Global Research

New START is the last remaining Russia/US arms control agreement.

Expiring on February 5, 2021 if not renewed, the Trump regime rejected Vladimir Putin’s offer to extend the agreement for another five years with no pre-conditions.

On September 28, Politico reported that Trump officials “asked the military to assess how quickly it could pull nuclear weapons out of storage and load them onto bombers and submarines if an arms control treaty with Russia” expires in February, citing three unnamed sources, adding:

The Trump regime “wants to underscore that it is serious about letting the treaty lapse if Russia fails to meet (its) demands.”

Claiming Trump’s arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea “is leery that Russia is dragging out the talks in the hope that Joe Biden” succeeds him in January is absurd on its face.

In many respects, DJT has been more onboard for improving US relations with Russia than any of his predecessors since Jack Kennedy — who favored nuclear disarmament and rapprochement with Soviet Russia.

Near the end of the Cold War, the landmark 1987 Reagan/Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty stepped back from the brink of possible nuclear confrontation.

Abandoning it by the Trump regime increased the risk of greater conflicts and chaos by escalating tensions instead of reducing them.

It was unjustifiably justified by  falsely accusing Russia of INF breaches.

Obama did the same thing after his 2014 coup in Ukraine, replacing democratic governance with Nazi-infested fascist tyranny.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s chief arms control negotiator Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov called the US demand for China to be part of extending New START “clearly a nonstarter for us,” adding:

Moscow will respond appropriately if the US side lets New START expire.

If Washington expands its nuclear arsenal, Russia “would be ready to counter this.”

Weeks earlier, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the following:

“We made clear our position on multiple occasions.”

“China has no intention to take part in so-called China-US-Russia trilateral arms control negotiations. This position is clear and consistent,” adding:

“China’s nuclear power is not on the same order of magnitude as that of the US and Russia.”

“It is not yet the right timing for China to participate in nuclear disarmament talks.”

“The US time and again drags China into the New START extension issue between the US and Russia.”

“It is the same old trick whenever it seeks to shift responsibility to others.”

“It is the US who has been obstructing (arms control) efforts and walking further down the wrong path of being a quitter.”

On October 1, the Arms Control Association said Trump “and his team have dithered and delayed on nuclear arms control matters,” adding:

“Now, at the 11th hour, they are pursuing an ill-advised strategy that has little chance of success and is probably designed to run out the clock on the last remaining treaty limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.”

“Unless Trump…overrules his hardline advisors and adjusts course or Joe Biden wins the presidential election and makes good on his pledge to extend New START, the treaty very likely will disappear.”

“That would open the door to an ever-more dangerous and costly global nuclear arms race.”

In July, Biden said if elected in November:

“I’ll pursue an extension of the New START Treaty – an anchor of strategic stability between the United States and Russia, and use that as a foundation for new arms control agreements.”

All politicians lie. Nothing they say can be taken on its face.

Time and again, campaign pledges by US and other politicians are breached if elected.

Biden is militantly hostile toward Russia.

In early September he called Russia, not China, most aggressive in sowing discord in US politics, adding:

“There are a lot of countries around the world I think would be happy to see our elections destabilized (sic).”

“But the one who has worked the hardest, most consistently, and never has let up is Russia (sic).”

The Big Lie refuses to die. Time and again, US officials accuse Russia, China, Iran, and other countries of things they had nothing to do with.

When false accusations are repeated enough, including by establishment media, most people believe almost anything no matter how untrue.

In August, the US National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center falsely accused Russia of trying to “denigrate” Biden.

It also falsely claimed that Iran is trying to sow division in the US to undermine Trump’s chance for reelection.

In modern memory, no evidence suggests that any foreign nation interfered in the US political process — what its intelligence community does repeatedly against other countries worldwide.

In response to unacceptable Trump regime demands for extending New START, Russia’s UN envoy Anatoly Antonov said the following:

The US side “created the time pressure situation in the issue of extending the New START, despite our numerous calls and proposals to extend the agreement…in the past years,” adding:

“Washington decided to ‘wake up’ only in the run-up to the (November 3) presidential election.”

“At the same time, the possibility of extending the treaty is conditioned by requirements which are obviously unacceptable for Russia and do not take into account our concerns in the strategic stability domain.”

In August, Sergey Lavrov stressed “the unfeasibility of Washington’s demands.”

In June 2019, Vladimir Putin said if New START expires, “there would be no instrument in the world to curtail the arms race.”

In his UN General Assembly address last month, he called the landmark agreement an “issue of primary importance that should and must be promptly dealt with.”

With Russia/US arms control talks largely stalemated because of the latter’s unacceptable demands, New START will expire in a few months unless Trump intervenes directly to save the landmark agreement.

At this time, it appears unlikely whether he’s reelected or loses to Biden in November.

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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.

Karabakh. The Azerbaijani and Turkish mass media and social networks persistently report about succesful actions of the Azerbaijani army and enormous losses among Armenian forces. However in fact the situation is different – the army of Azerbaijan has lost about 200 people since the start of operation, more than 350 were wounded, over 70 vehicles were destroyed, including tanks, MLRS, helicopters and UAVs.

Despite the ostentatious courage and significant military support from Turkey, Azerbaijani army faces persistent resistance of armed defence units of Karabakh consisting mainly of militia units. Even Syrian mercenaries transported by Turkish Air Force in a conflict zone are unable to achieve any advantage. The failure was due to the lack of readiness and inability of the regular army of Azerbaijan to resist the popular defensive movement that protects its lands from external aggression. In addition, the morale of the rebels far exceeds the motivation of the Azeris who participate in this risky undertaking. Realizing senseless nature of war and violence, number of the Azerbaijani military leaders refuse to carry out orders of the High Command.

It’s noteworthy that from the very beginning of the operation Turkish journalists were in the front line and covered news in a favorable light. Preparations for the attack were hidden from the international community, and movements of military convoys were masked by maneuvers.

It conveys the suggestion that this conflict has been well planned in advance and operated by using Baku. Highly likely it is possible to suppose that Aliyev was given the green light to launch military operation directly from Ankara.

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Azerbaijan has given Turkey control over the air segment of its military campaign to capture the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the Armenian Defense Ministry reported on September 30. According to Artsrun Hovhannisyan, Turkish and Azerbaijani aviation is being coordinated by the E7-T aircraft of the Turkish Air Force, which is an air command post. The military plane was spotted near the Turkish cities of Erzurum and Kars.

“It is possible that the leadership of the Turkish Air Force is on board this plane,” Hovhannisyan added.

As an example of such actions, the Armenian side claimed that two Turkish F-16 fighters, an Azerbaijani Su-25 attack aircraft, as well as a Turkish combat drone “Bayraktar”, which took off from the city of Kurdamir, had inflicted a missile and bomb attack on the Karabakh towns of Hadrut and Martakert.

Further a command and control post for Turkish combat drones is located near the city of Hadrut. It is reportedly coordinating the strikes of Azerbaijani warplanes.

Pro-Armenian sources insist that the Chief of General Staff of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces Najmaddin Sadigov was in fact removed from his command of the Karabakh operation at the behest of Turkish military advisers and specialists. Sadigov was allegedly an opponent of the dramatically increased influence of Turkey in the Azerbaijani military.

Armenia also showed photos of its Su-25 attack aircraft, which, according to it, was downed by a Turkish F-16 on September 29. The pilot of the Su-25, Major Valery Danelin, died. In their turn, Turkey and Azerbaijan insist that the Turkish Air Force and other branches of Turkish military are not involved in the conflict. According to Fahrettin Altun, the head of the communications department of the Turkish presidential administration, Armenian claims are “another fantasy of the Armenian military propaganda machine.” The Azerbaijani side, in turn, said that two Armenian Su-25 warplanes crashed into the mountain and exploded, the rest is absurd and disinformation.

Since September 30, the situation on the frontline between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces has not changed significantly. Despite this, intense firefights, artillery duels and air strikes are being reported along the entire contact line. Armenian sources accuse Azerbaijan and Turkey of intentional bombing of civilian areas of the Nagorno-Karabakh republic, including its capital, and even inside Armenia itself.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan, which ceased to name areas allegedly seized from the Armenians, insists that its forces have captured several key positions on the frontline. According to Baku, since the morning of September 27, its forces have destroyed up to 200 battle tanks and other armored vehicles, 228 artillery pieces, rocket launchers, mortars, 30 air defense systems, 6 command-control and observation posts, 5 ammunition depots, more than 110 vehicles and an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system. The number of killed or injured Armenian fighters was not provided but if one checks previous Azerbaijani reports, it has supposedly already exceeded 1,000.

On the other hand, the Armenian side said that during the last 24 hours only 130 Azerbaijani service members were killed, 260 others were injured, 32 military equipment pieces were destroyed and 13 UAVs were downed.

Both sides regularly release videos showing the destruction of enemy positions and equipment. Nevertheless it seems that without more active participation from the Turkish side, Azerbaijan is unable to deliver a rapid and devastating military blow to Armenia and thus capture the contested region. However, if the regional situation remains same, the Azerbaijani military is likely to have the upper hand in any developing war just because it has more manpower, weapons, military equipment and ammunition.

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“Sanctions must be treated as a form of warfare. . . . Let us regard the imposition of sanctions with the same gravity as we would regard the act of going to war.” – Mehran Nakhjavani[^1]

There is widespread concern among human rights monitoring bodies and experts, including the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, regarding sanctions imposed by the U.S. and some other countries on Venezuela. As noted by a UN Special Rapporteur charged with monitoring sanctions, “The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law.” The Special Rapporteur urged all countries to avoid applying sanctions against Venezuela “unless approved by the United Nations Security Council, as required by the UN Charter.”^[2]

While the U.S. has taken the lead in instigating unilateral sanctions against Venezuela, with an explicit condition that sanctions will only be lifted in response to regime change, Canada too has operated outside of its historic commitment to the UN and multilateralism by imposing a number of sanctions to replicate some of the U.S. sanctions. This article submits that certain sanctions imposed by Canada against Venezuela are illegal under Canadian law because Parliament has not authorized the government to make the regulation through which they were imposed.

On September 22, 2017, on the recommendation of then Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, the federal Cabinet, which is the executive branch of the Canadian government, made a regulation (the “Special Economic Measures (Venezuela) Regulations”, or the “Venezuela Regulations” for short) requiring all Canadians to boycott 40 named individuals in Venezuela (since then extended to the current total of 96 individuals including its Ombudsperson and Attorney General).

The government purported to act under the Special Economic Measures Act, SC 1992, c 17 (“SEMA”) which gives it authority to make such regulations. At the time, that act gave only two grounds for the government to do so.

The first one is easily understood: when there is a serious international crisis as a result of a grave breach of international peace and security. Canada has passed such regulations regarding various countries: Burma, 2007; Zimbabwe, 2008; Iran, 2010; Syria and North Korea, 2011; and South Sudan, Russia, and the Ukraine, 2014.

Whether or not all Canadians would have agreed with each of these regulations, it is fair to assume that all would have understood why they were made.

The second ground is more difficult to understand. It is the one that was used against the Venezuelan individuals because there is no obvious evidence that the domestic violence in Venezuela would lead to a serious international crisis.

Under this second ground, it is still possible to make such a regulation when Canada’s government wants to act in solidarity with an international organization of states or association of states of which Canada is a member.

If the association of nation states feels that the principles of law by which a nation state ought to abide have been torn apart, it can call on its members to take economic measures against that foreign state.

What is most peculiar is that in the case of the Organization of American States, a major organization of which Canada is a member, there was no such consensus against Venezuela. This created a difficulty as, for Canada’s government to pursue its goal, the OAS was the most obvious and relevant association of nations through which to do so. 

So, in order to rely on the second ground, the Canadian government had to find another association of nation states. Side-stepping Canada’s Parliament, it declared that Canada and the U.S.A. constituted an appropriate association, under the name “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela”.

This raises a number of questions, most significantly whether Canada, through its federal government, is acting as a country that adheres to the rule of law or subjugates itself to the wishes of the United States.

Specifically, is the making of the Venezuela Regulations by the Trudeau government validly authorized by Canada’s Parliament under the SEMA? Or are the Venezuela Regulations, in legal terms, ultra vires, meaning that Parliament has not given the government the authority or legal power to make them and therefore the regulation and the sanctions it imposes are of no force and effect.

The SEMA provision

The circumstance that must have occurred in order for the government to be authorized to make a regulation under the second ground is that:

“an international organization of states or association of states, of which Canada is a member, has made a decision or a recommendation or adopted a resolution calling on its members to take economic measures against a foreign state”

Is the “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela”, which Canada purports to have formed with the United States and of which only it and the United States are “members”, such an “association of states, of which Canada is a member”?

Events in 2017

Since 1990 Canada has been a member of the Organization of American States, currently composed of 33 states which include the United States and most other countries of the Americas. The OAS was formed in 1948 and has a charter. In May 2017 foreign ministers of the OAS met concerning political and economic events in Venezuela but were unable to agree on a consensus statement concerning that country. Nor were they able to do so at a subsequent meeting in June 2017.

Some time on or before July 26, 2017 thirteen OAS countries, including the US and Canada issued a “Declaration on the Situation in Venezuela” calling for respect for human rights and constitutional order. It did not call for economic measures to be taken against Venezuela.

In July 2017 the US Treasury Board unilaterally imposed economic sanctions on fourteen Venezuelan individuals.

Whether Canada could follow suit was a live question as early as the beginning of August 2017. An unidentified Canadian official is reported as stating that Canada could more easily sanction Venezuelan officials if Bill S-226, the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (Sergei Magnitsky Law), which was still before Parliament, had been passed into law. While there was commentary that Canada could have relied on the ground in the SEMA that a “grave breach of international peace and security has occurred that has resulted or is likely to result in a serious international crisis”, no one talked about implementing a decision of an international organization of states or association of states.

On August 8, 2017 the Foreign Ministers and Representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru, gathered in Lima, Peru and issued a declaration concerning Venezuela. While that declaration, among other things, called for a stop to the transfer of weapons to Venezuela in accordance with articles 6 and 7 of the Arms Trade Treaty, it did not call for the taking of economic measures against Venezuela or Venezuelans.

The following day, August 9, 2017, a counselor in the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. sent an e-mail to two individuals, at least one of whom was with the Legal Affairs Bureau of Canada’s foreign affairs department [the department goes by the name “Global Affairs Canada”], and copied it to two other persons in the Canadian embassy in Washington. The e-mail is the earliest document to which Global Affairs Canada gave access in response to a request under Canada’s Access to Information Act for records relating to “The Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela”. The contents of the e-mail are redacted, or covered up, as is the identity of a third person to whom it was copied.

Less than a month later on September 5, 2017 a 20 minute meeting took place in the office of Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa that is referred to in the record of the meeting as “The inaugural meeting of the Association [Concerning the Situation in Venezuela].”

The meeting was called to order by David Morrison, then the Assistant Deputy Minister Americas and Chief Development Officer at Global Affairs Canada. Under the heading “Members Present”, Mr. Morrison is described as “Representing Canada” together with three others, his advisor, a legal officer with Global Affairs Canada, and the Venezuela Desk Officer, South American Division of Global Affairs Canada.

The persons described as representing the United States are four persons from the US Embassy, the Charge d’Affaires, the Acting deputy Chief of Mission, a Minister Counselor for Political Affairs, and an Economic Counselor.

Tracking in part the language of the SEMA (as italicized below), the record of the meeting states:

“The Association recommends that its members take measures to respond to the situation in Venezuela. The Association therefore calls upon its members to take economic measures against Venezuela and persons responsible for the current situation in Venezuela.”

There actually was no need to call on the U.S. to take economic measures against Venezuela. It had already done so. In addition to above-mentioned U.S. Treasury Board sanctions imposed against the 14 Venezuelan individuals in July 2017 pursuant to presidential executive order 13692 made in March 2015, the president of the United States had issued Executive Order 13808 in August 2017 prohibiting, with certain exceptions, access to U.S. financial markets by the Venezuelan government and the state-owned oil company PdVSA.

Twelve of the 14 Venezuelans sanctioned by the US in July 2017 were subsequently sanctioned under the Venezuela Regulations made under the SEMA, and the other two were sanctioned by Canada under the regulation made on November 3, 2017 under the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (Sergei Magnitsky Law).

No charter, constitution, by-laws or other constating document for the so-called “Association”, or any document bearing any signature by anyone on behalf of either Canada or the U.S. has been produced by Global Affairs Canada in response to the Access to Information Act request.

No public record of any agreement between Canada and the United States to create the “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela” exists. In the U.S., while the president can enter into executive agreements under the presidential authority over foreign policy contained in the U.S. constitution, such agreements must be reported to the Senate under the Case-Zablocki Act of 1972 and would be expected to be disclosed in the U.S. State Department’s listing of U.S. Treaties and Other International Agreements. There is no mention of any agreement with Canada or any other state with respect to Venezuela in that listing.

Nor is there any executive order made by the U.S. president in 2017 or thereafter which refers to any agreement with Canada regarding Venezuela.

As for Canadian records, there is no reference to any such agreement in Global Affairs Canada’s published database of Canadian treaties and non-treaty international agreements, arrangements, or understandings.

Parliament’s intent

Did Parliament in the SEMA intend to authorize the federal government in these circumstances to make the regulation it did imposing sanctions on these Venezuelan individuals? The answer depends on the interpretation of the phrase “association of states, of which Canada is a member” in section 4(1.1) (a) of the SEMA. To help determine what Parliament meant by that phrase one can look at the proceedings in 1992 before the Parliamentary committee composed of members of Parliament who studied in detail Bill C-53, the bill which Parliament eventually enacted as the SEMA in that year.

Those proceedings suggest that Parliament intended that the association of states be a multilateral one, and that it actually exist and not merely be created ad hoc for the purpose of allowing the federal government to make a regulation that it wanted to, but could not, make on its own absent a “grave breach of international peace and security”.

The first witness before the Parliamentary committee was Barry Mawhinney (Legal Advisor in the Office of Secretary of State for External Affairs, as Canada’s foreign affairs minister was then called). He was asked by Committee member Axworthy the following question about the meaning of “international organization or association of states”. Mr. Axworthy’s question assumed that the organizations in question were multilateral, and that such organizations had some structure by way of “by-laws” or “obligations”.

“It is a complex question, and I really need your help on it. Clause 4.(1)—“international organization or association of states, of which Canada is a member, that calls on its members to take economic measures”—is a pretty loose definition. You just pointed out that we have OAS obligations, UN obligations. But we are also a member of a number of other multilateral organizations. To what extent do these organizations, in their own laws or obligations, set out mandatory or required steps by their member states? Does this not kind of put us into a position where our freedom of choice is being somewhat limited at this stage?

I guess what I am trying to get at, Mr. Mawhinney, is that we are saying that the more we get into a world of international multilateralorganizations there are all kinds of by-laws in those organizations that could be triggering us into a whole series of economic sanctions. We could end up putting sanctions on almost everybody, at some point or other, depending on how many clubs we want to belong to.”

In responding Mr. Mawhinney implied that the organization or association would be one already in existence and stated that the purpose of the legislation was to allow Canada, if it so chose, to take “collective action” pursuant to a “collective decision” thereof. He told the Committee:

I can think of only one club, and it is the mother of all clubs, where we have very clear mandatory sanctions under the United Nations. The concern here, Mr. Axworthy, was to ensure that where an international organization to which we belong has taken certain decisions which call for collective action—do not impose collective action, but call for collective action—we should be able to act pursuant to that collective decision. But it is, again, enabling legislation. This in no way requires Canada, if it decides otherwise, to carry through on any particular decision taken by an international organization. But what it does do is give us that option and that ability to take action if we so decide that it is in Canada’s best interest.

What we didn’t want to have was a situation where an international organization had taken a decision and we wanted to share in the implementation of that decision but we were unable to do that because this kind of threshold wasn’t available.

Throughout his testimony, as italicized in the passages quoted below, Mr. Mawhinney referred to a “broad coalition” or “broad international consensus” in a “multilateral context”. At the outset of his presentation to the Committee he stated that:

“Historically, Canadian governments have been guided by three basic principles in the application of economic sanctions. First, they have sought broad international agreement on the necessity and usefulness of sanctions.”

Mr. Mawhinney further stated:

“When we apply sanctions, and this has been consistently the practice of Canadian governments, we do so based on a broad international consensus to do so, and within a multilateral context.”

He then again stated:

“The situation set out here in the two thresholds makes it very clear that we are dealing with rare occasions; the grave breach of international peace and security that Mr. Axworthy was questioning me about, or the implementation of a decision by an international organization of which Canada is a member. So these things are not done frequently and they are not done lightly. They are done within the context of a very broad international consensus, dealing with very serious situations.”

Later Mr. Mawhinney repeated his reference to a broad coalition and that Canada would not be acting on its own when he stated:

“We would have to ensure that in applying those measures we had, as I mentioned earlier, a broad coalition of support internationally, that we were sharing the burden and, perhaps most important, that we were not, through our own measures, putting at a disadvantage either Canadian business or Canadian workers in relation to our competitors.”

In the testimony of Jeffrey Grenville-Woods (United Nations Association in Canada) before the Committee he too made clear his understanding that the purpose of the bill was to enable Canada to implement decisions of a separate body and not its own decision, when he stated:

 “The breach mechanism has to be as a result, I would submit, of a finding by this group of states because the purpose of the bill is to implement somebody else’s decision. It’s not a Canadian measure of its own accord.”

. . . . .

“The purpose of the bill is to implement somebody else’s decision in Canada. That seems to be the key element of clause 4: The Governor in Council may, for the purpose of implementing a decision, resolution or recommendation do the following things. If we’re implementing someone’s decision, recommendation or resolution, who is it? If that’s the only measure for the trigger, we need to know what the source of that process is. It could be the only argument you need in the House to justify the action taken, that an organization said there is this action to be taken and this is why we’re taking it.”

Mr. Grenville-Woods also pointed out the need to be “circumspect” in defining the meaning of “association of states” in his answer to the following question from Committee member Leblanc:

“I would like to direct my questions to comments you made earlier, which have to do with the definitions of an international organization of states, and what constitutes a serious breach or a crisis meriting the imposition of sanctions. Is there any recognized mechanism through the United Nations for classifying international organizations of states or associations of states or a body of international law that we could appeal to to introduce the kinds of precisions you were suggesting we make to bring us into line with the actions of other countries.”

Mr. Grenville-Woods responded:

“I think the quick answer to that is that there is no hard and fast definition of an international organization, nor is there a hard and fast definition of an association of states. That, I think, is the problem. If there was, then these words would have an international legal meaning that could easily be referred to. There is a very broad definition of international organizations, and that creates some difficulty. It’s useful to have a broad definition in the context of other purposes, such as trying to grant privileges and immunities to representatives of these organizations in your country or in the international community, but when you are talking about these organizations being the trigger for some action, then I think you have to be more circumspect in your definition.”

Committee member Robinson went so far as to propose an amendment to the bill to provide that the organizations or associations be specified by regulation. He withdrew the amendment after Serge April (Director General, Bureau of Legal Affairs, Department of External Affairs and International Trade) agreed to provide a list of the organizations most likely to be the subject of this particular clause. However, no such list is referred to in the Committee proceedings.

The above-quoted passages indicate that the Committee members and several witnesses, including from the government itself, understood the reference to “international organization or association of states of which Canada is a member” to mean more than Canada associating itself with one other state for the sole purpose of enabling Canada to impose sanctions under this ground in the SEMA. The purpose of the Act was to allow Canada to implement a “collective” decision of states of which it was a member, based on a “broad international consensus” in a “multilateral” context. The record also indicates that the Committee was unable to rely on a precise definition because there wasn’t one. Therefore it is up to the court to determine if something is a legitimate association in relation to the purposes of this statute, and to be ‘circumspect’ in making that determination.

The same phrase used in another statute

It is also a principle of statutory interpretation to presume there are harmony, coherence, and consistency between statutes dealing with the same subject matter.

Parliament used the phrase “an international organization of states or association of states, of which Canada is a member” in section 35 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, SC 2001, c 27. That section makes it clear that Parliament meant a multilateral association of states.  Section 35 provides that:

 “A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights for

. . . . .

(c) being a person, other than a permanent resident, whose entry into or stay in Canada is restricted pursuant to a decision, resolution or measure of an international organization of states or association of states, of which Canada is a member, that imposes sanctions on a country against which Canada has imposed or has agreed to impose sanctions in concert with that organization or association.” (my emphasis)

In order for Canada to act “in concert” with such association of states of which it is a member, the association must have more than just one member besides Canada. Otherwise, Canada would be acting in concert with only that one other state, and not an association of states.

Conclusion           

Even though “association” is not defined with precision, all the above quotes suggest two things: SEMA is talking about membership in existing associations which might have these kinds of regulation as an available ground for common action, and it does not envisage the idea that such an association be formed for the particular purpose of engaging in economic sanctions. While the latter is a possible permissible vision of “association”, it is not likely to be one of which the SEMA framers thought: it cannot have been their intention that Canada could engage in such a foreign affairs’ decision ad hoc, without any reference to Parliament.

None of the quotations about the meaning to be given to “association” suggest this as a possibility. In the case of existing institutions it is plausible to argue that, when becoming a member, Parliament approved of Canada acting according to that association’s known goals; not so when there is no existing one; not so when an association is formed without stated goals or formalities or Parliamentary oversight of any kind. This is boosted by the fact that the U.S. did not need this association to do what it did, that there was no common goal to associate, as the U.S. was merely helping Canada to help it, although Canada had no legal ground to assist the U.S.

There is no reason for Canada to “create” this association but for its desire to help the U.S. out, having failed to persuade the one obvious organization which it had democratically joined to, among other things, act in such a way. The Canadian government’s maneuvering smacks of tax avoidance practices’ techniques: act within the letter but not the spirit of the law. This points to the willingness to do U.S. bidding and to the anti-democratic nature of engaging in sanctions of this personal kind, questions which go to the very validity of the Venezuela Regulations.

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Andrew Dekany is a Barrister and Solicitor licensed by the Law Society of Ontario, Canada.

Featured image is from Yves Engler

Politicians have destroyed more than 13 million jobs this year in a deluge of edicts aimed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 200,000 Americans still died from the coronavirus, but the anti-COVID government crackdowns probably did far more damage than the virus. The COVID crisis has also shown how easy it is for politicians to fan fears to seize nearly absolute power.

In March, Donald Trump proclaimed that “we are at war with an invisible enemy.” He also declared, “I’m a wartime president…. This is a different kind of war than we’ve ever had.” Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, asserted that “every Marylander can be a hero, just by staying home” after he dictated a “shelter-at-home” order threatening a $5,000 fine and a year in prison for any Marylander who went outside in violation of his edict.

Almost 40 percent of households earning less than $40,000 per year have someone who lost his job in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve. The Disaster Distress Helpline, a federal crisis hotline, received almost 900 percent more phone calls in March compared with a year ago. A recent JAMA Psychiatry analysis warned that stay-at-home orders and rising unemployment are a “perfect storm” for higher suicide rates. A California health organization recently estimated that 75,000 Americans could die from “despair” as a result of the pandemic, unemployment, and government restrictions.

In the name of saving lives, politicians have entitled themselves to destroy an unlimited number of livelihoods. Politicians in many states responded to COVID-19 by dropping the equivalent of a Reverse Neutron Bomb — something which destroys the economy while supposedly leaving human beings unharmed. But the only way to assume people were uninjured is to believe their existence is totally detached from their jobs, bank accounts, and mortgage and rent payments.

COVID policymakers have written themselves the letter that Cardinal Richelieu gave to one of his agents in the novel The Three Musketeers: “The bearer of this letter has acted under my orders and for the good of the state.” This carte blanche was sufficient to place murders and other crimes above the law and beyond reproach in France. In contemporary America, the same exoneration is achieved by invoking “science” and “data.”

Gubernatorial tyranny

Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions, and also banned all recreational travel. Six Oregon counties have only one confirmed COVID case, and most of the state has minimal infections. But schools, businesses, and other activities were slammed shut by government command.

Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed some of the most severe restrictions, prohibiting anyone from leaving his home to visit family or friends. Whitmer also severely restricted what stores could sell; she prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity. (Purchasing state lottery tickets was still an “essential” activity though.) COVID infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, but Whitmer shut down the entire state — including northern counties with near-zero infections and zero fatalities, boosting unemployment to 24 percent statewide. Her repression provoked fierce protests, and Whitmer responded by claiming that her dictates saved 3,500 lives. She exonerated herself with a statistical formula that was painfully ethereal compared with the stark physical devastation in Michigan.

The shutdown order of Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, resulted in the highest rate of unemployment in the nation — 33 percent. But according to Sen. Rand Paul, COVID’s impact in Kentucky “has not been worse than an average flu season.” But that did not stop Beshear from forbidding people to attend church services and sending Kentucky State Police to attach notices to car windshields ordering church attendees to self-quarantine for 14 days and reporting them to local health departments.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed a state lockdown and justified his edict: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” So the governor is entitled to freeze the lives and movement of 20 million people, subverting their efforts to provide for themselves and their families to save one person? Most counties in New York state had five people or fewer who tested positive for coronavirus at the time of his decree, and most of the state has avoided the stratospheric casualty rate of the New York City area. Cuomo’s ludicrous formula exemplifies how politicians reap media applause for dramatic actions that have little or nothing to do with public safety.

Maryland politicians have destroyed more than 400,000 jobs in dictatorial responses claiming to thwart the coronavirus pandemic. “Nearly one in five Maryland workers have filed for unemployment” compensation, the Baltimore Sun reported. The situation is so bad that even the Washington Postrecognized that Maryland’s COVID “restrictions have crippled the economy and paralyzed daily life since mid-March.” But the shutdowns failed to prevent COVID cases from increasing by fiftyfold or the death rate from rising a hundredfold. That dictate never made any sense for much of the state. Garrett County, for instance, has had only ten COVID cases and no fatalities, but its schools and businesses were shuttered at the command of Annapolis.

Killing the elderly

Secrecy and hypocrisy have permeated COVID policies across the nation. Maryland is busy hiring a thousand “contact tracers” to track down anyone who might have interacted with anyone who tested positive for COVID. Privacy will be no excuse for failing to disclose personal contacts. However, at the same time, the Maryland Department of Health ordered local county health departments to cease disclosing which nursing homes have been ravaged by COVID outbreaks, claiming that such information “‘serves no public health purpose’ and violates privacy laws,” as WJLA-TV reported. Most COVID fatalities statewide have occurred in nursing homes. One might think that children would have a legitimate interest in knowing where their parents faced the greatest risk of dying, but no such luck in the Free State.

Why the secrecy? Reopen Maryland requested and was denied “information on whether … the state forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients discharged from hospitals, as suggested by the Governor’s April 5 executive order and corresponding directives from the Maryland Department of Health.”

Similar policies in other states helped send the COVID death rate into the stratosphere. Governor Cuomo, who callously compelled nursing homes to accept COVID patients, will have no legal culpability for a policy that contributed to more than 5,000 nursing-home deaths in his state. Pennsylvania’s health czar, Rachel Levine, issued a similar order, contributing to thousands of nursing-home deaths, and then removed her own 95-year-old mother from a nursing home to keep her safe.

The pandemic also revealed the lust by some politicians to perpetuate their power as long as possible on any shabby pretext. On May 15, Governor Hogan rescinded Maryland’s statewide stay-at-home order but permitted counties to extend it with their own decrees. Hogan’s announcement ending the state shutdown sparked a political pity party by Democratic officials in the Washington suburbs and Baltimore area. “All of us were taken aback by his announcement. We were hung out to dry,” whined Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, who faced the burden of justifying perpetuating the lockdown for the million residents of his county. Elrich lamented that Hogan’s decision “makes it sound like it’s an arbitrary decision…. [Hogan] kind of ignited this rebellion against what we were doing.”

The Washington Post summarized Elrich’s response: “Montgomery County rushed to create its own data dashboard last week, so elected leaders could justify to constituents why they remain stuck in a coronavirus shutdown.” But county officials are apparently being slippery, relying on arbitrary selection and manipulation of data to justify perpetuating arbitrary power. Maryland daily COVID fatalities had fallen by more than 50 percent but politicians did not want to loosen their grip. Anne Arundel County struck bureaucratic gold when it declared that its pandemic emergency would continue until “health equity” was achieved — whatever that means.

Federal diktats

While much of the media has responded to the pandemic by painting pro-lockdown politicians as saviors, COVID carnage was multiplied by incompetent federal agencies. Incompetent scientists at the Centers for Disease Control contaminated key samples for creating a test in February.

Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the Food and Drug Administration continued blocking innovative private testing. The FDA forced the nation’s most innovative firms to submit
to its command-and-control approach regardless of the feds’ having little or nothing to offer. FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn shrugged off his agency’s disastrous policies: “There are always opportunities to learn from situations like this one.” Trump made bushels of false or inaccurate statements on the availability of testing early on that contributed to confusion and fear during the pandemic. Instead of speedy access to life-saving medical results, Americans were obliged to settle for Trump’s ludicrous assertion that “anybody that needs a test gets a test.” While Trump condemned people who purchased more food and supplies than they needed short-term, administration officials also floated a proposal for a presidential diktat to cancel all flights nationwide and lock everyone at home for two weeks or longer.

While that bizarre proposal was rejected, the pandemic spurred other “trial balloons” to see how much additional power government could seize. In March, media reports indicated that Trump’s Justice Department was considering asking Congress to approve suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic — which some experts say could last 18 months. But Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, warned, the proposed policy “says ‘affecting pre-arrest.’ So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over.” The same type of pre-arrest power could be exercised to detain anyone suspected of being infected or failing to obey lockdown orders. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the most principled members of the Senate, tweeted in response to the news of the power grab, “OVER MY DEAD BODY.”

Because politicians have no liability for the economic damage they inflict, they have no incentive to minimize the disruptions they decree. Trillions of dollars of new deficit spending will be vexing American workers for many years. As Reason’s Matt Welch noted, “The estimated $3 trillion price tag on the first four batches of COVID-19 stimulus, divided by 330 million increasingly underemployed U.S. residents, equals $9,000 per capita, which has ended up where government payouts usually go: to entities with better connections than you.”

Permitting governments to seize boundless power on the basis of shaky extrapolations of infection rates will destroy our nation. Trump’s boast of being a “wartime president” should recoil on him after the government launched a preemptive attack on American prosperity. It will be years until we know how much permanent damage was inflicted by politicians’ panicky responses to the pandemic.

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James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications.

Drug maker GlaxoSmithKline may need to slaughter half a million sharks to harvest squalene, an oil made in shark livers, to make a new line of COVID jabs. Glaxo mixes squalene with a witches’ brew of proprietary surfactants to produce its controversial AS03 vaccine adjuvant. Adjuvants are compounds that amplify immune response to hyperstimulate the immune system. They are associated with a variety of autoimmune diseases.

Scientific studies have linked squalene adjuvants to Gulf War syndrome and to a wave of debilitating neurological disorders including epidemics of narcolepsy caused by Glaxo’s H1N1 Pandemrix vaccine during the 2009 swine flu “pandemic.” One study showed a 13-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children who received Pandemrix.

The devastating cascade of brain injuries to children and health care workers forced the termination of that Glaxo vaccine after European governments used only a small fraction of the jabs they had purchased from Glaxo. A recent study links squalene to carcinomas. In a bizarre and reckless twist, Glaxo has revived the dangerous adjuvant as its hall pass to the COVID-19 money orgy.

The company said it would manufacture a billion doses of this adjuvant for potential use in coronavirus vaccines. Around 3,000 sharks are needed to extract one ton of squalene.

Shark Allies, a California-based group, said Glaxo will kill around 250,000 sharks to make enough AS03 for the world’s population to receive one dose of its COVID-19 vaccine. If, as expected, two doses are needed, half a million sharks must die.

Glaxo declared that it would be producing 1 billion doses of AS03 “to support the development of multiple adjuvanted COVID-19 vaccine candidates.”

Glaxo has developed partnerships with multiple companies, including its behemoth rival Sanofi, China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals and Innovax Biotech in the city of Xiamen. Glaxo has also agreed to make the technology available to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations for COVID vaccines in Australia and elsewhere. Glaxo said it is focusing on what it considers a “proven technology” that will give the company “several shots on goal.”

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Dire US economic condition exceed the worst of earlier times.

Current conditions are unprecedented in US history with no signs of turning things around any time soon. More on this below.

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According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “(a)nother 1.5 million (Americans) applied for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits last week.”

The number includes 837,000 filing for state UI, along with 650,000 applying for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA).

PUA is the federal program for workers not eligible for regular UI.

Nothing on this scale ever occurred in the US for a duration this long since record-keeping began.

Unless congressional legislation signed into law extends PUA, it’ll expire at yearend.

State UI benefits expired at end of July. Politicized congressional wrangling failed to extend them.

The current status is likely to continue unresolved at least until post-November 3 elections.

On Thursday, Dem-controlled House members passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package by a narrow 214 – 207 margin — 18 Dems breaking ranks to oppose the measure.

It’s virtually certain to be rejected by Senate-controlled Republicans. Majority Leader McConnell opposes the bill.

On Thursday, Dem Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin failed to resolve differences on aid to states and local governments, as well as on other issues.

The House bill calls for the following:

• Reinstatement of $600 in weekly unemployment benefits through January.
• Another $1,200 direct payment to qualified Americans.
• $436 billion to states and local governments for one year.
• Funding for another round of Payroll Protection Program loans to hardest hit businesses.
• Another $25 billion for airlines to cover payroll costs.
• $75 billion for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.
• $225 billion for education and $57 billion for child care.
• Billions of dollars for rental and mortgage assistance.
• On Wednesday, NBC News reported that a $1.6 trillion Mnuchin GOP counter-proposal includes:
• $250 billion for state and local governments.
• $400 weekly in unemployment benefits.
• $150 billion for education.
• $75 billion for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing, and $60 billion for rental and mortgage assistance.

According to economists Carmen and Vincent Reinhart:

The current “situation is so dire that it deserves to be called a ‘depression.’ ”

“It seems disrespectful to the many losing their jobs and shutting their businesses to use a lesser term to describe this affliction.”

In recent economic declines, the Reinharts explained that some  growth engines remained intact, including during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

“Not this time,” they stressed, adding:

“The last time all engines failed was in the Great Depression.”

“The collapse this time will be similarly abrupt and steep. ”

It’s already worse than the 1930s, perhaps much harder times ahead with unprecedented numbers of businesses going bankrupt, countless others operating far below capacity. See below.

In Q II, the US economy contracted at an annualized 32.9% because of widespread sector shutdowns.

In US economic crises since the mid-19th century, it took on average eight years for GDP to return to the pre-crisis level, the Reinharts explained.

“(A) long journey out of a deep hole” lies ahead, they stressed.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the US economy peaked in February — marking the end of expansion that began in June 2009.

Dire economic conditions are most greatly harming women, non-white and lower-wage workers, those least educated, low-income families with children, and small businesses.

According to Feeding America in 2020, food insecurity in the US ranges from 8.6% in Loudoun County, VA (with the highest median per capita income) to 34.2% in Jefferson County, MS — with one of the nation’s lowest per capita income.

By population size, LA County, Harris County, TX (including Houston), and Cook County, IL (including Chicago) have the highest number of food insecure people in that order.

Around one in four US households experienced food insecurity this year — over 27% of households with children.

A Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research study estimates the number of food insecure households with children at nearly 30%.

Black families are twice as food insecure as their white counterparts. Latino households are also disproportionately affected.

According to the UN World Food Program, acute food insecurity worldwide may double this year over 2019.

Days earlier, the Economic Collapse blog discussed an “explosion of bankruptcies and layoffs in the US unlike anything…ever seen before.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that “(r)etail store closings in the US reached a record in the first half of 2020 and the year is on pace for record bankruptcies and liquidations (because of) the downturn’s severity.”

Bankruptcy attorney Al Togut expects “an avalanche” of firms going out of business through end of 2020.

Bloomberg News reported a 40% increase in New York City bankruptcies.

As more businesses become insolvent and job losses grow, the hardest of hard times may lie ahead — ordinary Americans hit hardest.

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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 Brookings.edu

China is radically changing its economic strategy. Faced with an international scenario that only tends to worsen with an unprecedented economic crisis approaching in the midst of a devastating pandemic, Beijing decided to adopt an economic internalization plan, seeking to create measures to prioritize the domestic consumer market and strengthen its economy from inside. Chinese experts and strategists call this strategy a “double inversion” and believe that it will be the key to transform the Chinese consumer market in the most important part of national GDP in the coming years.

The Chinese have seen the need for bolder reform measures to cultivate a more efficient domestic market and unlock the country’s potential. The new coronavirus pandemic has revealed the extreme fragility of global market structures and the accelerated decline of financial capitalism, highlighting the need for radical changes and the development of alternative economic models. The Chinese bet in the face of this world of rapid changes is to invest in the transition from an export-oriented economy to an economy focused on the domestic market. In a recent statement, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that China needs to create a new model of development in which domestic economic circulation is the mainstay so that domestic and foreign markets can complement each other.

Although the strategy was officially launched recently, some measures were already being taken previously and contributed to the Chinese choice for this change. For example, in 2020, the share of exports in Chinese GDP fell to 17%. On the other hand, domestic consumption had a significant increase and last year reached 58% of the national GDP.

However, this does not mean that exports will no longer be important in the Chinese economy. The country will continue to invest in its competitive advantages to further expand the supply of low-cost goods. The greatest proof of this is that investments in the “Belt and Road Initiative” will be maintained. Beijing will simply adopt a posture more focused on the national market – increasing Chinese income, so that domestic consumption becomes the central point of the national economy – without, however, falling into economic isolationism.

Indeed, the new Chinese economic policy will impact the entire world. It is impossible for such a radical reform to be carried out by the largest emerging power in the world without major collateral changes taking place in several countries. In the West, in particular, fears about the impacts of this initiative can already be seen. One of Germany’s largest banks, Commerzbank, for example, predicts that China has embarked on the path to autarchy. Europeans fear that the Chinese change will harm the EU due to the importance of relations with China for the bloc’s economy. Other Chinese trading partners, such as Japan and South Korea, also suspect that the new strategy poses a threat to them.

In the near future, China will consolidate itself as the major producer of most of the high-value goods and services that it now imports from Europe, Japan and Korea. The road to complete economic sovereignty is paved and it concerns the countries that offer such products and services to Beijing. With this change, it is likely that the trade war with the United States will intensify even more. Germany will be one of the most affected countries, as it has become China’s main supplier, mainly of vehicles, auto parts, aircraft, machines and industrial equipment – and this is what bothers Commerzbank economists so much.

What can be expected, however, in response to the new Chinese strategy is just a generalization of this practice. The only way for the other powers to compete with China is to follow its example and adopt more protectionist and isolationist measures aimed at consolidating stable domestic markets, creating a shield against the – possibly devastating –  effects of the coming economic crisis. China did not create its strategy suddenly, but empirically realized that the most appropriate thing at the moment would be to create this market inversion. Soon, Europe and the US will have to take similar measures to deal with the same problems that China faces now.

China came up from the 2008 crisis as the great emerging global power and its rising economic strenth saved the global economy with the purchase of industrialized products from the countries of the geopolitical North. Now, such northern markets realize that their possibilities for expansion are few and that they may no longer be able to count on China. What will they have, then, to overcome the present crisis if not to strengthen their own markets?

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

“October surprises” are a common occurrence in the electoral politics of the US when elections are only weeks away in November and canvassing of electorate by political contenders reaches a crescendo. But never in the entire political history of the US an “October surprise” has downright incapacitated a presidential contender running for re-election from electioneering for make-or-break two weeks.

President Trump announced the shocking news of having contracted COVID-19 infection on Friday at his official Twitter timeline:

“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!”

Half an hour later, First Lady Melania Trump confirmed the news and said they will be quarantining for two weeks at the White House:

“As too many Americans have done this year, @potus & I are quarantining at home after testing positive for COVID-19. We are feeling good & I have postponed all upcoming engagements. Please be sure you are staying safe & we will all get through this together.”

Couple of hours before the momentous announcement, Trump had named the suspect who had likely transmitted the virus to the president and the first lady:

“Hope Hicks, who has been working so hard without even taking a small break, has just tested positive for Covid 19. Terrible! The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantine process!”

30-year-old femme fatale, Hope Hicks, is a political advisor serving as a senior counselor to President Trump since March. Hicks previously served as White House communications director from August 2017 until March 29, 2018. From January to September 2017, she was White House director of strategic communications.

But her official designations don’t do justice to her immense clout in the White House and the Trump family. Maggie Haberman wrote an informative biographical account [1] of Hope Hicks in a February 2018 article for the New York Times:

“Ms. Hicks, 29, a former model who joined Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign without any experience in politics, became known as one of the few aides who understood Mr. Trump’s personality and style and could challenge the president to change his views.

“Her title belied the extent of her power within the West Wing — after John F. Kelly was appointed White House chief of staff, she had more access to the Oval Office than almost any other staff member. Her own office, which she inherited after the departure of another Trump confidant, Keith Schiller, was just next door.

“Most significantly, Mr. Trump felt a more personal comfort with Ms. Hicks than he has established with almost any of his other, newer advisers since coming to Washington. And for a politician who relies so heavily on what is familiar to him, her absence could be jarring …”

What Haberman was insinuating to was the fact that Hope Hicks relationship with President Trump had not entirely been professional. She had occupied a special place in Trump’s heart with her attractive looks, professional charisma and an intimate understanding of Trump’s psychological attitudes and mindset.

This fact also elucidates visibly tense moments Trump and Melania have had in their matrimonial life when Hope Hicks served as White House communications director until March 2018 when she had to quit the Trump administration because she spilled the beans on Trump’s 2016 election campaign when she was summoned by the House Intelligence Committee in February 2018.

Haberman adds in the report:

“Ms. Hicks resignation came a day after she testified for eight hours before the House Intelligence Committee, telling the panel that in her job, she had occasionally been required to tell white lies but had never lied about anything connected to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election …

“Ms. Hicks’s first association with the Trump family was working with Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, on her personal apparel and licensing brand about six years ago. When Mr. Trump was planning his campaign in spring 2015, he told Ms. Hicks he was pulling her from Ms. Trump’s team to put her on his small political staff despite her lack of experience.

“In recent weeks, her personal life drew unwanted attention when it was reported that she had dated Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary who resigned under pressure over allegations that he had abused his two former wives.”

It’s pertinent to mention that Hope Hicks broke up with Rob Porter in December 2018. For two years between her resignation from the Trump administration in March 2018 to March 2020, she worked for Fox Corporation as its chief communications officer and executive vice president, drawing a million-dollar salary.

She was reappointed senior counselor to President Trump in March, but it’s quite likely that she turned rogue and her loyalty to the Trump family was compromised during the intervening two years, and she colluded with Trump’s adversaries in the deep state and the rival political organization to thwart Trump’s re-election bid.

In fact, the family of Hope Hicks has a political background. Her mother, Caye Ann (Cavender) Hicks, was an administrative aide to Ed Jones, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee.

Here, allow me to clarify that COVID-19 is a pandemic that could randomly infect anybody, but more than 90% fatalities in the US have occurred in people who are more than 55 years old. Younger people typically have robust natural immunity against the contagion, whereas Trump is 74 years old and is at high risk both because of his age and because he is considered overweight.

Maggie Haberman further notes in the New York Times article: “Ms. Hicks also had the ability to stop Mr. Trump from focusing on an issue he was angry about, and sometimes shield other members of the staff from Mr. Trump’s anger.

“While Ms. Hicks and Mr. John Kelly developed a functional, respectful relationship, he considered her access to the president to be a challenge to the command-and-control system he tried to enforce, according to several White House aides.

“Even those in the West Wing who did not like her approach feared her power, and worried about crossing her. Before leaving the White House in March 2018, she told colleagues that she had accomplished what she felt she could with a job that made her one of the most powerful people in Washington.”

Finally, though the mainstream media is cheering it as poetic justice that befell Trump for flouting safety precautions against the outbreak, it’s not simply about health risks posed to Trump and Melania due to contracting the infection. Hopefully, they would recover within weeks. But the diagnosis has disrupted the entire electoral campaign of the Republican Party at a critical juncture weeks before the presidential elections.

Rumors are already swirling if Trump would be able to perform his functions as the president or whether he would delegate official duties to Vice President Mike Pence. Even if re-elected, if his health condition deteriorates and he is incapacitated from running the office of the president, then who would be appointed president?

All such perplexing and dispiriting speculations would obviously have a demoralizing effect on the electorate and the Republican voter turnout is expected to be low, and undecided voters might even vote for definitive choice, Joe Biden, instead of doubtful option, Donald Trump, in the upcoming presidential elections slated for November 3.

Citations:

[1] Hope Hicks to Leave Post as White House Communications Director:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/us/politics/hope-hicks-resign-communications-director.html

About the author:

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 frequent contributor to Global Research.

Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange

By John Pilger and Timothy Erik Ström, October 02 2020

How would you react upon knowing that Chuck, whom you have sat and engaged with, is a janitor at a bio lab making mutant viruses? 

This is a satire in The Cheers 1980s TV Series which bears a canny resemblance to today’s realities in response to COVID-19. 

Let us laugh, relax and reflect,… Don’t depress…

M.Ch. GR Editor

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click to enlarge

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Credits to the producers of Cheers

Gold is trading really close to its 2011 all-time high. This is obviously a critical level for the future of gold prices.

Historically gold in US dollars often clears significant all-time highs only some time after significant currencies like the Euro and British pound.

This is mainly due to US dollar behaviour during times of significant risk aversion, like we’ve had this year and 2008, for example.

The following charts comparing gold in USD, in GBP and in Euro shows just that:

Gold in USD only surpassed its significant March 2008 high about a year after gold in GBP and Euro did it. We have a similar setup where gold in GBP and Euro already hit their 2012 high around August 2019.

Both GBP gold and Euro gold are sitting comfortably above their 2012 high. History strongly suggests that USD gold will follow and get comfortably above the 2012 high real soon.

The US dollar cycle has turned and is likely to be under severe pressure over the coming months. This will significantly support USD gold prices.

The following chart (with analysis here) shows the US Dollar Index from a long-term point of view:

This suggest that we are in a part of the US dollar cycle between points 4 and 5, which is similar to the late 70s. Gold is likely to emulate the late 70s performance where it went from about $100 to $850 on the back of US dollar decline.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Hubert Moolman on GOLD and SILVER.

Featured image is from South Front

In the early hours of September 26, President Trump sent out the announcement on Twitter that a gigantic continental project long through dead and buried will be revived: The 2570 km Alaska Canada Rail connection which will move freight, oil, grains and other goods from Anchorage to the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta.

In his tweet Trump stated:

For those who are not aware, anyone wishing to take rail from the USA north, will only make it as far as British Columbia as a 1000 km gap separates any rail from Alaska. When looking at the post-WWII battles for continental development, it is somewhat incredible that this gap has remained in place for decades with the northernmost rail line extending as far as Dease Lake BC, built over 50 years ago by the great pro-development Premier W.A.C. Bennett. For decades the Dease Lake line was called “the railway to nowhere” and featured a price tag of only one dollar which in fact is today only a relic of a sabotaged northern vision which was always designed to connect Canada and the USA while opening up the north for development. That full story was told in Forgotten Battles Against the Deep State: W.A.C. Bennett vs the Malthusians.

When compared to the robust development of Russia’s Arctic and the new emerging Polar Silk Road paradigm which have united China and Russia ever closer into a long term Arctic growth program, the North American Arctic remains an underdeveloped barren tundra. Despite the bountiful resources in the Arctic, no roads, rail or other development have been permitted to extend northward for decades. Up until Trump’s announcement of Federal support for this new project, the only North American Arctic discussions of note in recent decades have centered on anti-Russian militarization and Anti-ballistic missiles.

Instead of that hoped-for era of prosperity and win-win development envisioned by Bennett, Kennedy or Diefenbaker, what arose in the wake of the 1971 floating of the U.S. dollar, was a 45 year slide into consumerism, speculation, and zero-technological growth at home and abroad which saw all of the frontier projects led by great statesmen during the post-WW2 decades increasingly grind to a halt.

While the Albertan and Alaskan governments have made several small efforts to encourage the plan over the years- very little headway occurred due to the monetarist-rules underpinning Globalization which place supposedly “free markets” on the throne, and nation states in the dungeon of economics. Ignoring the fact that top down national planning has driven all of the greatest bursts of prosperity in history including the periods of rail expansion in the 19th century and post-war period, Globalization’s architects have ensured that nations are to play no role whatsover, while “live in the moment” hedonism runs amok.

In the year 2000 the Alaskan government spent $6 million on a feasibility study followed in 2015 by a similar study funded by the Province of Alberta, desperately sitting upon the edge of total economic despair under the weight of decarbonization initiatives being pushed into law by Ottawa technocrats. It was here in 2015 that A2A was created as a private initiative to advance the plan which the federal government had committed to blocking for far too long. Standing for the Alaska-Alberta Railway Development Corporation, A2A’s CEO Sean McCoshen has stated:

“This is a world-class infrastructure project that will generate more than 18,000 jobs for Canadian workers at a time when they are most needed, provide a new, more efficient route for trans-Pacific shipping and thereby link Alberta to world markets.”

This last concept of linking North America into the Pacific now being increasingly shaped by the Belt and Road Initiative and Multipolar Alliance is vital. Any chance the west has to avoid a total meltdown under an emerging total economic blowout of the system and civil war is premised upon tying our economic destiny to the pro-growth win-win model of the east. The opportunities for war-avoidance both in the Arctic and in the Pacific should be obvious to all.

Although Trump’s announcement is a great first step towards the realization of the long-overdue project, there remains many obstacles that could yet derail it.

For one thing, the project must be vetted by Environmental Impact Assessments in both the USA and Canada. These organizations have developed a well-earned reputations as destroyers of all large scale infrastructure projects since the post-industrial paradigm shift occurred 4 decades ago. These nominally “environmental” organizations have operated since the early 1970s under the philosophical view that “natural ecosystems are fixed and static” while human activity is constantly changing. To the degree that human economic activity impacts the supposedly “natural static equilibriums of nature”, then that activity is “bad” and must be halted. “Good” infrastructure which is permitted to get approval by the Environmental Impact studies involve only such things as our found in things like the “Green New Deal” (ie: windmills, solar panels, and food-burning biofuel programs), or the Asian Green New Deal known as OSOWOG. The sorts of real infrastructure the west used to build during its pro-industrial growth paradigm or which China currently builds under the Belt and Road Initiative are verboten under this logic.

It must also be recalled that Canada’s federal government now dominated by Green New Dealers such as Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland must still approve the project to the degree that it moves through the Northwest and Yukon territories (Provinces are endowed with vast sovereign powers to determine their own use of resources in the Canadian Constitution which does give Alberta the flexibility to evade SOME aspects of federal sabotage which one might expect to see unfold under a renewed pro-growth paradigm.

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Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi and Dr. Heiko Schöning in conversation about Covid-19 and the genome-modifying vaccine, i.e. the real risks of new mRNA- or DNA-vaccine and the deadly danger it presents for us and the following generations.

Watch the video below.

 John Pilger has watched Julian Assange’s extradition trial from the public gallery at London’s Old Bailey. He spoke with Timothy Erik Ström of Arena magazine, Australia.

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Timothy Erik Ström: Having watched Julian Assange’s trial firsthand, can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?

John Pilger: The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, WAS then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It  had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy—look closely at the photo and you’ll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a political humour similar to Vidal’s—a judge gave him an outrageous 50-week sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as ‘heath care’. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the damage: Julian’s intellect had gone from ‘in the superior, or more likely very superior range’ to ‘significantly below’ this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and ‘perform in the low average range’.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, calls ‘psychological torture’, the result of a gang-like ‘mobbing’ by governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that Assange is diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s syndrome and, according to Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the world’s leading neuropsychiatrists, he suffers from ‘suicidal preoccupations’ and is likely to find a way to take his life if he is extradited to America.

James Lewis QC, America’s British prosecutor, spent the best part of his cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its dangers as ‘malingering’. I have never heard in a modern setting such a primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.

My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judge— a Gothic-looking magistrate called Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is known—and the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen. Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed. The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to denigrate expert witnesses, while the defence’s examination is guillotined at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would be assured.

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei came to join us one morning in the public gallery. He noted that in China the judge’s decision would already have been made. This caused some dark ironic amusement. My companion in the gallery, the astute diarist and former British ambassador Craig Murray wrote:

I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. 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 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.

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.

There are few records of the proceedings. They are: Craig Murray’s personal blog, Joe Lauria’s live reporting on Consortium News and the World Socialist Website. American journalist Kevin Gosztola’s blog, Shadowproof, funded mostly by himself, has reported more of the trial than the major US press and TV, including CNN, combined.

In Australia, Assange’s homeland, the ‘coverage’ follows a familiar formula set overseas. The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, Latika Bourke, wrote this recently:

The court heard Assange became depressed during the seven years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy where he sought political asylum to escape extradition to Sweden to answer rape and sexual assault charges.

There were no ‘rape and sexual assault charges’ in Sweden. Bourke’s lazy falsehood is not uncommon. If the Assange trial is the political trial of the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive. Journalists should ask: who is next?

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 Guardian ‘scoop’ 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.

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.

However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took ‘extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants’.

TES: What are the implications of this trial’s verdict for journalism more broadly—is it an omen of things to come?

JP: The ‘Assange effect’ is already being felt across the world. If they displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It doesn’t matter where you are. For Washington, other people’s nationality and sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively surrendered its jurisdiction to Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice. In Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided by police and journalists’ computers taken away. The government has given unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Assange ‘must face the music’. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is reinforced by its banality.

‘Evil’, wrote Hannah Arendt, ‘comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil’.

TES: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of what’s at stake with Assange’s trial?

JP: I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the ‘mainstream’ but not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies among the overpaid and undertalented, insecure in their pretensions of independence and impartiality.

I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first interviews at my home in 2010.

What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to dissent. The difference today is that the world’s imperial power, the United States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today. Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it. Little of this menace is reflected in the media.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial march through whole societies—think of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the ‘war on terror’—most of it behind a façade of deception.

Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrors—that’s why he is being persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.

The judge’s decision will be known on the 4^th of January.

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John Pilger, journalist, author and film director, has won many distinctions for his work, including Britain’s highest award for journalism twice, an American ‘Emmy’ and a British Academy Award. His complete archive is held at the British Library. He lives in London and Sydney. Visit his website at www.johnpilger.com

Featured image is from Snopes.com

In 2018, ABC news acknowledged that this was a US backed bombing by Saudi Arabia led coalition.

Below is the ABC News Report. 

This was not an accident. It was a targeted assassination of Yemeni children. 

These bombings of civilians were supported by the Pentagon. 

M. Ch, GR Editor

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A Yemeni court has issued death sentences against ten defendants in the case of the Arab coalition’s bombing of the Dahyan student bus, including the Saudi monarch and his crown prince, as well as the US and Yemeni presidents.

The Houthi-owned Yemen News Agency (SABA) reported on Wednesday that the Specialised Criminal Court in Saada held a session headed by Judge Riyad Al-Razami, to deliberate on the case of the Saudi-led coalition’s attack on a bus full of young boys in Dahyan in the Majz district.

SABA confirmed that ten defendants have been convicted and sentenced to death, namely:

Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Mohammed Bin Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Turki Bin Bandar Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Donald Trump, James Norman Mattis, Norton Schwartz, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Ali Mohsen Saleh Al-Ahmar, Ahmed Obeid Bin Daghr and Mohammed Ali Ahmed Al-Maqdashi.

The news agency indicated that the defendants are also required to pay a $10 billion fine to the victims’ families.

The news agency reported that:

“The prosecution has registered its partial appeal to the fifth paragraph of the verdict, regarding the right of those included in the indictment. Thus, the court has not decided on it yet. Private prosecution attorney, Hamdan Shani, joined his appeal to the prosecution’s appeal, while the defence attorney, Abdel Wahab Al-Fadhli, reserved the right to appeal on behalf of the defendants.”

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Yesterday, it was agreed upon at the European Council special meeting that Belarus will be sanctioned. However, the scope of the sanctions and the long path to agree on them, demonstrates that the European Union is in a crisis and cannot project its power as it wishes. German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the bilateral agreement on Belarus and the strategic approach to Turkey as a step forward. The chancellor stated that “we had many discussions today on the issues of Belarus and Turkey, Cyprus and Greece. In short, I can say that they were completely successful.”

This comes in the aftermath of the Greek and Cypriot Prime Minister’s continually vetoing any sanctions against Belarus unless the European Council agreed to a strong joint statement against Turkey and for sanctions to be implemented by December if Ankara continues to violate the maritime space of Greece and Cyprus. Diplomatic sources in Athens revealed that despite the insistence of the majority of the European Council to pass a strong statement against Turkey and a pathway towards sanctions, Germany became isolated and had to eventually give up its resistance to stop an appeasement policy towards Turkey.

None-the-less, with Athens and Nicosia satisfied with the European Council’s statement and plan for sanctions against Turkey, the path was now open for Belarusian officials to be sanctioned without veto objections. This is despite Belarus not being a European Union member or candidate state, or threatening military action against EU member states like Turkey does.

“It was a long and difficult debate, because of course Greece and Cyprus demanded their rights as our member states. But we also had a very frank discussion about the need to look at all of our relations with Turkey,” Merkel said with seeming disappointment. “We can say today that there are sanctions against actors in Belarus, which means that the European Union is now taking action against those who oppose the democratic movements. I think this sends a very important signal.”

Minsk announced today the imposition of sanctions against European officials in response to those imposed by the European Union on Belarusian officials. The European Union claims that the officials who have been sanctioned are involved in the alleged suppression of anti-government protests and/or falsifying the August 9 elections in which President Alexander Lukashenko won 80.10% of the vote. Belarus’ foreign ministry said it had drawn up a list of European officials barred from entering the country, but added that the list would not be made public.

The European Union agreed to impose sanctions on some 40 Belarussian officials, however, Lukashenko is not among them. This in itself is a sign of weakness and desperation from the European Union as it strangely does not sanction Lukashenko, who won the election, but only those associated with him.

Lukashenko in recent years has been trying to court the European Union while also resisting further integration with Russia, even clashing with Moscow over gas and oil prices. Although protests against the election result had the appearance of a Ukraine-like colour revolution, the European Union immediately expressed solidarity, burning all bridges that had been built between Minsk and Brussels. This has only pushed Belarus firmly back into Russia’s sphere. The Belarusian President and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin held a meeting for over four hours in Sochi last month, which Russian spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said was “constructive, lengthy and substantive in content.” The meeting also resulted in a $1.5 billion loan for Belarus.

It is evident that the attempted colour revolution failed to materialize, Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has not amounted much domestic influence and Lukashenko will not be removed from power soon. Rather than attempting to quickly repair relations to bring Belarus back closer to Brussels, the sanctions demonstrates that the European Union is moving forward with its foreign policy blindly and against their own interests.

The problem the European Union has is that if it repairs its relations with Lukashenko, it will mean an acknowledgment of weakness as they were not able to achieve what they wanted in Belarus. This is in the midst of the European Union already being deeply divided between a small German-led bloc and the rest of the Union in policies towards Turkey.

Another conundrum for Brussels is that from Lukashenko’s perspective, the European Union is now untrustworthy. Successive provocations, like having diplomats lay flowers where rioters died and saying Lukashenko is an illegitimate president, has likely created a permanent rift between Minsk and Brussels. Therefore, coupled with newly passed sanctions, the European Union has lost all influence they once might have had on Minsk, and therefore weakened their own interests while strengthening Russia’s by forcing the deepening of Belarus’ ties with Moscow.

With the European Union’s divorce with the United Kingdom becoming uglier, having tense relations with Turkey, and the endless rift it has with Russia – all completely different issues to each other – European policymakers have demonstrated that they are incapable of self-reflection and identifying weaknesses and failures in their foreign policy. For what the European Union wanted to achieve in Belarus, it has been a serious failure. By not sanctioning Lukashenko, Brussels has left a door open to normalize relations. However, from Lukashenko’s perspective, he will likely end his years-long flirtation with Brussels and move to more deeply integrate Belarus with Russia.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Spain currently faces one of the greatest crises in its recent history. The second wave of COVID-19 is approaching extremely quickly, with the world record for deaths by number of inhabitants. The situation is strongly aggravated by a lack of coordination of health policies, leading the country to chaos. Still, an unprecedented economic crisis is beginning to have its first effects, in addition to a scandalous political and institutional scenario.

Spain is currently marked by a strong tension between the central government and the regional governments. For example, the government of Pedro Sánchez is considering an intervention in Madrid due to the serious health situation in the Spanish capital. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of Madrid, is accused of negligence in fighting the virus and is losing more and more allies, even within her own party. On July 5, the central government had announced a national victory against the coronavirus, assuming that the country could already return to normality with proper precautions, which greatly strengthened the image of Sanchez and his socialist party. Since then, the responsibility for controlling the pandemic was passed on to each autonomous community in Spain, leaving the regional governments to protect their own territory. Above all, the early declaration of victory over the pandemic only served to improve Sanchez’s image and transfer the responsibility to regional governments, taking the blame from the central government.

Apparently, the terrible wave that once again threatens the health of Spanish citizens and their economic and social situation is not a sufficient reason for political forces from different wings to unite to fight the pandemic. On the contrary, the virus is used as a political weapon and rhetorical instrument during the endless debates and public confrontations of the conflicting sectors, while citizens helplessly watch over 30,000 deaths due to the new coronavirus (according to official data from the government, which differs from the National Statistics Institute’s data – which points to a total of 50,000 deaths).

In parallel to the virus, relations between the King and the government have become increasingly worse. The crisis peaked in late September, when the Spanish government vetoed the King’s participation in the inauguration ceremony for new judges in Barcelona, ​​which is traditionally celebrated by the monarch. As a justification for preventing the king’s participation, the government said the measure was necessary for the “institutional security”, without providing further details. However, the most plausible thing is that the government has simply tried to prevent an increase in tensions with the Catalan separatists due to the presence of the monarch, which would be interpreted as an insult by the separatist movements. In any case, the absence of Felipe VI profoundly irritated the Judiciary Branch, which severely repudiated the government’s attitude. Subsequently, members of the Judiciary met with the king in a virtual meeting, in which the monarch endorsed the repudiation against the government. This was interpreted by the vice president of the central government, Pablo Iglesias, as a break of neutrality – which is a posture unconstitutional for the king according to Spanish law.

While the political sectors are fighting each other, the national economy is ignored, which further contributes to aggravate the approaching social crisis. Spain counts on European support to face the disaster caused by the policies of social confinement, but such aid becomes truly impotent when the country occupies the second position in the unemployment ranking in the European continent, with a figure that exceeds 16%, only surpassed by Greece.

According to the Bank of Spain, in 2021, the Gross Domestic Product could grow between 4 and 7%, a figure well below that estimate in the last summer. Unemployment, on the other hand, may exceed the 22% mark. The debt, which had already reached the historical maximum of 110% of GDP in July, growing by 89.5 billion euros, would rise to 128% in 2022. In fact, there is no way of economic recovery for Spain in the near future.

With the anticipated growth of the second wave of the pandemic, everything is only going to get worse in Spain. The main metropolises in the country continue with their stores closed, activities suspended and people off the streets. After a brief period of attempt to break the isolation through a “new normal” with mild precautionary measures, the failure of the “victory over the virus” announced in July proved to be insurmountable, bringing not only an exponential increase in the number of deaths, but making Spain once again the epicenter of the pandemic in Europe.

In fact, the solution to all of Spain’s problems goes through a central point: internal political pacification. A country that is politically fragmented, with tensions between the government head and the head of state, and the central and regional governments will not be able to carry out adequate economic and social recovery planning to overcome a crisis such as the new coronavirus pandemic. If the structures of the European Union are still in operation, the aid provided by the bloc will not be limited to economic assistance but will include a mediation of the political crisis. However, it remains to be seen whether the EU really still has such an influence on its members.

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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

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Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered on October 2, 2018 by agents of Saudi Arabia’s despotic government, and the CIA concluded they killed him on direct orders from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Eight Saudi men have been convicted of Khashoggi’s murder by a Saudi court in what the Washington Post characterized as sham trials with no transparency. The higher ups who ordered the murder, including MBS, continue to escape responsibility.

Khashoggi’s assassination and dismemberment was so horrific and cold-blooded that it sparked worldwide public outrage. President Trump, however, stood by MBS, bragging to  journalist Bob Woodward that he saved the prince’s “ass” and got “Congress to leave him alone.”

MBS’s ascent to dictatorial power, soon after his elderly father King Salman became king in January 2015, was sold to the world as ushering in a new era of reform, but has in reality been characterized by violent, ruthless repression. The number of executions has doubled, from 423 executions between 2009 and 2014 to more than 800 since January 2015.

They include the mass execution of 37 people on April 23, 2019, mostly for taking part in peaceful Arab Spring protests in 2011-12. These protests took place in Shiite areas where people face systemic discrimination in the majority Sunni kingdom. At least three of those executed were minors when they were sentenced, and one was a student arrested at the airport on his way to attend Western Michigan University. Many of the victims’ families have said that they were convicted based on forced confessions extracted by torture, and two victims’ beheaded corpses were put on public display.

Under MBS, all dissent has been crushed. In the last two years, all of Saudi Arabia’s independent human rights defenders have been imprisoned, threatened into silence, or have fled the country. This includes women’s rights activists such as Loujain al-Hathoul, who opposed the ban on women drivers. Despite some openings for women under MBS, including the right to drive, Saudi women remain subject to discrimination in law and practice, with laws that ensure they are subordinate citizens to men, particularly in relation to family matters such as marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance.

The Trump administration has never challenged Saudi Arabia’s internal repression, and worse yet, it has played a vital role in the brutal Saudi-led war on neighboring Yemen. After Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi failed to leave office at the end of his two-year term as the head of a transitional government, or to fulfill his mandate to draw up a new constitution and hold a new election, the Houthi rebel movement invaded the capital, Sana’a, in 2014, placed him under house arrest and demanded that he do his job.

Hadi instead resigned, fled to Saudi Arabia and conspired with MBS and the Saudis to launch a war to try to restore him to power. The United States has provided in-air refueling, intelligence and planning for Saudi and Emirati air strikes and has raked in over 100 billion dollars in arms sales. While U.S. support for the Saudi war began under President Obama, Trump has provided unconditional support as the horrors of this war have shocked the entire world.

The blue backpacks stand for each one of the children killed in the Saudi bombing attack on a school bus. They used a 500 pound bomb manufactured by Lockheed-Martin.

According to the Yemen Data Project, at least 30% of US-supported airstrikes on Yemen have hit civilian targets, including hospitals, health clinics, schools, marketplaces, civilian infrastructure, and a particularly horrific airstrike on a school bus that killed 40 children and 11 adults.

After five years, this brutal war has succeeded only in wreaking mass devastation and chaos, with dozens of children dying every day from starvation, malnutrition and preventable diseases, all now compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Belated Congressional efforts to end U.S. support for the war, including the passage of a War Powers bill in March 2019 and a bill to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia in July 2019, have been vetoed when they reached President Trump’s desk.

The U.S. alliance with the Saudis certainly predates Trump, going back to the discovery of oil in the 1930s. While it’s traditional role as an oil supplier is no longer vital to the U.S. economy, Saudi Arabia has become one of the largest purchasers of U.S. weapons, a major investor in U.S. businesses and an ally against Iran. After the failed U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. began grooming Saudi Arabia to play a leading geopolitical and military role, alongside Israel, in a new U.S.-led alliance to counter the growing influence of Iran, Russia and China in the Middle East.

The war on Yemen was the first test of Saudi Arabia’s role as a leading U.S. military ally, and it exposed both the practical and moral bankruptcy of this policy, unleashing another endless war and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in one of the poorest countries on Earth. MBS’s assassination of Jamal Khashoggi came at a critical moment in the unraveling of this doomed strategy, laying bare the sheer insanity of basing America’s Middle East policy for the 21st century on an alliance with a neo-feudal monarchy sustained by murder and repression.

President Obama tried to change tack towards the end of his administration, putting a hold on the sale of munitions to Saudi Arabia and signing a nuclear deal with Iran. Trump reversed both these policies, and continued to treat Saudi Arabia as a critical ally, even as the world recoiled in horror at Khashoggi’s assassination.

While Saudi abuses have not diminished the Trump administration’s unconditional support, they have ignited global opposition. In an exciting new development, exiled Saudi activists have formed a political party, the National Assembly Party or NAAS, calling for democracy and respect for human rights in the kingdom. In its inaugural statement, the party laid out a vision for Saudi Arabia in which all citizens are equal under the law and a fully elected parliament has legislative and oversight powers over the state’s executive institutions. The founding document was signed by several prominent Saudi activists in exile, including London-based professor Madawi al-Rasheed; Abdullah Alaoudh, a Saudi academic who is also the son of jailed Islamic scholar Salman al-Awda; and Shia activist Ahmed al-Mshikhs.

Another new initiative, timed for the second anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder, is the launch of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), an organization conceived by Jamal Khashoggi several months before his murder. DAWN will promote democracy and support political exiles across the Middle East, in keeping with the vision of its martyred founder.

Progressive groups in the United States continue to oppose U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s Yemen war and to push USAID to restore direct humanitarian aid that has been slashed to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen in 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. European activists have launched successful campaigns to stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia in several countries.

These past two years have also seen activists organizing boycotts of Saudi events. Pre-COVID, when the kingdom opened up to musical extravaganzas, groups such as CODEPINK and Human Rights Foundation pressured entertainers like Nicki Minaj to cancel appearances. Minaj put out a statement saying, “It is important for me to make clear my support for the rights of women, the LGBTQ community and freedom of expression.” Meghan MacLaren, the U.K.’s top woman golfer, withdrew from a lucrative new golf tournament in Saudi Arabia, citing reports by Amnesty International and saying she cannot take part in “sportwashing” Saudi human rights abuses.

A new group called Freedom Forward, which seeks to sever the US-Saudi alliance, has focused on the upcoming G20 in Riyadh, which is taking place virtually in November, urging invitees to refuse to participate. The campaign has successfully lobbied the mayors of several major cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Paris and London, to boycott the event, along with notables invited to side events for women and global thinkers.

As we mark two years since Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, we may also soon be marking the end of the Trump administration. While it is hard to take Vice President Biden on his word that he would not sell more weapons to the Saudis and would make them “pay the price” for killing Khashoggi, it is good to hear a presidential candidate admit that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia” and call it a “pariah state.” Perhaps with enough pressure from below, a new administration could start the process of disentangling the U.S. from the deadly embrace of the Saudi dictatorship.

But as long as U.S. leaders continue to coddle the Saudis, it’s difficult not to ask who is more evil—the maniacal Saudi crown prince responsible for Khashoggi’s murder and the slaughter of more than a hundred thousand Yemenis, or the mendacious Western governments and businesspeople who continue to support and profit from his crimes?

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of  Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee grilled Michael Pack, who President Trump recently appointed to head the US government’s state propaganda arm, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

Pack was appointed in June and started a big shakeup at the US state media outlets run by the USAGM, like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Pack fired senior staffers, pushed out management, and froze funding.

During last week’s hearing, Democrats and Republicans on the committee teamed up to attack Pack for his purges. But what seemed more important to Congress and former USAGM officials was Pack’s move to freeze funds to the Open Technology Fund (OTF). The OTF was formed in 2012 and operated as part of Radio Free Asia for seven years. In 2019, the OTF became an independent non-profit, although it is financed by US taxpayer dollars through the USAGM.

According to former USAGM officials and OTF board members, the OTF supports protesters in other nations across the world.

“In many places around the globe, OTF quietly is providing support to protesters,” said Grant Turner, the former USAGM chief financial officer, who Pack removed in August. “So the Hong Kong protesters are protecting their identities from surveillance by OTF tools; protesters in Iran; we’ve seen it in Beirut,” Turner said.

Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, who sits on the board of the OTF, also testified and spoke of how the OTF helps protest movements.

“OTF has a long history of supporting internet freedom efforts, and was poised to expand its efforts in Hong Kong,” Kornbluh said. “It was going to serve support for circumvention tools and expand support for digital training.”

Kornbluh explained that the USAGM froze OTF funds before China’s national security law for Hong Kong came into effect.

“And then USAGM froze, and continues to withhold, its funding – and did that just weeks before the new security laws came into effect,” Kornbluh said. “So OTF hasn’t been able to support any of these efforts.”

The frozen Hong Kong funds were first reported by Time magazine in June. According to Time, Pack froze $2 million that would have “directly benefited the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.” One project the OTF was working on in Hong Kong was a “cybersecurity incident response team” that would have analyzed Chinese surveillance techniques in Hong Kong. The team would have shared information with developers who would design apps for protesters to use. The freeze in funding made this project impossible to go through with.

Another OTF project hampered by the freeze was a $500,000 “rapid response fund, designed to provide fast relief for civil society groups, protesters, journalists, and human rights defenders.” According to Time, this initiative has already made several payouts to groups in Hong Kong since the civil unrest began in June 2019.

The cut in funding inadvertently revealed the US government’s covert role in the Hong Kong protest movement. The US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy also provides funding for “pro-democracy” movements in Hong Kong.

Besides the US government supporting Hong Kong protesters through cutout organizations like the OTF and NED, there has been more overt interference in the city. Throughout the demonstrations, protesters were seen waving US flags and calling for Congress to pass legislation. Leaders of the movement even traveled to Washington and testified before Congress, pleading for US intervention.

President Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law in November 2019. The administration has since sanctioned Hong Kong officials and changed the city’s special trade status. This US interference gave Beijing the foreign boogeyman it needed to pass the controversial national security law.

Pack was appointed to head the USAGM after the White House accused Voice of America of repeating Chinese state propaganda in its coronavirus coverage. Considering this, the damage Pack’s overhaul did to the OTF’s support for protesters in Hong Kong was likely an unintended consequence.

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Dave DeCamp is the assistant news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

“Mendacity is a system we live in.” – Paul Newman, playing Brick in Tennessee Williams’, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

A profusion of philosophical, psychological, and political ink has been spent on the subject of lying and liars.  The toll in loves lost and relationships destroyed from lying is incalculable. All the war dead are victims of government lies; what Marine Major General Smedley Butler called a “racket.” Lies are poison, slow or quick working, and they kill both body and soul.

We are living in a country of lies.  A country where propaganda is disseminated around the clock and lies are the air we breathe.  Is it any wonder that most people are confused as to what to believe and whom to trust?  But it goes much deeper.

I have recently read a number of perceptive, truthful articles that have gotten me thinking further about this subject, although I must add that I have been preoccupied with the issue since I was very young and my father took me to see Pinocchio in the movie theater and subsequently told me improvised Pinocchio stories before bedtime.  Whether he knew it or not – and I think he knew – he set me on a lifetime’s quest to try to distinguish truth from lies and embrace the former.  Then as a teenager, I appeared on a very popular television show, To Tell the Truth.  I was recruited to lie, to play the part of an impostor, which I did quite well. I lied for the money and probably would have made a good lying politician if fate hadn’t interceded. It was only later that my actions and the show’s title kept reverberating through my mind, echoing down my days to the present and my interest in truth, lies, and propaganda.  From my father came a love for the redeeming nature of stories.

***

“More and more often there is embarrassment all around,” wrote Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller, “when the wish to hear a story is expressed.  It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”

***

It was getting dark on the street as the young man emerged from his high school on New York’s Upper East Side after basketball practice.  He had lost track of time as he dreamed his basketball dreams and headed to the subway for the long ride home.  It was December, 1961. A man, dressed in a cashmere overcoat and carrying a silver bowl, was walking his dog on the street.  The boy asked him for the time.  The man told him, adding with a grin that his watch always ran fast.  The boy recognized the grin from what seemed like a dream.  He pet the man’s dog, and the man asked him about the imposing school next to them.  He asked the boy his name and the boy said “Eddie.”  While the dog did its business in the street, they chatted for a few minutes.  The man wished him luck with his basketball and said his name was Paul. As the boy hustled toward the subway, Paul Newman shouted after him, “See you later, Fast Eddie.”

The next week the boy went to see Paul Newman playing Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler. He always remembered Paul’s words about mendacity and his words from The Hustler:

Fast Eddie: How should I play that one, Bert? Play it safe? That’s the way you always told me to play it: safe… play the percentage. Well, here we go: fast and loose. One ball, corner pocket. Yeah, percentage players die broke, too, don’t they, Bert?

Lies are a common way of playing it safe.  Except they kill the liar.

***

In an article by Mike Whitney, “Betrayal, Infuriating Betrayal,” in which he writes about the Democrats’ ongoing efforts – Russia-gate, etc. – to remove Trump from the presidency, efforts based on a string of lies they know to be lies [ my emphasis] and have been proven to be so, he wonders thus toward the end:

It’s surprising that this doesn’t piss-off more Democrats, after all, it’s the ultimate expression of contempt and condescension. When someone lies to your face relentlessly, repeatedly and shamelessly, they are expressing their loathing for you. Can’t they see that?

Of course, that’s a very good question.

I read Jonathan’s Cook’s piece, “The Guardian’s deceit-riddled new statement betrays both Julian Assange and journalism.”  Cook rightly excoriates The Guardian  for lying about Assange and betraying him to the British and American governments, long-standing lies [my emphasis] that continue to today as Julian sits in a British kangaroo court where injustice is being served to extradite him to the USA.  Here is one point he makes;

Nauseatingly, however, the Guardian not only seeks to blame Assange for its own mistake but tells a glaring lie about the circumstances. Its statement says: ‘No concerns were expressed by Assange or WikiLeaks about security being compromised when the book was published in February 2011. WikiLeaks published the unredacted files in September 2011.’

Then I read another fine article at Asia Times, by MK Bhadrakumar, “Permafrost descends on US-Russia ties,”  about a bipartisan Senate bill aimed at demonizing Russia.  The bill is led by Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware.  Bhadrakumar writes:

The fallout of all this is going to be profound for the Sino-Russian alliance. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hit out last week: ‘It is time to stop applying Western metrics to our actions and stop trying to be liked by the West at any cost … the West is wittingly or unwittingly pushing us towards this analysis.

‘It is likely to be done unwittingly [my emphasis]. However, it is a big mistake to think that Russia will play by Western rules in any case, just like thinking this in terms of China.’

I was struck by Lavrov’s word “wittingly or unwittingly” – diplomatic speech – since he knows the Senator’s bill is filled with lies but suggests otherwise – “It is likely to be done unwittingly.”

Finally, I read an article by Philip Roddis, “Julian, Guardian, and the Law of Volitionality.”  As a lead-in to his announced topic, he tells a little tale about his step-mother that struck me.  It is worth quoting in full:

Indulge me a moment, will you? At fifteen I acquired a stepmother. We never got on. Her and dad’s insistence that she be called “mum” didn’t help. For the two years we spent in the same house – I left home weeks before turning seventeen – I never addressed her by name or title.

She had dad round her little finger. One ploy was to badger him into making a ruling against me. Once she’d done so, she’d beg him to relent. “Oh it’s alright, Frank. Let him … ” [do/have whatever it was she’d got him to forbid]. But no way was he going to u-turn at this point. A matter of pride, you see. I saw this little comedy for what it was but dad fell for it every time.

And here’s the thing. Maybe she did too. She got her way, but I don’t rule out her motives for that post victory appeal being hidden to – and by – her. My flawed but brilliant teacher said that everybody knows what they’re doing. Indeed, it was so fundamental a tenet he gave it a name: The Law of Volitionality. Yes, he took it to absurd and at times cruel lengths but for all that he was onto something. To manage cognitive dissonance – to maintain a sense of being fundamentally good – we play games with ourselves. Stepmother was likely fooling herself almost as much as dad with her tiresome shenanigans.

It’s not that she wasn’t being manipulative. Just that an essential ingredient of the manipulation, vital to maintaining self-esteem, was a decision – volitionally squirrelled away, out of sight from everyday awareness – to hoodwink herself. [my emphasis]

You can find such examples every day.  Articles about lies tossed about by all sides of the political spectrum are commonplace.

I think it fair to say that everyone has lied at some point, but only the most manipulative are proud of it.  “The essence of the lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre.  This cynical consciousness that knows the truth but denies it to others is a perfect description of  politicians, propagandists, intelligence services, and their media mouthpieces. They know they are lying and are proud of it, but of course they will never admit it.

Most people are not that manipulative.  Sartre says there is another type of liar who suffers from bad faith.  While they lie to others, they also try to lie to themselves and hide the truth from themselves.  People often say that this person and that one really believe their own lies, that they are deluded, but this is not possible.  For “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as a deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.”

I have recently been thinking that many people who are adamantly insistent on the efficacy of mask-wearing against SARS-CoV-2, the virus associated with COVID-19, and  those who are always quoting the official statistics, are of this sort.  They either know there is good evidence against mask-wearing and the official statistical game, but try to convince themselves this isn’t so, or they avoid reading about the possibility to save face and live with themselves  – both acts of bad faith.  Such people are like Philip Roddis’s step-mother.  But in this case, the bad faith is about a Big Lie, just as the fake fight between Trump and Biden has induced many people to take bad faith sides in a scene from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

Had spoiled his nice new rattle”

So Tweedledee and Tweedledum

Had their scrum

All about the rattle.

When it was done

Only the dumb

Gave a shit about their battle

***

Last year, I was at a large library book sale and came upon an odd box of typed manuscripts of stories that lacked the author’s name.  They were free and so I took a few.  There was one very short story, entitled “Fear,” that struck me for its haunting connection to the issue of lies. “Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell,” wrote Benjamin, which seems so true with this anonymous story. Here it is:

Listen, that’s what I want to say to them.  Listen, this is one of those stories hard to believe.  When I first heard it, I doubted it completely.  Of course I was telling it and that might have been a factor.  It’s hard, once you hear your own voice, to believe it’s you.  After a while, however, I became convinced it had to be true.  I couldn’t make up anything so odd, so sick if you prefer.  At first the voice sounded strange, but once I realized it was really mine, I understood I was revealing this pathetic tale under great duress and it was understandable that my voice sounded foreign.

You should take that into account.  I am a very sick man.  I realize that now.  In the beginning, I thought I was surely dying, until, that is, I saw that I was already dead.  Dying was beside the point.  I was dead.  Naturally this came as a great surprise to me.  Now you might reasonably ask, how did this absurd situation come about, and how can a dead man write words?  Let me tell you.

It began when I was born while the world was engaged in one of its periodic slaughters. No, periodic is not true.  Those slaughters are constant.

So you wonder what my astrological sign is?  The mushroom cloud of course.  A cancer born under the sign of the mushroom.

Anyway, I have been living for decades now and you’d think I would have seen the obvious.  I didn’t, or that’s what I told myself.  Not for the life of me.  I kept going on as if I were alive when I was dead.  It’s obvious now: the dead never know they’re dead until… But I didn’t know it, and you can imagine, I hope, how this caused me many problems.

Don’t laugh.

That was the year I disappeared.

She asked me: “But are you content?”

– No, I wouldn’t say that.

– So you’re not?  It’s hard to tell?  Tell me.

– No, not really.

– Not really what?

– Not really content.

– What would give you contentment?

– I’m not sure.

– You mean to say you have no idea?

– No, not that.  I guess if I thought about it …

– Do that, that’s what I’m asking you.  You must have thought about it before.

– Sure I have but…

– Why the but?  You’re so hesitant about everything.  You don’t know, you doubt, maybe, but, perhaps.  Why are you so unsure?

I had no satisfactory answer.  I could only stumble over my words.  I was afraid they would trip me up, especially if I spoke without premeditation. I was used to hesitating so I could control things.  That’s not exactly true.  When I realized I was dead, I also realized it was because I had always been a liar, to myself and others.

It was then I disappeared.

Since coming here, I have been resolved to change.  Yes, the outside world was making me sick with all its lies and deceptions.  Mendacity, mendacity, mendacity – I heard someone in a play scream that out once. I never forgot it, and I felt I was going mad because of it.  But I too was a liar, so I resolved to change.

No more bullshit.  That was my number one resolution.  It sounded crude but was true. Next to it, I listed euphemisms for bullshit: exaggeration, manners, civility, tolerance, modesty , mental reservations, kindness, and of course lies.  Bullshit was lies and self-deception.  Simple as that. I couldn’t admit that I was dead; that was bullshit, and I was dead because I was a bullshit artist and just wanted to be an artist and write stories that were true.  I have always lied so much because, like everyone else, I was afraid of the truth. Saying it, hearing it, or seeing it.  I much preferred ideas of what should be true rather than what was true, or what I really thought was true.  I was afraid if I gave up lying I would feel lonelier than I did before.  Where did it get me anyway?  Where does it get anyone?  I have always hated myself for it.  This all seemed so weird to me; how everyone nodded at truth, just as they nodded to each other, and then went on lying their ways through life.  And if you asked them if they were lying, they would invariably deny it.  Oh, it’s so twisted.  I am sick. I don’t know where I’m going with this story.  It seems to have a life of its own, unlike me.

I didn’t really disappear.  They took me here.  I am so afraid.

That was it.  Short and eerie.   It reminded me of Kafka, who wrote in his diary: “The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps redeeming comfort that there is in writing.”

***

“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

That’s what the CIA has inscribed on the wall of its headquarters: The George Bush Center for Intelligence.

More appropriately, as a description of not only the CIA but American society as a whole, are Ken Kesey’s words from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.”

That’s not a lie.

Yes, “Mendacity is the system we live in.”

And the odor here is really loathsome.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site.

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

Featured image is by Julie Maas

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Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Author: Edward Curtin

ISBN: 9781949762266

Published: 2020

Options: EBOOK – Epub and Kindle, paper, PDF

Click here to order.

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Watching the network news on television or reading about current events in the newspapers seemingly transports one to an alternate universe where nothing seems to make sense. The profit driven news cycle in the United States is admittedly a poor mechanism for actually gaining an understanding of what is going on, but seven days of Ruth Bader Ginsburg worship hardly addresses what is ailing the country, particularly as questions about how she earned many millions of dollars while serving as a judge as well as some unsavory aspects of her career have been carefully buried.

A friend who is a retired U.S. Army general made an interesting comment several days ago, observing that when it comes to politics and voting patterns the so-called “silent majority” is indeed silent. What he meant was that many Americans who hold currently unpopular conservative views will not respond honestly to a call from an unknown pollster regarding voting intentions. This is particularly true of the current campaign in which Donald Trump is being reviled by the media and depicted by the Democrats as no less than a threat to American democracy. Biden by way of comparison pretty much gets a free pass, to include forgiveness for his frequent faux pas and mental lapses. In other words, Trump is being framed as someone poised to mount a totalitarian takeover of the United States, which in and of itself would disincline many voters to indicate openly that they would support him over Biden.

My friend was suggesting that the polls on the upcoming election just might be more than usually wrong. I would add to that the general vapidity of what one might expect from the presidential debates, which are similarly being framed in such a fashion as to avoid any topics that might really matter. But the polls do reveal two things. First, that there is a lack of any confidence in the integrity of politicians at all levels, and second, that jobs and healthcare are the principal concerns of nearly all voter demographics as they directly impact on quality of life.

Healthcare is admittedly a complicated issue given the fact that the entire system in the United States would have to be reformed, with considerable government intervention. The respected British medical journal The Lancet recently published “Measuring universal health coverage based on an index of effective coverage of health services in 204 countries and territories”. The study revealed, to no one’s surprise, that the United States has by far the world’s most expensive medical care, at around $9,000 per person per year while at the same time delivering poorer results than virtually any other industrialized nation. Medical expenses are in fact a leading cause of personal bankruptcy by Americans.

So, what are the two parties saying about health care? The Republicans want to overturn so-called Obamacare and replace it with something else which they cannot describe while the Democrats insist that they want to keep Obamacare in place while also blaming the president for the response to the coronavirus. That’s it. There is plenty of blame to go around on Covid-19 and Obamacare is in fact a bad program. It is good if the government is footing the bill for you, but anyone who is paying for his or her own insurance has seen the rates treble and even quadruple since the program became active. It has become a gold mine for the health care industry, which now assumes that it can charge whatever it wants and the suffering customer will be obliged to pay for it. That there is no effective regulation of health care is due to the fact that Big Pharma and other providers have completely corrupted Congress through political donations to make sure that the highly profitable status quo remains untouched.

And when it comes to the other great concern, “The Economy,” which means jobs, the two major parties have even less to say since they know deep down that they have both conspired in the gutting of America’s industrial and manufacturing infrastructure.

But another area dear to my own heart which the parties have been silent about is Foreign Policy, which also subsumes National Security, a related issue that the opinion polls do not specifically address. Both parties are strong on issuing position papers that refer to supporting allies, meaning Israel followed by everyone else, confronting threats from Russia and China, and maintaining the world’s number one military. Beyond that it gets a bit vague. We have recently learned from a possibly unreliable source named Bob Woodward that President Trump sought to assassinate Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad but was talked out of. Trump did order the assassination of senior Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, whom he and Secretary of State have recently described as the “world’s leading terrorist,” which is manifestly untrue. Is assassinating foreign leaders something that the United States wants to engage in? Why is no one talking about it?

And then there are the “hot wars” being fought in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan. None of those wars benefit from a constitutionally mandated declaration of war by Congress and they have cost the U.S. taxpayer trillions of dollars. Shouldn’t that be under discussion? Or the “maximum pressure” economic wars being waged against Venezuela, Cuba, Syria and Iran? Those “wars” have collectively killed tens of thousands of civilians and have done nothing to enhance the security of the United States. Shouldn’t Trump and Biden be talking about that?

Instead, we will see much finger pointing and hear a lot about how dangerous a win by either presidential candidate will be, all couched in general terms based on a lot of “what-ifs.” But what the American public needs, particularly the silent majority, is a viable plan for decent and affordable healthcare similar to what most of the rest of the world enjoys. And a new government also must act decisively to challenge corporate offshoring interests to bring manufacturing jobs back home. But most of all, the United States needs peace after nineteen years of spreading chaos all over the globe. End the wars and bring the troops home. Do it now.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“Looking back, I can see that we have a situation which I compare with the Third Reich…Joseph Goebbels, he was the Minister of Propaganda, and he said “if you repeat a message long enough, loud enough, hard enough, at the end everybody believes it.” And I think the crux of the problem is in the media.” – Doctor quoted in this interview.

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With the weather getting colder, people in Canada and all around the globe are witnessing a rising incidence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Prime Minister Trudeau was quoted as saying during a speech to the people of Canada the following:

“The second wave isn’t just starting, it’s already underway.”

Children are going to school in masks, just as everyone is forced to wear masks anywhere that’s indoors in some places. As the struggle worsens, people fear the return of spring-time lock downs and all the hardship springing from it.

Provoked by daily reports by politicians, chief public health officers, and the mainstream media, people might be understandably terrified. On the other hand, there are rational voices singing from the hymn book of sober second thoughts.

These voices belong to people called doctors.

As we reported in our last show, Doctor Sucharit Bhakdi in his book, Corona, False Alarm, laid out how the evidence of the panic was unreliable, how the COVID 19 was in fact no worse than a typical flu virus, and how the lockdowns cause more difficulties than the disease itself.

There are many, many more doctors also raising their voices calling for their nations and the world to rethink their COVID strategy. They are particularly effective in Europe. These include a petition signed by 2662 doctors and medical practitioners in the Netherlands, a public conference made up of 400 doctors in Spain, a Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee  made up of about 500 Doctors and scientists in Germany, and a public letter from Belgium signed by over 1500 people in the medical and scientific community.

Sadly, these people cannot get their voices in regular media.

This week, on the Global Research News Hour, we work to give these experts some space, and possibly assuage the out if control panic sweeping our society.

Our guests for the hour are two doctors with the group: Docs 4 Open Debate. For most of the program they speak about the unreliable test numbers, unreliable masks, the WHO’s role in this, and the determination to not just ignore but punish those in the profession who speak out.

Docs 4 Open Debate is a group in Belgium doctors and health professionals intent on demanding more critical analysis of the pandemic fight, relaxation of the extreme emergency measures, and freedom to express their positions on mainstream media. They crafted an open letter to this end which has so far been signed by 515 physicians and 1767 medically trained health professionals. Their site is docs4opendebate.be

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

As the pandemic continues to claim lives across the country, new information keeps coming out about how the Trump administration has made it harder for Americans to protect themselves.

We now know, for example, that early in the pandemic the U.S. Postal Service had planned to deliver five face masks to every U.S. household. It could have made mask-wearing a lot more common a lot earlier — and maybe saved a lot of lives. But the White House scrapped the idea.

Now we also know that the Trump administration took $1 billion in stimulus funds that were supposed to go towards making masks and other protective equipment for the pandemic — and gave most of it to weapons manufacturers.

Those funds were part of $10.6 billion in CARES Act money allocated to the Pentagon — a staggering sum, especially since the bloated military budget already claims 53 cents of every discretionary federal dollar available to Congress.

The Pentagon’s CARES money was supposed to help military employees and military families survive the pandemic.

The $1 billion in question was granted under a special law that lets the Pentagon require companies to manufacture urgently needed goods in case of a national emergency. This time, it was to make sure companies producing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), like N-95 masks, ventilators, and more, were making all they could.

But most of that money didn’t go to making PPE at all. Trump’s defense department gave it to corporations that make jet engines, drone flight controllers, and dress uniforms for the military. Two-thirds of it was distributed in big contracts worth more than $5 million each.

The military says that the “health” of the defense industry is crucial to national security. But the CARES Act money was specifically allocated to protect the health of the people of this country — not the companies that build weapons.

This comes at a moment when U.S. military spending is already near all-time highs — and when military contractors are doing better than lots of other companies.

“Major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman,” the Washington Post reports, “have remained financially healthy despite some pandemic-related disruption, and have continued to pay stock dividends to investors.”

Indeed, the CEOs of those companies rank among the highest paid corporate executives in the country. Last year General Dynamics’s CEO raked in $18 million, Northrup Grumman’s made $20 million, and Lockheed-Martin’s pulled in a whopping $31 million.

Still, many of those same military corporations paid out of the $1 billion Pentagon slush fund also applied for — and received — funds from the federal Paycheck Protection Program that Congress designated specifically to prevent COVID-related lay-offs. These extra Pentagon grants came on top of that, except without any requirements to protect jobs. Those companies could take the money and still fire as many employees as they want.

An additional $1 billion would have made a huge difference in the fight against COVID-19. My colleagues created a federal budget calculator. It shows that $1 billion could have funded nearly 28 million COVID-19 tests or purchased over 294 million N-95 respirator masks.

What makes us safer in the pandemic — access to more testing and a lot more face masks, or helping military corporations and their CEOs make a killing on our tax money?

Add that to the canceled Postal Service plan to distribute hundreds of millions more masks, and the record keeps getting more appalling. Make no mistake: The Trump administration’s heartlessness and militarism are costing lives.

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Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org

Featured image is from Shutterstock

On September 23, María Eugenia Russián, president of Fundalatin, Venezuela’s oldest human rights organization, testified to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and decried an attempt by a UNHRC fact-finding mission to erase people who were “lynched, burned alive, decapitated and murdered by extremist sectors of the Venezuelan opposition.” This fact-finding mission had published a report a week earlier that generated sensationalist headlines of “crimes against humanity” and painted a bleak picture of the situation in Venezuela.

However, the 400+ page report has been found to contain serious flaws and omissions, leading to charges that it politicizes human rights – a position backed by the Venezuelan government. But it’s not just Venezuela that has taken issue with the report: Argentina’s ambassador to the Organization of American States denounced it as “biased” and noted that “human rights are not an instrument for taking political positions.”

A parallel mission and attack on multilateralism

Moreover, even the formation of the fact-finding mission is suspect. Since 2017, Venezuela has been working with a different UN institution, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), to strengthen its capacity to guarantee human rights. This cooperation has led to technical agreements and to visits by the OHCHR to Venezuela.

Yet despite – or perhaps because – of this cooperation, the Lima Group, an ad hoc group of nations dedicated to regime change in Venezuela, maneuvered in the UN Human Rights Council to establish a parallel mission outside of the purview of the OHCHR. In the September 2019 debate prior to the founding of this mission, Russián said that it “seeks to thwart the advances between the Office of the High Commissioner and the Venezuelan state, hindering and duplicating its efforts.” She also made a prescient comment: “[the mission] will generate major headlines but will not contribute to resolving the situation.”

Several Venezuelan human rights organizations, including the Venezuelan Association of Jurists (AVJ), denounced the formation of the mission and the subsequent report as an attack on multilateralism. The AVJ notes that according to UN General Assembly Resolution 60/251, “the promotion and protection of human rights should be based on the principles of cooperation and genuine dialogue and aimed at strengthening the capacity of Member States.”

Neither of these principles were adhered to in the report, which means that the fact-finding mission violated the United Nation’s own guidelines. This contrasts severely with the latest update on Venezuela from the OHCHR, which notes that technical cooperation between Venezuela and the UN has led to progress in investigating 93 alleged cases of extrajudicial killings or excessive use of force, as well as the pardoning of 110 prisoners.

Flawed methodology, biased sources and egregious omissions

The first thing to note about the report is that the authors are all from countries that support Guaidó. One of them, Francisco Cox, has close ties to the Chilean Foreign Minister (Chile is one of the Latin American countries leading the charge against Venezuela). In an interview with journalist Anya Parampil, Chilean analyst Esteban Silva noted that Cox “is part of an operation against the government of Venezuela.”

Venezuelan human rights organization Sures considers that the report “lacks academic rigor” as the mission did not step foot in Venezuela “and as such never had direct access to the sources it consulted, including the victims, government officials and official records.” Lending credence to the claim of a lack of rigor is the fact that more than 50% of the report’s sources were links to social and digital media, while just 5% were NGOs.

Misión Verdad, an independent group of Venezuelan investigative journalists and analysts, wrote an exposé of the sources used in the report and found that one of these NGOs, COFAVIC (Committee of Relatives of Victims of the Caracazo), receives USAID funds and has ties to Human Rights Watch, which supports regime change and the brutal US sanctions. None of the NGOs the fact-finding mission contacted even mentioned the case of Orlando Figuera, a young Black man burned alive by anti-government protestors, which has arguably been the most infamous violation of human rights in Venezuela in recent years.

If the report were interested in balance, it would have cited or contacted Venezuelan human rights groups that document right-wing violence at protests and the devastating effects of U.S. sanctions. Five such organizations were contacted for this article: Fundalatin, AJV, Sures, Género con Clase (Gender with Class), and the Committee of Victims of the Guarimba and Ongoing Coup (guarimba is the term used for violent opposition protests in 2013, 2014 and 2017). None of them ever heard from the “independent” mission.

While victims like Figuera are ignored, another detailed critique by Misión Verdad documents the repeated “whitewashing” of political actors linked to violence by presenting them as victims. As analyst Joe Emersberger notes, the report’s treatment of opposition figure Leopoldo López ignores the leading role he has played in destabilizing Venezuela since 2002. López’s regime change strategy in 2014, ‘La Salida’, sparked opposition violence that resulted in the decapitation of Elvis Durán; he was riding a motorcycle down a street booby trapped by protestors with barbed wire. López’s name appears 61 times in the report; Durán’s does not appear at all.

As tragic as it is that a UN mission would engage in the erasure of victims of human rights violations perpetrated by government opponents, these are not even the most glaring omissions in the report. There are two ongoing mass violations of the human rights of all Venezuelans: the violent destabilization of the country by foreign and domestic actors, and the brutal U.S. sanctions. For Gisela Jiménez of Género con Clase, an organization that focuses on the rights of women and sexual diversity, currently the biggest challenge to the rights of Venezuelans is “the threat to the right to live in peace.” Russián of Fundalatin dates the biggest violation of human rights to March 2015, when then-President Obama characterized Venezuela as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. Since then, she notes, ”the Venezuelan people have been subjected to violations of their right to health and even the right to life, due to the embargo and the obstruction of imports of medicine, food and supplies.”

The report in the context of a hybrid war

Beyond the bias and politicization of the report, what perhaps damns it most is how it is being used. The omissions on the impact of coups and sanctions enable regime change operatives such as Elliott Abrams, U.S. special representative for Iran and Venezuela, to cite the report as evidence of crimes against humanity while, in the same breath, threatening to cut off Venezuela’s diesel supplies, which has drawn widespread condemnation from NGOs across the political spectrum for the devastating effect it would have on the Venezuelan people.

The report was similarly used by Senators Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin, who referenced it in a letter to the European Union in which they expressed “deep concern” over EU talks with the Maduro government and urged the EU to not monitor Venezuela’s parliamentary elections. This blatant attempt at interfering in and attempting to delegitimize Venezuela’s elections went uncovered by mainstream media, which focused all of their attention on the UNHCR report.

Furthermore, the timing of the report was also suspect, coming just a week before the 2020 UN General Assembly. Its purpose in this regard is clear: to add fuel to the fire in Venezuela and to shift the spotlight from U.S. allies with their own human rights issues. The timely release allowed Colombian president Duque and Chilean president Piñera to cite it and Venezuela in their general assembly speeches. In Colombia, 64 massacres have taken place this year alone, while the Piñera government in Chile was almost brought down by his government’s excessive use of force against peaceful protestors. Yet it was Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó who made the headlines, invoking the report while calling on the international community to exercise its “responsibility to protect” in a YouTube webinar on the sidelines of the General Assembly. The responsibility to protect is a doctrine used as the justification for military aggressions against Libya and Syria, among others.

The fact-finding mission has produced a document that is currently being employed in the furtherance of sanctions, electoral interference and threats of war. To put it another way, the UNHCR report on the human rights of Venezuelans will likely lead to even more suffering for Venezuelans. In the words of Fundalatin President Russián, the threat to the human rights of Venezuelans “becomes graver because of the behavior by powerful states, who in the name of human rights, seek a foreign military intervention in Venezuela.”

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Leonardo Flores is a Latin American policy analyst and campaigner with CODEPINK.

Featured image: Fundalatin President María Eugenia Russián outside of the United Nations

The Old Bailey has been the venue for a trial that should never have taken place. But during the course of these extradition proceedings against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder accused by the US Department of Justice for violating the US Espionage Act (17 charges) and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an impressive battalion of defence witnesses has been called upon.  They have assisted Assange’s legal team to build a picture of obscene politicisation, imperial overreach and wanton callousness. 

A picture of the detention facilities awaiting the publisher was painted with fine strokes: the alienating brutality of solitary confinement; likely special administrative measures restraining the detainee’s access to legal representation and family; inadequate health facilities both physical and mental for those at risk of self-harm.  Then came the chilling realisation, made clear on the seventeenth day: that the US intelligence services, through the Spanish security firm UC Global SL, had conducted surveillance of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and proposed kidnapping or poisoning a political asylee.

Peirce and violations of attorney-client privilege 

In the court on Thursday, attention turned to written submissions from human rights activist Gareth Peirce, Assange’s solicitor, who described brazen breaches of attorney-client privilege.  Trial observers noted how “extraordinarily difficult” it had been to follow Peirce’s statements, largely because of Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s penchant for preventing a full reading in the court.

Despite such stints of constipation, the point of Peirce’s submissions was clear enough.  Legally privileged documents were seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.  The Ecuadorean intelligence service was complicit.  Two diplomatic pouches with USB sticks were placed in a diplomatic bag, sent to Ecuador, then onwards to the United States.

Peirce claimed that, between 2017 and 2018, three legally privileged meetings were subjected to surveillance without her knowledge.  Assange’s Spanish lawyer Aitor Martínez was also the subject of such intrusion, his legal file photographed when absent in a meeting with his client.  The legal team representing Assange had a nagging sense that their gatherings might be monitored.  While not knowing the full extent of such intrusions, “an exceptionally high level of anxiety” was present during those meetings.

Martínez also furnished the court with an update on the criminal investigation against UC Global SL director David Morales, being conducted by Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional.  Morales’s part in this sordid matter was much in evidence the day before, when his role in facilitating surveillance of Assange and his embassy meetings, at the behest of his “American friends”, was given a generous airing by former employees of his company.  The outcome of that case may well shed light upon an already troubling bridge linking UC Global with the Central Intelligence Agency and Las Vegas Sands, owned by Trump supporter and Republican donor, Sheldon Adelson.

Tigar’s testimony and abuse of power 

Testimony from Professor Michael Tigar of Duke Law School was read, drawing parallels between the abuses of power perpetrated by the Nixon administration in 1971 and those of the Trump administration vis-à-vis Assange. 

The first case centred on the outcome of President Richard Nixon’s attempts to prosecute the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.  After the publication of the papers, Nixon’s staffers formed a covert unit known as the “White House Plumbers,” a blunt outfit that proceeded to commit crimes with abandon for the unforgettable Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP).  Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was burgled by the Plumbers in an effort to pilfer his medical files; Nixon ordered the illegal wiretapping of Ellsberg; the government then claimed to have mislaid those wiretaps when asked to produce them at trial.  And just to spice things further, US District Court Judge William M. Byrne, Jr., presiding over Ellsberg’s trial, was also approached by Nixon and his assistant for domestic affairs, John D. Ehrlichman, about the possibility of becoming the FBI’s next director.  Judge Byrne could only conclude that the government’s actions had “offended a sense of justice,” leading him to declare “a mistrial and grant the motion for dismissal.”

The US intelligence effort against Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, perpetrated through UC Global’s installation of surveillance facilities, threw up richly disturbing similarities.  Confidential files had been accessed; privileged conversations with lawyers had been recorded; over eager proposals for kidnapping or poisoning Assange expressed.  For Ellsberg, this was certainly damning.  “That’s essentially the same information that ended my case and confronted Nixon with impeachment, leading to his resignation.”

Baraitser’s exclusions 

Patience on the bench, and among the prosecution team, began to wear thin.  The prosecution, led by James Lewis QC, argued that the defence had run out of time.  Objections mounted, temperatures rose.  Material was excluded.  Judge Baraitser decided to exclude one of Peirce’s witness statements addressing the new allegations made in the second superseding indictment served in July.  The statement, argued the defence, was only appropriate to address “fresh and different” allegations the prosecution only saw fit to include at a later date. 

She also batted away the defence’s effort to submit a statement made by US Attorney General William Barr on September 15, outlining his belief that the executive branch had “virtually unchecked discretion” in deciding whether or not to initiate prosecutions. “The power to execute and enforce the law is an executive function altogether,” Barr stated.  “That means discretion is invested in the executive to determine when to exercise prosecutorial power.”

Readying the ground 

The ground, then, is being readied for closing arguments by the defence.  Three areas promise to feature.  The first is the heavy air of political motivation in the prosecution of Assange.  Outlets that had published the unredacted cables prior to WikiLeaks doing so on September 2, 2011, and left unmolested by the DOJ and law enforcement, suggest distinct targeting.  To this can be added the manoeuvrings in the Trump administration, noted in the testimony of Cassandra Fairbanks, about the decision to arrest Assange.  A clear change of heart had manifested in the matter, given the loss of interest shown by the Obama administration in pursuing the publisher.  Coupled with the theory of executive power endorsed by the Attorney General Barr – that such an officer should defer to the views of the presidential office in determining prosecutions – add to claims that this is a politically driven endeavour.

The second focuses on an abuse of power, sharply drawn in the testimony of two anonymous former employees of UC Global.  The third: that Assange, should he be extradited, will face cruel and inhumane treatment.  Frail health and appalling prison conditions at both the pre-trial Alexandria Detention Center, and the post-trial ADX Florence supermax in Colorado, promise to be a debilitating, even lethal mix.

With the evidence now in her possession, Baraitser will have much to get through.  Unfortunately, we are none the wiser about what items of evidence her judicial mind will accept or reject.  The jaw dropping accounts of embassy espionage, suggested poisoning and proposed kidnapping of Assange may be deemed, as the prosecutors insist, irrelevant to the charges at hand. 

A date for judgment was also set.  “Unless any further application for bail is made, and between now and the 4^th of January, you will remain in custody for the same reasons as you have been before,” Baraister explained to Assange.

After the adjournment, Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris spoke of the highest of stakes, of this being not merely a fight for life but press freedom and truth.  “This case is already chilling press freedom. It is a frontal assault on journalism, on the public’s right to know and our ability to hold governments, domestic and foreign, to account.”

Moris noted, with pertinence, the prosecution’s admission, under oath “that it has no evidence that a single person has ever come to any physical harm because of these publications.  Let me repeat that: there is no evidence that a single person has ever come to any physical harm because of these publications.”  Assange was in prison for informing “you of actual crimes and atrocities being committed by a foreign power.  That foreign power has ripped away his freedom and torn our family apart.”  It was a power determined “to put him in incommunicado detention in the deepest darkest hole of its prison system for the rest of his life.”

Assange will continue spending time at Belmarsh Prison, one of Britain’s most notorious facilities reserved for only the most hardened species of criminal.   He will put in court appearances every 28 days via videolink.  The defence will submit closing arguments on November 16; the prosecution will then make its final pitch to convince the court two weeks later.  The legions of press members, writers and scribblers should now ruminate, along with Judge Baraitser, about the consequences of this entire process.  Moris is clear about one of them.  “The US administration won’t stop with him.  The US says that it can put any journalist, anywhere in the world, on trial in the US if it doesn’t like what they are publishing.” 

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

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

I really do not know how to report Wednesday’s events. Stunning evidence, of extreme quality and interest, was banged out in precis by the lawyers as unnoticed as bags of frozen chips coming off a production line.

The court that had listened to Clair Dobbin spend four hours cross-examining Carey Shenkman on individual phrases of first instance court decisions in tangentially relevant cases, spent four minutes as Noam Chomsky’s brilliant exegesis of the political import of this extradition case was rapidly fired into the court record, without examination, question or placing into the context of the legal arguments about political extradition.

Twenty minutes sufficed for the reading of the “gist” of the astonishing testimony of two witnesses, their identity protected as their lives may be in danger, who stated that the CIA, operating through Sheldon Adelson, planned to kidnap or poison Assange, bugged not only him but his lawyers, and burgled the offices of his Spanish lawyers Baltazar Garzon. This evidence went unchallenged and untested.

The rich and detailed evidence of Patrick Cockburn on Iraq and of Andy Worthington on Afghanistan was, in each case, well worthy of a full day of exposition. I should love at least to have seen both of them in the witness box explaining what to them were the salient points, and adding their personal insights. Instead we got perhaps a sixth of their words read rapidly into the court record. There was much more.

I have noted before, and I hope you have marked my disapproval, that some of the evidence is being edited to remove elements which the US government wish to challenge, and then entered into the court record as uncontested, with just a “gist” read out in court. The witness then does not appear in person. This reduces the process from one of evidence testing in public view to something very different. Wednesday confirmed the acceptance that this “Hearing” is now devolved to an entirely paper exercise. It is in fact no longer a “hearing” at all. You cannot hear a judge reading. Perhaps in future it should be termed not a hearing but an “occasional rustling”, or a “keyboard tapping”. It is an acknowledged, indeed embraced, legal trend in the UK that courts are increasingly paper exercises, as noted by the Supreme Court.

In the past, the general practice was that all the argument and evidence was placed before the court orally, and documents were read out, Lady Hale said.

She added: “The modern practice is quite different. Much more of the argument and evidence is reduced into writing before the hearing takes place. Often, documents are not read out.

“It is difficult, if not impossible, in many cases, especially complicated civil cases, to know what is going on unless you have access to the written material.”

At least twice in the current case, Judge Baraitser has mentioned that the defence gave her three hundred pages of opening argument, and has done so in the context of doubting the need for all this evidence, or at least for lengthy closing arguments which take account of the evidence. She was highly resistant to any exposition by witnesses of their evidence before cross-examination, arguing that their evidence was already in their statements so they did not need to say it. She eventually agreed on a strict limit of just half an hour for witness “orientation”.

However much Lady Hale thinks she is helping by setting down a principle that the documentation must be available, having Patrick Cockburn’s statement online somewhere will never have the impact of him standing in the witness box and expounding on it. What happened on Wednesday was that the whole hearing was collapsed, with both defence and prosecution lawyers hurling hundreds of pages of witness statement at Baraitser’s head, saying: “You look at this. We can get finished tomorrow morning and all have a long weekend to prepare our next cases.”

I was so disappointed by the way the case petered out before my eyes, that the adrenaline which has carried me through must have dried up. Returning to my room at lunchtime for a brief doze, when I tried to get up for the afternoon session I was overcome with dizziness. I eventually managed to walk to the court, despite the world having decided to present itself at a variety of sharp and unusual angles, and everything appearing to be under glaring orange sodium light. The Old Bailey staff – who I should say have been really friendly and helpful to me throughout – very kindly took me up in a lift and through the advocate’s robing room to the public gallery.

I am happy to say that after court two pints of Guinness and a cheese and ham toastie had a substantial restorative effect. Those who have followed these reports will understand how frustrating it was to be deprived of James Lewis asking Noam Chomsky how he can venture an opinion on whether this extradition is politically motivated when he is only a Professor of Linguistics, or whether he has ever published any peer-reviewed articles. To attempt to encapsulate the wealth of information skipped through yesterday is not the work of an evening.

What I shall do for now is give you the eloquent and brief statement by Noam Chomsky on the political nature of Julian Assange’s actions:

I will also give you the breathtaking testimony of “Witness 2”:

A friend last night gave me the cold comfort that I should not worry about the hurried close of these proceedings reducing the public gaze on the evidence and the arguments (and I think there were altogether nine witness statements yesterday), because that public gaze had been extremely limited, as indeed I have been continually explaining. In other words, it makes no difference. I follow that argument, but it goes against some fundamental beliefs and motivations I have about bearing witness, which I shall need to develop further in my own mind.

In the next few days I will try to bring you a synthesis and analysis of all that passed on Wednesday. Now I need to go to court and see the last few dribbles of this case, and exchange last glances of friendship with Julian for some months.

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Boeing’s decades-long ties to Washington state could soon be numbered. 

In a massive blow to Seattle, labor unions and the liberal run state of Washington, Boeing is moving its 787 Dreamliner production to South Carolina in an effort to cut costs, Bloomberg revealed on Thursday. 

It is a move that is raising questions about how long Boeing may remain at its massive plant in Everett, where it has produced planes since the 1960s.

Dreamliner production is being consolidated as demand for Boeing’s planes has dropped amidst the 737 MAX controversy and the ongoing pandemic which has decimated the travel industry. The easiest way for Boeing to cut costs is to move to non-union labor in South Carolina and trim its operations. 

It’s also the latest move in Boeing bolstering operations in Republican-governed South Carolina. Aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafi noted that 747 production would end by 2022 and that “the overhead costs will be increasingly borne by the surviving planes, the 767 and 777X, which don’t have a lot of pricing power right now.”

Washington Governor Jay Inslee stopped figuring out new ways to raise taxes and defund the police long enough to issue a statement critical of Boeing, stating that the state would need to take a “hard look” at Boeing’s tax treatment. He estimated 1,000 jobs could be at risk.

Meanwhile, Boeing has been in the midst of scrambling to shore up its financials after two fatal 737 MAX crashes and the subsequent grounding of its 737 MAX planes in the interim. Melius Research estimates Boeing could see $23.3 billion in cash burn this year as a result of those groundings, coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Boeing CFO Greg Smith said in July: “The goal is to improve cash-flow profile, restore our balance-sheet strength as quickly as possible. And these actions will help get us there.”

Governor Inslee said: “We have asked the Boeing Company multiple times what it needs to keep 787 production in Washington”. Inslee also claimed the move would “signal an allegiance to short-term profits and Wall Street…”

Yeah, comrade. Also known as “capitalism”.

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A status conference on seismic litigation revealed today the industry will not pursue efforts to employ seismic blasting to search the Atlantic Ocean for offshore petroleum deposits this year, and possibly for several years.

The hearing marked a victory for dozens of organizations and thousands of coastal communities and businesses in a years-long legal and public battle challenging the government’s issuance of Incidental Harassment Authorizations, or IHAs. Those authorizations were needed because the airgun bombardment of the seafloor would have hurt ocean animals, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

The developments included:

• Recognition by government attorneys that the IHAs would expire on Nov. 30, and there was no mechanism to extend them;
• Acknowledgment that seeking new permits would move the lengthy process back to square one;
• A concession from lawyers representing the seismic industry that it is not feasible to launch boats this year.

“This is a huge victory not just for us but for every coastal community that loudly and persistently protested the possibility of seismic blasting,” said Catherine Wannamaker, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “There will be no boats in the water this year, and because this resets the clock, there will be no boats in the water for a long time. And we’ll continue fighting to keep it that way.”

Quotes from participating organizations:

“Seismic blasting harms whales in the search for offshore oil that we should leave in the ground. We can’t allow the oil industry’s greed to threaten endangered North Atlantic right whales and other vulnerable species,” said Kristen Monsell, ocean legal director with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re happy these animals will have a reprieve from this unjustified acoustic attack on our oceans. We’ll keep fighting to ensure the oil industry stays out of the Atlantic.”

“We are at a crucial time for the last remaining 400 North Atlantic right whales on the planet,” said Alice M. Keyes, vice president of coastal conservation for One Hundred Miles. “Seismic blasting in the Atlantic would sound the death knell for this magnificent species. We are proud to stand alongside hundreds of thousands of Georgians and East Coast residents who have fought against seismic blasting for the protection of our marine mammals, fisheries and ocean-dependent economies.”

“The end of Atlantic seismic testing for the foreseeable future is a much-needed reprieve for marine life, including the critically-endangered North Atlantic right whale,” said Jane Davenport, senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. “However, until there is an outright ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along the East Coast, we will continue to fight against this disruptive and dangerous practice.”

“Seismic surveys are the precursor to offshore drilling, but these waters are far too important to sacrifice to Big Oil. There’s no need to risk irreplaceable marine wildlife just for potential information about oil deposits that should never be drilled in the first place,” said Earthjustice Managing Attorney Steve Mashuda. “We’re grateful there will be no airgun blasting in the near future and will keep up the fight to make sure it stays that way.”

“We are relieved that the threat of seismic testing and its damage to marine wildlife is at least temporarily lifted,” said Laura Cantral, executive director of the Coastal Conservation League. “It’s vital that we use this pause to secure a permanent ban on offshore energy exploration activities and drilling in South Carolina and adjoining waters, and finally put an end to the unacceptable risk it poses to our economy and environment.”

“There will be no seismic blasting this year, and none of the senseless harm that would bring to our whales and fish and coastal communities, but the administration has left the door open to new proposals from industry,” said Michael Jasny, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at NRDC. “The only way to end the threat is to prohibit offshore oil and gas exploration for good.”

“Communities can breathe a little easier knowing the Atlantic is now safe from seismic airgun blasting in 2020. Today’s much needed news is a bright spot and in line with the court of public opinion,” said Diane Hoskins, Oceana campaign director. “Over 90% of coastal municipalities in the proposed blast zone are opposed to opening our coast to offshore drilling and its dangerous precursor, seismic airgun blasting. The expiration of these unlawful permits will finally protect coastal communities and our marine life. Oceana has been campaigning for more than a decade to protect our coast from dirty and dangerous offshore-drilling activities. We are going to do everything in our power to permanently protect our coasts and ensure dynamite-like blasting never starts.”

Trailing Biden by an average of 6.8 points — according to Real Clear Politics as of late September — do Trump strategists intend an October surprise to improve his reelection prospects?

On Monday in response to phony US Middle East anti-terrorism operations, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif said the following:

“You claim you eliminated Daesh. You killed Daesh’s number one enemy in a wretched act and with utmost bestiality.”

Zarif referred to the Pentagon’s murder of redoubtable terrorist fighter Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani in January.

Tehran-backed Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was killed at the same time — prompting retaliatory rocket attacks against the US presence in the country that continue.

On Sunday, two US convoys were attacked with explosive devices. Iraqis want their country back, Pentagon occupation ended.

In early September, US CENTCOM commander General Kenneth Mckenzie said Pentagon troop strength in Iraq would be reduced to about 3,000.

Is the Middle East the most likely location if an October surprise is coming? Will Iraq be targeted with Iran in mind?

Are more US preemptive hostilities in the region possible ahead of November elections?

Along with China and Russia, Iran is a key US target for regime change.

According to Bloomberg News, citing unnamed sources, the Trump regime intends new sanctions on over a dozen Iranian banks, along with remittance processors, and the informal hawala transfer system.

The action aims to try isolating the country’s financial sector from the world community and make it harder for Biden to rejoin the JCPOA if he’s elected president in November.

Despite everything thrown at Iran by the US for over 40 years, including all-out sanctions war, especially by the Trump regime, the Islamic Republic remains resilient.

Along with more sanctions that have no legal validity under international law, will Trump regime hardliners provoke confrontation with Iran in the coming weeks?

On the phony pretext of combatting ISIS the US created and supports, using its jihadists as proxy forces in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, the Pentagon terror-bombed Iraq on September 23.

According to Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet spokeswoman Commander Rebecca Rebarich, two F/A-18F Super Hornets from the USS Nimitz conducted the strikes.

The US Navy tweeted:

“Locked and Loaded #NavyReadiness”

“#USSNimitz (CVN 68) conducts flight operations in support of #OperationInherentResolve.”

“Nimitz is deployed to the @US5thFleet to ensure maritime stability and security in the Central Region (sic).”

Ahead of the strike, a Fifth Fleet news release said CVW 17 will “provid(e) close air support and defensive counter-air missions to the coalition fight” against Daesh forces — the terror group supported by the US and its imperial partners left unexplained.

Separately according to US media reports on Sunday, the Trump regime threatened to close its Baghdad embassy and evacuate its staff unless Iraqi authorities act to end rocket attacks on the heavily-fortified Green Zone where it’s based.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Pompeo informed Iraqi President Barham Salih and Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi of a possible diplomatic pullout from the city — not from its Erbil consulate.

Iraqi MP head of parliament’s Security and Defense Committee Mohammad Reza believes the Trump regime is bluffing.

In his latest press conference, Trump “did not address this issue,” he said, adding:

“I do not expect that the US embassy will be closed.”

“It is used as a kind of pressure on the Iraqi government, (related to the upcoming November presidential) election that the US cares about…No more, no less.”

Whether or not the Trump regime follows through on its threat, will it escalate strikes on Iraqi Shia militias with close ties to Iran?

With US November elections drawing near, will Trump strategists provoke confrontation with Iran to try increasing support for DJT?

In an attempt to revive his lagging behind reelection campaign, will he initiate a false flag incident against Iran as a pretext for confrontation.

False flags are a longstanding US tradition since the mid-19th century.

Post-9/11, the mother of all US false flags, GW Bush’s approval rating rose from around 50 to 85% in a few days, peaking at 90% on September 21?

Do Trump strategists have a similar scheme in mind, hoping he’ll get an approval boost to defeat Biden and gain a second term?

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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.

Hayat Tahir Sham (HTS), formerly known as Jibhat al Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, began demanding the evacuation of civilians in Agrabat in the Idlib province recently, or they would be moved by force.  HTS is supported by President Erdogan of Turkey and has come under increased pressure to remove civilians from areas of armed conflict under an agreement between Turkey and Russia. Idlib is the last terrorist occupied area in Syria. The Syrian government has regained about 70% of the nation’s territory and has allied with the Russian military in the fight against terrorism, which is an obligation of all UN members.

The skies over northwest Syria witnessed flights by Turkish and Russian warplanes amid the almost continuous mutual bombardment of southern Idlib. Civilians have said they fear a massive military operation is coming.

Turkish F16 aircraft flew along the border strip between Syria and Turkey, while Russian reconnaissance aircraft flew over Zawiya Mountain, and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) shelled HTS in intense strikes on areas within Zawiya Mountain in Idlib, unleashing a heavy barrage on the terrorist positions.

The heaviest fighting in six months continues to intensify in Idlib between Harras al-din (HaD) and the Turkish backed HTS, and the SAA.

Idlib is in a de-escalation zone agreed upon between Turkey and Russia in March. Erdogan of Turkey has poured thousands of troops in an invasion of Idlib, later President Putin of Russia forged an agreement to defuse a military confrontation. Turkey has more than ten thousand troops stationed in dozens of bases in Idlib province, and Russian pressure and diplomacy have sought to contain them.

The recent upsurge in fighting has seen the SAA amassing troops on the front lines in a looming confrontation, with the SAA increasing attacks on the numerous Turkish occupation outposts and the Turkish countered by sending in 15 armored vehicles over the border from Turkey.

Hayat Tahir al-Sham

HTS is the Al Qaeda affiliate in Idlib and is the strongest of the Radical Islamic terrorist groups who occupy Idlib. Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani is the leader of HTS, which is loathed by the civilian population because of their extremism and fascist political ideology which keeps women in subjugation and servitude.

The civilians are not the original inhabitants of Idlib, who left years ago, but the thousands of militants and their families who left on the green buses from various areas around Syria under a voluntary relocation program.

Ansar Abu Bakr Brigade

Ansar Abu Bakr Brigade is a hardcore terrorist group that is opposed to Turkey, HTS, Russia, and SAA. They have warned of more attacks on Turkish soldiers stationed in Idlib province after they claimed an attack on a Turkish military base in western Idlib province last week, close to the M4 highway.

Recently, a pick-up truck packed with explosives targeted a Turkish base in western Idlib, injuring several Turkish troops and HTS terrorists guarding the outpost.

Hurras al-Din (HaD) is a hardcore Al-Qaeda group that broke away from HTS, and the Ansar Abu Bakr Brigade is formed from them, while all have a history of ideological and leadership ties to Al-Qaeda, and view Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri as their “defining authority”. Almost all of the members are non-Syrian foreign terrorists who were initially brought to Idlib by the CIA program supported by Turkey which President Trump disavowed in 2017.

Russian-Turkey agreement and joint patrols

Russia and Turkey entered an agreement in September 2018 to demilitarize the Idlib province. On March 3 Turkey and Russia agreed on a ceasefire to establish security for the M4 highway connecting the Port of Latakia to the industrial city of Aleppo, with joint patrols to begin on March 15.

Turkish and Russian soldiers were trained to communicate in case of emergencies; however, the terrorists have launched attacks on both Turkish and Russian patrols at various times, which resulted in a break-down in the patrols due to security concerns. Russia has recently stepped up its attacks on the headquarters of HTS, HaD, and Ansar Abu Bakr Brigade.

Turkey has failed to implement its obligations under the agreements with Russia in Idlib, which was to separate the terrorists from the civilians. Turkey wants to maintain the chaos in Idlib, including the Al Qaeda linked groups who Turkey supports as their foot-soldiers in Syria.

M4 Highway

Turkish and Russian troops have come under attack from terrorist groups on the M4 highway, with roadside bombs and rockets frequently targeting the patrols which stopped at the end of March but resumed on July 22.

On August 18 the joint patrol was attacked, and again on August 25 when a Russian convoy was damaged and left two Russian servicemen injured.

Chemical attack in the planning stages

On February 1 about 15 ‘White Helmets’ members arrived and began working on a planned chemical attack, according to two residents who warned authorities of the plot in the border city of Sarmada, north of Idlib, after terrorists and a convoy of three trucks loaded with different chemical containers arrived.

“The provocation involving a crowd of about 200 people is planned to be staged in the settlement of Maaret al-Artik. These people, including children, are mostly family members of militants who were previously evacuated from southern governorates and have arrived in the Idlib de-escalation zone. About 400 liters of a chemical solution has been delivered by White Helmets activists in two pickup cars to the location from an underground storage facility,” the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Opposing Parties said.

According to the Russian center, the group was led by HTS terrorist Mahi al-Din al-Am, who took part in filming the fake chemical attack in Idlib’s Khan Shaykhoun on April 4, 2017.

The video of the staged chemical attack would be posted on ‘White Helmets’ accounts in social networks and would be picked up by Western and Arab media.

The Russian center has called on Turkey to exert pressure to prevent the use of poisonous agents in Idlib; however, HTS is supported by Turkey, and the movement of the chemicals was facilitated by Turkish intelligence agents.

“The Russian Center for the Reconciliation of Opposing Sides received information about the preparation of a provocation using poisonous substances in the southern part of the Idlib de-escalation zone by the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham,” Russian Admiral Alexander Grinkevich recently said, to accuse the Syrian government forces of using chemical weapons against civilians.

HTS terrorists have two tons of toxic agents warehoused in a civilian inhabited area in Southwest Idlib according to local sources, who believes is the reason for the recent demands by HTS for civilians to leave the area, or be forced to leave.

Syria surrendered its stockpile of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the United States and the OPCW, which oversaw the destruction of the weaponry. However, on April 14, 2018, the US, Britain, and France carried out a string of airstrikes against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack on the city of Douma. Trump and his allies blamed Damascus for the Douma attack, even though Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis stated that the US has no evidence that Syria has used chemicals on civilians.

Turkey uses the Syrian refugees and displaced persons

Turkey has been accused of using Syrian refugees and displaced persons to leverage EU support for its invasion and military action in Idlib.

“Refugees are not a bargaining chip to be played with at the whims of political leaders. Europeans cannot look away from what might become one of the worst humanitarian disasters the war in Syria has brought on its people. Respecting international humanitarian law as well as the human right to protection and refuge remains the sole possible answer in front of such indiscriminate violence,” said Wadih Al-Asmar, President of EuroMed Rights.

European leaders have been threatened by Erdogan that he may unleash a huge wave of refugees towards Europe if he is not allowed to remain 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 MD

On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. When I think of this scary word it conjures up heartbreaking images of vast numbers of people suffering, precipitated into abysmal poverty. The WHO used to agree with me.

For years the WHO on its “Pandemic Preparedness” homepage defined a pandemic as “several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” In 2009, however, the part about “enormous numbers of death and illness” was removed. Since 2010, the WHO’s “Emergencies preparedness, response” page now has the following definition: “A pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease.”

In a May 4, 2009 article, David Ozonoff, professor of environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health told CNN: “The word pandemic refers to how widely dispersed a disease is, not to how severe the disease is…you can have a pandemic without a large number of deaths.” This is exactly what we have in the case of the flu.

According to the WHO:

“Influenza remains one of the world’s greatest public health challenges. Every year across the globe, there are an estimated 1 billion cases, of which 3 to 5 million are severe cases, resulting in 290,000 to 650,000 influenza-related respiratory deaths.”

In the case of COVID-19, officially, worldwide, there are 33,916,696 cases and 1,013,879 deaths. Out of a global population of 7,815,358,156, this amounts to a death count of almost 1/100th of one percent. In the U.S., the tally is 7,407,201 cases and 210,814 deaths out of a population of 334,742,314 which amounts to a death count of around 2/3 of 1/10th of 1 percent.

Since on average 56 million people worldwide die every year from all causes and on average 2,830,688 in the U.S., the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 and the flu are  small. Certainly no reason to lock down the global economy and force people to wear masks. However, there is one very important difference between COVID-19 and the flu. So, detach from the COVID-19 fear narrative, fasten your seat belts, and look at the hard facts.

All COVID-19 tests are faulty.

May 26 CNN article: “Antibody tests used to determine if people have been infected in the past with COVID-19 might be wrong up to half the time…” They got this from the CDC’s own website which also states that antibody tests are not accurate enough to determine who should go back to work. Yet, the EEOC (Equal Employment opportunity commission) is allowing employers to force employees to be tested for COVID-19.

May 22 Science Magazine article: “Coronavirus antigen tests: quick and cheap, but too often wrong?” reported:

“Antigen tests don’t amplify their protein signal, so they are inherently less sensitive. To make matters worse, that signal gets diluted when samples are mixed with the liquid needed to enable the material to flow across test strips. As a result, most antigen tests have a sensitivity of anywhere between 50% and 90%…Last month, Spanish health authorities returned thousands of SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests to the Chinese firm Shengzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology after finding the tests correctly identified infected people only 30% of the time…”

FDA website on PCR tests, Page 38:

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

Bottom line: none of these tests can determine how much, if any, active infectious virus is in a person’s body because they don’t look for a virus. Instead, the virus is assumed to be present based on the detection of antibodies, antigens and fragments of nucleic acid. These tests aren’t discovering new COVID-19 cases—they are creating them.

COVID-19 case and death numbers are grossly inflated. There is no reason to believe any of the statistics provided by any government anywhere.

Example: Virginia, May 1, NBC 12 report:

“During a COVID-19 briefing, the State Department of Health announced it will now count the number of positive virus tests instead of the number of people who test positive. That means if one person is tested three times, and all three tests come back positive, it counts as three instead of how the numbers were being counted before which would only have been one because it was a single patient…Other states, including North Carolina, have been reporting testing numbers that way for quite some time.”

Example: Texas, May 18, Collin County Government meeting, 15 min. 28 sec. mark – 1hr 5 min mark, a Health Department representative explains to the Council that a new definition of COVID-19 cases is being introduced whereby a single confirmed case (someone who tested positive) can be counted up to seventeen times by including members of their household (not tested with no symptoms) friends, neighbors, and coworkers with symptoms (not tested), and a coworker’s family with no symptoms (not tested). The charts used at the meeting are available here. At the 58 min. mark they admit that they always knew that the lockdowns and social distancing would never stop COVID-19 from spreading.The County Council Judge called the lockdowns “irresponsible” and “irrational.”

Example: ABC News, July 21, Florida report:

“Governor DeSantis says he’s concerned about the accuracy of COVID-19 test results…People have said they submitted their contact information at a COVID-19 testing site, but after seeing how long the line was, they decided not to wait an hour or more to get the test. Nevertheless, a few days later, they got an email or a phone call telling them that they tested positive.”

Example: on September 1, ABC7 News reported that 94% of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. had other chronic diseases according to a new CDC report (see Comorbidities): “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.”Among those additional conditions listed on the CDC website are: “Influenza and pneumonia,” “Respiratory failure,” “Hypertensive disease,” “Diabetes,” “Heart failure,” “Renal failure,” “Cardiac arrest,” “Obesity,” “Sepsis,” “Alzheimer disease,” “Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events.”

Example: USA News, July 19, article: “Florida officials admit counting MOTORCYCLE death as COVID-19 fatality, remove it from list after media scrutiny.” It was Fox35, a subsidiary of Fox News, that initially broke the story. The article includes the following idiotic statement from Orange County Health Officer Dr Raul Pino: “But you could actually argue that it could have been COVID-19 that caused him to crash.”

Doesn’t this just fill you with confidence in public health authorities? So much for the Florida Health Department’s official policy that accidents don’t count as COVID-19 deaths. And this young guy in his 20s would have remained a COVID-19 fatality if Fox35 had not caught them. How many more cases like this are there?

It’s time to face the truth:

COVID-19 isn’t a disease just as sporting goods isn’t a hunting rifle. COVID-19 is a new category that a percentage of sick people, along with a percentage of healthy people, are herded into.

COVID-19 is a label, a classification, a designation, a figment of the imagination—a complete and utter fraud. There is no reason to wear a mask. There is no reason to do any kind of social distancing. There was never any reason to lock down the economy. There is no deadly virus—only inaccurate tests and corrupt politicians controlled by global elitists who want to rob and exploit us. Face it folks, you’ve been had, hoodwinked, bamboozled, lied to, conned, duped. The world is the same this year as it was last year and every year before. There is nothing to be afraid of.

Selling a Story

All of this COVID-19 propaganda that we are constantly being bombarded with is a sales pitch. I ought to know. I’ve been in sales for over 40 years. As a sales professional, I was taught to sell the sizzle, not the steak. I was taught that what we are really doing is selling a story. It doesn’t matter what the product or service is. The bosses give us a script to memorize and regurgitate. We don’t have to know what we’re talking about or even if it’s true. All we have to do is mouth the words and go through the motions. Don’t worry about truth—just follow the script, we were told, and you will make lots of money. Just follow the yellow brick road and it will lead to Emerald City in the merry old land of Oz. Just wear masks, constantly wash your hands, socially distance, stay home, and wait for the magic vaccine to arrive and you will be saved. Hallelujah! Praise Jesus! Enough already!

Want to get rid of COVID-19 and go back to a normal life? Then stop testing for it and it will go away. It’s that simple. And while you’re at it, stop thinking about it and stop worrying about it—pay it no mind.

Hold on a second. That’s stupid! Will pregnancy go away if we stop testing for it? Answer: of course not! That’s absurd because pregnancy is real. Pregnant women are real. You can deny reality, you can ignore it, but you can’t make it go away because reality is real. You can deny there is a brick wall in front of you, but try walking through it and reality will bash you in the face every time. But COVID-19 isn’t real so if you don’t test for it and ignore it, it will go away. Think of it as waking up from a bad dream. COVID-19 will go away when you wake up.

While dreaming, we get so caught up in an illusion that we don’t realize that what we are experiencing isn’t real so we play by the rules of the false reality. We might even be living a different life, think we know people we never met, and forget about our true life and who we really are.

With COVID-19, too many of us have accepted a false reality in the real world.

If this artificial existence goes on long enough we may never be able to face reality ever again.

Fear will keep us trapped: afraid of germs, afraid of human contact, afraid to take off the mask and breathe the air of the planet on which we were born. The late spiritual teacher Carlos Castaneda said that a sign of enlightenment, or being able to see clearly and truthfully, is to be able to realize you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming and to alter its reality. The only way to alter this COVID-19 nightmare is to wake up to what’s really going on.

The fact that all governments around the world with few exceptions adopted the same oppressive policies in response to COVID-19 at the same time clearly shows that their strings are being pulled by some outside cabal. This cabal consists of multinational pharmaceutical companies, and billionaire philanthropists along with their foundations. These entities have become an unelected shadow government that has corrupted medical science, public health institutions, and politicians. And their plans for us peons are devastating.

On April 21, 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation put out a report entitled: “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan” “Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities” It talks about carrying out “the largest public health testing program in American history” and refers to treating it “as a wartime effort.” It calls for hiring 100,000 to 300,000 people nationwide to test 20 to 30 million people per day in order to allow just about everyone to return to work. This would result in not only testing and contact tracing in every community, but also a “public health workforce” that could sanitize public spaces, spray sanitizers on people’s hands, and enforce social distancing rules.

Feeling nauseous yet? Wait, it gets better.

On pages 17-18, the report decrees that “privacy concerns must be set aside” in order to access people’s “infection status.” It further sates: “The loss of privacy engendered by such a system would come at too high a price if the arrival of a vaccine early next year was a certainty. But vaccine development and manufacture could take years.”

In other words, this crap is never going to end. Now, pay attention because here it comes:

A depiction of our future vaccine I.D. card can be found on page 18 of the report. It will provide everyone with

“a unique patient identification number that would link to a patient’s viral antibody and eventual vaccine status under a system that could easily handshake with other systems to speed the return to normal societal functions.”

This could potentially stop unvacinated and supposedly infected people from getting a job, traveling, or from going to sports events, concerts, etc. The report even talks about installing tracking apps on our smart phones. Naturally, the public should be “nudged” into using these apps. But forcing people to use them isn’t out of the question.

The Rockefeller Foundation report states that they are working with the governments in Maryland and California to implement these diabolical medical gestapos that will eventually include the entire nation. We must oppose this brand of tyranny. We cannot allow state, federal, and local governments to take us down a path that will lead to economic devastation, despotism, shattered lives, despair, and death.

Shame on all of us if we stand by and do nothing.

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Michael J. Talmo has been a professional writer for over 40 years and is strongly committed to the protection of civil liberties. He can be reached at [email protected].

While browsing the History/Politics section of a local bookstore the number of works devoted to the many aspects of Donald Trump was quite amazing, but considering his impact on current events domestically and globally probably not truly surprising.  Unable to decide which might provide the best overall view, the title Hatemonger by Jean Guerrero carried an obvious bias, not about Trump per se, but about one of the most influential characters in his coterie of admirers, Stephen Miller.  While many have come and gone, Stephen Miller remains attached to the Trump cause, and Trump is equally attracted to his hate monger.

The prologue effectively outlines the relationship between Miller and Trump – the similarities in their thoughts and actions.  Guerrero states clearly, “It is impossible to understand the Trump era, with its unparalleled polarization, without tracing Miller’s journey to the White House.”  Reading even just the first line of each introductory paragraph before the details are delivered provides a good overview of the relationship:

“In a White House where people are frequently forced out, Miller has survived….He grasps Trump’s grudges and goals….The demonization of migrants is to Miller what the border wall is to Trump: a tool with which to mobilized the base,” the base being white male supremacists.

As for the title, Guerrero writes,

“Trump knew how to hatemonger before he met Miller….but when their paths collided, there was an alchemy.  Trump’s riches, marketing instinct and emotional racism emerged with Miller’s fanatical ideology, work ethic and strategic thinking.”

After the prologue begins the Miller’s tale.

It tells of someone strongly racist, xenophobic, and someone ready and willing to manipulate in whatever manner was required for the success of their ideology.  One of the facets was adopting Horowitz’s assertion that between hope and fear, “fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion.”  He knew that whatever ire they could raise would simply harvest the media attention and focus it entirely on Trump, “The more upset the media was at his boss – or pretended to be – the better.  They’d fixate on him, elevate him.”

Inside the government, Miller applied himself, establishing himself as one of the principal movers of his and Trump’s agenda.  From Guerrero’s descriptions, the agenda is mostly Miller’s playing with Trump’s ideas however ill conceived or considered.  But it wasn’t just about Trump, “Miller observed early that to survive in Trump’s orbit, he would have to ally himself with Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.  It wasn’t hard.”  Miller is Jewish and pro-Zionist.  Very quickly “Miller was expanding his control across the government.  He dispatched ideological allies to key positions within the bureaucracy.”

Miller’s tale makes interesting reading about how one person with the ability to focus and the drive to dominate can steer the course of history.  Certainly there are other characters within the Trump pantheon, but Miller is a survivor, and wields much power with Trump.  It becomes a bit thin towards the most recent events, but that is a problem all writers have with the pace of events and deadlines for publishing.

The underlying message, while not actually stated, could be summed up even as the polls indicate a Trump election defeat:  do not count Trump out, his messaging may be racist, xenophobic, misogynist, narcissistic, and all the other negative adjectives one can find to describe him but, his base is solid, he is willing to deal with fear, and willing to pull out whatever tricks the Republicans can use in order to keep him – and them – in power.

Jean Guerroro’s Hatemonger is a timely publication before the election.  It will lose its punch if Trump is defeated and goes, but will become even more important if Trump wins – a good look at the two personalities leading a declining nation.

Footnotes:

After watching the ‘Presidential’ debate last night, Trump’s manner/methodology is straight out of Miller’s playbook: be aggressive, change the subject, attack the person, continually harp on one main topic, lie, dissimulate, and deceive.

It will be interesting to see if Biden goes through with the second debate.  If not, that might just reinforce Trump’s base, labelling him a loser.  If yes, then he has to suffer through another hour and a half of the same style of argument while trying to stay focused and calm.

Biden will not change the course of the imperial trajectory, but at least we will not have to listen toTrump’s narcissistic xenophobic misogynist rambling comments.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Since brutally dragged from Ecuador’s London embassy in April last year, confined to maximum security imprisonment, and subjected to guilt by accusation extradition hearings, establishment media have been largely silent about his state-sponsored crucifixion for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism.

Britain in cahoots with Trump regime hardliners want his life force slowly extinguished as a message to other truth-telling journalists of a similar fate awaiting them if dare expose US high crimes of war and against humanity.

According to testimony by US defense attorney Yancey Ellis and prisoner advocate Joel Sickler at London’s Old Bailey, Assange faces a “worse than death” fate if extradited to America — what’s likely from kangaroo court proceedings, presided over by Judge Vanessa Baraitser.

In the US, unconstitutional solitary confinement awaits him — a flagrant breach of prohibited 8th Amendment cruel and unusual punishment.

Isolated US prisoners are confined for 23 hours or longer daily in cells around 7 x 7 feet.

Societies are best judged by how they treat children, the elderly, the infirm, their most disadvantaged and prisoners. The US fails on all counts.

Social psychologist Hans Toch coined the term “isolation panic” – describing symptoms including hysteria, rage, total loss of control, emotional breakdown, regressive behavior, and self-mutilation.

Alcatraz was the prototype US super-max prison until closed in 1963.

Isolation behind bars crushes the human spirit, mind and body.

Longterm it causes panic attacks, lethargy, insomnia, nightmares, dizziness, irrational anger, memory loss, delusions and hallucinations, profound despair, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts to relieve unbearable emotional pain.

Caged like animals is like being buried alive. Even the strongest-willed break under unbearable strain.

Isolated in London’s Belmarsh prison, Assange endured the worst solitary confinement.

Denied human contact, it’ll continue or worsen if extradited to the US — slow brutalizing torture by any standard.

Along with nearly 200 international lawyers, judges, professors of law, and lawyers’ associations, over 100 notable current and former politicians and diplomats from 27 countries — including present and past heads of state — called for Assange’s unconditional release from politicized extrajudicial imprisonment.

On trial in London’s Old Bailey are speech, media and academic freedoms.

Extraditing him to death by slow-torture in the US will be a body blow to these fundamental freedoms.

Commenting on Assange and press freedom, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project director Ben Wizner earlier said the following:

“Any prosecution of Mr. Assange…would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations.”

“(P)rosecuting a foreign publisher for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest.”

Star Chamber-like proceedings against Assange exclude due process and judicial fairness — assuring guilt by accusation with no right of appeal — followed by extradition to the US.

Instead of rallying to his support in defense of truth-telling journalism the way it’s supposed to be, establishment media support his crucifixion by a conspiracy of near silence — ignoring show trial injustice.

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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.

Randy Hillier, (Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston) questioned the Premier on concerns being raised all over the world about the reliability of PCR tests for COVID.

“We know high false positive rates are due to high CTs (cycle thresholds) and Canadian and world experts agree it should not be more than 25 cycles. Yet according to the Journal of Virology, Ontario labs are testing samples at 38-45 cycles. Is our testing creating both a false understanding of risk as well as false positives?” Hillier asked the Premier.

Responding for the Premier, Minister of Health Christine Elliott seemed to acknowledge the problem, and simply implied that faulty testing was better than no testing.

“Since May, The Public Health Agency of Canada as well as virologists and other doctors around the world have been warning of problems with PCR testing procedures,” Hillier explained.

Amplification cycles are used to amplify a sample to make it easier to find the RNA that identifies COVID in a person; the threshold, or maximum amplification cycle, known as ‘CT’, should not exceed 25, yet Ontario labs are testing at between 38 and 45 cycles. This causes false positives because of improper manipulation of the sample.

Minister Elliott would not say when the government became aware of this problem and why nothing has yet been done to address it. Instead of committing to fixing the problem with PCR testing procedures, the Health Minister instead deflected by talking about other testing possibilities, many of which are not yet approved by Health Canada, or not widely available yet.

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The Unfinished People’s Revolution: From Philadelphia to Havana, and Back Again

By Prof. Charles McKelvey, October 01, 2020

The Western European democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century sought to establish more just societies through replacement of monarchies with republics and the elimination of hereditary class distinctions between nobles and commoners.

The 2020 Election: Nothing Will Change

By Robert Fantina, October 01, 2020

There are some people who believe a Biden presidency will usher in change. Has hell frozen over? He has a long record in government of ‘business as usual’, so looking for change from him and the Democratic Party is an exercise in futility.

“The Vaccine Should be Tested on Politicians First. If They Survive, the Vaccine Is Safe. If They Don’t, Then the Country Is Safe.”

By Peter Koenig, October 01, 2020

One may want to add to this very sensible proposal that the very first to be vaccinated with his own Moderna human genome-altering vaccine, should imperatively be the czar of vaccines, Bill Gates.

Letter from London: The Surreal US Case Against Assange

By Alexander Mercouris, October 01, 2020

The fox is guarding the henhouse and Washington is prosecuting a publisher for exposing its own war crimes. Alexander Mercouris diagnoses the incoherence of the U.S. case for extradition.

Why Is the World Going to Hell? Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma” Documentary Tells Only Half the Story

By Jonathan Cook, October 01, 2020

According to “The Social Dilemma”, we are fast reaching a kind of human “event horizon”, with our societies standing on the brink of collapse. We face what several interviewees term an “existential threat” from the way the internet, and particularly social media, are rapidly developing. 

The 1st Presidential Debate: Worse Is Yet to Come

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, October 01, 2020

Biden raised the New York Times’ story released over the weekend in which Trump’s tax returns showed Trump paid only $750 in total federal income taxes over two years, 2016-2017. Trump of course denied it as ‘fake news’.

UK Government Probing Cyber-attack over Syria Propaganda Leaks

By Ian Cobain, September 30, 2020

Hackers have penetrated the computer systems of the UK’s foreign ministry and taken hundreds of files detailing the country’s controversial propaganda programmes in war-torn Syria.

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After the first U.S. Presidential nominees’ debate, which occurred on September 29th, it is clear that America’s two mainstream political Parties failed disastrously to provide the nation’s voters with adequate options for the U.S. Presidency. Trump is a proven failure in every key respect, and Biden showed himself not even qualified for the office — maybe even less competent than his opponent is, and having no sense or awareness of how dire the nation’s condition has become (not only since January 20th of 2017, but ever since January 20th of 2001). We’re clearly in deep trouble, and the signs now are for even worse yet to come, regardless of whether the next President would be Biden, or Trump. If it will be Trump, he would likely be even more indebted to the far right than he has been. If it would be Biden, then he would be merely a face fronting for his biggest campaign donors, such as, perhaps, the top owners of Lockheed Martin.

Biden knows that his mental faculties are failing fast; and, so, even as early as 11 December 2019, Ryan Lizza headlined at Politico, “Biden signals to aides that he would serve only a single term”, and he reported that:

While the option of making a public pledge [to serve only one term] remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.

According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024.

Apparently, Kamala Harris is now running for President — not only  for Vice President — against the incumbent Trump;  and her ‘boss’, Biden, isn’t discouraging her extraordinary behavior in this regard; he is instead assisting it. Here are some recent signs of this remarkable fact:

A Biden-Harris campaign video was recently recorded, on September 12th, and published on the 15th, in which Kamala Harris says:

“A Harris Administration together with Joe Biden as the President of the United States, the Biden-Harris Administration, will have access, provide access, to one hundred billion dollars in loans and investments for minority business-owners.”

This statement was widely interpreted, among the surprisingly few news-media that reported it, to have been merely a flub by her, nothing that’s really remarkable. However, a campaign video which was published later the same day, had Joe Biden himself, reading from a teleprompter, and saying:

“A Harris-Biden administration is going to relaunch that effort and keep pushing further to make it easier for military spouses and veterans to find meaningful careers to ensure teachers know how to support military children in their classrooms and to improve support for caregivers and survivors so much more than we do now.”

The indications seem fairly clear that if Americans vote for Joe Biden to become the President, then not only will he not serve a second term, but he might not even serve much (or perhaps even any) of his first term. Why would this be so? Why is not Biden himself publicly disowning what Harris had said on September 12th, instead of himself saying essentially the same thing (as he immediately did)?

Furthermore: did his debate-performance on September 29th give him encouragement to be anything other than  a stand-in for his choice of Kamala Harris to be the next U.S. President? As he looks at a video of that performance, what would he think of it? If he wouldn’t be extremely depressed to look at it, then would his mental powers be even worse than one might otherwise consider them to be — simply oblivious to reality? He didn’t do even as well as Trump (which was also poor).

Harris had quit the Democratic Party Presidential primaries back on 3 December 2019, well before the first primary, in Iowa. CNBC bannered “Kamala Harris drops out of presidential race after plummeting from top tier of Democratic candidates”. Although she  had received campaign donations from 17 billionaires, while Biden had received them from only 13, she scored poorly in the polls, and knew, even before the end of 2019, that there was no way she’d be able to win the 2020 nomination. She now stands a very good likelihood of becoming the next U.S. President, despite that fact.

The only contender in the Democratic Party Presidential primaries who was a serious possibility to win the nomination, other than Biden, was Bernie Sanders, who received campaign donations from zero billionaires, none of them at all, but was nonetheless able to become the leading candidate after the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, until the South Carolina primary on 29 February 2020, and Biden’s subsequent sweeps of all of the Old Dixie states on Super Tuesday, 3 March 2020. Sanders quit on April 8th.

No third-party U.S. Presidential nominee stands any chance, at all, of getting even as much as 3% of the votes by Election Day; even Ralph Nader, in the year 2000, didn’t — he received only 2.74%, and came nowhere near to winning even a single state.

Sanders has the biggest U.S. national political following of any candidate who failed to win a major-Party’s Presidential nomination, and he is the only individual in the United States whose name is — in and of itself — a big enough political brand to stand a chance of winning the U.S. Presidency as a merely write-in candidate if a national movement will organize itself (even without any authorization from him) to encourage American voters to write his name in on a write-in line of their Presidential ballot.

If the numbers of voters, who write his name in, exceed the numbers of voters who vote for either of the two major-Party nominees, then, he could become the U.S. President. If not, then at least a message could be sent out, thereby, to the existing two Parties, making clear that, finally, a substantial proportion of the American electorate are rejecting them and believe that the U.S. has become so severely on the wrong track as to require now a very radical change of direction.

Ron Paul was another “movement” U.S. Presidential candidate who never received a major-Party Presidential nomination, but he never had scored in the pre-election polling as being a serious contender to win his Party’s nomination. Sanders did.

The DNC (Democratic National Committee) knew, even back in May 2016, that Sanders would actually be stronger than Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, but they nonetheless rigged the results for Hillary against Sanders (and sometimes even blatantly) because their billionaires are more important to them than their voters are. And the same happened with Biden against Sanders in 2020. Sanders is now committed to endorsing Biden, probably as part of a deal which would make him a major cabinet secretary if Biden wins. But that is beside the point here. A write-in is a decision by the individual voter, not by anyone else.

Americans have now seen what the U.S. Presidential debates are, and will be like: a contest between two individuals, both of whom are disastrously incapable of serving the nation adequately in that office.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for President as a cripple and became elected largely because the public didn’t know it. He is considered by most historians to have been the 2nd-greatest of all American Presidents. The problems are very different with regard to both Trump and Biden. Both men are manifestly incompetent to serve in that office. Would Kamala Harris be any better? The wrong man won the 2020 Democratic nomination, because the DNC is corrupt. Now is the time for each individual voter to make his or her own U.S. Presidential decision, on his or her own, and without any Party-guidance (because that’s so profoundly corrupt, in each of the two Parties).

I shall write-in the name “Bernie Sanders” on the Presidential line of my ballot, and I hereby invite as many American voters as possible to do the same thing — not only as a protest of conscience, but because I recognize — especially after the September 29th debate — that my country has gone so far off onto the wrong path as to require now only such drastic action by each individual U.S. voter, including me. I am no longer part of a Party — I am only an American, now.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

The Western European democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century sought to establish more just societies through replacement of monarchies with republics and the elimination of hereditary class distinctions between nobles and commoners.  This dynamic reflected the interests of the emerging merchant class as well as the popular classes of workers and peasants, in the context of an emerging capitalist world-economy.

The Jeffersonian-Jacksonian Revolution: An historically advanced expression

The American Republic was the expression of this phenomenon in North America.  Its constitution reflected a compromise between the big merchants and landholders, on the one hand; and the farmers, artisans, and workers, on the other.  The American ideology stressed individual liberty and equality of opportunity.

Material conditions favored the development of the American vision.  In the first place, there was the lucrative trading relation of the New England and Mid-Atlantic farmers with the slaveholders in the West Indies.  Secondly, there was territorial expansion of the nation through the conquest of the indigenous nations.  And thirdly, there was the core-peripheral economic relation between emerging Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders, which provided raw materials and markets for Northern industry.  These dynamics were the foundation of the spectacular economic ascent of the nation.

During the period 1789 to 1840, the American Republic remained politically divided between the Federalists and neo-Federalists, who successfully were creating a financial aristocracy; and the popular Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolution, which maintained that liberty cannot truly exist for the people without a wide distribution of agricultural and manufacturing property, accompanied by popular control of the state and state control of the banking and credit system.

Social philosophy is formulated in the context of lived experiences.  The Jeffersonian-Jacksonian popular revolution did not have the experiential basis for seeing the role of the unfolding European global conquest as the foundation of the nation’s spectacular ascent.  They were aware of the importance of the territorial expansion of the nation, but in accordance with their ethnocentric notions of civilization and barbarity, they viewed the land as freely available.  They recognized the contradiction between slavery and the ideal of liberty and opportunity for all, but they understood the importance of slavery to the economy of the nation, and they could fathom no strategy for its abolition without destroying the national economy, so they deferred its abolition.  They took for granted the lucrative trading relation with the West Indies; they could not see its connection to an emerging system of global domination that contradicted their professed revolutionary values.

In spite of their limited understanding, the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolutionaries were a progressive force in the context of their time.  Politically, they defended small farmers and workers against the pretentions of the financial aristocracy and the banks.  Economically, their ideology contributed to an economic ascent that was raising the standard of living of the nation.  They took concrete and practical steps toward the construction of a more just world, in the context of the world that they had inherited and of their lived experiences.

Following the age of Jackson, slavery became a central issue of public debate, as a consequence of the conflict of interests between the Northern industrial elite and the Southern slaveholding class.  For many abolitionists, it was a moral debate, not well integrated into unfolding political processes.  From the beginnings of the debate, the difficulties inherent in changing a structure of labor that was central to the nation’s economy led some to propose the gradual and compensated abolition of slavery.  As the debate intensified, many of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolutionaries seized the opportunity to propose the inclusion of blacks in their vision of liberty and opportunity, on the basis of the distribution of land or wage employment in manufacturing.  The proposal, however, did not have the consistent support of the Northern industrial elite, who merely feigned service to the vision of liberty and opportunity even with respect to whites.  The racial reconstruction project, lacking the necessary balance of political support, collapsed; the majority of freed slaves became impoverished tenant farmers and sharecroppers, lacking the most fundamental of human rights.

By 1890, the material context that provided the foundation for the spectacular U.S. economic ascent had come to an end.  In the first place, territorial expansion was no longer possible, as the nation reached its geographical frontiers.  The escape valve of Western opportunities for urban workers and the unemployed disappeared.

Secondly, industry, commerce, and banking became concentrated.  Concentration was to some extent a natural phenomenon, as the more efficient companies arrived to dominate the market.  But it also was driven by “unfair competition,” involving the use by the “Robber Barons” of illegal, unethical, and violent strategies to destroy competitors.  Small entrepreneurs found opportunities limited, if not blocked.

In this context, there emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century a popular movement to break-up or regulate the trusts.  But this proposal was not going to be easy to implement.  The big corporations were central to the nation’s economy.  How does the government regulate or control them, without causing havoc to the economy?  A complicated problem, even assuming the government is trying to defend the liberties of the people and not the interests of the corporations and the banks.  During the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, important antitrust legislation was enacted, designed to accomplish this delicate task.  However, before it could be known in practice if Wilson’s project would be effective, the entire effort was cast aside by World War I.

In the battle between the people and the corporations, war functions to the advantage of the corporations.  Inasmuch as the rapid production of arms and military equipment is needed for the war mobilization, the delicate balance between promoting the economic growth of the nation and protecting liberties of the people is upset.  The corporations are given free hand.

As a result of this law of corporate rule through war, World War I and World War II not only drove further the spectacular economic ascent of the nation; they also facilitated the consolidation of the corporate dominance.  By the 1950s, a “power elite” and a “military-industrial complex” had emerged, and the nation arrived to operate on the basis of a permanent war economy, with the political process controlled by the corporations.  The standard of living rose, but the political power of the people diminished.

The incapacity of the people to stop the national turn to war during the course of the twentieth century is rooted in the ideological limitations of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolution, particularly its incapacity to understand the factors driving U.S. ascent and to discern that these factors would soon reach their limit and the end of their time.  The revolutionaries possessed a social philosophy that had been advanced for its time, heralding a new world of individual liberty and opportunity and reinforcing new productive capacities and a spectacular economic ascent.  But they could not discern that the nation was on the road to empire, undermining the republic and its proclaimed democratic values.  They therefore were unprepared to see the coming twentieth century un-proclaimed U.S. imperialism and to delegitimate its pretexts for wars; they were unprepared to stop imperialist wars, in order to defend themselves.

And so, the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolution came to an end, unable to reframe the meaning of individual liberty in a world of large corporations; and unable to see that the imperialist domination of other lands was the foundation of the powerlessness of the people of the United States.  Its important legacy, in spite of its limitations, is all but erased from the memory of the people.

The Cuban Revolution: The people’s revolution reaches a more advanced stage

The American Revolution, however, would attain a more advanced expression, appropriate for twentieth century reality, in a nearby island nation, that of Cuba, where the experience of the people was of a different order.  The Cuban Revolution was born in the nineteenth century in the context of Spanish colonialism, and as such, it has been an anti-colonial revolution, which learned early the political necessity of uniting the popular sectors of workers, peasants, and blacks in a struggle against colonial interests and their native allies, the Cuban landed estate bourgeoisie.  Beginning with the U.S. intervention of 1898, Cuba passed to be a neocolonial Republic under U.S. tutelage.  Defined by this neocolonial situation, the Revolution arrived to be an anti-imperialist revolution, uniting popular sectors of workers, students, peasants, blacks, and women; standing against U.S. control and against the Cuban figurehead bourgeoisie and political class that were totally subordinate U.S. interests.  Unlike the American Revolution in the North, the Cuban Revolution not only discerned the role of imperialism in the shaping economic development and underdevelopment, but it also conceived itself as fundamentally an anti-imperialist revolution.

When the Cuban Revolution took political control in 1959, with the overwhelming support of the various popular sectors, it confronted the same problem that the U.S. popular revolution and antitrust movement had confronted in the progressive era in the United States, namely, the problem of how to change the structures of the economy in defense of popular liberties without undermining the productive capacity of the economy.  The Cuban Revolution attacked the problem step-by-step, without a previous ideology beyond that of the right of the nation to sovereignty and the right of the people to social justice.  First, it took possession of large agricultural estates, distributing the land to peasants in the form of cooperatives, state managed farms, and small-scale private property.  Secondly, it nationalized U.S. companies in Cuba, with the intention of cooperating with the United States in the payment of compensation.  Specifically, the Cuban Revolution proposed to establish a fund that would be fed by the USA-Cuba sugar trade in excess of the established sugar quota.  In response to the absence of U.S. cooperation, Cuba proceeded to the nationalization of all foreign companies.  Thirdly, the Revolution nationalized Cuban big industry, placing the companies under state management.  Its initial hope was that Cuban industrialists would cooperate with the Revolution in the economic development of the nation, but the Cuban figurehead bourgeoisie not have sufficient economic and ideological independence from U.S. capital to participate in an autonomous nationalist project of economic development.  The Cuban national bourgeoisie abandoned the country to participate in the U.S. directed Cuban counterrevolution.

The Cuban Revolution, therefore, proceeded on a model in which the state formulates a development plan, seeking to sever its peripheral role in the world-economy and its dependency on the U.S. economy; and taking ownership of private companies, foreign and domestic, not in response to a previously formulated plan, but in accordance with the practical demands of the situation.  The Revolution accepted small-scale private ownership of economic enterprises, insofar as it was practical and necessary for supplying the needs of the people.  With respect to the economy, Cuban socialism has been pragmatic.

The Cuban Revolution dealt with the universal problem of elite control of the political process by abolishing electoral parties and eliminating electoral campaigns.  Candidates for delegates to municipal assemblies are nominated in neighborhood assemblies, and they are elected in small voting districts on the basis of publicly displayed one-page biographies, without the necessity of conducting electoral campaigns.  The elected delegates of the municipal assemblies in turn elect the deputies of the national assembly, on the basis of suggestions submitted by the mass organizations.  Thus constituted, the National Assembly of People’s Power is the highest authority in the nation, which elects the executive and judicial branches of government to five-year terms, and to which the executive and judicial branches must render accounts.

In the first decades of the American Republic, Federalists and conservatives sought to prevent control of the government by the majority, for fear that the interests of the large merchants and landholders and the financial aristocracy would be swept aside.  In contrast, the Cuban Revolution developed a political structure designed to ensure that the interests of the people would be the highest priority of the government.

In the United States, the Federalists and neo-Federalists had feared democracy, which they considered to be systemic mob rule, shaped by unenlightened prejudices disseminated by demagogic politicians.  Accordingly, they favored the establishment of a relatively permanent senate and/or judiciary, constituted by members of the hereditary aristocracy, which would have the authority to check the actions of the mob.  The Cuban Revolution did not naively fail to recognize the possibilities for control of the political process by an unruly mass.  But they dealt with the threat in a different way.  Cuba’s systemic check on the people has been in the form of a vanguard political party, the Communist Party of Cuba.  Unlike the Federalists’ senates and judiciaries, the Cuban vanguard party was not initially formed from a hereditary minority, but from a minority of revolutionaries, who had distinguished themselves as leaders in revolutionary struggle.  Once established, this moral minority that has been self-perpetuating, itself selecting its new members.  Such a minority, based on revolutionary merit rather than status at birth, speaks to the people with moral authority.  Moreover, unlike the Federalists’ senates and judiciaries, the vanguard revolutionary party does not have political or legal authority or veto power.  Its role is to educate the people, guiding them in the formation of revolutionary consciousness and in providing the foundation for seeing through the factual and ideological distortions of the global elite.  The vanguard party leads but does not decide; the people decide, through its delegates and deputies.

The Cuban revolution was forged as an integrated project of students, peasants, workers, professionals, blacks, and women, just as the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolution of 1789 to 1840 was an integrated project of the middle class, farmers, and workers.  In the United States, the marginality of issues of race, and the even greater marginality of gender, were a reflection of the political conditions and assumptions of the time.  In contrast, the Cuban Revolution accomplished the integration of race and gender in the people’s struggle in a natural form.  The integration of blacks in the struggle was defined by the 1890s, reflecting the political necessities of the anti-colonial revolution.  During the neocolonial Republic, women assumed revolutionary tasks, and they were accepted because of the utility of their contributions.  In the period of 1959 to 1962, the triumphant revolution consistently made explicit the full participation of blacks and women in the revolutionary project and in Cuban society.

Cuban revolutionary ideology has been shaped by the lived experiences of the Cuban people, responding to the neocolonial situation of rule by an imperialist power and its large corporations.  As a result, it has been able to break new ground, to arrive to a more advanced understanding than that of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolutionaries of the period 1763 to 1840.  It has arrived to new insights and human experiences in regard to the control and regulation of the economy in defense of the interests of the people; and it has arrived to new structures for putting political power in the hands of the people and for popular political education, enabling the people to overcome confusion and division.

The absolute necessity of returning to Philadelphia

The people’s revolution now has to return to the United States.  The Cuban Revolution has reached its limit, in that it has attained the maximum of what it can attain in the context of the capitalist world-economy.  The capitalist world-economy itself has to be transformed, setting aside neocolonialism and imperialism, respecting the true sovereignty of nations, and facilitating cooperation among nations in mutually beneficial trade and in addressing the common problems that humanity confronts.  Such a transformation can only occur through the coming to political power of the popular sectors in key nations, especially the United States, still the largest economy in the world, and the still world’s reigning imperialist power.

What is presently occurring in the United States is not revolution but rebellion.  The current U.S. rebellions lacks an adequate intellectual base; it has a limited and distorted understanding of the popular revolution of the United States, and it is characterized by a profound ignorance of the Cuban Revolution and other anti-neocolonial revolutions and movements of the Third World.  In the context of a capitalist world-economy that has reached and overextended its territorial limits, such ignorance has to be overcome.  Intellectuals have to play an important role in this regard, appropriating insights that emerge from the experiences of popular struggles in other lands, adapting them to conditions in their particular nations.  They should follow the examples of the American revolutionary leaders and intellectuals of the period 1763 to 1840, who wrote pamphlets that were designed to explain to the people.  Their example shows that slogans, placards, and tweets alone will not get it done; sustained popular political education is the key, and the organization of the people developing its consciousness.

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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).

American democracy would best be served by focusing more on domestically relevant facts than rhetorical attacks against foreign countries like China.

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We demand:

• The complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa,
• The demilitarization of the African continent,
• The closure of U.S. bases throughout the world, and
• The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with the full participation of members of U.S. and African civil society.

October 1, 2020 is the 12th anniversary of the launch of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), a command structure with bases that are now in dozens of African nations. Yet, the existence of AFRICOM has escaped the awareness of not only the general public in the United States and the world. When four U.S. soldiers were killed in the small African nation of Niger, even members of the U.S. Congress were unaware of the U.S. military’s presence in the country and the extent of the U.S. military presence throughout Africa.

The International Day of Action on AFRICOM (October 1, 2020) aims to raise the public’s awareness about the U.S. military’s existence in Africa, and how the presence of U.S. forces exacerbates violence and instability throughout the continent.

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) has taken up the task of educating the public on AFRICOM and the extensive basing networks in Africa and throughout the world. Our campaign on AFRICOM is an integral element of our general opposition to U.S. global militarization, with its offensive command structures, approximately 800 to 1,000 overseas bases, and the United States’ status as the number one arms merchant on the planet.

We are calling on our friends and allies around the world to join us in calling for the United States to respect the wishes of African people to de-militarize the African continent, so Africa can begin to be a “zone of peace.”

We say the brutality, violence and systematic degradation of Black life in the colonized zones of the United States against Black people by the domestic police is replicated in Africa by the U.S. global police represented by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Over $150 billion of the people’s resources are being spent on U.S. bases in Africa and around the world to police people on behalf of the U.S. corporate and financial elite.

The African peoples who find themselves on the receiving end of the violence—because of corrupted African leadership in alignment with the U.S.—are saying to the people in the United States to demand U.S. troops and U.S. money is withdrawn. It is clear the introduction of AFRICOM has resulted in less security, less democracy and diminished human rights for African peoples who are in conflict with their own neo-colonial governments.

BAP supports that call and adds the people’s resources that are being squandered to support imperialist adventures must be seized by the people and used to address the human rights needs of African/Black people and other oppressed and exploited peoples for housing, healthcare, education, food and clean water, instead of on war on behalf of the capitalist dictatorship.

We call our friends to endorse this day, as an individual or as an organization. Beyond that, we call on you to organize an educational event on October 1, 2020, for which we have provided materials on this page.

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Polish Author, Monika Wisniewska, suggests that “The vaccine should be tested on politicians first. If they survive, the vaccine is safe. If they don’t, then the country is safe”.

Sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. It is dead-serious. One may want to add to this very sensible proposal that the very first to be vaccinated with his own Moderna human genome-altering vaccine, should imperatively be the czar of vaccines, Bill Gates. But no special fabrication for Mr. Gates. The real thing. Controlled by independent honorable virologists, immunologists and DNA-specialized biologists. 

If Mr. Gates “survives” with none of the devastating side effects (or premier effects), as suffered by the first 45 healthy volunteers for his vaccine (all had to be hospitalized with severe health damage), he may start testing it on a larger population (currently planned on 4,000 healthy volunteers) – and then only should the special DNA-modifying vaccine become subject of an objective information campaign, telling the populace at large and especially those, who are potentially interested in altering their DNA forever, what Covid-19 vaccination with the Moderna inoculation means and implies.

Then only should it become open for those who voluntarily want to alter their genome, in full knowledge that whatever later effect could result from it, CANNOT ever be corrected and the DNA changes might be passed on to the next and following generations.

Aside form that, there is high skepticism among the people all around the world about any Covid-19 vaccine. For several reasons. Perhaps first, because there is really no need for a vaccine. There are other well-known remedies that can heal and have proven effective in healing the novel coronavirus, especially hydroxychloroquine (known for at least 60 years and used successfully to fight malaria and recently was equally successfully used against Covid-19), and sodium chlorite (NaCIO), best administered according to a medical supervised formula. And there are others, like the Cuban developed Interferon beta-1a. China used hydroxychloroquine and Interferon beta-1a and combinations of them, as well as other non-vaccine drugs to successfully and rapidly combat and control the SARS-2-NoV (Covid-19).

Yet, both of these very efficient medications, hydroxychloroquine and NaCIO have been banned in the US and in most EU countries – prohibited under penalties to medical doctors who use them – in favor of not-yet known vaccines – vaccines which promise to become a multi-multi trillion-dollar business. Just imagine, what world have we become! No wonder people become suspicious.

According to an Axios-Ipsos poll, published by RT on 29 September 2020, based on 1,000-plus participating US-American adults, more than 50% of the respondents said they would NOT take a vaccine – any covid vaccine – even if paid US$ 100; 44% said they would accept the vaccine if offered an incentive of US$ 100. Reasons have to do with the mistrust in politicians, and in specific people who promote vaccination “über alles” – and have a vested interest.

Other reasons include the warp-speed by which CDC and especially Dr. Fauci from NIAID / NIH – the co-czar of vaccination – want to push the vaccine onto people. It doesn’t help either that CDC and NIAID / NIH have vested interests in vaccines, as they own hundreds of patents and make millions from vaccines. Covid has served to highly politicize inoculation, especially, but not exclusively, Covid-19 vaccinations – and to generate not only an enormous profit boost for pharmaceuticals and their shareholder, but to provide them with a “sustainable” bonanza for decades to come, as science knows and tells us, corona viruses do not go away – similarly to flu-viruses (also a type of corona virus) – and vaccinations have to be repeated annually.

That’s the state of affairs in the United States. In Europe, no such inquiries have been published yet, to my knowledge, but anti-covid vaccine skepticism is at least as high in Europe as it is in the US, if not higher. Most covid-vaccine resisters say they would refuse vaccination to the end, or if there was really no way out, they’d rather be vaccinated by a Russian, Chinese or Cuban anti-covid vaccine, than one from the west. That’s the level of trust treacherous western politicians have left.

What Monika Wisniewska proposes, politicians first and depending on the results, the people next. This might be an elegant way out – always, but always, provided that politicians get exactly the same vaccine injected into their arm as the population at large – and that the vaccines are clear of any nano-chip or similar digitizing technology. Since trust in western politicians is at its lowest, this would have to be monitored independently by honorable non-mainstream scientists.

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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 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.

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The unique, dominating position of the United States in the post-1945 world is well-known. It maintains this position thanks to both a very large historical goodwill capital and former glory in the eyes of generations around the world – and thanks to rampant militarism and imperialism that has destroyed the good ‘America’ that it used to be.

The world’s major division the next few years will be this: Are you on the side of continued US global dominance or do you want to see a new multipolar world with more balance and the US in the role of a partner among equals?

In my view, the US no longer has the capacity to lead itself effectively and find solutions to its own multi-dimensional crisis be it the economy, democracy, climate change, warfare addiction, social polarization, racism and on top of it all the Covid-19 crisis.

Not being able to lead itself, no one should wish that the US should lead the world. Neither does it have any right to.

While its allies, friends and admirers are increasingly turning sceptical, others turn away and look for other partners be it China, Russia or Iran.

While the friends of the US should try to help it out of its addiction to its outdated self-image, the designated enemies, of course, cannot help the US as it simply would not listen. Strangely, these countries also need the US and have sought and still seek constructive cooperation but in vain.

The fact is that no one threatens the US (and certainly not Russia with less than 8 % of the military expenditures of NATO. The US has become its own worst enemy but blames others for its problems.

Sadly, it seems that there is not one ministry of foreign affairs among the EU /NATO countries that has even thought of developing a strategy for the post-US dominated West.

Countries such as China, other BRICS and many others are building a new world order. Will the West, therefore, loose completely, or will parts of it still be able to save what can be saved and transition into the future multipolar world order?

The chances of a “yes” to that question is diminishing by the day.

The list of twenty points below was written long before the Presidential candidate debate on September 29 (it would be an offence to children to say that they behaved like children). But that debate only confirmed these points – and the simple point that it doesn’t matter much whether the next president of the US will be Trump or Biden.

It’s the system, stupid! And it is rapidly coming to an end.

It’s a valid intellectual-theoretical point that one cannot apply characteristics from psychology – basically the science of the individual – to much larger aggregates such as people, nations or the global system. That’s the fallacy of levels.

That said, let’s anyhow try to just a bit of such “psychologizing” to make it more familiar to the reader.

1. All empires go down, sooner or later – the latest was the Soviet Union, and the US/West has not been able to cope since its beloved enemy disappeared. All empires emerge, grow, reach a peak point, climax – and then begins to lose it to move to relative decline (others coming up) and then fall. Rather much like the individual life.
2. Over-reach or you never get enough – there is no one and nothing you don’t want to try to influence, dominate or control.
3. Hubris – we can get away with everything, we are big and powerful. May be right for a time, then reality catches up.
4. Exceptionalism – we can do things nobody else can because we are those we are – and we can tell others not to do what we ourselves do. We are above the law that others must follow, we fight wars for good while others fight for evil and are evil. Because we are good and have God on our side.
5. The unbearable lightness of routine – it’s all gone so well for so long thanks to our pervasive mind- and lifestyle-shaping influence through the media, film, culture, arts – Hollywood and all that. For as long as the rest of the world sees you as an ideal to imitate, – Americanization – everything goes smoothly.
6. The Number One problem – meaning that if you are (or believe you are) Number One in a rank order, there is no one to look up to and learn from so you end up becoming a teacher, master, dictator, more or less arrogantly “downwards”. If you are No 37, there are 36 others to learn from – how did they do it better than we did? However, sooner or later, the “pupils” stop listening and obeying the Master – His Master’s Voice, so to speak.
7. Mission activity or ‘mission civilisatrice’ – you try ad absurdum to shape others in the image of yourself; they shall become like us. Our national thinking is universalizable. The world should adapt to us, not we to the world. Remember who was The First World – (the Second and the Third) earlier?
8. Legitimacy in the eyes of others slowly disappears – you may get away with some bad acts once or twice, but when it becomes a habit, others begin to think. As time goes by, your normative power is eroded, and you rely increasingly on naked force – the military. My country, right or wrong: Send the marines!
9. Overmilitarization – the system needs a war more or less regularly; that means you need images of enemies (invented or real) all the time. Like a drug addict needs a fix. The US surely cannot do without enemies. The problem is that that military colossus called the Military-Industrial Media Academic Complex (MIMAC) always wants more – also in times when the economy cannot carry that burden. (Like the Sovjet Union in the 1970s and 1980s couldn’t). And the Coronavirus weakens the economy even further.
10. Increasing autism, denial of the real world plus Group Think – “everything worked so fine in the past, it cannot be true that we cannot just continue what we used to do. (So, let’s start a new Cold War, this time against China). Group think means that a small group of people over time build a common worldview that repels any new thoughts from the outside and become convinced that it’s right and everybody else wrong. The problem is that they don’t know they sit in that restaurant on US Titanic, the music playing so well…
11. Socio-political metal fatique – something has been strong for a long time but suddenly there is a crack, and then comes another. The unthinkable, or at least unlikely and unforseen, suddenly happens repeatedly. And old tools can’t fix the problems.
12. Lack of vision and lack of the pioneering new dynamics – of the type that makes other want to follow you voluntarily. Little by little, everything signal you send out is negative or destructive.
13. The old positive life energy ebbs, and paranoia enters – like the increasingly old crumpy person who feels that the world turns its back and become unreasonable. Is there any important country in today’s world that the Trump US is not running some kind of conflict with, even friends and allies? Enters paranoia – “The whole world is against us… we see enemies all around – the world doesn’t understand us anymore. But we shall teach them a lesson…”
14. Stagnation and anti-intellectualism – you continue to do what worked before, such as solving every problem with the military and increasingly becoming unable to think. To the person who has only a hammer in the toolbox, every problem in the house is about hammering…So, don’t allow anything new, don’t tolerate diversity, and crack down on critical voices.
15. The normative and cultural power vanish – the perception by others of the Empire’s values as good and fair and as part of a vision crumbles. They embark on a future without the Empire’s diktat and/or protection and build a new world order (that the US will not hear about or let its subordinates participate in).
16. Over-extension through self-aggrandizement – you engage in conflicts and wars which you don’t stand a chance to win, increasingly losing a sense of reality and of your own strength vis-a-vis others.
17. Addiction & uni-dimensionality – since the only power scale in which you are “second to none” is the military, you use that where other means would be much more effective and cheaper as well as create respect worldwide. Diplomacy fades – lacking carrots, use the big stick.
18. Decadence, illusions and lies – the Secretary of State, Pompeo, is on record boasting that it is part of the American tradition to “cheat, steal and lie” – in other words, moral decay. Fake and omission, a struggle about what reality really is mounted.
19. Psychopaths and kakistocrats increasingly win influence = Pathocracy! Kakistocracy means government by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens. The tempo with which norms and expectations of normal behaviour is broken overwhelms the world. Leader senility may play its role too – remember Breznev? And then, somebody usually turns up in the chaotic developments and declares that s/he is the saviour.
20. Democracy and people’s participation in it crumbles – most citizens sense what happens but in disbelief. Mobilization of counterforces to save what can be saved, become more difficult by the day.

“And faster than you may expect”?

One should hesitate to appear too sure about predicting the final end. Sometimes terminally ill people live longer than medical expertise predicted. Taking the risk anyhow, I would say within the next presidential term 2021-2026 or at the latest by 2030.

When the cracks are frequent enough and big enough, the decline and breakdown accelerate exponentially. Remember the end of the Cold War in 1989 when border guards just opened the gates and people started moving feely.

In a Danish academic book from 1981 (1) I predicted the fall of the West thus:

“The Western world is on its way down and the present crisis is not just cyclical and also not just a crisis of capitalism (it is not exclusively economic) but a sort of civilizational crisis. The global system that has existed with Europe-US as its centre and developed over the last 400-500 years is going through convulsions of a deeper nature than is normally perceived.

Neither liberalism nor Marxism which are both Western thought systems and neither the US nor the Soviet Union appears as attractive models to the rest of the world. They are in deep crisis themselves – socially as well as economically – while Japan, China and a series of new growth centres and regional larger powers are rising, particularly in Asia.

The wealthy, overdeveloped countries are approaching certain ‘objective’ limitations in terms of nature, raw materials, exploitation of human beings, the sheer size of the systems as well as management problems, social pressures, etc.

Armament and the increasing militarization of various types of social structures everywhere is an (attempt at) “rejuvenation treatment” in the old- age phase of the West, a sort of compensation for diminishing power in other areas.”

Conclusion: Governments, businesses, academia and others who in these years hold on to the US Empire will become a periphery in the future world order.

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The fox is guarding the henhouse and Washington is prosecuting a publisher for exposing its own war crimes. Alexander Mercouris diagnoses the incoherence of the U.S. case for extradition. 

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Following the Julian Assange case as it has progressed through its various stages, from the original Swedish allegations right up to and including the extradition hearing which is currently underway in the Central Criminal Court in London, has been a troubling and very strange experience.

The U.S. government has failed to present a coherent case.

Conscious that the British authorities should in theory refuse to extradite Assange if the case against him were shown to be politically motivated and/or related to Assange’s legitimate work as a journalist, the U.S. government has struggled to present a case against Assange which is not too obviously politically motivated or related to Assange’s legitimate work as a journalist.

This explains the strange succession of one original and two superseding indictments.

The U.S. government’s first indictment was based on what was a supposedly simple allegation of computer interference, supposedly coordinated in some sort of conspiracy between Assange and Chelsea Manning.

This was obviously done in an attempt to dispel the idea that the request for Assange’s extradition was politically motivated or was related to Assange’s legitimate work as a journalist.

However lawyers in the United States had no difficulty pointing out the “inchoate facts” of the alleged conspiracy between Assange and Manning, whilst both lawyers and journalists in the United States and elsewhere pointed out that the facts in the indictment in fact bore all the hallmarks of action by a journalist to protect a source.

The result was that the U.S. government replaced its indictment with a first superseding indictment, which this time was founded largely on the 1917 Espionage Act, and was therefore closer to the real reasons why the case against Assange was being brought.

However, that made the case look altogether too obviously politically motivated, so it has in turn been replaced by a second superseding indictment, presented to the court and the defence team virtually on the eve of the trial, which has sought to veer back towards strictly criminal allegations, this time of involvement in computer hacking.

More Problems for Another Indictment

The allegations in the second superseding indictment have however faced major difficulties, in that they do not seem to concern the United States and may not even be actual crimes.  Also they rely heavily on the evidence of a known fraudster, whose “evidence” is inherently unreliable.

The U.S. government has failed to make clear whether the additional allegations in the second superseding indictment are intended to constitute a separate standalone case.  Initially they appeared to deny that they did; then they hinted that they might do; now however they seem to be acting as if they don’t.

As if that were not confusing enough, the U.S. government and its British lawyers have floated confusing and contradictory theories about whether or not the British authorities can extradite Assange even if the case against him is politically motivated, and even if it is related to his journalistic activities.

Initially they seemed to be arguing that — contrary to all British precedent and the actual text of the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Britain — Britain can in fact extradite Assange to the U.S. on a politically motivated charge, because the enabling Act which the British Parliament passed, which made the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Britain a part of British law, is silent on whether or not individuals can be extradited to the U.S. on a politically motivated charge.

This argument of course came close to conceding that the case against Assange is politically motivated after all.

This threadbare argument, at least for the moment, seems to have been abandoned.  At least nothing has been heard of it throughout the current hearing.  Instead the U.S. government and its British lawyers have argued, in the face of the incredulity of a string of expert and factual witnesses, that the case is not politically motivated after all.

The same inconsistencies have beset the U.S. government’s arguments as to whether or not Assange is being charged under the Espionage Act for activities related to his work as a journalist.

Initially the U.S. government’s position was that he was not.  This was based on some theory — never satisfactorily explained or articulated — that Assange in some way is not a journalist, even though he is charged with doing things that journalists do.

Faced by a barrage of expert witnesses who pointed out that the charges brought against Assange under the Espionage Act do in fact relate to work journalists do, the U.S. government midway through the hearing reversed course.

Now it says that the charges against Assange not only do relate to his work as a journalist, but that they can be brought against any journalist who does the things Assange is being charged with having done.  The U.S. government has even argued that The New York Times would have been successfully prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing the Pentagon Papers, because that was an action essentially identical to the ones for which Assange is being charged.

The implications for journalists of this astonishing reversal are truly shocking.  It is staggering that in the media it has attracted no attention.

Trouble with Witnesses 

The U.S. government has shown the same lack of coherence in its response to the defence’s impressive lineup of expert witnesses.

The conventional way of responding to an expert is to call another expert to state a contrary view.  On the critical issues of U.S. law, especially the protections provided to journalists by the First Amendment to the Constitution, as well as on the politics in the U.S. behind the Assange prosecution, the U.S. government has however done no such thing.  Presumably it has found it difficult or impossible to find experts who can be relied upon credibly to state a contrary view.

Instead, armed only with affidavits from U.S. Justice Department officials, who are of course not impartial experts at all, but who are part of the U.S. government’s legal team, the U.S. government’s British lawyers have been left to argue that the defence’s experts are not really experts at all — an impossible argument to make convincingly in my opinion — and to debate with the experts points of U.S. politics and U.S. law — including difficult points of U.S. constitutional and case law — about which the experts are by definition far more knowledgeable than the British lawyers.

The result, inevitably, has been a series of humiliations, as the lawyers have been repeatedly caught out by the experts making basic errors of fact and interpretation about the points which they have sought to argue.

Unsurprisingly, the lawyers have attempted to make up for this by trying to intimidate and denigrate the experts, in a way that has only highlighted their own lack of expertise in the relevant areas by comparison with that of the experts.

Given the collapse into incoherence of the U.S. government’s case, it is unsurprising that the U.S. government’s British lawyers are now reportedly trying to persuade the Judge against hearing closing arguments.

Given the constant shifts and reversals in the U.S. government’s position, preparing and presenting a closing argument to the court which would be internally consistent and credible must be fast becoming a nightmare.  If closing arguments do take place, as I still expect, it will be interesting to see which of the many conflicting arguments and theories they have made the U.S. government’s lawyers finally run with.

On its face the U.S. government’s case ought to be close to collapse.  There was even a point in the hearing where one of the U.S. government’s British lawyers apparently admitted to the judge that the reason for the second superseding indictment was that the first superseding indictment was “failing.”

If so, then given that the charges being prosecuted against Assange are still basically those set out in the first superseding indictment, the case against Assange ought to be dismissed, and the U.S. government’s request for his extradition ought to be refused.

The Underlying Truth

It remains to be seen whether that is what actually happens.  However, that brings me to the single most important fact, and the underlying truth, about this extraordinary case.

It is very easy when following the intricacies of such a complex legal process to lose sight of what this case is really about.

Ultimately the U.S. government is not pursuing Julian Assange because he helped Chelsea Manning take certain steps with a computer to conceal her identity, or because he had some historic contacts with hackers, or because he became involved in some activities in Iceland, which caused him to fall foul of a fraudster (and FBI informant).

Nor is it because Assange received and published classified material.  In the U.S. the receipt and publication by the news media of classified material has grown to almost industrial levels.

It is because Assange, to a greater extent than any other journalist since the end of the war in Vietnam, has exposed the darkest and most terrible secrets of the U.S. government.

Outside the court where his son endures what the judge now admits is a political trial, Julian #Assange's father, John Shipton, describes the human carnage caused by America and utters an unforgettable truth: "Julian didn't do anything, they did." https://t.co/O4AbPg4IRU

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) September 26, 2020

The case against Assange has its origin in the calamitous “War on Terror” launched by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

That “war” provided the cover for a series of violent military aggressions, primarily in the Middle East, by the U.S. and its closest allies, first and foremost Britain but also including other countries such as Saudi Arabia and France.

The result has been a series of wars in a succession of Middle East countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen— fought by the U.S. and its allies and proxies, which have caused the devastation of whole societies, and the death and dispersal of millions.

In the process the U.S. has become drawn increasingly into practices which it once condemned, or at least said it condemned.  These include the “extrajudicial killing” (i.e. murder) of people — who have included children and U.S. citizens — by drone strikes, a practice which has now become routine; the kidnapping of individuals and their detention without trial in places like Guantanamo, a practice which despite unconvincing protestations that “extraordinary rendition” no longer happens almost certainly continues; and the practice of torture, at one time referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which almost certainly still continues, and indeed appears to have become normalized.

All of this activity straightforwardly violates international (and domestic U.S.) law, including war crimes law and human rights law, and does so moreover in fundamental ways.

It also requires, in order to implement the policies that result in these unlawful acts, in the creation of a vast and ultimately unaccountable national security apparatus of a sort that is ultimately incompatible with a democratic society.  Inevitably its activities, which have become routinely unlawful, are becoming unlawful within the territory of the United States, as well as outside it.

This manifests itself in all sorts of ways, for example through the vast, indiscriminate and illegal bulk-surveillance program exposed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, and by the systemic FISA surveillance abuse exposed over the course of the Russiagate “scandal.”

The extent to which the very existence of the national security apparatus, required to implement various U.S. illegal activities and to achieve its foreign policy goals, has become incompatible with a democratic society, is shown by one of the most alarming of recent developments, both in Britain and in the United States.

This is the growing complicity of much of the media in concealing its illegal activities.  Obviously without that complicity these activities would be impossible, as would the serial violations of international law, including war crimes law and human rights, which the United States and some of its allies now routinely engage in.

US post-war aggressive history of coups and invasions for geo-strategic & economic interests has been covered up by the establishment media, explained as 'spreading democracy', and Julian Assange, almost single-handedly, lifted that cover. Hence he is in the dock.

— Joe Lauria (@unjoe) September 20, 2020

All this explains the extreme reaction to Julian Assange, and the determined attempts to destroy him, and to pulp his reputation.

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.

Thus in a series of astonishing revelations Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have exposed in the so-called embassy cables the extraordinarily manipulative conduct of U.S. foreign policy; in the Vault 7 disclosures the instruments the CIA uses in order to — as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said, “lie” and “cheat” — and, most disturbingly, in collaboration with Chelsea Manning, the rampant war crimes and egregious human rights abuses carried out by the U.S. military during the illegal war and occupation of Iraq.

This is an extraordinary record for a journalist, and for an organization, WikiLeaks, which was only set up in 2006.

Not surprisingly, the result has been that the pursuit of Assange by the U.S. government has been relentless, whilst the media, much of which has been complicit in covering up its crimes, has preferred to look the other way.

Hence, the Surreal Quality 

It is this underlying reality which gives the whole case currently unfolding in London’s Central Criminal Court its surreal quality.

That 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.  However, the hearing in London is being conducted as if this were not the case.

Thus, the extraordinary zigzags in the U.S. government’s rationale for bringing the case, as it cannot admit the true reason why the case has been actually brought.

Thus, also the U.S. government’s strenuous efforts throughout the hearing to prevent evidence being produced of its crimes which Assange exposed.

The U.S. government has strenuously opposed all attempts to introduce as evidence the appalling “Collateral Murder” video, which shows the deliberate murder of civilians in Iraq by members of the U.S. military.  It has also strenuously opposed the introduction of evidence from a defence witness about his own torture.  This despite the fact that in both cases the fact of the U.S. crimes is scarcely disputed, and has in fact been all but admitted.

The result is the paradoxical and bizarre situation whereby the U.S. authorities try to cobble together a case against Assange based on a confusing medley of discordant and conflicting claims and facts, whilst failing to prosecute or hold to account those who were responsible for the very serious crimes which he has exposed.

In fact, as the U.S. government’s case has unraveled, the argument has become increasingly confined to the discrete issue of whether — by exposing the U.S. government’s crimes —Assange “irresponsibly” put the safety of various U.S. government informants at risk.

As it happens the evidence is clearly that he did not.   Over the course of the hearing the court has heard of Assange’s many and serious attempts to conceal the identities of these informants, and of the reckless and even possibly malicious actions of certain others, who actually exposed them.

The court has also been told of the absence of any evidence that any one of these informants has in fact been harmed by any disclosure by WikiLeaks or Assange.  Moreover, an expert witness has argued convincingly that the disclosure by a journalist of the identities of such informants would not under U.S. law be a crime anyway.

In response the U.S. government’s lawyers have relied heavily, not on the evidence of any actual witness, but on passages in a book by two Guardian journalists who are known to be hostile to Assange, and who — by publishing a password — seem to have done more to compromise the identities of the informants than Assange ever did.

Neither of these journalists has been called to give evidence on oath about the contents of their book.  Doing so would, of course, have exposed them to cross-examination by the defence about the truth of the book’s contents. Given the weight the U.S. government is apparently placing on the book, I find it astonishing that they were not called.

The surreal quality of the U.S. government’s treatment of this issue is shown by the fact that when an actual witness — the German journalist John Goetz — did in fact come forward and offer to give evidence on oath about a specific allegation in the book — refuting an allegation in the book that Assange supposedly made comments at a dinner, which Goetz attended, that showed a reckless disregard for the safety of the informants — the U.S. government’s lawyers strenuously objected, and were able to get the judge to exclude this evidence.

However, it is the staggering disproportion between the scale of the crimes Assange has exposed, and the crimes of which he is accused — if they are even crimes, and of which he anyway appears to be innocent — which for me stands out.

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.

By contrast over the course of the entire hearing no evidence whatsoever has been produced that as a result of any of Assange’s actions anyone has come to any actual physical harm.

Yet it is Assange who is in the dock, facing demands for his extradition to the United States, where a 175-year sentence may await him, whilst the persons responsible for the colossal crimes he has exposed, not only walk free, but are amongst those who are trying to jail him.

The point was made forcefully during the hearing by one of the defence’s most powerful witnesses, Daniel Ellsberg.

It was also made forcefully to Consortium News by one of its readers, who has correctly pointed out that the crimes which Assange exposed were clearly defined as war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunal, whose decisions are universally accepted as forming the bedrock of international war crimes law.

The Nuremberg Tribunal moreover made it clear that there is not only a positive duty to refuse to participate in such crimes, even when ordered to do so, but that no sanctions should ever been imposed for exposing such crimes when they occur.

Judges’ bench at international military tribunal at Nuremberg, 1946. (Wikimedia Commons)

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.

Assange and Manning have paid an enormous price for their defence of international law, and for the principles of basic human decency and humanity.

Manning was recently held in long spells of solitary detention, and has had her savings confiscated by the U.S. authorities, for no reason other than that she has refused to testify against Assange.

Assange has been subjected to what various UN agencies have characterized as long periods of arbitrary detention and psychological torture.

He continues to be denied bail, despite his known health problems, and is separated from his family.

He continues to have difficulties consulting privately with his lawyers, and has been exposed to the indignity — qualified in other cases by the European Court for Human Rights as a human rights violation — of being kept inside court rooms confined to a glass box or cage.

John Pilger has described vividly and in great detail, including to Consortium News, the inhuman conditions to which Assange is daily exposed to. That these amount to human rights violations ought not to require discussion or explanation.

International Conventions

That these human rights violations breach a host of international conventions to which Britain is a signatory, including against torture and arbitrary detention, in respect of the right to a fair trial, in respect of the right to privacy and dignity of the person, and of the right to a family life, also ought not to require discussion or explanation.

Recently there has been an outcry in Britain because legislation the British government is proposing, which would allow it to modify unilaterally the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement it agreed last year with the European Union, breaches international law.

Without in any way disputing the importance of this issue, which may have important consequences for peace in Ireland, I find the angry protestations of some British journalists and politicians, that Britain never violates international law, frankly unreal.

If they want examples of Britain violating international law they need look no further than the facts of Assange’s case.  They might also benefit from looking at what has been said over the course of the ongoing hearing in the Central Criminal Court.

Despite all the difficulties, there is however no reason to give up hope.

London graffiti, March 2020. (duncan c, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The extraordinary zigzags the U.S. government has been forced to make as it tries and fails to put a coherent and convincing case against Julian Assange together, show that the law, for all its many flaws, remains an important defence.

I am aware of the many criticisms which have been made of Vanessa Baraitser, the judge who is hearing Assange’s case.  I don’t disagree with any of them.

However, I do get the impression that Baraitser’s patience has been sorely tried by the U.S. government’s repeated and dizzying changes of position.  I also get the impression that she was particularly annoyed when the U.S. government, on the virtual eve of the hearing, presented to the court and the defence its second superseding indictment, which in effect made a nonsense of the first.

That may explain why the U.S. government’s British lawyers have largely conducted the case as if the second superseding indictment did not exist, basing their arguments mostly on what the first superseding indictment says, though perhaps unsurprisingly, and to the bafflement of the experts, they are now increasingly making arguments which have no basis in any indictment.

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, Baraitser has rejected the U.S. government’s various attempts to exclude en masse the evidence of defence witnesses, even if she has imposed a 30-minute guillotine on their examination in chief (direct examination) by defence lawyers.

In summary, and in my opinion, there is still a chance, however small, that Baraitser will decide the case in Assange’s favour.

If she does not do so, then I would have thought, based on what has happened over the course of the hearing, that Assange will have good prospects on appeal.

More encouraging than what has been happening inside the court, where the outcome remains very much in doubt, and where the prospects must be considered problematic to say the least, is what has been happening outside.

My wife, who attended one of the hearings last week, saw placards held up by some of Assange’s supporters outside the court, which called on road users to honk their horns in support of Assange.  To her delighted astonishment, despite the media blackout which surrounds the case, and despite the long campaign of character assassination to which Assange has been subjected, an extraordinarily high proportion of road users (more than a quarter) did so.

That reinforces my sense that the tide of opinion, at least in Britain, is shifting.  The battle is far from over, and can still be won.

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Alexander Mercouris is a political commentator and editor of  The Duran.

Featured image: Julian Assange’s father John Shipton outside the court where his son is on trial in London, September 2020. (Twitter)

If you’re wondering what the hell is going on right now – the “Why is the world turning to shit?” thought – you may find Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma a good starting point for clarifying your thinking. I say “starting point” because, as we shall see, the film suffers from two major limitations: one in its analysis and the other in its conclusion. Nonetheless, the film is good at exploring the contours of the major social crises we currently face – epitomised both by our addiction to the mobile phone and by its ability to rewire our consciousness and our personalities. 

The film makes a convincing case that this is not simply an example of old wine in new bottles. This isn’t the Generation Z equivalent of parents telling their children to stop watching so much TV and play outside. Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform for Edward Bernays-inspired advertising. It is a new kind of assault on who we are, not just what we think.

According to The Social Dilemma, we are fast reaching a kind of human “event horizon”, with our societies standing on the brink of collapse. We face what several interviewees term an “existential threat” from the way the internet, and particularly social media, are rapidly developing. 

I don’t think they are being alarmist. Or rather I think they are right to be alarmist, even if their alarm is not entirely for the right reasons. We will get to the limitations in their thinking in a moment.

Like many documentaries of this kind, The Social Dilemma is deeply tied to the shared perspective of its many participants. In most cases, they are richly disillusioned, former executives and senior software engineers from Silicon Valley. They understand that their once-cherished creations – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat (WhatsApp seems strangely under-represented in the roll call) – have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein’s monsters.

That is typified in the plaintive story of the guy who helped invent the “Like” button for Facebook. He thought his creation would flood the world with the warm glow of brother and sisterhood, spreading love like a Coca Cola advert. In fact, it ended up inflaming our insecurities and need for social approval, and dramatically pushed up rates of suicide among teenage girls. 

If the number of watches of the documentary is any measure, disillusion with social media is spreading far beyond its inventors. 

Children as guinea pigs 

Although not flagged as such, The Social Dilemma divides into three chapters.

The first, dealing with the argument we are already most familiar with, is that social media is a global experiment in altering our psychology and social interactions, and our children are the main guinea pigs. Millennials (those who came of age in the 2000s) are the first generation that spent their formative years with Facebook and MySpace as best friends. Their successors, Generation Z, barely know a world without social media at its forefront. 

The film makes a relatively easy case forcefully: that our children are not only addicted to their shiny phones and what lies inside the packaging, but that their minds are being aggressively rewired to hold their attention and then make them pliable for corporations to sell things.

Each child is not just locked in a solitary battle to stay in control of his or her mind against the skills of hundreds of the world’s greatest software engineers. The fight to change their perspective and ours – the sense of who we are – is now in the hands of algorithms that are refined every second of every day by AI, artificial intelligence. As one interviewee observes, social media is not going to become less expert at manipulating our thinking and emotions, it’s going to keep getting much, much better at doing it.

Jaron Lanier, one of the computing pioneers of virtual reality, explains what Google and the rest of these digital corporations are really selling: “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception – that is the product.” That is also how these corporations make their money, by “changing what you do, what you think, who you are.”

They make profits, big profits, from the predictions business – predicting what you will think and how you will behave so that you are more easily persuaded to buy what their advertisers want to sell you. To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”. 

And, though the film does not quite spell it out, there is another implication. The best formula for tech giants to maximise their predictions is this: as well as processing lots of data on us, they must gradually grind down our distinctiveness, our individuality, our eccentricities so that we become a series of archetypes. Then, our emotions – our fears, insecurities, desires, cravings – can be more easily gauged, exploited and plundered by advertisers.

These new corporations trade in human futures, just as other corporations have long traded in oil futures and pork-belly futures, notes Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard business school. Those markets “have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity”.

Flat Earthers and Pizzagate

The second chapter explains that, as we get herded into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathise and compromise is eroded. We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants.

Anyone who has spent any time on social media, especially a combative platform like Twitter, will sense that there is a truth to this claim. Social cohesion, empathy, fair play, morality are not in the algorithm. Our separate information universes mean we are increasingly prone to misunderstanding and confrontation.

And there is a further problem, as one interviewee states: “The truth is boring.” Simple or fanciful ideas are easier to grasp and more fun. People prefer to share what’s exciting, what’s novel, what’s unexpected, what’s shocking. “It’s a disinformation-for-profit model,” as another interviewee observes, stating that research shows false information is six times more likely to spread on social media platforms than true information.

And as governments and politicians work more closely with these tech companies – a well-documented fact the film entirely fails to explore – our rulers are better positioned than ever to manipulate our thinking and control what we do. They can dictate the political discourse more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than ever before. 

This section of the film, however, is the least successful. True, our societies are riven by increasing polarisation and conflict, and feel more tribal. But the film implies that all forms of social tension – from the paranoid paedophile conspiracy theory of Pizzagate to the Black Lives Matter protests – are the result of social media’s harmful influence.

And though it is easy to know that Flat Earthers are spreading misinformation, it is far harder to be sure what is true and what is false in many others areas of life. Recent history suggests our yardsticks cannot be simply what governments say is true – or Mark Zuckerberg, or even “experts”. It may be a while since doctors were telling us that cigarettes were safe, but millions of Americans were told only a few years ago that opiates would help them – until an opiate addiction crisis erupted across the US.

This section falls into making a category error of the kind set out by one of the interviewees early in the film. Despite all the drawbacks, the internet and social media have an undoubted upside when used simply as a tool, argues Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and the soul of the film. He gives the example of being able to hail a cab almost instantly at the press of a phone button. That, of course, highlights something about the materialist priorities of most of Silicon Valley’s leading lights.

But the tool box nestled in our phones, full of apps, does not just satisfy our craving for material comfort and security. It has also fuelled a craving to understand the world and our place in it, and offered tools to help us do that.

Phones have made it possible for ordinary people to film and share scenes once witnessed by only a handful of disbelieved passers-by. We can all see for ourselves a white police officer dispassionately kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine minutes, while the victim cries out he cannot breathe, until he expires. And we can then judge the values and priorities of our leaders when they decide to do as little as possible to prevent such incidents occurring again.

The internet has created a platform from which not only disillusioned former Silicon Valley execs can blow the whistle on what the Mark Zuckerbergs are up to, but so can a US army private like Chelsea Manning, by exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so can a national security tech insider like Edward Snowden, by revealing the way we are being secretly surveilled by our own governments.

Technological digital breakthroughs allowed someone like Julian Assange to set up a site, Wikileaks, that offered us a window on the real political world – a window through we could see our leaders behaving more like psychopaths than humanitarians. A window those same leaders are now fighting tooth and nail to close by putting him on trial.

A small window on reality 

The Social Dilemma ignores all of this to focus on the dangers of so-called “fake news”. It dramatises a scene suggesting that only those sucked into information blackholes and conspiracy sites end up taking to the street to protest – and when they do, the film hints, it will not end well for them.

Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our leaders are really doing – whether they are committing crimes against others or against us – is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is a vital one if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviours The Social Dilemma is concerned about, not least our destruction of the planet’s life systems (an issue that, except for one interviewee’s final comment, the film leaves untouched).

Use of social media does not mean one necessarily loses touch with the real world. For a minority, social media has deepened their understanding of reality. For those tired of having the real world mediated for them by a bunch of billionaires and traditional media corporations, the chaotic social media platforms have provided an opportunity to gain insights into a reality that was obscured before.

The paradox, of course, is that these new social media corporations are no less billionaire-owned, no less power-hungry, no less manipulative than the old media corporations. The AI algorithms they are rapidly refining are being used – under the rubric of “fake news” – to drive out this new marketplace in whistleblowing, in citizen journalism, in dissident ideas.

Social media corporations are quickly getting better at distinguishing the baby from the bathwater, so they can throw out the baby. After all, like their forebears, the new media platforms are in the business of business, not of waking us up to the fact that they are embedded in a corporate world that has plundered the planet for profit.

Much of our current social polarisation and conflict is not, as The Social Dilemma suggests, between those influenced by social media’s “fake news” and those influenced by corporate media’s “real news”. It is between, on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those trapped in the old media model or those who, unable to think critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media, have been easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.

Our mental black boxes 

The third chapter gets to the nub of the problem without indicating exactly what that nub is. That is because The Social Dilemma cannot properly draw from its already faulty premises the necessary conclusion to indict a system in which the Netflix corporation that funded the documentary and is televising it is so deeply embedded itself.

For all its heart-on-its-sleeve anxieties about the “existential threat” we face as a species, The Social Dilemma is strangely quiet about what needs to change – aside from limiting our kids’ exposure to Youtube and Facebook. It is a deflating ending to the rollercoaster ride that preceded it.

Here I want to backtrack a little. The film’s first chapter makes it sound as though social media’s rewiring of our brains to sell us advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our society’s growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very obviously neither proposition is true.

Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways for at least a century. And social atomisation – individualism, selfishness and consumerism – have been a feature of western life for at least as long. These aren’t new phenomena. It’s just that these long-term, negative aspects of western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly unstoppable rate.

We’ve been heading towards dystopia for decades, as should be obvious to anyone who has been tracking the lack of political urgency to deal with climate change since the problem became obvious to scientists back in the 1970s.

The multiple ways in which we are damaging the planet – destroying forests and natural habitats, pushing species towards extinction, polluting the air and water, melting the ice-caps, generating a climate crisis – have been increasingly evident since our societies turned everything into a commodity that could be bought and sold in the marketplace. We began on the slippery slope towards the problems highlighted by The Social Dilemma the moment we collectively decided that nothing was sacred, that nothing was more sacrosanct than our desire to turn a quick buck.

It is true that social media is pushing us towards an event horizon. But then so is climate change, and so is our unsustainable global economy, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet. And, more importantly, these profound crises are all arising at the same time.

There is a conspiracy, but not of the Pizzagate variety. It is an ideological conspiracy, of at least two centuries’ duration, by a tiny and ever more fabulously wealth elite to further enrich themselves and to maintain their power, their dominance, at all costs.

There is a reason why, as Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff points out, social media corporations are the most fantastically wealthy in human history. And that reason is also why we are reaching the human “event horizon” these Silicon Valley luminaries all fear, one where our societies, our economies, the planet’s life-support systems are all on the brink of collapse together.

The cause of that full-spectrum, systemic crisis is not named, but it has a name. Its name is the ideology that has become a black box, a mental prison, in which we have become incapable of imagining any other way of organising our lives, any other future than the one we are destined for at the moment. That ideology’s name is capitalism.

Waking up from the matrix 

Social media and the AI behind it are one of the multiple crises we can no longer ignore as capitalism reaches the end of a trajectory it has long been on. The seeds of neoliberalism’s current, all-too-obvious destructive nature were planted long ago, when the “civilised”, industrialised west decided its mission was to conquer and subdue the natural world, when it embraced an ideology that fetishised money and turned people into objects to be exploited.

A few of the participants in The Social Dilemma allude to this in the last moments of the final chapter. The difficulty they have in expressing the full significance of the conclusions they have drawn from two decades spent in the most predatory corporations the world has ever known could be because their minds are still black boxes, preventing them from standing outside the ideological system they, like us, were born into. Or it could be because coded language is the best one can manage if a corporate platform like Netflix is going to let a film like this one reach a mass audience.

Tristan Harris tries to articulate the difficulty by grasping for a movie allusion: “How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you’re in the matrix?” Later, he observes: “What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”

Although still framed in Harris’s mind as a specific critique of social media corporations, this point is very obviously true of all corporations, and of the ideological system – capitalism – that empowers all these corporations.

Another interviewee notes: “I don’t think these guys [the tech giants] set out to be evil, it’s just the business model.”

He is right. But “evilness” – the psychopathic pursuit of profit above all other values – is the business model for all corporations, not just the digital ones.

The one interviewee who manages, or is allowed, to connect the dots is Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer for Twitter and Google. He eloquently observes:

“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. A world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.

“This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. As if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. … What’s frightening – and what hopefully is the last straw and will make us wake up as a civilisation as to how flawed this theory is in the first place – is to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.” 

Here is the problem condensed. That unnamed “flawed theory” is capitalism. The interviewees in the film arrived at their alarming conclusion – that we are on the brink of social collapse, facing an “existential threat” – because they have worked inside the bellies of the biggest corporate beasts on the planet, like Google and Facebook. 

These experiences have provided most of these Silicon Valley experts with deep, but only partial, insight. While most of us view Facebook and Youtube as little more than places to exchange news with friends or share a video, these insiders understand much more. They have seen up close the most powerful, most predatory, most all-devouring corporations in human history. 

Nonetheless, most of them have mistakenly assumed that their experiences of their own corporate sector apply only to their corporate sector. They understand the “existential threat” posed by Facebook and Google without extrapolating to the identical existential threats posed by Amazon, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and thousands more giant, soulless corporations.

The Social Dilemma offers us an opportunity to sense the ugly, psychopathic face shielding behind the mask of social media’s affability. But for those watching carefully the film offers more: a chance to grasp the pathology of the system itself that pushed these destructive social media giants into our lives.

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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. 

Former NATO commander General Wesley Clark earlier explained that the US underwent a post-9/11 transformation. A “policy coup” occurred. 

With no public debate or acknowledgement, hardliners in Washington usurped power.

Days after 9/11, Clark learned from Pentagon commanders that plans were made to “destroy the governments in seven countries.”

Besides Afghanistan, Yemen, and partnering with Israeli wars on Palestinians, they include Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

The plan follows the 1990s Paul Wolfowitz doctrine, stating the following:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere…”

“This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

Adopted by both right wings of the US war party, his doctrine is all about waging endless wars by hot and other means for unchallenged control over all other nations, their resources and populations — what the scourge of imperialism is all about.

The Obama regime’s preemptive war on nonbelligerent Syria over nine years ago was and remains part of Washington’s aim for controlling the Middle East and its vast hydrocarbon resources — in cahoots with junior partner Israel and key NATO countries.

Russia’s legitimate involvement from September 30, 2015 to the present day — at the request of Syria’s government — turned the tide of battle from defeat of its forces to liberation of most of the country.

Illegal occupation of northern Syria by US and Turkish forces, along with Pentagon troops in the country’s south, prevent conflict resolution.

On Tuesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained the game-changing effectiveness  of Moscow’s Syrian operations, saying the following:

“A total of 865 gang leaders and more than 133,000 militants, including 4,500 militants from the Russian Federation and the CIS countries (US supported jihadists) have been eliminated,” adding:

“The operation in Syria has demonstrated the fundamentally increased capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces, the ability to successfully defend national interests in any part of the world, as well as the readiness to provide military assistance to its allies and partners.”

“A total of 98% of military police units’ personnel, 90% of Russian pilots, and 60% of sailors gained real combat experience” in Syria.

The most active phase of Russia’s military operations in the country was from September 30, 2015 – December 11, 2017.

Over 44,000 sorties were conducted to the present day. Long-range cruise missiles were used against high-priority targets.

Surface and sub-service vessels carried out around 100 strategic strikes against ISIS and other US supported jihadists — dozens more by long-range bombers to destroy their infrastructure.

Shoigu believes that the threat posed by ISIS in Syria is neutralized.

By invitation from Damascus, Russia established two military bases in Syria.

Its Khmeimim airbase facilities are suitable for all its combat and support aircraft.

Its Tartus naval base can accommodate numerous ships. Its state-of-the-art facilities include vessel servicing, maintenance and repair capabilities.

Russian operations prevented the Syrian Arab Republic from becoming a US vassal state.

Its involvement also helps maintain a regional balance of power.

Despite important strategic accomplishments in the past five years, war in the country continues because of foreign occupation.

A potentially important development occurred on Tuesday.

According to Southfront, “Russian troops broke through a US blockade and entered eastern Syria, erecting a checkpoint along a road in Hasaka,” adding:

“The Russian military convoy, despite the opposition of the Americans, managed to break through into the eastern part of northern Syria.”

Russia’s new military checkpoint blocks movement of US troops, weapons and equipment from Iraq into Syria.

It also blocks transport of stolen Syrian oil by the US into Turkey.

Separately on Thursday, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported the following:

“In cooperation and coordination with Turkish regime-backed terrorists, the Turkish Grain Board (TMO) started to loot the wheat and barley crops which are stolen from (Syrian) farmers” — citing local sources, adding:

The Erdogan regime “opened…storehouses for this purpose after forcing farmers…to hand over their crops to centers run by terrorists and Turkish brokers in Ras al-Ayn area in Hasaka northern countryside…”

They’re smuggling them cross-border into Turkey.

Its occupation forces and terrorist proxies threatened to burn Syrian crops if farmers don’t comply with Ankara’s demands.

Shoigu’s claim about the elimination of ISIS in Syria was somewhat exaggerated.

According to AMN News on Wednesday, Syrian and Russian warplanes struck Daesh positions in Raqqa and Homs provinces to “weaken…the terrorist group’s resolve and…eliminate their remaining sleeper cells.”

A Final Comment

US sanctions war on Syria is all about wanting its people starved into submission — notably by last June’s so-called Caesar Syria Civilian Protection legislation (Caesar Act) that has nothing to do with protecting its people.

The measure threatens sanctions on nations, entities and individuals that maintain legitimate economic, financial, military, and intelligence relations with Damascus — their legal right under international law.

On Wednesday, the Trump regime imposed new sanctions on Syria.

According to a Treasury Department statement, 13 Syrian entities and individuals were blacklisted.

Targeted individuals include Syrian Central Bank governor Hazem Younes Karfoul and General Intelligence Directorate head Husam Muhammad Louka.

Targeted entities include  telecommunications, tourism, and technology firms.

US war by hot and other means on the Syrian Arab Republic aims to eliminate its sovereign independence.

Russia’s involvement in the country is a powerful counterforce against US imperial objectives.

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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.

Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei Technologies, daughter of its founder, and permanent Canadian resident, has been under house arrest in Vancouver for almost two years now and is the object of extradition proceedings against her by the Government of Canada at the request of the USA.

These judicial actions against Meng are unjust, politically motivated by the USA, and contrary to the national interests of Canada. Consequently, our Coalition demands that the Government of Canada drop the extradition proceedings against Meng and release her at once.

We know that Meng’s arrest was unjust because she committed no crime in Canada. Rather, her company stands accused by the USA of violating its unilateral, and therefore illegal, economic sanctions against Iran. As the whole world realizes, in 2018, it was the Trump Administration which abrogated the JCPOA (the Iran Nuclear Agreement), which was enshrined in 2016 as an international treaty in UN Security Council Resolution 2231. The US government then re-instated coercive economic measures against Iran (and even increased them during the pandemic). Under the Charter of the United Nations, the only body in the world which can approve economic sanctions against a member state, is the UN Security Council.

What the US is trying to do, through the extradition of Meng, is to apply the concept of extraterritoriality to its international relations, that is, trying to force other countries to abide by domestic US laws.

The US indictment 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 literally dozens of countries, through which Meng travelled, to arrest her. Every single country refused until Meng arrived in Vancouver on December 1, 2018 and Trudeau slavishly acceded to the allegedly “urgent” US extradition request.

Further indications that the arrest of Meng was politically-motivated are the facts that President Trump declared he might release Meng if he secured a favourable trade deal with China and that he told John Bolton that Meng was “a bargaining chip” in his negotiations in his trade war with China.

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, which is the jewel in the crown 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 the letter of October 11, 2018, (just six weeks before Meng’s arrest) of US Senators Rubio and Wagner of the Select Intelligence Committee, advising Prime Minister Trudeau to exclude Huwaei Technologies from the deployment of 5G technology in Canada. 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. No proof was furnished by the senators 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. It’s important to note that Huawei Technologies Canada employs 1300 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.

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. Since the livelihoods of thousands of Canadian farmers and fishers depend on the export of these products to China, they were severely affected. 30% 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. 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 Aug. 6, 2020, despite the signing of the USMCA free trade deal this year. The tariff was removed a month later.

On June 23, 2020, 17 former Canadian politicians and diplomats penned an open letter to Trudeau noting that 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 of the Two Michaels, and called for Meng’s release. However, the Trudeau government did not accede to their recommendation.

Understanding that the Trump Administration is trying to draw the Trudeau government into its campaign to villify 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 is commencing a comprehensive, grass-roots, public campaign to free Meng. We would like to see a positive reset of Canada-China relations.

Therefore, we demand that 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.

Our campaign will include a parliamentary petition, 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.

Please join with us.

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“Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War” – Plato

This wisdom is as valid today as it was 2,500 years ago. Wars go on and on. They are exactly the anti-dote of sustainability. Though, they may be the only “sustainability” modern mankind knows – endless destruction, killing, shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and its sentient beings, including humans.

Yes, we are hellbent towards “sustainably”, destroying our planet and all its living beings, with wars and conflicts and shameless exploitation of Mother Earth – and the people who have peacefully inhabited her lands for thousands of years.

All for greed, and more greed. Greed and destruction are certainly “unsustainable” features of our western “civilization”. Not to worry, in the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth will survive. She will cleanse herself by shaking and shedding off the destroyers, the annihilators – mankind. Only the brave will survive. Indigenous people, who have abstained from abject consumerism and instead worshipped Mother Earth and expressed their gratitude to her daily gifts. There are not many such societies left on our planet.

In the meantime, we lie about the sustainability we live in. We lie to ourselves and to the public at large around us. We make believe sustainability is our cause – and we use the term freely and constantly. Most of us don’t even know what it is supposed to mean. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” anything and everything have become slogans; or household words.

Such buzz-words, repeated over and over again, are made for promoting ideas, and for bending people’s minds to believe in something that isn’t.

We pretend and say that we work sustainably, we develop – just about anything we touch – sustainably, and we project the future in a most sustainable way. That’s what we are made to believe by those who coined this most fabulously clever, but untrue term. It is the 101 of a psycho-factory.

As Voltaire so pointedly said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities.”

Sustainability. What does it mean?

It has about as many interpretations as there are people who use the term – namely none specific. It sounds good. Because it has become – well, a household word, ever since the World Bank invented, or rather diverted the term for “sustainable development” in the 1990s, in connection, first, with Global Warming, then with Climate Change – and now back to both.

Imagine! – There was a time at the World Bank – and possibly other institutions, when every page of almost every report had to contain at least once the word “sustainable”, or “sustainability”. Yes, that’s the extent of insanity propagated then – and today, it follows on a global scale, more sophisticated – the corporate world, the mega-polluters make it their buzz-word – our business is sustainable, and we with our products promote sustainability – worldwide.

In fact, sustainable, sustainable growth, sustainable development, sustainable this and sustainable that – was originally coined by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the Rio Summit, the Rio Conference, and the Earth Summit – held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June in 1992.

The summit is intimately linked to the subsequent drive on Global Warming and Climate Change. It exuded projections of sea level risings, of disappearing cities and land strips, like Florida and New York City, as well as parts of California and many coastal areas and towns in Africa and Asia. It painted endless disasters, droughts, floods and famine as their consequence, if we – mankind – didn’t act. This first of a series of UN environment / climate summits is also closely connected with the UN Agendas 2021 and 2030. The UN Agenda 2030 incorporates or uses as main vehicle – the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”.

In a special UN Conference in 2016, Bill Gates was able to introduce into the 16^th SDG “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”, the 9^th of the 12 sub-targets – “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” This is precisely what Bill Gates needs to introduce digital IDs – most likely injected via vaccines, beginning with children from developing countries – i.e. the poor and defenseless are time and again used as guinea pigs.

They won’t know what happens to them. First trials are underway in one or several rural schools in Bangladesh – see this and this.

These 17 sustainable development goals, are all driving towards a Green Agenda, or as some prominent “left” US Democrat-political figures call it, the New Green Deal. It is nothing else but capitalism painted Green, at a horrendous cost for mankind and for the resources of the world. But it is sold under the label of creating a more sustainable world.

Never mind, the enormous amounts of hydrocarbons – the key polluter itself – that will be needed to convert our “black” economy into a Green economy. Simply because we have not developed effective and efficient alternative sources of energy. The main reasons for this are the strong and politically powerful hydrocarbon lobbies.

The energy cost (hydrocarbon-energy from oil and coal) of producing solar panels and windmills is astounding. So, today’s electric cars – Tesla and Co. – are still driven by hydrocarbon produced electricity – plus their batteries made from lithium destroy pristine landscapes, like huge natural salt flats in Bolivia, Argentina, China and elsewhere. The use of these sources of energy is everything but “sustainable”.

According to a study by the European Association for Battery Electric Vehicles commissioned by the European Commission (EC), “The ‘Well-to-Tank’ energy efficiency (from the primary energy source to the electrical plug), taking into account the energy consumed by the production and distribution of the electricity, is estimated at around 37%.“ See this. See also Michael Moore’s film “Planet of the Humans”.

Hydrogen power is promoted as the panacea of future energy resources. But is it really? Hydrocarbons or fossil fuels today amount to 80% of all energy used worldwide. This is non-renewable and highly polluting energy. Today to produce hydrogen is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, similar to electricity.

As long as we have purely profit-fueled hydrocarbon lobbies that prevent governments collectively to invest in alternative energy research, like solar energy of the 2^nd Generation, i.e. derived from photosynthesis (what plants do), hydrogen production uses more fossil fuels than using straight gas or petrol-derived fuels. Therefore hydrogen, say a hydrogen-driven car, maybe as much as 40% – 50% less efficient than would be a straight electric car. The burden on the environment can be considerably higher. Thus, not sustainable with today’s technology.

To enhance your belief in their slogans of “sustainability”, they put up some windmills or solar cells in the “backyard” of their land- and landscape devastating coal mines. They will be filmed for propaganda purposes along with their “sustainable” buzz-words.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the IMF are fully committed to the idea of the New Green Deal. For them it is not unfettered neoliberal capitalism – and extreme consumerism emanating from it, that is the cause for the world’s environmental and societal breakdown, but the use of polluting energies, like hydrocarbons. They seem to ignore the enormous fossil fuel use to convert to a green energy-driven economy. Or, are they really not aware? Capitalism is OK, we just have to paint it green (see this, and this.

Let’s look at what else is “sustainable”- or not.

Water use and privatization – Coca Cola tells us their addictive and potentially diabetes-causing soft drinks are produced “sustainably”. They tout sustainability as their sales promotion all over the world. “Our business is sustainable from A to Z. Coco Cola follows a business culture of sustainability.”

They use enormous amounts of pristine clean drinking water – and so does Nestlé to further promote its number One business branch, bottled water. Nestlé has overtaken Coca Cola as the world number One in bottled water. They both use primarily subterranean sources of drinking water – least costly and often rich in minerals. Both of them have made or are about to sign agreements with Brazil’s President to exploit the world’s largest freshwater aquifer, the Guarani, underlaying Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. They both proclaim sustainability.

Both Coca Cola and Nestlé have horror stories in the Global South (i.e. India, Brazil, Mexico and others), as well as in the Global North. Nestlé is in a battle with the municipality of the tiny Osceola Township, in Michigan, where residents complain the Swiss company’s water extraction techniques are ruining the environment. Nestlé pays the State of Michigan US$ 200 to extract 130 million gallons of water per year (2018).

Through over-exploitation both in the Global South and the Global North, especially in the summer, the water table sinks to unattainable levels for the local populations – which are deprived of their water source. Protesting with their government or city officials is often in vain. Corruption is all overarching. – Nothing sustainable here.

These are just two examples of privatizing water for bottling purposes. Privatization of public water supply on a much larger scale is at the core of the issue, carried out mostly in developing countries (the Global South), mainly by French, British, Spanish and US water corporations.

Privatization of water is a socially most unsustainable feat, as it deprives the public, especially the poor, from access to their legitimate water resources. Water is a public good – and water is also a basic human right. On 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights.

The public water use of Nestlé and Coca Cola – and many others, mind you, doesn’t even take account of the trillions of used plastic bottles ending up as uncollected and non-recycled waste, in the sea, fields, forests and on the road sides. Worldwide less than 8% of plastic bottles are recycled. Therefore, nothing of what Nestlé and Coca Cola practice and profess is sustainable. It’s an outright lie.

Petrol industry – BP with its green business emblem, makes believe – visually, every time you pass a BP station – that they are green. PB proclaims that their oil exploration and exploitation is green and environmentally sustainable.

Let’s look at reality. The so far considered largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was a giant industrial disaster that started on April 20, 2010 and lasted to 19 September 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, spilling about 780,000 cubic meter of raw petroleum over an area of up to 180,000 square kilometers. BP promised a full cleanup. By February 2015 they declared task completed. In reality, two thirds of the spilled oil still remains in the sea and as toxic tar junks along the sea shore and beaches; they have not been cleaned up – and may never be removed. – Where is the sustainability of their promise? Another outright lie.

BP and other oil corporations also have horrendous human rights records – just about everywhere they operate, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Asia. The abrogation of human rights is also an abrogation of sustainability.

In this essay BP is used as an example for the petrol industry. None of the petrol giants operate sustainably anywhere in the world, and least where water table-destructive fracking is practiced.

Sustainable mining – is another flagrant lie. But it sells well to the blinded people. And most of the civilized world is blinded. Unfortunately. They want to continue in their comfort zone which includes the use of copper, gold and other precious metals and stones, rare earths for ever more sophisticated electronic gear, gadgets and especially military electronically guided precision weaponry – as well as hydrocarbons in one way or another.

Sustainable mining of anything unrenewable is a Big Oxymoron. Anything you take from the earth that is non-renewable is by its nature not sustainable. It’s simply gone. Forever. In addition to the raw material not being renewable, the environmental damage caused by mining – especially gold and copper – is horrendous. Once a mine is exploited in a short 30- or 40-years’ concession, the mining company leaves mountains of contaminated waste, soil and water behind – that takes a thousand years or more to regenerate.

Yet, the industry’s palaver is “sustainability”, and the public buys it.

In fact, our civilization’s sustainability is zero. Aside from the pollution, poisoning and intoxication that we leave around us, our mostly western civilization has used natural resources at the rate of 3 to 4 times in excess of what Mother Earth so generally provides us with. We, the west, had passed the threshold of One in the mid-sixties. In Africa and most of Asia, the rate of depletion is still way below the factor of One, on average somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6.

“Sustainability” is a flash-word, has no meaning in our western civilization. It is pure deception – self-deception, so we may continue with our unsustainable ways of life. That’s what profit-bound capitalism does. It lives today with ever more consumerism, more luxury for the ever-fewer oligarchs – on the resources of tomorrow.

The sustainability of everything is not only a cheap slogan, it’s a ruinous self-deception. A Global Great Reset is indeed needed – but not according to the methods of the IMF and WEF. They would just shovel more resources and assets from the bottom 99.99% to the top few, painting the “new” capitalism a shiny bright green – and fooling the masses. We, The People, must take

The Reset in our own hands, with consciousness and responsibility.

So, We the People, forget sustainable but act responsibly.

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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.

A grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky has legally absolved of criminal responsibility the police officers, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cogrove, involved in the shooting death of 26-year old Breonna Taylor, who was gunned down in her home on March 13.

A Republican state attorney general, Daniel Cameron, called a press conference to inform the world that as of September 23 no one would be indicted for the death of Taylor.

The attorney general suggested that her friend in the apartment with Taylor, Kenneth Walker, was responsible for her death due to the fact that he fired in self-defense against the police. Only in relationship to a neighbor in the building at another unit, where no one was injured, was a charge of reckless discharge of a firearm leveled against another police officer, Brett Hankinson, who was already terminated from the Louisville Police Department (LPD).

This action by the authorities in Kentucky was met with immediate condemnation in Louisville and across the United States. The family of Taylor rejected immediately the grand jury decision and demanded the release of all deliberations of the panel in order to uncover the actual evidence presented.

Bianca Austin, an Aunt of Taylor, read a statement at a September 25 press conference in Louisville saying:

“Know this: I am an angry Black woman. Angry because our Black women keep dying at the hands of police officers … you robbed the world of a queen…. I never had faith in Daniel Cameron to begin with. I knew he was too inexperienced with a job of this caliber. I knew he chose to be at the wrong side of the law. My hope was that he knew he had the power to do the right thing. That he had the power to start the healing of this city, that he had the power to help mend over 400 years of oppression. What he helped me realize is that it will always be us against them. That we are never safe,” she said.” (See this)

Attorney General Cameron made the claim that the testimony from one witness asserting that the police had announced themselves prior to the raid on the apartment was compelling enough to discount that the raid was unannounced.  Many other witnesses refuting the allegation saying there was no warning by police of an imminent breaking down of the apartment door.

Prior to this statement by Cameron, many reports indicated that the police entered the complex on the basis of a “no knock” warrant. Such police intrusions have been frequent for many decades particularly related to the so-called “war on drugs” waged against the African American communities nationally.

On September 28, a judge ordered that the proceeding of the grand jury be made public. The Attorney General’s office requested additional time to release the materials in order to cover over, known as redactions, of what they described as “personal information.”

One report on the order read in part as follows:

“Attorney General Daniel Cameron wants more time before releasing grand jury recordings to redact personal information. A judge ordered Monday (September 28) that Kentucky’s attorney general must release recordings of proceedings in the Breonna Taylor case, in which one officer was indicted, but not for her death. Cameron’s office said Monday that it would release recordings by Wednesday at noon, but newly obtained court documents show a motion for extension was filed sometime on Tuesday. In the motion, Cameron asks for another week in order to redact personal information. He says it will help protect private citizens and witnesses.”

Nationwide Response to the Grand Jury Whitewash

Demonstrations erupted almost immediately in Louisville and other cities after news of the grand jury decision reached the public. Many of these marches and rallies were led by African American women. Two days later on Saturday, September 26, the March for Black Women (M4BW) held rallies in many cities including Denver and Detroit.

In Louisville on September 23, the police declared an unlawful assembly after marchers wanted to demonstrate in the streets and not on the sidewalks. A curfew was imposed on the city while many people were beaten and arrested on false charges. Additional marches, civil disobedience and other actions were held from New York to California bringing thousands into the streets and highways.

Denver, Colorado and Buffalo, New York witnessed attacks on demonstrators by motorists plowing into the crowds just hours after the announcement of the grand jury decision. Over the last few weeks in the U.S., there have been mobilizations by right-wing supporters of President Donald Trump, some of these manifestations result in violence due to provocations by the neo-fascists groups suggesting they are present to defend the police and private property.

A television news story reported on the situation in upstate New York saying:

“Graphic video taken by ABC affiliate station WKBW-TV in Buffalo showed a maroon and white king-cab pickup truck drive directly into a group of demonstrators who pounded on the side of the truck and yelled for the driver to stop just before a protester on a bicycle was hit. The footage shows the truck speeding away as protesters on foot chased after it.” (See this)

Georgia state troopers and National Guard soldiers fired teargas at demonstrators in Atlanta as they expressed their anger at the failure of the Louisville authorities to indict the police in the Taylor execution. 11 people were taken into custody in Atlanta which has seen numerous incidents of police violence after the killing of George Floyd on May 25 and later the gunning down by a white patrolman of Rayshard Brooks at a Wendy’s restaurant on June 12. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) announced that it has completed its investigation involving the case on September 29. Former office Garrett Rolfe has been charged with felony murder in the killing of Brooks.

State officials in Georgia are known for the deliberate disenfranchisement and disregard for the city of Atlanta and other municipalities highly populated by African Americans. Governor Brian Kemp, who came into office after a contested and controversial 2018 election against former state legislative Democratic leader Tracey Abrams, has nullified any mitigation efforts imposed by municipalities to stem the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a devastating impact on the state.

For two days in the motor city, the Detroit Will Breathe (DWB) coalition called emergency demonstrations to denounce the vindication of police in the death of Breonna Taylor. On the evening of September 23, hundreds gathered outside Detroit police headquarters downtown for a rally and then march through the streets while chanting the name of Breonna Taylor and other anti-racist, Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality slogans. There was another similar demonstration again on September 25.

Police Killings of African Americans Documented

A mapping website which chronicles the number of African Americans and others killed by police in the U.S. has revealed the stark reality facing at least 40 million Blacks along with millions more belonging to various races and nationalities. In most cases the police involved are never investigated let alone prosecuted.

Black Enterprise magazine noted in a September article that:

“For its analysis, CBS News used data from Mapping Police Violence, a comprehensive database of killings by police officers and The Washington Post. The data, featured in a slideshow, described the killings of 85 Black people this year between January and April. The data also showed that at least one Black person was killed by police every week from Jan. 1 through Aug. 31.” (See this)

Many more African Americans are joining gun clubs as their security becomes even more jeopardized by the racist social atmosphere in various regions of the U.S. Irrespective of the outcome of the national elections on November 3, undoubtedly these racial incidents will increase.

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

Today will be remembered as a grand expose.  It was a direct, pointed accusation at the intentions of the US imperium which long for the scalp of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.  For WikiLeaks, it was a smouldering triumph, showing that the entire mission against Assange, from the start, has been a political one.  The Australian publisher faces the incalculably dangerous prospect of 17 charges under the US Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  Stripped to its elements, the indictment is merely violence kitted out in the vestment of sham legality.  The rest is politics. 

Witness statements were read from a veritable who’s who of courageous investigative journalism (Patrick Cockburn, Andy Worthington, Stefania Maurizi and Ian Cobain) and an assortment of legal freight from Guy Goodwin-Gill, professor of law at the University of New South Wales, Robert Boyle, well versed in the dark practices of grand juries and Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

These statements, pointing to the value of the WikiLeaks publications, the care taken in releasing them, and the terrifying prospects for press freedom, deserve separate treatment.  But Wednesday’s grand show was stolen by two anonymous witnesses, occasioned by a change of plans.  Originally scheduled for Thursday, testimony of the witnesses from the Spanish security firm UC Global S.L. were moved a day forward.  Both speak to the aims and ambitions of the company’ owner and director, David Morales, who passed information on Assange and his meetings with allies and associates to the US intelligence service while the Australian was resident in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.  Judge Vanessa Baraitser had relented on the issue of keeping their anonymity: to have not observed the convention would have been a mark of disrespect for the Spanish court.

Their material is part of a current investigation into Morales being conducted by a magistrate of the Audiencia Nacional court. That process was instigated at the behest of Assange’s legal team, whose filed criminal complaint alleges breaches of privacy and the violation of attorney-client privilege, amongst other charges.

Illegal agreements are born 

Witness #1 informed the court of a man determined: Morales “showed at times a real obsession in relatio to monitoring and recording the lawyers who met with the ‘guest’ (Julian Assange) because ‘our American friends’ were requesting it.”

The first witness added stitching to the account linking the UC Global with US intelligence.  In July 2016, with UC Global already contracted and providing security services to the Ecuadorean embassy, Morales “travelled to a security sector trade fair in Las Vegas, which I wished to accompany him”.  This would not be.  Morales “insisted he had to travel alone.  On this trip, Mr Morales showcased the company UC Global in the Las Vegas security sector trade fair.”

What followed was UC Global obtaining “a flashy contract, personally managed by David Morales, with the company Las Vegas Sands, which was owned by the tycoon Sheldon Adelson, whose proximity to Donald Trump is public knowledge (at the time Trump was the presidential candidate).”  Morales’s point of contact at Las Vegas Sands was its chief of security, Zohar Lahav.  Lahav is also the subject of interest for the Audiencia Nacional, which has asked the US Department of Justice to seek a statement from him.  The investigating judge, José de la Mata, is keen to examine details of the Morales-Lahav association and whether their meetings involved discussing information illegally obtained from Assange.

UC Global was hired to provide security services to Queen Miri, the luxury vessel owned by Adelson.

“The contract did not make sense,” claimed the witness.  Morales seemed to be overegging the pudding.  “The most striking thing about it was that he boat had its own security, which consisted of a sophisticated security detail, and that the contract consisted in adding an additional person, in this case David Morales, for a very short period of time, through which David Morales would receive an elevated sum.”

Thrilled at getting the contract, Morales was in celebratory mood, gathering employees in the Jerez company office to say that “we have moved up and from now on we will be playing in the big league”.  What did “big league” mean?  Morales, replying to the query from the first witness, claimed that “he had switched over to ‘the dark side’ referring to cooperating with US authorities, and as a result of that collaboration, ‘the Americans will get us contracts all over the world’.”  In 2017, Morales asked for a secure phone and encrypted computer to communicate with his American contacts.

Along with news of the contract came an uncomfortable revelation: “that we had entered into illegal agreements with US authorities to supply them with sensitive information about Mr Assange and [Ecuadorean President] Rafael Correa, given that UC Global was responsible for the embassy security where Mr Assange was located.”  As a result of this parallel agreement, “reports would also be sent to ‘the dark side’.” Morales made regular trips to the US to facilitate this, “principally to New York but also Chicago and Washington” where he would “talk with ‘our American friends’.”  The first witness pressed Morales at points who these “‘American friends’ were”.  “US intelligence,” came the reply.

When confronted by the first witness that UC Global should not be engaged in such activities,   Morales huffed.  He would open his shirt in defiance, and claim with brio that he was “a mercenary, through and through”.

The first witness also testified that Morales’s trips to see his “American friends” increased with frequency in 2017.  Trump’s victory seemed to be the catalyst.  By June or July 2017, “Morales began to develop a sophisticated information collection system outside the embassy.” He asked employees “physically inside the embassy to intensify and deepen their information collection.”  The internal and external cameras of the embassy were to be changed.  Morales, according to the first witness, had also “instructed a team to travel regularly to London to collect the camera recordings.”

Tasks forces and surveillance 

Witness #2, an IT expert, told the Old Bailey how he was asked to “form a task force of workers at our headquarters in Jerez” between June and July 2017.   “The purpose of this unit was to execute, from a technical perspective, the capture, systematization and processing of information collected at the embassy that David Morales requested.”  Witness #2 was responsible for “executing David Morales’s orders, with technical means that existed in the embassy and additional measures that were installed by order of Morales, in addition to the information gathered in the embassy by the UC Global employees who were physically present in the diplomatic mission.” 

The second witness sensed inconsistencies.  Morales told the task force that the contract with Ecuador necessitated the replacement of the embassy’s cameras every three years.  “This made no sense because the contract had been in force for longer than three years and the clause had not been fulfilled to date.”  While he was unaware of the clause, the second witness considered that the circuit operating CCTV security cameras at the time “were sufficient to provide physical security against intrusion inside the building.”

But Morales was adamant.  Security cameras with concealed audio recording capabilities were to be acquired and installed.  “Because of this, and in accordance with the orders of David Morales, who claimed that all of this was necessary to fulfil the contract, I sought providers for these types of cameras, insisting in, to the extent possible, concealing audio-recording capabilities.”

The extent of Morales’s zeal alarmed the second witness.  “Around June 2017, while I was sourcing providers for the new camera equipment, David Morales instructed that the cameras should allow streaming capabilities so that ‘our friends’ in the United States’, as Morales explicitly put it, would be able to gain access to the interior of the embassy in real time.  This request alarmed me greatly, and in order to impede the request, I claimed that remote access via streaming via the camera circuit was not technically achievable.”  The witness did not “want to collaborate in an illegal act of this magnitude.”  He noted Morales’s wish to have the entire embassy bugged and suggested that the purpose of installing microphones had been “per the request of the United States” to target Assange’s defence team.

Stunned by its illegality, the second witness tried to dissuade Morales by suggesting that Assange would detect the recording facilities.  But in early December 2017, the cameras, enabled with audio-recording means, were installed.  When asked by Assange and the Political Counselor Maria Eugenia whether the new devices recorded sound, the second witness had his orders: to not “share information about the system and to deny that the cameras were recording audio.”  Once in place, “the cameras began to record sound regularly so every meeting that the asylee held was captured.”

The second witness was also heavy on detail in various specific operations designed to frustrate Assange’s own countering efforts.  He had been asked by Morales in January 2018 to place rigid stickers on the external embassy windows at the top left hand corner.  It transpired that this seemingly idiosyncratic exercise had one express purpose: to neutralise the disruptions to recording conversations caused by Assange’s white noise machine, which “produced a vibration in the window that stopped the sound being extracted via the laser microphone, which US intelligence had installed outside.”  The stickers served to eliminate the vibration, enabling the laser microphones to “extract conversations.”

Morales had also impressed upon the IT specialist that he install a microphone in the PVC folder of the fire extinguisher in the embassy meeting room used by Assange.   The same was done for “the toilet at the end of the embassy” as it had become a venue of “strategic” importance: Assange “who suspected that he was the subject of espionage, maintained many of his meetings there in order to preserve confidentiality.”

While a whole range of targets were of interest, the Spanish former judge and member of Assange’s legal team, Balthasar Garzón, was particularly important.  “The security guards at the embassy were requested to search for evidence of travels to Argentina and Russia in Garzón’s passport pages, which were photographed.” 

Nappies, contemplated kidnappings and proposed poisonings 

Such behaviour at the embassy conformed to a consistent pattern of instructions that verged on the comic and grotesque.  On one occasion, recalled Witness #2, Morales had asked him to “steal a nappy of a baby which according to the company’s security personnel deployed at the embassy, regularly visited Mr Assange.” The pilfering of the nappy was for reasons of identifying whether the baby was, in fact “a child of the asylee.”  It was “the Americans”, Morales claimed, “who wanted to establish paternity.”

Not content merely with establishing paternity, Morales’s “American friends” were also suffering from states of desperation, keen to bring Assange’s stay in the embassy to an end.  According to the second witness, “the Americans were desperate [in December 2017] and that they had even suggested that more extreme measures should be employed against the ‘guest’ to put an end to the situation of Assange’s permanence in the embassy.”  Suggestions were made to Morales by his US contacts: the door of the embassy would be left open; an “accident” could be claimed for covering an operation “which would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee”.  Another option was put on the table: “the possibility of poisoning Mr Assange”.  Such suggestions, Witness #2 claimed, “shocked” the employees, who “commented amongst ourselves that the course that Morales had embarked on was beginning to become dangerous.”

The eviction and arrest of Assange followed.  Witness #1 informed Assange’s legal team that Morales had “betrayed both the terms of the contract and the trust that had been given to him by the Government of Ecuador, by systematically handing over information to US intelligence agencies.”  He came to realise that information on the security of the embassy and Rafael Correa had been sold to “the enemy, the United States, which is the reason I put an end to my professional relationship with him.” 

These revelations excited Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, having already etched his name into legal history at these proceedings with supporting testimony.  In his optimistic view, such evidence of surveillance by the CIA of Assange’s conversations with his legal team “and everyone else” in the embassy, along with suggestions of poisoning and kidnapping, might mean him walking free. “That’s essentially the same information that ended my case and confronted [President Richard] Nixon with impeachment, leading to his resignation!” Convincing to Ellsberg it may be, but will it sway the icy temperament of Judge Vanessa Baraitser?

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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]

Military personnel outnumber civilian scientists in the United States government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program. With the military so heavily involved in the distribution of this vaccine, is it any surprise that most Americans don’t want anything to do with it?

An organizational chart obtained by Stat shows, raising concerns about whether military officials are qualified to lead the massive public health campaign. The military is used for war. Rolling it out to distribute a rushed vaccine signals one thing to the public if you’re brave enough to admit it: this vaccine distribution is a war on the public perpetrated by the government. Wake up.

This vaccine won’t be voluntary by any sense of the word.  You don’t have to take it, but if you don’t, you won’t be able to eat, buy food, pay rent, or leave your house that will be taken from you if you cannot pay the mortgage because you refuse the vaccine. That doesn’t sound like anyone will have much of a choice.

This vaccine could be ready before the election, however, it may not be. Political chaos surrounding the elections is all a part of this vaccine agenda.  The goal is to have everyone tracked, traced, monitored, and under authoritarian control. The goal is the New World Order.

The Health and Human Service’s $300 million “pandemic-related” ad campaign (propaganda rollout) touched off an outcry, and rightfully so, after Politico reported leaked details. Among the concerns were its funding sources: Food and Drug Administration contributed $15 million for pre-campaign work, while most of the program’s $300 million budget was requisitioned from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention funds appropriated by Congress, Politico revealed.

Additionally, the Ohio national guard has been called upon to help provide “security” for the presidential debates. Around 300 members will be sent to the city to “ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending Tuesday’s presidential debate in Cleveland.”

The military will be increasingly used in the coming months and it’s rollout will be seen as a way to provide peace and safety. Please remain vigilant and prepared. Stay alert and know all the possibilities of what could be coming, as it’ll give you an idea of the additional preps that will be needed. As of right now, refuse to live in fear, and make sure you can defend yourself and your family, especially if you intend to deny the vaccine.

Changes are coming, so prepare and stay alert.

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Featured image is from SHTFplan.com

Good news or bad, he dominates the headlines and front pages of newspapers, he leads tele-vision coverage, and populates the shelves of book shops.  He doesn’t seem to  mind what is said about him as long as he is in our faces and on our minds. 

His latest intrusions involve news of his failure to pay US taxes for a decade,  accusations of drug use he has levelled at Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden, charges that the Democrats are seeking to open US borders to migrants and claims that opponents of his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett are motivated by anti-Catholic bias rather than her ultra-conservatism. Trump  castigates  scientists who contradict his untruthful claims about the corona virus and relishes unwelcome revelations and reports about him so he can reply on Twitter or elsewhere, keeping himself in the news.

He has continued to claim, falsely, that the results of the November 3rd  election will be skewed because millions will have voted by mail. Trump has hammered home this line for more than a year because more Democrats than  Republicans generally vote by mail.  This time round 69 per cent of Biden supporters plan to vote by mail as compared to 19 per cent of Trump backers who  intend to  cast ballots at the polling stations despite risks posed by COVID-19.  Trump does not care whether votes catch COVID. He even courts contagion by  campaigning in halls where hundreds of fans gather without masks or social distancing. Of course, those nearest him wear masks.

Writing in the Guardian former US secretary of labour Robert Reich argues that the ongoing presidential election campaign does not feature differences over issues and   divergent policies.  Instead, he says, “The central fight is over Donald J. Trump”.

Reich divides the US public — and electorate — into Trump’s backers and opponents, “us and them”, Trump Nation and Anti-Trump Nation. Trump  does not consider himself president of all US citizens only of his backers. In his  view people who do not support him live in a “different country.”

While I agree with Reich in principle, I have my own take on the  division. I prefer to classify the sides as the “Trump Cult” and the “Anti-Trump Camp.”   Unfortunately for the US, they do live in the same country.

Adherents of the Trump cult are, like all cultists, devoted to an individual, blind to his failings, faults and flagrant misdeeds and are prepared to go to great lengths, including adopting violence, to see him reelected. Members of the Anti-Trump Camp are motivated to oust him due to his character,  behaviour and policies. They operate as traditional political activists determined to rid the US and the world of Trump.

Trump cultists are overwhelmingly white working, lower middle class and middle class, although oligarchs finance Trump as well as vote for him.  Many Trump cultists are religious and lack higher education. Few Blacks, Latinos  and Asians vote for him. Anti-Trump campers come from all economic  groupings, are more educated, less devout, and include large proportions of Blacks, Latinos and Asians.

The motivations of Trump cultists are largely defensive and negative.  This is why they are attracted to Trump, who is defensive and delights in negativity.  Cultists are defensive because they wish to maintain White, Christian rule in a country where non-Whites are growing in number and religious observance is in decline.  In recent years, Blacks, in particular, have been demanding equality and power sharing.  Trump cultists feel detached  not only from Washington, the US capital, but also from lawmakers in their  home states. They are fundamentally anti-government and wrongly believe Republicans intend to downsize government. They resent local, state, and  national interference in their lives.

Trump cultists resent the influential elite, which has dominated US political, economic, social, educational and scientific life for many decades.  Cultists empathise with Trump’s  resentment of his predecessor Barack  Obama who, although identifying as Black, belongs to the elite.  Obama’s gentlemanly appearance,  graceful manners, and Harvard law degree have gained him admission to the elite while crude and rude Trump can never hope to secure membership.

The fact that Black Obama has succeeded where White Trump has  failed has deepened his resentment. An envious Trump is doing his best to erase Obama’s presidential legacy and is applauded by his “base” of supporters for doing so.  They also back his drive to reverse liberal legislation regulating greenhouse gas emissions and guns because they argue such measures

Anti-Trump campers are both defensive and positive. They understand   the federal government requires reform but must be protected. They are motivated by the need to rescue, protect, and maintain economic and social gains made by liberal and progressive legislation and policies in recent decades. These include health care for poorer sections of the population, the right to abortion, equal rights for all, controlling weaponry, and dealing with climate change.

The basic division of the country did not begin with Trump. It has existed since the US was founded. He has simply exploited it — loudly and persistently — to his advantage. Maps of red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) states show that Trump cultists are dominant in the south, parts of the midwest, and the north central states while the Anti-Trump camp is located in the northeast, west coast, Colorado and New Mexico.  A few purple states have mixtures of the rival parties.

The cultist population of red states, the majority of states, largely inhabits rural areas and outer suburbs of major cities and towns while campers in the blue states are concentrated in urban areas and inner suburbs.

While Trump accuses Anti-Trump campers of being “radical leftists,”Trump cultists are, in fact, radical revanchists who seek to revert to a fictitious simpler society of decades ago when Whites enjoyed superiority without challenge and to “return” to “greatness” the US never attained.

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Featured image: President Trump at a July briefing at Southern Command Headquarters in Miami.

First published on September 27, 2020

“Implementation of the current draconian measures that are so extremely restrict fundamental rights can only be justified if there is reason to fear that a truly, exceptionally dangerous virus is threatening us. Do any scientifically sound data exist to support this contention for COVID-19? I assert that the answer is simply, no.”

– Sucharit Bhakdi, MD [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

It’s been called the biggest lockdown in world history.

Schools started closing down. Most businesses outside a few exceptional cases were forced to shut down. All sports and entertainment events were also closed. Land borders were closed. [2]

On March 26, 1.7 billion people were effected by some form of lock-down. In early April, that number leaped to 3.9 billion people – more than half the population of Earth!

This was in response to SARS-CoV-2, a nasty enemy so menacing that it has in less than a year infected over 32,000,000 people, and is on the verge of claiming one million lives! Medical practitioners everywhere scrambling to find solutions while regular citizens mull about at home, many terrified about where all this might lead. [3]

Meanwhile, there are dissident voices throughout America and Europe who see the course of the germ is not quite as dangerous as the World Health Organization (WHO), politicians and mainstream media are leading them to believe. Moreover, the radical measures taken to protect the public are not having an impact, and in some cases even having a detrimental effect.[4]

These voices are rarely heard in mainstream media, and have in fact been banished in Facebook and other social media. [5]

This week, on the Global Research News Hour we begin part one of an epic series exploring this virus, what it does, what measures are being taken to deal with it, and on the overall impact this “War on Covid” will have on our world.

The first guest is Sucharit Bhakdi. This renowned expert in microbiology along with Karina Reiss wrote a book – Corona: False Alarm? Facts and Figures. He breaks down how the facts he chronicles show how mightily deceived the public has been.

Our next guest is Mark Crispin Miller. A noted academic from New York, he took a particular interest in the mask question used to contain the spread of the virus. He analyzes the situation in an article that he is in the process of writing. He joins us to share his thoughts about masking, and the various methods used to further this remedy and other aspects of the COVID situation.

Sucharit Bhakdi, MD is a physician and  a post-doctoral researcher. He was named chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz in 1990, where he remained until his retirement in 2012. He has published over three hundred articles in the fields of immunology, bacteriology, virology, and parasitology, for which he has received numerous awards and the Order of Merit of Rhineland-Palatinate. He is a specialist in microbiology and one of the most cited research scientists in German history. His book, co-authored by Karina Reiss, is Corona: False Alarm? Facts and Figures. 

It is available now in the English language.

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, and author of numerous articles on media censorship and election fraud. He is also authoring a major article which is focused on the widespread lies about the safety of the masks we put on to protect us from the threat of COVID 19.

(Global Research News Hour episode 288)

 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

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

Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-have-lot-evidence-that-fake-story-all-over-world-german-doctors-covid-19/5723723
2. Cornelius Hirsch (April 15, 2020) ‘Europe’s coronavirus lockdown measures compared’, Politico; https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-coronavirus-lockdown-measures-compared/
3. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
4. https://www.globalresearch.ca/medical-doctors-ask-reassessment-corona-measures/5724110
5. ibid

The 1st Presidential debate of 2020 held last night, September 29, was a reflection of the growing systemic social crisis in the USA. This is what we saw:

1) a refusal of the representatives (Trump & Biden) of the two wings of the Corporate Party of America to propose any actual solutions to the multiple crises now all intensifying across the country—health, economic, racism, and climate.

2) identity politics run amuck, now writ large at the highest political levels—i.e. the Great Distraction in full force, crowding out and preventing solutions to the crises.

3) a harbinger of political chaos just around the corner—at both a street level and in the major political institutions of the country—and the collapse of Democracy before our eyes.

The commentary of the media following the chaotic exchange (none dare call it a debate) focused on the ‘form’ rather than the content of the exchange: Trump went wild interrupting Biden and stealing much of Biden’s time. The moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, was either incompetent in his inability to stop him or else willing to let him continue and intervening only when Trump had succeeded in drowning out most of Biden’s talk. Biden too was unable to deal with Trump’s antics, at times taking Trump’s bait and falling into his trap.

But what’s so new about all that? That’s Trump, who came to give a speech to his 40% voter ‘red’ base—i.e. the third party at the debate! Nevertheless, the media was shocked that Trump would engage in such an egotistical, disrespectful disregard for the rules of the debate which he had pre-agreed to. To the talking media heads the ‘form’ of the debate was thus more important than any content that might have addressed today’s multiple real crises.

1) The Multiple Crises Ignored (Economic, Health, Race, Climate)

Biden raised the New York Times’ story released over the weekend in which Trump’s tax returns showed Trump paid only $750 in total federal income taxes over two years, 2016-2017. Trump of course denied it as ‘fake news’. And that was that. There was no follow up discussing the four decades long tax system rip off. Nor about why both parties (i.e. both wings of the one party) since 2001 have given investors, corporations, and the wealthiest US households more than $15 trillion in tax cuts. GW Bush $4.7T, Obama $6.1T, Trump $5T with both parties agreeing to another $650B just last March.

Nor was there any mention of the escalating income inequality on both Republican & Democrat watches that was enabled by the $15 trillion tax redistribution to corporations and the rich. Nothing was said why Trump’s tax rip off resulted in wealthy investors getting $3.4 trillion in stock buybacks and dividend payouts in just the last three years; or why under Obama they got more than $6 trillion in buybacks & dividends on his watch!

And nothing was said by either of them why there are still 40 million American workers jobless, or why tens of millions of those lost jobs will never return, or why a long line of big corporations are now announcing permanent layoffs by the tens of thousands.

Biden never bothered to raise the point why millions of small businesses have gone under and millions more are about to do so. He could have quoted the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), the trade association arm of small businesses in the US, and its recent forecast that 21% of the roughly 30 million small businesses have already, or soon will close, if no real fiscal stimulus and bailout is passed. Trump of course ignored that altogether. He no doubt would have called the NFIB survey ‘fake news’.

There was a brief exchange on US manufacturing by both candidates, but both were wrong on the facts. The business cycle in 2008-10 destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs, only some of which came back and then mostly as two tiered, temp, low paid, no benefits jobs. The current recession is now in repeat mode in manufacturing. Production is up but jobs aren’t being restored. Biden could have indicated manufacturing was in a recession for the six months prior to Covid but he didn’t. And neither candidate discussed why free trade deals, in addition to the recessions, have destroyed at least 4 million US manufacturing jobs. Biden clearly will not go there since they, like the Republicans, are champions of free trade deals. The Dems praised the recent phony NAFTA 2.0 agreement negotiated by Trump. Trump’s promise to bring back those jobs in 2016 has been all smoke and mirrors. But did Biden bother to cite the facts?

And what about trade? Trump claimed his trade wars have been a glowing success. Is that why he’s had to subsidize the farm sector with $49 billion in cash handouts since 2018 (with $17B more promised)! If his trade wars have been so successful, why has he had to funnel billions of dollars in hand outs to his agribusiness buddies? Why have more than 10,000 small farmers gone bankrupt in recent years every year? Biden said nothing of this subsidy to agribusiness still earning billions in profits or the bankruptcies of small family farms. For Biden the ‘trade problem’ is not the escalating subsidies to business or the destruction of jobs in the millions; it’s just a China deficit issue, the numbers of which he couldn’t even quote correctly.

So far as the health/Covid crisis is concerned, there was an exchange in last night’s ‘debate’. But it came down to Biden saying we should wear masks and Trump saying a vaccine was around the corner. That’s it. Biden noted correctly, of course, that Trump has grossly mismanaged the handling of the virus response. To which Trump simply retorted Biden would close down the entire economy again. Trump’s position is ‘Horror of horrors! We can’t save grandma and grandpa if the profits of our nail salons are the cost’! Biden’s position: Yes we can. Let’s all wear masks.

But where was the discussion that the US total reliance on private businesses and ‘markets’ has in large part been responsible for the magnitude of the Covid crisis in the US? The US had outsourced its production of PPE to China and elsewhere before the crisis. There was no mention of that, because both parties have agreed for decades to provide business tax incentives to move operations offshore. There was not a word about the responsibility of US businesses that conveniently offshored critical US goods like PPE and now testing agents to ensure greater profits for themselves. Now, with a second Covid wave imminent this winter, the US still lacks reagents and other pharmaceutical materials needed to do effective testing. Six months into the Covid crisis US business continues to offshore production of critical health supplies, despite US deaths are now predicted to exceed 400,000 by year’s end. That’s more US dead in less than a year than occurred during nearly four years of World War II. But still no war production plan is in place in the US. Neither Trump or Biden has proposed one. Trump, the great admirer of private business and stock markets, is still reluctant act like a ‘war president’ in the worst war confronting the US since 1941. Why? Because he knows that means stepping on the toes of his business buddies and election campaign contributors. For the same reason Biden won’t go there.

For Biden to propose putting the US on a war production footing would mean seizing the necessary production assets of private business, including big pharma companies, and returning it all to the US under a central war production plan. His wing of the Corporate Party of America is no more interested in doing that than Trump’s wing. Nor Trump or Biden explained how a vaccine might be fairly distributed to all Americans next year, or how a million tests a day would be produced and administered.

Biden not surprisingly defended Obamacare, the ACA, focusing on how it protected pre-existing conditions. Trump bragged about how he gutted it by ending the individual mandate.

But what did both say about the fact nearly 50 million workers and families are again uninsured? And at least another 30-40 million grossly under-insured? Biden’s answer was to add the ‘public option’ to Obamacare—which Obama himself pulled from the ACA in 2010. That way private employers can keep their tax write offs for continuing to provide their employees health insurance while the health insurers can continue to reap record profits from both private employer plans and the ACA. Biden specifically reject any notion of Medicare for All. Trump said he had an alternative plan to replace ACA—which he’s been saying for three years but not showing!

In short, both candidates provided no answer to how to manage the continuing Covid crisis, nor to the even worse general health crisis in the US. The USA remains in the ranks of 3rd world banana republics when it comes to the health security of all but the wealthiest of its citizens.

And what about the discussion of race relations and policing in America? Here a heated exchange did occur. Biden’s answer was to get local police departments, politicians and select community leaders together to ‘unite America’. Somehow that would end systemic racism and institutionalized police repression. Trump attacked that idea as well as race ‘sensitivity’ training programs in general, which he recently declared cancelled. According to Trump, the programs were demeaning to whites and suggested they were reverse racists. White folks don’t want to be reminded of that, he said. Even more, they don’t want to be forced to ‘role play’ as blacks. It’s demeaning. And that was that, i.e. the full extent of the discussion of systemic racism in America: let’s do more sensitivity training (Biden); let’s not because it’s reverse racism and might make his white folk political base uncomfortable. They don’t like being even role played as black (Trump).
And climate change? Biden’s answer was to rejoin the Paris Accords and maybe spend some more money on alternative energy infrastructure, as he went out of his way to reiterate his rejection of the notion of a ‘Green New Deal’. Trump’s answer to climate warming was it was too expensive for American business, even though they’re reaping historical maximum profits and getting trillions of dollars of tax cuts and subsidies every year. Trump then attacked Biden for California being consumed by forest fires, saying the Dems there have mismanaged the forest floor by not raking up enough leaves. Biden said nothing in return about the fact that 65% of California’s forests are federal land, and if anyone was responsible for not ‘raking the leaves’ it was Trump’s own Interior Department. But he did say there were larger storms in Iowa, whatever that meant. Neither candidate has a clue what to do about the climate crisis.

In summary, neither Trump or Biden addressed the real issues or proposed any credible solutions to the multiple crises afflicting America today— multiple crises now intensifying, converging, and exacerbating each other.

2) Identity Politics Run Amuck

What we also saw in the first presidential debate is a reflection—at the highest level of politics and within the US elite itself—of the country’s descent into the muck of identity politics.
US society is becoming mired in the plague of identity politics. At all levels, the focus is increasingly on extreme individualism—often at the expense of the public good. Rational discussion and solutions to collective crises are crowded out of public discourse. Replaced by fear-mongering appeals to identity among their political supporters by politicians and elites of both wings of the Corporate Party of America.

White European Americans are fearful their culture, jobs, and ‘way of life’ is about to give way to the ‘others’—i.e. all peoples of color whether Latin, Muslim, and other immigrants coming into the country; and to those of color already (African Americans) here but growing in number as well.

Like the Jews in Germany, large sections of white European Americans see black Americans as the ‘others’ living within our midst but not really one of us. Like the German Jews, they are the foreigners allowed to come here by past politicians. As in Germany, the ‘others’ become the ‘enemy within’ and symbol of all the causes of their economic and social fears, insecurity, and anxiety—as politicians and elites re-direct the cause of social decay from their policies to the ‘others’—i.e. immigrants, blacks, LGBTQ, etc. Immigrants, blacks, and gays are the cause of their declining standard of living, their culture, and their way of life—i.e. Trumpublicans and their media); white European ‘deplorables’ are preventing you people of color from achieving your rightful identity as equals to white European Americans—i.e. Democrats and their media.

It’s all part of the ‘Great Distraction’, designed to allow the elites of both wings to continue to pick all our pockets while we’re preoccupied with identity issues and politics. So long as we’re immersed in issues of identity there’s no need to divide and conquer so they can continue to pick our pockets. Identity means by definition we’ve divided ourselves from each other.
Technology of course plays a conscious role in enabling the descent into extreme individualism and dead end identity.

The youngest are mesmerized by their electronic gadgets that enable them to focus neurotically on themselves for hours upon hour every day, absorbing most of their waking lives. Young adults are immersed in social media sourced news and pseudo-facts. As they grow realize they are condemned to lives of indentured, low pay, part time and temp service employment, they desperately seek and embrace simplistic ideologies as an explanation for their plight. Middle age adult become increasingly insecure and fearful as the see their families’ futures dim and realize they are approaching older age and retirement without pensions and sufficient income to keep themselves from poverty. They look for a ‘strongman’ to save them in time.

They all become fodder for clever manipulation, fear mongering by media talking heads, and conspiracy theories multiplying daily on social media that substitute for the thinking and evaluating facts and opinions that is necessary for rational thought. The network does the thinking for them. People fearful and in crisis grab the nearest exit and short cut to explain their situation and propose a solution.

The capitalist media no longer consists of objective presenters of facts and events but subjective interpreters and spinners of facts and events. The subjective media is the new priest providing the congregation of the fearful and desperate the answers it wants them to absorb—except now it all occurs on a daily and by the minute basis instead of just on Sunday mornings. The result is predictable: when confronted with objective facts, such facts are rejected since they don’t conform to the rapidly expanding fantasy world of conspiracies and the messaging of media spin doctors.

Tell me what I already believe or I’ll listen to someone else who will! Don’t tell me what I don’t want to hear’. Tell me something so that I can cheer: ‘Hooray for our side’.
People are so concerned trying to understand who they are, that they are enable to see who they are becoming—at the hands of political elites who have found playing the identity card works well for keeping folks—white and non-white—from understanding the real source of their fears, their anxieties, their growing angst. That real source originates in the policies of both parties that are ever-enriching their wealthy elites at the expense of the rest of society.

Identity politics is the Heroin fix necessary to create the social stupor of the Great Distraction. And the flip side of the Great Distraction of identity politics is the Big Rip-off—where the same elites and politicians of both wings of the Corporate Party of America pick our pockets.

What we’ve just seen at the highest level in yesterday’s 1st presidential debate is the same focus on Identity politics, albeit now write large at the highest level. The same Great Distraction that has been intensifying in America for years. The same Big Rip Off in action! As the former intensifies, the latter grows in tandem.

In the first presidential debate both Biden and Trump immersed themselves in a personality food fight, like teenagers in a high school cafeteria: Trump attacked Biden as ‘sleepy Joe’ who Trump even suggested failed to graduate from the college. Adding to Trump’s pre-debate comments that Joe has early onset dementia and has to take performance drugs to stay awake and debate. Biden in turn declared Trump a clown. A neurotic egotist. Sick. Mentally unfit.

The disease of identity politics in America has thus bubbled up like foul smelling swamp gas from society at large, to the very top echelons of the American political elite. Every election cycle we say the quality of the candidates put up to represent can’t get worse; but it does.

Listening to the media commentators at CNN and other outlets after the ‘debate’, the talking head experts were perplexed and repeatedly asked each other why any voter would continue to support Trump after his childish performance in last night’s debate? Conversely, at Fox the spin was his performance was precisely why his base continues to support him. What the former don’t understand, and the latter won’t admit, is that Trump’s 40% base remains solid no matter what he says, how he says it, or what he does. And that’s for a fundamental reason that also has to do with Identity.

For white European Americans, Trump is the bulwark against the ‘others’. He stands unequivocally against the changing demographic where White Europeans will soon no longer constitute the majority. They fear should that happen, not only their jobs but their culture, their values, their religion, and ‘their America’ will be no more! That single, fundamental reason is why they overlook everything about Trump and still support him regardless of his racism, his misogyny, his proto-fascist inclinations, his disrespect for democratic practices and norms, his verbal slips about ‘suckers and losers’, and all the rest. Nothing matters except he hold back the wave of colored folks of varying hues that will take away their America.

And with more than 350 million guns in America (and more than 15 million assault rifles) many of them are prepared to go to violent extremes if need be. Many are just waiting for the ‘Big Dog Whistle’ from Trump.

3) A Political Crisis of Unimaginable Dimensions

In an essay entitled, ‘A Most Dire Warning’ a couple weeks ago this writer predicted the most likely scenario following the November 3 election. It included Trump taking legal action to stop the mail in ballot vote counting by turning to his now many Federal District and Appeals court recent ideological judge appointees. The scenario includes Trump declaring himself the winner on November 3-4, knowing that more Republicans will vote directly that day than will mail in ballots than Biden supporters will vote directly. CNN polls show 66% of Trump supporters will vote directly vs. only 22% Biden supporters. That means Trump will likely show an early lead, supported by exit polling. But he must stop the mail ballot counting or he may lose in the end. He will rely on his 6-3 US Supreme Court majority to support Appeals court decisions to stop the voting in select swing or blue states. There is a precedent for this already. It’s exactly what the Supreme Court did in 2000 to ‘select’ George W. Bush as president. It stopped the vote recount in Florida to give Bush the presidency. Only this time it will be multiple states and the original mail in ballot vote counting that may be halted. Protests that erupt will be met with physical police force. That too is being planned. Protestors will be identified as ‘Antifa’ and ‘BLM’ militants and repressed. The federal police force created in 2002 for the first time in US history—called the DHA—are the favored instruments. But Trump may call on his radical fascist street supporters to assist where necessary as well. The more the street level social chaos the more likely the Supreme Court will tend to try to settle the dispute to end the street chaos.

In yesterday’s debate, the moderator asked Trump if he would call on his street supporters to not get involved. To this he answered, “ the Proud Boys ( a widespread neo-fascist group in America today) Stand Back. Stand Down”. Immediately the radical right, hearing these words, began to mobilize and prepare for Trump’s ‘big dog whistle’ on November 4.

Trump will not accept the outcome should he lose on November 3. Nor in January 2021. He said “we might not know for months” the final vote count. That means well beyond January 2021. In the meantime, he further noted he’s “Counting on the Supreme Court to look at the ballots”. Will the SCOTUS review the tens of millions of mail in ballots directly! Trump concluded “This is not going to end well”.

For his part, Biden declared to the TV audience “He can’t stop you from the outcome of this election”. If we get the votes, he’s not going to stay in power”. But what Biden fails to understand is we may not get all the votes if the mail ballots end of not being counted—as happened in 2000 in Florida thanks to the same Supreme Court that is soon even more in Trump’s camp! Biden’s pre-debate statement that the US military will ‘escort him out of the White House’ was wishful thinking as well. The Pentagon generals the next day publicly stated the they would not get involved. So who will ‘escort’ Trump out? The Democrats have no executive arm; Trump does: the DHS swat teams and most of the police departments in the country that support his election.

And then there’s the Proud Boys who may just descend upon Washington D.C. and take up positions around the White House, armed with their AR-15s. Who’s going to try to escort Trump out in that scenario?

The foregoing exchange by Trump and Biden on the day of the election and after was undoubtedly the most important exchange of the entire 1st presidential debate. All the rest was irrelevant verbal bombast, appeal to identity politics, and personality clash. Viewers of the debate learned nothing about how America might extract itself from its intensifying multiple crises. What they learned is that a political crisis may be coming, the likes of which haven’t been seen in America since 1860.

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Featured image is from fivethirtyeight.com

Trump Administration’s Corporate Bailouts Aided Failing Fossil Fuel Companies; Stands in Contrast to Lack of COVID-19 Assistance for Ailing American Families

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Oil and gas companies have issued nearly $100 billion in new bonds since the Trump administration’s COVID-19 corporate bailout began in March, a new report released today by Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen and BailoutWatch found.

The analysis found that at least $99.3 billion in new bonds have been issued since the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department undertook a taxpayer-backed rescue of corporate debt markets. The oil and gas industry, which entered the crisis in dire shape, has responded to the Trump administration’s intervention with record new borrowing.

Report highlights include:

• A total of 56 oil and gas companies have issued $99.3 billion of debt in U.S. markets since the Federal Reserve began its bailout of corporate debt markets in late March. Some said they might fail without the fresh financing.
• The Fed has purchased debt from a total of 19 oil and gas companies. Those companies have sold debt investors more than $60 billion in new bonds since the Fed’s intervention began, representing about 60% of energy debt issuance in that period. Of those 19 companies, 12 have received downgrades of their short-term debt, long-term debt, credit or default ratings from major credit rating agencies since March.
• Oil and gas companies incorporated in the U.S. have issued $129 billion in new bonds this year, according to Bloomberg data. This tally is a record for the year to date going back at least a decade. The first three quarters of 2020 represent the highest level of energy debt issuance for that period since at least 2010. This surge in borrowing was made possible by the Fed’s promise to purchase large quantities of corporate debt.
• Of the 122 new bond issuances reviewed, 93 will be used at least in part to pay down or refinance a specifically named existing debt such as commercial paper, revolving credit lines or other bonds. At least 15 companies are issuing new bonds to replace existing bonds that had higher coupon rates.

“When consumers take on too much credit card debt, they can be forced into bankruptcy and face financial ruin. But when the oil and gas industry accumulates too much debt, it gets a bailout on the backs of taxpayers,” said co-author Alan Zibel, research director of Public Citizen’s Corporate Presidency Project. “This bailout is an unprecedented rescue of a dying industry. Instead of bailing out climate-destroying fossil fuel companies, we must assist small businesses, local governments and individuals facing dire financial straits.”

“Big Oil is exploiting COVID-19 to go on an unprecedented borrowing binge, and the Trump administration is to blame,” said co-author Lukas Ross, program manager with Friends of the Earth. “Polluters are getting a $100 billion lifeline, while most Americans are being left behind.”

“Fossil fuel companies are still headed for a financial cliff, but this bailout handed them a bit more road,” said co-author Dan Wagner, editor of BailoutWatch. “This is prolonging the life of the fossil fuel industry at a time when it needs to be phased out for communities and the climate.”

Read the full report here and access the full list of bond issuances here.

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Tra Stati Uniti e Cina è in corso una guerra fredda che si gioca sul piano politico, commerciale e del controllo delle risorse energetiche.

Mike Pompeo, il segretario di Stato degli Stati Uniti, è a Roma per incontrare il presidente del Consiglio Giuseppe Conte e far sentire la voce del governo americano di Donald Trump. Su Byoblu24, con una disamina del giornalista ed esperto di geopolitica Manlio Dinucci, cerchiamo di capire quali saranno stati i temi al centro della discussione.

Il progetto della via della seta, oggetto di un memorandum d’intesa firmato tra Cina e Italia nel marzo 2019, è particolarmente osteggiato dall’amministrazione degli Stati Uniti. Il timore è che dietro di esso si nascondano scopi militari di Pechino, che beneficerebbe di una via privilegiata per far arrivare mezzi armati in Europa. Per Manlio Dinucci, questa possibilità è da escludere e la via della seta darebbe all’Italia convenienti sbocchi commerciali nel continente euroasiatico.

A preoccupare Pompeo è anche il progetto di gasdotto denominato Nord Stream 2 voluto dalla Russia per portare il proprio gas in Germania. Secondo Dinucci il caso Navalny, l’oppositore del governo Putin, sarebbe da collegare proprio alla volontà di Pompeo di bloccare i progetti dei russi di far arrivare il loro gas in Europa.

Hackers have penetrated the computer systems of the UK’s foreign ministry and taken hundreds of files detailing the country’s controversial propaganda programmes in war-torn Syria.

In a security breach of enormous proportions, the hackers appear to have deliberately targeted files that set out the financial and operational relationships between the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and a network of private-sector contractors that have been covertly running media platforms in Syria throughout the nine-year civil war.

Middle East Eye understands that between 200 and 300 highly sensitive documents are thought to have been acquired by the hackers.

Some of the documents have already been posted on the internet, and foreign office ministers and officials are bracing themselves for the possible appearance of more over the coming weeks.

While the hackers are not thought to have yet been identified, the sophistication of the cyber-attack has raised concerns at the FCDO that a state actor could have been responsible, with suspicion focusing on Russia.

In 2018, the UK foreign ministry said that Russian intelligence officers had attempted to hack into its computer systems.

The FCDO is refusing to comment on the hacking that led to the exposure of the Syrian propaganda material.

In a statement, the ministry said:

“The UK has been clear in our support for elements of the moderate opposition in Syria to stand up to both the tyranny of the Assad regime and the brutal ideology of Daesh.”

The FCDO became aware of the breach last week, after some documents had been posted by the hacking collective known as Anonymous. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was briefed at the weekend and other ministers were informed on Monday.

The documents shed further light on propaganda initiatives known in UK government circles as “strategic communications”, whose existence came to light four years ago, and which MEE detailed earlier this year.

The programme aimed to promote “attitudinal and behavioural change” among Syrian audiences by fostering secular values, building resilience among the civilian population and by promoting what the UK government described as the Moderate Armed Opposition.

They show that British government contractors established radio stations, published Arabic- and English-language magazines, newspapers, books and children’s comics, designed posters and stickers, and helped to run opposition groups’ media offices.

One contractor is said to have distributed more than 660,000 printed items across Syria in six months.

The hacked documents also show how the “strategic communications” programme has influenced the reporting of many major media organisations, with one contractor claiming to be in contact with 1,600 international journalists and other individuals able to help influence public opinion.

Citizen journalists

At the heart of the propaganda initiatives was a large network of Syrian citizen journalists, many of whom began reporting on the uprising against the government in 2011 and were then provided with training, equipment and encouragement by UK contractors – without the role of the British government being made explicit.

A number of citizen journalists were detained and murdered by the Islamic State group after it began capturing territory in the country in 2015.

IS frequently denounced its victims as western “spies”, and some Syrian citizen journalists were pursued across the border to Turkey and murdered.

The documents posted on the internet in recent days identify not only private-sector contractors working for the Foreign Office, but also a number of the individuals who are running those companies.

However, MEE understands that senior FCDO officials are less concerned about the contents of many of the documents – as the existence of the propaganda programme had already been made public – than they are about the apparent ease with which the department’s computer systems were broken into.

Similar programmes have been run in Syria by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which does not appear to have been hacked.

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Ongoing protests in Thailand appearing very similar to those recently seen in Hong Kong are no coincidence.

They are part of an admitted “Pan-Asian Alliance” that – while claiming to be “pro-democracy” are in reality created by the US government and aimed directly at Beijing.

Thailand has tilted too close to Beijing for Washington’s liking and as a response, has scheduled Thailand for destabilization and if possible, regime change.

Thailand Tilting “Too Close” To China

China is Thailand’s largest and most important trading partner, its largest foreign direct investor, and its largest source of tourism with more Chinese tourists coming to Thailand each year than all Western nations combined.

Thailand is also hosting one of the key routes of China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative with construction already ongoing for high-speed rail that will connect China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and eventually Singapore.

Finally and perhaps most upsetting for the US is that Thailand has begun replacing its aging US military hardware through a series of major Thai-Chinese arms deals including the purchasing of main battle tanks, other armored vehicles, naval vessels including up to 3 submarines, and jointly-developed arms programs like the DTI-1 multiple rocket launcher system.

Thailand has also recently replaced some of its US-built Blackhawk helicopters with Russian Mi-17V-5’s.

To counter this, the US has mobilized opposition groups and NGOs it has funded in Thailand for years to now demand the current government step down and the nation’s constitution be rewritten, paving the way for US-backed billionaire-led opposition parties of Thaksin Shinawatra and Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit into power. These are opposition parties that have long served US interests in the past and have explicitly promised to roll back Thai-Chinese relations should they take power again.

US NED Was Behind Hong Kong’s Unrest, and Are Now Behind Thailand’s Unrest

The US was indisputably behind the protests in Hong Kong with the political opposition and protest leaders confirmed to be recipients of US government cash via notorious regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Many of the protest leaders literally flew to Washington DC or visited the US consulate in Hong Kong to receive aid, directives, and other forms of support.

In Thailand too, virtually every aspect of the protests are funded by the US government.

Worse still is that the US is attempting to stitch these various movements together to form a regional front against Beijing with Thai protest leaders regularly traveling to meet their US-funded counterparts in Hong Kong and Taiwan and vice versa while creating an online army with the help of US-based social media giants to stack public narratives in their favor.

It will be a front that if regime change in any or all of the nations currently targeted by Washington in Asia is successful, will transform the region from a rising global economic power to a dysfunctional warzone not entirely unlike the Middle East.

US Funds Thai Protest Leaders 

The core leadership of Thailand’s protests includes Anon Nampa of the US NED-funded “Thai Lawyers for Human Rights” (TLHR). Anon Nampa leads every major rally, taking the stage and delivering the opposition’s demands to the current government including demands for regime change.

TLHR’s founder had in the past admitted that the organization “receives all its funding from international donors,” in an interview given to the English-language newspaper, Bangkok Post.

TLHR’s US government funding was openly displayed on the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) website in 2014.

Its name has since been removed from NED’s website but continues to receive US funding through the NED via the “Union for Civil Liberty” (UCL) of which it is a member.

The UCL is still listed on NED’s current webpage for programs it funds in Thailand. TLHR is listed as a member of UCL on its official website next to other recipients of US NED funding including the Cross Cultural Foundation, the Human Rights Lawyers Association, and the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL).

US Funds Orgs Trying to Rewrite Thailand’s Constitution 

Another of Anon Nampa’s demands is the rewriting of the Thai constitution. These efforts have been spearheaded by an organization called “iLaw” – also funded by the US NED.

Thai-based English-language newspaper The Nation in an article titled, “iLaw launches petition for charter rewrite,” would claim:

The Internet Law Reform Dialogue (iLaw), a human rights NGO, has launched a campaign seeking signatures from 50,000 voters to sponsor a motion for a Constitution rewrite. 

The organization’s US government funding is not mentioned in the article, but can easily be found on NED’s official website under the name, “Internet Law Reform Dialogue” (iLaw).On iLaw’s own website under “About Us” it admits:

Between 2009 and  2014 iLaw has received funding support from the Open Society Foundation, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and a one-time support grant from Google.

Between 2015 to present iLaw receives funding from funders as listed below1. Open Society Foundation (OSF)2. Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBF)3. National Endowment for Democracy (NED)4. Fund for Global Human Rights (FGHR)5. American Jewish World Servic (AJWS)6. One-time support donation from Google and other independent donors

Other groups working to rewrite Thailand’s constitution include “ConLab” or “Constitution Lab” (on Facebook) who do so in partnership with US government-funded iLaw and which recently held an event at the US Embassy’s “American Corner” at Chiang Mai University.

The US political process is money controlled, Big Money running things.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), over $6 billion was spent by US presidential and congressional candidates in 2016.

A record amount is expected this year to be known post-November 3 elections — including dark money.

CRP calls it “spending meant to influence political outcomes where the source of the money is not disclosed.”

It comes from:

“Politically active nonprofits such as 501(c)(4)s are generally under no legal obligation to disclose their donors even if they spend to influence elections.”

“When they choose not to reveal their sources of funding, they are considered dark money groups.”

“Opaque nonprofits and shell companies may give unlimited amounts of money to super PACs.”

“While super PACs are legally required to disclose their donors, some of these groups are effectively dark money outlets when the bulk of their funding cannot be traced back to the original donor.”

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court ruled against government limits on corporate spending in elections, claiming a First Amendment right of “political speech.”

The ruling greatly exacerbated US money-controlled elections, mocking a free, fair, and open process, what democracy is supposed to be — absent in America from inception.

One party with two right wings runs things, each taking turns controlling the White House and Congress.

Duopoly power excludes independents. No one not on board for dirty business as usual continuity becomes president or holds key congressional posts.

Horse race journalism substitutes for a free, fair, and open 4th estate discussion of domestic and geopolitical issues mattering most.

Voter disenfranchisement is rife. Millions of Americans are shut out of the process because of past criminal records, including innocent people wrongfully imprisoned, others for political reasons or offenses too minor to matter.

Around half of eligible voters opt out most often because their rights and needs aren’t addressed or served by the US ruling class.

Corporate interests run elections with electronic ease.

This year the USPS is involved because of a likely record number of mailed in ballots.

The result perhaps will be delayed because of time needed to count them, especially if November 3 results are close.

So-called US presidential debates are pre-scripted, well-rehearsed, made for television theater.

They feature bombast over substance, slogans and one-liners over solutions, and promises made to be broken if elected.

Tuesday’s Trump v. Biden round one was a heated spitting match, slings and arrows substituting for give and take debating the way it should be — virtually never when US politicians face off with each other.

Last night’s matchup was near-no-holds-barred bare-knuckled rhetorical brawling.

Debating the way it should be is an ancient tradition.

As a junior high school student long ago in my mid-teens, I was involved in one on a topic I don’t recall — a civil give-and-take I do recall.

Socrates and Plato debated political, social, and other issues.

The Socratic method involves opposing sides asking and answering questions.

Ideas are freely aired. Beliefs are challenged. Truths are sought.

Critical thinking is stimulated, opinions formed.

Conclusions are reached through free and open dialogue and discussion.

Debates should let opposing sides air views and challenge those of others in a civil manner — ideally by the Socratic method.

Trump v. Biden round one — with likely more of the same coming twice more — was open warfare, back-and-forth mud-slinging ad hominem insults and shouting used as political weapons.

When post-“debate” polls come out, they’ll likely show that Tuesday night theatrics left the public mind on Trump v. Biden largely unchanged.

Neither figure rises to head of state stature the way it should be everywhere — notably at a time of economic collapse when responsible leadership is most needed.

No matter which wing of the US one-party state runs things, plutocrats, oligarchs, and kleptocrats are served exclusively at the expense of ordinary people everywhere.

Post-election next year, continuity is assured like virtually always throughout US history.

Rare short-term exceptions proved the rule — none since the Clinton co-presidency, notably not post-9/11.

Will Orwell’s dystopian vision unfold in the next four years, no matter whether Republicans or Dems control the White House and/or Congress?

Will harder than ever hard times worsen, forever wars rage with no resolution, and police state crackdowns on nonbelievers toughen?

What I remember as an adolescent and youth was replaced by a nation unsafe and unfit to live in — permanently at war on humanity, full-blown tyranny perhaps another major false flag away.

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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.

After 60 years of foot-dragging and dissembling, the U.S. government finally confessed and admitted its role in the bloody 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government led by Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh. With Coup 53’s compelling documentary evidence, its now Britain’s turn to fess up.

More than 300 were killed and thousands imprisoned for “treason” in an MI6/CIA-backed coup that left the country condemned to a 25-year reign of terror under the dictatorship of U.S.-backed Shah, Mohmmad Reza Pahlevi.

In 2013, the CIA officially fessed up and admitted to (1) bribing high Iranian government officials, (2) spreading defamatory anti-government propaganda, (3) hiring Tehran’s most brutal criminal gangs to riot in the streets and ultimately (4) orchestrating the 1953 coup d’état in Iran as an act of U.S. foreign policy planned and approved by the highest levels of government.

But not a peep from Great Britain—which admitted nothing and concealed everything. The British government may even have arranged to conceal an interview with a talkative MI6 spy named Norman Darbyshire, who actually revealed his—and Britain’s—complicity in the Iranian coup during a 1985 BBC documentary called End of Empire. But his incriminating testimony was mysteriously edited out of the broadcast before it aired.

However, the transcript of agent Darbyshire’s lost interview has now resurfaced in numerous independent locations and has been reenacted, prominently, in this new documentary.[1]

The film’s director Taghi Amirani, an Iranian who traveled around the world seeking new details about the coup that devastated his homeland, stated:

Even though it has been an open secret for decades, the UK government has not officially admitted its fundamental role in the coup. Finding the Darbyshire transcript is like finding the smoking gun. It is a historic discovery.[2]

What Agent Darbyshire Reveals

Darbyshire served as head of the MI6’s Persian division based in Cyprus and worked in Iran from 1943 to 1947 and then again from 1949 until he was kicked out by Mossadegh in 1952. His motive for granting the interview to the BBC appears to have been to counter the boastful claims of CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt who wanted to take credit for the coup. In the all-important interview, Darbyshire stated his belief that Mossadegh was a weak character, an ardent nationalist and xenophobe who would have soon been overwhelmed by the communists if the British had not stepped in.

From the beginning of his time in the country, Darbyshire said he had been under orders from the British Foreign Secretary to remove Mossadegh secretly without telling the ambassador. He wanted to enact the coup earlier, but the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), John Sinclair, knew “about as much of the Middle East as a ten year old and was far more interested in cricket anyways.”

Darbyshire went on to detail that he had carried biscuit tins with “damn great notes” to pay bribes and that the coup operation cost around 700,000 pounds, a total he would know because “[he] spent it.” The coup plot, he also said, “worked.”

Darbyshire said that he played an especially key role in enlisting the Shah’s Sister, Princess Ashraf, who was tracked down in Paris and paid to go to Tehran to convince her brother to go along with the coup.

Darbyshire and his associates further paid off organized criminal networks led by the Rashidian Brothers, whom he said were “intrigued by contact with the British and delighted to take our money for something they believed in themselves.”

As the documentary shows, the MI6, in collaboration with the CIA, (1) planted anti-Mossadegh propaganda in the media, (2) recruited mobs to riot and chant anti-Mossadegh slogans, (3) bribed members of Iran’s parliament, and (4) assassinated key figures who were loyal to Mossadegh, most notably the head of the national police, Mohammed Afshartous.

Darbyshire notes in his interview that MI6 did not intend to kill Afshartous, only to kidnap him. According to Darbyshire:

Something went wrong: [Afshartous] was kidnapped and held in a cave. Feelings ran very high and Afshartous was unwise enough to make derogatory comments about the Shah. He was under guard by a young army officer and the young officer pulled out a gun and shot him. That was never part of our program at all but that’s how it happened.

However, this does not explain the clear evidence of torture on the body, not to mention that the corps was dumped on the street for all to see—a technique that is often used to instill widespread fear.

The rogue, young army assassination story is thus suspect, especially given men like Darbyshire; they are experts in disinformation. Their job is to cover up their agencies’ crimes, smear their enemies and try to sanitize the historical record—even after their own passing, as Darbyshire died in 1993.

Mohammed Mossadegh on trial after the coup. [Source: batiraporu.com]

Devious Policies  

While Darbyshire may be trying to hoodwink us one final time, Coup 53 is nonetheless a remarkable film because of the many interviews that it runs, not only with Darbyshire, but also with other CIA and British MI6 operatives who speak openly about the people they were dealing with and the devious policies they were enacting in Iran.

Sir Peter Ramsbotham, for example—a man who would later become Ambassador to Iran in the early 1970s—revealingly discusses how the men on her Majesty’s Middle Eastern desk would call Mossadegh “dotty” or crazy in the head because of his defiant policies and habit of conducting bedside conferences in his pajamas.

A strong parallel exists with Belgian secret service agents who branded Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first post-independence leader, as “Satan” after he had condemned Belgian colonialism and aimed to assert national control over the Congo’s rich mineral wealth.[3]

In a CBC documentary made in the 1990s, Colonel Louis Marlière and former CIA Station Chief Lawrence Devlin cavalierly discuss the different methods they had adopted for trying to assassinate Lumumba, including the use of toothpaste poison, and how Lumumba’s body was disposed of in acid.

When asked about his reaction to Lumumba’s killing in January 1961, Colonel Marlière said “good riddance,” while Devlin stated that he had been very busy, and with Lumumba out of the way, a major problem had been solved.

Lumumba (center), prior to his murder by firing squad, had much in common with Mossadegh, both in terms of his domestic policy and in the way he was overthrown. [Source: trtworld.com]

Colonial Legacy

Coup 53 significantly showcases the colonial conditions that existed in Iran prior to the coup, which were similar to the Congo and other African countries.

The British expatriates lived in luxury while the locals were treated as second-class citizens or worse in their own country. An old Iranian gardener interviewed in the film describes commuting from his mud hut to the show-piece cottages with backyard swimming pools that were advertised in promotional videos by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company trying to recruit new British employees.

The Iranians who worked for the Anglo-Iranian Company did not mix with the British who called them wogs. Further tensions developed when the British built a pipeline to Iraq, under the Koran River, as a means of siphoning off fuel for the British Royal Navy.

While the Anglo-Iranian oil company had rights to drill for oil in Iran, the agreement entailed paying Iran 16% of the revenues in return. When requests to see the company books were rejected, the Iranian government decided to nationalize the oil refineries.

Darbyshire himself acknowledged that the Iranians, “had the feeling they were being screwed the whole time and quite rightly too and from about 1920 onwards.”

After Mossadegh’s nationalization decree, the British tried to destabilize the government by sabotaging the major oil refinery at Abadan and prevent it from working.

U.S. President Harry S. Truman at the time enjoyed positive relations with Mossadegh who was named as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1952, and rebuffed British overtures to back a coup.

However, when Truman was succeeded by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, and foreign policy was placed under the control of John Foster and Allen Dulles, who had worked for one of Wall Street’s biggest financial houses, Sullivan & Cromwell, Mossadegh’s political fate was sealed along with that of the Iranian people.

Final Moments of Coup Reenacted

The interviews in Coup 53 vividly recount the final moments of the coup and the heroism of those who tried to defend the sitting president. Mossadegh’s relatives, former bodyguards and aides testify about Mossadegh’s despondency after the coup, exacerbated by his solitary confinement and subsequent house arrest.

Mossadegh generally comes across sympathetically as an intelligent and dignified leader who had the best interests of his people in mind. By contrast, the coup plotters, like Colonel Marlière, come across as smug and arrogant, showing little remorse for their coordination of the sinister plot.

Anti-Mossadegh protestors on eve of the coup display a portrait of the Shah. [Source: theguardian.com]

The Iranian coup ultimately poisoned U.S. and Western relations with the Middle East and signified that the West, while favoring authoritarianism, would overthrow democratic regimes which sought to control and more equitably distribute their own economic resources.

One can indeed trace an important lineage between the 1953 coup in Iran and the 1954 coup in Guatemala right on up through to recent efforts by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other U.S. government agencies working in collaboration with the British to try to topple left-wing and nationalistic regimes that tried to enact similar policies to those in Iran led by Mossadegh.

Darbyshire tellingly returned to Iran in the early 1960s where he played a role in developing the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, which was notorious for torturing and terrorizing the political opposition. His career and legacy remind us of the damaging consequences of covert operations and the need for transparency in government.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of Covert Action Magazine and author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018).

Notes

[1] Coup 1953 (2020), Taghi Amirani, Walter Murch, https://coup53.com/. The National  Security Archive has reprinted the Darbyshire interview on its web site: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/dc.html?doc=7033886-National-Security-Archive

[2] Julian Borger, “British Spy’s Account Sheds Light on Role in 1953 Iranian Coup,” The Guardian, August 17, 2020, https://www.msn.com/en-

us/news/world/british-spys-account-sheds-light-on-role-in-1953-iranian-coup/ar-BB182WX0

[3] Lumumba’s adversary, the Belgian collaborator Moise Tshombe, was nicknamed “the Jew” because he governed the wealthy province of Katanga.

Featured image: As reenacted in the new documentary entitled “Coup 53,” British MI6 agent Norman Darbyshire reveals all the dirty details in suppressed interview. [Source: ft.com]