Global Research

For the past months the Peoples’ Republic of China has been subject to one after the other devastating shocks to its agriculture sector. A deadly outbreak of African Swine Fever that halved China’s huge pig herds in 2019, was followed by infestation from a plague of fall armyworms (FAW) which reached China in December, 2018 and now threaten China’s corn belt. Now the worst floods in some 60 years is wiping out major rice and other crops in central China along the Yangtze and other rivers. Food Security is one of six national priorities for national security. President Xi Jinping has just issued a call to citizens not to waste food or face penalties, a sign that the depth of the food security threat is far worse than thought.

While any of the several problems would be manageable in normal times, the combination of agriculture disasters combined with the economic consequences of the China outbreaks of coronavirus are presenting challenges that could well impact global food security in coming months.

Fall Armyworm

At the end of 2018 the presence of a large infestation of dreaded fall armyworm was noted in southern China. In 2019 the devastation by the resilient fall armyworm (FAW) invasion caused destruction of more than 1 million hectares of farmland in China last year, damaging mainly corn and sugarcane crops. According to government news wires, so far in 2020 the fall armyworm infestation has already destroyed 1.07 million hectares in 24 provinces as of early August. Notably, the FAW infestation worked its way across Africa where it was first detected in 2016 to India and in 2018 to China.

Now as the plague moves north inside China, it threatens the heart of China’s northeastern region, including Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning provinces and the Inner Mongolia region, known as the grain basket of China, producing about half of the country’s corn on some 13 million hectares. On August 21, Chinese state media reported presence of the dreaded FAW in in Liaoning province in its northeastern cornbelt for the first time. The government has made fighting the pest a priority, however the insect is resistant to many pesticides and produces up to 3,000 eggs a season. The adults can travel up to 60 miles in a night. A major problem is that the FAW in China has already developed a resistance to many commonly used insecticides. As of February 20 this year, despite vigorous attempts at eradication with various chemicals including sophisticated spraying with drones, the FAW infestation range in China was 90 times larger than during the same period the previous year. That was just at the peak of the China coronavirus lockdowns which severely hampered timely pest control measures.

African Swine Fever

The FAW is not the only major threat to China food security. In 2019 the African Swine Fever resulted in the death of more than 40% of China’s pig population, the largest in the world according to official Agriculture Ministry statistics, though industry estimates put the loss as high as 60% or more than 215 million pigs. African swine fever (ASF) is an animal disease affecting pigs and wild boars with up to 100% fatality rate. There is no known cure meaning infected herds must be slaughtered to contain spread. The crisis in 2019 was the worst ever for ASF pig losses in China.

While incidences of ASF in China are dramatically down this year, the rebuilding of pig herds will take a minimum of three years according to the UN’s FAO. And the new cases of ASF are still being detected. The US Department of Agriculture reports that China’s overall swine production and slaughter will hit record lows in 2020 as African Swine Fever continues to impact China’s hog industry. If all goes well, far from sure at this point, pig herds are expected to be only at 80% of pre-fever levels by 2022. With pig being the largest source of animal protein in the Chinese diet, the result has been doubling of consumer prices for pork products at a time the economy is in serious stress from COVID-19 and other factors.

Now, since June central China from Sichuan Province to Wuhan region along China’s largest river, Yangtze and its tributaries, severe flooding is causing new outbreaks of African Swine Fever. As of early July, as record rains continued, a Shandong Yongyi survey of small pig farmers, corporate farmers, traders and slaughterhouses in 20 provinces revealed dozens of African swine fever cases had occurred since the heavy rains in Guangdong province, the Guangxi region and other areas.

Then the Great Floods and Droughts

Every summer usually beginning May or June, there is Monsoon rainfall in central China in the region from Sichuan to Wuhan along the longest river in Asia, the Yangtze River. The Yangtze originates in the Tibetan Plateau. This year the rains have been recorded as the heaviest in some 60 years, since records began in 1961, and as of late August heavy rains have not stopped. The result has been severe flooding especially along the path of the Yangtze River basin.

By late July the intensive rains had raised the water levels along the Yangtze River to such a level level that the huge Three Gorges Dam, world’s largest hydroelectric dam, situated between Chongqing in the West and Wuhan and finally, Shanghai, was deemed by some hydrologist experts to be in danger of collapse. To control flooding damage to Chongqing, officials were forced to open the Three Gorges Dam to release huge volumes of water. That water began causing severe flooding downriver in Wuhan, the site of the first declared outbreak of the coronavirus at the end of 2019.

Quite literally, a dammed if you do and dammed (sic) if you don’t dilemma—flood Chongqing to save Wuhan and risk rupture of the huge dam or release water and flood Wuhan and major downriver regions. So far both have taken place. And the record rains are in the fifth declared flood as of late August.

Chongqing is a megacity with more than 33 million people in the metropolitan area, including some 23 million farmers. The entire Yangtze Basin contains considerable agriculture including rice crops that have been washed away from the flooding. In the southwest, the Province of Sichuan with a major upstream section of the Yangtze, raised its flood emergency response to its highest level for the first time as its rivers overflowed and villages and farmland were inundated.

The 13 provinces in China that plant rice by July were all impacted by the record flooding. Farmers plant rice three times a year and the extended flooding from June into late August has impacted all three plantings. At this point there are no precise estimates of the total agriculture crop damage due to the flooding in the Yangtze region other than that it is immense.

While central China is afflicted with record flooding, other parts of China have seen severe drought, especially in the wheat regions of northern and central China.

Wheat is mainly planted in central and northern China. Farmers only harvest once a year in late May to early June. This year droughts killed the crops in Henan, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Xinjiang, Jilin, and other northern provinces. Henan Province alone produces some 25% of China’s total agriculture production. According to independent assessments wheat production areas of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces this year is lower in quality than 2019 and up to 30% lower in produced volumes. Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Xinjiang is worse. State-run media Xinhua reported on June 16 that 50.7 percent of Inner Mongolia’s land suffered heavy droughts this year. The region mainly grows wheat, as well as soybeans and corn. Crops and wild grass were unable to grow, impacting local animal husbandry.

While details of the extent of agriculture devastation are limited, as it is considered a matter of national security, the situation is clearly far graver that so far admitted. One indication is official remarks. Vice Premier Hu Chunhua recently asked the governors of each province in China to make sure sown areas of agricultural crops would not shrink and crop yield not be reduced this year. Given the extent of flooding damage, drought and insect damage to crops, that could be near to impossible. On July 27 at a Beijing food security meeting the Vice Premier warned that governors would be punished if they failed to uphold the promise, including with dismissals.

Fortunately for China, its close economic ties with Russia and the fact the Russian grain harvest looks set to again be the world’s largest mean that China will be able to import much of the deficit, albeit at a high price. However, with much of the world still imposing one or another degree of COVID-19 quarantine, global food availability is likely to become an increasing problem.

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

Featured image is from NEO

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

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

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

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

In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats—nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale.

More military-intelligence and FBI candidates

The number of contested congressional seats in 2018 was unusually large, as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targeted 115 seats, about half of those in the Republican caucus. Candidates from military-intelligence backgrounds won the nomination for 30 of those seats, making them the largest single occupational group, ahead of lawyers (20), state and local politicians (26), businessmen (15), and others (24).

The likely takeover targets have shrunk in number because of the Democratic success in 2018. Only 31 seats are on the DCCC’s “red-to-blue” shopping list, and even of these, one is held by a Democrat already. That leaves 30 seats now held by Republicans but targeted for potential takeover. Of these, five have military-intelligence operatives as the Democratic nominees: Feehan, Jones, Jacobs, Kulkarni and Johnson, profiled above.

Another 18 military-intelligence candidates are running in districts held by Republicans that are not currently considered competitive but could become so in some cases if the Democratic edge in the election widens significantly—it is currently averaging about seven percent in the polls. The number of CIA Democrats in the House of Representatives could rise to as many as 20, depending on political shifts between now and November 3.

Reviewing the biographies of these candidates, based on the information they themselves chose to present on their campaign websites, gives a glimpse of the social types who are being attracted to and mobilized by the Democratic Party’s campaign against Trump, and particularly by the incessant claims that Trump is a Russian stooge and that his victory in 2016 was the product of “Russian meddling” in the elections.

By region, these candidates include:

Northeast

New Jersey, 4th Congressional District: Stephanie Schmid, a retired Foreign Service officer, is opposing incumbent Christopher Smith, an anti-abortion zealot who has held the seat for 40 years. A former attorney, Schmid joined the Foreign Service in 2011 and worked in Haiti, Brazil and Washington, D.C. Her website declares, “Stephanie has proudly served with Republican and Democratic leaders who have always put country before party.”

Pennsylvania, 13th Congressional District: Todd Rowley, a retired FBI counterintelligence officer, is the Democrat opposing first-term Republican John Joyce. Rowley is a former policeman, state trooper and paramedic who spent 24 years as an FBI agent engaged primarily in paramilitary and counterintelligence operations, including liaison with the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence.

Image on the right: Todd Rowley

Maryland, 1st Congressional District: Mia Mason is a retired 20-year military veteran, who “completed a total of 5 combat tours between Iraq and Afghanistan while serving in the Navy and Army,” according to her campaign website. She was discharged from the military for being gay and then brought back in. She was “onboard USS Kitty Hawk CV-63 for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.” She is opposing five-term Republican incumbent Andy Harris in a district that comprises the rural eastern shore of Maryland.

Pennsylvania, 14th Congressional District: William Marx retired from the Marines after a 16-year career and is now a high school teacher and local councilman. He is running against first-term incumbent Republican Guy Reschenthaler in this southwest Pennsylvania seat.

Image on the left: Bill Marx

Midwest

Ohio, 14th Congressional District: Hillary O’Connor Mueri was a Navy pilot, who flew combat missions during the Iraq war to provide close air support to ground forces. She went to law school after the military, specializing in product litigation in the aviation industry. Mueri is running against four-term incumbent David Joyce in a mixed suburban and rural district extending northeast from Cleveland along Lake Erie.

Wisconsin, 1st Congressional District: Roger Polack was recruited by the US intelligence services while a student at the University of Wisconsin and trained to specialize in Asian affairs. His web site declares: “Roger served multiple tours as a civilian intelligence officer in Afghanistan, spending 20 months on the ground first as an analyst for, and then Deputy Director of, the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell. He sat face to face with Taliban detainees, helped plan law enforcement and military operations, and managed the intelligence priorities of 40 civilian and military staff.”

In other words, the Democratic candidate in the district formerly held by Republican Paul Ryan, now by first-term Republican Bryan Steil, should be investigated for possible connections to torture and assassination. But in the eyes of the Democratic Party leadership, this record is a credential, not the mark of Cain.

Image on the right: Chip Coldiron in Afghanistan

Indiana, 3rd Congressional District: Chip Coldiron is an Army veteran deployed twice to Afghanistan, who became a health care worker and then schoolteacher after leaving the military. He is running against four-term incumbent Jim Banks in a district centered on Ft. Wayne.

South

Kentucky, 6th District: Josh Hicks is a Marine veteran turned policeman. In his four years on active duty, he was deployed twice with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, rising to the rank of sergeant. He went to work as a policeman in eastern Kentucky, becoming a member of the SWAT team. He is running against four-term incumbent Andy Barr in a district centered on the city of Lexington.

North Carolina, 11th Congressional District: Morris Davis is the former chief prosecutor at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, although he was forced out by the Bush administration because he objected to the use of testimony obtained through torture of detainees. The Guantanamo posting was the culmination of a 25-year military career as a Judge Advocate General in the Air Force. Davis is running for the Asheville-based seat formerly held by Mark Meadows, now White House Chief of Staff for Trump. He was initially a heavy underdog to 25-year-old Madison Cawthorn, a right-wing activist who won an upset victory in the Republican primary, but Cawthorn is now caught up in a scandal over social media postings of his trip to see Hitler’s vacation hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, which he tweeted was “on his bucket list” of must-see locations.

Georgia, 1st Congressional District: Joyce Marie Griggs retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel after a 33-year career in Army intelligence. She won the Democratic primary to face incumbent three-term Republican Buddy Carter in a district centered the city of Savannah. According to her website: “Among her many decorations, medals, and badges are the Bronze Star, Defense Meritorious Service, and Global War on Terrorism Service medals, and the Parachutist badge.” Griggs  had three tours in Iraq in 2007, 2008 and 2010.

Georgia, 9th Congressional District: Devin Pandy, like Griggs, is a career Army intelligence officer, who initially specialized in electronic warfare systems maintenance and was deployed overseas five times, to Panama, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer 2. He boasts of coming from an Army family, with his grandfather in World War II, his father in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, and his brother and sister-in-law also in the military. Pandy is the Democratic candidate for the seat vacated by right-wing Republican Doug Collins, who is running for US Senate. He will face Republican Andrew Clyde, a businessman and Navy veteran with a huge financial advantage.

Image below: Devin Pandy (left)

Florida, 1st Congressional District: Philip Ehr is a repeat candidate from 2018, when he lost to incumbent Matt Gaetz, perhaps the most fervent Trump supporter in Congress, by a 2-1 margin in a district that comprises Pensacola and much of the Florida Panhandle. According to his campaign website, in the course of his 26-year career as a Navy seaman and pilot: “He flew reconnaissance missions in the Cold War, Desert Storm and post-9/11 operations; oversaw U.S. air operations in NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign in the Balkans; organized operational intelligence support to non-DOD Federal agencies; improved electronic warfare readiness of Allied forces; and provided strategic advice to senior leaders in Washington and London.”

Florida, 12th Congressional District: Kimberly Walker was in the Army for eight years, then a prison guard, and is now a civilian employee of Centcom, the US military command for all operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, headquartered in Tampa. After the military and prison system, Walker was hired as an IT contractor at MacDill Air Force Base, then “accepted a position as a Software Engineer at United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM).” Later she became a contractor for Centcom headquarters. She is the Democratic candidate against four-term incumbent Republican Gus Bilirakis, who has a 50-1 advantage in terms of fundraising.

Florida, 18th Congressional District: Pam Keith is a former Judge Advocate General in the Navy, who continued in the legal profession and became a legal counsel to Florida Power & Light. Keith lost the Democratic primary in 2018 to another military-intelligence candidate but ran again in 2020 and won Tuesday’s primary easily. She will oppose two-term incumbent Republican Brian Mast, himself a combat veteran who lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

Alabama, 1st Congressional District: James Averhart retired from the Marine Corps as a Chief Warrant Officer Five after a 30-year career, mainly as a military policeman, rising to head the Marine Corps Correction Service (the prison for Marines convicted of criminal offenses on duty). He was in combat in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm (the two phases of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War). As the Democratic candidate in the Mobile-based 1st Congressional District, left vacant by the retirement of Republican Bradley Byrne, Averhart is a prohibitive underdog to Republican nominee Jerry Carl, a Mobile County commissioner, who has raised $1.7 million to Averhart’s $50,000.

Oklahoma, 2nd Congressional District: Danyell Lanier is a Navy veteran and health care trainer who won an uncontested primary for the Democratic nomination against five-term incumbent Republican Markwayne Mullin. Lanier’s website gives little biographical information about her. Mullin has raised $1.3 million compared to $18,000 for Lanier.

Colorado, 4th Congressional District: Ike McCorkle is a retired Marines Corps special forces officer, who boasts of a military family, including two grandfathers, his father, a brother and two cousins. According to his campaign website, he retired in 2014 “to recover from eighteen hard years of service in the USMC Infantry and Spec Ops communities.” McCorkle deployed six times overseas, four times in combat, was wounded multiple times, and medically retired with the rank of captain. He is the Democratic candidate in the heavily rural district covering the eastern third of Colorado, against three-term incumbent Ken Buck, an extreme right-winger.

Utah, 2nd Congressional District: Kael Weston spent seven years as a military adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than any other State Department official. According to his campaign website, he was “State Department Political Adviser to a dozen Marine commanding generals, including during and after the biggest battle of the Iraq War (Fallujah, 2004-2007).” He also played a significant role in Afghanistan, in the city of Khost and as a Marine Corps adviser in Helmand province, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds against the Taliban. Weston is a published author and has written regularly for the corporate media on counterterrorism and military subjects. He will be the Democratic candidate against four-term incumbent Republican Chris Stewart, who is a heavy favorite and enjoys a 4-1 fundraising advantage.

Some conclusions

There is one other aspect of this list that has political significance. It represents the intersection of the pro-imperialist orientation of the Democratic Party and identity politics. Of the 18 candidates given thumbnail descriptions above, six are African American (Griggs, Pandy, Walker, Keith, Averhart and Lanier), and three more are white women (Schmid, Mason and Mueri). In other words, half of these military-intelligence candidates are examples of “diversity,” although enabling minorities and women to commit the same crimes previously committed by white men would not seem to be an improvement.

Not every one of these 18 candidates is a monster or a war criminal. But then there are those whose background is so filthy that they provide an unanswerable argument against claims, put forward by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, that it is possible to “reform” the Democratic Party and even to transform it into a vehicle for social progress.

What does it say about the Democratic Party that it has, among its candidates for Congress, a half dozen career military intelligence operatives, the longest-serving civilian adviser to US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, and the former overseer of prisons for the Marine Corps? What of the record of FBI counterintelligence officer Todd Rowley? His campaign website deserves a more extended citation:

Todd served as the FBI’s senior liaison representative to the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) regarding the FBI’s role in support of and counterintelligence efforts related to U.S. government overseas sensitive and classified construction projects in critical threat countries. Todd regularly interacted with FBIHQ and USIC senior executive managers and personnel throughout the USIC, representing the FBI’s security and counterintelligence interests related to a host of critical threat and national security matters…

Todd traveled overseas extensively in support of this critically important mission. During Todd’s distinguished FBI career, he was entrusted with some of our country’s most sensitive and classified intelligence information and was called upon to provide testimony in Federal Court and Grand Juries, as well as being the affiant in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) proceedings.

What does such an individual see in the Democratic Party? And equally important, what does the Democratic Party see in him?

This list, however tedious—and hideous—is instructive. It gives a picture of the social elements that comprise a significant fraction of the Democratic Party. These candidates, drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus, demonstrate the real nature of this organization, a political instrument of Wall Street and the imperialist state.

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This is how Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jose Arreaza, direct from Caracas during the August 20, 2020 historic Zoom Conference, responded to a question about the threat of a US-led military intervention in Venezuela:

“Maybe they [Canadian government officials] can listen to this [Conference]. I am so sure that, I don’t know if the Minister, but people from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Canada are listening to this conference, to this exchange, and they are taking notes, hopefully they rectify, and they will never support, not now or in the future, a military operation against Venezuela. Thank you, August.”

The question was based on recent reports compiled in an article. It indicates that the Trump administration is planning for a pre-US presidential election “October surprise” military intervention into Venezuela. The operation may not US troops directly, but the US counts on other countries such a Colombia. The silent acquiescence of Canada would obviously play a key role. The US counted on Canada’s silent surrender to the May 2020 US-led military intervention, one of whose key figures was Canadian-American former US Special Green Beret turned mercenary.

On August 19 there were yet further indications of this military operation. This time, Covid-19 is one of the main pretexts. Furthermore, Canada is no stranger to the cynical use of Covid-19 to further its own interests, initially to get a seat on the United Nations Security Council. It used Covid-19 to repair its tarnished image after its humiliating defeat for that seat. Let us keep this in mind as we review some of the most recent troubling revelations.

The Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Nation in New York, Samuel Moncada tweeted on August 19.

[My translation] “The Center for International Strategic Studies is one of Washington’s most active propaganda organs in the campaign for the invasion of Venezuela. In 2019, it organized a secret meeting to discuss US-Colombia military attack with Venezuelan traitors.” See here, for which we are indebted to The Grayzone and Max Blumenthal:

Exclusive: US military attack on Venezuela mulled by top Trump advisors and Latin American officials at private meeting of DC think tank @CSIS https://t.co/6L9Bl6s4KM via @MaxBlumenthal pic.twitter.com/3jccZEHKOh

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) April 14, 2019

What is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)?

CSIS is ranked the number one think tank in the United States as well as the defense and national security center of excellence for 2016-2018 by the University of Pennsylvania’s “Global Go To Think Tank Index.”

In the CSIS recent August 5 article, the title tells it all:

“Venezuela: Pandemic and Foreign Intervention in a Collapsing Narcostate.” It refers to Covid-19 in the region. However, it is based on the false affirmation that Covid-19 is not being treated in Venezuela and thus many are flocking to Colombia and other countries, as the title of the article indicates:

“If international politics makes a multilateral humanitarian military intervention unthinkable—as has occurred elsewhere in the world—when the international community fails to act, Venezuela’s neighbors could be forced to take matters into their own hands as a matter of national self-preservation….Current challenges in the region—spanning citizen security, economic resilience, democratic consolidation, energy security, and the respect for human rights, among others—point to a need for broader and deeper involvement. And should it reinforce its dedication to concerns distinctly relevant to the North America, the continent can further its hemispheric leadership and effect positive change throughout the region.”

This is the real situation:

• Venezuela: 35,687 cases, 297 deaths, 24,561 people recovered, with a population of 29 million.

• Colombia: 502,178 cases, 15,979 deaths, 326,298 people recovered, with a population of 50 million.

A large explosion rocked the Arab Gas Pipeline in Syria on August 24 causing a blackout in the country’s capital Damascus and multiple other cities and towns.

The explosion occurred between the towns of Ad Dumayr and Adra the a result of a ‘terrorist attack’, according to Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem. The incident led to a pressure drop and cascading shutdowns of the country’s power stations. Authorities almost immediately extinguished the fire, but as of August 25 morning blackouts were still seen in many towns and even in the capital, with some power restored to hospitals and government buildings.

This is the sixth time that stretch of the gas pipeline has been hit by an explosion over the course of the Syrian conflict, Kharboutli added, refusing to speculate about possible causes of the latest blast. The US envoy for Syrian affairs James Jeffrey insisted that the explosion was likely an attack by ISIS.

Earlier, ISIS claimed responsibility for several drone and rocket attacks on Syria’s oil and gas infrastructure in the Homs desert. In April, a mysterious explosion also erupted on a natural gas pipeline near al-Shadadi in the province of al-Hasakah. This area is in the hands of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces and the US-led coalition. Then, some sources also accused ISIS cells operating in the area. However, there are many more than just one suspect.

In January, Damascus said divers had planted explosives on offshore pipelines belonging to the Banias refinery on the Mediterranean coast, but the damage had not halted operations. This attack was likely conducted by Israeli forces.

The terrorist attack in Syria took place two days after a top Iranian nuclear official has for the first time described the July 2nd fire at the Natanz nuclear facility as sabotage.

“The explosion at the Natanz nuclear facility was a result of sabotage operations,” Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said adding that “Security authorities will reveal in due time the reason behind the blast.”

The fire at Natanz caused severe damage, setting back the development of advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges. On top of this, Iran was targeted by a series of strange explosions and fires at various military and industrial sites across the country.

These developments together with the attacks in Syria and the blast in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, raise more and more concerns that Iran and countries from the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance became a target of a major Israeli-led or even US covert destabilization campaign.

The UN arms embargo on Iran will expire in October, and Iran is now shopping for Russian military hardware, including the S-400. The US suffered a humiliating defeat at the UN on Aug. 14, as they tried to extend the embargo, but found themselves isolated on the global diplomatic stage as Russia and China voted against the extension, and the only country who sided with the US was the tiny Dominican Republic. 

Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace said,

“It is a scorched-earth approach, destroying the JCPOA in order to make it difficult for a Biden administration, and for the Iranians, to return to it,” DiMaggio said. “They’re not concerned with keeping a lid on Iran’s nuclear program. They really want to kill this deal.”

Army 2020 arms expo

Army 2020 is being held on August 23-29 at Kubinka Air Base, Alabino Military Training Grounds, outside of Moscow. About 70 nations will participate in a display of more than 730 pieces of Russian weapons, equipment, and industrial exhibits.

The event acts as a showroom for sales, as well as a forum for discussions between military officials, researchers, and defense industry experts.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the ongoing Army 2020 event will enable the Iranian delegation to inspect the latest Russian equipment.

Shoigu explained,

“This year we decided to combine the international military-technical forum ‘Army’ and the Army International Games,” while adding, “At the forum’s expositions, the Iranian delegation will be able to get acquainted with the latest examples of Russian weapons and military equipment.”

Shoigu also met with Iranian Border Police forces, who are competing in the 6th International Army Games, which are being held concurrently with ARMY-2020.

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami explained the need for continuing regional cooperation to establish peace and stability in the region while attending Army 2020. He said,

“The realistic response of the UN Security Council and the rejection of the recent US anti-Iran resolution on extension of arms embargoes against Iran, once again, brought a major defeat for the US and its regional allies and proved the global opposition to unilateralism.” He added, “JCPOA parties’ reaction to activation of trigger mechanism and re-imposition of sanctions on Iran was another harsh response, rejecting America’s excessive demands.”

Hatami inspected the Russian made S-400 Triumf air defense system at the ARMY-2020 military expo on Sunday along with his Iranian delegation, where they were briefed on the S-400’s systems feature and principles of operation. The delegation also inspected the Pantsir S1E combined medium-range surface-to-air missile system and anti-aircraft artillery system, the Kamov KA-226T utility helicopter, and was browsing the Sukhoi Su-30 fighter.

Hatami added that the joint strategies applied by Tehran and Moscow can bring peace and stability to the region, regardless of the US one-sided policies.

Shoigu referred to the developing mutual defense cooperation between Tehran and Moscow which join the two in strategical, regional, and international goals.

Kasem Jalali, the Iranian ambassador to Russia, confirmed that Tehran was shopping for Russian weapons to “enhance its defense capabilities,” and recognized that Moscow has “always been by our side in times of trouble”.

Weapons ‘Made in Iran’

Iran has developed advanced air defense capabilities at home. In 2019, the Khordad-3 air defense system produced by Iran Aviation Industries Organization shot down a $220 million US-made Northrop Grumman Global Hawk surveillance drone over Iranian airspace in the Strait of Hormuz, and Tehran ordered the Iranian made Bavar-373 air defense system, described as similar to the S-300 to be produced.

Trump trashed the Obama era Iran Nuclear deal

US President Trump inherited in 2016 a historic treaty known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was designed for global security and had brought the US and Iran to a closer relationship.

The 2015 deal was: if Iran keeps its promise to limit its civilian nuclear program, the US would lift sanctions. Iran stuck to its promises, but Trump broke the deal in 2018, alone and without the support of the US allies who had signed the deal.

Iran complied with its promises under the agreement, as verified by eleven consecutive International Atomic Energy Agency reports. Trump trashed the deal, even though the US was not the only signer, to get support from his fans for the 2020 re-election campaign.

US-Russian Arms Control in the Middle East

US-Russian cooperation in removing Syria’s declared chemical weapons (CW) in 2013-2014 was seen as an important arms control achievement; however, the two failed to build on their joint success because the US policy in the Middle East is decided in terms appeasing Israel, at the expense of the rest of the region.  Prospects for future joint projects are dim unless their regional interest are broadened and fairly balanced.

The US-Israeli-UAE deal

Earlier this month, it was speculated that the recent joint US and Israeli F-35 drills may have been aimed at dealing with advanced Russian air defense systems being sold to Iran.

Israel has depended on a long-standing US policy to not sell the same weapons to Arab countries but was shocked by the recent US willingness to sell the UAE the F-35 jet. The UAE purchase is seen as a countermeasure to Chinese and Russian arms sales to Iran.

In the process of getting an Arab monarchy to make a peace-deal, Israel has lost its military advantage as ‘best-friends forever’ with the US, which has stood for half a century.

Russia-Turkey weapons deal

Russia signed a contract to deliver the second batch of S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems to Turkey, which is a follow-up to the September 2017 deal for the S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems, costing $2.5 billion. to Turkey.

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Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist.

Featured image is from MD

“They came again this morning at about 8:00 o’clock. A large cargo-type helicopter flew low over the cabin, shaking it on its very foundations. It shook all of us inside, too. I feel frightened … I see how helpless and tormented I am becoming with disgust and disillusionment with the government which has turned this beautiful country into a police state … I feel like I am in the middle of a war zone.”—Journal entry from a California resident describing the government’s aerial searches for marijuana plants

Backyard gardeners, beware: tomato plants have become collateral damage in the government’s war on drugs, especially marijuana.

In fact, merely growing a vegetable garden on your own property, or in a greenhouse on your property, or shopping at a gardening store for gardening supplies—incredibly enough—could set you up for a drug raid sanctioned by the courts.

It’s happened before.

After shopping for hydroponic tomatoes at their local gardening store, a Kansas family found themselves subjected to a SWAT team raid as part of a multi-state, annual campaign dubbed “Operation Constant Gardener,” in which police collected the license plates of hundreds of customers at the gardening store and then investigated them for possible marijuana possession.

By “investigated,” I mean that police searched through the family’s trash. (You can thank the Supreme Court and their 1978 ruling in California v. Greenwood for allowing police to invade your trash can.) Finding “wet glob vegetation” in the garbage, the cops somehow managed to convince themselves—and a judge—that it was marijuana.

The hydroponic tomato garden that led to a 2012 police raid. (Court exhibit via Washington Post)

In fact, it was loose-leaf tea, but those pesky details don’t usually bother the cops when they’re conducting field tests.

Indeed, field tests routinely read positive for illegal drugs even when no drugs are present. According to investigative journalist Radley Balko,

“it’s almost as if these tests come up positive whenever the police need them to. A partial list of substances that the tests have mistaken for illegal drugs would include sage, chocolate chip cookies, motor oil, spearmint, soap, tortilla dough, deodorant, billiard’s chalk, patchouli, flour, eucalyptus, breath mints, Jolly Ranchers and vitamins.”

There’s a long list of innocent ingredients that could be mistaken for drugs and get you subjected to a raid, because that’s all it takes—just the barest whiff of a suspicion by police that you might be engaged in criminal activity—to start the ball rolling.

From there, these so-called “investigations” follow the usual script: judge issues a warrant for a SWAT raid based on botched data, cops raid the home and terrorize the family at gunpoint, cops find no drugs, family sues over a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, and then the courts protect the cops and their botched raid on the basis of qualified immunity.

It happens all the time.

As Balko reports,

“Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (It’s happened with all five.)”

Surely, you might think, the government has enough on its hands right now—policing a novel coronavirus pandemic, instituting nationwide lockdowns, quelling civil unrests over police brutality—that it doesn’t need to waste time and resources ferreting out pot farmers.

You’d be wrong.

This is a government that excels at make-work projects in which it assigns at-times unnecessary jobs to government agents to keep them busy or employed.

In this case, however, the make-work principle (translation: making work to keep the police state busy at taxpayer expense) is being used to justify sending police and expensive military helicopters likely equipped with sophisticated surveillance and thermal imaging devices on exploratory sorties every summer—again at taxpayer expense—in order to uncover illegal marijuana growing operations.

Often, however, what these air and ground searches end up targeting are backyard gardeners growing tomato plants.

Just recently, in fact, eyewitnesses in Virginia reported low-flying black helicopters buzzing over rural and suburban neighborhoods as part of a multi-agency operation to search for marijuana growers. Oftentimes these joint operations involve local police, state police and the Army National Guard.

One woman reported having her “tomato plants complimented by the 7 cops that pulled up in my yard in unmarked SUVs, after a helicopter hovered over our house for 20 minutes this morning.” Another man reported a similar experience from a few years ago when police “showed up in unmarked SUV’s with guns pulled. Then the cops on the ground argued with the helicopter because the heat signature in the ‘copter didn’t match what was growing.”

Back in 2013, an aerial surveillance mission spotted what police thought might be marijuana plants. Two days later, dozens of city officials, SWAT team, police officers and code compliance employees, and numerous official vehicles including dozens of police cars and several specialized vehicular equipment, including helicopters and unmanned flying drones, descended on The Garden of Eden, a 3.5-acre farm in Arlington, Texas, for a 10-hour raid in search of marijuana that turned up nothing more than tomato, blackberry and okra plants.

These aerial and ground sweeps have become regular occurrences across the country, part of the government’s multi-million dollar Domestic Cannabis Eradication Program. Local cops refer to the annual military maneuvers as “Eradication Day.”

Started in 1979 as a way to fund local efforts to crack down on marijuana growers in California and Hawaii, the Eradication Program went national in 1985, right around the time the Reagan Administration enabled the armed forces to get more involved in the domestic “war on drugs.”

Writing for The Washington Post, Radley Balko describes how these raids started off, with the National Guard, spy planes and helicopters:

The project was called the Campaign Against Marijuana Production, or CAMP… In all, thirteen California counties were invaded by choppers, some of them blaring Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as they dropped Guardsmen and law enforcement officers armed with automatic weapons, sandviks, and machetes into the fields of California … In CAMP’s first year, the program conducted 524 raids, arrested 128 people, and seized about 65,000 marijuana plants. Operating costs ran at a little over $1.5 million. The next year, 24 more sheriffs signed up for the program, for a total of 37. CAMP conducted 398 raids, seized nearly 160,000 plants, and made 218 arrests at a cost to taxpayers of $2.3 million.

The area’s larger growers had been put out of business (or, probably more accurately, had set up shop somewhere else), so by the start of the second campaign in 1984, CAMP officials were already targeting increasingly smaller growers. By the end of that 1984 campaign, the helicopters had to fly at lower and lower altitudes to spot smaller batches of plants. The noise, wind, and vibration from the choppers could knock out windows, kick up dust clouds, and scare livestock. The officials running the operation made no bones about the paramilitary tactics they were using. They considered the areas they were raiding to be war zones. In the interest of “officer safety,” they gave themselves permission to search any structures relatively close to a marijuana supply, without a warrant. Anyone coming anywhere near a raid operation was subject to detainment, usually at gunpoint.

Right around the same time, in the mid-1980s, the federal government started handing out grants to local police departments to assist with their local boots-on-the-ground “war on drugs.” These grants (through the Byrne Grant program and COPS program, both of which started to be phased out under George W. Bush, only to be re-upped by Barack Obama) could be used to pay for additional police personnel, equipment, training, technical assistance and information systems. However, studies show that while these federal grants did not improve police effectiveness or drug deterrence, they did incentivize SWAT team raids.

But how do you go from a “war on drugs” to SWAT-style raids on vegetable gardens?

Connect the dots, starting with the government’s war on marijuana, the emergence of SWAT teams, the militarization of local police forces through the federal 1033 Program, which allows the Pentagon to transfer “vast amounts of military equipment—machine guns and ammunition, helicopters, night-vision gear, armored cars—to local police departments,” and the transformation of American communities into battlefields: as always, it comes back to the make work principle, which starts with local police finding ways to justify the use of military equipment and federal funding.

Each year, the government spends between $14 and $18 million funding helicopter sweeps and police overtime to help the states track down illegal marijuana plants. These sweeps are even being carried out in states where it’s now legal to grow marijuana.

The sweeps work like this: Local police, working with multiple state agencies including the National Guard, carry out ground and air searches of different sectors. Air spotters flying overhead in helicopters relay their findings to police on the ground, who then carry out a search-and-destroy mission.

Mark my words: the use of police drones will make these kinds of aerial missions even more common.

For the most part, aerial surveillance is legal. As Arthur Holland Michel writes for The Atlantic: “When it comes to law enforcement, police are likewise free to use aerial surveillance without a warrant or special permission. Under current privacy law, these operations are just as legal as policing practices whereby an officer spots unlawful activity while walking or driving through a neighborhood.”

There have been a few notable exceptions.

In 2015, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that surveillance from a low-flying helicopter conducting an aerial search for marijuana by state police and the national guard was illegal under the U.S. Constitution. The court reasoned that “when low-flying aerial activity leads to more than just observation and actually causes an unreasonable intrusion on the ground—most commonly from an unreasonable amount of wind, dust, broken objects, noise, and sheer panic—then at some point courts are c and require a warrant before law enforcement engages in such activity. The Fourth Amendment and its prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures demands no less.”

In Philip Cobbs’ case, helicopter spotters claimed to have seen two lone marijuana plants growing in the wreckage of a fallen oak tree on the Virginia native’s 39-acre family farm.

Cobbs noticed the black helicopter circling overhead while spraying the blueberry bushes near his house. After watching the helicopter for several moments, Cobbs went inside to check on his blind, deaf 90-year-old mother. By the time he returned outside, several unmarked police SUVs had driven onto his property, and police (ten in all) in flak jackets, carrying semi-automatic weapons and shouting unintelligibly, had exited the vehicles and were moving toward him.

Of course, it was never about the two pot plants.

What the cops were really after was an excuse to search Cobbs’ little greenhouse, which he had used that spring to start tomato plants, cantaloupes, and watermelons, as well as asters and hollyhocks, which he planned to sell at a roadside stand near his home. The search of the greenhouse turned up nothing more than used tomato seedling containers.

Nevertheless, police charged Cobbs with misdemeanor possession of marijuana for the two plants they claimed to have found. Eventually, the charges were dismissed but not before The Rutherford Institute took up Cobbs’ case, which revealed that police hadn’t even bothered to secure a warrant before embarking on their raid of Cobbs’ property—a raid that had to cost taxpayers upwards of $25,000, at the very least—part of their routine sweep of the countryside in search of pot-growing operations.

Two plants or two hundred or no plants at all: it doesn’t matter.

A SWAT team targeted one South Carolina man for selling $50 worth of pot on two different occasions. The Washington Post reports: The SWAT team “broke down Betton’s door with a battering ram, then fired at least 57 bullets at him, hitting him nine times. He lost portions of his gallbladder, colon, bowel and rectum, and is paralyzed from the waist down. He also suffered damage to his liver, lung, small intestine and pancreas. Two of his vertebrae were damaged, and another was partially destroyed. Another bullet shattered his leg.” After security footage showed that most of what police said about the raid was a lie, the cops settled the case for $2.75 million.

Monetary awards like that are the exception, however.

Most of the time, the cops get away with murder and mayhem. Literally.

Bottom line: no amount of marijuana is too insignificant if it allows police to qualify for federal grants and equipment and lay claim to seized assets (there’s the profit motive) under the guise of fighting the War on Drugs.

SWAT teams carry out more than 80,000 no-knock raids every year. The vast majority of these raids are to serve routine drug warrants, many times for crimes no more serious than possession of marijuana.

Although growing numbers of states continue to decriminalize marijuana use and 9 out of 10 Americans favor the legalization of either medical or recreational/adult-use marijuana, the government’s profit-driven “War on Drugs”—waged with state and local police officers dressed in SWAT gear, armed to the hilt, and trained to act like soldiers on a battlefield, all thanks to funding provided by the U.S. government, particularly the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has not abated.

Since the formation of the DHS post-9/11, hundreds of billions of dollars in grants have flowed to local police departments for SWAT teams, giving rise to a “police industrial complex” that routinely devastates communities, terrorizes families, and destroys innocent lives.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.

Unfortunately, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids tend to go hand in hand with an overuse of paramilitary forces.

In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant. In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building. In another subset of cases, police conduct a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.

All too often, the shock-and-awe tactics utilized by many SWAT teams only increases the likelihood that someone will get hurt with little consequences for law enforcement, even when the raids are botched.

Botched SWAT team raids have resulted in the loss of countless lives, including children and the elderly. Usually, however, the first to be shot are the family dogs.

SWAT raids are usually carried out late at night or shortly before dawn. Unfortunately, to the unsuspecting homeowner—especially in cases involving mistaken identities or wrong addresses—a raid can appear to be nothing less than a violent home invasion, with armed intruders crashing through their door.

That’s exactly what happened to Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

The problems inherent in these situations are further compounded by the fact that SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have essentially done away with the need for a “no-knock” warrant altogether, giving the police authority to disregard the protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment.

Clearly, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, something must be done.

When the war on drugs—a.k.a. the war on the American people—becomes little more than a thinly veiled attempt to keep SWAT teams employed and special interests appeased, it’s time to revisit our drug policies and laws.

“You take the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all the rights you expect to have—when they come in like that, the only right you have is not to get shot if you cooperate. They open that door, your life is on the line,” concluded Bob Harte, whose home was raided by a SWAT team simply because the family was seen shopping at a garden store, cops found loose tea in the family’s trash and mistook it for marijuana.

“Our family will never be the same,” said Addie Harte, recalling the two-hour raid that had police invading their suburban home with a battering ram and AR-15 rifles. As The Washington Post reports:

Bob found himself flat on floor, hands behind his head, his eyes locked on the boots of the officer standing over him with an AR-15 assault rifle. “Are there kids?” the officers were yelling. “Where are the kids?” “And I’m laying there staring at this guy’s boots fearing for my kids’ lives, trying to tell them where my children are,” Harte recalled later in a deposition on July 9, 2015. “They are sending these guys with their guns drawn running upstairs to bust into my children’s house, bedroom, wake them out of bed.”

It didn’t matter that no drugs were found—nothing but a hydroponic tomato garden and loose tea leaves. The search and SWAT raid were reasonable, according to the courts.

There’s a lesson here for the rest of us. As Bob Harte concluded: “If this can happen to us, everybody in the country needs to be afraid.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

What do we know?

We know that the tests do not work but governments pretend that they do. We also know that some vaccines sterilize people. Warp Speed vaccine preparation almost guarantees vaccine injury, plus it is an entirely new DNA altering vaccine. Big Pharma is not liable for injuries. Nano-tech is also part of the equation with Immunity Passports etc. — Mark Taliano

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Dr Petrella is a retired gynaecologist from Teramo in Italy who has already garnered controversy over his Covid 19 views. Petrella was expelled from the Order of Doctors after retirement for his views surrounding the HPV vaccine which he considers to be ineffective and in some cases dangerous. Petrella upheld his right to his opinion and stated that he is against any kind of mandatory vaccine. Petrella is appealing against the decision.

Regarding Covid19, the gynecologist said:

”Doctors and virologists go on television every day to tell shit and lies to create panic. Time to send home all these highly paid gentlemen and consultants who have kept us locked up in jail. We can’t take it anymore”.

Petrella wrote a letter to the Abruzzo region authorities:

Translated from Italian:

Text by Oltra TV.

“I am ashamed to have been represented, in this health emergency, by doctors on television who said shit and created anxiety. A revolution can come out here,” Petrella continued.

He then also turned to the police who in this period have been the protagonists of several unpleasant episodes:

“With what conscience you make a fine of 500 euros to poor people!”

It does not fail to deal with one of the most discussed issues of this phase.

“The mask, in addition to creating the now known complications, predisposes to cancer.”

But the worst is that you are planning to force the children to put them in school. ‘Dr. Petrella then added:

“There will be war. Did you understand scientists of my feet, virologists of my shoes? Open everything again, nothing happens”.

About two weeks ago the Abruzzese doctor sent a registered letter to the President of the Abruzzo Region Marco Marsilio and for information to the Regional Health Councilor Nicoletta Verì, to the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Teramo, to the Carabinieri Command of Teramo and to the General Director of the ASL of Teramo. The object of the registered letter is the mandatory use of masks for this emergency.

Petrella about the emergency declared:

“You created the panic, there is no emergency. The virus will return in October because you said the vaccine is already ready”.

The doctor is very hesitant on this aspect because it takes years to make a vaccine and making one on a virus that is so changeable is unthinkable: “Colleagues, react, strike.”

The mask is harmful and infringes the rights. In the letter the doctor wrote:

“I do not intend to use the aforementioned mask, at least in open spaces and with sufficient distance from other people”.

Petrella then touched on the legal issue:

“Since the mask is a medical surgical device, it cannot be imposed, under penalty of violation of Article 32 of the Constitution and of the Oviedo Convention signed by Italy”.

He also added:

“On the basis of the anti-terrorism law and article 85 of the TULPS (Consolidated Law on Public Safety): “It is forbidden to circulate misrepresented, or with an unidentifiable face”.

Then Petrella touched on the topic of the correct use of the masks that should be changed several times a day to have an effective action:

“You do it? If you see an elder afterwards, do you change it immediately? “It limits the physiological act, primary and essential for life, that is, breathing. The lack of a free and healthy breathing is incompatible with an optimal state of health which represents the primary good of each individual, well protected by the Constitution and by the laws 848/55 and by the law 881/77″.

“Why don’t you journalists say anything about these things?” You are accomplices. People are reacting, they can’t take it anymore. He can’t live, he has no money left. They will come to Rome”.

Still taking up the text:

“It is immediately understandable that within the space between the face and the mask an accumulation of hypercapnic stale air is rapidly created and more saturated with microbes, viruses, bacteria and fungi contained within the oral cavity. This increases the possibility of developing pathologies of the lower respiratory tract”.

He also pointed out in the registered letter that there is the possibility of dispersing air through the escape routes between the mask and the face that are created above, below and to the side:

“So what the fuck is it for?” “Prolonged use of the mask over the months involves, for the reasons explained above, an increase in tissue acidosis which, as is now well known, predisposes to the onset of cancer”, Petrella continued.”The imposition of the mask is detrimental to the dignity of the individual, it metaphorically represents a gag, a symbol of slavery”.

Although these are words contained in the letter sent to the President of the Abruzzo Region.

“With the Nuremberg trial, for the first time in history, it is established that no law can be harmful to human dignity. It is, in the hierarchy of laws, superior to any law. You cannot pretend to ignore it”.

Petrella then concluded the reading of the letter:

”If as a result of this communication an oppressive action is taken against me, to force me to use the mask in all situations of parking outside the home, I will take legal action to protect my rights and my health“.

Finally, the Abruzzo doctor invited everyone to send this letter to their regional presidents to make themselves heard and save the future.

Read the report in Italian here.

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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.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

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Claims by German doctors that Navalny was poisoned appear greatly exaggerated. See below.

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Russian political figure with scant public support, sharp Putin critic, Western media darling Navalny supported by the CIA and NED became ill onboard a flight to Moscow.

Rushed to a Omsk, Russia hospital and placed in a medically induced coma, doctors at the facility diagnosed his illness as a metabolic disorder.

US and other Western headlines screamed otherwise, claiming he was poisoned. No traces of poisons were found in his blood or urine.

At the request of family members, he was flown over the weekend to Berlin’s Charite Hospital for treatment.

On Monday, a statement by the hospital said the following:

Navalny “is being treated in intensive care and remains in medically induced coma.”

“While his condition is serious, it is not currently life-threatening.”

“Clinical findings indicate poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors.”

“The specific substance involved remains unknown, and a further series of comprehensive testing has been initiated.”

“The effect of the poison – namely, the inhibition of cholinesterase in the body – was confirmed by multiple tests in independent laboratories.”

“As a result of this diagnosis, the patient is now being treated with the antidote atropine.”

“Navalny’s prognosis remains unclear. The possibility of long-term effects, particularly those affecting the nervous system, cannot be excluded.”

“The treating physicians remain in constant contact with Mr. Navalny’s wife.”

“After close consultation with the patient’s wife, Charite is reassured that the decision to make details of the patient’s condition public would be in accordance with his wishes.”

Cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) “are medications that prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine in the body,” Medicinenet explained, adding:

They “block the action of acetylcholinesterase.”

“Acetylcholinesterase is an enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine to an inactive form.”

“This reduces nerve cell communications in your body that use acetylcholine to help transmit cell to cell messages.”

“Doctors prescribe cholinesterase inhibitors to individuals with dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease…Parkinson’s disease, glaucoma, myasthenia gravis, and schizophrenia.”

The Royal Society of Chemistry said “(n)atural cholinesterase inhibitors (are found in) marine organisms,” adding:

They’re “common(ly) (used) for the management of several disease states…notably neurological disorders.”

They’re also found in pesticides and nerve agents.

The Extension Toxicology Network of Cornell, Michigan State, Oregon State, and UC Davis explained the following:

“Cholinesterase (ko-li-nes-ter-ace) is one of many important enzymes needed for the proper functioning of the nervous systems of humans, other vertebrates, and insects.”

Unintended “human exposure to cholinesterase inhibiting chemicals can result from inhalation, ingestion, or eye or skin contact.”

If “a person receives too great an exposure to cholinesterase inhibiting compounds, the body is unable to break down the acetylcholine.”

If Navalny was exposed to cholinesterase inhibitors, it doesn’t automatically indicate an attempt to poison him.

He’s undergoing further tests to learn more about his condition..

With scant public support in Russia, there’s no reason why its authorities would want him poisoned or otherwise harmed.

Establishment media straightaway claimed otherwise.

Like political Russophobes in Washington and London, they invent reasons to bash Russia, providing no evidence backing claims because none exists.

Nothing suggests Kremlin responsibility for Navalny’s condition.

Note: Claims by German doctors that Navalny was poisoned were disputed by Russian doctors.

Russian toxicologists at Omsk “found no toxic chemical substances (in Navalny) that could be called poisons, or their residues.”

Navalny tested negative for cholinesterase inhibitors at Omsk, Reuters reported.

RT quoted Omsk region’s top toxicologist Alexander Sabayev saying the following:

When Alexey Navalny was admitted to the in-patient clinic, he was examined for a wide range of narcotics, synthetic substances, psychedelic drugs and medical substances, including cholinesterase inhibitors. The result was negative.”

German doctors who examined Navalny agreed that their Russian counterparts involved in treating him “saved (his) life.”

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Noi, persone di buona volontà di tutti i ceti sociali, di tutti i continenti, di credo e religioni diverse, richiamiamo la vostra attenzione sulla minaccia di una guerra nucleare totale che può scoppiare molto facilmente a causa di azioni deliberate da parte di qualsiasi Stato nucleare o a causa di un errore non intenzionale, umano, tecnico o di altro tipo.

Stiamo assistendo al fatto che la soglia per l’uso di armi nucleari in un attacco limitato o su larga scala è stata recentemente drasticamente abbassata, portando il mondo intero sull’orlo di un Armageddon nucleare.

Molti funzionari militari e civili di alto rango, politici ed esperti parlano apertamente della possibilità di utilizzare armi nucleari in un primo colpo d’ attacco contro qualsiasi nazione con numerosi pretesti, con l’impiego di cariche nucleari a basso o alta potenza.

Gli Stati Uniti infatti si sono ritirati da una serie di noti e utili trattati e accordi sul controllo delle armi nucleari, per ragioni dubbie e con spiegazioni illogiche.

I vettori di armi nucleari stanno diventando più sofisticati, più veloci e più precisi. Sono realizzati in una pericolosa combinazione che comprende armi nucleari strategiche e tattiche insieme a sistemi di difesa missilistica e capacità convenzionali, e con la possibilità di collocare armi d’attacco nello spazio, inclusi sistemi di difesa missilistica e armi anti-satellite.

Molte esercitazioni militari, che in precedenza erano state condotte con l’uso di armi convenzionali, si stanno gradualmente trasformando in esercitazioni con l’impiego di finte armi nucleari.

Gli esperti di armi nucleari calcolano che durante un primo massiccio attacco nucleare, almeno 34 milioni di persone morirebbero immediatamente e 57 milioni subirebbero ferite multiple, che causerebbero orribili dolori, sofferenze, malattie da radiazioni e morte. Inoltre, vari tipi di infrastrutture, flora e fauna, centrali nucleari, risorse idriche, compresa l’acqua potabile e dighe idroelettriche, verrebbero pesantemente danneggiate o completamente distrutte da enormi tempeste di fuoco, vasta contaminazione nucleare, potenti esplosioni e terremoti.

Ma questo è solo l’impatto immediato. L’inverno nucleare, se provocato anche solo da una guerra nucleare limitata, minaccerebbe l’intera umanità con fame e altre minacce mortali.

Noi che abbiamo firmato volontariamente questo appello vi sproniamo, in qualità di leader di tutte le nove nazioni nucleari, a intraprendere le seguenti azioni nel 2020:

Primo, quale passo iniziale verso un disarmo nucleare completo e irreversibile su scala globale, che vi impegniate a non usare e a denunciare qualsiasi tipo di uso di armi nucleari in un primo attacco contro qualsiasi nazione in qualsiasi momento.

Secondo, firmare e ratificare il Trattato sulla proibizione delle armi nucleari con   l’impegno seguente specificato nel punto successivo.

Terzo, impegnarsi a smantellare irreversibilmente tutte le armi nucleari entro il 6 agosto 2045 o prima di tale data – in tutti i nove Stati dotati di armi nucleari, in fasi attentamente calibrate e attraverso meccanismi di ispezione ben sviluppati e reciprocamente accettabili, a condizione che tutti gli Stati dotati di armi nucleari seguano questo modello simultaneamente e onestamente.

Queste due proposte non sono conclusive. Sono un inizio. Sono le più urgenti. Altre disposizioni concrete devono essere elaborate senza alcun ritardo.

Firmato personalmente come espressione della nostra buona volontà:

Firma

…………………..

residente nella Repubblica (Stato) di ……………

(alla data) ………………………. 2020.

Comitato No Guerra No NATO (CNGNN), ITALIA

Con i membri del Comitato Esecutivo CNGNN:

Giuseppe Padovano (Coordinatore Nazionale CNGNN), Manlio Dinucci (giornalista, saggista, portavoce CNGNN), Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti (giornalista, scrittrice, Relazioni Internazionali CNGNN), Flaminio Maffettini (avvocato), Jeff Hofmann (TV reporter),Vladislav Gavryusev (ricercatore di fisica), Franco Dinelli (PHD CNR-INO), Berenice Galli (TV reporter), Germana Leoni (giornalista, scrittrice), Maria Heibel ( saggista, blogger), Isabella di Magdala, Manuela Fani, Ciril Munca (poeta), Silvia Forlivesi (archeologa), Francesco Cappello (insegnante), Maya Nogradi (film maker), Luca Belardi (film maker), Suor Stefania Baldini (religiosa), Padre Fernando Zolli (monaco comboniano), Cesare Casotti (bibliotecario), Cristoforo Attardo (blogger), Luca Sardi (musicista), Roberto Germano (fisico).

il 21 Agosto 2020.

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Sponsorizzato da “Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space” (USA)  Analytical Agency “Strategic Stability” (Russia), Comitato No Guerra No NATO (Italia)

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump adviser Jared Kushner are hitting the road in an attempt to strong-arm more Arab states into normalizing relations with Israel, turning their backs on Palestine and isolating Iran.

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U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo and unelected advisor to President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, are embarking on a tour of the Middle East beginning with a stop in Israel to discuss “regional security issues related to Iran’s malicious influence” with Prime Minister Netanyahu, followed by visits to Sudan, Bahrain and now official U.S. partner, the United Arab Emirates.

Spun as an effort to speed up a U.S.-brokered “normalization” between Arab countries and Israel, the trip comes just four days after the White House sent the Secretary of State to the U.N. Security Council with the message that all UN sanctions against Iran were to be restored; invoking a clause in the Iran nuclear deal “that allows participants to reimpose UN sanctions on Iran.”

Critics of the move have deemed it illegal, not only because the Trump administration itself withdrew from the deal it is now attempting to enforce, but also because the UN Security Council had previously voted to allow the arms embargo to expire in the fall.

As Pompeo and company land in Jerusalem, tensions are high in the region. Sudan, one of the countries on the itinerary, is in political disarray nearly two years after the ouster of longtime President Omar al-Bashir in 2018. In July, Sudanese Prime Minister, Abdalla Hamdok, replaced seven senior cabinet officials, including the ministers of finance, foreign, energy, and health. Five days ago, he sacked his official spokesperson for disclosing ongoing talks with Israel during a press conference in which spokesman Haider Badawi said he was “looking forward to concluding a peace agreement” with the apartheid state.

The Sudanese government immediately disavowed Badawi’s comments, asserting that “no one tasked [the spokesman] with making statements on this matter.” Meanwhile, Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen has reportedly confirmed talks with Sudan, adding that “Israel hopes to reach a peace agreement that includes the return of Sudanese refugees to their country,” according to the Al-Ittihad newspaper. Israeli officials have also claimed that Netanyahu himself met with the head of Sudan’s transitional government in Uganda last February for a top-secret meeting to discuss normalizing relations.

The long-time ally

Bahrain, a long-time Atlanticist client state, is also on Pompeo’s diplomatic schedule. The tiny Gulf state of fewer than two million people has played host to the U.S. Navy since 1947 and was the headquarters for the British protectorate of the lower Persian Gulf after World War II. The crown prince of Bahrain, Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa descends from a long line of Al-Khalifas to rule the nation under Britain’s neo-colonial eye and, later, as a sovereign country since 1971. Considered a “strong security partner” by the U.S. and host of the only operating American naval base in the region with 7,800 U.S. troops, the Trump administration recently lifted arms sales restrictions imposed by Obama. Another member of the Al-Kahlifa clan, Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid Al-Khalifa, sat down for an interview with The Times of Israel last summer in which he said he “hoped to visit Israel, when it’s all open, peaceful,” signaling Bahrain’s openness to facilitate normalization between Israel and Arab states.

A report updated in June by the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CSR) titled “Bahrain: Unrest, Security, and U.S. Policy,” outlined the country’s human rights record and history of political repression, which should nevertheless be overlooked because the country “has long presented a policy dilemma for the United States because Bahrain is a longtime ally that is pivotal to maintaining Persian Gulf security.”

An easy dilemma

The policy dilemma is limited to whether or not Bahrain, Sudan or any other oil-rich countries wish to abide by Atlanticist dictates for their particular region, which has now shifted to a policy of exclusion of the Palestinian people living under the apartheid regime in Israel and an intensification of the campaign of isolation against Iran.

This is being called normalization and some, like Sudan’s former government spokesman, see nothing wrong with it. In what may be the most disingenuous statement ever made, Haider Badawi told Sky News Arabia that Sudan “shall be able to build an exemplary peace deal to all our neighboring countries in the region, so that they are able to follow our footsteps and do the same with Israel. I would like to note here that even Palestinians have had a long history of diplomatic ties with Israel. So, why should it be right for them and considered wrong for us.”

Pompeo will finalize his trip in the UAE, where he will meet with Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan to discuss the deal signed with Israel a few weeks ago. Jared Kushner’s itinerary, however, has not been made public. He will be accompanied on an ostensibly separate excursion by National Security adviser, Robert O’Brien and special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook in what is only being described as “talks with leaders in the region to encourage more Arab countries to follow in the UAE’s footsteps and move forward with full normalization of relations with Israel.”

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Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.

China’s One Belt One Road project has been a great source of speculation for some time since its announcement by the Communist Party of China and China has since fielded a barrage of endless accusations that they are seeking to assert “global hegemony” and consequently engaging in imperialism since then.

Xi Jinping and the CPC have always assured the international public that China’s main focus is multipolarity but this hasn’t staved off their critics among every level of power in the US. But what about China’s broad-scale infrastructural projects is so imperialistic in nature and is the much-feared “debt trap” a real phenomenon?

To examine whether the debt trap is real, we must consider first what actually is a debt trap and what historical examples we can draw from the West to first to establish a comparative baseline.

The Debt Trap: The IMF’s Structural Adjustment Program versus China’s Lending Practices

The other major avenue through which African countries become beholden to the West’s unfortunate and often unfair measures is via the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs which have historically been heavily involved in the regions that China is now involved in.

The US and UK for example pressured Tanzania into following this program. As an agrarian raw materials exporting nation, Tanzania compensated for low growth with foreign capital inflows including in the form of foreign aid. This foreign aid was later restricted in the 1970s and by 1980s and the country had no other choice but to approach the IMF. The IMF extended Tanzania a tranche loan under the condition that they reduce domestic credit drawings by the public sector. Since then, Tanzania has been trapped into a circuitous relationship with the IMF where they are stuck between accepting liberalizing reforms or being starved of funding. And the same stories can be found for 25 other countries across the African republic.

By the same token, IMF intervention in Indonesia and South Korea was deeply unpopular. The IMF also initiated a series of harmful structural adjustment reforms on Bangladesh after they accepted credit from the IMF under the three year Structural Adjustment Facility. Bangladesh subsequently underwent a shift from government to military rule under martial law where the negotiated adjustments took place including a strong shift from public lead growth to a mixed economy. By 1978 the moves towards privatization of sectors like agriculture and industrial development and they incentivized private investment which had the ultimate cost of massive job loss and stagnating growth at around 4%.

So, in order to examine whether China has an impact on the Global South that is equivalent to that of the IMF or as some of the pundits argue worse than, we must compare their impact with the of the West’s international financial body, the IMF.

Similarly, the West gives aid to most African countries with Egypt, Kenya and South Sudan being the largest beneficiaries. US, Canada, Japan and France all follow a program of aide known as “tied debt” essentially meaning that the money given to these African countries must be spent on each countries national companies or that a percentage majority of these purchases must be made at each countries companies. The ultimate consequences of a program where African countries are beholden to importing solely from the US, Europe, Australia and Canada is that they are locked into a vicious cycle of being able to afford less than they otherwise would have at a globally non-competitive rate creating an artifical hike in these nations’ production prices. This current structure continues a cycle of poverty alongside other expectations or pressures for structural reform from these exact same nations.

Zambias President, on Western trade relations, said

“they are not prepared to discuss the issues of justice and fair play concerning the international trade and commercial sector, which imposes consider able suffering and privation on developing countries. The developing world continues to subsidize consumption of the developed world, through an iniquitous trade system. The existing structure is designed to consign us to perpetual poverty and underdevelopment. It is unrealistic to expect support, relief or respite from those who benefit from the status quo.”

The African subcontinent by contrast have a notion of a specifically Chinese model of growth as unique from the West. President of the African Development Bank said

“the phenomenal growth rate and the fact that hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty is an attractive model for Africans and not just the elderly leadership. Young, intelligent, well-educated Africans are attracted to the Chinese model even though Beijing is not trying to spread democracy. We can learn from them how to organize our trade policy, how to move from low to middle income status, to educate our children in skills and areas that pay off in just a couple of years.”

The 2 billion dollar credit line China extended to Angola in 2004 was used by the nation for railroad repair, road building, office construction, a fibre optic network and oil exploration – all of which was possible because China does not follow a model of tied debt. China immediately guaranteed them a contract for the sale of oil in which they were able to begin paying back the loan which was originally at 1.5% interest and was dropped to 0.25% interest including a five year interest free period which is being recuperated over a space of 17 years. For Angola, this is a realistic goal for not only paying back their debt to China but also for upgrading their infrastructure enough to begin investing in other trade projects.

Tanzanian leader Julius Nyere who have also accepted similar deals with China once commented on the country’s relationship saying “the Chinese people have not asked us to become communists in order to qualify for this loan. They have never at any point suggested that we should change any of our policies, internal or external.”

Another of the biggest investment’s China has entered into in the subcontinent of Africa is funding the building of Sudan’s Merowe Dam. China won the bid for the dam because comparative to other contenders they promised to keep Chinese staff costs low, which from 2003 to 2005 employed 18, 000 Chinese workers and 16, 000 Sudanese workers.

Another of China’s larger project in the BRI was the East Coast Rail Link with Malaysia. China put negotiation on this project above all else when a Malaysian company rejected the original terms of the project, instantly the Chinese company sought to negotiate new terms until both parties were happy. Outside observers would have noted no instance of imposing hegemony on Malaysia at all. And that’s not the only instance where resistance lead to China negotiating new terms with local players

Similarly, China has been accused of “land-grabbing” in the African subcontinent mainly by its rivals but China has not invested in major plots of agricultural land outside of infrastructure projects and has always historically had a firm focus on food self-sufficiency. Another of China’s biggest projects in subcontinent is the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Guage Railway which connects the port city of Mombasa and Nairobi. The project itself is a massive boost the Kenyan economy, not only in that it facilitates trade but is being built almost entirely with local resources generated within Kenyan Railways.

The next biggest project along the BRI in Africa is the Karuma Hydroelectric Power Station. The project cost cost $458 million with 85% of that in a concessional loan from the import-export bank of China where again Sinohydro won the major contract for procurement and construction largely because of cheaper costs of materials and labour. By comparison, another procurement company may have loaded Kenya with significantly more debt while developing necessary infrastructure needed to electrify the country.

Ultimately, not only is China working within the systems of the countries they work with but in Global South nations that have been overrun by lawlessness since early British, or French colonization and later American financial domination, they are improving those systems by investing in new infrastructure, and discouraging against corruption at the local political levels.

In order to work with China fully, each nation must invest capital wisely and even then China cancels or suspends debt repayments at great cost to themselves. Many on the left attempt to argue that that imperialism at its core is purely about “exporting capital” as Lenin originally described it in the context of British imperialism limits us in our understanding of imperialism entirely.

What people tend to ignore in his original descriptions are a reference to a parasitic capitalism that sought to aggressively extract surplus value usually through manipulation or force without benefiting the domestic economy of the country that the capital is exported to.

For example, following the logic of the original reductionist position the US’ relationship with Australia could be considered definitely imperialist simply on the grounds that they are Australia’s primary investor. To many this would sound like a ridiculous argument when the US export technology that Australian businesses in turn benefit from without the same traps that they would extend to other countries.

So, what we really need to be asking ourselves when we examine this definition is whether or not that particular countries investment is actually growing the domestic economy. For every major metric of investment as exploitation,

China does not fit the mould and its time for the left rather than simply parroting Old Ideological lines to recognize the need for an analysis that fits the era. China not only is not exploiting the Global South but many of the countries they engage with on economic policy are far further to the right than they are. A country with a strong history of devastation at the hands of British imperialism themselves is not going to simply abandon this historical memory. In fact, it is China’s historical memory of being looted by the British which is exactly why China sees its greatest revenge as the drive towards increasing domestic living standards and building towards a counterhegemonic bloc of Global South nations with exactly the same history of looting at the hands of European and Western colonialism as theirs.

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Jemma Nott is a political economy student at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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COVID-19: Trigger for a New World Order. Economic Stagnation and Social Destruction

By Patrick Henningsen, August 24, 2020

What makes all of this difficult for so many is that the sudden transition has been almost instantaneous, leaving people in a near callow state of bewilderment, wondering what just happened to their old life.

Free Speech be Damned: Joshua Krook and the Australian Public Service

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 25, 2020

There was very little controversial about it.  A featured blog post in the Oxford Political Review, authored in April by Joshua Krook, suggested that COVID-19 had brought a host of benefits for big tech companies.  Isolation ushered people towards online platforms.  Engagement on such platforms had increased dramatically.

Rashomon American Style. Truth Is Somewhere in Between

By Philip Giraldi, August 25, 2020

Many journalists and op-ed pundits have been observing how the United States has become two nations that are seemingly divided along a red-blue line, each side believing in “facts” that are irreconcilable with those “facts” believed to be true by the other side. Some are even suggesting that the United States is on the verge of what would be a new civil war. 

China: Everything Proceeding According to Plan, Complete Interruption of Relations with US?

By Pepe Escobar, August 25, 2020

China plans not only in years, but in decades. Five year plans are complemented by ten year plans and as the meeting chaired by Xi showed, 15 year plans. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is in fact a nearly 40-year plan, designed in 2013 to be completed in 2049.

Alliance Between Venezuela and Iran Evolves into the Military Sphere

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, August 25, 2020

The alliance between Venezuela and Iran seems to be taking new directions. The ties between the two countries began to strengthen in an economic sphere when, in the first half of 2020, Tehran started sending oil ships to Venezuela, circumventing the international trade rules imposed by Washington with the aim of blocking Caracas economically.

US to Tighten Venezuela Sanctions after Gasoline Seizure

By Ricardo Vaz, August 25, 2020

US President Donald Trump has allegedly expressed “frustration” that sanctions have not succeeded in ousting the Maduro government. The White House’s hardening stance comes less than 90 days ahead of November presidential elections, which Trump hopes to win with the support of Latin American emigre communities in Florida.

The DNC and the Politics of Betrayal. Political and Moral Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party

By Black Alliance for Peace, August 25, 2020

The political and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party was on full display last week. First it was the convention of the Democratic Party, where the progressive wing of the party was pushed to the margins while the victorious, neoliberal right wing engaged in a surreal spectacle that came off oblivious to the economic, social and political crisis the country has been experiencing.

“Poisoned” Kremlin Critic Flown to Germany as German-Russian Nord Stream 2 Nears Completion

By Tony Cartalucci, August 25, 2020

Navalny’s sudden reappearance across the Western media comes just at the height of US attempts to place maximum pressure on Germany to cancel a pipeline – Nord Stream 2 – it is jointly constructing with Russia. The pipeline would move Russian hydrocarbons into Western Europe directly, bypassing Ukraine now fully destabilized by US and NATO intervention.

North Macedonia conducted elections on July 15 that were originally scheduled for April 12 but were postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. On August 18, the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) and the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) reached a deal to establish a coalition government that gave greater powers to the Albanian minority in North Macedonia. Under this deal, North Macedonia will have their first ever Albanian Prime Minister, although it will not be until the last 100 days of the four-year mandate of the new government headed by Zoran Zaev. The fact that the North Macedonian Albanians will have some of the most vital ministries and the position of the First Deputy Prime Minister shows that they now have some of the greatest influence in the country. The Albanians now have some power to try and federalize the country if they wish.

Zaev, the leader of the SDSM and Prime Minister-designate, is introducing the first ever deputy prime minister, who will be appointed at the suggestion of the DUI. Without Albanian parties, a government could not be formed in North Macedonia as the Albanians account for a massive 20% of the population. By having a huge minority, they can wield great influence in coalition governments, which is exactly why they requested the Ministry of Finance.

The DUI party now controls the largest number of municipalities in North Macedonia where Albanians live and control a good part of government ministries. Effectively, they managed to push through a consensual decision-making system. Consensual democracy, although implies a half-hearted way of decision-making, actually enables Albanians to control the entire state of North Macedonia. Effectively, in these elections, the Albanians are definitely political bosses in Skopje.

The Ministry of Finance controls everything in the country, so the government of Zaev will not be in a situation to fully control all financial and political flows in the country, especially since the first deputy prime minister, who comes from the DUI party, has a signature with the Prime Minister. That is why a rivalry between the SDSM and the DUI will most likely emerge in the first 100 days of the new government.

Although the ruling political milieu remains the same because SDSM and DUI are in power again, they will also have a lot of problems because the majority they have in parliament is very narrow. The situation is not only bad politically, but also socially – the economic situation is catastrophic, and North Macedonia is among the leading countries when it comes to the number of people infected with COVID-19 per capita. The new government has a plethora of problems to deal with including a major economic crisis, increasing poverty, and the COVID-19 pandemic. But it does have a trump card – securing a date for negotiations with the European Union, a process which will last at least 15 years. But it is unlikely this trump card can outweigh all the problems the country has at the moment. That is why this government is unlikely to survive for a long time, especially since next year there will be local elections for mayors.

The SDSM, under the guise of “Macedonia for all,” managed to abolish almost all parties of minority communities in these elections, namely parties of Serbs, Turks, Vlachs, Romas and Bosniaks. Through the election for the new North Macedonian government, three Albanian foreign ministers in the region will exist – in North Macedonia, Albania and the partially recognized Kosovo. According to a 2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor report, 83% of Albanians in Albania supported the idea of a Greater Albania, with 81% and 53% of Albanians in Kosovo and North Macedonia respectively supporting such an ambition.

Although the overwhelming majority of Albanians want a Greater Albania, it is unlikely to be achieved as North Macedonia does not pose a threat to U.S. dominance in the Balkans, and instead serves American interests in the region, especially since joining NATO in March of this year. The Albanians, who form the majority in western North Macedonia, will likely be pushing for a federalized state or autonomy as a first step towards independence or unification with Albania. However, unlike in Kosovo, the Albanians are unlikely to find western support for this, especially since North Macedonia is now a NATO member and has serious ambitions of joining the European Union.

For this, although the Albanians of North Macedonia have their best opportunity to date to make the next step towards a Greater Albania, it will not be realized as it will not find western support like it did in Kosovo. Nonetheless, even without western support, this will not stop the DUI and other Albanian organizations in the country from attempting to establish a headway for the eventual federalization or independence of western North Macedonia.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign announced Sunday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will address this week’s Republican National Convention—news that sparked swift criticism both because it’s unprecedented for the nation’s top diplomat to participate in this type of political event and because he will reportedly speak from “an undisclosed location” in Jerusalem while he’s there on official travel.

Before meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday, Pompeo—a former congressman from Kansas who previously served as CIA director under Trump—wrote Sunday on his personal Twitter account:

“Looking forward to sharing with you how my family is more SAFE and more SECURE because of President Trump. See you all on Tuesday night!”

The State Department told an Associated Press correspondent that

“Secretary Pompeo will address the convention in his personal capacity. No State Department resources will be used. Staff are not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeo’s appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.”

Citing two unnamed sources “close to the secretary,” McClatchy reported Sunday that “Pompeo’s decision to deliver a speech to the Republican National Convention while on official travel to the Middle East was cleared by” his personal attorney as well as lawyers for the State Department, RNC, and White House.

Wendy Sherman, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs in former President Barack Obama’s administration and led the negotiations for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, told McClatchy that Pompeo’s decision was a “shameful” attempt to appeal to evangelical voters who supported Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocating the U.S. Embassy.

“Pompeo speaking from Jerusalem breaks multiple traditions and norms,” Sherman said. “Secretaries of state, as far as I can find, have never appeared at a political convention. They, like the secretary of defense, have been above politics because they stand for America in the world.”

“At a time when peace and security in the Middle East is so tough, this political appearance is more than shameful,” she added. “Jerusalem should not be a prop in the Republican convention. Pompeo should not tarnish his office by this unprecedented action.”

At a time when peace and security in Middle East is so tough, Jerusalem should not be a prop for the RNC, and @SecPompeo should not be tarnishing the office of SecState. Unprecedented and wrong.

— Wendy R. Sherman (@wendyrsherman) August 23, 2020

The Times of Israel detailed on Monday how Pompeo’s decision constrasts with his predecessors from at least the past couple decades:

Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry, for instance, sat out the 2016 Democratic convention. And when Obama was officially nominated for a second term in 2012, Hillary Clinton was literally half a world away, traveling to the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, East Timor, Brunei, and far eastern Russia.

It’s not just Democrats. When Republicans nominated John McCain in 2008, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on a trip to Portugal, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Former U.S. President George W. Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, likewise did not speak to the 2004 Republican National Convention.

During a campaign event in Wisconsin last week, Trump said that “we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem,” referring to his 2017 decision to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv. “That’s for the evangelicals,” the president added. Sherman was far from alone in accusing Trump and Pompeo of exploiting religion and using the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem as a prop for political gain:

US Embassy to be used as a campaign prop ….. again https://t.co/VE4ZSPwq8J

— (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) August 23, 2020

⁦@mikepompeo⁩ will speak to the @GOP convo from #Jerusalem. It is an outrageous exploitation of religion to advance Trump. That’s why he moved the embassy in the 1st place. They are displaying their contempt for human life, religion, & international law. Disgrace. pic.twitter.com/cK2U71kndO

— James J. Zogby (@jjz1600) August 24, 2020

And from there it will only sink lower, using Judaism as a political prop with Pompeo crowing to the Evangelical vote from Jerusalem. https://t.co/CyjfGvt2s1

— Ariel Gold אריאל #SaveUSPS ☮️🔥✡️ 💕🌹 (@ArielElyseGold) August 24, 2020

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) suggested that Pompeo’s speech could violate the Hatch Act, which restricts federal employees from participating in certain political activities:

If reports are true, @SecPompeo is using foreign travel paid for by American taxpayers to campaign for Donald Trump.

This action by our top diplomat is not only inappropriate, but also likely violates the Hatch Act.

What @StateDept resources were used for this political stunt? https://t.co/GUKO3DA0eV

— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) August 24, 2020

Noting on Sunday that “it’s very unusual for a diplomat to get involved in domestic politics” and that “this starts to look like using taxpayer-funded federal resources for a campaign,” Margaret Brennan, moderator of CBS News‘ “Face the Nation,” askedRepublican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel whether taxpayers will be reimbursed for Pompeo’s trip. The chair did not provide a direct answer.

“I can only tell you, Margaret, that the events that we’ve put forward from the RNC and the campaign are going to be paid for by the convention from… the RNC and the campaign,” McDaniel responded. “You know, everything that we’ve put together has changed because of Covid. The president rightly said we’re going to leave Jacksonville because we don’t want to have resources taken away from a city that’s dealing with a pandemic. And he brought it back to the White House, which is his residence.”

“And it’s being paid for by the Republican National Committee and the campaign, not the taxpayers,” McDaniel added. After Brennan asked whether she was confirming that Pompeo’s trip will be reimbursed by the campaign, the chair said that “I’m not confirming anything having to do with Secretary Pompeo’s trip. I am just saying the programming, the staging, everything that we’re doing will be paid for by the Republican National Committee and the campaign.”

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

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Featured image: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on August 24, 2020 in Jerusalem. (Photo: Pompeo/Twitter)

A mystery for months is how it is that so many governments in so many different places on earth could have adopted the same or very similar preposterous policies, no matter the threat level of the virus, and without firm evidence that interventions had any hope of being effective. 

In the course of two weeks, traditional freedoms were zapped away in nearly all developed countries. In a seriously bizarre twist, even the silliest policies replicated themselves like a virus in country after country.

For example, you can’t try on clothing in a store in Texas or in Melbourne, or in London or in Kalamazoo. What’s with that? We know that the COVID bug is least likely to live on fabrics unless I have symptoms of it, sneeze on my handkerchief and then I stuff it in your mouth. The whole thing is a ridiculous mysophobic overreach, like most of the rules under which we live.

Then there was the inside/outside confusion. First everyone was forced indoors and people were arrested for being outdoors. Later, once restaurants started opening, people were not allowed indoors so eating establishments scrambled to make outdoor dining possible. Are we supposed to believe that the virus lived outside for a while but then later moved inside?

Or these curfews. So many places have them despite a complete absence of evidence that COVID spread prefers the night to the day. I guess the real point is to put a stop to revelry that might bring people together in a fun way? It’s like all our governments decided on the same day that COVID spreads through smiles and fun, so we have to banish both.

In Sydney and Los Angeles, and also in Detroit and Miami, you need to wear a mask when you walk in a restaurant but not when you sit. And this 6-foot rule is highly suspect too. It seems to imply that if you get too close to each other, COVID spontaneously appears. At least people seem to believe that.

Australia, in its way, even created a slogan and a jingle to go with it. “Staying Apart Keeps Us Together,” says Orwell, I mean, Victoria.

Socially distance! Don’t be a silent spreader! Even though the largest study yet has shown that “asymptomatic cases were least likely to infect their close contacts.” Which is to say, this is mostly nonsense.

In most places too, you have to quarantine two weeks when you arrive from afar, even though it is rare that the virus incubation period is that long. The mean period is 6 days, perhaps, which is what one would expect from a coronavirus like the common cold.

Oh, and in department stores, you can’t spray perfume to try it out, because surely that spreads COVID – not. Except that there is not one shred of evidence that there is any truth to this. This one seems completely made up, though it is widely imposed.

The list goes on. The bans of gatherings over 50 outdoors and 25 indoors, the closures of gyms at a time when people need to be getting healthy, the shutting of theaters and bowling alleys but the keeping open of big-box stores – these policies are as ubiquitous as they are unsupported by any science. And we’ve known this for many months, ever since the media meltdown over Florida Spring Break ended up in zero fatal cases contracted at the revelry.

The worst case is school closings. They were shut down at the same time all over the world, despite evidence available since at least January that the threat to children is nearly zero. Yes, they do get COVID almost entirely asymptomatically, which is to say they do not get “sick” in the old-fashioned sense of that term. What’s more, they are highly unlikely to spread it to adults precisely because they do not have symptoms. This is widely admitted.

Still governments decided to wreck kids’ lives for an entire season.

And the timing of it all seems strangely suspicious. All these countries and states implemented this compulsory clown show at the same time, whether cases were everywhere or nowhere.

In the U.S., this was fascinating to watch. The shutdowns happened all over the country. In the Northeast, the virus had already spread widely toward herd immunity. The South shut down at the same time but the virus wasn’t even there. By the time the virus did arrive, most states in the South had already reopened. The virus doesn’t seem to care either way.

Now, looking at this it is very easy to go to conspiracy as the explanation. There is probably some secret hand at work somewhere that is guiding all of this, the thinking goes. How can so many governments in the world have simultaneously lost their marbles and abolished the people’s liberties in such a cruel way, while trampling on all rights of property and association?

I tend to resist big conspiracy theories on this subject simply because I seriously doubt that governments are smart enough to implement them. From what I can see, these governors and statesmen seem to be making things up in a crazy panic and then sticking with them just to pretend that they know what they are doing.

Pete Earle’s theory of pot commitment seems to explain why the stringency persists even in the lack of evidence that they do anything to suppress the virus.

But how can we account for the imposition of so many similarly ridiculous rules at the same time across so many parts of the globe?

I invite you to examine a very interesting study published by the National Academy of Sciences: Explaining the homogeneous diffusion of COVID-19 nonpharmaceutical interventions across heterogeneous countries.

A clearer title might be: how so many governments behaved so stupidly at once. The theory they posit seems highly realistic to me:

We analyze the adoption of nonpharmaceutical interventions in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries during the early phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Given the complexity associated with pandemic decisions, governments are faced with the dilemma of how to act quickly when their core decision-making processes are based on deliberations balancing political considerations. Our findings show that, in times of severe crisis, governments follow the lead of others and base their decisions on what other countries do. Governments in countries with a stronger democratic structure are slower to react in the face of the pandemic but are more sensitive to the influence of other countries. We provide insights for research on international policy diffusion and research on the political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This seems to fit with what I’ve seen anecdotally.

These guys in charge are mostly attorneys with specializations in bamboozling voters. And the “public health authorities” advising them can get credentials in the field without ever having studied much less practiced medicine. So what do they do? They copy other governments, as a way of covering up their ignorance.

The political and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party was on full display last week. First it was the convention of the Democratic Party, where the progressive wing of the party was pushed to the margins while the victorious, neoliberal right wing engaged in a surreal spectacle that came off oblivious to the economic, social and political crisis the country has been experiencing. The second thing that happened was the emergency reconvening of the U.S. House of Representatives to “save the post office.”

On the night Kamala Harris accepted the nomination as vice president, the Democratic Party devoted itself to demonstrating it was more militantly aggressive in its commitment to military threats, in the use of force and in reclaiming the U.S. global dominance that Trump supposedly has squandered. Neocons from the Republican Party also spoke to assure the country Joe Biden would commit to a stronger NATO, to completing the military pivot to Asia, and to standing up to the demon of the moment—Vladimir Putin.

The inspiring stories of democratic renewal and of happy days being just around the corner once Joe is in office seemed strangely disconnected from the fact that Congress had gone on vacation, leaving millions in economic limbo because the federal enhanced unemployment benefit had expired. Yet the House was called back by Nancy Pelosi not to pass a bill to end the confusion around extended unemployment and to protect against evictions, but to save the postal service so nothing would get in the way of electing the political class.

The racism, militarism, and materialism that Dr. King warned would be the diseases that would kill the body politic of the United States have created a zombie democracy.

War, the political betrayal of the working class, and an inane political posturing in the face of an intractable crisis are the politics of a society beyond salvation.

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The perfectly timed poisoning of unpopular, ineffective Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny and the involvement of Germany comes as Washington sought to place maximum pressure on Berlin to cancel the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. 

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Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny – according to German doctors – was allegedly poisoned but is expected to survive. If Navalny was poisoned and the goal was to assassinate him, it was a poorly conceived, poorly executed, and most of all – poorly timed plan.

Navalny’s sudden reappearance across the Western media comes just at the height of US attempts to place maximum pressure on Germany to cancel a pipeline – Nord Stream 2 – it is jointly constructing with Russia. The pipeline would move Russian hydrocarbons into Western Europe directly, bypassing Ukraine now fully destabilized by US and NATO intervention.

Just last week German state media DW in an article titled, “US senators threaten Germany’s port town of Sassnitz over Nord Stream 2 gas project,” would highlight the nature of US pressure, reporting that:

Three US senators are threatening the ferry port on the island of Rügen with “crushing” sanctions to prevent the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Fearing financial ruin, the people of Sassnitz are defiant.

This latest threat from the US against their own German “allies” comes after a long, concerted campaign to pressure Germany into cancelling the joint pipeline with Russia.

Earlier this year, the New York Times in an article titled, “A Russian Gas Pipeline Increases Tension Between the U.S. and Europe,” would report:

…the State Department moved to potentially impose economic penalties on investors and other business participants in the project, an expansion of existing sanctions.

The new measures were “a clear warning to companies” that “aiding and abetting Russia’s malign influence projects will not be tolerated,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters. “Get out now, or risk the consequences.”

The New York Times would note that growing US pressure faced condemnation from European leaders who accused Washington of interference in their sovereign affairs and specifically in regards to European energy policy.

The pipeline is already well over 90% completed.

Perfectly Timed Political Stunt 

The New York Times in a more recent article titled, “Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic in a Coma, Was Poisoned, German Doctors Say,” deliberately trumps up the incident.

Indeed Navalny is in a coma, but according to the German hospital currently treating him in an official statement, it was a medically induced coma. The statement read:

Since his admission at the weekend, Alexei Navalny has been receiving treatment at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The patient is being treated in intensive care and remains in medically induced coma. While his condition is serious, it is not currently life-threatening.

The New York Times in its article notes how unpopular and ineffective Navalny has been as an opposition figure in Russia over the years, admitting that:

Mr. Navalny’s needling criticism of Mr. Putin has never posed a serious electoral threat to the Russian leader, and Mr. Putin remains popular with many Russians.

It should be noted that Navalny himself and the anemic opposition he leads is a product of the US State Department with virtually ever organization and individual in it the recipient of US government money channeled through Washington’s notorious regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Navalny’s US Backing 

It is documented fact that Navalny was funded by and specifically to serve US interests through the NED and a variety of other US-based programs and fellowships and clearly promoted throughout the entirety of the Western corporate media.

Navalny’s fading brand is admitted openly even by his most eager supporters in the Western media – most recently in the above mentioned New York Times article describing his alleged poisoning.

The notion that the Kremlin would order Navalny’s assassination at this time defies common sense and logic.

There was very little controversial about it.  A featured blog post in the Oxford Political Review, authored in April by Joshua Krook, suggested that COVID-19 had brought a host of benefits for big tech companies.  Isolation ushered people towards online platforms.  Engagement on such platforms had increased dramatically.

Names were not mentioned.  Krook’s then employer, the Australian Public Service, made no appearance in the text.  Tech entities were not outed, though Krook noted, in general, how “big tech companies” have been “pursuing the attention economy”, seeking to get “all our attention at all times.”  With COVID-19, this had been achieved.  “People are trapped indoors, at home, on their devices at all times, with nowhere to go.”  Krook’s tone did come across as a touch judgmental, suggesting that replacing “human connection with technology has never felt so nakedly negative.”  He likened big tech entities to spouses who know “everything about you.”  By giving them information about yourself, a loss of free will is perpetrated precisely “because the person, or company, knows so much about you.” 

It took three months for Krook to get the call.  The managers of the APS took issue with the post.  It’s pessimism might damage the government’s relationship with the technology industry.  In Krook’s words to the Guardian, “the problem was that in talking about the big tech companies, we risked damaging the relationship the government has with big tech companies and that when we go and do public-private partnerships, they could Google my name, find my article and then refuse to work with us.”  Had the article been ingratiating – “positive about the big tech companies” – it would have been entirely permissible.  His options were starkly simple: remove the post or face termination of employment.  Any future pieces would have to go through the censoring scissors of the service.  

Screenshot from Oxford Political Review

What followed was the usual pattern.  The cold sweat of initial alarm; a quick request to the Oxford Political Review that the blog post be removed.  Deletion.  Then, a reconsideration of matters, the growth of a backbone to resist: quitting the job in the public sector and talking about civil service censorship.

As Krook explained in the Oxford Political Review,

“I resigned from my job in the government because I fundamentally disagree with the decision.  The Australian government should not be involved in censoring personal blog posts.  Public servants should be able to criticize private companies, including big tech companies.  There is no conflict of interest.  Freedom of speech is fundamental to a thriving, secular democracy.”

It pays to know what creatures you are working for, and what strange armour they insist on wearing when they deal with expression.  Know their values and code of conduct, because they are bound to be conversely related to what is actually intended.  Ideas will only be permitted in such an ecosystem if they are expressed with respect, which usually means causing no offense to the thick and unimaginative.  What is challenging is bound to be offensive; what is audaciously defying is bound to rub the dullards the wrong way.

The APS, for instance, has a code of conduct which deals with “employees as citizens”.  This has a sinister edge to it.  The APS acknowledges in Section 6 of the Code that employees are citizens and members of the community but “the right to serve the community as APS employees comes with certain responsibilities.”  Central to the point is a notion that has been stretched and mangled in punishing supposed transgressions by APS employees.  Responsibilities, for instance, “include maintaining confidence of the community in the capacity of the APS, and each member to it, to undertake their duties professionally and impartially.”  This comes terribly close to having no opinions, or at least the sort you can legitimately express. 

The section further gives clues as to what an APS employee should, or should not do.  Be careful making comments in an unofficial capacity (no mention of the healthy thoughts of such a person as an engaged private citizen).  Be wary of participating in political activities, participating in acts that might generate a conflict of interest, be cautious when working overseas and when being “identifiable as an APS employee.”

Naturally, such elastic codes are drafted in ways that suggest openness and fairness, while coldly repudiating them.  There is, for instance, a tentative nod to the engagement of APS employees “in robust discussion … as an important part of open government.”  But the lid is tightly shut on the issue of public comments, which must conform to the “APS Values, Employment Principles and the Code.”  And public comments are broad indeed, covering public speech, online media including blogs and social media networking sites. 

Michaela Banerji, formerly an employee of the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship, found at much personal cost that tweeting critically about government policy on refugees, even anonymously, was sufficient to get her sacked.  Her heroic effort to bring her messages and opinions within the realms of Australia’s implied right to freedom of communication on political subjects was snootily dismissed by the country’s highest court in 2019.  The implied right was not a personal one, intoned the High Court judges, but “a restriction on legislative power which arises as a necessary implication” on construing various sections of the Australian Constitution “and as such, extends only so far as is necessary to preserve and protect the system of representative and responsible government mandated by the Constitution.” 

Justice James Edelman went so far as to claim that the APS Code did not turn “public servants into lonely ghosts” but conceded that it would cast “a powerful chill over political communication.”  All that interested the judges, however, was that Banerji had been given a proportionate penalty balanced against preserving a neutral public service.  Had Krook dared test the waters of litigation, it would have been grimly interesting how the High Court might have distinguished his case to that of Banerji’s, given that he expressed no criticism in the post of the government or government policy. 

The Krook affair also reveals another disturbing trend.  With all that froth and babble about regulators keen to rein in the power of Silicon Valley, we have an object lesson about how keen the Australian government is to stay in the warming bed of big tech.  Google, Facebook and other representatives will be delighted by this stinging hypocrisy.  Public servants have been crudely warned: do not write pieces, however general, about the consequences of the COVID-19 tech world and its delighted Silicon Valley stalwarts.

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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]

Many journalists and op-ed pundits have been observing how the United States has become two nations that are seemingly divided along a red-blue line, each side believing in “facts” that are irreconcilable with those “facts” believed to be true by the other side. Some are even suggesting that the United States is on the verge of what would be a new civil war. To be sure, each morning it is possible to open Facebook, which is, of course, a managed site that features innuendo, opinion plus outright lies, and immediately see wide divergences in analysis of events that took place the night before. This is particularly true regarding the long running debate over the genesis of the coronavirus and the methods that are being used to combat it.

On one side in the pandemic crisis debate are all those who, often for ideological reasons, reject government telling people what they should or must do. On the other side is establishment medical thinking and those government officials who believe that the state has an obligation to intervene in what is undeniably a health crisis. The “truth,” if it actually exists, might well recognize that the virus is dangerous and should be treated seriously while also taking steps to minimize the collateral damage in those measures that are being taken to tame it. And, of course, both sides are talking past each other, frequently resorting to ridicule and doling out punishments to make their points. Humiliating a store clerk because she is wearing a mask or simulating a sneeze in the face of someone who is not doing so to express one’s contempt are hardly conversation starters.

Likewise, the “black lives matter” generated protests have not surprisingly also produced strong responses that have gone far beyond the whys or wherefores involving the killing of one man in police custody. Much of the heat is generated by elusive collateral issues that remain stubbornly subject to individual interpretation like “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” Most Americans caught in the middle of the verbal onslaughts probably would agree that the militarization of police forces in the U.S. since 9/11 has not exactly worked out well in terms of making policing community responsive. But rampaging crowds of looters and provocateurs seemingly dedicated to destruction of both public and private property suggest that the countervailing arguments have gone far beyond the point where anything sensible might come out on the other end.

One is reminded of the Japanese book and movie Rashomon. The story was written by Akutagawa Ryunosuke in 1922 and the film, directed by Akira Kurosawa, followed in 1950. The tale, set in 8^th Century feudal Japan, involved a rape and a murder with each of the four principal characters providing his and her own version of what had occurred. The murdered samurai speaks through a Shinto psychic, while a bandit-witness in the forest, a traveling monk, and the samurai’s wife, who was the rape victim, all provide alternative versions of what had taken place. The story reveals how all of the contradictory testimony was fundamentally dishonest, in that each participant was interpreting events to support his or her self-interest in the outcome of the tragedy.

The movie is now considered to be one of the greatest films ever made and the story line, dubbed the “Rashomon effect,” has been used to described situations in which eye witnesses to an event provide completely contradictory versions of what took place. One might suggest that the Rashomon effect is currently working overtime in the United States. The mainstream “progressive” media sees “peaceful demonstrators” in places like Portland or Seattle because that fits their agenda of anti-Trumpism, while others see mostly burning buildings and cars as well as injured policemen because they are internally wired to condemn the disorder. Particularly in a stress situation, most people will see what they want to see.

Similarly, COVID-19 is a “hoax” because to some the government is inappropriately and “unconstitutionally” getting involved while others are prepared to lock themselves in the basement for three months because they believe the dire warnings they are receiving by way of the media must be true. No one is necessarily lying in an attempt to deceive because those expressing their views actually are convinced by what they are apparently seeing and hearing.

With the virus raging and blm continues to grow, the federal government has been playing its own little Rashomon game in the country’s foreign policy. Some observers, like myself, see an escalating Rashomon-esque global war of aggression, while the key players in Washington claim to see only threats to American hegemony and the liberal democratic order that the U.S. claims to support. In the Middle East, for example, the U.S. and Israel have been edging towards war with Iran and Syria, possibly suggesting that the recent bombing in Beirut might have been a “plausibly denied” Israeli preemptive strike against Hezbollah. Israel has in fact been the aggressor, having instigated an increasing number of incidents with Hezbollah along the Lebanese border while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the Pentagon’s leaders look benignly on and praise Israeli restraint. But other “Rashomon effect” witnesses to what is taking place see all the aggression coming from Jerusalem and Washington. Neither side can see any merit in what the other is saying.

China is largely replacing Russia as the most favored “threat” for both the Democratic and Republican parties. Beijing has already been accused of unleashing the coronavirus on the United States while also preparing to interfere in the upcoming November national elections, even though evidence to back up either claim has been lacking. This fearmongering has led the U.S. to dispatch warships, including two aircraft carrier strike groups, to the South China Sea to intercede in a maritime dispute China is having with its neighbors, several of whom are allied to the United States. China has declared a two-hundred-mile economic zone off its coasts and also off some disputed islands which Washington has declared “illegal,” in part because it restricts “freedom of the seas.” The contested area, which is over 7,000 miles from North America, has been the site of massive U.S. Navy exercises in recent weeks. The increase in military activity has the potential to turn nasty if China opts to contest the U.S. presence. Some congressmen are already predicting that there will be an armed conflict of some kind within the next three to six months.

So, China sees itself has a regional power that is engaging in economic expansion in competition with countries like the United States while the U.S. sees an increasing threat. Both are looking at the same data and drawing conclusions that are nevertheless diametrically opposed, just like Rashomon. And both are talking past each other. To be sure China is no “gentle giant.” It is a totalitarian state with the world’s largest population and what might currently be the largest economy. It has recently reneged on agreements to maintain Hong Kong as an autonomous region, which has invited international opprobrium. The head of the FBI Christopher Wray has described Beijing as the “greatest long term threat” to the future of the United States, though he is probably referring to the economic and political challenges rather than its military. China in return is out to supplant the United States as the world’s superpower and has done so by largely peaceful means, expanding its commercial ties to and investments in resource rich regions of the third world, locking in the raw materials that it will rely on to grow even more economically powerful.

Mike Pompeo is uncomfortable with that, saying last month that “We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come: that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.” So it’s all about a “free 21^st century,” but in Rashomon fashion China wants the freedom to continue to expand economically that Washington sees as a potential threat to “political” freedom and, more generally speaking, to its own dominance. Both countries have their own vision of what they are “seeing” and neither one is listening.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

Featured image is from TUR

The Trump administration is reportedly considering ending all Venezuela oil sanctions exemptions in October.

“Whatever oil business is left has to be completed (by the deadline),” an anonymous source told Reuters, while a State Department spokesman said Washington continues to warn companies on the “risks” they face by dealing with Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.

US President Donald Trump has allegedly expressed “frustration” that sanctions have not succeeded in ousting the Maduro government. The White House’s hardening stance comes less than 90 days ahead of November presidential elections, which Trump hopes to win with the support of Latin American emigre communities in Florida.

Starting with financial sanctions against PDVSA in August 2017, the US Treasury Department has imposed successive rounds of measures targeting Caracas’ main source of income. A January 2019 oil embargo was later expanded to a blanket ban on all dealings with Venezuelan state entities. The South American nation’s oil production has plummeted, falling from 1.911 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 to a decades-low record of 336,000 bpd in June.

The measures targeting Venezuela’s oil industry were further escalated in 2020 with the levying of secondary sanctions against two Rosneft subsidiaries. The Russian oil giant had been carrying a large proportion of Venezuelan crude before rerouting it to other destinations. Following Washington’s secondary sanctions, Rosneft transferred its assets to a Kremlin-owned company.

Most recently, the US Treasury Department looked to further choke off the Caribbean country’s oil exports by targeting vessels and shipping companies. PDVSA has attempted to assume shipping costs but its fleet has likewise been hurt by US sanctions.

Since the January 2019 oil embargo, foreign companies have gradually ceased to deal directly with PDVSA, while those who did requested special permission from US authorities. The Treasury Department has also issued temporary waivers to allow corporations to wind down their Venezuela activities. These have included California-based oil giant Chevron, which operates several joint ventures with PDVSA.

Washington’s threat to further tighten its sanctions regime comes days after the seizure of Venezuela-bound gasoline shipments.

According to the Wall Street Journal, threats of legal action and sanctions forced the Greek owner of four fuel tankers to surrender the Iranian fuel to US authorities in international waters. While the current location of the ships is unknown, they reportedly transferred the fuel cargo to other tankers bound for Houston.

Tehran reacted to the first reports through its ambassador to Venezuela Hojjatollah Soltani, who denied that the tankers were Iranian. The country’s oil minister, Biyan Namdar Zangane, later confirmed that the fuel had indeed been shipped from Iran and it had already been paid for by Venezuela.

Venezuelan authorities have yet to comment on the seizure.

With sanctions taking a hit on the country’s refining industry and also driving away fuel exporters, Caracas turned to Tehran to address its worsening fuel shortages.

Iran sent five fuel tankers in May while also offering technical assistance in repairing Venezuela’s most important refineries. The Amuay, Cardon and El Palito facilities have been brought back online, despite operating intermittently and severely below capacity.

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The US military has been facing increasing pressure from local resistance forces and pro-Iranian groups in Iraq.

On August 21, an improvised explosive device (IED) reportedly struck a vehicle of company working with the U.S.-led coalition in Aweerij, south of the capital, Baghdad. The vehicle was destroyed and its driver was killed. Pro-Iranian sources even claimed that the entire supply convoy of the US-led coalition was destroyed, and three Fijian private military contractors working for the U.S. military were killed. These claims have not been confirmed by any visual evidence so far.

On August 22, another IED attack hit a logistical convoy of the US-led coalition near Baghdad. This time the incident happened in Ghazaliya, on a highway leading to the al-Shuala district. The video from the site showed that at least one vehicle was damaged.

On August 23, an IED explosion targeted a convoy of US forces withdrawing from Camp Taji just a few hours after the US military officially handed the military base to Iraqi government forces. The base used to host 2,000 US troops. Most of them are set to be withdrawn in the coming days.

According to local sources, local Shiite resistance groups and Iranian-linked forces were behind these attacks. Iran and its Iraqi allies vowed to expel US forces from Iraq after the assassination of Iranian Quds Force Commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Deputy-Commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a US drone strike on January 3, 2020.

On August 20, Iran even unveiled two missiles with named after Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The missiles were revealed on the occasion of the National Defense Industry Day. The first missile “Martyr Hajj Qassem Soleimani” is ballistic with a range of up to 1,400 km. The second weapon, named “Martyr Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis,” is a cruise missile with a range of up to 1,000 km. Iran claimed that both missiles are capable of penetrating advanced anti-missile systems.

Tehran considers its missile program to be among the cornerstones of the country’s defense capabilities. On January 8, 2020, Iran even publicly conducted a missile strike on US military bases in Iraq retaliating for the assassination of Soleimani and al-Muhandis in Baghdad. The naming of new Iranian missiles after these prominent commanders are likely a demonstration of the Iranian determination to continue its anti-US campaign in the region. Therefore, the pressure on US forces in Iraq will likely further increase in the near future.

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Despite ruling Belarus with an iron fist, most Belarusians support Alexander Lukashenko.

President since 1994, he was legitimately reelected by a 61.7% majority, according to the pro-Western election monitoring group Golos.

It published “data collected by US-backed civic youth organization Zubr ‘Bizon’ and Chestniye Lyudi (‘Honest People’), an election monitoring group established by a group of programmers,” Sputnik News reported. More on this below.

Lukashenko’s victory margin exceeded the largest presidential landslide in US history since 1820.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by a 61.1% – 38.5% majority.

Running virtually unopposed in 1820, James Monroe won by an 80% majority.

George Washington, the first US president, won unanimously in 1789 and 1792, receiving all electoral college votes.

Compared to today’s money-controlled US political process, Washington did no campaigning, spending nothing to become US president twice.

Inventing the office he held from scratch, he was quoted saying: “I walk on untrodden ground.”

He was the nation’s larger than life figure, a general, not a politician who preferred to “liv(e) and d(ie) a private citizen on (his Mount Vernon) farm,” he said.

He was called on to take the job he didn’t want because his stature exceeded all others in the country at the time.

Today’s America and world are vastly different than in his day, what no one in his time could have imagined.

Commenting on the state of the nation at the time, Benjamin Franklin was quoted saying that a republic was created if its ruling class ahead could keep it.

He understood that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, what happened throughout the years to the present state of things that are far too debauched to fix.

According to Sputnik News, opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya won 25.4% of the vote, not the officially reported 10%.

Her support was far less than the 60% majority triumph she falsely claimed, Sputnik further explaining:

“Golos’ figures are based on data received after the processing of protocols from 1,310 polling stations, constituting about 22 percent of the total 5,767 polling places throughout Belarus, with protocols said to cover regions across the country, including cities, towns and villages.”

“The protocols were said to account for about 1.8 million voters, or about 32.2 percent of the 5.8 million people who cast votes.”

Despite results it reported, Golos claimed they’re not reliable, adding:

Lukashenko “cannot be considered Belarus’ legitimate president.” Election results should be declared “invalid.”

Lukashenko won. Tikhanovskaya lost. Cross-border in Lithuania, she met with US and EU officials, manipulating her to serve their interests.

On Sunday, Sergey Lavrov accused anti-Lukashenko elements of seeking “bloodshed” in the country.

With establishment media support, Tikhanovskaya appeals more to the West than Belarusians who oppose a repeat of 2013-14 (US orchestrated) Euromaidan violence in neighboring Ukraine.

Tikhanovskaya “was not allowed to calm (things) down, and she began to make political statements, quite harsh ones, demanding to continue strikes, walkouts, protests,” Lavrov explained — her remarks scripted by her US handlers.

Notably her remarks are made in English for a Western and Belarusian audience, not her native language.

Controlled by her handlers, her agenda is unrelated to strengthening democracy in Belarus, a notion both right wings of the US one-party state abhor and tolerate nowhere — not at home or abroad.

Russia is involved diplomatically to prevent a repeat of what happened in Ukraine.

The Kremlin supports the right of Belarusians to decide on who’ll lead them — free from foreign interference.

Previous articles discussed the reintegration of Belarus into Russia — with or without Lukashenko.

By referendum judged open, free, and fair by international monitors, Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to correct an historic mistake by returning to Russia.

Belarusians deserve the same choice — to decide by independently monitored referendum whether or not to again become a Russian republic.

That’s how democracy the way it should be is supposed to work.

As for my view, I support the right of the Belarusian people to decide this issue on their own, free from foreign interference.

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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 OneWorld

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Let’s start with the story of an incredibly disappearing summit.

Every August, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) converges to the town of Beidaihe, a seaside resort some two hours away from Beijing, to discuss serious policies that then coalesce into key planning strategies to be approved at the CCP Central Committee plenary session in October.

The Beidaihe ritual was established by none other than Great Helmsman Mao, who loved the town where, not by accident, Emperor Qin, the unifier of China in the 3^rd century B.C., kept a palace.

2020 being, so far, a notorious Year of Living Dangerously, it’s no surprise that in the end Beidaihe was nowhere to be seen. Yet Beidaihe’s invisibility does not mean it did not happen.

Exhibit 1 was the fact that Premier Li Keqiang simply disappeared from public view for nearly two weeks – after President Xi chaired a crucial Politburo gathering in late July where what was laid out was no less than China’s whole development strategy for the next 15 years.

Li Keqiang resurfaced by chairing a special session of the all-powerful State Council, just as the CCP’s top ideologue, Wang Huning – who happens to be number 5 in the Politburo – showed up as the special guest at a meeting of the All China Youth Federation.

What’s even more intriguing is that side by side with Wang, one would find Ding Xuexiang, none other than President Xi’s chief of staff, as well as three other Politburo members.

In this “now you see them, now you don’t” variation, the fact that they all showed up in unison after an absence of nearly two weeks led sharp Chinese observers to conclude that Beidaihe in fact had taken place. Even if no visible signs of political action by the seaside had been detected. The semi-official spin is that no get-together happened at Beidaihe because of Covid-19.

Yet it’s Exhibit 2 that may clinch the deal for good. The by now famous end of July Politburo meeting chaired by Xi in fact sealed the Central Committee plenary session in October. Translation: the contours of the strategic road map ahead had already been approved by consensus. There was no need to retreat to Beidaihe for further discussions.

Trial balloons or official policy?

The plot thickens when one takes into consideration a series of trial balloons that started to float a few days ago in select Chinese media. Here are some of the key points.

1. On the trade war front, Beijing won’t shut down US businesses already operating in China. But companies which want to enter the market in finance, information technology, healthcare and education services will not be approved.
2. Beijing won’t dump all its overwhelming mass of US Treasuries in one go, but – as it already happens – divestment will accelerate. Last year, that amounted to $100 billion. Up to the end of 2020, that could reach $300 billion.
3. The internationalization of the yuan, also predictably, will be accelerated. That will include configuring the final parameters for clearing US dollars through the CHIPS Chinese system – foreseeing the incandescent possibility Beijing might be cut off from SWIFT by the Trump administration or whoever will be in power at the White House after January 2021.
4. On what is largely interpreted across China as the “full spectrum war” front, mostly Hybrid War, the PLA has been put into Stage 3 alert – and all leaves are canceled for the rest of 2020. There will be a concerted drive to increase all-round defense spending to 4% of GDP and accelerate the development of nuclear weapons. Details are bound to emerge during the Central Committee meeting in October.
5. The overall emphasis is on a very Chinese spirit of self-reliance, and building what can be defined as a national economic “dual circulation” system: the consolidation of the Eurasian integration project running in parallel to a global yuan settlement mechanism.

Inbuilt in this drive is what has been described as “to firmly abandon all illusions about the United States and conduct war mobilization with our people. We shall vigorously promote the war to resist US aggression (…) We will use a war mindset to steer the national economy (…) Prepare for the complete interruption of relations with the US.”

It’s unclear as it stands if these are only trial balloons disseminated across Chinese public opinion or decisions reached at the “invisible” Beidaihe. So all eyes will be on what kind of language this alarming configuration will be packaged when the Central Committee presents its strategic planning in October. Significantly, that will happen only a few weeks before the US election.

It’s all about continuity

All of the above somewhat mirrors a recent debate in Amsterdam on what constitutes the Chinese “threat” to the West. Here are the key points.

1. China constantly reinforces its hybrid economic model – which is an absolute rarity, globally: neither totally publicly owned nor a market economy.
2. The level of patriotism is staggering: once the Chinese face a foreign enemy, 1.4 billion people act as one.
3. National mechanisms have tremendous force: absolutely nothing blocks the full use of China’s financial, material and manpower resources once a policy is set.
4. China has set up the most comprehensive, back to back industrial system on the planet, without foreign interference if need be (well, there’s always the matter of semiconductors to Huawei to be solved).

China plans not only in years, but in decades. Five year plans are complemented by ten year plans and as the meeting chaired by Xi showed, 15 year plans. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is in fact a nearly 40-year plan, designed in 2013 to be completed in 2049.

And continuity is the name of the game – when one thinks that the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, first developed in 1949 and then expanded by Zhou Enlai at the Bandung conference in 1955 are set in stone as China’s foreign policy guidelines.

The Qiao collective, an independent group that advances the role of qiao (“bridge”) by the strategically important huaqiao (“overseas Chinese”) is on point when they note that Beijing never proclaimed a Chinese model as a solution to global problems. What they extol is Chinese solutions to specific Chinese conditions.

A forceful point is also made that historical materialism is incompatible with capitalist liberal democracy forcing austerity and regime change on national systems, shaping them towards preconceived models.

That always comes back to the core of the CCP foreign policy: each nation must chart a course fit for its national conditions.

And that reveals the full contours of what can be reasonably described as a Centralized Meritocracy with Confucian, Socialist Characteristics: a different civilization paradigm that the “indispensable nation” still refuses to accept, and certainly won’t abolish by practicing Hybrid War.

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A new focus of tensions and uncertainties appears to be emerging in Iran. Recent reports from the Iranian authorities have concluded that the explosion at the Natanz nuclear plant had a criminal cause, most likely caused by a sabotage operation. Not many details have yet been provided about the completion of the investigations. The Iranian government has announced that more information about the case will be released soon but made clear the authorities’ certainty about the criminal nature of the plant’s fire.

In July, a major explosion hit the Iranian nuclear power plant at Natanz, used especially for enriching uranium – an essential activity for the development of nuclear technology. The explosion sparked a huge fire that caught the attention of the media around the world at the time. After the incident, no fatalities or leaks of radioactive materials were reported in the region, so the damage was considered low.

Immediately after the explosion, several rumors were spread about the real nature of the event, as it is common on such occasions. Some of the rumors claimed that Israel had triggered the explosion with the intention of damaging Iran in its nuclear development plans. At the time, all rumors were denied and no “conspiracy theory” was highlighted. Now, after the result of the investigations, such rumors have surfaced, but the Iranian government remains silent about them, stating that the investigations’ data will be revealed later.

Despite the uncertainties surrounding the case, the proximity of the date of the explosion in Natanz with other similar events in Iran brings us intriguing reflections and leaves many questions unanswered. In fact, since June, a series of repeated explosions at Iranian plants has been reported. In June, there was a major explosion at the nuclear power plant at Parchin’s military base in Tehran. This plant is the largest explosive factory for Iranian forces and is therefore a place of great strategic value for the country. Shortly thereafter, there was the event in Natanz, after which, in July, another major explosion occurred at the Isfahan power plant in central Iran. Still, not only plants have been victimized by mysterious explosions in Iran, but also several other facilities: on June 30, an explosion at a clinic in Tehran left 19 dead; in July, two people died in an explosion at a factory also in Tehran; also in July, a major fire in the port of Bouchehr destroyed several vessels, but left no victims. All these incidents have had no well-defined explanation and are therefore the subject of rumors.

The most curious thing is to note that the explosions occurred shortly after Iran intensified its uranium enrichment project. The withdrawal of the US from the 2015 nuclear agreement led Tehran to reconsider the national nuclear plan and to announce the resumption of the uranium enrichment program in the first half of June, on a date coincidentally close to the beginning of the series of explosions. Whether or not there is a causal relationship between both facts, the proximity of the dates is minimally interesting and justifies the suspicions and hypotheses raised by several experts. This is not a mere “conspiracy theory”: the possibility that foreign powers are sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program through some secret operations  is quite plausible, regardless of whether it is factual or not.

Since the resumption of the uranium enrichment program, Iran has received several accusations from other countries, mainly from Israel, that it is planning to acquire an atomic bomb. Tehran vehemently denies such accusation, as it has done on many other occasions – according to various statements by Shiite religious leaders, the building of a nuclear bomb is condemnable according to the Islamic religion, so Iran, as an Islamic Republic, could not undertake such project. However, Iranian military progress remains intense and the results are visible. The country recently announced the development of a new long-range ballistic missile, causing even more negative reactions in the West and Israel, where the speech about a possible Iranian nuclear bomb is gaining strength.

In fact, we should expect the Iranian authorities to provide more information about the case and only then express opinions about it. For the time being, the most interesting thing to note is the war of narratives around Iran: even with several pronouncements denying the accusations, the United States and Israel maintain the claim that Tehran is building an atomic bomb as an official state discourse; on the other hand, the opinion of experts on possible sabotage against strategic installations of the Iranian government is classified as a “conspiracy theory” or “false rumor” and is immediately rejected.

There is, of course, an information war around the case. We do not know if it was foreign sabotage – and we may never know – but we do know that such subversive activities really exist and often happen.

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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

The alliance between Venezuela and Iran seems to be taking new directions. The ties between the two countries began to strengthen in an economic sphere when, in the first half of 2020, Tehran started sending oil ships to Venezuela, circumventing the international trade rules imposed by Washington with the aim of blocking Caracas economically. Earlier this year, Tehran sent several cargoes of gasoline to Venezuela to help the South American country overcome fuel shortages, as well as equipment to help state oil company PDVSA overcome production and export difficulties during the crisis.

The presence of Iranian ships on the Venezuelan coast has been a real affront to the United States, which has always played a role of naval hegemony in the Caribbean. Recently, the United States claimed to have seized four ships carrying Iranian gasoline en route to Venezuela, prompting Washington to tighten sanctions on both countries. But the US was unable to contain the Iranian advance and now the alliance between Caracas and Tehran has advanced into a military step.

Recently, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro thanked Iran for helping the South American country overcome US sanctions on its oil industry. At the time, he said that Iran is helping to maintain all Venezuelan national governance but did not elaborate on how this cooperation was taking place. He said it was important to maintain secrecy on the topic because of the economic boycott imposed by the US – which he called a “brutal war”. However, Colombian President Iván Duque said last week that Maduro was interested in buying missiles from Iran, which Venezuelan officials denied, but later Maduro responded that Duke’s statement was a “good idea” and that he had not yet considered it.

Shortly thereafter, Maduro confirmed his interest in buying Iranian weapons. According to the Venezuelan president, Iran, possessing advanced military technology, can be a great partner of the South American country in case of possible attacks by the US. According to Maduro, buying Iranian missiles was not in his plans until the moment that Iván Duque gave him this idea by accusing him in a condemning tone of being acquiring such equipment.

“With Iran having tremendous military technology, buying short, medium and long-range rockets and missiles from Iran to defend against imperialist threats seemed like a good idea, [so] I gave the order to Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino to evaluate all potentialities and possibilities, and if it is possible and convenient, we will buy these missiles at the right time”, said Maduro in an interview with the state television channel” Venezolana de Televisión”.

According to the Venezuelan president, the Duke’s pronouncement was intended to attack Venezuela to take international attention away from Colombia’s national problems, such as the massacres and murders perpetrated by drug trafficking militias and the great social crisis generated by the new coronavirus, however, it ended up arousing interest the Venezuelan government to buy such Iranian missiles.

Now, it seems that the possibility of buying Iranian missiles is being evaluated by Vladimir Padrino, leader of the Venezuelan Defense, and there is a great tendency for the negotiations to be concluded, considering that there is a willingness on both sides for international cooperation since they have a common enemy. Looking at the case from a realistic point of view, it is very unlikely that negotiations between Iran and Venezuela started due to Iván Duque’s pronouncement. Both countries were probably already discreetly maintaining this dialogue and the accusatory and condemnatory pronouncement served only as an opportunity to make the news public. In fact, it seems that Duque’s words were a flawed blow: Venezuela was expected to deny the accusations and thus create a scenario of tensions and uncertainties, but, contrary to what was predicted by the Colombia-US coalition, Venezuela has made public its intention to acquire the missiles and now the alliance is almost official.

If the missiles are bought by Caracas, this will be a major blow to the American presence in South America and, at the same time, a major milestone for Iranian international projections. The most important thing to note is that this agreement has a much deeper dimension than mere military trade: everything indicates that it will only be the first step in a major military alliance. Venezuela will have its defense system strengthened and will guarantee greater security against possible attacks by both Americans and Colombians. Likewise, in a possible war against Washington, Iran will have the definitive support of Venezuela – a strategically well located ally, with its coastline pointing to the Caribbean Sea, an important area of ​​American influence.

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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

Longstanding US plans earmarked Belarus for regime change, wanting pro-Western puppet rule in another nation bordering Russia.

There’s nothing spontaneous about mass protests that erupt in nations the US wants transformed into client states.

They’re most likely to occur in the run-up to and/or after elections in which a pro-Western US chosen candidate is unlikely or unable to defeat an incumbent dark forces in Washington want toppled.

On August 9, longtime Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko defeated opposition challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in an election he was expected to win.

His inflated eight-to-one majority triumph created an opportunity for prearranged protesters to cry foul in Minsk streets.

Historian, former UK envoy, human rights activist Craig Murray believes Lukashenko was reelected handily “with over 60% of the vote.”

Tsikhanouskaya’s claim that she triumphed by over a 60% majority amounted to reading lines scripted by her US handlers.

She lost. He won, but likely by much less than an 80% majority.

Orchestrated daily protests have been ongoing since the August 9 presidential election, most likely to continue ahead.

US regime change plots don’t quit until achieving success or they’re foiled.

Russia is highly unlikely to allow another US client state to emerge on its border without acting to prevent it.

On Sunday, Sergey Lavrov explained that Washington seeks to gain control over Belarus, adding:

In cahoots with its NATO partners, the Trump regime is “trying to redraw Belarus according to (its) own design.”

“(W)e will not be against any decision that the Belarusian leadership will make regarding dialogue with its population.”

“When the West says that only mediation with the participation of Western countries will be effective, everyone remembers how it was in Ukraine, where Western mediation turned into a complete (unwillingness of the Obama regime) to negotiate.”

Moscow supports Lukashenko’s proposal for dialogue with opposition elements on constitutional reform.

Belarusians need no external interference in their internal affairs, what’s been going on for the past two weeks.

Lukashenko accused the US-led West of attempting to destabilize the country, including by deploying NATO forces close to its borders.

Foreign dark forces want him removed him from office, he stressed.

Tikhanovskaya’s call for Lukashenko “to leave” came ahead of a planned meeting with Trump regime Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun in Lithuania on Monday — to hand her updated imperial instructions.

She’s putty in the hands of US dark forces using her to further their interests, manipulating her moves and remarks.

Belarus and Russia are Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member states, along with Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

It calls for member states to abstain from use of force, at the same time pledging military support in case a CSTO nation is invaded by foreign elements.

On Sunday, Belarusian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Anatoly Glaz said his country rejects what he called “threadbare advice” from Ukraine’s pro-Western puppet regime, adding:

Kiev has “a lot of more important everyday problems to address inside the country for years to come rather than giving advice to the neighbor” it doesn’t want or accept.

Hostile US actions destabilized Belarus. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell opposes Trump regime shenanigans to destroy the JCPOA while supporting its unlawful color revolution attempt in Belarus, tweeting on Sunday:

“Hugely impressed by massive and peaceful demonstrations in Minsk and across #Belarus.”

“They show determination and courage of the Belarusian people to seek democratic change (sic).”

There’s nothing “democratic” about trying to replace an elected president with pro-Western puppet rule.

Ignoring US-orchestrated violence, Pompeo said the Trump regime “has been inspired by the display of peaceful expression of the Belarusian people seeking to determine their own future (sic)” — as long as the nation’s ruling authorities subordinate its sovereign rights to US interests.

Russia stands ready to help the Belarus stay free from Western control.

Its actions will conform to the rule of law — polar opposite how hegemon USA operates everywhere.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

NOTE: This piece was written in April 2020 and first appeared in the May-June edition no. 180 of New Dawn Magazine

I can remember them saying that ‘everything changed after 9/11’. It did, but certainly not for the better. I think we can all agree on that.  I remember how everyone surrendered their rights and key aspects of democracy, all in the name of ‘keeping us safe’.

Back then, world-changing decisions were made in reaction to an exaggerated threat, with sweeping ‘emergency measures’ and laws enacted. Usually, nothing good follows from a government that is making decisions and formulating permanent policy, suspending constitutions and rights – imposing all of this on a population operating from a position of fear. That much we did learn. Some of us did anyway.

In January, like a leviathan sprung forth from the titans Oceanus and Ceto in ancient Greece, the global coronavirus pandemic was born. Like 9/11, it was a disruptive event, but this time on a scale unimaginable. Whether or not one believes this was naturally-occurring or a biologically-engineered pathogen (there is every reason to believe it could be), it is beyond argument that this ‘crisis’ is and will be used to advance a multi-pronged globalist agenda, likely to feature more wars between the great powers.

Modern man is now entering realms of dystopia only imagined before by the likes of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, with more than a hint of Philip K. Dick. What makes all of this difficult for so many is that the sudden transition has been almost instantaneous, leaving people in a near callow state of bewilderment, wondering what just happened to their old life.

No matter which way this situation goes, it’s almost certain life will never be the same.

COVID Crisis

By now we should be familiar with the story: a novel coronavirus, scientifically known as SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, has made its way across the planet, infecting millions of people and registering over 100,000 deaths (as of the time of writing) across 180 countries. The victims of this outbreak are overwhelming elderly persons over the age of 70 and those in palliative care, most of who have severe and chronic underlying medical conditions.

Make no mistake about it – this is a disruptive event on a scale the modern world has never seen before. The shock and awe began from the moment the story broke from the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei Province. Global audiences were inundated with images of Chinese authorities putting hundreds of people into biological suits, hosing down the outside of buildings, before quarantining themselves in their apartments. Then began a state-sanctioned medieval-style program that western media and politicians enthusiastically dubbed a “lockdown,” a term aptly borrowed from the prison industrial complex.

Wuhan was an unforgettable spectacle which really impacted the western psyche, such that when the coronavirus made it to European and North American shores, the public was already conditioned to expect a Chinese-style response from their own governments. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what they got and, in fact, it was what they demanded.

On 12 March, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called an emergency press conference where he took to the podium, flanked by his two leading science advisors, Sir Patrick Vallace and Chris Whitty, who proceeded to explain the government plan of action which was centred around the commonly known epidemiological concept of “herd immunity.” Their strategy was a familiar one because it has been the orthodoxy in modern epidemiology – allow a virus to go through approximately 60-80% of the population in order to achieve herd immunity, naturally extinguishing the virus in a single season.

But Johnson made the fatal error of grossly overestimating the death rate at 1% of the total infected, an estimate that would have left the country with some 52 million infected and 500,000 fatalities. Of course, in hindsight, these numbers were pure fiction, but at the time everyone was so enveloped in fear that they believed the ‘experts’. Nonetheless, the herd immunity approach was more or less identical to the ‘no lockdown’ approach taken by European countries Sweden and Iceland, as well as Belarus, Mexico, and Japan. This would entail standard random sample testing nationally and for those exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms. The elderly and vulnerable people would be told to self-isolate for a period of time while studies were conducted.

‘Plan A’ didn’t last long. On 24 March, Johnson appeared on national TV, this time without his science team, to announce a nationwide lockdown – an effective shutdown of society and most of the country’s economy. The UK was now following fellow NATO member states France, Italy, Spain and others, which had already imposed draconian national lockdowns, including strict new ‘social distancing’ guidelines preventing people from being together.

It appeared that Johnson’s sudden 180º degree turn was prompted in part by an alarmist report generated by one of the government ‘expert’ teams at Imperial College London, led by controversial computer modeler Neil Ferguson who was previously responsible for the 2001 ‘Foot and Mouth’ crisis, a debacle which ended in the unnecessary culling of some six million livestock in Britain.

This time, Ferguson and his team worked their modelling magic to come up with an estimated half a million coronavirus deaths if the government did not implement “very intense social distancing and other interventions now in place.”

While the figure was completely fictional, the media seized on it, as did government officials, which fuelled fear and panic across Britain’s government-media complex. Frightened and unsure, the public accepted the authoritarian measures, but the government never gave an end date to the quarantine; it was left open-ended at the discretion of the government’s scientific coterie.

Once that bubble of fear had been sufficiently inflated, a medieval-style lockdown was a fait accompli in numerous countries including Australia and New Zealand. The impact of a full national quarantine is yet unknown, but it’s already becoming clear that it will be nothing short of cataclysmic for those countries who agreed to the voluntary self-destruction of their economies and the indefinite suspension of democracy.

It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and Imperial College tried conjuring a global panic over a flu virus. Back in 2005, the “range of deaths,” the UN warned of bird flu virus H5N1, “could be anything between five and 150 million.” Officials even drafted in Imperial’s most reliable doomsayer, Neil Ferguson, to help come up with another completely fictional death toll of 200 million people. His high school level math equation was breathtaking in its over-simplicity:

“Around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof. Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”

That doomsday prediction led to the culling of tens of millions of birds in Southeast Asia, but the pandemic never really materialised. In the end, human fatalities numbered in the hundreds worldwide. It was a non event.

Similar unremarkable numbers followed the global hype over the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Thanks to the work of investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US was caught over-inflating the number of cases – a fraudulent move that had grave implications for government policy and stoking unfounded public fear.

With COVID-19, the globalist medical industrial complex, led by WHO, hoped to repeat the previous public relations campaigns by hyping the novel coronavirus as the next Spanish Flu. This time they were given an extraordinary opportunity thanks to China which put on an incredible media performance and ‘show of strength’ in the month of January by ‘locking down’ Wuhan – inspiring western and other leaders to try the same big government approach.

However, the results would turn out economically disastrous for western ‘lockdown’ countries.

Economic Collapse

All of this is certain to trigger a protracted global recession marked by at least 12 months of negative growth, with economic and social displacement the likes of which the world has never seen before. The decision by countries like the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US to voluntarily implode their economies and place most of their populations under house arrest will have a lasting impact not only on national economies but also the global economy for years to come.

In terms of scale, the damage caused to markets and industry has already surpassed the 2008 financial crisis by orders of magnitude, and there’s no end in sight.

To ‘fight the coronavirus’ governments have imploded their real economies and replaced them with nationalised pools of finance earmarked for each section of the economy. This emergency transformation is the same as a wartime mobilisation of an economy, with a heavy focus on the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex, the military, and selected corporate partners hand-picked by the state. This hard fusion of state and corporate interests is classic corporatism or fascism. In this brutal and constrained environment, these are some of the only institutions strong enough to remain viable.

The net effect of immediately putting millions of workers onto government welfare rolls and pushing hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) into bankruptcy will be the largest consolidation and transfer of wealth in modern history. Those with enough capital to ride out the crisis will be able to buy-up companies, and even whole industries, for literally pennies on the dollar. Monopolies like Amazon, Google and telecoms giants will consolidate and solidify their market shares as competitors gradually die off and are swallowed-up in receivership. Formerly independent contractors will now be reliant on government assistance, as will any business qualifying for government ‘relief’ grants and loans. Large corporations will now have governments covering the cost of their payrolls for the duration of the crisis.

There is no semblance of any discernible sound economic model to describe what is now happening with government printing up record amounts of money to cover the enormous cost of the shutdown. For a wealthy country like the US, the Federal Reserve Bank will simply go into overdrive, creating trillions of dollars to be released through various ‘stimulus plans’ and bailouts. The New York Fed is now pumping trillions of new dollars into banks, with the Fed also issuing ‘bridge’ loans directly to businesses. This never happened before in history. The US is also buying up unprecedented amounts of corporate stock in order to keep Wall Street afloat. With these levels of quantitative easing, there are risks of hyperinflation and other systemic problems. This may be coupled with higher food prices due to supply shortages, and stagnant wages due to a glut in the labour market after the government’s domestic scorched earth economic policies. The end result of all these bailouts (if they ever end) will be exactly as with any war in history: a rapid wholesale transfer of power, control and ownership into centralised government and the central banking cartel.

For individuals and families, this means your savings are wiped-out, your property collapses in value, and your future prospects are dim, at least in the short to midterm, and you will have no choice but to load up on personal and family debt to survive.

Before this crisis, we saw the largest wealth gap in modern history since the Gilded Age (1870–1900), with the richest 1% now owning more than half of the world’s wealth. After the first phase of this crisis, that gap may double or even triple. With SMEs wiped out, the only jobs available will be with the government or with a handful of mega-corporations.

As is often the case after any war, developed and developing countries are likely to become dependent on credit lines from either the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or from the United States itself which will have plenty of dollars and US Treasury bonds for sale or loan at near zero percent interest rates. Plenty of funny money to go around, mostly for the elites.

The shutting down of the world’s airlines – along with biosecurity and financial stagnation hitting certain sections of global trade – will severely injure the dominant system of globalisation. This will no doubt encourage already existing regional trading blocs, like ASEAN in Southeast Asia, and the African Union, leveraging their interests to create more regionalised and resilient trading networks. As physical trade and relations are codified regionally, globalisation will increase in the online digital sphere and with international e-commerce, online learning and social networking.

Now, with massive economic recession, marked by record levels of mass unemployment and debt, the balkanisation of formerly open globalisation routes, combined with a new global veil over scarcity of resources, all under a broad cloak of biological insecurity – the soil is fertile for more dismantling of democracy and a rise in fascist regimes, particularly in the West. The trend was already moving in this direction before the crisis, but now it will only accelerate.

Historically speaking, the scene is now set for another world war in which the winner sets the agenda for a ‘new world order’ going into the 21^st century.

Full Spectrum Dominance: World War Footing

Just as in 1914 and the onset of World War I, the year 2020 will be a major pivot point for the early 21^st century and should be seen as a tangible prelude to a new world war. There are a number of reasons why this is likely.

It is true that you can implement more change in two years of war than you can in twenty years of peace. In the case of the corona crisis, that two years was reduced to two months. Presently, events are being framed by western powers as the “global fight against an invisible enemy,” but the corona crisis has created a number of new paradigms some of which are classic precursors for war. The first and most obvious is the fact that virtually overnight, the western countries, especially NATO member states the United States, United Kingdom and France, have effectively mobilised all aspects of their country’s economy and restructured society to reflect both a wartime economy and a state of martial law. The western bloc countries are now prepared to bunker down for a long war if need be.

The threat of a biological agent presents some serious problems for a globally-embedded military as America’s. Already the US had to cancel major NATO drills in Europe, and pull some of its naval fleet into dock because of the coronavirus and fears of infecting large numbers of military personnel. Other countries may have similar issues. In this sense, the disease has severely slowed fighting across the world – one of the more unexpected, albeit welcome, tertiary benefits of the crisis.

The western powers first obvious choice for instigating either a hot or cold war is China, along with its allies. When US President Donald Trump refers to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” he is signalling to his base and to the war hawks in the Republican Party that the White House is preparing a confrontation. Anti-Chinese rhetoric and media propaganda has increased substantially in the US since the onset of the corona crisis, with many Americans, particularly the right-wing, now blaming the Chinese for releasing this pestilence into the world.

After a few more months of economic destruction, social malaise and an increasing death toll in the US, the new ranks of unemployed will be demanding a scapegoat for their terrible suffering, at which time a war with China could become more viable for Washington. This could take the form of an on-off, hot-cold war which lasts for 30 or 40 years, and pulls in other major powers using proxy battlegrounds in third party countries.

For the US empire, one primary objective in confronting China would be to disrupt and possibly derail Beijing’s historic infrastructure and economic development known as the Belt and Road Initiative, designed to link Europe with Asia along various routes over land and sea. If successful, the global centre of gravity would shift away from the US and back towards Eurasia. In the event of a global depression post-corona, the US is geopolitically well-placed to weather the storm as it commands the control of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. China’s Belt and Road would effectively upend Washington’s plans for Fortress America lording it over all global markets during this new tumultuous epoch.

In some ways, the crisis has disrupted the emergence of a new multipolar world, but the imperative for multipolarism may also be propelled by the economic balkanisation and the fact that the US will continue withdrawing its military assets from stalwart outposts like the Middle East. Any US withdrawal from the world stage will be filled by other emerging powers like Russia, India, Turkey and possibly Japan. Many of these emerging powers require resources and materials, so the scramble to establish trading routes in Africa will be a post-corona feature.

The corona crisis also provides a convenient cover for the aggressive roll-out of 5G networks around the world. These look to be the backbone of a new global surveillance state able to track and record everything in real-time. Along with millions of masts in towns and cities, the network will also feature an array of new satellites with the potential to flood our atmosphere and communities with even more untested high-frequency radiation.

One World Health & Medical Martial Law

The current ‘state of war’ extends internationally with blanket travel restrictions already in place. There looks to be a rapid drive to institute a streamlined global system of mandatory digital tracking and tracing, implemented under the auspices of ‘global health’ and spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO). They are joined by participating governments and the transnational corporations that will roll out these new ‘health surveillance’ systems.

The real question that remains unanswered is what will happen once all the ‘lockdown’ measures are relaxed, and international air travel opens up again?

There are already noises coming from governments and organisations about requiring citizens to pass some form of ‘immunity test’ for COVID-19 to be granted freedom of movement within society by carrying an ‘immunity passport’ or digital certificate stored on a microchip or smartphone.

This dovetails with the rapid drive for a cashless society as a result of the corona scare. Due to corona contagion fears, paper money and coins are being stigmatised as ‘dirty’ with many retail outlets refusing to accept cash. Once this system is adopted domestically, it follows that these same restrictions will be extended to international travellers. Needless to say, this has grave implications for personal liberty and privacy. At present, this juggernaut seems difficult to stop.

If allowed, this new bio regime will become the de facto governance for the world’s population. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (net worth $97.8 billion) has called for a national vaccine tracking system in the US, funded in part by an estimated $100 million he and his wife Melinda’s Gates Foundation have donated to fight the coronavirus to discover ‘a fix’ as quickly as possible. Gates is already heavily invested in vaccine research, development and production and, with his wife, they are a primary driver in the proliferation of vaccines globally. Gates says he will front the investment for seven new vaccine factories around the globe, and as he told Daily Show host Trevor Noah during an interview on 2 April, “until we get the world vaccinated.”

Clearly, he has a vision for vaccinating every person on the planet, presumably for the coronavirus, or until the next big ‘outbreak’. “The only thing that really lets us go back completely to normal and feel good about sitting in stadiums with lots of other people is to create a vaccine and not just take care of our country but take that vaccine out to the global population,” said Gates.

From oligarchs like Gates, the transnational pharmaceutical corporations, and the government officials in their pocket, the warning is clear: you will not be permitted to resume ‘normal life’ until you accept the latest vaccine. And do not expect the list of newly required vaccinations to end with the novel coronavirus. Once this first precedent is set, countries dependent on international travel and trade will be forced to adopt the regulatory framework of this new ‘one world health’ security complex. The trail is then blazed for a constant stream of vaccine requirements to ‘fight’ various and sundry outbreaks and ‘biothreats’, be they real, exaggerated or completely fabricated. This could be another disruptive force going forward.

Combine this with naked authoritarian statements made by other self-appointed corona tsars like Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO, who recently remarked that members of families may need to be removed from their homes by force. “Most of the transmission actually happening in many countries now, is happening in the household at family level…. In some sense, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now, we need to go and look at families to find those people who may be sick and remove them, and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner,” said Ryan.

The obvious danger here is that this new state-corporate regime will discriminate against and marginalise citizens based on their immunity records, requiring them to take a new vaccine to receive rights and privileges. This would be a complete abrogation of personal liberty and human rights, effectively turning the clock back hundreds of years – all based on what many leading doctors and epidemiologists agree is no more of a significant public health threat, in terms of infections and fatalities, than seasonal influenza.

A COVID Green New Deal?

One of the clear main political beneficiaries of a COVID-19 global shutdown has been the climate change lobby.

By forcibly shutting down millions of businesses and pulling tens of millions of cars off the road and grounding world commercial airlines, the crisis has delivered young Greta Thunberg the evidence she and her supporters need to demonstrate the virtues of a net zero carbon world in a real-life simulation.

This will also accelerate the adoption of a so-called ‘Green New Deal’ internationally, which may have less to do with saving the environment or ‘changing the climate’, and more to do with the creation of new global financial bubble based on the commodification and financialisation of Earth’s ecosphere. This is essentially a new ‘green-backed’ and fully tradeable monetary credit, bond and derivatives market.

Greta didn’t appear out of nowhere in 2018. She and her handlers have been tasked with a mission, and now in just three weeks they are very close to realising large pieces of their agenda, which also dovetails with UN Agenda 2030 sustainability goals.

Who’s Winning: Globalism or Nationalism?

Another unexpected byproduct of this crisis has been a number of European Union member states kicking Brussels to the curb, either for not reacting fast enough to help, or simply for not releasing enough funds for struggling public institutions and businesses. As a result, countries like Italy and Poland are exerting their nationalist power over Brussels’ relatively weak and ineffectual response to requested assistance from members states.

At the same time, this new global control grid lends itself towards the implementation of a world government structure to be used to fund an international regime that regulates and adjudicates problems, as well as manage future ‘outbreaks’. In late March, former British PM and Chancellor, Gordon Brown, called for world leaders to create a provisional global government body in order to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and manage the global economic collapse.

Screenshot from The Guardian, 26 March 2020

Whatever geopolitical and social engineering agendas were already in motion before the crisis, you can be sure that the coronavirus has accelerated many of them.

In terms of power-grabs, this is the embodiment of “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Oh, and don’t forget –it’s really all about saving lives. 

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Patrick Henningsen is the founder and editor of the news and analysis website 21st Century Wire, and is an independent foreign and political affairs analyst for RT International. He is also the host of the SUNDAY WIRE radio program which airs live every Sunday on the Alternate Current Radio Network. Learn more about this author at: www.patrickhenningsen.com

Notes

1. Professor who predicted 500,000 Britons could die from coronavirus and prompted Boris Johnson to order lockdown accused of having ‘patchy record of modelling pandemics’, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8164121/Professor-predicted-500-000-Britons-die-coronavirus-accused-having-patchy-record.html

2. Return of the oppressed, aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap-leads

3. Is an ‘immunity certificate’ the way to get out of coronavirus lockdown?, edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/health/immunity-passport-coronavirus-lockdown-intl/index.html

4. The first steps after lockdown ends: How will Spain return to normal life?, english.elpais.com/society/2020-04-05/the-first-steps-after-lockdown-ends-how-will-spain-return-to-normal-life.html

5. Bill Gates Calls For National Tracking System For Coronavirus During Reddit AMA, www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/03/18/bill-gates-calls-for-national-tracking-system-for-coronavirus-during-reddit-ama/

6. Bill Gates on Fighting Coronavirus – The Daily Social Distancing Show (YouTube), www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyFT8qXcOrM

7. The coronavirus is washing over the U.S. These factors will determine how bad it gets in each community, www.statnews.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-how-bad-it-gets-different-communities/

8. Gordon Brown calls for global government to tackle coronavirus, www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/26/gordon-brown-calls-for-global-government-to-tackle-coronavirus

Featured image is from New Dawn 180

A federal judge in Houston late yesterday approved an incentive package worth up to $57 million for top executives as part of bankruptcy proceedings for oil giant California Resources Corporation.

Nine executives with the company, which is California’s biggest oil and gas producer, would get the high-dollar payouts if they meet certain metrics over the next year as part of CRC’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy claim, filed last month.

The potential executive payouts are nearly double the $29 million in back taxes the company owes to Kern, Ventura and Orange counties. In all, the state’s largest driller is seeking bankruptcy protection to wipe out more than $5 billion in debt and equity interests.

“After laying off hundreds of workers, polluting California’s environment and failing to pay taxes, CRC is piling execs into a luxury getaway car and stepping on the gas,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If company officials have the money for big-bucks incentive payments, they can pay their taxes and do environmental cleanup. It’s time for Gov. Newsom to step in and prove he’s with Californians over fat cat polluters.”

The Center has called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to intervene in the company’s bankruptcy proceedings to ensure it sets aside enough money for well cleanup.

CRC and its affiliates operate approximately 18,700 wells in California, which could cost more than $1 billion to properly plug, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Of these 7,826 are already “idle,” which means they’ve produced no oil in the past two years.

So far in 2020, Gov. Newsom has issued more than 500 permits to CRC for drilling new wells, reworking existing wells and other dangerous activities.

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“DeJoy himself confirmed that there have been significant service slowdowns. It makes no sense at all for him to say USPS sorting machine ‘are not needed.’ Put them back.”

***

Update:

In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told lawmakers that he has “no intention” of returning or replacing mail sorting machines that have been removed from post offices across the nation.

Questioned by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) on the machine removals , DeJoy—a Trump megadonor with no prior experience working for the U.S. Postal Service—said, “They’re not needed, sir.”

Watch:

DeJoy says he has "no intention" of bringing back any mail sorting machines that were removed since he became postmaster general https://t.co/uPUUHHEj5w pic.twitter.com/fr9XQTonGG

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 21, 2020

“Postmaster General DeJoy himself confirmed that there have been significant service slowdowns,” tweeted Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) in response to DeJoy’s remarks. “It makes no sense at all for him to say USPS sorting machine ‘are not needed.’ Put them back.”

According to the American Postal Workers Union, the USPS under DeJoy’s leadership was moving to decommission more than 670 sorting machines around the country before the postmaster general vowed earlier this week to suspend his operational changes until after the November election.

Iowa Postal Workers Union President Kimberly Karol—a 30-year Postal Service veteran—told NPR last week that the removal of mail sorting machines “hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past.”

🚨🚨 Louis DeJoy testified today that more than 600 mail sorting machines removed by USPS under his leadership won't be reinstalled. That includes:

59 in FL
58 in TX
34 in OH
30 in PA
26 in MI
15 in NC
12 in VA
12 in WI
11 in GAhttps://t.co/N6Ek0rU10B

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) August 21, 2020

In an email sent hours after DeJoy committed to suspending his policy changes, Kevin Couch, a director of maintenance operations at USPS, instructed postal workers “not to reconnect/reinstall machines that have been previously disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager.”

Following the hearing Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted that

“Louis DeJoy flat-out lied to the Senate today about the changes he’s implemented at the USPS, refused to cooperate with requests for documents, and rejected the idea of fixing his damage.”

“Enough is enough: the Board of Governors must remove DeJoy and reverse his acts of sabotage,” Warren added.

Earlier:

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is set to testify Friday before the Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the wake of startling new revelations surrounding the process that led to his appointment as well as fresh details on his plans for a massive post-election overhaul of mail operations.

Earlier this week, as Common Dreams reported, DeJoy vowed to suspend—but not reverse—his policy changes at the U.S. Postal Service that caused massive package backlogs across the country and threatened the timely delivery of mail-in ballots.

According to the Washington Post, DeJoy “has mapped out far more sweeping changes to the U.S. Postal Service than previously disclosed, considering actions that could lead to slower mail delivery in parts of the country and higher prices for some mail services.”

“The plans under consideration, described by four people familiar with Postal Service discussions, would come after the election and touch on all corners of the agency’s work,” the Post reported. “They include raising package rates, particularly when delivering the last mile on behalf of big retailers; setting higher prices for service in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico; curbing discounts for nonprofits; requiring election ballots to use first-class postage; and leasing space in Postal Service facilities to other government agencies and companies.”

Watch DeJoy’s testimony, which is scheduled to begin at 9:00 am ET:

In a letter (pdf) Thursday to USPS Board of Governors member John Barger—who, like DeJoy, is a major Republican donor—Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) and Katie Porter (D-Calif.) raised alarm about Barger’s role in selecting the postmaster general, who was appointed in May despite his complete lack of experience at the agency.

“As you know, the executive hiring firm Russell Reynolds Associates was contracted to research and recommend a candidate to the United States Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors for the position of postmaster General,” the lawmakers wrote. “According to individuals familiar with the process, Mr. Louis DeJoy was never recommended by this firm but was rather introduced by you to the selection committee.”

Krishnamoorthi and Porter said in a joint statement Thursday that “the appointment of Mr. Louis DeJoy as postmaster general was highly irregular and we are concerned that his candidacy may have been influenced by political motivations.”

“We need to get to the bottom of why Mr. DeJoy was considered, given that he apparently was not one of the candidates recommended by the firm contracted to make such recommendations, and did not undergo a background check as was urged by then-Inspector General and Vice Chairman of the USPS Board of Governors David Williams.”

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

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THE FACE MASK

Ample scientific literature. Medical consensus (shared by Dr. Fauci) until it was repealed by government directives.

By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.”

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).

By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.” Dr. Russell Blaylock,

FACE MASK 

SOCIAL DISTANCING

Social distancing in the case of Covid-19 is based on tenuous scientific norms. it disrupts social gatherings, family relations, sport and cultural events. And it is enforced by police state methods.

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Color Revolution-beleaguered Belarusian President Lukashenko surprised the world on Sunday after exiting a helicopter that landed on his palace grounds while dressed in body armor and holding an AK -47, which was a risky soft power stunt that could either do wonders for his image or completely backfire on him.

***

中国周边有400多个装备核武器的军事基地，美军继续对中国进行包围，中国进入 “包围状态”。

美国与罗纳德-里根航母打击群在有争议的南海进行军事演习。这些靠近中国大陆的美国 “海上防空行动 “是美国在该地区大幅增加的军事演习的一部分。

美国国防部长埃斯佩尔宣布，美国将从德国撤军，但把军队移到靠近俄罗斯边境的地方，以对俄罗斯起到更有效的威慑作用。

俄罗斯表示，将把任何瞄准其领土的弹道导弹视为核攻击，并将以核武作为回应。

虽然美国在形式上没有与任何非洲国家开战，但一份新的报告显示，美国在22个非洲国家都有特种部队活动，有29个基地，6000名士兵，其中在尼日尔有一个巨大的无人机中心，耗资1+亿建造，预计到2024年运营成本将超过2800亿美元

**

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

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

By Edward Curtin, August 19, 2020

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Biden’s Speech Stirs Up Sense of Déjà Vu – Same Old Lies Disguised as New Promises, Little More than a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

By Scott Ritter, August 24, 2020

Joe Biden delivered his acceptance speech as the nominee of the Democratic Party to face off against Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election with all the pomp and circumstance that the Covid-19 pandemic would allow, speaking to a television audience from a podium set up on the stage of an empty theater.

Responding to Voter Suppression, Understanding Manipulated Elections

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, August 24, 2020

Voter suppression in the 2020 election has become a topic of great concern. In reality, voter suppression has been part of US politics since the founding of the country. The oligarchs who wrote the US Constitution enabled voter suppression by not including the right to vote in it and only allowing white male property owners to vote, suppressing the votes of 94 percent of the population.

“Chasing the Light” by Oliver Stone

By Edward Curtin, August 24, 2020

Ever since he has devoted his life to the art of waking up his fellow Americans through writing and filmmaking, which he had the great good fortune to learn at NYU film school from that other passionate New York filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, who was his professor.  Scorsese said, “Well – this is a filmmaker.”  It was an epiphany that Stone says he will never forget. A pure gift that set him on his way to eventually make his great films.

Glitzy Convention Conceals Emerging One-Party Tyranny

By Mike Whitney, August 24, 2020

The Democrats and Hillary have never accepted the factual version of how the election was lost. Instead, they fabricated a conspiracy theory about Trump colluding with Russia. Although the Mueller Report proved that the claims of meddling were baseless, Clinton and the Dems continue to trot them out at every opportunity.

Trump Walks Alone: Former US Allies Britain, France, Germany Join Russia and China in Forcefully Rejecting Trump Iran Sanctions

By Prof. Juan Cole, August 24, 2020

Their foreign ministries underlined that they could “not support this initiative, which is incompatible with our current efforts to support the JCPoA . . . We remain engaged in favor of the JCPoA in spite of major challenges engendered by the withdrawal of the United States.

The 2020 Covid Global Economic Meltdown: “Political Trickery” and the Relevance of 9/11

By Anthony Hall, August 23, 2020  

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.

US Elections: Dissecting the Democrats in 2020

By Michael Welch, Mark Robinowitz, and Ajamu Baraka, August 22, 2020

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.

Just a little pinprick
There’ll be no more, ah
But you may feel a little sick
Can you stand up?
I do believe it’s working, good
That’ll keep you going through the show
Come on it’s time to go

There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb

Pink Floyd‘s 1979 song Comfortably Numb, resonates so well with what has happened within this empire.

Thanks to Big Pharma, with assistance from the medical profession, Opioids have overwhelmed our nation. It started out with the push by the aforementioned criminal class to get people in pain hooked on these narcotics… but for ‘To help them’. (Yeah, right, and I got this bridge in Brooklyn for sale, real cheap!)

Then, as with all so called remedies, those NOT in physical pain began using them. Now, as a baby boomer, I can recall that back in the day, the 60s and 70s, qualudes were the ‘In thing’, and  heroin became readily available, but you had to go ‘Black Market’ to get  both of them. As far as amphetamines, I can remember my old family Doc, who made most of his money as a ‘Diet Doc’. One day I had an appointment for a checkup and arrived a bit early. The line of women went from his waiting room right out into the stoop outside… all there for their weekly supply of uppers… sorry, diet pills. When it was my turn, he looked at me from his desk and said ‘You know, sometimes I feel like a dope pusher’. Yet, only certain docs would prescribe ‘Ludes’ as we called them, as the muscle relaxers they were intended to be. So, Opioids were always with us… but not like now!

When Nixon, in the early 70s, did his ‘War on drugs’ it was really a ‘War on Marijuana’. He sent planes into Mexico to destroy the crops, spraying them with Paraquat, an insecticide. He also closed up the border a bit, and the price of pot skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, suddenly heroin was available at a much lower price than before. I can remember seeing the teenagers who hung out at our schoolyard (a few years younger than me) graduating from sniffing glue to shooting up. Two of them wound up DOA a few years later. Going to the beach during summer recess in the early 70s we would invariably see the usual bunch of ‘ down heads’ dancing around on the concrete promenade, stoned out of their faces. Me and my pals just stuck to smoking dope, thank goodness! So, the scent of narcotics was always there in dear old Amerika.

Fast forward a few years later, in 1978, when I was hospitalized after shoulder surgery for a football injury. They had me on an IV filled with Percodan (narcotic). I did not know what they were giving me, and when I asked the Jamaican nurse, she enlightened me. “No”, I demanded, “Get me off this stuff!” She told me that my doctor needed to change the order. “Call him! I don’t want that **** going in me!” It took them 45 minutes to reach my doctor. She came in and took off that bag and replaced it with another. “He has you on a non narcotic pain reliever. OK?” I was elated. No more addictive drug for me. Well, perhaps an hour went by, and the shoulder pain increased dramatically. I rang for the nurse. “Listen, I made a mistake. This new stuff is not getting rid of this tremendous pain (shoulder injuries can be extremely painful). I need you to put me back on the Percodan… please!” She said she could not do so, without a doctor’s order. I was going wild in my bed, screaming for the Percodan. Finally, she got the resident on duty to come by. Seeing my condition, the doc just told her to go ahead and replace the IV with the Percodan. I can still close my eyes and recall that peaceful feeling as the warmth of the drug made its way through me.

Factoring out those out there who are in lots of pain from injury or illness, what of the overwhelming majority who are not in that group and are hooked on opioids? What makes them drive for literally hours to go interstate to get them at Pill Mills? This has been going on forever but… it’s the past 20 years we have seen the death rate from Opioid overdose increase by Six fold! As with the increase in narcotic abuse during the 60s, and the Crack Cocaine epidemic during the 80s, why then?

It would take pages of explanations, but simply said the 60s were when this empire sent hundreds of thousands of young men to the killing fields of Vietnam in a connived war. Meanwhile, the disparities in wealth, especially for people of color, was obscene, along with the outright segregation in both the South and North (Remember, Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked more viciously in Chicago than in Birmingham). It was a time when too many of us , especially those on the short end of the economic and military draft stick, just lost any hope for a better future. Of course, the 80s was when that infamous and brutal ‘ Reagan Revolution’ saw the gap between ‘Haves’ and ‘Have Nots’ widen tremendously. It was also the ‘Me Decade’ when the race towards upward mobility created a new group, the Yuppies (Young, Upwardly Mobile) that had the trademark Darwinian label of ‘Survival of the Economic Fittest’. Of course, from Bush Sr.’s phony war on Iraq 1 to 9/11 to Bush Jr.’s phony war on Iraq 2, more of our citizens just lost hope…

And then Mr.’Hope and Change’ came along to save the day… for Wall Street and the Military Industrial Empire. He succeeded in bamboozling so many low and middle income folks with his rhetoric vs. actions (or inactions). The Subprime scam of the early 21st Century that he inherited gave him pause to do the right thing and come down hard on the crooks and scoundrels. Instead, he told Wall Street while campaigning for President that he kept the natives from coming after them with pitchforks!  We don’t have to even comment on this newest servant of the empire… the worst ever, if that is even possible. The real pandemic is the utter resignation of too many of us… especially our young. THAT is why Opioid use is going through the roof! God forbid, if this Two Party/One Party scam continues to suck up to the Super Rich (who in actuality make up less than 1/2 of the 1%) the early 1930s will look like child’s play. When a men and women cannot support themselves properly, let alone their families, chaos will rule, and Opioid abuse will reign supreme! To quote from Pink Floyd “Is there anybody out there?”

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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]

The political development unfolding in Minsk, with high possibility to spill over and spread throughout the former Soviet republic of Belarus is sensitive and delicate.

 The first information that emerged about opposition rallying against elected President Alexander Lukashenko was worrying and heart breaking as that country has maintained political and economic stability these years. Of course, just as I personally admired him for his courage, the current political developments vividly remind me of Republic of Sudan in North Africa.

By geography, Belarus is a landlocked former Soviet republic in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. While Sudan is encircled by seven countries, it also has to northeast a huge Red Sea. It is third-largest country in Africa, and the third-largest in the Arab world by area before the secession of South Sudan in 2011. Like many other eastern European countries, Belarus has a negative population growth rate and a negative natural growth rate. Belarus has only 9.4 million while Sudan has a population of 43 million (both 2019 estimates by UN office in charge of Global Population Studies)

Belarus is a presidential republic, governed by a president and the National Assembly. The term for each presidency is five years. Under the 1994 constitution, the president could serve for only two terms as president, but a change in the constitution in 2004 eliminated term limits. Lukashenko has been the president of Belarus since 1994.

That was changed. In 1996, Lukashenko called for a controversial vote to extend the presidential term from five to seven years, and as a result, the election that was supposed to occur in 1999 was pushed back to 2001. Throughout the period, groups such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has declared the elections “un-free” because of the opposition parties’ poor results and media bias in favor of the government.

In the case of Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir came to power in June 1989. Al-Bashir, who had been in power for more than 30 years, refused to step down, resulting in the convergence of opposition groups to form a united coalition. The government retaliated by arresting more than 800 opposition figures and thousands of protesters, according to the Human Rights Watch.

Many people died because Al-Bashir ordered security forces to disperse the sit-in peaceful demonstrators using tear gas and live ammunition in what is known as the Khartoum massacre, resulting in Sudan’s suspension from the African Union. Eventually, Omar al-Bashir was gone. Sudan opened a new political chapter with a new Prime Minister, Abdalla Hamdok, a 61-year-old economist who worked previously for the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

What makes the comparison interesting, President Alexander Lukashenko is referred to as the last political dictator in Europe. Similar title was awarded to Omar al-Bashir as the longest ruler and dictator in Africa. Significantly, long service in political position must necessarily reflect on the level development and on the lives of the population.

The political unrest in Sudan connected to both politics and economy. Sudan is rich with natural resources, as it has oil reserves. Despite that, Sudan still faced formidable economic problems, and its growth was still a rise from a very low level of per capita output. Next, agricultural production remains Sudan’s most-important sector, employing 80 percent of the workforce. Worse is production practices are rudimentary. There has not been efforts, at least, to modernize agriculture to the growing population. In 2018, 45% of the population lives on less than US$3.20 per day, up from 43% in 2010. There is still a huge increase in unemployment, so of course, politics and economy questions are inseparable.

On the opposite side, and in fact better than Sudan, Lukashenko continued a number of Soviet-era policies, such as state-ownership of large sections of the economy, and opposed Western-backed economic shock therapy in the post-Soviet transition. Over 70% of Belarus’s population of about 9 million resides in urban areas.

The labor force consists of more than six million people, among whom women hold slightly more jobs than men. In some analysis, nearly a quarter of the population is employed by industrial factories. Employment is high in agriculture, manufacturing sales, trading goods, and education. The unemployment rate, according to government statistics, was 1.5% in 2010.

That however, Lukashenko has to gravitate between a romantic political idealism and corrosive reality. The will of the people of Belarus, peoples demands – the basic principle of democracy. But again, the key questions are the advantages that President Alexander Lukashenko has under his armpit. While the political situation is unpredictable, Belarus belongs to Eurasian Union, it also has the Minsk Agreement (Russia-Belarus Treaty) as instruments on which to capitalize in attempt to normalize the situation.

Belarus and Russia have been close trading partners and diplomatic allies since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Belarus is dependent on Russia for imports of raw materials and for its export market. However, the future of the Russian-Belarus union has been placed in doubt because of Belarus’ repeated delays of monetary union, the lack of a referendum date for the draft constitution.

The major problem here is Belarus relations with several European Union members including neighboring Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. The EU has already threatened imposing sanctions, as United States has done in relation to the election held on August 9, 2020. The authorities accused the Russians of trying to destabilize the situation in Belarus in the run up to the presidential elections. Thousands have rallied across Belarus in some of the country’s biggest opposition protests in a decade.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has emerged as his main rival, pledges to topple his regime and restore democracy. President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country since 1994, is facing a united and determined democratic opposition in what may be the toughest political fight of his life. Discontent, as always the case, has been simmering for years. Secretary-General António Guterres has issued a statement underlining the importance for all Belarusians to exercise their civil and political rights.

On August 16, President Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko held discussion on the situation that has developed following the presidential election in Belarus including with due regard to external pressure. The Russian side reaffirmed its readiness to render the necessary assistance to resolve the challenges facing Belarus based on the principles of the Treaty on the Creation of a Union State, as well as through the Collective Security Treaty Organization, if necessary.

In reality, the world is closely watching to see noticeable changes in Belarus. In reality, the world is closely watching to see noticeable changes in Belarus. Some experts suggest a national political dialogue, some argue that Lukashenko should have taken a page from Kazakhstan. Nursultan Nazarbayev ruled the country from 1991 to 2019. He resigned in March 2019, but now the Kazakh Security Council’s chairman-for-life, other school of thought says Lukashenko should listen to President Vladimir Putin.

There has been decades-long economic stagnation and prospects of further economic integration with Russia – seen by many as threatening Belarus sovereignty – has weakened Lukashenko’s image as the guarantor of stability. Belarus has had a troubled relationship with many of its neighbors. There are many other issues which Belarus and Russia have to settle to ensure regional stability in the Commonwealth of Independent States, or at least, in the Eurasian Union. Time will, indeed, show a peaceful exit out of the crisis, and/or what next for Belarus.

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When NATO covered Serbia with missiles and bombs, Alexander Lukashenko was the only head of state who visited Belgrade and supported our initiative to join the Union of Russia and Belarus.

We will never forget this.

Recently, the same NATO countries launched a hybrid aggression against the Republic of Belarus, wishing to abolish its freedom and independence and physically eliminate Alexander Lukashenko, just as they eliminated Slobodan Milosevic. And like their historical predecessors – the Axis forces, they wish, having trampled on Serbia and Belarus, to destroy Russia – the greatest source of spirituality, creativity and social justice for the whole world.

We will never allow this.

Serbia, Belarus and Russia share a common faith, martyrdom, origin, culture and tradition. We cannot be defeated. Better don’t try! But everything that we wish for ourselves, we wish for others – freedom, independence, love, justice, legality, creativity. You can cooperate with us. You can even become our brothers.

We demand that modern fascists and pseudo-democrats in the West immediately stop or be deprived of the opportunity to carry out hybrid aggression and all forms of interference – political and military, financial and economic, informational and subversive – in the internal affairs of the Republic of Belarus, all threats, sanctions and blackmail… No one has any legal or moral right to this!

We send words of solidarity, love and support to the fraternal people of the Republic of Belarus and President Alexander Lukashenko with the confidence that they have enough faith and inner strength to overcome this historical temptation with an enlightened face and become an even more powerful and attractive factor in the world to come, which will get better.

We call on individuals and organizations in our country and in the world to join us and support this appeal.

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US lawmakers have introduced a bill to change the way the federal government refers to the leader of China. 

The ‘Name the Enemy Act’ would require that official US government documents instead refer to the head of state according to his or her role as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This implies the new bill stands to prohibit the use of the term “president”.

The Chinese leader, currently Xi Jinping, holds three official titles, none of which is “president”: head of state (guojia zhuxi, literally “state chairman”); chairman of the central military commission; and general secretary of the CCP.

Critics say “president” offers unwarranted legitimacy to an unelected leader.

“Addressing the head of state of the People’s Republic of China as a “president” grants the incorrect assumption that the people of the state, via democratic means, have readily legitimised the leader who rules them”, the legislation states.

The House bill would prohibit the use of federal funds for the “creation or dissemination” of official documents and communications that refer to the China’s leader as “president”.

The legislation comes as many top cabinet officials, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have recently begun abandoning the term “president” in favour of “general secretary”.

Earlier in May, a White House report in May used Xi’s party title exclusively.

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After Russia, the U.S. is the second largest arms exporter to India. As a major Washington defense partner, New Delhi signed two $3.5 billion arms purchase agreements earlier this year. However, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Clarke Cooper reiterated Washington’s supposed dismay over India’s military purchases from Russia. Issuing a warning, he said that significant purchases of Russian weapons, such as anti-aircraft systems or advanced fighter jets, “risk future opportunities that may be impeded by significant Russian defense articles.”

Although he said that Washington recognizes “the historic legacy sustainment line that New Delhi had with Moscow and that, to use a metaphor, it’s not a light switch to turn on or off,” and that they do not want “to put at risk India’s sovereignty or India’s national defense as there’s a maturation toward future modernization of their systems,” he said “there is a risk when significant Russian systems are brought forth that put at risk interoperability with not only the United States, but with other partners that India may be seeking to work with that are either of NATO status or NATO-aligned. And then there’s also the risk of potential exploitation of technology when we’re looking at significant Russian platforms.”

Despite U.S. threats, India last month approved the purchase of 21 MiG-29 and 12 Su-30MKI fighters for a total value of more than $2.5 billion from Russia, with Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh urging for the delivery of the S-400 anti-aircraft defense systems as soon as possible.

However, it is unlikely that Washington will choose to sanction India for purchasing Russian weapons. Former financial adviser to the Indian Ministry of Defense, Amit Cowshish highlights that imposing sanctions on New Delhi will only hurt Washington’s own interests since the South Asian country is one of the largest markets in the world. Cowshish stressed that if the Trump administration moves ahead with sanctions, India will say it cannot buy U.S. equipment, which will hurt its own military industry as it loses a major market.

According to a Stimson Center working paper by Sameer Lalwani, India’s defense equipment is overwhelmingly Russian – 90% of the Army, 41% of the Navy and two-thirds of the Air Force.

“India’s share of Russian systems has grown, not decreased, because of Indian Army acquisitions. While India’s naval and air forces are decreasing their quantitative reliance on Russian arms, their most advanced or offensive capabilities still originate from Russia,” Lalwani wrote. “While the United States treats Russia as an equally revisionist threat to the global order as China, India sees Russia as a partner to ensure a multipolar balance of power, and a hedge against a potential Sino-Russian bloc.”

As India is the key player in the Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS), it is unlikely Washington is willing to antagonize New Delhi so quickly. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled the IPS report in June 2019. It demanded that India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand serve Washington’s interests in Asia-Pacific because “these alliances are indispensable to peace and security in the region and our investments in them will continue to pay dividends for the United States and the world, far into the future.” Effectively, the IPS is the U.S.’ strategy to attempt to maintain its unilateral hegemony in Asia-Pacific, and India has a key role in this vision.

The IPS is directly aimed against China, and not Russia, and it is for this reason that although New Delhi may be willing to oppose Beijing within limits, it is highly unlikely that India will want to sever its long relationship with Moscow on Washington’s demand. It is likely that the comments by Cooper, despite being a high official, do not reflect on Washington’s real demands and expectations of New Delhi. Although Washington would want India to stop its relations with Moscow, the Americans know this is not possible and recognize that for now Russia has very limited influence in the Indo-Pacific region. It is for this reason that New Delhi’s relations with Moscow can for now be tolerated by Washington so long as they remain in opposition to China. It is also for this reason that it is unlikely Washington will sanction India over its procurement of Russian-made weapons.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Like the wandering and rascally Odysseus upon whom he models his life, Oliver Stone is “double-minded” in the most profound and illuminating ways.  The title of his fantastic new memoir is a case in point.  “One of the first basic lessons in filming,” he writes, “is chasing the light.  Without it, you have nothing – no exposure that can be seen; even what you see with your naked eye needs to be shaped and enhanced by the light.”

For as a true artist living out a marriage between his writing and his filmmaking, his father and his mother, the warrior and the peacemaker, the domesticated and wild man, he has chosen a title that has a double meaning that is subtly woven like a thread through this labyrinthine tale. It takes the reader from his childhood through his service in Vietnam and his struggles as a writer and filmmaker up to 1987 and his great success with his powerful autobiographical film, Platoon, for which he received Oscars for Best Film and Best Director, among others.

Driven by a youthful urge to escape his internal demons first brought on by his mismatched parents’ divorce when he was fifteen, Stone dropped out of Yale, his father’s alma mater, where he had enrolled to fulfill his stockbroker father’s dream. He accepted an offer from a Catholic Church group to teach English-speaking high school students in Chalon, a suburb of Saigon, which he did for six months before traveling around southeast Asia.  Back in Saigon, he joined the merchant marine and worked his way back to the states cleaning boilers, the lowest and dirtiest job on the ship.  After a storm-tossed 37 days journey, he was cured of his desire to go to sea, a romantic fascination he had acquired from literature.  The lesson: Books are not life, nor are movies – they are ways to shape and illuminate it.

Back in the states he threw himself into writing, his first love and the place where his “anxieties could be relieved” and where he felt he could confirm his independent existence separate from his parents.  Through writing he could control his story. He wrote a novel called, “A Child’s Night Dream.”

He reentered Yale but only lasted a few months since his heart was not in the placid life of academia, having already had a taste of the wandering life.  He then quit Yale for good, to his father’s great disappointment. Lou Stone thought Oliver might turn into a “bum,” a painful refrain in this memoir.  This twisted parental inculcation of shame and fear cast a deep shadow on Oliver’s soul and became one of the ghosts that he spent years trying to outrun by becoming a workaholic desperate for success. His novel was subsequently rejected and he fell into a deep depression and self-loathing.

Suicidal at nineteen, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army in Vietnam to expiate his guilt, shame, and self-loathing, thinking that perhaps God would take his life for him.

“Odysseus thought he would return home when he left Ithaca,” he writes, “I wasn’t sure of anything…”

It was in Vietnam on January 1-2, 1968, after a terrifying night battle along the Cambodia border where his unit was in a hot zone interdicting North Vietnamese Army troops coming through Laos and Cambodia toward Saigon, when he experienced a profound light experience very different from the type he would later chase while making films.

The battle raged throughout the dark jungle night where confusion and terror reigned.  It was impossible to hear or see, and although 25 Americans and 400 North Vietnamese were killed, Stone “hadn’t seen a single one of them [Vietnamese],” although he performed bravely. Here is his brilliantly disturbing and revealing description of what ensued.

Full daylight revealed charred bodies, dusty napalm, and gray trees.  Men who died grimacing, in frozen positions, some of them still standing or kneeling in rigor mortis, white chemical death on their faces.  Dead, so dead.  Some covered with white ash, some burned black.  Their expressions, if they could still be seen, were overtaken with anguish or horror.  How do you die like this?  Charging forward in a hailstorm of death into these bombs and artillery.  Why? Were you terrified, or were you jacked out of your fucking mind?  What kind of death did you achieve?  It was frightening to contemplate, and yet, I wasn’t scared.  It was exciting.  It was as if I passed from this world and was somewhere where the light was being specially displayed to me in a preview of another life.  Soldiers might say it was hell, but I saw it as divine; the closest man would ever come to the Holy Spirit was to witness and survive this great, destructive energy.  [emphasis added by author]

So after fifty years in another life, the survivor remembers in that odd mixture that memory is, a shaping force that relies on the light of experience to enhance the existential marriage of hope lost and found, fact and fiction joined to find the truth of an epiphany.  He continues:

No person should ever have to witness so much death.  I really was too young to understand, and thus I erased much of it, remembering it in this strange way as a stunningly beautiful night full of fireworks, in which I hadn’t seen a single enemy, been fired on, or fired at anyone.  It’d been like a dream through which I ‘d walked unharmed, grateful of course, but numb and puzzled by it all.  It reminded me of passages in Homer of gods and goddesses coming down from Mount Olympus to the bloody battlefields at Troy to help their favorites, wrapping a mist or cloak around them and winging them to safety.

These passages appear early in the book, and I quote them not just to point out the dual nature of the book’s title – only something a truly creative writer would conceive – but because the dual theme of chasing and being chased by the light is central to Oliver’s life story.  It is a tale of a split-soul, the twice wounded warrior who receives a Bronze Star for heroism but who hates war and journeys to get back home where he can rest with his family by the hearth and feel at peace, and the wild, restless, tormented free pirate sailing for adventure and new discoveries. Of course getting back home is no simple matter, especially when you left because home had set the conflict in your heart in the first place, as it did for Stone.

Home is a country as much as a family, and this personal tale is also a guidebook through modern American history, a country riven since the 1960s. A country that’s been feeding on lies that had “infected everything, and I was still numb from it.  Because I’d basically never woken up.”

But there are epiphanies along the way that wake Stone up, intuitions, hunches, risks he takes, and there are luminescent passages throughout this book to crack open the reader’s consciousness to a second reality. Chasing the Light is not a superficial trip down memory lane like so many memoirs by famous people; Stone is a wonderful writer, and as with his films, he takes you deep to places you may wish to avoid but are essential for true sanity. The great thing about this memoir is his passion for truth and life that courses through its pages.  He seizes the reader by the throat and shouts: Consciousness!  Wake up!  Don’t let sleep and forgetfulness make you into one of the living-dead!  A lesson he learned fortuitously at NYU when he took a course in classical drama and his professor, Tim Leahy, raged about the fate of Odysseus and how he was the only one of his crew to get back home because he dared to keep his eyes and ears open to both the dark and light forces whirling all around him.  He refused “LETHE” – sleep and forgetfulness.

But as the fates decreed, when the desperately poor warrior Stone came back from Vietnam to NYC and was still struggling to find his way back to a true home he couldn’t envision, writing to make sense of his life, he encountered his Calypso, as did Odysseus along his wandering journey to get home to Ithaca.  Her name was Najwa Sarkis, an older Lebanese woman who worked at the United Nations. They fell together and for five years Najwa gave Oliver shelter from the storm in her apartment in the East 50s. The sex was passionate and the living conditions in Calypso’s cave comfortable, and although they married at her insistence, it was like his parents’ marriage, built on a lie.  “I can’t say the marriage, from my side,” he writes, “was built on love, but rather on comfort and caring for each other.”  Tempted to stay by the thought of comfort, as Odysseus was by the promise of immortality, Stone finally admits the truth to Najwa and himself, packs his bags and leaves “his goddess.” He knew he wasn’t home yet and had to risk much more to try to get there.  “The flaw was that I hadn’t grown into my own man.  This I knew in my gut – that I hadn’t yet been successful as a writer because I’d failed to complete the journey I started when I went to Vietnam.”  So Odysseus heads to the uptown subway with his two suitcases.

Vietnam haunts him. He starts to write what eventually will become the script for Platoon, using Odysseus as his template and example of conscious behavior to expose all the lies of the Vietnam war and the insidious hypocrisy of American life. As in Tennyson’s poem about the older Odysseus, still wanting “to seek, to find, and not to yield,” the memoirist, himself now not young, says, “In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder.  The joke is on us.  Ha Ha Ha.”

Throughout this book, Stone is very hard on himself as well as the country:

I had my story, I realized.  I was no hero. I slept on my consciousness.  My whole country, our society had.  But at the least – If I could tell the truth of what I’d seen – it was better than…what?  Nothing – the void of a meaningless war and waste of life while our society was stuffing it’s ears with wax.  Odysseus, lashing himself to his mast to preserve his sanity, had insisted on hearing the Sirens, and remembering it.  Whereas I was honored for my service to my country, the truth was I soiled myself when I could’ve resisted, exiled myself, gone to jail for it like the Berrigans, the Spocks, and some 200,000 others.  I was young, yes, and I can say that I didn’t know better, that I was part of the unconsciousness of my country.

He tells us he didn’t wake up until he was nearly thirty-years-old – in 1976.

Ever since he has devoted his life to the art of waking up his fellow Americans through writing and filmmaking, which he had the great good fortune to learn at NYU film school from that other passionate New York filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, who was his professor.  Scorsese shone a light on Oliver after he had made a short film without dialogue called Last Year in Vietnam.  It was shown to the class, a tough group of critics, but before anyone had spoken, Scorsese said, “Well – this is a filmmaker.”  It was an epiphany that Stone says he will never forget. A pure gift that set him on his way to eventually make his great films.

But the journey was hard and took years to complete.

Stone’s mother, Jacqueline Pauline Cézarine Goddet, and his father, Louis Stone (born Abraham Louis Silverstein), were married in Paris as World War II ended.  He was an U.S. Army officer and she, a “peasant” French girl, were mismatched from the start. They “made possibly the greatest mistake of their lives – to which I owe my existence,” he tells us.  Oliver became very close to his French grandparents, especially his Mémé.  As he was struggling to write successful screenplays and break into filmmaking, his beloved grandmother dies and he goes to France for her funeral.  There is a scene in this memoir – I almost said movie – where he arrives alone in a suburb of Paris where she is laid out in her musty apartment in an old apartment building.  He felt the dead were calling to him from the past – Vietnam, France.  So much death, so many lies, betrayals.  He writes:

I thought about how Odysseus went to the Underworld to find Tiresias for a prophecy about when and how he’d return home to Ithaca.  And once in the Underworld, he recognized his mother, Anticlea, who, like the other shades, had come to him to slake herself at the pool of sheep’s blood he had sacrificed to get there.

For Oliver, his Mémé was like a mother to him, and with her forty-year marriage to her beloved Pépé who had predeceased her, was a symbol of what family life should be all about, the family Oliver had lost and desperately wished for. Home as love and commitment. “Without a family, we one and all suffer,” he says.

In less than four pages, his description of this encounter with his grandmother illuminates the heart of this memoir and is an exquisite example of a great artist at work. An artist who uses words to touch your soul, heart-breaking, tender, and hopeful in turns, far different from the often-popular image of Stone.  I would buy this book for these four pages alone.  Listen:

I drew up my chair closer to be with her, like we’d been when I was young, cuddled in her big bed as she told me the stories of the wolves in Paris who’d come down the chimneys to snatch the children who’d been bad…There was the silence of ‘la mort,’ and then the October light began to drop.  No one else knocked or visited.  Just me. And you, Mémé – and that something listening between us.  Not long ago I’d been twenty-three.  You were so happy when I’d returned in one piece from over there.  I’d tried to pay my debt to society.  We all have one, we don’t only live for ourselves.  But I still felt uneasy and Mémé did too.  What did Vietnam have to do with saving our civilization when it only made the world more callous?  You never asked me for an explanation.  Three wars in your life time…I’d done nothing.  I’d achieved nothing.  Therefore I was nothing…I was crying but didn’t know I was until I felt the tears.  I hadn’t cried in so any years – I was a hard boy.  I had to be, I felt, to survive.  I was raised to believe men don’t cry.

But this time it feels fresh, like a rain.  But who am I crying to?  Not you, Mémé – you’re not the one judging me.  You never have.  Is it my self I’m crying to?  My self, but who was that?  I could not see myself.  I was ugly, hiding.  I could cry myself dry with self-pity.  All this pain, so much pain.  Yes, I feel it now- feel sorry for myself, it’s okay- so raw, all my lies, my embarrassment naked for the dead to see, naked to the whole world!  No one loves me, no one will ever love me.  Because I can’t love anyone – except you, Mémé, and you’re gone now.  Can I…can I learn to love?  How can I start?  By just being kind like you were?  Can I be kind – to myself?  In my mind, I heard Mémé reply: ‘Try – you’re a man now.  You’re no longer seventeen sitting on the sidelines of your life, judging.  You’ve seen this world, tasted its tears.  Now’s the time to recognize this, Oliver, Oliver, Oliver’ – my name, invoked three times to rouse myself, to wake myself from this long slumber.  Do something with your life, I demanded, all this energy bottled up for years, hopeless dreaming and writing, no excuse, you can do better.  Stop fucking around…Mémé continued speaking to me so gently.  That soft voice: ‘Mon chéri, mon p’tit Oliverre, te fais pas de soucis pour rien…Fais ta vie.  Fais ce que tu veux faire.  C’est tout ce quil y a.  Je t’embrasse, je t’adore.’ (My darling, my little Oliver, don’t be miserable for nothing…Make you life.

Do what you have to do.  That’s all there is.  I embrace you, I adore you.) …The other shades were approaching now, smelling the blood, so many young men groaning…faces distorted in death.  There was whispering, many voices.  ‘Stone, hey man, don’t forget me!  Where you goin’?  Gimme some!  Hey, tell my girl you saw me, will ya? Remember me, will ya?  You got a joint?’  Mémé wanted me to go – quickly, before it was too late.  I couldn’t hear, but it clear what the shades were saying:  We, the dead, are telling you – your lifespan is short.  Make of it everything you can.  Before you’re one of us.  I rose and kissed Mémé’s face one last time…” Au revoir, ma belle Mémé.  And I walked out – as she looked away and began slaking her thirst with the others…I walked the silent streets to the Metro.  Like in a dreamscape, there were no living people.  Maybe that’s the reason we die.  It makes us want to live again.

Oliver does exactly that.  Reborn, determined, he returns to the U.S. and makes his life by making the illuminating movies that have made his reputation.  He does the opposite of what his father advised him.  “People don’t want to know the truth,” his father told him.  “Reality is too tough.  They go to the movies to get away from all that.”  He knew his “very nature was unacceptable to the fantasy world of moviegoers,” but he wasn’t home yet and pushes on, getting in lots of trouble for telling truths people don’t want to hear, except perhaps the dead.

But making those films was far from smooth sailing.  It was another form of warfare, treacherous, filled with betrayals, drugs, Hollywood a place where you had to watch your back. Just when the battle seemed over and you had won, another rocket would explode at your feet, throwing you for a loop.  It would take another toll on Stone. So often, when he would think his screenplay or deal to direct a film was secured – that the stone he had rolled to the top of the hill was set – back it would roll.  He would find that often what seemed to be up was down and that when he thought he was at the top, he was soon on the bottom. The years that followed were a roller coaster ride.

He writes truthfully about his need to quell his anxiety with a host of drugs that fueled his days and nights and led to addiction, his guilt and confusion, his partying like his glamorous party-loving mother, who “was there for me, and yet she wasn’t; it was more like she was on display.”  He tells us how he was always running from something, writing, hustling, trying to justify himself as he traveled toward a home called success, the bitch-goddess Success, the pipe dream nurtured in Hollywood.

In numerous chapters, a reader fascinated with the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, from the screenplay through directing, financing, casting, editing, distributing, etc., will delight in his detailed description of the movie game.  Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, Platoon are explored in depth.  If you want to know about Al Pacino, Charlie Sheen, Michael Cimino, James Woods, Dino De Laurentiis, the wild Richard Boyle, et al., it’s all here.  The good, bad, and the ugly.  Gossip or insights, call it what you will.  It’s all interesting.

Stone writes about his second wife, Elizabeth, the joy that the birth of their son, his first child, Sean, brought him, the conflicts that developed as he’s torn between home life and the mad pursuit of filmmaking, “even if it’s leading you off a cliff.” He wrote in his diary:

What have I become?  A Macbeth of workaholics.  I’ve worked straight 17 years, two scripts a year, etc., and what has it brought me?  Never been able to relax, but must.  I’m always running like a mad rabbit down an Alice in Wonderland hole, always getting bigger or smaller and never knowing what will happen next.”

By the end of the book, Oliver, now forty-years-old in 1987, is on the top of the world when he wins Oscars for Platoon, and although he revels in this victory, something continues to eat at him, as if he hadn’t really reached Ithaca, but was still on the journey. “So I’d come to this moment in time,” he writes.  “Success was a beautiful goddess, yes, but was I being seduced by this vindication, this proving myself to my father; was it the acceptance, the power?  What did I really believe?”

The double-minded rascal was still alive and at sea, despite saying that, “And truthfully, I don’t think I’d ever been happier.” He had finally achieved great film success, had a lovely wife and child, a garden, his books, a pool to jump in.  Tranquility.

No. He tells us:

Mine was a free man’s life, without a home, really, except for the wenches in the local ports, like Sabatini’s Captain Blood, who ‘was born with a gift for laughter and the sense that the world was mad.’  Thus it remains a split in my soul – the home, the hearth, and then out into the wind with your crew – Odysseus’s ‘I am become a name.’  Could this be?  Could I live two different lives?  Like those hard men I’d worked with in the merchant marine twenty years before – six months on land, six at sea; unsettled, eccentric men who remained free in their souls yet tormented.  In the next years, I’d live out this split in my nature to the fullest.

The reader will have to await a sequel to Chasing the Light to see if Odysseus ever finds his way to his true home.

In the meantime, Charlie Sheen’s words at the end of Platoon will have to suffice:

Those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to this life.

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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/

Israel has banned all imports except food and medical supplies into the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian official told Anadolu Agency on Sunday.

“All private sector companies have been notified of the Israeli decision to stop the entry of all commodities and goods, except food and medicine,” said the official, who preferred to be unnamed.

There was no comment from the Israeli government on the report.

Israel has cut fuel imports into Gaza since last week as part of punitive measures over the launch of fire-bomb balloons from the strip.

Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has groaned under a crippling Israeli blockade that has deprived its roughly two million inhabitants of many vital commodities, including food, fuel and medicine.

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LeMonde reports that France, Germany and Britain have rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to reimpose UN Security Council sanctions on Iran that were revoked in early 2016 with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA).

Their joint statement said,

“France, Germany and the United Kingdom note that the United States ceased to be a participant in the JCPoA in the wake of its withdrawal from the accord [in 2018].”

Their foreign ministries underlined that they could “not support this initiative, which is incompatible with our current efforts to support the JCPoA . . . We remain engaged in favor of the JCPoA in spite of major challenges engendered by the withdrawal of the United States, and we are convinced that we must treat the question of the systematic non-compliance by the Iranians with their obligations under the JCPoA via a dialogue between the participants in the accord. We call urgently on Iran to reverse all its steps that are incompatible with its nuclear obligations and to return without delay to full compliance.”

This is a stronger stance, and a more vigorous rebuke, to the US that the informed and canny Crisis Group had expected from the Europeans, and sounds precisely like what Russia and China have been saying.

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo accused Europe of siding with Iran’s ayatollahs. I’m not sure what he expects to accomplish with this ayatollah-shaming, except to further anger his erstwhile allies, whom Trump has decisively alienated. Iran is elated.

The Iran nuclear deal was signed between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany in 2015, including the United States. It offered Iran an end to all international sanctions if it would mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program, which was for making fuel for its three nuclear reactors to produce electricity.

In May, 2018, the Trump administration breached the treaty. The document contains a provision that allows any signatory to invoke “snapback,” restoring the UNSC sanctions on Iran enacted in 2007, if it can show that Iran did not fulfill its obligations under the treaty. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has argued that since the US is a signatory, it can still invoke snapback.

Europe is raising one eyebrow and exclaiming, “You must be joking, monsieur!” The US ceased to be a participant in the Iran nuclear deal in May, 2018, and has no standing to now invoke the snapback clause.

The wild and wacky Trump administration is perfectly capable of maintaining publicly that international UNSC sanctions on Iran have been restored even if no one goes along with Washington, of course. But it is simply a form of political theater.

Since the US is already threatening third party sanctions on countries that deal with Iran, Washington is unlikely to be able to find new ways to twist Europe’s arm.

For its part, Russia is openly defying the Americans and continuing to deal with Iran. China’s Xinhua news service reports that Russia’s Sergei Riabkov, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, declared Thursday that Russia will not cease its cooperation with Iran, despite American threats of sanctions. He said, according to the RIA Novosti press agency, “We are guided exclusively by our own interests and our obligations to international law.” He was indirectly responding to US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s threat to sanction countries that opposed US efforts to reimpose sanctions on Iran.

Riabkov said that Russia condemns the US intention to reestablish UN sanctions against Iran. He accused the US of tying the UN Security in knots with its “irresponsible enterprises,” and preventing the world body from undertaking a large contingent of questions relevant to its mandate. Nevertheless, he said, Russia would continue its dialogue with the US.

China called the US move “illegitimate.” Beijing is preparing a wide-ranging program of investment in and trade with Iran valued at a mind-boggling $400 billion over 25 years, and clearly does not intend to allow Trump’s antics and Pompeo’s posturing to get in the way.

Iran fully complied with the letter of the treaty until Trump breached it and imposed a financial and trade embargo on Iran that destroyed its petroleum industry and left it penniless. Europe was threatened with third party sanctions by the US Treasury Department and so was dragooned into going along with Trump’s blockade of Iran, much to the dismay of Tehran. Iran’s government can’t see why it should perfectly comply with a treaty when it has not only received none of the sanctions relief promised but has actually had much more severe sanctions imposed on it than when it had the full enrichment program.

So, Iran has acted out a bit to pressure Europe, but in relatively minor ways. It wasn’t supposed to enrich higher than 3.67% but it went to 4.5%. This is a merely symbolic protest. You can’t do anything with 5% enriched uranium but use it for reactor fuel, same as 3.67%. The European members of the Security Council seem to me to be quite unreasonable in wanting Iran to remain in complete compliance even though they are complicit with Trump in destroying the Iranian economy. Where are Total S.A.’s and BP’s investments in Iran? What have the Europeans bought from Iran, as the standard of living of its people has plummeted under Trump’s tender mercies. Would France put up with being treated this way?

Anyway, as with the vote last Friday in which the US could only find one ally (the tiny Dominican Republic) among the 14 other UNSC members for its resolution extending an arms embargo on Iran, so in this snapback move, Washington will go down to defeat. As for sanctions, the UN Security Council members likely believe that they only have to hold out until mid-January, and President Biden will rejoin the JCPOA, saving it and allowing them to jump into Iran trade and investments with both feet.

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Here are a few takeaways from the Democratic Convention:

1. The Democrats are running on the same platform they ran on in 2016.
2. The Democrats put style above substance, flashy optics above ideas or issues.
3. The Democrats think that hollow tributes to “diversity” and “inclusion” will win the election.
4. The Democrats have abandoned white, working class voters opting instead for people of color.
5. The Democrats have learned nothing from Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016.

In 2016, Democrat front-runner, Hillary Clinton lost the election because she failed to see her support was eroding in the key Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump won all three states with a measly 77, 651 votes total. All three states were expected to go Democrat but flipped to the GOP due to Clinton’s support for free trade and immigration policies that cost jobs and imposed unwelcome demographic changes on the working people of those states. The Democrats and Hillary have never accepted the factual version of how the election was lost. Instead, they fabricated a conspiracy theory about Trump colluding with Russia. Although the Mueller Report proved that the claims of meddling were baseless, Clinton and the Dems continue to trot them out at every opportunity. On Tuesday at the convention, Hillary again reiterated the lie that Trump stole the election. She said:

“Vote like our lives and livelihoods are on the line, because they are. Remember: Joe and Kamala can win 3 million more votes and still lose. Take it from me. We need numbers so overwhelming Trump can’t sneak or steal his way to victory.”

The determination on the part of the Democrats to mischaracterize what actually happened in the election is not a trivial matter. It suggests that deception is central to their governing style. Party leaders do not think their supporters are entitled to know the truth but rather believe that events must be shaped in a way that best serves their overall political interests. For Democrats, lying is not a personal failing, but an opportunity for enhancing their grip on power. This is from an article in The Guardian:

“Donald Trump’s electoral college victory rests on the shoulders of more than 200 so-called “pivot counties” across the US. That is, counties that voted for Barack Obama only four years earlier. The most decisive of these swings occurred in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county, nestled in the north-east part of the state…There, voters gave Trump a nearly 20-point victory after going for Obama by almost 5% in 2012. But Trump’s win in Luzerne was also noteworthy for its magnitude. His 26,000 vote plurality in Luzerne comprised almost three-fifths of his plurality in the state as a whole, and with it Pennsylvania’s 20 coveted electoral votes….” (“The Forgotten review: Ben Bradlee Jr delivers 2020 lessons for Democrats”, The Guardian)

Critical battleground states tilted in Trump’s favor because Democratic policies had decimated their communities and eviscerated their standard of living. Author Ben Bradlee Jr. explains this phenom in his book “The Forgotten” which should be required reading at the DNC. Here’s a clip from the review at the Guardian:

“The Forgotten documents the ravages of deindustrialization, lost jobs, crime and drugs. It captures the sense of displacement tied to a changing and less monochromatic America. Once upon a time, Luzerne was home to coal and textiles, dominated by Protestants from Wales and Catholics from Ireland and continental Europe. Not any more. Luzerne is poorer and smaller, for many a less recognizable place. Not surprisingly, immigration and Nafta come in for constant criticism.” (The Guardian)

This is the real reason Hillary was defeated. Russia had nothing to do with it. The Dems abandoned the white working-class people who had always voted for them and began to cobble together their Rainbow coalition. When Hillary denounced these people as “Deplorables”, it forced more of them to join Trump team. The rest is history. Here’s more from the same article:

“In the absence of a recession, however, the party stands to face the same electoral map it did in 2016. In fact, Ohio now looks an even tougher nut to crack. Much as the Democratic base loathes the president, reality cannot be wished away. Luzerne would be a good place for the party to start addressing this reality.” (The Guardian)

The point we’re trying to make is that the effectiveness of the Democrat Convention can only be measured in terms of its impact on potential voters. So, why have the Dems shrugged off any effort to reach out to the people who could help them win?

It’s not that complicated. The Dems are merely abandoning the people who, they believe, will leave anyway as their globalist economic agenda becomes more apparent putting more downward pressure on overall living standards. It’s worth noting, that when Obama left office in 2016, this process was already well-underway. According to a Gallup poll, 71 percent of the people said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going. (in Obama’s last year.) Only 27 percent said they’re satisfied. So, even though Obama’s personal approval ratings remained high, his handling of the economy was extremely unpopular. (except on Wall Street, of course.)

During this same period, the PEW Research Center conducted a survey titled: “Campaign Exposes Fissures Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S” which showed why Trump was steadily gaining on Hillary. Here are a few excerpts from the report:

“Among GOP voters, fully 75% of those who support Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination say life for people like them has gotten worse…”

“GOP voters who support Trump also stand out for their pessimism about the nation’s economy and their own financial situations: 48% rate current economic conditions in the U.S. as “poor.

“Within the GOP, anger at government is heavily concentrated among Trump supporters – 50% say they are angry at government…”

“Among Republicans, a majority of those who back Trump (61%) view the system as unfair…among Trump supporters, 67% say trade agreements are bad thing…”

“Half of Trump supporters (50%) say they are angry at the federal government…. Anger at government – and politics – is much more pronounced among Trump backers than among supporters of any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat…” (“Campaign Exposes Fissures Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S“, PEW Research Center)

So, a higher percentage of Trump supporters think they are getting screwed-over by an unfair system. They think “free trade” only benefits the rich, they think the government is unresponsive to their needs, they think the system is rigged, and they’re really, really mad.

So, which speaker at the Democrat Convention addressed the concerns or complaints of white working-class people who now almost-universally harbor these same feelings??

No one, because no one in the Democrat party plans to do anything about these issues, in fact, just the opposite. Now that the Dems have been subsumed by Wall Street and their big globalist donors, things are going to get dramatically worse for working people who will see a vicious attack on essential social services and programs as soon as the election is over. The massive build-up of debt– by mainly Democrat Governors who deliberately drove their states into bankruptcy at the behest of Fauci’s Vaccine Gestapo– will now be met by a growing demand for austerity on a scale unlike anything we’ve experienced in the last century. The country is being prepared for an excruciating restructuring that will create a permanent underclass that will provide an endless source of sweatshop labor for the multinational carpetbaggers. Those jobs will likely go to members of the Dems rainbow coalition while white, working class people in America’s heartland –with their strong sense of patriotism– will be seen as a potential threat to the emerging new order.

It’s clear that the Dems anticipate resistance to their plan by the contemptible way they have branded struggling workers as “white nationalists” and “racists”. But is it true or are the Democrats and their deep-pocket allies preemptively denigrating these people and supporting BLM rioters to head-off growing resistance to their strategy of total control through widespread mayhem, decimation of the economy and extermination of the American middle class? Author CJ Hopkins summed it up like this in a recent article at The Unz Review:

“What we are experiencing is not the “return of fascism.” It is the global capitalist empire restoring order, putting down the populist insurgency that took them by surprise in 2016.

The White Black Nationalist Color Revolution, the fake apocalyptic plague, all the insanity of 2020 … it has been in the pipeline all along. It has been since the moment Trump won the election. No, it is not about Trump, the man. It has never been about Trump, the man…

GloboCap needs to crush Donald Trump… not because he is a threat to the empire…, but because he became a symbol of populist resistance to global capitalism and its increasingly aggressive “woke” ideology . It is this populist resistance to its ideology that GloboCap is determined to crush, no matter how much social chaos and destruction it unleashes in the process...” (“The White Black Nationalist Color Revolution”, CJ Hopkins, The Unz Review)

Bingo. It is the “populist resistance to global capitalism” that is the defacto enemy of the Party elite, the same elites who conspired with senior-level members of the Intelligence Community, the FBI, the DOJ and the Obama White House to spy on the Trump Campaign, infiltrate the presidential transition, and to try to topple the elected government. And while the coup plotters have still not been brought to justice, they are now within spitting distance of their ultimate objective, which is seizing executive power and using it to crush the fledgling opposition, impose a one-party system of government, and transform America into a corporate superstate ruled by Global Capital. Here’s a clip from an article by Gary D. Barnett at Lew Rockwell:

“By the end of this next planned phase of the ‘virus’ scare, a global reset of the world economy will be ready to launch. This reset will be mammoth in scope, as everything we have known will be restructured. … Those out of work in the final stage will most likely stay out of work, pushing the dependency state to new levels sought by the ruling class. … Controlling the population will be a key component of the plan, including population size, birth rates, movement, and personal contact among individuals. The elimination of normal human interaction is sought, and this is only the beginning…. The ultimate goal is total control, and every tool in the box of the tyrants will be used to gain that control. Restraint by the ruling class will be non-existent, as this staged reset is now going forward at a very accelerated pace.” (“The Economic Insanity of This Coronavirus Pandemic Plot and the Coming Global Reset“, Lew Rockwell)

The coup plotters have chosen the candidates they want to carry out the next phase of their operation. All they need now is to win the election.

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Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

One speech, well written and read well, does not a president make. At the end of the day, the Democrats are putting forward a wolf in sheep’s clothes, who is peddling the same worn-out lies disguised as new promises.

Russia’s Sergey Lavrov is right about hegemon USA, saying the following on Saturday:

The Trump regime’s “intention is to do everything possible in order not to be bound by any international multilateral obligations,” adding:

“When the US decides that China is a threat because it sells too much to the US and buys too little, the Americans impose restrictions on imports from China.”

“When the US decides that Iran, although it is doing everything it agreed on under the JCPOA, however, misbehaves, then sanctions are imposed against Iran.”

Washington’s geopolitical agenda is largely the same under both right wings of its war party — seeking dominance over all other nations by whatever it takes to achieve its aims.

What works at times short-term is self-defeating longer-term.

The harder hegemons push other nations to bend to their will, even at the expense of their own interests, the more they hasten their decline.

Unacceptable US policy toward Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is one of many examples.

The Trump regime wants its completion undermined to favor sales of far more expensive US liquified natural gas (LNG) to European markets — infuriating key ally German.

In early August, German media reported on a letter from hardline US senators to German port of Mukran’s management.

Defying the nation’s interests and international law, “financial destruction” of the port was threatened if its management continues providing logistical support for completion of Nord Stream 2’s construction.

In response, Bundestag MP Jurgen Tritten denounced what he called “a (US) declaration of economic war,” adding:

“The nasty habit of threatening American letters to German companies is growing.”

“This interference into the sovereign affairs of Germany and the European Union has reached an unprecedented level of aggressiveness which must not go unanswered.”

“The companies involved in this project need protection from Washington’s wild west methods.”

“Germany and the EU must find a robust response to this US behavior.”

“This can include (our own) threat of sanctions…such as on the import of (LNG) from the USA.”

Separately, the German Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations demanded that Berlin and Brussels protect sovereign EU nations and their enterprises from “attacks by third countries” — including by providing financial and legal support.

German state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Minister-President Manuela Schweisig called US threats over Nord Stream 2 “absolutely unacceptable,” adding:

It’s Berlin’s sovereign right to decide “where and how to get its energy.”

Germany’s Federal Foreign Office Minister of State Neils Annen denounced US “extraterritorial sanctions against close partners and allies,” calling them “a serious attack on our national sovereignty.”

Germany is committed to Nord Stream 2’s completion.

The Trump regime and congressional hardliners are going all-out to undermine its remaining construction.

Russia is a reliable political, economic and trade partner with European and other world community countries — seeking cooperative relations with all, dominance over none, threatening none.

US hegemonic policies are polar opposite. They risk alienating key allies like Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse.

Two humiliating defeats of the Trump regime on Iran at the UN in the past week reflect the most glaring examples of opposition to its unacceptable geopolitical demands.

It’s a sign of perhaps more of the same to come, especially because there’s no let-up of DJT’s all-out war on Iran by other means in defiance of the rule of law and strong opposition from key allies that want the landmark JCPOA agreement preserved.

The Trump regime has no legal right to impose snapback sanctions on Iran, a policy it’s illegally pursuing in defiance of opposition by other signatories to the deal.

In response to its imperial arrogance, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif tweeted the following last week:

“After officially and explicitly ceasing its participation in the JCPOA at the highest level, and having violated each and every one of its obligations under the JCPOA and Resolution 2231, the US cannot arrogate to itself any right under that Resolution.”

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

Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — the other JCPOA signatories — agree with Iran on this issue.

The US is waging war by hot and/or other means against all nations it doesn’t control — a self-defeating agenda over time by alienating allies and stiffening resistance of its adversaries.

Along with Russia and Iran, China tops the US target list for marginalizing, weakening, undermining, and isolating on the world stage — preliminary steps to wanting pro-Western puppet rule replacing their sovereign independence.

On a pre-recorded Fox News interview to air Sunday, Trump threatened to decouple economically from China, saying:

“(W)e don’t have to” do business with Beijing. Asked about possibly decoupling, he said:

“Well it’s something that if they don’t treat us right I would certainly, I would certainly do that.”

Despite growing irreconcilable differences between both nations, they’ve been closely integrated for decades — breaking up not simple to do.

China’s economy is a key engine of global economic growth. The nation is a reliable trading partner.

Virtually all large and many smaller US companies operate in China. It’s a major purchaser of US products and services.

Trump’s war on China by other means is the stuff that major conflicts are made of if cooler heads in Washington don’t step back from the brink to avoid a greater class of civilizations than already exists.

The US is a nation in decline, repeating the pattern of all other empires in world history.

It’s no longer the world’s leading super-power.

Russian super-weapons outmatch the Pentagon’s best, developed at a small fraction of the cost.

China is heading toward surpassing the US as the world’s leading economy.

Despite decades of US war on Iran by other means, the Islamic Republic proved resilient in defense of its sovereign independence.

America’s day in the sun is fading, weakened over time by its imperial arrogance and unwillingness to change.

Like all other previous empires, the dustbin of history awaits its arrival.

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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.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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First published on June 29, 2020, updated on April 28, 2021

It is remarkable that a large series of events taking place over the past months produced a unified message about hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and produced similar policies about the drug in the US, Canada, Australia, NZ and western Europe.  The message is that generic, inexpensive hydroxychloroquine (costing only $1.00 to produce a full course) is dangerous and should not be used to treat a potentially fatal disease, Covid-19, for which there are no (other) reliable treatments. 

Hydroxychloroquine has been used safely for 65 years in many millions of patients.  And so the message was crafted that the drug is safe for its other uses, but dangerous when used for Covid-19.  It doesn’t make sense, but it seems to have worked.

In the US, “Never Trump” morphed into “Never Hydroxychloroquine,” and the result for the pandemic is “Never Over.”  But while anti-Trump spin is what characterized suppression strategies in the US, the frauds perpetrated about hydroxychloroquine and the pandemic include most western countries.

Why do I say “Never Over”?  I am expanding on this claim with a), b), c) on August 30. Later in the paper additional evidence is provided.

a) Because if people were treated with HCQ at the onset of their illness, over 99% would quickly resolve the infection, avoiding progression to the late stage disease characterized by cytokine storm, thrombophilia and organ failure. Despite claims to the contrary, this treatment is very safe.  (Yet outpatient treatment is banned in many US states.) UPDATE Jan 15: The CDC forgot to rewrite its guidance on malaria and hydroxychloroquine during Covid.  CDC says hydroxychloroquine “can be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers…”  Only “when it is used at higher doses for many years, a rare eye condition called retinopathy has occurred.”

b) If people were treated prophylactically with this drug (using only 2 tablets weekly) as is done in some areas and in some occupational groups in India, there would probably be at least 50% fewer cases after exposure. (Such treatment is currently banned in much of the US, including in my state of Maine.)

c) Protocols for in-hospital treatment (that were unknown during the initial peak of illness in the US and Europe) using HCQ and individually selected blood thinners, steroids, vitamins, zinc and other drugs such as used at NYU, have significantly reduced mortality of the very small number of people who might still progress to a serious illness. (The FDA, however, recommends against the use of HCQ outside of clinical trials, and the CDC and NIH recommend against it.)

If we followed a), b) and c) the result would be much briefer periods of infectiousness, lower viral loads, less severe illness and considerably less transmission.  The R zero (average number of people each case infects) would drop below one and the pandemic would soon die out.

Were acts to suppress the use of HCQ carefully orchestrated?  You decide.

Might these events have been planned to keep the pandemic going?  To sell expensive drugs and vaccines to a captive population?   Could these acts result in prolonged economic and social hardship, eventually transferring wealth from the middle class to the very rich?  Are these events evidence of a conspiracy?

Here is a list of what happened, in no special order. Please help add to this list if you know of other actions I should include.  This will be a living document, added to as new information becomes available.

I have penned this as if it is the “To Do” list of items to be accomplished by those who pull the strings.  The items on the list have already been carried out.  One wonders what else might be on their list, yet to be carried out, for this pandemic.

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1. You stop doctors from using the drug in ways it is most likely to be effective (in outpatients at onset of illness).  You prohibit use outside of situations you can control.

Situations that were controlled to show no benefit included 3 large, randomized, multi-center clinical trials (Recovery, Solidarity and REMAP-Covid), the kind of trials that are generally believed to yield the most reliable evidence. However, each of them used excessive hydroxychloroquine doses that were known to be toxic and may have been fatal in some cases; see my previous articles here and here. And a 4th Chinese study that also used excessive doses (3.6 g HCQ in the first three days and 800mg/day thereafter, comparable to the above studies) also found no benefit from HCQ.

2. You prevent or limit use in outpatients by controlling the supply of the drug, using different methods in different countries andstates.  For example, in New York state, by order of the governor, hydroxychloroquine could only be prescribed for hospitalized patients.  In Nevada, the governor outright prohibited both prescribing and dispensing chloroquine drugs for a Covid-19 diagnosis. In New Jersey, the Department of Consumer Affairs required a positive test result before a chloroquine prescription could be dispensed or prescribed. Even back in March, pharmacy boards were coordinating to restrict its use.

France has issued a series of different regulations to limit prescribers from using it.  France’s Health Minister also changed the drugs’ status from over-the-counter (OTC) to a drug requiring a prescription on January 13.

3. You play up the danger of the drug, emphasizing side effects that are very rare when the drug is used correctly. You make sure everyone has heard about theman who died after consuming hydroxychloroquine in the form of fish tank cleaner. Yet its toxicity at approved doses is minimal. Chloroquine was added to table salt in some regions in the 1950s as a malaria preventive, according to Professor Nicholas White in his study for the Recovery trial.

4. You limit clinical trials to hospitalized patients, instead of testing the drug in outpatients, early in the illness, when it is predicted to be most effective.

Finally, but not until May, you have Fauci’s NIAID conduct a trial in outpatients, using hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, but you only enroll 20 patients, after planning for 2,000. You reduce the duration of followup from 24 weeks to 13 days post treatment. You cancel the study after only 5 weeks, claiming inadequate enrollments, even though you have 11 study sites to enroll patients.

5. You design a series of clinical trials to givemuch too high a dose, ensuring the drug will cause harm in some subjects, sufficient to mask any possible beneficial effect.  You make sure that trials in 400 hospitals in 35 countries (Solidarity) plus most hospitals in the UK (Recovery) use these dangerous doses, as well as additional sites in 13 countries (REMAP-Covid trial). There were additional Covid-19 trials that used similar excessive doses, such as PATCH, which I have not yet addressed.

6. You design clinical trials to collect almost no safety data, so any cause of death due to drug toxicity will be attributed to the disease instead of the drug.

7. You issue rules for use of the drug based on the results of the UK Recovery study, which overdosed patients. Of course the Recovery results showed more deaths in the hydroxychloroquine arm, since they gave patients 2.4 g in the first 24 hours, 800 mg/day thereafter. Furthermore, the UK has the 2nd highest death rate in the world for Covid-19 (Belgium is 1st), so simply conducting the trial in the UK may have contributed to the poor results.

8. You publish, in the world’s most-read medical journal, the Lancet, an observational study from a massive worldwide database named Surgisphere (which includes 96,000 hospitalized Covid cases) that says use of chloroquine drugs caused significantly increased mortality.  This was said to be the paper to end all controversy about HCQ and Covid-19.  You make sure that all major media report on this result. This was to be the nail in the coffin for hydroxychloroquine. Then you quickly have 3 European countries announce they will not allow doctors to prescribe the drug. Soon additional countries ban its use for Covid.

9. You do your best to ride out any controversy over the veracity of this paper, never admitting culpability. Even after hundreds of people criticized this Lancet observational study due to easily identified fabrications–the database used in the study did not exist, and the claimed numbers of cases did not agree with known numbers of cases–the Lancetheld firm for two weeks, which served to muddy the waters about the trial, until finally 3 of the 4 coauthors (but not the Lancet nor the author who purportedly owned the database) retracted the study. Neither the authors nor the journal have admitted responsibility, let alone explained what it was that induced them to coauthor and publish such an obvious fraud.

You made sure very few media reported that the data were fabricated, the “study” was fraudulent, and the drugs were actually safe. Even though the story of the database company, Surgisphere, was full of scandalous details, most media ignored it.  The story of the study’s retraction went largely unnoticed by the public.  You made sure most people remember the original (false) story: that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine frequently kill patients.

10. You ensure federal agencies like FDA and CDC hew to your desired policies.  Some examples:

a) FDA advised use only in hospitalized patients (too late) and later advised use restricted to only clinical trials (which are limited, are difficult to enroll in, have been halted prematurely, or may use excessive doses).

b) you have FDA make unsubstantiated and false claims, such as:  “Hospitalized patients were likely to have greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness)“and claim the chloroquine drugs have a slow onset of action. If that were really true, they would not be used for acute attacks of malaria or in critically ill patients with Covid. (Disclosure:  I once dosed myself with chloroquine for an acute attack of  vivaxmalaria, and it worked very fast.).

c) although providing treatment advice is a large part of its mission, CDC instead refers clinicians to the NIH guidelines, discussed below.

d) Despite the fact that Belgium’s COVID treatment guidelines repeatedly mention that the doses of HCQ in the Recovery and Solidarity trials were 4 times the cumulative dose used in Belgium, you make sure the Belgian guidelines, paradoxically, only recommend use of HCQ within clinical trials.

11. You make sure to avoid funding/encouraging clinical trials that test drug combinations like hydroxychloroquine with zinc, with azithromycin, or with both, although there is ample clinical evidence that such combinations provide a cumulative benefit to patients. For example, one study that did look at this combination had no funding.

12. You have federal and UN agencies make false, illogical claims based on models (or invention) rather than human data.  For example, you have the FDA state on June 15 that the doserequired to treat Covid is so high it is toxic, after the Recovery and Solidarity trials have been exposed for toxic dosing.  This scientific double-speak gives some legal cover to the clinical trials that overdosed their patients. According to Denise Hinton, RN, the FDA’s Chief Scientist (yes, a registered nurse without scientific qualifications is the Chief Scientist at FDA), or perhaps a clumsy FDA wordsmith:

“Under the assumption that in vivo cellular accumulation is similar to that from the in vitro cell-based assays, the calculated free lung concentrations that would result from the EUA suggested dosing regimens are well below the in vitro EC50/EC90 values, making the antiviral effect against SARS-CoV-2 not likely achievable with the dosing regimens recommended in the EUA. The substantial increase in dosing that would be needed to increase the likelihood of an antiviral effect would not be acceptable due to toxicity concerns.”

You have a WHO report claim toxic doses are needed. This is nonsense since:

• In 2005, CDC researchers showed strong effects against SARS-1 at safely achievable concentrations.  Here is the relevant quote, “The infectivity of coronaviruses other than SARS-CoV are also affected by chloroquine, as exemplified by the human CoV-229E [15]. The inhibitory effects observed on SARS-CoV infectivity and cell spread occurred in the presence of 1–10 μM chloroquine, which are plasma concentrations achievable during the prophylaxis and treatment of malaria (varying from 1.6–12.5 μM) [26] and hence are well tolerated by patients.” A reader asked me to note that this study was done in tissue culture.
• the drug at normal doses is being tested in over 30 different medical conditions (see clinicaltrials.gov), and
• reports from many different countries say that the drug is effective for Covid-19 at normal doses, while a high dose chloroquine treatment trial was halted in Brazil and a preprint of the study was posted April 11, or perhaps April 7, after finding that drug effects were causing ventricular arrhythmias and deaths. JAMA published the results in their April 24 edition.
• Toxicity in the Brazilian study was seen after only 3 days of treatment, during which 3.6 grams of chloroquine were administered. But the Solidarity (3.2 grams of hydroxychloroquine in 3 days), Recovery (3.6 grams of hydroxychloroquine in 3 days) and REMAP-Covid trials (3.6 grams of hydroxychloroquine in 3 days) continued overdosing patients until June, or probably longer in the case of REMAP-Covid, despite Brazil’s evidence of deaths by overdose.

Tellingly, JAMA editor Gordon Rubenfeld wrote in April, after the Brazilian study came out in JAMA, “if you are prescribing HCQ after these JAMA results, do yourself and your defense lawyer a favor. Document in your medical record that you informed the patient of the potential risks of HCQ including sudden death and its benefits (???).” 

13. You create an NIH Guidelines committee for Covid treatment recommendations, in which16 members have or had financial entanglements with Gilead, maker of Remdesivir. The members were appointed by the Co-Chairs.  Two of the three Co-Chairs are themselves financially entangled with Gilead.  Are you surprised that their guidelines recommend specifically against the use of hydroxychloroquine and in favor of Remdesivir, despite a Chinese Phase III study showing no benefit, which was mistakenly posted on the WHO website, then taken down?  The guidelines authors deem their recommendations the new “standard of care.” Additional remdesivir studies have shown no clear mortality benefit.

You create an NIH treatment guidelines summary that cherry picks the literature to claim HCQ provides no benefit.

14. You frighten doctors so they don’t prescribe hydroxychloroquine, if prescribing it is even allowed in their jurisdiction, because prescribing outside the newNIH “standard of care” leaves them open to both malpractice lawsuits and potential loss of license.  For example, Michigan’s Medical Licensing Board issued the following:

“Prescribing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine without further proof of efficacy for treating COVID-19 or with the intent to stockpile the drug may create a shortage for patients with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or other ailments for which chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are proven treatments. Reports of this conduct will be evaluated and may be further investigated for administrative action… It is also important to be mindful that licensed health professionals are required to report inappropriate prescribing practices.” 

In other words, Michigan pharmacists are required to snitch on doctors prescribing the drugs for Covid.

You further tell doctors (through the FDA) they need to monitor a variety of lab parameters and EKGs when using the drug, although this was never advised before, which makes it very difficult to use the drug in outpatients. You have the European Medicines Agency issue similar warnings. In Australia only physicians in certain specialties are allowed to prescribe the drug for Covid. And in Queensland, physicians or pharmacists who do not comply (for example, by prescribing the drug for prevention of Covid) face up to 6 months’ imprisonment and a fine up to $13,000 Australian dollars.

15. You manage to control the conduct of most trials around the world by specially designing the WHO-managedSolidarity trials, currently conducted in 35 countries. WHO halted hydroxychloroquine clinical trials around the world, twice. The first time, May 25, WHO claimed it was in response to the (fraudulent) Lancet study.  The second time, June 17, WHO claimed the stop was in response to the Recovery trial results.  Recovery used highly toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine in over 1500 patients, of whom 396 died.  You stop the trial before the data safety monitoring board has looked at your data, a move that is unlikely to be consistent with trial protocol. WHO’s trial in over 400 hospitals overdosed patients with 2.0 g hydroxychloroquine in the first 24 hours.  The trial was halted 3 days after the toxic doses were exposed (by me). The trial involved doctors around the world typing minimal patient information into an online WHO platform, which assigned the patient a treatment.

The only “safety” information collected during the trial was whether patients required oxygen, required a ventilator, or died. This effectively masked the adverse effects of the drugs tested.

I should mention that WHO’s initial plan for its Solidarity trial entirely omitted the chloroquine drugs, but they were added at the urging of participating nations. WHO’s fallback position appears to have been to use toxic doses.

16. You have theWHO pressure governments to stop doctors prescribing hydroxychloroquine.

17. You have the WHO pressure professional societies to stop doctors prescribing hydroxychloroquine.

18. You make sure that the most-consulted US medical encyclopedia, UptoDate, advises physicians to restrict hydroxychloroquine to only clinical trials, citing the FDA.

19. You have the head of the Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Tony Fauci, insist the drug cannot be used in the absence of strong evidence…while he insisted exactly the opposite in the case of the MERS coronavirus outbreak several years ago, whenhe recommended an untested drug combination for use…which had been developed for that purpose by his agency.  And while he was bemoaning the lack of evidence, he was refusing to pay for trials to study hydroxychloroquine, and cancelled two NIAID-sponsored trials of outpatient HCQ before completion. And he changed the goalposts on the Remdesivir trial, not once but twice, to make Remdesivir show a tiny bit of benefit, but no mortality benefit. Yet don’t forget, Fauci was thrilled to sponsor a trial of a Covid vaccine (partly owned by his agency) in humans, before there were any data from animal studies.  So much for Fauci’s requirement for high quality evidence, before risking use of drugs and vaccines in humans.

20. You convince the population that the crisis will be long-lasting. You have the 2nd richest man in the world, and biggest funder of the WHO, Bill Gates, keep repeating to the media megaphone that we cannot go back to normal until everyone has been vaccinated or there is a perfect drug. (The Gates Foundation helped design the WHO Solidarity trial, which says only that it has multiple funders,  helped fund the Recovery trial, and Gates is heavily invested in Covid pharmaceuticals and vaccines.)

21. You have CDC (with help from FDA)prevent the purchase of coronavirus test kits from Germany, China, WHO, etc, and fail to produce a valid test kit themselves. The result was that during January and February, US cases could not be tested, and for months thereafter insufficient and unreliable test kits made it impossible to track the epidemic and stop the spread.

22. You have trusted medical spokesmen lie to the public about the pandemic’s severity, so precautions weren’t taken when they might have been more effective and less long-lasting.  Congress was repeatedly briefed about the pandemic in January and February, which scared several Congress members enough that they sold off large amounts of stock, risking insider trading charges.  Senator Burr is one of them, currently under investigation for major stock sales on February 13.

Yet Dr. Fauci told USA Today on February 17 that Americans should worry more about the flu than about coronavirus, the danger of which was “just miniscule.” Then on February 28, Drs. Fauci and Robert Redfield (CDC Director) wrote in the New England Journal:

“…the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

23. You destroy the reputation of respected physicians who stand in your way.  Professor Didier Raoult and his team in Marseille have used hydroxychloroquine on over 4,000 patients, reporting a mortality rate of about 0.8%.  (The mortality rate of patients given hydroxychloroquine in the Recovery trial was 25.7%.) Raoult is very famous for discovering over 100 different microorganisms, and finding the long-sought cause of Whipple’s Disease.  With this reputation, Raoult apparently thought he could treat patients as he saw fit, which he has done, under great duress.  Raoult was featured in a New York Times Magazine article, with his face on the magazine cover, on May 12, 2020.  After describing his considerable accomplishments, the Times very unfavorably discussed his personality, implied he conducted unethical trials without approval, and using anonymous sourcing produced a detailed hit piece. Raoult is now considered an unreliable crank in the US.

UPDATE:  Raoult has now (November 13) been legally charged with ethics violations in France for propounding and using HCQ in Covid patients.

You gather a group of Yale professors to dispute their Yale professor colleague Harvey Risch, an MD, PhD epidemiologist, on his publications and vocal support of the benefits of HCQ for Covid. Their first argument is that he is not an infectious disease doctor.  Notably, the first signer of the statement opposing Dr. Risch is an economist.

Physician and state senator Scott Jensen of Minnesota is being investigated by his state medical board due to anonymous complaints about ‘spreading misinformation’ and giving ‘reckless advice’ about COVID in interviews. Jensen was previously selected as “Family Physician of the Year” in his state. Now his medical license is at risk, not because of how he treated a patient, but for what he said outside of the office. Unprecedented.

UPDATE:  Jensen was exonerated.

24. You have social media platforms ban content that does not agree with the desired narrative.  As YouTube CEO and ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, Susan Wojcicki said,

“YouTube will ban any content containing medical advice that contradicts World Health Organisation (WHO) coronavirus recommendations. Anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”

25. When your clinical trials are criticized for overdosing patients, you quickly have Oxford-affiliated, Wellcome Trust-supported scientists at Mahidol University publish papers (a literature review with modeling and a modeling study) purporting to show that the doses used were not toxic. You develop a new method to measure hydroxychloroquine in a handful of Recovery patients who were not poisoned.  However, there are 2 problems you forgot with this approach:

• The Brazilian data, including 16 deaths, extensive clinical information and documented ventricular arrhythmias, are much more persuasive than a theoretical model of hydroxychloroquine pharmacokinetics.
• Either the drug is too toxic to use, even at normal doses, for a life-threatening disease, or even extremely high doses are safe.  You can’t have it both ways.

Oxford is the institution running the Recovery trial, and invented a Covid vaccine that already has 400 million doses on order.  The Wellcome Trust funded the Recovery trial.

26. You change your trial’s primary outcome measures after the trials have started, in order to prevent detection of drug-induced deaths (Recovery) or to make your drug appear to have efficacy (NIAID Remdesivir trial).

27. You stop manufacturers from supplying the drug. Shortly after the fraudulent Lancetpaper came out, Sanofi announced it would no longer supply the drug for use with Covid, and would halt its two hydroxychloroquine clinical trials. One of the cancelled Sanofi trials was expected to test 210 outpatients early in the course of disease. The trial remains suspended at the time of writing, while the Lancet paper was retracted 13 days after publication.  You surely don’t want a trial of hydroxychloroquine treatment early in the disease, since it might show an excellent effect.

Sanofi (a pharma company) began acting like a regulator.  From the Australian DOH’s Therapeutic Goods Administration website:

Sanofi, the supplier of one of the hydroxychloroquine products marketed in Australia (Plaquenil), has also written to health professionals reinforcing that hydroxychloroquine is not approved for use in Australia for treatment of COVID-19 outside the confines of a clinical trial. Sanofi also reinforced some of the known risks of prescribing hydroxychloroquine, in particular potentially serious cardiac issues. Globally, Sanofi has received an increased number of reports of serious cardiac issues, including deaths, in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, This appears to be more common in patients also treated with other medicines that can affect the heart.

Then Sanofi started collecting information on all off-label use of hydroxychloroquine in New Zealand and Australia.  Why is Sanofi, a drug manufacturing company, becoming a surveillance/enforcement mechanism intended to frighten medical providers from using the drug for Covid, which use is by definition “off label.” Sanofi alternatively suggests one may report (anonymously or not) others’ off-label use to New Zealand’s Pharmacovigilance Center or the Australian equivalent.
And see this: Novartis will supply HCQ only under certain conditions, and halted its HCQ trial due to lack of enrollments, although enrollment was not an issue for its other COVID trials.

28. You attempt to retract published papers that provide evidence to support use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID.

29. You have your ‘bought’ scientists conceal their financial conflicts of interest in their HCQ clinical trials and publications as well as in the guidelines they produce.

30. You can get your experimental, unlicensed drugs tested, much more expeditiously and cheaply than under ordinary circumstances, on Covid patients in large clinical trials, but only as long as no drug is designated effective for the condition. This opportunity only lasts while the “standard of care” for early Covid disease is nothing more than supportive measures, since no drug is deemed effective.

31. You have a research organization with big Pharma members (A.O.K.I.) pressure the Russian Ministry of Health to remove hydroxychloroquine from its treatment guidelines.

32. You stopped use of hydroxychloroquine, allegedly in response to the fabricated Lancet study, in France, Italy and Belgium (countries with very high COVID mortality rates) then Portugal then Switzerland. But Switzerland restarted using HCQ 15 days later. This created a natural experiment in Switzerland. About 2 weeks after hydroxychloroquine use was halted, death rates approximately tripled, for about 15 days. Then, after its use was allowed again, two weeks later death rates from Covid fell back to their baseline. (Thanks to FranceSoir)

33. You reverse an old trick of clinical trials, to mask benefit of hydroxychloroquine.  The trick was to replace the saline placebo with a substance that is being used by many clinicians and in many trials against Covid, thus by comparison likely to reduce the positive effect of your tested medication. This was done in trials both at NYU and at University of Washington, using vitamin C or vitamin C plus folate respectively as placebos.

34. You have the chief medical officers of Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the director of the UK’s National Health Service, write to UK doctors, a) urging them to enroll their Covid patients in one of 3 national clinical trials, two of which greatly overdosed patients with hydroxychloroquine, and b) stopping their use of “off license treatments” outside of a trial. Yet again, we encounter a veiled threat against clinicians actually attempting to treat the primary SARS-Cov-2 infection. The chief doctors wrote:

While it is for every individual clinician to make prescribing decisions, we strongly discourage the use of off-licence treatments outside of a trial, where participation in a trial is possible… Any treatment given for coronavirus other than general supportive care, treatment for underlying conditions, and antibiotics for secondary bacterial complications, should currently be as part of a trial, where that is possible.”

35. You have a state Pharmacy Board refuse to dispense hydroxychloroquine outside of clinical trials on June 15, citing the FDA recommendation for use only in trials.  You issue this new regulation on the same day that FDA publishes its recommendation, indicating prior coordination. But when your regulation is exposed on July 14, you immediately rescind it.

36. You have the IMF offer rapid financing to Belarus, but only if it follows the recommended model of Covid response and imposes quarantines, isolation and curfews.

37. A group of doctors went to Washington DC July 27-28.  They called themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” and gave a press conference and livestream talks about the Covid-19 pandemic as well as about the need for physicians to be able to prescribe HCQ freely.  While the media sparsely attended the press conference, the livestream got millions of views. And within hours, their livestream was banned by Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter was said to additionally ban comments about its ban. Then Squarespace took down the Frontline Doctors’ website.

Today, Bitchute is hosting their press conference. So is Brighteon. In those media that do discuss the event, the group is tarred for providing misinformation.

38. After the HCQ issue got so much attention on social media, you impose another ban on July 29 on the prescribing of HCQ for Covid, starting July 30 in Ohio, using its Pharmacy Board to dictate to physicians what they may not prescribe. (A repeat of #35 in a different state.) Ohio, with the governor’s approval, had first limited hydroxychloroquine dispensing on March 22. At least 3 other states limited its dispensing at the same time.

This ban got so much attention that Republican Governor Mike DeWine rescinded it the next morning. DeWine claimed to agree with FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who said in a July 30 TV interview that the prescribing of HCQ is between a doctor and patient. This is in accord with FDA law; but then, why was FDA silent when pharmacy boards, governors and other state entities prevented the prescribing of this FDA-approved drug in their jurisdictions?

39. After having Google take down physician James Todaro’s article on hydroxychloroquine for 4 months, you allow it to resurface right before Google’s (and Facebook’s and Amazon’s and Apple’s) CEOs testify before Congress on July 29 on censorship and abuse of power. You have Twitter warn that Todaro’s article is at an unsafe link.

40. After massive attention to the banning of the videos posted by the physician group ‘America’s Frontline Physicians’ and its website, you make intense efforts to discredit the physicians involved.

MedPageToday claimed it “could find no evidence that any of the speakers worked in hospitals with significant numbers of COVID-19 patients.” But the doctors claimed they used the drug early and prevented hospitalizations and deaths.  With over 4.4 million Americans diagnosed with Covid, what doctor hasn’t seen a Covid patient?

USA Today blared the headline: ‘America’s Frontline Doctors’ may be real doctors, but experts say they don’t know what they’re talking about.

You have USA Today review and publish detailed information on the licenses, practice locations and malpractice histories of the doctors who spoke out. USAT reporters claim these doctors are not experts and lack knowledge about the use of HCQ in Covid-19, despite the fact that most work in primary care, urgent care or emergency medicine and report using the drug for Covid. Yet no one asks how many years ago ‘expert’ Tony Fauci last treated a patient? ‘Expert’ Deborah Birx’ medical license expired in 2014, so she hasn’t treated a Covid patient either.  BTW, she worked in Fauci’s lab between 1983 and 1986.

41. Hydroxychloroquine use is truly the wedge issue for understanding and turning around the pandemic. If hydroxychloroquine works reasonably well as a prophylactic and treatment for Covid-19, it could potentially end the severity of the pandemic, greatly reduce transmission, and return us to life as we knew it.  You must make use of the levers of government, plus mainstream media and social media, to stop that from happening.

So, just in case doctors thought the Frontline Doctors’ video, or a new study from Spain showing the drug’s usefulness meant they should use hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, you must act fast. You use Representatives at a Congressional health subcommittee hearing on July 29 to threaten doctors about one use of the drug last April, in veterans who were nursing home patients.  Per the Washington Post:

“doctors at the 238-bed nursing home dosed [30] patients with what came to be called a “covid cocktail” for more than two weeks in April, often over the objections of nurses and without the full knowledge of residents’ families. At least 11 residents received the drug even though they had not been tested for covid-19, The Post found.”

I have treated patients in nursing homes, and one rarely discusses medication changes with family, unless the patient is seriously ill.  When nursing home residents were dying like flies last April, when tests were hard to come by, and confirmed diagnoses few and far between, doctors used this medicine to try to prevent nursing home deaths during a pandemic. And now they are being scapegoated for doing so.

The WaPo article does not even tell us whether the patients survived, thrived or were harmed. The article hardly makes sense. Its only purpose is to blacken the drug and the physicians who use it.

Yet on August 27, with respect to HCQ’s use in nursing homes, Senators Warren, Wyden and Casey demanded that FDA and Medicare/Medicaid explain how they are tracking it, and also demanded an Inspector General investigation into its recent use in nursing homes. “The Trump Administration owes us answers on the use of an ineffective drug like hydroxychloroquine in nursing homes — the epicenter of the pandemic,” Elizabeth Warren said in a statement.

42. You use state Medical Licensing Boards to threaten doctors who claim there is a cure for Covid-19.

43. You have Dr. Fauci discredit published observational studies that show benefit during a Congressional hearing, demanding randomized controlled trials.  Fauci never tells the Committee he has cancelled the one randomized controlled trial of HCQ that his agency, NIAID, had promised to conduct on HCQ.  NIAID claimed that it could not enroll enough subjects, and the study was cancelled after only 20 were enrolled.  However, Fauci told the Committee that 250,000 Americans have shown interest in participating in trials of a Covid vaccine. It is difficult to reconcile such extreme lack of interest in a treatment trial, and such massive interest in a vaccine trial.

Doctors who wrote studies showing HCQ benefit, even when used late (50% mortality reduction) have defended their work from Fauci’s criticism of it to Congress.

44. You erode the doctor’s primary responsibility to the patient, replacing it with the need to perform clinical research. This is the first time I have ever heard such a thing in the US: research physicians are pressuring frontline doctors not to veer from protocol-determined treatment, even when patients enrolled in treatment trials are at risk of death. ‘Helping future patients’ is the rationale provided.

Need I say this was the justification for the Nazi doctors’ experiments? It was not accepted at Nuremberg and it shouldn’t be accepted now. Medical ethics are no mystery. As published in the JAMA, and accepted worldwide, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, a.k.a. “Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects” states,

While the primary purpose of medical research is to generate new knowledge, this goal can never take precedence over the rights and interests of individual research subjects.

One of the Nuremberg Principles says essentially the same thing.

45. You use the term “stellar” to describe the Recovery trial in the August 5, 2020 NY Times, but avoid any hint that the Recovery trial’s hydroxychloroquine arm gave 1500 patients a toxic, potentially lethal dose, of whom over 25% died.

46. You censure and oust from the Detroit Democrats a state legislator because she credited HCQ for saving her life when she had Covid-19, and she publicly thanked President Trump for bringing the drug to her attention. It had been extremely difficult for her to obtain the drug, because her governor, Gretchen Whitmer, had banned use of the drug for Covid.

47. Despite assuring you control the outcome of the vast majority of randomized clinical trials of the chloroquine drugs, you have been thwarted by physician researchers in Detroit, Spain, Italy, France, Saudi Arabia who publish their observational results with hydroxychloroquine, showing the drug dramatically reduces mortality from Covid.

Doctors in Turkey, the US and Canada, and the US show that HCQ’s cardiac toxicity is negligible. So you have frontman Tony Fauci repeatedly dismiss this evidence from thousands of patients, since it did not come from randomized controlled trials.  See c19study.com for a compilation of 99 (58 peer reviewed) studies of the chloroquine drugs in Covid-19, and convince yourself what the overall data truly show.

48. You have Wikipediawrite the following about Covid and HCQ:  “all clinical trials conducted during 2020 found it is ineffective and may cause dangerous side effects.”  The footnotes refer to only a handful of trials, while a compilation of all 99 studies (of different types, including meta-analyses and observational studies) on the drug in Covid-19 tells a completely different story.

49. You electronically disappear articles favorable to HCQ. A meta-analysis preprint of 41 studies of EARLY HCQ use, written by US physicians, is posted at this link on the ResearchGate site which hosts a collection of academic papers. The article rapidly disappeared from the link.  Here is a brief description of the article: Prodromos et al., Preprint, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.29781.65765 (meta analysis).

Hydroxychloroquine is Effective and Safe for the Treatment of COVID-19, and May be Universally Effective When Used Early Before Hospitalization: A Systematic Review

Meta analysis of 41 studies concluding: “HCQ has been shown to have consistent clinical efficacy for COVID-19 when it is used early in the outpatient setting, and in general would appear to work better the earlier it is used. Overall HCQ is effective against COVID-19. There is no credible evidence that HCQ results in worsening of COVID-19. HCQ has been shown to be safe for the treatment of COVID-19 when responsibly used.”

A reader (later) sent me another working link for the full text here.

50. Can we begin to connect the dots between those who fraudulently suppressed effective treatments for Covid-19, and those who wish to maintain the pandemic crisis to remake the world? Today, on 9/11, Oxford epidemiologist Dr. Peter Horby, a principal investigator for the Recovery trial in which 396 people who were overdosed with hydroxychloroquine died, retweeted a tweet from the World Economic Forum about the environmental benefits of using bicycles.  Horby added, “This is where we need to be headed.”

51. From Anthony Fauci, who has perhaps done more than any other person to besmirch the value of HCQ and prevent Covid patients being treated effectively, comes a statement that seems to hearken to the World Economic Forum sentiment in #50 above.  Fauci blames the pandemic (which his actions prolong) on humans damaging nature. And he suggests we must learn to live differently, in harmony with nature.

And now, suddenly, I understand why it is so important to claim the pandemic came from human encroachment on bat territory, and not from a lab accident. Because human encroachment is being positioned to take the blame for Covid-19. (SARS-1, Ebola and SARS-2 are claimed to have arisen from humans living too close to bats, eating them and getting infected, starting epidemics–but this has not been proven for either SARS epidemic, nor proven for the Ebola epidemics.). This is not Fauci waxing eloquent about nature. This is Fauci, America’s Doctor, starting the conversation about how the human population, not the bat virus, is the real underlying problem.

The quote below was published in the journal Cell, in the final paragraph, on September 3 by Fauci and Morens:

“The COVID-19 pandemic is yet another reminder, added to the rapidly growing archive of historical reminders, that in a human-dominated world, in which our human activities represent aggressive, damaging, and unbalanced interactions with nature, we will increasingly provoke new disease emergences. We remain at risk for the foreseeable future. COVID-19 is among the most vivid wake-up calls in over a century. It should force us to begin to think in earnest and collectively about living in more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature, even as we plan for nature’s inevitable, and always unexpected, surprises.”Are they hinting that a reduced human population will be less susceptible to pandemics? Or that rural populations need to move?

52. Even though the famous Mehra/Desai Lancet paper claiming HCQ and CQ caused hugely increased deaths was exposed as a total fabrication by the Lancet editor and retracted on June 4, the Washington Post today, on September 11, links to its favorable May 22 story about the Mehra/Desai paper–using it as the sole evidence for yet another false claim of the danger of hydroxychloroquine.

This despite the fact that the WaPo reported on June 2  about concerns regarding the paper’s authenticity. The New York Times ran at least 3 articles about the fabricated Mehra/Desai paper here, here and here, and you know the WaPo reads what the NYT reports.

You neuter criticism electronically by making it hard to read.  I commented on the 9/11 article in the WaPo, and its gratuitous slur against HCQ, in which WaPo cited as authority a fabricated paper.  I used the online comment form.  I am a subscriber. The WaPo printed my comment, but my comment seems to be the only comment whose words extend beyond the right margin, and are chopped off. How odd.

53. When all else fails, would you really try to blow up much of the world supply of hydroxychloroquine?

According to the Taiwan English News:

An explosion at a pharmaceutical factory in Taoyuan City left two injured and caused a fire early this afternoon, December 20…

Liberty Times reported that the factory produces hydroxychloroquine APIs, and is the world’s second largest HCQ raw material supplier.

Another source tells the same tale.  The Pharmaceutical company is named Sci Pharmtech Inc. The explosion was huge and spread to five other companies.

54. Big mistake. You meant to expunge all official information about the safety of hydroxychloroquine.  But you forgot to remove CDC’s malaria treatment guidance, which still tells the truth about the drug. A 2 page information sheet is available online on the CDC website.  It might disappear after I post this. CDC’s guidance states,

“Who can take hydroxychloroquine? Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed to adults and children of all ages. It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers.

What are the potential side effects of hydroxychloroquine? Hydroxychloroquine is a relatively well tolerated medicine. The most common adverse reactions reported are stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, and headache. These side effects can often be lessened by taking hydroxychloroquine with food. Hydroxychloroquine may also cause itching in some people. All medicines may have some side effects. Minor side effects such as nausea, occasional vomiting, or diarrhea usually do not require stopping the antimalarial drug. If you cannot tolerate your antimalarial drug, see your health care provider; other antimalarial drugs are available. 

How long is it safe to use hydroxychloroquine? CDC has no limits on the use of hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of malaria. When hydroxychloroquine is used at higher doses for many years, a rare eye condition called retinopathy has occurred. People who take hydroxychloroquine for more than five years should get regular eye exams.

Overdose of antimalarial drugs, particularly hydroxychloroquine, can be fatal.

55. Twitter censored the Brazilian Ministry of Health for tweeting to citizens that they should seek early treatment for Covid, as the sooner they get treated, the better the result. (The harmful US recommendation is to stay home and do nothing until you require hospitalization.)

This tweet violated the Twitter Rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Learn more

56. You have the WHO issue guidance that HCQ should not be used for Covid, based on 6 multicenter trials that included over 6,000 patients. Six!  Scores of trials using much larger numbers of patients demonstrated benefit, but these were omitted from the WHO review.

Of course, included in these six trials (and accounting for about half the patients in WHO’s review) are the Recovery and Solidarity trials that overdosed subjects on hydroxychloroquine and caused 10-20% higher mortality than in the placebo subjects who received no treatment!

If effect, WHO is confirming that when you poison patients with excessive doses they do not do well. I concur that poisonous doses of HCQ  or anything else should never be used in patients.

Will WHO comment on the only real question, which is the value of using therapeutic doses early in the course of illness? The results of over 200 studies speak for themselves.

Why aren’t the families of subjects who died in these trials bringing charges? Was information on which drugs their family members received withheld from them to prevent that from happening?

57. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is still up to their dirty tricks smearing hydroxychloroquine. Yet another paper has come out of U. Washington, paid for by BMGF, that claims HCQ isn’t helpful for early treatment (despite dozens of studies to the contrary). If you read the new paper carefully, you learn that HCQ actually did help, but the authors massaged the data to remove statistical significance… and shut the trial down prematurely.  My analysis is here.

58. It is important to keep banging the drum that says, not only don’t the drugs work, but they are dangerous, to boot. And so we have a new meta-analysis designed to do just that.

Here’s how:

1. Never admit there was anything wrong with the trials that overdosed patients with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine.  In fact, these authors called the Recovery and Solidarity trials that gave patients 4 times the normal dose of HCQ at first, “pragmatic.” Odd use of verbiage.
2. Cherry pick a small number of studies from which to perform your meta-analysis, so that the number of subjects in the overdose studies outweighs the number in all the other trials. In this case 67% of all subjects in this meta-analysis (which included about 14 of 233 total trials) had been enrolled in the Recovery and Solidarity overdose trials. Two other overdose studies were included, PATCH and Remap-CAP. (PATCH abruptly ended after only 5 subjects were enrolled, once the other overdose trials were exposed.)
3. Because the 3 overdose studies (except PATCH, in which none of the 5 died) had a higher proportion of deaths in the hydroxychloroquine arms than in the placebo arms, and provided more than two thirds of the subjects for this meta-analysis, the authors of the meta-analysis were able to conclude that using HCQ is associated with higher death rates than using nothing at all.
4. Incredible that the toxic doses used in 4 of the trials selected are whitewashed by calling them “relatively high doses” and never linking these doses to the increased death rates.
5. Another odd thing is that investigators from the included trials, whose data were used in this study, are listed as coauthors.  There are 94 coauthors, all of whom signed off on the final paper (i.e., the overdose investigators had the opportunity to craft the language of this paper to cover their butts regarding their overdose trials).
6. Many of these investigators have financial interests in products and/or companies making new products for which hydroxychloroquine would be a cheap competitor.

Here is the new paper.

Mortality outcomes with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in COVID-19 from an international collaborative meta-analysis of randomized trials

• Cathrine Axfors,
• Andreas M. Schmitt,
• […]
• Lars G. Hemkens

volume 12, Article number: 2349 (2021)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22446-z

“Results for hydroxychloroquine are dominated by RECOVERY and WHO SOLIDARITY, two highly pragmatic trials, which employed relatively high doses and included 4716 and 1853 patients, respectively (67% of the total sample size). The combined OR on all-cause mortality for hydroxychloroquine is 1.11 (95% CI: 1.02, 1.20)…”

Remember:  the system would not be going to these lengths if hydroxychloroquine didn’t work. Please think about that.

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This article was originally published on Anthrax Vaccine.

If fodder is needed for the argument that a Deep State is running wild and determined to depose President Donald J. Trump, this will surely help.  In a statement by self-titled “former Republican National Security Officials”, a hand-on-heart allegiance is made to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.  The authors are intent on moving the incumbent out of office, “profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”   

These former security officials, who include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden, see Joe Biden as the better horse.  He has “the character, experience and temperament to lead this nation.”  They might have their disagreements with him, but there would be “the time to debate those policy differences”.  In the immediate future, Trump had to be ushered out of office to stop his “assault on our nation’s values and institutions.”

The message is regaled in the language of defending democracy, the very sort of fragile creature such individuals have not been averse to mutilating in the past. But it is also couched in terms of cod psychology.  The term “unfit” is used four times.  This lack of fitness was demonstrated by bad character, corrupt behaviour, the inability to lead “during a national crisis.” 

What is particularly galling for the authors is that Trump dared interfere with the National Security Family, offices of the imperium that should run without disruption and melodrama.  This mismanagement, as they term it, involved the dismissal or replacement “often by tweet” of “the secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the Directors of National Intelligence and the FBI, three National Security Advisors, and other senior officials in critical national security positions”.

The signers also take issue with the president’s spread of “misinformation”, the undermining of public health expertise, attacking officials at state and local level “and wallowing in self-pity.”  He had demonstrated greater interest in re-election “than the health of the American people.”

Misinformation is a good point.  Trump has been exceedingly inventive to the point of fiction in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic.  He takes of the root of conspiracy.  But it is also worth noting that many of these former security officials who take issue with him were not averse to getting on the well-laden wagon of misinformation when it came to launching a war against Iraq in 2003.  The administration of George W. Bush was stacked high with true believers allergic to the findings of UN weapons inspectors.  Then Secretary of State Colin Powell, who put in an appearance at the Democratic National Convention just passed, gave a show of supreme mendacity on February 5, 2003 before the United Nations.  “What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”  What was solid was the premature adjudication of the matter: Saddam Hussein had to go, and fictional weapons of mass destruction would do nicely as a pretext.

The result was the commission of what is loftily described as the “supreme international crime”: the crime against peace or what is sometimes, if awkwardly termed, a “war of aggression”.  In 2005, criminologists Ronald Kramer, Raymond Michalowski and Dawn Rothe gazed forlornly at the US-led invasion of Iraq and concluded that it, and the subsequent occupation, violated international law.  State crimes had been committed and “state officials responsible for the violations of law pursuant to the invasion and occupation of Iraq are guilty of war crimes.”

The signatories of this pro-Biden note also have their noses out of joint at Trump’s compromising of the Department of Justice, his libelling of federal judges, and those who “sought to uphold the law.”  He insulated himself from accountability, fired officials who commenced investigations or testified against him, threatened whistleblowers, promised pardons for silence “and blocked prison time for a political crony convicted of lying on his behalf.”

Smelly stuff indeed, till you consider what took place in the Republic after September 11, 2001.  During those dark years under GWB, the rule of law was given a right royal thrashing, and was barely able to walk after that.  Warrantless surveillance of US citizens was conducted with the specific purpose of avoiding the law altogether.  Torture was modish, given a shining light as a preferred method of military interrogation; inventive apologias and seedy justifications could be found through the DOJ for it use.  The “Bush Six” – Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Douglas Feith – rode high on stallions of bare legality.  The Central Intelligence Agency got bold and ugly with its Rendition Program.  Guantanamo Bay became code for human rights violations and legal purgatory.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch suggested that the then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the chief US commander in Iraq and Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be investigated for allegations of torture.  In 2011, HRW released a further report arguing for “a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes committed in connection with the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the CIA detention program, and the rendition of detainees to torture.” To date, these dark retainers of executive power remain free to go about their business and whitewash a sullied era.  The Obama administration ensured that no prosecutions would take place. 

The vocal, boisterous defenders of a cause are bound to be those who have, along the way, fiddled and forfeited it.  Be wary, claimed E. M. Forster in “What I Believe”, of the cohorts overly keen on causes.  “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.”  Trump has done his immodest bit to ransack an already soiled office.  The precedent of a burgeoning imperial presidency, indifferent to caution and legality, eager to bloody the noses of adversaries, spy on citizens and evade the rule of law, was already there to emulate. 

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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]

As Friday’s hospitalization numbers across the Sun Belt appear to confirm CDC head Dr. Robert Redfield‘s assertion that the American COVID-19 outbreak has peaked and is starting to fade, the State of Virginia is setting a new precedent by seriously discussing forcing Virginians to be vaccinated with whatever rushed-to-marked candidate the FDA approves first.

During an interview that aired on Friday, the state’s health commissioner said he planned to invoke state law to make vaccinations mandatory – once a western product is available, presumably.

Here’s more from ABC News 8:

State Health Commissioner Dr. Norman Oliver told 8News on Friday that he plans to mandate coronavirus vaccinations for Virginians once one is made available to the public.

Virginia state law gives the Commissioner of Health the authority to mandate immediate immunizations during a public health crisis if a vaccine is available. Health officials say an immunization could be released as early as 2021.

Dr. Oliver says that, as long as he is still the Health Commissioner, he intends to mandate the coronavirus vaccine.

“It is killing people now, we don’t have a treatment for it and if we develop a vaccine that can prevent it from spreading in the community we will save hundreds and hundreds of lives,” Oliver said.

Pro-medical-choice activists in the state argue that the issue is a matter of medical choice, and that the hasty “expedited” approval process being implemented by the FDA is grounds for concern. State health authorities insist, meanwhile, that they would never mandate a vaccine that hadn’t already proven to be safe.

Virginia Freedom Keepers Director of Communications Kathleen Medaries, a mother of three from Chesterfield, says this is a matter of medical choice.This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It’s not a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine issue,” Medaries said. “For me, it’s an issue of being able to assess each vaccine for myself and my family one at a time.”

[…]

“He shouldn’t be the one person to make a decision for all of Virginians,””Medaries responded.

The state’s top medical official is opposed to a bill that has been put forth in the state assembly that would create more exemptions to the mandatory vaccination power, allowing exemptions on religious and other grounds.

Oliver believes that COVID-19 is a public health emergency that should take precedent over everything else, and that vaccine-assisted herd immunity is the state’s best and only real defense.

The decision comes after Massachusetts said it would make the flu vaccine mandatory this year as part of a campaign to protect the state’s medical system. We suspect Virginia and Massachusetts won’t be the only states to discuss mandatory COVID and/or flu vaccination in the coming weeks, as the school year begins.

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Featured image is from ZH

The military situation in Syria continued deteriorating in recent days.

On August 21, the Syrian Army and its allies increased their anti-ISIS raids in the Palmyra-Deir Ezzor-Al-Mayadin triangle. According to pro-government sources, these efforts are being actively supported by recently deployed reinforcements from the Iranian-backed Liwa Fatemiyoun armed group.

On August 20, ISIS claimed responsibility for the recent attack on Russian troops in the province of Deir Ezzor.  The attack, which took place on August 18, killed Maj. Gen. Vyacheslav Gladkih and injured two other Russian service members. In a statement released by its news agency, Amaq, ISIS claimed that a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which had been planted by its terrorists east of the town of al-Sukhnah in eastern Homs, struck a Russian patrol that was combing the region.

Earlier, the Russian military said that the incident took place near the al-Taim oil field, which is indeed located to the east of al-Sukhnah, in the western Deir Ezzor countryside. These details play into the hand of the ISIS propaganda. According to Syrian government sources, a few hundreds of ISIS members take shelter in the Homs-Deir Ezzor countryside. These terrorists pose a notable security threat to pro-government forces, but they claim that the full elimination of the ISIS cells in the desert is not possible as long as the US occupies the al-Tanf area.

Kata’ib Hezbollah, the Iraqi pro-Iranian group, is reinforcing its military positions in the southern countryside of Syria’s Deir Ezzor, according to pro-government sources. Kata’ib Hezbollah fighters are currently building fortifications around their positions in the outskirt of the city of al-Mayadin.

The situation is also tense on the contact line between the army and militants in southern Idlib. According to pro-militant sources, at least 2 opposition fighters were killed in Syrian Army strikes in al-Bara and other areas in the al-Zawiya mount.

The string of assassinations of former rebel commanders continues in southern Syria. An attack with an improvised explosive device killed Issa Al-Janati, a former rebel commander in al-Quneitra. The IED attack took place near the commander’s house in the town of al-Zubaidah in the al-Quneitra countryside on August 17. Al-Janati died of his wounds, while his wife was slightly injured. Al-Janati, who is known by his nom de guerre “Abu Wassim,” used to be a senior commander in the Free Syrian Army. In 2018, he joined the reconciliation process. Nevertheless, he refused to enlist in the Syrian Arab Army or any pro-government faction.

This was the first assassination of a former rebel commander in al-Quneitra. Such assassinations take place in Daraa province on a regular basis. Local sources link them with the increased activity of Israeli special services that are not happy to see how their former proxies are changing their public position.

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According to Berlin police sources, between 500,000 and 1 million peaceful protesters (mostly without masks) demonstrated against the Corona rules.

An important grassroots movement against social engineering and the closure of economic activity is unfolding in Germany.

It has the support of a committee of scientists and medical doctors.

…

Watch the video below.

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Voter suppression in the 2020 election has become a topic of great concern. In reality, voter suppression has been part of US politics since the founding of the country. The oligarchs who wrote the US Constitution enabled voter suppression by not including the right to vote in it and only allowing white male property owners to vote, suppressing the votes of 94 percent of the population.

Five of 16 states had white-only voting in 1800 and after 1802, every new state, free or slave, except for Maine banned Black people from voting. In 1807, New Jersey, which originally gave voting rights to “all inhabitants,” excluded women and Black men from voting. Maryland banned Jewish people from its polls until 1828. After the Civil War expanded voting rights to Black men, the Black vote was suppressed through intimidation campaigns and Jim Crow laws. After decades of protests, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and voting by Black people increased, but in recent years suppression tactics are reducing that vote.

This year, the Republican Party and President Trump are working to suppress the votes of Black people, the working class, immigrants, and others, especially by attacking the US Postal Service to decrease mail-in voting.

The Democrats are also guilty of voter suppression as they do all they can to keep third parties off the ballot. Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins explains party suppression is voter suppression because millions of people refuse to choose between two Wall Street-funded candidates and so they don’t vote. Sanders-Democrats also point to an unfair nomination process resulting in Joe Biden becoming the nominee.

Voter Suppression is Violence, From Cool revolution.

Voter Suppression Today

Voter suppression has gotten more sophisticated in recent elections through the massive de-registering of voters, abuse of voter ID laws, cutting the number of polling places in minority communities, felony disenfranchisement, not counting provisional ballots, and voter intimidation at the polls. In 2020, the battle over mail-in ballots and the Post Office is also a major issue.

On March 30, President Trump said in an interview on FOX, if there was high voter turnout “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Trump was explaining why he opposed more money being spent to help states conduct the 2020 election during the pandemic. More recently, Trump floated the idea of delaying the November 3 election, an idea rejected by even Republican allies and something he does not have the power to do.

Removing people from voter registration lists has become a common practice. A Brennan Center study found that almost 16 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. Jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination, which are no longer subject to pre-clearance after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, had a median purge rate 40% higher than other jurisdictions.

Voter ID laws have become a key tool in voter suppression. The ACLU reports that: “Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls. Seven states have strict photo ID laws.” Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification resulting in ID laws reducing voter turnout by 2-3 percentage points, according to the US Government Accountability Office.

This year voter intimidation is making a comeback. Trump’s response to the closing night of the DNC was to tell Fox News that on election day he’s going to send law enforcement, sheriffs, US Attorneys, and Attorney  Generals to polling locations. While Trump has no control over sheriffs and police, making the threat is part of an intimidation campaign.

Republicans are recruiting an estimated 50,000 volunteers to act as “poll watchers” in November, part of a multi-million-dollar effort to control who votes. This campaign includes a $20 million fund for legal battles as well as the GOP’s first national poll-patrol operation in nearly 40 years.

Poll watchers in some states can challenge the eligibility of voters. After the 1981 election, Democrats sued over voter intimidation and a federal “consent decree” stopped the practice but the decree was allowed to expire at the end of 2017, and a judge declined to extend it in 2018.

The ACLU points to some of the impacts of these voter suppression efforts and how they are targeted at people of color and youth, writing:

• Seventy percent of Georgia voters purged in 2018 were Black.
• Across the country, one in 13 Blacks cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws.
• One-third of voters who have a disability report difficulty voting.
• Only 40 percent of polling places fully accommodate people with disabilities.
• Counties with larger minority populations have fewer polling sites and poll workers per voter.
• Six in ten college students come from out of state in New Hampshire, the state trying to block residents with out of state drivers’ licenses.

Stop privatization of the Postal Service from PostalReporter.com.

Voting during the pandemic, mail-in voting and the Postal Service

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new issues for voting in 2020. More people will be voting by mail as 20 states expanded or eased access to voting by mail as a public health measure. The election could be decided by a fight over which mail ballots are counted. One of the most common reasons for invalidating a vote is if the ballot arrives late, making postal delivery of critical importance. In the primaries, more than 540,000 mail ballots were rejected during primaries across 23 states this year, nearly a quarter in key battlegrounds for the fall, i.e. Florida, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Last week, the Democrats in the House passed $25 billion in emergency funding for the Post Office. While this is insufficient, it is opposed by President Trump. Senator Mitch McConnell may not take the issue up in the Senate, saying it is too much money and other COVID-19 relief proposals should be included in it.

Trump is also trying to undermine the ability of the Post Office to deliver ballots on time.  Trump crony, Louis DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General, is a prominent Trump donor, deputy finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, and the former lead fundraiser for the Republican National Committee. DeJoy donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Party and its candidates, so he is heavily invested in a Republican electoral victory.

DeJoy fired people with experience running the Postal Service on August 17, and twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced in a new organizational structure that centralizes power around DeJoy. He stopped overtime work and mail sorting machines and mailboxes have been removed. As a result of public pressure, he  says he stopped further removals until after the election, although people are reporting finding locked mail boxes.

The Democrats, who have been complicit with the attack on the Post Office, are paying attention now that it is affecting the election. Unfortunately, their proposal falls far short of the $75 billion investment needed by the Postal Service, and doesn’t address the long term problems created by the Congressand president in 2006 when they required the Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of pension and healthcare costs.

We need to act now because they are likely to ignore the efforts at privatization of the postal service after November. We need to demand more money for the Post Office and insist on the end of any privatization of the Postal Service so it remains a public agency serving the public good. The so-called ‘Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act‘ of 2006, which was designed to weaken the Post Office, must be repealed. And, the Post Office should be given greater power to provide other services like a Postal Bank for the millions of people who do not have access to banking services.

Showing up by protesting for the Postal Service gives postal workers the power to defy the Postmaster General and speak out. Postal workers in Washington State are refusing to take mail sorting equipment offline. Postal workers have been ordered not to speak to the press so people are not aware how bad the situation is. If workers see the public is on their side, they may have the courage to speak or anonymously leak documents to the media.

2020 Highlights Mirage Democracy

The failure of US democracy is on display in the 2020 election but these are long-term problems. The United States is not a democracy; it is a plutocracy. Elections give people the illusion of choice when in reality the power elites are the ones who choose the candidates, as we described in this 2013 article.

Some people choose not to participate in the elections for this reason. Others choose to use the election to make a point by rejecting the corporate candidates and voting for third-party candidates who support their positions, such as national improved Medicare for All, acting on climate change, ending police violence and imperialism, and more or only voting in down-ballot races.

If you choose to participate in the election, here are some actions you can take to protect your vote:

1. If you want to vote in 2020, order your mail-in ballots, if they are available, as soon as possible. In our state, Maryland, the Board of Elections warns they may run out of ballots.
2. Know your rights. It is illegal to intimidate or coerce voters. If you experience it or see it happening to someone else, record it by video or in writing to poll workers.
3. If you are told you are not registered, demand a provisional ballot. Due to Voter-ID laws, each state has different requirements. Understand what is required in your state, and come prepared.

Finally, it is important to remember when we are inundated with a constant focus on the 2020 elections that the power of the people does not derive from elections. Our task is to build people’s power outside of elections.

People have the power to make the country ungovernable. Both parties are ignoring issues supported by a majority of the people, including, improved Medicare for all, a robust Green New Deal, a guaranteed basic income, a tax on the wealth to shrink the wealth divide, cuts to the bloated military budget, free college and vocational education and confronting the climate crisis, which is already wreaking havoc across the nation.

The Occupy Movement, the Fight for $15, the student debt movement, labor strikes and the uprising against police violence show people have power. We have only begun to scratch the surface of our potential. We have to build the power to rule from below, no matter who is elected president in 2020.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

Featured image: Stop Voter Suppression from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Constant attacks by some US elites on China will, according to some observers, diminish and disappear once the US presidential election is over in November 2020.

This is unlikely to happen for at least two reasons. One, the issues that underscore the targeting of China are fundamental in nature and go beyond elections and personalities. Two, at the root of some of these issues are questions of power— of dominance and control— whose resolution will span decades if not centuries.

In examining the interface between the US and China, I shall begin with those areas of conflict where the latter has surpassed the former. This will be followed by reflections on manifestations of US power which are not as formidable as they are made out to be.  Conclusions will be drawn from these two categories on the emerging pattern of global power.

Within specific sub-fields of science and technology, China appears to have moved ahead of the US. Maritime surveillance and lunar geography would be two such sub-fields. Chinese advances in electronics and telecommunications have also been breathtaking. It is because China is at the forefront of cutting edge technology that there is so much anxiety in the US and the West today about China’s ascendancy. Those who have dominated the world for so long know that it is mastery over science and technology that endows a nation or civilization with power and strength.

Its mastery over science and technology is one of the reasons why in a few decades China has become the factory of the world manufacturing a whole range of affordable, quality goods for people everywhere. China’s success in penetrating markets has made the nation indispensable to the global economy.  Even in the entertainment industry, a video-sharing platform like Tiktok has become a sensation among the young prompting US authorities to impose curbs upon it .

More than its production of goods and services, it is China’s massive global infrastructure transformation through its Belt Road Initiative (BRI) that is destined to have a lasting impact upon humankind. An endeavor that spans 138 countries, the BRI connects Asia with Africa and Europe through land and maritime routes.  It not only seeks to build highways and ports but also attempts to initiate agrarian projects and accelerate industrial ventures which will raise incomes and increase productivity of many poor countries

Compared to the BRI there are other spheres where US power appears to be overwhelming. But if we probed each of these spheres carefully, we would discover that US power is only a veneer.  Its so-called military prowess is a case in point. Though the US has a huge arsenal and some 800 military bases girding the globe, we forget that it has not won a single major war since the end of the Second World War. Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan testify to this. In fact, its involvement in wars in the last 50 or 60 years have been unmitigated disasters.

Another pillar of US power is the US dollar— the world’s reserve currency. The dollar is no longer as dominant as it once was. In 2015 for instance, approximately 90 % of bilateral transactions between China and Russia were conducted in dollars. By 2019 “the figure had dropped to 51%”

US imposed sanctions against Russia since 2014 following Crimea’s restoration to Russia  contributed to this.  The US also imposed “tariffs on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Chinese goods “ which forced China to de-dollarise.”  Moscow and Beijing reinforced their financial relationship  in June 2019 through a deal “ to replace the dollar with national currencies for international settlements between them.” Russia has also been accumulating yuan reserves at the expense of the dollar.

The US also perpetuates its global dominance  through an extensive propaganda network which projects the US as the greatest nation on earth. It is a portrayal  which has lost its lustre in the last couple of decades.  The US led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 which was unjust as it was immoral tarnished the US’s image in the eyes of the world. Increasingly, it has come to be perceived as a rapacious nation which has no scruples about slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent people in pursuit of its hegemonic agenda.

More than its role in wars and all the sufferings they cause, the US elite’s  failure to govern effectively has shattered and battered its image.  The coronavirus pandemic and the economic miseries generated by it, have revealed that compared to some countries in Asia the US elite is incapable of protecting the well-being of its own citizenry. With 176 thousand  fatalities and 5.68 million infections as of the 22nd^t of August 2020,the elite stands condemned for betraying and sacrificing  the people. If good governance is the hallmark of a ‘developed nation’ then the US can no longer lay claim to that status.

The coronavirus pandemic with all its dire consequences has also exposed how deeply flawed notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘the rights of the individual’ are in the US . When freedom of the individual relegates the collective good of society to the margins, it breeds  a self-centred obsession with freedom which in the ultimate analysis undermines freedom itself. If freedom and the celebration of the individual are the glorious attributes of societies like the US,  the pandemic has shown us all  how ugly their  misconception and misapplication can be.

In a nutshell, it is not just the rise of China which is responsible for the decline of the US. Its own distorted perspective on power , its perverted sense of individual freedom and most of all its lust for global hegemony have all contributed to its fall.  This is why as the American people approach yet another presidential election, they should for their own good reflect upon their own flaws and foibles as a nation. It is humility and honesty of this sort that is the need of the hour.

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Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Malaysia. 

The Canadian Dimension, a forum for debate on contemporary issues facing the Left, published an analysis of the political situation in Venezuela. The text is presented below:

On December 6, Venezuelans will go to the polls to elect a new National Assembly. Since the last election in 2016, self-declared interim president and opposition leader Juan Guaido has seen his domestic popularity —and his standing among many foreign nations— slide.

In fact, upon Guaido’s return last year from an international tour —financed by the U.S. — to seek backing for more sanctions and the ouster of elected president Nicolas Maduro, Guaido was booed out of the Caracas airport.

Such was the anger of ordinary Venezuelans against an individual who recently signed a contract with U.S.-based mercenaries to overthrow the government in a bizarre failed plot that has come to be known as the “Bay of Piglets.”

Now, Guaido and right-wing factions within the National Assembly are boycotting the elections, as opposition leaders have vowed not to recognize the “false” electoral body designated by the Supreme Court. The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies are expected to win on December 6.

Clear enough?
Trump #HandsOffVenezuela #19Aug https://t.co/MjsRGmScjE

— Alberto Torres (@Marabino2010) August 19, 2020

While Guaido’s standing in Venezuela is currently at rock bottom, the self-declared interim leader has also seen much of his international support evaporate. According to an August 14 press statement issued by the U.S. State Department entitled “Joint Declaration of Support for Democratic Change in Venezuela”:

“We call on all political parties and institutions in Venezuela to engage promptly in, or in support of, a process that will establish a broadly acceptable transitional government that will administer free and fair presidential elections soon and begin to set the country on a pathway to recovery. For a peaceful and sustainable resolution of the crisis, a transitional government is needed to administer presidential elections, so that no candidate has an improper advantage over others.”

For its part, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) issued an identical statement, calling for a “swift and peaceful transition to democracy” in Venezuela.

Like Venezuela’s opposition leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will not recognize the upcoming legislative elections. They have instead demanded “a process that will establish a broadly acceptable transitional government that will administer free and fair presidential elections,” which are not yet due, and which would necessarily exclude Maduro.

This is the usual formula: one that establishes a pretext for more sanctions, violent regime-change actions and open coup attempts, all geared to stoke a revolt among the Venezuelan people and a mutiny among the armed forces.

However, the press statement issued by the U.S. State Department and GAC is notable because of the dwindling number of ally countries that are now “committed to the restoration of democracy in Venezuela.”

A year after sabotaging the Norway-mediated talks between the Venezuelan gvmt & oppo, U.S. now thinks those discussions should "inform the way forward." Unclear if this is due to Trump's misgivings about Guaidó or pressure from allies tired of the farce.https://t.co/VudEFNUcK9

— Leonardo Flores (@LeonardoEFA) August 14, 2020

What used to be a long list of more than 50 nations is now down to just 19: Albania, Australia, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Israel, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Republic of Korea, Saint Lucia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

This is a far cry from the formerly extensive coalition of dozens of states that have heretofore unequivocally recognized and supported Guaido. The State Department could not even get sign-on from all of the members of the Lima Group —the multilateral body consisting of 14 countries, including Canada, that is dedicated to a “peaceful exit to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.”

Thus, the list of partner states now includes Israel, along with some of the most servile allies of the U.S. (and notable violators of human rights and democracy) such as Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Haiti.

More intriguingly, the two rivals to Canada’s defeated bid for a United Nations Security Council Seat last June, Norway and Ireland, do not appear on the list of countries dedicated to “an end to the Maduro dictatorship.”

This appears to vindicate those who had lobbied the UN and other international organizations to reject Canada’s campaign for a UNSC seat, citing the Trudeau government’s support for anti-democratic actions in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Haiti, to name just a few examples.

Even many in the U.S. Congress admitted the failure of the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy in a recent hearing.

“Our Venezuela policy over the last year and a half has been an unmitigated disaster,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“If we aren’t honest about that, then we can’t self-correct.” Murphy continued, declaring that U.S. support for Venezuela’s opposition forces has handed Maduro an opportunity to label Guaido an ‘American patsy’ while hardening support for his government around the world.

Ironically, Trump may have been better off if he considered some of the diplomatic overtures coming from within the Venezuelan government. Its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jorge Arreaza, wrote an op-ed for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), stating, “Trump would do better if he followed his initial instinct of talking to President Maduro. A respectful dialogue with Venezuela is what is really in the interest of the U.S.”

It is not surprising that Senator Murphy’s admission of failed coup attempts at a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting on August 4 has become a popular YouTube video.

During the hearing, Murphy pressed Special Representative for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, on the administration’s disastrous policy on Venezuela, which has “left America in a weaker position, failed to restore democracy, and allowed the humanitarian situation to worsen.” Murphy continued:

“[W]e thought that getting Guaido to declare himself president would be enough to topple the regime. Then we thought putting aid on the border would be enough. Then we tried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year, and it blew up in our face when all the generals that were supposed to break with Maduro decided to stick with him in the end… I think this is just a prescription to get stuck in a downwards spiral of American policy from which we cannot remove ourselves.”

The Canadian media should take a similarly critical stance toward the Trudeau government’s dubious attempts to oust the Maduro regime, including its failure to condemn Guaido for his partnership with armed US mercenaries to foment a violent coup within Venezuela.

Anything less is an endorsement of generations of failed U.S.-led policies in Latin America, ones that have contributed to violence and destabilization throughout the entire hemisphere.

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Featured image: Rally in rejection of the U.S. destabilizing plan against Venezuela, 2019. | Photo: Twitter/ @codepink

What does “Human 2.0” mean?

According to Dr. Carrie Madej, it is transhumanism where humans are melding with artificial intelligence, like in the movie Matrix.

Transhumanism has a bearing on the Future Of Humanity.

It is happening right in this moment. And we need to make a decision.  

The Covid-19 vaccine is frightening. This is something completely experimental which has an impact on humanity.

You can genetically modify humans. 

Watch the video below.

Dr. Carrie Madej’s incisive analysis.

Earlier Video Video with Dr. Carrie Madej

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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