Trump. That way the Supreme Court may not have to directly ‘select’ Trump, as they did with George W. Bush in 2000. But they would indirectly, by enabling the state legislators to select the electors that then select Trump. (This was the way Senators used to be ‘elected’ before the US Constitution was amended to provide for direct election of Senators).

The more economic, political, and health crises and confusion there is around November 3 and after, the more likely the Courts will defer to the above scenario in the name of restoring social order.

So it just may be that Trump doesn’t really want a fiscal stimulus before November 3. Maybe his latest ‘line by line’ tweets are just that—a delaying tactic.

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

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“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” George Orwell

Can we agree that there are two types of Covid-19?

The first type, is Covid-19 ,”The Virus”, which is a fairly mild infection that most people don’t even realize they’ve contracted. They remain either asymptomatic or have slight flu-like symptoms that go away after a week or so. A tiny sliver of the population– that are mainly-older, vulnerable people with underlying health conditions– can develop complications, become seriously ill and die. But, according to most analysis, the chances of dying from Covid are roughly between 1 in every 200 to 1 in every 1,000 people. (CDC-IFR- 0.26%)

In other words, Covid is not the Spanish Flu, not the Black Plague and the alleged Planetary Killer Virus it was cracked up to be. It kills more people than the annual influenza, but not significantly more.

The second type of Covid-19, is Covid “The Political Contrivance” or, rather, 

CODENAME: Operation Virus Identification 2019.

This iteration of the Covid phenom relates to the manner in which a modestly-lethal respiratory pathogen has been inflated into a perennial public health crisis in order to implement economic and societal changes that would otherwise be impossible.

This is the political side of Covid, which is much more difficult to define since it relates to the ambiguous agenda of powerful elites who are using the infection to conceal their real intentions. Many critics believe that Covid is a vehicle the World Economic Forum Davos Crowd is using to launch their authoritarian New World Order. Others think it has more to do with Climate Change, that is, rather than build consensus among the world leaders for mandatory carbon reductions, global mandarins have simply imposed lockdowns that sharply reduce economic activity across-the-board. This, in fact, has lowered emissions significantly, but at great cost to most of humanity.

Covid restrictions have triggered a sharp uptick in suicides, clinical depression, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse.

The list goes on and on. Also, it has left economies everywhere in a shambles, increasing unemployment and homelessness exponentially, while setting the stage for massive famines in undeveloped countries around the world. Even so, key players in the Covid crisis– like Bill Gates– continue to marvel at impact these onerous restrictions have had on emissions. Take a look at this excerpt from a recent post at the Microsoft founder’s blog:

“You may have seen projections that, because economic activity has slowed down so much, the world will emit fewer greenhouse gases this year than last year. Although these projections are certainly true, their importance for the fight against climate change has been overstated.

Analysts disagree about how much emissions will go down this year, but the International Energy Agency puts the reduction around 8 percent. In real terms, that means we will release the equivalent of around 47 billion tons of carbon, instead of 51 billion.

That’s a meaningful reduction, and we would be in great shape if we could continue that rate of decrease every year. Unfortunately, we can’t.

Consider what it’s taking to achieve this 8 percent reduction. More than 600,000 people have died, and tens of millions are out of work. This April, car traffic was half what it was in April 2019. For months, air traffic virtually came to a halt.

To put it mildly, this is not a situation that anyone would want to continue. And yet we are still on track to emit 92 percent as much carbon as we did last year. What’s remarkable is not how much emissions will go down because of the pandemic, but how little.

In addition, these reductions are being achieved at, literally, the greatest possible cost.

To see why, let’s look at what it costs to avert a single ton of greenhouse gases. This figure—the cost per ton of carbon averted—is a tool that economists use to compare the expense of different carbon-reduction strategies. For example, if you have a technology that costs $1 million, and using it lets you avert the release of 10,000 tons of gas, you’re paying $100 per ton of carbon averted. In reality, $100 per ton would still be pretty expensive. But many economists think this price reflects the true cost of greenhouse gases to society, and it also happens to be a memorable round number that makes a good benchmark for discussions.

Now let’s treat the shutdown caused by COVID-19 as if it were a carbon-reduction strategy. Has closing off major parts of the economy avoided emissions at anything close to $100 per ton?

No. In the United States, according to data from the Rhodium Group, it comes to between $3,200 and $5,400 per ton. In the European Union, it’s roughly the same amount. In other words, the shutdown is reducing emissions at a cost between 32 and 54 times the $100 per ton that economists consider a reasonable price.

If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and spread the pain out over a much longer period of time. The loss of life and economic misery caused by this pandemic are on par with what will happen regularly if we do not eliminate the world’s carbon emissions.” (“COVID-19 is awful. Climate change could be worse“, Gates Notes)

Isn’t it curious that Gates has spent so much time calculating the impact lockdowns have had on carbon emissions? And look at how precise his calculations are. These are not “back of the envelop” type computations, but a serious bit of number-crunching. He even takes the number of people who have died of Covid worldwide (600,000) and painstakingly compares it to the projected “global mortality rates” (“on an annualized basis”) of people who will die from “increases in global temperatures”.

Does it seem to you that Gates might have more than a passing interest in these estimations?? Does it look like he might be more than just a neutral observer impartially perusing the data?

Let me pose a theory here: In my opinion, Gates’ interest in these matters is not merely speculative curiosity. He and his fellow elites are conducting an elaborate science experiment in which we– mere mortals– are the lab rats. They are deliberately using the Covid-scare to conceal their real objective which is to prove beyond a doubt that curtailing emissions by shutting down vast swathes of the global economy will NOT stave off catastrophic climate change.

So, let’s just assume for the sake of argument that I’m right. Let’s assume that other elites read Gates report and agree with its conclusions. Then what?

This is where it gets interesting, because Gates doesn’t really answer that question, but his silence gives him away.

Let me explain: Gates says, “The relatively small decline in emissions this year makes one thing clear: We cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less.”

Okay, so we cannot stop climate change by doing what we are doing now.

Then Gates says: “Let science and innovation lead the way….Any comprehensive response to climate change will have to tap into many different disciplines…. we’ll need biology, chemistry, physics, political science, economics, engineering, and other sciences.”

Right again, we’ll follow the science.

Gates then says: “It will take decades to develop and deploy all the clean-energy inventions we need.”

Okay, so we have to move fast to avoid tragedy.

Finally, Gates says:

“Health advocates said for years that a pandemic was virtually inevitable. The world did not do enough to prepare, and now we are trying to make up for lost time. This is a cautionary tale for climate change, and it points us toward a better approach.”

Got that? So, on the one hand, Gates is saying ‘We must act fast and follow the science’, and on the other he is saying, ‘Shutting down the economy alone isn’t going to work.’

WTF? If it’s not going to work, then why bother? Why is Gates sending a mixed message?

Ahh, but there’s the rub. It’s not a mixed message and it is not a contradiction. What Gates is doing is leading the reader to draw the same conclusion that he has, (wink, wink) that is, if reducing economic activity isn’t going to work, then we have to find an entirely different solution, like reducing the size of the population. Isn’t that the only logical conclusion?

Yes, it is. So, the Great Lab Experiment of 2020 (Covid) has alot to do with population control; thinning the herd so our exalted Davos Overlords can ensure their blue-blooded offspring will have mild temps when they winter-over on their private islands in the Caribbean. But population control is just a small part of a much more ambitious plan to restructure the global economy, vaccinate everyone on the planet and dispose of those niggling civil liberties to which Americans have become so attached.

The elitist strategy has been dubbed the “Great Reset” which refers to the World Economic Forum’s Covid Action Platform, a program that aims at restructuring “economic and social foundations” in a way that best suits the interests of “stakeholder” capitalists. Here’s a clip from their press release:

“COVID-19 lockdowns may be gradually easing, but anxiety about the world’s social and economic prospects is only intensifying. There is good reason to worry: a sharp economic downturn has already begun, and we could be facing the worst depression since the 1930s. But, while this outcome is likely, it is not unavoidable.

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism…

The level of cooperation and ambition this implies is unprecedented. But it is not some impossible dream. In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office….

Clearly, the will to build a better society does exist. We must use it to secure the Great Reset that we so badly need. That will require stronger and more effective governments, though this does not imply an ideological push for bigger ones. And it will demand private-sector engagement every step of the way.” (“The World Economic Forum’s Covid Action Platform“, WEF)

If it sounds like our illustrious leaders want to remake society from the ground-up, it’s because that’s exactly what they have in mind. And they’re not even trying to hide their real intentions. They say quite bluntly: “the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”

That sounds alot like marching orders to me and, indeed, that’s exactly what they are; orders.

But how do they intend to affect these dramatic and revolutionary changes?

Why Covid, of course. They’re going to use Covid to make fundamental changes to the existing system, including accelerating privatization (“stakeholder capitalism”), merging governments into a unified global regime, intensifying the elements of social control (via mass electronic surveillance, intrusive contact tracing, security checkpoints, lockdowns, internal passports, biometric IDs etc) and taking whatever steps are required to introduce a tyrannical Brave New World.

It’s all there in black and white, they’re not even trying to hide it. In their own words, the “Great Reset” depends on the Covid Action Platform, right? In order to “build a better society” we need to “make radical changes to our lifestyles” including reductions in “frequent air travel to working in an office”. So just forget that trip to Italy next year Mr. and Mrs. WorkerBee. Ain’t gonna happen. Bill Gates says, “No.” And get used to working from home, too, because we don’t want your dog-eared Capri spewing carbon into our pristine-blue skies.

The statement also makes clear that the obliteration of millions of jobs and small businesses was not an accidental casualty of the Covid lockdowns, but the planned demolition of business and workers these Mucky-mucks consider ‘non-essential’.

And as far as who will participate in this new blueprint for Capitalist Valhalla? Well, everyone of course. According to the authors: “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”

There it is from the horse’s mouth: The glorious Biosecurity Slave State is emerging right before our very eyes and we just thought we were in another Great Depression rounded off with a pandemic.

So, when we talk about Covid the “Political Contrivance”, we’re actually referring to the vehicle that elites have settled on to transition the country from its present condition to a full-blown “lock-down” police state. Covid is the smokescreen that’s being used to conceal the maneuverings of filthy-rich powerbrokers who want to implement their Grand Plan for humanity. So, if everything feels chaotic and upside-down at the present time, don’t be alarmed; it’s all by design. The more muddled and turbulent the world becomes, the easier it is to get people to submit to moronic activities like wearing a diaper on your mouth every time you leave the house or standing 6 feet apart at the grocery store so invisible pathogens don’t climb up your pant-leg and bite you. Psychologists know that –in a topsy-turvy world where uncertainty prevails — people are more apt to follow the directives of affable blockheads, like Tony Fauci, even though they may be abandoning their last-claim to personal freedom in the process.

Looking back to April of 2020, we probably should have anticipated where all this was headed, after all, Mr. NWO himself, Henry Kissinger, announced what to expect in an op-ed he posted in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s what he said:

The reality is the world will never be the same after the coronavirus. To argue now about the past only makes it harder to do what has to be done…”(NOTE– Is Kissinger clairvoyant? How did he know the “world would never be the same again”?)

“Enlightenment thinkers (argued) that the purpose of the legitimate state is to provide for the fundamental needs of the people… Individuals cannot secure these things on their own. The pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.” (NOTE– In other words: Globalism is good, Nationalism is bad. The same refrain we’ve heard for the last 30 years.)

While the assault on human health (from Covid) will—hopefully—be temporary, the political and economic upheaval it has unleashed could last for generations. (NOTE–Another peek into Henry’s crystal ball, eh?) No country, not even the U.S., can in a purely national effort overcome the virus. Addressing the necessities of the moment must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program.” (“The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order”, Wall Street Journal)

As Kissinger clearly states, globalization is still alive and well among the Davos heavyweights who now see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put their plan into action. Parts of Australia and New Zealand are already under de-facto martial law while PM Boris Johnson is adding another 2,000 cops in London to enforce his goofy Covid mandates. Everywhere in the western world, freedom is collapsing faster than a corrugated lean-to in a Kansas tornado. Meanwhile in panic-stricken America, fainthearted proles continue to hide behind their sofas waiting for the faux-plague to pass. Do they even see the train-wreck just ahead? Author Gary D. Barnett summed it up like this:

“At this moment in time we are standing on a precipice with the state attempting to push us over the edge. Once over that edge, there will be no coming back. This is why if the people fight back in mass, and withhold all support from the governing demons, we can awaken from this nightmare, and regain normalcy.” (“The State’s Covid Response Is a Cancer for the Freedom of Humanity”, Gary D. Barnett, Lew Rockwell)

Bravo, Mr. Barnett. That says it all.

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November 2020: Reflections on “White Elections”

October 7th, 2020 by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

In less than four weeks a nation that loves nostalgia will be entertaining an election not unlike those a century ago. The election on 3 November 2020 will be fundamentally a “white man’s election”, the penumbra of protest notwithstanding.

Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination and the election four years ago by appealing to the populist elements that were opposed to what can actually be called the Bush-Clinton gang in the GOP. With the necessary money and a salesman’s astute sense of how to hawk, he overwhelmed the GOP establishment candidates and placed himself on the wave of those who rightly hated Clinton and certainly had no love for Obama.

Neither Hillary Clinton’s horrid personality nor her legacy could possibly appeal to anyone except party diehards, gravy train parasites and the academic faux gauche, i.e. those who bought the synthetic brand Obama in 2008 and became addicted to the product.

Mr Trump’s unexpected win– although not surprising for those who had a sober view of Clinton– caused considerable upset in the Establishment. As I have noted, but apparently few others have, while Donald Trump is unsurprisingly rich, he is in fact the first POTUS to be elected in at least a century who was not previously a senior civil servant, military officer or professional politician. That of course means that he was not been “trained” how to behave or instructed as to who really makes decisions for the White House. Although the mass media have focussed on his business career and his wealth, they conspicuously ignore the fact that he is also the first person in the White House since 1980 not controlled by the Bush family![1]

Since in the US no one likes to talk about power as it is really exercised and by whom, four years have been spent attacking a mediocre New York real estate gangster for stage performances that were largely spoiled by the crew behind the curtains. Never mind any virtues or defects of Donald Trump’s ostensible program or policies since these are not really important. The most serious problem has been that there was a policy and program adopted prior to his election that Ms Clinton was supposed to represent and failure to elect her meant this policy and program had to be pushed without her– against Mr Trump if necessary.

Donald Trump’s failure to cooperate with those who in fact make policy was manifest in the frequent changes to high office appointments. Since the only power Mr Trump actually has had– not unlike Jimmy Carter– is to appoint and dismiss cabinet officers and some other senior bureaucrats, this is what he did. Although his appointments did not give him more control over the relevant departments, they did cause considerable irritation throughout senior echelons of the federal bureaucracy. The most obvious disruption arises when people whose careers have advanced by following certain superiors in a given structure find that they have a new boss and perhaps even that they are transferred to some part of the organisation less favourable to their future promotion. For outsiders these changes are scarcely noticeable but for career civil servants at the higher management levels such disruption is taken very seriously. The programs that were dependent for their smooth implementation on continuity from the Obama-Clinton management were now subject to administrative delays or even budgetary obstacles. Thus layers of official Washington had reasons to aggravate the obstructions and contribute to the attack on Trump.

As the impeachment proceedings finally demonstrated, the principal objections to Donald Trump were nothing more than his frustration of the Establishment program to which the Bush-Clinton gang was committed. Every effort has been made to show that Donald Trump as POTUS is neither entitled nor competent to exercise executive authority. Nor is he allowed to change Establishment policy (in the form of initiatives under his predecessors). Yet the US Constitution does not name failure to adhere to the policies of a previous administration as a violation of the law or an impeachable offense. None of those who claim that Mr Trump is the “worst ever” POTUS seem to have any recollection of George W Bush, a semi-literate son of the ruling dynasty, re-elected by blatant election fraud with at least one illegal war to his credit, not to mention the demonstrable corruption in office. No matter how mediocre he may be, Donald Trump’s record is snow white compared to that of his predecessors.

Failing impeachment and removal from office, the immediate effects of the 2015 pandemic plan were then turned against Mr Trump in a last ditch attempt to show that he is incompetent, if not the cause of the faux pandemic.[2] Clearly a project, which under Ms Clinton would have been launched earlier (no doubt to profile her “leadership”), was now implemented in the hope that it would foil Donald Trump’s re-election chances. However that was not sticking either.

A serving POTUS rarely has to seek party re-nomination for a second term, the micro-convention held by the Republicans was therefore a formality. For years however the Democratic Party has had to contend with its dissident left wing (in the US sense of the word). Again Bernie Sanders was let into the bullring to take a few stabs at a Trump effigy to keep the restless in their seats until a suitable nominee could be appointed.

The lockdown—apparently supported mainly by Establishment jurisdictions– was bound to create a variety of social tensions. Hence the situation was ripe for some creative counter-insurgency work. It is no secret that police officers, especially but not only in urban forces, perform contract murders– frequently for those who run the drug business in the area. It takes little fantasy to imagine that Mr Floyd was assassinated for propaganda reasons. The rather unusual spread of simultaneous demonstrations following his murder was quicker than even the Ferguson or Charleston killings several years ago could trigger.[3] Moreover careful attention to the locations and the composition of the demonstrations ought to have raised suspicions.

The demonstrations in predominantly white cities like Portland, while forty years ago perhaps sensible venues, were selected for media-effectiveness. White folks demonstrating in cities, where Blacks form an insignificant portion of the population, that “Black lives matter” also makes sense. It is comparable to the US motivation for dropping atomic bombs on cities that had not yet been attacked. These demonstration venues also have advantages: The absence of any other distracting activity made the demonstrations the easy focus of cameras. There were no embarrassing Black neighbourhoods to film and maybe raise questions that did not fit the script. The scope of Black issues could be carefully defined without any real Blacks involved.

One of the tactics of counter-insurgency developed and refined from the Phoenix Program is the creation of armed propaganda teams that appear and behave like the enemy. BLM is such an organisation, as is Antifa. Remarkable about the conduct of these two groups—exhibiting traits of CANVAS coaching– is that they perform a mirror of what whites thought they saw in the 60s.[4] The propaganda team composed the language by borrowing heavily from “white” depictions of the Civil Rights movement protests. The point of the operations was not to mobilize Blacks– on the contrary. The primary aim of the operation is consolidation of white votes for the Democratic Party. Instead of dressing like the Klan to intimidate Blacks, they are costumed like Civil Rights protesters to intimidate Whites who might vote for Trump.

There is another aspect of this campaign that is even more provocative. As the escalation of sexual identity/ gender based politics has overwhelmed nearly all other opposition issues, the classical and wholly unresolved issues of economic justice, the plantation prison system, housing and education, not to mention the militarism that drives US foreign (and domestic policy) have been obscured. If one considers the positions taken by arguably the most radical Black American of his day, Malcolm X, there is nothing in any of his speeches that would justify or promote the conduct under the banners of BLM and Antifa.[5] Ironically– but I believe intentionally– the excited attention given to Black Lives Matter and its allies actually serves to suppress the fundamental issues of white supremacy upon which the US is based and that people like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King consistently raised.

Historically elections have been fought for marginal shifts in the allegiance of white voters. Since the 50s these shifts were occasionally magnified by whether Blacks were able to vote or not. One could say that Black votes became the “swing” constituency in presidential elections. This was always a source of conflict within the historically racist Democratic Party. The mobilisation of Black voters was so contentious that it had even split the party.

Barack Obama conspicuously avoided mentioning King’s name in any of his speeches during the 2008 presidential campaign. Yet his speeches were saturated with subliminals that surely triggered the name in the heads of liberal listeners. (I frequently had to show people the speeches afterwards to prove that he had never said “King”.) This practice continued throughout his two-terms. Surely he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize so quickly to consecrate his election as if he were “Martin Luther King”, without being him. At the same time the “right Black man” was finally given the prize.

Black Lives Matter consortium was invented and funded to promote virtual Black protest with subliminal messages aimed at white voters in the same way the Obama campaign was contrived. In the view of the Establishment, real Black Americans are too offensive to whites and too unreliable politically. Moreover there is a standing policy in the Democratic Party not to mobilize Blacks except under the most controlled conditions. Ideally these are the conditions under which what Black Agenda Report calls the “Misleadership Class” can manipulate them. So what we have in fact is the product of a long-standing practice of the historical Democratic Party, a Black movement without any Blacks. The core of this armed propaganda has modernised the minstrel show in a violent and destructive manner.

These Democratic Party covert operations are designed to smear Donald Trump without staining the Democrats themselves. It is another strategy for capturing the “swing vote” without any obligation to serve the constituency whose ballots it needs. It aims—like in elections a century ago—to stuff the ballots for a Southern racist (Biden) against a carpetbagger (Trump) and, regardless of who wins, leave everything else just as the Establishment wants it.

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Notes

[1] This author contends that essentially from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 until 2016, the Bush family has directly or indirectly controlled the White House. GHW Bush exercised this control as vice president for two terms, as POTUS for one. Bill Clinton was essentially co-opted into the Bush gang while governor of Arkansas when the state was being used as a hub for drug running by CIA assets. GW Bush then served two terms and was relieved by Barack Obama, a person with a long and intimate relationship to the US intelligence services with which the Bush family also enjoys a historically strong connection. Hence “bipartisanship” in the US has been based upon domination of both major parties by an alliance of the Bush family and the Clinton couple. However, were the same configuration to be identified in another country, e.g. the Soviet Union/ Russia, the conclusion would be reached immediately that the intelligence agencies or even criminal syndicates have undue control over the executive. For example, it has been commonplace to identify Russian President Vladimir Putin as a former KGB officer. It was very rare that US President GHW Bush was introduced as a former head of the CIA. By treating the entire US system as sui generis there is virtually no analysis of power relationships and structures pertaining to the USA in categories or concepts that permit comparison with other regimes. This is deliberate and not accidental, another aspect of so-called “exceptionalism”.

[2] Although the extent to which prior planning exercises occurred and public statements were made by various prominent individuals suggest that the conditions for the so-called pandemic in 2020 could have been man-made, any culpability remains deniable.

[3] On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a town in Greater St. Louis. On 17 July 2015, nine parishioners were murdered in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, including the senior pastor, by one Dylann Roof.

[4] CANVAS, the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies, is the successor organisation to OTPOR, a Serbian consultancy specialised in training for revolutions. It played a major role during the NATO war against Yugoslavia, coaching civilian opposition to the Serbian government. See http://www.canvasopedia.org and The Revolution Business http://www.journeyman.tv/film/5171

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auWA7hMh5hc Malcolm X delivered a speech at the Oxford Union, 3 December 1964

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As we approach the one year anniversary of the novel coronavirus outbreak, we find ourselves facing many unanswered questions.

We find ourselves worse off in many ways, in comparison to when the outbreak just began, as we receive signals from public health officials and the media to prepare for another lockdown.

It appears we are approaching what could to be a perfect storm. The US Presidential Elections, flu season, the arrival of the new experimental COVID vaccine and the prophesied ‘second wave’ of COVID.

The big news of the week of course, has been President Trump and the First Lady have both tested positive for COVID. The President has been hospitalized.

President Trump’s doctor, said that Trump’s diagnosis was confirmed using the PCR test. Just like virtually every other ‘confirmed case’ we hear reported.

But was PCR really developed with the intention of diagnosing infectious diseases? Is PCR capable of diagnosing infectious diseases? How could a test developed almost 40 years ago be used to diagnose a brand new disease found less than one year ago?

In this report, we examine this questions in addition to reviewing video clips of multiple doctors weighing in on the subject including the biochemist Kary Mullis who invented PCR and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for doing so has to say.

Why is understanding the test so important?

Because it is the driving factor in the fear campaign, that is being driven by the corrupt media and then used by the government to justify the restrictions imposed on our lives.

This is a must see report that may change the perception of you, or of someone you may know, regarding the crisis.

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Featured image: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Graphic. (U.S. Air Force Graphic by Rosario “Charo” Gutierrez)

Will America Turn Their Back on Armenians Again?

October 7th, 2020 by Steven Sahiounie

They say, ‘Timing is everything’.  US President Trump fell ill with COVID-19 simultaneously as Armenian Prime Minister, Nicol Pashinyan, was waiting for a phone reply to his previous request for urgent help from the White House.

On Oct. 1 Pashinyan spoke by phone with Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, asking: Why is nothing being done to stop the US ally, Turkey, from using American-made F-16 jets against Armenians in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh?

O’Brien had promised to set up a phone conversation between Pashinyan and Trump, but hope for American help for Armenia vanished just a few hours later when Trump announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19.

Iran as peacemaker

The Foreign Ministry of Iran said Monday it is working on a peace plan to ending the fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, both of which share a border with Iran.

Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said,

“Iran has prepared a plan with a specific framework containing details after consultations with both sides of the dispute, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as regional states and neighbors, and will pursue this plan.”

Since the beginning of the conflict, stray mortars have injured a child and damaged some buildings near the border with Azerbaijan, and Khatibzadeh warned both sides against enlarging the conflict zone onto Iran’s territory.

The current fighting

Fighting erupted on Sept. 27 and has killed dozens on both sides.

The breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh lies in Azerbaijan, but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since the end of a separatist war in 1994, and has seen many military flare-ups over the years; however, the current battlefield may erupt into a much bigger regional war, due to President Erdogan of Turkey actively participating in the conflict against the Armenians.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned of attacks on populated areas which are taking a deadly toll on civilians.

PM Pashinyan calls the conflict a “civilizational front line”, referring to the Armenians who are Christians, and the Azerbaijanis who are Muslims and backed by Erdogan of Turkey, who has morphed his secular modern nation on the doors of Europe, into a new Turkey governed by the Muslim Brotherhood, an internationally banned terrorist group.

The Turkish danger

The former Ottoman Empire of Turkey killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the end of World War I. The US Congress and many countries have declared that slaughter a “genocide.”

Erdogan has said of his support of Azerbaijan in the current conflict, “We must finish the work of our grandfathers,” which Armenians worldwide recognize as the Turkish national preoccupation with oppressing Christians. The Armenians of Kessab were not surprised that in 2014 Turkey was once again in bloody-thirsty pursuit of them.

Turkey is not only providing air support against the Armenians but also recruiting Syrian mercenaries from among the terrorists Turkey supports and protects in the terrorist occupied enclave at Idlib, Syria.  Erdogan is paying three thousand dollars per month to each terrorist he moves from Idlib to Azerbaijan.

The US, EU, and NATO have long objected to the Syrian and Russian campaign against the Al Qaeda terrorists in Idlib, who continue to hold 3 million civilians as human shields in Idlib.

Erdogan has already involved Turkey in fighting proxy wars in Syria, Libya, and now Azerbaijan.  His domestic audience is unable to voice opposition after Erdogan has jailed tens of thousands of activists and intellectuals, and Turkey is considered to be the largest prison for journalists on earth.

The NATO position

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said recently while in Ankara that the 30-country military alliance is “deeply concerned by the escalation of hostilities,” in Nagorno-Karabakh, and urged Turkey to help end the fighting.

“I expect Turkey to use its considerable influence to calm tensions,” Stoltenberg said after talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

History of the conflict

Nagorno-Karabakh was designated an autonomous region within Azerbaijan during the Soviet era, and it claimed independence from Azerbaijan in 1991, just three months before the Soviet Union’s collapse. 30,000 people were killed in a full-scale war in 1992, and by 1994 the war ended with Armenian forces holding Nagorno-Karabakh and substantial areas outside of the borders.

Turkey’s attack on Kessab 2014

At dawn on March 21, 2014, armed terrorists of Jibhat al Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and the US-supported Free Syrian Army (FSA) attacked the small village of Kessab, Syria which sits on the Turkish border.  The residents, landowners, and farmers are ethnic Armenians.

Rafi Der Jiboujian, an eye-witness said,

“Turkey opened the border, and the armed groups came into Kassab, shooting and firing missiles at us. One missile from Turkey hit the local police station. We evacuated the area because if we hadn’t left they would have butchered us, cut our heads off.”

US Ambassador Powers lies about Kessab

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) questioned the US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Powers, in front of a Congressional hearing in April 2014 concerning the Kessab attack.  Schiff represents an area in the greater Los Angeles region which is home to a major Armenian American community, many of whom are the leaders of industry in Los Angeles.  Amb. Powers lied directly to Rep. Schiff, the US Congress, and the American people.  She said, “I would note that, unfortunately, the extremist group that appears to have taken hold of that town is not one that the United States and the United Nations overall has a great deal of leverage over. And so, our emphasis now is on supporting the moderate opposition in Syria that is taking on those extremist groups,” and she added, “So, it’s resources, it’s strengthening the moderate opposition which is taking on ISIL – the very group that appears to have taken over that town.”

Amb. Powers was fully aware that it was the US-supported FSA who participated in the attack alongside Jibhat al Nusra and were occupying Kessab when on April 1, 2014, the leader of the US-backed Syrian opposition, Ahmed Jarba, traveled to Kessab to meet with the FSA troops and congratulate them on the attack and occupation of a Christian village in Syria, which resulted in deaths, kidnappings, rapes and the permanent displacement of the majority of residents.

Amb. Powers was fully aware that ISIL was not part of the attack on Kessab, but it was the FSA, the “moderate opposition” that Obama and Sen. John McCain (R, AZ) had supported with billions of the US tax payer’s dollars in weapons, training, and payroll through the CIA office in southern Turkey.  In 2017 President Trump cut the CIA project.

On May 13, 2014, Ahmed Jarba was sitting in the Oval Office at the White House with US President Obama, Susan Rice, and John Kerry, having left the blood stained streets and homes of Kessab to fly to the US.

The Armenian American community

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles recently, waving Armenian flags and holding up signs that demanded US media pay attention to the armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Today, the large and historic Armenian community of Fresno, dating back to 1880, are marching through their streets once famous as the Raisin Capital of the World.

Even though the US is home to the largest Armenian community outside of Armenia, the US government in the days of the Obama administration, and now during the Trump presidency, do not view Armenian suffering, death, and destruction as an important issue.  Trump was elected on an isolationist strategy: America first. Trump’s supporters commented that the recent protests in Los Angeles by local members of the Armenian American community, principally in Glendale, were a nuisance to traffic.  Trump’s base advised the Armenians of L.A., who have been American citizens for at least 3 generations, to “go to Armenia and fight!”, signaling they do not support ethnic communities in the US, but rather consider ‘real’ American citizens as a pure-strain, free of attachments to ancestral homes.

Trump administration ‘asleep at the wheel’

Trump has “simply not been paying attention and been completely disengaged,” said Thomas de Waal, a British expert on the region and author of a book on Nagorno-Karabakh, “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War.”

If Armenia today is betting that the US will step-in with support, they may lose their bet, if they recall the US position after the attack on the Armenian village of Kessab, in Syria.

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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 VOA

The Armed Forces of Azerbaijan supported by Turkey continue their large-scale offensive to capture the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region from Armenian forces. Following the gains of the previous days, when Azerbaijani forces captured the towns of Talish, Jabrayil and Mataghis, they developed momentum in the Jabrayil district capturing the villages of Shikhali Agali, Sari jali, and Mezre, and several other hill tops, according to the country’s president Ilham Aliyev.

Currently, Azerbaijani forces are working to consolidate their gains and conduct artillery and air strikes on positions of the Armenians preparing for a further offensive. So, the Azerbaijani advance slowed down due to weather conditions. The bad weather in the area complicates the usage of combat drones and aviation.

Meanwhile, forces of the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Republic announced that they had carried out ‘powerful’ retaliation strikes on territory of Azerbaijan. Armenian sources insist that after the strikes, several hundred thousand residents of different cities of Azerbaijan have been fleeing in panic to Baku. The Armenian military claimed that Azerbaijan paid a heavy price for the recent gains. According to it, Armenian forces inflicted to the ‘enemy’ 3154 casualties and destroyed 368 armoured vehicles, 4 rocket launchers, 124 UAVs, 17 military planes and 14 helicopters. The Armenian side emphasizes that Azerbaijani forces have been extensively bombing civilian targets, including the largest Karabakh city, Stepanakert. Azerbaijan denounces these claims as blatant propaganda.

The ongoing Azerbaijani advance is not only supported by Turkey and involves Turkish military specialists, special forces and military equipment, but also became another case of the employment of Turkish-backed Syrian militants.

On October 5, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA reported citing its own sources that at least 93 Turkish-backed militants had been killed since the start of the war on September 27. The report added that at least 450 more militants were deployed to the combat zone last weekend. This was reportedly the third batch of Syrian militants deployed to the area.

The Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc has been taking an upper hand in the battle against Armenian forces. The decisive role belongs to the air dominance and the numerical superiority of the Azerbaijani side. The only current advantage of Armenian forces is the low quality of Azerbaijani infantry and Turkish-backed Syrian militants involved in the ground advance as well as the low planning and management skills of the ground phase of the Azerbaijani operation.

Azerbaijani infantry and motorized units marching towards fortified positions of Armenians become an easy target for counter-attacks, artillery and missile strikes. This reminds one of the approaches employed by Turkey in Syria and Libya, when Ankara was sending waves of cannon fodder (consisting of members of various militant groups) to capture positions of the ‘enemy’, while Turkish special forces, artillery and air power were doing the main job.

Meanwhile, the Armed Forces of Armenia are not employing all the variety of means and measures that they have to fight back the advancing Azerbaijani military. Despite the loud propaganda about the Armenian key role in resisting to the ‘terror alliance’ of Turkey and Azerbaijan, the Pashinyan government has no political will to recognize the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and go for a full-scale war to defend Armenian population there.

Thus, the participation of the official Armenian military in supporting forces of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (as it remains a de-facto independent state with its own military forces) are limited as of now. This raises reasonable questions regarding the real goals of the Pashinyan government. Experts say that in fact what it aims is to achieve are the goals of his government’s foreign patrons in the Washington establishment thus losing Karabakh and using this as a pretext to break its remaining ties with Russia and push the country towards its integration with NATO.

On October 5, Pashinyan publicly admitted that the situation on the frontline is “complicated” and called on servicemen demobilized a year ago to rejoin the Armed Forces. The prime minister said that he was calling them not to a simple service, but to the battle “between life and death”. Pashinyan also declared that he is confident in Armenian victory.

Nonetheless, the mobilization of reservists showcases that the real situation is much more complicated than everyone wants to admit. Moreover, just fresh troops, without modern weapons, experienced commanders and instructors, will not be able to turn the tide of the conflict. In the worst case scenario, this may just increase casualties on the Armenian side.

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New guidance on immigration laws released Friday by the United States Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS) makes it almost impossible for members of a Communist or similar party to be granted permanent residence or U.S. citizenship. 

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In a policy alert issued October 2, USCIS announced:

“In general, unless otherwise exempt, any intending immigrant who is a member or affiliate of the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party … domestic or foreign, is inadmissible to the United States.”

The policy amendment, supposedly “part of a broader set of laws passed by Congress to address threats to the safety and security of the United States,” effectively blocks members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from ever obtaining permanent residency or citizenship in the United States.

While the alert did not explicitly mention the CCP, which has more than 90 million members—and could impact millions more in Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and elsewhere—the move adds a new dimension in Washington’s ongoing aggression against the Chinese government and people, and the Left more broadly.

The policy builds on laws dating back to 1918, which classified communists and anarchists as security threats, and to 1950 when the Internal Security Act excluded foreign members of Communist or “totalitarian” parties from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, there were 2.5 million Chinese immigrants in the U.S. in 2018, or 5.5% of the foreign-born population. 67,000 Chinese citizens were granted U.S. permanent residency that same year, ranking it third in the nation of origin behind Mexico and Cuba. To date, no official figures are detailing the numbers of CCP members who have residency or citizenship in the United States.

Claiming that any effort to separate the ruling CCP from the Chinese people was doomed to fail, Beijing slammed U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s congratulations to “the people of China” on China’s National Day, October 1. Earlier this year, US policymakers even considered banning entry into the United States for all CCP members, Reuters reported; the move was deemed too risky to follow through. However, like almost all Chinese government officials, most executives of state-owned enterprises and officials at public institutions are members of the CCP.

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Netanyahu’s Dirty Laundry Tells All

October 7th, 2020 by Philip Giraldi

Staff in Washington D.C.’s Blair House, where the U.S. president houses his V.I.P. foreign guests, report that they have begun counting towels and robes after visitors depart. Soap and shampoo resupply is also being closely monitored and a metal detector has been installed in the downstairs breakfast room to prevent silverware losses. The heightened security comes in the wake of revelations regarding the all-too-frequent visits by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been accused of regularly arriving at Blair House with multiple suitcases and bags containing many months’ worth of his dirty laundry, all of which he has washed, dry cleaned and pressed at U.S. taxpayer expense. While most visitors choose to deal with their soiled linen as a private matter, Bibi evidently is quite happy to have his washed for him in Washington.

Apart from the Netanyahu behavior demonstrating his complete contempt for his hosts, the prime minister appears to have an established track record when it comes to questionable behavior. He and his wife Sara have been the targets of several long-running corruption investigations in Israel, some of which remain unresolved. It is the latest in a series of crimes involving Israeli leaders, which have included the rape conviction of former President Moshe Katsav.

But more to the point, it is difficult to avoid the belief that the Jewish state and its hundreds of front organizations operating in the United States are basically both corrupting and impoverishing the United States one bite at a time. My father used to have a typical New Jersey expression describing someone who is obnoxiously persistent in trying to taking advantage of you. He called such behavior “getting pecked to death by a duck.” Lacking a sharp beak, one hardly notices the duck’s endeavors until it kills you. Israel and its proxies are the duck that is bleeding the United States one peck at a time.

There are, of course, the big-ticket items that make the news briefly like the more than $4 billion in annual military assistance that Israel gets, mostly guaranteed for the next ten years. Israel is now seeking $8 billion more on top of that to thank it for making friends with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in a politically motivated White House ceremony. Israel enjoys a number of tax breaks, co-production arrangements and trade concessions that almost certainly amount to more than $10 billion annually in a one-way cash flow to America’s “best friend and greatest ally.” The 1985 United States free trade agreement with Israel alone has benefitted the Jewish state by $144 billion, which is the U.S. deficit on the trade between 1985 and 2015.

One might note in passing that Israel is quite capable of defending itself, to include a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver it, while its Jewish citizens enjoy a European standard of living, to include free public education through college and state provided medical care that is in part funded by American taxpayers.

Ron DeSantis

But it is on the duck pecking level that the penetration and corruption of the United States becomes clearer. It seems that every week one notes a couple of articles here and there that reveal how Israel and its friends wield tremendous power at all government levels and also in the media. One that resonated in the past couple of weeks described how Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, has signed a bill authorizing the state’s department of motor vehicles to issue car license plates bearing the legend “Florida Stands With Israel.” The Israeli-American Council (IAC) immediately praised the “heartwarming expression of solidarity” which “affirms the strong bond between the State of Florida’s citizens and the Jewish State of Israel. This kind of warmth is why Florida has always been a leading destination for Israeli-Americans.”

Now, DeSantis is no novice when it comes to the sucking up to Israel game. He has been playing the Israel and anti-Semitism cards throughout his political career. In 2018, as a Congressman running for governor, he attacked his opponent Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum during their gubernatorial race as not being a “friend of Israel.” Earlier, as a Congressman, DeSantis sponsored in 2013 the Palestinian Accountability Act which called for the withholding of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority until it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state. In 2017, he co-founded the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus.

When DeSantis ran for governor, he predictably promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in America and that the “first delegation [he] would lead would be to the state of Israel.” He then took his entire cabinet with him as part of a 75-person taxpayer funded delegation on a six-day boondoggle at the end of May 2019, meanwhile boasting that “Today I’m pleased to report that I’m keeping that promise. Our delegation will bring business, academic and political leaders to help strengthen the bond between Florida and Israel.” He held a meeting of his Cabinet in the American Embassy in Jerusalem during his visit, the first time that such a meeting has ever been held by a state government on foreign soil. During the meeting he ostentatiously signed a legislative bill “combating anti-Semitism.”

And now one can buy license plates extolling the parasitic relationship with Israel, surely a unique expression of dual loyalty not exhibited by any other state in the union. The Florida relationship is also a perfect example of how Israel’s friends go about setting up mechanisms that will benefit the Jewish state. Israel will be selling its products and services to Florida, enabled by a government in place that is promoting the process and will steer contracts in its direction. In return, Florida will get little or nothing as Israel is a tiny market and has no particular need of anything that the Sunshine State produces.

All such trade agreements are designed to enrich Israel. Another interesting example of how this works at the state level and the abuse that it can produce has recently surfaced in Virginia, where a so-called Virginia-Israel Advisory Board (VIAB) has actually been funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia taxpayers to promote and even subsidize Israeli business in the state, business that currently runs an estimated $500 million per annum in favor of Israel. Grant Smith of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP) has done considerable digging into the affairs of VIAB. He has observed how “VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that advance Israel from within key state governments.”

And then there is Congress, where a bill has been introduced that will enable Israel to block any U.S. arm sales to the Middle East that it does not approve of, a nearly complete surrender of American sovereignty to the Jewish state. And there is also the Congressman Brad Sherman of California story. Brad, who is Jewish, would very much like to replace recently defeated coreligionist congressman Eliot Engel as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The committee, of course, deals with Israeli issues and Engel was widely regarded as one of the Jewish state’s staunchest friends in Congress. So what did Brad do? He approached a number of Jewish groups to help the process along. In a zoom event hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) he confirmed that “You went to bat for Eliot Engel in a huge way, and demonstrated that you understood how important that chairmanship is… And I won’t compare myself to my good friend Eliot Engel, except to say that when it comes to having one’s heart in the right place, Eliot and I are in the exact same place.” If Brad succeeds, and he probably will, whose interests will he be serving in an important government office? Some might regard such behavior as treasonous.

Also out of California comes the story of some new legislation to combat the scourge of anti-Semitism, much in the media of late together with the shocking news that many Americans are unable to name even a single so-called Nazi death camp or to parrot alleged “facts” about the holocaust. What is described as “holocaust education” is already mandatory in a number of states where studying the American Revolution is apparently optional. Jewish groups have infiltrated boards of education to “advise” on suitable textbooks, which present a positive narrative relating to Israel while also depicting claimed Jewish victimhood. It is now also likely that holocaust education will become mandatory nationwide due to recent congressional passage of the Never Again Education Act.

At the end of August, California Assembly Bill 331 “took a major step toward [California] becoming the first state in the country to mandate completion of an ethnic studies course as a requirement for high school graduation.” Reports of “anxiety and outrage” in the Jewish community over the first draft of the bill had led the members of the 16 member California Legislative Jewish Caucus to quickly move to insert “guardrail” language into the text. The new language will “…prohibit the teaching of any curriculum that promotes bias, bigotry or discrimination, including against Jews or Israelis.”

The issue might seem relatively clear cut, but there was of course a hidden agenda, which was to block any consideration of the plight of the Palestinians or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which, it was feared, would become part of the curriculum. And the inclusion of “Israelis” as a protected group pretty effectively prohibits any discussion of Israel at all, except, presumably, in positive terms. In California schoolrooms one can criticize the behavior of the United States or Mexico but anything negative about Israel will be forbidden. And California is not alone. Twenty-nine states currently either ban or otherwise punish the promotion of BDS, largely due to the effective lobbying by Israeli partisans at the legislative level in those states.

So everywhere anyone turns, there is Israel, Israel, Israel. So, what’s a little dirty laundry between the “best friends” in the whole wide world? Maybe. But alternatively, it just might be that we Americans are getting pecked to death and all the Trumps and Bidens do is grin and smile while our country is being systematically screwed by a foreign country aided by a domestic lobby that is only in the game to take whatever it can. Wake-up America!

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

At the UN Security Council, the US, UK, France and allies have blocked the testimony of Jose Bustani, the OPCW’s first Director General, on the chemical watchdog’s Syria cover-up scandal. The Grayzone has obtained Bustani’s prepared statement and is publishing it in full.

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Jose Bustani was invited to brief the Security Council on the OPCW’s cover-up of an investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018. The US, UK, and France bombed Syria after accusing the Syrian government of dropping toxic gas in Douma. OPCW inspectors later found evidence that undermined the official narrative, but were censored by their superiors under US pressure.

As the OPCW’s first Director General, Bustani experienced first-hand the costs of challenging pro-war narratives. In 2002, he was personally threatened by John Bolton and ousted as OPCW chief after he facilitated inspections that stood in the way of the Bush administration’s drive to invade Iraq.

In his comments, Bustani voices support for the OPCW inspectors and urges the current Director General, Fernando Arias, to let them air their suppressed evidence in a transparent manner.

“At great risk to themselves, [the inspectors] have dared to speak out against possible irregular behaviour in your Organisation, and it is without doubt in your, in the Organisation’s, and in the world’s interest that you hear them out,” Bustani says. “Regardless of whether or not there is substance to the concerns raised about the OPCW’s behaviour in the Douma investigation, hearing what your own inspectors have to say would be an important first step in mending the Organisation’s damaged reputation. The dissenting inspectors are not claiming to be right, but they do want to be given a fair hearing.”

Full transcript below.

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Mr Chairman, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, your excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen,

My name is José Bustani. I am honoured to have been invited to present a statement for this meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the Syrian chemical dossier and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. As the OPCW’s first Director General, a position I held from 1997 to 2002, I naturally retain a keen interest in the evolution and fortunes of the Organisation. I have been particularly interested in recent developments regarding the Organisation’s work in Syria.

For those of you who are not aware, I was removed from office following a US-orchestrated campaign in 2002 for, ironically, trying to uphold the Chemical Weapons Convention. My removal was subsequently ruled to be illegal by the International Labour Organisation’s Administrative Tribunal, but despite this unpleasant experience the OPCW remains close to my heart. It is a special Organisation with an important mandate. I accepted the position of Director General precisely because the Chemical Weapons Convention was non-discriminatory. I took immense pride in the independence, impartiality, and professionalism of its inspectors and wider staff in implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention. No State Party was to be considered above the rest and the hallmark of the Organisation’s work was the even-handedness with which all Member States were treated regardless of size, political might, or economic clout.

Although no longer at the helm by this time, I felt great joy when the OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 “for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons”. It was a mandate towards which I and countless other former staff members had worked tirelessly. In the nascent years of the OPCW, we faced a number of challenges, but we overcame them to earn the Organisation a well-deserved reputation for effectiveness and efficiency, not to mention autonomy, impartiality, and a refusal to be politicised. The ILO decision on my removal was an official and public reassertion of the importance of these principles.

More recently, the OPCW’s investigations of alleged uses of chemical weapons have no doubt created even greater challenges for the Organisation. It was precisely for this kind of eventuality that we had developed operating procedures, analytical methods, as well as extensive training programmes, in strict accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Allegations of the actual use of chemical weapons were a prospect for which we hoped our preparations would never be required. Unfortunately, they were, and today allegations of chemical weapons use are a sad reality.

It is against this backdrop that serious questions are now being raised over whether the independence, impartiality, and professionalism of some of the Organisation’s work is being severely compromised, possibly under pressure from some Member States. Of particular concern are the circumstances surrounding the OPCW’s investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, on 7 April 2018. These concerns are emanating from the very heart of the Organisation, from the very scientists and engineers involved in the Douma investigation.

In October 2019 I was invited by the Courage Foundation, an international organisation that ‘supports those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record’, to participate in a panel along with a number of eminent international figures from the fields of international law, disarmament, military operations, medicine, and intelligence. The panel was convened to hear the concerns of an OPCW official over the conduct of the Organisation’s investigation into the Douma incident.

The expert provided compelling and documentary evidence of highly questionable, and potentially fraudulent conduct in the investigative process. In a joint public statement, the Panel was, and I quote, ‘unanimous in expressing [its] alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma’. The Panel further called on the OPCW, ‘to permit all inspectors who took part in the Douma investigation to come forward and report their differing observations in an appropriate forum of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, in fulfilment of the spirit of the Convention.’

I was personally so disturbed by the testimony and evidence presented to the Panel, that I was compelled to make a public statement. I quote: “I have always expected the OPCW to be a true paradigm of multilateralism. My hope is that the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyse a process by which the Organisation can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”

The call for greater transparency from the OPCW further intensified in November 2019 when an open letter of support for the Courage Foundation declaration was sent to Permanent Representatives to the OPCW to, ‘ask for [their] support in taking action at the forthcoming Conference of States Parties aimed at restoring the integrity of the OPCW and regaining public trust.’

The signatories of this petition included such eminent figures as Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor at MIT; Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Chair of the Swedish Doctors for Human Rights; Coleen Rowley, whistle-blower and a 2002 Time Magazine Person of the Year; Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Film Director Oliver Stone, to mention a few.

Almost one year later, the OPCW has still not responded to these requests, nor to the ever-growing controversy surrounding the Douma investigation. Rather, it has hidden behind an impenetrable wall of silence and opacity, making any meaningful dialogue impossible. On the one occasion when it did address the inspectors’ concerns in public, it was only to accuse them of breaching confidentiality. Of course, Inspectors – and indeed all OPCW staff members – have responsibilities to respect confidentiality rules. But the OPCW has the primary responsibility – to faithfully ensure the implementation of the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention (Article VIII, para 1).

The work of the Organisation must be transparent, for without transparency there is no trust. And trust is what binds the OPCW together. If Member States do not have trust in the fairness and objectivity of the work of the OPCW, then its effectiveness as a global watchdog for chemical weapons is severely compromised.

And transparency and confidentiality are not mutually exclusive. But confidentiality cannot be invoked as a smoke screen for irregular behaviour. The Organisation needs to restore the public trust it once had and which no one denies is now waning. Which is why we are here today.

It would be inappropriate for me to advise on, or even to suggest how the OPCW should go about regaining public trust. Still, as someone who has experienced both rewarding and tumultuous times with the OPCW, I would like to make a personal plea to you, Mr Fernando Arias, as Director General of the OPCW. The inspectors are among the Organisation’s most valuable assets. As scientists and engineers, their specialist knowledge and inputs are essential for good decision making. Most importantly, their views are untainted by politics or national interests. They only rely on the science. The inspectors in the Douma investigation have a simple request – that they be given the opportunity to meet with you to express their concerns to you in person, in a manner that is both transparent and accountable.

This is surely the minimum that they can expect. At great risk to themselves, they have dared to speak out against possible irregular behaviour in your Organisation, and it is without doubt in your, in the Organisation’s, and in the world’s interest that you hear them out. The Convention itself showed great foresight in allowing inspectors to offer differing observations, even in investigations of alleged uses of chemical weapons (paras 62 and 66 of Part II, Ver. Annex). This right, is, and I quote, ‘a constitutive element supporting the independence and objectivity of inspections’. This language comes from Ralf Trapp and Walter Krutzsch’s “A commentary on Verification Practice under the CWC”, published by the OPCW itself during my time as DG.

Regardless of whether or not there is substance to the concerns raised about the OPCW’s behaviour in the Douma investigation, hearing what your own inspectors have to say would be an important first step in mending the Organisation’s damaged reputation. The dissenting inspectors are not claiming to be right, but they do want to be given a fair hearing. As one Director General to another, I respectfully request that you grant them this opportunity. If the OPCW is confident in the robustness of its scientific work on Douma and in the integrity of the investigation, then it has little to fear in hearing out its inspectors. If, however, the claims of evidence suppression, selective use of data, and exclusion of key investigators, among other allegations, are not unfounded, then it is even more imperative that the issue be dealt with openly and urgently.

This Organisation has already achieved greatness. If it has slipped, it nonetheless still has the opportunity to repair itself, and to grow to become even greater. The world needs a credible chemical weapons watchdog. We had one, and I am confident, Mr Arias, that you will see to it that we have one again.

Thank you.

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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.

Featured image is from TG

On September 28, 2020, Meng Wanzhou, Chief Financial Officer of Huawei Technologies and permanent resident of Canada, was forced to make yet another appearance in court in Vancouver where she faces possible extradition to the USA. The charges she faces if extradited to the USA, according to the “superseding indictment” of January 24, 2019, includes seven counts of bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit both, plus conspiracy to defraud the USA, all of which if proven carry possible sentences of more than one hundred years in a US federal penitentiary, plus heavy fines.

To date, Ms. Meng has been under house arrest in Vancouver for twenty-two months.

This judicial action against Meng is unjust, politically motivated by the USA, and contrary to the national interests of Canada. In fact, Meng’s arrest is being cynically used by the Trump Administration to drag Canada into a trade war and a new cold war with China. Canadians should be very concerned and should demand that the Trudeau Government of Canada drop the extradition proceedings against Meng and release her at once.

Trudeau’s Hypocritical Stance on Sanctions on Iran

Meng’s arrest was unjust because she committed no crime in Canada. Rather, her company stands accused by the USA of violating the country’s unilateral, and therefore illegal, economic sanctions against Iran. As the whole world knows, in 2018, it was the Trump Administration which abrogated the JCPOA (the Iran Nuclear Agreement). The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was several years in the making before becoming enshrined in 2015 as an international treaty in UN Security Council Resolution 2231. The Trudeau Government applauded the Agreement when it came into effect in 2016.

The importance of the ten-year Agreement was that it likely averted a pre-emptive military strike by the USA (supported by Israel) against Iran, while, at the same time, it provided the means by which to remove a regime of economic sanctions which had been imposed by the UN Security Council against the Islamic Republic over several decades. For its part, Iran pledged not to enrich uranium above the level of 5% and to submit to the most stringent inspections ever devised by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). In this way, Iran’s partners in the agreement, which included the permanent five member states of the UN Security Council (Russia, China, the USA, the UK, and France) plus Germany, were satisfied that Iran’s nuclear program would remain strictly peaceful (as Iran had always maintained) and that it could not manufacture a nuclear weapon.

As a reward from the P5 + 1, the doors of international trade were to have been opened to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which had been progressively closed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and monies belonging to the Iranian government, which had been frozen in Western banks, would be returned to Tehran.

Donald Trump made it clear as early as the 2016 US election campaign that he did not like the JCPOA and thought he could wring more concessions out of Iran, particularly regarding disarming Iran’s conventional missile program. Following the presidential election, the Trump Administration failed to follow through on removing some of the US’s coercive economic measures against Iran, although the IAEA certified time after time that Iran was in compliance of its commitments under the JCPOA.

Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump abrogated the treaty and announced that the USA would restore some of its previous economic sanctions and even impose further sanctions on Iran in what has today become a campaign of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic.

Although the USA walked away from the Iran Nuclear Agreement, the remaining members of the P5 + 1 declared their profound disappointment and their determination that they would remain within the treaty. The European Union went so far as to create a financial instrument and a financial institution which it hoped would enable corporations resident in the EU to trade with Iran without facing penalties from the USA.

For its part, the Trudeau Government also expressed its regret about the US abrogation of the JCPOA and the hope that the agreement would carry on.

The problem for the USA is that reneging on international agreements (including several strategic arms limitation deals with Russia), walking away from membership in multilateral organizations such as the World Health Organization, and applying unilateral sanctions on Iran without the approval of the UNSC – and even increasing them during the Covid-19 pandemic – was simply not palatable to most countries of the world who were growing more and more alarmed about the untrustworthiness of the USA.

The problem for the rest of the world, however, is that the US regards itself as an exceptional state that is not subject to the rules of international law and routinely tries to apply the principle of extraterritoriality. For example, the USA has taken to court several European banks such as Deutsche Bank, the largest bank in Germany, and BNP Paribas of France, as well as corporations like the Chinese ZTE, all of which tried to skirt the US sanctions on Iran. The fines levied against them by the USA were enormous, thus making examples of them in front of the whole world. As a result, despite the EU’s specially-created financial instrument and financial institution to get around US sanctions on Iran, no European-based transnational corporations or banks are currently willing to break the de facto US blockade on the Islamic Republic.

The result for the people of Iran is severe: life savings vanish as the value of the national currency plummets, prices of basic commodities are rising dramatically, there’s widespread unemployment due to the lack of spare parts and markets, and medical supplies are scarce, despite supposedly being exempt from economic sanctions but which require international monetary transfers to arrange.

In effect, US sanctions are part of a hybrid war on the people of Iran and 38 other countries of the world that also includes conventional military/naval strikes, support for terrorist groups, cyberwarfare, fake news, lawfare, and foreign electoral intervention. The end goal in implementing coercive economic measures for the US (and Canada), then, – like medieval sieges – is regime change.

The US attempt to extradite Meng Wanzhou, however, is qualitatively different in that it marks the first time the USA has ever tried to extradite an executive of a corporation, rather than just fine the corporation which was seen by the USA to defy its unilateral and illegal economic sanctions on Iran.

The US indictment/arrest warrant against Meng was approved by a court in New York State on Aug 22, 2018, and the US tried unsuccessfully following that date to pressure many countries through which Meng travelled to arrest her. Every single country refused until Meng arrived in Vancouver on December 1, 2018 and Trudeau slavishly and hypocritically acceded to the allegedly “urgent” US extradition request, despite the fact that his government continues to support the JCPOA. The “urgent request” from the US came on November 30, 2018, exactly one day before a US delegation, led by President Trump, met for a working dinner about trade matters with a Chinese delegation, led by President Xi, on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 1.

Timing of Meng’s Arrest

The timing of the arrest of Meng and the working dinner was not likely a coincidence. According to official US sources, Trump was unaware of the arrest. However, according to former US Secretary of State John Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, claims he knew of Meng’s arrest before he sat down to that dinner. In any case, the two delegations left the meeting with a ceasefire in the US trade war on China.

Developments following the arrest of Meng confirm that her arrest was indeed politically motivated. On December 6, 2018, President Trump declared he might release Meng if he secured a favourable trade deal with China. He also told John Bolton that Meng was “a bargaining chip” in his negotiations in his trade war with China. In fact, in The Room Where it Happened, Bolton reveals that Trump privately gave Meng Wanzhou the nickname, “The Ivanka Trump of China”, a moniker illustrating that Trump understood he was asking Canada to take a high-value hostage in the person of Meng Wanzhou to be leveraged against the People’s Republic to get a trade deal favourable to the USA.

In addition, there is the underhanded attempt by the Five Eyes, which links five English-speaking remnants of the British Empire, namely the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in a formal security and intelligence network, to exclude Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., which is the crown jewel of the Chinese technology industry, from participation in the deployment of 5G internet networks in all of the Five Eyes countries. This underhanded attempt was clearly demonstrated in US Sentators and Select Intelligence Committee members Rubio and Wagner’s letter of October 11, 2018, written just six weeks before Meng’s arrest, advising Prime Minister Trudeau to exclude Huawei Technologies from the deployment of 5G technology in Canada:

“…Given the strong statements by former Canadian national security officials as well as similar concerns out of the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom, we hope that you will reconsider Huawei’s inclusion in any aspect of Canada’s 5G development, introduction, and maintenance. Should you have any questions about the threat that Chinese state-directed telecommunications firms pose to your networks, we urge your government to seek additional information from the US. Intelligence Community.”

The senators alleged that involving Huawei in Canada’s 5G network would compromise the security of the network and undercut the profitability of domestic US and Canadian tech firms. The fact that the senators furnished no proof that Huawei technology would provide spyware for China and Huawei firmly denies that proposition. And, on the other hand, since at least 2018, the US government has been pressuring its high tech firms routinely to build back doors for US intelligence agencies to access to their encrypted devices.

The arrest and extradition proceeding against Meng Wanzhou have contributed to a major deterioration in Canada-China relations. At various times following Meng’s arrest, China, which is Canada’s second-largest trading partner after the USA, banned importation of Canadian canola, pork, and lobsters. This has severely affected the livelihoods of thousands of Canadian farmers and fishers who depend on the export of these products to China. 30 per cent of Canadian exports go to China, but Canadian exports only account for less than 2% of China’s imports. So the potential of even more harm is possible. In addition, the promising Chinese-Canadian collaboration on a COVID-19 vaccine collapsed.

Canada and its people paid dearly so far and gained nothing from Trudeau’s slavish acceptance of Trump’s request to arrest and extradite Meng to the USA. Moreover, given the Trudeau government’s stated aim to diversify its trading partnership, if is counter-productive for Canada to pick a fight with its second largest trading partner. In what should have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, Trudeau failed to release Meng after Trump levelled a new 10% tariff on Canadian aluminum on August 6, 2020, despite the signing of the USMCA free trade deal this year. The tariff was removed a month later.

It’s also important to note that Huawei Technologies Canada employs 1300 very highly-paid workers in Canada and is very heavily invested in contributing its advanced, made-in-Canada, R&D expertise to Canada’s 5G network. In fact, Huawei recently moved its entire US R&D division en masse from Silicon Valley, California, to Markham, Ontario, due to deteriorating relations between the USA and China. All of these Canadian jobs, plus the several Huawei research and development centres at several locations across Canada, are threatened by deteriorating relations between Canada and China.

On June 23, 2020, nineteen former highly-ranking Canadian politicians and diplomats, including a former minister of justice, penned an open letter to Trudeau noting that, in the “Greenspan Opinion”, a leading Canadian lawyer had delivered an opinion that it was entirely within the rule of law for the minister of immigration unilaterally to end the extradition proceedings against Meng. They noted the harm being done to Canada by the continuing prosecution of Meng as well as the arrest and prosecution in China of the “Two Michaels” (Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig). The nineteen signatories ended their open letter with a call for Meng’s release. However, the Trudeau government has not yet acceded to their recommendation at the time of this writing.

The Cross-Canada Campaign to Free Meng Wanzhou

Understanding that the Trump Administration is trying to draw the Trudeau government into its campaign to vilify China, to disrupt international cooperation, free trade, and multilateralism, all of which is rapidly leading to a new cold war and possibly to actual military hostilities; and recognizing now that it’s entirely within the discretion of Immigration Minister Medicino and in accordance with the rule of law for him to end extradition proceedings against Meng, the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War announced on September 29, 2020 the start of a comprehensive, grass-roots, public campaign to free Meng, stating that it would like to see a positive reset of Canada-China relations.

In its statement, the Coalition made three demands of the Government of Canada:

1) cease extradition proceedings against Meng and release her immediately;

2) protect Canadian jobs by permitting Huawei Technologies Canada to participate in the Canadian deployment of a 5G internet network;

3) initiate a long-overdue foreign policy review to develop an independent foreign policy for Canada.

In the past week, the Coalition also launched a parliamentary petition to free Meng Wanzhou under the sponsorship of MP Niki Ashton of the New Democratic Party. According to the rules of the House of Commons, if the petition garners at least 500 signatures in 120 days, Ashton will formally introduce the petition in the House, forcing the Trudeau Government formally to respond.

To date, Parliamentary Petition e-2857 has garnered 280 signatures from Canadians and permanent residents of Canada, with 115 days to go.

According to the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, the campaign will also include virtual public meetings, virtual visits to MP’s office, letters to editors and op-ed pieces, and hopefully a Cross-Canada Day of Action on December 1, 2020, the second anniversary of Meng’s arrest.

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This article was originally published on The Canada Files.

People who interested in supporting this campaign are urged to contact the writer at [email protected].

Ken Stone is a long-time antiwar, environmental, social justice, labour, and anti-racism activist. He is currently Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War.

Featured image is from TCF

About 3,500 U.S. companies, including Tesla Inc, Ford Motor Co, Target Corp, Walgreen Co and Home Depot have sued the Trump administration in the last two weeks over the imposition of tariffs on more than 300 billion U.S. dollars in Chinese-made goods.

The suits, filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, named U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the Customs and Border Protection agency and challenge what they call the unlawful escalation of the U.S. trade war with China through the imposition of a third and fourth round of tariffs.

The legal challenges from a wide variety of companies argue the Trump administration failed to impose tariffs within a required 12-month period and did not comply with administrative procedures.

The companies challenge the administration’s “unbounded and unlimited trade war impacting billions of dollars in goods imported from the People’s Republic of China by importers in the United States,” according to a suit filed by auto parts manufacturer Dana Corp.

In a filing on Monday, Tesla called tariffs “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.” The carmaker wants the court to declare the duties unlawful and order a refund, with interest, amounts already paid.

 

Companies filing suit include heavy truck manufacturer Volvo Group North America, U.S. auto parts retailer Pep Boys, clothing company Ralph Lauren, Sysco Corp, guitar manufacturer Gibson Brands, Lenovo’s U.S. unit, Dole Packaged Foods, a unit of Itochu Corp and golf equipment manufacturer Callaway Golf Co.

Home Depot’s suit noted it faces tariffs on bamboo flooring, cordless drills and many other Chinese-made products. Walgreen, a unit of the Walgreen Boots Alliance, said it is paying higher tariffs on products like “seasonal novelties; party, first aid, and office supplies; and household essentials.”

Lighthizer’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On September 15, the World Trade Organization (WTO) found the United States breached global trading rules by imposing multibillion-dollar tariffs in Trump’s trade war with China.

The WTO rejected the U.S. argument that the tariffs were applied to products it said had benefited from practices that the U.S. considers are contrary to “public morals,” like theft, misappropriation and unfair competition.

The tariffs, imposed in 2018, marked the beginning of the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

(With input from Reuters)

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Featured image: A worker seen on a steering wheels production line in central China’s Hubei Province, September 3, 2020. /VCG

Further Betrayal of Palestinians

October 7th, 2020 by The Muslim News

The old idiom says, “possession is nine-tenths of the law”, but in the case of the dispossessed Palestinians, occupation represents one hundred per cent of the law after their land was usurped due to Israel’s creation some 82 years ago. Other Arab territories have been annexed in a succession of wars that followed too.

Justice is further away than ever with the UAE and Bahrain formally becoming the latest Arab countries to sell out their Palestinian brethren by normalising relations with Israel, despite Israel’s continued illegal military occupation of Palestinian land and the expansions of illegal settlements and destruction of Palestinian homes.

Both Arab dictators proceeded to formally sign agreements to normalise relations with Israel at a ceremony hosted by President, Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel US leader since Harry Truman who presided over the recognition of Israel in 1948.

Trump has torn up so many international conventions and norms by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, despite its special status, as well as handing over Syria’s Golan Heights that have been illegally occupied by Israel for over half a century.

The move by the UAE and Bahrain to the Israeli camp is also a shift to realign the Middle East against Iran, described by Benjamin Netanyahu as Tel Aviv’s biggest enemy. Tehran was one of just a few countries to publicly condemn the normalisation of relations, describing it as “shameful” and a “humiliating act.”

Trump has tried to turn the rest of the world against Iran by trying to destroy the landmark nuclear deal by unilaterally withdrawing. According to Middle East Eye Editor, David Hearst, the new alliance in the Middle East could also be targeted against Turkey’s influence in the region.

The deal was brokered by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner and former British PM, Tony Blair, who called the deal “a massive and welcome opportunity to recast the politics of the region.”

The former envoy to the Middle East Quartet has spent much of his forced retirement time trying to encourage Arab countries to build cooperation with Israel based on a “shared outlook.”

He is credited with turning the accepted formula of “peace with the Palestinians before normalisation” on its head by effectively relegating their legitimate aspirations for a viable state to the back of the queue.

Perplexingly, apart from dangling the prospects of more US military sales, the UAE is reported to have received a pledge from Netanyahu that Israel will temporarily suspend its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, not to carry out the usurpation of territories already illegally seized for decades.

The new alliances are a further trampling of Palestinian rights by Israel’s incessant illicit encroachments. The theft of their land is a legacy of British colonialism and placing a special responsibility on the UK to put right before might.

The latest Arab alliance, which some suspect comes ahead of Saudi Arabia following suit, is a sad day, not just a more betrayal and as such sets a precedent that there is little sense of justice left in the world.

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Trump Needs Accomplices at Every Level of Government to Pull Off a Coup

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, October 06 2020

The Trump campaign is mobilizing “an army for Trump,” calling on “all able-bodied men and women to stop the election from being stolen by Democrats.” Although it’s unclear just what this army is being recruited to do, a coalition of progressive organizations has mobilized more than 6,000 “election defenders.”

Julian Assange’s Extradition Hearing: The Only Just Outcome Is His Freedom

By Margaret Flowers, October 06 2020

Under conditions that violated Assange’s rights and his ability to defend himself, his legal team made a clear case that for multiple reasons the only just solution is to free Assange. However, Judge Baraitser has not ruled favorably for him in her past decisions or even in this hearing.

Medical Doctor Warns that “Bacterial Pneumonias Are on the Rise” from Mask Wearing

By John C. A. Manley, October 06 2020

“A group is suing Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum and Tulsa Health Department Executive Director Bruce Dart, saying the city’s mask mandate is harmful to healthy people,” reports Activist Post. The group includes business owners and two doctors.

Billionaires’ Media: The Smearing of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Joyce Nelson, October 06 2020

The Globe and Mail published an extraordinary and very lengthy article vilifying Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and calling him “a top voice of misinformation on social media.” The headline for the piece summarizes its range: “How a Kennedy became a ‘superspreader’ of hoaxes on COVID-19, vaccines, 5G and more”.

Israel Lobby Will Face Blowback, Eventually

By Yves Engler, October 06 2020

The ruthlessness of the Israel lobby is remarkable. Recently they’ve convinced Zoom to cancel a university sponsored talk, a prominent law program to rescind a job offer, a public broadcaster to apologize for using the word Palestine and companies to stop delivering for a restaurant.

Towards a New Gold Standard? Or a Currency War with China?

By Peter Koenig, October 06 2020

Rumors have it that the remaining months of 2020 may bring explosive changes in the world’s financial system. But such “doomsday” rumors have been floating around during the last few years. Why? – The US dollar is getting weaker and weaker.

“Material Ecology”: Neri Oxman at the New York Museum of Modern Art

By Prof. Sam Ben-Meir, October 06 2020

As Oxman observes, “The group considers all living creatures as equals.” The aim is “to shift human-centric design to a design culture focused on conserving, improving and augmenting the natural environment through novel technological developments.”

Cuba: A Model for Healthcare Reform from a Surprising Place

By Keith Preston, October 06 2020

Cuba is widely regarded by Americans as an impoverished “Third World” nation. Yet, Fitz’s Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution describes how Cuba’s approach to healthcare during the six decades since the 1959 revolution has produced rather extraordinary results.

Japan’s Economy of the Post-Abe Era. Powerless Fiscal and Monetary Policy

By Prof. Joseph H. Chung, October 06 2020

The huge negative impact of the corona-virus crisis on the Japanese economy is difficult to estimate at this moment. However, it could hurt severely the economy which had barely survived the decades-long stagflation. Thus, Suga is facing very challenging task of saving the economy he has inherited.

John Lennon at 80: One Man Against the Deep State ‘Monster’

By John W. Whitehead, October 06 2020

“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”—John Lennon (1969). John Lennon was a musical genius and pop cultural icon.

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President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to the Russian Zvezda TV Station, following is the full text.

***

Journalist: Mr. President, thank you very much for giving us this opportunity and meeting with us. We are here in Syria on the fifth anniversary of the start of Russian military operations on the territories of your country, the operation which aimed at liberating Syria from terrorism. That’s why we want to discuss with you and sum up the outcomes of these events.

President Assad: You are welcome in Syria. It’s my pleasure to meet you today and to give this interview to your respectable TV station.

Question 1: Mr. President, if we look back at the events which happened five years ago, how do you describe the situation which existed in Syria in 2015? Did you hope to get outside help then?

President Assad: In order to sum up the position at that time, I can say that it was very dangerous.  The terrorists were advancing in different regions of Syria and occupying cities, with direct support from the United States, France, the UK, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia; in addition to the indirect support from other Western countries.

This dangerous situation in Syria was the subject of discussions between us and the Russian military and political leadership, particularly after 2014 when ISIS started operating and occupying large areas in the Syrian steppe.  We were hoping, of course, to receive help for a number of reasons.  First, the political position of Syria is important, and consequently any disturbance in this region will spread throughout the Middle East and also affect other regions.  The struggle for Syria dates back to prehistoric times because of its importance, this is nothing new.  The other reason is that the terrorism, which Syria is fighting, is the same terrorism which kidnapped the children of the Beslan school in 2004, and it is the same terrorism which attacked the Moscow theater and killed innocent people.  This is a global terrorism and therefore it is in Russia’s interest, first to strike at this terrorism in Syria, and second to preserve this stability which might affect other countries’ interests, including Russia’s own.

Question 2:  If we compare the situation that existed five years ago with the situation now, what is your assessment of what Russia is doing, the role of the Ministry of Defense, and what the Russian troops are doing, operating here for the past five years on the frontline in the war on terrorism?

President Assad:  There is no doubt that the Russian Army is highly advanced technically, this has been proven and has become evident during the war.  It is also highly professional, in terms of identifying its goals accurately and proceeding with determination to achieve them.  With regards to the Russian military personnel that we have engaged with at all levels from officers to soldiers, they have worked incessantly; for example, when the battles were fierce, Russian pilots would start their air raids at three in the morning, before sunrise, and would sometimes continue late into the night.  They had no time to rest.  The Russian Army has of course made sacrifices, some of its members have been martyred on Syrian territory.

The Russian Ministry of Defense – which is the umbrella under which these fighters operate – in its military and political capacity, has shown a great degree of credibility.  It would have been difficult to carry out these joint military operations between our two armies, had it not been for the credibility of the Russian Defense Ministry which was made evident by their transparency, clarity and integrity in everything that we agreed and implemented together during the past five years.  This sums up the impressions of many Syrian military personnel in their relations with their Russian counterparts.  I would like to add a final point: The Russian people have always been proud of their army, but after all these battles, they have every right to be even prouder of its great achievements.

Question 3:  Thank you very much for these words. Let’s go back to the cooperation between the Russian and the Syrian armies. Since we have talked about this, the Syrian Army has also changed a lot during the past five years. What are the areas of expertise which the Syrian experts, the Syrian military, have acquired through their interaction with the Russian military and the Russian Defense Ministry?

President Assad:  There is no doubt that the Russian Army possesses a wide range of expertise.  This dates back to the Great Patriotic War during which it acquired military expertise in a conventional war, in addition to the expertise it acquired during the Chechen War.  That was an unconventional war and similar to the one we are fighting today, in the sense that it was supported by foreign powers in order to weaken Russia and perhaps even with the objective of dividing it.  It involved terrorist groups which appeared in different forms as sleeper cells; everything in the Chechen War was unconventional.

We also have a lot of experience, albeit different.  Our experience in fighting terrorism dates back to the second half of the 1970s and continued into the early 1980s; it was also a fight against extremist terrorist groups.  However, the war we are currently fighting is similar to the Chechen War in that it is unconventional and they are being supported by foreign powers; they are less than an army but more than sleeper cells.

Therefore, merging the Russian and Syrian expertise in dealing with terrorism was undoubtedly very important, especially since during this time (past five years), the terrorists have developed their techniques in ways which are outside of our expertise.  This means that there are lessons for both armies to learn from in dealing with terrorism.  It is safe to say that militarily it was a very rich experience; and since terrorism has not ceased, there are always new lessons to learn, especially since no battle is the same.  No doubt that bringing together the vast experience and expertise of both the Syrian and Russian Armies proved to be very useful, especially for us in Syria.

Question 4: You know that in the end there are similarities between our two countries in many ways. Syria has for many centuries been at the crossroads of the interests of different countries, or let’s say different powers. Russia, too, throughout its history, has fought many wars. But we have never started a war. The enemy has always come to us. Since you have touched on this subject, our country celebrates this year the 75th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War. In that war, which had a horrible impact on the Russian people, the turning point was the battle for Stalingrad, after which the offensive started westward. We were able to expel (excuse me for the expression) the fascists from our country. Can we compare that to what happened to the Syrian people, I mean the battle for liberating Aleppo, which is often described as the Syrian Stalingrad. What is the impact of liberating Aleppo on the process of liberating Syria from terrorism?

Image on the right: Russian military inspect suspected chemical weapons workshop in Aleppo, November 14, 2016 © / Ruptly

President Assad: You are asking about a very important juncture in the Syrian war – the battle for Aleppo.  The comparison you are making is familiar to Syrians because Aleppo was besieged for more than two years.  During most of that time it was a complete siege, and so if it was possible to bring in foodstuffs or basic necessities, it was done at a high risk through corridors that were constantly under terrorist fire with no certainty of delivery.  There was no electricity, no water, no basic supplies; nevertheless, the people of Aleppo were steadfast throughout the battle.

So, I believe that the importance of the comparison lies first in the siege and also in the steadfastness of the people.  When you referred to Stalingrad, you highlighted the steadfastness of the people before you mentioned the military victory; in other words, without the steadfastness of the people of Stalingrad, the Russian army wouldn’t have been able to launch a great offensive.  The same also applies to Syria; without the steadfastness of the people of Aleppo, it wouldn’t have been possible for the Syrian Army to prepare for such a major battle.

Coincidentally, a further comparison is that in Stalingrad, the army kept moving west until the end of World War II.  In Aleppo too, the army moved west; and to continue the process of liberation towards Idleb, we must also continue to move westward.

Both Aleppo and Damascus are the two largest Syrian cities, and so Aleppo has a political, economic, and military importance.  There is no doubt that in terms of strategic outcomes, the battle of Aleppo was very important, regardless of the surface area or the number of fighters.  Its outcome was decisive and changed the course of the war in Syria; and therefore, I believe that militarily and politically, the situation after the battle of Aleppo, was very different to that before the battle.  So, the comparison you have made is correct, after taking into account of course the difference in surface areas between the two countries.

Question 5: This battle had great dimensions for Syria, and also incurred huge losses. It played an essential role in changing the course of events. Mr. President, based on the agreement which was signed between Russia and Syria in your country, today there are two Russian military bases, Hmeimim and Tartous. In your opinion, what is the role that these two bases will play in providing security in Syria today? And what is the role that they will play in the future?

President Assad:  The Russian military role in Syria –particularly the role of military bases – can be viewed from two perspectives; the first is fighting terrorism, which we call international terrorism.  This will end one day or at least it will be weakened as a result of the continuing battles to eliminate it; so, what comes after this terrorism? The other perspective is related to the role of Russia in the world. Today, we live in an international jungle; we do not live under international law.  The reason why we live in this jungle is that for a quarter of a century there has been no international balance.  International balance requires a Russian role: politically – in international organizations, and militarily – through military bases.

How do we benefit from this situation?  Syria, as a small country and like many small countries, and possibly even most countries around the world, will all benefit from this international balance.  In that sense, Syria will benefit indirectly from this new balance.

Therefore, we shouldn’t have a narrow view of the Russian presence to only fighting terrorism, because the time frame of the base, or the agreement, is 45 years.  Terrorism will not continue to exist for 45 years, so what comes after terrorism?  There is an important Russian role necessary for international balance in which military presence in different parts of the world plays an essential part.  Of course, when the West abandons the use of military force to create problems around the world, Russia might not need these bases, but for now, Russia and the world need the balance that I have mentioned.

Question 6: Mr. President, let’s talk about those who constantly violate and ignore international law, and you know who I’m talking about. You are the elected President of the Syrian Arab Republic. You led the war on terrorism. The law is on your side, and the people are behind you; nevertheless, we constantly hear some Western leaders making bad statements such as: “Assad must leave.” We remember very well how Barack Obama talked about this. Unfortunately, the same is being repeated now by Donald Trump. Recently, a book was published in the United States, Fear: Trump in the White House, by famous American journalist Bob Woodward, in which he states that in 2017, after the missile attack on Syria, Trump wanted to assassinate you, and I quote: “Let’s kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the lot of them.” How do you comment on that? What did you do? Why do they demonize you?

President Assad:  First of all, regarding the statements which always call for the removal of the president: The United States is used to having presidents – let’s say, as American agents, in the sense that it appoints them – and consequently it tells them: now you stay.  And when their role comes to an end, it tells them: go.  They are used to that.  I am not one of those (presidents), and consequently all the statements they make do not concern us at all.  They do not bother us, and we do not care about them.  This is an American discourse directed at the Americans themselves.

Question 7: Aren’t you vexed by the West’s disregard for its relationship with you, which can sometimes be rude?

President Assad: No, no, because it is less important than warranting one’s concern about it and I’ll tell you why.  If we look at Trump’s recent statements quoted in the book you mentioned, they are neither surprising nor new.  The American policy since the Cold War, and even since the end of World War II up until today, is a policy of hegemony, of coup d’états, of assassinations and wars.  So, this is normal, Trump hasn’t said anything new.

On the contrary, we have to recognize that Trump has an important merit, which is exposing the American regime.  For us, it was already exposed, but it was hiding behind some pretty masks – like democracy, human rights, and other similar things.  Trump is frank.  He says, “this is what we do.”  So even if Trump doesn’t say it, we must know that it is part of their policy and part of their thinking.  The United States does not accept partners in the world, and consequently does not accept independent states, including in the West.  The West is a satellite of the United States, not its partner.  They are not independent.  The Americans do not accept an independent individual or an independent state.  They do not even accept Russia, which is a superpower, to be independent.  They do not accept you even in history; they even deny your role in eliminating Nazism, as if Russia had no role in that.

So, if they haven’t accepted Russia in the past, why would they accept it in the present?  And if they haven’t accepted the large Russian state as independent, would they accept Syria, a smaller country, as an independent state?  This is the problem with the Americans: they do not accept any individual who acts in the best interest of his country, any individual who respects himself, or maintains an independent national decision.

Question 8: Yes, this is another similarity between our two countries. Well, can we talk about the process of granting amnesty to members of the armed groups. How is the process of reconciliation between the opponents going? In July, parliamentary elections were held in which the ruling coalition won. We congratulate you on that, but it is clear that the problem of the opposition is still there.

I still remember when the Geneva talks were conducted, representatives of the government and the opposition were brought into the meeting halls from different doors, so that they do not fight among themselves. How is this process going now? What is new about the constitutional committee? What is the role of the international mediators in this process? The role of the United Nations? What is the role of Russia? And whom do you personally trust in this process?

President Assad: Concerning the negotiations, Russia and Iran play an important role in supporting these negotiations and moving them forward in order to try and achieve something, albeit partially – because the negotiations will take a long time.  But let’s be frank.  When we talk about another party which we call “the opposition” – and you have opposition in your country – a prerequisite of the opposition is that it should be patriotic, and it should come from within the Russian people and represent at least part of them.  However, when you, as a Russian citizen, know that this opposition, or this individual, is linked to a foreign intelligence agency, you do not call them opposition, because opposition is linked to patriotism.

With regards to what is happening in the negotiations, there is a party supported by the Syrian government because it represents its views.  However, there is another party which has been chosen by Turkey, which is not a Syrian party.  Turkey, and those countries behind it, like the United States and others, have no interest in reaching any genuine results in the deliberations of the committee.  They are seeking to weaken and dismantle the state; this is exactly what has happened in other regions where the United States interferes and imposes a constitution that leads to unrest and chaos instead of stability.

This is something we do not accept and we will not negotiate over things which undermine Syria’s stability.  That’s why if we really want the negotiations to produce results, all those individuals need to take their cue from what the Syrian people, in their different sections and political affiliations, want.  I believe that the coming rounds of negotiations will show this more clearly.  If the dialogue is Syrian-Syrian, it will succeed.  But as long as there is foreign interference, the negotiations cannot succeed.

Question 9: If you don’t mind, I would like to ask you a number of personal questions which have to do with the past in one way or another. Can you please tell us if you have thought, throughout all the horrible events that you and your country have experienced throughout the war, that you are hanging between life and death? Have you thought about that at any point in time?

President Assad:  If you had come to Damascus before 2018, for instance, we would have been sitting here with shells falling around us from time to time.  Death was a probability for any citizen, anyone walking in the street or riding a bus, in their car, going to work or going anywhere.  They could have been hit by shells that could have caused death or injury.  That was a probability during the war.  But I think that humans, by nature, are capable of adapting to this situation, in any country or any place in the world.  That’s why life carried on in Damascus, and I personally went to work every day, never stopped at any time, even under the shelling.  There was no other choice.  One cannot hide; otherwise the terrorists would have achieved their objectives.  Our strength is that life continued.  That’s why I think that with the passing of time, you stop thinking about it.  Maybe, it becomes part of your subconscious mind, but not part of your daily thinking; it becomes something you get used to.

Question 10: Looking at your life today, as president of a state leading the fight against terrorism, is that the life you dreamt of at a certain point in time when you had a different type of life?

President Assad:  This terrorism we are experiencing today has been attacking us since the 1950s.  At every stage, it developed its techniques.  In the 1950s it created chaos but it wasn’t armed, in the 1960s it started to become armed.  In the 1970s and 80s it became organized, and today this same terrorism has developed its tactics and gained political support, with backing from countries and banks.

Our fate with terrorism has existed even before I, and most Syrians, were born and therefore it should always remain in our minds.  Even if we defeat this terrorism, we should always think that it could come back.  For the simple reason that first and foremost, it is not about individuals in as much as it is about ideology; as long as the West continues to take reference from its colonial past and continues to think of hegemony, it is inevitable that it will continue to bring this terrorism back to life in other forms.  We must think realistically that even if it was eliminated, it could appear later in different forms.  That’s why the battle for us, is against terrorist ideology before it is a battle against terrorists as individuals; when this ideology is eliminated, the West and Syria’s enemies, will no longer have the tools to resurrect it.

Journalist: Do you think so?

President Assad:  I do think so, because the West will not change in the foreseeable future.  And also, because the intellectual war is more difficult than a military war and it takes longer to rehabilitate and equip new generations with the right kind of thinking: with non-extremist thought, non-fanatic thought, with open-mindedness.  Just as this terrorist ideology has been developed since the 1960s; it took 50 years to reach the stage we are at.  It does not appear and spread throughout the world overnight.  Hundreds of billions have been spent to establish it and the West has been supporting it since the days of British rule, even before the American presence.  They have supported religious extremism since the beginning of the 20th century; so, fighting it needs time.

Journalist: We hope for the best, and that with the help of God, and with open-mindedness, we will win together. Mr. President, thank you for meeting with us, and for the time that you have taken to answer our questions. Allow us to wish you and your family good health and well-being, and to wish Syria peace and prosperity. Thank you.

President Assad:  Thank you; and I would like to take this opportunity to send my regards, through your programme, to the families of the Russian fighters in Syria.  As I mentioned at the beginning, the Russian people are proud of what their army has achieved in Syria, but these families certainly have the right to be even prouder, than any other citizen, of the great achievements made by their sons in Syria; they have not only protected the Syrian people, but they have also protected their own families and their Russian compatriots.

Once again, you’re welcome in Syria, and thank you.

Journalist: Thank you very much for these kind words.

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Featured image is from SANA

Azerbaijan is slowly but steadily gaining an upper hand in the war with Armenia for the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.

As of October 5, the Azerbaijani military, supported by Turkish military advisers, specialists and intelligence, captured the towns of Jabrayil, Mataghis and Talysh after heavy clashes with Armenian forces. Azerbaijani sources also report the control over multiple villages including Ashagi Abdulrahmanli, Mehdili, Chakhirli, Ashagi Maralyan, Sheybey and Kuyjagh. On the other hand, the Armenian side confirmed that it lost ‘some positions’ but did not provide details claiming that the situation on the frontline has been rapidly changing.

Stepanakert, the capital of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, other populated areas and civilian targets in the region have become a target of regular rocket, artillery and drone strikes. The Azerbaijani military extensively uses cluster munitions, heavy artillery, rocket launchers and even Israeli LORA theater quasiballistic missiles while simultaneously accusing Armenia of intentionally striking civilian targets in Azerbaijan.

For example, on October 4, the government of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic announced that Armenian forces had destroyed the military air base near Azerbaijan’s Ganja. This air base, according to the Armenian side, hosted F-16 fighter jets from Turkey. Azerbaijan indirectly confirmed the incident but insisted that Armenian strikes hit Ganja city only. In its own turn, the Armenian military denounced the Azerbaijani claim saying that only the military base that was hit.

In the comments from October 4, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev claimed that Azerbaijani forces are “chasing” Armenians like “dogs” and demanded the full withdrawal of Armenian forces, the Armenian recognition of Karabakh as a sovereign Azerbaijani territory and an official apology from Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to the Azerbaijani nation.

On top of this, Aliyev emphasized that a military solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh question is on the table and criticized 28 years of unsuccessful negotiations. In his remarks, Aliyev apparently cosplayed Turkish neo-Ottomanist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that over the past years has been used to employ rhetoric of this kind and provide a hard power-based realpolitik in the Greater Middle East. Turkey is a natural strategic ally of Azerbaijan and extensively backs it in its war with Armenia.

A day earlier, on October 3, the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan made his own address regarding the war saying that Nagorno-Karabakh has been fighting against “an Azerbaijani-Turkish terrorist attack, the volume and scale of which is unprecedented.” He said that the Azerbaijani operation is controlled by “150 high level Turkish military officers” and claimed that the end of the current conflict can only be victory on the Armenian side. As for now, it does not look that this forecast is realistic.

The ongoing Armenian-Azerbaijani war has likely become the first military conflict of such a scale between two state actors of a comparable power. After the first week of war, it was already clear that the final number of casualties will be counted in the thousands.

While so far the Azerbaijani side has not demonstrated any miracles in ground warfare, it has once again demonstrated a successful employment of the concept of the wide-scale usage of unmanned aerial vehicles: reconnaissance, aerial targets, loitering munitions and drones carrying bombs and missiles. This allows the Azerbaijani side, with an apparent help from Turkey, to successfully detect, uncover and strike Armenian artillery and fortified positions. Regardless the reality of Armenian claims about the supposed usage of Turkish F-16 jets to cover the employed UAVs, the Azerbaijani side has gained full control over the air dimension.

In its own turn, Armenia had time to conduct extensive engineering work preparing a wide network of fortified positions across the region. This allows Armenian forces to keep their positions in many areas despite the air dominance of Azerbaijan. Up to 80% of casualties on both sides are a result of rocket, artillery or air strikes.

Nonetheless, forces of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republics and Armenian units (which Erevan calls ‘volunteers’) are an underdog in the event of a large-scale prolonged conflict with the Azerbaijani-Turkish bloc, even if Armenia openly enters the conflict. Therefore, the outcome of the war will significantly depend on the ability of Azerbaijan (with help from Turkey and its mercenaries/militants) to use its air and numerical advantage to develop the advance and make some gains while the regional diplomatic situation allows this. The balance of power could also change if some third party would intervene in the conflict to put an end to the violence. Such an action could become a response to some irrefutable evidence of ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population in the areas of Azerbaijan or the increasing deployment of members of various Middle Eastern terrorist groups to the region.

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Rumors have it that the remaining months of 2020 may bring drastic and explosive changes in the world’s financial system. But such “doomsday” rumors have been floating around every beginning of fall during the last few years. Why? – The US dollar is getting weaker and weaker. It is not quite on a free fall, but still remains a major trading currency and a key world reserve currency. And for many economists that’s difficult to understand.

However, it is unlikely that that the collapse of the dollar will come from one day to the next. That would not be good for the world economy, as still too many countries depend on the dollar.

Facts are,

i) China’s foreign exchange reserves have just increased to US$ 3.112 trillion equivalent, of which about US$ 1.3 trillion denominated in US-dollars – and in general forex-reserves continue to grow;

ii) within short, possibly by the end of 2021, the Chinese yuan, or renminbi  (RMB) could become the world’s third largest reserve currency, after the US-dollar and the euro, surpassing the Japanese yen and the British pound, reported by CNBC;

iii) according to Morgan Stanley , at least 10 regulators (i.e. Central Banks and similar forex regulating institutions) added the yuan to their reserves in 2019, bringing the total to 70 – and rising; and

iv) according to the FED, the US economy could lose in excess to one third of its GDP up to the end of 2020 or mid-2021, while China’s economy is expected to grow by 1.3% (IMF) in 2020, and by China’s own estimate up to 3.5%.

Given the dismal covid-related world economy collapsing, and with China being the only major economy expected to grow this year, the number of yuan reserve holders may increase drastically by the end of 2020 and especially through 2021, suggesting that central banks around the world realize that for their financial stability, they must increase their yuan holdings significantly in the foreseeable future. This means shedding other reserve currencies, like the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, but especially the US-dollar. For example, Russia has dumped the dollar, reducing her dollar debt-holdings by 96%.

The Russian Trade Minister, Denis Manturov, called on his BRICS colleagues to increase their trading in local currencies instead of US dollars. Trade in national currencies is a key aspect of cooperation of the five-nation alliance that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa and it is an effective way to dedollarize their economies.

China and Russia and many of the Shanghai Cooperation (SCO) countries are trading for many years already in their local currencies, or in yuan, especially cross-border trading, but they are also promoting currency swap arrangements with other countries, eager to escape the iron fist of sanctions of the United States.

In an interview with MarketWatch, senior fellow Stephen Roach at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, says coronavirus may cause a dramatic decline of the US dollar in the near future – “In a Covid era, everything unfolds at warp speed.” Roach also predicted an up to 35% drop of the dollar against major international currencies. He adds, given today’s economic outlook, this might happen rather quickly.

Indeed, while western economies are struggling keeping afloat, China is preparing to launch a new international currency, the digital, gold-backed, possibly crypto-RMB as an international payment and reserve currency, completely outside the dollar-dominated SWIFT system. The new digital RMB money is currently tested in several Chinese cities with positive results.

The People’s Bank of China – China’s Central Bank – recently revealed plans to have its sovereign digital currency ready in time for the 2022 Winter Olympics. The international rollout could actually happen much earlier, possibly in 2021, or earlier if warranted by international monetary events. In any case, the new trading currency may very likely find an astounding attraction by many countries that are eager to dedollarize and get out from under the boot of threats of sanctions by Washington.

It is clear that any money or legal tender that will grow into a major international trading and reserve currency needs to be backed by a strong economy. Backing of a strong economy is fully commensurate with the yuan. China’s economy today in real – and solid – output and long-term stability can easily be assessed as the world’s strongest. Comparing for example the Chinese GDP with the US GDP is like day and night: The Chinese GDP consists of more than two thirds of tangible and solid production and construction of infrastructure, housing, transport, energy and so on; while the US GDP is almost the reverse, more than half is consumption and service industries. Most hard production is outsourced. This undoubtedly distinguishes the yuan or RMB from fiat currencies, as are the dollar and the euro – which are backed by nothing. Simply put, China’s economy and her currency attract a lot of international trust and confidence.

Unfortunately, these differences are not (yet) reflected by the undistinguished linear accounting of GDP, but they are recognized by international economic observers and analysts, including nations’ treasurers around the world.

These are good reasons for the new digital RMB or yuan to grow fast as a primary trade and reserve asset for many countries. It will most likely far outrank Bitcoin, which is often heralded as possibly the “new gold”, or reserve currency.

Not only would the number of countries holding the Chinese currency in their reserve coffers increase rapidly, but the total amount of yuan reserve holdings might skyrocket faster than analysts expect, signaling clearly the end of the US-dollar hegemony. This might undoubtedly shift the global balance of economic power.

“Looking back years later, the two defining historic events of 2020 would be the coronavirus pandemic, and the other would be [China’s] digital currency,” Xu Yuan, a senior researcher with Beijing’s University’s Digital Finance Research Centre, told recently the South China Morning Post.

These developments are not ignored by Washington. The US will not so easily give up its dollar hegemony which means largely control over the world’s economy and financial flows. Although the times of total dollar-control of the world economy are irreversibly gone, Washington intends to slow down the power shift as long as possible. Though a hot war is not excluded, more likely is a currency war.

In line with the Great Reset announced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and, in parallel, the IMF prediction of the Great Transformation (see this and this), a kind of currency revolution might be initiated, possibly introducing a major instrument for launching the Great Reset, alias Transformation.

As a hypothesis, Washington could, via the IMF, return to some kind of a gold standard. It could take the form of a digital SDR-type currency-basket intended to replace the dollar and the emerging digital yuan / RMB as trading and reserve currency. The current composition of the SDR contains the five major international forex currencies, US dollar (41.73%), euro (30.93%), yuan (10.92%), yen (8.33%), and British pound (8.09%).

Although the yuan is vastly undervalued, especially as compared with the US-dollar and the euro, the yuan is finally present in the basket since 2017 and has thereby become an official international exchange and reserve asset. The respective weights in the SDR basket have last been set in 2016 and are valid for 5 years, meaning they are up for renegotiation and readjustment in 2021.

Continuing with the hypothesis of the new gold standard, it might well be that in the hypothetical new SDR-like currency, gold would take a prominent role, one that overshadows the weakness of the US dollar. However, as was the case with the 1944 gold-standard, Washington-Treasury-FED would insist on the value of gold in the basket being linked to the dollar – which would de facto disproportionately increase the respective weight of the dollar in the basket.

If such a hypothetical deal would be accepted by the majority of countries – the US has still the sole veto right in the two Bretton Woods Institutions, IMF and World Bank – the hypothetical gold-based “SDR” would be a serious contender to the emerging internationalized digital yuan / RMB.

To forego such a situation, a possible currency war, China, as a holder of large direct and indirect gold reserves, may consider establishing a “gold commodity” market priced in yuan / RMB – and invite other large gold producers, like Russia, Venezuela, South Africa and others not in the US orbit, to join in an alternative currency, i.e. a yuan-denominated gold market, or a weighted average gold value of, say, the three major participants of the alternative gold commodity market.

This alternative currency denominated gold would be strengthened by the power of the respective economies which would back it.

In the end – as is already demonstrated today – international trust in the respective economies and their currencies – gold backed or not – will determine the outcome of a possible currency confrontation. China, already engaged in cross-border trading in local currencies and expanding yuan-trading arrangements internationally, for example, with currency swap measures in place with Russia, Iran and Venezuela, would be well placed to break the US-currency hegemony.

Finally, the goal is not to have one hegemon to replace another domineering power, but to establish a balanced world with several regional hubs or financial centers which would promote a monetary equilibrium that would gradually accompany progress of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the bridge that spans the world (see this), with increasingly equal access to vital resources for building peacefully a World Community with a Shared Future for Mankind.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

New Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has inherited from Abe Shinzo an economy in bad shape. The arrow of fiscal policy has made itself powerless, the arrow of monetary policy flooded the country with money which has lost its direction, The arrow of the structural adjustment has never left the bow. The long shadow of corona-virus is threatening the Japanese economy.

Abe Shinzo is the unique Japanese prime minister who has ruled Japan for nine years, one year in 2007-2008 and eight years, 2012-2020. This is a remarkable achievement in terms of the length of the prime minister’s mandate. But, the people’s expectation for national leaders is correlated with the length of the leader’s being in power. So, one asks if Abe has done something which is commensurate with length of governing.

Perhaps, the most important criterion for judging Abe’s policy achievements is his economic policy which may be grouped in to two policies: Abenomics and CORONA-19 policy.

What I am trying to argue in this paper is this. First, the Abenomics has not been a big success given the injection of enormous resources. This is attributable to wrong diagnosis of the problem of post-bubble Japanese economy. Second, the delayed emergency measures taken by Abe against the COVID-19 have made the recovery of the Japanese economy more difficult.

1. Abenomics 

The malaise of the Japanese economy began with the real estate bubble burst of 1989. But, who made the bubble in the first place? Japan enjoyed unprecedented economic boom for three decades before the bubble. GDP increased by more than 10% a year. Such prosperity was due to the Korean war, the Dodge Plan, the Cold War and the Japanese people’s remarkable ability to import foreign know how – especially the technology of the U.S.- and japanize it.

However, the Japanese miracle was attributable primarily to the Japan Inc. led by the golden triangle composed of highly motivated and competent politicians, business leaders and the bureaucrats.

The success of the golden triangle led to the trilateral collusion, which became a powerful oligarchy and ruled the economy. Real estate speculation was the fastest way of making quick money and it is more than possible that the oligarchy and other rich people were the chief source of the asset bubble.

In 1988, a year before the drama of the bubble burst, in Ginza (Tokyo) area, one-square-meter land was worth US$ 149,000. The territory of Japan was 37% of that of the U.S. But the value of real estate in Japan was 4 times that of the U.S. real estate. In the Tokyo stock market, the value of stocks was 69% of GDP in 1988; it jumped to 152% in 1989. It is hard to understand how such bubble is possible. One possible reason was the fact that the Japanese elite groups were little concerned with the health of the national economy; they were more interested in making quick bucks.

Then, in 1989, the bubble exploded without noise. But it was as devastating as large earthquakes. The value of real estate in Tokyo fell by 80%; the stock index in the Tokyo Stock market fell from 30,000 to 15,000. This created a panic among policy makers. The Bank of Japan ( BoJ) reacted in a disturbing way; it jacked up, in 1990, the interest rate from 2% to 6%. This was too much; it created uncertainty; it reduced consumption; it slowed down production of goods and services. The recession began.

To fight the recession, the BoJ reduced the interest rate to zero per cent by1994. This was too drastic and too late. The recession did not stop. What was more worrisome was the danger that this policy of the BoJ made the traditional monetary policy powerless in recovering the economy from recession. To recover the economy from the recession,   interest rate should go down, but it could no longer go down below 0%. Here, Japan was trapped in so called the liquidity trap. Therefore, the BoJ had to use another monetary policy tool, namely the quantity easing policy (QE) in addition to two other policies comprising the fiscal policy and the structural adjustment policy.

In this way, Japan picked three policies: the QE policy,   fiscal policy and the structural adjustment policy. These three sets of policies became Abenomics adopted in 2012, the year when Ave became prime minster for the second time.

The QE policy is a monetary policy which does not rely in the interest rate, rather, it consists in expanding liquid funds to the financial institutions which can finance consumer expenditures and business activities including investments and exports of goods and services. The fiscal policy consists in expanding tax income or government debts in order to bail out firms in trouble or expand consumption expenditure through subsidies or tax incentive measures. Of these three policies, the structural adjustment policy was the most difficult, because to implement it, the government was forced to discipline large corporations and people and institutions which were parts of the oligarchy.

One wonders why Abe picked arrows to identify economic policies. It is unusual to name economic policy with war weapons such as arrow. Abe took arrows to show his strong wish to carry out these policies. In fact, his policies were bulldozer policies of pushing through no matter what. Such strategy may have merits in speeding up the policies. But, it is not wise to handle in this way such a complex reality as the economy.

Anyway, we have three arrows designed to kill the enemy, the stagflation of the Japanese economy which was, once, strong enough to challenge even the American economy. In this way Abe, got himself three arrows: the monetary arrow, the fiscal arrow and the structural adjustment arrow. Unfortunately, none of the three arrows have hit the target, the recovery of the dynamism of the Japanese economy.

The fiscal arrow ended up with astronomic government debt representing 250% of GDP in 2019. This was the highest public debt rate in the developed countries. This presents serious problem. Some people say that it is not a problem, because the creditors are Japanese citizens and they do not force the government to pay back the debt. But, sooner or later, the government must honour its debt and to do so, it has to find needed funds, more taxes, which means burden on the future generation of citizens.

The more important question is whether or not the fiscal arrow has hit the target, that is, the freeing the economy from decades-long stagflation. Unfortunately, the fiscal arrow has not hit the target. Even with government debt representing 250% of GDP, it was not enough to hit the target. It could not go through the tall wall of the structural ailment of the Japanese economy. The fiscal arrow was broken.

Much of the funds generated by the public debt should have been used for enforcement of productive firms, not the bail out of insolvent large corporations which were, in fact, the source of the structural ailment of the Japanese economy.

The monetary arrow did fly far, but it was also broken before hitting the target of saving the Japanese economy. The BoJ literally flooded the financial market with US$ 923 in billion in 2013, US$ 1,056 billion in 2014 and US$ 656 billion in 2015 amounting to a total of US$ 2,835 billion. There were other QE measures giving total money supply of US$ 12 trillion representing 2.4 times the Japan’s GDP of US$ 5 trillion in 2019.

So, money supply had no limit. But, was there any demand for the money? By and large, the demand for money comes from the consumer and the businesses. The income distribution has become more and more unequal, because the income of the vast majority of the Japanese people stopped to increase for years. Under such circumstance, it is no wonder that few people went to banks to borrow money, for the simple reason that they had no means to pay back the debt. The businesses did not go to banks either, because there was no demand for their products. So, the banks ended up with mountains of money which was, in fact, a burden in a situation of zero per cent interest rate.

What banks did was to finance the bailout of firms in trouble, make loans to pay old debts of consumers and businesses and even invest in foreign countries. One thing sure was that the QE was no longer the solution to the stagflation of the Japanese economy. In this way, the monetary arrow was also broken. It could not pierce the thick wall of the structural defects of the Japanese economy.

The failure or the limited success of the fiscal and the QE arrow was, perhaps, due to a wrong diagnosis of the aliment of the Japanese economy. It is possible that the ailment of the Japanese economy was not something that could be cured by fiscal or monetary policies. At least, there was a limit to what the two arrows could do.

The real nature of the problem was structural ailment of the economy. Therefore, what Japan needed was the structural reform of the economy. There were surely many structural problems. But, as far as the stagflation of the economy is concerned, two problems may be identified: demographic problem and the low productivity of large corporation.

Japan is one of the countries which suffer much from demographic problem. The absolute number of the population of Japan will decrease from 126.5 million habitants in 2019 to 100 million in 2050. The speed of aging of the population is such that the population of 65 years old plus which counted for 17.4 % in 2000 now represents 28% of the population. On the other hand, the active population of age group of 15-64 years old which represented 67.5% in 2013 now represents 59.3%.

The demography is perhaps one of the most important determinant factors of the potential growth of the economy. It determines the quantity and the quality of the labour force; it determines the size of the domestic market. The declining population is the common challenge of all the developed countries. The obvious solution is immigration. But Japan is the most anti-immigration country among the developed countries In average, in OECD countries, immigrants account for 12.2 % of total population against 1.2 % in Japan.

The main reason for the absence of immigrants in Japan is obviously the racism. Under the centuries-old Shintoism, the Japanese believe that they are the Yamato-race meaning the emperor’s race, hence superior to all other races. Even now, discrimination against foreigners is a common phenomenon in Japan. There are about one million Koreans most of whom still remain Korean citizens poorly integrated into the labour market. Suga, the new prime minister, has to assure massive immigration to survive economically. But, to do so, Japanese must stop thinking that they are superior to all other races.

There is another factor which is responsible for the stagflation in Japan. It was the loss of global competitiveness of large corporations, members of the Keiretsu (assembly of big corporations). These corporations were once the pride of Japan and the envy of the world. However, since the bubble burst followed by stagflation, they lost the support of the domestic market as well as the global market.

In the period, 1995-2011, the global share of Toyota car production fell from 51% to 41%. The world share of Honda car production went down from 39% to 29%. In the period from 1995 to 2007, the global share of DRAM memory chip production dropped from 42% to 9.2%. This is incredible. The global share of Japanese production of navigator had free fall from 100% to 0 %. As for the profit of Japanese firms, in the period, 2001-2011, the profit of the Mazda decreased from 4.3% to 2.5%, while that of Toyota dropped down from 9.5% to 1.9%.

The implication of these figures is that the real cause of the Japanese stagflation was the losing competitiveness of Japanese large corporations in the global market. Therefore, the real structural adjustment policy was not the balling out of these corporations. The priority should have been given to SMEs. True, large corporations have made great contribution to the Japanese economic development by making GDP grow. However, as labour-saving technology developed further, the capacity of large corporations to create jobs became marginal.

The large corporations were also responsible for the concentration of income and assets in the hands of a small group of people. This has invited unequal income distribution leading to shrinking consumer demand and declining GDP growth.

In fact, Abe’s third arrow of the structural reform should have consisted in not bailing out non-viable large firms; it should have helped competitive large corporation; it should have allocated more resources to the development of SMEs. But there was no one to promote and pursue such policy. In other word, the third arrow did not have its archer.

Abenomics has failed. If it is a success, it was surely very limited success. It is true that since 2012, the minus GDP growth became relatively rare; the jobs increased in number, mainly low paid jobs; the stagflation was dealt with some success. But this cannot be regarded as success, given the injection of fiscal resources and quantity easing which amount to almost 5 times GDP. The failure of Abenomics is largely due to the lack of Abe’s political will to impose structural reform of Japan’s industrial structure on the one hand and, on the other, the absence of effective immigration policy.

2. Haunting COVID-19 Crisis

Thus, Suga has inherited the economy which was still facing the danger of stagflation. To make the matter worse, Suga is given the economy further devastated by Abe’s poor management of corona-virus crisis. The Japanese economy had barely survived the decades-long stagflation. Now, the shadow of the corona-virus is cast over the sky. Nobody knows the degree of devastation created by the virus crisis. However, Abe’s poor management of the virus crisis could have worsened the negative impact on the Japanese economy. Abe lost the golden time in stopping the virus propagation so that he could protect his friends’ investments in the Summer Olympics.

Undoubtedly, it is rather early to assess the impact of the virus crisis on the economy, because even the first wave of the pandemic is not over. It is possible to have, soon, a second wave. But, already some of available data suggest that the damage of the economy caused by the pandemic seems very grave. For instance, in the second quarter of 2020, the Japanese GDP has fallen by almost 28 % compared to the same period of 2019. For the entire year of 2020, the GDP is expected to decrease by 6%. This is serious. For the entire period of Abe’s rule from 2012 to 2020, the annual growth rate of the Japanese GDP was, in general, a little, below 1 %. The fall of 6% in 2020 is indeed a big blow.

There are already 500 bankruptcies of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of which 69 were food and beverage business; 53, hotel business; 54, apparel business. The consumer spending has shrunk by 14% as of July 2020. The major fall of consumer spending took place for travel (-58%), entertainment (-38), department stores sales (-29%) and transport (-28%) There is no doubt that they were the SMEs which suffer the most from the pandemics. This is the problem, because, in Japan, 70% of all jobs are created by the SMEs. Moreover, we should not forget that the vast majority of Japanese earn their butter and bread from working for the SMEs.

Abe has provided a set of emergency funds to cope with the devastating outcome of the lockdown. His government has provided as much as US$ 2 trillion, which may look like a large amount. It is. In addition, Abe has provided a series of fiscal and monetary incentives for the production and the consumption of goods and services as well the exports of goods and services.

Perhaps, the most important policy measure taken by Abe is the access to bank loans. However, the trouble is this. In all probability, the bulk of benefits of these measures will go to large corporations for two reasons. First, the trilateral collusion of politics-corporations-bureaucracy has always favoured large corporations in policy making. Second, what counts in the long run is bank loans, but they are difficult for SMEs to have access because of prejudice and weak collaterals.

It is a well known fact that the global economy had hard time to recover from the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. The main reason was the fact that the QE money was spent for the survival of unhealthy large banks and corporations at the expense of the development of the SMEs. Don’t forget. The results of the anti-SMEs policy is rising jobless and shrinking consumer demand. In Japan, the consumer spending accounts for 60% of GDP.

To sum up, Abenomics has done some good to the Japanese economy. But, Abe Shinzo has injected more than US$ 20 trillion of money and fiscal funds to free the Japanese economy for persistent stagflation. So, one would have expected better results, given the amount of money spent to save the economy of the country of rising sun. This is an amount of money large enough to expect a victory over the ailing Japanese economy.

But, we cannot say that it is a success. It has failed to put new breath into the economy; it has failed to attenuate the suffering of ordinary Japanese people. In fact, according to a survey, 70% of the respondents said that they had received no or little benefits from Abenomics.

The huge negative impact of the corona-virus crisis on the Japanese economy is difficult to estimate at this moment. However, it could hurt severely the economy which had barely survived the decades-long stagflation. Thus, Suga is facing very challenging task of saving the economy he has inherited.  We all wish him good luck, but it is hoped that he would consider the following policies.

First, the government should not rule the people. it should serve the people. The master of the country is not the government but the people.

Second, the government should stop its decades-long pro-large corporation policy and, instead, invest heavily in SMEs which are the center of economy.

Third, the new government of Suga should find the archer of the third arrow; Suga must become himself the archer. He should boldly undertake the structural adjustment of large companies. If history says anything, Korea could have had stagflation, if President Kim Dae-jung did not go through the extensive structural adjustment of large corporations during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998. President Kim closed insolvent Chaebols; he forced healthy Chabols to specialize; he forced to make their accounting system more transparent; he induced hem to cooperate with SMEs to create productive value chain.

Fourth, this is difficult. Japan should stop thinking that they are superior to other races. The demographic problem and the problem of shrinking labour force can be solved only through immigration. Immigrants will not come, unless the racial discrimination is solved in Japan. But, it should be pointed out that the immigration policy is one of the most difficult government policies. Japan should learn much from Canada which has a very successful immigration policy.

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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the East Asia Laboratory (OAE)-the Study Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM), Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: Suga announcing the new imperial era name “Reiwa” on 1 April 2019 (CC BY 4.0)

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Kyrgyzstan Color Revolution in Central Asia

October 6th, 2020 by Andrew Korybko

The sudden outbreak of Color Revolution unrest in the historically unstable Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan following recent parliamentary elections in this Russian CSTO mutual defense ally intensifies the US’ Hybrid War “containment” of Russia when seen in the context of the ongoing regime change efforts in fellow ally Belarus as well as CSTO-member Armenia’s dangerous efforts to provoke a Russian military intervention in support of its illegal occupation of universally recognized Azerbaijani territory.

Color Revolution In Central Asia

The historically unstable Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan [former Soviet Republic] is once again in the midst of Color Revolution unrest after this Russian CSTO mutual defense ally’s latest parliamentary elections were exploited as the pretext for members of the non-systemic opposition to torch their seat of government and free former President Atambayev who was arrested last year on charges of corruption. This sudden crisis is actually the third serious one in the former Soviet space in just as many months following the ongoing regime change efforts in Belarus since August and Armenia’s dangerous efforts since the end of last month to provoke a Russian military intervention in support of its illegal occupation of universally recognized Azerbaijani territory. Crucially, all three of the aforementioned countries are Russia’s CSTO allies, and their respective crises (provoked to varying extents by the US) intensify the American Hybrid War “containment” of Russia.

The US’ Triple Hybrid War “Containment” Of Russia

The author has written extensively about the Belarusian Color Revolution campaign and Armenia’s aggression in Nagorno-Karabakh, but those who aren’t familiar with his analysis of those issues can refer to the two articles hyperlinked earlier in this sentence for a quick overview. The present piece aims to inform the audience about the complex dynamics of the Kyrgyz Color Revolution crisis and the impact that it could have on the US’ recent Hybrid War “containment” offensive along the western, southern, and eastern peripheries of Russia’s so-called “sphere of influence”. The pattern at play is that the US is trying to provoke a Russian military intervention in one, some, or all three of these Hybrid War battlefronts through the CSTO, but the Kremlin has thus far avoided the trap of these potential quagmires. Lukashenko tried do this with his ridiculous claims about a speculated Polish annexation of Grodno while Pashinyan wants to provoke Azerbaijan into attacking Armenian cities to trigger a similar intervention scenario, hence Armenia’s attack on its rival’s Ganja in order to bring this about.

The Kyrgyz Powder Keg

Kyrgyzstan is an altogether different powder keg, however, since it has a recent history of close to uncontrollable inter-ethnic and political violence after its last two Color Revolutions of 2005 and 2010, especially the latter. The author explained all this in detail in his April 2016 analysis of the US’ history of regime change attempts in the region, which comprises one of the chapters of his 2017 ebook on “The Law Of Hybrid Warfare: Eastern Hemisphere”. He expanded upon his research in this direction in August 2019 following President Jeenbekov’s arrest of former President Atambayev, his former mentor, which almost plunged the country back into a state of de-facto civil war. It was explained that “Kyrgyzstan must ‘cleanse’ its ‘deep state’ (permanent bureaucracy) simultaneously with cracking down on organized crime (which is sometimes affiliated with some ‘deep state’ forces).” This is the only way to combat the destabilizing clan-based nature of the country (worsened by Western NGOs and diplomatic meddling) that’s responsible for its regular unrest.

Will The Crisis From 2010 Repeat Itself?

The present situation is so dangerous though because the last round of Color Revolution unrest in 2010 sparked accusations of ethnic cleansing against the local Uzbeks that inhabit Kyrgyzstan’s portion of the divided Fergana Valley. That in turn almost provoked an international conflict between both landlocked states that was thankfully averted at the last minute by Tashkent’s reluctance to worsen the security situation by launching a “humanitarian intervention” in Russia’s CSTO ally (one which could have also been exploited to promote the concept of “Greater Uzbekistan” over the neighboring lands inhabited by its ethnic kin considering the country’s closer coordination with American strategic goals at the time). Uzbekistan has since moved closer to Russia after the passing of former President Karimov, but its basic security interests remain the same, particularly as far as ensuring the safety of its ethnic kin in neighboring states. Any repeat of the 2010 scenario could therefore return Central Asia to the brink of war unless a Russian diplomatic intervention averts it.

The Threat To Russian Interests

From the Russian perspective, Kyrgyzstan’s capture by Western-backed political forces could lead to long-term security implications. The state’s potential internal collapse could turn it into a regional exporter of terrorism, especially throughout the volatile Fergana Valley but also across China’s neighboring region of Xinjiang if a new government decides to host Uighur terrorists. The soft security consequences are that Kyrgyzstan’s Color Revolution government could reduce its commitment to the CSTO and Eurasian Union up to and including the country’s potential withdrawal from these organizations if the new power structure isn’t co-opted by Russian-friendly forces first. It’s possible, however, that Moscow might succeed in mitigating the blow to its geopolitical interests in the scenario of a regime change in Bishkek since it had previously worked real closely with Atambayev (who’s the most likely candidate to seize power, either directly or by proxy), though only if it can prevent a civil war from breaking out first. That might necessitate a CSTO intervention, however, which is risky.

Concluding Thoughts

As it stands, the US’ Hybrid War “containment” of Russia is making progress along the western, southern, and eastern periphery of the Eurasian Great Power’s “sphere of influence”. Belarus is no longer as stable as it has historically been known for being, Armenia is still trying to trick Russia into going to war against Azerbaijan (and by extension Turkey), and Kyrgyzstan is once again on the verge of a collapse that could take down the rest of Central Asia in the worst-case scenario. Having shrewdly avoided the first two traps, at least for the time being, Russia is now being challenged with the most serious crisis of the three after the latest events in Kyrgyzstan. The country’s clan-based nature, proliferation of Western NGOs, and Western meddling in its admittedly imperfect democracy make it extremely unstable, thus heightening the risks that any well-intended Russian military stabilization intervention via the CSTO could entail, perhaps explaining why one never happened in 2010 during more dangerous times. The Kremlin will therefore have to carefully weigh its options in Kyrgyzstan.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

On Monday, after three days of hospitalization for reported Covid illness, Trump was discharged.

He returned to his White House residence away from staff to continue recovering.

Is he ill from Covid infection, seasonal flu/influenza, or something else?

Diagnostic PCR tests are notoriously unreliable. A positive result may not indicate Covid illness.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

“Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms.”

The above means that a positive for Covid test result does not necessarily confirm illness from the disease.

It may indicate seasonal flu/influenza or a common cold — in both cases ranging from mild to more severe.

It begs the question: Why are unreliable tests used that are unrelated to accurate disease diagnosis?

Why is the medical community using and relying on them?

Is their widespread use all about creating mass hysteria fear-mongering — establishment media part of the diabolical scheme?

Ordinary people in the US and abroad were manipulated into accepting mandatory or voluntary house arrest.

It wrecked economies, their livelihoods and welfare.

It potentially harmed their emotional and perhaps physical health — while transferring enormous amounts of wealth to super-rich interests.

Independent health experts are unsure whether official reports about Trump’s illness are accurate or otherwise.

On October 1, he tweeted having contracted Covid illness. White House doctor Sean Conley said it was detected 72 hours earlier.

If the timeline is accurate, he became ill eight days ago as of Tuesday October 6.

If seriously ill from Covid disease, he shouldn’t have been discharged.

According to Thailand Medical News, Covid disease by age group 70 – 79 is as follows:

  • 5.6% of all reported cases.
  • 17.2% of hospitalizations.
  • 27% of deaths.

Mixed messages on Trump’s health status leaves unanswered whether his illness is serious, mild, or something in between.

It’s unclear precisely what illness he contracted.

Reportedly on Friday, he experienced a high fever and low blood oxygen level, prompting his medical team to order hospitalization.

According to medical experts, oxygen levels below 94 may indicate severe Covid illness.

On Friday and Saturday, Trump’s reported oxygen level dropped to 93, why reportedly he was given supplemental oxygen.

His experimental drug regimen is potentially hazardous to human health, especially for someone his age (74) and obesity (around 240 pounds).

He’s on remdesivir shown to cause kidney disease.

According to nephrological experts, including Johns Hopkins University researchers, over half of seniors in their mid-70s or older have mild or more advanced kidney disease.

It’s part of the aging process. Body parts wear out gradually over time.

National Kidney Foundation president Dr. Beth Piraino explained that “we lose kidney function” with aging, why regular screening is essential to minimize risk of kidney failure.

Trump’s use of redemsivir that’s unrelated to curing Covid illness — if reports about his drug regimen are accurate — is playing Russian roulette with his kidney functioning and overall health.

He’s also reportedly on Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ experimental neutralizing antibody cocktail — another experimental drug with no proved efficacy.

Dr. Conley said Trump was given dexamethasone on Saturday, perhaps Sunday as well.

It’s a steroid drug used for patients diagnosed seriously ill from Covid disease.

It’s highly atypical for patients with mild Covid symptoms.

In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published a mixed assessment of the drug.

It can be beneficial in treating severe Covid illness. It works by suppressing abnormal immune responses that can damage bodily organs. It doesn’t cure Covid disease.

At the same time, its side effects are potentially harmful to human health — why the drug should only be administered in extreme cases.

Commenting on Trump’s reported illness, an unnamed infectious disease doctor said the following:

“Dexamethasone is the most mystifying of the drugs we’re seeing him being given at this point” — if reports are accurate.

“The steroid is normally not used unless the patient’s condition seems to be deteriorating.”

“It raises the question: Is (Trump) sicker than we were told, or are the doctors overreacting in a way that could be potentially harmful?”

As of Monday, Trump is back at the White House around a week after reportedly falling ill.

Criticized by Dems and hostile establishment media for saying don’t “be afraid” of Covid illness, perhaps he’s right.

There’s a thin line between Covid disease and seasonal flu/influenza — the latter not accompanied by mass hysteria, fear-mongering, lockdowns and economic collapse.

What’s going on this year is an instrument of social control, repression, and transferring wealth to the nation’s privilege class at the expense of most others.

A steady drumbeat of fear-mongering reports drown out alternative views.

Community Health Sciences and Surgery Professor Joel Kettner earlier said the following in response to what’s going on in the US:

“I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this.”

“I’m not talking about the pandemic because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year. It is called influenza.”

Epidemiologist Hendrik Streeck stressed:

“The new pathogen (Covid disease) is…less dangerous than Sars-1.”

Outbreaks in 2003 affected about 8,000 people, reportedly in 29 countries.

Less than 800 died from the illness. Since 2004, no further cases were reported anywhere.

At the time, the CDC said: “SARS is no longer a threat in the world today.”

Founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center David Katzm said the following about SARS-CoV-2 that produces Covid disease:

“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near-total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself.”

“The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.”

What’s gone on throughout 2020 confirmed his worst fears.

A Greater Depression is unfolding in real time. Things may worsen ahead and be long-lasting for ordinary Americans and others elsewhere.

Trump may or may not be ill from Covid disease. He may or may not recover fully from what ails him.

According to a JTN/RMG poll conducted from 10/1 – 10/3, at least two days after Trump’s reported illness, Biden is ahead by 8 points.

Whatever the results of US November elections, harder than ever hard times affect most ordinary Americans.

Things are most likely to be long-lasting and greatly detrimental to their health, welfare and futures — no matter which wing of US duopoly rule runs things.

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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.

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New York’s Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting Material Ecology, a tantalizing sample of the truly astounding and path-breaking work of Neri Oxman and her team, Mediated Matter group, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Oxman is an American-Israeli architect and designer – yet these designations conspicuously fail to capture the utterly novel field which Oxman’s work is exploring, defining and re-defining. Every item in the show may be viewed as a “demonstration of new materials and new processes, as a door into a new way of designing and making.” Her inter-disciplinary work bridges engineering, biology and computer science – while addressing itself to both timely and timeless epistemological and ethical issues.

Oxman’s epistemic interventions testify to, welcome, and embrace a new concept of what knowledge is and how it emerges: “Knowledge can no longer be ascribed to, or produced within, disciplinary boundaries, but is entirely entangled.” In other words, Oxman’s work – both theoretically and materially – lies at the very forefront of human understanding: Oxman and her team are inventing not only new kinds of objects, and the technologies which makes such objects possible – they are inventing a new, holistic field altogether, re-making the very boundaries of human disciplines. In the process, they are creating new, interdependent modes of knowledge; new forms of experience and new ways of living or being in the world.

Neri Oxman and her team at MIT refer to the field which they have created as Material Ecology: an “emerging field in design denoting informed relations between products, buildings, systems, and their environment.” Hence, Oxman’s push towards “universal synthesis” – material ecology’s integrating, harmonizing, and tapping into multiple disciplines in its approach to design – remains conscious of the ethical entanglement with our environment. Their work consistently emphasizes “environmentally informed digital design and fabrication.”  These often visually stunning designs can take the form of extrusions – materials that have been thrust out by an animal or machine; or intrusions – 3D-printed objects engineered to be infused with organic material, such as melanin or bacteria.

Oxman’s posits a nevalogue – a kind of moral shorthand that clarifies the ethical commitments of Material Ecology. A few of these principles are of special significance. For the practicing material ecologist, the client is always first and foremost nature itself: “The natural environment at large constitutes the ‘client’ for every commissioned project, as well as its ‘site’ and material source.” We can and must take Oxman at her word here: in a certain sense her designs are meant to let nature realize its own inherent telos, its own intrinsic ends, and its own interests.

Consider, for example, the Silk Pavilion – on display at the exhibition – that employed 17,000 silkworms in its fabrication, a thoroughly astonishing example of inter-species collaboration. Oxman positively envisions the partnership with other species as part of the repertoire of sustainable construction methods as we enter a new era of ecologically conscious architecture and design. Silk Pavilion is remarkable both because Oxman and her team were able to modify the worms’ spinning patterns, so that they spun in sheets rather than cocoons, and because they did not utilize the traditional method of boiling the larvae alive in their cocoon to extract the silk thread. Rather, their process allowed the silkworms to pass through the entire cycle of metamorphoses and live out their lives unharmed.

Many of the “demos” on display in this show are full of a weird and wonderful beauty. But what is most striking is that they represent a vision of the future, novel ways of designing our environments.  At the same time, this radically new material ecology is anchored throughout by an ethical awareness – inseparable from an ethic of interanimality and interspecies cooperation. Oxman and her team are collaborating with living nature, the living material world, in the creation of what are ultimately new, transcendentally beautiful, and environmentally sustainable structures with the potential for large-scale applications. Their work also presents us with the fruits of a holistic conception of the organism as inherently expressive, valuable, and tending towards creative and ontological expansion.

Another principle of Material Ecology is that it prioritizes integration over segregation. Consider the traditional facade of a building: it is constructed out of discrete parts each of which serves a distinct function. Hard, rigid materials make for the exterior shielding or shell; while supple and yielding materials serve for comfort and insulation; and, finally, translucent materials allow the structure to communicate with the environment. Human skin, by contrast, utilizes generally the same material constituents over the entire body: smaller pores and thicker skin act as a barrier; larger pores and thinner skin for filtering, such as on the face. Distinct functions, in other words, are integrated rather than segregated, unified into “a single material system that can at any point respond and adapt to its environment.”

This ideal façade – able to modify itself in response to changes in the environment – is the motivation behind the “Totems” installation which utilizes melanin (the compound in skin pigmentation). Oxman envisions melanin’s use in architecture to produce optical variations in a building’s façade, depending on the time of day or season. The Totems demo, produced by injecting liquid melanin into a 3D-printed transparent block to manifest flesh-colored curls and plumes, is like so much in the exhibition, captivating, wonderful and strange.

Material Ecology seeks to produce “smart objects that respond to their environment and function more like bodies than manufactured entities, accommodating multiple functions rather than just one.” The “Armour” demo is a case in point: it is Oxman’s answer to the classic I-beam, a ubiquitous and fundamental component in modern architecture and an unmistakable symbol of the Industrial Revolution. The exhibition offers us only a small-scale prototype, but the idea is clear enough: Oxman’s Armour is effectively a beam designed to function as both skin and structure simultaneously. “Stiff structural components are embedded in a soft skin” – so that the design is capable of carrying vertical, horizontal, and rotational loads, while the beam’s sectional profile and structural thickness can be modified according to the anticipated load.

Material Ecology represents an approach to design that is non-human centered. This principle carries many implications, but it is central for grasping the ethical achievement of Oxman and Mediated Matter. As Oxman observes, “The group considers all living creatures as equals.” The aim is “to shift human-centric design to a design culture focused on conserving, improving and augmenting the natural environment through novel technological developments.” In short, material ecology breaks decisively with the kind of anthropocentrism which has led to untold environmental devastation and the irretrievable loss of countless species, and instead adopts a lateral rather than hierarchical relationship to non-human others.

Oxman’s approach to design is ultimately an embrace of “co-culture over single organism culture.” This fundamental ethical principle requires not only the recognition of biodiversity but underscores our entanglement and the ineliminable inter-dependency among individuals and species. Material Ecology offers us a way into the future that answers some of our deepest needs, and the needs of the countless species with which we share this planet. It posits a way of addressing some of our gravest environmental concerns – and does so by harnessing the creative energy that unites all Life. The mutual, inter-species collaboration which Oxman envisions has the potential to transform the face of our cities and communities, and to imbue them with an almost other-worldly yet natural beauty. As we hurtle towards an uncertain future, Oxman’s vision suggests a way of interacting with and reshaping our world that we need now more than ever.

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City.

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Israel Lobby Will Face Blowback, Eventually

October 6th, 2020 by Yves Engler

How much is too much? When will Israeli nationalists in North America completely discredit themselves by overusing their power to crush those defending Palestinians?

The ruthlessness of the Israel lobby is remarkable. Recently they’ve convinced Zoom to cancel a university sponsored talk, a prominent law program to rescind a job offer, a public broadcaster to apologize for using the word Palestine and companies to stop delivering for a restaurant.

A week ago Israel lobby groups convinced Zoom to cancel a San Francisco State University talk with Palestinian resistance icon Leila Khaled, former South African minister Ronnie Kasrils, director of women’s studies at Birzeit University Rula Abu Dahou and others. It is thought to be the first time Zoom has ever suppressed a university-sponsored talk.

Last month the Israel lobby pressed the University of Toronto’s law school to rescind a job offer to head its International Human Rights Program. The pressure to block the hiring committee’s candidate, Valentina Azarova, came from judge David Spiro, who was a former Toronto Co-chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and whose uncle Larry Tanenbaum owns the Toronto Raptors and grandmother Anne Tanenbaum financed the University of Toronto’s centre for Jewish studies. While Spiro’s efforts were covert, B’nai B’rith has openly called on University of Toronto administrators to block the hiring committee’s decision.

CBC’s The Current recently apologized for employing the word “Palestine”. On August 18 guest anchor Duncan McCue introduced graphic artist Joe Sacco by referencing his work in Bosnia, Iraq and Palestine (Sacco has a work called Palestine). At the beginning of the next day’s edition McCue apologized for having mentioned Palestine and Honest Reporting Canada boasted about their efforts to pressure the public broadcaster from employing the P word.

As part of a bid to bankrupt a small left-wing Toronto restaurant that has a “I love Gaza” message in its window the CIJA and B’nai B’rith successfully campaigned to shutter Foodbenders delivery services, institutional contracts and social media accounts. They allied with the far-right Jewish Defense League and others who vandalized the restaurant in July.

In an August Walrus story titled “Objectivity Is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists” former CBC journalist Pacinthe Mattar describes a senior editor stepping in to suppress an interview from Jerusalem with Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, an Emmy-nominated journalist of Palestinian descent. Many months later Mattar was blocked from an expected promotion by the “director who had decided not to run the 2017 interview from Jerusalem” who “had expressed concerns that I was biased and therefore should not be promoted, an opinion shared by some of the other committee members. And that was that.”

Anti-Plaestinian organizations are waging an aggressive campaign to have Facebook adopt the ‘stop criticizing Israel’ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The explicit aim of those pushing the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism is to silence or marginalize those who criticize Palestinian dispossession and support the Palestinian civil society led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The Israel lobby cancel machine rolls along in spite of evermore overt Israeli racism, conquest and rights violations. Many of those targeted in the above-mentioned incidents have suffered emotionally and career wise yet the impacts on them are insignificant compared to the daily indignities Palestinian suffer. The Israeli state continues to steal Palestinian land in the West Bank, oversee a punishing blockade of Gaza and allow Toronto Jews to emigrate while Palestinians driven from their homes in 1948 can’t even visit, let alone emigrate.

The Israel lobby is a unique political force. Rooted in European colonialism and the US empire’s regional interests, it is backed by many zealous billionaires and a substantial portion of a generally influential ethnic/religious community. It also crassly exploits victimhood. As John Clark recently posted on Facebook, “Zionism is the only political ideology I know of that claims that disagreement with it is a hate crime.”

Fortunately, every cancel and smear campaign it wages alienates some new people and opens others’ eyes. Unfortunately, many more well-meaning individuals will suffer emotional and financial consequences before the Israel lobby cancel machine is stopped.

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Links Between Israel and Yemen’s Former President Saleh

October 6th, 2020 by Middle East Monitor

The spokesperson for the Houthi-supported Yemeni army, Brigadier Yahya Saree, revealed yesterday details of the links between Israel and former Yemeni President the late Ali Abdullah Saleh. Such links, he said, go back at least to the year 2000.

During a press conference in the capital Sanaa, the senior official cited official documents and stated that Saleh’s government had secret relations with Tel Aviv which included visits by officials on both sides. According to Saree, normalisation between the two countries peaked in 2007, when Israeli diplomat Bruce Kashdan arrived in Sanaa to meet Yemeni military and security officials who were relatives of Saleh.

“The Israeli official left Sanaa International Airport on 16 July, 2007,” said Saree. “The visit had been arranged by Yemeni officials, and the UAE played a leading role in it. The Israeli diplomat had earlier visited Yemen on 2 February, 2005.”

During the visit, security in the Red Sea and Bab Al-Mandab was discussed in addition to commercial cooperation and allowing Israeli produce to enter the Yemeni market.

Al-Masirah reported that the document also mentioned the signing of an agreement that allowed Israeli civilian flights to use Yemeni air space.

Another document, purportedly issued by the UAE Embassy in Sanaa, noted that a Jewish delegation visited Yemen and asked officials to naturalise approximately 60,000 Israelis with Yemeni nationality, 15,000 of whom had US citizenship. The Emirati ambassador in Sanaa, Hamad Saeed Al-Zaabi, in a memorandum to the UAE Foreign Minister in 2004, noted that the “Yemeni-Jewish normalisation” is part of a larger scheme drawn up by the US.

Saree insisted that Israel has constantly meddled in Yemeni affairs and continues to do so.

“Yemen has long been the main target of US-Israeli plots and the ongoing onslaught clearly proves this. The Armed Forces call upon Yemenis from all walks of life to raise their awareness about the real intentions of foreigners. Our struggle is nothing but a fateful battle for liberation and independence.”

The army spokesperson also claimed that further information about Israel’s involvement in the Yemen war will be disclosed. “We have other evidence of the Israeli military participation in the aggression, and it will be revealed in due course.”

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The issue of healthcare reform is one that is consistently identified by opinion polls as being among the most important to Americans. The United States continues to be the only fully industrialized nation that lacks a public healthcare system, a feature of modern “democracy” that is taken for granted in most developed countries. Most American proponents of healthcare reform typically cite the models utilized by Canada, Western Europe, or Australia as the most appropriate guides for the implementation of universal healthcare in the United States. However, Don Fitz, a Green Party activist, provides a comprehensive overview of a model for reform that originates from what many would consider to be a surprising place. Cuba is widely regarded by Americans as an impoverished “Third World” nation. Yet, Fitz’s Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution describes how Cuba’s approach to healthcare during the six decades since the 1959 revolution has produced rather extraordinary results.

The overview of Cuban healthcare begins with an examination of the challenges that Cuba faced immediately following the revolution. Previously, healthcare in Cuba had been almost entirely private. After the revolution, Cuba lost approximately half of its physicians with most of these becoming émigrés to the United States in search of a more lucrative place to practice medicine. Only about three thousand Cuban physicians remained and those who stayed did so out of a commitment to their profession. The methods of funding healthcare before the revolution typically relied on either fee-for-service relationships between physicians and patients or “mutuals” that functioned as a kind of private insurance system operating on a semi-cooperative basis. The very limited healthcare that was available to the poor was mostly provided by the state.

An innovative reform that was implemented following the revolution involved the creation of “polyclinics” organized on the basis of a structural framework described as “centralization/decentralization.” Under this model, small teams of healthcare professionals were assigned to serve individual communities, with each healthcare team having a collection of families under their care, usually numbering in the range of 120 to 150 family groupings, with the families including 600 to 800 persons. Clinicians would often visit patients at home. The polyclinics functioned within a centralized meta-level framework that was based on a single system of healthcare provision. The individual teams providing healthcare to particular communities were the decentralized component of the system. It was not the provision of health care that indicate decentralization but rather the ability to decide how to do it locally.

Over time, Cuban healthcare practices experienced a series of innovations. The initial community-based polyclinics eventually evolved into a system of family doctors that were able to provide personalized care in a way that included the cultivation of physician-patient and physician-community relationships. The achievements of Cuba in the area of healthcare are particularly astounding when it is considered that Cuba is an island nation with approximately the same population size as New York City. Clearly, the Cubans have been highly capable of successfully managing their own affairs in spite of the hardships the country has faced in the post-revolutionary era. The obstacles faced by Cuba have largely been due to the hostility of the United States and the Americans’ persistent attempts to undermine the achievements of the Cuban revolution.

An important aspect of Cuban healthcare has been the role of Cuba’s military doctors in providing health services to insurgent movements in Africa, a process that began when Cuba began offering support to anti-colonial resistance forces on the African continent in the 1960s. Cuban physicians involved in Africa often traveled clandestinely in order to avoid detection by Western intelligence services or those of colonial and neo-colonial governments on the continent. African resistance leaders often preferred that Cuba send black doctors so that the Cuban physicians would more easily blend in with the local population. The role of Cuban doctors in establishing healthcare services in impoverished African nations such as Angola, which was involved in an intense anti-imperialist struggle in the 1970s and 1980s, attests to the quality of the Cuban healthcare system and its exportability to other nations. Cuba faced a predictable crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, which occurred during a time when the AIDS crisis was also presenting challenges to Cuba’s healthcare system.  Cuba responded to the economic crisis of the post-Cold War era through the implementation of changes reminiscent of those adopted by Lenin during the period of the New Economic Policy.

Aside from the interesting overview of the history of post-revolutionary Cuban healthcare provided by Fitz, the discussion of medical education in Cuba is also quite fascinating. Fitz’s examination of Cuban medical training is based in part on his daughter’s experience as a student at the ELAM, or Latin American School of Medicine. ELAM was established by the Cubans and provides opportunity for students from around the world to study medicine on the condition that ELAM graduates serve as healthcare workers in an underserved part of the world upon the completion of their studies. Such a concept could theoretically be transplanted to the US where the medical education of students could be publicly funded in return for medical service in underserved communities.

Fitz provides an interesting profile of 13 students attending ELAM and their activities, including the participation of ELAM students in disaster relief activities such as the Haitian earthquake of 2010. During the first two decades of the 21st century, Cuban healthcare has continued to face a range of challenges. For example, dengue fever and mosquito-borne illnesses are common to Cuba’s tropical environment. Fitz describes the efforts of Mariela Castro, daughter of Fidel’s brother Raul to challenge discrimination against women, gender, and sexual minorities in Cuba. He likewise describes his own participation in Cuba’s March Against Homophobia in 2012. Post-revolutionary Cuba has a regrettable history of discrimination and repression directed toward sexual preference which the nation has fortunately made bold efforts to overcome in more recent years. Cuba has continued to provide much needed assistance to African nations in response to challenges such as the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014.

Clearly, Cuba’s achievements in the development of its healthcare system in the decades since the revolution have been remarkable. Fitz’s discussion of these achievements is not only thorough but well-documented from appropriately cited source material. The analysis of Cuban healthcare that Fitz provides is based on a synthesis of both scholarly research drawing from the relevant literature, including both English language and Spanish language sources, and the experiential research of Fitz and members of his family. If nothing else, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution is an excellent representation of mixed method scholarship which includes painstaking documentation of the claims being made concerning the accomplishments of Cuban healthcare. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the statistical data that Fitz provides for the purpose of supporting his claims.

Astonishingly, Cuba has in recent decades managed to outperform the United States in a range of critical areas pertaining to general public health. As of the early 2000s, 45% of Cuban physicians were family doctors living in the same neighborhoods as their patients. The typical patient wait time at a clinic was 15 minutes. In the year 2000, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was 6.3 per 100,000 births compared with 7.1 for the United States. By the year 2017, infant mortality in Cuba had dropped to 4.1 per 100,000 births as opposed to 5.7 for the United States. Cuba has made comparable progress regarding life expectancy. In 1960, shortly after the revolution, Cuba’s average life expectancy was 64.2 years compared to 69. 8 years in the United States. By 2016, Cuba had slightly passed the United States with an average life expectancy of 79 years compared to 78.5 years for the United States.

A reasonable standard with which a society’s healthcare system can be evaluated is the combination of infant mortality rates and life expectancy that is experienced. One of the great achievements of modern civilization is the dramatic increase in life expectancy. During the height of its empire, ancient Rome’s life expectancy was only 48 years. In many historic societies, life expectancy was only in the range of 30 years. Low life expectancy rates were partially rooted in high rates of infant mortality and deaths from childhood diseases. In many families, a third to a half of the children would not survive until adulthood. Indeed, it was during the era of rising living standards at the dawn of modernity that the status of children began to increase dramatically with practices such as infanticide, child slavery, and child labor experiencing a significant decline.

Within the context of American political discourse, American healthcare is often touted as being “the best in the world” as opposed to supposedly backward nations of the Global South or “socialist” countries supposedly hampered by the ills of bureaucratization and inefficiency. However, Don Fitz describes how Cuba has been able to provide higher quality healthcare to its citizens than the United States in spite of the fact that Cuba spends only 4 to 5 percent per individual on healthcare compared to the United States. Indeed, some of the voluminous facts that Fitz provides would be comical if they were not so tragic. For example, an average hospital stay in Cuba costs $5.49 per day as opposed to $1,944 in the United States. It has been widely documented that medical bankruptcy is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. Fitz manages to marshal a vast range of evidence in support of his thesis that US healthcare is largely an elaborate corporate-perpetrated scam that frequently pales in comparison to Cuban healthcare, which often produces superior results at a tiny fraction of the costs.

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Keith Preston is a self-identified “anarcho-pluralist” who has published six books, including Attack the System: A New Anarchist Perspective for the 21st Century (2016). Keith resides in Richmond, Virginia, United States. He received degrees in Religious Studies, History, and Sociology from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the founder and chief editor of AttacktheSystem.Com. He has been interviewed on numerous radio programs and internet broadcasts, and appeared as a guest analyst on Russia Today, Sputnik, Press TV, and the BBC.

For months, Donald Trump has been mounting a preemptive strike against the democratic election process. He signals his intent to manipulate — indeed, steal — the presidential election in the event that Joe Biden wins. With no evidence to support him, Trump repeats the mantra “voter fraud” to lay the groundwork for political, legal and extra-legal challenges to a Biden victory. In an unprecedented move, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power as he orders right-wing militias armed with assault weapons to “stand back and stand by.”

Now that Donald Trump has tested positive for COVID-19, all bets are off. After months of recklessly discouraging social distancing and mask wearing, the chickens have come home to roost. Trump has tried mightily to change the subject away from the coronavirus and his criminal responsibility for more than 207,000 deaths and over 7 million people in the United States who have the virus. But with Trump’s infection, that strategy is now dead.

The timeline of Trump’s positive diagnosis is unclear. Trump remains hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the White House has issued conflicting and contradictory reports about his condition. Doctors say we may not know the course of Trump’s illness for a week to 10 days.

If Trump’s symptoms worsen, he could temporarily hand over the presidential reins to Vice President Mike Pence under the 25th Amendment. In the event that Trump becomes very ill and refuses to put Pence in charge, the 25th Amendment allows Pence and a majority of the cabinet, or a body Congress lawfully designates, to declare Trump unable to discharge the duties of the presidency. Pence would then take over. If Trump tells Congress that “no inability exists,” two-thirds of the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives could decide that Trump is still unable to discharge his presidential duties, and Pence would remain acting president until after the election. He could become the GOP nominee or the Republican National Committee could select a new nominee. Ballots already cast for Trump in early voting would be transferred to his replacement. Each state would decide how to proceed as there is probably insufficient time to print ballots with the name of a new nominee. If Trump dies, Pence would become acting president and if he is unable to serve, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is next in line.

The election will not be decided on November 3. Since there are an unprecedented number of people voting by mail-in ballots due to the pandemic, it could take weeks to finish resolving challenged ballots and counting the votes. Nevertheless, Trump, mindful that mail-in ballots generally tilt toward Democratic candidates, has insisted that the winner be declared on November 3.

Trump could order postal inspectors to impound mail-in ballots by claiming forgery or foreign fraud, so they might not be counted.

The Trump campaign is mobilizing “an army for Trump,” calling on “all able-bodied men and women to stop the election from being stolen by Democrats.” Although it’s unclear just what this army is being recruited to do, a coalition of progressive organizations has mobilized more than 6,000 “election defenders.”

Are we doomed to suffer a coup d’état and four more years of Trump’s bullying, racism, misogyny, cruelty, lying and xenophobia? Or can his assault on the very essence of democracy be stopped?

A Looming Constitutional Crisis

As Biden has been leading in the polls, Trump confirmed at a September 25 rally in Virginia that if he loses the election, “We’re not going to stand for it.” Reiterating his false claim of voter fraud from mail-in ballots, Trump told the crowd, “We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat.”

According to the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), “Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power.” The bipartisan group of experts, which conducted a series of election crisis scenario exercises, warns, “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

TIP’s report says “there is a chance” that “Trump will attempt to convince legislatures and/or governors to take actions — including illegal actions — to defy the popular vote.”

The election is actually multiple elections. Each state controls its own election process. Harvard professor Daniel Carpenter described a scenario in which Biden “wins a plausible victory and Republicans move to undermine it.” He posed a hypothetical situation in Arizona or North Carolina where Biden wins a state majority but the state legislature decides to give their delegates to Trump.

Barton Gellman reported in The Atlantic that “the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”

If states refuse to certify or report slates of electors to the Electoral College, that will result in “underpopulation” and force the election into the House of Representatives, according to Carpenter. “[I]f the Electoral College is underpopulated and the courts don’t intervene, or maybe even if they do, the election is thrown to the House,” he said. The states would then vote by delegations. The Democrats have a majority of members, but the Republicans have a majority of delegations because each state has equal voting power and there are more red states than blue states.

The electoral votes are to be opened before a Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021. But the Electoral Count Act, which governs the counting of electoral votes, is rife with ambiguities.

A constitutional crisis could result if the legislature of a state submits a vote certificate that is different from that which the state’s Democratic governor submits, and the GOP-controlled Senate disagrees with the Democratic-controlled House. The conflict would invariably end up in the Supreme Court.

“I would hope that the Supreme Court would make the winner of the Electoral College the President if it came to that,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law School, told Truthout. “If not, theoretically it could depend on the military. I am skeptical that state governors and governments could do much.”

Trump wants Amy Coney Barrett on the high court to resolve just such a dispute in his favor. Barrett did research and provided assistance with briefing for Bush v. Gore, in which a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court overturned the Florida Supreme Court’s order of a statewide manual recount in a very close election.

Barrett, who helped install George W. Bush as president, would likely be a loyal foot soldier in Trump’s army as well.

But Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s plan for a rushed Senate confirmation of Barrett by October 26 could be derailed by the loss of his slim Republican majority. The GOP has a 52-48 majority in the Senate. Thus far, two Senate Judiciary Committee members, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), have tested positive for coronavirus. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) also had a positive test. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has indicated she would vote against Barrett’s confirmation and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) opposes filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat before the election. With five GOP senators not voting for confirmation, Barrett would not be confirmed.

Trump and Biden have unequal power to challenge the results of the election. Rosa Brooks, co-founder of TIP, contrasted Trump’s “awesome coercive powers” with Biden’s lack of power to contest the election results. “Joe Biden can call a press conference; Donald Trump could call on the 82nd Airborne,” Brooks told Geoffrey Skelley at FiveThirtyEight.

Will the Military Facilitate or Halt Trump’s Coup?

But would the 82nd Airborne help Trump illegally overturn the election results?

Service members have a duty to obey lawful orders. But they also have a duty to disobey unlawful orders and a law that violates the Constitution or a federal statute is an unlawful order.

Indeed, Pentagon officials said in late September that top military leaders could resign rather than take on protesters in the streets in the event of election unrest.

On June 1, Trump threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and deploy active-duty troops to quell Black Lives Matter protests. In response to Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and his threats to deploy federal troops more widely, 89 former defense officials wrote on June 5, “We are alarmed at how the president is betraying [his] oath [to support and defend the Constitution] by threatening to order members of the U.S. military to violate the rights of their fellow Americans.” They said that Trump gave governors “a stark choice: either end the protests that continue to demand equal justice under our laws, or expect that he will send active-duty military units into their states.” The former defense officials urged Trump “to immediately end his plans to send active-duty military personnel into cities as agents of law enforcement, or to employ them or any another military or police forces in ways that undermine the constitutional rights of Americans.”

Although some congressional Republicans have pushed back against Trump’s suggestion that the winner of the election may never be known, it remains to be seen whether they will resist his attempted coup. Thus far, they have walked in near unanimous lockstep with Trump, notably during his impeachment proceeding and his Supreme Court nomination of Barrett even as votes are being cast.

Although Trump’s COVID-19 outbreak is the wild card here, the prospects for a peaceful transition to a Biden administration if Trump is in charge are dubious.

Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, is optimistic, however. “For those worried that Donald Trump could single-handedly defy the election results and hold on to power, fear not — he cannot do that,” Bassin wrote in an email to Truthout. “In order to do that, he’d need accomplices at every level, throughout the country — in the executive branch, in the Congress, in the courts, in state legislatures, in the media.” But a landslide in favor of Biden could make potential accomplices feel less confident in supporting Trump if he were to claim that the results are ambiguous or fraudulent.

Voting is absolutely critical for democracy. But at the end of the day, stopping a coup attempt will depend on far more than the ballot, and will require creative and courageous acts of civic and political engagement from all of us.

Let’s get to it!

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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