Global Research

The world economic crisis of 2020 is creating the context for large-scale repeats of some key aspects of the bailout of 2007-2010. The bailout of 2007-2008 drew, in turn, from many practices developed in the period when the explosive events of 9/11 triggered a worldwide reset of global geopolitics.

While the events of 2008 and 2020 both drew attention to the geopolitical importance of Wall Street, the terrible pummelling of New York’s financial district was the event that ushered in a new era of history, an era that has delivered us to the current financial meltdown/lockdown.

It lies well beyond the scope of this essay to go into detail about the dynamics of what really transpired on 9/11. Nevertheless, some explicit reckoning with this topic is crucial to understanding some of the essential themes addressed in this essay.

Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the relevance of 9/11 to the background and nature of the current debacle. The execution and spinning of 9/11 were instrumental in creating the repertoire of political trickery presently being adapted in the manufacturing and exploiting of the COVID-19 hysteria. A consistent attribute of the journey from 9/11 to COVID-19 has been the amplification of executive authority through the medium of emergency measures enactments, policies and dictates. (See this)

Wall Street is a major site where much of this political trickery was concocted in planning exercises extending to many other sites of power and intrigue. In the case of 9/11, a number of prominent Wall Street firms were involved before, during and after the events of September 11. As is extremely well documented, these events have been misrepresented in ways that helped to further harness the military might of the United States to the expansionistic designs of Israel in the Middle East. (See this)

The response of the Federal Reserve to the events of 9/11 helped set in motion a basic approach to disaster management that continues to this day. Almost immediately following the pulverization of Manhattan’s most gigantic and iconographic landmarks, Federal Reserve officials made it their highest priority to inject liquidity into financial markets. Many different kinds of scenario can be advanced behind the cover of infusing liquidity into markets. (See this)

For three days in a row the Federal Reserve Bank of New York turned on its money spigots to inject transfusions of $100 billion dollars of newly generated funds into the Wall Street home of the financial system. The declared aim was to keep the flow of capital between financial institutions well lubricated. The Federal Reserve’s infusions of new money into Wall Street took many forms. New habits and appetites were thereby cultivated in ways that continue to influence the behaviour of Wall Street organizations in the financial debacle of 2020. (See this)

The revelations concerning the events of 9/11 contained a number of financial surprises. Questions immediately arose, for instance, about whether the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers had obliterated software and hardware vital to the continuing operations of computerized banking systems. Whatever problems arose along these lines, it turned out that there was sufficient digital information backed up in other locations to keep banking operations viable.

But while much digital data survived the destruction of core installations in the US financial sector, some strategic information was indeed obliterated. For instance, strategic records entailed in federal investigations into many business scandals were lost. Some of the incinerated data touched on, for instance, the machinations of the energy giant, Enron, along with its Wall Street partners, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup. (See this)

The writings of E. P Heidner are prominent in the literature posing theories about the elimination of incriminating documentation as a result of the controlled demolitions of 9/11. What information was eliminated and what was retained in the wake of the devastation? Heidner has published a very ambitious account placing the events of 9/11 at the forefront of a deep and elaborate relationship linking George H. W. Bush to Canada’s Barrick Gold and the emergence of gold derivatives. (See this and this)

The surprises involving 9/11 and Wall Street included evidence concerning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. A few individuals enriched themselves significantly by purchasing a disproportionately high number of put options on shares about to fall precipitously as a result of the anticipated events of 9/11. Investigators, however, chose to ignore this evidence because it did not conform to the prevailing interpretation of who did what to whom on 9/11.

Another suspicious group of transactions conducted right before 9/11 involved some very large purchases of five-year US Treasury notes. These instruments are well known hedges when one has knowledge that a world crisis is imminent. One of these purchases was a $5 billion transaction. The US Treasury Department would have been informed about the identity of the purchaser. Nevertheless the FBI and the Securities Exchange Commission collaborated to point public attention away from these suspect transactions. (p. 199) (See this)

On the very day of 9/11 local police arrested Israeli suspects employed in the New York area as Urban Movers. The local investigators were soon pressured to ignore the evidence, however, and go along with the agenda of the White House and the media chorus during the autumn of 2001.

In the hours following the pulverization of the Twin Towers the dominant mantra was raised “Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda did it.” That mantra led in the weeks, months and years that followed to US-led invasions of several Muslim-majority countries. Some have described these military campaigns as wars for Israel. (See this)

Soon New York area jails were being filled up with random Muslims picked up for nothing more than visa violations and such. The unrelenting demonization of Muslims collectively can now be seen in retrospect as a dramatic psychological operation meant to poison minds as the pounding of the war drums grew in intensity.In the process a traumatized public were introduced to concepts like “jihad.” At no time has there ever been a credible police investigation into the question of who is responsible for the 9/11 crimes. (See this and this)

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose September 10, the day before 9/11, to break the news at a press conference that $2.3 trillion had gone missing from the Pentagon’s budget. Not surprisingly the story of the missing money got buried the next day as reports of the debacle in Manhattan and Washington DC dominated MSM news coverage.

As reported by Forbes Magazine, the size of the amount said to have gone missing in Donald Rumsfeld’s 2001 report of Defense Department spending had mushroomed by 2015 to around $21 trillion. It was Mark Skidmore, an Economics Professor at the University of Michigan, who became the main sleuth responsible for identifying the gargantuan amount of federal funds that the US government can’t account for.

As the agency that created the missing tens of trillions that apparently has disappeared without a trace, wouldn’t the US Federal Reserve be in a position to render some assistance in tracking down the lost funds? Or is the Federal Reserve somehow a participant or a complicit party in the disappearance of the tens of trillions without a paper trail? (See this)

The inability or unwillingness of officialdom to explain what happened to the lost $21 trillion, an amount comparable to the size of the entire US national debt prior to the lockdowns, might be viewed in the light of the black budgets of the US Department of Defense (DOD). Black budgets are off-the-books funds devoted to secret research and to secret initiatives in applied research.

In explaining this phenomenon, former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, has observed,

“thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which Congress and the Commander In Chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.”  (The Money Mafia by Pauil Hellyer)

Eric Zuesse goes further. As he explains it, the entire Defense Department operates pretty much on the basis of an unusual system well outside the standard rules of accounting applied in other federal agencies. (See this)

When news broke about the missing $21 trillion, federal authorities responded by promising that special audits would be conducted to explain the irregularities. The results of those audits, if they took place at all, were never published. The fact that the Defense of Department has developed in a kind of audit free zone has made it a natural magnet for people and interests engaged in all kinds of criminal activities.

Eric Zuess calls attention to the 1,000 military bases around the world that form a natural network conducive to the cultivation of many forms of criminal trafficking. Zuess includes in his reflections commentary on the secret installations in some American embassies but especially in the giant US Embassy in Baghdad Iraq.

The US complex in Baghdad’s Green Zone is the biggest Embassy in the world. Its monumental form on a 104 acre site expresses the expansionary dynamics of US military intervention in the Middle East and Eurasia following 9/11. (See this)

The phenomenon of missing tens of trillions calls attention to larger patterns of kleptocratic activity that forms a major subject addressed here. The shifts into new forms of organized crime in the name of “national security” began to come to light in the late 1980s. An important source of disclosures was the series of revelations that accompanied the coming apart of the Saudi-backed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the BCCI.

The nature of this financial institution, where CIA operatives were prominent among its clients, provides a good window into the political economy of drug dealing, money laundering, weapons smuggling, regime change and many much more criminal acts that took place along the road to 9/11.

The BCCI was a key site of financial transactions that contributed to the end of the Cold War and the inception of many new kinds of conflict. These activities often involved the well-financed activities of mercenaries, proxy armies, and a heavy reliance on private contractors of many sorts.

The Enron scandal was seen to embody some of the same lapses facilitated by fraudulent accounting integral to the BCCI scandal. Given the bubble of secrecy surrounding the Federal Reserve, there are thick barriers blocking deep investigation into whether or not the US Central Bank was involved in the relationship of the US national security establishment and the BCCI.

The kind of dark transactions that the BCCI was designed to facilitate must have been channelled after its demise into other banking institutions probably with Wall Street connections. Since 9/11, however, many emergency measures have been imposed that add extra layers of secrecy protecting the perpetrators of many criminal acts from public exposure and criminal prosecutions. (See this, this and this)

The events of 9/11 have sometimes been described as the basis of a global coup. To this day there is no genuine consensus about what really transpired to create the illusion of justification for repeated US military invasions of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Eurasia.

The 9/11 debacle and the emergency measures that followed presented Wall Street with an array of new opportunities for profit that came with the elaborate refurbishing and retooling of the military-industrial complex.

The response to 9/11 was expanded and generalized upon to create the basis of a war directed not at a particular enemy, but rather at an ill-defined conception identified as “terrorism.” This alteration was part of a complex of changes adding trillions to the flow of money energizing the axis of interaction linking the Pentagon and Wall Street and the abundance of new companies created to advance the geopolitical objectives emerging from the 9/11 coup.

According to Pam Martens and Russ Martens, the excesses of deregulation helped induce an anything-goes-ethos on Wall Street and at its Federal Reserve regulator in the wake of 9/11. As the authors tell it, the response to 9/11 helped set important precedents for the maintaining flows of credit and capital in financial markets.

Often the destination of the funds generated in the name of pumping liquidity into markets was not identified and reported in transactions classified as financial emergency measures. While the priority was on keeping financial pumps primed, there was much less concern for transparency and accountability among those in positions of power at the Federal Reserve. (See this)

The financial sector’s capture of the government instruments meant to regulate the behaviour of Wall Street institutions was much like the deregulation of the US pharmaceutical industry. Both episodes highlight a message that has become especially insistent as the twenty-first century unfolds.

The nature of the response to 9/11 emphasized the mercenary ascent of corporate dominance as the primary force directing governments.

Throughout this transformation the message to citizens became increasingly clear. Buyer Beware. We cannot depend on governments to represent our will and interests. We cannot even count on our governments to protect citizens from corporatist attacks especially on human health and whatever financial security we have been able to build up.

Prof. Anthony James Hall is Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is Professor emeritus of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta.  The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial globalization since 1492.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies: “Since March 18, the beginning of the pandemic,” the 12 richest Americans “have seen their combined wealth increase $283 billion, an increase of almost 40 percent.”

Those 12 people primarily benefited from the two-party unanimously approved CARES Act, which was an unprecedented looting of taxpayer wealth under the guise of being a “taxpayer relief bill.”

Meanwhile, poverty, debt, hunger, depression & suicide rates have all skyrocketed. Primarily because tens of millions of people have had their livelihoods destroyed by mandated government policies.

In response to all of this, Congress has now gone on an extended vacation without doing ANYTHING to help their constituencies survive or recover from the direct policies that they enacted.

Meet the “Oligarchic Twelve / Despotic Dozen:”

• [numbers measured in billions of dollars]
• Name | Wealth 3/18 | Wealth Now | Gain
• Jeff Bezos 113b | 189b | +76b
• Bill Gates 98b | 114b | +16b
• Mark Zuckerberg 55b | 96b | +41b
• Warren Buffett 68b | 81b | +13b
• Elon Musk 25b | 73b | +48b
• Steve Ballmer 53b | 71b | +18b
• Larry Ellison 59b | 71b | +12b
• Larry Page 51b | 67b | +16b
• Sergey Brin 49b | 66b | +17b
• Alice Walton 54b | 63b | +9b
• Jim Walton 55b | 62b | +7b
• Rob Walton 54b | 62b | +8b

Never let a crisis go to waste!!

Do you grasp how unprecedented & obscene this is?

For the richest people to increase their net worth by 40% over such a short time period, while the country is in quarantine & the economy is locked down, is a Crime Against Humanity.

While “56.2 million workers sought unemployment aid” during a pandemic, these people experienced the greatest wealth increase rate ever!!

BOTH parties are completely on board with all of this… while children are starving, while tens of millions of people are buried in debt that they will never get out of, our political class is vacationing, cruising on yachts and playing golf while Rome burns!!

Wake up America, BOTH parties have thrown us overboard!!

This coming election will be a logistical fiasco / disaster that will emphatically prove our corrupted failed state status to those who are still in denial. The election will result in further chaos, confusion & division.

This will lead to a significant percentage of the population calling for and falling into compliance with increasing authoritarian order.

We are being drowned in divide & conquer propaganda while global technocratic imperialists rob us all blind and exploit the virus to implement a wickedly oppressive economic, “health” and surveillance system.

The window of opportunity to solve things peacefully is closing fast. We need to focus on forming groups to more effectively disseminate vital information & form self-sufficient communities to defend our families.

The extent to which you think I am exaggerating is an accurate measure of how propagandized you are.

I say all of this out of love & respect. It is all so hard to wrap your head around how obscenely corrupt our society has become.

The hour is late… but it is not too late…

We are gaining solid traction in uniting people with opinions across the political spectrum.

As shockingly corrupt & crazy as things have become, we may be at a tipping point where people with diverse perspectives come together against the core of systemic corruption.

Due to the virus having such personal impact on everyone, and because the systemically power-crazed forces are exploiting it to such an extreme degree, this could be the point in which real changes takes root.

Obviously it won’t be easy, and this election will be a total fiasco / disaster… but, there is HOPE.

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It was hard to stomach.  The usual suspects, the usual scripts tatty from overuse.  The 2020 Democratic National Convention was a prolonged display of avoidance, evasion and theatrical amnesia.  There were moments of formality masquerading as promise: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nominating Senator Bernie Sanders for presidential candidate.  But it was not to be.  The decision had long been made in advance: the Democrats wanted Joe Biden, and so did Ocasio-Cortez.  “If you were confused no worries!” she tweeted.  “Convention rules require roll call & nominations for every candidate that passes the delegate threshold.”  She had been asked to second the nomination for Sanders.

Few previous conventions could have been so heavily fussed with a non-attendee.  The only thing that mattered was President Donald J. Trump.  It was, in fact, the most devotional display of rage to an absent figure imaginable.  There was little in the way of substantive promise for change; there was everything in the way of seeking restoration instead of resolution, the Democratic Bourbon Return that will do nothing to deal with the trauma patient that is the US Republic.  

Hillary Clinton got into the grievance register, playing her slightly deranged they-took-it-from me look despite claiming an initial readiness to owe Trump “an open mind and the chance to lead.”  There had been little improvement from 2016, no contemplative licking of wounds, merely platitudes that the Biden-Harris combination would see the rainbow of togetherness break over disturbed US skies.  Crucial to her was voting, and voting en masse.  “Remember: Joe and Kamala can still win 3 million more votes and still lose.  Take.  It.  From.  Me.  We need numbers so overwhelming Trump can’t sneak or steal is way to victory.”  That’s the Clinton we have all come to know.

Barack Obama, delivering his address from Philadelphia, took the teacher’s tone to a pupil who had ceased to pay attention in class. 

“I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.”  

This entrustment had led to catastrophe: 170,000 Americans dead, millions of jobs lost, a reputation tarnished “and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.”  Trump had deployed the US military as “political props” against peaceful protesters; attacked the press as the enemy.  For his part, Obama mourning the flaying of the Constitution and democracy can only go so far.  His administration had an appetite for prosecutions against whistleblowers – or at the very least for not stopping them.  He sidestepped Congress in 2011 in ordering unilateral air-strikes on Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.  He was responsible for the dubious practice of murderous drone strikes, even against US nationals. 

In December, 2016, Conor Friedersdorf, in teasing out the implications of Obama’s lethal drone policy, argued that he had “set dangerous precedents”.  He had excluded the policy from the courts; he had affirmed the primacy of the state in such matters and cratered much foreign real estate on the way.  “Thanks to Obama’s actions, Donald Trump will be inaugurated into an office that presumes the authority to secretly order the extrajudicial killings of American citizens.”

As was the chosen formula for the Convention, what mattered about Biden was not being Trump.  Biden the empathiser, the decent, the believer in all, as opposed to Trump, supposedly none of those.  “When he talks with someone who’s lost his job,” reflected Obama, “Joe remembers the night his father sat him down to say he’d lost his.”  Not exactly thick on vision or policy and certainly not reflective on his own role in bringing Trump to power in the first place. 

Kamala Harris served up the prosecutorial brief on accepting the nomination for Vice President.  It was cut and dried for the chorus and the converts.  Her multi-ethnic background got an airing.  There was mention of structural racism.  There was an odd suggestion that coronavirus, despite lacking eyes, “knows exactly how we see each other – and how we treat each other.”  There was no intention, let alone effort, to convince any swaying voters.  “I know a predator when I see one.”  Debra J. Saunders of the Las Vegas Review-Journal was polite in her assessment: Harris was doing her job as her campaign wanted it done.  “But the campaign is clueless.  And the usually sharp Harris seemed so as well.”  Again, the Clinton trap: surely, the choice for candidate is obvious, is it not?  Only a lunatic would vote for the other fella.

Biden’s speech tried to avoid the mammoth elephant in the convention zoom room, but it proved impossible.  Trump remained a satanic centrepiece, as he had for the entire convention.  “If this president is re-elected we know what will happen.”  Biden tried focusing on personality, not ideas, apart from promising a “national strategy” against the coronavirus.  Emotion, not thought, mattered.  He knew loss.  “I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest … I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes.”  To cope, you find purpose. 

The incumbent, however, remained the lingering spectre at the gloomy feast.  “The current President has cloaked America in darkness for much too long.  Too much anger.  Too much fear.  Too much division.”  Remove the cloak, he implored.  “I will be an ally of the light, not of the darkness.  It’s time for us, for We the People, to come together.”

The Democratic National Convention left the republic as it started.  The US remains bitterly divided, its fault lines of rage and desperation sundering.  Trump’s counter was as predictable as it was obtuse, suggesting that the chaotic ruined republic would not heal under a Biden presidency.  The Democrats “spent four straight days attacking America as racist and a horrible country that must be redeemed.”  The incumbent is the president of lawless disorder, and he is staking a claim that the only recipe to lingering illness is to take another dose of poison.  Biden’s preference is for a different, distracting potion: drink it, forget and hope that someone puts Humpty Dumpty together again.

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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 FAIR

Virtually every aspect of “student protests” in Thailand are funded and backed by the US and aimed at destabilizing a key partner of China, reversing Thai-Chinese relations, and advancing Washington’s Beijing containment policy. 

• Thailand is a key partner of China’s and has pivoted toward Beijing at Washington’s expense;
• Protesters are backed by pro-US billionaire-led opposition parties;
• US-backed billionaire-led opposition vowed months ago to “take to the streets;”
• US government funds core protest leader Anon Nampa via National Endowment for Democracy (NED);
• US also funds orgs trying to “rewrite” Thailand’s constitution;
• US funds fake news fronts posing as “independent journalism;”
• Despite “pro-human rights” slant, opposition parties are led by worst human rights offenders in Thai history. 

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The Southeast Asian Kingdom of Thailand has tilted too far toward China for Washington’s liking.

The country – with nearly 70 million people and the second largest economy in Southeast Asia – counts China as its biggest trade partner, its largest source of foreign direct investment, the largest source of tourism with China providing more tourists per year than all Western nations combined, and a key partner in developing infrastructure including the already under-construction China-Laos-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore high-speed rail link that will only further cement these ties.

Thailand is also replacing its aging US military hardware with Chinese alternatives including Chinese-made main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, naval vessels including the Kingdom’s first modern submarines, and jointly developed projects like the DTI-1 multiple rocket launcher system. Thailand and China have also conducted joint military exercises in recent years.

To reverse this trend – the United States is attempting to destabilize Thailand politically and economically – topple the current government and place into power a political opposition led by abusive billionaires who have specifically vowed to roll back Thai-Chinese relations.

This has manifested in protests the Western corporate media has claimed are “student-led” and “organic” despite what are clearly centrally led protests with easily identifiable leaders tied directly to US government funding.

The protests are leveraging a nation-wide network created by US government organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, and other funding mechanisms to overwrite Thailand’s indigenous institutions with Western-style alternatives across Thailand educational, labor, media, and political spaces.

The protests also have direct ties to US-backed opposition parties including those of fugitive billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai Party and corrupt billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit of Future Forward/Move Forward Party and even foreign opposition movements the US is funding in China’s territories of Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Thailand’s US-backed Billionaire-led Opposition

Thailand’s political opposition – while portrayed by the Western media as “progressive liberals,” is in fact run by two corrupt billionaires.

One – Thaksin Shinawatra – is a convicted criminal who currently hides abroad as a fugitive. Despite this – he still openly runs his political party Pheu Thai – as New York Times would note in their 2013 article, “Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand Wields Influence from Afar.”

Thaksin also runs a number of nominee parties operating in lockstep with Pheu Thai – including Future Forward/Move Forward Party headed by fellow billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit.

 US, British, and European embassy staff regularly accompanied pro-Western billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit when facing charges for his various corruption and sedition cases. 

Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit had attempted to distance himself from Thaksin Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai Party during an FCCT event in Bangkok before the 2019 elections – but admitted he had voted for it and attended their rallies. His party’s platform is identical to Pheu Thai’s, his party headquarters literally next door to theirs, and Pheu Thai eventually, literally nominated him as their pick for PM. Pheu Thai and Future Forward have functioned as an indistinguishable opposition front ever since. 

Thaksin had served as Thai prime minister from 2001-2006 and openly and repeatedly served US interests at the expense of Thailand’s own best interests.

These ties and interests included:

• In the late 1990’s, Thaksin was an adviser to notorious private equity firm, the Carlyle Group. He pledged to his foreign contacts that upon taking office, he would still serve as a “matchmaker” between the US equity fund and Thai businesses. It would represent the first of many compromising conflicts of interest that would undermine Thailand’s sovereign under his rule.

• Thaksin was Thailand’s prime minister from 2001-2006. Has since dominated the various reincarnations of his political party – and still to this day runs the country by proxy, via his nepotist appointed sister, Yingluck Shinawatra.

• In 2001 he privatized Thailand’s resources and infrastructure including the nation’s oil conglomerate PTT – much to Wall Street’s delight.

• In 2003, he would commit Thai troops to the US invasion of Iraq, despite widespread protests from both the Thai military and the public. Thaksin would also allow the CIA to use Thailand for its abhorrent rendition program.
• In 2004, Thaksin attempted to ramrod through a US-Thailand Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) without parliamentary approval, backed by the US-ASEAN Business Council who just before the 2011 elections that saw Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra brought into power, hosted the leaders of Thaksin’s “red shirt” “United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship” (UDD) in Washington DC.

This included Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit’s Future Forward Party (now renamed Move Forward) whose headquarters is literally next door to Thaksin’s Pheu Thai HQ on Phetchaburi Road, Bangkok.

Both parties hold joint press conferences, have identical political platforms, and Thaksin’s Pheu Thai even nominated Thanathorn as their candidate for prime minister following the 2019 elections – as Bangkok Post in their article, “Pheu Thai offered Thanathorn nomination for PM’s post,” reported.

US-backed Billionaire-led Party Has Anti-Chinese Foreign Policy Platform 

Thanathorn – the heir of his parents billion dollar autoparts manufacturing fortune and before entering politics helped bust unions at his family’s factory – maintained an anti-Chinese foreign policy platform during his 2019 election campaign.

Articles like Bloomberg’s “Thailand needs hyperloop, not China-built high-speed rail: Thanathorn,” illustrates clearly the agenda US-backed political parties and leaders like Thanathorn represent – particularly in rolling back Thai-Chinese relations. The article would note:

A tycoon turned politician who opposes Thailand’s military government has criticised its US$5.6 billion high-speed rail project with China because hyperloop technology offers a more modern alternative.

It should be noted that not only does the “hyperloop” exist only as crude prototypes versus China’s high-speed rail technology already moving billions of people a year – the Thai-Chinese high-speed rail line is already under construction with a new grand station nearing completion built specifically to serve as, among other things, a terminal for Chinese-built high-speed trains.

Thailand’s massive Bang Sue Grand Station nears completion and will serve as a terminal for Chinese-built high-speed trains.

Thus – Thanathorn’s proposed “alternative” would mean cancelling actual ongoing construction and waiting years if not indefinitely for theoretical “hyperloop” technology to be developed let alone deployed. In other words – Thanathorn would cancel an important infrastructure project that would greatly expand the movement of goods and people across Asia, just to spite China on Washington’s behalf and leave Thailand with absolutely nothing except PowerPoint presentations as an alternative.

Thanathorn ran in 2019 on a platform that included cancelling Thai-Chinese rail projects in favor of the nonexistent “hyperloop.” It was a proposed policy that would have served only Washington’s interests at Thailand and China’s expense. 

The US political season never ends. It’ll be in high gear post-conventions this month.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, US 2020 presidential aspirants, groups working on their behalf, “leadership PACs, super PACs, dark money outlets,” and other sources raised over $2.7 billion so far.

As an incumbent, Trump amassed a sizable war chest before Biden entered the race.

Politicians in America are bought like toothpaste. Big money controls the process in cahoots with party bosses.

Voters have no say over over who runs things or their agendas.

Democracy in America is pure illusion, never the real thing from inception to now.

Longtime critic of US politics when alive and active, Gore Vidal once said the following:

“I do not think that the American System in its present state of decadence is worth preserving.”

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party” — each wing similar to the other.

America’s “democracy” in name only is a system “where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates” no different from each other.

“By the time (aspirants) get to be presidential material, (they’ve) been bought ten times over.”

America is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon…”

Bread and circuses can’t conceal reality, nor carefully scripted political campaigns.

Candidates for president and key congressional posts are largely cardboard cutouts of each other on issues mattering most, differing mainly by party label and style.

In endorsing Harris as Biden’s running mate, the NYT called her “a VP that big business can back,” adding:

“Biden…gain(ed) traction among crucial donors in Big Finance and Big Tech,” picking Harris “strengthened that support. Wall Street” backs her.

She’s pro-war, pro-big money, pro-police state toughness, pro-mass incarceration, anti-governance serving everyone equitably according to international, constitutional and US statute laws.

Her gender, race and cultural roots are non-issues. Her choice as Biden’s running mate is all about her support for Dem party politics across the board.

She’s one-sidedly pro-Israel, hostile to Palestinian rights and regional peace — nearly always voting along party lines.

She co-sponsored the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 that’s all about China bashing, unrelated to human rights.

She supported the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization of 2020 — the police state USA Patriot Act in new form that includes Big Brother spying on Americans.

As California AG, she said “(i)t’s not progressive to be soft on crime.”

Countless individuals she prosecuted, got convicted and imprisoned committed misdemeanors too minor to matter — like smoking marijuana, she admitted using herself earlier.

The Times called her Senate voting record “exemplary.”

According to Roll Call, her “legislative record…shows a loyal (Dem) and Trump counterpuncher,” adding:

She “voted with fellow (Dems) 99 percent of the time…show(ing) (she’s) a reliable soldier” — besting Bernie Sanders’ 98% along party lines voting record.

Among other reasons, she was picked as Biden’s running mate for being safe, including as president if makes it that far.

With 21 other Dems, she opposed what she called a “precipitous withdrawal” of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan — nations threatening no one the US attacked aggressively and continue a policy of permanent (illegal) occupation.

She was one of eight Dems to vote against the US, Mexico, Canada trade agreement to replace NAFTA.

While rhetorically expressing support for Medicare for all, she only backed a choice between a consumer public option or private insurance coverage.

Her position on healthcare is much like Obama’s who time and again said:

“If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor.”

“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”

Instead they got the so-called Affordable Care Act, a healthcare rationing scheme to enrich insurers, drug companies and large hospital chains.

Obama initially supported a public option, then dropped the idea to please Big Pharma and other healthcare industry interests.

Steps toward universal healthcare are opposed by most House and Senate members.

Roll Call said Harris “went back and forth” on this issue, showing that if it came up for a vote and hers mattered, she’d oppose what she rhetorically backed.

She supported Sanders’ S. 1129 single-payer 10-year transition to Medicare for all — a lengthy period that assures it will never become the law of the land.

On communications, technology, and social media issues, she declined to endorse anti-trust actions against monopolistic practices of industry giants.

On law and order issues, she’s hardline, opposing calls to hold police accountable, saying supporters of this policy are “shameful.”

Harris is a loyal Dem foot soldier now elevated in their ranks as Biden’s running mate.

If elected, she’ll be vice president in January, a heartbeat from the nation’s highest office with a chance for the brass ring in a future election or sooner — if Biden defeats Trump and is unable to complete his 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.

Featured image is from WOKV – Jacksonville’s

Surprising ruptures have shaken the Canadian political landscape this week as Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that she would add “Finance Minister” to her portfolio the day after scandal-ridden Bill Morneau stepped down from the position on the evening of August 16^th. As Freeland gave her remarks to the press, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced that Ottawa’s parliament would be requesting that the Queen’s Governor General prorogue parliament until the end of September whereby a new Throne speech would announce a new green “economic restart” for the Canadian economy.

(In the peculiar form of British Parliamentary governments, parliaments can be shut down unilaterally by an order signed by the Monarch’s Governor General at any time a Prime Minister should request it).

The logic behind prorogation is that the government’s annual economic program announced last December did not take into account the emergence of COVID-19 and this reality demands we prepare for the “post-COVID world order”. Pesky democratic institutions like Parliament might only get in the way of the types of broad reforms needed for these changes.

The next several weeks will be decisive in planning out this transformation. and as he unveiled the news of prorogation, Trudeau stated: “we need to reset the approach of this government for a recovery to build back better. And those are big, important decisions and we need to present them to parliament and gain the confidence of Parliament to move forward on this ambitious plan.”

While commentators and opposition parties were abuzz with speculation about the Liberal government’s corruption (all committee hearings investigating the We Charity scandal have been shut down until September 24^th), the reality is not so superficial and has much more to do with the oncoming economic collapse and the false solutions being prepared to “solve” it.

The Strategic Reality of the Collapsing Trans Atlantic System

The uncomfortable fact which too many commentators tend to run away from out of fear, ignorance or intellectual dishonesty, is that the world financial system is sitting on the verge of a global financial meltdown of a $1.2 quadrillion derivatives time bomb which former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King stated in September 2019 is on the verge of “financial Armageddon”. This grim reality was known long before the COVID pandemic was launched during October 2019’s Event 201.

It is this oncoming financial meltdown that underlies the war drive against China which certain western geopoliticans fear will shape the new system which they sought to control. France’s Bruno Lemaire laid out this fear in the most candid way in July 2019 when he said “unless we are able to reinvent Bretton Woods, The New Silk Roads might become the new world order”. (1)

So what role does Canada play in this and how does this affect the shakeup in the current Canadian government? Why would Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes Scholar more proficient in regime change than banking, be given the reigns of Canada’s economic order during these trying times?

To answer these questions, we must review the role of Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action, former head of the Bank of England, and leading organizer of the upcoming COP26 Summit to be held in the UK this coming November.

Carney the Eco-Warrior Takes the Helm Again

When Mark Carney stepped down from the position of Governor of the Bank of Canada in 2013 to become the first non-British Governor of the Bank of England since the private central bank was created in 1694, it was made clearly known that this Oxford-trained Canadian technocrat had been vetted by some very high level powers.

After training for years as a Goldman Sachs investment banker where his activities helped fuel the bubble that nearly brought down the world economy in 2008, Carney was brought into the Governorship of the Bank of Canada to take on the role as the clean, conservative-minded Canadian central banker navigating through the chaos which his former employer helped create. It was at this time that Carney became a member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Group of 30, Foundation board member of the World Economic Forum and leading participant at Bilderberg and Davos events. While still Bank of Canada governor, Carney was handed the keys to the BIS’s Financial Stability Board (FSB) by fellow Goldman Sachs man Mario Draghi in 2011 where he managed global derivates regulation (aka: fuse of the international weapon of mass financial destruction now bursting at the seams).

After serving seven years as Governor of the Bank of England (2013- March 2020) the world economic system has been stretched to its limits and the oncoming collapse has been accelerated by a global pandemic.

Now, after 7 years in the City of London, Carney is returning back to his home country.

On August 10^th, it was first announced that Mark Carney (aka: the eco warrior of bankers) will be running a task force to restart the economy (titled the “Canadian Pandemic Recovery Plan”) which will attempt to aggressively put into motion those Green New Deal reforms laid out during the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” summit of July 14, 2020.

The Great Reset Fraud

As I laid out in my recent paper The Great Reset Fraud, this program is little more than a cover for global depopulation and world government run by the same arsonists who have lit the world economy on fire in the first place.

Echoing the Great Green Reset program, Freeland pointed out on August 18, the collapse of jobs, irreversible shutdown of businesses, the unmanageable growth of a $343 billion deficit, and phase out of Emergency Response Benefits will need to be green and driven by the goal of decarbonization. When asked about decarbonization specifically, Freeland stated “of course, it has to be part of it. I think all Canadians understand that a restart of our economy needs to be green.” She then smiled and stated that this crisis is actually a wonderful opportunity.

Calling for a new hierarchy of values which will shape the new system which Carney and Freeland (both Oxford trained technocrats) believe will come online in short order, in an April 2020 interview on the Post-Covid19 economy, Carney stated “the great test whether this new hierarchy of values will prevail is climate change.”

For anyone sick of the immoral, monetarist religion of free markets that have run roughshod over the world for the past forty years of post-industrial decay, war and speculation, the proposition to change our “hierarchy of values” may seem like a breath of fresh air. The problem is that the drive of a green economy of green bonds, green grids, carbon taxes, cap and trades, and green banking will tend to cause humanity as a whole to suffer immensely and will strip nation states of the productive industrial potential needed to resist the will of a transnational oligarchy.

Like all nations, Canada’s economy is extremely reliant on fossil fuels, and every attempt made to create green infrastructure grids has resulted in massive energy price spikes for consumers, unreliable electricity prone to blackouts, and massive tax-payer subsidies to keep green industries financially viable. These problems have required the emergence of green reset task forces using a pandemic to force through changes which would never be democratically accepted under “normal” circumstances.

The Carney/Freeland Great Reset Task Force

For the past several years, both Carney and Freeland have been laying the groundwork for a new system of measuring “value” aimed at reducing both national sovereignty and nations’ physical capabilities to sustain human life while simultaneously (and quite ironically) doing grave damage to the environment.

For starters, Carney’s Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures co-run by New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg aims to force all companies in the world to disclose all activities that either create carbon dioxide or disrupt supposed states of natural equilibrium which mathematical ivory tower ecologists presume govern all natural states.

On February 26, 2020, Carney joined Sir David Attenborough in launching the “COP26 Green Private Finance Initiative to ensure that “every professional financial decision to take climate change into account. The right framework for reporting, risk management and returns will embed these considerations and help finance a whole economy transition. To achieve net zero, every company, bank, insurer and investor will need to adjust their business models for a low carbon world.”

Sir Attenborough has been a lifelong friend of Prince Philip and a neo-Malthusian guru who has attempted to teach the world that all of our woes stem not from systems of empire (to which his career is vitally beholden), but rather to over population. A recent call to leaders to correct this problem using the cover of COVID19 is one of countless testimonies to this misanthropic philosophy.

The Green bankers Climate Compact which Carney pioneered would ensure that companies which are considered “dirty” would never receive loans from banks and any insurance they received would come at impossibly high premiums as punishment for their climate offending ways. As a shining role model for “good green behaviour” Carney has cited his former employer Goldman Sachs has already ruled out any future financing for oil drilling, thermal coal projects or Arctic development.

In his paper “Fifty Shades of Green”, Carney stated that all dirty (brown) companies with poor climate grades will either not receive loans or receive loans at such high levels of interest that they will be artificially bankrupted (taxing polluters to death).

As Carney said in September 2019, “the firms that anticipate these developments will be rewarded handsomely. Those that don’t will cease to exist”.

This means that every company working along China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa would not exist in Carney’s world while any western company which could actually participate positively in the multipolar dynamic would be cut off of all credit and die.

After companies have proven their greenness, simply being approved for bank loans will not be enough to carry out their business. Here Carney and his colleagues at Canada’s Infrastructure Investment Bank plan to issue green bonds which today amount to only 5% of all global bond issuances but which Carney hopes will soon attain the “$3.5 trillion in energy sector investments [needed] every year for decades” which are required to “keep warming below 1.5 degrees”.

By re-wiring the Canadian economic system to this new system of values in time for the November 2020 COP26 summit in the UK where he will act as British Climate Advisor and key organizer, Carney hopes that the Canadian model will be internationalized so that climate change “will affect the value of virtually every financial asset.”

A New System of Economic Value

The problem with Carney’s post-COVID vision is that “value” is tied not to the rising of living standards, human creative reason or national productive powers of labour that characterized the creative growth of human civilization for the past several centuries but rather upon the TOTAL INVERSE. By placing values on reducing human activity, reducing carbon footprints, reducing traces of human activity upon the earth- the potential to sustain life will not only be consciously reduced but financially incentivized. Under a Green New Deal, humanity will effectively be imposing forms of energy, and practices onto ourselves which will ensure that we never participate in any large scale projects characteristic of the New Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, Asteroid Defense etc… and will never become capable of freeing themselves from a Malthusian class of supranational bankers managing a post-nation state world order from above.

If the world is truly as closed, finite and entropic as the misanthropic minds of an Oxford-trained technocrat like Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland or David Attenborough, then this sort of post-COVID world order would admittedly be the way to go.

If on the other hand, we happen to live in an open system, creative, anti-entropic universe and express a species characteristic of transcending our “limits to growth” by making new discoveries and translating those discoveries into new scientific and technological progress, then not only should Freeland, Carney and other Green New Dealers be removed from all positions of high office, but nations should join the multipolar alliance which puts value on increasing humanity’s potential rather than killing off our species under a 21^st century blood letting.

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Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.

Note

(1) Even though President Trump has authorized the most foolish anti-Chinese rhetoric, sanctions and military maneuvers amidst, it is this very collapse that compels those British-run deep state operatives enmeshed in Washington (including Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott) to attempt a coup and civil war in America itself. With all of his problems, Trump does after all believe in national sovereignty- supports protectionism, genuinely wants to re-industrialize and despises Malthusian depopulation, making him all too intolerable for a technocratic globalist.

Mayhem in Melbourne

On August 2, lockdown measures were implemented in Melbourne, Australia, that were so draconian that Australian news commentator Alan Jones said on Sky News: “People are entitled to think there is an ‘agenda to destroy western society.’”

The gist of an August 13^th article on the Melbourne lockdown is captured in the title: “Australian Police Go FULL NAZI, Smashing in Windows of Civilian Cars Just Because Passengers Wouldn’t Give Details About Where They Were Going.”

Another article with an arresting title was by Guy Burchell in the August 7^th Australian National Review: “Melbourne Cops May Now Enter Homes Without a Warrant, After 11 People Die of COVID — Australia, This Is Madness, Not Democracy.” Burchell wrote that only 147 people had lost their lives to coronavirus in Victoria (the Australian state of which Melbourne is the capital), a very low death rate compared to other countries. The ramped up lockdown measures were triggered by an uptick in cases due to ramped up testing and 11 additional deaths, all of them in nursing homes (where lockdown measures would actually have little effect). The new rules include a six week curfew from 8 PM to 5 AM, with residents allowed to leave home outside those curfew hours only to shop for food and essential items (one household member only), and for caregiving, work and exercise (limited to one hour).

“But the piece de resistance,” writes Burchell, “has to be that now police officers can enter homes with neither a warrant nor permission. This is an astonishing violation of civil liberties…. Deaths of this kind are not normally cause for government action, let alone the effective house arrest of an entire city.” He quoted Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews, who told Victorians, “there is literally no reason for you to leave your home and if you were to leave your home and not be found there, you will have a very difficult time convincing Victoria police that you have a lawful reason.” Burchell commented:

[U]nder this new regime you can’t even remain in your house unmolested by the cops, they can just pop ‘round anytime to make sure you haven’t had Bruce and Sheila from next door round for a couple of drinks. All over a disease that is simply not that fatal….

Last year more than 310,000 Australians were hospitalised with flu and over 900 died. By all metrics that makes flu a worse threat than COVID-19 but police weren’t granted Stasi-like powers during the flu season. Millions of people weren’t confined to their homes and threatened with AUS$5,000 fines for not having a good reason for being out of their homes.

At an August 19^th press conference, Australia’s second most senior medical officer said the government would be discussing measures such as banning restaurants, international travel, public transport, and withholding government programs through “No Jab No Pay” in order to coerce vaccine resisters.

An August 13 article on LifeSiteNews quoted Father Glen Tattersall, a Catholic parish priest in Melbourne, who said the draconian provisions “simply cannot be justified on a scientific basis”:

We have a curfew from 8 pm to 5 am, rigorously enforced including by the use of police helicopters and search lights. Is the virus a vampire that just comes out at night? Or the wearing of masks: they must be worn everywhere outside, even in a park where you are nowhere near any other person. Why? Does the virus leap hundreds of metres through the air? This is all about inducing mass fear, and humiliating the populace by demanding external compliance.

Why the strict curfew? Curfews have been implemented recently in the US to deter violence during protests, but no violence of that sort was reported in Melbourne. What was reported, at least on social media, were planes landing in the night from ‎the Chinese province of Guandong carrying equipment related to 5G and the Chinese biometric social credit system, which was reportedly being installed under a blanket of secrecy.

Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus at Boston University, concluded in an August 13^th article,

“We are living through a coup d’état based on the oldest of ploys: declaring emergencies, suspending law and rights, and issuing arbitrary rules of behavior to excuse taking ‘full powers’.”

Questioning the Narrative

Melbourne has gone to extremes with its lockdown measures, but it could portend things to come globally. Lockdowns were originally sold to the public as being necessary just for a couple of weeks to “flatten the curve,” to prevent hospital overcrowding from COVID-19 cases. It has now been over five months, with self-appointed vaccine czar Bill Gates intoning that we will not be able to return to “normal” until the entire global population of 7 billion people has been vaccinated. He has since backed off on the numbers, but commentators everywhere are reiterating that lockdowns are the “new normal,” which could last for years.

All this is such a radical curtailment of our civil liberties that we need to look closely at the evidence justifying it; and when we do, that evidence is weak. The isolation policies were triggered by estimates from the Imperial College London of 510,000 UK deaths and 2.2 million US deaths, more than 10 times the actual death rate from COVID-19. A Stanford University antibody study estimated that the fatality rate if infected was only about 0.1 to 0.2 percent; and in an August 4^th blog post, Bill Gates himself acknowledged that the death rate was only 0.14 percent, not much higher than for the flu. But restrictive measures have gotten more onerous rather than less as the mortality figures have been revised downward.

A July 2020 UK study from Loughborough and Sheffield Universities found that government policy over the lockdown period has actually increased mortality rather than reducing it, after factoring in collateral damage including deaths from cancers and other serious diseases that are being left untreated, a dramatic increase in suicides and drug overdose, and poverty and malnourishment due to unemployment. Globally, according to UNICEF, 1.2 million child deaths are expected as a direct result of the lockdowns. A data analyst in South Africa asserts that the consequences of the country’s lockdown will lead to 29 times more deaths than from the coronavirus itself.

Countries and states that did very little to restrict their populations, including Sweden and South Dakota, have fared as well as or better overall than locked down US states. In an August 12^th article in The UK Telegraph titled “Sweden’s Success Shows the True Cost of Our Arrogant, Failed Establishment,” Allister Heath writes:

Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-​king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.

Not restraining the populace has allowed Sweden’s curve to taper off naturally through “herd immunity,” with daily deaths down to single digits for the last month. (See chart.)

The Pandemic That Wasn’t?

Also bringing the official narrative into question is the unreliability of the tests on which the lockdowns have been based. In a Wired interview, even Bill Gates acknowledged that most US test results are “garbage.” The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology used in the nasal swab test is considered the “gold standard” for COVID-19 detection; yet the PCR test was regarded by its own inventor, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, as inappropriate to detect viral infection. In a detailed June 27^th analysis titled “COVID-19 PCR Tests Are Scientifically Meaningless,” Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter conclude:

Without doubt eventual excess mortality rates are caused by the therapy and by the lockdown measures, while the “COVID-19” death statistics comprise also patients who died of a variety of diseases, redefined as COVID-19 only because of a “positive” test result whose value could not be more doubtful.

The authors discussed a January 2007 New York Times article titled “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t,” describing an apparent whooping cough epidemic in a New Hampshire hospital. The epidemic was verified by preliminary PCR tests given to nearly 1,000 healthcare workers, who were subsequently furloughed. Eight months later, the “epidemic” was found to be a false alarm. Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed by the “gold standard” test – growing pertussis bacteria in the laboratory. All of the cases found through the PCR test were false positives.

Yet “test, test, test” was the message proclaimed for all countries by WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom at a media briefing on March 16, 2020, five days after WHO officially declared COVID-19; and the test recommended as the gold standard was the PCR. Why, when it had already been demonstrated to be unreliable, creating false positives that gave the appearance of an epidemic when there was none? Or was that the goal – to create the appearance of a pandemic, one so vast that the global economy had to be brought to a standstill until a vaccine could be found? Recall Prof. Codevilla’s conclusion: “We are living through a coup d’état based on the oldest of ploys: declaring emergencies, suspending law and rights, and issuing arbitrary rules of behavior to excuse taking ‘full powers’.”

People desperate to get back to work will not only submit to a largely untested vaccine but will agree to surveillance measures that would have been considered a flagrant violation of their civil rights if those rights had not been overridden by a “national emergency” justifying preemption by the police powers of the state. They will agree to get “immunity passports” in order to travel and participate in group activities, and they will submit to quarantines, curfews, contact tracings, social credit scores and informing on the neighbors. The emergency must be kept going to justify these unprecedented violations of their liberties, in which decision-making is removed from elected representatives and handed to unelected bureaucrats and technocrats.

A national health crisis also a necessary prerequisite for relief from liability for personal injuries from the drugs and other products deployed in response to the crisis. Under the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA), in the event of a declared public health emergency, manufacturers are shielded from tort liability for injuries both from the vaccines and from invalid or invasive tests. Compensation for personal injuries is a massive expense for drug companies, and the potential profits from a product free of that downside are a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies and investors. The liabilities will be borne by the taxpayers and the victims.

All this, however, presupposes both an existing public health emergency and no effective treatment to defuse it. That helps explain the otherwise inexplicable war on hydroxychloroquine, a safe drug that has been in use and available over the counter for 65 years and has been shown to be effective in multiple studies when used early in combination with zinc and an antibiotic. A table prepared by the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (below) found that the US has nearly 30 times as many deaths per capita as countries making early and prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine.

The latest international testing of hydroxychloroquine treatment of coronavirus shows countries that had early use of the drug had a 79% lower mortality rate than countries that banned the use of the safe malaria drug. Lowering the US mortality rate by 79% could have saved over 100,000 lives. But an effective, inexpensive COVID-19 treatment would mean the end of the alleged pandemic and the vaccine bonanza it purports to justify.

The need to maintain the appearance of a pandemic also explains the inflated reports of cases and deaths. Hospitals have been rewarded with increased fees for reclassifying cases as COVID-19. As deaths declined in the US, the numbers of cases reported by the Centers for Disease Control were also gamed to make it appear that America was in a “second wave” of a pandemic. The reporting criterion was changed on May 18 from people who tested positive for the virus only to people who tested positive for either the virus or its antibodies. The exploding numbers thus include people who have recovered from COVID-19 as well as false positives. The Loughborough and Sheffield researchers found that when controlling for other factors affecting mortality, actual deaths due to COVID-19 are 54% to 63% lower than implied by the standard excess deaths measure.

Ushering in “The Great Reset”

Forcing compliance with global vaccine mandates is one obvious motive for maintaining the appearance of an ongoing pandemic, but what would be the motive for destroying the global economy with forced lockdowns? What is behind the “agenda to destroy Western society” suspected by Australian commentator Alan Jones?

Evidently it is this: destroying the old is necessary to usher in the new. Global economic destruction paves the way for the “Great Reset” now being promoted by the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Monetary Fund and other big global players.

Although cast as arising from the pandemic, the “global economic reset” is a concept that was floated as early as 2014 by Christine Lagarde, then head of the IMF, and is said to be a recharacterization of the “New World Order” discussed long before that. It was promoted as a solution to the ongoing economic crisis triggered in 2008.

The World Economic Forum – that elite group of businessmen, politicians and academics that meets in Davos, Switzerland, every January – announced in June that the Great Reset would be the theme of its 2021 Summit. Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum, admonished:

The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.

No country will be allowed to opt out because it would be endangering the rest, just as no person will be allowed to escape the COVID-19 vaccine for the same reason.

Who is behind the Great Reset and what it really entails are major questions that need their own article, but suffice it to say here that to escape the trap of the globalist agenda, we need a mass awakening to what is really going on and collective resistance to it while there is still time. There are hopeful signs that this is happening, including massive protests against economic shutdowns and restrictions, particularly in Europe; a rash of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the lockdowns and of police power overreach; and a flood of alternative media exposés despite widespread censorship.

Life as we know it will change. We need to ensure that it changes in ways that serve the people and the productive economy, while preserving our national sovereignty and hard-won personal freedoms.

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute and author of thirteen books, including her latest, Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) described as one of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases was until recently categorically against wearing the face mask.

He offered advice and provided specific health guidelines based on scientific evidence.

Click the screenshot below to view

Video interview with Dr. Fauci

“No reason to be walking around with a mask”. it is not providing perfect protection. It has “unintended consequences”, says Dr. Fauci. He is absolutely right

And now Dr. Fauci is in favor of the mask.

In a bitter irony, his earlier statement (2 months ago) is now categorized as “fake news”.

Access to the video is partially blocked by “Fact Check”….

His statements are politely categorized as “Partly False”.  “Outdated” scientific statement?

Now Fauci is saying exactly the opposite: “We are trying to get people to universally wear masks”.

Fauci is not only lying to himself, he is actively involved in the censorship of medical doctors who question the official agenda which is destroying our lives. 

Dr. Fauci’s earlier statement (corroborated by scientific evidence) has been repealed.

There is a broad consensus among medical doctors that the face mask is detrimental to a person’s health.

Fauci was labelled fake news for telling the truth. And now his lies are upheld as the “official truth”.

BBC Video Interview with Fauci 

Click the BBC Report Below

READ THIS 

It should be noted that Fauci’s earlier assessment (categorized as “partially false” by Google’s “Fact Check”) is consistent with a broad “scientific consensus”.  According to Dr. Russell Blaylock:.”

Researchers found that about a third of the workers developed headaches with use of the mask, most had preexisting headaches that were worsened by the mask wearing, and 60% required pain medications for relief. As to the cause of the headaches, while straps and pressure from the mask could be causative, the bulk of the evidence points toward hypoxia and/or hypercapnia as the cause. That is, a reduction in blood oxygenation (hypoxia) or an elevation in blood C02 (hypercapnia).

It is known that the N95 mask, if worn for hours, can reduce blood oxygenation as much as 20%, which can lead to a loss of consciousness, as happened to the hapless fellow driving around alone in his car wearing an N95 mask, causing him to pass out, and to crash his car and sustain injuries. I am sure that we have several cases of elderly individuals or any person with poor lung function passing out, hitting their head. This, of course, can lead to death.   (Blaylock, op. cit).

People are being misled.

The compulsory wearing of the face mask should be discontinued.

The evidence is there.  SPREAD THE WORD

“There’s a term: ‘Good Cop. Bad Cop.’ And Trump is the ‘bad cop.’ Biden is the ‘good cop.’”

-Mark Robinowitz, from today’s interview.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The race that started with 20 candidates in June of 2019 would eventually thin to seven when the primaries began in February.

The race was looking competitive as Bernie Sanders was burning up the campaign and leading consistently.[1]

But South Carolina was the first state where Joe Biden started picking up steam. Observers found that he was winning big in particular with black voters. Joe Biden never lost popularity after that. In the primary contests to follow he stayed in the lead and eventually bested Sanders. Ultimately, Sanders threw in the towel and pledged support for Biden. [2]

Now, at 77, Joe Biden, with the help of the intrepid California Senator Kamala Harris, are presented to their fellow Americans as the team poised to replace Donald Trump and heal the damages wrought on the nation and the Earth.

Many progressives across the U.S. pledged their support for the Democrats. Even the highly respected and world renowned figure Noam Chomsky talked about the ‘chasm’ between the Biden and Trump in terms of their views, and fully supported Biden.

During a week when Biden and Harris were finally cemented with the high honour of leading their party to triumph on November 3, there is too little attention paid to some of the concerns dogging the team, beyond that coming from Trump and company. While there are some who will stop at nothing to defeat Trump, more Americans still need to know more about the man fighting to take his place. That is the focus on this summertime edition of the Global Research News Hour.

Our first guest is Mark Robinowitz. In the first half hour he talks about his reservations about Biden and Harris. He comments on the role of Sanders as a ‘sheep dog’, and comments on what Biden and Harris would really do in office. The second guest is Ajamu Baraka. He too comments on Biden and Harris, confronts Chomsky’s arguments, and comments on the foreign policy under the new guard as not better than that of Trump.

Also, both Robinowitz and Baraka take time to develop the difference the ‘little guy and girl’ can do to proactively constrain the building of empire regardless of who leads.

Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist, ecological campaigner and permaculture practitioner and publisher of oilempire.us as well as jfkmoon.org. He is based in Eugene, Oregon.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

1.  https://interactives.ap.org/delegate-tracker/
2.  ibid

The Daily Mail has come out with an incisive review of a Kinder-garden in Thailand which has applied the model of social engineering imposed by the Royal Thai government.

Similar guidelines have been imposed by governments throughout the World. 

Social distancing is justified with a view to fighting the dangerous virus.

Have a look at these pictures.  Is this what you want for your kids? Is it justified as a means to combating the Big V virus?

This is social engineering at its best sustained by the fear campaign which is destroying civil society as we know it, Worldwide. it’s killing our children. 

It is all based on a big lie, sustained by media disinformation. 

Russia’s reaffirmation of its CSTO mutual defense obligations to Belarus was made in response to Lukashenko’s claims that NATO poses a threat to Belarus, which Moscow evidently believes are at least credible enough to remind the alliance about its red line, whereas the same can’t be said about how Russia regarded fellow CSTO ally Armenia’s similar claims about Azerbaijan last month during their clashes near Tovuz since it declined to reaffirm its identical commitments at that time and therefore hinted that it didn’t believe Armenia’s allegations of so-called “Azerbaijani aggression”.

” … Is not in our stars but in ourselves”. Paraphrased right out of Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) you have it in a nutshell, for all of you, like myself, who actually vote.

It seems that during each and every major election cycle the masters of empire make sure to give you choices as if right out of those old Chinese Restaurant specials: One from Column A and one from Column B.

This is what the Repugnanton and Demoncratic Parties shovel at us, over and over.

Anyone who has to work for the man, in any manner, should finally conclude that these two parties don’t give a rat’s ass about you… Period! The shame of it all is that they continually pander to your emotions to get you to “Trust Us this time!”

They both are controlled by this Military Industrial Empire, so you will always get the hype for war and, better yet, a ‘Strong Defense’. So, your hard earned tax money will see about 50% of it invariably going to the War Economy… while your roads, bridges, infrastructure, schools, libraries continue to rust and wilt away. Of course, with very little money funneled for Real Health and Dental Care, YOU will wilt away!

I could not get myself to watch the Demoncrat convention this week.

Just too much **** to digest and  defecate for one intestine. They called out all the ‘Big Machers’, as my 8% Jewish heritage would say it.

In addition to war criminals Obama and Miss Hillary, they ushered out war criminal Colin Powell. He was the same guy, as a JAG military lawyer, who 50 years earlier had been sent to whitewash the My Lai massacre. Check it out.

Then, 33 years later, Powell stood at the UN and basically lied about Iraqi WMDs and Iraq’s intent to manufacture them.

Along with many other ex Generals and NSA types, Powell is a ‘born again Demoncrat’. Actually, who could blame him after what his old bosses, war criminals Junior and Dick, did to destroy our nation’s moral compass? Now, Mr. ‘Born Again’ Powell realizes (as does this writer) just how dangerous our current president and his evil administration are. Cannot blame Colin for that.

It was sad to watch ‘Feel the Bern’ once again prostrate himself before the altar of the DNC led coup.

This is the same evil group that did the dirty deed to him in ’16. What would I have done if I was Bernie?

Well, first off, after that March evening, when his two fellow candidates, Mayor ‘Alfred E Neumann’ (sorry) Buttigieg  and little Amy (former ‘give em hell’ prosecutor) Klobuchar dropped out and supported Sleepy Joe, ‘Feel the Bern’ should have done a Yogi Berra with ‘Déjà Vu’ all over again.

The next day, when Clyburn and countless pastors made sure that the black voters in SC shunned Bernie and voted for Sleepy Joe, he should have called a press conference. “I am dropping out of the race for president. I will support anyone the party selects to run against Trump. After November 3rd, I will ask my supporters to follow my lead in search of a new 3rd Party to represent our voices. Perhaps the established Green Party or a new one that echoes our urgent needs for major viable change.”

Knowing how dangerous (from the mouth of Noam Chomsky) this president and his party and administration are, decent Americans of all political leanings need to ‘Drain that swamp’…. ASAP!!

We cannot wait for four more years of this Neo Fascist/Neo Nazi mindset that is destroying our republic. I would say ‘Democracy’ but alas, we have NOT had one for generations! Putting a Biden/ Harris administration in place will NOT see real change, but… the days of the brown and black shirts could easily return if this current gang gets four more years. Cassius knew what Brutus failed to see.

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

Following last week’s humiliating rebuke of the U.S. at the Security Council, Mike Pompeo is going to the United Nations in a transparent, bad-faith effort to trigger the so-called “snapback” provision to reimpose U.N. sanctions on Iran. Only JCPOA participants can invoke this provision, and the U.S. publicly ended its participation more than two years ago:

But diplomats in Europe, China and Russia — the other powers that brokered the deal during the Obama administration — have questioned the legality of the demand because the United States is no longer part of the nuclear agreement.

The administration wants to have things both ways. It wants to be able to quit the JCPOA, wage economic war on Iran in violation of our previous commitments, and then it expects to able to use the deal’s own provisions to destroy the deal. When they first started floating this idea earlier this year, I said that it wouldn’t receive any support from the other parties to the deal, and it won’t. The U.S. obviously forfeited any right to act as a participant in the JCPOA when it reneged on that agreement. Everyone understands this, and the rest of the Security Council will not put up with this duplicity. The U.S. doesn’t even have the legal standing to bring this up at the Council, and I expect that is what the other members will say to Pompeo today.

The Trump administration maintains that it can use the “snapback” provision because it is a permanent member of the Security Council, and UNSCR 2231 listed the P5+1 among the participants, but this is clearly a case of trying to use the letter of the law to defeat the spirit of the law. When that resolution was written, it was taken for granted that the P5+1 would all remain parties to the deal. As soon as the U.S. left the deal, that was no longer the case.

The US legal case for why it is legally allowed to invoke UN snapback on #Iran circulated to European officials is convoluted and bizarre. Here is a thread outlining the Trump administration's arguments (please do not shoot the messenger). 👇🏽

— Sahil V. Shah (@SahilV_Shah) August 20, 2020

Pompeo has been citing Obama administration officials’ statements about “snapback” to support his case, but this just underscores how dishonest and two-faced the entire exercise is. The “snapback” provision was created for the sole purpose of penalizing Iran in the event that it stopped complying with the nuclear deal. The only reason that Iran has reduced compliance (consistent with its own rights under the JCPOA) in the last year is that the U.S. reneged on its side of the bargain and has been working overtime to kill the agreement outright. For the U.S. to come back now and claim the right to use the “snapback” provision, the administration must think everyone else on the planet is an idiot that can’t remember how we got here. The Trump administration is not seeking to restore U.N. sanctions because they want to preserve the JCPOA, because it has been their goal all along to kill the agreement and create a pretext for conflict. Having trampled on UNSCR 2231 for years and ignored its requirements for the U.S., they now think that they can turn the resolution that was passed to uphold and endorse the JCPOA into a weapon to destroy it. They are wrong as a matter of law and as a matter of international politics, and no matter what delusional statements they make about it the other parties to the deal will not cooperate. There are very few governments anywhere in the world that will agree that U.N. sanctions are back in force. The EU has already said that it doesn’t accept that the U.S. has the right to use this provision, so they are not going to be restoring sanctions just because Pompeo tells them to.

The president was quoted yesterday as saying that using the “snapback” was “not uncommon,” which shows how little he understands about it. Not only has it never been used before, because it was a new mechanism created specifically for this agreement, but once the Trump administration goes ahead with its reckless stunt it is likely that no future international agreements will contain a provision like this again.

Not uncommon?!

The snapback mechanism was an unprecedented and powerful innovation in the JCPOA. If invoked by a state that says it has withdrawn, it will never be accepted in any international agreement ever again.

Even John Bolton–JOHN BOLTON–thinks this is a bad idea. https://t.co/E9kK1TywmX

— (((James Acton))) (@james_acton32) August 19, 2020

The end result of this destructive behavior will be a weakened Security Council, reduced U.S. influence at the U.N. and with our allies, and more international humiliation and isolation caused by the administration’s Iran obsession. Like the original decision to leave the JCPOA, this stunt is reckless, harmful, and completely unnecessary. It is Trump’s failed foreign policy in miniature: needlessly combative, short-sighted, inept, and bad for American interests.

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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image: U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo participates in a press conference with U.S. President Donald J. Trump during the NATO Foreign Ministerial in Brussels on July 12, 2018. (State Department photo/ Public Domain)

The globalist Powers That Be have clearly decided to topple the long-standing sole-ruler of Belarus, President Aleksander Lukashenko. The question is why at just this time? There is a case to be made that one reason is he is being destroyed for his unforgivable coronavirus defiance. In any case Belarus is being hit with a full force West-led Color Revolution. The protests over the August 9 election show every sign of the usual Color Revolution destabilization protests, manufactured by the usual Western NGOs, as well as private contractors using social media to steer the protests.

Under Lukashenko’s regime, the country defied WHO and the global coronavirus lockdown demands. He refused to order lockdown of his citizens or the economy. As of August 13 the country had recorded a total of 617 covid19 related deaths. Belarus stood together with Sweden and the US State of South Dakota as one of the very few places in the world to successfully disprove the bizarre and dangerous WHO demands for a global lockdown to control the pandemic. Belarus ordered no lockdown so most industry continued. Schools remained open other than a 3 week closing during Easter. There were no mask requirements, though volunteer groups distributed masks to some and in June the EU sent a shipment of PPE including masks to Health officials for distribution. Football and the May 9 Victory parade went as normal. And now the country stands as an example the WHO and friends do not want.

One very important point is that the Health Ministry ignored the very flawed WHO recommendations on loosely classifying deaths as Covid19 when only a “suspicion” is there. The basis for the Belarus pathologists to state the cause of death from coronavirus is the presence of a patho-morphological picture with laboratory confirmation of Covid-19.ⁱ

This all did not sit well with the globalist Powers That Be. The manifestly corrupt WHO, whose main private donor is the Gates Foundation, criticized Lukashenko’s government for lack of quarantine and in June, when announcing it would grant Belarus a $940 million loan, the IMF said it was conditional on the country imposing quarantine, isolation and closed borders, demands Lukashenko rejected as “nonsense.” He noted in a widely-quoted statement, “the IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, a curfew. This is nonsense. We will not dance to anyone’s tune.”

Color Revolution Begins

Clearly NATO and the Western globalist circles have been working on toppling Lukashenko well before the covid19 events. That coronavirus defiance may only have helped galvanize events. The West and its “democracy” NGOs have long had Lukashenko in their targets. During the Bush Administration in 2008 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced Lukashenko as Europe’s “last dictator.” After that, Russia created the Eurasian Economic Union along with Kazakhstan and Belarus as members. Until now Lukashenko has refused Putin’s proposal to merge with Russia in one large Union State. That may soon change.

The protests broke out in Belarus after elections on August 9 gave Lukashenko some 80% of the vote against his last-minute opposition candidate, the ‘western’ candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Those protests are being run using the same model that the CIA and its various “democracy” NGOs, led by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) developed in Serbia, Ukraine, Russia and numerous other states whose leaders refused to bow to the globalist dictates. A co-founder of the NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The NED gets its financing from the US government, but poses around the world as a “private” democracy-promoting NGO, where it was instrumental in most every Washington-backed regime change destabilizations since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

In 2019, the NED listed on its website some 34 NED project grants in Belarus. All of them were directed to nurture and train an anti-Lukashenko series of opposition groups and domestic NGOs. The grants went for such projects as, “NGO Strengthening: To increase local and regional civic engagement… to identify local problems and develop advocacy strategies.” Another was to “expand an online depository of publications not readily accessible in the country, including works on politics, civil society, history, human rights, and independent culture.” Then another NED grant went, “To defend and support independent journalists and media.” And another, “NGO Strengthening: To foster youth civic engagement.” Another large NED grant went to, “training democratic parties and movements in effective advocacy campaigns.”ⁱⁱ Behind the innocent-sounding NED projects is a pattern of creating a specially-trained opposition on the lines of the CIA’s NED model.

The Murky Nexta

A key role in coordinating the “spontaneous” protests was played by a Warsaw-based texting and video channel called “Nexta,” based on the Telegram messaging app. Nexta, which is Belarusian for “somebody,” is nominally headed by a 22-year old Belarus exile based in Poland named Stepan Putila. With the Belarus Internet shut by the government since days, Nexta, operating from Poland, has posted numerous citizen videos of protest and police crackdown and claims now to have 2 million followers. It quickly became the heart of the Color Revolution once Belarus shut its Internet access.

Stepan Putila is also known under the moniker Stepan Svetlov. Putila previously worked for the Warsaw-based Belsat channel which broadcasts propaganda into Belarus and is funded by the Polish Foreign Ministry and USAID. The co-founder and Editor in Chief at Nexta since March, 2020 is a Belarus exile named Roman Protasevich who used to work for the US Government’s propaganda media, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Protasevich also worked for the Polish-based Euroradio which is partly funded by USAID. He was active in the CIA’s 2013-14 Maidan Square demonstrations in Kiev and according to his Facebook likes is close to Ukrainian neo-nazi Pahonia Detachment. In April 2018, Protasevich ends up at the US State Department in Washington, a notable contact. On his Facebook then he noted, “The most important week in my life begins.” The same day he posted a picture of himself inside the US State Department, stating “Never had so many important and interesting encounters in my life.”ⁱⁱⁱ After he left Washington he went to work for the USAID-funded radio in Belarus Euroradio.fm on August 31, 2018. Two years later Protasevich is coordinating the anti-Lukashenko events from Warsaw via Nexta. Coincidence?

Nexta which uses the London-registered Telegram, and is in NATO-member Poland, outside the country, so far has eluded shutdown. Nexta has been sending out, via social media, such information as plans for protests, at what time and where to gather for a rally, when to start a strike, where police are assembled and so on. Nexta has also circulated texts of protesters’ demands, updates about arrests, locations of arrests by riot police, and contacts for lawyers and human rights defenders as well as maps showing where police are located and addresses for protesters to hide in.

It has also advised subscribers how to bypass internet blocking by using proxies and other means. As Maxim Edwards, a pro-opposition British journalist at Global Voices, describes Nexta, “It is clear that the channel does not merely report on the protests, but has played a substantial role in organising them.”^iv

No doubt such coordination from abroad would not be possible unless Nexta had some very sophisticated assistance from certain intelligence services. Nexta claims it depends on “donations” and ads for funding, but claims to get no “grants” from governments or foundations. Whether true or not, it is an answer that gives little clarity. Is USAID one of their “donors” or the Open Society Foundations? The relevant point is that Nexta uses cyber technology that Belarus is not able to shut down. In 2018 the Russian governments unsuccessfully tried to ban Telegram for refusing to reveal their source codes.

Global Stakes

The opposition political candidates to Lukashenko is also surprisingly clever in tactics, suggesting they are being guided by professionals. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya the alleged “political novice” who stepped in when her husband was arrested and forbidden to run, claims she won the election based on exit pollers. On August 14 Tikhanovskaya announced that she was forming a “coordination council” to secure a peaceful transfer of power. It echoed the earlier call by another opposition candidate, Valery Tsepkalo, a former Belarus Ambassador to Washington who, like Tikhanovskaya’s husband Sergei Tikhanovsky, was barred from running for president. Tsepkalo called it a “national salvation front.”

Though Belarus is a small country of less than 10 million, the stakes of this destabilization effort of the West are enormous. In 2014 the Obama CIA head John Brennan led a US-backed coup d’etat in Ukraine to prevent Ukraine joining Russia’s economic union. That coup has not given Ukraine anything positive. Instead it has resulted in rule but by other corrupt oligarchs, but friendly with Washington, especially under Obama.

The NED tried in 2018 to destabilize Armenia, another part of the Russian Eurasian Economic Union. Were they now to break off Belarus, the military and political consequences for Russia could be severe. Whether or not the Lukashenko defiance of the WHO coronavirus dictates had a role in the timing of the ongoing Minsk Color Revolution attempt, clearly some powers that be in the West, including the EU and Washington would love to collapse Belarus as they did in Ukraine six years ago. If they succeed we can be sure they will be emboldened to try Russia after.

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

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

Notes

1 Natalya Grigoryeva, How Belarus Ignored the WHO and Beat Coronavirus, FRN, June 21, 2020, https://fort-russ.com/2020/06/covid-19-psychosis-defeated-how-belarus-ignored-the-who-and-beat-coronavirus/

2 NED, Belarus 2019, https://www.ned.org/region/central-and-eastern-europe/belarus-2019/

3 Anonymous, Roman Protasevich, August 17, 2020, https://www.foiaresearch.net/person/roman-protasevich

4 Maxim Edwards, How one Telegram channel became central to Belarus protests, August 19, 2020, https://radioeonline.com/2020/08/19/how-one-telegram-channel-became-central-to-belarus-protests/

Featured image:  Protest rally against Lukashenko, 16 August. Minsk, Belarus License: The Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license Under Some Conditions https://bit.ly/325WwSw

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

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

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

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

A high-profile and highly influential scientific study regarding the potential of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat Covid-19 patients was retracted among suggestions of fraud back in June. The research in question was headed by a renowned Harvard professor called Mandeep Mehra and published by The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal in the world.

It concluded that the antimalarial drug used since the 1950´s was actually killing Covid-19 patients by inducing heart failures. It caused quite a stir. (Brief historical fact: the Quina tree, the source of quinine and its family of medications, is also the “national tree” of Peru).

Short after the publication of the study (22 May), the World Health Organization (WHO) halted all research being conducted on hydroxychloroquine, which included simultaneous testing in 17 countries. The worldwide influence of the scientific paper – and the fact that hundreds of doctors were already trying the drug in Covid-19 patients – led a lot of researchers to look closely into it, immediately finding an alarming level of incoherence.

In the meantime, the news was spread far and wide by the corporate media, many times in a highly politicized fashion. They swiftly convinced the world of the danger of treating the symptoms of Sars-Cov-2 with HCQ.

In the realm of social media, a wave of censorship against dissenting voices soon followed. A viral video showing a group of physicians called the Frontline Doctors, speaking publicly in favor of HCQ – by sharing their own clinical experience – was removed by most social media giants (but only after millionshad already watched it). Could a testimony taken from a physician’s own experience be called “false”? Of course! Today a handful of social media corporations control what we can say or hear.

Instead of informing their audiences with a balanced discussion about all the scientific research conducted so far regarding the drug, both positive and negative, corporate media directed a barrage of ad-hominems and smear toward the mentioned doctors. An army of “fact-checkers” was opportunely deployed after that to police the web and reassure everyone that HCQ is both useless and dangerous. Everyone who said otherwise was snake oil peddler.

But regardless of its massive political effect, the study wasn’t a particularly well-crafted fraud to begin with. A couple of weeks after the publication, The Lancet received a letter from more than a hundred physicians and researchers, jointly demanding a review of the study and the disclosure of the raw data used in it. When the company providing such data – Surgisphere – refused to relinquish it for independent inquiry, three of its four authors retracted the paper.

Dr. Sapan Desai was the one who didn’t retract it, as he is (or was) the owner of Surgisphere and the provider of the data. It was allegedly obtained from 96,000 patients in hundreds of hospitals from five continents, a presumption that, according to many experts, should’ve immediately raised eyebrows. An expert in data integration projects told The Guardian that a database like the one Desai is said to own was “almost certainly a scam”.

Surgisphere’s website, just like Dr. Desai himself, vanished soon after the fraud was revealed, while its few employees, among them an adult content model and a sci-fi writer, appear to be no more than part of a façade.

Among the observations made to the retracted paper by the researchers were these pearls: “A range of gross deviations from standard research and clinical practices”; “gross misrepresentation of the numbers of (Covid-19) deaths in Australia”. The data was not only very hard to obtain, due to very different country laws and levels of development, it showed suspiciously similar tendencies despite focusing on very dissimilar regions of the Earth.

According to Science magazine, it was the presence of Mandeep Mehra what gave the study the “gravitas” needed to be published in a medical journal as The Lancet. He did retract it and apologize as soon as the news about the refusal to open the data was out. Mehra and Desai were introduced to one another by a third researcher, Dr. Amit Patel, who also participated in the retracted paper. Patel and Desai are also brothers-in-law.

Edward Horton, The Lancet’s editor in chief, said that the whole thing was a “monumental fraud”. A Bostonian research scientist writing for The Guardian, James Heathers, called it “the most important retraction in modern history”. Heathers correctly pointed out that “studies like this determine how people live or die tomorrow”. Sadly, “saving people’s lives” is also used as a justification for giving dubious science a free pass in times of emergency.

Despite the fact that the malign influence of private interests in science research and medicine is quite well-known and documented today, the few corporate news outlets that covered “Lancetgate” decided not to look into the obvious…

A world of conflicts of interest

In opposition to the coverage given to the original study, its retraction wasn’t as widely and swiftly publicized by the mainstream press. In fact, other than The Guardian, only a few news media covered this historic scientific embarrassment in any depth.

When they did, they rarely went beyond mentioning “data concerns”. But that could be understood as anything from a computer virus destroying part of the data to legitimate human error. Not many hints were given to the readers to let them suspect of deliberate and outright fraud, much less one rooted in conflicts of interest.

The spin given to the news was not much about why or how it happened – how reputed scientists and The Lancet were fooled by fake data – but mostly about how bad it looked for everyone and how the need for remedies for the pandemic was driving scientists and regulatory bodies to bypass important scrutiny.

A New York Times op-ed went deep into the problems in the peer review system, a process both “opaque and fallible”, going as far as to acknowledge a “politicization of the pandemic”, but it failed miserably by not informing its readers of one of the reasons why peer review might fail: conflicts of interest.

Where’s the relationship between this incident and the pervasive role of Big Pharma’s money in academia, science and politics?

The many flaws quickly pointed out by more than a hundred scientists didn’t make the press question how a reputed and seasoned researcher like Harvard’s Mehra was so easily fooled, and then The Lancet and its peer review system. The Guardian didn’t look deep, or at all, into potential conflicts of interests involving the researchers in question and Big Pharma.

As you probably know already, the way pharmaceutical giants make their money is through patents – the monopoly to market a certain drug for a certain time – and hydroxychloroquine lost any patent it had decades ago. As Marcia Angell wrote in 2002:

Patents are the lifeblood of the drug industry. Without a patent, a company has no incentive to bring a drug to market.

As the Alliance for Human Research Protection correctly pointed out, “…mainstream media carefully avoid asking the… overriding question, lest the magnitude of science fraud is laid bare”.

And the question regarded specific and flagrant conflicts of interest. The independent media didn’t miss it. As Professor Michel Chossudovsky wrote for Global Research (June 10):

The Lancet acknowledges that the study received funding from the William Harvey Distinguished Chair in Advanced Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital which is held by Dr. Mandeep Mehra. In this regard, it is worth noting that Brigham Health has a major contract with Big Pharma’s Gilead Sciences Inc., related to the development of the Remdesivir drug for the treatment of COVID-19. The Gilead-Brigham Health project was initiated in March 2020.

The mandatory question right after acknowledging Gilead’s relationship with said Hospital, one that the corporate media could never dare ask, also made by Prof. Chossudovsky, is if the fraudulent study was made “to provide a justification to block the use of HCQ”?

The reason behind this mainstream media omission could be found in the billions of dollars the pharma industry spends in advertising, the “lifeblood” of corporate news, which predisposes them to naivety and simple-mindedness regarding possible conflicts of interest. Seems logical, they are in the exact same spot as the researchers who take Big Pharma money and then are supposed to pass objective judgment about their products and questionable role in society.

Add to that the fact that media and pharmaceutical corporations share interlocking directorates. As FAIR.org reported back in 2009, media names like The New York Times or the NBC share directors with companies like Eli Lilly or Merck, respectively.

A consequence of decades of conflicts of interest corrupting traditional media is that today most people is dangerously uninformed of the risks of letting the group of corporations that comprise Big Pharma, and their hedge fund shareholders, wield its power over both governments and science. Even today, many people are prone to call Big Pharma influence a “conspiracy theory”.

The mere idea that Big Pharma’ influence could be swaying what is being said and done politically and in the realm of corporate media, regarding the Cov-Sars-2 pandemic and potential remedies, is utterly outrageous! The fact that they spend as no other industry in government lobbying and media advertising doesn’t seem to matter because, well, how could Big Pharma be worried of anything else but our health in these times of great despair… right?

In fact, both Big Media and Big Pharma are motivated by profit, and they are partners in crime, as members of the latter have been “repeatedly convicted of marketing harmful—often fatal—drugs; substantial fraud; price manipulation; and concealment of evidence.”

Their managers are legally forced to enrich their shareholder masters without regards for “externalities”, like an opioid overdose crisis. A pandemic is seen by these huge psychopathic entities just as a once in a lifetime opportunity to plunder. A desperate consumer is a great costumer, especially when Gilead, Novartis, AstraZeneca and the rest of the bunch can spend his or her taxes in disproportionally expensive remedies because they own the government bodies made to regulate them.

Advertising money is the reason why a critical look into this world of conflicts of interests is completely absent from mainstream media, even if “progressive” as The Guardian.

In addition to this, you have probably heard a lot lately about how fake news and conspiracy theories are a “threat to democracy”, or how they “undermine traditional institutions”. Well, giving wide coverage to a fraud involving top Western scientists and doctors, using the most important medical journal ever known to the effect of discarding a cheap drug with no patents and a potential competitor for expensive pharma company products, can produce some serious “undermining” of public trust.

We should end this article by quoting some worried –and sometimes pessimistic– scientific authors. Among them the editors or former editors of The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

“A turn to towards darkness”

Regarding the nefarious role of commercial conflicts of interest in science, Marcia Angell, quoted above, also wrote this in 2009:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Recently (not under Angell’s editorship), the NEJM –second in prestige only to The Lancet– also published and retracted research by Mehra and Desai.

The editor of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton, also seems to have lost faith in what is nowadays called scientific research:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.

Are we going back to the Dark Ages, or are we there already? In France, the former Health Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, leaked an extraordinary anecdote from a private reunion he had with the editors of The Lancet, other journals and experts, to French news medium BFMtv.

According to Douste-Blazy, Richard Horton (The Lancet) literally said:

If this continues, we are not going to be able to publish any more clinical research data because pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today, and are able to use such methodologies as to have us accept papers which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which, in reality, manage to conclude what they want to conclude.

“When there is an outbreak like Covid, in reality, there are people like us – doctors – who see mortality and suffering… and there are people who see dollars. That’s it,” admitted the French physician.

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Daniel Espinosa Winder lives in Arequipa, second largest city of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching propaganda and mainstream media. He writes for a peruvian in print weekly, “Hildebrandt en sus trece” since 2018. His writings are a critique of the role of mass media in society”. 

In not renewed, New START expires on February 5, 2021.

Months earlier, Trump falsely called it a “bad deal.”

He never read it and knows no more about it than what Pompeo and other regime hardliners told him.

The decade-ago agreement is the only remaining arms control treaty between Russia and the US.

Preserving it is vital to avoid a greater arms race than already ongoing.

Between them, Russia and the US have an estimated 94% of nuclear warheads.

Trump regime hardliners want China included in a new deal.

Beijing earlier said nuclear talks with the US won’t happen unless it’s agreeable to nuclear parity — what’s clearly off the table for bipartisan militarists in Washington.

New START limits deployed strategic nuclear warheads and bombs to 1,550.

Deployed ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and nuclear-capable heavy bombers are limited to 700.

Deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and bombers are limited to 800 — about 50% fewer than START I permitted.

New START doesn’t limit non-deployed ICBMs and SLBMs, but monitors their numbers and locations.

On-site monitoring and verification were agreed on to assure both countries remain in compliance with their obligations.

If New START isn’t renewed and expires next February, limits on the world’s largest nuclear arsenals no longer will exist for the first time in nearly half a century.

Two days of Russia/US New START renewal talks in Vienna ended Tuesday with both sides miles apart, including the Trump regime’s demand for China to be involved.

Russia’s representative to Vienna-based international organizations Mikhail Ulyanov said if China joins New START talks, nuclear armed Britain and France should be included.

Due to their “non-readiness” to be involved, the “US and Russia should concentrate on (a) bilateral track.”

If talks remain stalemated between both countries, Ulyanov called for extending the current agreement beyond its February 2021 expiration date while they continue trying to find common ground.

Trump regime arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea indicated a willingness to discuss the idea if Russia agrees to New START changes the US side demands, falsely claiming the current agreement is “deeply flawed,” adding:

“If we can fix things (the Trump regime wants changed), and if we can address all warheads, and if we do so in a way and if we can address all warheads, and if we do so in a way that’s extendable to China, then we would be prepared.”

“We’re not going to take a bad deal back to Trump, but we would recommend that we consider, that he consider, an extension of New START this year.”

Russian negotiator in Vienna/Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Moscow “doesn’t put forward any precondition” on an extension, adding:

“We got the impression that the option of extension of START is not closed, but the US hesitates to say ‘yes’ and has additional ideas on what needs to be done.”

So far, no follow-up meeting is scheduled.

Billingslea said it’s up to Russia to accept US pre-conditions for additional talks before the Trump regime is willing to hold them.

Sergey Lavrov stressed that New START extension talks should proceed with no preconditions.

The US aim is all about seeking a strategic advantage over other countries, mainly Russia and China.

On Tuesday, Billingslea said most likely Putin and Trump would meet if both sides agree on extending New START.

At this time, there are no preparations for a summit-level meeting to take place.

Ryabkov explained talks ended on Tuesday with “the priorities of the US and Russia at this stage” far apart, adding:

“Russia favors extending New START, but is not ready to pay any price for it.”

The US side “expect(s) us to move toward their demands, and, by and large, they avoid answering the direct and logical question.”

“Are they ready to extend the agreement without preconditions, as proposed by President Vladimir Putin?”

“There is still no answer to this question. (T)he current consultations have not changed this situation.”

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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 InfoRos

The series of unfortunate events involving the US-led coalition, Turkey and Turkish proxies continues in Syria’s Greater Idlib.

Late on August 19 and early on August 20, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) shelled positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham near Haranabush and al-Sheikh Bahr in southern Idlib with what pro-opposition sources called “long-range rockets”. Despite multiple claims in pro-opposition media about fierce SAA strikes, no casualties were reported. The SAA likely used BM-27 Uragan or BM-30 Smerch heavy rocket launchers. The BM-27 has a range of 37 km, while the more advanced BM-30 can hit targets up to 90 km away.

On the same day, unidentified gunmen destroyed communication towers used by the Turkistan Islamic Party near the town of Ras Elhisn, which is located right on Turkey’s border. The Turkistan Islamic Party, which as well as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has an al-Qaeda-like ideology, is an internationally-recognized terrorist group mostly consisting of Uyghur militants. The group has a strong presence in northern Lattakia, western and southern Idlib and is one of the main allies of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The terrorist group’s main stronghold is Jisr al-Shughur.

Over the previous few days, the Russian Aerospace Forces conducted a series of airstrikes on positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham across Greater Idlib punishing the group for the recent IED attack on the joint Turkish-Russian patrol on the M4 highway. Meanwhile, two US combat drones crashed in the region as a result of a mysterious incident that pro-US sources described as a midair collision.

If the situation in Idlib further deteriorates with such speed, the Turkish attempts to stabilize it by deploying additional troops and equipment there will appear to be not enough to keep Turkish al-Qaeda friends under control in the area.

A Syrian pro-government group known as the Popular Resistance in the Eastern Region (PR-ER) has claimed responsibility for the recent rocket attack on U.S. troops in Deir Ezzor. Three unguided rockets landed in the vicinity of the CONICO gas plant, where U.S. forces are deployed, late in the hours of August 18. The U.S. military confirmed the incident without reporting any losses.

The PR-ER said in a statement that the rocket strike was in response to an earlier attack by U.S. forces at a Syrian Arab Army checkpoint near the village of Tal al-Dhahab in the northern al-Hasakah countryside. The U.S. attack left a Syrian service member, Malik Muhammad al-Muhaimid, dead and injured at least two others.

The PR-ER first surfaced over 2 years ago declaring the aim of fighting the US occupation of northeastern Syria. Since then, it has claimed responsibility for several attacks on US forces. However, the group’s activity remained relatively low recently. The intensification of its actions may be linked with the growing tensions between the Syrians and US forces in the region.

Meanwhile, Turkish proxies also entered the game on the banks of the Euphrates. On August 18, the pro-Turkish armed group “Gathering of Rebels in the Land of Deir Ezzor” released a statement threatening Syrian, Russian, Iranian and Kurdish forces in the province with attacks.

It also claimed responsibility for the IED blast that killed a Russian major-general near Deir Ezzor city. The group self-identifies as a unit of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). This was, however, denied by the SNA. Pro-Turkish sources claim that this armed group was created by the Kurds to discredit the Syrian patriots on Turkish paychecks. It’s as if there is something that can done to discredit pro-Turkish groups more than what they have done by themselves.

Deir Ezzor province seems to be becoming a center for the new proxy battle for the Syrian energy resources.

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“A Wakeup Call to the World” – this is what Dr. Carrie Madej calls the hidden agenda within the barely talked about ID2020.

What is envisaged is a “genetically modified humanity” (GMH) so as to better control, command the world population, or what’s left of it, once the Gates Agenda has been implemented.

Let that NEVER happen!

See for yourself, Dr. Carrie Madej’s presentation – 21 min. video (17 August 2020). Transhumanism – “Human 2.0”? – A Wakeup Call to the World, Nanotechnology implanted in your cells – and a genetically modified human DNA.

For those who don’t know yet Bill Gates and his intentions – you may also want to watch his 2010 TedTalk, in Southern California, called “Innovating to Zero”. In it he says unmistakably, “If we do a real good job vaccinating, we may reduce the world population by 10% to 15%”. Watch for yourself.

The Gates TedTalk coincides with the launching of the infamous Rockefeller Report 2010 which planned and predicted the so-called “Lockstep Scenario” in which we – humanity of 193 countries – are marching, in lockstep, to insane orders.

Under this “Lockstep Scenario” the world is losing thousands, if not millions of lives – not so much due to the covid-19 virus, but to the impacts of the closing down of the global economy, social engineering and tyranny which are being imposed on the world, on 193 countries (all UN member states) all at once – no escaping.

You may also watch this 4 min. video of Bill Gates Briefing to CIA – How the Vaccine will Modify Behavior. Already 15 years ago a sinister agenda was under preparation.

Fear is the name of the game. Where it is no longer fear of the corona virus, it is fear from the authorities’ draconian implementation measures, lockdown, destruction of the world economy, of millions of livelihoods lost, of countless victims of famine, extreme poverty, despair, suicide – and fear of what is still to come – there is no end in sight.

The end is in our hands. In the hands of the People. We have to resist in masses. We have to roll out a heart- and conscious-felt movement, like the one that took place in Berlin on 1 August and mobilized 1.3 million people. A new one is planned for 29 August, 2020 – also in Berlin – a Peace Demo – protest against Germany’s – and the world leaders’ (sic) dictatorial and out-of-law and out-of-constitution repressive measures, lockdowns – and destruction of our fundamental life support systems.

All of this, as you may realize, has nothing to do with covid, nothing to do with a virus.

The virus is just a clever idea to use an invisible enemy for instilling fear, worldwide, by this minuscule, insanely rich and psychotically power-hungry elite to put the entire world population to its knees. FEAR that obliterates the human immune system and may bring about a range of illnesses far worse than covid-19, including cancer, coronary diseases, diabetes – and much more.

Imagine the pressure, blackmail, corruption and outright threats that must be used against 193 world governments to act in unison, at the same time with lockdowns and tyranny, destroying their own and the world’s socioeconomic system as we knew it.

People, resist in solidarity!

Read related articles:

Agenda ID2020 of the “One World Order”: The 101 to Understanding Its Implications

By Peter Koenig and Dr. Vernon Coleman, August 17, 2020

The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”

By Peter Koenig, August 14, 2020

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

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO); RT; Countercurrents, Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press; The Saker Blog, the and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

In Colombia, a terrible wave of violence affects the people and especially traditional indigenous communities. According to United Nations data, more than 40 murders of social leaders have occurred this year alone.

Last Tuesday, August 18, three Indians of the Awá people were murdered in the municipality of Ricaurte, department of Nariño, while two young men were tortured and murdered in El Patía, department of Cauca, and a social leader, Jaime Monge, was also murdered in Villacarmelo, a rural area of Cali. These deaths made newspapers’ headlines a few days after others that shocked the country. On Saturday, 15, eight young men were shot in the municipality of Samaniego; on the 11th, five teenagers were murdered in Llano Verde and an Afro-Colombian social leader was murdered in Chocó; and on the 8th, in the municipality of Leiva, Nariño, two students who were attending school were murdered.

Contrary to what was common in other times, there is no public claim of responsibility for the murders. The main reason for this is that currently there is no longer a monopoly on the attacks by the major illegal factions, but the simultaneous action of a wide variety of militias involved in drug trafficking networks. However, the Colombian State denies the existence of widespread paramilitarism in the country. Whenever a massacre occurs in the country, the official versions generally point to drug trafficking as the culprit, without further investigation, which is why the attacks remain unpunished.

Despite the denials of the authorities, the existence of multiple groups is evident and the phenomenon of paramilitarism can no longer be associated strictly with groups such as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (National Liberation Army), being, currently, an extremely multifaceted and widespread phenomenon. For example, in three recent massacres in the Santander region, a paramilitary group known as “Los Rastrojos” was denounced as the perpetrator. According to local sources, this group has between 150 and 200 members and is advancing across the country.

This same armed group – “Los Rastrojos” – has an interesting history of links with drug trafficking in the neighboring country, Venezuela. The group was expelled from Venezuela due to the constant and incisive actions of Venezuelan security forces, which forced the migration of militia members to Colombia, where they are now spreading with great speed. However, “los Rastrojos” act not only in drug trafficking, but also in politics, apparently. It was this group that, in February 2019, accompanied Juan Guaidó’s flight to Colombia. Guaidó, moreover, has several records in photos and videos with members of the militia, which raises suspicions of links between the Venezuelan opposition and Colombian drug trafficking.

In fact, the peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and the FARC in 2016 did not end civil conflicts, but it did generate a reconfiguration of the actors in the fighting. Now legalized, the FARC is no longer the main belligerent group and new, lesser-known militias are taking on a greater role in drug trafficking. In practice, the power of these militias far outweighs the ability of state security forces to control and combat them, which spurs the creation of secret networks of cooperation between the state and organized crime to keep illegal activities “restricted” and avoid the liquidation of the social order. In this way, rises what we can call a narco-state – a phenomenon in which people and criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking start to occupy positions of relevance in the government and to influence state policies.

The existence of a Colombian Narco-State is almost undeniable and explains the inertia of state forces to investigate crimes committed by criminal organizations. Massacres occur freely across the country as social movements and communities of traditional peoples become an obstacle to the advancement of trafficking. The State remains silent and even collaborates with the actions of the militias and thus the interests of crime are realized without any impediment.

The situation in Colombia, however, is old and the country has been referred to as a Narco-State on several other occasions. What is really surprising is not the Colombian government’s attitude towards organized crime, but the inertia of international organizations and foreign powers in the case. Still, the role of the US in South America is curious. A few months ago, US President Donald Trump accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of being involved in drug trafficking and offered a millionaire reward for his “capture”. However, the main center of US operations against Venezuela is precisely Colombia, from where, on more than one occasion, mercenaries left and crossed the border into Venezuela trying to overthrow Maduro. In addition, Washington-backed Venezuelan opposition leader Guaidó has already demonstrated links to at least one criminal organization active in Colombia and involved in the murders of social leaders.

Why do Washington, the United Nations and all the Western powers that condemn Maduro remain silent in the face of these cases? Why is Colombia not being punished with international sanctions for its inertia in preventing the massacre of its own people? Perhaps drug trafficking is not really an enemy for Washington.

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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

Before even debating the efficacy, safety, and necessity of different vaccines – one must get past the fact that the most corrupt corporations on Earth hold a monopoly over their development (and the profits made from them). 

Forbes in their article, “9 Pharmaceutical Companies Racing For A COVID-19 Vaccine,” would provide a list of the current front-runners racing to develop the West’s first COVID-19 vaccine.

The article would claim:

With more than 6 million confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide and the number increasing daily, the race for a Covid-19 vaccine is moving at full speed. 

This and many other articles are supposed to protray the gravity of the COVID-19 crisis and the desperate need to develop a vaccine to fight it with.

Under “Operation Warp Speed” the Department of Health and Human Services has allocated around $10 billion to feed into giant multinational multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical corporations – each with a track record of bribery, corruption, market manipulation, and price gouging.

The US Department of Health and Human Services itself is headed by Alex Azar – former president of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly – which was accused of manipulating the price of insulin in the US, and fined for doing so in Mexico – Politico reported in its article, “Trump’s HHS secretary nominee boosted drug prices while at Eli Lilly.”

If COVID-19 was truly the danger we are told it is – why has the Western World placed its trust in the most corrupt corporations on Earth? Why do Western governments draw department and ministry heads from these corporations? Why is the development of these vaccines being done in secret by for-profit corporations through the use of proprietary technology rather than as an exercise in open, international collaboration?

Upon seeing examples of the colossal corruption carried out by each of these “Operation Warp Speed” candidates it will become clear that their collective appearance at the trough of $10 billion in taxpayer dollars to develop a COVID-19 “vaccine” is the capstone upon a long, sordid history of profiting at the expense of the general population’s money and even their health.

The Insidious Six  

Six of the eight corporations shown in a table in Forbes’ article are Western pharmaceutical giants. They include:

• Johnson and Johnson;
• Pfizer;
• Moderna;
• GSK;
• AstraZeneca and;
• Novavax.

The other two companies included are Chinese companies – thus Westerners are extremely unlikely to receive anything developed by them.

All six Western pharmaceutical corporations have backgrounds of impropriety.

Four of the six are convicted – not accused of or suspected of – but convicted of criminality ranging from falsifying research, the bribing of doctors, regulators, legislatures, and even law enforcement officials, to the marketing of drugs to children for conditions not approved of by regulators, and false advertising – just to mention a few.

One company is accused of recently manipulating the stock market as part of its inclusion in “Operation Warp Speed.” The last company simply takes US government money by the billions and produces nothing.

A normal person would not likely trust a convicted criminal – recently released from prison – walking up to their front door and injecting an unknown substance into their body claiming it protects them from some sort of disease or condition.

Yet that is precisely what the West does when they roll up their sleeves to be injected by substances created by pharmaceutical corporations repeatedly convicted of the worst possible crimes such businesses could commit.

The difference of course is a criminal walking up to you on the street raises immediate red flags.

A criminal corporation hiding behind bribed doctors with clean white coats, certificates affixed to their walls, professional, clean, and well-light examination rooms, stamps of approval from government regulators, and all the other facades of modern Western healthcare – lulls the public into a false sense of trust and safety these corporations and their products do not deserve.

Johnson and Johnson: Covering Up (and still selling) Cancer-Causing Products  

This US-based Fortune 500 multinational multi-billion dollar corporation made headlines after lawsuits filed against it claiming its baby powder products caused cancer won repeatedly in US courts.

NPR in its article, “Johnson & Johnson Stops Selling Talc-Based Baby Powder In U.S. And Canada,” would note that Johnson and Johnson had denied all wrongdoing and even cited various reports “proving” its baby powder was “safe.”

Yet the NPR article noted (emphasis added):

Separate investigations by Reuters and The New York Times in December 2018 revealed documents showing Johnson & Johnson fretted for decades that small amounts of asbestos lurked in its baby powder. 

“From at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public,” Reuters reported.

NPR would conclude the article by noting (emphasis added):

Both types of the powder will continue to be sold in other countries around the world“where there is significantly higher consumer demand for the product.”

Johnson & Johnson is one of a handful of companies working with the National Institutes of Health to develop potential treatment options for the coronavirus pandemic and a vaccine for COVID-19.

Despite courts ruling against Johnson and Johnson and its own internal documents admitting the dangers of its product – it continues to sell it overseas for the simple fact it faces less likelihood of litigation for causing harm to human health.

And as if creating a product that causes cancer and still selling it overseas despite pulling it from shelves in America isn’t bad enough – Johnson and Johnson has been convicted by the US Security Exchange Commission (SEC) of wide scale systemic bribery.

From the US SEC’s official website itself – in a report titled, “SEC Charges Johnson & Johnson With Foreign Bribery,” it states (emphasis added):

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Johnson and Johnson (J&J) with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by bribing public doctors in several European countries and paying kickbacks to Iraq to illegally obtain business.

The SEC statement also noted:

The SEC alleges that since at least 1998, subsidiaries of the New Brunswick, N.J.-based pharmaceutical, consumer product, and medical device company paid bribes to public doctors in Greece who selected J&J surgical implants, public doctors and hospital administrators in Poland who awarded contracts to J&J, and public doctors in Romania to prescribe J&J pharmaceutical products. J&J subsidiaries also paid kickbacks to Iraq to obtain 19 contracts under the United Nations Oil for Food Program.

Johnson and Johnson – one of the Western big-pharma corporations pursuing a COVID-19 vaccine they would like to eventually inject into your body – is a corporation convicted of bribing governments and doctors to promote their products and award them contracts whether these products work or not, are safe or not, or are even necessary in the first place or not.

Some might point out that this SEC case was from 2011 – but reports as recent as 2019 indicate that Johnson and Johnson is still under investigation for exactly the same practices.

Reuters in its article, “Exclusive: FBI targets Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, GE, Philips in Brazil graft case – sources,” would note:

The U.S. FBI is investigating corporate giants Johnson & Johnson, Siemens AG, General Electric Co and Philips for allegedly paying kickbacks as part of a scheme involving medical equipment sales in Brazil, two Brazilian investigators have told Reuters.

Brazilian prosecutors suspect the companies channeled illegal payoffs to government officials to secure contracts with public health programs across the South American country over the past two decades.

Johnson and Johnson – repeat offenders – guilty of bribing the very people who are supposed to scrutinize the safety, efficacy, and even necessity of healthcare products – is “racing” to develop a COVID-19 vaccine it wants to jab you with.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ official website, Johnson and Johnson has already received $456 million in funds from the US government for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

Pfizer: Bribing Government Regulators for Drug Approval 

The Washington Post in a 2012 article titled, “Pfizer agrees to pay $60M to settle foreign bribery case,” would report (emphasis added):

Pfizer Inc. agreed Tuesday to pay $60 million to settle charges alleging that some of its foreign subsidiaries bribed doctors and health-care officials in order to gain regulatory approval for the company’s drugs and boost sales in those countries.

The Washington Post article specifically noted that one Pfizer product it bribed doctors to use came as an “injection” but both the Washington Post and the official SEC complaint (22 pages, PDF) refused to name the products involved in a bribery racket operating in over a dozen countries around the globe from Eastern Europe to East Asia.

More recently, FiercePharma would report in its 2018 article, “Pfizer joins DOJ probe into claims pharma bribes funded Iraqi terrorists,”

The Justice Department’s inquiries stem from a lawsuit, filed last fall, in which veterans and their families accused Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Roche and Johnson & Johnson of paying bribes to win business from the Iraqi ministry of health at a time when the ministry was controlled by terrorists.

Of course, Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca are both also currently vying with Pfizer for a COVID-19 vaccine with the help of billions of US taxpayer dollars.

Pfizer – like Johnson and Johnson – has an established pattern of bribing the very people in government and national healthcare sectors charged with ensuring the safety, efficacy, and even necessity of products made by companies like Pfizer. Instead, Pfizer is paying them off and despite being caught doing so repeatedly, face what is essentially a “slap on the wrist” and allowed to not only continue doing business – but continue its business of bribery.

According to FoxNews in their article, “Pfizer to get $2B for coronavirus vaccine under ‘Operation Warp Speed’,” Pfizer will receive up to $1.95 billion in funds from the US government for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

Moderna: Masters of Stock Manipulation

Moderna has yet to make any products to bribe doctors and regulators to push onto the public, but hopes its candidate for a COVID-19 vaccine could be the first.

And already it is accused of manipulating the stock market amid its efforts to do so.

CBS News in its article, “Watchdog urges SEC to investigate vaccine maker Moderna,” would report:

…concerns center on insider trading activity at Moderna after the company last month announced positive results in Phase 1 trials of its coronavirus vaccine. The news pushed up the company’s stock price 30% to an all-time high of $87. In the days following the announcement, Moderna’s CEO, other executives and funds controlled by the chairman of its board sold about $90 million worth of company shares.

The article also noted:

“Evidence suggests that Moderna and at least two of its officers, possibly among others, may have improperly exploited coronavirus fears to boost the company’s value, as well as their own bank accounts,” Herrig [head of Accountable.us] wrote.

Moderna has become the centerpiece of the US government’s “Operation Warp Speed” headed by Moderna’s own Moncef Slaoui – who joined Moderna’s board of directors as recently as 2017 and only left Moderna in May 2020 – a month after “Operation Warp Speed” was announced and after divesting with Moderna stock sky-high from suspected market manipulations.

Governments subservient to globalist diktats are willfully killing their own people in the name of fighting a misnamed “pandemic”.

SARS-COV-2, the virus said to be the causative agent of COVID-19, has been neither isolated nor purified. Nevertheless, even according to flawed statistics, coding changes, altered reporting protocols, and flawed diagnostic testing, the aforementioned respiratory virus still has low infection fatality rates.

The real menace is not the virus, which can be successfully prevented and treated, (1), but rather state measures, which interfere with sound treatment protocols. Nobody needed to die, but the excess death tolls from lockdowns and other state measures is staggering.

Constitutional Canadian lawyer Rocco Galati states that state measures have been proven to create from 12-14 : 1 more deaths than the supposed virus. (2)

Cancelled hospital procedures coupled with state-sponsored psychological warfare (3) have created unreasonable fear and anxiety amongst Canadians who now fear hospitals. These toxic conditions have created a 40% increase in heart attack deaths in Canada. (4)

Suicide and drug overdose deaths have also increased and outnumber supposed COVID deaths by a ratio of 3:1.

In England, the Guardian reported that an extra 10,000 Alzheimer’s patients have died. (5)

The UN warns that an extra 10,000 children per month risk starving to death (6) due to consequences of state-imposed “COVID measures” which disrupt supply lines and deny people the right to generate income.

The UN and World Food Bank anticipate that by December 2020, an additional 130 million people will be on the brink of starvation. (7)

Censorship of these important facts and statistics is a key element in this global conspiracy against humanity.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.

Notes

(1) Pr Harvey Risch, “L’hydroxychloroquine agit chez les patients à haut risque, et dire le contraire est dangereux” France Soir, 12 August, 2020
( http://www.francesoir.fr/politique-monde/lhydroxychloroquine-agit-chez-les-patients-haut-risque-et-dire-le-contraire-est ) Accessed 20 August, 2020.

(2) Rocco Galati and Sarah Westall, “Video: Trudeau and Canadian Government Sued over COVID Measures. Constitutional Lawyer Rocco Galati” Global Research, 19 August,2020. Sarah Westall, 17 August, 2020. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/trudeau-canadian-government-sued-covid-measures-sets-worldwide-example-rocco-galati/5721543 ) Accessed 20 August, 2020.

(3) Mike Robinson, “77 Brigade: Is British Military Waging an Information War on Its Own Population?” UK Wire, 29 April, 2020. (https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/04/29/77-brigade-is-british-military-waging-an-information-war-on-its-own-population/ ) Accessed 20 August, 2020.

(4) Rocco Galati and Sarah Westall, “Video: Trudeau and Canadian Government Sued over COVID Measures. Constitutional Lawyer Rocco Galati” Global Research, 19 August,2020. Sarah Westall, 17 August, 2020. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/trudeau-canadian-government-sued-covid-measures-sets-worldwide-example-rocco-galati/5721543 ) Accessed 20 August, 2020.

(5) “Extra 10,000 dementia deaths in England and Wales in April” The Guardian,
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/covid-19-causing-10000-dementia-deaths-beyond-infections-research-says) Accessed 20 August, 2020.

(6) Lori Hinnant and Sam Mednick, “Virus-linked hunger tied to 10,000 child deaths each month.” AP, 27 July, 2020. (
(https://apnews.com/5cbee9693c52728a3808f4e7b4965cbd) Accessed 20 August, 2020.

(7) Audrey McNamara, “UN food agency chief: World could see famines of ‘biblical proportions’ within months” CBS News, 22 April, 2020.
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-famines-united-nations-warning/) Accessed 20 August, 2020.

Featured image is from the author

The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (FKMCD) yesterday approved the first-ever U.S. release of genetically engineered mosquitoes. Despite public outcry and scientific dispute over the human health and environment risks posed by this field trial, the approval permits the release of 750 million GE mosquitoes over a two-year period in Monroe County, Florida, which may begin in 2021.

Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board members have received more than 2,000 comments from Florida residents opposing the release of GE mosquitoes. Despite encouragement from the public, the Board members also rejected the proposal for a referendum on November’s ballot, which would have asked Monroe County residents to vote on whether to accept or reject the GE mosquito trial. In 2016, voters in the proposed release site in Key Haven, Florida, voted to reject the GE mosquito trial.

Neither the FKMCD nor Oxitec has publicly announced where or when the releases will occur. Documents submitted by Oxitec did not include details about an environmental impact statement (EIS).

“With all the urgent crises facing our nation and the State of Florida — the Covid-19 pandemic, racial injustice, climate change — the administration has used tax dollars and government resources for a Jurassic Park experiment. Now the Monroe County Mosquito Control District has given the final permission needed. What could possibly go wrong? We don’t know, because EPA unlawfully refused to seriously analyze environmental risks, now without further review of the risks, the experiment can proceed,” said Jaydee Hanson, Policy Director for the International Center for Technology Assessment and Center for Food Safety.

“The Mosquito Control Board has an obligation to our community, not a vendor that’s products are risky and untrustworthy. FKMCD wants to proceed with an experiment that may be damaging to public and environmental health and our local economy,” said Barry Wray, Executive Director of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition. “We need true solutions to benefit our community and ecosystems.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, community members and national organizations critiqued Oxitec’s application for failing to address important environmental risks and potential negative health impacts. Community members asked the FKMCD to reject the field trial application, pointing out the lack of data demonstrating that Oxitec’s mosquitoes will be safe and effective, the likelihood that biting females will be released, thus putting humans and animals at risk, and the lack of free and prior informed consent of people living in the area.

“The release of genetically engineered mosquitoes will needlessly put Floridians, the environment and endangered species at risk in the midst of a pandemic,” said Dana Perls, food and technology Program Manager at Friends of the Earth. “This approval is about maximizing Oxitec’s profits, not about the pressing need to address mosquito-borne diseases.”

“The Mosquito Control Board is not equipped to manage this process. Why have they not acquired the appropriate amount of insurance as well as performance and maintenance bonds?” said Ed Russo, President, Florida Keys Environmental Coalition. “Their evasive answers and lack of management skills are an indictment of their unprofessionalism and arrogance which speaks loudly of an unprepared regulatory process.”

Although the FKMDC is focused on reducing mosquito-borne diseases, scientists have raised major concerns that GE mosquitoes could create hybrid wild mosquitoes which could worsen the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and which may be more resistant to insecticides than the original wild mosquitoes.

As highlighted by a public panel of experts speaking on the topic, GE mosquitoes could pose significant threats to sensitive ecosystems in the Florida Keys. A recent field study in Brazil by researchers from the Powell lab at Yale University confirmed that the mosquito’s engineered genes had spread into wild populations of mosquitoes. Recently a group of scholars from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign questioned proceeding with this experiment on scientific and ethical concerns.

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Was COVID-19 a Cover for an Anticipated or Planned Financial Crisis?

By Anthony Hall, August 20, 2020

The internationalization of increased unemployment and poverty brought about in the name of combating the corona crisis is having the effect of further widening the polarization between rich and poor on a global scale.

Medical Fascism: Australia Plans to Make Covid-19 Vaccine ‘as Mandatory as Possible’ Once Proven Safe

By Samantha Maiden and Charis Chang, August 20, 2020

The Oxford University vaccine is made from a genetically engineered virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees and is known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Scientists have altered the virus to make it mimic the coronavirus.

All Spying All the Time: The Insatiable Appetite of the US Government to Spy on Everyone in America.

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, August 20, 2020

During this summer of madness in Portland, Oregon, and sadness over COVID-19, two below-the-radar events occurred implicating the insatiable appetite of the United States government to spy on everyone in America. The feds have been wearing away at our privacy rights using a multitude of means.

The Hariri Assassination: Israel ’s Fingerprints

By Rannie Amiri, August 20, 2020

As for the yet unsolved case of the February 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the underpinnings of this covert operation including the role of Israel have now surfaced. A crackdown on Israeli spy rings [in 2010] operating in Lebanon has resulted in more than 70 arrests over the past 18 months. Included among them are four high-ranking Lebanese Army and General Security officers—one having spied for the Mossad since 1984.

USAID Document Exposes New US Plot to Overthrow Nicaragua’s Elected Socialist Government

By Ben Norton, August 20, 2020

A newly released document exposes a US government operation to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government in Nicaragua. The plot is administered by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a regime-change vehicle that uses the pretense of “humanitarian aid” to advance Washington’s aggressive foreign-policy interests.

American Politics: Send in the Clowns for the Circus Is in Town

By Edward Curtin, August 19, 2020

The Umbrella People are the moguls who own the showtime studios – some call them the secret government, the deep-state, or the power elite. They run a protection racket, so I like to use a term that emphasizes their method of making sure the sunlight of truth never gets to those huddled under their umbrella.

Covid-19: Lockdown of the Global Economy of Planet Earth. Diabolical Project: The Closing Down of 193 National Economies Is Not “A Solution”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Bonnie Faulkner, August 19, 2020

Planet Lockdown. Devastating economic and social consequences. We are living one of the most serious crises in modern history. According to Michel Chossudovsky, the coronavirus pandemic is used as a pretext and a justification to close down the global economy, as a means to resolving a public health concern. A complex decision-making process is instrumental in the closing down of national economies Worldwide. We are led to believe that the lockdown is the solution.

Unanimously adopted Security Council Resolution 2231 that affirmed the JCPOA nuclear deal eliminated UN sanctions on Iran.

Its provisions and the P5+1 approved nuclear agreement are binding international and US constitutional law under the Supremacy Clause — Article VI, Clause 2.

DJT unlawfully withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, giving his regime no legal say over its implementation or whatever relates to it.

Days earlier, he vowed to unilaterally impose snapback sanctions on Iran.

The JCPOA provision lets any of its signatories reimpose veto-proof sanctions on Iran that became null and void when the agreement took effect in January 2016.

Only JCPOA signatories Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany may legally invoke snapback now — not the US after illegally abandoning the binding agreement.

Remaining signatories unanimously oppose snapback because it would undo years of diplomatic efforts that went into establishing the JCPOA they want preserved.

Time and again, the US does what it pleases, operating extrajudicially and forcing its will on other nations by pressure, bribes, bullying, threats, and brute force when other actions fail.

On Wednesday, Trump said he “direct(ed) Pompeo to notify the United Nations Security Council that (his regime) intends to restore virtually all of the United Nations sanctions on Iran” — extrajudicially he failed to add.

At his unilateral discretion in defiance of the rule of law, the Security Council ruling, and unanimous will of remaining JCPOA signatories, Trump unlawfully claimed the right to “prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon” it doesn’t seek, never did, and urges their elimination regionally and worldwide.

On Wednesday, Pompeo said the following:

On Thursday, he’ll “meet with the (SC) president and…secretary general (to) provide notification of the snapback, and then 30 days from now all the sanctions that were in place will resume (sic).”

He threatened Russia, China, and other nations, saying the Trump regime will hold them accountable if reject its will on Iran.

He falsely claimed that “European people” are not safe because the Security Council overwhelmingly rejected the Trump regime’s resolution to extend the expiring arms embargo on Iran indefinitely.

On Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif tweeted the following in response to Trump’s vow to invoke snapback:

“US recourse to Dispute Resolution Mechanism in (SC Res.) 2231 has NO LEG TO STAND ON.”

On Wednesday, Iranian President Rouhani slammed Trump regime threats, saying:

“America is no longer a member of the JCPOA to use (snapback), and all (its other signatories) condemned the US effort,” adding:

“The world knows what will happen if the (Trump regime) takes this dead-end path.”

“They…burned the bridge and imagine that (it’s still there for them) to cross.”

“If anyone in Iran thinks that this tyrannical (regime) in the White House and the oppressive sanctions are permanent, they are wrong because neither the White House tyrants nor the sanctions are there to stay forever.”

“Sanctions will break and disappear. Through resistance, we made them understand that they have made a mistake and the White House has fully understood that they have made a mistake, but they are helpless on the path they have taken and it has become difficult for them to find a way out.”

Will remaining JCPOA signatories Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany break with the Trump regime’s unlawful invoking of snapback by fully supporting the agreement (and SC Res. 2231) affirming it to prevent the deal from unraveling altogether?

Last Friday, the Trump regime’s attempt to extend an arms embargo on Iran indefinitely was overwhelmingly rejected by SC members, the Dominican Republic alone supporting what defied the JCPOA’s letter and spirit.

Will SC members support the rule of law by refusing to go along with unilaterally and illegally imposed snapback on Iran by the US?

The fate of the JCPOA hangs in the balance.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is by Sabaaneh/Middle East Monitor

Although the U.S. can threaten Germany, now during the American election campaign, threats cannot prevent the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. It is interesting to observe how for the first time this century Berlin is resisting demands made by Washington.

After the U.S. State Department included the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline as a project that could be sanctioned, the Minister-President of the German Province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Manuela Schwesig, said that Europe should make it clear to the U.S. that threats of sanctions are unacceptable. Earlier, the German Bundestag announced that due to the American threat of sanctions, they are considering the possibility of filing lawsuits with various courts and also address the United Nations, because it is a threat to a sovereign state and a violation of its rights. The American threat does not refer only to the companies, but also to the government institutions that approved the realization of the project.

It is clear that Schwesig in her comments was acting as a spokesperson for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and sent a clear message to Washington. It is obvious that Washington is accustomed to Europe unconditionally satisfying their interests and meeting every request and pressure they demand. The situation in international relations in the post-Cold War era, with the strengthening of multipolarity, has changed significantly. This is evident since the U.S. is now threatening allies if their interests do not perfectly align. Germany has a clear interest in completing Nord Stream 2 – it will provide an energy hungry Germany with energy stability.

Although Washington-Berlin relations may be tense, because of the election campaign, the U.S. is unlikely willing to go so far as sanctioning a so-called ally state. The scope of American pressure on Germany will be limited and it cannot be expected that the Democratic-Liberal bloc will in anyway support any intentions of U.S. President Donald Trump on foreign policy issues, including Nord Stream 2.

Given that the election campaign is underway, the range of its pressure on Germany is limited and Nord Stream 2 will certainly be completed. The project has already been delayed to some extent because some companies withdrew from the job of laying pipes due to financial threats, so Russia organized other pipelayers there to ensure its completion. In a more serious political sense, apart from punishing companies that participate in the construction of the Nord Stream 2, Washington will not be able to take any other effective measures to disrupt construction.

Berlin will certainly not be willing to give up on the project that it has already invested €10 billion so far, especially now that it is in the final phase as the pipelines to be laid is on a stretch of less than 200 kilometers on a route that is more than a thousand kilometers long. The German economy is very dependent on Russian gas and energy, which cannot be replaced in its entirety with very expensive American liquefied gas.

Germany is starting to show resistance that it has not shown so organized this century so far, and it is trying to encourage other Europeans to stand up against American threats of sanctions. Some companies have already left Nord Stream 2 because they believe that as the project is nearing completion, if they do not give it up, they will lose contracts on the American market in the long run. Germany wants to bring this issue before the United Nations Security Council, but it is a path that does not bring much hope for them as the U.S. has the right to veto. However, it is interesting as this is the first time that some kind of tougher resistance against the U.S. is shown.

Germany could impose more rigorous sanctions on American products that are in the European market, but that is a major risk as Germany largely depends on the American market, which is the most important one for it after China.

Therefore, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is an important and expensive project for Germany, not only in the economic sense, but also in the political one. Germany is trying to make some kind of compromise, but the question on who will soon be in the White House will depend on how to move forward in Berlin-Washington relations. Germany surrendering Nord Stream 2 would not only be a huge loss of money invested, but its economy would not be able to compensate for the amount of energy it needs. It is for this reason that Germany is willing to risk sanctions from the U.S. and does not question scrapping the Nord Stream 2 project.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

It certainly was dramatic, as US President Donald Trump announced in the White House Thursday an agreement by the United Arab Emirates and Israel to move to full normalisation.

Former Congressman Ron Paul and his colleague Dan McAdams recently conducted a fascinating interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which focused in part on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was Kennedy Jr.’s uncle. The interview took place on their program the Ron Paul Liberty Report.

Owing to the many federal records that have been released over the years relating to the Kennedy assassination, especially through the efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, many Americans are now aware of the war that was being waged between President Kennedy and the CIA throughout his presidency. The details of this war are set forth in FFF’s book  JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.

In the interview, Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed a fascinating aspect of this war with which I was unfamiliar. He stated that the deep animosity that the CIA had for the Kennedy family actually stretched back to something the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, did in the 1950s that incurred the wrath of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.

Kennedy Jr. stated that his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, had served on a commission that was charged with examining and analyzing CIA covert activities, or “dirty tricks” as Kennedy Jr. put them. As part of that commission, Kennedy Jr stated, Joseph Kennedy (John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy’s father) had determined that the CIA had done bad things with its regime-change operations that were destroying democracies, such as in Iran and Guatemala.

Consequently, Joseph Kennedy recommended that the CIA’s power to engage in covert activities be terminated and that the CIA be strictly limited to collecting intelligence and empowered to do nothing else.

According to Kennedy Jr., “Allen Dulles never forgave him — never forgave my family — for that.”

I wasn’t aware of that fact. I assumed that the war between President Kennedy and the CIA had begun with the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The additional information added by Kennedy Jr. places things in a much more fascinating and revealing context.

Upon doing a bit of research on the Internet, I found that the commission that Kennedy Jr. must have been referring to was the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, which President Eisenhower had established in 1956 through Executive Order 10656. Eisenhower appointed Joseph Kennedy to serve on that commission.

That year was three years after the CIA’s 1953 regime change operation in Iran which destroyed that country’s democratic system. It was two years after the CIA’s regime-change operation in Guatemala that destroyed that country’s democratic system.

Keep in mind that the ostensible reason that the CIA engaged in these regime-change operations was to protect “national security,” which over time has become the most important term in the American political lexicon. Although no one has ever come up with an objective definition for the term, the CIA’s power to address threats to “national security,” including through coups and assassinations, became omnipotent.

Yet, here was Joseph P. Kennedy declaring that the CIA’s power to exercise such powers should be terminated and recommending that the CIA’s power be strictly limited to intelligence gathering.

It is not difficult to imagine how livid CIA Director Dulles and his cohorts must have been at Kennedy. No bureaucrat likes to have his power limited. More important, for Dulles and his cohorts, it would have been clear that if Kennedy got his way, “national security” would be gravely threatened given the Cold War that the United States was engaged in with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and other communist nations.

Now consider what happened with the Bay of Pigs. The CIA’s plan for a regime-change invasion of Cuba, was conceived under President Eisenhower. Believing that Vice President Nixon would be elected president in 1960, the CIA was quite surprised that Kennedy was elected instead. To ensure that the invasion would go forth anyway, the CIA assured Kennedy that the invasion would succeed without U.S. air support. It was a lie. The CIA assumed that once the invasion was going to go down in defeat at the hands of the communists, Kennedy would have to provide the air support in order to “save face.”

But Kennedy refused to be played by the CIA. When the CIA’s army of Cuban exiles was going down in defeat, the CIA requested the air support, convinced that their plan to manipulate the new president would work. It didn’t. Kennedy refused to provide the air support and the CIA’s invasion went down in defeat.

Now consider what happened after the Bay of Pigs: Knowing that the CIA had played him and double-crossed him, John Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as CIA director, along with his chief deputy, Charles Cabell. He then put his younger brother Bobby Kennedy in charge of monitoring the CIA, which infuriated the CIA.

Now jump ahead to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Kennedy resolved by promising that the United States would not invade Cuba for a regime-change operation. That necessarily would leave a permanent communist regime in Cuba, something that the CIA steadfastly maintained was a grave threat to “national security”— a much bigger threat, in fact, than the threats supposedly posed by the regimes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.

And then Kennedy did the unforgivable, at least insofar as the CIA was concerned. In his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, he declared an end to the entire Cold War and announced that the United States was going to establish friendly and peaceful relations with the communist world.

Kennedy had thrown the gauntlet down in front of the CIA. It was either going to be his way or the CIA’s way. There was no room for compromise, and both sides knew it.

In the minds of former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the people still at the CIA, what Kennedy was doing was anathema and, even worse, the gravest threat to “national security” the United States had ever faced, a much bigger threat than even that posed by the democratic regimes in Iran and Guatemala. At that point, the CIA’s animosity toward President Kennedy far exceeded the animosity it had borne toward his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, several years before.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews atLewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

While the media blames the crisis in Lebanon solely on corruption, the US government unleashed a “maximum pressure” campaign to push regime change and crush Lebanese resistance with sanctions and aggressive hybrid warfare.

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As the people of Lebanon suffer through one of the worst economic crises in their nation’s conflict-ridden history, the Donald Trump administration is exploiting the disaster to force regime change and weaken Lebanese resistance groups.

A massive explosion on August 4 devastated Lebanon’s capital Beirut, killing more than 150 people, wounding thousands, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, and ravaging a sizable chunk of the city.

The massive blast also destroyed Lebanon’s most important port, where 80 percent of food was imported into the country.

Even before the apocalyptic incident, Lebanon was enduring an economic calamity that had caused hyperinflation and wiped out the wealth of much of the country, fueling widespread food shortages and 20-hour blackouts.

Lebanon’s economy is now in a state of total collapse. The value of its national currency has plummeted by 80 percent, and more than half of the population is languishing in poverty.

Political kingpins, activists, Western government-funded NGOs, and international corporate media have blamed Lebanon’s problems solely on corruption. And there is no question that widespread financial impropriety and outright theft was a key factor in bringing the country to such a dismal point.

But an even more important element that has been conveniently left out of this picture is the role of the United States, and its allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia, which have pursued a concerted policy of destabilization, or what they call “maximum pressure.”

Washington has suffocated Lebanon and its neighbors with aggressive economic warfare, explicitly aimed at paralyzing the country and weakening Hezbollah, one of the most powerful and popular resistance forces in the region, which has successfully resisted US and Israeli interventionist designs, helped defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, and even expelled the Israeli military after two decades of brutal military occupation of south Lebanon.

Hezbollah has a political arm that is democratically elected, holding 12 seats in Lebanon’s parliament, and which has been a member of the country’s governing coalition for a decade. Because of the resistance movement’s presence in government, Washington and Tel Aviv have refused to recognize the legitimacy of Lebanese democracy, and have desperately pursued regime change.

The crushing sanctions Washington has imposed on Syria and Iran have not only devastated the economies in the area; they have produced a ricochet effect back in Lebanon, severing the country from regional trading partners.

Then there is the nine-year Western-backed proxy war on the government in Damascus, which has destabilized Lebanon’s neighbor and unleashed a historic refugee crisis, putting enormous pressure on Beirut.

All of these factors have led to a catastrophe in Lebanon.

Trump administration pushes ‘maximum pressure’ campaign on Lebanon

The response of the Trump administration to the fateful Beirut blast was more sanctions.

The Wall Street Journal reported on August 12 that the US government was preparing to impose new sanctions “against prominent Lebanese politicians and businessmen in an effort to weaken Hezbollah’s influence.”

The newspaper noted that the blast “has accelerated efforts in Washington to blacklist Lebanese leaders aligned with Hezbollah.” It added that US officials see the post-explosion chaos as “an opportunity to drive a wedge between Hezbollah and its allies as part of a broader effort to contain the Shiite force backed by Tehran.”

Top US officials want to “turn the screws in Lebanon,” the Journal reported. It quoted an unnamed official who remarked, “I don’t see how you can react to this kind of event with anything other than maximum pressure” – a reference to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign to bring about regime change in Iran.

The Trump administration is preparing anticorruption sanctions against Hezbollah’s allies in Lebanon, as it seeks to weaken the group in the aftermath of the Beirut explosion https://t.co/jOnnuzAayT

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) August 12, 2020

Senior US officials remarked bluntly that they want Lebanon’s current government to be replaced with a “technocratic” regime that shuns Hezbollah.

This demand confirmed a 2019 report in The Grayzone by journalist Rania Khalek, which detailed how Western-backed NGOs in Lebanon were exploiting anti-corruption protests to advance a strategy to remove Hezbollah from the country’s governing coalition and install US-aligned, IMF-friendly technocrats.

The Wall Street Journal also acknowledged that the Trump “administration’s existing sanction programs against Hezbollah” have already “taken an economic toll” on Lebanon.

Washington has therefore made it clear that it has no problem pushing Lebanon deeper into the economic abyss, to the edge of state collapse, in hopes of neutralizing Hezbollah.

Washington’s all-out war on the ‘Resistance Axis’

The crisis in Lebanon cannot be understood outside of the wider context of the overarching, obsessive US strategy aimed at crushing what is known as the “Resistance Axis,” in which Hezbollah serves as a key actor.

The ongoing, nearly decade-long war on Syria looms large in this situation. When the US government and its allies in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey initiated a regime-change war against Syria in 2011 and 2012, Hezbollah immediately recognized the proxy conflict as an attack on all resistance forces in the region, which would inevitably swallow Lebanon as well.

So while Washington and the Wahhabi Gulf monarchies poured billions of dollars into arming and training Salafi-jihadist rebels groups in Syria, giving birth to ISIS and fueling the spread of al-Qaeda, Lebanese Hezbollah helped to prevent state collapse in Damascus, battling Western proxies that threatened to turn the country into a failed state, as they did in Libya after the 2011 NATO regime-change war.

Some US lawmakers openly argued in Congress that it was a “good thing” that ISIS and other Sunni extremists were attacking “Hezbollah and the Shiite threat to us.” And an Israeli think tank funded by the US government and NATO even insisted in 2016 that ISIS should not be defeated, precisely because it could “be a useful tool in undermining” Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.

Meanwhile, as Israel treated al-Qaeda militants in its hospitals and Israeli officials said they preferred ISIS staying in power, Hezbollah played a key role in the fight to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, both of which had crossed from Syria into Lebanon and took over Sunni-majority border towns, which they subsequently used as bases to launch attacks on Shia- and Christian-majority Lebanese villages.

Hezbollah successfully expelled these extremist Salafi-jihadist groups, and defended Lebanese sovereignty, in collaboration with Christian militias, Sunnis and Druze, and the Lebanese national army itself.

Faced with its own failure in the military component of the war in Syria, Washington then turned to full-scale economic warfare.

US economic warfare on Lebanon, Syria, and Iran

In June, the US government imposed a crushing unilateral coercive measures regime on Syria known as the “Caesar” sanctions. The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal detailed how the US and European sanctions on Syria effectively amount to a medieval-style siege of the entire country, and all of the millions of civilians who live inside of it.

Humanitarian experts have even warned that the Western economic warfare could unleash a famine. The United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization’s Syria representative, Mike Robson, cautioned there may soon be bread shortages in Syria. “There is already some evidence of people cutting out meals,” he stated.

The economic blockade has also damaged the economy in Lebanon, which has been virtually unable to do business with one of its most important trading partners. In 2017, Lebanon was by far the largest recipient of Syrian goods, receiving nearly 32 percent of its exports. Now, the sanctions have made that exchange nearly impossible.

The US ambassador in fact explicitly stated that Lebanon would not be allowed to buy energy from Syria due to the Caesar sanctions. The US-imposed severance of the two neighbors has exacerbated the electricity crisis in Lebanon, where there are often power shortages for up to 22 hours per day.

The US economic blockade of Iran has also caused a fuel shortage in Syria, forcing people to wait in lines for hours to get gasoline.

Moreover, Damascus had relied on the Beirut port for imports prior to the explosion. Now that its crucial economic lifeline has been destroyed, both Lebanon and Syria are facing extremely severe crises and the serious possibility of famine.

A Syrian-American economist, financial analyst, and prominent online commentator known by the pseudonym Ehsani told The Grayzone “there is little doubt” that the Syria war has terribly impacted Lebanon’s economy.

While disastrous, fiscally unsound policies overseen by the Lebanese central bank – which is also heavily influenced by the US embassy – played an important role in pushing the nation to the economic brink, the war on Syria has also hurt the Lebanese economy “in a big way,” Ehsani said.

“Economic growth clearly decelerated since 2011,” the start of the war in Syria, he explained. “And it ground to a halt in the past few years, leading up to the financial crisis. Between 2016 and 2019, Lebanon’s economic growth was practically zero. And it kept declining from its pre-2011 levels steadily.”

While corruption is an endemic problem in Lebanon, it has plagued the country for decades. Yet a pivotal economic shift occurred with the introduction of the US policy of exacerbating the crises in the region to destabilize independent governments and weaken the Resistance Axis, explained journalist Elijah J. Magnier, a war correspondent who has covered the region for decades.

“The US sanctions crippled the Syrian economy due to the restriction of the flow of cash, oil, and machinery needed to re-boost the local economy,” Magnier told The Grayzone. “Moreover, the US presence in north-east Syria and their control of the oil and gas prevented the country not only from vital energy but also from the rich agriculture resources the area is known for.”

“The US sanctions on Syria stopped all Arab and Gulf countries from rebuilding the country and pushed back all possible financial investment,” he said. “This has caused the devaluation of the local currency and prevented the Lebanese market from offering an alternative to Syria for fear of direct sanctions on the Lebanese government.”

Magnier added:

“As far as it concerns Lebanon, the US asked a local bank to collect over $20 billion in cash and to ship it abroad, creating a real thirst for foreign currency in the country. Moreover, the US imposed sanctions on wealthy Lebanese living abroad and on more than one bank, injecting real fear among the population of being accused of supporting terrorism or seeing their savings confiscated by the US authorities abroad. That has starved Lebanon of several billion dollars in cash that family members used to send back home to their relatives.”

US boasts of impact of sanctions on Lebanon, and CENTCOM commander visits

While imposing de facto economic blockades on Syria and Iran, the United States has hit Lebanon with several rounds of what it calls “targeted sanctions.” These US Treasury sanctions on Lebanon have sought to punish Hezbollah and its allies in the government and business sector.

While Washington portrays targeted sanctions as supposed humanitarian measures that do not hurt civilians, economic experts say this is patently false.

Ehsani, the Syrian-American economist, told The Grayzone,

“The effects of the US sanctions on the region is to push most business transactions underground. Lawless rogue elements typically fill the void as more legitimate businesses exit the scene. Such legitimate businesses do this because most global organizations opt to follow an ‘over-compliance’ posture to avoid any chance of getting entangled in such transactions.”

US sanctions have also hurt Lebanon by “the loss of potential money inflows that had fallen under significantly more scrutiny from US Treasury,” Ehsani added. “How much of the average $7-8 billion yearly inflow got affected by these sanctions is hard to ascertain.”

“While Western capitals speak of ‘smart sanctions,’ the fact is that even industries exempt from sanctions tend to quickly fall under the sanctions regime. This can be seen with importers of raw materials for medicine for example,” he explained.

“What has been clear is that benign sanctions are a myth,” Ehsani said. “Sanctions are akin to carpet bombing the standards of living of the average citizen.”

Before the August 4 explosion, Washington itself acknowledged that its sanctions were stinging Lebanon.

Just two weeks before the Beirut blast, the US government-run media outlet Voice of America (VOA)  celebrated the effect its coercive measures were having. “US Sanctions on Syria Leave Hezbollah More Isolated in Lebanon,” it gloated.

The VOA report noted that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had described the US sanctions as part of an “economic war” aimed at “starving both Syria and Lebanon.”

The neoconservative group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) approvingly tweeted the VOA article, insisting that the resistance “network is vast, but it can be reined in.”

The Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act introduced sanctions on the Syrian regime, which could deter Hezbollah from pushing Lebanese state institutions from assisting Assad. The network is vast, but it can be reined in. https://t.co/ttNgsio7I8

— UANI (@UANI) July 20, 2020

This VOA report came on the heels of a quiet yet important visit that the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Frank McKenzie, took to Beirut on July 8, to pressure the Lebanese Army to distance itself from Hezbollah and strengthen its bonds with the US military.

The US embassy in Lebanon reported that the CENTCOM commander met with top Lebanese political and military officials. Lebanese President Michel Aoun tweeted a photo of a meeting with McKenzie and the US ambassador, Dorothy Shea.

قائد القيادة الوسطى في الجيش الأميركي الجنرال كينيث ماكينزي بعد لقائه الرئيس عون: مستمرون بدعم الجيش اللبناني المدافع عن استقلال لبنان وسيادته pic.twitter.com/TcvPi5wXrp

— Lebanese Presidency (@LBpresidency) July 8, 2020

Saudi monarchy-backed media outlet Al Arabiya reported gleefully on the CENTCOM visit, chirping, “US general affirms support for Lebanon; Hezbollah supporters burn Trump photos.”

The quiet US junket demonstrated that, on the eve of the Beirut blast, Washington was already ratcheting up its pressure on Lebanon’s government.

.@CENTCOM Commander General Kenneth McKenzie discussed his visit to Lebanon and U.S. support for @LebArmyOfficial in his interview with @LBCI_NEWS https://t.co/xBY52UoPCM

— U.S. Embassy Beirut (@usembassybeirut) July 9, 2020

Western governments, NGOs, and media try to pin Beirut blast on Hezbollah

The August 4 explosion appears to have been the result of the explosion of thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate that the Lebanese government confiscated from an abandoned ship in 2013 and improperly stored at the Beirut port, violating safety protocol.

The Lebanese government, which resigned a week after the blast, officially attributed the incident to negligence. But President Michel Aoun acknowledged it could have possibly been the result of an attack.

Some Beirut residents told Asia Times that they saw and heard military aircraft flying overhead moments before the explosion.

Asia Times also reported, citing unnamed Western officials, “that Western reconnaissance craft were in the skies above the Lebanese coast at the time of the blasts,” although the officials denied carrying out an attack.

A US Central Command official told Asia Times that the “cause of the first fire/explosion is still an unanswered question,” adding that there is no “actual evidence to support or confirm that” it was caused by ammonium nitrate, and that “other alternatives” are possible.

Although the incident appears to have been an accident, some Lebanese analysts have suggested the blast could have potentially been an attack by Israel, which militarily occupied south Lebanon for more than 20 years and waged a devastating war in 2006, brutally bombing Lebanon and leaving more than 1,000 Lebanese dead and parts of the country in ruins.

Israel violates Lebanon’s sovereign airspace on a daily basis. In 2019, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon reported an average of 96.5 violations each month. UN Secretary-General António Guterres even spoke out against the Israeli aggression, stating,

“I reiterate my condemnation of all violations of Lebanese sovereignty and my call for Israel to cease its violations of Lebanese airspace.”

Despite the presence of Western aircraft during the explosion, the history of Israeli attacks, and the constant Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, there has been a concerted campaign to try to pin the blast on Hezbollah, waged by the US and Israeli governments, a coterie of hawkish think tanks, and a sizable portion of the corporate media.

There is not even a scintilla of evidence linking Hezbollah to the explosion. In fact, the Lebanese resistance group would have everything to lose if it were involved.

But this didn’t stop the Atlantic Council, NATO’s de facto think tank, which is funded handsomely by the governments of the United States, Britain, and United Arab Emirates, along with top weapons and oil corporations. The Atlantic Council’s Gulf monarchy-backed Rafik Hariri Center tried to link Hezbollah to the blast with nothing more than insinuations.

"Hezbollah is acutely aware of the danger that such chemicals—even if not of a military grade—pose to nearby civilians, perhaps more so than any other entity in Lebanon," writes @DavidADaoud in MENAsource.

Read more ⬇️ https://t.co/N62M3U1k85

— Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East Initiatives (@ACMideast) August 7, 2020

Then there was the hawkish executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth. Never one to let something like a dearth of evidence get in the way of his mindless speculation about Washington’s foreign adversaries, Roth immediately implied after the blast that Hezbollah was responsible. He did not provide a shred of evidence; it was just his gut instinct.

Pro-Western protesters in Lebanon have also seized on the chaos to call for the dissolution of the Lebanese armed resistance.

Following the explosion, anti-Hezbollah groups took over Lebanese government buildings and unfurled banners calling for Beirut to demilitarize — an obvious demand for Hezbollah to put down its weapons and end its fight against Israel.

The US and Saudi have once again sought to capitalize on politically engineered tragedies in Lebanon using their local proxies. Legitimate fury about the Beirut blast has been channeled into a sectarian campaign to disarm Hizbullah by interventionists with neo-colonial fantasies pic.twitter.com/Ml7VfOQVku

— Amal Saad (@amalsaad_lb) August 9, 2020

The US embassy in Beirut openly welcomed these demonstrations, tweeting openly, “We support them.”

1/2 The Lebanese people have suffered too much and deserve to have leaders who listen to them and change course to respond to popular demands for transparency and accountability.

— U.S. Embassy Beirut (@usembassybeirut) August 8, 2020

US pledges ‘aid’ while intentionally exacerbating Lebanon’s economic crisis

Even as the Trump administration threatens to impose more aggressive sanctions on Lebanon, seeking to punish forces that support the Resistance Axis, the US government has pledged humanitarian aid to the country.

Moments after the explosion, Washington put its public relations operations into hyperdrive, seeking to portray itself as a noble protector of Lebanon.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – the former CIA director who quipped, “We lied, we cheated, we stole; we had entire training courses” – promised support following the blast.

Spoke this morning with Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab to express my deepest condolences in the wake of the horrible explosion in Beirut. The U.S. stands in solidarity with the Lebanese people and remains committed to assist with the aftermath of this terrifying event.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) August 5, 2020

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a soft-power arm that Washington uses to destabilize foreign governments it has targeted for regime change, announced it would be providing Lebanon with humanitarian aid.

John Barsa, the hardline neoconservative Trump loyalist recently installed as head of the USAID, who has explicitly used the ostensible aid agency as a weapon to overthrow the progressive governments in Latin America, announced support for Lebanon the next day.

BREAKING: The 🇺🇸 is providing immediate assistance in response to the catastrophic #LebanonExplosion in Beirut. This aid will provide critical health & humanitarian support for Lebanon’s emergency response. Follow @USAIDSavesLives for updates on our response efforts. pic.twitter.com/jgNdgco3tN

— JBarsaUSAID (@JBarsaUSAID) August 5, 2020

US Central Command revealed that they were working with USAID to distribute medical supplies to Lebanon.

.@USAIDSavesLives and @USAID provide critical medical supplies to assist the people of #Lebanon #BeirutSupport @usembassybeirut @USAFCENT https://t.co/uzdwiIDaJD

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) August 11, 2020

Ironically, in the weeks before the explosion, as Lebanon’s government begged for an economic lifeline, Washington was dragging its feet.

As millions of Lebanese citizens struggled to put food on the table, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also refused to play ball. This baffled many international observers. Left unmentioned in coverage of the IMF’s behavior was the de facto veto the US holds in the organization, which it wields as a neoliberal instrument of Washington’s economic power.

“The IMF conditions include privatization and taxes the Lebanese society can’t afford,” the journalist Elijah Magnier explained to The Grayzone. “Moreover, the IMF is controlled by the US administration, which is asking for a new government without Hezbollah. That is not feasible because Hezbollah represents 13 MPs and enjoys the support of the majority of the parliament.”

Magnier also emphasized that when Lebanon had assembled a new government in the middle of the crisis, under Prime Minister Hassan Diab, Washington waged a destabilization campaign.

“With the formation of a new government, the US boycotted it and pressured Europe and the Gulf countries to cease any support, defining it as ‘Hezbollah’s government,’” Magnier said. “These measures contributed in the hectic financial situation in the country, which was also triggered by decades of corruption and mismanagement by the US friends who ruled Lebanon for all these years.”

The pro-Israel lobby group the American Jewish Committee (AJC) let the cat out of the bag when it tweeted on August 9 that international assistance to Lebanon following the explosion “must be conditioned on the long-promised, long-avoided disarmament of Hezbollah.”

AJC made it clear that Western aid will be hung over Lebanon like a sword of Damocles, adding,

“Unless the malignant role of Iran’s terror proxy is addressed there will never be meaningful change for the people of Lebanon.”

So-called Western "aid" for Lebanon is going to be predicated on removing Hezbollah from the government (even though it was democratically elected) and disarming the Lebanese resistance to US imperialism / Israeli colonialismhttps://t.co/R3ZuMfmE1k

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 9, 2020

Magnier also pointed out that the amount in international aid being offered to Lebanon is relatively little.

“35 countries gathered all to offer to the UN and NGOs in Lebanon $300 million, the equivalent of what Hezbollah spend in less than five months in the country, only on salaries,” he said.

Meanwhile, as millions of Lebanese civilians suffer, financial analysts expect the US campaign of economic warfare and “maximum pressure” to only continue going forward.

“The sanctions policy are likely to stay,” Ehsani told The Grayzone. “This policy is more acceptable to the average Western electorate than direct military involvement. Policy makers are therefore likely to make more use of them post the Iraq debacle. Regional governments and average citizens will bear the brunt of this silent evisceration of their economic well being.”

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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

The government of far right Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cut off fuel for the sole power plant in the Gaza Strip, a small Palestinian territory surrounded on three sides by and blockaded by Israel. As a result, on Monday the Gaza Strip’s sole power plant went dark, Al Jazeera reports.

The denial of fuel to the Gaza Strip came in response to Hamas sending ammonium balloons over Israeli territory with incendiary materials attached. The balloons have caused some brush fires. The balloons are intended to protest the Israelis reneging on their pledges to ease the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israel keeps the 2 million Palestinians there in the world’s largest open air prison camp.

Israeli fighter jets have bombed Gaza on several occasions during the past week.

The Israelis have also stopped Palestinians from fishing, denying the population a key source of protein and interfering in livelihoods.

Before the cut-off of fuel, the Gaza Strip had electricity for 6 hours, then none for 10 hours, in an ongoing cycle. Now they will have electricity for only 4 hours daily, and that will have to made available by expensive generators. The Israel blockade on the civilian population of Gaza, in effect since 2007, has left the population poverty-stricken, so paying for fuel for generators is a real hardship.

The General Union of Worker Organizations in Gaza estimated that 90% of the Gaza Strip’s factories and workshops would be idled by the closure of the power plant. That is some 500 factories that will be left dark, leaving 50,000 workers unemployed.

Waste water treatment will also be impeded, meaning more raw sewage going into the Mediterranean.

Hospital patients are at special risk from lack of electricity. The spokesman for the Gaza ministry of health, Dr. Ashraf al-Qudra, said that the lack of power poses a threat to premature babies nurseries, to patients in intensive care units, and to kidney patients (dialysis needs electricity). It will also halt surgeries and deliveries by Caesarean section.

While the incendiary balloons are condemnable, they do not offer any justification for these forms of collective punishment on a mass scale. Israeli bombing of Hamas facilities might be justified, but not cutting of diesel supplies to the whole population. The denial of electricity to 2 million civilian noncombatants is nothing less than a war crime.

In the wake of the Rwanda genocide, a special court was set up to judge war crimes and Shane Darcy notes,

“The Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) enumerates collective punishment as a war crime…”

The Israeli authorities are therefore guilty of committing an ongoing war crime against the Occupied Palestinians of Gaza.

In my experience, many people still believe in the legitimacy of collective punishment, so let me just underline that it is very illegal and that officials who commit it can be tried for it. It was outlawed after World War II because it is the sort of nasty practice in which the Nazis liked to engage. They would take a village and then shoot every tenth villager to, as the French say, “encourage the others.” The individuals shot hadn’t committed any crime.

Usually when someone violates the Geneva Conventions, they are acting like Nazis.

As Doctors without Borders notes,

“International humanitarian law posits that no person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit. It ensures that the collective punishment of a group of persons for a crime committed by an individual is also forbidden, whether in the case of prisoners of war or of any other individuals (GCIII Art. 87, API Art. 75.2.d, APII Art. 4.2.b). This is one of the fundamental guarantees established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols. This guarantee is applicable not only to protected persons but to all individuals, no matter what their status or to what category of persons they belong, as defined by the Geneva Conventions (GCIV Art. 33).”

The Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, article 3, paragraph 87, says:

“Collective punishment for individual acts, corporal punishment, imprisonment in premises without daylight and, in general, any form of torture or cruelty, are forbidden.”

Note that collective punishment is here grouped with torture as an offense. And while the paragraph concerns prisoners of war, civilians should have more rights than a prisoner of war, not fewer. Moreover, there is a sense in which Israel has taken all the Palestinians in Gaza prisoner.

The 1977 First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions reiterated this principle even more broadly. Article 75, para. 2 concerns “persons who are in the power of a Party to the conflict.” That is, the law concerns not just POWs but everyone who falls into the hands of a belligerent. The 2 million Palestinians of Gaza have certainly fallen into Israeli hands, being completely surrounded by the Israelis and being deprived by the latter of airports, seaports and freedom of movement:

• • .”2. The following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever, whether committed by civilian or by military agents: a) violence to the life, health, or physical or mental well-being of persons, in particular: i) murder; ii) torture of all kinds, whether physical or mental;iii) corporal punishment; and iv) mutilation; b) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, enforced prostitution and any form of indecent assault; c) the taking of hostages; d)

collective punishments; and e) threats to commit any of the foregoing acts.”

Again, imposing collective punishment on persons in your power where you are a party to a conflict is in the same category as murder and mutilation.

The Second Additional Protocol of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions, Art. 4.2.b further says:

“Part II

HUMANE TREATMENT
Article 4 – Fundamental guarantees

1. All persons who do not take a direct part or who have ceased to take part in hostilities, whether or not their liberty has been restricted, are entitled to respect for their person, honour and convictions and religious practices. They shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction. It is prohibited to order that there shall be no survivors.

2. Without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing, the following acts against the persons referred to in paragraph I are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever:

(a) Violence to the life, health and physical or mental well-being of persons, in particular murder as well as cruel treatment such as torture, mutilation or any form of corporal punishment;

(b) Collective punishments.”

So all but a tiny number of Palestinians in Gaza do not take direct part in hostilities toward Israel. Half of the residents of Gaza are children. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz estimates Hamas to have 30,000 activists in its military wing. The smaller Islamic Jihad, which is not affiliated with Hamas and often defies it, is thought to have 6,000 fighters. So there are like 36,000 combatants in Gaza and nearly 2 million noncombatants, i.e. persons who do not take direct part in hostilities.

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

Featured image is from The Bullet

During this summer of madness in Portland, Oregon, and sadness over COVID-19, two below-the-radar events occurred implicating the insatiable appetite of the United States government to spy on everyone in America. Regular readers of this column know that the feds have been wearing away at our privacy rights using a multitude of means. Yet, these two below-the-fold events this summer have caught the feds flatfooted.

Here is the backstory.

After the calamity of Watergate, Congress investigated the nature and extent of FBI and CIA spying on Americans as ordered by President Richard Nixon. A Senate committee headed by the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, in 1975 made such startling revelations of warrantless and unlawful spying on Americans pursuant to presidential whims — going back to FDR — that it offered legislation to provide judicial oversight.

The legislation is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. It established the FISA Court, with a rotating membership of federal district court judges appointed to it by the chief justice.

FISA is profoundly unconstitutional because it authorizes the judges on the FISA Court to issue search warrants using a lesser standard of proof than what the Constitution requires. The Fourth Amendment requires proof of the likelihood of evidence of crimes in the place to be searched as a precondition for the issuance of search warrants, and it requires specification of the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.

When James Madison wrote the Fourth Amendment, his goal was to compel the government to focus its investigative resources on evidence of crimes, not spying on political adversaries, as the British had done to the colonists, and to establish that the natural right to be left alone by the government — privacy — is the default position.

FISA reverses all that. It presumes that the feds can obtain all the business and financial records they want about any person for any reason because they can define “business records” and “financial records” to include anything they want, such as mail from the Post Office or medical and legal records.

FISA also ignores the constitutional requirement of probable cause of crime and substitutes in an amorphous and absurd standard of probable cause of speaking to any person who has spoken to any foreign person. FISA also ignores the specificity requirement of identifying the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

The FISA Court meets in secret in Washington, D.C., and even the judges on the court do not have access to its records. So, the court was hugely embarrassed a few years ago when one of its orders was leaked to the press. It was an order to Verizon directing it to furnish a year’s worth of telephone records to the National Security Agency — America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spy agency — of all 113 million Verizon customers! This was done without the NSA showing probable cause of crime and without identifying a single customer.

The unconstitutional order was granted pursuant to section 215 of FISA. That section purports to permit bulk acquisition of electronic data — print and voice — without identifying whose data is being sought and without requiring any showing of probable cause of crime. Last February, section 215 expired, and Congress made fruitless attempts to revive it.

Last week, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., when he adjourned the Senate for the summer, addressed the issues it will take up in the fall. FISA section 215 was not among them. McConnell’s silence is baffling as he and the intelligence community have been claiming loud and long, for nearly 20 years, that without section 215, the United States is ripe for subversion and invasion.

Was the pro-spying crowd in the government exaggerating all along about its need for section 215, or will the NSA continue to spy without even a tissue of statutory authorization? My friends formerly in the NSA tell me it doesn’t care about the law or the Constitution. Its goal is to spy on all persons all the time.

A few days before the mysterious McConnell silence came a rare public warning from the NSA. These master spies were concerned that military and Department of Homeland Security personnel in the streets of Portland were unwittingly exposing themselves to being spied upon, not by the feds, but by demonstrators in the streets using the same sophisticated spying tools the government uses.

Thus, the NSA warned that the demonstrators were using stingrays — fake cell towers that send signals that lock onto mobile phones permitting the user of the tower to follow the movements of the phones — as many local police departments unlawfully do.

Stated differently, the federal government was not warning Americans about foreign spies or the depth of its own spying. It was warning government employees about the depth of sophisticated Americans spying on them. The failure to abide this warning is surely one of the reasons the feds largely departed Portland’s streets as the demonstrators knew when and where the troops would arrive.

Government spying is a way of life for tens of thousands of government personnel, even outside the NSA. Yet, all of them have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy — privacy as a natural right, as the default position, with its invasion strictly limited to collect evidence of crimes from identified persons when authorized by a judge.

We have come full circle from Madison’s America. He was determined to craft a government that could not do to Americans what the British had done to the colonists. He failed.

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One cannot fail to recognise the ubiquitous crisis in all forms of leadership that exists on the planet today. Qualities of wisdom, courage and statesmanship, once admired and emulated by aspiring people of principle, have been undermined and sterilised via collective slavery to the prescribed money and power agenda, which reflects the default position of society. 

Today, little people claim to be big and ‘big’ people seem to want to be invisible. The higher values of society have been corrupted and put into reverse, replaced by a centrally directed pandemic of fear and confusion; leaving nobody sure what direction society needs to move in.

Out of this chaos a new type of leadership will need to emerge and its primary value must be Spiritual Wisdom. It is the prima facie lack of spiritual aspiration in the great body of humanity which has allowed the anti-life corruptive forces to gain such a wide ranging control over everyday life.

There are two predominantly fake versions of spirituality: formal religion and the narcissistic meditator. These have replaced the deeper calling of true individual spiritual evolution: confronting injustice and giving service to humanity.

In the former case, by replacing prophetic teachings with dogma and control, and in the latter, by using bona fide Eastern practices as a personal escape mechanism. A closing of the eyes to the need to face up to the injustices of the world and working to expose and change them.

The deeper calling which exists in all humanity has been grossly undernourished, leaving many having no ‘belief’ in the existence of a greater force for good and no sense of deeper purpose associated with ‘being alive’. What might be described as living in a permanent void.

How can life on Earth improve while such a state prevails? How can people be uplifted when the spark of life has died in them?

The starting point for reversing this dystopian state of affairs is to recognise that this spark is not actually beyond redemption. But that it is simply buried and suffocated by continuous confirmation to the long-running fake plan for society, and could re-emerge from its enforced hibernation if the right conditions were set in place to bring about such a transformation.

Since we are all blessed with receiving ‘life’ (being born) it becomes a question of admitting to a Source of this life state which comes before and extends beyond the individual ‘you’ and ‘I’. Provided one has some sense of wonderment about this greater life force one’s spirit is intact and onward one can go to develop the values of courage, dignity and statehood I mentioned at the start.

If there is no wonderment, but moral and ethical values are nevertheless expressed, this will suffice in upholding the basic dignity associated with being human, but will not give creative impetus to the evolution of human society.

But if there is no dignity and no wonderment – and the capitulation to slavery has been complete – then only a radical form of redress could come to the rescue of the values that give meaning to life and the lost souls trapped into laying their lives at the feet of our planetary oppressors.

That radical form of redress is what is now needed. It means the rise into positions of respected leadership of individuals (and groups of individuals) who are dedicated to advancing the cause of human emancipation, whatever the odds that stand against them. And since it is dogma and indoctrination that are the first two hurdles to stand in their way, these must be the first to come under sustained attack.

This means root and branch reform of the entire education system and a radical rebuilding of the teacher pupil relationship. A transformation founded upon the natural human propensity for social bonding, the insight that leads to ‘vision’ and a sharing of the work-load that life places in all our laps.

The goals that have been set for new arrivals on this planet are false. That is the first lesson for any ‘real’ education. A child arrives on Earth as a bright and beautiful human being, full of the innocent spontaneity which is a direct expression of the divine source from whence the child has come. But the figureheads of the society into which that child arrives have the ambition of turning this new human being – into a robot.  Something a bit wrong here, wouldn’t you agree?

Computer technology and the digitalised images such technology conveys, are not compatible with the human condition. They are alien to true humanity and represent a disconnect between body, mind a spirit. A distortion of our deeper bond with the greater whole without which we cannot operate as real people, only as fake lookalikes.

The emerging ‘true leadership’ will recognise this fact and ensure that the body, mind and spirit unity is redeemed as the first and most fundamental condition of the new education.

It will also recognise that the same distortion of truth lies at the heart of the financial institutions that control the global money supply, ensuring the ever greater disparity between poverty and wealth.  The new education will therefore elucidate an economic principle whereby the wealth of the planet is to be shared amongst all peoples and poverty is eradicated.

It will note that there is no proper justice left within the decisions and processes of national and international law, and will advise a fair system of trial accompanied by ‘a corrective’ process rather than the ‘coercive’ process of the existing prison system.

An alliance with cosmic law (God’s law) – known and practised as Common Law – will become the medium for judging and redirecting the antisocial acts of others.

As all humans need good food and water to be healthy, the new leadership will ensure everybody has the right to such nourishment in their daily lives. A pro-ecological agriculture and farming practice, in the hands of humane and sensitive practitioners, will therefore be recognised as the proper basis for planetary equilibrium and proper nourishment of humanity as a whole.

Within this emerging new paradigm, the emphasis will move away from a globalized marketing regime, to local and regional production and distribution systems based on the principle of co-operating rather than competition. ‘Human scale’ will be the watchword for industry of all sorts.

Where there is to be an overriding central body concerned with ensuring the course for the emergent new society is set fair, it will comprise ‘a council of the wise and true’.

Offering a sound template for living in harmony with fellow humans and with nature, is the work that those of us who share this vision, need to do at this time.

It is a very exciting time to be alive. In spite of the daunting nature of the challenges we face, the human spirit, reconnected to its divine origins and true sense of purpose, will overcome all attempts to consign it to prison. Instead it will bring about a renaissance. A renaissance far exceeding any temporary upturns in creative expression witnessed in previous centuries.

But there is one inadmissible factor without which we cannot ensure this metamorphosis reaches its full potential; a recognition that we are simultaneously both truly individual and innately social beings – who place on an equal footing the ability to lead wisely and yet to never loose touch with our roots as brothers and sisters within the great family of man.

Holding this vision in front of us, we will surely overcome all that stands in the way of the great emancipation of life on Earth.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly prescient reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Belarus’ disproportionate budgetary dependence on five big businesses makes it extremely vulnerable to economic destabilization if the tiny percentage of the country’s population employed in those companies join in the nationwide labor strike movement to remove Lukashenko.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he intends to make a Covid-19 vaccine as “mandatory as you can possibly make it” for all Australians once it becomes available.

It emerged today that the Morrison Government has confirmed a landmark agreement with drug giant AstraZeneca to manufacture one of the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccines currently being developed by Oxford University researchers, news.com.au reports.

If it’s proved safe to use, Prime Minister Scott Morrison believes the agreement will ensure Australians will be among the first countries in the world to secure the jab, revealing this morning it could be available to Aussies as soon as early next year.

The UK Government has already ordered 100 million doses.

Asked whether the vaccine would be mandatory, Morrison told 3AW’s Neil Mitchell that it needed to get to about 95 per cent of the population.

“I would expect it to be as mandatory as you can possibly make it,” the Prime Minister said.

“There are always exemptions for any vaccine on medical grounds but that should be the only basis.

“I mean we’re talking about a pandemic that has destroyed you know, the global economy and taken the lives of hundreds of thousands all around the world and over 450 Australians here.

“We need the most extensive and comprehensive response to this to get Australia back to normal.”

However, in response to suggestions there would be community resistance to mandating it, Morrison said the government had not yet made a firm decision and this would be made once the medical issues about the vaccine were known.

Morrison said there

“we’ll take that issue when it presents when clinical trials are finished and we have to understand what the medical issues potentially might be and that’s why we’ll take advice on its application but … you know, I’m certainly open to that suggestion but that is not a position that the government has taken”.

Mitchell pointed out that there would be campaigns from the anti-vaxxers but the Prime Minister seemed unfazed.

“I’m used to that, I was the minister that established ‘no jab, no play’,” he said, referring to a programme that sees government benefits withheld from parents who do not vaccinate their children. “My view on this is pretty clear and not for turning.”

During a later press conference, Australia’s acting chief medical officer Professor Paul Kelly said the vaccine would at first, be voluntary.

“Of course, the first will be a voluntary call for people and I’m sure there will be long queues – socially distanced, of course – for this vaccine,” Kelly said.

He said there would be strong campaigns to encourage people “and we’ve had experience before of linking vaccination with other programmes and all of those things will be looked at over time”.

While the ‘no jab, no play’ programme is aimed at getting children vaccinated, the Prime Minister was asked what the government would do when they were adults.

“We’re going to take this one step at a time,” Morrison said.

“I don’t think offering jelly beans is the way to do that as you do with kids but we’ll take those issues as they present and consider what steps are necessary at that time.”

He said the rollout of the programme would also depend on clinical advice that would identify any vulnerabilities in communities.

“The obvious priority is around health workers and people like that,” he said.

“What is important to understand with any of these vaccines is it does protect you, it does protect you but it also protects the community and, as is the case with any vaccine, there will be some individuals who, for precise medical reasons, can have issues with any vaccine,” Morrison said.

“They and their safety and their health depends on the vaccine’s take-up more broadly in the community. That’s how they get protected.

“And this is an important part of our vaccine strategy, not just on Covid-19, but more broadly. We’ll seek its most widespread application, as we do with all important vaccines.”

A vaccine holds the key to life returning to normal for millions of Australians and the hope that international travel can resume in the future after the nation’s borders were closed earlier this year.

While Morrison cautioned that more work needed to be done to prove the vaccine was safe to use, he said the government will fund the rollout of more than 25 million doses to cover every Australian for free as soon as the drug is available which could be next year.

“The Oxford vaccine is one of the most advanced and promising in the world, and under this deal we have secured early access for every Australian,” Morrison said.

“If this vaccine proves successful we will manufacture and supply vaccines straight away under our own steam and make it free for 25 million Australians.

“However there is no guarantee that this, or any other, vaccine will be successful, which is why we are continuing our discussions with many parties around the world while backing our own researchers at the same time to find a vaccine.

In a “Letter of Intent” with drug company AstraZeneca to supply the University of Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate to Australia, medical manufacturer Becton Dickinson has also been engaged for the supply of millions of needles and syringes.

The Letter of Intent covers vaccine development, production in Australia and distribution with a formal agreement including the price of the vaccine to taxpayers to follow.

However it will be provided to all Australians free of charge.

Morrison said he was also working to ensure early access to the vaccine was secured “for countries in our Pacific family, as well as regional partners in Southeast Asia.”

How the vaccine works

The Oxford University vaccine is made from a genetically engineered virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees and is known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19.

Scientists have altered the virus to make it mimic the coronavirus and ensure the immune system can learn how to attack it. It does not involve injecting Covid-19 but a virus that “looks like” the virus to trigger an immune response.

Recent trials involving 1077 people showed promising signs that it can trigger an immune response but further trials are underway.

“The preliminary data shows that it is safe and induces a strong antibody response in all vaccinated volunteers, suggesting that an effective vaccine could be within reach,” Oxford University’s Rebecca Ashfield said in July.

“This trial was the first time that the vaccine had been given to humans: 543 healthy adults aged 18-55 were vaccinated with a single dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. A further 534 people were given a control vaccine that gives similar minor reactions, including injection site redness and mild pain.

“Volunteers are having their immune response (both antibodies and T cell levels) monitored for at least 12 months, and will also be observed to see whether or not they develop Covid-19.

“The preliminary data from the trial clearly demonstrates that the vaccine induces an antibody response within 28 days. This response is in a similar range to that in individuals who have recovered from Covid-19, providing encouragement that the vaccine will be able to protect the majority of people against infection.

During the trials, 10 volunteers were also given a second “booster” dose of the vaccine which increased the antibody response to even higher levels.

“Importantly, the vaccine demonstrates an acceptable safety profile, with no vaccine-induced severe adverse events – that is, no major side-effects,” Dr Ashfield said.

Scientists working on the vaccine believe that one dose may not be enough to protect against Covid-19 infections.

“My personal prediction — based on decreases in antibody levels in individuals infected with other types of coronavirus, rather than data from the current vaccine trial — is that we’re likely to need yearly boosters, similar to annual flu jabs,” Dr Ashfield said.

Deliberately infecting people with the virus may be possible in future (after careful consideration of the ethical implications), but is not currently allowed.

A second trial has been launched involving 10,000 UK individuals, focusing on health workers and other trials are being conducted around the world, including in Brazil where rates of infection are high.

“The expanded UK trial will include children and older adults to estimate vaccine efficacy in these age groups. Immune responses in people over 70 are often lower than those in younger adults,” she said.

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A disturbing new document outlines plans for a US regime-change scheme against Nicaragua’s elected leftist government, overseen by USAID, to bring about a “market economy” and a purge of Sandinistas.

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A newly released document exposes a US government operation to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government in Nicaragua.

The plot is administered by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a regime-change vehicle that uses the pretense of “humanitarian aid” to advance Washington’s aggressive foreign-policy interests.

The document (PDF) details the creation of a new “task order” called Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN) and its plan for “Nicaragua’s transition to democracy” – a euphemism for removing the leftist Sandinista Front for National Liberation (known commonly by the Spanish acronym FSLN) from power.

In the pages, the US government agency uses hardline neoconservative rhetoric, referring to Nicaragua’s elected government as the “Ortega regime,” and making it clear that Washington wants to install a neoliberal administration that will privatize the economy, impose neoliberal reforms, and purge all institutions of any trace of the leftist Sandinista movement.

The USAID regime-change scheme states openly that one of its top “mission goals” is for Nicaragua to “transition to a rules-based market economy” based on the “protection of private property rights.”

The document concludes by calling for the future US-installed regime in Nicaragua to “rebuild institutions” and “reestablish” the military and police; to “dismantle parallel institutions” that support the Sandinista Front; and to persecute FSLN leaders through “transitional justice measures” – in other words, a thorough purge of the Sandinista movement to prevent it from ever returning to power.

In case it was not explicit enough that Washington’s goal was regime change, the 14-page USAID document employed the word “transition” 102 times, including nine times on the first page alone.

USAID declared its intention to assist in what could be an “orderly transition” or a “sudden transition without elections,” which is clear code for a coup. At the same time, it acknowledged that Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition is divided and has little chance of winning the upcoming 2021 national election.

USAID oversees another far-right coup attempt in Latin America

Ever since the Sandinista Front returned to power in Nicaragua through democratic elections in 2006, Washington has been hellbent on trying to topple it.

In 2018, the Donald Trump administration supported a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua, in which far-right gangs took over neighborhoods and paralyzed the country with bloody barricades known as tranques. The US-backed insurgents unleashed a reign of terror, killing and injuring hundreds of Sandinista activists and state security forces; marking the homes of leftist activists, ransacking and burning some down; and torturing and threatening supporters of the elected government.

When the 2018 putsch attempt failed, the US government resorted to a raft of aggressive tactics to bring down Nicaragua’s leadership. In the past two years, the Trump administration has imposed several rounds of suffocating sanctions on the small Central American nation, often with bipartisan support in Congress, not a word of opposition from the Democratic Party, and cheers from the billionaire-funded human rights industry.

The US Agency for International Development was instrumental in the Donald Trump administration’s violent US coup attempts against Venezuela’s elected government in 2019, working directly with the Department of Defense. USAID has poured hundreds of millions of dollars funding the US regime-change efforts against the leftist Chavista government, and has bankrolled the Trump-backed coup regime of Juan Guaidó.

USAID has always functioned as a CIA cutout and soft-power arm for Washington. But under the Trump administration, it has kicked its coup efforts in Latin America into hyper drive.

In April 2020, USAID was taken over by de facto director John Barsa, a hardline Republican businessman, Trump ally, and son of anti-communist Cuban immigrants. In coordination with Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Barsa has turned USAID into a blunt weapon of regime change, openly financing putsch efforts against the socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

US govt’s Democracy International posts job listing for USAID coup liaison in Nicaragua

The Grayzone contacted USAID to ask confirmation that the document detailing its plans for a political “transition” in Nicaragua was authentic. The agency did not respond.

We were able, however, to gather evidence demonstrating the document’s legitimacy. For starters, metadata on the PDF file show that the original author was the forms division of the US government’s General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees logistics for USAID and other agencies.

Metadata on the USAID PDF document shows it was drafted by the US government

Even more compellingly, the pages spelling out the regime-change plot employ precisely the same language and phrases as a job listing that was posted in late July by another US government-funded organization, Democracy International. In fact, the USAID document appears to be a more detailed job description for this post.

Democracy International stated in its listing on LinkedIn that it was seeking a Nicaraguan national in the capital of Managua to work as a “Senior Level Technical Expert – Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance to provide technical and programmatic support for USAID/Nicaragua’s Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN) Task Order.”

Directly echoing the USAID document, the Democracy International job listing said that the “purpose of the Task Order is ‘to provide rapid, responsive, and relevant analytical and technical assistance that bridge USAID/Nicaragua’s efforts to create the conditions for, and support, a peaceful transition to democracy in Nicaragua.’”

This employee would help develop a “Transition Response Plan” – a regime-change scheme. (The brief job listing uses the term “transition” 10 times.)

During the Cold War, coup coordination jobs like these would have been covert positions arranged with the CIA. In the freewheeling 21st century, however, this dirty regime-change work is carried out in the open, and advertised publicly on LinkedIn.

In case it wasn’t clear what this organization’s relationship was to USAID, it stated clearly on the post: “Democracy International, Inc. (DI) provides technical assistance, analytical services and project implementation for democracy, human rights, governance and conflict mitigation programs worldwide for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. State Department and other development partners.”

The job listing explicitly noted that the employee would work with the US government to provide “technical advice and country knowledge to GON (government of Nicaragua) ministries, USG (US government), and other stakeholders.”

Clearly, Democracy International is searching for a local point person to help carry out Washington’s regime-change efforts on the ground. The USAID document spelled out in detail the specific destabilization strategy that this liaison would follow.

The Grayzone called the Democracy International office with a request for comment on the LinkedIn job listing, the RAIN program, and the USAID document. A secretary would not let us speak with a specific member of the international team, simply saying, “We will inform the relevant people that we have received a call and I can give them their name and number and they will call you.”

The secretary asked if The Grayzone had a specific question to respond to. We said, “Local Nicaraguan media outlets have criticized USAID’s RAIN program, which is described in the Democracy International job posting, and characterized it as what appears to be an attempt at orchestrating a coup in the country. Can you respond to that characterization and do you think it is fair or unfair?” The Democracy International secretary replied, “Wow that’s so interesting. I will definitely let them know that you called.”

Democracy International never called back.

USAID’s regime-change plot to “transition” Nicaragua to a “market economy”

USAID’s Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN) plan makes it clear that it is just a “short term bridge” to bring about regime change in the country, adding, “It is USAID’s intent to follow RAIN with longer-term programs, which will be determined as the crisis evolves.”

The regime-change plot outlined a “Mission Goal 2” in which “Nicaragua provides basis for future economic growth and increased trade through transition to a rules-based market economy based on transparent and accountable regulatory institutions, fiscal and monetary stability, respect for the rule-of-law and protection of private property rights.”

A supplementary “mission objective” emphasized USAID’s desire for a new neoliberal regime in Nicaragua that “works with the private sector to rebuild institutionality and an efficient and fair administrative bureaucracy” – in other words, mass privatization.

(Among the supposed crimes committed by the Nicaraguan “regime,” USAID lists “confiscation of properties.”)

The USAID document outlined further US priorities for Nicaragua following a successful regime-change operation.

USAID’s “Mission Goal 3” would be “Security reform and rebuilding institutions” to “reestablish independent and professional security forces.” This is clearly a call for purging the police and military of Sandinista loyalists and bring in US trainers to establish a neocolonial-style security force, much like General Keith Dayton did in the occupied West Bank after Palestinian resistance was extinguished following the Second Intifada.

The “new government must act quickly to dismantle parallel institutions,” USAID adds. This is an indirect hint that Washington seeks to destroy the Sandinista Front, the Sandinista Youth, and other grassroots institutions that work with but are independent of the current socialist government. At its most severe, such a proposal could amount to an Augusto Pinochet-style purge of the left in Nicaragua.

“Additionally, it will need to implement transitional justice measures,” the USAID document added. This language, which has also been used in the proxy war on Syria, suggests the new neoliberal Nicaraguan government would be compelled to prosecute Sandinista Front officials, echoing the strategy the US-backed right-wing regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador have used to criminalize the left-wing parties that previously ruled those countries, hunt down former leftist leaders, and throw opposition officials in prison on dubious charges.

Another important part of the RAIN job would include recruiting native coup coordinators to help carry out the regime-change plot. USAID described this responsibility as follows: “Identification of potential Nicaraguan partners for rapid impact Grants Under Task Order to promote transition-related activities.”

The initiative allotted $540,000 in grants to entice Nicaraguan opposition groups into assisting the regime-change effort. (In the second-poorest country in the Western hemisphere, where the minimum wage is between $200 and $300 per month, half a million dollars is no petty sum.)

These funds would compliment the millions of dollars that USAID and the NED provide to right-wing Nicaraguan organizations every year.

The USAID document insisted that “Nicaragua’s immediate future remains highly uncertain.” Yet it acknowledged that the right-wing opposition is divided and unpopular, admitting that its leadership has not “coalesced around a party or candidate.”

Taking into account the weakness of the opposition heading into the 2021 national elections, the USAID plan outlines three scenarios for the overthrow of the socialist government and a “transition” to a US-friendly neoliberal regime.

The first is an “Orderly Transition scenario,” a far-fetched situation in which an unpopular US-backed opposition group somehow manages to win the election.

The second potential regime-change scenario is described as a “Sudden, Unanticipated Transition,” in “which one or more political crises, such as a snap or failed election, a presidential resignation, a major health crisis, a major natural disaster, or internal conflicts, lead to sudden regime crisis and transition either to an interim government or a new government.” This is the coup option, and USAID makes it clear that it would be more than happy with such a situation, and wants its RAIN liaison to prepare for it.

The third is a “Delayed Transition scenario,” in which the Sandinista government remains in power. In this case, USAID says that RAIN would help it destabilize the government in other ways and lead to future regime change.

But USAID didn’t want readers to get the wrong impression. It stressed in the document that its coup would be “gender sensitive in compliance” and based on “gender-informed analytical work.” (Although the women who make up the bulk of the Sandinista base would have to be excluded from Washington’s woke political “transition”).

The USAID document balanced its liberal language on gender with neoconservative rhetoric claiming, “Malign foreign influences, principally Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia, will continue to attempt to strengthen the corrupt autocratic Ortega regime.”

“What if Nicaragua did that in the United States?”

The existence of the USAID regime-change document was first reported on July 31 on the popular Nicaraguan radio and video show Sin Fronteras, hosted by William Grigsby Vado.

Grigsby, a prominent leftist media personality with a large following at the base of the Sandinista Front, condemned the US plot. “It is nauseating, the document; bearing to read it is difficult,” he said in outrage. “You have to have a strong liver to bear it. It pained me a lot.”

“What right does the US government have to contract a firm to subvert public order in any country?” Grigsby fumed. “It is a shameless intervention. Before they did it with the military; in this case they are doing it by subverting public order and funding political opposition activities. That is unacceptable!”

“What if Nicaragua did that in the United States, if for example Daniel Ortega said, ‘Hey, we’re going to help the protesters in Portland’?” he added. “But they reserve to themselves the right to act against the democratic institutionality of a country.”

Grigsby concluded by condemning “yankee imperialism” and slamming Nicaraguan opposition figures who are participating in this regime-change scheme.

“You all can do one of two things,” he thundered at the opposition. “Follow the rules of democracy, accept your defeat, and participate in the political game. Or you can simply remain as treasonists, hitmen, and traitors.”

The USAID document shows Washington pushing the latter option, and driving the country into a deepened conflict.

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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

All images in this article are from The Grayzone unless otherwise stated

On August 14, the final abandoned home was demolished with the more than $265 million in Hardest Hit Funds initially designed to preserve neighborhoods as opposed to their destruction in the majority African American city of Detroit. (See this)

Over 15,000 houses have been destroyed since 2014 yet tens of thousands more dilapidated and abandoned homes, apartments, commercial and industrial structures remain in the city.

These government funds were deliberately redirected from their intended purpose to later serve as a profitable enterprise for private companies engaging in work which environmentally has endangered hundreds of thousands of people.  A corporate-imposed administration in Detroit headed by Mayor Mike Duggan has defined its mission as the exploitation of labor, resources and tax dollars for the wealthiest interests in the city and beyond. This regime was installed during an unprecedented declaration of emergency management and bankruptcy during 2013-2014.

The 2008-2009 corporate and financial institutional bailout only provided a small percentage of the overall assistance to homeowners so deeply impacted by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Toxic mortgages and urban bond initiatives played a pivotal role in the bankruptcies and near financial ruin of many of the major cities across the United States.

Detroit and other municipalities were already suffering from the vast transferal of wealth from the working class and oppressed peoples to the capitalist ruling class which expanded exponentially after the restructuring of the world system after 1975. Industrial centers such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois, among others, were turned into economic wastelands where unemployment remained astronomically high while workers fled the areas seeking work and other forms of social assistance.

In Detroit, a popular struggle emerged during the latter months of 2019 over the introduction of yet another questionable municipal bond deal which would cost the people of the city a half-billion dollars. The existing demolition program which has exhausted its funds was characterized by graft, patronage and the widespread poisoning of the affected communities through the dangerous levels of lead, asbestos and other harmful materials left after the demolition of the homes and apartment buildings.

An Auditor General’s report commissioned by the City Council took several years to complete due to the lack of transparency by the Duggan administration. The overcharges, missing documents and arbitrary actions taken against salvageable homes which were not even on the demolition lists, has tarnished the image of the program in the eyes of the public. (See this)

Consequently, due to public pressure, the bond deal went down in flames at the City Council table during November. In a 6-3 vote, the Council, although not known in recent years to take positions which support the interests of the majority Detroit population, felt the mass discontent and rejected the financial scheme.

Nonetheless, amid the economic distress of the people of Detroit, the City Council has passed by a 5-4 margin another revised bond initiative introduced by the administration. The plan on paper says that 8,000 homes will be “rehabilitated” while an equal number are slated for destruction.

There is no explanation as to how this measure if approved in the November election, can improve the conditions of the people of the city. Detroit has been disproportionately stricken with COVID-19 infections. 40 percent of the deaths from the pandemic are among African Americans even though they only constitute 13 percent of the population of Michigan.

These actions by the bank-directed administration in Detroit are a reflection of the lack of mitigation efforts to resolve the existing crisis which is growing every month in its magnitude. There have been no resolutions, ordinances and executive orders issued to place a moratorium on evictions which are rapidly increasing. Similarly, the daily Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city have been attacked on several occasions by the police resulting in more than 400 arrests and numerous injuries from pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and other crowd control tactical weapons.

A moratorium on evictions by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the wake of the pandemic has been lifted. Another moratorium ordered by 36^th District Court Judge William C. McConico also expired on August 17.

Nearly 100 people gathered outside the court on August 17 demanded that no evictions be carried out in Detroit and that these actions amid the current crisis should be resisted by the people in the communities. Another car caravan outside the office of Whitmer on August 19 demanded that she reinstate the statewide moratorium.

A National Pattern of Underdevelopment of Cities

The funding allocated for the Cares Act passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in March provided the bulk of assistance to the top echelons of the capitalist ruling class in the U.S. Many firms have profited immensely from government policy at the same time granting $1,200 per worker for the masses and an additional $600 in weekly jobless benefits.

These additional benefits have run the course as Congress is divided between the Democratic and Republican parties and therefore cannot reach agreement on even a minimal bailout for the working class and oppressed. The Heroes Act passed by the House of Representatives, which called for additional financial assistance to working families, has been completely rejected by the Senate. A series of executive orders announced by Trump on August 7 excluded the supplemental payments to workers and retirees while mandating the revocation of payroll taxes for employers which would defund social security and unemployment insurance.

An article recently published by the Brookings Institution think tank assessed the emerging crisis prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report says:

“Legacy cities are likely to suffer more deeply from the COVID-19 pandemic. They have high concentrations of residents vulnerable to the disease itself, due to underlying health conditions, inadequate access to good health care, and other environmental factors. Legacy cities also have fragile economies with long-standing structural weaknesses that expose them to more severe initial impacts and complicate their path to recovery.”

With specific reference to Detroit, this same analysis emphasizes:

“For instance, as an urban center with a high-risk population, Detroit was an early ‘ground zero’ for COVID-19 infections and deaths. Although showing signs of recovery, the pandemic’s early economic impacts on Detroit and similar places is staggering—and in most cases, more severe than those occurring in other metropolitan areas.”

Another article on the crisis was placed in the New York Times on August 17. The writers suggest that the precipitous decline in tax revenue in many cities throughout the country will result in service cuts, educational downsizing and municipal lay-offs. These developments are a result of not only the public health, services and educational problems they are a by-product of the unequal and exploitative nature of municipal finance which serves to subsidize private investment through the financial institutions.

Electoral Politics and the Status of the Cities

There is tremendous political and corporate media pressure being placed on working class and oppressed peoples in the U.S. to choose between the two parties of the ruling class, neither of which have advanced a program to begin to resolve the contemporary situation. Unrest in cities such as Portland, Seattle, Chicago and others are a direct result of the failure of the municipal governments to address the demands for police accountability and the imperatives of defunding law-enforcement.

At this critical stage, there is a need for a comprehensive redistribution of wealth. The working people are being forced to endure unemployment, hunger, lack of education and healthcare, environmental degradation along with state repression principally implemented to guarantee maximum profits for the banks and multi-national corporations.

The upcoming November elections will generate much interest and debate over the future of the U.S. However, until the workers and oppressed organize independently of the interests of Wall Street there will not be any hope for economic revival among the majority of people inside the country.

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

Featured image is from Free Press

The shaky stability established in Syria after the end of the Turkish attack on the Syrian Army in Idlib in February and March of 2020 has collapsed.

Just a day after the confrontation between the US military and the Syrian Army in the province of al-Hasakah, US troops deployed at the Koniko gas fields on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River came under rocket attack. According to local sources, at least 3 unguided rockets fell near US positions. Nonetheless, the attack led to no casualties.

A few hours earlier, two combat drones of the US military crashed in Idlib. Just ahead of the incident, pro-militant sources claimed that they had shot down 2 Russian drones in the area. Nonetheless, photos and videos from the ground immediately revealed that at least one of the crashed drones was an MQ-9 Reaper. Later, US media citing defense officials reported that the US lost two MQ-9 Reapers in a midair collision over Idlib. Many Syrian sources immediately linked the incident with the use of electronic warfare systems on US combat drones in the area.

On the same day, a Russian major-general was killed and two service members were injured after an improvised explosive device hit their convoy near the Al-Taim oil field, about 15 km outside the city of Deir Ezzor. The killed major-general was identified as Vyacheslav Gladkih. He served as Deputy Commander of the 36th Combined-Arms Army. In Syria, he was serving as an adviser to the Syrian Arab Army.

Recently, ISIS significantly increased the number of attacks on Syrian pro-government forces in the provinces of Homs and Deir Ezzor. The terrorist group is especially active near the cities of Deir Ezzor and Mayadin. It could be suggested that the group of Russian advisers was there to discuss the current situation in the area with its Syrian counterparts.

On August 19, local sources reported the simultaneous increase of military activity in the provinces of Idlib, Hasakah and Deir Ezzor. In Idlib, 3 Turkish military convoys crossed the border and moved towards the contact line between militants and the Syrian Army south of the M4 highway. Just recently, a joint Turkish-Russian patrol came under attack there, but Ankara is still set to protect al-Qaeda terrorists hiding there at any cost. In al-Hasakah, the Syrian Army is reinforcing it’s positions near Tell Tamr and in the countryside of al-Qamishli. In the provinces of Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Army and the National Defense Forces conducted several raids near the cities of Deir Ezzor and al-Mayadin. The recent series of ISIS attacks on positions of pro-government forces, including the death of a Russian major-general, will likely lead to a larger united effort of Syrian and Russian forces to track and eliminate the ISIS cells that still hide in the desert.

The conflict in Syria seems to have all chances to once again enter a hot phase with the provinces of al-Hasakah and Idlib being the main points of possible confrontation of foreign forces deployed in the country. At the same time, the ISIS threat in the central Syrian desert also remains an important destabilizing factor.

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In May 2007, Security Council Resolution 1757 established the STL “on the outskirts of the Hague.”

Ten SC members voted “yes,” none “no,” Russia, China, South Africa, Indonesia, and Qatar abstaining.

Five judges were involved in proceedings, Judge David Re presiding.

The STL’s mandate was to “hold trials for the people accused of carrying out the attack of 14 February 2005 which killed 22 people, including the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, and injured many others.”

Proceedings begun on March 1, 2009 concluded with the STL’s announced ruling on August 18.

Four wrongfully accused Hezbollah suspects were tried for the crime they had nothing to do with. See below.

“Accused Salim Jamil Ayyash (was found) guilty beyond reasonable doubt of all (nine) counts against him in the indictment (sic).”

“Hassam Habib Merhi, Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Assad Hassan Sabra (were found) not guilty of all counts charged in the amended consolidated indictment.”

Charges against a fifth suspect, Mustafa Badreddine, were dropped following his 2016 death.

All suspects were tried in absentia, their whereabouts unknown.

No evidence implicated Syrian or Hezbollah’s leadership in what happened.

Yet Syrian forces based in Lebanon had to withdraw from the country because in the immediate aftermath of the incident, Damascus was falsely blamed for what it had nothing to do with — their removal a motive behind Hariri’s killing, benefitting Israel.

In announcing the STL’s ruling, presiding Judge Re called what happened on February 14, 2005 “a political act,” adding:

“The trial chamber is of the view that Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Mr. Hariri and some of his allies (sic).”

“However, there was no evidence that the Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Mr Haririr’s murder, and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it.”

The STL didn’t consider the most obvious suspect with motive, opportunity, and ability to carry out what happened. See below.

No credible evidence suggested that Hezbollah members or Syrian nationals were responsible for the February 2005 incident.

In its ruling, the STL presented no evidence to suggest that Hezbollah, its members, or Syria wanted Hariri killed.

The STL’s 2,600-page ruling (and 150-page summary) failed to provide “closure” by not pointing fingers where they belong, even though the responsible party for what happened wasn’t on trial — that alone a gross miscarriage of justice.

In early August, I explained the following:

Israeli fingerprints were all over the powerful car bomb blast that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 20 others, scores more injured.

The blast left a 30-foot-wide/six-foot-deep crater. Syria, then Hezbollah, were falsely blamed for what happened, four Hezbollah members wrongfully tried by the STL.

Israel was responsible for what happened, targeted killings one of its specialties.

At the time, Hezbollah-intercepted Israeli aerial surveillance footage and audio evidence showed Hariri’s route on the day of his assassination.

Criminal law expert Hasan Jouni called its evidence compelling.

North Lebanon Bar Association head Antoine Airout said “revelations by Hezbollah (were) very serious and objective.”

Syria and Hezbollah had nothing to gain from what happened. Israel clearly benefitted, including by false accusations against its enemies.

At the time of the incident, Middle East journalist Patrick Seale said “(i)f Syria (or Hezbollah) killed (Hariri), it must be judged an act of political suicide…hand(ing) (their) enemies a weapon with which to deliver (a destabilizing) blow.”

Judgment by the STL failed to hold Israeli PM Aerial Sharon accountable for the high crime committed by his regime.

Throughout Jewish state history since May 1948, no Israeli political or military officials were ever held accountable for high crimes of war, against humanity, or other international wrongdoing too serious to ignore.

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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.

We discuss Diana Johnstone’s memoir, “Circle in the Darkness”:

Yugoslavia under Tito; bombing of Serbia; Camp Bondsteel; spook revelation journalism;

Paris in 1968; anti-war movement of the ‘60s; legacy of Charles de Gaulle; Europe occupied since WWII;

the Greens; Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties; neoliberal counterrevolution in the 1980s; finance capital;

internationalism vs nationalism; privatization; financial institutions living off of sovereign debt; austerity;

Yellow Vests a revival of an economic left; Antifa enforcing the establishment position;

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) a rule to break national sovereignty; destruction of Libya by NATO;

new phase of capitalism called ‘green’; censorship of intellectual discussion

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Chinese tech giant Huawei calls itself “an independent, privately-held company that provides information and communication technology (ICT)…connect(ing) over three billion people in (over) 170 countries.”

The company is leading the race to roll out 5G technology, its market potential worth trillions of dollars.

The Trump regime wants imports of Chinese tech products restricted or blocked.

It also banned US companies from using information and communications technology from sources his regime calls a threat to US national security.

Last May, Trump’s Commerce Department tightened restrictions on Huawei’s ability to buy US software and technology used to develop and produce semiconductors.

Intel, Google, Qualcomm and other US tech companies suspended sales to Huawei.

At the time, the US Commerce Department extended a temporary license to let US tech companies sell certain non-critical products to Huawei for another 90 days through late August. The temporary waiver expired.

The Trump regime wants the company cut off from US chips and other high tech products to undermine its ability to compete with corporate America effectively.

On Monday, Trump’s Commerce Department further escalated war on Huawei to prevent the company from buying foreign-made US chips.

It also added another 38 company affiliates in 21 countries to its so-called entity list.

These firms are subject to special “licensing requirements for the export, reexport and/or transfer (in-country) of specified items,” barring their access to certain US technology — according to the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS).

According to Chinese tech analyst Ma Jihua, newly announced Trump regime restrictions “closed all roads for Huawei” by cutting off its ability to buy US chips from foreign suppliers, adding:

“The new rule also means that the US’ previous tricks didn’t work on Huawei and the US has basically played all its cards against” the company that remains resilient despite all-out Trump regime efforts to harm its operations.

“If the US forces Huawei into the corner, the Chinese government will retaliate without hesitation.”

Commenting on the Commerce Department ruling, Pompeo falsely claimed new actions against Huawei aim “to protect US national security, our citizens’ privacy, and the integrity of our 5G infrastructure from Beijing’s malign influence (sic).”

A politicized US Justice Department indictment last year charged Huawei, two company affiliates, and its chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou with 13 counts of financial fraud, money laundering, wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy to defraud the US, obstruction of justice, and violation of (illegally imposed) US sanctions on Iran.

On Monday, Pompeo said the Trump regime will “restrict most US exports to Huawei and its affiliates on the entity list” and will pressure its allies to adopt the same policy.

After initially working with Huawei to build out Britain’s 5G network, PM Boris Johnson bent to Washington’s will by announcing no new purchases of its equipment after December 31 to eliminate what his regime called “high-risk vendors.”

It’s unclear if or how many other European countries will go along with the US by no longer doing business with Huawei.

Germany reacted cooly to Trump regime’s demands, saying no evidence suggests Huawei poses a national security threat.

Czech Republic Prime Minister Andrej Babis rejected Pompeo’s demands, saying:

“We are a sovereign country. We treat these countries quite standardly like everyone else,” adding:

“I (told Pompeo) that we are moving forward as a member of the EU, that there has been a similar situation in other similar bids, and that we cannot eliminate anyone to comply with EU rules.”

He refused to rule out working with Huawei in building out the country’s 5G infrastructure.

Czech President Milos Zeman said “great powers should not be hostile to each other, but should have a common enemy, which is international terrorism.”

In early August, diplomatic outreach to the US by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and former Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi to preserve the world’s most important bilateral relationship fell on deaf ears in Washington.

Its hostile agenda toward Beijing is polar opposite constructive dialogue Wang and Yang urged.

So far, China hasn’t retaliated against US war on Huawei and its other enterprises.

The only language both right wings of the US one-party state understand is toughness.

It’s likely coming ahead against US companies in whatever ways China considers appropriate.

A Final Comment

In response to the latest hostile Trump regime actions against Huawei, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian issued the following strongly worded statement:

“China firmly opposes the deliberate smearing and suppression of Chinese enterprises including Huawei by the US side.”

“For some time now, the US has been abusing national security concept and state power to impose all sorts of restrictive measures on Chinese companies like Huawei without producing any solid evidence.”

“This is stark bullying.”

“What the US has done shows clearly that the market economy and fair competition principle it claims to champion is nothing but a fig leaf.”

“Such practice violates rules of international trade, disrupts global industrial, supply and value chains, and will inevitably damage America’s national interests and image.”

“I’d like to stress that the more hysterically the US tries to keep Huawei and other Chinese companies down, the more it proves they are doing great and the US is bringing hypocrisy and bullying to a whole new level.”

“Many successful businesses of other countries have suffered the same treatment in the past.”

“The shameful behavior of the US has been and will continue to be rejected by countries in the world.”

“The US claims that Huawei threatens US national security, which is totally baseless.”

“Let’s take a look at the facts.”

“Over the past 30 years, Huawei has developed over 1,500 networks in more than 170 countries and regions, and served 228 Fortune 500 companies and more than three billion people all over the world.”

“Not a single cybersecurity incident like those revealed by Edward Snowden or WikiLeaks has there been.”

“Not a single tapping or surveillance operation like PRISM, Equation Group or ECHELON has there been.”

“And not a single country has produced evidence of any backdoors in Huawei products.”

“The US is really the top empire of hackers in this world.”

“American companies Cisco and Apple admitted years ago that there are security loopholes and backdoors in their equipment.”

“US intelligence has long been running indiscriminate, illegal surveillance programs on foreign governments, businesses and individuals including those of its allies.”

“Even American citizens don’t have any secrets to speak of. These are open facts.”

“We urge the US to immediately correct its mistakes and stop smearing China and suppressing Chinese companies.”

“The Chinese government will continue to take necessary measures to safeguard Chinese companies’ legitimate rights and interests.”

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

A major sign of financial distress in the US economy kicked in in mid-September of 2019 when there was a breakdown in the normal operation of the Repo Market. This repurchase market in the United States is important in maintaining liquidity in the financial system.

Those directing entities like large banks, Wall Street traders and hedge funds frequently seek large amounts of cash on a short-term basis. They obtain this cash from, for instance, money market funds by putting up securities, often Treasury Bills, as collateral. Most often the financial instruments go back, say the following night, to their original owners with interest payments attached for the use of the cash.

Screenshot: Bankrate.com

In mid-September 2019 the trust broke down between participants in the Repo Market. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York then entered the picture making trillions of dollars available to keep the system for short-term moving of assets going. This intervention repeated the operation that came in response to the first signs of trouble as Wall Street moved towards the stock market crash of 2008.

One of the major problems on the eve of the bailout of 2008-09, like the problem in the autumn of 2019, had to do with the overwhelming of the real economy by massive speculative activity.

The problem then, like a big part of the problem now, involves the disproportionate size of the derivative bets. The making of these bets have become a dangerous addiction that continues to this day to menace the viability of the financial system headquartered on Wall Street.

By March of 2020 it was reported that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had turned on its money spigot to create $9 trillion in new money with the goal of keeping the failing Repo Market operational.

The precise destinations of that money together with the terms of its disbursement, however, remain a secret. As Pam Martens and Russ Martens write,

Since the Fed turned on its latest money spigot to Wall Street [in September of 2019], it has refused to provide the public with the dollar amounts going to any specific banks. This has denied the public the ability to know which financial institutions are in trouble. The Fed, exactly as it did in 2008, has drawn a dark curtain around troubled banks and the public’s right to know, while aiding and abetting a financial coverup of just how bad things are on Wall Street.

Looking back at the prior bailout from their temporal vantage point in January of 2020, the authors noted

 “During the 2007 to 2010 financial collapse on Wall Street – the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Fed funnelled a total of $29 trillion in cumulative loans to Wall Street banks, their trading houses and their foreign derivative counterparties.”

The authors compared the rate of the transfer of funds from the New York Federal Reserve Bank to the Wall Street banking establishment in the 2008 crash and in the early stages of the 2020 financial debacle. The authors observed, “at this rate, [the Fed] is going to top the rate of money it threw at the 2008 crisis in no time at all.”

The view that all was well with the economy until the impact of the health crisis began to be felt in early 2020 leads away from the fact that money markets began to falter dangerously in the autumn of 2019. The problems with the Repo Market were part of a litany of indicators pointing to turbulence ahead in troubled economic waters.

For instance, the resignation in 2019 of about 1,500 prominent corporate CEOs can be seen as a suggestion that news was circulating prior to 2020 about the imminence of serious financial problems ahead. Insiders’ awareness of menacing developments threatening the workings of the global economy were probably a factor in the decision of a large number of senior executives to exit the upper echelons of the business world. (See this)

Not only did a record number of CEOs resign, but many of them sold off the bulk of their shares in the companies they were leaving. (See this)

Pam Marten and Russ Marten who follow Wall Street’s machinations on a daily basis have advanced the case that the Federal Reserve is engaged in fraud by trying to make it seem that “the banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy condition;” that it is only because of “the COVID-19 pandemic” that the financial system is” unravelling,”

The authors argue that this misrepresentation was deployed because the deceivers are apparently “desperate” to prevent Congress from conducting an investigation for the second time in twelve years on why the Fed, “had to engage in trillions of dollars of Wall Street bailouts.” In spite of the Fed’s fear of facing a Congressional investigation after the November 2020 vote, such a timely investigation of the US financial sector would well serve the public interest.

The authors present a number of signs demonstrating that “the Fed knew, or should have known…. that there was a big banking crisis brewing in August of last year. [2019]” The signs of the financial crisis in the making included negative yields on government bonds around the world as well as big drops in the Dow Jones average. The plunge in the price of stocks was led by US banks, but especially Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

Another significant indicator that something was deeply wrong in financial markets was a telling inversion in the value of Treasury notes with the two-year rate yielding more than the ten-year rate.

Yet another sign of serious trouble ahead involved repeated contractions in the size of the German economy. Moreover, in September of 2019 news broke that officials of JP Morgan Chase faced criminal charges for RICO-style racketeering. This scandal added to the evidence of converging problems plaguing core economic institutions as more disruptive mayhem gathered on the horizons. (See this)

Accordingly,there is ample cause to ask if there are major underlying reasons for the financial crash of 2020 other than the misnamed pandemic and the lockdowns done in its name of “flattening” its spikes of infection. At the same time, there is ample cause to recognize that the lockdowns have been a very significant factor in the depth of the economic debacle that is making 2020 a year like no other.

Some go further. They argue that the financial crash of 2020 was not only anticipated but planned and pushed forward with clear understanding of its instrumental role in the Great Reset sought by self-appointed protagonists of creative destruction. The advocates of this interpretation place significant weight on the importance of the lockdowns as an effective means of obliterating in a single act a host of old economic relationships. For instance Peter Koenig examines the “farce and diabolical agenda of a universal lockdown.” Koenig writes,

“The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.”

Inflating the Numbers and Traumatizing the Public to Energize the Epidemic of Fear

There have been many pandemics in global history whose effects on human health have been much more pervasive and devastating than the current one said to be generated by a new coronavirus. In spite, however, of its comparatively mild flu-like effects on human health, at least at this point in the summer of 2020, there has never been a contagion whose spread has generated so much global publicity and hype. As in the aftermath of 9/11, this hype extends to audacious levels of media-generated panic. As with the psy op of 9/11, the media-induced panic has been expertly finessed by practitioners skilled in leveraging the currency of fear to realize a host of radical political objectives.

According to Robert E. Wright in an essay published by the American Institute for Economic Research, “closing down the U.S. economy in response to COVID-19 was probably the worst public policy in at least one-hundred years.” As Wright sees it, the decision to lock down the economy was made in ignorant disregard of the deep and devastating impact that such an action would spur.“Economic lockdowns were the fantasies of government officials so out of touch with economic and physical reality that they thought the costs would be fairly low.”

The consequences, Wright predicts, will extend across many domains including the violence done to the rule of law. The lockdowns, he writes, “turned the Constitution into a frail and worthless fabric.” Writing in late April, Wright touched on the comparisons to be made between the economic lockdowns and slavery. He write, “Slaves definitely had it worse than Americans under lockdown do, but already Americans are beginning to protest their confinement and to subtly subvert authorities, just as chattel slaves did.” (See this)

The people held captive in confined lockdown settings have had the time and often the inclination to imbibe much of the 24/7 media coverage of the misnamed pandemic. Taken together, all this media sensationalism has come to constitute one of the most concerted psychological operations ever.

The implications have been enormous for the mental health of multitudes of people. This massive alteration of attitudes and behaviours is the outcome of media experiments performed on human subjects without their informed consent. The media’s success in bringing about herd subservience to propagandistic messaging represents a huge incentive for more of the same to come. It turns out that the subject matter of public health offers virtually limitless potential for power-seeking interests and agents to meddle with the privacies, civil liberties and human rights of those they seek to manipulate, control and exploit.

The social, economic and health impacts of the dislocations flowing from the lockdowns are proving to be especially devastating on the poorest, the most deprived and the most vulnerable members of society. This impact will continue to be marked in many ways, including in increased rates of suicide, domestic violence, mental illness, addictions, homelessness, and incarceration far larger than those caused directly by COVID-19. As rates of deprivation through poverty escalate, so too will crime rates soar.

The over-the-top alarmism of the big media cabals has been well financed by the advertising revenue of the pharmaceutical industry. With some few exceptions, major media outlets pushed the public to accept the lockdowns as well as the attending losses in jobs and business activity. In seeking to push the agenda of their sponsors, the big media cartels have been especially unmindful of their journalistic responsibilities. Their tendency has been to avoid or censor forums where even expert practitioners of public health can publicly question and discuss government dictates about vital issues of public policy. (See this)

Whether in Germany or the United States or many other countries, front line workers in this health care crisis have nevertheless gathered together with the goal of trying to correct the one-sided prejudices of of discriminatory media coverage. One of the major themes in the presentations by medical practitioners is to confront the chorus of media misrepresentations on the remedial effects of hydroxychloroquine and zinc.

On July 27 a group of doctors gathered on the grounds of the US Supreme Court to try to address the biases of the media and the blind spots of government. (See this)

Another aspect in the collateral damage engendered by COVID-19 alarmism is marked in the fatalities arising from the wholesale postponement of many necessary interventions including surgery. How many have died or will die because of the hold put on medical interventions to remedy cancer, heart conditions and many other potentially lethal ailments? (See this)

Did the unprecedented lockdowns come about as part of a preconceived plan to inflate the severity of an anticipated financial meltdown? What is to be made of the suspicious intervention of administrators to produce severely padded numbers of reported deaths in almost every jurisdiction? This kind of manipulation of statistics raised the possibility that we are witnessing a purposeful and systemic inflation of the severity of this health care crisis. (See this)

Questions about the number of cases arise because of the means of testing for the presence of a supposedly new coronavirus. The PCR system that is presently being widely used does not test for the virus but tests for the existence of antibodies produced in response to many health challenges including the common cold. This problem creates a good deal of uncertainty of what a positive test really means. (See this and this)

The problems with calculating case numbers extend to widespread reportsthat have described people who were not tested for COVID-19 but who nevertheless received notices from officials counting them as COVID-19 positive. Broadcaster Armstrong Williams addressed the phenomenon on his network of MSM media outlets in late July.

From the mass of responses he received, Williams estimated that those not tested but counted as a positive probably extends probably to hundreds of thousands of individuals. What would drive the effort to exaggerate the size of the afflicted population? (See this at 1:03-1:15)

This same pattern of inflation of case numbers was reinforced by the Tricare branch of the US Defense Department’s Military Health System. This branch sent out notices to 600,000 individuals who had not been tested. The notices nevertheless informed the recipients that they had tested positive for COVID 19. (See this)

Is the inflation of COVID-19 death rates and cases numbers an expression of the zeal to justify the massive lockdowns? Were the lockdowns in China conceived as part of a scheme to help create the conditions for the public’s acceptance of a plan to remake the world’s political economy? What is to be made of the fact that those most identified with the World Economic Forum (WEF) have led the way in putting a positive spin on the reset arising from the very health crisis the WEF helped introduce and publicize in Oct. of 2019?

As Usual, the Poor Gets Poorer

The original Chinese lockdowns in the winter of 2020 caused the breakdowns of import-export supply chains extending across the planet. Lockdowns in the movement of raw materials, parts, finished products, expertise, money and more shut down domestic businesses in China as well as transnational commerce in many countries outside China. The supply chain disruptions were especially severe for businesses that have dispensed with the practice of keeping on hand large inventories of parts and raw material, depending instead on just-in-time deliveries.

As the supply chains broke down domestically and internationally, many enterprises lacked the revenue to pay their expenses. Bankruptcies began to proliferate at rates that will probably continue to beastronomical for some time. All kinds of loans and liabilities were not paid out in full or at all. Many homes are being re-mortgaged or cast into real estate markets as happened during the prelude and course of the bailouts of 2007-2010.

The brunt of the financial onslaught hit small businesses especially hard. Collectively small businesses have been a big creator of jobs. They have picked up some of the slack from the rush of big businesses to downsize their number of full-time employees. Moreover, small businesses and start-ups are often the site of exceptionally agile innovations across broad spectrums of economic activity. The hard financial slam on the small business sector, therefore, is packing a heavy punch on the economic conditions of everyone.

The devastating impact of the economic meltdown on workers and small businesses in Europe and North America extends in especially lethal ways to the massive population of poor people living all over the world. Many of these poor people reside in countries where much of the paid work is irregular and informal.

At the end of April the International Labor Organization (ILO), an entity created along with the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, estimated that there would be 1.6 billion victims of the meltdown in the worldwide “informal economy.” In the first month of the crisis these workers based largely in Africa and Latin America lost 60% of their subsistence level incomes. (See this)

As ILO Director-General, Guy Ryder, has asserted,

This pandemic has laid bare in the cruellest way, the extraordinary precariousness and injustices of our world of work. It is the decimation of livelihoods in the informal economy – where six out of ten workers make a living – which has ignited the warnings from our colleagues in the World Food Programme, of the coming pandemic of hunger. It is the gaping holes in the social protection systems of even the richest countries, which have left millions in situations of deprivation. It is the failure to guarantee workplace safety that condemns nearly 3 million to die each year because of the work they do. And it is the unchecked dynamic of growing inequality which means that if, in medical terms, the virus does not discriminate between its victims in its social and economic impact, it discriminates brutally against the poorest and the powerless. (See this)

Guy Ryder remembered the optimistic rhetoric in officialdom’s responses to the economic crash of 2007-2009. He compares the expectations currently being aroused by the vaccination fixation with the many optimistic sentiments previously suggesting the imminence of remedies for grotesque levels of global inequality. Ryder reflected,

We’ve heard it before. The mantra which provided the mood music of the crash of 2008-2009 was that once the vaccine to the virus of financial excess had been developed and applied, the global economy would be safer, fairer, more sustainable. But that didn’t happen. The old normal was restored with a vengeance and those on the lower echelons of labour markets found themselves even further behind. 

The internationalization of increased unemployment and poverty brought about in the name of combating the corona crisis is having the effect of further widening the polarization between rich and poor on a global scale. Ryder’s metaphor about the false promises concerning a “vaccine” to correct “financial excess” can well be seen as a precautionary comment on the flowery rhetoric currently adorning the calls for a global reset.

Prof. Anthony James Hall is Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is Professor emeritus of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta.  The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial globalization since 1492.

This incisive article by Rannie Amiri focussing on Israel’s spy ring in Lebanon was first published by Global Research on July 23, 2010. The article also addresses the role of the UN sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL)

Is it relevant?  According to the August 18, 2020 verdict by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) based in The Hague Salim Ayyash was found guilty of killing Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a suicide car bombing on Feb. 14, 2005.

Cui bono? Lets review the timeline: 

Two months after the assassination, on April 7, 2005 the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1595 to form “an investigative team to look into Hariri’s assassination.”

The team’s report submitted to the UNSC in October 2005 pointed to the role of Syria’s military intelligence. The insidious role of Israel’s spy-ring operatives inside Lebanon was casually  ignored despite the evidence.

This report serves Israel’s interests. It was released 8 months before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in July 2006.

The following article of Rannie Ariri published ten years ago suggests that the verdict of the LST judgment should be questioned.

“Outside the obvious deleterious ramifications of high-ranking Lebanese military officers working for Israel, the very legitimacy of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is now in question”. (2010 report entitled “The Hariri Assassination: Israel ’s Fingerprints”, below)

Flash Forward to August 2020

The Beirut explosion on August 4th, followed by the LTS’ “fake verdict” on August 18, have triggered destruction as well as political and social havoc within Lebanon.

According to (former) Israel Defense Forces Chief  of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi (who currently serves as Israel’s Foreign Minister), in testimony to the Knesset [2010] revealed

“what Israel hopes the fallout from the STL’s report will be: fomentation of civil strife and discord among Lebanon ’s sectarian groups…” (Rannie Ariri, op cit).

And in recent developments, in the wake of the Beirut explosion,  Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi confirmed that Israel would channel medical humanitarian aid to Lebanon.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 20, 2020

***

In the Middle East , the link between political machinations, espionage and assassination is either clear as day, or clear as mud.

As for the yet unsolved case of the February 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the underpinnings of this covert operation including the role of Israel have now surfaced.

A crackdown on Israeli spy rings operating in Lebanon has resulted in more than 70 arrests over the past 18 months. Included among them are four high-ranking Lebanese Army and General Security officers—one having spied for the Mossad since 1984.

A significant breakthrough in the ongoing investigation occurred in late June and culminated in the arrest of Charbel Qazzi, head of transmission and broadcasting at Alfa, one of Lebanon ’s two state-owned mobile service providers.

According to the Lebanese daily As-Safir, Qazzi confessed to installing computer programs and planting electronic chips in Alfa transmitters. These could then be used by Israeli intelligence to monitor communications, locate and target individuals for assassination, and potentially deploy viruses capable of erasing recorded information in the contact lines. Qazzi’s collaboration with Israel reportedly dates back 14 years.

On July 12, a second arrest at Alfa was made. Tarek al-Raba’a, an engineer and partner of Qazzi, was apprehended on charges of spying for Israel and compromising national security. A few days later, a third Alfa employee was similarly detained.

Israel has refused to comment on the arrests. Nevertheless, their apparent ability to have penetrated Lebanon ’s military and telecommunication sectors has rattled the country and urgently raised security concerns.

What does any of this have to do with the Hariri assassination?

Outside the obvious deleterious ramifications of high-ranking Lebanese military officers working for Israel, the very legitimacy of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is now in question. The STL is the U.N.-sanctioned body tasked with prosecuting those responsible for the assassination of the late prime minister. On Feb. 14, 2005, 1,000 kg of explosives detonated near Hariri’s passing motorcade, killing him and 21 others.

It is believed the STL will issue indictments in the matter as early as September—relying heavily on phone recordings and mobile transmissions to do so.

According to the AFP,

“A preliminary report by the U.N. investigating team said it had collected data from mobile phone calls made the day of Hariri’s murder as evidence.”

The National likewise reported,

“The international inquiry, which could present indictments or findings as soon as September, according to unverified media reports, used extensive phone records to draw conclusions into a conspiracy to kill Hariri, widely blamed on Syria and its Lebanese allies …”

In a July 16 televised speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah speculated the STL would use information gleaned from Israeli-compromised communications to falsely implicate the group in the prime minister’s murder:

“Some are counting in their analysis of the (STL) indictment on witnesses, some of whom turned out to be fake, and on the telecommunications networks which were infiltrated by spies who can change and manipulate data.

“Before the (2006) war, these spies gave important information to the Israeli enemy and based on this information, Israel bombed buildings, homes, factories and institutions. Many martyrs died and many others were wounded. These spies are partners in the killings, the crimes, the threats and the displacement.”

Nasrallah called the STL’s manipulation an “Israeli project” meant to “create an uproar in Lebanon .”

Indeed, in May 2008 Lebanon experienced a taste of this. At the height of an 18-month stalemate over the formation of a national unity government under then Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, his cabinet’s decision to unilaterally declare Hezbollah’s fixed-line communication system illegal pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

Recognizing the value their secure lines of communication had in combating the July 2006 Israeli invasion and suspecting that state-owned telecoms might be compromised, Hezbollah resisted Siniora’s plans to have its network dismantled. Their men swept through West Beirut and put a quick end to the government’s plan. Two years later, their suspicions appear to have been vindicated.

Opposition MP and Free Patriotic Movement head Michel Aoun has already warned Nasrallah that the STL will likely indict “uncontrolled” Hezbollah members to be followed by “… Lebanese-Lebanese and Lebanese-Palestinian tension, and by an Israeli war on Lebanon .”

Giving credence to Nasrallah and Aoun’s assertions, Commander in Chief of the Israel Defense Forces Gabi Ashkenazi, predicted “with lots of wishes” that the situation in Lebanon would deteriorate in September after the STL indicts Hezbollah for Hariri’s assassination.

Ashkenazi’s gleeful, prescient testimony to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs Committee betrays what Israel hopes the fallout from the STL’s report will be: fomentation of civil strife and discord among Lebanon ’s sectarian groups, generally divided into pro- and anti-Syria factions. Ashkenazi anticipates this to happen, of course, because he knows Israel ’s unfettered access to critical phone records will have framed Hezbollah for the crime.

Israel’s agents and operatives in Lebanon and its infiltration of a telecom network have been exposed. At the very least, the STL must recognize that evidence of alleged Hezbollah involvement in Hariri’s death (a group that historically enjoyed good ties with the late premier) is wholly tainted and likely doctored.

The arrest of Qazzi and al-Raba’a in the breakup of Israeli spy rings should prompt the STL to shift its focus to the only regional player that has benefited from Hariri’s murder; one that will continue to do so if and when their designs to implicate Hezbollah are realized.

It is time to look at Tel Aviv.

Rannie Amiri is an independent Middle East commentator

First published on November 19, 2013.

Author’s Note 

Who killed Hariri, Who killed Arafat? 

According to the August 18, 2020 verdict by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in The Hague Salim Ayyash was found guilty of killing Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a suicide car bombing on Feb. 14, 2005. Cui bono?

In early April 2005 the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1595 to form “an investigative team to look into Hariri’s assassination.”

The team’s report submitted to the UNSC in October 2005 pointed to the role of Syria’s military intelligence. The possible role of Israel was casually ignored despite the evidence.

The following article documents the targeted assassination of Yasser Arafat which had been ordered by the Israeli Cabinet.

M. C. , August 20, 2020

***

The forensic tests on samples taken from Yasser Arafat’s corpse by a team of Swiss scientists exhibit high levels of radioactive polonium-210.  The exhumation of his body was implemented in November 2012. The samples revealed “levels of polonium at least 18 times higher than usual in Arafat’s ribs, pelvis and in soil that absorbed his bodily fluids.”

These developments raise the broader issue which the media has failed to address: Who was behind the assassination of Yasser Arafat?

The assassination of Yasser Arafat had been on the drawing board since 1996 under “Operation Fields of Thorns”.

According to an October 2000 document “prepared by the [Israeli] security services, at the request of then Prime Minister Ehud Barak, stated that ‘Arafat, the person, is a severe threat to the security of the state [of Israel] and the damage which will result from his disappearance is less than the damage caused by his existence'”. (quoted in Tanya Reinhart, Evil Unleashed, Israel’s move to destroy the Palestinian Authority is a calculated plan, long in the making, Global Research, December 2001. Details of the document were published in Ma’ariv, July 6, 2001.).

In August 2003, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz declared “all out war” on the militants whom he vowed “marked for death.”

“In mid September, Israel’s government passed a law to get rid of Arafat. Israel’s cabinet for political security affairs declared it “a decision to remove Arafat as an obstacle to peace.” Mofaz threatened; “we will choose the right way and the right time to kill Arafat.” Palestinian Minister Saeb Erekat told CNN he thought Arafat was the next target. CNN asked Sharon spokesman Ra’anan Gissan if the vote meant expulsion of Arafat. Gissan clarified; “It doesn’t mean that. The Cabinet has today resolved to remove this obstacle. The time, the method, the ways by which this will take place will be decided separately, and the security services will monitor the situation and make the recommendation about proper action.” (See Trish Shuh, Road Map for a Decease Plan,  www.mehrnews.com November 9 2005)

The assassination of Arafat was part of the 2001 Dagan Plan.

In all likelihood, it was carried out by Israeli Intelligence.

It was intended to destroy the Palestinian Authority, foment divisions within Fatah as well as between Fatah and Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas is a Palestinian quisling. He was installed as leader of Fatah, with the approval of Israel and the US, which finance the Palestinian Authority’s paramilitary and security forces.

The above text was written in January 2009 as part of the following article:

The Invasion of Gaza: “Operation Cast Lead”, Part of a Broader Israeli Military-Intelligence Agenda
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2009-01-04

Planet Lockdown. Devastating economic and social consequences. 

We are living one of the most serious crises in modern history. 

According to Michel Chossudovsky, the coronavirus pandemic is used as a pretext and a justification to close down the global economy, as a means to resolving a public health concern.  

A complex decision-making process is instrumental in the closing down of national economies Worldwide. We are led to believe that the lockdown is the solution.

Politicians and health officials in more than 190 countries obey orders emanating from higher authority. 

In turn millions of people obey the orders of their governments without questioning the fact that closing down an economy is not the solution but in fact the cause of  global poverty and unemployment. 

What we are dealing with is a crime against humanity.

And this diabolical agenda is an election issue in the U.S.  

No meaningful debate on the closure of the World economy at the Democratic Party Convention (August 17-20, 2020)

Listen to: 

Guns and Butter

Interview of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky with Bonnie Faulkner on the Economic and Social Dimensions of the Covid Crisis

download MP3 file 

The economic and social impacts far exceed those attributed to the coronavirus. Cited below are selected examples of  a global process: 

• Massive job losses and layoffs in the US, with more than 10 million workers filing claims for unemployment benefits. (April)
• In India,  a 21 days lockdown has triggered a wave of famine and despair affecting millions of homeless migrant workers all over the country. No lockdown for the homeless: “too poor to afford a meal”. (April)
• The impoverishment in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa is beyond description. For large sectors of the urban population, household income has literally been wiped out.
• In Italy, the destabilization of the tourist industry has resulted in bankruptcies and rising unemployment. 
• In many countries, citizens are the object of police violence. The tendency is towards a totalitarian state. 

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For the first time in about a year, Syrian pro-government forces and the US-led coalition found itself engaged in what seems to be direct clashes near the village of Tal al-Dhahab in northeastern Syria.

Syrian sources said that on August 17 an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter struck a checkpoint of the Syrian Army in the province of al-Hasakah after the Syrian Army and pro-government locals blocked a US military convoy in the area. According to state-run news agency SANA, the strike killed a soldier and injured two others.

It is interesting to note that according to the US-led coalition version of events, the US military convoy came under gunfire from unidentified persons, when it was passing the army checkpoint. Then, US forces returned fire. No airstrikes were conducted according to the US statement.

Tal al-Dhahab is located south of the city of Qamishli. A large number of positions of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and the US-led coalition are located the countryside of the city. US forces regularly conduct patrols around the city. These patrols often try to block the movement of the Russian Military Police convoys in the very same area. In its own turn, the Syrian Army, pro-government locals and even the Russian Military Police also block try to block US military convoys. However, the August 17 situation became the first incident when such developments led to a real confrontation between the sides. Taking into account the intensity of interactions in the Syria-US-Russia triangle, this situation is setting up a dangerous precedent that may lead to a wider confrontation between the sides.

ISIS conducted several successful attacks on positions of the Syrian Army and the National Defense Forces in the provinces of Homs and Deir Ezzor. According to pro-opposition sources, at least 5 soldiers and several civilians were killed there in the last few weeks. As of August 18, the army and its local allies are reportedly preparing to conduct another series of anti-ISIS raids in the desert. The ISIS threat still remains an important but destabilizing factor in the central Syrian desert, but government forces lack resources to fully eliminate it.

Meanwhile, the military situation once again dangerously escalated in Greater Idlib. On August 17, a joint Turkish-Russian patrol came under an attack near the village of Arihah on the M4 highway. The explosion of supposed an improvised explosive device targeted a Turksih Kirpi armoured vehicle. The attack took place in the same area where the joint Russian-Turkish patrol was hit by a car bomb on July 14.

In both cases, Turkish sources almost immediately speculated that the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) may have been behind the attacks claiming that the groups supposedly active in the area .This is a lie. Neither the YPG nor the PKK have any active presence in southern Idlib. Contrary to Turkish fairy tales, the only terrorist groups active in this part of Idlib are Turkish-sponsored terrorists like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Turkistan Islamic Party and others. The Turkish unwillingness to get rid of its pocket al-Qaeda supporters is the main source of the instability there. Therefore, Turkish soldiers in Idlib die to protect al-Qaeda from the inevitable defeat in the event of a direct confrontation with the Syrian Army and its allies.

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In these times of COVID-19 , the big challenge for most of us is how to protect ourselves and our families from the virus and how to hold on to our jobs. For policy-makers that translates into beating the pandemic without doing irreversible damage to the economy in the process.

With over 3 million cases and some 250,000 deaths from the virus to date globally, and the expected loss of the equivalent of 305 million jobs worldwide by mid-year, the stakes have never been higher. Governments continue to “follow the science” in the search for the best solutions while foregoing the obvious benefits of much greater international cooperation in building the needed global response to the global challenge.

But with the war against COVID-19 still to be won, it has become commonplace that what awaits us after victory is a “new normal” in the way society is organized and the way we will work.

This is hardly reassuring.

Because nobody seems able to say what the new normal will be. Because the message is that it will be dictated by the constraints imposed by the pandemic rather than our choices and preferences. And because we’ve heard it before. The mantra which provided the mood music of the crash of 2008-2009 was that once the vaccine to the virus of financial excess had been developed and applied, the global economy would be safer, fairer, more sustainable. But that didn’t happen. The old normal was restored with a vengeance and those on the lower echelons of labour markets found themselves even further behind.

Now is the time to look more closely at this new normal, and start on the task of making it a better normal, not so much for those who already have much, but for those who so obviously have too little.

This pandemic has laid bare in the cruellest way, the extraordinary precariousness and injustices of our world of work. It is the decimation of livelihoods in the informal economy – where six out of ten workers make a living – which has ignited the warnings from our colleagues in the World Food Programme, of the coming pandemic of hunger. It is the gaping holes in the social protection systems of even the richest countries, which have left millions in situations of deprivation. It is the failure to guarantee workplace safety that condemns nearly 3 million to die each year because of the work they do. And it is the unchecked dynamic of growing inequality which means that if, in medical terms, the virus does not discriminate between its victims in its social and economic impact, it discriminates brutally against the poorest and the powerless.

The only thing that should surprise us in all this is that we are surprised. Before the pandemic, the manifest deficits in decent work were mostly played out in individual episodes of quiet desperation. It has taken the calamity of COVID-19 to aggregate them into the collective social cataclysm the world faces today. But we always knew: we simply chose not to care. By and large, policy choices by commission or omission accentuated rather than alleviated the problem.

Fifty-two years ago, Martin Luther King, in a speech to striking sanitation workers on the eve of his assassination reminded the world that there is dignity in all labour. Today, the virus has similarly highlighted the always essential role of the working heroes of this pandemic. People who are usually invisible, unconsidered, undervalued, even ignored. Health and care workers, cleaners, supermarket cashiers, transport staff – too often numbered among the ranks of the working poor and the insecure.

Today the denial of dignity to these, and to millions of others, stand as a symbol of past policy failures and our future responsibilities.

On May Day next year we trust that the pressing emergency of COVID-19 will be behind us. But we will have before us the task of building a future of work which tackles the injustices that the pandemic has highlighted, together with the permanent and no longer postponable challenges of climate, digital and demographic transition.

This is what defines the better normal that has to be the lasting legacy of the global health emergency of 2020.

Guy Ryder is Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO). 

GR Editor’s Note:

The ILO should take a firm and official stance to restore the global economy as well as recognize that the “lockdown” does not constitute a solution to the public health crisis.

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Featured image is from ILO

In the 2010 book American Empire Before the Fall, Bruce Fein maintains that beginning with the notion of Manifest Destiny and the launching of war against Mexico in 1846, and culminating in the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has abandoned the principles that constituted the foundation of the nation as a Republic, converting itself into an empire.  He calls upon the American people take up their moral duty to restore the American Republic. 

Fein is among the founders of the American Freedom Agenda, which was established in 2007 by disaffected conservatives demanding that the Republican Party return to its traditional mistrust of concentrated government power.  

Fein’s analysis includes specific proposals that have a progressive ring, which suggests the possibility of a conservative-progressive consensus in defense of the American Republic and the Constitution.  Such proposals include impeachment of a president who deceives the Congress or the people to obtain authorization to initiate war; prohibition of war against non-state actors, like Al Qaeda or Taliban, or against a tactic, such as terrorism;  renunciation of the current war against international terrorism, replaced by an alternative approach that treats international terrorists as criminals; prohibition of military bases or troops abroad, except through Congressional declaration; the abolition of the state secrets privilege; and prohibition of the detaining of persons as enemy combatants without accusation or trial.

Fein identifies four Charter Documents: The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, George Washington’s Farewell Address, and a July 4, 1821 speech by then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.

These documents “expounded the nation’s revolutionary philosophy: individual liberty and due process over a national security state; government by the consent of the governed; a separation of powers; checks and balances; and sovereignty in ‘We the People,’ not a King or monarch.”  The revolutionary philosophy reflected a distrust of government; and the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were intended to arrest governmental power.

Fein captures the individualism tied to a concept of a limited state that is central to the creed of the American Republic at its founding.  He writes that the philosophy of the Republic placed the individual at the center of society.  It was believed that individual liberty was attained through limited control and regulation of the individual by the government. 

Fein, however, does not see the Charter Documents as living documents, that is, as establishing the foundation for an evolving society, in which changing conditions create the need to formulate new interpretations of philosophical principles.  Even before the Republic was established, the merchants and producers of New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies were benefiting from trading relations with slave economies in the Caribbean as well as Charleston and Virginia, and this lucrative trade was made possible by strong, repressive states.  But this state support of commerce was not visible to the merchants and producers, because the role of their state was limited; they experienced the trade as natural, as not involving state support or regulation. 

But this would soon change.  The conquest of territories to the West created the material conditions for capitalism to evolve to the stage of monopoly capitalism, in which large companies and trusts emerged that were not subjected to any checks on their power.  In this new economic situation, if the rights of the people were to be defended, there needed to be a revised understanding of the relation between the citizen and the state.  Beginning with that historic moment, the rights of the people would have to be defended through the control of the state by the people, and their use of the state as a check on the power of corporations, thus provoking a significant practical shift in the concept of the balance of powers.  However, in the American story, the people never arrived to control the state, so its capacity to check the corporations has been limited, and attained mostly through a process of elite concessions to popular protests and demands.

Fein is right in calling the people to reject empire and turn to the task of restoring the American Republic.  But the restoration must be based on a revision of the principles of the Charter Documents, taking into account that the people now live in a world dominated by large corporations.  Such revision itself must be based on the Charter Documents.  That is, all new and reformulated principles must be established as Constitutional Amendments, supported by laws enacted by the U.S. Congress, acting on behalf of the political will of the majority of the people.  The Founding Fathers were not proposing that subsequent generations of Americans had to embrace their philosophy, which was formulated in a particular historical, social, and political context.  Rather, they were insisting that any changes in philosophy, law, or policy had to be implemented in accordance with the Constitution, the juridical foundation of the Republic.

There is another significant limitation in Fein’s insightful analysis.  Fein does not see the economic benefits that accrued to the United States in its turn from Republic to Empire.  He does not see the importance of conquest, colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism in creating and sustaining the global economic structures that facilitate the development of the core nations.  He sees the U.S. turn to empire as a psychological problem.  He writes that “the American Empire concocts national security worries from trifles as light as air to justify intervention for the psychic thrill of power.”  He believes that the American Empire is “endlessly at war everywhere on the planet to enjoy the juvenile thrill of domination and swagger,” . . . “for nothing more than the psychic gratification of domination.” 

The idea that imperialism is an irrational psychological disposition toward conquest without material benefits to the conquerors was formulated in the classic essay “Imperialism” by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, originally published in Germany in 1919.  But during the course of the twentieth century, anti-imperialist movements in Latin America and anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa emerged.  These movements understood imperialism as a practice, as a continuous series of measures designed to ensure the access of the global powers to raw materials, superexploited labor, and markets for surplus goods; continuous policies that promoted the underdevelopment of the colonized and neocolonized as they promoted the development of the core zone.  A mature understanding in our time requires appropriation of this insight into the economic logic and immorality of modern imperialism, formulated from the perspective of the victims of imperialist practice, who constitute the majority of humanity.

In not seeing the economic motives of empire, Fein reflects the limited consciousness of intellectuals of the North, who by and large do not see the relation between the economic development of the West and the conquest and colonization of vast regions of the world from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.  They share this limitation with George Washington, who in his Farewell Address of 1796, as Fein approvingly reports, expressed the conviction that the American Republic can expand its commerce while having little political involvement in the affairs of other nations.  The father of the nation should be forgiven for such limited understanding, inasmuch as he lived prior to the emergence of popular revolutionary movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, which lifted up political leaders and intellectuals capable of explaining the economic development of some nations on a foundation of conquest, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and superexploitation. 

A century and a half later, President Dwight Eisenhower, looking at the question from the practical point of view of U.S. economic interests, understood the connection between foreign affairs and the economy.  He declared in 1953, “Foreign policy should be based primarily on one consideration.  That consideration is the need for the U.S. to obtain certain raw materials to sustain its economy and, when possible, to preserve profitable foreign markets for our surpluses.  Out of this need grows the necessity for making certain that those areas of the world in which essential raw materials are produced are not only accessible to us, but their populations and governments are willing to trade with us on a friendly basis.”  For Fein, Ike’s precise and frank formulation is nothing more than the “specious orthodoxy” of the American Empire, which is irrationally driven by domination as an end in itself. 

Although Fein does not see the economic logic of imperialism, American Empire Before the Fall makes clear that empire has become too costly for the United States, politically and economically, and it therefore is not sustainable.  Moreover, Fein documents with great clarity that U.S militarist imperialist aggressions have been made politically possible through a persistent pattern of presidents lying to the Congress and to the people.   He provides persuasive evidence that that various presidents have withheld information from Congress in order to solicit Congressional support for war: Polk (Mexican-American War), Truman (Korean War), Johnson (Vietnam War and intervention in the Dominican Republic), Nixon (secret bombing of Cambodia), Clinton (Bosnia), and Bush 23 (Iraq War).  He further maintains that such conduct is an impeachable offense.  Imagine impeaching a president for something that really mattered, like launching an unconstitutional and illegal war!

Above and beyond the pattern of lying by presidents to justify particular wars, Fein maintains that the American Empire at its foundation is defended with the myth that the United States must defend democracy and human rights in the world in order to ensure international stability and access to resources, and this for the most part noble goal requires a global military presence.  Fein writes that the people have been indoctrinated into the orthodoxy of the American Empire, which maintains that “the United States has been obligated by divine Providence to make the world safe for democracy and freedom, and to crush every conceivable foreign danger before it germinates.” 

Fein further maintains that the national response to terrorism ought to be freed from the myths, distortions, and exaggerations of empire.  He maintains that international terrorism is a crime, not an act of war; international terrorists should be treated as criminals, not warriors or combatants.  He writes that “the terrorism threat can and should be defeated by an aggressive enforcement of the criminal law in federal civilian courts, coupled with Special Forces to eliminate terrorists who cannot be captured and brought to justice.”

Fein maintains that the restoration of the American Republic is the duty of every citizen.  He envisions the emergence of a new political leadership that is able to inspire the people to defend the Constitution.  In this he is entirely correct.

The new political leadership should base its appeal to the people on a national narrative that avoids the idealist errors of conservatives and progressives.  Although it ought to affirm the sacredness of the Charter Documents of the nation, the new leadership at the same time has to recognize the different economic reality of today’s world, defined by transnational corporations that operate with insufficient constraints; and it has to affirm the changed national values since the era of the Founding Fathers with respect to race, gender, and environment, without castigating the founders for being products of their time. 

The new leadership has to adopt an anti-imperialist platform as the only sustainable option for the nation, and it also has to formulate a realistic long-term comprehensive economic plan for the nation in a post-neocolonial world-system, a plan that weans the nation from the permanent war economy that has been integrally connected to imperialism.  Although opposing military presence in all regions of the planet, the new political leadership it has to support a strong military for self-defense and for defense of the national territory; and a strong, integrated law enforcement system that is able effectively counter the crimes of domestic and international terrorism, but in accordance with the due process principles of the Constitution.  With respect to possible threats to the security of citizens and the nation as a whole, it has to find a common-sense balance between naiveté and exaggeration. 

The new political leadership has to lead a process of change in the right way, in accordance with the Constitution and the law and with standards of reasoning and truth.  It has to explain to and teach the people, convoking them to the restoration of the Republic and the fulfillment of the American promise of democracy. 

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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). 

After the coronavirus pandemic exploded worldwide, Ari Friedlaender, a marine ecologist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz, had to abandon his fieldwork in Antarctica, where he was studying the effects of tourism and fishing on humpback whales. He was stressed, but after returning home Friedlaender realized the pandemic offered an unprecedented opportunity for similar studies of whales in nearby Monterey Bay. Lockdowns had dramatically reduced noisy boat traffic, which can stress marine life, and he and his colleagues were soon discussing how to investigate the whales’ response to the hiatus.

The study, which received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this week, is just one example of how wildlife scientists are now working to understand the impacts of what many are calling the “anthropause”—the dramatic slowdown in human activity caused by the pandemic. Some are tracking how fish, mammals, and even iguanas are reacting to steep declines in tourism. Others are pooling data on animal movement, gathered from GPS tracking devices and automated cameras, to probe large-scale responses to emptier roads and airports. In particular, the pause has created unique natural experiments, allowing researchers to compare how animals behaved before, during, and after the pandemic.

“A lot of people are coming together to ask really big, complex questions,” says Nicola Koper, a conservation biologist at the University of Manitoba.

Megastudies launch 

The International Bio-Logging Society, for example, is coordinating a large effort to assess how reduced vehicle, ship, and aircraft traffic is affecting animal behavior. More than 300 researchers have indicated they have relevant animal tracking data from 180 species of birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, and sharks across almost 300 study populations from all continents and oceans. “There is a gold mine of data,” says Christian Rutz of the University of St. Andrews. Among other things, researchers will be investigating whether animals changed their movement patterns during the hiatus—crossing roads more frequently, for example, or venturing out at unusual times, such as during daylight rather than just at night.

Koper, who wasn’t able to get to her field sites this spring because of the pandemic, has brought together a separate team of 16 researchers to explore the same kinds of questions for 85 bird species in Canada and the United States. Working with data from eBird, a citizen science project run by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, the researchers are examining bird communities in 95 U.S. and Canadian counties. One question they are asking is whether species known to be less tolerant of noise, such as yellow-rumped warblers, became more abundant around airports. And they are checking whether low-flying species became more common near roads, which might imply fewer collisions with cars.

Quick changes, and some surprises

The anthropause has prompted some researchers to quickly modify existing studies. In March, during the first week of Italy’s strict lockdown, ecologist Francesca Cagnacci of the Edmund Mach Foundation’s Research and Innovation Centre got special permission to visit field sites in the forests around Trentino, where she has been tracking deer and other animals with radio collars and a few camera traps. “I was very lucky because I was allowed to go out. My helpers could not,” she recalls.

The forests usually bustle with activity, including mountain bikers, hunters, and quarry trucks rumbling along the roads. Then, “all of a sudden—silence,” Cagnacci recalls. As she installed a few dozen additional automated cameras, Cagnacci saw something very unusual: deer and other animals wandering around during daylight. “I won’t forget this for my entire life,” she says.

Now that humans are again using the forests, Cagnacci is continuing to monitor her sites. One intriguing observation is that wildlife seems to be less active now than it was before the anthropause. This is the kind of hypothesis that could be tested with the larger database being assembled by the biologging society initiative, she says.

Other studies are also producing surprises, says Amanda Bates, an ecologist at Memorial University. She is helping synthesize the results of 50 studies of changing human activity conducted this year by more than 100 researchers. One observation that might not have been obvious: Reduced traffic doesn’t always mean quieter roads, if the fewer remaining vehicles are traveling faster. And some benefits of the hiatus have been greater than expected. For example, a study in Florida found a sizable benefit to loggerhead turtles from beach closures. Females usually lay eggs about 50% of the time that they crawl onto shore, when they’re not disturbed by people, dogs, bright lights, or other dangers. But during the beach closures the rate increased to 61%, says Justin Perrault, director of research for the Loggerhead Marinelife Center. Like other studies, this finding could help managers improve the outlook for wildlife, Bates says. “The lockdown has given us the capacity to find where we can optimize conservation.”.

In Chile, researchers have made novel sightings of rare species in cities. Conservation biologist Eduardo Silva-Rodríguez of the Austral University of Chile is part of a group that placed automated cameras in urban forests and university campuses. The snapshots included some surprises: a vulnerable wild cat called the güiña (Leopardus guigna) and endangered southern river otters (Lontra provocax) that had not previously been detected in urban areas. “This opens many questions,” Silva-Rodríguez says. Have the animals always been there? Or were they just visiting, perhaps because stray dogs that once scared them away had moved away as food scraps became less available? They plan to continue to monitor for these species after the partial lockdowns are lifted.

What happens when tourists disappear?

Many researchers are examining how the standstill in tourism is affecting wildlife at popular destinations, such as national parks and marine reserves. In Ecuador’s Galápagos Marine Reserve, Jon Witman of Brown University and colleagues have received a grant to study, among other things, whether the absence of tourists makes shy marine fish bolder, a behavioral change that could alter how the ecosystem functions. The reserve, where Witman has worked for 20 years, usually gets thousands of recreational divers each year. But the lockdown has caused a decline “unlike anything that would ever happen, short of a world war,” Witman says. He heads to the Galápagos next week—none too soon. “We’re chasing a fleeting moment,” he says. The team’s findings could eventually help reserve officials fine-tune management practices, Witman says, such as by figuring out how to best spread out divers to minimize disturbance to wildlife.

In the Bahamas, researchers are examining how the absence of tourists is affecting the diet and health of rock iguanas, a lizard. Visitors routinely feed the iguanas bread, meat, fruit, and vegetables, which had helped boost their population. But it’s not clear how the treats affected their health, and now the drop in “tourism feeding could have really profound effects,” says Susannah French, a physiological ecologist at Utah State University, Logan.

French has a new grant to work with a research team that hopes to sail to the Bahamas soon to join colleagues in studying the issue. They will assess iguana population numbers, weigh the animals, take blood samples, and check their gut microbiota. The data could help local officials better manage tourists once they return, says Chuck Knapp, a conservation biologist at the Shedd Aquarium who is on the team. “We are not looking to shut down this industry, we just want to ensure that it’s sustainable,” he says.

In the Society Islands of French Polynesia, researchers are trying to answer another complicated question: Are coral reefs facing more or fewer problems now that tourists aren’t around and hotels have gone dark? On one hand, local residents appear to be returning to subsistence fishing to make ends meet, note scientists working at the Moorea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research site. That could mean trouble for reefs, because the increased catches could include herbivorous fish that eat algae and help keep them from overgrowing and killing coral. At the same time, the lack of tourists in waterfront hotels could help the reefs if it means less nutrient pollution from wastewater, which stimulates algae growth. To clarify such trade-offs, a postdoc on the island has been gathering socioeconomic data and other researchers have just arrived, says ecologist Sally Holbrook of UC Santa Barbara. “The COVID-19 pandemic represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to better understand the links between humans and coral reefs.”

In Zambia’s national parks, where tourism is still shut down, an NSF grant is enabling Scott Creel, a conservation biologist at Montana State University, to double the number of GPS collars his team is placing on carnivores. That should enable the researchers to test ideas about how dominant carnivores, such as lions, cope differently with human-altered landscapes from less dominant carnivores, such as hyenas and wild dogs.

In the United States, researchers at the Institute for Bird Populations are focusing on bird behavior in Yosemite National Park and several other federal parks in Western states. For years the institute has collected data on breeding bird diversity and abundance—and also estimated noise levels within the parks, which fell silent when they closed to visitors for several weeks in March. “It was quite astounding,” says Chris Ray of the University of Colorado, Boulder. “This is fantastic data.”

Crossbows and microphones

Marine researchers, meanwhile, are turning to crossbows and microphones to understand how the pandemic is affecting ocean life. In Monterey Bay, Friedlaender and his colleagues took to the water in March and early May, when boat traffic was minimal, equipped with a special crossbow that allowed them to collect blubber samples from 45 humpback whales. When they can return to the lab, they’ll measure levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in the samples. Then, they plan to collect new samples over the next year, when boat traffic is expected to pick up. By comparing the samples, they hope to find a clear signal of just how much additional stress—if any—the boat noise creates for whales.

A project called the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE) is hoping to answer that kind of question on a larger scale. IQOE, which began in 2015, has been compiling data on underwater noise from the groups that operate large arrays of hydrophones—underwater microphones—and other listening devices. One goal is to assess the quieter background “soundscape” of the ocean, in which animals evolved their communication strategies, by taking advantage of local changes in noise, such as modification of shipping lanes or installation of wind farms. COVID-19 created a much larger perturbation: a weekslong dip in international ship traffic.

Now, IQOE hopes to gather as a big a picture as possible. “There has never before been a global network of hydrophones, so people will need to get accustomed to the idea of cooperating,” says Edward Urban, project director for IQOE, which will provide software for researchers to process data so that it can be compared in a global analysis later this year.

Scientists acknowledge that these unique scientific opportunities are coming at the expense of much human death and suffering. And they are hoping the anthropause really is a once-in-a-lifetime event. “It’s our sincere hope that no one ever gets a chance to study this again,” Witman says. “But incredible things are happening in natural ecosystems.”

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With reporting by Rasha Aridi.

Erik is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. 

这幅画是我对今天所看到的世界，也就是我去买菜，或者跑腿时看到的世界进行了长时间的仔细的视觉探索的结晶。

平凡的世界之所以看起来枯燥无味，只是因为我们已经习惯了，我们每天都能看到它，但平淡的世界从来都只是一个迷人的地方的欺骗性的简单外表，我们所做的一切几乎都有精神上的，和伦理上的意义。

很多时候，我们必须非常小心地观察日常世界才能感知这些东西，但有时它们会以一种明显的方式浮现出来。

想象一下，在一个原本看不见的人身上撒上灰尘，面具就是这样，权力斗争，和信仰现在以一种突出的象征宣告出来，让所有人都看到。

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你可以点击下面的链接阅读整篇文章的英文版，也可以用手机翻译

“The World That I See Today”: Sanity, Her Son, and the Credulous                                                

By Jordan Henderson, August 17, 2020

Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People. 

Trump, Biden, Pence, Harris, and their clownish sidekicks, Pompeo, Michelle Obama, et al., are performing daily under the umbrella’s shadowy protection. For The Umbrella People run a three-ring circus, and although their clowns pop out of separate tiny cars and, acting like enemies, squirt each other with water hoses to the audience’s delight, raucous laughter, and serious attentiveness, they are all part of the same show, working for the same bosses. 

Sadly, many people think this circus is the real world and that the clowns are not allied pimps serving the interests of their masters, but are real enemies.

The Umbrella People are the moguls who own the showtime studios – some call them the secret government, the deep-state, or the power elite. They run a protection racket, so I like to use a term that emphasizes their method of making sure the sunlight of truth never gets to those huddled under their umbrella. They produce and direct the daily circus that is the American Spectacle, the movie that is meant to entertain and distract the audience from the side show that continues outside the big top, the place where millions of vulnerable people are abused and killed.

And although the sideshow is the real main event, few pay attention since their eyes are fixed on the center ring were the spotlight directs their focus.

The French writer Guy Debord called this The Society of the Spectacle.

For many months now, all eyes have been directed to the Covid-19 propaganda show with Fauci and Gates, and their mainstream corporate media mouthpieces, striking thunderbolts in the storm to scare the unknowing audience into submission so the transformation of the Great Global Reset, led by the World Economic Forum, Wall Street, the International Monetary Fund, et al can proceed smoothly.

Now hearts are aflutter with excitement to see the war-loving Joe Biden boldly coming forth like Lazarus from the grave to announce his choice of a masked vice-presidential running mate who will echo his pronouncements.

And the star of the big top, the softly coiffured reality television emcee Trump, around whom the spectacle swirls, elicits outraged responses as he plays the part of the comical bad guy.

Punch and Judy indeed.

All the while the corporate mainstream media warn of grim viral milestones, election warnings, storms ahead!  The world as you know it is coming to an end, they remind us daily.

The latter meme contains a hint of truth since not just the world as we know it may be coming to an end, but the world itself, including human life, as the clowns initiate a nuclear holocaust while everyone is being entertained.

Meanwhile, as the circus rolls along, far away and out of mind, shit happens:

With more than 400 military bases equipped with nuclear weapons surrounding China, the United States military continues its encirclement of China and China enters a “state of siege.”

The U.S. conducts military exercises with the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group in the contested South China Sea. These U.S “maritime Air defense operation[s]” close to the Chinese mainland are a part of significantly increased U.S. military exercises in the area.

The U.S. Defense Secretary Esper announces that the U.S. is withdrawing troops from Germany but moving them closer to the Russian border to serve as a more effective deterrent against Russia.

Russia says it will regard any ballistic missile aimed at its territory as a nuclear attack and will respond in kind with nuclear weapons.

Although the U.S. is formally not at war with any African country, a new report reveals that the United States has special forces operating in 22 African countries with 29 bases and 6,000 troops, with a huge drone hub in Niger that cost 100 + million to build and is expected to have operating costs of more than $280 billion by 2024.

The U.S. continues its assault on Syria, aside from direct military operations, by building up Kurdish proxies in northeastern Syria to protect the oil fields that they are stealing from the Syrian government, a plan hatched long ago.  The U.S. says their strategy is to deny ISIS a valuable revenue stream.  The same ISIS they used to attack the Syrian government in a war of aggression.

A new document exposes the U.S. plan to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a traditional U.S. regime change and CIA front organization.

Meanwhile, in Belarus, a place most Americans can’t find on a map, there is another color “revolution” underway.

Continuing its war against Iran and Venezuela by other means, the Trump administration seizes Iranian tankers carrying fuel to Venezuela.

“Something will happen with Venezuela.  That’s all I can tell you.  Something will be happening with Venezuela,” said Trump in a July interview with Noticias Telemundo.

And of course the Palestinians are left to suffer and die as Israel is supported in its despotic policies in the Middle East.

The list goes on and on as the U.S. under Trump continues to wage war by multiple means around the world. But his followers see him as peaceful president because these wars are waged through sanctions, special operations, drones, third parties, etc.

But back in the center ring, the two presidential clown candidates keep the audience entertained, as they shoot water at each other. Trump, who now presides over all the events just listed, and Biden, who enthusiastically supported the American wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.

But then the followers of Obama/Biden also see their champions as peaceful leaders.  This is even more absurd.

Don’t you like farce?

Besides being a rabid advocate for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a senator, Biden, as Vice-President under Obama for eight years, seconded and promoted all of Obama’s wars that were wrapped in “humanitarian” propaganda to evade international law and keep his liberal supporters quiet.

From Bush II, an outright cowboy war-wager who used America’s large military forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretensions – i.e. lies, Obama and his sidekick Biden learned to arm and finance thousands of Islamic jihadists, run by the CIA and U.S. special forces, to do the job in more circumspect ways. They expanded and grew The United States Africa Command (U.S. AFRICOM) throughout Africa. They agreed to a $1 trillion upgrade of U.S nuclear weapons (that continues under Trump). They disarmed their followers, who, in any case, wished to look the other way. Out of sight and out of mind, Obama/Biden continued the “war on terror” with drones, private militias, color revolutions, etc. They waged war on six-seven – who knows how many – countries.

An exception to the more secretive wars was the Obama administration’s openly savage assault on Libya in 2011 under the lies of an imperial moral legitimacy. In order to save you, we will destroy you, which is what they did to Libya, a country still in ruins and chaos.  Their equally blood-thirsty Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let the cat out of the bag when she laughed and gleefully applauded the brutal murder of Libya’s leader Moammar Gaddafi with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” Yippee!

After Libya was destroyed and so many killed in an illegal and immoral war financed with $2 billion dollars from the America treasury, Joseph Biden bragged that the U.S. didn’t lose a single life and such a war was a “prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward.”

Biden was Obama’s front man on Iraq, the war he voted for in 2003, and wrote an op ed article in 2006 calling for the breakup of the country into three parts, Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish.

When Obama launched 48 cruise missiles and more than ten thousand tons of bombs on Syria in 2016, killing over a hundred civilians, a third of them children, V.P. Biden stood proud and strong in support of the action.

When the U.S. launched the bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014, Biden was of course in agreement.

But we are told that Trump and Biden are arch-enemies. One of them wants war and the other wants peace.

How many Americans will vote for these clowns this year? They are really front men for The Umbrella People, the money people who use the CIA and other undercover forces to carry out their organized crime activities.

As C.S Lewis said in his preface to The Screwtape Letters:

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint . . .. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump received 129 million votes out of 157 million registered American voters eager to believe that this system is not built on imperial war making by both parties.

Perhaps that’s a generous assessment. Maybe many of those voters believe in the U.S.A.’s “manifest destiny” to rule the world and wage war in God’s name.  I hope not. But if so, you can expect a big turnout on November 3, 2020.

In any case, It’s quite a circus, but these clowns aren’t funny.  They are dangerous.

“But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns
Don’t bother they’re here”

Don’t you like farce?

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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/

For the Trump administration’s senior officials, it’s been open season on bashing China. If you need an example, think of the president’s blame game about “the invisible Chinese virus” as it spreads wildly across the U.S.

When it comes to China, in fact, the ever more virulent criticism never seems to stop.

Between the end of June and the end of July, four members of his cabinet vied with each other in spewing anti-Chinese rhetoric. That particular spate of China bashing started when FBI Director Christopher Wray described Chinese President Xi Jinping as the successor to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It was capped by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s clarion call to U.S. allies to note the “bankrupt” Marxist-Leninist ideology of China’s leader and the urge to “global hegemony” that goes with it, insisting that they would have to choose “between freedom and tyranny.” (Forget which country on this planet actually claims global hegemony as its right.)

At the same time, the Pentagon deployed its aircraft carriers and other weaponry ever more threateningly in the South China Sea and elsewhere in the Pacific. The question is: What lies behind this upsurge in Trump administration China baiting? A likely answer can be found in the president’s blunt statement in a July interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News that “I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose.”

The reality is that, under Donald Trump, the United States is indeed losing to China in two important spheres. As the FBI’s Wray put it,

“In economic and technical terms [China] is already a peer competitor of the United States… in a very different kind of [globalized] world.”

In other words, China is rising and the U.S. is falling. Don’t just blame Trump and his cronies for that, however, as this moment has been a long time coming.

Facts speak for themselves. Nearly unscathed by the 2008-2009 global recession, China displaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy in August 2010. In 2012, with $3.87 trillion worth of imports and exports, it overtook the U.S. total of $3.82 trillion, elbowing it out of a position it had held for 60 years as the number one cross-border trading nation worldwide. By the end of 2014, China’s gross domestic product, as measured by purchasing power parity, was $17.6 trillion, slightly exceeding the $17.4 trillion of the United States, which had been the globe’s largest economy since 1872.

In May 2015, the Chinese government released a Made in China 2025 plan aimed at rapidly developing 10 high-tech industries, including electric cars, next-generation information technology, telecommunications, advanced robotics, and artificial intelligence. Other major sectors covered in the plan included agricultural technology, aerospace engineering, the development of new synthetic materials, the emerging field of biomedicine, and high-speed rail infrastructure. The plan was aimed at achieving 70% self-sufficiency in high-tech industries and a dominant position in such global markets by 2049, a century after the founding of the People’s Republic of China 

Semiconductors are crucial to all electronic products and, in 2014, the government’s national integrated circuit industry development guidelines set a target: China was to become a global leader in semiconductors by 2030. In 2018, the local chip industry moved up from basic silicon packing and testing to higher value chip design and manufacturing. The following year, the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association noted that, while America led the world with nearly half of global market share, China was the main threat to its position because of huge state investments in commercial manufacturing and scientific research.

By then, the U.S. had already fallen behind China in just such scientific and technological research. A study by Nanjing University’s Qingnan Xie and Harvard University’s Richard Freeman noted that between 2000 and 2016, China’s share of global publications in the physical sciences, engineering, and math quadrupled, exceeding that of the U.S.

In 2019, for the first time since figures for patents were compiled in 1978, the U.S. failed to file for the largest number of them. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, China filed applications for 58,990 patents and the United States 57,840. In addition, for the third year in a row, the Chinese high-tech corporation Huawei Technologies Company, with 4,144 patents, was well ahead of U.S.-based Qualcomm (2,127). Among educational institutions, the University of California maintained its top rank with 470 published applications, but Tsinghua University ranked second with 265. Of the top five universities in the world, three were Chinese.

The Neck-and-Neck Race in Consumer Electronics

By 2019, the leaders in consumer technology in America included Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft; in China, the leaders were Alibaba (founded by Jack Ma), Tencent (Tengxun in Chinese), Xiaomi, and Baidu. All had been launched by private citizens. Among the US companies, Microsoft was established in 1975, Apple in 1976, Amazon in 1994, and Google in September 1998. The earliest Chinese tech giant, Tencent, was established two months after Google, followed by Alibaba in 1999, Baidu in 2000, and Xiaomi, a hardware producer, in 2010. When China first entered cyberspace in 1994, its government left intact its policy of controlling information through censorship by the Ministry of Public Security.

In 1996, the country established a high-tech industrial development zone in Shenzhen, just across the Pearl River from Hong Kong, the first of what would be a number of special economic zones. From 2002 on, they would begin attracting Western multinational corporations keen to take advantage of their tax-free provisions and low-wage skilled workers. By 2008, such foreign companies accounted for 85% of China’s high-tech exports.

Shaken by an official 2005 report that found serious flaws in the country’s innovation system, the government issued a policy paper the following year listing 20 mega-projects in nanotechnology, high-end generic microchips, aircraft, biotechnology, and new drugs. It then focused on a bottom-up approach to innovation, involving small start-ups, venture capital, and cooperation between industry and universities, a strategy that would take a few years to yield positive results.

In January 2000, less than 2% of Chinese used the Internet. To cater to that market, Robin Li and Eric Xu set up Baidu in Beijing as a Chinese search engine. By 2009, in its competition with Google China, a subsidiary of Google operating under government censorship, Baidu garnered twice the market share of its American rival as Internet penetration leapt to 29%.

In the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global financial meltdown, significant numbers of Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs returned from Silicon Valley to play an important role in the mushrooming of high-tech firms in a vast Chinese market increasingly walled off from U.S. and other Western corporations because of their unwillingness to operate under government censorship.

Soon after Xi Jinping became president in March 2013, his government launched a campaign to promote “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation” using state-backed venture capital. That was when Tencent came up with its super app WeChat, a multi-purpose platform for socializing, playing games, paying bills, booking train tickets, and so on.

Jack Ma’s e-commerce behemoth Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, raising a record $25 billion with its initial public offering. By the end of the decade, Baidu had diversified into the field of artificial intelligence, while expanding its multiple Internet-related services and products. As the search engine of choice for 90% of Chinese Internet users, more than 700 million people, the company became the fifth most visited website in cyberspace, its mobile users exceeding 1.1 billion.

Xiaomi Corporation would release its first smartphone in August 2011. By 2014, it had forged ahead of its Chinese rivals in the domestic market and developed its own mobile phone chip capabilities. In 2019, it sold 125 million mobile phones, ranking fourth globally. By the middle of 2019, China had 206 privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, besting the U.S. with 203.

Among the country’s many successful entrepreneurs, the one who particularly stood out was Jack Ma, born Ma Yun in 1964. Though he failed to get a job at a newly opened Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in his home city of Hangzhou, he did finally gain entry to a local college after his third attempt, buying his first computer at the age of 31. In 1999, he founded Alibaba with a group of friends. It would become one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. On his 55th birthday, he was the second richest man in China with a net worth of $42.1 billion.

Born in the same year as Ma, his American counterpart, Jeff Bezos, gained a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University. He would found Amazon.com in 1994 to sell books online, before entering e-commerce and other fields. Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing company, would become the globe’s largest. In 2007, Amazon released a handheld reading device called the Kindle. Three years later, it ventured into making its own television shows and movies. In 2014, it launched Amazon Echo, a smart speaker with a voice assistant named Alexa that let its owner instantly play music, control a Smart home, get information, news, weather, and more. With a net worth of $145.4 billion in 2019, Bezos became the richest person on the planet.

Deploying an artificial intelligence inference chip to power features on its e-commerce sites, Alibaba categorized a billion product images uploaded by vendors to its e-commerce platform daily and prepared them for search and personalized recommendations to its customer base of 500 million. By allowing outside vendors to use its platform for a fee, Amazon increased its items for sale to 350 million — with 197 million people accessing Amazon.com each month.

China also led the world in mobile payments with America in sixth place. In 2019, such transactions in China amounted to $80.5 trillion. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the authorities encouraged customers to use mobile payment, online payment, and barcode payment to avoid the risk of infection. The projected total for mobile payments: $111.1 trillion. The corresponding figures for the United States at $130 billion look puny by comparison.

In August 2012, the founder of the Beijing-based ByteDance, 29-year-old Zhang Yiming, broke new ground in aggregating news for its users. His product, Toutiao (Today’s Headlines) tracked users’ behavior across thousands of sites to form an opinion of what would interest them most, and then recommended stories.

By 2016, it had already acquired 78 million users, 90% of them under 30.

In September 2016, ByteDance launched a short-video app in China called Douyin that gained 100 million users within a year. It would soon enter a few Asian markets as TikTok. In November 2017, for $1 billion, ByteDance would purchase Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based Chinese social network app for video creation, messaging, and live broadcasting, and set up an office in California.

Zhang merged it into TikTok in August 2018 to give his company a larger footprint in the U.S. and then spent nearly $1 billion to promote TikTok as the platform for sharing short-dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. It has been downloaded by 165 million Americans and driven the Trump administration to distraction. A Generation Z craze, in April 2020 it surpassed two billion downloads globally, eclipsing U.S. tech giants. That led President Trump (no loser he!) and his top officials to attack it and he would sign executive orders attempting to ban both TikTok and WeChat from operating in the U.S. or being used by Americans (unless sold to a U.S. tech giant). Stay tuned.

Huawei’s Octane-Powered Rise

But the biggest Chinese winner in consumer electronics and telecommunications has been Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies Company, the country’s first global multinational. It has become a pivot point in the geopolitical battle between Beijing and Washington.

Huawei (in Chinese, it means “splendid achievement”) makes phones and the routers that facilitate communications around the world. Established in 1987, its current workforce of 194,000 operates in 170 countries. In 2019, its annual turn-over was $122.5 billion. In 2012, it outstripped its nearest rival, the 136-year-old Ericsson Telephone Corporation of Sweden, to become the world’s largest supplier of telecommunications equipment with 28% of market share globally. In 2019, it forged ahead of Apple to become the second largest phone maker after Samsung.

Several factors have contributed to Huawei’s stratospheric rise: its business model, the personality and decision-making mode of its founder Ren Zhengfei, state policies on high-tech industry, and the firm’s exclusive ownership by its employees.

Born in 1944 in Guizhou Province, Ren Zhengfei went to Chongqing University and then joined a military research institute during Mao Zedong’s chaotic Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He was demobilized in 1983 when China cut back on its engineering corps. But the army’s slogan, “fight and survive,” stayed with him. He moved to the city of Shenzhen and worked in the country’s infant electronics sector for four years, saving enough to co-found what would become the tech giant Huawei. He focused on research and development, adapting technologies from Western firms, while his new company received small orders from the military and later substantial R&D (research and development) grants from the state to develop GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) phones and other products. Over the years, the company produced telecommunications infrastructure and commercial products for third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) smartphones.

As China’s high-tech industry surged, Huawei’s fortunes rose. In 2010, it hired IBM and Accenture PLC to design the means of managing networks for telecom providers. In 2011, the company hired the Boston Consulting Group to advise it on foreign acquisitions and investments.

Like many successful American entrepreneurs, Ren has given top priority to the customer and, in the absence of the usual near-term pressure to raise income and profits, his management team has invested $15 to 20 billion annually in research and development work. That helps explain how Huawei became one of the globe’s five companies in the fifth generation (5G) smartphone business, topping the list by shipping out 6.9 million phones in 2019 and capturing 36.9% of the market. On the eve of the release of 5G phones, Ren revealed that Huawei had a staggering 2,570 5G patents.

So it was unsurprising that in the global race for 5G, Huawei was the first to roll out commercial products in February 2019. One hundred times faster than its 4G predecessors, 5G tops out at 10 gigabits per second and future 5G networks are expected to link a huge array of devices from cars to washing machines to door bells.

Huawei’s exponential success has increasingly alarmed a Trump administration edging ever closer to conflict with China. Last month, Secretary of State Pompeo described Huawei as “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang.”

In May 2019, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American firms from supplying components and software to Huawei on national security grounds. A year later, it imposed a ban on Huawei buying microchips from American companies or using U.S.-designed software. The White House also launched a global campaign against the installation of the company’s 5G systems in allied nations, with mixed success.

Ren continued to deny such charges and to oppose Washington’s moves, which have so far failed to slow his company’s commercial advance. Its revenue for the first half of 2020, $65 billion, was up by 13.1% over the previous year.

From tariffs on Chinese products and that recent TikTok ban to slurs about the “kung flu” as the Covid-19 pandemic swept America, President Trump and his team have been expressing their mounting frustration over China and ramping up attacks on an inexorably rising power on the global stage. Whether they know it or not, the American century is over, which doesn’t mean that nothing can be done to improve the U.S. position in the years to come.

Setting aside Washington’s belief in the inherent superiority of America, a future administration could stop hurling insults or trying to ban enviably successful Chinese tech firms and instead emulate the Chinese example by formulating and implementing a well-planned, long-term high-tech strategy. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear, the very idea of planning is not a concept available to the “very stable genius” presently in the White House.

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Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, among many other works, of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. He is currently researching a sequel to that book, which would cover several interlinked subjects, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Halting Our Descent into Tyranny: Defeating the Global Elite’s COVID-19 Coup

By Robert J. Burrowes, August 19, 2020

As many authors have documented, the global elite is conducting a coup to take complete control of our lives. It is doing this by using the ‘virus’ to terrorize the human population into believing that we will ‘catch’ Covid-19 if we do not submit to draconian restrictions on our rights and freedoms. And while the elite is conducting its coup, the most important challenges that confront our world are being largely ignored.

Keep It Real: “Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher”. Review of Diana Johnstone’s Book

By Rick Sterling, August 19, 2020

One theme running through the book is the need to reach out and engage with regular people. She recounts her experiences opposing the US war on Vietnam.  Johnstone and her allies launched a campaign to educate and engage with regular Minnesotans, to explain what was happening in Vietnam and why the war should be opposed. She helped organize teams of students and teachers who went door to door in Minneapolis.

The Great Election Fraud: Will Our Freedoms Survive Another Election?

By John W. Whitehead, August 19, 2020

And so it begins again, the never-ending, semi-delusional, train-wreck of an election cycle in which the American people allow themselves to get worked up into a frenzy over the misguided belief that the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president. For the next three months, Americans will be dope-fed billions of dollars’ worth of political propaganda aimed at keeping them glued to their television sets and persuading them that 1) their votes count and 2) electing the right candidate will fix everything that is wrong with this country.

Ten Years of Planetary Movement for Mother Earth!

By Prof. Claudia von Werlhof, August 19, 2020

The truth to be known are the facts about the system we live in, which in itself is based on different forms of direct and structural violence against life itself, against nature and against human beings! This truth is a secret and thus it has become a taboo to speak about these facts. Whenever this taboo is violated, we have observed, there is always a prompt reaction to stop any further discussion of it.

Lebanon: Pearl on the New Silk Road or Zone of Dark Age Chaos

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, August 19, 2020

In the weeks surrounding the Lebanon disaster, Iran found herself the target of a vicious sequence of attacks as arson and explosions were unleashed beginning with the June 26 explosion at the Khojir Missile production complex, the June 30 explosion at a medical clinic killing 19, a July 2 explosion at the Natanz nuclear facility which set Iran’s centrifuge production schedule back by months and the July 15 fires at the Bushehr Aluminum plant. Additionally, and the UAE experienced its own anomalous fires which ravaged one of the most important markets in Dubai (luckily empty due to Covid-19) on August 5.

Video: The Great Vaccine Debate! Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. vs Alan Dershowitz

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Prof. Alan Dershowitz, August 18, 2020

Don’t miss this historic debate between Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. With the current COVID crisis dominating headlines at national and local levels, the topic of vaccines is now front and center.

The Hunger Crisis in Guatemala

By Yanis Iqbal, August 18, 2020

A report released by Oxfam in July 2020 states, “COVID-19 is deepening the hunger crisis in the world’s hunger hotspots and creating new epicentres of hunger across the globe. By the end of the year 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself.” Like other regions in the world, Latin America, too, is set to witness the intensification of an already-existing hunger crisis with the number of people facing severe food insecurity increasing from 4.3 million in 2019 to 16 million in 2020, an increase of 269%.

Agenda ID2020 of the “One World Order”: The 101 to Understanding Its Implications

By Peter Koenig and Dr. Vernon Coleman, August 17, 2020

Agenda ID2020 – is hardly mentioned by any media, let alone the mainstream. Agenda ID2020, if carried out, is the ultimate control by a small elite – of the One World Order (OWO), also called the New World Order (NWO) – over the world population. It is a mechanism that would allow controlling every movement of each one of the 7-plus billion people of planet earth, including everyone’s health records, cash flows, bank accounts, as well as our behavior in this ultra-controlled society – which I refrain from calling civilization anymore.

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At a time when the European Union was extremely quick to mobilize and condemn Alexander Lukashenko’s presidential re-election and is preparing a sanctions package against Belarus, disinterest and appeasement towards Turkish aggression against member states Greece and Cyprus continues unabated. Many are questioning why the EU was so easily able to mobilize to condemn Belarus, a non-EU member, but after years of Turkey violating Cypriot maritime space and being on the verge of war with Greece, the European bloc remains indifferent to their own members facing hostility from a non-EU member state.

The EU already has a reputation of being Germany’s “Fourth Reich” in Greece. This is the same rhetoric used by EU sceptics all across Europe, with renowned historian and journalist, Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Mail what many Europeans were feeling during the economic crisis in previous years:

“We are witnessing […] the economic colonisation of Europe by stealth by the Germans. Once, it would have taken an invading military force to topple the leadership of a European nation. Today, it can be done through sheer economic pressure.” Heffer continues by saying that the “rise of the Fourth Reich” stems from Germany “using the financial crisis to conquer Europe” as its policies “would make Europe effectively a German empire.”

Germany and Turkey are both massive countries of 83 million and 82 million people respectively. As they both have large populations, they are therefore energy hungry, but neither have their own gas and oil deposits to speak of, and completely rely on external sources to meet their energy demands. It is on this basis that the German-Turkish alliance has been strong for hundreds of years.

With Europe industrializing in the 1800’s, the German Confederacy and the Austro-Hungarians were finding themselves catching up to the British and the French as they did not possess colonies like their counterparts. Rather, their need for cheap resources came from the Ottoman Empire who at the time still ruled over large swathes of the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa. The vast Ottoman Empire directly bordered the Austro-Hungarians, meaning there was an unhindered path between the German states and the riches of the Middle East without Russian, British or French influence. However, this would change as Greece, with assistance from the Russians, British and French, would achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1822 with the proclamation of the Hellenic Republic, the first country ever to achieve independence from the Ottomans. The German funding, arming and training of the Ottomans was not enough to prevent Greece’s independence, creating a threat to German access to Ottoman resources, and over the next century the Serbs and Bulgarians would also achieve their independence, completely severing German access to Ottoman resources as pro-Russian/British statelets were being established between the two entities.

However, the German-Turkish alliance would continue even after World War I with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 that replaced the Ottoman Empire. The alliance would continue even with Nazi Germany, when Turkey signed a Friendship Treaty on June 18, 1941. After the war, millions of Turks would migrate to West Germany to fill a labor void, and today account for about 5% of the population, a huge number that is enough to influence German policy and public opinion.

It is with this long history that Germany to this day continues to appease Turkey’s aggression against Greece and Cyprus despite the two being EU member states. As Matthias Warnig, the Chief Executive Officer of Nord Stream 2, himself says, Germany will become Europe’s main energy hub once the pipeline connecting “the world’s largest gas reserves in northern Russia to consumers in Europe” is complete. Germany remains defiant despite U.S. threats of sanctions to complete this project.

During his recent working visit to Moscow, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said at a joint press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, that

“sanctions between partners are, of course, the wrong way. Ultimately, where we draw our energy from remains our sovereign decision. No country has the right to dictate Europe’s energy policy through threats. It will fail.”

By Germany vetoing EU condemnation against Turkish aggression on Greece and Cyprus just days ago, Berlin is guiding Turkey towards a conflict with Greece. For the Germans, such a conflict would be beneficial as it would end the EastMed pipeline project between Israel, Cyprus and Greece that is favored by the U.S., ensuring that Germany remains the sole energy hub of Europe. For the Turks, as it is energy starved, its provocations against Greece and Cyprus is in the hope of either starting a military conflict, or forcing the Greeks and Cypriots to surrender some of its continental shelf rights so that it can access rich deposits of gas and oil in the Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. Germany’s appeasement towards Turkey is a mutually beneficial exercise for both countries to secure their energy interests.

In fact, the disinterest in Washington and Berlin to alleviate threats of war between Greece and Turkey has been noticed by Russia, with Moscow even offering to mediate the crisis if called upon by Athens and Ankara. However, neither have taken up the Russian offer, with Turkey remaining isolated in its demands, not able to secure open German support but has at least Germany’s silence and indifference, while Greece and Cyprus will be relying on France and other regional states to try and secure its interests. Regardless, Berlin’s insistence on not supporting fellow EU member states against hostility from non-member states ensures that its own interests can be served. This demonstrates that for Germany, the EU is a non-violent mechanism to control much of the continent and that true European solidarity does not exist.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Belarusian President Lukashenko’s announcement that presidential elections will follow a planned constitutional referendum possibly paves the way for a “phased leadership transition” in the Color Revolution-beleaguered former Soviet Republic, one which opens up an opportunity for Russia to protect its national interests if a friendly candidate like Viktor Babariko comes out on top or ends up sharing power with a Western-friendly one like Sergei Tikhanovsky.

As it was expected, the ‘historic’ UAE-Israeli peace deal did not contribute to the stability in the Middle East. Instead, the situation has been slowly, but steadily moving towards a larger confrontation in the region.

Immediately after the announcement of the US-sponsored peace deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that his country is not going to fulfill one of its key provisions – the suspension of the annexation of West Bank territories. The prime minister emphasized that the annexation plan was just delayed, but not suspended.

“There is no change to my plan to extend sovereignty, our sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, in full coordination with the United States,” Netanyahu said adding that “Israel will have comprehensive peace agreements with other Arab countries without returning to the 1967 borders.”

This unfortunate, but expected statement goes fully in the framework of the Israeli regional policy and contradicts position of the US-sponsored deal reached with the UAE. In particular, Crown Prince Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed emphasized that “it was agreed to stop Israel’s annexation of the Palestinian lands.”

The Israeli actions strengthened the already existing controversy over the deal and on August 15-16, the situation escalated in the Gaza Strip. According to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Palestinian protesters with explosives tried to approach the security fence and then Palestinian forces launched at least 2 rockets at southern Israel. In its own turn, IDF aircraft conducted a series of airstrikes on what Tel Aviv described as Hamas targets.

If the Israeli leadership keeps its course on the annexation of the West Bank areas, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will expectedly escalate, and even possibly expand further. For example, in this scenario, an escalation could be expected in the area of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights and on the Lebanese-Israeli contact line.

On August 14, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah already declared that the movement “will not remain silent on the crime of the bombing the Port of Beirut if it is proven that Israel is behind it.” According to Nasrallah, Hezbollah would wait for results of an investigation into the Beirut port explosion and if it turns out to be an act of sabotage by Israel then it would “pay an equal price”.

The August 4 blast in the port of Beirut is still surrounded by mystery and uncertainties, and many sources, including the top US leadership, still consider the possibility that the tragedy was caused by some kind of ‘attack’. In this event, the main suspect is Israel, which has always been interested in the destabilization of neighboring Arab states to secure own dominance in the region.

Tensions are also growing between the United States and Iran. On August 14, the Department of Justice announced that US forces have seized some 1.116m barrels of Iranian fuel aboard 4 ships headed for Venezuela. The seizure came amid increasing attacks on US forces and facilities from pro-Iranian and anti-US armed groups in Iraq.

On the evening of August 16, a rocket targeted the Green Zone of Iraq’s capital Baghdad, which houses government buildings and foreign missions. The strike led to no casualties. Just a few hours earlier, the pro-Iranian armed group Ashab al-Kahf released a video showing an improvised explosive device attack on a US equipment convoy in the Anbar area.

The group claimed that the convoy was fully destroyed.

On August 15, two rockets targeted the biggest US military base in Iraq – Camp Taji. The base is located north of Baghdad. On the same day, a convoy carrying logistical supplies for the U.S.-led coalition was targeted on the highway between Dhi Qar and Basrah in southern Iraq. The attack was conducted by another pro-Iranian group, Usbat al-Tha’ireen. Pro-US sources denied any casualties as a result of the attack. These were just the most recent in about two dozen various attacks on US-affiliated targets in Iraq during the past few weeks.

If the US and Iran continue the current confrontational course, it is expected that the number and intensity of attacks in Iraq will increase boosting the chances of an open confrontation between the US and Iranian-led forces.

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On February 14, 2005, an explosion rocked Beirut killing and injuring hundred of people chief among them the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik al-Hariri. The West was quick to blame Hezbollah and Syria. In 2006, Israel and its tanks rolled into Lebanon.

15 years later, on August 4^th, another explosion rocked Lebanon. This time, the fingers were again pointed at Hezbollah and its ‘Iran backers’. And once again, Israeli tanks crossed into Lebanon.

After years of investigating the first incident, on Tuesday, August 18, 2020, Syria and Hezbollah were acquitted of involvement in the 2005 explosion. Judges at a U.N.-backed tribunal said Tuesday that there was no evidence the leadership of the Hezbollah militant group and Syria were involved in the 2005 suicide truck bomb assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.”

Yet reading the Western media headlines, one would think that the judge had found Hezbollah guilty. Just as the most recent explosion was blamed on Hezbollah. But what would Hezbollah gain from such horrific acts?  If not Hezbollah, ‘cui bono’? The answer is simple. Proving it is not.

The 1967 war resulted in the exponential expansion of Israeli water sources including the  control of the Golan “Heights” (also referred to as the Syrian Golan). For decades, Syrian Golan and the return of its control to Syria had posed a major obstacle to the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations. Israel’s water demands make it virtually impossible to accommodate this process. In fact, even with full control of the Golan, Israel’s water crisis in 2000 were so acute that it prompted Israel to turn to Turkey for water purchase.

Importantly, Syria’s presence in Lebanon since the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 played a crucial role in hindering Israel’s never-ending water demands. Although the 1955 Johnston Plan (under the auspices of the Eisenhower administration) proposed diverting water from Lebanon’s Litani River into Lake Kinneret, it was not officially formulated, though it remained an attractive prospect. In 1982, Israeli forces established the frontline of their security zone in Lebanon along the Litani. Numerous reports alleged that Israel was diverting large quantities of Litani water.

On June 6, 1982, Israel advanced into Lebanon. However, the Syrian army halted the Israeli army advance in the battle of Sultan Yakub and the battle of Ain Zahalta. Sharon’s plan to conquer all of Lebanon and destroy Syria as a military power was thwarted. In reviewing the book and the battles, the famous scholar and activist, Israel Shahak, opined that “the principal purpose of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was destruction of the Syrian Army”[i].

A 1987 book by Col. Emmanuel Wald of the Israeli General Staff entitled “The Ruse of the Broken Vessels: The Twilight of Israeli Military Might (1967-1982) reveals the aims of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the month of pre-planning that had gone into it.  Wald writes that Ariel Sharon’s master plan codenamed “Oranim” was to defeat the Syrian troops deployed in the Bekaa Valley all the way to the district of Baalbek in North of Lebanon. According to Wald, “during the first days, it was quietly approved by the U.S.”.

Sharon’s plans were put in the backburner. Though the urgency of the successful implantation of the plan was not lost on Israelis; perhaps made even more urgent in the face of the 1991 Lebanese-Syrian Treaty of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Coordination .  The treaty was a challenge to Israel and its diversion of water and annexation.  When Syria replaced Israel as the dominant power in southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israeli fears grew that Syrian success in controlling the Golan and by extension, Lake Kinneret, would have a devastating effect on Israel.

Washington, always ready to serve Israel, passed the Syrian Accountability Act and the Lebanon Sovereignty Restoration Act.  Without any hesitation to investigate the explosion, Washington and the West did not hesitate to place the blame on Syria and Hezbollah. Much to the delight of The Washington Institute, the pro-Israel think tank, the United States implemented the Act which in addition to sanctions, called for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.   In 2006, the deck was cleared for Israel to attack Lebanon.

Although the Tribunal found no ties to Syria or Hezbollah leadership, it did convict Salim Ayyash –  a Hezbollah member. The question is, was Ayyash a rogue member acting on his own or was he a member of Israel’s “Arab Platoon” (Ronen Bergman, 2018)[ii].

The Arab Platoon a clandestine commando unit whose members operated disguised as Arabs, were trained fighters who could operate inside ‘enemy’ lines, gather information, and carry out sabotage and targeted killings. Their training included commando tactics and explosives, but also intensive study of Islam and Arab customs. Nicknamed the “Mistaravim” (the name by which the Jews went in some Arab countries), they practiced Judaism but in all other aspects were Arabs.

It is not clear to this writer if Ayyash was a Hezbollah member or a Mistaravim. However, it is evident that neither Syria, Lebanon, nor Hezbollah benefited from the attack.

Curiously, the initial tribunal date coincided with the Lebanon port explosion which devasted the country, even making it appear as if the explosion and the delay in the hearing would benefit Hezbollah. Undoubtedly, the findings of the Tribunal must have been very disappointing for Israel and its backers who had placed the blame on Hezbollah and Syrian leadership. It may be reassuring for some and worrying for others that the FBI is in Beirut investigating. FBI has managed to build quite a reputation for cover ups.

Beirut has been devastated. And as with 2006, every foe is out to grab a part of this beautiful country. During the 2006 war, while Israel bombed Lebanon, Carlyle profited greatly – as did the Saudis, the U.S., and of course, Israeli. The systematic destruction of Lebanon translated into significant opportunity for the Carlyle Group and with the ‘crisis, they announced a $1.3 billion fund for investment in the region. They were not alone. The rush was on. The big investment banks — Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers – all increased their presence in the region. Israel, the perpetrator as the benefactor, received an increase of USD 500 million additional in aid package from the U.S. in September of the same year (Ynet news).

With millions of funds from  CIA/NED spent in Lebanon over the past few years (NED 2018, etc.), the country is ripe for its enemies to bend it to their will.   Clearly, this would not benefit Hezbollah, Iran, or Lebanon.   Fingers have also been pointed at Israel for being the culpit.  It may take several years for the truth to come out – and be proven.  At the end of the day though, cui bono?

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Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on US foreign policy.

Notes

[i] Sahak, Israel.  Israel Considers War With Syria as It Ponders 1982 Invasion of Lebanon,The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (September 30, 1992).

[ii] Ronen Bergman.  Rise And Kill First; The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.  P. 24. Random House 2018

The verdict was finally delivered Aug. 18 by presiding Judge David Re, of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), based near The Hague in The Netherlands. The trial, which began in 2014 and cost about $1 billion, found that there was no direct evidence implicating the leadership of Hezbollah, or of the Syrian Arab Republic in the attack which killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005. 

Salim Ayyash was found guilty of conspiracy to commit a terrorist act, killing Rafik Hariri, murdering 21 others, and attempting to murder 226 more in the suicide car bombing; however, his whereabouts remain unknown. Evidence was presented that Ayyash had possession of one of the six cell phones which were used by the assassination squad. Three other defendants: Hussein Hassan Oneissi, Assad Hassan Sabra, and Hassan Habib Merhi were acquitted by the STL.

Hezbollah has consistently denied any involvement in the event. However, it was widely assumed that the STL would blame Hezbollah or Syria.  When Rafik Hariri was murdered in 2005, many blamed Israel.

Reactions to the STL verdict

Lebanese President Michel Aoun welcomed the verdict of STL as an ‘achievement of justice’.  Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of Rafik Hariri, said he accepted the verdict.

Who killed Rafik Hariri?

Patrick Seale wrote Feb. 23, 2005, in “The Guardian”, that Israel’s ambition has long been to weaken Syria, sever its strategic alliance with Iran and destroy Hezbollah. Israel has great experience at “targeted assassinations”, not only in the Palestinian territories but across the Middle East. Over the years, it has sent hit teams to kill opponents in Beirut, Tunis, Malta, Amman, and Damascus.

On Feb. 16, 2005, Australian investigative journalist Joe Vialls wrote of his theory on the Beirut bombing, “Bearing in mind that this blast was caused by a highly specialized micro-nuke sourced from Dimona in the Negev Desert.” He wrote, “In a desperate attempt to slow down their forthcoming defeat in Palestine, Jewish Special Forces micro-nuke former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, then instruct western media outlets to falsely blame the atrocity on Syria.”

Gregory M. Zeigler, Ph.D., former Captain, US Army, Military Intelligence wrote on July 23, 2005,

“On a large number of topics, Joe Vialls’ analyses are still the most penetrating and detailed available. He was one of the first to expose the problems in the stories of the Bali and Jakarta bombings, the assassination of Rafik Hariri.”

In the aftermath of the Hariri bombing, Lebanon became split between a US-EU-NATO coalition, and another supported by Hezbollah and its allies Iran and Syria.

The people of Lebanon, and their politicians, remain divided between those who wanted the tribunal to blame Hezbollah, and others who see the court as a political tool to discredit Hezbollah.

France versus Turkey in Beirut

On Aug. 13, the Turkish President Erdogan accused the French President Macron of “colonial designs” in Lebanon, and ridiculed Macron’s visit to the destroyed Port of Beirut as “putting on a show.”

The French Ministry of Armed Forces said on Aug. 13 that France would deploy two Rafale fighter jets and the frigate Lafayette off the coast at Beirut as part of a plan to demonstrate its military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.  Macron is opposed to Erdogan’s attempt to control the Sea through drilling for energy resources, which has angered both Greece and Cyprus, as well as the maritime agreements he made with Libya, which are incongruous, and his military intervention in the Libyan conflict.

International warships gather at Beirut

And on Friday, the Lebanese Army said On Aug. 14, the French helicopter carrier PHA Tonnerre docked at Beirut’s port, carrying a French army engineering unit, engineering vehicles, and necessary equipment to remove debris from Beirut port, according to the Lebanese Army.  Medical and food aid, construction material, and two vehicles donated to the Lebanese Civil Defense, from France were with the carrier.

Lt. Gen. Sir John Lorimer, the UK Defense Senior Adviser Middle East and North Africa, said on Aug. 17 in Beirut,

“The deployment of HMS Enterprise complements an immediate package of military and civilian support. As part of the strong relationship between both our armies, the UK has offered enhanced support to the Lebanese Armed Forces, who are central to the Government of Lebanon’s response, including tailored medical help, strategic air transport assistance, and engineering and communications support.”

The Beirut Port Blast

The STL verdict was delayed 2 weeks due to the devastating explosion at the Port of Beirut, which coincided with the original verdict date of Aug. 4 which killed nearly 180 people, injured more than 6,000, and destroyed thousands of homes. Thirty people are still missing after the blast, which caused up to an estimated $20 billion in damage.

Bedri Daher, Head of the Customs Authority for Lebanon, was arrested Aug. 17, after being questioned by Judge Fadi Sawwan for over four hours. Beirut newspaper Al-Akhbar reported that while Daher was under interrogation he said that the UN inspected the Rhosus when it entered Lebanese territorial waters in 2013 and found no restricted items onboard despite that the ship delivered nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate to Beirut Port. The UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti has denied the claim.

After the explosion, Daher said he repeatedly warned the country’s judiciary about dangerous substances stored at Beirut’s port, sending six memos to judiciary officials warning that the substances posed a danger to the public.

US Undersecretary for Political Affairs David Hale told reporters in Beirut, “The FBI will soon join Lebanese and international investigators at the invitation of the Lebanese in order to help answer questions that I know everyone has about the circumstances that led up to this explosion.” The US views Hezbollah, a political party with members in the parliament, as a terrorist group.  Washington may have missed the chance to pin the Hariri murder on Hezbollah, but they may view the Beirut Port blast investigation as a second chance to hit their mark.

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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.

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