Global Research

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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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Featured image is from the author

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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Featured image is from OVOTW

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.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thailand’s US-backed Billionaire-led Opposition

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

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

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

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

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

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

These ties and interests included:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Times called her Senate voting record “exemplary.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from WOKV – Jacksonville’s

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

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

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

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

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

The Strategic Reality of the Collapsing Trans Atlantic System

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

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

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

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

Carney the Eco-Warrior Takes the Helm Again

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Reset Fraud

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

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

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

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

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

The Carney/Freeland Great Reset Task Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New System of Economic Value

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

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

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

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

Note

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

Mayhem in Melbourne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questioning the Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pandemic That Wasn’t?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ushering in “The Great Reset”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click the screenshot below to view

Video interview with Dr. Fauci

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBC Video Interview with Fauci 

Click the BBC Report Below

READ THIS 

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

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

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

People are being misled.

The compulsory wearing of the face mask should be discontinued.

The evidence is there.  SPREAD THE WORD

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

-Mark Robinowitz, from today’s interview.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

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

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

Similar guidelines have been imposed by governments throughout the World. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not uncommon?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Color Revolution Begins

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

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

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

The Murky Nexta

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

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

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

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

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

Global Stakes

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A world of conflicts of interest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A turn to towards darkness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump regime hardliners want China included in a new deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far, no follow-up meeting is scheduled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from InfoRos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let that NEVER happen!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People, resist in solidarity!

Read related articles:

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

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

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

By Peter Koenig, August 14, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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

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

The article would claim:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Insidious Six  

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

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

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

All six Western pharmaceutical corporations have backgrounds of impropriety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet the NPR article noted (emphasis added):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The SEC statement also noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pfizer: Bribing Government Regulators for Drug Approval 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moderna: Masters of Stock Manipulation

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

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

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

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

The article also noted:

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

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